“Is that true, Syl?”
“Sure. One night at the Latin Club, after he took over for Johnny. My feet were aching for days after, the way he stepped all over them. I was his first girlfriend in New York, did you know that?”
“That I knew. Don’t you remember? I was the one what paid.”
“Don’t be a silly goose, Mite. I did it for free. It wasn’t ever
business with him. Oh Jerry, Jerry and me, we had something, don’t you remember? We had something real, at least before I got sick. That’s the problem, that’s why he put me on the piers. But I can’t get better out here, it just makes me sicker, the fog, the type of clientele. You don’t get the sweet married men from Chicago down here. I told him, let me go back to Pittsburgh and get healthy. I got a sister there, a married sister. I told him, let me go back and I’ll return, better than ever.”
I reached into my pocket, pulled out my roll, peeled off more than enough. “Here.”
“What’s this?”
“It’s your ticket to Pittsburgh. The Boss, he wants you to go, to get well. But you gots to go now, tonight, run up to the terminal and leave right away while still you can and not say nothing to no one.”
“Is that what Jerry wants? He wants me to get well?”
“Sure he does. You always been his favorite, Syl.”
“Still?”
“Sure. Go to your sister, she’ll take care of you.”
She looked at the money for a moment afore grabbing at it and stuffing it under her dress, into the top of her stocking.
“It will be grand back in Pittsburgh,” she said. “I was a queen there. You know, my sister, she was always jealous of me. I was the one that had the way with the boys. She didn’t invite me to her wedding, afraid I’d steal the groom. Won’t it be something when I go back, won’t it be a stir. She better hold tight to her man, my sister, that jealous witch, yes she better.”
“So tell me something, Sylvie. After what Blatta he done to that Turkish bastard what was supplying Christine, remember her, after that everyone knowed not to supply any flea powder to our girls.”
“Course they knew. No one crosses Jerry.”
“Not thems that’s smart, anyway. So, Sylvie, the question I gots, the question what’s suddenly been racking my noggin, is this: Who is it who’s been selling to you?”
“What are you talking about? I don’t have the least idea what you are talking about.”
“Come down off it, Syl. The world can tell you’re smacked back just by looking at you.”
“Did Jerry say something? Jerry told you, didn’t he? And you acting like you don’t know, like you don’t know when you know everything about everything. What are you playing at, Mite? What’s the game?”
I stared at her for a moment, at her reddened nose, her twitching mouth, her eyes narrowing suspiciously at me, and then I knowed, and then I knowed, just like I knowed that she was never going back to Pennsylvania.
“Let me see what the Boss gave you,” I said, and she did.
I found him at the Paddock, hard by the Winter Garden, sitting in a back booth in the back room, his hat on and his jaw hanging, a cigar in one hand, a gin in the other, a near-naked broad shimmying in his lap. Lieutenant Nick Fallon, Vice.
“Got a minute, Lieutenant?”
“What does it look like, dick-for-brains?”
“It looks like your head’s about to explode.”
His smile was wide and scary, near insane, his face was enveloped by smoke, and just then indeed it looked as if he would burst in flames like an earthbound Hindenburg. Fallon was so open in his vices, so damn joyful, that I suppose for him they wasn’t vices at all. He didn’t feel embarrassed or degraded by them, they was simply worldly pleasures what made life something other than a wait for death. But there was one thing, one need that did embarrass him with its dark power, one secret desire which just then, clever little me, I was beginning to suspect.
Fallon slapped the bare thigh of the girl what was kneeling astride him and she squealed and pinched his cheek and hiked a leg over his lap so as to slide off the seat and leave us alone in the booth. He watched her go with a sweet regret on his ugly mug and then turned that mug on me.
“What’s the agenda, Brenda?”
“I’ve been asking around. I ain’t got nothing firm yet.”
“And I haven’t cracked a little pissant’s head yet. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Not yet.”
He leaned over and rapped his knuckle into my noggin, loosing a sharp spot of pain. “You are a cute one. You could make some real scratch cruising the Square in a pair a tight jeans and a T-shirt, playing at being a juvenile.”
“That ain’t my game.”
“Mite, you don’t know your game.”
“I got a question for you, Lieutenant.”
“I don’t need questions, I got questions up and down my dick. What I need is answers.”
Without responding, I reached into my jacket and pulled out the little wax-paper bundle with red thread I got from Sylvie and tossed it onto the middle of the table. It sat there, small and delicate, like a little ornament designed to hang from a Christmas tree.
“I could run you for possession right now,” he said slowly.
“I found this on one of our girls. I needs to know who it came from.”
“One of your girls? Which one?”
“That don’t matter.”
“The one you been with at ‘21,’ the one with the bum leg?”
“Shut up, she ain’t nothing to do with this, nothing to do with nothing. Leave her out of it.”
“She isn’t one of your girls?”
“That’s what I said. She’s pure civilian.”
“Not so pure as you might think.”
“Don’t even start, you scum bastard.”
He grabbed my tie, pulled it toward him until I was out of my seat, bent over the table, my face inches from the smoldering tip of his cigar.
“It’s Lieutenant Scum Bastard to you, Mite. Don’t be forgetting your place.”
He let go. I slid back across the table and pooled down to the seat as if my backbone had just been neatly extracted with a filet knife.
“I’ll take this,” he said, swiping the ornament from the
center of the table, dropping it into his jacket pocket. “This is the part of my job that gives the most satisfaction, taking poison like this off the street.”
“I’m sure you’ll find a nice home for it.”
“Johnny Broderick, that cop I told you about, he was once looking to nab a pimp like you. He got word the sucker was eating dinner in the Automat. Broderick strolled in, took a sugar bowl, whacked the pimp in the head, and then, over his collapsed carcass, he said, ‘Case closed.’ Johnny Broderick. In his off hours he was Dempsey’s bodyguard. They made a movie about him. Edward G. Robinson. Johnny Broderick.”
It happened right on cue, Fallon started talking about Johnny Broderick and suddenly the curtain it dropped and everything went nameless and strange on me again. What was this thing sitting across from me? Best I could tell it seemed to be made of cement, with granite lips and asphalt eyes, some great yet jolly creature built with the bones of the earth. And it was talking to me, this thing what had no name and no meaning, talking to me in a voice as deep as the Grand Canyon.
“You keep playing your game, holding out,” came the canyon voice out of them gray stone lips, “and I’m going to close the case on you. Time to come clean.”
I sat there, trying to blink it away like I done before, but it wouldn’t disappear, this thing in front of me. I closed my eyes for a longer time and opened them again, but it was still there, the cement creature with the granite lips and Hubert’s voice.
“Suddenly you don’t look so good, Mite. You look like you’re about to lay a puddle right here on the table. Just keep it the hell away from my suit, it’s not even shiny yet.”
The cement creature leaned forward, waved a burning tree trunk in the air.
“Go outside and what do you see?” it said. “Sucker bait over every last surface. Signs selling liquor, magazines, movies and televisions, selling sex even, if you can read between the neon. God bless Artcraft. It’s the new age, Mite, everything is marketing now. Pretty soon we’ll be billboards ourselves, with signs on our hats and shoes.”
I closed my eyes to the cement man, just listened to his words, and slowly, gradually, like a lifting fog, the voice lightened and the meanings came clear.
“They call it Waxy Red on the street, or Wacky Red, depending. The thread is the key, the thread is the sign they ask for. Prime quality, expensive as far as horse goes. For junkies who know enough to demand the very best. You can always count on J. Jackie Moonstone to have the fiercest stuff in the city and to know the power of a label.”
I opened them suddenly, my eyes, and he was back, Lieutenant Nick Fallon, Vice, no longer cement and stone and asphalt, but a man, a cop with a name and a purpose in life which unbeknownst to him was about to reach a glorious fulfillment.
“Now agitate the gravel,” he said, “and don’t come back till you have something to tell me about what’s going on.”
I did as he said, I hustled out of there fast as I could hustle. Time, it was running out on me, it was running out, it was almost gone, and I was almost lost. But I had my answer now. Wasn’t I the little detective? I had my answer and I knew
where it would lead. Betrayal first, sure. But then west, the golden West.
And in my pocket, to keep up my courage, I had that lemon too, the very symbol of my future, though by now it was bruised, soft and spongy, by now its scent was no longer so sweet but had taken on the bitter aroma of decay.
Within the hard brown
exterior of the Lincoln, wedged in a corner of the backseat, Kockroach feels safer than anywhere else in his new world. As the Lincoln cruises the streets of the city, dodging lane to lane, moving shoulder to shoulder with other cars and trucks, twisting down side streets, turning, stopping, starting, stopping again, as the car transports him through the city in a familiar rhythm, he comes closest to recovering the old sensations: comfort in his skin, purpose, community, the great fear of something coming from above to squash him flat. That is why he sits always in the rear seat’s corner, jammed as tight against the door as he can manage, one eye looking out, one eye looking up.
The Lincoln now is double-parked across Broadway from a small, narrow bar called the Paddock. Cars are honking angrily as they stream past but Istvan, in the front seat, doesn’t so much as twitch at the hostile sounds. The Paddock is one of Fallon’s places, Fallon, whom Kockroach knows to be an enemy.
Kockroach does not have a subtle system of classification. He wants, he fears, those are his twin guiding lights, and when he applies that simple matrix to the humans who sur
round him, he places them into one of two distinct categories, friend and enemy. A friend is someone who feeds his greed without feeding his fear: Istvan, his prostitutes, Mite—at least Mite before all the questions. An enemy is someone who feeds his fear without feeding his greed: Rocco Stanzi.
Then there are those who feed both his fear and his greed, who supply him with the material things he craves but also nurture the dread that gnaws at his liver with the constant hunger of an arthropod. These others, these in the middle, might give a human some pause, but not Kockroach. They too are enemies, fear is that strongly embedded in the cockroach emotional DNA, enemies to be used as long as possible and then destroyed. Abagados is such an enemy, as is J. Jackie Moonstone, as is Fallon.
Yes, Fallon keeps the Square calm and for a small price allows Kockroach’s collections to go unimpeded, but there is something in Fallon that Kockroach doesn’t trust, some streak of angry honor that Kockroach believes Fallon will one day turn against him, and so Fallon feeds the fear. And now, from a bartender at the Paddock who is paid to keep tabs on the scum with whom Fallon meets each night, Kockroach has learned that the scum with whom Fallon is meeting this night is Mite.
Mite steps out of the Paddock, hikes up his pants, tilts down his fedora to cover his eyes, looks left and right, slips into the pharmacy next door.
“Pick him up,” says Kockroach.
Istvan pulls the Lincoln in front of a green Oldsmobile,
speeds across two lanes, cutting off a Checker cab, makes a fast U-turn, and stops with a squeal and a jerk in front of the drugstore. When Mite exits with a pack of chewing gum, Istvan is outside, holding open the car door. Mite is unwrapping the foil on one of the sticks when he looks up and sees Istvan, the car, the open door. His jaw drops.
Mite takes a hesitant step forward, peers into the car. “What’s the word, Boss?”
“The word,” says Kockroach from inside, “is Fallon.”
“I had a question for Fallon, is all,” says Mite, sitting now in the backseat as the brown car cruises north, headed out of the city. “Where are we going?”
Kockroach doesn’t answer.
“It was something what was happening with Sylvie. After what you done to the Turk what was doping up Christine, I didn’t expect no one would be such a stupid tit-face as to be selling to our girls. But someone was, see, it was obvious with her. So I figured it was good business to find out who. Whoever it was we needed to do something about it, don’t you think?”
Kockroach doesn’t answer. He is jammed into the corner of the car, staring. He smells something coming from Mite, it smells like cat urine, like the breath of a mouse, it smells like fear. Kockroach lets the silence between them grow until Mite can’t help himself from filling it.
“So I went and talked to Sylvie and then to Fallon and this is what I found out. The stuff she’s getting, it’s coming from up north, from Harlem, from Moonstone. How about them
kosher dills? There’s no doubtsky aboutsky, Moonstone’s the one what’s ruined a prime piece of real estate like Sylvie.” Mite’s head swivels to look outside the car, at the bleak black landscape on either side of the highway. “Where are we going, Jerry?”
Kockroach doesn’t answer.
“So you gots to tell me what to do about it. Somehow, Moonstone’s slipping it through some tit-face into our territory and taking money out of our pockets. You want I tell what’s happening to the
Nonos
?”
Kockroach doesn’t answer.
“Where we going, Jerry? I got someplace in the city I got to be. Where you taking me?”
“Did you find out who the tit-face is?” says Kockroach.
“Sure I did,” says Mite. “The tit-face is you.”
Kockroach doesn’t react with surprise, his smile stays broad, his head still, his hands calmly one in the other on his lap.
“Did you tell Fallon?” says Kockroach.
“Nah.”
“Did you tell Abagados?”
“Don’t needs to, he knows already you’re in league with Moonstone without me saying a word. He wants me to prove it is all.”
“Can you?”
“Sures I can.”
“Will you?”
Mite looks again outside the window, at the unfamiliar landscape passing by. “I suppose you’re going to knish me like you done Stanzi.”
“That reminds me,” says Kockroach. “On the way back, Istvan, we need to stop at Kirschner’s.”
“Why wasn’t it enough what we had?” says Mite. “That’s what I don’t understand about you getting messed up with Moonstone. We started with nothing, we ended up as kings. Take your cuts, protect your territory, work with Nemo and the
Nonos,
roll in the clover. Why wasn’t it enough?”
Kockroach considers Mite’s question. One thing Kockroach has learned in his time among the humans is that all humans lie. They lie to get what they want, they lie because they are afraid, they lie to express the very essence of their humanity. Cats prowl, mice devour, cockroaches scurry, humans lie. Kockroach, therefore, had fully expected Mite to lie, he had planned for it, seen the ribbons of possibility float into the future with each expected falsehood. But Mite has turned the tables by telling him the truth. It is why Mite still beats him at the ritual of chess, his maneuvers are always full of surprises. Kockroach considers how to respond, and decides to battle claw with claw. For the first time since the change he will tell Mite the absolute truth about himself and his plans, and he begins with the biggest truth of all.
“I’m hungry,” says Kockroach.
“Well, there’s the problem right there. You know what you need? You need let me take you out to dinner at Mama Leone’s. Seven courses that will split your belly. If the mama don’t kill your hunger, nothing will.”
“Nothing can. I’m hungry all the time.”
“That’s sad, really. That’s like the saddest thing I ever heard. Don’t you want to be happy?”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what we all want. The right to happiness, it’s in the Constitution or something. Everyone wants to be happy.”
“That’s not what I want.”
“Then what is it you want, big fellow? Tell me. What?”
“Everything.”
“Well, that ain’t happening. Sometimes you just gots to accept the way things are. I’m small, I’m never going to be big, I accept it. I’m never going to be a swell, I accept it. I’m never going to write one of them thick books, fine. I’m always going to have a boss, I accept it, so it don’t matter who it is so long as I get my cuts. You gots to learn to accept things.”
“I accept my hunger.”
“You should show a little more gratitude to the
Nonos
. He took us in when we had nothing, gave us responsibility, allowed us to rise. He was the one what okayed the move on Big Johnny. He don’t deserve what you’re doing to him.”
“Why should he be the
Nonos
?”
“Because that’s the way it is, that’s what he is. He’s the
Nonos
. Who else but him?”
“Me.”
“You? You’re not even remotely Greek. That Jerzy thing I made up on the spot. You don’t even know what it means to be the
Nonos
.”
“Everyone feeds him. I want to be fed.”
“Don’t we all. But why you? Why not Nemo, what’s been around longer than both of us, or Stavros, or even me. Everyone’s got to wait their turn to move up. Why the hell do you think you got the right to take over out of turn?”
“The player that knocks over the boss piece wins the ritual.”
“And that’s going to be you?”
“Sweet pea.”
“But we have it cushy as it is. Why you want to risk it all to be top dog?”
“Because I can.”
“I suppose that’s why you’re going to kill me too, because you can. How are you going to do it? You going to crush my throat like you done Stanzi? Or are you going to let Istvan lead me out to one of these deserted woods and put a bullet in my brain. Oh, no answer to that? Well look, I got one request, all right? Two maybe. Two. Don’t let it hurt, please. Just don’t let it hurt. That’s the one I just thought of, but the other, the more important, do me a favor and take care of Celia for me, will you? Will you, Jerry?”
“Sure I will.”
“Thanks. You’re a pal.”
“Palsy.”
“Yeah, you son of a bitch.”
“Don’t you ever think about what the other guy’s feeling, Jerry? Don’t you ever wonder, when you got the moke’s
throat in your grip, what’s going through his brain and then feel it as if it’s going through your own?”
Kockroach pauses a moment. The question puzzles him. Of course he considers the matrix of greed and fear that controls his opponents’ actions so that he can plan and plot and gain an advantage. But Mite is asking something different. He tries to remember the most recent moments when he triggered the greatest amount of fear in the humans, Sylvie at the piers, Cooney in his house, Stanzi in the grip of death. In those triumphant moments, did he feel anything that they were feeling, even the least intimation of their emotions?
“No,” he says finally.
“Then you’re lucky. I does. I can’t help it. I looks into their eyes and I feels what they feel.”
“I don’t understand,” says Kockroach.
“Well, yeah, maybe neither does I. This frigging world don’t make no sense.”
“But it does. Perfectly.”
“Go to hell.”
“You see what you want and you take it. Others try to take it for themselves. Whoever is stronger wins. What does not make sense?”
“It ain’t that easy.”
“Sure it is, Mite. It is only you that makes it hard. The world is all beeswax, everything.”
“There’s more to life than business, Boss.”
“Only that something above is ready to squash you flat if you step into the light.”
“That’s the only part I believe, you ask me. But when you’re
going after them the way you do, Jesus, I can’t help but suffer for them. And when there’s the screaming, forget about it. It turns out I don’t got the stomach for it. Who would have guessed? It’s ’cause I been there, I guess, on the wrong side of the big boy’s fist. And when finally I’m on the right side, it’s still there, them feelings.”
Kockroach wonders if that is a great weakness or a great strength. It could stay an opponent’s hand at the crucial moment, but it might also be why Mite still beats him at chess.
“I couldn’t take it no more,” says Mite. “I had to get out. Them feelings was why I done what I done, if you gotta know. It was never nothing personal. I just saw a way.”
“The lemon,” says Kockroach.
“Son of a bitch, what don’t you know? Where are we going? I got a right to know. Where?”
“Someplace special for you.”
“You don’t got to be so damn cheery about it. So what do you feel, Jerry? When you got some moke up against the wall and you’re there twisting his arm behind his back and he’s screaming and the arm is snapping, what do you feel then? What?”
“Hunger.”
“Christ, you got it bad, don’t you? You got a tapeworm the size of a snake inside your gut. I almost feel sorry for you, you starving son of a bitch. Why don’t you just frigging eat me instead of killing me.”
“I want to eat the entire city. I want to devour the world.”
“You know what, Jerry, all this time I never realized how crazy you are.”
“You want to know a secret, Mite? I’m not human.”
“Tell me about it.”
Istvan slows the car to a stop. “We’re here, Mr. Blatta,” he says.
Mite’s head swivels quickly to look outside. “What is it? Where are we?”
“Get out, Mite,” says Kockroach.
“Sure, Jerry. Sure. But can you do me a favor and not let Istvan do it to me? It ought to come from you. Can you do that for me, that little thing?”
“Istvan, stay in the car.”
“Sure, Boss.”
“Thanks, Jerry, really. You know, when it comes it ought to have the personal touch, don’t you think. Most of my life it’s been cold, noways reason my death it should be the same.”
“Get out, Mite.”
Mite nods, opens his car door, steps out. Kockroach steps out the other side. Mite is crouched, as if readying himself to be leaped upon, but when his gaze spins crazily around and he sees where he is he stands straight. They are on a street, a suburban street with thick trees hanging over the curbs and houses on either side. There are lights, streetlights, security lights, cars parked in driveways.
“This ain’t no deserted field.”
“No,” says Kockroach.
“I thought you was sending me straight to hell. Where are we?”
“Yonkers.”
“Same difference, then. What are we doing here?”
“Look over there,” says Kockroach, pointing. Mite’s head twists as he follows the direction until his gaze alights on a large white house on the crest of a hill. A light on the post announces the address and a shallow white picket fence surrounds the front of the property.
“This Cooney’s place?”