Kockroach (10 page)

And suddenly, a whole new territory has opened up for Kockroach to plunder.

Pressed and pleated, shaved and shined and buffed, tie tightened, belt cinched, shoes double-knotted, jacket double-buttoned to his throat, glasses on, hat on, grin on, cigarette burning like a warning in his teeth, Kockroach saunters out of the elevator and greets the world.

“Good evening, Mr. Blatta.”

“Anything we can get you, Mr. Blatta?”

“Should I check your mail, Mr. Blatta?”

Kockroach stops at the main desk, tells the clerk a guest will be coming during the night.

“Very good, Mr. Blatta.”

“Your car is here, Mr. Blatta.”

“Step away, please, and let Mr. Blatta through.”

A path is cleared as if for a tycoon and doors are opened as if for a starlet. Kockroach walks through the crowded lobby, leaving gapes and green tributes in his wake.

Istvan is waiting for him outside, leaning on the hood of the big humped Lincoln, chocolate brown and encrusted with chrome. Istvan is Kockroach’s driver, promoted by Kockroach from the pack of lowly gangsters who police the Square. Istvan’s huge arms are crossed, his peaked cap is tipped up on his wide blond head, his narrow blue eyes light up with devotion when he sees Kockroach exit the hotel. Istvan jumps away from the hood and reaches for the door.

“Good evening, Mr. Blatta.”

Kockroach ducks into the car without breaking stride.

“What’s on the agenda tonight, Mr. Blatta?” says Istvan, his accent thicker than his arms.

“Beeswax.”

The Murdock Hotel is a desiccated pile of cracked brick wedged between a dusty supply warehouse to the east and a failing shirtwaist factory to the west. The desk clerk, perched
on a stool, hunched over something pornographic, glances up to see Kockroach standing before him and jerks back so hard he slams into the boxes behind him, sending mail and keys clattering to the floor.

“Room two-two-four,” says Kockroach.

“Right away,” says the clerk as he drops to his knees and searches the floor for the key.

Kockroach climbs the steps slowly, sensing their rotting boards, their foul stench. He slams his fist on the damp wall and a slab of plaster dislodges to crash upon and tumble down the steps. He opens the door to Room 224 without a knock and finds Sylvie shivering beneath a blanket on her bed. She startles when she sees him, sits up, teeth chattering. The blanket slips down, baring her sagging, mismatched breasts and the ribs beneath them.

“Get dressed,” he says. “We’re going out.”

“I can’t, Jerry. God, I can’t. Don’t you see how sick I am?”

Kockroach steps forward and sits on the bed. He gently caresses the side of her face. She leans into his touch.

“I don’t want to see you like this,” he says.

“I miss you too, Jerry. We’re never together anymore. Remember when you used to take me out, when I taught you to dance at the Latin Club? Those were times, weren’t they? I know I haven’t been working enough, but I’m still sick. Even with the medicine you been giving me, I can’t do it anymore. I have to get away. I got a sister in Pittsburgh. I was thinking of visiting her, just for a while, to get back my strength.”

“You’ll be swell. You need to get up, step out. We’ll go for a ride.”

“I can’t get up. I can’t move.”

Kockroach reaches into his jacket, pulls out a small wax-paper bundle tied with a bright red string, and drops it onto her bed. The faint aroma of vinegar rises from the blanket.

“Medicine,” says Kockroach.

“I don’t know what’s worse,” says Sylvie, “the sickness or the cure.”

“Get dressed,” he says, standing. “I’ll be waiting for you outside.”

Sylvie stares at the bundle with the red thread for a long moment, as if deciding on something, and then snatches it to her chest.

“And Sylvie,” he says, his smile brightening, “put on something sharp.”

Istvan drives the Lincoln slowly through Times Square, the phantasm of light and color reflecting off the brown, the chrome, the glass like a scrambled message from a neon god. Kockroach sits jammed into the corner of the backseat, a cigarette in his teeth, one hand clamped on Sylvie’s knee. She is in a black dress with sequins, high heels, a fluffy boa wrapped around her neck. Her face is pale, pale as death, but her lips are painted red.

Istvan slows the car and then stops. Kockroach’s door opens, a red-haired woman in a tight sweater and bangle earrings leans into the car. “Sylvie,” she says, “dragged your skinny ass out of bed, did you?”

Sylvie snuggles up to Kockroach and licks his ear. Without
turning her head, she slips a stare at the woman. “Get back to work, Denise. There might be a sailor still who hasn’t filled your mouth.”

“Leastways I’m working, baby.”

“Since you’re in the dough, let me give some advice. Do something about them snaggleteeth.”

The red-haired woman smiles.

“Please,” says Sylvie, “before you start frightening small children.”

“How’s beeswax?” says Kockroach.

“Started slow, must be a Bible convention in town, but it’s picking up.”

“Let me see.”

The woman pulls a wad of bills from inside her sweater. Kockroach takes them, sniffs them, jams them into his jacket. “Any trouble?” he asks.

“A tall hat from Texas thought he was so good he should get it for free. Janine whispered your name and he near pissed himself trying to take the wallet out of his pants.”

“I’ll be back before dawn. Tell Janine I want her to wait for me.”

The red-haired woman nods her head at Sylvie. “Why she get to ride tonight?”

Sylvie leans over Kockroach. “’Cause Jerry is tired of your fat ass and wanted a dose of class.”

“Dose of clap is more like it.”

Kockroach pushes the red-haired woman out the door and slams it shut. Istvan pulls away, down Broadway, as Sylvie leans over and sticks her tongue out at the window.

The great face rising above the car, its mouth open as if in perpetual surprise, blows a ring of smoke.

The brown car slides through empty streets.

“Where are we going?” asks Sylvie.

“I have something to show you.”

Sylvie cuddles up. “Some out of the way club? Some exotic gangster hangout?”

“Something like that.”

“Anyplace is fine,” she says, drowsily leaning her head on his strong left arm. “Surprise me.”

“That’s the intention,” he says. “Feeling better?”

“Much.” She yawns.

“Are you too tired to dance?”

“Don’t be silly,” she says, rubbing his stomach with her left hand. “I’m never too tired to dance with you.”

The streets narrow, twist and turn. The car purrs along, turns right, squeezes through an alleyway. It comes out on a wide stretch of asphalt, lined with blocky brick buildings fronted by wooden frames, the frames empty now of the carcasses hanging daily in the mornings. The thick smell of meat, rotting, luscious, hovers over the puddles and the cracked sidewalks, the dim streetlights, the overturned trash bins being scavenged by rats.

A huge dog in an alley, gnawing on the raw haunch of something, bends in respect as the brown car passes.

“Where are we?” says Sylvie, suddenly sitting up.

“Go to the end, Istvan,” says Kockroach.

“Is that the club?” says Sylvia.

“The far end.”

The car pulls to the end of the street, turns right, then left again, where they reach a wide, uneven strip of cobbles leading to a row of desultory wooden piers, ill lit, swirling with fog, seeming to be in the very process of slowly, agonizingly, collapsing into the Hudson River. Sylvie shrinks from Kockroach when she sees the piers.

On one, a shadow leans on a post, its very posture a signal of defeat. On another, toward the street, are two shadows, one walking fast, head swiveling, the other, well behind, dragging itself toward the light. A car rumbles along the cobblestones, stops at still another pier, a shadow slips in, the car moves off.

“Why’d you bring me here?” says Sylvie, unable to hide the desperation in her voice. “What business do you have here?”

“Do you see the pier straight ahead?”

“What about it, Jerry?”

“It’s yours now, sweet pea.”

“Go to hell. I’m no pier monkey. It’s only dope fiends and toothless scags that need work the piers.”

Kockroach loops a finger around her lower lip and pulls it down. There is a large gap between her front teeth and her back molar. “I’d say you’re a bit of both.”

“It was you that gave me the medicine. It was you that did this to me.”

“You were sick, you needed to be working. Like now.”

“Not here, not on the piers. Jerry, don’t make me do this.”

“Every bum needs a job.”

“Jerry, please. I’m begging you, no. Don’t do this. Let me go to Pittsburgh. My sister lives there. Front me the bus fare, that’s all I’m asking. I’ll get well. I’ll come back better than ever and be the queen of the Square. I was prime once, don’t you remember? We had something, didn’t we? We had nights. I taught you to dance at the Latin. Don’t do this, please, please, I’m begging you, please.”

Kockroach leans over and opens Sylvie’s door. “Nothing personal, pal, just beeswax.”

“Don’t, no, God, don’t make me, please, please, not the piers. I’ll do anything, anything.”

He lets her cry on as a wisp of fog floats in the door. He doesn’t have to shove her out, he sits there and waits until she cries herself into silence and then climbs out all on her own.

“You did this to me, you stinking cockroach,” she yells as she slams the door shut, losing her balance in the effort.

Kockroach watches silently as she staggers over the wide, uneven expanse of cobbles, reaches the pier, collapses against a wooden pole. He remembers that this is the first human with which he ever mated and wonders if that matters. He decides that it doesn’t. Kockroach does not read, but if he did he would agree with Shakespeare that “what’s past is prologue.” And if Kockroach did, in fact, ever have a book in his hand, he would certainly skip past the prologue and get right to the meat of it, which is the desiccated woman gripping desperately the wooden pole, now, turning from a drain on his
finances to a productive member of his organization, now. Something needed to be done.

“You’ll check on her later, Istvan, make sure she stays all night.”

“No problem, Mr. Blatta. Where to?”

“The Acropolis.” Kockroach lights a cigarette. “Word is the
Nonos
wants to talk.”

If you took a midnight stroll
in the Square in them days, missy, what would you see? Degenerate womanizers, degenerate joint swingers, degenerate jazz fiends and drug fiends, and hooch hounds. It was a landscape of degeneration, God bless us all. But of all the degenerate degenerates patrolling the Square in them days, the most degenerate of all were them degenerate gamblers, the DGs.

Was a DG what made his life on the Square when first I arrived name of Jimmy Slaps. He had scuffed shoes and a long face and he wore his greasy old raincoat rain or shine, its filthy beige tail trailing after him like an ugly rumor as he cruised the Square looking for a bet, any bet, at any odds. If was a craps game going off in an alleyway south of Forty-fourth, Jimmy Slaps was there. If was a poker game being dealt in some fleabag flophouse, Jimmy Slaps was scratching behind his ear and raising hard on his two pair. His bible was the racing form, his drug of choice was long-shot odds, he jacked off to queens full.

See, the thing about a DG is he believes he’s found the answer to Hubert, the very purpose of life, and that the Main Street fools living without the thrill of seeing if the up card matches the two jacks down are the ones what are missing
out on the true sweetness of the world. That’s why a sure thing don’t never interest guys like Jimmy Slaps. You want a sure thing, sell shoes for a living; Jimmy Slaps, he wanted to gamble.

And here’s the killer. If to be good at the thing you love to do is to be blessed in this world, then Jimmy Slaps was a limp-dick Mongol in a Chinese whorehouse.

So there was a poker game going down in the Chelsea Hotel off Forty-first, a big-money game organized by two pros from Chicago, and all the DGs on the Square was hot to take part. I’m talking about legends now. There was Shifty Mahoose, there was Kings Dagboy, there was Ices Neat, there was Tony Marrone. Big game, hot game, and naturally Jimmy Slaps wanted—no needed—to buy in. But the buy-in was a grand and Jimmy Slaps just then didn’t have enough to fade a game of nickel craps.

Old Jimmy was left out in the cold until Kings Dagboy, never a generous soul to begin with, agreed to cover Jimmy Slaps’s buy-in in exchange for nothing more substantial than a signature. It was a puzzling turn of events, more puzzling still when you knew that the Slap in Jimmy Slaps came from the way Jimmy’s eyes lit and he tapped the table with his fingertips whenever the card he was looking for came through.

With a tell like that, it wasn’t long afore Jimmy Slaps slapped hisself right out of that game, a thousand off the nut to Kings Dagboy. And Kings started immediately putting the squeeze on Jimmy, literally, throwing him in the crapper of that room at the Chelsea, taking Jimmy’s head in his meaty hands and squeezing that long face until Jimmy’s eyes near popped.

Jimmy begged for time, Kings Dagboy laughed and let loose his fists, busting Jimmy’s nose, knocking out two teeth. If Jimmy Slaps was a sad sack afore, now he was a bleeding piece of meat a thousand to the wrong with nowheres to run and no hopes of getting there. That’s when Kings made his offer. It was all a setup from the start, see, all a way for Kings to entertain the two pros from Chicago and make a profit on the thou in the process. And with his back against a toilet and Kings Dagboy’s fist aiming once again for his face, Jimmy Slaps had no choice but to agree.

When word got out, every DG on the Square wanted in on the action. Kings was making book and within five hours of the deal there was twenty thou on the line one side or the other, with Kings bound to make a couple G’s on the vig alone no matter how it all turned out. They set it up in the basement of an old garment factory on Thirty-ninth and the crowd poured in, a festive high-spirited crowd as interested in the show as in the welfare of their bets. Kings’s runners was working the crowd, taking bets to the last minute. Entrepreneurial souls was edging through the room with a bottle and a glass selling whiskey pure for a buck a swallow. Long-lost pals was shouting greetings back and forth like at a county fair.

It were a party until Jimmy Slaps hisself appears like magic beside a crate at the back end of the basement. Hoots and cheers and a few more bets taken and then the crowd quiets. Jimmy Slaps, shivering now, steps up on the crate, sweat pouring down his bloodied face, his filthy raincoat swirling about him, a revolver in his shaking right hand.

“This is my last bet, boys,” he tells the crowd in a quavering
voice. “Life is all snake eyes without faith in something purer than a string of numbers hit. No more will I put my faith in a king-high straight, now I pledge myself to the King of Kings, the only shooter worth a bet. I have promised God I am finished with the life, and I want you all to keep me to it. If I make it through, no matter how I whine or beg, I’m asking you not to take my bets. Will you do that for me, will you, boys?”

The crowd lets out a roar, but not a roar of assent. It is a roar of disdain, a full-throated bellow of heckles and crude remarks, telling old Jimmy Slaps to quit the Bible-punching and get right to it. A crowd of DGs don’t want to hear about no change, no redemption, no promises to the great good Lord. All they wants is the bet laid and the race run so they can head to the window and lay another.

Jimmy Slaps smiles right into that roar, smiles as if, by God, he means every word of it, that he is finished with it all, that face to face with death itself, he has found an answer to Hubert and is ready to change. And in the middle of the crowd, selling my whiskey for a buck a shot, I believe him, that he really has found an answer. And I cheers for the son of a bitch, I does, I cheers as loud as my larynx allows.

Until right then, in the middle of the crowd’s disapproving roar and my cheers of hope, Jimmy Slaps puts that gun smack to his head and pulls the trigger.

We was royalty, the Boss and me. We ruled the Square, under the kingly benediction of the
Nonos
. We was funny kind of partners; I did what the Boss told me and he, well, he told
me what to do. There it was, the delicate nature of our partnership, and it didn’t matter that I was the brains behind our rise in the Square, that I soothed the nerves he rankled and kept the money flowing, because he was the muscle and muscle always gets the bigger say. I knew better than to hold any kingly ambitions myself, but as long as he let me tell him what I needed to do, and then I followed his directions like a lapdog, we got along like gangbusters and we was both of us making out. I had climbed as far as ever I could hope to climb, I was the key man under the key man in Times Square and life was ever so grand.

Or was it?

Jimmy Slaps, what did he want in this world? He wanted to gamble, to bet, to feel the probabilities work their smooth impartial magic on his life. But when it became too real, when the hammer was cocked and the barrel faced his temple at a smooth six-to-one, suddenly he didn’t want the magic of them odds no more. You see, sometimes everything you’re hustling for it comes true and then you wonder if all that time you been hustling for the wrong damn thing.

In the spare moments between collecting the protection moneys and collecting the sharking moneys and collecting from our whores and collecting our cuts from the beer and drugs and smuggled cigs what was sold on our turf, in the spare moments I began to wonder if maybe I’d be in a whole different line if Old Dudley hadn’t sidled up to me in that library and started whispering about chess in my ear and that maybe the whole other line might have been the right line for me.

I see you trying to hide your sniggers. What the hell could
Mite ever hope to be except a hustler, a chiseler, a thief? What other could Mite ever expect for hisself except the bowl of crap he fell into in hitching a ride on the back of the Boss. But see, maybe our fates ain’t as fixed as you would have it. Maybe it ain’t so set in stone, the way our lives they turn out. What better proof of that than old Jimmy Slaps, swearing afore the whole of his peers that his life would change and never would he take another bet.

I thought about going the Jimmy Slaps route, hitting my knees and asking God to save me, I even strolled every now and then up to old St. Pat’s and slipped into the cool calming darkness and watched the light twist blue and red through them windows. But in the end, when it came time for the actual praying, I couldn’t go through with it.

I mean let’s say He is everything them street-corner preachers say He is, let’s just say it. Then He is everything, ain’t He? The sun, the moon, the scrap piece of trash floating like a beam of light on the shiv of the wind. And if He’s everything, then He’s nothing too. Which meant when Hubert came a-visiting my mom, filling her with nothing, maybe he was really filling her with God, and hell with that. I couldn’t help the feeling that if ever I dropped to my knees and said the words and tried to open my heart, it would never be what I hoped would come rushing in, some guy with a long white beard and a cardigan and a pipe calling me sonny boy and tiger. No, it would be Hubert hisself jumping in my head and making hisself at home and sending me spinning in the air afore I fell on the floor with foam coming out my mouth.

So no, it wasn’t never going to be prayer that saved me, no
way, I was onto that scam. But see, by then I had something else in mind.

First time ever I saw her it was storming like an orphan and I was soaked to the bone and I dived into the Automat for a refuge and there she was, seated by the window, stirring her coffee. Flawlessly beautiful, the line of her jaw, the bump of her nose, the pale white skin, eyes the blue of a sky you don’t never see in the city, the blue of a sky over an Iowa cornfield, and missy, I had never been to Iowa and still I knew. And when I saw her, all at once my little hustler dreams they faded like a fog beneath the sun and I understood, with the vicious cruelty of a bully boy, exactly what I was and all them things that would never be mine.

And then she stood and walked her crippled walk over to refill her coffee cup and my heart, my twisted black heart, it cracked open with hope. For I knew then that we was two of a kind, this woman and me, two bodies marked with misfortune, two lonely souls looking for comfort in a world what starts out cruel on the schoolyard and goes downhill from there. You could see the goodness in her, how could there not be with her leg in a brace, and her face it glowed with her goodness, just like my mother’s face, even in the throes of her episodes, maybe especially then. And the goodness there, along with her affliction, it gave me the courage to hitch up my pants and slide over to her table and sit down uninvited and tell her a story and ask for my thirty-nine cents. And there it began between Celia and me.

By the time of now I’m speaking, we was painting the town once a week, rubbing shoulders with the hoit-toit at “21,”
chugging wine, chewing steaks so thick you had to cuts each piece twice, longways and then sideways, just to get it in your mouth. Good times we had then, and I could confide in her everything about my life except the one thing what mattered most, the desire what kept me up at night, the desire to take care of her, to protect her, to matter to her, just like it was with me and my ma. And we wanted the exact same things, Celia and me, I could tell, security, peace, a place of our own, a family, with the kids reaching up theys little arms to us.

Silly, ain’t it, a guy like me dreaming that hackneyed picket-fence dream, but when you’re my size normalcy suddenly ain’t so normal.

Yeah there it is, what would save me from Hubert’s grasp, the only thing worth the game. Love, dammit, love would save me. I loved Celia Singer, not like the cricket’s love some moke with a highball and a hard-on feels for the dancer what’s grinding away on his lap, no, missy. My love was purer than that, higher than the meat and kidneys what rule the day on this soiled heap of dust. It was like a hard cold star in the night sky, like the flight of a white pigeon skimming the rooftops as it makes its way home, like the explosion in my heart when my momma let the emptiness flow through her one last time.

Can you feel it, missy? I still can. From the first moment I laid eyes on her, it never stopped glowing.

I could never tell Blatta about what I was hoping for with Celia because Blatta wasn’t the type in who to confide your soft intimate yearnings. And I couldn’t tell our girls what were working the Square, and I couldn’t tell the barkeeps what
were paying our protection, and Peter, over at “21,” he didn’t want to hear it, and my mother she was dead. In fact, there was only one Joe what I could confide all my hopes and dreams to, only one who seemed to understand. And this you’ll never guess, this is a beautiful thing, this, because the Joe I was confiding to was the one Joe what could make it all come true.

Fat Nemo drummed the tabletop with his fat fingers. He was dressed to the nines, double-breasted pinstripes, tie tight. When Nemo, with that neck of his, so thick it was like he had no neck, had his tie tight it meant business. I’m setting the scene, all right, just sos you understand how what happened happened. It ain’t so easy to see sometimes. Sometimes it’s like the smallest breath of air changes everything. Fat Nemo, I knew by then, was the number two in the organization. Sitting beside Nemo was Mr. Abagados, the
Nonos
. The old man appeared to be sleeping, his hands on his cane, his chin falling down to his throat.

“He knows to come?” said Nemo to yours truly.

“I tolds him so myself,” I said.

“Then where the hell might he be, Mite?”

“He’s having problems.”

“Is that so?”

“With a whore.”

“Well, that is a surprise, isn’t it, problems with a whore.”

The back room behind the kitchen of the Acropolis was set for a banquet, a banquet without no food, the long tables
arranged in a O, with the
Nonos
and Nemo at the head table and the bottom U filled with men in slouch hats and bulky jackets, all the headmen of the Abagados mob, sitting back, yawning, rubbing their noses.

“What about we order up some grub,” said one of the men.