The Angels of Catastrophe (16 page)

Flawed, Durrutti thought. He said, “Okay.”

There are several ways to enter an office unannounced. Most businessmen prefer to go in politely with a card in hand. Maimonides had never entertained such petite bourgeois banalities. He decocked the Bulldog's hammer and kicked open the door, nickering in an ear-splitting falsetto, “Surprise! Surprise! Look who's in the house!”

The tableau was as Maimonides said it would be. A pageant of riches. Ephraim Rook was sitting at his desk counting a hummock of cash, a stack of used ten and twenty and
one hundred dollar bills as high as his chin. His back was to the door and when the intruders came in, the
shyster
was slow on the uptake. Curlicuing in his IKEA chair, he glimpsed the pair of thieves in the doorway.

Unable to recognize them, Rook underwent a crash course in premature aging, adding thirty years on himself in two seconds. He goggled at them and said with a quaver, “What's with the fucking stockings? What is this? A joke? If so, you can see I don't get the punch line.”

Maimonides was prompt to tell him otherwise. He was glad to do it. “No, it's a tragedy. Your tragedy. Now gimme the cash.”

“Not so fast, buddy. Who are you guys anyway?” Ephraim demanded to know.

“Friends, we are not.” Maimonides's face was mashed flat against the stocking. He loomed over Ephraim with his revolver. “We want the money. Everything else, including you, is inconsequential.”

Rook dressed better than anyone else in the Mission. Satin shirts and silk underwear were de rigueur for him. Expensive Italian boots from Milan were his due in life. Ephraim changed his suits twice a day and he drove a late model Saab coupe. He hadn't gotten wealthy by handing his cash over to strangers. His job was taking money from people, not giving it to them. He refused to oblige Maimonides's request—his entrepreneurial instincts wouldn't let him do it.

“Fuck off,” he said. “The money is off limits! The shit is mine and I ain't giving it to you! You'll have to kill me first!”

“Don't tempt me,” Maimonides replied.

When a man shoved a large bore revolver at your nose and you refused to give him the money he wanted, you were either crazy or a bullet proof thug. A lunatic or a hard-core recidivist. A person with a death wish or just plain self-centered. Ephraim was a little of everything. He jumped up from his desk, yapping, “You fuckers don't get it! You can't take me down! Do you know who I am?”

The quiescence that greeted him was galore with hate. “You're nobody,” Maimonides raged. “A nebbish and a germ.”

“The hell I am! Who told you that?”

Ephraim fancied himself as an outlaw and he was full of tricks. Training his watery eyes on Maimonides, he reached in the desk's top drawer for his gun, an itty-bitty Colt derringer. Maimonides anticipated the tactic and closed the drawer on Ephraim's feminine wrist. His rival squealed in a heart-wrenching glissando. “Fucking God, what do you want from me?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary, I can tell you that much.” Maimonides pushed aside a pile of twenties and parked his gargantuan buttocks on the desk. “Give us the paper and we'll leave.”

The money didn't belong to Ephraim—it never did. It belonged to the Nicaraguans employing the
shyster.
Rook was your classic middleman. One of a dying breed. If you needed to move a black market product from point A to point B, you called on Ephraim. Middlemen were a necessary link in the food chain of crime. You gave Rook a cut in a job—five percent and whatever he could steal
without getting caught—and he did your dirty laundry for you.

Maimonides was not interested Ephraim's histrionics. They made him cross—and his feet were hurting again. “Goddamn it, man, hand over the
gelt.
Don't make me have to pop a cap in your ass.”

Ephraim cried even louder, holding his injured wrist. His self-mastery deteriorated as his voice ululated in the tastefully furnished office. “No, you can't do this!”

Maimonides grinned like a harlequin under the silk stocking and said, “Yes, I can. I'm the boss here. You'll do as I say. Now take off your fucking clothes.”

The command did not sit well with Ephraim—Maimonides was talking about his best suit. The vanguard of his self-esteem, a beautiful gold and black Gucci. Made him preen like a little rooster. He ran a hand over the jacket's mega-expensive fabric and replied with incredulity, stretching out each word to express his displeasure. “You want me to strip?”

“Exactly. Do it now.”

“Why? You a faggot?” Ephraim harrumphed. His mouth disfigured itself with conceit. “Because if you are, buster, I'll tell you right now, I don't take it up the ass. Never have and never will. I ain't no sissy.”

Maimonides was amused. “How noble of you. There's always a first, you know. Think of what you've been missing.” He brandished the Bulldog at Rook. “Enough of the sex talk. Hurry up with this.”

Ephraim undressed, doing an inhibited striptease. Chastened by the sight of his own scrotum—there was
more hair on a pair of coconuts—he tossed the Gucci to Maimonides. The expression on Ephraim's beleaguered face was indecipherable. Naked or not, Rook was up to something. Making impromptu plans. The cunning
meshugge
was always up to something.

“I don't know who you guys are,” he spoke up. “But you've got some courage to come in here and jack me up like this. It takes
chutzpah
to pull a stickup on Ephraim Rook. You gentlemen don't know nothing about my reputation or maybe you wouldn't be doing this.” Ephraim stroked his bare arms to stay warm. Standing behind the desk he resembled an orphaned child in need of a home.

Maimonides replied, “Your mother should care who you are. The United Nations should care. Amnesty International should care. The world should give a damn. But to be honest, I don't.”

“This is a very big mistake,” Ephraim countered shrewdly.

“No, it isn't,” Maimonides said. “It is written in the stars. It was fated. Some things were never meant to be.”

Ephraim pleaded with him, weaving his hoo-doo. “Who are you working for? Whatever he's giving you, I'll double it.” He saw neither man was moved by his largesse and he added, “I'll triple what you're getting. C'mon, who's your boss? It ain't that asshole Maimonides, is it? The bastard is dirt. He's nothing, truly nothing. I can't even begin to count the number of ways that make him nothing. You know who I mean?”

“No,” Maimonides teased him. “I don't know the name. Who is he?”

Eager to be useful, particularly if it hastened his liberation, Rook gibbered, “This ex-con about my age, though he looks twenty years older than that. He's overweight and has bad breath, smells with onions. He dresses like a dick. Drives an old Cadillac. Jewish trash. You know, low-rent.”

Durrutti evacuated the desk, shoveling the cash into a garbage bag Maimonides had given him. The money made a soft pleasant sound as it hit the bottom of the bag, like autumn leaves after you've raked them up on a warm October afternoon. It made him dreamy for the cool nights before Halloween.

Maimonides said to the subjugated Ephraim, “Now I have to figure out what to do with you. Frankly, I should blow your fucking brains out with this gun. But I'm willing to consider other methods. What would you suggest if you were in my shoes? Be creative.”

Ephraim was petrified, cowering with nausea. The nearness to his own death made him feverish. He reviewed his life and the climb from poverty to wealth and he was puzzled. All that for this? He put his veiny hands over his groin; the jewelry on his wrists tinkled. The musk of his fear mingled with his aftershave cologne. “Me? I should tell you how to snuff me?”

“Why not? Give me one good reason why you should live. You're taking up precious space.”

A speechmaker, Ephraim had never been. He'd rather let a cash register do the talking for him. His vocabulary was nil. His powers of introspection were nonexistent. Rook was a man who'd skimmed the surface of his
own life; he didn't have an inkling of self-consciousness in him. His imagination had only two colors, black and white. He glowered at Maimonides and snarled, “Fuck you, I ain't telling you nothing!”

“Good. I respect your honesty. Now open your mouth.”

“What for?”

Maimonides propelled the Bulldog in between Rook's lips and masturbated the gun's barrel in his foe's mouth. Ephraim's eyes were moist with humiliation. His masculinity was being violated. The boundaries of his sanity were being tampered with. Maimonides was realigning his personality for him.

Then he squeezed the trigger.

Ephraim should have been dead and taking the expressway to heaven where he would experience everlasting peace. You could hear a choir of angels singing hallelujah in the background. Their saccharine voices were blended together in thunderous harmony concerning what a stupid man Rook had been. That he should have been wiser while he had the chance. Since Maimonides didn't have any shells in the .44, none of these things happened.

Believing he'd been murdered in cold blood, the unexpected return to life proved too much for Ephraim and he became hysterical. He already had one foot in the grave—to switch directions in midstream was impossible. His eyes flickered. He put his hands over his ears and slavered, “No, no, this isn't right!”

Maimonides sagely counseled him. “Yes, it is. That's why we came here today. To make things right.” He clobbered
the shylock on the head with the Bulldog, then took a roll of duct tape and tied Ephraim's hands and feet to the ergonomic chair. Maimonides slung the bag of money over his shoulder and removed the silk stocking from his face. The fabric had etched his lily white skin with a fine meshed pattern. He spluttered at Ephraim, “So I'm nothing? Everyone is entitled to their goddamn opinion, but yours is no good. It's just been canceled.”

Recognizing Maimonides, Rook went bananas, graduating to a higher level of disorientation. His fears had been confirmed: life was worse than death. He frothed at the mouth as he wiggled to bust free of his bonds. He bleated, “On my soul, I don't believe this! And that's Ricky Durrutti too, ain't it? Sheesh! I'm going to murder you guys!”

Maimonides shut the office lights on his way out with Durrutti, leaving Ephraim to plot his revenge in darkness. Before closing the door, Maimonides extended a courteous invitation to Rook.

“You want a piece of us? Yeah, sure you do. A hard fucker like you would, wouldn't he? Then come and get it. We'll be at Hunt's Donuts waiting for you, chump. You can count on it.”

E
ighteen years ago a woman was murdered in her garage on Sycamore Alley. There had been no signs of a forced entry. The neighbors hadn't heard anything or if they had, they never told the police. The investigation bogged down due to a lack of leads and then it was shelved. There were no suspects. They never found the killer.

Most of the homes on Sycamore look the same. Two and three storied flats and apartment complexes with bad pastel paint jobs. Overpriced, rundown and besmeared with gang grafitti. The casualties in a dirty little real estate war. No one knew if the woman had struggled with her assailant before her death—but late at night you can hear her treading down the alley looking for her executioner, calling his name.

Murderers come in all shapes and sizes in the Mission. For the homeless it is the ocean fogginess, the coastal rains, the lousy drugs, the stingy general-assistance welfare checks, the lack of public parks to sit in and how the police keep you moving so you can't get warm.

Looking out the window from his seat on the number 14 Mission bus Durrutti saw the fog was dense. It was clinging to the ground at street level and wreathing the parapets of the National Armory on Fourteenth Street.
Junkies were huddled around a trash can fire next to the Grand Southern Hotel. A Mexican with a red windbreaker in the adjacent seat was jiving him in a husky and intimate voice designed to bully him, saying he wanted to rub Durrutti out. The tone was part intimidation and part loneliness. The intimidation, Durrutti didn't appreciate. The loneliness, he understood.

The Mexican's swarthy face was barricaded behind a pair of oversized mirrored sunglasses. His shoulders heaved inside the windbreaker. Durrutti ignored him. Death threats? They were a fact of life. Like the Mississippi River or the moon. Everyone left the world how they entered it—with fear eating the soul.

The second time the Mexican said he was going to kill Durrutti, his gravely voice rose a notch, confident he had the interest of his fellow passengers. He certainly had Durrutti's attention. The image of a bullet in his noodle didn't thrill him. He whirled in his seat and challenged the Mexican. “Go ahead! Just shut the fuck up, will you? You're giving me a fucking migraine headache!”