Forsaking All Others

by Jimmy Breslin

“Do you do what she says all the time?” Weinstein said.

  Maximo pretended not to hear. He took his time paying Eddie for the shirts and then pretended to be thinking of something else he had to buy; anything but let them see that he could not leave the store because Francisca, on behalf of Teenager, had told him to wait. She was back quickly, her attitude telling Maximo that she had been quite correct in ordering him to wait.

  “He is coming right down here to get you,” she said.

  “I thought you were going to Brooklyn,” Eddie Hernandez said. Before Maximo could by word or body motion find a way to evade the question, a man came in and Eddie had to wait on him.

  “Why don’t you go ahead?” Maximo quietly said to Francisca. “I’ll wait for him.”

  She made a face and did not move.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be right outside when he comes.”

  Weinstein half rose from his chair to flick his cigarette in an ashstand. “I thought you were the smart one,” he said to Maximo.

  “Who knows,” Maximo said.

  “I guess nobody does,” Weinstein said. “If somebody like you works for that dirt up the street.”

  “I don’t work for him,” Maximo said sharply.

  “She mentions his name and you’re afraid to move,” Weinstein said.

  “I’m only doing it so she won’t get in trouble,” Maximo said.

  “Sure,” Weinstein said.

  Out of some yearning for protection, for cover, Maximo held the gift-wrapped boxes in front of him, but he was stung too badly and had to do something more; he simply could not walk out of the store and leave Weinstein and Eddie to talk to each other about him.

  “Whose baby is this?” Maximo quickly asked Francisca.

  “My sister.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She was home sleeping.”

  “Are you still in the same building?”

  “Ah hah.”

  “Do you still work by Indio?”

  She nodded yes.

  “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Do you think you should sell dope?”

  “I don’t sell it. I only give it out.”

  “Well, do you think you should give it out? Would you like someone giving out dope to this baby someday?”

  “The baby wouldn’t take dope.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I would stop it.”

  “Would you like to stop it for others too?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why only ‘maybe’?”

  “My sister has no job. I must get the money.”

  “Does your sister receive welfare?”

  “She doesn’t go yet.”

  “If she got welfare, then you wouldn’t need the money from Indio.”

  Francisca thought. “What if Teenager got very mad at me?”

  “We could fix that,” Maximo said.

  “How do you do that?” Francisca asked.

  “Because I can,” Maximo said.

  “You can?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She was a ridiculous little girl, standing here in front of him in a blue schoolgirl’s parka that had strings hanging from the hood and tangled black hair and one small hand on the handle of the stroller containing her sister’s baby, a child with a chance to go nowhere. And now her free hand reached up and smoothed the front of Maximo’s hair. Reached up with a woman’s confidence, and eyes that told him that a young body inside schoolgirl’s clothes was restless.

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  “Then I’ll do it,” Maximo said. For a moment, between the rum and her eyes, he felt his prick stirring. Crazy, he said to himself. No, he said. He could see that she knew exactly what she was doing.

  A screech and sudden horn blaring outside ended the mood. Inside the Mercedes, Teenager motioned for Maximo. Maximo did not move for a moment. Teenager opened the door and stood out in the street, his bearded face looking across the top of the car, his shout coming through the glass windows and door to fill Eddie Hernandez’ store.

  “Yo, Maximo!”

  Without speaking, Maximo left the store, went out to the car and got in. Francisca walked out behind him and acknowledged her reward, a wave from Teenager as he got back into his Mercedes.

  Watching from the counter, Eddie Hernandez pursed his lips in thought. “At least he says something to the girl.”

  “What? He shows off for us.” Weinstein said.

  “At least he put it in her mind,” Eddie said.

  “And the second that dirt shows up in his big car he runs out like a punk. What is she supposed to think? She thinks the same thing I do. There’s something the matter with him. You’re sure he’s not in with this dirt?”

  “No, he just doesn’t know how to get away from the guy,” Eddie said.

  “Gutless,” Weinstein said.

  “Who knows how a guy thinks,” Eddie said.

  That night, at eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve, Teenager had three pillows propped under his head in his bed, a dish of brown rice and pork balanced on his chest and a glass of coquito, thick and white, strong with rum, on the night table next to him. Benny and Santos Rivera sat on the floor, eating.

  “Maximo!” Teenager called out.

  Maximo, leaning in the doorway, took another large sip of coquito. By now he had enough to feel comfortable in the crowded apartment.

  Teenager took the plate from his chest and swung out of bed. He picked up his leather coat.

  “Tell Lydia that I just had to go someplace for a little while. Tell her it was very important. It was to do some good, to help somebody. She will believe you.”

  As Maximo went into the kitchen to speak to Lydia, Teenager, swallowing his drink, went out the door and started for Luisa Maria’s. He did not even have to face his wife, he exulted; Maximo did everything.

  The rum made Maximo think it was all humorous. He put an earnest look on his face as he approached Lydia, who smiled proudly that Maximo was in her kitchen.

  Also at this time, in the Christmas rush of 1976, there appeared in the middle of a long customs line at Kennedy Airport one Gaetano Ricci, forty, who had just stepped off TWA flight 75 from Rome. His ticket indicated that his trip had originated at Palermo, Sicily. At five-foot-six and weighing one hundred forty-two pounds, Gaetano was not imposing, but one physical attribute did make him stand out in the crowded hall: he had a square chest.

  Sweating lightly, he placed two old leather suitcases in front of a customs man. Gaetano had his overcoat buttoned, and he kept one hand spread across his chest, as if giving the oath of allegiance to this new country. The customs man carefully went through his bags, smiled and handed Gaetano the customs slip.

  “Just hand it to the guard on your way out,” the customs man said.

  Gaetano picked up the bags and walked toward the guard who stood in front of swinging doors that would take Gaetano out of the customs area and to the street, to the blue Mercedes of his cousin out in parking field two. Gaetano walked up to the customs man, dropped one of the bags and held out the marked slip.

  “Thank you,” the guard said.

  Gaetano picked up the suitcase.

  “Excuse me,” the guard said, his arm out like a gate. “Would you mind stepping over to that room?”

  “Non pozzo parrare le paroli Americani,” Gaetano said.

  Gaetano glanced about and saw that he was being watched by a group of young men with severe faces and three-piece business suits.

  In the airport offices of the Drug Enforcement Agency, Gaetano, asked in Sicilian to remove his coat and shirt, sighed and unbuttoned himself and revealed ten pounds of heroin strapped to his upper torso.

  “Trovaio sut’ll letto,” Gaetano said.

  “He says he found it under the bed,” one of the drug agents said.

  The others in the room nodded. For six weeks they had been monitoring this particular TWA flight, along with two Alitalia
runs, for single passengers who appeared nervous or, like Gaetano, deformed. Gaetano was the seventh to be caught with heroin.

  Two days after Gaetano’s arrest, a licensed customs broker named Guiliani, with offices in the overseas freight terminal at Kennedy Airport, reported to drug agents that a shipment of Italian provincial furniture was on hand. Guiliani called because he had been told that failure to do so would cost him his license and perhaps his freedom. The drug agents were concerned with Guiliani’s daily business, for he was the only top customs broker at Kennedy with an Italian name and was the one to whom Italian exporters went automatically. This time, agents found the legs of the dining room table were hollow and stuffed with one hundred fifteen pounds of heroin. When agents delivered the furniture to a house at Randall Avenue in the Bronx, two men let the agents, dressed in coveralls, lug in the furniture. The two men remained inside the house long enough to twist off the table top and discover that bags of talcum had been stuffed into the table legs. Both went crashing out the back door and into the arms of agents.

  Such arrests produced another of the momentary, bothersome interruptions in the drug peddling being done by the gangster family of Louis Mariani. The dope, of course, would reappear shortly; a few cars riding into New York from Canada would rectify everything. But this particular lapse caused trouble in the Bronx, where Pedro Torres sat in his club and did not have enough white heroin, while everywhere in his area the streets were coated with this new brown heroin being sold by Teenager. Teenager’s pushers were boasting, “This is Spanish from the ground where it is grown all the way into your arm. The Wop has nothing to do with this.”

  Reluctantly, Mariani allowed Torres to have a cup of coffee with him on the matter. Mariani did not feel that he, a man of honor and stature, should be required to speak to a Spic, and Torres would make the second such person, a person as low as a dog, with whom he had sat. The first one, Teenager, was supposed to be part of a cemetery by now. How could Corky miss him like he did? Then this Teenager disappeared and Corky was going around saying that he had scared the Spic away. Scared him like you scare a tractor trailer. Wherever Teenager had gone, he sure was back now. Torres was a Spic, Mariani thought, who lived with all these Spics. Maybe he could get a close shot.

  When Mariani arrived at the coffee shop of the Mirror Motel, on the approach to the Whitestone Bridge, he found Torres at a center table, the morning sunlight exploding off the rows of heavy gold chains around his neck. Mariani, who wore a four-carat pinky ring, became uneasy; the eyes of all were supposed to be attracted to this ring, to the hand of a man of honor, not to the neck of some filthy Spic. Mariani immediately suggested they sit in the back, by the kitchen door, so that he could pretend that the Spic sitting with him was merely a busboy whom he was graciously allowing to relax.

  “Have coffee?” Mariani said.

  “I’m just drinking a juice,” Torres said.

  “Coffee,” Mariani said.

  “I don’t drink coffee.”

  “Have coffee.”

  “All right.”

  “Want Danish?”

  No.

  “Have Danish.”

  “I don’t feel like eating.”

  “Sure you do. Have Danish.”

  Torres was irritated that Mariani had to show his control in such a way, but as he needed something, he acquiesced.

  Mariani yawned over his coffee. “I’m exhausted. Wife got me crazy last night. Soon’s Johnny Carson’s over I always go right off. Like I’m hit on the head. Last night my wife gets up and goes down and sits in the kitchen. She’s still there at two o’clock in the morning. I yell down to her, ‘Hey, are you thinking up some way to get rid of me?’ She says, ‘I’m waiting for Nicki.’ That’s my daughter. She’s out somewhere. So I says to my wife, ‘You could wait in bed just as good as you could in the kitchen.’ Not my wife. Three o’clock she sits there until. Finally my daughter comes home and the wife comes up to bed. I want to get up and strangle my daughter. Got me awake all these hours. What does the wife say to me? ‘Go back to sleep.’ What sleep? I didn’t catch a minute. Her and that daughter. Don’t let my wife hear one word from anyone else about her daughter.”

  “That is the mother for you,” Torres said.

  “Don’t get me wrong, my daughter don’t do nothing wrong. Any daughter of mine does it right. You know that. If the guy goes away, the wife stays in the house until the day he comes home. And that’s it. Anybody don’t do that, don’t deserve to live. My daughter does it the right way, don’t worry about her. Last night, you know what she did? Went to a late movie with a girlfriend. A girl we know. You should’ve seen my daughter this morning. Up and singing at seven o’clock. I says to her, ‘Hey, let an old man sleep.’ I could hardly freaking move. That’s when you get old.”

  Mariani gulped coffee, took a bite of the Danish and, mouth full, asked, “What’s your problem?”

  “So many people are making business and I don’t have enough to sell.”

  “Two days, three days, everything will be all right,” Mariani said.

  “Excuse me, but your man said this to me last week.”

  “Wait a couple more days.”

  “The good pushers go to Teenager because he gives them brown rocks to sell.”

  “Anybody leaves you, then you got to do what you got to do,” Mariani said.

  “I know. I have to take a pusher off the count if he leaves me.”

  Mariani gulped the rest of his coffee and looked out the restaurant door at the parking lot. Standing up, he reached across the table and tugged at Torres’ cheek. “Take a pusher off the count and then take the other guy, too.”

  “Teenager?”

  “He’s the guy taking the business away from you.”

  Mariani looked out at the parking lot again. Then he reached for Torres’ cheek again. “I know you’ll do this right, sweetheart. Let me tell you what I’ll do for you. You know Corky? Sure you do. He’s my man. I’ll tell Corky to come around give you three thousand. That’s for expenses. All right, sweetheart? Anything else? I’m counting on you.”

  Mariani left. Let these Spics kill each other, the way they’re supposed to, he told himself.

  Torres followed slowly. He had come to Mariani for help, and he wound up carrying a contract on Teenager.

  “Excuse me,” the cashier said.

  “Yes?” Torres said.

  “The check,” she said. “The gentleman walked out before you said you’d pay.”

  As Torres paid the check, he saw Mariani slip into the passenger seat of a blue Cadillac and be driven away.

  19

  AT NOON ON FRIDAY, Haydee looked into Maximo’s cubicle and asked if he would be around later and Maximo quickly said yes, without asking what it was about, for never again was he going to allow himself to gash his insides by refusing her. This time, Haydee wanted Maximo not for his company over a drink, but for his assistance at a Bronx Democratic Party meeting where judges were to be selected. The meeting was to start at three-thirty and be over at five.

  “Whole idea of these things is to hold them when nobody can get there but the politicians,” Haydee said. “They’d die if they had the public in there watching them make up judges.”

  “What happens when they see us?” Maximo said.

  “Nigger like me walks in? A riot.”

  After lunch, Maximo called Nicki.

  “I want to have an early dinner with you.” I can t.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s Friday and I have to go home. By the time I get to your house and then Angela picks me up, it’s too late. I’m starting to get asked a lot of questions at home. Next thing, they’ll put a timelock on the door.”

  “I don’t want you to come to my house. I want to go out someplace with you.”

  “I don’t want to do that,” Nicki said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to waste a night in a restaurant. If I wanted to do that, I’d go be a waitr
ess.”

  “I’ll be through at five. I have no bar course tonight. I can meet you for a drink and have a nice dinner. You can get home early. I just want to see you.”

  “To do what?”

  “To sit down like civilized people and have a decent conversation over a meal.”

  “If you lived in a civilized place, I’d go up and let myself in and we could have some real conversation,” she said. “Oh, freak it! Look at this. I just spilled all over. I’m trying to polish my nails and talk at the same time.”

  “Dinner,” Maximo said.

  “Well, I’d love to see you. But I have to be home early.”

  “So have dinner and go home.”

  “That isn’t what I want, but, all right, I’ll take it.”

  He made a date for five at La Casa Wong, a Chinese-Latin restaurant on Fordham Road, three blocks from the building where the meeting about judges was being held.

  At three o’clock, Haydee appeared in Maximo’s cubicle doorway with a Puerto Rican who was quite dark, had a shaved head and was so thin he appeared starved. A small gold earring was speared through the right earlobe. A T-shirt made from a flag of Puerto Rico hung on his bony frame. Haydee introduced him as Ron Seguera and said he was the chairman of the Bronx Hispanic Judicial Coalition.

  “The only thing Ron knows about the law is to plead guilty,” Haydee added.

  They took the subway to Fordham Road and arrived at a quarter past three at the office building where the Democratic headquarters was located. Maximo removed his tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves in order to comply-as much as possible with the Third World dress of Ron with his earring, and Haydee who wore a yellow T-shirt and black pants. They took the elevator to the fourth floor, where at the end of the narrow hallway, mail still stuck in the discolored slot under the lettering on the frosted glass door that said “Democratic Executive Committee of Bronx County.”

  Haydee pulled the mail out of the slot and walked in. At a desk in a large room there was a woman in her fifties, champagne hair as pale as a stone under the ceiling lights, who immediately looked up from her typewriter.

  “Got your mail,” Haydee said.

  “Junk mail. Must have just come. We got all the good mail,” the woman said.