The Importance of Being Dangerous (12 page)

“Yes, I'm not sure, but I, uh, I'm not feeling myself. I have a bit of numbness—”

With a soft touch, Raul appeared and dropped the phone to the floor for him. He stayed behind Eagleton's torso and wrapped it in his thick arms. An elbow to the windpipe, a firm palm compressed the chest. That's all the help the system needed to close down. From the little speaker on the floor, a dispatcher was asking questions. Beside it, Jack Eagleton could no longer answer.

 

“
SEE
,
DARLIN
', this is what I'm talking about,” Michael said from one side of his dining room table. He had made the omelets that morning along with French toast, a bowl of strawberries, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and imported Sumatra coffee out of his new coffeemaker. “Look at these Bronx listings. It's like another world. Back in the days before Manhattan lost its mind.”

He and Sidarra had met for brunch at last that Sunday, and they pored over the newspaper she read now (but he quietly hated most), the
New York Times
. Michael handed her the real estate section and she pretended to study the classifieds.

“It's definitely another world,” she said. She took a few more bites and smiled as if the food was better than it was. Michael was always very proud of his eggs. They weren't bad once you got past all the salt. He was busy reading the front page. “Michael, I don't think you should count on us moving to the Bronx. My commute to work, Raquel losing her friends, Aunt Chickie being in Harlem
and all. Either buying the brownstone is gonna have to work or we're gonna have to find something else close by. That's what I'm thinking now.”

He listened quietly, averting his eyes occasionally as she spoke. When she was done, he said okay and resigned himself to the newsprint again. “Oh, damn,” he said all of a sudden. “Ain't that some shit. Sidarra, look at this.”

“What?”

“Your boss, girl. Your boss is dead.”

“Clay?”

“No, your boss boss. The chancellor. Look here. Eagleton. The man died yesterday of a heart attack, they think.”

“You had better be joking, Michael.” Sidarra grabbed the paper from him and read a few paragraphs of the article. She rushed her hand to her mouth as her eyes absorbed the words. “My God!” she gasped. “How do you like that?” she whispered.

“Fifty-two. What a shame,” said Michael. “That's young for a white man. Did you know this guy, work with him?”

Sidarra could barely think beyond her sense of shock and just shrugged. “Not really. I mean, everybody up there is
near
him, you know, but not like contact. I was introduced to him when he came on. He looked through me on a few occasions after that. I didn't know him.”

They read together for a couple of minutes, turning to the page the story continued on without saying a word. “Guy was the real deal,” Michael said. “Raised in San Francisco. Yale-, Oxford-educated. Very qualified guy. Loss for the kids. You, uh,” Michael turned to Sidarra, “you okay?”

She nodded, still fixed on one particular paragraph.

“This gonna be a problem for you?”

Sidarra had been reading the part about Eagleton's wife, her trip to the emergency room, the end, when she realized Michael
had been talking to her. “No. No. They come, they go. It can't probably get much worse for me. We'll see. But, uh, his wife, Michael. I'm thinking about the man's wife. She came home yesterday and found him on the floor. Imagine that. Her man. Just like that, gone.”

THE MAN IN THE SECOND-FLOOR APARTMENT
wanted eight, but was willing to take five thousand dollars and three months to move out. The boiler was not in bad condition, but the electrical system was underpowered, and many wires had been gnawed into by basement rats. All the plumbing was the original copper. The huge mantel in the parlor apartment where Mrs. Thomas had lived was mahogany under several coats of white, then green, then a fading peach layer of paint. The reconfiguration of each floor into one unit would not be as hard to do, given the convenient position of support beams. And the whole thing leaned east about eight or nine degrees. Sidarra learned all this about the brownstone before she bought it from Mr. Simms, who is still slapping himself. When he purchased the place for $45,000 in 1978, he never expected to sell it one day for $525,000. It was easy to come down off his price. Sidarra paid cash. Mr. Simms danced back to the Bronx. She liquidated most of her Cicero Club gains from the offshore shell
company to do it, hundreds of shares in sixteen carefully researched companies. The sell-off made Sidarra the crew's junior shareholder. Yet it came right back. Within weeks of the public offering, they had made nine times their investment in Solutions, Inc.

And there would be more money soon.

“How do you know?” she asked Griff.

“I thought
you
would know,” he said over coffee. They sat beside each other in the booth and dropped into hushed tones. “The plan was to get in on the IPO, sure. But we were only gonna hold a few weeks or so, then dump most of it. Koob placed a bet online about a Solutions director.” She looked quizzically at him. “You can do that,” Griff added, turning to meet her eyes only briefly. “Koob told you.”

“Koob never told me that.”

“He did. You weren't listening. Or you were high already. This is why I think we need a rule against smoking cheeba until after persuasion.” He chuckled and tried to hide his face in a sip of coffee, but Sidarra just waited, a little impatiently, for Griff to come back to the point. “This web site has some nefarious shit you can wager on. It's an online international mayhem casino. You can bet on certain untimely events.”

“Who the hell knows about shit like that?” she asked incredulously.

“Belinda. My wife,” he said. Sidarra rolled her eyes. “Koob says it's set up by Russians. The risk is ridiculous, Sid, but the payouts are absurd. They list the directors of every Fortune 500 company, heads of state, national monuments, climactic events, terrorism, plane crashes. If anything happens, you can hit. When Eagleton died suddenly, we hit.”

“When did you place the bet? How could you have known he would have a massive heart attack?”

“We didn't know,” Griff answered, his expression unchanged. “We placed it a while ago, after we decided to get in on the IPO. We
placed it on all the top executives of Fortune 500 companies we had a piece of, a thousand dollars in the event any one of a list of directors over the age of fifty died in a month that began with the letter J. Eagleton died in June and paid ten to one. Baby, there was a lot of money at stake with the angel round. We needed insurance.”

She squeezed his hand in disbelief, looked away, and choked back a smile to keep it from growing too wide. For just a moment something in Griff's eyes looked false, different; like the news, it threw her off-balance. “I wish I'd known. It's definitely a nice surprise.” She paused and shook her head. “But let's get something straight, Griff: I don't ever want to be treated like lady luck by you guys. My brothers used to do that and their luck ran out pretty fast. I want to know about everything before it happens. I want to decide everything before it happens.” She looked deeply into Griff's hazel eyes and held his gaze. The old sincerity had returned; he seemed to get it. “Now, I've been thinking about moving into trusts more. I might do that. What do you think?” she asked.

“I've had a similar thought lately, but there's other things too for me.”

“And I think from now on we should start coming into Q's through the back door only,” she added. “I don't want all those eyes on me every time we walk in there. It's like the Apollo sometimes.”

“That's cool,” he said. “Hey, by the way, you know Raul's got a crush on you?”

Sidarra turned into Griff's face and got real close. “You should probably worry less about who else has a crush on me and work on your own.”

I do, Griff wanted to say. Every day.

 

MICHAEL WASTED AN ENTIRE DAY
off for Sidarra driving her around stores on Fordham Road in the Bronx. His low-cost taste
in home materials was exposing his roots, and the whole outing made her impatient. If she'd stuck with him, there'd be wallpaper everywhere. By the time Sidarra refused to stand any closer than the doorway of tile shops, Michael was getting resentful. He barely understood how her money had come so fast, but the change in attitude, the loss of interest in him, started to smell like betrayal. He knew she didn't wear the clothes he bought her, even though he'd outspent himself. Her kind explanations about why her closet was full of dresses with the tags still on them didn't help. Sometimes speaking nicely is a way of telling somebody you're better than they are, or that they don't belong in your league anymore. The truer that felt, the angrier Michael got.

That didn't matter as much to her as the whirlwind construction crew already at work on her new home. Q knew somebody who knew a contractor known for speed, and the race was on. Fortunately, there are stores near the corner of Park Avenue South and Nineteenth Street that sell bathroom fixtures from Italy as well as a full array of marble tiles from the region. Sidarra's new acquaintance Darrius Laughter had his boyfriend fax her a list. She and Raquel went together, free of Michael's constant sticker shocks, and they sat in empty luxury claw-foot bathtubs imagining bubbles. They turned faucets at a rate of ten a minute. They stood under chrome showerheads that looked like sculptures and tried to guess where the water actually came out. They had long dialogues in and out of the presence of salespeople. If somebody got funky with them, Raquel had learned how to lead them right out of the store.

Carpets look the best on newly finished wood floors, and carpets were found in the tall buildings of lower Fifth Avenue. In their elongated windows hung beautifully woven rugs from Persia, Pakistan, and India. This was the template for a thousand forgeries found in Target and Kmart, where Sidarra usually bought area rugs.

Raquel soon took over the day. Her urges moved them along; her imagination colored their tastes. Sidarra followed her daughter through each store with a kind of awe. The older Raquel got, the more she became Sidarra's teammate—even, on days like this, her captain.

“I'm just gonna run a bit, okay, Mommy?”

“Do what you gotta do, Raquel.”

Sidarra and the salesmen would stand aside smiling over a $3,000 rug while Raquel, with a look of care and utter determination on her brown face, would do short jogs and quick stops on the fabric.

“She wants to see how the traction works,” Sidarra would explain to the person. “I never used to let her run in the house.”

“Your daughter is a very serious child, no?” asked the curious salesman.

“I found it, Mommy!” Raquel exclaimed.

“That one, sweetheart?”

“Yup. It should be comfortable. Just enough. This one's right.”

Sidarra knew it was her own fault that Raquel wouldn't leave the “comfortable” thing alone. Children have no reason to dismiss the things you say and fewer worries to replace them with. Raquel told all her friends about the shoe-making children of Taiwan. She might never stop wondering about them. Of course, Sidarra had been the same way. That's why she was putting Raquel in a fine Catholic school come the fall. She knew that what had happened to her as a young woman seemed to turn on the moment she stopped focusing on things that interested her. She roamed, then she settled too soon. That was not going to happen to Raquel's mind. That's what comfort started to mean to Sidarra now. That's why spending time buying the details for the house had to be their joint endeavor. It's why she went to such lengths to conceal from coworkers the brochures and catalogues on her desk and spoke in whispers to salesmen on the phone. She couldn't
explain it, but she wanted nothing in the way anymore. She wanted clean open space to live in and now she could. As long as her own wits and research turned Cicero's Club blood money into small fortunes, she saw no harm in sending a few bad people to chase after their insurable losses. They'd be paid back eventually. Following some inconvenient bumps in their roads, their way would open again. The only lesson would be the improvement of her life, and one that, for obvious reasons, they would never learn.

 

THE DUMPSTER IN FRONT OF THE BUILDING
had been gone two weeks and the paint dry for one when Aunt Chickie finally agreed to come see the renovation of Sidarra's brownstone. Rain fell hard that late August day. It soaked into the brick along the tops of buildings and darkened the sky by midafternoon.

“So this is what you did, huh?” She spoke under her breath, thoughtfully, and Sidarra didn't answer. “You and that guy. They sure can be useful sometimes.”

Inside the door, the vestibule had changed. Sidarra replaced the old mailboxes and hung a chandelier that shined ample light on the fresh white walls. Through the glass door, Aunt Chickie could see a short hallway and rooms opening to the rear of the parlor floor. Sidarra led her aunt into the living room that had once been two and a half smaller rooms. The high ceilings seemed even farther away under the columns of exposed brick, the restored mantel that arched proudly around a grand new mirror and the thin tracks of bright, recessed halogens.

“Mmm, mm, mm,” Aunt Chickie said, careful with each curious step. Sidarra watched her eyes for approval. “Your mother,” she said, emphasizing the
th
for some reason, “your mother would be very proud of you, Sid.”

“I appreciate you saying that, Auntie. Are
you
proud of me?”

This was always the harder part for Aunt Chickie, who never
had children of her own. She nodded reluctantly at Sidarra. “Ummhmm.” Sidarra needed more. She waited like the nine-year-old girl who always hoped for Aunt Chickie to come visit and, eventually, maybe, to compliment her. “Yes, Sidarra,” Aunt Chickie added with some vigor. “Yes, yes, girl. I'm
very
proud of you, truly.”

Sidarra moved toward her aunt with her hand on her daughter's back, as if to push her four-foot security blanket along with her, and made them all grab in a hug. “Then come live with us. Come on, Aunt Chickie.”

“Come on, Aunt Chickie,” Raquel echoed.

“This house is too big for just us. Live here where we can be near each other.”

“Yeah!”

Aunt Chickie was flattered enough to turn slightly away, as if to take counsel with herself. At that age, the facts of one's immediate life are never far from thought. She was hopelessly poor and spending most of her fixed income on housing at the senior home. She was sick and needed watching. But she was also proud and happy to be nasty when she cared to be. At the old-age home, she had a perfect balance of friends and enemies. And she was watched every so often by nurses. Tough choice.

“You want to put me in the apartment where that old lady died?”

“No! She died over there,” Raquel announced, pointing back to the living room.

“Of course not, baby,” Sidarra explained. “Come let me show you the apartment downstairs. It's on the street level so you wouldn't have to climb stairs, and it's got a kitchen and access to the back.” Sidarra led them carefully down the stairs and walked her through the sitting room in front.

“What's that out there?” Aunt Chickie asked, pointing to the rear.

Raquel and Sidarra smiled at each other. “Come look, Aunt
Chickie.” They walked under the low ceilings, across the small kitchen, and through a short pantry hall to a door with a window at the top. “That's the garden. That's
your
garden.”

“Garden?”

“Yeah. Mr. Simms didn't even rent out the ground-floor unit. He saved it for himself in case he ever decided he wanted a place in the city again. There's a backyard out there that was full of so much junk and rotting nonsense that you couldn't see it's got two lemon trees. I just found out there's fresh soil underneath.”

Aunt Chickie was silent as she stared out the bottom edge of the window. She scanned the yard, but her eyes kept falling on the soil beds. At first she seemed to be trying to guess which way the sun fell. Aunt Chickie was a plant mother, a green thumb trapped in the city. She abruptly changed the subject. “You should throw yourself a party or something, Sid. A housewarmer.”

“I'd like that. With Labor Day coming up, I thought maybe a barbecue. I just don't know who to invite.” The three of them continued to stare up at the gray sky from the window. “You wanna think about it? Staying here?”

When a face gets old enough, tears fall a different way. Like soldiers who already know the paths they'll march down, it is steady as they go. Sometimes you cannot even tell they've been through except for the wetness they leave in the grooves of the cheeks. After the last one had gone, Aunt Chickie was clear. “No, I'll stay,” she said softly. “I'd like to stay.”