Dead I Well May Be (14 page)

It was a pisser. Andy’s party had had to be postponed. Everyone getting shot at had spoiled the mood a bit. It was rescheduled for tonight.

I’d got the 1 train back, gone to the apartment, slunk to the sofa, slept. I felt awake now and in pain and dirty. Fucking shooting people for a living. What kind of a life was that? Bloody ridiculous. Jesus, I wasn’t fourteen anymore. I was practically twenty. In a couple of weeks, in point of fact. Maybe it was time to turn over a new leaf. I wondered if I’d paid off my plane ticket yet. Jesus, but what would I be going back to? Nothing. Bloody nothing. Fucking rain.

It was late afternoon now, so I dialed the number, put on an accent that I hoped was Jersey Shore.

Is Bridget there?

Hold on, Mrs. Pat said.

A long pause and then that voice:

Yes?

I haven’t seen you in forever, I said.

It’s been impossible. Our schedule has been so busy, but, uh, don’t think I haven’t been thinking about you, Bridget said.

I want to believe you.

It’s true. Listen, M—, listen, I can’t really talk here. I’ll call you, ok?

Ok.

She hung up.

I looked at the phone for a half a minute.

I stripped and went into the shower.

I felt filthy. I scrubbed and soaped myself and scrubbed again. I sat down on the floor and let the water come over me. I banged the floor and cursed for a minute or two. I remembered what I’d said to Sunshine about my
chi
and laughed. I washed my hair and got out. I was absolutely bloody famished, so I decided to go down into Harlem to get some Chinese. It was hot now, so I dressed in shorts and a cotton T-shirt and desert boots. I still had the .38 and there were slugs out of it, probably in some crime lab right now being looked at by some bespectacled fuckwit. Somehow, I’d have to get rid of it. I wiped it and washed it and put it in a plastic bag. I got my backpack and put the gun inside with a book and a water bottle. I went downstairs. In the hall, steam was again escaping from the heating. I dodged the jets, put on my sunglasses and Yankees hat, and turned right towards Amsterdam.

There was a building Dumpster on the corner. The street was empty, so I took out the bag with the gun and threw it in. It was as dumb a place as any, but whoever found it around here would probably keep it.

I went by the projects, crossed 125th, buzzed the Chinky door, and Simon let me in.

I told him I’d waved to him last week but he hadn’t seen me. He apologized. The place was clean, and there was a new calendar with views of Hong Kong Harbour. Simon looked well. He stared at me from behind the bulletproof glass.

Wha happ your han? he asked.

I cut it, banged into something, hurts like a bastard, I said.

You gey stiches?

No, I didn’t. I bandaged it up myself.

Go to emergence room Sin Luke, no quessions. They do it, quick, no quessions.

I thought you had to fill in lots of forms and stuff.

Do, fill in fake name, Simon said, as if he knew all about it, but really, someone must have told him and he was just passing it on.

I’ll think about it, I said, knowing full well I would never be so stupid as to go to the emergency room with a heavy-caliber gunshot wound the same bloody day as a major shooting involving heavy-caliber weapons. Besides, it would be a cool scar.

When, much later, I had been betrayed twice, lamed, severely traumatized, and had a .22 slug in the gut, and I thought I was fucking dying, my scruples, however, somewhat lessened and I actually did take myself to trusty old Saint Luke, painter, Greek, bit of a fabulist, and, of course, doc.

But that was still to come, and for now I could afford bravado.

Fuck it, Simon. Useless quacks will take your bloody hand off by accident or something, I said.

Simon laughed, and I could sense his brain filing away the word
quack
for later use.

I ordered curried pork with fried rice and sat in the corner with the three tabloids I’d bought. I’d already read the
Times
, so these would do for lunch. I ate some pork and rice and drank some of my Coke. It was another hot one.

The air-con above the door was hardly making a difference.

Hey, Simon, you wouldn’t put the air up a wee notch, would ya? I asked, but he wasn’t coming out from behind that bulletproof glass if it was World Peace Day and it was the pope and the Dalai Lama asking him. He nodded and went back to watching a Bob Ross painting show on his black-and-white TV. Bob’s stoner voice relaxed me.

Before I could open the papers, the door opened and Freddie, our mailman, came in. I knew him quite well, because we’d talked about getting me into the postal service as a casual when I’d first arrived. Bureaucratically, it was impossible, but we’d talked and he’d helped get me a bar job. He was a huge black man in his forties, three hundred
pounds at least, stereotypically jolly, and seemingly happy with his lot. Even on a day like today when the heat must be murder for him.

Michael, he said, shaking my hand, I haven’t seen you around.

No, I’ve been working, Freddie.

Shit, man, where you working? At Carl’s?

No, Freddie. Don’t you pay any attention? I was only there for a week, just until they fixed me up, up in the Bronx.

Freddie grinned and ordered an egg fried rice and a sweet-and-sour chicken and spring rolls and sat down beside me. His mail cart was outside, and on 125th Street you’d think that someone would have wheeled it off, but no one did.

That was some funny shit, you working in Carl’s, you know, the only white dude in the whole joint. You musta taken some.

I did, I agreed, but I still go in there sometimes, Freddie, not regular, but I go.

Carl’s was a bar a few blocks east of here. I’d worked there while Scotchy checked me out and passed me up to Sunshine for final approval. It wasn’t called Carl’s anymore, and I didn’t go in there ever, but I wanted Freddie to think I was a cool customer.

Freddie, though, didn’t give a shit whether I was a cool customer or not. His grub was up. He ate his food with gusto and we chitchatted about this and that, mainly sports. We ate and talked, and Freddie finally had to leave. I was sorry to see him go. He was a good presence in people’s lives. A horrible, lazy mail carrier, but a good man and about the only black guy I knew in the city. He was a steady bloke and knew a bit, and I would have liked to get his perspective on one or two things, but daylight wasn’t the time and we were both sober and it was too soon after recent events to be levelheaded about them.

Listen, if I’m at Carl’s this Friday, will you be around? I asked him as he was going out.

No man. Apollo. Monday, Tuesday maybe, he said.

Really, Tuesday? I don’t want to go down there and stick out like a sore thumb and you not show up.

Michael, what’s on your mind? Women, huh? Freddie asked with a huge grin.

I nodded and said I’d see him, but of course by Tuesday I was in
fucking Mexico and not destined to be back in Harlem for quite some time.

I finished my food, which was so loaded with MSG I was starting to see visions.

I said a pleasant cheerio and went outside and fixed my shades and my hat. Freddie was chin-wagging with some Costa Rican guy, and he introduced us and then he disturbed the hell out of me by asking if I was still seeing that big-chested, redheaded girl, which could only be Bridget, and here I was thinking that I was Mr. Secret Agent Man with her, but if the goddamned postie knew then half the fucking city knew.

I told him no, I’d never been seeing her and that he was mistaken.

I went down to the 125th IRT stop. I thought about calling Mrs. Shovel (her name was Rebecca); she wanted me to call, she would be waiting. But no. In New York, at least, Bridget was my girl. She was mine. It was all her. Darkey would fuck up. He’d hit her or get drunk; she’d come to me, we’d fly away together, over the ocean. Safe. Aye, oh aye …

The train came, and I took it to the Bronx.

It troubled me that now I was mixed up in a killing. We were implicated in the death of Dermot and surely this would amount to something. Surely the cops would be on my trail, pounding doors, relentless. That’s how it was on TV. But, in fact, Dermot’s death barely even registered. It made no difference whatsoever. A drop in the bucket. No one stuffed him with straw, so it didn’t even make the evening news.

I was still concerned, though, for if you look at the newspapers of the early nineties, they’re absolutely full of stuff about organized crime in New York. There were over three hundred FBI agents working on breaking the Mob’s power in New York City, and to your average reader it seemed that every bloody cannoli shop was bugged or videotaped and every second dough tosser in your local pizzeria was a bloody federal agent. You saw rat after rat and trial upon trial on TV, U.S. Attorney and later Mayor Giuliani grinning in the Sunday papers
and boasting about how he was sticking it to the Families. It wasn’t him alone, by any means. I mean, there were the cops, the FBI, treasury men, state police, tax guys, even the fucking Royal Canadian Mounted Police. So you’d think with all this that it would be impossible around then to run an operation like Mr. Duffy’s or like Darkey’s, but it wasn’t.

It wasn’t at all.

For as exciting as the Mob story was in New York in the early nineties, the grander narrative wasn’t their decline, their collapse, their self-immolation. No, the big story was the drug-addled slaughter taking place nightly in Harlem and the South Bronx and Bed-Stuy. The big story was who was moving into the vacuum created by the decline and fall of the Mafia.

And the truth was that above 110th Street the rules were different. No one seemed to care about what happened up there; certainly, in all the time that I was in Harlem and Washington Heights, I never came across a single agent, a single narc, a single goon.

Not that it would have made much difference even if the Feds had ventured north of 110th, because Darkey was very smart. Very goddamned smart. Darkey concerned himself only with recent Irish immigrants, the poor wee illegal weans fleeing 30 percent unemployment and a civil war and of whom there were tens of thousands in Riverdale, Washington Heights, and the odd wee pocket in the Bronx. Those boys and girls weren’t going near the cops, never mind the United States government. It wasn’t Boston and it wasn’t San Francisco, but look at the INS figures for Irish immigrants to the United States in the late ’80s and multiply that by about a dozen and you’ll have some idea of the scale of what I’m talking about.

Of course, the Micks weren’t just going uptown. Woodside was a big draw in Queens, and there was Hell’s Kitchen and the Upper East Side around Second and Third. But that was someone else’s space. Not Darkey’s, but probably still under Mr. Duffy. The point of all this is, I suppose, that despite the FBI and despite Mayor Dinkins and despite the cops, Mr. Duffy and Darkey weren’t having any bother at all. I shouldn’t have worried about the peelers looking for me. Jesus, I was nothing. I was protected, and Darkey had them confused and bent. I was safe as houses. Sunshine would look out for us all, and our
Darkey was charmed and on to a sweet thing. He had no legal concerns; potential enemies were destroying themselves; the Micks kept coming. He had his girl, his crew, his skinny guardian angel, and but for that flabby and slightly pockmarked face of his you could say he was sitting pretty. So, as I sat there later that night in the public bar of the Four Provinces getting hot and drinking vile Harp Lager and feeling a wee bit sorry for myself and a wee bit anxious about the morning’s events, I had to admit to myself that I really shouldn’t be that concerned. We were fine. And I told myself that things were going to be ok and go on that way for the old foreseeable. Darkey was raking it in and it would trickle down to us and we’d get fatter and richer and maybe we’d retire in a year or two and get to a university or have a bar ourselves somewhere.

And sure enough, events might just have gone that way but for a process already in motion that three of our little crew knew about, but crucially not me and not Scotchy.

But again, that’s the future and this is now, and at the minute I was getting a bit eggy about the death of some wee shite called Dermot and getting all existential about organized crime and the racial nature of policing policy in NYC.

You look troubled, Andy said.

Do I?

Yes.

Oh.

What were you thinking about?

I was thinking that we’re bloody lucky we’re uptown, otherwise the peelers would be down our fucking necks.

Yeah.

You ever see that film
Across 110th Street?
I asked him.

No.

No, me neither, but I bet it makes some pretty good points about organized crime and the racial nature of policing policy in New York. Peels don’t care what goes on up here, fucking don’t care, I said.

Andy cocked his head.

What’s the matter with you today? he asked. Do you want to be fucking caught?

No.

Well, Jesus.

All right, forget it, excuse me for thinking, Andy. Big mistake around here. Forgot who I was talking to, I said.