by Marc Olden
Bitch mood’s cooling out, thought Neil. Maybe I’ll get lucky and walk out of here without blood being spilled. The second telephone in their apartment was the number Neil had given Lydia and the people he was buying dope from. This phone went along with his street role and had nothing to do with his life as husband and father. Except that it did, at least in Elaine’s eyes.
“You’re looking the part,” she said. “You’re Neil the actor, the laid-back street dude out to cop. Christ, I should take a refresher course every so often before I forget English altogether.” She snorted, the usual putdown of Neil’s work, the usual stomping on law enforcement.
Elaine was a snob, politer than most snobs, but still concerned with appearances and status, which left cops and agents in an unfortunate position as far as she was concerned. Cops and agents had no status and never would have any.
She’d married Neil, had a child, done nothing else, and that was the problem. Newspapers, magazines, and television panel shows were telling her, insisting that women must do more. Not knowing what more was had left Elaine confused and scared, as well as hard to live with. She was thirty, and the next milestone would be forty. Before that arrived, Elaine Shire surely had to find out what more was.
More was not ballet lessons, attending writing workshops, Transcendental Meditation, or a guitar she never touched a week after Neil bought it for her.
More, to tell the God’s honest truth, was not even her daughter, Courtenaye.
Neil fought against Elaine’s turning him into more. She wanted him to go to law school, to do something else with his life besides carry a gun and sit around in bars waiting to buy narcotics. Lawyers had status, a future, and a wife could be proud of that. Where was the pride in describing your husband the narcotics agent?
Uncertainty. Self-criticism. Elaine suffered from both, and she suffered from jealousy. Not of other women, but of Neil’s certainty: he was doing what he wanted to do.
He said, “The sitter—”
“She won’t mind. She’ll be getting paid just for ringing the front doorbell.” Elaine stood up, leaving her cigarette and holder in a seashell used as an ashtray. Neil tensed. Then surprise. …
He relaxed, surprised as hell. Because Elaine smiled as she walked over to him.
“When I take time from my thoughtful paranoia, I worry about you. I really don’t like the idea of my husband rushing out into the night to meet some woman who will do anything, and I mean anything, to keep out of jail.”
“No problem. I’m hot for my wife, and the lady I’m meeting is definitely not my type. Purple lipstick and silver lamé boots.”
“Oh, God. Extremely gross. Thank the Lord for bad taste. Purple lipstick? I bet she looks as though she’s been hit in the mouth by a train.”
Neil was hugging Elaine when she flinched. “That, that thing.”
“Sorry.” Neil looked down at his gun.
“Well, I can always sue the government like the rest of the world does.”
She was warm, concerned, affectionate. Surprise. No Miss Bitch tonight. Hallelujah. A man going out on the street had enough on his mind without a domestic hassle.
Fear. You pushed it as far back into your brain as you could. Cops and agents had a special way of dealing with fear. You ignored it, reminding yourself that you had a lot of men, money, guns, and clout behind you, and if some prick wasted you in the night, your people would come after him and add his blood to yours on the sidewalk. You’d be taken care of. That’s where you got the courage to go out on the street among people who were sick enough to pull out your heart with pliers and feed it to a starving rat.
You could be killed, crippled for life, have your eyesight shot out of your skull, disgraced to the point where you couldn’t get a job guarding a gingerbread house. But don’t think about it, just don’t think about it. Just keep your mind on what’s backing you up. Think on that
Elaine ran a fingernail tipped in silver polish down along the front of Neil’s black leather jacket. “Stay cool, Pie. Keep your round little face out of the line of fire. Let somebody else do the shaky stuff. You just point your finger at whoever did it, then sit yourself down somewhere quiet.”
“You know me, I’m attached to my ass in more ways than one. No chances, nothing uncool.”
He inhaled her sweet, gentle perfume, hands feeling the warmth and roundness of her hips. He felt the start of an erection, and for a second thought about not going, about letting Lydia wait.
“Pie?”
“Yeah?”
“Hormonal secretions secreting.”
“Horny?”
“I do believe so.”
He kissed her gently, careful not to hug her too tightly, careful to keep her away from the gun on his left hip.
“Come back,” she whispered, her open mouth moving toward his. “Come back.”
They kissed deeply, fiercely, clinging to each other, forgetting about the gun, and Neil found himself loving her more than he had in a long time.
Lydia said, “The priest works with Barbara Pomal.”
“Sure?” Neil stopped drumming on the steering wheel with his fingers.
“I got the name Barbara today from my cousin René. When you talk about a Barbara in dope, you’re talking about Barbara Pomal. You know who she works for?”
“Mas Betancourt. One of the biggest importers in town. She’s one of his three top lieutenants. What’s the connection between Barbara Pomal and this priest who’s supposed to be going around collecting money for this super deal?”
Lydia leaned toward Neil from her side of the car, using her hands to emphasize her point. “My cousin René, he’s a mule for Blind Man in Brooklyn.”
“You told me.”
“Well, this afternoon earlier, René had to go to see Blind Man, who wanted him to make a run over to Union City, New Jersey.”
“Where a lot of Cubans live.”
“Yes. Well, René gets to Brooklyn, but at the last minute Blind Man changes his mind. He tells René there’s no run today, no package, go back to Manhattan. This priest comes over around that time, and René figures the priest is there to get money from Blind Man for this special deal that’s goin’ down, I don’t know when. René figures Blind Man canceled the Union City run because he has to give money to the priest.”
Neil nodded. “Makes sense.” He watched a bus pull out from behind his car. Parked in darkness on Central Park West and Sixty-eighth Street. Lydia had come down from her Washington Heights apartment by subway to meet him and take him to an after-hours club on West Eighty-first Street and Broadway.
Bad Red wanted to talk with Neil about another buy. Before that, Lydia had plenty to tell Neil, and he was more than interested in what she had to say.
“So while my cousin René is getting ready to leave Blind Man, he hears the priest make a telephone call. René hears him say, ‘Hello, Barbara? Tell our friend everything is fine, I have what I came for.’ Then the priest said something about airport, like maybe he and Barbara were going to meet at the airport tonight to go somewhere.”
Neil said, “If the priest is collecting money for a deal of this size, the money is to pay for the dope in advance. Nobody’s fronting a deal this size, but Jesus, how big is it? Damn, I’d like to know. Sweet Jesus, I’d like to know.”
“René said something else, too. Said the priest said to Blind Man, ‘Barbara wants to talk with you.’ ”
Neil shrugged. “Doesn’t mean it’s Barbara Pomal. Understand, I’m not saying you’re wrong, but Barbara could mean any Barbara.”
Lydia disagreed. “Blind Man would not come to the telephone to speak to just any Barbara. You have to understand Cuban men. Believe me, I know them. They are very, very macho, very much a man, too much masculine. For someone like Blind Man to come to a telephone to speak to a woman, she must be important. Barbara Pomal is important, because everybody knows she works for Mas Betancourt.”
“Everybody knows. You’re right about that. We know th
e identity of every Latin, black, Italian importer in town. But getting next to these people is something else again. They’re so goddamn insulated, you can’t catch ’em with dirty underwear or a button missing.”
Neil knew who Mas Betancourt was. One of the four biggest Cuban importers in Manhattan, doing millions of dollars in dope every year without ever going near the stuff. Intelligence had files on everybody in narcotics, but that was far from bringing the man down.
Mas Betancourt, the cripple. Yes, he was heavy enough to put together a super deal, but why? Why was he working with blacks when he’d done all right on his own? Why was he reaching out? Was the deal that big?
Neil Shire’s mouth watered at the thought of it, at the thought of bringing down Mas Betancourt. Importers didn’t fall every day. In fact, they almost never fell at all. You needed a truckload of luck to bring one down. Neil would give anything in the world to be the one to do it to somebody as big as Mas Betancourt.
When he and Lydia finished talking, it was just after ten o’clock. Despite the October chill, a few homosexuals were cruising the park side of Central Park West, stopping to sit and shiver on the concrete-and-wooden benches, their busy eyes, continuing to accost, examine, lure.
Lydia waited for Neil’s approval, her face expectant.
He knew his role; he was learning fast. Stroke your snitch. Make him purr. Make him do the right thing your way.
“Sounds good, Lydia. What’s that you’re wearing, a new dress?”
She smiled. “René gave it to me today. That’s when he told me about Barbara. Friend of his got hold of some dresses, and René’s helping him to sell them. You like it? You really like it?” She was a puppy anxious to play tug-of-war with the master’s newspaper.
“Sure do. Gray’s a nice color for you. Has an elegance about it. You ought to wear dresses and skirts more often, not just pants. Dresses suit you.” Even if they are stolen.
Pretty René and his business partner were peddling stolen property. Neil was as sure of that as he was of the number of toes he had on both feet. Anyway, it was true; Lydia did look nice in that stolen gray dress. Nothing wrong in complimenting your snitch. A woman is a woman is a woman, and they all need stroking.
“So René’s in the dress business instead of traveling to New Jersey?”
Lydia nodded in agreement. “Yes. He spends money like water. He’s generous with Olga, with me, even with Shana. He’s got his good side.”
“Rolando the priest.” Rolando was the only name on the priest that René had overheard.
“Yes.” Lydia rolled down the window and blew cigarette smoke at the darkened park. “I’ll try to find out if it’s a first or last name, but it’s probably a first name.”
“Be careful with René. Don’t question him too much. Let him do the talking if you can. Watch yourself. You say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, and you’ve got a problem. We won’t be backing you up twenty-four hours a day, so you’ve got to be cool, got to know what you’re doing, understand?”
She nodded slowly, bringing the cigarette to her mouth with a tiny hand containing four rings with huge colored stones. “I’ll be careful.”
Don’t dwell on the hard times, thought Neil. She could get wasted, but don’t remind her any more than you have to. “You keep working like you’re working, and you won’t have to spend a night away from Olga.”
“You mean that?” Her hand went out quickly to his arm, her face full of trust.
What the fuck am I saying? thought Neil. Can I promise her that? Jesus.
“I mean it.”
At the after-hours club, over drinks costing five dollars each, Bad Red got down to business.
He liked Neil. Bad Red wanted to see all them nice Eye-talians out there in the suburbs get rich, so he was going to do a tasty deal with Neil.
Two keys of cocaine, seventy-five percent pure guaranteed. Bad Red just wanted to be friends with Neil and his people. Bad Red, Lonnie Conquest, and Julius Shelton.
Neil’s heart almost pushed its way up to his throat. Two keys of that kind of pure was at least a hundred thousand dollars. That meant Lonnie and Julius, two black country boys, were well connected. That meant Neil was rolling over people, moving up.
His mouth was dry, and the excitement almost made him run to the bathroom and piss his heart out, but Neil agreed to a hundred and ten thousand dollars, the biggest buy of his life.
8
PARIS.
To make sure they weren’t being followed, Rolando, the priest, and Barbara Pomal went sightseeing. Near Notre-Dame they stopped at the Esmeralda Café for ham sandwiches and wine. Around the corner from the Cluny Museum, they found a patisserie and bought flan, delicious custard pastries, then walked back to the beautiful medieval courtyard at the Cluny Museum’s entrance and sat on a bench, eating slowly, talking softly.
Their eyes never ceased to move in all directions. The priest and the Cuban woman were as alert as hungry eagles. To be careless now was unthinkable; at stake was a dope deal involving more heroin and more money than anyone in America had ever put together. Carelessness would, at the very least, cost Rolando and Barbara their lives.
In narcotics, buyers and sellers were cautious to the extreme and paranoid as a way of life. They sensed surveillance where there was none, they read betrayal where it didn’t exist. Buyers and sellers lived on the edge of an abyss that was both imaginary and real.
Surveillance, arrest, ripoff, violence, did exist; they were as much a part of dope as glassine envelopes and dirty hypodermic needles. The fear of these things, however, was an even bigger part of dope.
It was not this customary wariness that made Rolando and Barbara Pomal stroll arm-in-arm in the cool noon Paris sun. They were not suffering from the rampant paranoia that touched the lives of everyone who touched narcotics.
Both knew what they stood to lose if they were being followed by police, rival dealers, informants. This morning they had handed an aluminum suitcase containing two million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Jules Berry, a top lieutenant for Jacquard in Marseilles. This was the second of three cash payments due the Corsican Jacquard for Mas Betancourt’s five hundred kilos of white heroin.
The aluminum suitcase, similar to those now used by Arabian oil-rich sheikhs to carry jewels and money, had four key locks and two combination locks. Without keys or combinations, the suitcase could be opened only with a blowtorch. The priest and the Cuban woman had turned the suitcase over to Berry and the two men with him just before nine this morning, in front of a deserted Champs Élysées sidewalk café that was just opening for breakfast.
The sightseeing that followed, though a precaution, was enjoyable. Rolando, an ordained Catholic priest who had left the church four years ago, knew Paris well, spoke fluent French, was an excellent guide. At thirty-one, he was tall and stoop-shouldered. He had a long, sad, houndlike face and wore all black, hat and overcoat included, except for the tiny patch of white at his throat on his Roman collar. Reading from a guidebook written in French, Rolando spoke softly to his companion, in Spanish, of the city’s glorious history.
Barbara Pomal inhaled the air, grateful for this respite in their European mission. She was thirty-five, tall, with shiny black hair pulled back, parted, and tied in a bun on her neck. She dressed well, preferring expensive pantsuits and blue diamonds. She was not pretty; her nose was too long, jutting out over a receding chin.
But because she was intelligent, strong, and self-controlled, men found her attractive. She was one of Mas Betancourt’s three trusted lieutenants, handling negotiations for the dope he bought, seeing that certain moneys reached banks and people in Europe, South America, Mexico, anywhere Mas Betancourt made a buy.
She was tough, an excellent businesswoman experienced in all phases of top-level narcotics dealing. She had one child, a sixteen-year-old son still living in Havana with the husband who had sent Barbara out of Cuba when the boy was a year old, telling her he and the boy would meet her in
Miami.
The husband never reached Miami; he changed his mind and decided to remain in Cuba with the boy. In fifteen years, Barbara Pomal had seen only photographs of her son.
Rolando was Mas Betancourt’s nephew, in charge of arranging for huge amounts of cut and mixes that Mas sometimes sold to the distributors who bought dope from him. Rolando also traveled to South America and Mexico, arranging payments for whatever cocaine and brown heroin Mas Betancourt bought. It was the priest’s job to handle money going to South America and Mexico, reporting to Barbara Pomal when the transactions were finalized.
Rolando, the only child of Mas Betancourt’s now-dead sister, had been a brilliant scholar, educated in Cuba and in America. He had joined the priesthood with the thought of isolating himself from the world and devoting himself to scholarship and mystic studies. But the world had changed since medieval scholars like Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine could cloister themselves in monasteries, spending hours sipping wine made by brother monks and reading hand-lettered manuscripts.
Then, too, Rolando’s intelligence came with a sense of irony that made him critical of God and church, that made him want to challenge both. If the changing church refused to allow Rolando to be entirely a scholar and student, then he would return to life, but on his own terms. If life was changing so rapidly, Rolando wanted to be a part of it, to drown himself in it, thoroughly immerse himself in it.
He left the church and embraced the most exciting existence possible. He went to work for his uncle, Mas Betancourt, where danger, power, life, death, and intense satisfaction were one and the same. Rolando’s keen intelligence demanded faster living and more danger than anyone else. And he got it.
Dope was an incredible game to him, intricate and Byzantine, and because, in his heart, he didn’t care if he won or lost, he played the game of dope well. He would play the game to the fullest, because that’s what he wanted life to be, a maximum use of mind, spirit, body. The gray, pathetic existence endured by most of humanity was not for him. Like Lucifer, Rolando preferred to reign in hell rather than serve in heaven.
