Police and Thieves: A Novel

by Peter Plate

  Lately Eichmann had been querying me, accusing me of wimping out on him. His thesis was that I wanted to get out of the business. He thought I was getting scared. He was right on both counts, but I wasn’t going to admit that.

  The sticky fog-burned air was a perfect conductor for the acute tension Flaherty was radiating. The lock wasn’t yielding to his ministrations, so he took out another thin metal rod from his satchel, one with a smaller head. He put the thing into the keyhole, fooled with it for a minute, and then said out loud, “Got it!” He removed the Schlage and nudged open the creaky door, going inside.

  I dashed across the pavement and ran into the lot after him. I snuck up to the door and peered in—Flaherty was dumping underwear, socks, and papers on the floor. He picked up our two-burner hot plate and hurled it against a wall, smashing it to pieces. Then he overturned a basin filled with dishes and rinse water, spilling the water and jettisoning the dishes onto the floor.

  The coffee table was caked with leaves and crumbs from Chad’s Kentucky weed—the clues we were operating a cartel in the garage. Flaherty got down on his knees and pushed aside a hummock of months-old laundry to focus his attention on a sinsemilla bud. He scooped up the bud and pocketed it.

  He left a half hour later after wrecking everything in sight. I hid behind a garbage can when he exited the garage, wondering what he was up to. Then Eichmann and Bobo showed up with Louis in tow. I told them what had happened and we proceeded to evaluate the damage.

  Flaherty had executed a blitzkrieg on our nest. He’d taken a knife and sliced the couch cushions, broken the coffee table, and urinated on my sleeping bag. Louis was still looking vulnerable from the session with Flaherty at the police station. He said, “That narc, he’s a Mexican, ain’t he? Whatever he is, he’s way off course. Ain’t nothing good will come of him.”

  “He isn’t a Mexican,” Eichmann mumbled.

  Louis paused to touch a bandage on the side of his mouth. His scalp was covered with stitches running north and south; his cheeks were crisscrossed with welts. The man’s face was a landmark of devastation. “What do you mean, he ain’t no Mexican?”

  “Just what I said, Louis. Flaherty is about as much a Mexican as you are a white man.”

  “Hell,” Louis jeered. “And he might be a policeman, but only on the outside.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “On the inside, he’s something sick I don’t want to look at. But I’m going to get his ass, you wait and see.”

  I listened to Louis talk about going to war with Flaherty. If he wanted to challenge the policeman to combat, I didn’t know what to do.

  Eichmann took me to one side and said quietly, “You take the money, Doojie. It’ll be safer with you, on account of you being the youngest one here with no convictions on your arrest record and shit.” He slipped me two huge wads of bills, his and Bobo’s. Eichmann cut his eyes over to the garage door while I stuffed the money down my pants.

  Bobo was at the door gripping a crappy Brazilian-made Taurus .38 revolver in his hand, keeping watch on the parking lot and San Carlos Street. I pointed at the gun and said to Eichmann, “What’s that for?”

  “The pistol? It’s for protection.”

  “Since when?”

  “Starting here and now.”

  Louis ranted about what he was going to do to the narc. “I’ll find him,” he vowed, rubbing the gristle on his nose. “I ain’t going to put up with it, him treating me like that. He was demoralizing me.”

  Hearing Louis, I wanted to go to sleep for a month. I was drawing Flaherty’s hostility like a magnet, and my friends were getting penalized for it. Nobody was going to get out of this unscathed.

  “I was at the station,” Louis said. “On account of my car, you know. Some goddamn vato on York Street boosted my ride. So I go down to the cop shop. I’m jawing with the desk sergeant when Flaherty comes up to me and says, ‘You Louis?’ I say, ‘Who’s asking?’ He replied, ‘Never mind. Come with me.’ Then he got me in that room and after he brought in Doojie, he worked me over something sinful, saying he wanted someone who saw what he did. He told me what he did, like he’s so bad, it don’t matter who he tells. He said he did it, and that you saw him do it.”

  “I didn’t,” Eichmann said. “Doojie did.”

  “Whatever. He kept socking me in the belly, but I didn’t tell him nothing. He had me down on the floor, but I didn’t say who you were. But now he knows where you live. What are you going to do about that? Y’all are stupid for staying around here with that cop on the loose. You need to do something quick or you’re going to end up in serious shit.”

  I didn’t blame Louis for getting upset with us. The narc had rearranged his face. I no longer trusted my ability to stay out of harm’s way. Louis put a cigarette in his mouth and I lighted it for him, steadying his fingers with my hand. Eichmann reached for an overturned chair, flipped it right side up, and sat down. I couldn’t read the mood in his eyes, but we both knew we were in over our heads and there was no getting out, not now. We were in a clampdown.

  Eichmann said, “Flaherty knows where we live and he sort of knows who we are, but he doesn’t have our names.”

  Louis attested to that. “That’s correct. You could be worse off than you are.”

  In the short time I’d known Eichmann, aggravation and frustration ruled his restless face. He lowered his eyelids to half-mast and a fire blew up behind his dilated eyes. His cheeks turned crimson with the struggle to articulate his thought. He glowered at us, “Fuck it! If Flaherty wants to start a fight, let the freak bring it on!”

  It was a defiant manifesto and a delusional one, but I bought into it. Eichmann’s minimalist strategy was also sensible: To defend our squat was realistic; the carport was all we had. But if we lost it, so what? Like my ancestors had done throughout the centuries whenever the ghetto was invaded, we would hide ourselves and everything we had, leaving nothing behind for the victors. The landlord and Flaherty could drop dead for all I cared. Wanting to make a pact out of it, Eichmann asked, “What do you guys say to that?”

  Louis wasn’t into it. “I’m not going to sit around and wait for that psychopath to come to me. I’ll get him myself.”

  After gobbling two codeine pills to tranquilize his frazzled nerves, Louis said he’d stay in touch, and he hobbled off. Bobo and I swept up the floor while Eichmann got some Hefty bags to throw away the trash. Toiling steadily, it took us the better part of an hour to make everything shipshape again. I was about to get rid of the broken dishes and the glass when there was a tap on the door. Without waiting to be asked in, Loretta slinked into the garage. When she saw what we were doing, the color in her almond-shaped eyes shifted from green to gray. “Well!” she exclaimed in her Okie twang. “You have a typhoon in here or what?”

  Eichmann winced. He didn’t want to tell her everything about our conversation with Louis. Our business wasn’t Loretta’s affair. He admitted with reluctance, “Ah, it’s nothing. We’re just straightening things out. Someone broke in. I think it was the cops.”

  “The cops?”

  “It’s just a hunch.”

  “That’s terrible!”

  Eichmann scratched his chin with diligence. “Yeah, it is.”

  “Why don’t you let Bobo and Doojie finish up here and we can go out.”

  No matter how much Loretta and Eichmann quarreled, it must’ve been great to have a girlfriend who didn’t want to see you suffer. The two of them went to the Vietnamese fast-food take-out joint on Mission to get a bowl of white rice garnished with bok choy for a dollar and a quarter.

  While Bobo and I cleaned the garage, he told me that one time when Eichmann wasn’t around, Loretta seduced him. Bobo said he didn’t feel bad about betraying Eichmann. It was worse than that: Having sex with Loretta had been sad. “She didn’t even take off her clothes. She just rolled down her underpants and wouldn’t let me touch her titties or nothing. It was over before I knew it. Boom, I’m twenty-two years ol
d, and it was my first fuck in life.”

  Throwing away the remains of our television set, I meditated on Bobo’s sorrow. Loretta had taken his cherry, then left him in the dust without any afterglow. Imagining what this felt like was painful. I wanted to jump out of my skin. I remembered our cash was stashed inside my pants. I could take off and nobody would stop me. If I wanted to, I could walk out of the garage and I’d be free of Bobo and Eichmann and Dee Dee, Maurice and Flaherty. I could kiss poverty good-bye and run for the hills. The notion gave me great solace, and I was able to get through the rest of the day without another glitch.

  24

  The following afternoon, Eichmann and I were on Valencia Street, floating with the spaced vacant stride that came when it was a hundred degrees in the shade. As we neared the corner of Sixteenth Street, drifting past Puerto Alegre, Bombay Bazaar, the Crown Hotel, and K&H Liquors, some other dealers by the check-cashing store saw us coming and they dispersed. No one wanted to be near me now that Flaherty was on my trail. I was considered bad luck, a jinx.

  While Eichmann went into the K&H for a pack of smokes, I waited out in the street for him, soaking up the hazy sunshine. A middle-aged white lady in a T-shirt inscribed with the slogan Don’t Ask Me For Shit trudged past me on her way into the Muddy Waters Café. The saying on her shirt reflected the independent spirit popular in America nowadays.

  Eichmann came out of the store and burred, “Can you believe it? The bastards wouldn’t let me buy any Marlboros with my food stamps. C’mon, there ain’t nothing happening around here. Let’s go down to Mission.”

  A gaggle of dealers were doing business under the skeletal trees next to the BART station, hawking their stock-in-trade, calling out the names of their products: mota, chiva, and coca. They were so courteous and mild-mannered, I was reminded of the Fuller Brush salesmen in Daly City, the men who went door-to-door and sold household goods to improve your domestic life. Eichmann was a few steps ahead of me, limping mightily in one cowboy boot and one black oxford shoe.

  All I saw in my head was the dead man on Folsom Street telling me to do something. I was in a whirlpool, furious enough to feel treacherous, even physical, toward Eichmann. Transmitting virulent antipathy in his direction, I caught up with him just as we hit the crosswalk.

  “Something on your mind, Doojie?”

  “No, everything’s okay.”

  “Don’t bullshit me. You look like you’ve been sucking on a razor blade. What is it?”

  “Forget it. It’ll get personal.”

  “Personal, whatever. We can do that.”

  “No, we better not.”

  “C’mon, quit being a fairy. You’re like some queen who wants to get something off her chest.”

  “You want me to be direct?”

  “Yeah, that would be okay.”

  “You’re a jerk, that’s all.”

  The red light turned to green and we waded into the intersection. I moved without knowing what I was doing. All the cars on Mission were stuck in a traffic jam that went back to the underpass by the Otis Street welfare office.

  I prayed a truck or a car would hit Eichmann and critically wound him, to save me from doing it myself. He saw only one angle, not the whole panorama. He was concerned about the health of our business? I was frightened; I thought Flaherty was going to shoot me.

  At Capp Street we saw three hookers fighting in front of the Victoria Theater. Eichmann exulted, “Hey, we know them!”

  Ruby and Heather were throwing chingasos with another woman. The trio were brawling in earnest, so we trotted over to them. Heather was hitting another working girl on the head with an empty Gallo wine bottle. Ruby, her battle-weary partner, was going through the woman’s purse, gibbering something about getting her money back.

  The afternoon we’d spent with Louis and his girlfriends in the Linda Street park seemed like a decade ago. Since then my fear of Flaherty had congealed into a self-pitying paste I wanted to smear across Eichmann’s face. I wanted him to eat what I had eaten, a mountain of nausea.

  Eichmann was busy getting in between the warring hookers, barking, “Hey, let’s break it up! C’mon, cut the crap, will you? The fucking cops are coming, okay?”

  The only time I’d been shot by a cop wasn’t even worth mentioning to anyone, it was just one of those things. A year ago in May I was crossing Union Square on my way back to the Mission from North Beach when I got trapped in a demonstration on Geary Street by the St. Francis Hotel. A slew of demonstrators, maybe fifty of them, mostly kids with a sprinkling of adults, were holding picket signs and chanting slogans about the destruction of the redwood forests up north.

  A squadron of cops on horseback trapped the kids against the doors to Macy’s department store. The horses had wet, turbid eyes like they were high on amphetamines; they were having a hard time restraining themselves. One of them reared up on its legs and backed into a store window, shattering it and showering the passing shoppers with glass.

  A line of riot police on foot swooped down Powell Street after the horses, cutting off any escape. The cops were wearing dark blue jumpsuits and hard helmets with Plexiglas face shields. They snaked across Geary Street into Union Square, two lines of them trotting double-time past the retirees sitting on the park’s benches.

  Before I knew it, I was in the middle of them. I raised my hands to the sky and shook my head. Why was this always happening to me? As if he were answering my question, the shortest cop in the front line lowered a riot-control rifle to his shoulder and smiled at me.

  The cop pulled the trigger of his short-barreled weapon. A black and shiny rubber bullet popped out of the gun’s wide-mouthed muzzle, nailing me in the hip. I was knocked ten feet backward onto the pavement. To this day I still walk funny, and I never went back to Union Square again.

  But with Eichmann? I had a hard time keeping up with the shifting gears of his ego. His narcissism, his irresponsibility toward Loretta and myself, it was getting hard to take.

  Eichmann’s hair, caught in a bandanna, hung to his shoulders in faux dreadlocks. After he dispatched Ruby and Heather on their way, he put a finger to his mouth and picked a fleck of chicken salad from his teeth, rubbing it in between his fingers until it disappeared.

  I looked into Eichmann’s eyes, but all I saw was myself, reflected in the lenses of his mirrored sunglasses.

  25

  At sundown I turned the corner onto San Carlos Street, and everything was the same as that morning. Three Chinese kids were passing a football around on the sidewalk; two dope fiends were sitting on the roof of an abandoned car playing cards. Back at the garage, I found Loretta sitting on the couch next to Eichmann, haranguing him. She was verging on an avalanche of tears, saying, “What do you mean, you thought I would take care of it?”

  “Just that, Loretta. It was your thing.”

  “My thing? Jesus Christ!”

  Eichmann said, “This is a woman’s thing, not mine. So I didn’t put on a rubber. We can chalk it up to the heat of the moment. If I remember, you weren’t doing any complaining then.”

  “What kind of shit is that?”

  Eichmann took the cigarette he’d been smoking and stubbed it out on the floor, then fired up a joint that’d been sitting in his shirt pocket. “I ain’t bragging, just telling it like it is.”

  Loretta was steaming. “Now what are we going to do?”

  “About what?” Eichmann said.

  “What we’re talking about!”

  “That? Christ, what hell … it’s like there’s no relief with you, you know? We’ve got a relationship going, so what’s the fucking problem?”

  “Jesus, you asshole! I’m going to have a baby!”

  “Yeah, so? It’s been done before. Why don’t you lighten up about it?”

  “A baby!” Loretta repeated with majesty. “I don’t believe this is happening to me!”

  “Well, it is and I’m going to be a dad.”

  “You’re scared, aren’t you?”

&n
bsp; “Shit, no,” Eichmann swore. “I ain’t scared of having no damn kid.” He reduced the spliff to a nub in less than a minute—the ganja blaze in his eyes was the look of a serene man—nothing could perturb him. Smoking dope made him benevolent, charitable, and foolish. I couldn’t tell if what Loretta was saying penetrated his malfunctioning brain.

  Eichmann offered the spit-soaked roach to her, saying sweetly, “Why don’t you have a toke of this, babe. It’s that medical marijuana with the high THC content. You’ll feel better.”

  “I can’t do that no more. It’s not good for the kid.”

  “The kid?”

  “Yeah, the thing that’s growing inside of me now, thanks to you. I can’t smoke anymore. And I can’t drink. That’s what they said at the clinic.”

  “Wow, that’s a bitch. You and me can’t party together? That kind of news, God … that is very negative.”

  What Loretta did next will always remain in my mind as the moment when Eichmann began to see the light of day. When he realized there were more people in the world than just himself. He was about to light up another joint when Loretta pounced on him, biting him on the face, taking a mouthful-sized chunk of skin out of his cheek. Eichmann put a hand on his face and hollered, letting out a shrill falsetto, “Goddamn you, girl! What’s wrong with you?”

  Exploding into a string of lung-bursting sobs, Loretta drummed her fists on his ribcage until Eichmann’s spindly legs shook at the knees. He kissed her, placing the palm of his hand on the top of her head while she rocked and thrashed back and forth in his arms, crying like a baby until she exhausted herself.

  Eichmann was bleeding on everything, but he had enough poise to croon, “It’s okay, honey, it’s okay. I’ll just have to make a little more money.… I’ll take care of business. You know I will, right? Don’t I always?”

  The next day Eichmann decided to shuttle Loretta over to his aunt’s duplex on Mariposa Street. So that’s how he was taking care of business, by dropping the pregnant girlfriend off at the old lady’s place. It was a bold step backwards, and I was not overjoyed to hear about the arrangement. While Eichmann crammed Loretta’s Prell shampoo, black leather jacket, tampons, rhinestone jewelry, and extra clothes into her traveling bag, I went through some ugly changes.