The Angels of Catastrophe

by Peter Plate

  “These days, him doing what he does, handling other people’s money for them? He’s an accountant, right? And a landlord? Hardly glamorous. The way he dresses and how he acts, like a big shot? The pussy. You’d never know it was the same guy who used to flog televisions at the flea market. Huddling in his car at dawn hoping to sell a portable black and white set by noon so he could eat. He was so poor, all his hair fell out. Me and him, we used to count pennies for coffee. Now he thinks he’s the greatest.”

  “What should I do about him?”

  “For the moment, nothing.” Maimonides was fatalistic and enjoying it. “But just wait. Ephraim won’t leave you in peace. It’s not in his nature. If he’s already got his hooks into you, he’ll want a bigger piece of your ass. Something that will hurt. But don’t worry. He’ll give you a signal first. Ephraim believes in advertising whatever it is he’s doing.”

  Maimonides’s prediction unnerved Durrutti—more tsouris, the diminutive Jew didn’t need. The dungeon of his heart did not beat. No air passed through his lungs. The faces of Jimmy Ramirez, Sugar, Ephraim Rook, and Kulak rotated in the kaleidoscope of his agitated mind.

  He looked out the bakery’s window—a summery night had fallen with a guillotine’s quickness; the stars in the sky were few and far between. Seeing them made him perversely optimistic, easing his fears—if a star could twinkle overhead, hope lurked in the Mission.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rats nested in the palm trees above the Lavadería Sandoval and the Iglesia de Diós on Mission Street. Durrutti heard them as he rambled toward the El Capitán Hotel. Billowing fog darkened the storefront windows of the Palacio Latino Restaurant, the Red Dragon Liquor Store and the An-da Jiang Acupuncture Clinic. The road was deserted, save for a lonely car turning left onto Twenty-third Street.

  Having slept three hours in four days, Durrutti was seeing double. It took him a second to realize Zets had pulled up alongside him in his bullet-riddled squad car. The cop leaned out the driver’s window, aimed a flashlight in his eyes and cackled like an escapee from a mental asylum. His blemished face was ablaze with a policeman’s lust for small details. “Look who we have here,” he wheezed. “The shit himself. Where you going, you fucking midget?”

  Durrutti got enraged when he was reminded how short he was. He froze in his tracks and didn’t breathe. He didn’t know if it was Halloween or just a nightmare. His sphincter twinged with fear; a trickle of sweat ran down his thigh. “I was going home. To the El Capitán.”

  Zets was wearing his riot helmet; his wooden face was obscured by the helmet’s brim. His voice was moist and had more bass in it than a foghorn. “Where have you been?”

  “Getting a doughnut,” Durrutti said. “You know ... at La Cabana.”

  The answer didn’t quench Zets’s thirst for information. His irritation was overt. The distaste on his face was plain to see. “You don’t expect me to believe that, do you? Stay put. I want to have a word with you.”

  The patrolman rocketed out of the squad car, maneuvering his bulk like a ballerina on steroids and swung around the front fender. The baton was in his arms. His blue combat overalls were a canvas of catsup stains, Pennzoil mechanical grease, chocolate chip cookie crumbs and lightning bolts of dried blood. The acne on his cheeks was three-dimensional, as if his welts were illuminated with high-grade track lighting.

  Durrutti was frightened—Zets was the ugliest man on Mission Street. His face belonged in a museum of horrors. “What’s going on here? I ain’t doing anything.”

  The Jewish cop’s eyes glittered off-kilter as he approached Durrutti. The air was fetid with rotting garbage. A car whizzed by the policeman, inches from his back—Durrutti prayed a passing driver would broadside him. Zets gabbled at him, “Don’t give me that shit. You got any identification on you?”

  “What for?” Durrutti quailed. “You know who I am.”

  Zets flicked the nightstick an inch away from Durrutti’s nose, testing his reflexes. “The law requires that you show proof of identity. Failure to do that will force me to arrest your ass.”

  Durrutti was in a no-win situation and he didn’t bicker. He reached for his wallet and found a driver’s license, one that had expired two years ago. He handed the tattered document to Zets like it was a used condom. The cop turned the flashlight on it and griped, “Are you pulling my leg? This is worthless. It ain’t no good.”

  “It’s got my name and picture on it. What more do you want?”

  “But it’s not valid. You got anything else?”

  The conversation was turning into a contest of wills. Durrutti manufactured a hardness he didn’t feel and stuck out his jaw, mad that Zets was making a mountain out of a mole hill. He had to go to the bathroom so badly, he wanted to cry. “No, I don’t. I’ve got nothing. What’s going on here, anyway?”

  Zets said the magical words everyone on the wrong side of the law dreaded to hear. The voodoo that wrecked lives. The spellbinding incantation which cost women and men their freedom. The divination that killed. “Step over to the squad car, Ricky and spread your legs. Put your hands on the hood where I can see them.”

  No matter what language you spoke, a policeman’s patter was the same. The idiom of law enforcment was universal, like Esperanto. You did what he requested or you paid a penalty. Since Durrutti acted deaf, Zets gave him a poke in the ribs with the nightstick to motivate him, a jab that sent a rill of torment into his armpit.

  “Empty out your pockets,” Zets brayed. “And put everything on the car.”

  Durrutti went through the drill and tossed the wallet, a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, a key chain and a fistful of one dollar bills on the black and white’s hood. Zets rummaged through the possessions, engrossed in the poetry of his job. He read every scrap of paper in the wallet. He examined each key and he tried on the sunglasses. Before he could pocket the money, it blew off the hood and into the street, disappearing under the nearby cars parked at the curb.

  “Okay, Ricky. Where is he?”

  “Where is who?”

  “Where’s Lonely Boy?”

  Popping unexpected questions at you was a cop’s favorite ploy. His notion of martial arts. One way to deal with it was to remain mute. Another option was to play dumb. A third avenue was to get smart. Just for kicks, Durrutti chose the latter. With his hands on the hood and his head periscoped between his shoulders, he grated through his teeth, “Who’s asking?”

  Being smart earned him a whack in the ulna with the nightstick. At first, the hurt was tolerable, just a blow to the bone. All he had to do was grit his teeth and smile through the pain. A second later, it felt like the entire solar system had landed on his arm.

  Zets regarded himself as benevolent and said to Durrutti, “See? That didn’t feel too good, did it? It made me feel bad, too. Your pain is my pain. Did you know that? Now just tell me where the fuck that goddamn wetback is.”

  Durrutti gasped, wringing his arm and wishing he were dead. “I don’t know. I don’t even know who he is.”

  Zets was eloquent with the baton and cut an arabesque across Durrutti’s face with it, smacking him upside the cheekbone with the stick, then backhanding him in the jaw with the pommel. Durrutti capsized to the pavement—Zets yanked him back onto his feet like he was an accordion. He dug his fingers into Durrutti’s waistband and spread-eagled him on the hood, then pressed up against him from behind. His superior weight and his Kevlar body armor squeezed the air from the other man’s lungs. “Let’s try it again. Tell me where Lonely Boy is.”

  Durrutti desperately wanted to move, but couldn’t. The policeman’s cock was wedged against the cleft in his buttocks. The gun belt abraded his tailbone. “I don’t know him. How can I tell you where he is?”

  “Don’t fuck with me. I’m not in the mood.”

  “Neither am I.”

  Zets looped one of his water buffalo-sized arms around Durrutti’s neck and wrenched his head to an angle that wasn’t anatomically possible. The cop said in a monoton
e just a degree shy of bedlam, “Now talk to me.”

  He managed to reiterate, most unwisely, “But I don’t know anything.”

  Proof of Zets’s disbelief was immediate. He socked Durrutti in the ear with one of his lead-lined riot gauntlets, caroming his head off the hood. It hurt, but not too bad. Since Durrutti wasn’t holding any drugs or weapons, Zets wouldn’t arrest him. He didn’t even have any warrants out on him. Legally, he was clean as a whistle. The only thing he had to worry about was whether or not the cop was going to kill him.

  In a technique he must have learned from the devil, Zets hooked the baton around Durrutti’s emaciated neck, flush with his adam’s apple and gave him a good choke. All the colors in the street became brighter for Durrutti. The storefront neon lights blinded him. Sounds were muffled; a woman’s laughter echoed in his head. The circulation of oxygen in his lungs came to a halt. His pulse tolled like a church bell.

  “Zets, I can’t fucking breathe. Stop it.”

  “Then tell me where the mojado is.”

  “I can’t. I just don’t know.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Durrutti caught a glimpse of the cop’s scarred complexion, a landcape so ravaged, it had turned his opponent’s face into the cratered topography of a lost continent. He was so busy admiring the policeman’s skin, he never saw Zets thwack him in the noggin with the nightstick.

  It was curtains for him. A velvety descent to nowhere. The blow knocked him to the ground and before he went unconscious, the image of Sugar’s moony face emerged from the red and bloody haze. She was apple-cheeked with excitement. “Aww, you got a boo-boo? That’s terrible! Do you want me to kiss it for you? Hey, guess who I brought with me? You’ll love it!”

  Behind Sugar and moving slowly in her wake and seeming as if he owned everything under the sun was Ephraim Rook. He had on his best suit, a gold-threaded Gucci. An embossed Star of David shimmered from a chain neatly and discreetly laid over a brocaded blue and white silk tie. His orange hair was glazed with scented pomade. His suntanned face was creased in a fraternal greeting that somehow failed to reach his barracuda eyes. “Good to see you again, Durrutti. Good to see you. How are you feeling?”

  Rook’s tinny voice burst like a hemorrhage in Durrutti’s brain and he blacked out, falling face first to the pavement.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Dunrutti came to all alone on the ground. He had a split lip, a cut above his eyebrows and blood all over his clothes. He probed the inside of his mouth with his tongue and discovered he was missing a tooth. In summation, he was fortunate. Zets had left him in one piece.

  Not knowing where else to go, he went to the El Capitán to lick his wounds. The lights of the El Herradero Restaurant, Duc Loi Supermarket and the Hong Kong Cafe glimmered through the fog as he staggered toward the hotel. It was late night, made darker by the broken street lamps. The sound of a garbage truck accompanied him while he held a hand to his head. He had a lump big as a baseball on his temple.

  The police flooded the Mission, doubling the foot patrols on Bryant and Harrison Streets. Helicopters plodded through the smoggy night sky, stirring the palm trees’ desiccated fronds. Cop vans chugged in the neighborhood’s garbage-strewn alleys, addling the homeless winos who slept in them. The dragnet set for the cop shooter was a tightly flung lasso.

  Durrutti had a call on the telephone at four o’clock in the morning. He was in his room smoking cigarettes. The night clerk banged on his door, saying a gentleman was on the line. Durrutti was shell-shocked from the beating and from lack of sleep. Against his own advice, he answered the phone. To his bewilderment, it was Fleeta.

  “Ricky? You there?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “You awake?”

  “Maybe. Depends on what you’re gonna tell me.”

  “Listen here. I have milestone news for you. I was talking to a dude the other day down at the New Mission Cafeteria. The homeboy hangs out in front of the place and so he knows everyone. Anyway, he said he has an aunt in Oakland who’s seen Jimmy Ramirez over there. In fucking Oakland. That’s heavy.”

  Durrutti was skeptical. How fast the black man was talking—he heard the misspent money in his pebbly voice—he deduced Fleeta was coked up to the gills. It was too much for Durrutti and he wanted to go back to bed. “Where does she live in Oakland?”

  “She’s in west Oakland, near DeFremery Park.”

  He wilted with the misinformation. Fleeta was talking a fantasy. “Jimmy spends time in east Oakland, near Fruit-vale. He’s got some cousins on Foothill. I don’t think it was him.”

  Fleeta was indignant. He hated being wrong and got into a self-righteous snit. “You think I’m lying? That’s fucked up. You really are selfish, you know that? I mean, here I am, phoning you in the middle of the night trying to save your shit from the pigs. And do you care? It don’t sound like it. Okay, this woman also said she saw Jimmy’s car. You know, the Chevy.”

  Durrutti parried lightly. “With the candy apple red flake paint job?”

  Fleeta demurred. “Huh? She said it was blue with one of those murals on the trunk. With a naked chick on it from a TV show, you know.”

  “That ain’t Jimmy. He wouldn’t do that to his car. A mural on the trunk? That’s not him.”

  “How do you know? It might be him.”

  “No, no, that Chevy of his, he’d never dress it up like that. He ain’t into being flamboyant.”

  Fleeta expressed his disappointment like he meant it. His sincerity mollified Durrutti. “Well, to hell with it. Remember the other day when I saw you? You know, in Hunt’s? I wanted to tell you something about that.”

  Upon hearing this, Durrutti got the heebie-jeebies. Fleeta was going to tell him some horror story he didn’t want to hear at four o’clock in the morning. “Is it important?”

  Fleeta’s voice spiraled down into a whisper, ready to fool the cops if they were listening in on a wiretap. “Very important.”

  The urge to ask was irresistible. “What is it?”

  “You need to stop looking for Jimmy. Back off while you can.”

  Durrutti heard Fleeta’s tension, digitized and pouring through the telephone’s receiver like a cupful of hot butter. “Why? What’s going on?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “I’m sure I don’t. But that ain’t the point. So tell me.”

  “People are talking about how you’re going around asking so many questions. You know, about Jimmy.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s making everyone nervous.”

  “So?”

  “Some folks are saying you’re a cop.”

  Durrutti was astonished. “They’re saying I’m a cop?”

  “Yeah, a policeman. A plainclothes dude. Maybe F.B.I.”

  It was an insult without comparison. Durrutti felt like a martyr. The only thing uglier was someone saying you were a child molester, a short-eyes. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined a career in law enforcement. Not even on angel dust. Fleeta’s spiel reduced his body temperature by three degrees. Black spots materialized in front of his eyes. His paranoia reached the heights of creamy ecstasy. “What are you telling me?”

  Fleeta blithered, “The shit is gonna splatter. So back off. And guess what else?”

  The El Capitán was chilly and Durrutti was strung out and hyper-tired. He plunged his hands into the side pockets of his threadbare velvet bathrobe and gazed out the hotel’s fusty hall window. Other than a hooker in a fur coat standing at the corner next to Ritmo Latino, Mission Street was a stretch of dead pavement. Even Hunt’s Donuts looked like it had closed down for the night. “What is it, Fleeta?”

  “I’ve got someone here who would like to speak with you.”

  Blood thudded through Durrutti’s veins. His eyes burned as if he had conjunctivitis. “No, I don’t wanna talk to nobody. I gotta get some sleep.”

  “C’mon, man,” Fleeta coaxed. “Don’t be such a tight ass. Live a little.”

 
“Who is it?”

  By the sound of it, Fleeta was at a party with men and women who dressed with good taste and knew what the term disposable income meant. Knowing him, there were plenty of spicy females and excellent drugs in the room. Fleeta was born to have fun. The telephone changed hands and a woman’s voice threaded itself into the receiver with a rush of poetic breath.

  “That you, honey? What’s going on?”

  He had a mini-seizure when he heard who it was. His heart palpitated. Fleeta had bushwhacked him. “Sugar ... what a surprise.”

  She pealed an exaggerated coked-out giggle. Behind her laugh was acrimony. Durrutti heard its telltale tremolo when she replied, “Yeah, Fleeta said it would blow your fucking mind. How are you? We haven’t talked in so long. I still think about you. Isn’t that strange?”

  The danger was, he didn’t know what he was feeling toward her. Leftover love. A dash of hate. Stultifying ambivalence. Rampant denial. His head hurt, right between his eyes. He stifled a caustic retort, putting it on ice with civility. He willed himself to be cavalier as he asked, “Where are you guys? Sounds like fun.”

  “We’re at a small get-together. Just some friends. Someone had a birthday.”

  “Oh, yeah? Who’s house?”

  The crash of breaking glass and a drunken woman’s cursing and hot be-bop jazz in the background preceded Sugar’s answer. “We’re at Ephraim’s. At his condo.”

  “Ephraim Rook?”

  “Yeah. We’re having a fiesta.”

  The name of his enemy on her lips overcame his composure. To hear it at that predawn hour destroyed him. Now he knew what death was. His hands were clammy and his legs shook at the knees. He bravely held back the hostility in his voice. “At four in the morning?”

  Sugar was spontaneously defensive, a native charm of hers that had been refined with practice. She hissed, “Christ, listen to you. What’s wrong with that?”

  Ephraim had a split-level condominium on top of Nob Hill off California Street near Grace Cathedral and the Fairmont Hotel. His apartment overlooked the Golden Gate Bridge. Persian carpets covered the parquet oak floors in every room, excluding the master bathroom. A ferris wheel-sized crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling in the dining room. To cap it off, he had a live-in Salvadoreña maid.