Blind Man's Alley (37 page)

50

B
EFORE LA SOMBRA
started our association, he was already very involved with the battle for liberation of our people,” Armando Medina said. They were at a corner table in the cafeteria, Armando surrounded by Rafael and three other young Puerto Rican prisoners. “That’s what landed him in the
cárcel
in our homeland. When he was there, he realized it was the same system as on the outside, only in the
cárcel
they didn’t hide it no more. That’s one useful thing about being here,
hermanos:
it shows you real clear what this country thinks of you. ’Cause we all know, it ain’t so different in here than it is on the street. How they want to keep us in cages, beat us when they feel like it, keep us away from the good things they keep for themselves.

“La Sombra understood that no one man could stand up against injustice. He formed our association at El Oso Blanco, dedicated it to brotherhood, and to defending against the abuses of the prison. La Sombra was murdered in El Oso Blanco, but the association only grew bigger and more powerful.

“The association is now bigger in
Nueva
York than it is in our homeland. There’s hundreds of us here. The warden, the
policía
, they going to call us a gang. If we were white folks with money, they’d call us a political party,
hermanos
, but ’cause we poor and brown, they call us a gang.

“We not no gang. One hundred and fifty percent
corazón
. That’s what we have. Heart, my brothers. Heart. Every eye that is closed is not asleep. Every eye that is open is not seeing.”

Rafael understood that Armando was offering a well-rehearsed sales pitch. He looked around at the other young men who were listening to Armando’s spiel. He was surprised how rapt they all looked, like eager students seeking to impress a favorite teacher. Rafael understood the hunger: for protection, for power, for something to do in the midst of the overwhelming boredom and drudgery of prison.

Armando had approached Rafael a few days ago, right after Rafael had gotten out of the punitive segregation unit. Armando was again sitting down across from him in the cafeteria.

“Luis told me how you got sent to the bing,” he’d said. “’Cause of a shank.”

“Wasn’t my blade,” Rafael had said.

“I know it wasn’t. I told Luis he can’t be getting you in no more trouble like that. I know you could have said something to the CO, that asshole Ward they got running gang intel. But you kept your mouth shut, did the thirty days, and didn’t cause no trouble. Took what came at you like a man.”

Rafael said nothing, just looked at Armando.

“They got you back working with the laundry, right, doing setups?”

Rafael nodded. “I want to be working in the kitchen, but they won’t let me do that.”

“You been cooking up sandwiches on the iron? That shit’s better than anything they serve us out the kitchen.”

Rafael smiled. Making grilled cheese sandwiches by placing them in a brown paper bag and then running a clothes iron over it was a Rikers staple, and indeed they were better than most of what the kitchen offered. “Yeah, we do that. Not exactly like cooking, but it’s something.”

“Laundry can be like the mail around here, good way to move stuff around. You already did us a solid, though, not snitching out Luis on the shank. I’d like you to hear what we can do for you,
hermano.”

Rafael had been a little surprised that Armando had come back to him, given that Rafael had shrugged off his first approach. But that had been before Rafael had a deputy warden on his back, before he found himself accused of yet another thing he hadn’t done.

Armando turned to Rafael now, breaking through his reverie. “How about you?” he asked. “You understand that we are all fruit from the same tree?”

Rafael hesitated, not sure how to answer this. “I’m proud to be Puerto Rican,” he said.

“That’s something, but not everything. You smoke,
hermano?”

“Cigarettes?”

Armando laughed, turning to the others. “He smokes something, just not cigarettes. We got that too. The Association provides for the Association. I say it like that because the Association is its members, and we are the Association.”

Armando made a quick gesture, his hand palm outward, the index finger crossed in front of the middle finger. The guards were trained to watch out for gang signs; getting caught could get you put in the bing.

“So how we join up?” the young man next to Rafael asked.

“You got to follow the seven steps. You come talk to me later, any of you who wants to have brothers for life.”

As Rafael stood to leave, he found Armando standing next to him. “Will I see you later,
hermano?”
Armando asked.

Rafael understood all this talk of brotherhood for what it was. He knew what joining a gang would lead to; the question was whether he still had any choice. “I got to think on it,” he said.

“Nobody survives in here without his brothers,” Armando said, putting a hand on Rafael’s shoulder. “It’s important to be part of something beyond yourself.”

“I hear you,” Rafael said.

Armando smiled. “Struggle, share, progress, and live in harmony,” he said.

“Amen,” Rafael said.

51

A
RE YOU
listening to me?” Leah demanded.

Jeremy wasn’t, not really. Even in the best of times, paying attention to his older sister wasn’t his strong suit, and these were far from the best of times. Jeremy hadn’t been able to focus for a while now, and it was only getting worse.

He still didn’t quite understand what twisted impulse had made him pimp out Alena to Mattar. He’d realized the enormity of his mistake by the time he’d arrived back at his apartment that night. He’d called Alena’s cell phone repeatedly, but she hadn’t picked up. At his wits’ end, Jeremy had gone over to her building and let himself in at three a.m., scared about what he was going to find.

Alena wasn’t there; Jeremy decided to wait for her. He’d ended up falling asleep, but there was still no sign of her when he woke up a little before ten the next morning. Distracted and miserable at the office, he’d left a couple more messages during the course of the day, then headed straight back to her apartment after work.

All of Alena’s belongings were gone. The furniture remained, the apartment fully reverting back to the elegant sterility it had possessed as a display unit. Jeremy searched in vain for any sign of Alena, anything to indicate she had ever been there at all.

Jeremy didn’t have a clue how to track her down. She’d been living with a couple of roommates somewhere on the Lower East Side before moving into the model unit; Jeremy had never gone to that apartment. The only friend of hers he’d ever met was Ivy, and he didn’t even know Ivy’s last name, let alone how to contact her. All he had was Alena’s cell phone, which was now going straight to voice mail without ringing.

Jeremy hadn’t been expecting to miss Alena like he was. From the start he’d convinced himself that their relationship was fundamentally transactional in nature, more sexual barter than romance. Because he’d always ascribed mercenary motives to Alena, he’d tried to block himself from falling for her, not wanting to play the fool. That was probably why he had left her with Mattar: he’d figured one of them was bound to burn the other sooner or later, and he didn’t want to be the victim.

But what if her betrayal hadn’t been inevitable? What if there’d been a real possibility of their building something, and he’d destroyed it? What if he’d acted solely out of paranoia and an inability to trust people’s motives? So much of his waste of a life was nothing but one long self-fulfilling prophecy caused by his own preemptive destructiveness.

Jeremy also hadn’t seen Mattar since that night, assumed he never would again. The summit meeting between their fathers had taken place a few days later, and by the end of that meeting the Al-Falasi family had officially withdrawn as potential investment partners in the Aurora Tower. Jeremy’s father had not offered any details, and Jeremy knew better than to ask.

So whatever his reasons for betraying Alena, doing so hadn’t accomplished its supposed goal. Jeremy didn’t know where his father was going to turn next for the hundreds of millions of dollars they needed to keep the construction going.

“Jeremy?” Leah said, her voice rising as it always did when she was angry with him. “Please tell me you’re not high.”

Snapped back to the present, Jeremy rolled his eyes at his sister. They were in her office, a little before noon. “What’re you talking about?” he said irritably.

“You’re just refusing to pay attention out of principle? This is your mess, remember.”

The endless aftermath of the accident: one more thing Jeremy just couldn’t bring himself to care about anymore. He wondered if the instinct for self-preservation had simply withered away in him. He knew that the problems relating to the Aurora had spiraled out of control, and that it was far too late to come clean, the sins of the cover-up having by now exceeded those of the original crime.

“It sucks that the DA’s going after Pellettieri, but I don’t think we can shut that down, not at this point.”

“Pellettieri could sink you.”

“You want me to talk to him?”

“You can’t even be in the same room with him. For all you know he’s already flipped.”

Jeremy watched as his sister stood up from behind her desk and turned to the window, looking out at a swath of Central Park. “What do you want to do, then?” he asked.

“Darryl thinks we should get him to run.”

“Run? You mean like leave the country?”

“Darryl would organize it, do it professionally. He’d disappear.”

“Isn’t that up to Pellettieri?”

“Not necessarily,” Leah said, her voice clipped.

“What does that mean?”

Leah turned back around, but was still too agitated to sit down. “Look, we didn’t put Pellettieri in this position; he got there on his own. He’s the one who got those people killed.”

Jeremy felt a sudden stab of something like compassion. “I’m worried about you, Lee,” he said. “You’ve gotten too deep into this.”

“You think I should’ve just left it to you to handle?” Leah said. “You can’t even take care of yourself.”

“You’re my sister, not my mom.”

“Mom told me I was going to have to take care of you,” Leah said, before she could stop herself. It was something she’d almost let slip a half dozen times before.

Jeremy was half smiling. “Yeah, right,” he said. “When was this?”

“It was just before she died,” Leah said quietly, regretting having said it. “Mom told me you were going to need me to look after you.”

“I doubt this is what she meant,” Jeremy replied sarcastically.

“This isn’t some game I’m playing for my own amusement,” Leah snapped. “Your greed is what created this mess.”

“I never wanted anyone to get hurt.”

“You think that matters?” Leah said, feeling anger seep into her as she glared at her brother. “Nobody cares what you wanted to happen. What matters is what did.”

“What do you want from me?” Jeremy said angrily. “An apology? I’m totally fucking sorry that any of this happened, okay? I only came to you about Fowler because I didn’t know what else to do. All I was looking for was
advice
, you know. I didn’t know you were going to start running some kind of death squad.”

“Don’t you dare,” Leah said slowly, her face going taut. “Don’t you dare put this on me.”

“Fine,” Jeremy said angrily. “Are we done, then?”

Leah sucked in a breath, willing herself to calm down. “We can’t fall apart over all of this, Jeremy. That doesn’t do anybody any good. Are you okay?”

Jeremy looked at his sister, puzzled. “What do you mean, am I okay?”

“You haven’t seemed okay lately.”

“Things have been fucked up ever since the accident at the Aurora.”

“Really? Is that when things started to get fucked up?”

Now it was Jeremy’s turn to glare. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Leah hesitated, deciding not to say what she was thinking, which was that Jeremy’s shit had never been together, certainly not since their mother had died. Their father never should have put Jeremy in charge of the Aurora—it was the sort of mistake Simon never would have made if it hadn’t been his son. “Nothing,” she said instead. “Just that it seems like a long time now, we’ve been dealing with this. And you were right before: one thing just keeps leading to another—it keeps getting bigger whenever we try to control it.”

“Do you think Dad suspects anything?” Jeremy said.

“I don’t think Dad’s capable of imagining there’s anything going on in this company that he doesn’t know about. Certainly not anything like this.”

“He’d kill us if he knew,” Jeremy said. “Literally, don’t you think?”

“It might kill him,” Leah said. “But let’s not find out.”

Now it was Jeremy’s turn to study his sister. “How are you holding up?” he asked.

“I’m coping.”

“You’re fucking that lawyer, aren’t you?”

Leah was taken aback, less by the question itself than by the way Jeremy had asked it. “Don’t talk to me like that,” she said.

“Are you?”

“It’s not any of your business,” Leah said. “I never ask you about your sordid girls.”

“This lawyer, he knows a lot. Why aren’t you worried about him?”

“He’s on our team. Most of what he knows is privileged, and most of what he suspects he knows better than to think about. Our lawyers get to know our sins. Most of them, anyway.”