“Besides,” Tee pointed out, “you said this guy is Fourth Precinct, right? Those kids never get out of the South Ward. The Fourth is up in Central.”
“Oh, yeah, good point. You know anyone up that way who might be able to help me?”
Tee got a far-off look.
“What?” I asked.
“Well, I know these dudes up there. Trust me, if your cop was dirty, they’d know. They got that neighborhood wired. Hell, I think they got the whole city wired.”
“Okay. I’m not going to have to get stoned again, am I?”
Tee had once set me up with sources who felt the only way to ensure I was not a member of a law enforcement agency was for me to smoke pot with them. It was an experience that proved two things to them: one, I’m not a cop; and two, my tolerance for marijuana is not especially impressive.
“No, no, nothing like that this time,” he assured me. “But let me ask you something: You need a new pair of boots by any chance?”
“Huh?”
“Just say yes.”
“Yes?”
“Okay, let me make a call.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, I was out the door with an address scribbled on a piece of paper and instructions to stop at an ATM machine to pick up a hundred dollars in cash. I was also instructed not to get too attached to said money.
The address was on Irvine Turner Boulevard, which was one of Newark’s most notorious drug corridors for one reason: it offered a straight shot to Route 78, an east-west interstate that led rather quickly to some of the state’s nicest bedroom communities. All the suburbanites who came to Newark to get their drugs—and make no mistake, that was a big part of the clientele—knew they couldn’t get lost if they just stayed on Irvine Turner.
I relied on my GPS to guide me to the address Tee had written for me, which turned out to be around the corner from the Fourth Precinct headquarters. It was a cream-colored, two-story, warehouselike building that encompassed a good chunk of the block. The only apparent tenant, and it occupied perhaps one-tenth of the building, was a bodega that had a door onto the street. It had dark windows—behind bars, of course—made of one-way glass, the kind that would allow someone inside to see out, but not the other way around.
Where was Tee taking me, anyhow? I pushed through the bodega’s door to the sound of little bells chiming—a few had been tied to the door. The store was empty except for a turban-wearing cashier sitting in a bulletproof box.
I approached the man, who I guessed was Sikh, and said, “Tee sent me.”
He tilted his head and peered at me like I was speaking a soon-to-be-extinct Javanese dialect.
“I’m the guy Tee sent,” I said.
More peering.
“Is this one-sixty Irvine Turner Boulevard?” I asked.
“One-sixty A,” the guy said in a thick Indian accent. “You want one-sixty, you go around the corner.”
“Around … which corner?”
The guy pointed out the door and vaguely to the left, so that’s the direction I took. I reached the end of the building without seeing anything obvious, just a narrow alleyway. It was far cleaner than most Newark alleys—spotless, actually—which
really
got me suspicious. I hoped Tee remembered that I had a cat who depended on me as his sole means of support.
I turned and, midway down the alley, found a meshed steel door, the kind that served as a superstrength screen for another door inside it. I pulled on the screen, but it was bolted solid. A security camera, attached to the side of the building about fifteen feet up, looked down on me.
There was no knocking on a door like this. But I also couldn’t see any other way in. I studied the door frame, the door itself, and saw nothing obvious. Was I supposed to stand there until someone saw me on the camera?
Then I found it, just to the left of the frame: a small, recessed doorbell button, practically camouflaged because it had been painted the same cream color as the concrete around it.
I pressed the button and waited. Nothing happened. I pressed again. Still nothing. I was beginning to think it was broken—and there was no way into this hulk of a building—when I pressed the button a third time.
Then I heard a metallic voice: “Keep your shirt on, keep your shirt on. What are you, dying or something?”
The voice sounded … Jewish? Were there still Jews left in Newark? I thought they all left a half-century ago. I couldn’t even tell where the sound was coming from. My head swiveled in every direction.
“Over here, over here,” the voice said.
This time I was able to place it as coming from the camera, which had a small speaker.
“Oh, hi,” I said, feeling weird because, to anyone who walked by, it looked like I was talking to a wall.
“You just gonna stand there all day, looking like a putz? What do you want?”
“I’m … I’m the guy Tee sent.”
More faintly, like he didn’t know I could still hear him, the voice asked, “What did he say?” Then another guy—who also sounded like an older Jewish man—replied, “He said he was the guy Tee sent. The boots. The boots.”
“Oh, yeah,” the voice said, returning to its previous volume. “You here about the boots?”
“That’s right.”
“Why didn’t you say so? You think I’m a mind reader or something? Hang on, hang on.”
I waited another moment, until the door was opened by a granite block of a black man who, I assumed, was not the owner of the voice I heard on the speaker. I followed him down an unadorned, windowless hallway until we reached another door, where he punched in a numeric code.
The door opened, and suddenly I felt like I was in a chaotic, mismatched Macy’s. It was a large, open space filled with merchandise, loosely organized by category: luggage to the immediate left, cookery and housewares straight on, hardware beyond that, clothing and footwear to the right, electronics in the back left. The only thing missing was the perfume section.
“What … what
is
all this?” I asked, but my granite-block guide was not a talker.
I heard a pleasant dinging sound and turned to see two men appearing out of a freight elevator. The first had on yellow-tinted glasses, a dark yellow shirt with the top three buttons undone, light yellow slacks, and white slip-on shoes that reminded me of something a nurse would have worn forty years ago. His saggy skin was deeply tanned, even though it was March. His jewelry—a necklace, multiple bracelets, and rings on several digits, including both pinkies—was all yellow gold. His hair, what little of it there was, had been dyed blond and was gelled back. He looked like a wrinkled human banana and walked like the only rooster in a hen house.
The second man was slump-shouldered and appropriately pale for the season. He wore light gray pants and a blue cardigan sweater over a white oxford shirt, which was buttoned all the way to the top. He had no jewelry. His hair was its natural gray. He walked like a man who had lost every bet he ever placed.
The man in yellow said, “I’m Bernie. Everyone calls me Uncle Bernie. This is my brother Gene. Which one of us do you think is older?”
Both guys were at least seventy, though it was hard to tell beyond that. Either one of them could have been 138 for all I knew. If he had asked me who was older, him or Methuselah, I still wouldn’t have been able to answer.
“I have … I have no idea,” I said.
“Come on, guess.”
“He’s older,” I said, pointing at Gene, if only because I could tell that was what Uncle Bernie wanted to hear.
“See? That’s what everyone thinks, Gene! You look like a
shlamazel.
You’re not gonna get any tail at the bar dressing like that.”
I suspected both of these guys were a bit beyond their bar-cruising years—unless you were talking about the salad bar at an assisted living facility—but I at least appreciated his spirit.
“Anyhow, I know you didn’t come here to admire my good looks,” he said. “C’mon. Let’s go.”
* * *
Uncle Bernie led me through some racks of clothing toward a footwear section that would challenge a Nine West.
“You sure you don’t need some pots and pans?” Uncle Bernie asked me on the way back. “I just got some new All-Clad. That’s top of the line, All-Clad. The best. The
best.
”
“No thanks.”
“What about a TV? Samsung. Sony. Those Japs make a good TV now. Fella like you, I bet you like sports, right? Me? I like the ponies. I go to the track. I place a bet. I take a little nap in the sun. It’s very relaxing. But you young guys? You all like the football and the basketball. Need a good TV for that, am I right? How about a new high-def?”
“That’s okay.”
“Boots,” Gene reminded Bernie. “He came for the boots, remember?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m just talking here. What, you think I’m some kind of
goyishe kop?
”
“That’s Yiddish for ‘stupid,’” Gene translated.
“Okay, here we are,” Bernie said as we arrived at a series of wire racks, filled from top to bottom with shoe boxes. “What size are you? Ten? Eleven? You’re so tall, I bet you’re eleven.”
“Yeah, eleven works,” I said.
“Okay, okay, where are we … boots, boots,” Bernie said, pawing through some boxes. “Here we go. Timberlands. Excellent company, Timberland. They make a fine product and they stand behind it a hundred percent, a thousand percent. Now these? These are the top of the line.”
He pulled out a pair of work boots and continued: “These are from their premium collection. Steel toe. Waterproof. Eight-inch upper—that’s two inches more than their usual. You wear these boots, people say, ‘Hey, look at that
feinshmecker
!’”
“That’s Yiddish for someone who has good taste,” Gene interjected.
“Now, you get these boots retail for one fifty, one sixty, even on sale. You? You’re a friend of Tee’s—as far as I’m concerned, you’re
mishpokhe.
I give ’em to you for a hundred even. We good?”
I was so stunned by everything I was seeing—much less by what a
mishpokhe
was—I had to slow down and make sense out of it. “I’m sorry, Uncle Bernie, I just have to know, what is all this? Where did this come from?”
“What do you mean, where did this come from? You think I’m back here tanning leather all day? It came from the manufacturer.”
“No, I’m just asking … I’m sorry, are you guys some kind of fence or something?”
Bernie recoiled, looking genuinely offended. “Fence? Fence!
A broch!
My mother would rise from the grave and cuff me behind the ear if I stole so much as a lump of sugar! A fence! Shame on you.”
“So how did you guys … get all this stuff?”
“Warranties,” Bernie said. “It’s all about the warranties.”
“Huh?”
“We’re a warrantied product reseller,” Gene explained.
“What’s … what’s that?”
“Well, take those boots you got there. Timberland,” Uncle Bernie said. “Now, Timberland is a popular boot around here. And these young black guys, they all want their boots to be crisp and new, all the time. The moment a boot gets a speck of dirt on it? Feh! They’re done with it.”
“But these look brand-new…”
“I’m not finished. Am I finished? Geez, this guy. It’s like he’s sitting on
shpilkes.
”
“That means that you’re impatient,” Gene said.
“Anyhow,” Bernie plowed forward, “Timberland, they guarantee their product for life. For life, you hear me! So we have people all over, people who know us, people who know what we’re looking for. And they recover these kind of things for us—for a small fee, naturally. So say we get a pair of slightly used boots. We send them back to Timberland and, whammo, new boots.”
“They just … send you boots?”
“Well, there’s work involved. You have to write a letter—the letter is important, make ’em know you’re serious. And then sometimes we might have to, what’s the best way to put it, massage ’em a little. This is an art we’re talking about here.”
“Timberland guarantees its product against material or manufacturing defect,” Gene said. “So we—”
“Tut, tut,” Bernie interrupted. “What are you, making a
megillah?
He gets the point. Geez, Gene, someone asks you what time it is, you build ’em a clock.”
“So all this stuff,” I said, making a sweeping gesture with my arm. “The pots, the pans, the power tools. All of it is—”
“Straight from the manufacturer, never been used, good as new,” Bernie said. “Same as you get in the store. But for the right customer, Uncle Bernie gives you a discount.”
“But can you … do that?” I asked. “Is it legal?”
“Legal?” Bernie spat. “Was it legal what the Pharaoh did to my people? Was Auschwitz legal? Don’t talk to me about legal!”
“But don’t these companies, I don’t know, protect against this somehow? You must have twenty pairs of Timberlands there. Doesn’t Timberland eventually figure out it’s shipping all these new boots to the same place?”
Bernie just smiled and said, “We in the tribe have a saying for that: ‘
Mensch tracht, Gott lacht.
’”
“Man plans, God laughs,” Gene said.
I felt like laughing, too. Newark: there are a million scams in the naked city.
“So, I’m not here to dance with you, I’m here to sell stuff,” Bernie said. “You want the boots or not?”
“Yeah, I’ll take the boots. But I need a quick favor,” I said, extracting the picture of Darius Kipps from my pocket. “My guy Tee tells me you know all the cops around here.”
“The cops, the pawnbrokers, the shopkeepers, the
machers
, the
kurves,
the
bubbas
,” Bernie assured me. “We know everyone. In this line of work, someone farts, you gotta be able to smell it, kid.”
“Okay. Well, I’m trying to figure out if this one detective is dirty or not.”
“Dirty? What, you mean is he on the take?”
“Yeah, something like that. I just want to know if he’s involved in anything he shouldn’t be involved in.”
“Time was, they were all on the take,” Bernie said, chuckling. “You remember that, Gene? They paid those poor
shmendricks
a hundred fifty bucks a week and then they wondered why they were all in the mob’s pocket.”