Every Man a Menace

by Patrick Hoffman

  They were going to cut Semion into pieces, Moisey realized. The final absurdity.

  “Good,” he said. He considered shaking his friend’s hand, but he patted his shoulder instead. He checked the safety on the gun, then slid it into the waistband of his pants. He stepped to a mirror by the door and practiced pulling it out. The suppressor made it ungainly. His reflection showed him as a ghastly man, skinny, pale, dark circles under his eyes. His head looked like a skull.

  I’ll tell him to run. I’ll tell him he has to go, that’s it, game over.

  He grabbed the suitcase. Mr. Hong rose to his feet. Moisey nodded to him and walked with Isaak to the door.

  “I’m sorry,” Isaak whispered.

  Moisey stared at his pouty bottom lip and marveled at how long it had taken him to discover that his friend was a complete sociopath.

  “It’s floor thirty-one. He’s in thirty-one twenty. We’ll come behind you.”

  Moisey stood alone in the corridor. There was an emergency exit at the end of the hall. He looked behind him and saw one at the far end, also. They could take opposite stairs. He walked toward the lift feeling like he was somehow outside himself. In a daze, he pressed the button to call the elevator. Thirty-one twenty, he repeated Semion’s room number in his mind.

  His mouth was dry. As the doors opened he realized that he had to urinate; the feeling was so strong that for a moment he thought about going back to Isaak’s apartment. But instead he pulled the suitcase in behind him and pressed 31. The doors closed and he felt the pull of the rising elevator.

  The elevator door opened and he began walking toward the apartment. The fear inside his chest was unlike any he’d felt before. A perfect and complete fear. He stopped in front of Semion’s door, staring at the rug in front of it. Someone had placed a rug so that people could wipe their feet. Had Semion done it? The gun pressed the skin under his belly. His ears picked up the low drone of the elevator kicking back to life. Let it go down to the ground floor, he thought. But it stopped too soon.

  He pressed Semion’s doorbell. In his mind, strange fragmented memories: his mother, a dinner he’d eaten in Thailand, a ferry he’d once taken. After a moment, the peephole darkened. Moisey forced a smile.

  The door opened. Confusion filled Semion’s eyes. A white room stood behind him. High ceilings. Blue sky. Clean floors. Semion was backing away, his hands up near his chest. The gun kicked, making a hissing noise. Smoke in the air. Blood pouring through Semion’s hands from his throat. Blood coming out like water.

  Two more shots. One in the chest, one in the head. The room became quiet. He was already dead.

  Part 4

  Vanya Rodriguez, also known as Anna Monticello, also known as Candy Hall-Garcia, Candy Thompson, and Candy Valentino, was born with the name Jacqueline Rose Infante. In her mind she thought of herself as Jackie Santos. She was born in Brazil but grew up in Newark. She had dropped out of Rutgers after her sophomore year, and not too long after that she had gone to prison: two years at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County. She had been arrested in Queens holding an ounce of cocaine and nearly a hundred thousand dollars in fake gift cards for Fifth Avenue stores. She was twenty-three years old when she got locked up.

  After she got out, she linked up with a group of credit card forgers operating in Dallas and San Francisco. Over the next few years, Jackie Santos developed a small reputation, among certain types, as a woman who could talk a sober man into doing just about anything. She liked running with thieves. The normal world bored her.

  The idea to go after Semion Gurevich was brought to her by a man named Tom Roberts. Roberts was an ex-cop, a felon, working as an unlicensed private investigator in San Jose. He could get things done that other PIs couldn’t. He was what the Jewish Mafia referred to as a handy man. He was good with wires, crowbars, lock picks, GPS devices, guns, baseball bats, all of it.

  “All you gotta do is just meet this guy,” said Roberts, when they first spoke about it. They were sitting at a back table in a hotel bar just south of the San Francisco airport. The place smelled like a fast-food restaurant. Roberts drank coffee; Jackie sipped a wine spritzer.

  “You get to go to Miami for two weeks, all expenses paid. Just get me into his apartment.”

  “And?”

  “A thousand a day,” said Roberts. He was a big bald Caucasian. His neck went straight down from his head. He had hairy knuckles and hair coming out of his ears. He looked like a cop. Jackie had a soft spot for him because he’d never tried to sleep with her.

  “What do you need me for?” she asked.

  “This guy lives in a fancy high-rise,” said Roberts. “I’m not gonna be able to just break in. I need a pretty girl like you to help me get in there first.”

  “Sweetheart, I’m kinda busy right now,” she said, opening the negotiation. She was dressed in a white romper and a black satin jacket. She’d shown up with wet hair and red lipstick.

  “Harvey said he’d forget that little business if you did me this one.”

  It would be nice not to owe Harvey anything. He had a claim on eighteen thousand dollars from her after a complicated deal that involved real estate fees in Redwood City. Roberts had her attention.

  “Two thousand a day,” said Jackie.

  “One-five,” said Roberts. “I’m only getting three.”

  “Let me think about it,” Jackie said.

  They had worked together in the past. Roberts ran a scam for a divorce attorney in San Jose. He would send Jackie into bars to accidentally meet the poor guys who’d become their targets. She’d flirt with the men, get them drunk, and then ask them to drive her to her hotel. On the way, they’d be stopped by one of Roberts’s cop friends; the men would be arrested for driving under the influence. The attorney would then use that DUI charge against them in divorce court. It was all about leverage. It paid well.

  The Miami job didn’t sound that complicated. After calling Harvey Bloom and confirming that he’d clear the debt, Jackie agreed to go. Roberts told her that his client had hired him to set up a wire in the man’s house; that was all. She’d meet the guy, seduce him, knock him out with GHB, and open the door.

  No matter how hard she pressed, he wouldn’t tell her anything about who had hired him, or why this client wanted to listen to Semion Gurevich’s private conversations.

  They went to Ground Zero on their first night in Miami. Semion wasn’t hard to spot; there were photos of him all over the Internet. The man hovered in the VIP section like a Russian oligarch. They identified his partner, too. She even managed a brief flirtatious conversation with him.

  “I know how we do this,” she said afterward. “You know how a magician will say keep your eyes on the prize—look over here—then, whoopsie, sorry baby, you lost all your money?”

  Roberts shook his head. They were sitting in his rental car outside their motel. The windows were down. Jackie’s seat was leaned back like a lounge chair.

  “Listen,” she said. “We come out here so you can put your little microphones in his room, right?” Roberts nodded. “So, it’s easy you make him pay some money, too. You understand me?”

  Roberts shook his head again.

  She explained how she would do it. She’d done it before, she said. You knock a man out, pour blood all over his bed, and then you blackmail him. It’s easy. Usually, she did it to married men, but the same principles applied. She said you called it Red Bedding.

  Roberts didn’t like it. They had a job to do, he said. They couldn’t get sidetracked.

  She felt like she was talking to a child. She sighed and started over. “Wait, wait, I’m saying—if we scare him, if he’s trying to figure out what happened, he doesn’t even stop to think if you put a little microphone in his room. See? It makes it even better for you.”

  Roberts, softening right before her eyes, looked at her.

  “He pays us a little something,” she continued. “Your boss pays you a little something nice. Two for o
ne. You make the rules about how you do the job, right? You decide what’s the best way.”

  “You want to paint the room with blood?” Roberts said.

  “It’s easy.”

  “Human blood?”

  “Pig blood, stupid! Look, you knock him out. You take pictures—” With her hand, she mimed taking a photo. “Take a picture of him lying with me. I’m covered in blood. My chest is out, my tits, you know, bloody, cut up and killed. You put the knife in his hand. You put your little microphone in his room. We take the knife. We leave. Then you call him, tell him my body’s buried somewhere and unless he wants the police to start asking questions, he pays us our money. He’s rich—you could take him for a million, five million. Maybe we just say pay us a quarter million, keep it simple. We split it up. And at the end of the day, you got your little tape player tucked away in his wherever.”

  “And my client?” Roberts said. “What’s he going to think when his recording comes back full of talk about all this shit?”

  “What, you don’t know how to edit tape? Just snip, snip, cut it out. We split two fifty large. Think about it. That’s like a month of good living for me, a year, maybe two years for you!”

  Roberts bent his head, scratched his neck. She watched him think it through. When he looked up, his face wore a boyish expression.

  “You are the craziest woman in this world,” he said.

  “That’s why you call me,” she replied. “You love me.”

  The only thing he insisted on was that someone else had to pick up the money. “Otherwise it’s too risky,” he said. “You want word to get back to San Francisco that someone looking like me was in on this? These people know each other.” He would bring in two of his partners from California, he said. Two ex-cons from Stockton.

  The men were named Danzig and Denver Mike. Roberts had met them at the California Men’s Colony, in San Luis Obispo. He’d served thirty months there on a drug case; because of his law enforcement history, he was placed in protective custody. He never told Jackie what the other two men were doing on the protected yard, but she assumed they were either snitches or pedophiles.

  They arrived in Miami—already sunburnt—just after Jackie met Semion Gurevich for the first time. The two men spent their days drinking cans of Coors beer and smoking cheap cigarettes outside their motel room, kissing all the time and holding hands. Jackie didn’t have a problem with that, but she still thought there was something vulgar about them. They were big and ugly, like Roberts. The three of them looked like unemployed construction workers. When they got drunk, their eyes turned red. Roberts acted differently around them. Jackie wondered if he’d slept with them in prison.

  Danzig and Denver Mike rented a white pickup truck. On the day everything went down, they were supposed to meet Jackie, drop the money, take their cut—twenty-five thousand, 10 percent—drive to Fort Lauderdale, and fly back to California. Easy breezy. All Roberts had to do was call Semion Gurevich and monitor the exchange.

  Jackie waited for it all to happen in a motel she’d moved to that morning. At ten twenty-five, Danzig and Denver Mike arrived with the money. They were amped up. Denver Mike was yelling the second he came in.

  “You should have seen the look on his face!” he shouted. “‘This ain’t shit to me.’ Like he’s Jay-Z rich. ‘I’m God and you’re shit.’”

  “Give me the money!” shouted Danzig, apparently reenacting the moment. “We should’ve taken his ass for more than that. We could’ve, too.”

  The men smelled strongly of beer, cigarettes, chemicals. They were drunk. The energy coming off both of them made Jackie’s skin crawl. She stood up straight and tried to make herself appear larger than she was. Where was Roberts? She took the bag from Danzig, dumped it on the bed, and began sorting through the bills, looking for tracking devices.

  “Y’all said, ‘Raise up!’” said Danzig. He grabbed the other man, pulled him closer, and searched his face. It was the kind of gesture meant to imply that they were actively stamping this memory into their consciousness—a greedy, drunken gesture. Jackie had known men like them her entire life. She scooped the money back into the bag and checked the clock on the dresser. Where was Roberts?

  Later, when Jackie looked back on this moment, she wondered if she’d missed something, some warning. Had shadows passed over the blinds? Had the floorboards on the balcony creaked?

  She placed the bag of money on the ground. Danzig and Denver Mike, their tanned, stubbled faces still nearly touching, continued to talk incessantly. And then, without warning, the door burst open and men charged in. Jackie thought they were FBI agents at first, because of their dark clothes; she automatically dropped to the ground and covered her head. She didn’t see guns, but she heard suppressed shots, deep and violent: thoop, thoop, thoop, thoop. Danzig and Denver Mike fell to the ground. The floor shook. Black blood pooled out from their heads. Jackie’s world shrank down to a singular feeling—the desire to stay alive.

  The next thing she knew she was being lifted by gloved hands. It was only then that she looked at the men’s faces and saw they were all Asian.

  They swung her around violently, pushed her against a wall, and duct-taped her hands behind her back. A pistol pressed against her temple. The men didn’t speak much; when they did, it was in Chinese. She watched as one of them searched the floor for shell casings. Another man searched the dead men’s clothes, finding a cell phone and scrolling through it, then taking pictures of its screen with his own phone. He took pictures of the dead men’s faces, too. He had to lift Danzig’s head and turn it to get the right angle. His phone made a camera clicking noise every time he snapped a picture. Then they dragged the bodies to the closet, smearing blood along the way. Jackie watched them struggle to stuff the men in, one on top of the other. The closet door wouldn’t shut, and the man left it open.

  One of the other men had pulled back the blinds and was looking out at the parking lot. His hand tapped against his thigh, like a nervous tic. Finally, he said something, and the others pushed Jackie toward the door, placing a jacket over her taped hands and marching her across the hot parking lot to a waiting SUV. There was a group of black men right across the street from her, but she was too scared to yell.

  It was bright outside, and she squinted against the light. Tears streamed down her face. A driver stepped out of the vehicle, went to the cargo door, and opened it. She was forced to sit down on the bumper, and one of the men lifted her legs and pushed her in. The door slammed shut. She had two seconds alone, and then all four doors opened and the men piled in.

  A man leaned back and wrapped silver duct tape around her head and mouth. Her shoulders ached from the pull of her hands behind her back. The tape didn’t taste like anything, but it was wrapped so tight it made her drool. The car began to move.

  She should have never been in that motel room, she thought—stupid, amateur shit. Why hadn’t they killed her right then? The idea that they were going to try to sell her into some kind of sexual slavery passed through her mind. Her fear felt locked and permanent.

  When they reached Ground Zero, they sat in the SUV for almost ten minutes. One of the men said something that must’ve been a joke, and the rest laughed. She willed herself to cry harder. She was incredibly thirsty, and it struck her as absurd that she might die wanting a drink. The men talked among themselves in hushed voices. She knew they were waiting for Semion to show up. When she closed her eyes she heard the peaceful drone of cars passing on the street.

  Semion parked his white Range Rover—the same one she’d ridden in—right next to them. One of the Chinese men hopped out and greeted him. She could see their midsections but not their heads. The dull bass sound of male voices reached her ears, but she couldn’t make out the words. She tried to concentrate. Somewhere in her mind, in the midst of all the chaos, she realized that the way to play Semion was to push against him. It wasn’t going to work to claim love. It wasn’t going to work to apologize. He needed to be abused. He was
the type of man who could be swayed by abuse.

  You’re angry, she told herself, preparing like an actress. You’re furious. He fucked you. He forced you. Fuck him. Fuck him. Fuck him.

  The door opened. The light blinded her. The fear of death filled her up and she opened her mouth and let the words come out. The look on Semion’s face—a disgraced, privileged face—inspired even more venom. Fuck him. Fuck you. Fuck the world.

  He let her go.

  Jackie ran directly from the parking lot to a gas station about six blocks away. Her lungs burned. She called Roberts from inside the station—surrounded by Day-Glo-colored snack food—and told him to pick her up. He showed up ten minutes later.

  “What the fuck happened?” he asked.

  “Where the hell were you?”

  “I got lost!”

  She stared at him for a moment. The man looked panicked. He needed a shave. His car smelled like cigarettes. She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them and fastened her seat belt. Roberts had turned in his seat and was looking out the back window. Jackie wanted to cry again, but she controlled herself. They pulled out onto the street.

  “They’re dead,” she said. “They’re dead, they’re fucking killed.”

  “What happened?” Roberts said again. “Who killed them?”

  She told him about the Chinese men, told him how they’d brought her to Semion and how he’d let her go.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he got his money back.” She watched Roberts to see how he took that news, then added, “And because he’s soft.”

  “Lordy, fucking lord,” Roberts said, banging on the steering wheel as he drove. “I swear, so help me, this is your shit! You did this! This is you! They are not paying me enough for this one, not even fucking close! Did you get your fingerprints all over the room? What did you tell them?”

  She counted back from ten to zero, the way they’d taught her in anger-management class.