Durrutti nudged Maimonides. Fleeta's arrival was serendipitous. “Psst. Guess who's here?”
“Who?”
“Fleeta Bolton.”
Maimonides's response time was on delay. Whenever Durrutti said something to him, he heard it five seconds later, as if his friend's voice went through a reverb chamber to get to him. He replied, “Oh, yeah? I look forward to this. Fleeta brings out the best in me. We make beautiful music together. We're a symphony. World class.”
Fleeta did a reconnaissance on the coffee shop, drawing less-than-approving glances from the Salvadorenos. Black men with known criminal records were frowned upon. He turned his head carefully and scanned the room. Sighting the two Jews, he let out a triumphant hurrah and shouted, “Durrutti! Just the motherfucker I wanted to see!”
The ardor in Fleeta's voice made Durrutti suspicious. Enthusiastic people were trouble. The black man wended a path toward him with a hard smile enameled on his mouth and calculated vitriol in his eyes. These things meant Fleeta was on a business call and Durrutti prepared himself for difficulty. His nerves went into overdrive, ready for additional turmoil.
Fleeta found a chair, dragged it over to the table and dropped himself into the seat. His platinum dental work glittered as he smiled sideways at Durrutti. “Yeah, man, I'm glad I found you. I've been meaning to talk to you. Lots has been happening since I last seen you. What've you been up to?”
Durrutti slouched in his chair and took Fleeta in with an expressionless bug-eyed stare, betraying nothing. Fleeta wasn't easy to decipher and he wondered how much he could tell him. The issue of trust was always on his mind; he did a constant inventoryâwho was at his back and who wasn't. He drawled, “Not much, Fleeta. Things are slow.”
Disappointed by the lack of candor, Fleeta got the message Durrutti wasn't talking. Subdued, he pivoted in his seat and refocused his attention on Maimonides. He scrutinized him and said, “Baby, you got any reefer for a brother? I need to get leisurely. My head is torqued tighter than a missile cone.”
Maimonides was concentrating on his arm, testing the abcess with his index finger, watching it change colors when he touched it. He was immersed in the act and didn't care for the interruption. Without looking at Fleeta, he said, “I ain't got no weed. What do you smoke that shit for? It's too expensive and it makes you drool.”
Fleeta pursed his mouth to summon up a retort, an insult that would send Maimonides reeling. Then he saw the abcess and his jaw dropped as he shrieked in sheer repulsion, “What the fuck is that! Cover that damn thing up! It's disgusting!”
Maimonides rested his catty green eyes on Fleeta's mug with cold-lidded indifference. Fleeta didn't exist as far as he was concerned. He said with considerable equanimity, given the pain he was in, “We live in a democracy. You have choices here. You don't like my abcess? That's awful. Do me a big favor. Don't fucking look at it.”
“Don't tell me nothing,” Fleeta lisped.
Before the two of them got into an argument, Durrutti intervened and navigated the conversation to a more constructive position. “Okay, you assholes. Shut up.” He said to Fleeta, “You run into Jimmy yet?”
Fleeta was eager to dump on Jimmy's downsliding reputation and he replied in a voice dripping with silvery disdain. “Nope, but I've been hearing things about the dude. Very ugly things. The more I hear, the funkier it gets. Jimmy is a genius at making a bad situation worse. The brother has fucked my shit up, like royal. Because I'm his friend, everybody is acting strange with me. I can't even go to someone's house without them locking up everything in sight because they think I'm gonna steal from them. His karma is rubbing off on me and that ain't good. What do you want him for?”
Durrutti decided to take Fleeta into his confidence. It was a foolish move, but he couldn't help it. He needed allies. He was scared and tired, fried to a crisp, well past the burnt-out stage. Which made him crazily talkative. “Can I tell you a secret?”
Fleeta was attentive. His face went foxy, then ravenous. “I'm the man. Your best friend. Lay it down for me.”
“You know the cop that got dusted? That Chamorro dude? The narc on Mission Street?”
“Hell, yeah! It's been on television every night! Every douche bag in the street knows about that!”
“Well, Jimmy was involved with it.”
Fleeta was aghast. His mouth went slack with shock and he banged his fist on the table, rattling the coffee
cups and slopping coffee onto the floor. “My homeboy? Jimmy? He shot a motherfucking cop?”
His voice was louder than a public-address system, truly superhuman. Fleeta should have been in the Guinness Book of World Records. Everyone in Hunt's Donuts heard him. Maimonides groaned, his face going ashy. “What's the matter with you, Fleeta, ha? Lower the volume. Show some discretion.”
Durrutti knew he'd made an error in judgment by saying anything at all to Fleeta. He modified his indiscretion. “Jimmy didn't shoot anyone. Not even close. But the gun that was used in the killing, it was in his possession at one time.”
“Who told you that?”
Most people who hustled in the streets were inveterate gossips. Fleeta was no exception. He thrived on rumors. Durrutti knew whatever he said, it was ammunition in Fleeta's hands. Telling him something might backfire. He answered with the trepidation a man feels when he's discovered himself in a cul-de-sac. “The cops did.”
Fleeta's pretty brown eyes sparkled with terror. His smile suicided and he put a hand over his mouth and said through his splayed fingers, “The police interviewed you?”
“That's right.”
“That's the shits! What did you tell them?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you say anything about me?”
Maimonides ceased
futzing
with his arm and proceeded to get rancorous with Fleeta.
“Oy gevalt.
You think the whole world revolves around you? The cops don't give a flying fuck about your shit. This is about Ricky.”
Fleeta puffed up like a rooster in a barnyard cock-fight. “Don't be disrespecting my ass, you. I've paid my dues. The pigs know who I am.”
It became necessary to reeducate Fleeta. Durrutti reached across the table and playfully walloped him in the shoulder, hard enough to warn him to keep his cool. He said, “I didn't say anything about you, Fleeta. I would never do that. But they're hunting for Jimmy and they think I know where he is.”
Fleeta rubbed his arm and appraised Durrutti with newfound tribulation as he leaned back in the chair, seeking to put some distance between him and the bitter-faced, dark-haired Jewish thug. He asked, “The cops breathing down your neck?”
“Sort of. They want Jimmy, to ask him about the gun. And they want this other guy Paul Stevens for the killing.”
“Who's that?”
“It doesn't matter. He's dead. He's out of the picture.”
“The police want a dead man?”
“He's their number one suspect. But they don't know he's dead and I ain't gonna tell them.”
Fleeta tabulated what Durrutti was telling him and said, “Fuck that noise. Whatever you do, fool, it's gonna be too deep for me. I'm staying away from it. Hell, if I was rational, I'd leave this goddamn town.”
This was not what Durrutti wanted to hear. He'd failed to exploit Fleeta's sympathy. He hadn't played his cards right. “Don't say that, please. You've got to help me locate Jimmy. I need to talk to him real bad.”
Fleeta heard the frantic catch in the other man's
voice and he smelled a deal. He smelled money and his face went rigid with ambition. “What will you do for me if I do?”
Maimonides pulled three Rolex watches from his suit and said, “I'll tell you what. You help Durrutti find this Jimmy Ramirez and I will give you a discount price on one of these, okay? What do you say to that? You'll be getting a real treasure.”
Fleeta was taut with derision; his facial muscles were striated with hate. He put a hand up and wagged a finger an inch away from Maimonides's bulbous nose. “You think you can sell anything, don't you? That ain't no Rolex, man. That's a fake.”
Maimonides was mortified and offended. “How do you know that? It says Rolex on it, right?”
“Are you retarded or what? That don't mean shit.”
During the Russian Revolution Durrutti's grandfather had been a conscript in one of the warlord armies that had roamed the Ukrainian steppes. His
zaydeh
was the son of a Jewish serf and had nothing to his name except the shabby uniform on his back and a gold watch.
It was a pocket watch, his pride and joy. To earn it he'd slaved for years, working a myriad of jobs. One night while the regiment was bivouacked on an abandoned dairy farm near the front in Crimea, Durrutti's
zaydeh
and his squad went to sleep in a barn. In the middle of the night the commanding officer, a minor Muscovite noble, came in to count the soldiers to see if anyone had deserted. He saw the watch and woke the peasant soldier, kicking him in the leg, saying he wanted it.
Zaydeh
gave the timepiece
to the officer, knowing he would've been shot for insubordination if he had refused.
Maimonides said to Fleeta, “You wouldn't know a fucking Rolex even if it hit you in the face. Look at you and your clothes. What do you know about anything?”
Fleeta preened, “That's an insult! Are you saying I don't know fine jewelry when I see it?”
“That's exactly what I'm saying. Some of us have the ability. Others don't. And those who don't are too stupid to admit it.”
“You sound just like that motherfucker Ephraim Rook,” Fleeta hooted.
The light in Maimonides's eyes flickered at the mention of the racketeer's name, as though the wiring in his head was shorting out. He said to Fleeta, “Ephraim don't concern you. He never did and never will. That's because what he does is geographical and it is historical. Only certain people can be involved. In short, he is a Jewish problem.” Maimonides ran a hand through his curly hair and added, “Why didn't you say you knew Ephraim? That changes everything. It implies you have a prejudice against me. What the fuck are you here for? To make trouble? Please.”
Fleeta shot back, “What do you have against the brother? What did he ever do to you?”
Maimonides jeered, “Rook ain't your brother. You share the same mother? I don't think so.”
Durrutti hushed Maimonides, flashing a reproving glance at him. “You're being a lummox.” Then he said to Fleeta, “Okay, what's on your mind?”
Handing the ball back to Fleeta made him feel better. It improved his ego. The sunlight bleeding through the doughnut shop's scratchy window framed his Afro with a fiery corona. He said, “I just wanna make sure I don't get killed, that's all.”
It was a humble request. Durrutti gave it some thought. A rabbi would have said there were sins on Durrutti's soul. There was the sin of being born. There was the sin of being a chronic lawbreaker. Large and small, these transgressions were his and he had to atone for them. How, he didn't know. The rabbi would say, put yourself in God's hands. Durrutti didn't believe in God and he was sure God didn't believe in him either.
Maimonides had his own methods of coping with sin. He was a felon who'd lived outside of society most of his life. He hawked up a lunger and let it fly at the floor and put his elbows on the table and stared at Fleeta. The black man's virgin face was a huge contrast to Maimonides's own battered, late-middle-aged
punim.
Maimonides's visage, coated with a layer of talcum powder to hide the bumps on his skin, was a weather report of too many years spent in prison. He said, “Listen closely and I will tell you a story. What do you really know about Ephraim Rook?”
Fleeta said, “I've known Ephraim for years. He and Iâ”
Maimonides interrupted him. “Bite your tongue. You know nothing. Let me fill you in. Ephraim has no morals. He is a skunk. The worst type. This I know because Ephraim and I ran together. He was the fair haired boy. I was his shadow. He was the good criminal. I was the bad
criminal. When we pulled a job, he planned it and I did the dirt. It went on for years like that. Then something went wrong and I took a rap for him. I went to jail and he left me to rot there. Ephraim has always had things his way. The new cars. The big house. The restaurants with the fancy menus in three languages. The chicks with the fine asses. Frankly, I'm sick of it. You think I'm envious? No, I am angry. Besides, Ephraim Rook ain't your business. If it was, you and I would have discussed it. But we haven't and we won't. And here's why. Between me and Ephraim, nothing is forgotten or forgiven. It's just one of those things, like cancer or whatever. You have it or you don't. Why do I have to keep telling you people that?”
Fleeta took umbrage, half-rising in his seat. His mouth was stony. “Who do you mean, you people?”
The black-tar swirl in Maimonides's eyes crystallized into a pellucid intelligence. He said with sincere but meaningless compassion, “Don't take this wrong, but you're obviously no Jew. What can I say? You're a
goy.
And probably better off for it.”
Maimonides's granite face left no room for argument. The cold-blooded finality of his pronouncement settled over the three thieves like a winter's day, underlining the fact it was ninety-five degrees outside on Mission Street. The tension around the table was thick enough to cut with a hacksaw. The doughnut baker was up front and he gave the cantankerous trio a worried look. More than ready to call the cops on them if things got out of hand. Durrutti flipped him the high sign: no problems over here. The baker nodded and retreated into the kitchen.