Every Man a Menace

by Patrick Hoffman

  They bounced along the road for a moment. Then Gloria said, “He’s a racist, too, you know. He called me a Chinese bitch. That’s why you’re here, Mr. Repair Man.”

  Mr. Deal Broker. Mr. Repair Man.

  They got onto the freeway at South Van Ness, looping around the ramp. Raymond looked at the frosted windows of the jail as they drove past. He pictured all the men sitting in there, dressed in orange, breathing stale air, kicking themselves for stupid moves. Traffic was thick, but moving. His belly felt racked with nerves. Ten times more! Arthur was sure as hell going to want to know about that.

  Quietly, almost to herself, Gloria was singing what sounded like an old disco song: Something in the way you make me feel, it feels so good to me. For a moment Raymond wondered if she was high. He pivoted in his seat so he could take a look at the man behind him: a skinny, older Filipino man with pockmarked cheeks who met his gaze and smiled. They were coming off the Bay Bridge now.

  “Exit there,” said Gloria.

  The driver pulled off the freeway and pulled into a parking lot alongside a Denny’s. They backed into a spot with a view of the entrance. The driver cut the engine.

  “Now we wait,” said Gloria.

  Raymond scanned the lot. He looked for occupied cars, looked in the restaurant windows, searched for groups of men that looked like cops. The driver of the van was sending text messages. He should’ve had his eyes up, Raymond thought, ready to move.

  His mind cycled through a series of strange thoughts. He hadn’t eaten, and he imagined what Gloria would say if he got out of the van, went to the counter, and ordered pancakes. That thought was pushed out by a memory of a childhood friend of his, a boy named Rusty, who had once shit his pants in a parking lot much like this one. The boy had started to cry afterward.

  The phone in Gloria’s hand lit up. She looked at it, then looked at Raymond.

  “Five minutes,” she said.

  Raymond’s forehead was damp. He breathed deeply, trying to relax. Underneath all his nerves and dread, though, he recognized a new kind of feeling: optimism. The end was near.

  The man sitting behind Raymond said something in their language and the man sitting in front turned around. Raymond expected to see a cool look on his face, but what he saw instead—sadness—made Raymond feel ashamed. The man looked right at Raymond, then answered the man.

  “What are they saying?” Raymond asked, trying to sound good-humored.

  “He said,” said Gloria, pointing her thumb over her shoulder at the man in back, “that you are a very important person. And that man,” she said, pointing to the front, “said he feels honored to have ridden in the same car with Mr. Repair Man.”

  The man in back and Gloria both laughed. Their laughter seemed fake, almost violent. It sounded like barking. “Nothing,” said Gloria, as though Raymond had accused her of something. “They didn’t say anything important. They say, ‘You owe me this, you owe me that.’ They always argue, these two.” The man in front didn’t join in the laughter. “Stupid,” said Gloria.

  All five of their heads turned as a police car sped past. Gloria organized her face into an expression of unworried confusion. Raymond looked at her pearls and thought about snatching them off her neck; then he imagined grabbing her face and kissing her. He thought about the last girl he’d kissed, a girl from the Tenderloin named Emily. A man walked out of the restaurant with a phone pinned between his ear and shoulder, carrying large paper bags filled with food. He was muttering something. He looked like a trucker. As Raymond watched, he dug in his pocket, his eyes locked on the van, and a car alarm chirped. He got into the car beside them and drove away.

  “Here,” said Gloria, pointing toward the entrance. John’s black SUV was pulling into the lot, heading for a space across from them.

  “Hold on,” said Gloria.

  They watched as the driver’s door popped open. John, standing tall, his chest puffed out, walked toward the door of the Denny’s. The way he carried himself, calm and slow, made Raymond appreciate him. He went to the cash register and spoke to a redheaded waitress.

  “Is Shadrack with him?” Raymond asked.

  “He’ll take you to him.” They watched John for a moment. Gloria said, “When he comes out, walk with him. Walk right behind him. Get into the front seat. Don’t talk until you’re in the car.”

  John came out with a coffee in his hand. He walked back toward his car.

  Raymond opened the door and stepped out. He and Gloria exchanged one final look; her eyes stayed flat and calm. Then he slid the door shut and walked after John.

  For some reason, right then, he remembered that Gloria had claimed not to know John. The thought unsettled him, but it was too late to do anything about it. A moment later he was in the SUV.

  The inside smelled sweet, like pipe tobacco. John was already turning the car on. “Buckle up,” he said, fitting his coffee into a cup holder.

  Raymond watched Gloria’s van—its engine and lights still off—until he couldn’t see it anymore. Then he turned to John.

  “You good?” Raymond asked.

  “I could complain, but it won’t do nothing,” John said.

  Raymond touched the key in his pocket, nodded his head, and looked at the road coming at them. The lights of the dashboard glowed blue. John did something to the steering wheel and the radio switched on; the sound of an announcer providing play-by-play for a basketball game filled the car. Draymond Green is having an MVP-type night, the voice said. They were back on 80, heading away from San Francisco.

  “Where we going?” asked Raymond.

  “Gonna go meet the man.”

  Raymond had a habit, when he was nervous, of working his tongue over each tooth in his mouth. He was doing it right then. He looked in the side-view mirror to see if Gloria’s van was following them, but all he could see was yellow headlights.

  “They’re not following us,” John said.

  The basketball game continued. John would occasionally react to a shot with a slight shake or nod of his head. When it went to commercial, he turned the volume down almost all the way. He kept the car on cruise control, driving exactly the speed limit, in the middle lane. Every few seconds, his eyes went to the rearview mirror.

  “You ever do one of those pills?” Raymond asked. Maybe he’d take one tonight, he thought, after the job was done. Celebrate new beginnings. He hadn’t done that in a while.

  “Hell no,” said John, quietly. “It ain’t pills, either. It’s powder.”

  The man was acting grumpy. Raymond turned and looked at his face. John knew he was staring, but he kept his eyes on the road. Something about the way he refused to return his look rubbed Raymond the wrong way. He wanted out of the car.

  “When we gonna get there?” he asked.

  “We’re getting close,” John said.

  Different things that Shadrack had said passed through Raymond’s mind. I read you the very first night we met. Sure as a song is sung by a singer.

  John switched his turn signal on and guided them onto the Hercules exit. Raymond suffered through a quick moment of thinking he’d forgotten his phone before his hand patted it in his left pocket. Then he touched the pocket that held the key and note. John turned left onto a road Raymond had never been on before. They headed up a windy suburban street filled with beige houses set back at intervals, blinds drawn. Raymond became more and more nervous with each turn they made.

  Eventually, John pulled into a driveway. The house looked the same as all the surrounding ones. A light on inside made the blinds glow orange. John opened his door and stepped out. Raymond let himself have one second alone before he took a deep breath and opened the door.

  For the first time since he’d been released, Raymond looked up at the stars in the sky. He turned and scanned the block again: no sign of anyone else. Everything was silent. There was a chill in the air.

  “Come on,” said John, walking toward the house. He pulled open a metal screen door, then turned and l
ooked at Raymond. His face was shaded; Raymond couldn’t see his eyes. It seemed like he was waiting for someone to let them in. Raymond’s nerves grew more raw by the second.

  “Who is it?” Shadrack called from inside.

  “It’s us,” said John.

  When the door opened John placed a hand on Raymond’s back and nudged him forward. Shadrack stood just inside, his face looking either bored or distant. Raymond had to squeeze by him to enter. As he passed, Shadrack pulled his head back like a man avoiding bad air.

  The room was empty, the carpet dented where a couch had once sat. Raymond smelled cigarettes. He walked to the center of the room and turned to face Shadrack. The man’s face was unmistakably sad; there was a weariness in his eyes, and his mouth hung flat and loose. Raymond’s chest flooded with dread.

  “Go on down that way,” Shadrack said. He pointed down a hallway that led away from the front room. Raymond’s mouth went dry. He wanted to ask Shadrack what was wrong, but he couldn’t. He waited for Shadrack to lead the way, but the man waved him forward.

  An orange glow leaked from under the door at the end of the hall. The hall itself was dark and carpeted. Raymond could feel Shadrack and John behind him; he wanted to turn back, to run past them and get back outside, but he felt suddenly powerless. Something was drastically wrong. He decided to pray—it was something he rarely did, but right then, walking in that hallway, the darkness all around him, he prayed to God to deliver him from this situation. His fear had become complete.

  “Go on,” said Shadrack, when Raymond paused near the doorway.

  He reached for the door—it was cracked open—and pushed it. Shadrack and John stepped up behind him and forced him into the room. Raymond’s eyes settled immediately on the floor, but it took him a moment to process the fact that it was covered in plastic. It was one big sheet, the kind a painter lays out before a job.

  Shadrack, standing in the doorway, said, “Sorry, man. I liked you, I really did.”

  Movement came from Raymond’s right side. He looked that way and saw Gloria’s boy, the one with the mustache. He held a gun at Raymond’s head. “No, no, no,” said Raymond.

  Raymond heard the shot, felt his head swing like he’d been punched. He felt the ground pulled to his chest, saw his blood and brains thrown on the floor.

  Part 2

  “Hello friend,” said Mr. Hong, his mouth a few inches from Semion Gurevich’s ear.

  Semion sat at a table in the back of a club he owned in Miami. The table was raised up on a tier, overlooking a crowded dance floor. The bass from the speakers rumbled. The lights turned everyone red.

  “Join us,” he said, leaning back in his seat.

  He gestured at the table. There were two women and another man sitting with him already. They were all dressed and tanned for a night out. Semion watched Mr. Hong glance at them, smile shyly, and say he couldn’t. Mr. Hong looked, Semion sometimes thought, like the kind of man who always wins at the horse tracks. A perennial winner.

  The older man bent down to Semion’s ear again. “Usual,” he whispered. “Fish market, sometime now until one week. Have your boy bring the documents to my office.” Semion understood fish market to mean a warehouse outside Chiang Mai, Thailand. He understood documents to mean money. My office meant Mr. Hong’s lawyer’s office, in Miami.

  Mr. Hong pulled his head back and looked at Semion. “Good?”

  “Yes, good, you old bastard,” Semion said. “I love you, you know that? I love the way you dress!”

  “Good,” said Mr. Hong. He nodded to the other guests at the table, gave Semion’s shoulder a final squeeze, and walked away.

  Semion took a moment to reflect on how blessed his life had become. The man sitting across from him winked.

  “Who was he?” asked one of the blond women.

  “He’s a real estate man,” said Semion. “A rich bastard. I love him.”

  It was seventy-nine days before Raymond Gaspar would be killed.

  Semion Gurevich was thirty-five years old. He was born in Rostov-on-Don, Russia; when he was three, his family immigrated to Israel. They settled first in Kiryat Ono, and then in the Yud-Yud Gimmel section of Ashdod. It was a rough neighborhood, but Semion learned to blend in. Even as a troublemaker, he graduated high school with decent marks. He scored a high health report as well, and shortly after graduation he was conscripted into the Israeli Defense Forces. After seven months of dusty calisthenics, endless target practice, bland food, and crowded dorms, he found himself stationed near the Egyptian border. He spent his days caught between boredom and tension. He did things that still bothered him even now during that time: he broke an old Arab’s nose with the butt of his gun; he tossed stun grenades at a group of children. But he survived.

  Semion had grown up around drugs; there was plenty of heroin in Ashdod. He’d smoked it a few times in high school; he sniffed dirty cocaine at parties. He’d even sold a bit of ecstasy during his final year of high school. It was only natural that he fell in with the few soldiers in his unit who sold heroin. We’re doing God’s work, said one of them. Selling drugs to Arabs. At that point they were still just making beer money.

  After finishing his service, he settled in Tel Aviv. A month later he began to think about selling drugs in earnest. With the contacts he’d made in the army, and the friends he’d made growing up in Ashdod, he was soon able to make good money importing heroin from Lebanon and selling it in the streets. His parents had raised him to be tolerant, and it served him well: he worked with Arabs, Africans, Bedouins, Jews, and Russians—and he insisted on mutual respect. He was a hustler, and he liked making money. It made him feel powerful.

  After the first few years, Semion didn’t even have to stand on the street anymore; he could sit back and manage the men. But one summer—a particularly hot one in his memory—Semion got into a conflict over territory with a Russian gangster named Abram Gorin. Semion’s group had gone through a series of small expansions, adding a few men to their street crew along the way, and spread two blocks west to Sderot Har Tsiyon. This area turned out to be one that Gorin thought of as his own.

  The Gorin gang operated on a different level: they were international. They had a reputation. One night, after Semion had drunk too many beers in a bar on Rosh Pina, a handsome-looking Russian man—bald, with bright blue eyes—stepped in front of him on the street and grabbed him by the shoulders. It was a friendly gesture, like an uncle measuring a nephew. Speaking Russian, the man said that Mr. Abram Gorin wanted Semion to know he was no longer allowed to sell heroin in Neve Sha’anan. He looked Semion in the eyes. “Do you hear me?” he asked. Semion didn’t speak Russian perfectly, but he understood this, and, unable to do anything else, he nodded his head.

  The next morning, when he woke, Semion felt equal measures of guilt and fear. What had happened? It was as if he’d been told he had cancer: one day he was healthy, the next he was not. Still, a depressed kind of disbelief kept him from telling his men to stop dealing. Six days later, his friend Schmuel Teper—a funny, chubby man—was pushed in front of a moving bus. Schmuel survived, but he would never walk again.

  A week after that, the same Russian man approached Semion outside his home. It was early in the day, but the sun had already heated the dusty streets. The man wasn’t rude to him; he simply smiled and scanned the area with his eyes, and then, having satisfied himself that they were alone, beckoned Semion toward him with two fingers. When Semion stepped closer he told him that he had to leave Israel. He made the visit feel like a favor. When Semion managed to nod the man slapped him on the back and walked away.

  The next day, Semion called his group together. He invited them all to his apartment—a rare occurrence—and explained that they had to take some time off. Abram Gorin himself had insisted on it, he said. “We take a break,” he said. “Lay low. See how it shakes out.” He expected the men to resist, to call for war, but nobody did. Nobody argued. Three months later, Semion moved to Miami.

  A few
of his friends from the army—Russian Israelis, like himself—had been living there, and they helped him find an apartment in South Beach, in a tower overlooking Biscayne Bay. He didn’t bring much—a bag filled with clothes, a computer, a razor, his toothbrush. He had a good amount of money saved.

  One of his friends in Miami was Isaak Raskin. Isaak, a short man with the kind of strong jaw and dimpled chin normally associated with Hollywood actors, was preparing to open a nightclub called Ground Zero; Semion invested cash in it. The club did well, and over the next four years they opened three more. For a time it seemed like Semion might leave the drug trade behind. But eventually Isaak, who had connections in the shipping business, began talking to him about setting something up.

  They would do things differently he insisted. No selling on corners to Arabs and Africans. No heroin. No rival gangs. They were going to be middlemen, and they would focus their attention on a benign corner of the market: ecstasy.

  “Listen to me,” Semion said to Isaak, arranging his words like a drunken professor. “If we’re going to do this, we have to stay small. You get too big you attract the wrong type of attention. Trust me. I know this. We stay small; we make good money. But we stay small.”

  Isaak, for his part, simply frowned and nodded, as though he couldn’t have agreed more.

  A man named David Eban, another friend of Semion’s from Israel, introduced him to a Flemish group that cooked drugs in a lab outside of Ghent. Eban agreed to sign on as a courier, and began to move the product across the Dutch border, to Rotterdam. Isaak had a cousin who worked as a second mate on an Israeli freighter that operated a line from Rotterdam to the Port of Virginia. He could walk right onto the ship with fifteen pounds of pure MDMA stashed in the false bottom of a duffel bag. Another Israeli, Mark Orlov, would meet the ship in Virginia. The cousin’s cut—7.5 percent—was a ridiculously high price for a mule, but Semion and Isaak were not running a typical operation. There were less than ten men involved, no amateurs.