The Angels of Catastrophe (8 page)

“I did not.”

“Did too. Every fucking time I turned my back, you were doing a number on her head. She just collapsed under it.”

“We had a fling,” Durrutti scoffed. “That's all. She took her freedom. What, you haven't left someone before?”

“She almost took my life and not without some help from you. I'm not a young man. I can't take this shit anymore. But what's your excuse. Did you like fucking Sugar?”

Durrutti attempted to appease Rook. “I was just being her friend.”

“Friend? You don't even know how to spell the word.
Friends like you, no one should have. It makes life so confusing.”

The more upset Ephraim got, the clearer it became: he regarded Sugar as his most important liquid asset. His crowning achievement. His greatest trophy. His victory in life. The fuel in his gas tank. His raison d'être. Without her, he didn't exist. She was his mirror. He explained this to Durrutti. “You don't know her like I do. Sugar and I are soul mates. We were meant for each other. I hired the most expensive astrologer in this goddamn town to make sure. Sugar needs me.”

“I'm glad.”

“You, glad?” Rook unleashed one of his trademarks, the humorless laugh. “That'll be the day. Since when? A black man will become the President of the United States before that happens. Glad, my ass.” He grew thoughtful, quite contrite. His ruddy features softened and blurred. “She left me because I have one fault in this lifetime. I loved her too much. I couldn't keep my hands off her. I was so insecure and possessive. All the attention, it made her phobic. She said to me, ‘Daddy, I have to go.' And what was I supposed to do, say no?”

“And you blame me for this?”

“Absolutely. You interfered with the flow of our process.”

“Hey, I didn't do anything wrong.”

“The fuck you didn't. What we had, it was organic. Not artificial like you.”

Insults are a staple of life. But the barrage of name-calling was getting on Durrutti's nerves. A coldness rushed
through his arms and legs. Deeper than anger. An emptiness that made him hyperventilate. Before he could stop himself, he walked over to where Ephraim sat and stood before him.

It was a three story drop to the pavement on Mission Street. The sidewalks were congested with ice-cream vendors, homeless men and mariachi musicians. It would have been easy to push Rook through the window. The fall would kill him.

When a friendship ended, it had to turn into something else. It wouldn't rest or go away. Because of Sugar, something bad was looming on the horizon. Durrutti could feel it in his bones. He said, “You done talking, huh?”

“Actually, I was just beginning.”

“Get the hell outta here. I've heard enough.”

Rook made his exodus with a sneer and a promise. He made a show of being tough that was transparent even to himself. He was just bluffing. The only thing he had going for him was his clothes. “You'll pay for this, Ricky. You have my word on that.”

Durrutti escorted Rook to the door and watched him retreat into the hall. Then he looked down at his own feet. What he saw wasn't pretty. What he saw made him ill. A letter addressed to him from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms lay on the worn-out carpet. He bent over and picked it up. Kulak's penciled scrawl greeted his eyes. He didn't bother to open it. He knew what the Fed wanted without having to read his incorrigible handwriting.

T
he Federal Building looked as though nothing ever changed there. The tower's concrete and steel walls were scratched and tortured by the wind. Shadows remained transfixed at right angles. The sun was merciless in exposing the defects of everything that moved on Golden Gate Avenue's sidewalks. Homeless men from the Civic Center Plaza were outside the front doors begging and panhandling the lawyers, cops and judges for spare change. Inside the place law clerks were lockstepping like robots on caffeine.

Kulak had changed, visibly so. The cop's wart-ridden hands trembled when Durrutti plopped into a folding chair next to his desk. The drinking veins on his mountainous nose, which hadn't been so pronounced during the first visit, stood out like beacons of despair. A patch of eczema was germinating on his jaw. It was gratifying to see the pressure was getting to him too.

On his desk lay a pair of handcuffs, manila folders, a quartet of unwashed, lipstick-streaked coffee mugs and a boxy Dell computer the size of a tombstone. Durrutti's police file lay on top of a stack of reports: his decade-old mug shots were stapled to the first page. He didn't look
so spectacular in the photographs-no one ever did when a picture was taken of them in a jail cell with blood on their face.

You stay long enough in San Francisco, the city will transform you. Some folks end in South of Market side streets strung out on black tar heroin, the kind that causes flesh-eating abcesses. Others become millionaires and buy high-priced houses in Noe Valley. Seeing his mug shots again displeased him—he was getting older. He said to Kulak, “What do you have these pictures out for? Are we gonna play show and tell?”

Kulak ignored the sarcasm and made a circle in the air with a nicotine stained finger. “I want to find the hook between you and Jimmy Ramirez. I want to connect you two.”

Him and everybody else in the neighborhood. Durrutti had limped up and down Mission Street so many times looking for Jimmy, he was wearing out the pavement. He'd been to every bar, cafe, taqueria and bodega and pool hall in a two mile radius, but no one knew where the Mexican was. He wasn't at the Mission Cultural Center and he wasn't at the Burger King on Sixteenth Street. Jimmy had become a magician, and made himself invisible. He said truthfully, aware of the irony, “I don't know where the bastard is. I wish I did.”

Kulak's eyes were trained on a spot three inches to the left of his visitor's chin. His jasmine oil-scented toupee was swept back from his extinct hairline, highlighting his sunburned elfin ears. He wore his contempt for Durrutti like a pimple on his nose, daring him to pop it. He replied, “You're in serious trouble. You keep lying about Jimmy
Ramirez, it'll get ugly. I'll become a stick up your ass. Now don't give me any more crap ... tell me where he is. I'm sick of this stalling around.”

Durrutti was more tired than angry. He was faint and heard a pinging in his head. Maybe he had a brain tumor. He could only hope so. He was sleepy with the roller-coaster sensation you get when everything is going tremendously wrong. “Fuck you. I ain't done nothing.”

Kulak fondled the wattles under his chin with gusto. “No, Durrutti ... fuck you. Every day we can't find Jimmy Ramirez and every day we can't locate the gun that killed the cop, the problem leads back to you, Jew boy. Right up your ass like a torpedo.”

The newspapers reported Chamorro's death was being investigated hush-hush. His widow was quoted at a press conference as saying she'd received death threats on the telephone. Unidentified callers stated if her family was stupid enough to hold a public funeral for the deceased narc, there would be another shooting.

The back of Durrutti's throat was dry from anxiety. He wanted a drink, a stiff one, to wash away the smoke in his mouth. Something to kill the pain. Better yet would be a one-way ticket on a rocketship to another galaxy. Kulak was treading on ground that would require him to have a lawyer present. The policeman knew it and inexplicably switched gears, changing the topic to something less delicate and far less incriminating.

“What do you know about two dealers?” He lifted one of his haunches and farted, evincing no self-consciousness. “A pair of queens named Jackie and Arlo.”

He wasn't keen on answering and was wary of the shift in Kulak's line of questioning—the cop was getting crazy, and he didn't like it. Crazy people reminded him of his parents. He said feebly, “I don't know them.”

“You don't?”

“Never seen them in my fucking life.”

The first time he had been with Jackie and Arlo had been in the Sunrest Bar celebrating their wedding. They were drunk and throwing their general assistance welfare check money around like it was confetti. Arlo had on a white wedding gown and Jackie was in a rented velveteen tuxedo. They'd just gotten hitched at Glide Memorial Church in the Tenderloin. Arlo had paid for the ceremony with her food stamps.

The G-man's gimlet eyes bored into Durrutti like the twin barrels of a sawed-off Remington shotgun. He said, “You don't expect me to swallow that, do you? Now how about Paul Stevens?”

Durrutti stiffened in the chair, getting prickly. He hated it when people repeated themselves. “Haven't we been through this already? I told you I didn't know the fucker. I don't know anything about the guy, okay? Quit bugging me with that.”

“You're not being honest with me.”

“I ain't saying shit because there ain't shit to speak of. Don't push me. What's it going to get you?”

“You're covering for him. I can smell it on you, you fucking queer. I'd like to know why.”

He gave the cop a one-eyed glare. “I'm not protecting anybody.”

How true it was. He couldn't do Paul Stevens any harm. Nobody could. Paul was out of danger. He was six feet under in a potter's field. Dead and resting for eternity. A likeness of Paul swinging out of K&H Liquors in his hound's-tooth check coat with the wind feathering his salt and pepper hair as he reached into his pocket for a cigarette floated before his eyes like a daydream.

He said to Kulak, exhausted by the interplay, “Listen, I don't know the dude. I've never heard of him, all right? Just because I live around here doesn't mean I know everybody.”

When a cop poses a question, it isn't so much what he's asking as what's not being said. The invisible power of things left unspoken was the interrogator's greatest strength. Durrutti's own strength was ebbing; aware of this, he focused on keeping his lies in order.

Kulak said, “You're a link in this shit and I'm gonna find out how.”

Hearing this, Durrutti succumbed to self-induced paranoia. He didn't like the staunch tenacity in the cop's voice. Some people's paranoia is delicious; it makes you giddy, like drinking liquor. Kulak's stripe of paranoia was wreaking havoc on Durrutti's nervous system. The Fed had opened a door in his brain by going on about Paul Stevens. Along with everything else, fear came flying out. Fear of the dead. Fear of the living. Fear he wouldn't get through this ordeal unscathed. He looked at his shoes: they had witnessed each and every one of his triumphs, sorrows and defeats.

Kulak said, “You won't talk?”

“You must be kidding,” Durrutti joshed. “What's in it for me? You've got me in a corner and you want me to bend over so you can fuck me? No, I won't talk. One, because I don't know anything. And two, I wouldn't even if I did. With or without a lawyer.”

“Why not? People are getting killed.”

“Correction. Your people, not my people. I heard Chamorro was crooked.”

His opinion, offered without invitation, angered Kulak. The agent's face simmered in the fires of his own tension, turning beet red enough to have a heart attack. He gripped the edge of his desk with both hands, bent forward a few inches and tried to strangle Durrutti with his eyes. “You heard wrong. He took some chances and made a tactical error. He was only doing his job.”

“And it got him killed.”

“You don't care if men die?”

Durrutti let some seconds go by before he answered him. He was walking on a tightrope. The cadence in his reply was deliberate, each vowel and consonant was distinct from its predecessor. “I ain't being cold, but this murder don't got nothing to do with me.”

The defiance in his response was laughable. Denying the trouble he was in didn't make it go away. He knew what Kulak was saying: everyday the police didn't find the shooter who'd murdered the cop on Mission Street, Durrutti was a giant step closer to San Quentin Prison.

They didn't use the gas chamber in San Quentin anymore. Death row inmates were iced via lethal injection, like they were in the dog pound at the SPCA. More humane,
the authorities said. The last guy executed went into convulsions and tried to break out of the restraining straps. It took him eight minutes to kick the bucket.

A vein was doing pushups on Kulak's forehead. He put his hand on Durrutti's wrist, the two of them sitting close together at the desk. The sun came through a window; dust motes flitted in the unventilated air. Kulak's hand was fleshy and covered with black hairs. The weight of it gave Durrutti a headache and he said, “Would you mind getting that fucking thing off me?”

Kulak removed his hand and lavished a less than heartwarming smile on him. Watching that smile Durrutti knew his job was to steer clear of the wall of fire the cop was putting in his path. Certain people could help him do that. Jimmy Ramirez was one of them.

Durrutti had a queasy feeling he'd never see Jimmy again.

T
he hotels on Mission Street were a coda for the seventh ring of oblivion. An underworld where landlords evicted tenants by setting their rooms on fire. The tête-a-tête with Kulak at the Federal Building left Durrutti unsettled. He couldn't stop trembling; his left arm shook uncontrollably. Lounging in his room at the El Capitán didn't make things any easier.

He went to see Jackie and Arlo, thinking they might soothe him. The door to their room was ajar when he knocked on it. Arlo was pulling on a pair of white silk stockings over her pale unshaved legs. She looked up at Durrutti with eyes that were soaked in barbiturates and whinnied, “Hey, baby cakes. Where have you been keeping yourself? Come in, come in. I ain't seen you in ages.”