Hurt Machine (16 page)

“Yes, there was smoke,” he said, “lots of smoke and the stink of burning flesh and hair, but it wasn’t all smoke. There was ashes too, Mr. Moe, ashes of the dead falling like snow. You could not help but breathe it in. You would wonder sometimes, who it was you were breathing in. It was better not to dwell on it. If you would dwell on such things, it was all a man could do not to rip his own chest open or to throw himself onto the electrified fence. It was better to think of the small things like surviving.”

Only a man like Mr. Roth, a man who came out the other end of Auschwitz, could call surviving a small thing. But I don’t suppose all the scholarship and study by those who didn’t live through it could make sense of it. I never judged things Mr. Roth told me about his experiences in the camps. Who was I to judge, after all? And some truths can’t be argued.

I had seen three more hate-mailing scumbags that day, but my heart wasn’t in it. My lies were unconvincing and I barely listened to the answers to my questions. There was just something about Jorge Delgado that sang to me. He lit me up like a neon Christmas tree and I couldn’t say why exactly. Maybe it was that he wasn’t simply another run-of-the-mill misogynist or misanthrope. He wasn’t the typical griper or whiner. He didn’t feel sorry for himself or wronged by the world. He wasn’t a narcissist. No, he was something much more dangerous: a believer, a believer with a bad temper. But it wasn’t Delgado I was thinking about when I got out of the shower.

Still damp, I stood naked, staring at myself in the mirror and saw for the first time what I had become. I
was
thin and pale. I could see something in my future, brief as it might be, that I could never have imagined: frailty, my arms and legs as easy to snap as dried twigs. For the first time in my life I felt old. I didn’t want to think about the implications of old, especially if this was as old as I would ever get. I found self-pity especially unattractive. It’s what I hated about the people I’d spent my day with, but there I was, feeling cheated somehow. I turned away. As my Bubbeh used to tell me, “It is one thing to say
oy
vey
—oh, woe—and something else to say
oy
vey
iz
mir
—oh, woe is me.”

The phone interrupted my sad reverie. In a moot gesture, I wrapped the towel around my waist and rushed to answer. I wouldn’t have cared if it was a phone scammer calling. I just needed to speak to someone, anyone to help pull me out of the hole I’d been digging for myself.

“Hey, Moe.” It was Nick Roussis.

“Nick! Glad you called.” And I was. “What’s up?”

“Like I said I would the other night, I been keepin’ my eyes and ears open.”

I was confused. “Huh?”

“About the murder, you know? I said I would listen and I also sent out some feelers.”

“Then I take it you heard something.”

“You always was pretty smart that way, Moe. There’s no gettin’ anything by you.”

“I didn’t know Greeks were big on sarcasm.”

“Sure, it’s like democracy, we invented it.”

“Okay, Socrates, what did you hear?”

“You busy tonight?”

“I guess I am now,” I said.

“Come by the Grotto around eight. There’s somebody I think you should talk to.”

“Okay, as long as you don’t make me eat that shitty pizza.”

“Moe, you don’t show up, I’ll have pies delivered to your house for a week.”

“Now that’s a threat that scares me. I’ll be there at eight. Thanks, Nicky.”

“See you then.”

I hung up and was pretty curious about who it was Nicky wanted me to talk to. Sometimes I thought I would live as long as I was still curious. I bet a lot of cats had that same thought as they breathed their dying breaths.

TWENTY-FIVE

The Grotto was standing room only. I had been here before on many such late spring nights when I was a kid. Back then, in ancient times, before shopping malls, iPhones, or texting, it was a place to meet friends or girls or to go on tentative first dates. A lot, maybe too much, about the world had changed to suit me, but there was something comforting in seeing the faces I saw there that night. Kids might dress differently than they did when I was young, but all the technology in the world couldn’t beat the awkwardness and hormone-fueled behavior out of them. Girls still whispered in each other’s ears and giggled. Boys still strutted about trying to get noticed.

I thought of Pam and ached, not because I missed her, but because I didn’t. I hadn’t really thought about her in days. Carmella had done that to me. That was her particular brand of magic, or her curse. She had done it to me the first time I saw her in the lobby of the Six-O precinct over twenty years ago. The immediacy of attraction wasn’t mutual. I think the first thing Carmella ever said to me was, “Yo, you got a problem?” Which was followed with some crack about her not needing some middle-aged guy stalking her. Not exactly the start of a beautiful friendship. I was married to Katy then, happily so, though the first hairline cracks between us were beginning to show.

Carmella was the classic bad drug, my bad drug: once she came back to town, she blotted out the rest of the picture and all I could see was her. My reaction to her was chemical, reflexive. Even though I was pissed off at her for withholding Alta’s personal effects from me and for skipping out without an explanation, I couldn’t wait to see her again. My anger heightened the electricity between us; it always had. It was potent, this dance we did, unhealthy, but powerful. I guess, it’s why Carmella left me to go to Toronto in the first place. And now my being sick brought it to a whole new level. How could Pam compete with that? Suddenly, I wasn’t quite as wistful about the kids on their first dates. I kept my eyes straight ahead and walked to the door at the Grotto marked “Employees Only.”

Nick Roussis was sitting at his desk, his back facing the door. He didn’t seem to be conscious of me standing behind him because something on the computer screen had his complete attention. Just about the time I opened my mouth to say something, he slammed his fist down on the keyboard, sending keys flying off in all directions.

“What did that computer ever do to you?”

“Oh, Moe, Jesus! You startled me,” Nick said, trying to compose himself. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you come in. This,” he said, tossing the ruined keyboard in the trash,” is just about business. My suppliers are making me crazy. You own a business. You know how it is.”

Yes and no. I knew what it was like to have suppliers give me a hard time, but it never got me mad enough to take it out on the hardware. Then again, I’d never invested enough of myself in the wine business to lose it like that. I never cared about it like my brother Aaron cared about it, the way Nick cared about his restaurants.

“What, are the suppliers shorting you on your orders? Not giving you full value on your credits?” I asked.

“That should be the worst of it. Forget it. C’mon, the guy I want you to meet is—”

“Nicky, pick up line two,” a disembodied voice filled the room. “It’s your brother, Gus. He says it’s important.”

A angry look washed across Nick’s face, not dissimilar to the one he had after making short work of his keyboard. “Fuck!” He picked up the phone. “What?” He listened, his face hardening. Then he barked something out in Greek—a curse, no doubt. You don’t have to understand a language to understand its swear words. A long stream of Greek followed and it wasn’t love poetry either. Nick smacked his palm down on the corner of the desk. He listened for a couple of seconds and screamed into the phone before slamming it back into its cradle. I may not have been a keyboard smasher, but I certainly understood arguments between brothers.

“Not having a good night, huh?”

Nick was distracted. “What?”

“Having a bad night?”

“Yeah, let’s get outta here before the roof collapses. The guy I want you to talk to is waiting for us at a restaurant in Bay Ridge. C’mon out the back way. I’ll drive.”

We stepped through the near empty kitchen, out the rear door of the pizzeria, down the loading dock steps, and onto West 10th Street.

“My car’s over here.” He pressed a button on his key and the taillights on a gray BMW 525 winked at us.

“Nice ride,” I said, sliding into the front passenger seat.

“Gotta have some perks for all this fuckin’ aggravation, no?”

“You’ll get no argument from me, Nick.”

When Nick turned right onto 86th Street, neither he nor I had much of a stomach to look as we passed by the Grotto.

…

An old school Italian restaurant, D’Alto’s was an endangered species. Smelling of backyard red wine, garlic bread, Parmigiano cheese, and oregano, dimly lit with Chianti bottle candlestick holders covered in generations of melted wax, full of tables dressed in red and white checkered linens, the place reminded me very much of Cara Mia and a hundred other red sauce restaurants that had vanished from the Brooklyn landscape over the last decade. These kinds of places weren’t hip, weren’t Food Channel enough. Nothing that came out of the kitchen required a degree from the Culinary Institute of America. But I loved places like D’Alto’s because it smelled and tasted like my childhood, like eggplant and veal smothered in red sauce and covered in mozzarella cheese, like Brooklyn was supposed to taste.

An old man approached us with menus.

“We’re with him,” Nick said, pointing at a man seated at a table in the darkest corner of the restaurant. “Bring us three glasses of red to start, okay?”

The old man nodded yes. In a place like D’Alto’s, the wine list was very short: red or white. Period. Sometimes, it wasn’t even that extensive. Mostly, it was just red and then it was homemade either in someone’s basement or backyard. You drank it from water glasses and if it wasn’t fit to drink straight, you squeezed in some lemon and threw in a couple of ice cubes to cut it.

When we got to the dark table, the lone figure fairly popped up out of his seat. Except for some acne scars, he was a good-looking guy, maybe six-three, two hundred and sixty pounds, early thirties, with a huge upper body, a real prison build. Lots of empty time to fill up with push-ups and pull-ups and free weights. He had a head of neatly kept black hair, dark brown eyes, and a strong chin. He had a confused nose that couldn’t decide which way to go, but it added a nice bit of character to him.

“Joey Fortuna, this is Moe Prager, the guy I want you to talk to,” Nick said. “Moe, Joey Fortuna.”

We shook hands. Fortuna’s handshake and prison tats on his arms reinforced my guess about his workout routine.

“Joey here was once a firefighter, one of New York’s Bravest,” Nick continued.

“No wine for me,” Fortuna said, waving his glass away when the old man delivered the red wine and a basket of crusty bread. “Just some sparkling water and lime.”

I snickered. Nicky did too and told the old man to leave the third glass on the table, that he’d drink it.

“What’s so funny?” Joey wanted to know.

“Should you tell him, Moe, or should I?”

“Be my guest, Nicky.”

“Kid, in a place like D’Alto’s, you’re gonna get tap water with lemon. These old Guineas don’t know from sparkling water.”

The kid tried to laugh with us, but it sounded hollow. He was on edge. Whether that was because he didn’t like getting ragged on or because of what he’d been brought here to talk about, I couldn’t say. What was obvious was that he wasn’t having himself a grand old time.

Nick and I sampled the red wine. Definitely homemade, but not bad, no ice or lemon required. I put down my glass.

“You said Joey
was
a firefighter or didn’t I hear that right?” I asked.

“No, Moe, that’s right. Past tense,” Nick said.

Joey spoke up, “I got caught—”

“—selling steroids, right?” I finished his sentence.

“Fuck, man, how’d’ya know?”

“Acne scars, prison build, tats. You still juicing?”

“No way,” he lied. “I swore that shit off. I’m on parole. If they ever heard I was—”

“Calm down, kid. Calm down,” Nick said, patting Joey’s huge shoulder. “No one here’s interested in that kind of thing. No one wants anybody to get jammed up. Just tell Moe what you told me.”

The kid opened his mouth just as the old man came back to take our order. Nick did the honors.

“Cold antipasto plate, eggplant parm, veal parm, a big dish of ziti with red sauce. And him,” he said, pointing at Joey, “he’ll have two grilled chicken breasts with a salad. Oil and vinegar on the side. That okay with you, kid?”

“Lean protein and leafy greens. Just what I was gonna order.”

The old man shook his head in silent disgust.
Grilled! No breading! No red sauce!
Sacrilege!
He was still shaking his head as he walked away.

“Okay, kid, tell the man,” Nick cued Fortuna. “Tell Moe what you’ve been doin’ to make ends meet.”

Fortuna bowed his head and muttered, “Collections.” Then louder, “I been doing collections.”

“Not traditional collections, I take it. You’ve been working for someone who puts money on the street,” I said.

“That’s right. I sorta convince guys that are slow payers to speed up their delivery, if you know what I mean.”