Police and Thieves: A Novel (17 page)

Her husband had organized all the kids around a pink papier-mâché donkey piñata hanging from the ceiling in the living room. A blindfold was placed over the birthday boy’s eyes, and he was given a stick to strike the donkey. Everyone screamed when he took a swing and missed the piñata, nearly falling over. He flailed wildly and by chance struck pay dirt—the donkey’s legs broke open and a shower of toys fell to the floor.

A black plastic squirt gun lay among the goodies, and I jumped on top of a girl’s shoulders to get my fingers around its fluted barrel. Another girl with bobbed hair tried to take the gun away from me, but I refused to give it up, and she started to bawl. The next thing I knew, I was surrounded by a posse of adults. The toy was wrenched from my hands by Doojie Sr. who shamed me in front of everyone. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know how to share weapons?”

He and the host’s wife escorted me from the living room downstairs to the basement, a bare-walled room occupied by a Maytag washer and dryer. In the doorway, Doojie Sr. put his hand on the hostess’s hip and pointed at a chair next to the dryer, saying to me, “You sit there and cool out. The next time you want a gun, just ask politely. That’s all you have to do. It works like a charm.”

Flaherty was getting closer. I ran down Valencia toward the police station with my whole life unreeling before my eyes. Louis flashed through my mind—after the beating he received from Flaherty, I’d gone to his house in Bernal Heights to deliver him a courtesy
eighth, a token of my esteem for not ratting on me.

I’d never been to his home before. It was a two-storied cottage on the northwestern slope, the more affluent section of the hill. How he managed to afford that, I don’t know. Louis let me in the door and I squeezed by him into a spotless vestibule, then he went ahead of me into the kitchen, saying over his shoulder like he was very busy, “Follow me.”

He led me into a sunny nook that faced the blue waters of the East Bay and the shipping yards in China Basin. A huge, red-tinged smokestack rose up from the shoreline, dwarfing the warehouses around it. Louis had two frying pans going on his stove. One of them was crackling with six eggs, the other pan was smoking with bacon. The toaster popped up two pieces of browned Wonder bread. By the sink there was a plate of yams and a stack of corn muffins on a napkin. Louis had an apron around his waist, and he was drinking buttermilk from a carton; there was a ring of it drying around his mouth. He squinted at me, asking, “So, Doojie, you want something to eat?”

A lone black woman panhandler in a watch cap was standing by Taqueria El Toro with a paper cup in her hand. Behind her, the sandstone bulwarks of the police station loomed at the intersection, huge and silent against the neon-lit foggy sky. Eichmann shouted at me, telling me to watch my back. I craned my head: Flaherty’s obsidian eyes burned into mine.

Not everyone was in hot water like me. Five blocks away on Mariposa Street, Loretta was probably taking a nap at Eichmann’s aunt’s place. The old woman’s studio was small and filled with her
chotchkes
, but she had an extra fold-out bed for Loretta.

Mrs. Popolovsky was Eichmann’s only living relative, the elder sister of his long-gone mother. Every time I went over there to see how Loretta was doing, Mrs. Popolovsky would wave me in
the door with a scolding, saying, “Come in. Come in already.”

She was thrilled Loretta was having Eichmann’s baby. She was already praying for a boy and asking Loretta if they would bring up the child in the orthodox way. I don’t know how Mrs. Popolovsky ended up in Oklahoma. Eichmann never told me, but her drawl was as pronounced as Loretta’s. She wore a sack dress with light-brown orthopedic shoes, the kind you laced up the sides. Her English was poor, and to compensate for it, she used gobs of volume to make herself understood. Mrs. Popolovsky was feeding the pregnant girl
schmaltz
night and day. “To fatten up the baby and make it strong like its father,” she said.

The thing of it was Loretta wasn’t a Jew. Mrs. Popolovsky didn’t give two hoots. “A baby is a baby. It’s a saint. It isn’t born a
ganef
. It becomes one.”

At the stop light, Eichmann waved his arms and ran into the street, moving against the traffic toward the Elbo Room, a club on the corner of Sycamore. The place used to be known as Amelia’s, the only dyke bar in San Francisco.

Eichmann pushed his way in the door, past the people queuing up to pay the cover charge. He never paid for anything if he could help it. The doorman, a muscle-bound laid-back guy in a fedora and gold chains, didn’t have a chance to register what Eichmann was doing. Eichmann went by him so fast, all he left behind was his musky smell.

I leapfrogged over a parked car and bounded into the street, crossing the yellow dividing line, intent on following Eichmann into the Elbo Room. My approach was foxy. On the sidewalk I flopped onto my stomach and snaked in between the legs of a man in a Nike jacket, inching forward. The bouncer heard some noise, but I was well below eye level, and he didn’t see me until I was already in the door and past him.

Nobody bothered me when I got to my feet. A girl in a tight iridescent minidress brushed my chest with her bare arm. She made a wince that passed for a smile, looking down her aquiline nose at me.

Eichmann was sitting by himself on a barstool in the corner next to the men’s room. He had his back to the wall and he was nursing a beer. His frayed pant cuffs were high on his shins, exposing his alabaster pale ankles and the drooping black nylon socks he’d worn for weeks. He was moving his foot to the beat of the music, letting his eyes roam across the room.

Maybe I should have let him alone. He was trying to get away from me as much as he was trying to get away from Flaherty. But the seat next to him was empty and I climbed aboard it. The bartender looked at me, though I didn’t say anything. A breathless waitress came over and dumped a load of dirty glasses onto the dish rack. A big black dude stalked out of the rest room, slamming the door behind him, just inches from Eichmann’s ear. My partner took it all in with a world-weary gaze and said to me, “What do you want, Doojie?”

I wanted a lot of things. The landlord showed up the other evening with a rental cop, a private security-guard type, to evict us. We stopped what we were doing, shut the roll-down door, and barricaded ourselves inside the garage. Since we’d gone shopping that morning at Trader Joe’s, we had enough supplies to withstand a siege for at least a week. Eichmann peered through the slats in the wall facing the driveway and said, “These guys are idiots.”

Instead of filing a trespassing charge and having the Mission police come and get us, the landlord hired a rent-a-cop. It wasn’t a legal move on his part, so we let him stand outside the carport for the remainder of the night, screaming at us in Chinese and Spanish. In California, possession of the property was nine-tenths of the law. He couldn’t do anything to us.

Then there was the issue of blood. Who was my father? My mother refused to tell me. You’d think he’d killed her, whoever it was. I felt like a vampire waiting for nightfall. I had someone else’s dreams, their skin, their knobby legs, their bad teeth. I belonged to someone I’d never seen.

Eichmann’s eyes grew fixed, staring over my shoulder. “Fucking hell,” he said. “Guess who’s here?”

Casually, like I didn’t mean anything by it, I half turned on the stool. A few feet away from us, Flaherty sat by himself in a booth. His face was convulsing with a spastic twitch. His long hair was shellacked with mousse gel and hung over his eyes in ropes. The narc’s complexion was shining white and hot in the bar’s orangeade light. There was a bottomless pit in his eyes, the mark of the undead. A cocktail waitress asked him what he wanted to drink, and without taking his eyes off me, he gave her his order. Flaherty’s hands were shaking, he was so tense.

I faded into myself, trying to get a grip on things.

During the Russian Revolution, my grandfather said he’d gotten a leave from the war front and found a train to take him home. It was night and he found a seat in the dark and fell asleep. Some time later the train pulled out of the station. When he woke up at daybreak, he was in a rail car filled with soldiers like himself, young, half-starved peasant conscripts, the sons of serfs, poorly trained and badly armed. The snag was, they were dead. He read the sign on the train’s window—even though it faced outward, he deciphered the warning—a medical skull-and-bones logo that said he was riding on a plague train.

That’s how it was being with Flaherty in the Elbo Room. The man was a disease. The cocktail waitress came back with a double whiskey and a Beck beer chaser. He laid a ten-spot on her tray; she mock-bowed to him and walked away. More people were entering
the club. Flaherty seemed content to stay where he was; the drinks visibly relaxed him. Despite the lack of available seating, he was alone in the booth because of his fearsome presence and size. Nobody wanted to get near him. Eichmann muttered, “Fuck him. We can sit here all night if we have to.”

The second Eichmann made his pronouncement, Flaherty unholstered his pistol. Pulling out a loaded gun in a bar is only done by certain men. Some want to perform a robbery. Others are drunk and unsure of what they’re doing. In either case, some form of self-interest is being expressed. But Flaherty was beyond self-interest. He straightened out his hand and aimed the snout of the Smith and Wesson at my head. Eichmann said, “What’s up?”

I could have told him we were going to die and go to hell—he would’ve believed it. It was a place so similar to the neighborhood. Dee Dee and Maurice lived there. Papaya vendors sold fruit from two-wheeled carts under the shade of Mission Street palm trees; old men passed the afternoon at Los Portales Pharmacy waiting for their wives; the bells of Mission Dolores tolled on the hour, and black-and-white police cars were parked near every corner.

A woman in a spandex dress with Farah Fawcett hair saw the gun in Flaherty’s hand and went berserk, shrieking at the top of her lungs. There was an immediate stampede for the door. A young black woman jumped over a booth; she missed the table where Flaherty stood and sank one of her high heels into his chest.

He lost his balance and fell to one side; the Smith and Wesson slipped from his fingers as he was trampled underfoot. We lost sight of him in the mob, and without any further ado, Eichmann and I exited the nightclub onto the sidewalk, bursting into the street. The moist, autumn-chilled air was cool on our faces, making me smile. Eichmann marveled all the way back to
the garage. “It’s an omen, Doojie. Our luck is improving.”

In September the palm trees on Mission Street turn brown as the days get hotter. During that September, Eichmann and I were asked by Mrs. Popolovsky to come and have dinner with her. While I was warmed by her invitation, I didn’t look forward to the meal. Eichmann was pleased his aunt cared enough to make such an offer. “Count your blessings. She wasn’t always this nice,” he said.

Ever since our last altercation with Flaherty, we’d been laying low. Accordingly, our enterprise was paralyzed. In this way, the narc had won a victory over us. We’d been able to retain our freedom, but we paid for it—I was afraid to go outside. Eichmann was philosophical about our status. “Look at it this way. We ain’t the only ones hurting. Nobody else is doing any better than us.”

It was true. The dope trade in the neighborhood had dried up in August. The simple selling of a nickel bag of weed had vanished like a lost folk art. The police were everywhere, cracking down on the Valencia Street junkies, busting heads, running people into jail. It was so much easier to stay in the garage and not deal with any of it.

But our home was under attack. The landlord was stepping up his campaign to reclaim the garage by trying to serve us with a three-day eviction notice for failure to pay rent. The process server, a lanky law student with horn-rimmed glasses, was coming by the carport four or five times an afternoon, seeing if anyone was in. The summons to court had to be delivered in person, so we made sure he never caught us. This escapade was in its second week,
costing the landlord hundreds of dollars.

The stroll over to Mariposa Street was pleasant. Eichmann and I went down Seventeenth Street and stopped to have a look at the former police station, a sandblasted two-storied stone building spread out on a lot near Treat Street. At the turn of the century, the jail housed the Irish bootleggers in the neighborhood.

We got to Mrs. Popolovsky’s studio just as the sun went down over Twin Peaks. Diamond Heights, Corona Heights, and Buena Vista Park in the Haight-Ashbury were varnished black and glowing from a faint silver line of light left in the sky. Eichmann made a grunt. “C’mon, let’s go inside.”

The door was open and we went in. Eichmann accidentally tipped over the cat’s litter box, depositing its contents onto the shag carpeting. Mrs. Popolovsky was in the kitchen heaving a colander of steaming potatoes into a Tupperware container. The fold-out table by the stove was set with four paper plates. In the center of the table was the main course, a hunk of cow’s tongue on an aluminum tray. Eichmann’s aunt had gone old-country shtetl-style in planning her menu.

Loretta was beached on the sofa with her hands folded over her swollen belly. Eichmann looked at his aunt, then sat down by his girlfriend, giving her a kiss on the mouth. A fat black cat was sprawled out on the rug at his feet; it jumped onto Eichmann’s lap and he swatted it across the rump, sneezing furiously. “Damn,” he wheezed. “I can’t fucking breathe.”

I was wondering where I was going to sit when Mrs. Popolovsky came out of the kitchen to give her nephew a hug. Even when he was sitting down, she was no higher than his navel. “Eh,” she mumbled. “You’re getting thin.”

She pinched his stomach and Eichmann squealed, blushing. “Cut it out, will you?”

Loretta took one of Eichmann’s pudgy hands and placed it on her stomach—his face went still with disbelief and his mouth gaped, exposing the half-inch space between his two front teeth. Little Eichmann was moving inside her, his progeny. He hushed us and put his ear on Loretta’s belly. “He’s talking to me.”