The Importance of Being Dangerous (11 page)

“Hey, colored girl,” a male voice whispered gently.

“What?” she said out loud. And before she could turn around, she thought: Who would call me a colored girl?

A colored man. “How are you doing today, sweetie? Stop looking like such a colored girl and come over here.”

Sidarra was relieved to see a short, dark, round-faced man in his late forties waving to her from behind a beauty counter. His salty hair was cropped very close to his head, his skin and grooming unblemished, but his glasses and white coat reminded her a little of a scientist or her oldest brother Alex. He waved more impatiently at her.

“C'mere, c'mere.” She walked over to him, and he took her in with a friendly gaze. “What is this?” he proclaimed. “You're here for a makeover, right?”

She grinned and looked down for a second. “I know we're old friends and all, but are you trying to flatter me?” she asked.

“Not really. I like you. What's your name?”

“Sidarra.”

“Sidarra, that's a name you should live up to. You know you have a juicy smile?”

“Thank you.”

“My name is Darrius Laughter,” he said, looking down at her hands.

Sidarra immediately giggled. His face didn't move. “For real? That's your name? Laughter?”

“Yes. It wasn't always. It used to be Slaughter, but a long time ago my family came together and made a decision about what we planned to be. We planned to be about laughter, not slaughter. You know you've been searching for me a long time, right?”

“All day, if you're the one selling my moisturizer.”

“Moisturizer? First of all, it's at least exfoliators for you. Second of all, sit down. We're going to fix this once and for all. This
damsel-in-distress number you're working doesn't really suit you. Look at your skin. You have exquisite bones. I
know
I've got a queen at home, but, sister, you could put him to shame if you wanted to. Please want to.”

Sidarra sat on the stool with her hands clasped, about to say something when a tall red-haired European woman interrupted. “Darrius, I need you to show me where we've put the Celestier cleanser.”

Darrius swung his hips around instantly. “I'm not over here talking to myself, Ruina. This gorgeous creature happens to be my customer.” He turned back around to Sidarra. “I'm sure you can find it yourself.” Darrius waited about five seconds for Ruina to go back to where she'd come from. “These bitches in here will try your last nerve, I'm telling you. They think every line starts with blue eyes. Whatever. Over here they wait.”

Sidarra relaxed into the seat. “I'm open to suggestions. I'd like to see what you got.”

“Oh, we got. I'm gonna swab a little of this product—it's a cleanser—over your face first, okay? Then we'll look at some ideas I have. It'll be fun.”

It was. He came around the counter so he could stand in front of her. Darrius's touch was professional and gentle. She realized she was being adored by experienced hands and closed her eyes. When he was finished, he pointed to several bottles he had set out on the counter and started to explain what each one could do for her. Then he looked into her face suddenly and stopped what he was doing.

“My God.”

“What?”

“It's so obvious I almost missed it. Let me pull your hair back.” He reached up, and she didn't object. “Wait a minute.” He took quick little steps around the counter and came right back with a
hairbrush he'd retrieved from a drawer. “Just let me do this.” Nobody in Saks Fifth Avenue's lobby was getting their hair done but the colored girl. Everyone else was invisible. “I thought so,” he said, studying his work. “And I was right as usual.”

“What?” she said, peering past him into the lighted mirror on the counter.

“Sidarra. Do me and the world a favor. Try never to wear your hair in your face again. Look at you. This is a stunning discovery. And you haven't even spent a dime. Leave now and you'd still be up a million bucks.”

“Thank you,” she blushed, trying to see in the mirror what Darrius was so sure about. “Let's make it two million, okay?”

“Let's.” And they did, all afternoon. Hours passed as she and Darrius talked and laughed and made her beautiful. The counter was crowded with lipsticks and glosses, skin products for mornings and bedtime care, blush, eyeliners, and mascaras in combinations she'd never thought to try. She felt the giddiness of luck at a craps table. Every time she threw the dice, Darrius came back with something that made her look even better. He told her about his family in Virginia. They critiqued certain actresses. She told him about Raquel. They ignored the circling snobs.

When it was over and time for her to go home, Sidarra asked, “So what am I gonna do now?”

“Well, you're going to go on being this vision I call ‘you.' You're going to come back with your little girl at least once a month. Here's my card. Home number's on the back in case you're not lying about coming to one of my parties. And today you're going to buy the lipstick and the exfoliator.”

She was confused. “But what about all the other stuff, Darrius?”

“Well”—he looked around—“that stuff's expensive.”

Sidarra watched him ring up the two items on the register.
Sixty-two dollars and seventeen cents. Then he reached under the counter for a bag, placed the two items in it, and proceeded to pour in about five or six samples each of everything else on the counter—even the things she said she didn't want. He smiled as the bag filled up with a year's supply of the best beauty products she'd ever seen.

“You never know,” he smirked.

Sidarra paid cash. Darrius kissed her on both cheeks. She would be back soon.

“You're a good man,” was all she could say at the end.

Darrius looked kindly into her face. “Listen, sweetheart, just because you're stopping traffic doesn't mean the light's green, okay? Be careful out there. And, Sidarra.”

“Yes?”

“By the next time I see you, get the sad out of your eyes.”

“I'll try.”

 

IT WAS NEVER GOOD TO SEE MR
.
SIMMS
, her landlord, but when she got home there he was on the stoop. It had been more than a year since he cornered her over late rent, and things had changed. Still, after being broke so long, she could do without any encounters. He stopped her before she could utter a greeting.

“Sidarra, I'm sorry to tell you, but your neighbor's gone on.”

She tried to read his expressionless face. “What? What are you talking about, Mr. Simms? Who left?”

“Mrs. Thomas. You couldn't smell it out in the hall? She died a few days ago.”

“Oh Lord, no! C'mon, Lord. You're kidding.”

“I'm afraid not,” he said. Sidarra started past him, as if she had to see for herself. “You don't want to go in there. It's not pretty. They already took her out anyway. It's just some folks from her church cleaning up and boxing stuff. Place is a right fucking mess.
That's what happens when you get that old. Cockroaches running the joint. I don't believe she could see them.”

Sidarra put her Saks bags down and sat on the stoop. “She was my friend,” she mumbled into her knees as a big tear welled up in one eye. “She used to take care of my daughter. This is gonna be hard for Raquel when she gets home.”

Mr. Simms was not one to commiserate. He had something else on his mind. “I should tell you something else, though the time's probably not right.”

“What's that?”

“I'm getting out of this business pretty soon. I've been thinking about it for a while, and with all this new money coming into Harlem…I mean, look up and down the block. Well, maybe not this one, but the next one,” he pointed. “That one over there. All over. You see those huge Dumpsters parked on the street? That's money. That's someone who just bought one of these old buildings and they're gutting it. It's a whole new day in Harlem. I couldn't buy in here today.”

“You're selling the building?”

“That's what I decided. You might as well know now. Gives you a head start on finding someplace else, unless you want to fight it. I hear you'll lose, but if you get a decent lawyer who can drag things out a bit, the new owner might give you something to get you out faster. With the rent laws as they are, all I can do is ask you nicely.”

The day had quickly become too interesting for her. For every up there seemed two downs.

“What do you want for it?”

“I don't know yet. There'll be an appraisal or two. I'll let you know if you like.”

She suddenly felt exhausted. She wanted to get her kid and her cat and curl up in bed. “Please do that. Please don't make any moves without letting us know.”

His eyes brightened strangely. “
You
thinking about buying this place?”

Sidarra regained her wits. “No, probably not me, but my boyfriend might.”

“I always knew you'd be all right, Sidarra,” he said, tipped his hat, and walked back down the stoop. “I'll let you know.”

JACK EAGLETON
,
THE FIFTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD CHANCELLOR
of the New York City public schools, also happened to live in a brownstone. However, his was located in tony Brooklyn Heights. It was the official residence of the officeholder, paid for long ago by the citizens. If it had ever gone on the market, it would have fetched at least five or six times what Mr. Simms's beat-up old Harlem building was worth. The precise reasons for the discrepancy can never be known for certain, but the truth had something to do with the leafy quiet of Eagleton's block, the affluence of his neighbors, and the complete lack of property crimes in Brooklyn Heights. The four-story single-family brownstone also happened to face the lovely pedestrian promenade, which meant it enjoyed wide-open views of the Manhattan skyline, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn Bridge from half the rooms in the house.

Raul knew all of that—the differences between Harlem and Brooklyn Heights, the absence of people from the promenade
after dark, and Jack Eagleton's exact address. Raul was in possession of other relevant facts and accessories. In contrast to the impulsive roughneck he was before his visit to Philadelphia, the pinstriped Raul was steadily trying to change. He was determined to be the Cicero Club's epoxy. His .45 long gone, he'd traded up to a Glock pistol. Unlike Blane, Raul took his debts seriously.

Eagleton, on the other hand, was an established man of few debts. His three-quarter-million-dollar-a-year salary as a public servant was merely round-town cash. He had liabilities which were more than offset on a balance sheet by his assets. He had a fulltime maid, a couple of house workers who came in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a cook for three hours every evening, a dog walker for his bichon frise twice a day, and, during weekdays, a valet for the town car the city provided. He paid only for his wife's personal expenses. Having spent many years roving between educational administration, as a former university president, and private sector consulting companies, as an executive and director, Eagleton had assets too numerous to name. By the end of the 1997 school year, Eagleton already owned 7 percent of the stock of the multibillion-dollar Solutions, Inc. Come June 6, the company's IPO would easily multiply the value of his shares by a very fat factor. Cash simply landed on Eagleton, as it had on his father and grandfather before him, like rain to a drain with nowhere else to flow.

Once the IPO occurred, a storm of cash would land on the Cicero Investment Club too. Raul cleaned Brett Goldman's laptop out of his office. Sidarra reached him by phone before he even knew it was lost. During the telephone conversation that occurred at the end of a long day, Goldman thought he recognized the company name she gave him and set in motion the Solutions stock sale to them. Raul got the laptop back on the man's desk and Griff just as easily secured the flow of paperwork. They were in.

But you don't get to be a good lawyer without wondering
“what if” a lot, and Griff began to wonder what if this Goldman wasn't always so dumb. What if somebody figured out that one of the angels in the angel round had the wrong color wings? What would they do if an investigation of their shell corporation's IPO gains somehow led to any one of them? Griff decided they would need protection. The best protection would be personal information about the misdeeds of the gods. With the threat of embarrassing disclosures of secret transactions there would never be an investigation. They needed to get inside Eagleton's home and borrow a little documentation of his personal deals. So they needed more from Raul.

And Raul wanted more, too. It was true that he had never been inside a townhouse before, but he had never been inside a skyscraper before, either. And when he did that, he found out he could take not only Goldman's laptop but three others without being known. He'd never done any shit like this before or known people who got shit like this done. What he'd already accomplished could be made into a video game. It
was Mission Impossible
. He
could
think it through. He knew exactly what to do. Raul was ready to handle Eagleton.

But Yakoob could be vague. Beyond the basic facts of date, place, and face, the only instructions he gave Raul was to do this one like a pool game. “With every shot you take, you line up the next two options or you play a safety. There can never be an angle that surprises you. Relax. Think of Sidarra's game: the soft touch always beats the bang. You got a lot of bang in you. Just get the man's shit.”

Being in the thick of whatever he was in was more than a thrill for Raul. It was the education he never had. He went to school on Eagleton. He figured he'd be caught if he tried to get into the Board of Ed building, but a townhouse was a little different. He learned that Eagleton liked Scotch and he knew where Eagleton
kept it. He knew when he had it, and he knew that Eagleton's wife drank something else. He observed that whenever Eagleton himself was home, he was never far from his own briefcase or his laptop. Raul learned that schools chancellors and their wives would rather not shop for groceries themselves. They had it delivered from an online supermarket that only operated in Manhattan. Raul knew that he was too wide to fit under a steel fence above the promenade, so he lost twelve pounds. And, most of all, Raul knew Manny, another dealer.

If Raul had been a small-time dealer of good cheeba, Manny was a chemist with a business plan. Manny was an ex-junkie from the same block, and he had been instrumental in Raul's marriage to angel dust several years before. For a junkie, Manny was lucky. Crack didn't work for him; only heroin did. He could sell crack and do heroin at the same time. Some people's bodies have that gift. The longer he stayed in the game, opportunities for other productive chemistry lessons came his way. Fate kept him out of jail and his flesh bullet-free. So he was around for new drugs, designer cocktails, homemade Ecstasy, things he could make as a hobby. For a dealer, he was extremely lucky, gaining notoriety for cutting-edge shit without the usual stickups and shoot-outs. Friends came to Manny for knowledge, pills, and new highs. Raul came to his heavily fortified apartment on East 112th Street in Spanish Harlem for something slow, potent, and obscure.

“The money is good, yo,” Manny said one evening in late June. He was cooking on a laboratory stove. He hunched his long, bony frame shirtless over a flame. “Please, Raul. Don't touch shit, okay?”

Raul drew still again and leaned against a wall. “I already told you it'd be a grip. Don't ever doubt that shit, motherfucker. My word is bond. But you gotta show me exactly how or you might have a hard time spending that cash.”

Manny understood. “It's all in the amounts. It's basic fucking biology, man. Just be cool. I'll show you.”

 

MICHAEL HAD NOT GIVEN UP
despite the doubts he hoped Raquel would pass on to her mother about their relationship. He sensed something not just distant but stronger in Sidarra's personality. She still had most of her same old insecurities, but as a man with a little more time in the world, he figured she was growing up again. She was accepting those things about herself and going on. To keep her from going without him, he bought her clothes she wouldn't wear. He tried to feed her beauty better than she was learning to do herself. He rubbed her back without request. He reminded her of their old rituals, like reading Sunday papers over Sunday brunch. He offered to take them to dinner if ever she'd go. And hardest of all, he never doubted her investment interests anymore. The success was too obvious. But he tripped up over the brownstone thing.

“Six hundred thousand dollars?” he almost screamed the night she told him Mr. Simms's asking price. “Excuse me. Is he fucking crazy?”

“Michael, please lower your damn voice. You'll wake the baby.”

Michael began to pace frantically around the kitchen in his high black socks, boxers, and white undershirt. “That's mind-boggling. That's
mind-boggling,
Sid. That's what he really thinks he can get?”

“He showed me comparable sales figures,” she said from behind a cup of tea.

“Have white people lost their damn minds? Who the hell would pay that kind of money for this hulk of deferred maintenance in Harlem?
Harlem!
Don't these yuppie bastards know what Harlem is? What, are they knifeproof? Bulletproof?” He pretended to be
a yuppie walking down the street. “‘Don't mind me, junkie, sir. I'll just step over you on my way up to my million-dollar personal tenement. And don't waste your bullets shooting me in the back, because, funny thing is, those things just don't affect my kind.' Geez. And these are the same people who watch you count out their change in the token line like you must be the dumb-ass who's sure to short them a nickel. I don't get it, Sid. This uptown madness is gonna end in about ten minutes.”

“Look, I don't know why it's happening either, but it's been going on for a lot longer than ten minutes, Michael.” Sidarra waved off Michael's exaggerations. “You see those nice people on the street who still smile and wear old clothes and stand at the checkout line and pay with pennies at the bottom of their purses? They used to be all over New York. On the bus. At the park. Where do you think they live? They live in rent-stabilized apartments, Michael. Well, guess what? They're not making any more rent-stabilized apartments. All those people have to go. If you want to stay in this place, you better get rich and you better own, Michael, or they're gonna drive you out. That's just how it is now.”

“But, Sid, you
know
Harlem. This place ain't no Broadway musical. Motherfuckers actually live and die here. It couldn't be worth that kind of money even if you had it.”

“But it's home. Why should you be the only person in this room who appreciates owning the home he loves?”

“Maybe 'cause I do actually love it and you really don't. Maybe 'cause it's the Bronx, baby! Do you know what six hundred thousand dollars would buy you in the Bronx? Any idea? The whole damn borough only costs about two and a half million.”

Sidarra had had enough and bit her lip in exasperation. “What are you talking about, man? Do you know what it means to finally own my own home? Can you imagine what it means to have my daughter see me do that for us? I think I can do this.
I
can do this.
Me. A brownstone. Do you know a brownstone is all my daddy ever hoped to get us—a brownstone and a Mercedes-Benz? And he never got either.” She paused and looked out the window with her hand on her hip, then back at him. “So just what are you saying, Michael? Because I don't want to keep running around this with you if you can't be supportive at all.”

He held a beer can to his thick belly and sighed at her. “I want to be supportive, darling. You know I do.” He scratched the back of his head. “I don't know. Maybe it's time. Maybe we could—”

“Could what, Michael?” she baited him to finally say it. For years he couldn't even talk about marriage and she knew he wouldn't now.

“I don't know,” he said, falling back against the kitchen countertop. “What do I know? Apparently you're the one got all the dividends coming. I just think you should at least consider the Bronx.”

“The Bronx, no thonx,” she said calmly, just as her daddy would have said.

 

RAUL SAT ALONE ON A BENCH
at the end of the promenade one perfect night in June. The air was warm and still crisp. For all the clarity of the sky that glowed with the light of a million Manhattan office windows, nobody walked by to disturb him. Raul would probably enjoy few chances ever to take in the peace of that view again. In fact, he would get exactly three, and this was the first.

He squeezed under the fence bars on a Wednesday evening while Eagleton was still out and the house was empty of workers, guests or Mrs. Eagleton. Raul carefully reached the Scotch carafe in the bar and left a few drops of the future in it. Somehow Eagleton would have to be involuntarily separated from his work and induced to forget about it. Raul was back on the bench in time to see houselights come on in the windows. That was the night
of the IPO, June 6. The Eagletons got in from celebrating around 11
P.M
.

On the second night, Raul crawled under security gates with Nestlé Crunch bars in his stomach. He had thought hard about the skyline across the river, distracting himself with minor visions of honor and expertise. When his moment came again, he slipped back inside the residence and smeared Manny's mix over the fresh steaks that had arrived earlier by truck. Mrs. Eagleton, he knew, was a vegetarian. That was a Friday. The mix worked slowly through the system. It was hardly perceptible until the toxins had accumulated, but once they reached a certain point, the process would be fast. It needed a foothold in the lymph nodes. Multiplication throughout the bloodstream with just two doses. Then a third and final administration to hasten a deep sleep before the body could panic and seek help. That he took care of on the following Wednesday, again with a belly full of chocolate. By that time he'd grown bold. That time, Raul was still sitting in the house when the potion went down. He had found a dark place to wait and listen. He was a witness to Eagleton's last Scotch of the night. One false move or an errant sound and the Glock would have changed the plan instantly.

While Yakoob and his wife were in an Ocho Rios bungalow feverishly enjoying the fruits of his investment acumen while trying to make a baby, Raul was busy taking his words to heart. He remembered that Eagleton was Sidarra's boss and that Yakoob had called him the problem. Maybe he didn't need to wake from this sleep after all. Mrs. Eagleton had left on Thursday for a weekend trip home to see family in Minnesota. There was only the question of timing and Eagleton's peculiar insides. The chancellor had approximately twenty-two hours in which to die. His heart would simply give out. But Raul had to know; it would determine when and how he'd return the laptop and briefcase to the house. His own heart barely beat from his hiding place in the long cur
tains of the back parlor. The hundred-and-fifty-year-old floorboards described exactly where Eagleton was in the grand front parlor. Raul tried to imagine the movements he heard. Eventually he heard stumbling. Eagleton had fallen against something. Something had fallen to the floor and shattered. Something else sounded like a groan, but he couldn't be sure. Then Raul heard the unmistakable sound of cell phone buttons being pressed.