Flood (21 page)

33

MARGOT HAD NO sooner walked out the door than Max appeared—he waits as silently as he does everything else. I gave him four grand, holding out one for myself for the running expenses of this case, and told him to stash it for me someplace. Less four hundred for Max, this thing still had the chance to show a decent profit if it worked out.

I asked Max if he wanted something to eat, purposely avoiding the subject of horseracing, and I saw a tiny flicker pass across his face. So he thought I already knew the results and wasn’t admitting anything. Okay, just for that I’d torture him until he demanded to know the truth.

I didn’t have long to wait. As soon as we got to the restaurant Max made the sign of a galloping horse to ask me what happened last night. Instead of telling him I showed him that harness horses don’t gallop—that’s against the rules. In fact, they’re called
standardbreds
instead of
thoroughbreds
because they’re bred to a standard gait, either a trot or a pace. They evolved from working horses, not from rich men’s playthings like the useless nags who run in the Kentucky Derby. I showed him with my fingers how pacers move their outside legs together and then their inside legs together in rolling motion, while trotters put one front leg and the opposite rear leg forward at the same time. I showed him what it meant to break stride, or go off gait, and why pacers were generally faster and less likely to break than trotters.

Max sat through this entire explanation with the patience of a tree, figuring he would outwait me. But he finally cracked under the strain, just as I was explaining about new breeds now being developed in Scandinavia, how they aren’t as fast as American-style trotters but they have tremendous endurance. Jumping up, he stalked over to the cash register for the
News
and fired it over to me hard enough to break bones. Then he folded his arms across his chest and waited.

As I opened the paper I had a momentary flash of panic. What if the goddamned
Times
was wrong? But there it was in greasy black and white. We won. I showed Max the chart of the ninth race—Honor Bright had left cleanly, grabbed a quick tuck fourth at the quarter, moved outside with cover at the half, then fired with a big brush on the final paddock turn to blow past the leaders and win going away by almost two lengths. Max insisted I show him what the charted race would have actually looked like if we’d been there watching, so I got some paper and diagrammed the whole thing for him. Max really showed class. He never asked how much we had won—-the victory itself seemed enough. Of course, he could have already figured it out. But the real class showed when he agreed to pick the money up from Maurice and never said a word about making another bet. I’d proved something to him, and that was enough—he didn’t think he’d found the key to the vault.

I dropped Max at the warehouse where I used a pay phone to call Flood and tell her I wouldn’t be seeing her until very early the next morning. I told her I’d ring her from downstairs before I came up.

My face hurt a bit and I wanted to change the dressing—and I wanted to sleep. But when I got back to the office I had to explain the whole race again to Pansy and feed her too, so it was after four in the afternoon when I finally lay down.

34

THE TINY BATTERY-POWERED alarm woke me just past eight. When I picked up the desk phone to call Flood I heard some freak yell, “Hey, Moonchild, are you on the line?” and hung up quietly. I could have used another shave for cosmetic purposes but it wasn’t necessary for the role I had to play. I had to be a guy waiting around the night court for a friend or a relative. I didn’t want to look too much like a lawyer—I don’t work the Bronx courts (neither does Blumberg or any of my regulars—you have to be bilingual to do it), and I didn’t want people talking to me. I didn’t want to look too much like a felon either—some smartass rookie might decide to ask me if there were any warrants out against me. There weren’t but I had to time things right. I had to be in front of the court at eleven-thirty like I’d been told, so I had to get there earlier to make sure. But not too early—I didn’t want to be hanging around there either.

I got out a pair of dark chino pants, a dark-green turtleneck jersey, a pair of calf-high black boots, a fingertip leather jacket, and one of those Ivy League caps. I changed quickly, shoved a set of I.D. in my pocket, added three hundred bucks, and snapped a second set of I.D. papers into the jacket’s inner sleeve. No weapons—the court’s full of metal detectors and informants, and Pablito’s people might have even a worse attitude than the law. So no tape recorder either, not even a pencil.

Now for the bad part—riding the subway without nuclear weapons, or at least a flamethrower. But it was early enough and I walked until I came to the underground entrance. I played with the local trains for a while, backtracking and crisscrossing until I got to the Brooklyn Bridge station. I found a pay phone there and called Flood—she said she was doing okay and she’d stay there until I called her, sounding subdued but not depressed. It’s bad to be depressed at night—that kind of thing is easier to handle in the morning. That’s why when I’ve only got a couple of bucks in my pocket I get some action down on a horse or a number or something before I go to sleep—something to look forward to. And if it doesn’t come through for me, at least it’s another day where I beat the system—it’s daylight, I’m not looking out through prison bars, the suckers are getting ready to go to work, and there’s money for me to make. It works for me, but I don’t think Flood’s a gambler.

I grabbed the uptown express, rode it to Forty-second Street, and crossed the tracks like I was looking for the local. I took a look around. Lots of freaks working the second shift tonight—chain snatchers, child molesters, flashers and rubbers, the usual. No Cobra, though. Sometimes you get dumb-lucky, not this time. I waited for two more express trains to come on through and took the third one.

A guy in the seat across from me was wearing a tattered raincoat buttoned to the neck, denim washpants, new loafers with tassels, no socks. He had neatly trimmed hair and crazy eyes. Nice disguise, but he’d left the plastic hospital tag around his wrist when he’d gone over the wall. He had one hand in his pocket and his lips were moving. I got up quietly and moved to another car.

A kid about the size of a two-family house was standing in the middle of the next car, playing his giant portable stereo loud enough to crack concrete. Everybody was looking the other way. A citizen with a delicate beard and a belted trenchcoat was complaining to the girl next to him about noise pollution. The kid watched the whole conversation with reptile eyes. I moved on to the next car.

A young transit cop with the obligatory mustache walked through the train listening to his walkie-talkie and nodding to himself. I saw a skinny Spanish kid about fourteen years old practicing his three-card monte moves on a piece of cardboard. He had very smooth hands, but his rap was weak—I guess he was an apprentice. Two blacks in Arab robes with white knit caps on their heads moved through the cars, rattling metal cups, looking for donations with a story about a special school for kids in Brooklyn. Some people went in their pockets and put coins in the cups.

I moved through a couple of cars again. Sat down next to a blond kid wearing only a cut-off sweatshirt, no jacket. He looked peaceful. I checked his hands—one large blue letter tattooed on each knuckle. H A T E. The letters were set so they faced out. I moved on before the fellows collecting money asked this boy for a contribution.

The last car had nothing more troublesome than some kids staring out the front window like they were driving the train, and it lasted all the way to 161st Street.

The South Bronx—not a bad place if you had asbestos skin. A short walk to the Criminal Court Building, almost eleven now. The Bronx Criminal Court is a brand-new building—the juvenile court is in the same building, just with a different entrance. I guess the city figured there was no point making the delinquents walk a long distance before they reached their inevitable destination.

I found a quiet bench, opened my copy of the
News,
and kept an eye on my watch. Nobody approached. It was getting near the end of the arraignment shift and only a few losers were waiting around. I spotted one of the hustlers, a young Spanish guy with a lawyer’s suit. I’d heard about this one—he works Blumberg’s game, only in the Bronx. Next to him, Blumberg is Clarence Darrow.

I left the bench with five minutes to spare, climbed out of the basement to the first floor, and went out the 161st Street exit. I lit a cigarette and waited. At eleven-thirty a dark red gypsy cab with the legend
Paradiso Taxi
on the door and a foxtail on the antenna pulled up. I walked out of the shadows, smartly said, “Hey, my man,” and the driver looked me over. “Where to,
amigo?”

“Oh, someplace downtown, you know?”

“Like the Waldorf?”

“That’s it.” I climbed in the back without further negotiations. The cab shot straight up 161st like it was headed for the highway to go downtown and I leaned back and closed my eyes. Rules are rules. The local cops aren’t too bad, but some of the federal lunatics don’t believe the Constitution applies to banana republics like the South Bronx. If I ever got strapped into a polygraph, I wanted the needles to read
No Deception Indicated
when they asked me where Una Gente Libre had its headquarters.

35

EITHER THE DRIVER really worked a gypsy cab as a regular job or he was a hell of an actor. Even with my eyes closed I could feel the lurch of the miserably-maintained hunk of metal every time we floundered around a corner. Normal potholes put my head against the ceiling, and each genuine home-grown South Bronx edition almost knocked me unconscious. He had the radio tuned to some Spanish-language station at a volume that reminded me of the holding tank at Riker’s Island—and for an added touch of authenticity he screamed
“Maricon!”
and waved his fist out the open window at another driver who had the audacity to attempt to share the road with us.

We turned a sharp corner; the driver doused the radio. He switched to a smooth cruising mode and spoke distinctly without taking his eyes from the windshield. “At the next corner, I stop the cab. You get out. You walk in the same direction as I drive for half a block. You see a bunch of
lobos
in front of a burn-out. You walk right up to them and they let you through. You go into the burn-out and someone meet you there.”

I said nothing—he obviously wasn’t going to answer questions.
Lobo
may mean wolf in Spanish, but I understood he was describing a street gang that would be in front of an abandoned building.

The cab stopped at the corner and got moving again as I was swinging the rear door closed. I looked at the cab as it moved away—it sure looked like a gypsy cab, but someone must have stolen the rear license plate. I marched the half block until I spotted about a dozen kids—some sitting on the steps of the abandoned building, some standing. Only about half of them were looking in my direction.

The
lobos
came fully equipped—they all wore denim cut-offs with a winged and bloody-taloned bird of prey on the back—the birds had human skulls instead of heads. I spotted bicycle chains, car antennas, and baseball bats—one kid had a machete in a sheath. No firearms on display, but two of them were sitting next to a long flat cardboard box.

As I got closer I could see they weren’t kids at all—none of them looked under twenty years old. They wouldn’t fool a beat patrolman too easily either—no radios playing, no wisecracking among themselves, just quietly watching the street.

I glanced up and saw a gleam of metal at one of the windows—there wouldn’t be any winos sleeping in that building tonight. A car turned into the block from the other end and came toward me. The
lobos
moved off the steps and I stepped back in the shadows. The car was a year-old white Caddy—it never slowed down but I glimpsed three people in the front seat—two girls and a driver with a plantation hat. Some pimp was on his way to the Hunts Point Market, and suddenly I knew just about where I was in the South Bronx.

When I got within fifty feet of the building I saw hands go into pockets but I kept on coming. It wasn’t bravery—there was no place else to go. When the hands came out of the pockets with mirror-lensed sunglasses I figured I was going to be all right. Nobody needs a disguise to take your life.

I approached the gang. They looked briefly at me then past me to see if I had come alone. I kept walking up the broken steps, heard movements behind me, didn’t turn around. I went through the door into a black pit—and stopped. A voice said: “Burke. Don’t move, okay? Just stay where you are.”

I didn’t. I felt a hand on my arm. I didn’t jump—it was expected. The hand groped, found mine, and a heavily knotted rope was pushed into my palm. I grabbed one of the knots and felt a gentle tug. I got the message and followed along in the direction I was pulled. I couldn’t see a damned thing—the guy leading me must have been using sonar or something.

The same voice finally said, “In here,” and I stepped through a door covered with dark blankets. Now I could see a dim light ahead and I followed the back of the man leading me down a long flight of stairs until we came to another blanket-covered door at the bottom. My guide felt his way through the blankets until he found a bare spot, knocked three times, waited patiently, heard two raps from the other side, rapped once in response, waited, rapped one more time. He gently pushed against my chest to indicate that we should stand back, and then from the other side of the wall bolts sliding, metal scraping, something heavy being moved. I wanted a cigarette but I didn’t want to move my hands. After a couple of minutes the door slid open and a large man parted the blankets and stepped out. I couldn’t see him too well but there was enough light to catch the highlights bouncing off the Uzi submachine gun he held in one hand. He stood there covering us both for what seemed like a long minute, saying nothing.

Then I felt a breeze on the back of my neck and heard Pablo’s voice behind me saying, “This way, Burke,” and I turned and entered the door behind me, my back now to the man with the Uzi. By the time anyone broke down the blanketed door and confronted the guard, the people in the room I was stepping into would have been long gone.

The big room was as anonymous as a cell block—a round table in the center, several couches and old stuffed chairs scattered around, concrete floor, plasterboard walls. A light fixture dangled from someplace in the blacked-out ceiling, hanging so low it was almost touching the table—no windows that I could see. There was a large TV set in one corner on a metal stand with a videotape deck hooked up below it. The rest of the room was in shadow. The chairs and the couches were occupied but I couldn’t see anything except shapes.

I didn’t need anyone to tell me where I was to sit. As I approached the table I noticed a large ashtray on top and a green plastic garbage bag sitting underneath. When we all left this room, it would be as if nobody had ever been there. Fine with me.

I sat down. Pablo sat directly opposite me. He gave me the two-handed handshake he always uses. He made no motion that I could see, but the shadows moved closer as he spoke, especially those behind me. “I’m going to say some things in Spanish to my people now. After I finish I’ll talk with you in English, okay?”

“Good.”

Pablo launched into rapid-fire Spanish, only some of which I understood. I caught
“amigo mio,”
not
“amigo de nostros.”
He was saying this man is a friend of
mine,
not a friend of
ours.
He would be vouching for my character, not my politics. Most of the rest got past me but I caught
compadre
more than once and couldn’t tell if he was referring to me or someone else in the room. When he’d finished he looked around. Someone asked a soft-voiced question—Pablo appeared to be giving the matter some thought, then said “No!” in a flat voice. No more questions. Pablo turned to face me, and the shadows moved even closer.

“I told them it would not be necessary to search you, that you were not of the
federales.
I told them you were not with the police, and that you would be here for your own reasons. I told them that you have helped me in the past and that you would help me again in the future. And I told them that we would help you if it did not conflict with our purpose. Okay?”

“Sure. Okay to smoke?”

Pablo nodded and I slowly, carefully took out the cigarettes, left the pack on the table, reached for the wooden matches, and lit up. I heard one of the watchers in the shadows mutter something and I reached out for the cigarette pack, tore it open and laid out the smokes one by one. I tore the wrapping paper into small bits and put the whole mess into the garbage bag. I heard
“Bueno”
from one of them, a short laugh from another. Pablo took it up. “My friend, you said that it was necessary for us to meet. So?”

I picked my words and the pace of my speech carefully, trying for a show of dignity they would respect and that would show my respect for them. You have to talk a lot of different ways in my business. You don’t throw in a lot of references to Allah when you’re talking to a Black Muslim, but you don’t offer him a ham sandwich either.

“There is a man named Goldor”—the room went dead quiet so suddenly that my voice sounded like it was echoing—“that I need to speak with. He knows something I need to know. I understand that he is a person with whom you have a dispute. He is not the target of my inquiries, but he is
not
my friend and I would not protect him. I come here for two reasons. First, I must talk to him and I do not want you to believe that this talk means we are doing business—I would not do business with someone you dislike. Second, if you dislike him you must have good reason. If you have good reason, you have good information—and if you have good information, you can perhaps assist me in getting an audience with him. That’s all.”

No one spoke, but the tension level had tripled since I said Goldor’s name. It stayed quiet until Pablo spoke again. “How do you know we dislike Goldor?”

“This is something I heard from a good source.”

“A source you trust?”

“As to reliability of information, yes. That is all.”

“So your source is in law enforcement?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been told if Goldor has any protection?”

“I have been told that he does not take street rumors seriously, and that he does not believe himself to be in any danger.”

Pablo smiled. “Good. Do your inquiries about Goldor involve a woman?” Nothing showed in my face, but it felt like a punch to the heart—did that goddamned Flood ever stop making trouble? “In some ways, yes,” I told him, “but I am not looking for a woman. I am looking for a man, and Goldor may know where he is.”

“This man is a friend of Goldor?”

“Possibly. It is also possible that he may be an enemy.”

“An informant, then?”

“He may be.”

“If you find this man, will it help Goldor?”

“No.”

“Will it hurt him?”

“Most likely not.”

Pablo paused for a moment, looking at me. Then he got up from the table, disappeared back into the shadows—they blended around him until I was alone in a pool of light. I couldn’t make out a single word of what they said this time, but it didn’t sound like an argument. After few minutes Pablo came back to the table and the shadows followed him again. “For me to tell you what we know about Goldor it is necessary to tell you some other things, some things that otherwise you would not know. But first I tell you this, and I tell you out of friendship only. Goldor is dead. His body is still moving above the ground but his death is certain. If you go and speak with him it may be that later
el porko
will want to speak with you, understand? You must be able to say
another
reason to have spoken with him. Agreed?”

“Yes.”

Pablo took another deep breath, reached over and took the cigarette from my hand, put it to his lips, took a deep drag. “Goldor is not a human being. You have no word for him in English, nor do we in Spanish. The closest we could come is
gusaniento,
you comprende?”

“Like rotten—full of maggots?”

“Something like that, yes. He is the head of an industry which sells the bodies of human beings for the pleasure of others. But not like a whoremaster or a common pimp. No, Goldor is special—he sells children in bondage. If you buy a boy or a girl from Goldor’s people, that child is yours to keep—to torture, to kill, whatever you want. Goldor is above the street. He is like a broker of degeneracy—you tell him what you want and he finds it and delivers it to you. Goldor is not human, as I told you. He is a demon, a thing who worships
el dolor,
the pain of others. He
believes
in pain, my friend. Where he finds women who share his beliefs we do not know, but we do know that many of his victims are volunteers. The police know of him but he cannot be touched. To the authorities, his hands are not dirty.”

“He’s not alone in this.”

“Compadre,
you come right to the point. Why would we want to deal with such a man when there are so many others like him? I will tell you. On the Lower East Side you know we have a community. It is a bad place to live but survival is possible—you know about survival. We have many operations down there, as we do in the Bronx. We hear many stories about young Puerto Rican boys who just disappear, but with no complaints to the police. So we look for ourselves. We see that some of those boys are in foster care—but not foster care like with the city. Some kind of informal arrangement, we are told. Some of the mothers believe that their children will have a better way of life, more opportunities—at least they say so to us. But some—and we know this for certain—they have just sold their children. We look, we ask questions, we spend some money until we are sure. It is Goldor doing this. Not personally, but it is him.

“We have a meeting about what is to be done—by then we know much about this Goldor. One of our people, a brave
jibaro
not too long in this country, she volunteers to get with Goldor to learn the whereabouts of the children he has taken. Her name was Luz; we all called her Lucecita, which means Little Light. Lucecita was not a child, Burke. She knew that she would have to have sex with the demon, but it was a price she was willing to pay. We are a disciplined people, not like the newspapers think. Her man is sitting right in this room. He fought with her in front of all of us. He wanted to kill Goldor, not to send Luz to him. But we as a group decided that killing him would not find the children—it would not kill the thing he does. Lucecita got a job in a restaurant where Goldor eats, and it was arranged that they would meet. She was invited to his home, and she went. We never heard from her again.”

“Did you—?”

“Wait, Burke. Please. The next day Goldor left on a plane for California. We have people there, he was followed. Some of us went to his house in Westchester but we found no sign of Luz. We thought she perhaps had been taken for sale too, but we knew he only sold children—so we assumed she was dead. Then our people in California told us that some of Goldor’s people were dealing in films—videotapes. Sex films, torture films. We arranged to buy all of the films, one of each, and they were sent here. When we viewed the films we were looking for clues to where they might have been made, thinking we might find a way to locate Lucecita. We found the answers and we swore by our blood that Goldor would die. There are some things one cannot say in any language. Some things you must see yourself.”