Rage Is Back (9781101606179) (19 page)

I took a pull of coffee. “You don't seem like the blackmail type, Cloud.”

“I prefer the term ‘extortion.'” He picked up his coffee cake, crammed half into his mouth.

I figured I had a few seconds before he was able to speak again. “Listen, at the risk of . . . Just for the record . . .”

“Let me guess: you like the nigga.” Cake crumbs sprayed the table.

“Yeah, I do. He's a good boss.”

But he was more than that. What, exactly, was hard to put into words, not that I would've waxed poetic about the dude to Cloud and Karen anyway. T wasn't my friend. One time he'd let me take home a Chester Himes novel I'd started reading at his crib, but we'd never had a conversation about anything personal. He didn't trust me any more than he trusted anybody, which was to say not at all. And yet, we both knew that I saw something in him which would have been deadly if I'd been anybody else: the fact that his soul wasn't in the drug game. Not to the exclusion of all else, the way the unwritten charter stipulated it should be. He had other plans, ambitions you couldn't weigh on a triple-beam scale, and no degree of acumen or ruthlessness could balance that out. I had no clue what those plans were, had never given it much thought, but I could see it because I recognized it in myself. Anybody could see it in me, of course. But I was just a kid with a paper route. T was supposed to be running the show.

Karen leaned over the table and tapped the manuscript with her forefinger, very TV-cop-interrogating-prisoner. “How can you say that, after reading this?”

“I'm not saying I approve. Just, he's a likable guy. Especially compared to Lazarus. Or Jumpshot, who for the record was a total dipshit.”

“That makes it okay to frame him and get him killed?”

“Jesus, Karen. I never said it was okay. Slick, maybe. Elegant. But not okay. Okay?”

“One of Jumpshot's people came at Lazarus in the showers,” said Cloud. “A cousin or something.”

“And?”

“Jamaicans cut him up.”

“Cloud?”

“Youngblood.”

“Isn't T going to wonder how you know so much?”

“Nope. Gonna show his dumb ass a copy of this fine literary effort.”

“What if he only sent it to Karen's agency? He could track her down.”

“There is no her. I'm her.”

“Plus, Dondi, nobody gives Authors' Inc. an exclusive look. We're second-tier.” She laid her hand over mine. “I'm not worried.”

I looked from Karen to Cloud, then back to Karen. “In that case, I need you to do me a favor when this is finished. To even things out.”

Cloud brushed the crumbs off his fingers and shot me a look of disgust, or disbelief, or some kind of dis-. “We're already doing this the hard way, out of respect for your employment status.”

“What's the easy way?”

Cloud reached out and snatched the remaining coffee cake off my plate. Before he could bring it to his mouth, Karen slapped the slice out of his hand.

“You're not in jail, fool. Act civilized. There's plenty more.” She shook her head, and stood to cut him some.

Cloud fingered the corner of my manuscript. “The easy way is selling this information to Everton and walking away.”

Karen laid another wedge of cake on the table. “I told him that wasn't an option.”

“Thanks. But I still need you to do something.”

Cloud snorted, forked his slice in half. “I guess you couldn't have turned out any way
but
stubborn, with these two knuckleheads for parents.”

Karen made a show of ignoring him. “Something such as?”

“Get T a book deal. Shop his manuscript.”

“What?” In stereo.

“‘Crown Heist' is tight. If the rest are like this, he deserves to be published.”

“Shit,” Cloud said between bites, “if the rest are like this, I'm gonna be a millionaire.”

“You know representing clients isn't part of my job.”

“Neither's running a workshop for the lunatic fringe.”

She crossed her legs at me. Another gesture Karen had weaponized.

“It's the least you can do.”

“The least I can do is nothing.”

“Well, you're not doing nothing. You're extorting my boss, who's been nothing but fair to me.”

She hit me with one of her trademark venom-eyed stares, but I was ready: held it, neutralized it, watched it fade, then pounced.

“This is exactly the kind of perverse shit you live for, Karen. And you know I know it.”

She sighed, twiddled her spoon, tried to sound petulant.

“Just so you know, the market for debut story collections is fucking abysmal.”

9

ccording to the Ambassador—who, when he's out of glue, has been known to deliver impromptu lectures of considerable scholarship—the underground has not always inspired fear. In ancient times it was safer than topside: the site of mankind's early, womb-like dwellings and the haven to which death would return him. Mining was considered a dirty business when it started, a kind of rape; special rites of absolution were performed at the outset of any expedition. With the rise of science the metaphor changed, and the nurturing mother became a vast brain from whose recesses knowledge had to be extracted in the name of progress. That dovetailed nicely with the needs of industry, and soon the planet was being hollowed out and restocked with sewers and trains, water mains and electrical lines.

The modern city required a level of coordination between its visible and submerged halves that made the idea of people living underground plausible again. But who would populate it, now that the subterrain was so tainted by both the ascendant heaven-and-hell cosmology and the fact that it was full of things we didn't want to see? Laborers and slaves, naturally. And thus the underground came to symbolize the silent oppressed, always threatening to breach the bright surface. Your boy H. G. Wells imagined a future in which mine workers degenerated into a depraved new race; Chuck Dickens and Vic Hugo envisioned sewer-dwelling classes totally severed from the world above, their very existence un-guessed-at.

The mythic journey to the underworld is typically embarked upon alone, but there are exceptions. Like the drunken Athenian duo of Theseus and Pirithous, whose idiotic plan to kidnap Persephone ended in tears. Or my man Odysseus, who brought all his sailors on a roadtrip to the Kingdom of Hades that was more an excuse for Homer to relate the fates of the Greek heroes after Troy than a portrait of hell.

Or me, Billy and Dengue, whose Sunday morning began with a cab ride to the meatpacking district, and continued with a squeeze through a chain-link flap cut from a razor-wire-topped fence. From there, we clambered through a trash-strewn lot, into the alley alongside an abandoned brick building. A wooden door with a dangling padlock opened into a small room. A man slept loudly in one corner, atop a swirl of newspapers and clothes. In another was a jagged hole, chopped through the cement floor. The top rungs of a rusty ladder breached the opening.

We climbed down into a stagnant, pissy near-darkness, and started walking: along the ledge of one train tunnel, then through a service door and down a spiraling flight of metal stairs, into another. Then up to the catwalk.

Billy led the way and I led Dengue, who managed to keep up surprisingly well. What light there was fell in narrow beams, and seemed exhausted from the journey. I'd been forbidden to bring a flashlight. “Cops carry flashlights,” the Ambassador had said, and that was that.

Tunnel
is one of those concepts you think you understand, but don't—not until you walk through one. We're talking about a goddamn cylinder hollowed out of the rock and dirt that is our planet, and New York City sits atop hundreds of miles' worth, eighteen stories deep in some places and three or four in most. You know what an ant farm looks like? That's what all our apartment buildings and museums and shit are built on. Forgive me if this is all obvious to you, or if it sounds like stoner wisdom. If you've never been down there, you only think you know what I'm talking about. Whatever, forget it.

Another ladder, me spotting Dengue from below and imagining the Ambassador losing his footing, taking me down with him, the two of us shishkabobbed atop a railroad spike for all eternity. And then we were trudging through a deeper tunnel, tar black and echoing with the drip of water so that if you weren't too busy waving your hands in front of you and being terrified, you might imagine you were in a cave.

“Couldn't we have done this at a Starbucks?” I asked.

Billy was too far ahead to hear me, Dengue too focused on drawing breath to respond.

“Or at Fizz's crib. Fizz's office. A church. A synagogue. A mosque. Maybe not a mosque. Those probably
are
under surveillance.”

“Almost there,” my father called. I heard him take off running, then a grunt and a beat of silence and the slap of both his sneakers hitting the ground at once. “Wait till you see this,” he called, sounding like nothing so much as a kid showing off a new Christmas toy.

He was acting pretty goddamn close to normal, and it seemed clear to me that the idea of revenge was what had nudged him those final, crucial degrees. Which worried me, a lot: revenge was what had taken him away, and I knew it could snatch him up again. And not for nothing? The same obsessive streak or justice-lust or impulse for self-sabotage ran in my veins, too—had ruled my thoughts of Billy all those years he was gone, even if I hadn't recognized it as such until now.

“Keep going straight?” I called.

“Hold on, hold on.” A tinkling sound, like a wind chime, and then light flooded the tunnel. Billy stood above us, beneath an ornate, soot-covered chandelier.

“Voilà. The Parlor.”

Four feet up from the tracks, just like a regular subway station, was a huge, semicircular space—not technically a hall, but it felt like one. The ceiling was domed, the fixture suspended precisely in the middle. It was meant to hang much higher off the ground, but the electrical wiring had been yanked loose, presumably so that one might screw in a bulb, as Billy had.

Inlaid mirrors covered the walls, so sixty watts went a long way. There were benches on one side, rows of them lined up like church pews, angled inward so that anyone seated there would have a perfect view of the piano positioned opposite. It was a grand.

Billy's eyes sparkled as he watched me climb up and take in the space. At my expression, I suppose, or the memory of his own first visit. Or the fact that he was sharing this place—hell, sharing anything—with his son.

“Piano still here?” asked the Ambassador, scrabbling over the ledge and brushing himself off.

“Where would it go?” Billy took his arm, just above the elbow. “This way.”

“That's all right, I can get there.” Billy let go and Dengue beelined to it, pulled out the bench, sat down. He fished a tube of airplane glue out of his pocket, rubbed some on the collar of his T-shirt, and treated himself to a big exhilarating-sunrise-on-the-mountaintop breath. “Any requests?”

“Since when do you play the piano?” I asked.

“Shit, if a blind black man can't tinkle the ivories, who can?”

“It's tickle, not tinkle.”

“‘Straight, No Chaser,'” said Billy. He was seated on a bench, legs crossed at the ankles, smiling wide and calm like all was right with the world.

“Excellent choice.” Dengue made claws of his hands, cracking the upper joints of his fingers. “I only know one song,” he explained. “But I play the fuck out of it.”

The piano was so monstrously out of tune that evaluating the performance was impossible. I walked over and sat behind Billy.

“What is this place?”

He leaned back, spoke over his shoulder. “It was supposed to be the central station of a private train line they built in the thirties. Company went bankrupt. It was never even used.”

Dengue murdered Monk for a while, notes ricocheting off the tunnel walls. He'd located an octave in which the keys weren't even connected to their wires. Hitting them produced a thwack that the Ambassador seemed to believe he could employ as percussion.

Billy listened like he was sitting in Symphony Space. I wanted to ask him how he could be so comfortable in one tunnel, and so convinced that a nexus of evil energy dwelled in another. Weren't they all connected? Couldn't this demon move around?

Dengue built to a horrific crescendo, pounding the busted keyboard with iron hands, and then it was over. Billy clapped; I did the same.

I stopped. He stopped. The clapping didn't.

We stood up. Dengue too, so fast he knocked over the piano bench.

“Who's there?”

Into the light strolled a reedy black man, head-to-toed in camouflage like he'd just stepped off a troop transport from Tikrit, patchy beard and all. Only he was pushing fifty: a first-generation writer, a graffiti grandpa. The fact that he was rocking wraparound sunglasses in total blackness confirmed it. All those dudes were bonkers.

“Me.” His voice was hoarse, but strong.

“What up, Drum?” from Billy.

Dude swung himself up into the parlor like a gymnast mounting the parallel bars.

“Kill that, kill that. The handle's Supreme Chemistry now. I take that Drum shit as a diss, you know what I'm sayin'?” He gave Billy a pound. “Welcome home, kid. Dengue, what's good, my ninja?”

“Supreme Chem, how you livin'?”

“Yo, ninjas is on some bullshit, B, but what else is new? I been beefin' with this one sucker ninja all week on some message board stupidness. Ninja talkin' greazy 'bout how he invented bubble letters. I'm like, ‘Ninja, I been doin' this since '69, where you was at? How come I ain't see no trains with your name on 'em 'til spring '72? If you was at the Writers' Bench so much, why true school ninjas don't even recognize your face?' Not to mention, they ain't even bubble letters, the name is softies. Yo B, I had to break down how much of what the world been jockin' for like the last thirty bullets is just ninjas bitin' Supreme Chem's formulas, from softies to three-Ds to the way I dropped my R behind my D when ninjas was off eatin' Watermelon Now and Laters with Miss Lucy and shit. But let me stop running my mouth. Meanwhile, here come this other ninja, out the woodwork
behind
the woodwork, ain't been heard from in ten, twelve years and now he claimin' he kinged the BMTs in like '77–'78. Shit is crazy, B. Ninjas wanna act all wild west on the interwebs, like they can't get mashed in the face when they step out they little no-windows basement apartment. I call 'em lie-oneers, you know what I'm saying? Origihaters. But let me stop running my mouth. What's the science on this meeting, B? I hope y'all ain't bringin' no ninjas I got beef with.”

“That would be practically impossible,” said Dengue, giving Supreme Chemistry a pound.

Until the dude smiled, I wouldn't have thought it possible. “True, true. How they say, B? Heavy is the head that wears the crown.”

“So that's why I got a headache.” Cackles in the darkness, from a direction I hadn't even noticed, and then Nick Fizz and two other dudes emerged.

You know that thing I said earlier about pink-fur-Kangol gay Puerto Rican b-boy flair? I meant it as a figure of speech. But goddamn it if Nick Fizz wasn't rocking an actual pink fur Kangol. Funny thing is, it didn't even look that gay. He had one of those beards you've gotta touch up three times a week at la barberia, same as half of all Boriquan males between fifteen and fifty-five, and the hat was cocked at the classic diddy-bop degree. It matched one of his polo shirt's stripes, sat atop a pair of chunky old-school eyeglasses. By the time you got done looking at him, it seemed totally hetero-plausible.

Cloud and Dengue had squabbled about whether to invite him, Cloud arguing that Fizz had too much to lose to be trusted, and that his old crew, the one he'd have to reunite, was even more scattered than most. Dengue said Nick was solid as ever, and asked Cloud how the fuck he thought he knew anything about anybody after sixteen in the hoosegow, and in this way the matter was resolved.

I gave Fizz a hug and shook hands with the infamous Sambo CFC—who indeed had curly hair, though I'd imagine it had covered far more of his head when he took his nom de plume—and a guy who introduced himself as Stoon BMS, then stepped back a full pace as if expecting me to fall forward onto my face at the thrill of meeting him.

Every few minutes after that, a pair of writers or a trio would step into the light, until I felt like I was watching a kind of reverse play, me standing on stage and the various characters entering from the wings, the aisles. There were twelve people there, plus me, when Dengue sounded a chord on the piano and called the meeting to order. Everybody sprawled on the pews except Supreme Chemistry, who stood behind us like a sentry.

What happened next reminds me of the most boring scene in all of Homer. Just when the action's heating up, my man takes a ten-page time-out to run down every vessel that sailed to Troy, who its captain was, how many battalions of troops he brought, and for what heroic attributes and agricultural products motherfuckers from that particular region of Greece were known. A little later, he provides an equally stupefying catalog of armies on the Trojan side.

How long do you figure it should take a dozen guys who all know each other anyway to introduce themselves? Three minutes, maybe? I'm going to skip the play-by-play—don't say I never did anything for you—but this is how it manages to take fifteen:

“Whaddup, whaddup, good to be here, good to be here, Stoon BMS representing Castle Hill, na'mean, BMS president, na'mean, Bronx Most Shocking, Beat Mad Suckers, Best Motherfuckin' Style, Boogiedown Meets Shaolin, whatever whatever. Original members was myself, Dash 7, who was vice president, um, Ty-Ty 99, Javelin—R.I.P.—and Maser. Then, lemme see, Xerxes and Asap got down in '79, and then Blaze One, Mug, Swag 3, Phast, and Skizz. I also represent 12 Angry Monkeys, 12AM Crew, that's me, Lord Ock, Fed 125 . . .”