Shoot the Moon (10 page)

Russell does a quick check across the street, then up and down the block: nobody but the old lady and the wino. There are some kids up ahead, but they’re all the way up at 153rd, playing some game on the sidewalk. Couldn’t be better.

He waits till the guy’s almost alongside of him before he says something to him.

“Hey, man, you got the time?”

The dude stops, startled by Russell’s voice. Almost involuntarily, he raises his left hand to look at his watch.

“Five after eight,” he says.

“Nice watch, man,” Russell tells him. The truth is, Russell can’t tell a Rolex from a Timex. The dude doesn’t say anything.

“Think you could help me out with a little change?” Russell asks him.

This seems to make the guy uncomfortable. He starts looking around. But, of course, there’s no one there.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any change,” he says, and then adds, “sorry.”

“Any folding money?”

“Sorry,” he says again.

“Me, too,” Russell says. And to show how sorry he is, he reaches to his waistband and lifts the bottom of his T-shirt just enough to reveal the handle of his gun.

Goodman’s first thought upon seeing the gun is that he’s about to lose control of both his bowels and his bladder at the same time. So intense is his concentration in attempting to keep this from happening that he’s unable to react to the situation in any other way: Not only does he say nothing; he can’t even begin to
think
about speaking.

“Putchya hands down,” the kid says.

“What?”

“Your hands. Put ‘em down.”

Goodman looks, and sure enough, he’s raised both hands slightly, the way a stagecoach passenger might once have signaled surrender to the bad guys in an old Western. He tries to lower them, but they won’t go all the way down.

“Give it up,” he hears the kid telling him. “Your money, your wallet, your watch. Whateva you got.” As he speaks, the kid glances around nervously, up and down the block.

For Goodman, everything seems to be happening in slow motion. Gradually, he regains control of his sphincter muscle and mastery of his urinary function. He wants to speak, wants to assure the kid he’s ready to give up everything. But still he can’t get his voice to cooperate.

The black kid doesn’t seem to know what to do with Goodman’s paralysis. He starts looking up and down the block and across the street. Goodman follows the kid’s glances, trying to see what he’s looking at. When he sees nothing, he suddenly thinks, This kid is as scared as I am. It is that realization that manages to break the spell for Michael Goodman and liberate him from his paralysis. Intellectually, he knows he should be afraid for his life; but in spite of himself, he begins to feel like he’s in a movie scene, that all this is happening to some different person and that he’s just an observer, watching it all from someplace else.

“You heard me, man!” he hears the kid say. But while the kid tries to make it sound menacing, to Goodman it comes out plaintive, as though he’s now being
begged
for his money.

Goodman the accountant does some quick calculation. He figures he has maybe $12 on him, give or take a token. He knows he should give it up - he’s always reading about people getting killed over pocket change. But no sooner does he think that than his mind starts wandering to the gun. Something about it didn’t look real. And why isn’t the kid pointing it at him? He’s reminded of one of those drawings in a magazine or comic book, where there are all sorts of mistakes you’re supposed to find: What’s wrong with this picture?

So he lies. “I’ve only got $2,” he says. “The watch cost me four bucks on Canal Street.” That much is the truth.

Goodman waits for the kid’s reaction. He expects disbelief and anger. He’s prepared to be hit, to be searched, to be commanded to turn his pockets inside out. But none of these things happens.

Instead, the kid says, “Fuck,” as if he’s just scratched the coating off an instant lottery game and lost. He doesn’t seem angry at all, or even particularly surprised. Mostly, he seems
tired
all of a sudden.

So Goodman says, “Sorry.”

The kid seems to shrug his shoulders ever so slightly.

“Is that real?” Goodman asks, gesturing toward the kid’s waistband, where the gun is again covered by the T-shirt.

“Uh-uh,” the kid shakes his head from side to side.

“Looks like a water gun.”

The kid doesn’t say anything. He just stands there, looking like he’s liable to start crying at any moment. For the first time, Goodman notices how thin he is. He wonders when the last time was the kid had something to eat.

“You hungry?” he asks the kid.

“No.”

“Sick?”

“Sorta.”

“Anything I can do to help you?”

The kid smiles and does something that comes out like half laugh, half snort. “What I need, man, you don’t got.”

And slowly, finally, it dawns on Goodman: This kid is a junkie.

Suddenly, there is a single
blip
of a siren, and both Goodman and the kid turn their heads toward the street. A police car pulls up to the curb next to where they’re standing. The words 40 pct are stenciled on the side. Two uniformed officers step out. One is a white male, the other a black woman. They approach, each resting a hand on a holstered gun. It is the white male who speaks.

“Everything all right here?”

It is clear to Goodman that the question has been directed to him. And it’s just as clear that he can have the kid arrested with as little as a shake of his head, silence, or even sufficient hesitation. But he hears himself speaking.

“Yes, sir” is what he says. “Everything’s fine.”

The officer is apparently less than convinced. Gently, he manages to place his body between Goodman’s and the kid’s; just as gently, he steers Goodman away from the kid, until Goodman realizes that the four of them are now standing in pairs: the white officer with Goodman, the black officer with the kid.

“What’s going on here?” the officer asks him.

“I was just asking him directions to the subway.”

“A little bit out of your neighborhood?”

Goodman notices how young the officer is, wonders if he can really be twenty-one.

“I work up here,” he tells him.

“Where?”

“The Bronx Tire Exchange.”

“Who’s your boss?”

“Manny.”

“Tell him Brian says hello, okay?”

“Okay.”

“And be careful around here.”

“I will be,” Goodman says. “Thanks for stopping.”

“No problem.”

Goodman watches as the officers get back into their car and pull away from the curb. He hears the kid say something, but it’s said so quietly, it takes him some time to realize it was “Thank you.”

“No problem,” says Goodman, who liked the sound of the phrase when the officer said it to him a moment ago. He turns toward the kid and extends his hand. “My name’s Michael.”

The kid takes his hand and they shake. “Russell,” he says. For Russell, it’s the first white hand he’s ever shaken.

“Can I tell you somepin?” Russell asks.

“Sure.”

“Don’t be walking around up here. Getcha inna trouble.”

“Thanks. Can I tell you something?”

Russell nods.

“Don’t be robbing people. You’re no good at it.” He reaches into his pocket, fishes out a $10 bill, and offers it to Russell, who stares at it for a moment before accepting it with a sheepish smile.

“Would you do me a favor, Russell?”

“I guess I owe you one.”

“Meet me tomorrow?”

“Whafor?”

“I got something I want you to check out for me.”

“You gonna bring the cops?” Russell asks.

Goodman smiles. “You know I’m not,” he says.

“Yeah.” Russell nods. “I guess you had your chance.”

“Twelve noon,” Goodman tells him.

“Here?”

“Shit, no,” says Goodman, who almost never swears. He’s in no hurry to come back to this particular spot. Yet he’s not ready to invite his new acquaintance to
his
neighborhood, either. He decides on neutral territory. “Ninety-sixth and Lexington,” he says.

“Bet,” Russell says.

“What?”

“Never mind. I be there.”

Raul Cuervas’s meeting with Mister Fuentes takes place at the Hotel Fontainbleau in Miami Beach, where Mister Fuentes has a permanent suite of rooms on the top floor. Johnnie Delgado is there, along with Papo and Julio, who also work for Mister Fuentes. There’s another man there, too, a scary-looking guy with a full black beard, whom Cuervas has never seen before. Nobody bothers with introductions.

“Hello, Raul.”

“Hello, Mister Fuentes,” Cuervas says. “I feel very bad I’ve caused you this problem.”

“Me?” Mister Fuentes smiles. “I don’t believe I have a problem.”

The words send a chill through Cuervas, and he doesn’t respond. He tries to think of different meanings Mister Fuentes’s statement might have, but he came up with only one.

“Raul,” Mister Fuentes says, “I want you to go with Papo and Julio and Gatillo here. They got a job to do, and they need your help. They’ll fill you in on the details on the way there.”

“Mister Fuentes, I’m real sorry-”

But Mister Fuentes stops him by raising a hand. The meeting is over.

Walking from the room, following Papo and Julio, and aware of the bearded one following
him,
Cuervas takes no comfort from the fact that, translated into English, the word
gatillo
happens to mean “trigger.”

That evening, Michael Goodman sneaks down to the basement again. He notices that the combination lock on his storage bin is still set to the digits of his lucky number, 5-6-2, and therefore not really locked. He resolves to be more careful in the future.

By the light of his flashlight, he unzips the duffel bag, unties one of the pillowcases, and makes a little cut in one of the blue plastic bags. He squeezes a small amount of white powder into a sandwich bag. Then he tapes up the cut and replaces everything. This time, he makes sure the lock is locked.

Back upstairs, he goes into the bathroom, which has the brightest light in the apartment, and looks at the powder in the sandwich bag. It’s the best look at it he’s had so far. In the clear plastic bag, he can see it has a slightly grayish color to it.

“Now,” he says to the powder, “we’re going to find out what you are.”

Back in his apartment, Russell Bradford tries to sleep the rest of the day away. He wasted no time spending the $10 the guy gave him on two
nickle
bags of heroin, but they wore off pretty fast. Still, with only what they call on the street a “sniffin’ habit,” he hasn’t gotten that sick yet.

As far as meeting the guy tomorrow, he’s not sure. Could be some kinda setup, even if the guy didn’t snitch him out to the cops when he had the chance to.

He’ll wait till tomorrow, see how he feels.

* * *

Michael Goodman feels tired as he lies on his sofa bed, but he also feels hopeful. He’s got a job of sorts, he’s survived a mugging attempt, and he’s made a start at the business of figuring out some way to become an alchemist who can turn white powder into green money.

The sandwich bag lies underneath his pillow.

Shortly after midnight, two officers from the Miami Police Department make a grim discovery. Investigating a car parked underneath an overpass on I-95, they find a body slumped over the wheel. The car will turn out to be stolen. The body is that of a male Hispanic, thirty to thirty-five years old.

It isn’t the small-caliber bullet hole in the back of the man’s head that the officers find remarkable. They’ve seen plenty of homicides during their years in what’s become known as the nation’s murder capital. It isn’t even the ligature marks around the man’s neck. It’s what they find later, at the morgue, when they see that the man’s penis has been neatly sliced off and stuffed into his anus.

The older cop, who’s seen just about everything in his day, is able to decipher the message for the benefit of his partner and the morgue attendant: “Just somebody’s cute way of telling the world that this guy fucked himself.”

Raul Cuervas has become the first victim of the twenty kilos. He will not be its last.

Goodman lies on his back on his sofa bed, hands underneath his head, and waits for morning to come. He can’t see the sky from his apartment - his only window faces a brick wall across a narrow alley - but he watches as his ceiling gradually changes from black to charcoal to gray, signaling the arrival of another day.

What keeps him awake this morning is not just his daughter’s headaches and his own mountain of debts. What keeps him awake is what he knows he’s about to do before this day is over.

He thinks back to the moment he drove the rental car out of the visitors’ parking lot of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department headquarters. In one respect, all he’d really done at that moment was to reject having to do things according to their convenience: He’d simply gotten fed up with their bureaucratic nonsense.

But as soon as he tells himself that, Goodman knows he’s denying the obvious. He drove off because, on some level, he’d wanted to keep his options open at least. Because he didn’t know what he wanted to do about the narcotics, he’d held on to them until he could decide. And, since he was about to return the car in any event, holding on to them had necessitated moving them from the tire to the duffel bags. Next, since he was returning to New York, he’d had no choice but to bring them with him. And, once home, it had made sense that he put them somewhere where they’d be safe - and it turned out to have been a good thing he’d done that.

Each of those actions he can group under the heading of keeping his options open. All he’d really done was to retain the
possibility
-
however remote - that at some point, he might actually decide to try to do something with the stuff.

But now it’s different. Now he’s about to push off from shore. Now he’s about to
do that something.
And he finds that while the thought terrifies him, it also excites him just a little bit. What he finds difficult - what he finds all but
impossible
- is to focus on the immorality of what he’s about to do. Now he forces himself to do just that.

He knows it’s wrong; that’s easy enough. But he also knows it’s wrong to let his daughter go untreated for something horrible that might kill her. He makes himself mouth the words he hasn’t dared mention to his mother-in-law, hasn’t allowed to let form in his own vocabulary until this moment. He says them out loud now as he lies staring at the gradually lightening ceiling.

“Brain tumor,” he says.

And if narcotics are the scourge of the city, if they kill people and enslave children and cause crime, are they any worse than his only child dying of a brain tumor because her father stood by hopelessly and did nothing to save her?

He doesn’t know the answer to that question. But he knows that if he lets his daughter die, his own life is over, too. And he knows that no matter how criminal, no matter how wrong, he will go and meet the kid named Russell today. He will choose his daughter’s life over the hundreds or thousands of lives that may be jeopardized or lost in the bargain. That will be his sin; that will be his crime; he’ll answer for that.

Lenny Siegel is at his office before eight this morning. In fact, except for a few of the secretaries, he’s the first one there. What brings him in early is a pile of reports on his desk. This being the first week of October already, the September monthly reports of everyone in his group have been turned in. As leader of Group Two, it’s now Lenny’s job to review those reports, evaluate each person’s performance, total up the statistics, and compile a report of his own summarizing the activity and performance of the group during the preceding month.

The problem is that Lenny already knows that the reports are going to be high on bullshit and low on results. The truth is, it’s been a slow month for the whole office. But this will mark the third month
in a row
that’s been slow for Group Two, and Lenny knows the district director isn’t going to want to hear it again. As he thumbs through the first of the reports, Lenny keeps remembering the director’s words at the last supervisors’ meeting: “What we need is
production,
fellas,” he’d explained. “Think of us like you’d think of any other company. Without production, we’re out of business.” At the time, no one in the room had quarreled with the point. Lenny himself had wanted to say, “But we’re not just
any other company,
” but he’d thought better of it and had kept his mouth shut. You know what they say: The boss may not always be right, but he’s always the boss.

So as he goes through report after report now, Lenny knows it’s time to convey the director’s message to his group. It bothers him a little bit, because the truth is, they aren’t all part of some Fortune 500 company. For one thing, they’re dealing with human beings. For another, all you’ve got to do to understand the difference between them and some manufacturing company is to take a look at what kind of
production
you’re talking about. Some companies produce automobiles; some produce refrigerators; some produce barbecue sauce. Here, we’re in the business of producing seizures and arrests. That’s how
we
measure success.

“Seizures and arrests,” Lenny says out loud, pleased at the double entendre he’s discovered. He could be a cardiac surgeon talking. And wasn’t his mother always telling him he could have been a doctor?

He can almost hear her voice. “Look at you. You could’ve been a doctor, a lawyer, a
CPA!
But no, you had to become a
cop!”

“I’m not a cop, Mom,” he’d explain for the umpteenth time. “I’m an agent.”

“Agent schmagent. What kind of a Jewish boy gives up all that education and becomes a secret agent?”

“Not a
secret
agent, Mom. Just an agent.”

“Better you should keep it secret.”

But after twenty-one years, it
is
no secret: Lenny Siegel is an agent - in fact, now a group leader - in the New York Office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, otherwise known as the DEA. And this morning, as he thumbs his way through the last of the monthly reports of the twelve field agents who work under his supervision, he knows that, like it or not, he’s going to have to do something to get some more production out of them: more seizures, more arrests.

He wonders what the average cardiac surgeon with twenty-one years’ experience makes in a year. Two hundred thousand? Three? Half a million? There’s gotta be a few out there pulling in 2 or 3 million.

Lenny Siegel, as a grade 13, step 6, with twenty-one years in (make that twenty-three, counting his two years in the military), makes $58,156 - before taxes.

Mom was right once again, after all. So what else is new?

Michael Goodman is up early, too, this morning. He showers and shaves, breakfasts on a bowl of Special K. He eats it dry, without milk - partly because he likes it crunchy better than soggy, partly because milk is expensive. He stirs some powdered grapefruit Tang into a glass of tap water and drinks it down. He’s tried orange Tang and doesn’t care for it, but the grapefruit is almost like the real thing. And, as everybody knows, New York City tap water is the best in the world. He once read that it keeps beating all these fancy bottled waters in taste tests where they blindfold the participants. And on top of that, it’s
free.
Just one of the many reasons I love this city, thinks this man who, not twenty-four hours ago, found himself the victim of a broad-daylight mugging attempt.

But Goodman knows that it’s that very mugging attempt that may turn out to be his lucky break, the entrée he so desperately needs to the underworld of drugs. At the same time, he knows he can’t count too heavily on his new friend Russell. All he knows about him for sure is that he’s young, he’s black, he tries to mug people, and he’s very bad at it. Chances are he won’t even show up for their meeting. But since Goodman’s got the day to kill - it’s Wednesday, and he doesn’t start at the Bronx Tire Exchange until tomorrow - he’ll go and see. And he’ll take his little sandwich bag with him.

Lenny Siegel assembles his field agents for a group meeting shortly after ten o’clock.

“These reports suck,” he tells them, waving the stack of them dismissively. “We’re running a law-enforcement agency here, not a creative writing class. The DD is tired of excuses. He wants
numbers,
as in numbers of arrests made and amounts of drugs seized.”

His eye catches a hand raised in the back of the room. It’s on the end of an arm connected to the body of Jimmy (“No Neck”) Zelb. Before he became a DEA agent, No Neck was a small-team all-American football player who went on to become a cop in Toledo. He’s one of Siegel’s best men.

“Yeah?” Siegel asks.

“Maybe it’s a good thing the numbers are down,” Zelb says. “I mean, can’t we say it’s ‘cause we been doing our job so well?” There’s a murmur of approval around the room, a nodding of heads.

“You can say it, but the old man isn’t saying it,” Siegel says. “He goes to Washington in November to defend our budget. All they want to hear down there are
numbers.
Not theories, not sociology -
numbers.
Is that so hard for you guys to understand?”

“Things are tight out there,” says Frank Farrelli. Another murmur, more nodding heads.

“You’ll see how tight they are when they take our overtime budget away,” Siegel says. “Or when they make us turn our cars in at the end of the day. See how you like riding to work on the subway.” That seems to hit a nerve. The murmuring subsides; the heads stop nodding.

The meeting breaks up shortly after. By eleven, Siegel’s left alone in his office, staring at a blank form in front of him entitled “Group Two Monthly Activity Report.”

He lights a cigarette. It’s his fifth one of the morning.

Russell Bradford is awakened by his mother’s voice, helped considerably by the fact that it’s aimed directly into his left ear.

“Get up off that sofa, boy!” she shouts. When he’s slow to react, she adds, “Don’t you be sleeping another day away!”

Russell rubs his eyes. His back is sore where it’s been pressed against the hard part of the sofa.

“What day is it?” he asks.

“It’s Wednesday,” she says as she moves about the living room, straightening up. “I’m goin’ to visit Nana at the hospital. You can come with me, or you can get your butt up and go lookin’ for a job. But you are
not
goin’ to lay around the house all day.”

Russell has a vague recollection that there’s something he’s supposed to do today, but he can’t remember what.

“What time is it?” he asks.

“Almost noon.”

Noon. Noon today is when he’s supposed to meet the white guy. He sits up.

“
Ezzackly
what time is it?” he asks his mother.

She stops what she’s doing and looks at her watch.

“Eleven-twenty,” she tells him.

Russell raises his body from the sofa, stretches the muscles in his back.

“So?” she asks. “You comin’ with me, or you goin’ lookin’ for a job?”

“I can’t go with you,” Russell says. “I got a interview at twelve o’clock.”

“What kind of interview?”

“With a white guy,” Russell tells her. “About a job.”

“Where?”

“Ninety-sixth and Lexington.”

“What’s at Ninety-sixth and Lexington?”

Russell thinks. “A store,” he says. He figures he can’t go wrong there.

“Well, break a leg.”

Russell figures she means he should get going. He heads for the shower.

Even though it’s only a four-block walk to Ninety-Sixth Street, Goodman arrives fifteen minutes early. He views Ninety-sixth as a sort of line of demarcation between the white world to the south and the black and Hispanic world to the north. As a gesture of accommodation, he crosses the street and waits on the uptown side. There, he melds into a small group of people waiting for the crosstown bus. He tries to remember what Russell looks like, wonders if he’ll recognize him, or if he’s going to be guilty of being one of those white people to whom all blacks look alike.

Every so often, he reaches his right hand into his rear pants pocket and feels the sandwich bag.

Fifteen minutes go by. Twenty, twenty-five. Four westbound buses come and go. Goodman wishes he’d asked Russell for his phone number. Then he realizes Russell might not
have
a phone, so he’s glad he didn’t ask. He decides he’ll give it until one o’clock.

Goodman once worked for an accounting firm that had a black kid who ran the mailroom. He was a nice kid, and everybody liked him. Thing was, he was supposed to be in each morning at nine, but he never made it before ten or ten-fifteen. When Goodman commented on it to one of the other accountants, the response he got was that the kid was on CPT.

“CPT?” Goodman had asked.

“Yeah. Colored people time.”

Now he wonders if Russell maybe runs on colored people time. Or black time. Or Afro-American time. Whatever. He’s wondering what the next politically correct phrase will be, when he feels a tap on his shoulder.

Russell offers no reason for being late, and Goodman asks for none. It is enough that he’s come. “Hello, Russell,” he says.

“Hello.”

Goodman looks around. The corner is a crowded one, but then it’s pretty crowded both ways along Ninety-sixth, and up and down Lexington, as well.