Blood of My Brother

by James Lepore

  “I’ve been calling you,” Jay said to Danny, settling the paper on his lap.

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I have a new client.”

  “So?”

  “So,” Danny answered, “she says she worked for Bryce Powers.”

  “Who is she?”

  “A knockout Spanish broad.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Donna Kelly.”

  “Donna Kelly is Spanish? You believe that?”

  “It’s an alias, who cares?”

  “What’s her story?”

  “She has something she says Powers gave her.”

  “What?”

  “Five hundred thousand in cash.”

  Jay’s brain had still been dull from sleeping, but this brought him fully to his senses. “Seriously?” he said.

  “Yes. I’m going to Florida on Monday.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m bringing her the money.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “In a locker at Newark Airport.”

  “Dan,” Jay said, “I don’t . . .”

  “Get dressed,” Danny replied, cutting him off. “I’ll tell you in the car.”

  “Five hundred grand, Dan, come on, it’s dirty.”

  “Her retainer was clean.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty-five K.”

  Jay took this number in, remaining silent. Twenty-five thousand dollars was a lot of money for any working class guy, but especially for Danny, who was always on the balls of his ass, swimming in credit card, and, recently, shylock debt.

  “Where are we going?” Jay asked, knowing that with a fee like that in hand there would be no talking his friend out of this job, and that he would get the full story later when Dan, a lover of drama, felt the moment was right.

  “Remember that hostess at that restaurant on Varick Street?” Dan asked.

  “No.”

  “She remembers you. I ran into her last night. She was with a friend. She said to bring you in tonight, we’d have dinner, the four of us. She says there’s no hard feelings.”

  “No hard feelings for what?”

  “She wouldn’t say.”

  Jay, smiling, rerolled the newspaper and threw it at his friend, who fended it off with a forearm. In Danny’s dark brown eyes was the sly, mischievous look that even Jay, who had known him for thirty-seven years, could never interpret entirely. I might be pulling your chain, it could be saying, or I might not, take your pick; or possibly, I am lying to you for the fun of it and you may never know the truth. Or, you’re too serious, Jay, so I’m breaking your balls to try to get you to lighten up. Or any combination of these.

  “Okay,” Jay said, looking at his watch, “what time?”

  “Eight o’clock, but let’s go in now. I gotta see a guy.”

  “What kind of a guy?”

  “Just a guy. Come on, get dressed.”

  Upstairs, Jay shaved and put on khakis, comfortable loafers, and a black polo shirt. Before he pulled his shirt over his head he took a quick look at the six-inch scar that ran vertically down his right bicep, faded to a pale, almost translucent white after thirty years. Danny had helped him get revenge for the infliction of this wound, had nearly killed a black kid twice his size in Newark’s Branch Brook Park to do it. He was a happy-go-lucky guy usually, his friend Danny, but he could turn mean in a heartbeat, and there was no stopping him when he got it in his head to do something, like take on somebody twice his size or courier a large amount of cash to Florida for a beautiful woman.

  “So who’s this guy we’re seeing,” Jay said once they were out of Montclair and headed east on Route 3, one of a half dozen north Jersey highways that feed cars and buses and people by the thousands around the clock into the glittering maw that is Manhattan.

  “Why do you have to ask so many questions?” Danny replied, “It’s not good for your health.”

  Danny was divorced, with two sons, aged fourteen and twelve. He made a decent living from his private eye business, but he liked nice clothes and fancy cars; he liked to eat at good restaurants; he liked to entertain women in style; he liked to pick up tabs; he liked to go to the track, and bet with bookies. With those habits he was always in debt. He had maxed out many credit cards since his divorce five years ago, and could never manage to pay anything but interest on a total debt that was approaching sixty thousand dollars. And Jay knew that he had recently borrowed from a loan shark in Manhattan, a guy that he and Danny had grown up with on the streets of Newark, but who nevertheless insisted on repayment. They’re quirky that way, he had told his friend at the time.

  “Is it the Pretzel?” he asked now.

  The Pretzel was Johnny D’Ambola, who, at the age of eight, had been diagnosed with idiopathic scoliosis. His back corkscrewing out of control—hence the nickname—he had been put in a full body cast for six months, which apparently left him a lot of time to ruminate on how he would one day get even with his neighborhood tormentors, Dan Del Colliano being chief among them. He was the loan shark.

  “Yeah. But first I gotta see another guy.”

  “You’re collecting for the Pretzel?”

  “Right. It cuts down my vig. I gotta do it.”

  “Fuck.”

  “You asked.”

  “I have to know, asshole. You want me to sit around with my thumb up my ass?”

  “Don’t worry. The guy’s a fag.”

  “Literally?”

  “I don’t know, but he’s a faggot.”

  Jay did not respond. He had had this kind of conversation with Danny enough times to know that at a certain point further questioning would be fruitless. He had the option of asking to be dropped off someplace, a bar, say, and picked up later. He wouldn’t exercise that option in this case, although in the past he had steered clear of some of his friend’s more dubious activities, which included low-end drug dealing and the occasional insurance scam.

  They were different people in many ways, he and Danny—in most ways, really—but their friendship went deeper than mutual interests or values. Thrown together at age five on the first day of the Newark riots, they had spent the next nine years back-to-back with each other in a long fight for survival as the city rapidly changed from a patchwork of peaceful middle class ethnic enclaves to a no-man’s-land dominated by black and Hispanic street gangs. Walking home from school, or to the corner candy store, were dangerous trips in those years.

  Once, riding his bike in Branch Brook Park when he was ten, Jay was accosted by two older, and bigger, black boys, who wanted the bike. When he resisted, they slashed his arm with a box cutter. He had made the mistake of going out alone that day. Thereafter he stuck close to Dan, who was a fearless brawler, and who had good tactical sense as well: He knew when to talk, he knew when to cut and run, he knew fence holes and alleys and backyard escape routes all over the neighborhoods they lived in; and if it did come down to a fight, he was a wild man with his fists. No one fucked with Jay if Danny was around, and he was never far off; and Jay never forgot this.

  They stopped on Canal Street to put the top down on Danny’s leased BMW convertible, and then made their way to Silvano’s, a restaurant on Sixth Avenue, where the guy who owed the Pretzel money was the bartender. His name was Al Spano. He was around fifty, tall, with too much wavy gray hair and a potbelly. He owed D’Ambola twenty-five hundred dollars, and had missed his last two weeks’ interest, or vigorish payments, at two hundred fifty per week. Dan was supposed to collect those two weeks, plus the current week, seven hundred fifty all together. The restaurant had just opened for dinner, and was quiet, with only a young couple sitting at an outside table, having drinks.

  Dan parked at the curb in a loading zone in front of the restaurant. He asked Jay to stay with the car, and move it if a cop came along. Jay got out and leaned against the car, and watched Danny enter and take a seat at the bar. At first Spano, who he could see from the waist u
p, did not seem concerned. Then the fight seemed to go out of him, and he went over to his jacket, which was hanging on a hook behind the bar, took an envelope out, and handed it to Danny. Danny strolled out, and they drove off, this time with Jay driving.

  “How’d you do?” Jay asked.

  “Okay. I got five hundred.”

  “He didn’t look too worried.”

  “He wasn’t, at first.”

  “I don’t want to know what you said to him.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “What did you say, tough guy?”

  “I told him that because this was the first time he was late, he got to deal with me, that I wouldn’t hurt him, but that if I left without the money, the next guy they sent, it would be different. The next guy got paid to hurt people, break bones and so on. I asked him how his family was doing, his two grown daughters, his grandkids. He’s a degenerate gambler, the dumb fuck. He won at OTB today and gave me some of it. I was lucky. It was easy.”

  “Who told you to say all that, Johnny D.?”

  “No, he left it up to me.”

  “How much do you owe him?”

  “Five grand. The vig’s five hundred a week.”

  “Five hundred percent annual interest.”

  “That sounds right.”

  “Christ.”

  “When I bring him the money, I’ll get a pass on this week’s vig. I can use it.”

  “Can you imagine, the Pretzel?”

  “Unbelievable. It would give me great pleasure to break his ass, but if I did, I’d be in trouble. He’s a made guy.”

  “I can loan you the money.”

  “Maybe someday.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Little Italy. I’ll tell you when to turn.”

  Danny directed Jay to the Abbadabba Italian-American War Veterans Club on Madison Street in what was left of Little Italy, where Johnny D’Ambola hung out every night of his life except for Christmas, Easter, and when he went to Florida, where he owned a nightclub in Hallandale. The city was not as busy as it usually was—it was the Labor Day weekend—but there were still a dozen cars double-parked on Madison Street. Jay double-parked as well, and waited in the car while Dan went into the club. Ten minutes later he came out, and got into the passenger seat.

  “That’s done,” he said.

  “Good. How was the Pretzel?”

  “He’s a jerkoff.”

  “I’m sure. How come he didn’t come out to say hello?”

  “I didn’t tell him you were here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s surveillance here all the time. You don’t need to be on film with these assholes.”

  “Okay. If you say so. Where to?”

  “I told them we’d meet them at the bar at the Four Seasons.”

  “All the way uptown?”

  “It’s a beautiful night for a drive.”

  It was a beautiful night for a drive. It was warm. There was a gentle breeze. The sun was setting across the Hudson and, as it did, its last mellow light cast a magical glow on the only real city in the world.

  “Tonight you can get your mind off of beheadings and whatnot,” said Dan.

  “Right.”

  “One thing.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s not talk about Nietzsche, and those guys.”

  Jay laughed. “I never talk about Nietzsche,” he said.

  “Well, Hemingway, Schopenhauer, you know what I mean.”

  “I can’t promise.”

  “These broads are gum chewers.”

  “They have their place.”

  “The gorgeous mosaic.”

  Jay laughed again. He did not think that Dan had been keeping up with the latest in diversity marketing. “I’ll do my best,” he said.

  “That’s all I ask. God knows that’s all I ask.”

  “Have we ever had a bad time together?”

  “Not that I can remember.”

  4.

  August, 4. 1991, Mexico City

  Mexico City’s Aztec founders believed that human sacrifice was the only way of guaranteeing that the gods would allow them to continue as a race. Each evening a heart was cut from living flesh to ensure that the sun would rise the next day. On one occasion in the fifteenth century, twenty thousand prisoners were sacrificed over four days as part of the dedication of a new temple to the main god, Huitzilopochtli. Their fetish for offering flayed humans to their gods, and their history as mercenaries and warriors did not, however, prevent the Spanish from conquering the Aztecs in the sixteenth century, nor their gradual demise, via intermingling with their conquerors over the following centuries, as a distinct race. There are no pure-blooded Aztecs among Mexico’s population today, although many claim, with pride, to have some of that ancient warrior blood in them, as a means, in some cases, perhaps, of rationalizing conduct not far removed from that of their cruel and violent ancestors.

  Polanco and Lomas de Chapultepec, only a few miles to the east of the city center, are, among Mexico City’s nearly four hundred colonias, or neighborhoods, arguably the finest: Polanco with its smart hotels and shops, its charming residential streets, its Parisian air; Chapultepec with its walled estates and polo clubs and botanical gardens. They stand side by side, the princess and the dowager queen, casting fearless and disdainful eyes on the urban monster that surrounds them.

  In these enclaves of the rich lived two of mixed Aztec and Spanish blood, a mother on an estate in Chapultepec, and her daughter in a three-hundred-year-old convent in Polanco. The mother, a spoiled heiress to a nouveau riche fortune, did not know that the daughter—the product of a youthful indiscretion—lived nearby, but if she were told, the effect on her life would have been minimal: distasteful, but fleeting and not disquieting, like the bad smells—unavoidable in La Ciudad de Mexico—she sometimes encountered on her shopping trips into the city.

  The daughter, Isabel Gutierrez Perez—a name chosen from the phone book and placed via a one hundred peso bribe on her birth certificate—had been told that her unwed mother, a servant in a Chapultepec mansion, had died giving birth to her in the summer of 1977, and that her father was unknown, possibly a Mixtec Indian from the south, passing through the great city. The landowners, Isabel was told, represented by one Senor Hermano, who visited Isabel from time to time, had given her to the Convent of Santa Maria, where Dominican Sisters ran an orphanage as part of their life of service to Mexico’s poor.

  Isabel was given these few threads about her past, and no more, when she was five, and as the years passed she wove them into a melodramatic tapestry containing the images of her brave and beautiful parents, “Rosalita,” saintly in life and in death, and “Miguel,” working the land, trying desperately to save enough money to send for his daughter. These images she clutched fiercely to her heart until 1991, when, at the age of fourteen, she was forced to abandon them forever.

  For as long as she could remember, Isabel received visits from Tio Hermano once each year on her birthday. A large, impressive man who smelled of a sweet cologne and whose dark, wavy hair turned a distinguished silver as the years passed, he brought her small gifts—a coloring book, plastic beads, a cheap doll—and sat with her and Sister Josefina for a few minutes in the convent’s hushed courtyard, their conversation gently monitored by a weathered statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe gazing not at them but at the bloodred roses strewn at her feet. Isabel was at first awed by these visits. They gave her hope, and they conferred a status on her that the other children did not have: She might be wanted. Nothing came of them, however, and the void in her life where her parents should have been grew bigger with each passing year. She receded, even on her birthday, in the presence of larger-than-life Uncle Herman and demur Sister Josefina, into her isolation and loneliness. But after his visit on her thirteenth birthday, in 1990, Uncle Herman came twice more: at Christmas, when he brought her a simple but very beautiful pearl necklace, and at Easter, when his gift was a bouquet of sp
ring flowers and a lovely white dress for her to wear at her confirmation ceremony.

  Isabel, as any curious teenager would be, was eager to experience the world beyond the convent, a world she had seen only in small glimpses through the distorting prism of smuggled magazines and the occasional television show the girls were allowed to watch; but the idea of scheming to escape, to meet boys, did not appeal to her as it did to some of the other older girls, who were reacting to the stirrings of womanhood in their bodies.

  Isabel had no enemies, nor any close friends among these girls. She stood aside, as she had been doing since she was a child, and watched their girlish exuberance play itself out among the tall columns, and in the quiet corridors and austere common rooms of the orphanage. Fingering the pearls in her room, she prayed that they were a talisman of her freedom. She had no way of knowing how expensive they were, but they glistened against her pale olive skin, and it was obvious, even to her inexperienced eyes, that these were different from the trinkets that she had been given in the past. She had never been mistreated or lied to and so she did not fight off the question that came naturally to her mind in the light of Uncle Herman’s gifts and extra visits: was it not possible that he had come to have some affection for her, and would help her find her place in the world beyond the convent’s massive wooden gates?

  As Isabel approached her fourteenth birthday her breasts rounded and filled to a heaviness that was at first disturbing; her long, coltish legs turned shapely and her rear end plump and high and firm below a trim girlish waist. Her face remained angelic, but beneath its layer of baby fat her features were fine, her eyes a breathtaking blue, her lashes long and black like her lustrous hair. In short, she was a beautiful, exotic child in the body of an even more beautiful and exotic woman. She was not unaware of these changes, had seen the way people—the other girls, the sisters, the occasional visitor—had looked at her. There was, however, nothing in her life experience that would enable her to connect them to Uncle Herman’s heightened interest. But they were. Uncle Herman saw them coming when he visited Isabel for her thirteenth birthday in August of 1990, and confirmed them on his Christmas and Easter visits. On her fourteenth birthday he took her away.