Dancing Aztecs (2 page)

“Sure,” Jerry had said. “Marked with an
A
.”

“You weel make deleevery at midnight, in thee Port Authority bus terminal parking garage, top level, southeast corner. You onnerstand?”

“Port of Authority? You mean in Manhattan?”

“Ees something wrong?”

Jerry had shrugged, saying, “No, that's okay. Port of Authority bus terminal parking garage, top level, southeast corner, midnight.”

“Weeth a box marked
A
.”

“
A
. Gotcha.”

So here he was, the next afternoon, following the new guard Hiram through the piles of cargo to a stack of five wooden crates, each about the size of a case of whiskey, and all addressed to:

Bud Beemiss Enterprises
29 West 45th St.
New York, N.Y.
USA

Each crate was marked with a stenciled letter,
A
through
E
, a different letter on each crate. The one marked
A
was at the bottom of the stack.

“Wouldn't you know it,” Jerry said, and kicked the right crate. “That's the one I want.”

“Always works that way,” the guard agreed.

Jerry put his clipboard on another pile of crates. “Give me a hand, will you, Hiram?”

Hiram gave him a hand, and pretty soon the box marked
A
—which fortunately wasn't very heavy—was stowed in the back of the van with the sack of registered mail from Northwest Orient (cash, stocks, maybe jewelry) and the package from Seaboard addressed to a dental supply house (possibly gold), and Jerry was saying, “Thanks a lot. See you around, Hiram.”

“Have a nice day,” Hiram said.

PRIOR TO WHICH …

Until he'd come up with the idea of Inter-Air Forwarding, Jerry Manelli had mostly just lived along from hustle to hustle, starting when he'd dropped out of high school at sixteen and went to work for the numbers people, running their paper. When he saw how profitable that game was, he started carrying some of the action himself. That is, he'd only turn in three quarters of the tickets and cash he'd received, keeping the rest for his own benefit. If any of those players ever hit he'd have to pay their winnings out of his own pocket, but that never happened once. A very nice hustle.

But a little scary, considering who his bosses were. So after a while he quit that and lived on the profits until it was time to hustle again. Then he connected for a while with his brother-in-law Frank McCann's brother Floyd, who was with a construction crew, and the two of them spent a couple evenings a week loading a Hertz truck with concrete blocks or brick from the work site and driving them out to Patchogue on Long Island, where some Irishman friend of Floyd's named Flattery had his own construction company and liked to buy his materials at a discount. But after Floyd nearly got caught one time, Jerry retired again, and when no new hustle came along he went to work in a body shop where the boss was hustling the customers so hard there wasn't any leverage left over.

Shortly after that. Jerry hooked up with an old friend from high school named Danny Kolabian who had just been fired by a vending machine company, and the two of them put together a very nice hustle, except it only worked a couple weeks. What they did, on Monday morning Jerry and Danny went to the vending machine company's warehouse, using a key the company didn't know Danny had, and they put one of the jukeboxes from the warehouse into a company truck. They crossed the wires to start the truck, and then drove to fourteen different bars that were customers of the vending machine company, and in every bar they said, “We're here to switch the jukeboxes.” The Monday bartenders didn't know any different, so at each place Jerry and Danny carried in the machine from the truck, switched it with the jukebox already in the bar, and on the way to the next place they'd rifle the machine's coin box for the weekend's take. They made eleven hundred dollars the first Monday and thirteen fifty the second Monday, but the third Monday four guys were waiting in the vending machine warehouse with autographed baseball bats. Jerry had good legs and good wind so he got away, but Danny was hit twice and recognized once and had to leave town, and was now either somewhere on the West Coast or buried over in New Jersey.

For the next several years life went on like that, from hustle to hustle, until two years ago, when Inter-Air Forwarding had come along, since when Jerry had become almost respectable, a successful private businessman with his own truck and his own route.

The idea had been one of those sudden strokes of genius. Jerry's sister Angela and her husband Mel Bernstein had taken a vacation in Israel, and it was Jerry who'd picked them up at Kennedy on their return to the States. But there was a delay because of a bomb scare—the Arabs again playing the fool—and Jerry had to hang around the airport for an hour and forty-five minutes. Mostly he just sat near the big windows and stared out at the airplanes, until he began to notice all the little trucks. Blue trucks, red trucks, yellow trucks, white trucks, zipping and zapping among the planes, skittering around like ants dressed up for Mardi Gras. Some had airline names on their sides, but others had obscure company names or no name at all. Now and again, one of the trucks would stop near a pile of boxes or canvas mail-bags, and the driver would hop out and toss a couple things into his truck, and off he'd go again. Jerry watched that several times, and gradually his boredom changed to interest. “Hmmnmmmm,” he said, and leaned forward in his seat.

When Mel and Angela finally got off their plane and through Customs—Angela had stashed her new gold bracelet where Customs was very unlikely to find it—Jerry tried to talk to Mel. “Comere,” he said. “Take a look at all those trucks.”

“I've got a headache, Jerry,” Mel said. “I've been on that plane a month.”

“Just take a minute,” Jerry told him. “Look at those trucks.”

Mel said, “You've heard of jet lag?”

Angela said, “Jerry, talk to us tomorrow, okay?”

But Jerry had been sitting there alone a long time. “What if,” he said, “what if you had one of those trucks yourself? You go from terminal to terminal, you pick up whatever looks good.”

Angela wasn't listening. “Come
on
, Jerry,” she said.

But Mel had listened, even with his jet lag, and now he frowned at Jerry, frowned out at the trucks, thought it over, and then shook his head. “No,” he said.

“No? Why not?”

“It isn't that easy,” Mel said. “It can't be.”

“Why not?”

“
I'm
going home,” Angela said.

Jet lag makes people irritable. Mel said, “Forget it, Jerry, will you? They've got security.”

“The hell they do,” Jerry said, and that ended the conversation for then, because Angela was walking out of the terminal. But that Saturday when they were all having a beer-and-hot-dog picnic in Frank and Teresa McCann's backyard Mel himself brought it up once more, and the result was Inter-Air Forwarding, with all the families chipping in to buy the van. There were Jerry, and his brother-in-law Mel, and his other brother-in-law Frank McCann, and Frank's brother Floyd. As originator of the idea and driver of the truck, Jerry took 50 percent of the profits, with 15 percent to each of the others and an honorary 5 percent for Jerry's parents, who were retired now and trying to live on a fixed income.

It isn't true that airports have no security at all; an honest citizen can hardly get into the men's room without a luggage search and a body frisk. But airport security is meant mostly to impress honest citizens and insurance companies, and secondarily to catch hijackers and other crazies. There is no security against a man with his own truck and his own clipboard, and Inter-Air Forwarding was a safe, reliable financial success from the beginning.

At first the partnership worked only with items picked up from the cargo areas and value rooms out at JFK, but the process of fencing the merchandise put them in contact with customers who had another use for Inter-Air. These were people who would pay to have specific items collected
before
they went through Customs. The occasional anonymous request would come to Jerry by phone, he would make the pickup and delivery, he would collect his fee, and there was never any trouble.

Until the box marked
A
.

THAT NIGHT …

In a place called the Gateway Garden on Queens Boulevard, Jerry was dancing the Hustle with a girl named Myrna. “Tough,” Myrna said. “Very tough.”

Jerry grinned. He liked to dance, and he liked Myrna. “We're here to satisfy,” he said, and spun her left and then right and then out at arm's length.

Back again, torso to torso, with the record of “Love to Love You, Baby” by Donna Summer booming from the speakers, they dipped and weaved through the other dancers, and Myrna spoke close to Jerry's ear: “I got a bottle of Lancer's rosé in the refrigerator. You ever try that?”

“It's pink and it sparkles,” Jerry said. “Just like you.”

Myrna grinned, not exactly like a little girl. “You wanna drink me, Jerry?”

“You're close,” Jerry told her.

“Come on to my place later,” Myrna said. “The kid's with her grandmother.”

“I got a thing to do in the city,” Jerry said. “Maybe after that, like around one o'clock.”

“Manhattan? This hour of the night?”

“A guy I got to see.” They dipped together, moving with the music, and Jerry grinned at her, saying, “After that, we'll drink a little, eat a little. Have some nice rosé.”

“Nice,” said Myrna. “Very tough.”

Jerry had found himself married one time, seven years ago when he was. twenty-two, but the marriage had only lasted four months before he'd realized it was
her
hustle. “I'm not the Welfare Department,” he'd told her, and that was that. Now he had the life he wanted. The attic of his parents' house in Bayside had been converted into an apartment for him, with an outside staircase for privacy. He had a good income from Inter-Air Forwarding, he had a nice place to live, he had a good wardrobe, and most nights he was out dancing with girls like Myrna. What more could anybody want?

The record ended. “You have good moves, girl,” Jerry said.

“Very very,” she said. “There's a guy over there waving at you.”

“Yeah?” Jerry looked at Mel, over by the entrance. “Time to go. See you later.”

“Who is that guy?”

“My brother-in-law.”

“Yeah? He looks Jewish.”

Jerry laughed. “What do
I
look?”

“You look terrific,” she said. “I'll put a couple glasses in the freezer. It's nice when they get that frosting on them.”

“Don't you get any frosting on
you
” Jerry said, and patted her hip, and the next record started: “You Sexy Thing,” by Hot Chocolate.

Jerry walked over to Mel, who looked past him, saying, “That's a great-looking girl.”

“She thought you looked good, too,” Jerry said.

“Yeah?” Mel tugged at his shirt buttons, staring across the room.

Jerry said, “Your wife is my sister.”

“I can
look
,” Mel said. “Come on.”

Mel's station wagon was outside, with the box marked
A
in the back. Mel drove, and Jerry sat there humming Hustle tunes to himself while he looked out at Queens Boulevard, wide and dull, flanked by red-brick boxes. Mel said, “What's her name?”

“Who?”

“The girl you were dancing with.”

“Myrna. Stepakowski, something like that.”

“Yeah? She didn't look Polish.”

“Well, she's half Mexican,” Jerry said, making that up for the hell of it.

“That explains it.” Mel said, and they took the 59th Street Bridge to Manhattan.

When he was a teen-ager, Jerry had come in to Manhattan all the time on the subway. He and other guys would come in and do a movie, maybe buy records, spend half an hour in a Playland near Times Square. When they got a little older they'd come looking for girls, and drink a lot in the midtown bars, but by the time he was twenty-one, twenty-two, Jerry'd had enough of Manhattan. Who needed it? The beer would make you just as sick right at home in Queens. Now, this was the first time in almost three years that Jerry had crossed the river.

They drove to the Port Authority bus terminal, and up to the top parking level, where they found their contact waiting for them. The contact, a tall, big-shouldered wrestler-type guy in a biege sports jacket and chocolate slacks and white loafers and chocolate wing-collar shirt and white-on-white tie, took one look at the box and said, “What shit is this?”

Jerry frowned at him. “What shit is what?”

“That shit,” said the contact. “It's the wrong box.”

Jerry switched his frown to the box, sitting there on the tailgate of the station wagon. “The hell it is.”

“That box has an
A
on it,” the contact said.

Jerry nodded. “That's right.”

“You were supposed to get a box with an
E
on it,” said the contact.

“The hell I was.”

“You were told an
E
,” the contact said. He moved his big shoulders around inside his jacket, to show he was getting annoyed.

Jerry stuck his chin out a little, to show he didn't give a damn. “I was told an
A
,” he said.

“E.”

“A.”

The contact opened his mouth to say something—probably
E
—and then closed it and frowned instead, apparently thinking things over, and when he opened it again he said, “You wait right there.”

“I got all the time in the world,” Jerry told him.

The contact walked away across the concrete floor, sparsely populated with parked cars, and opened the rear door of a maroon Cadillac Eldorado. He bent down to speak to somebody inside there.