American Gangster (6 page)

Laurie, having already collected Michael, passing by on the way out of the park toward her car, said, “He
is
the police. Hard to believe, I know.”

Richie didn't see or hear any of this. He didn't even see his son's puzzled expression as the boy looked
back at his father holding the gun on those bigger kids. The child felt a sensation that was far too complex for him to parse: shame intertwined with pride. But he would feel it again.

And by the time Richie had made the teenagers clean up after themselves, his wife and son were long gone, and so were most of the other moms and kids, leaving him alone on the grassy patch where, minutes before, his son had played under a blue-gray sky on a day that seemed suddenly colder.

Richie Roberts's apartment in
Newark was nicer than a junkie's.

Barely.

Though the way he lived offered no proof, Richie was human and could hardly help but glance around his bleak little pad without thinking of the Manhattan town house or lovely suburban home he could be living in, if he weren't a stick-up-his-ass fool. He had no choice but to think about the great food—French cuisine maybe (though he'd never really had any, unless you counted fries)—that he could be eating right now, as opposed to standing at his gas stove pouring a can of Campbell's into a pot with his stitched-up black-and-blue hand.

But it wasn't just the nice digs he could be enjoying or the great food he might be chowing down on. It was denying those things to his family; that's what grated.

What kind of fucking idiot walks away from a cool million? Walks away, knowing he's alienated not just
his own partner, but every goddamn cop in New Jersey and, when word got out (which it probably already had), New York to boot?

He could still feel the eyes on him when he'd walked out of that Newark police station, all by himself—even Javy Rivera hadn't been up to accompanying him—knowing this quiet, staring response was not out of awe or respect over Richie turning his back on all that crooked bread, no. These looks spoke of contempt, on the one hand, and fear on the other.

He would never be trusted again by his fellow cops.

The saving grace was that he wouldn't have to be a cop much longer.

He got himself a spoon and hauled his pot of soup over to the little cluttered desk, piled with law textbooks. Almost at random, he cracked open a text and started his night's studies for the upcoming New Jersey Bar exam. On the wall nearby, casting silent encouragement his way, was a framed photograph of one of his heroes: heavyweight champ Joe Louis, standing over the sprawled, vanquished Billy Conn.

When the soup was gone, the hunger sated but the tension gnawing, Richie went to the small wooden box that was his stash, where an ounce or so of grass waited along with rolling papers and clips.

He rolled a joint, smiling to himself at his hypocrisy, and soon was mellowed out and deep in his studies, smoke swirling to the ceiling like his conscience trying to find its way to freedom.

A sprawling jumble of
a city, Bangkok had all the humid heat, rank pollution, snarled traffic and diseased prostitutes its ragged reputation promised. Despite the colorful if grotesque palaces and temples, this was a world chiefly of weather-beaten cement with occasional splashes of tropical green poking through. Dirty, poor, crowded, its sidewalks clogged by stalls selling knock-off T-shirts and cheap jewelry, Bangkok made Harlem seem a paradise.

In the deceptive candy flush of neon at night, Frank Lucas—in a short-sleeved sportshirt and chinos, just another anonymous tourist—rode along in back of one of the three-wheeled motorized vehicles called a tuktuk. Bicycles darted around like flies (and flies were darting around everything and everyone else), but the tuk-tuk did its own share of weaving in and out of the impossible traffic.

Frank had checked into the Dusit Thani Hotel, where he'd skipped any tourist bullshit to catch the three-wheel taxi to his destination: the Soul Brothers Bar, which he'd been told back home was the top hangout for black GIs on R & R.

This was Frank's first trip to Southeast Asia, and—though he didn't impress easily—the sights and sounds and smells had overloaded his sensory system. What a shock it was to enter the Soul Brothers Bar and find the kind of black joint you might find in a funky corner of Atlanta or Chicago or Harlem itself.

The only way the joint could have been smokier was to be on fire. Otis Redding was singing “Dock of the Bay” courtesy of the Rockola jukebox, and at tables and booths and along the bar, black soldiers—Frank was the only man other than the two bartenders not in uniform—were putting the moves on slit-to-the-thigh-silk-dress Thai girls, who didn't look hard to seduce.

Frank ordered a Coke at the bar and found his way to a small table, where he sat and surveyed the scene. And some of what he saw would not have been allowed in the funkiest hole in Atlanta, Chicago or even Harlem. . . .

Not every GI had a hooker on his arm or in his lap; a few were zonked out, slumped in booths laughing lazily or flat-out sleeping, and a few others were drunk out of their minds. Dope was being rolled and smoked and even shot up. A staircase, up which went soldiers and their “dates,” meant the second floor wasn't so restrained.

After a while a trio of ex-GIs started playing Southern blues tunes—“Gone Dead on You” by Blind Lemon Jefferson was their opener.
Authentic-sounding shit
, Frank had to admit.

Just as authentic were the smells that found their way through the smoke and general bar stench to tickle both his nostrils and his memory: ham hocks and collard greens served by waiters in stripeless army uniforms. Home away from home for Uncle Sugar's boys.

One uniformed figure stood out from all the others, perhaps because he wasn't wasted on dope or booze, and didn't have a hooker hanging on his arm, either: an army master sergeant. The tall, commanding figure, whose Apache cheekbones added an edge to affable, handsome features, threaded through the tables and patrolled the booths and bar as if on inspection.

At first the sarge seemed to be checking on the GI customers' well-being. Then at one booth, he shook hands with a patron and, through the smoke, Frank could barely see the pass-off of cash from the client for some packets of white from the sarge.

Frank must have been staring, because the sarge was suddenly squinting at him through the smoke, the guy's expression sinister at first, then shifting into a kind of loose-lipped shock.

The sarge called out, “
Frank?
”

Frank lifted his Coke in salute and smiled, just a little, and his old friend Nate Atkins beamed at him and made a beeline.

Nate sat and grinned and said, “You're too old to get drafted. What the fuck are you doing on this turf?”

“Thought maybe you could recommend a good Thai banker.”

Nate blinked a couple times. “Got a major deposit to make?”

“Yeah. A major deposit. And maybe a sergeant major deposit, too.”

Nate liked the sound of that. He gestured to the dingy, debauched surroundings. “What do you think of the place?”

“All the comforts of home. Soul food with dope on the side and a blow job for dessert. You're not still in the
service
. . . ?”

“No! Hell no.” He gestured to the uniform. “This is just to make the fellas feel comfortable. So I heard about Bumpy. You taking over for him, or what?”

“What. Protection's out.”

“But you're still moving powder.”

“Yeah. And I want to move some more.” He flicked half a smile at his old friend. “I hear the quality is high, your neck of the woods. Rumor or fact?”

Nate's brown eyes, always alert, took on a sharpness. He got up easily, saying, “You got a few minutes? Let me make a call.”

Frank sat at the
same table with Nate, but they had two guests, a couple of young Thai wise guys in
sportshirts with big pointed collars and too much gold jewelry.

The conversation going on right now was in the Thai language, which Frank didn't understand; but he trusted Nate, a shirttail relation from North Carolina.

A skinny, dead-eyed Thai punk asked Nate, “He say how much stuff he wants?”

Nate, also speaking Thai, said, “He said ‘a lot.'What that means I don't know. Four or five keys, maybe.”

Both Thai hoods studied Frank like he was a modern art painting they were trying to comprehend.

Then the skinny Thai said, “And he's your cousin.”

“My cousin-in-law,” Nate said by way of full disclosure. “My ex-wife's cousin, actually. But he's family to me. I trust him.”

The Thai kid thought about that. Then he said to Nate, “Ask your cousin-in-law how much he wants.”

Nate asked Frank.

Frank said, “A hundred kilos.”

Now it was Nate studying Frank like modern art.

“Are you fucking kidding me, Frank?” Nate asked.

“Am I known for my sense of humor, Nate?”

The next day, pushing
through the paradise-forpickpockets throng on the sidewalk along a row of steamy food stalls, Frank and Nate walked and talked.

“No one I know can get
that
much,” Nate said.

“I heard you were connected.”

“I am connected. I know every gook gangster in
town, and that's a lot of gook gangsters. I know every goddamn black soldier in the Army from the cooks to the colonels, and on up.”

“Good to hear.”

They stopped and bought mangos from a vendor, and munched as they went on.

“Well,” Nate said reflectively, “I suppose I could piece together that many keys, from different suppliers. But ain't none of it gonna be one-hundred percent pure.”

Frank shook his head. “Then I don't want it. Not what I want.”

Nate grunted in exasperation. “I
know
that. I see where you're comin' from, my man. I just do not think it's possible, without risking floating facedown in one of these fuckin' canals.”

“It's my risk.”

“It's my risk, too!”

“If you want to get rich, it is.”

Nate bit into the mango. “Means dealing with the Chiu-Chou syndicates in Cholon or Saigon . . .
if
they'll even deal with your stateside ass.”

But Frank was shaking his head. “No. Not good enough.”

Nate's jaw dropped, part in reaction, part for effect. “What the fuck . . . ?”

Frank was still shaking his head. “Too late. It's been chopped. I want to get it where
they
get it. From the
source
.”

Nate slowed, and Frank didn't. Catching up, the big
man eyeballed his old friend and then started laughing. “Pullin' my chain, right?”

Frank's eyes said
Wrong
.

Astounded, Nate managed, “
You're
gonna get it. Your own self.”

Frank shrugged with his face. “Why not? Good shit in life don't come around to hand itself to you. You got to go after it.”

Nate tossed the mango pit in the gutter. “You mean
you're
gonna go into the fuckin' jungle like fuckin' Tarzan?”

Frank shrugged. “I lived in jungles all my life, Nate. Where I lived, fuckin' Tarzan wouldn'ta made it.”

Nate put a hand on his friend's shoulder and stopped him, right there on the sidewalk, making a thousand people walk around the ex-soldier and the tourist. “No, you don't get it. This isn't
a
jungle. This shit is
the
jungle. Tigers. Vietcong. Fuckin' snakes
alone
will kill you!”

Frank raised an eyebrow. “And how is that different from Harlem?”

Khaki-clad Frank felt like
he was leading the goddamn Dirty Dozen, so motley a bunch were these Thai thugs and black soldiers, riding mules with shoulder-slung automatic weapons through jungle dense as a pussy patch. Funny thing was, he was enjoying himself, arrayed with pistol, rifle and ammo bandolier like a bronze Pancho Villa.

Days had passed since he'd sold Nate on the plan. They'd ridden in trucks and on boats and up and down every damn river in the Golden Triangle, as far as he could tell. And now they were about to arrive at the opium farm where Frank would do the deal that would change everything back home, that would make Bumpy Johnson a footnote in the Frank Lucas story.

If Frank didn't get himself killed, instead.

Right now they were under a pleasantly cooling canopy of foliage thick enough to blot out the sun. He could see the sunlight ahead, the light at the end of this tunnel, and when the canopy finally opened up, Frank Lucas found himself breathing in a syrupy sweet scent and staring down at a green-dotted-purple poppy field the size of Manhattan.

They stopped here and Nate had a confab with a Thai mercenary in the native gibberish. Frank waited for Nate to translate.

“He says,” Nate said, “this whole area's controlled by the Kuomintang—Chiang Kai-Shek's army.
Defeated
army. . . .”

Frank nodded. “They're on guard down there.” He'd already spotted the Chinese soldiers with their outdated weapons. “But what about those boys—
they
ain't Chinese.”

He was indicating a handful of white sentries in camouflage jumpsuits, Americans probably, with weapons that were real up-to-date.

Nate said, “CIA, likely.”

“Is that a problem?”

“I don't know. Let's see.”

Nate dispatched the Thai he'd spoken to before, sending him down to talk to the Chinese guerrillas, having no idea how the American spooks would figure in.

But all went well. Before long Frank and Nate were in a natural cavern the size of an airplane hangar, which Frank gathered was a major processing center. In this rocky cathedral, Frank and Nate used their Thai point man to translate a negotiation with what turned out to be a vanquished Chinese general.