A Cool Breeze on the Underground

by Don Winslow

  They practiced that for a week, Neal following Graham down Broadway, on the subway, on the bus, down crowded streets, down nearly empty ones. One day tailing Graham east on Fifty-seventh, Neal was concentrating so hard on Graham’s shoes, he bumped right into his back.

  “Now, why did that happen?” Graham asked him.

  “I dunno.”

  “Good answer. Exactly. You don’t know. The pace, Neal, you have to watch the pace. Everybody has a different stride—long, short, slow, fast…. I shortened my steps. I kept walking just as fast, but I shortened my stride. I took smaller steps. I made you bump into me. The first block or so you’re tailing, measure the guy’s step against the cracks in the sidewalk. What is it? Step, step and a half to each crack? Count it off. Is it slow or fast? It’s like music, so sing to yourself if you have to. Keep time.

  “Another good reason to match his step is he can’t hear you so easy. A guy who knows how to shake a tail is going to listen as well as look. He’ll hear the difference in walking sounds, and if he hears one sound too long, he’ll know he’s pulling a caboose. So it’s like you imagine he’s got paint on his shoes, and you walk in his footprints.”

  So they spent a week with Neal following Graham and matching his pace and his stride. Graham would take the kid along crowded streets and then suddenly down empty ones, where the boy’s every footfall would echo in his own ears.

  “You’re tailing an amateur, it doesn’t matter, Neal. Save your energy and just stay out of sight. But a pro, it’s like it’s a habit with him, to mix up his walk slow and fast and slow again…. He’s going to play Simon Says: Take one giant step, one baby step.” They went at it again. A solid month of tailing. After the first week, Graham knew that Neal was the most talented prospect he had ever seen—fast, canny, and the lucky owner of a set of looks that was quite literally unremarkable. Graham worked him hard, leading him on chases down the shopper’s paradise of Fifth Avenue, where every store window offered a reflection, onto subway trains, into coffee shops, movie theaters, and men’s rooms, through the parks and the alleys. At first, the kid was always easy to detect or to shake, but after a short time, Graham found himself working hard to lose the little bastard, and then hard even to see him.

  “Find the blind spot,” Graham told the kid, “and stay in it for as long as you can.”

  “What’s the blind spot?”

  “The blind spot … the alley … the slipstream; a spot behind the guy where he just doesn’t see you. Usually, it’s behind him, slightly to his left side, about fifteen feet back. But it depends, you know, on his height and build. That’s why it’s good you’re a little shit, because it gives you a bigger blind spot to stay in.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. Like when you’re following somebody, and you get into the rhythm, and then you feel like you’re invisible, like the guy can’t see you.”

  So they practiced finding that spot, picking a stranger at random out of a crowd and following him. Neal got good at it, real good, and Graham marveled at the kid’s ability to fade back into a crowd, to disappear momentarily, and then reappear instantly back on the track. And a shadow made more noise than Neal Carey.

  “Use the crowd,” Graham lectured. “Horizontal, too, not just vertical, because you can get beside your guy if you use the crowd right. Like try to find a woman with real big ones, and get beside her. Then when your guy turns around, he’s not even going to see you, he’s too busy checking out her Daisy Maes.”

  Soon neal graduated to trickier stuff.

  “Today,” Graham announced one time, “you’re going to follow me from the front.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “That’s why it’s so beautiful. No one is going to be looking for a tail in front of him.” Graham showed him, crossing the street and then crossing back in front of a guy they picked at random. Graham used store windows and the mirrors of parked cars to follow his man, not missing a beat when the man turned into a bookstore off Fifty-seventh.

  Neal tried and failed miserably, losing his mark after five minutes.

  “Because you didn’t listen, Neal. Remember what I told you: Every step is different. Do the soles of his shoes slap the sidewalk? Do they click? If it’s a woman wearing high heels, that’s a different sound. Maybe the mark’s wearing sneakers.”

  Back at it. Until “Front Following” became automatic. Then they moved on to “The East Side—West Side,” where the tail stays on the opposite side of the street. (“Why does the chicken cross the road?” Graham asked. “So the chicken he’s following doesn’t make him.”)

  Then they went to the two-man stuff: relays, pass-offs, front and back doors, peekaboos (“Peekaboo. I see you. You see me. But you don’t see him.”), and the ever-tricky “Fake Burn,” in which you let the mark give you his best move and “lose” you, while your unseen partner stays on the mark’s relaxed ass.

  Neal loved the “Fake Burn,” loved it with an intensity that inspired him to create his own variation: “The Solo Fake Burn,” known in the Carey household as “Neal’s Very Own Special Fake Burn.”

  “You can’t have a one-man Fake Burn,’ ” Graham replied with disgust when Neal announced his invention. “The whole point is that you have two men.”

  “Not necessarily,” replied Neal with a degree of preadolescent self-satisfaction that might have aggravated a man more sensitive than Graham.

  “Okay,” Graham said, “I’m going to walk out this door and be back in two hours, and I want you to tell me where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing.”

  Graham polished off his beer and headed out into the street. He made Neal about twelve seconds later, because the dumb little bastard was wearing red socks that could have given Ray Charles a headache. Graham made a mental note to correct the kid on that, and settled into the not unpleasant task of teaching him a lesson. He crossed Broadway against the light but stopped in the island, noticing with pride that Neal hadn’t jumped after him. Then he crossed the rest of the street and ducked down the IRT entrance on the uptown side of Seventy-ninth, bought a token, and walked back up the downtown side. Sure enough, Ol’ Red Socks was still with him. So he stopped at a newsstand, looked at a paper, reached into his pocket for a coin, changed his mind, and headed straight back at Neal, forcing him to front follow for a good fifteen minutes.

  Now I’ve got him worn down, Graham thought, I’ll finish him off, and he checked to see the red socks back in a crowd at the cross-town bus stop. He got into the line to board the bus, and used the bus’s side mirror to see the red socks get into line about five old ladies back. When it came his turn to get on board, he stepped past the door and leaned against the front of the bus until he saw the red socks go up the steps.

  Bye-bye, Neal, thought Graham as he stepped out across the street. See you later.

  Graham ambled along the sidewalk, looking back to see whether maybe, just maybe, the kid had hung tough. But no red socks, no Neal, lesson administered. “The Solo Fake Burn” indeed.

  An hour and a half later, Neal entered McKeegan’s to find Graham occupying his usual spot at the bar.

  “You got your hair cut and had a BLT at The American. The bread was soggy. Next time, tell ’em take it easy on the mayo.”

  Graham reached down and pulled up the boy’s pant leg. Plain old white socks.

  “Reversible,” said Neal. “The key to The Solo Fake Burn’ is to make one man into two men. The first man had red socks. The second man didn’t. The rear doors of buses also help.”

  “Neal Carey could follow you into the can and hand you the toilet paper,” a proud Graham told Ed Levine, “and you wouldn’t know he was there.”

  Other subjects emerged, such as Photography 101. (“It is very hard,” Graham lectured, “to get the guy’s face and pecker in the same shot. But try, because if you just get the pecker, the guy will deny it’s his. Unless it’s humongous.”) Or Dirty Fighting. (“The basics of hand-to-hand combat, Neal, are simple. Forget this
karate shit, like Levine goes in for. Just pick up something hard and heavy that’s not your pecker and hit the guy with it. And don’t always try to break his jaw, like on Rawhide. There’s time for that when he’s unconscious. Hit him in the knee, or across the shins. The elbow is always nice.”)

  And thus the education of Neal Carey continued.

  Neal‘s mother was home.

  She looked like shit. Her eyes resembled blue marbles after a hard day’s play on the sidewalk. Greasy brown hair hung uncombed over her face, and her skin had the life and luster of chalk. She looked just like herself.

  She was happy to see Neal. “Baby,” she said. “Baby, you look good. Mama’s missed you.”

  “So where you been?” asked Neal, crossing over to the couch, where she sat slumped, to give her a peck on the cheek.

  “Around and about, around and around.”

  Neal heard soft sounds behind the closed bathroom door.

  “Your pimp here?”

  “He’s not my pimp, baby,” she said. “He’s my manager. Momma’s a little sick, baby, but she’s gonna be better soon.”

  “Why don’t you stay this time? Get off that shit. I’ll help you.”

  “Now isn’t that a touching scene?”

  Neal turned toward the voice, to see Marco come through the door. The pimp wore a white linen suit and a sky blue shirt open at the collar. A single gold chain hung from his neck. His full black hair was greased and combed straight back. He was solid without seeming heavy. He held a syringe in his right hand.

  “You’re Neal, right? Johnny, say hello to Neal.”

  “Hello, Neal.”

  Johnny was huge. He had both fat and muscle. You could land planes on his flattop. Make pancakes on his open palms.

  Neal didn’t answer. He watched as his mother stretched out her arm. Johnny took off his belt and wrapped it around the woman’s arm until a vein stood out clearly. Marco squeezed the syringe until the tiniest drop glistened on the edge of the needle.

  “Don’t do that,” Neal said.

  “Quiet, Neal. The doctor is working.”

  “I said don’t do that.”

  “Yeah, and we all heard you. Now shut up.”

  Neal slipped his hand into his right back pocket and pulled out a metal shoehorn. He slid the curl over his index finger and felt the cool metal settle firmly into his palm, the wide edge sticking out.

  He waited for Marco to bend over to his mother’s arms and then he burst across the room. Lifting his arm over his head, he slammed the hard metal edge down right between the pimp’s eyes. Marco dropped to his knees as the blood pumped from his shattered nose onto the formerly white suit.

  “Jesus! I can’t see! I can’t see!” Marco screamed as Johnny grabbed Neal and Neal’s mother grabbed the syringe. Marco pulled himself up on the arm of the couch, felt for the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket, and wiped the blood from his eyes. His legs trembled as he made his way over to Neal and backhanded him once and then twice across the mouth.

  “You think you’re a man, little shit?”

  Neal’s mother watched from inside a fluffy cloud as the men stripped her son and held him down on the couch. Marco had gone at him with the belt for what seemed like a long time when she heard the boy’s first cry and thought she should go to him. But he was so far away.

  Ed levine got quiet when he got angry. Graham was straining to hear him.

  “Is this dink connected?”

  “By a thread. An uncle in numbers. Nobody heavy.”

  Graham had forced the story out of Neal, who had finally showed up for work two days late and barely able to walk. He had gently cleaned the boy off, medicating the cuts that threatened to become infected. He had seen some beatings as a kid, but he had never seen anything like this. Neal’s back and legs were a red and purple contour of welts and bruises where the pimp had lashed him with the buckle end of the belt.

  “Nobody beats on one of my people,” Levine said.

  “Phone call to Mulberry Street takes care of him. They owe us a couple.”

  “No. This is personal. I want him for myself. Set it up.”

  “C’mon, Ed—”

  Levine’s glare ended the discussion.

  Joe graham didn’t like it.

  Levine had told him to set the guy up and he had set the guy up, but he wasn’t happy about it. Standing in a dark alley with a vicious dope-pushing pimp and his gigantic thug, Graham just hoped that Ed Levine knew what he was doing. Ed Levine was a big guy, but this ox with Marco was a whole lot bigger.

  “Where’s your friend?” Marco asked him. The pimp, still decked out in his trademark white suit, was nervous.

  “He’s coming.”

  “He better be. I don’t like standin’ around when I’m holdin’.”

  “I don’t like standing around, period.”

  “I hear that.”

  Come on, Ed, thought Graham. I hope you’re not slopping down that Chinese food somewhere and forgot about our little appointment.

  Marco said, “You don’t mind my friend pats you down. Not that I don’t trust you …”

  “Hey, it’s business, right?” answered Graham.

  Graham lifted his arms as Johnny carefully and gently checked him for weapons. The guy is a pro, thought Graham, feeling a little more scared and wishing more than ever that Levine had just let the old Italian guys on Mulberry take care of this.

  “He’s okay,” Johnny reported, smiling pleasantly at Graham.

  “What happened to your arm?” Marco asked.

  “I stuck it someplace it didn’t belong.”

  “Hope she was worth it!” Marco laughed.

  Graham chuckled politely and made a note to add this to Marco’s tab.

  “Good evening, gentlemen.”

  Graham turned with relief at the sound of Ed’s voice and then regretted it. Levine was dressed in a three-piece gray pinstriped suit. What, Ed, are you going to rumble or sell them term life?

  “How ya doin’?” asked Marco, sizing him up. This did not look like a guy who would want to buy dope.

  “I’m doing fine,” Levine answered. “It’s you I’m worried about.”

  “You got no worries about me, my friend. I’m legit.”

  “Your health, I mean. I’m worried about your health.”

  There it was. In the air where everyone could feel it. Somebody was going to get hurt.

  “Who are you?” asked Marco. He wanted to get right to it.

  “I’m the guy who’s going to bust you up bad,” Ed answered in a conversational tone.

  Before Graham could move or shout a warning, Johnny came at Levine from the blind left side with a swooping right hook designed to cave in Ed’s jaw. Graham watched amazed as Levine leaned away from the fist and grabbed the wrist with his own left hand, switched his weight to his right foot, and kicked low and hard with his left.

  The sole of his foot caught Johnny hard on the side of his planted left knee, and the sickening sound of bone and cartilage giving way as the giant crumpled to the ground with a scream made Graham want to lose his dinner.

  Marco began to sweat but forced a smile. “You’re in big trouble, sport. My Uncle Sal—”

  “Thinks you’re a sniveling little scumbucket. At least that’s what he said to me at the social club. He doesn’t like guys who beat up little boys, either.”

  Graham should have known the punk had a gun. Didn’t they all? He cursed himself for not having checked him in the endless second it took for the pimp to reach inside his jacket to his shoulder holster.

  Levine waited until he saw the muscles in Marco’s wrist tense as he grabbed the handle of the revolver. He waited for the exact moment when the forearm lay flat and tight against the chest. Then he stepped back on his left foot, brought his right foot up level with his own chest and then straightened his leg with a lightning kick that hit Marco’s wrist like a hammer on an anvil. Marco’s wrist snapped like a dead branch.

  Marco stood,
shocked and stupid, his right arm graciously numb and his hand caught inside his lapel. At least he understood now what was going on, although he couldn’t believe this guy was so pissed off about some stupid hooker’s little kid. Credibility came quickly with a sharp kick that cracked two ribs and doubled him over in pain. He was trying to hit the deck when three fists banged into his face with jackhammer speed, breaking his nose and left cheekbone. He felt only relief when his knees crashed onto the concrete. The alley in front of him spun in fiery red and sickly yellow as he heard the little one-armed guy ask, “Where did you learn that stuff?”

  Levine was just reaching his stride, his breathing even and the slightest sheen of sweat beginning on his forehead. Chiding himself for getting out of shape, he did a reverse spinning dropkick that hit Marco flush in the side of the head and sent him flying into an unconscious heap.

  “Is he dead?” Graham asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Levine answered. He squatted down beside Marco and grabbed him by the broken wrist, squeezing hard. The sharp pain woke the pimp up. “Are you listening to me, asshole? Your career in New York is over. You got that?”

  Marco listened numbly. An end to physical pain was the height of his worldly ambitions.

  Graham had walked out into the street to fetch a cop who had been guarding the alley for them. He was a young patrolman, two years on the force and eager for a good arrest.

  “He’s yours and he’s holding,” Graham told him. “Easy felony. Do us a favor, though, and just drop the big guy off in an E Room and lose him, okay? You take care of that other thing?”

  “The kid’s mother. Yeah, we sent her out on a bus couple hours ago—one-way ticket.”

  “The kid?”

  “Wasn’t around.”

  “Okay, good job. Go pick up your prize.”

  They went into the alley, where the cop surveyed the scene. One mob-type gorilla lay whimpering against the wall, and a very duded-up wise guy, with a face that now looked like pie from the Automat, was kneeling and clutching a hand that was pointed uptown.