One tagger had blazed NOFEAR 13! just past the third rail. Kid wasn’t lying. He must have stood on his toes, bent at the waist, his sneakers in puddled filth, leather-lined socks to protect him from the river of rats that made short work of all the fast-food containers tossed onto the tracks. Making his statement in hyper-drive, every nerve ending exposed, tuned to catch the sound that could mean he’d just run out of time….
The tag had been sprayed in yellow-outlined orange fire. Looked pretty fresh. Maybe the kid himself was still alive, somewhere.
In this station, women don’t wait on the platform for the train to arrive. They stand huddled on the stairs, not moving until they hear the rumble of an incoming.
I didn’t make eye contact with any of them.
I was on my fourth cup of Mama’s hot-and-sour soup when she left her register to sit across from me in my booth.
“You working?”
“Looking.”
“Look hard?”
“I am, Mama.”
“Good.”
I expected more. Usually, no matter what I say, Mama berates me for lack of effort. In her mind, you look for work, you find work, period.
But she just nodded. Didn’t even ask me if the soup had been good.
I could feel the city shifting all around me. Under my feet, too. Like an earthquake rising up to meet a hurricane.
Slums being torn down to build high-rent high-rises—urban renewal, New York style. Maybe they’ll build a tent city on Welfare Island to house all the “service personnel.” Ferry them over every day to wash the hallways and clean the toilets, take them back to where they belong before it gets dark.
The Fulton Fish Market is closed down now, all the action relocated to the cheaper real estate in the Bronx. The subways may be underground, but any strong rain takes them out of service. The average cabdriver won’t leave Manhattan, and most of them won’t take a black man north of Ninety-sixth.
It isn’t even news anymore that some restaurants are selling hundred-dollar hamburgers, or that reciting a list of brand names is enough to make some girls wet. The evangelicals don’t have a chance in this town. Consumerism always trumps Christianity in a city where pieces of red string for your wrist are going for a C-note.
Celebrities need causes—it’s an image thing. And you can’t have a cause without a gala. Ice-sculpture swans, caviar canapés, and enough jewelry to cure MS if you pawned it. They always announce how much money they brought in, but never how much they actually paid out.
Who’s supposed to give a damn? The paparazzi?
They do TV specials on human-trafficking. You know what that means: beautiful European women tricked into coming here to be “models” who end up in brutal whorehouses. Just say “sex slaves” and you’ve got a guaranteed audience. The truth—that every child victim of incest is the very definition of “sex slave”—just doesn’t make for good cheesecake. Not in public, anyway. But you can’t walk into a porn shop without finding an “incest” section. I guess it’s true: if you build it, they will come.
Hobbyists troll the Internet pretending to be children to attract pedophiles. Some pathetic first-timers actually show up at the “girl’s” house, looking for the hot underage action they’ve been promised. Naturally, the camera crews are waiting. Nobody ever goes to jail, but it makes for nice low-budget TV. Another public service, brought to you by the network.
Sex offenders are being disgorged from prison like toxic waste into drinking water. Profiteers are selling Megan’s Law snake oil to morons who think a human that would rape a baby would never lie about his home address.
Some other geniuses are pushing GPS cuffs for the freaks. Won’t stop them from doing what they do, but it’ll save a lot of money on cadaver dogs.
It’s just a matter of time before some marketing degenerate wires up a halfway house for sex offenders and makes a reality-TV show out of it.
On Law and Order, everybody’s taking the “Man One and he does the max!” deals. In the streets, they just deal out the manslaughter.
Borough racism is back in style, from Bensonhurst to Howard Beach. Street gangs are making a comeback. If you melted down all the illegal handguns in the city, you’d have enough steel to put the Twin Towers back up.
The Albanians are moving in on the Italians. The Vietnamese are making things tight for the Chinese. The Puerto Ricans are getting tired of the Dominicans having all the fun. The Jakes are looking to take back the turf they lost to home-grown blacks.
The mayor spent the gross national product of most third-world countries just to beat out a party hack who had all the charisma of a poorly embalmed corpse. Pocket change for a sheik who has his eyes on a bigger throne.
In this city, the politicians tax everything except the bribes they live on. The former Commissioner of Corrections was such a model of “tough on crime” that they named a jail after him. Bush was going to make him head of Homeland Security when the “favors” he took from companies who did business with the city started to surface. So he pleads guilty to the usual “no jail” deal, they take his name off a building, he doesn’t get the public job. Maybe he’ll write a book about how he would have gone about being corrupt…if he’d actually done it.
Judges buy their way onto the bench, then sell their judgments. When they get caught, they roll faster than a greased ball bearing down a Teflon slide. Can’t wait to put on the wires and help nail the same lawyers they used to take money from.
It’s never over, not really. Hell, you can get disbarred here and still get licensed to practice in Florida. Just like one of those pedophile priests they used to recycle.
Everybody takes the pills, but nobody reads the labels.
The letter took a long time to get to me. There was no date on it, but the postmark on the envelope was six weeks old. I recognized the name on the return address. And couldn’t miss the NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONAL SERVICES—INMATE CORRESPONDENCE PROGRAM printed on the back, never mind the CORRECTIONAL FACILITY stamped in red.
The man who wrote knows I don’t personally check the mail drop I use. He knows the pickups over in Jersey are made once a month, at most. And take even more time to find their way into my hands.
There’s a lot of names on that drop. All of them belong to me, but nobody who uses it knows more than one of them. This was addressed to “Gustav Erchdorf.” The prison censors run a random scan on outgoing mail, but known gang members get special scrutiny. And if a ranking member of the tightest white-supremacist crew in New York sent a letter to any of my other covers, from Rubinowitz to Rodriguez, it would trip even the low-voltage wires that pass for a “security squad” Inside.
Of course, even if one of those ace code-crackers opened this one, all they’d find is what I read:
Gus, my main man!
I bet you didn’t know I’ve been trying my hand at poetry. Got to kill this time somehow, right? What do you think?
My pain banishes
White window, filmy shallowness.
Clearest, fairest, willfulness. Telling:
Universe is eternity.
Not fate, common comedy.
Truth’s lethal Taxation.
14 Words
44 Twice
30 Pieces
The closing was the authenticator.
“14 Words” is a standard signature for neo-Nazis: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Written by David Lane, former member of The Order, doing life-plus in supermax for his part in the assassination of a radio talk-show host. A Jewish one.
“44 Twice” comes out to “88.” The eighth letter of the alphabet, so “HH.” As in “Heil Hitler!”
And the “30 Pieces” wasn’t about Judas; it was about what they paid him with.
Silver was an old friend. Better, an old comrade. Inside, I’d never run with his crew. Given a choice, I don’t think he would have, either. But his destiny changed the day he killed a black convict for st
ealing his wife’s picture from his cell.
Must have taken Silver a long time to put that message together. Just the right touch of could-mean-anything, bullshit-mystical “poetry” to give off that authentic aura to any mailroom cop who sees the same kind of crap every day.
But there’s no single “convict culture,” no matter what Hollywood tells you. There’s only one thing all prisoners have in common: time. Some do it; some use it. And there’s all kinds of ways to do that, from learning to be a better person to learning to be a better predator.
The letter code works like this: if you see an exclamation point, you throw out every word before the last question mark. The whole thing’s written in ultra-fancy, “artistic” script. You see this from convicts a lot, so the watchers are used to it: laboriously hand-printed words, each letter as individually detailed as a piece of netsuke. To decode, you take the first letter of the first word, second letter of the second, and so on, making one word per line, starting each line with the first letter of the first word.
I did that. Came up with:
Man will call. Use name Tex.
It was another couple of weeks before that happened.
I hadn’t been there the first time he’d called.
“He say, no phone to call him at; he call you. What time? I say, ‘I just answer phones. Answer lot of phones. Business, answer phones, okay?’”
The number the underground has for me rings different places—the Mole reroutes them all the time—but it’s always forwarded to Mama’s. Only a few people know about me and Mama’s place, and nobody was guaranteed I’d be around at any given time. But Mama always was.
“He say, tell you his name Tex. You expect his call. I say, ‘Sure, sure. Tex. You call couple of days, Tex. Maybe Mr. Burke check messages by then, leave number for you call him at, okay?’”
“How’d he take that?” I asked her.
“Very polite man.”
“Sound nervous? Angry?”
“Very calm man. Quiet voice. Not soft, quiet, okay? White man. Not young.”
“Smell bad to you?”
She shrugged, her ceramic face expressionless. “Maybe bad man,” she said. “But not police. Not police, not this one.”
When he called again—forty-eight hours to the minute from when he had first tried—Mama gave him a number for me…a cloned-and-clipped Mole special, way past untraceable. Besides, it was only going to be used once.
“What?” I answered when it rang.
“A brother of yours told me to call you. Said to use the name Tex. Said you’d recognize it.”
“Enough to listen.”
“I have something big. Huge. Enough for everyone. No bang-bang, no B-and-E, nothing but talk. My brother said you were the man for this. He said I could trust you, down the line. I want to pitch the job—”
“Go ahead.”
“Not on the phone.” His voice was exactly as Mama had described. Quiet, not soft, with the absolutely neutral hardness of a blue-white diamond. The real thing. With plenty of miles on his odometer. No “you know better than that” speeches from this one. No flexibility, either.
“I don’t make dates.”
“Any way you want to do it, it’s done. Point-blank.”
“That could mean—”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “My brother told me I could trust you with my life. I’m ready to do that. You name your terms, I say yes, and we do it. If that’s not enough, you want me to prove in first, just say what you want and it’s done.”
I was watching from behind the second-story kitchen window of a Chinatown apartment, invisible through glass a trompe-l’oeil master had turned into translucent orchids on a white frost background.
A man entered the small park. Difficult to guess his height from my angle of observation; impossible to guess his weight inside the thigh-length denim coat. White man, red knit watch cap on his head, some kind of work gloves on his hands.
All of the battered benches were occupied except for one. Every time a local wino had tried to stretch himself out on it, a couple of young Chinese with glossy pompadours and high-sheen silk shirts under fingertip black-leather jackets would detach themselves from a clot at the entrance, stroll over, and explain that the bench was reserved.
Most just moved along, but one guy, who had approached the bench while having an animated, angry conversation with himself, swung a clenched fist at the first Chinese kid who approached. They took him down like wolves cutting a cripple from the herd.
Those kids were all shooters, but I never saw a gun, much less heard a shot. I guess they were learning more from Max than humility and respect.
The white man walked over to the empty bench. Sat down. Lit a cigarette. Stared straight ahead, as if the smoke held secrets he needed to know.
Five of the Chinese kids approached. Two behind him, one at each side, the other squared up, hands empty but ready to draw.
I’m not a lip-reader, and I didn’t have binoculars anyway. But I didn’t need any of that to know what the Chinese kid said as he carefully removed a small, bronze-colored glass bottle out of his jacket and handed it to the man.
“You drink this now.”
The man never hesitated. He opened the bottle, tilted it to his lips, swallowed. He held the bottle upside down, shook it a few times, showing them he had emptied it.
The Chinese kids took the bottle and walked away from the bench, back to their posts.
Nobody bothered the white man when he stretched out on his back and closed his eyes.
Four hours later, the man opened his eyes.
“Don’t sit up too fast,” I told him. “Just ease into it, or it’s gonna hit you like an ice pick in the spine.”
If waking up in an abandoned warehouse with holes in the roof and rats running the rafters bothered him, he didn’t show it.
“You”—he glanced at his wristwatch, taking care to move slowly—“had plenty of time to make sure. Right?”
“Right,” I agreed. Whoever he was, he’d been searched as deeply as you could search a human. By the best in the business, men and machines both. He hadn’t been carrying a weapon, or anything that could be used as one. He hadn’t been wired. He wasn’t GPS’ed.
And nobody could have followed the pony-express handoffs we’d used to finally get him here.
He gingerly patted his pockets. We’d put everything back where we’d found it. He’d been carrying a current California driver’s license. Claude Davis Dremdell. Brown/blue. Six feet one, 212. DOB: 1/9/44. His photo matched all the info except that this guy was bald. Not skinhead-shaved, hairless as a teardrop. And not just his head, his whole body. He didn’t even have eyebrows.
When his clothes had been removed, I could see his upper body had been covered in White Power ink, prison-issue. Some of it pretty artistic, some just blue blobs of hate messages, down to the thick swastika on the back of his left hand.
“Anything else you want me to do?” he said, slowly pulling himself into a sitting position, patting his pockets again until he found his cigarettes.
“Yeah,” I said. “Talk.”
“You know how the niggers call each other ‘dog,’ like they invented the concept? Well, they didn’t. Niggers never invented—”
I raised my hand like a traffic cop.
“Yeah, that’s right. Silver said you run with—”
“What he would have told you is there’s only one color I care about. You went to a lot of trouble to get this meet. Took a lot of risk, too. Silver vouched for you with me, same way he did me with you. There’s nothing about you that smells cop. Fair enough. But you’ve been around enough to understand we’re not alone here. You wanted it this way: nothing on the phone, nothing in writing. When this is over, you’re going to have another drink. We’ll leave you somewhere safe, make sure nobody bothers you until you wake up.
“So there’s only one question left,” I said to him. “When do you want to take that drink?”
&nb
sp; “Can I tell my story?”
“Not if it’s going to be the one you started with. I heard that one already.”
“But that’s the only way to set the—”
“You’re an intelligent man. I can see that. Feel it. And you must be a righteous one, too, if Silver has your trust. But me, I’m a money man, period. You want to tell me a story with a big-money ending, I got all the time you need. You want to tell me some mud-people/ice-people story, you might as well drink up now, pal.”
He got his smoke going, closed his eyes for a second, then nodded, like he was agreeing with himself.
“You got other references, you know,” he said, giving me a skull’s smile. “Guy named Bobby says you did a deep solid for us, way back.”
I picked up the sound of a slowly approaching car. Nothing necessarily bad—there wasn’t ever much traffic out where we had him stashed, and the unlit roads were busted concrete, so nobody went too fast, but…I raised my left finger to my lips in a “ssssh” gesture, giving me the half-second I needed to slide my short-barreled .357 Mag out and center it on his chest.
He didn’t move. Neither did I. Not my body, anyway. My mind searched for what he’d meant by the “us” I’d done a major favor for. Then I remembered. Went back. Long time ago.
Bobby took a seat on the hood of my car. “You calling in the marker?”
“There is no marker, Bobby. I’m asking an old friend for a favor, that’s all.”
“The guys you want to meet—you know who they are?”
“Yeah,” I told him. My eyes were on his hand. The hand with the crossed lightning bolts that looked like a swastika.
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