The Angels of Catastrophe (22 page)

Maimonides was scientific about Sugar's presence. “Well, well, the show has begun. We have some guests. If Ephraim's here to talk about the money, he made a drastic error in bringing a chick with him. Usually I don't talk business in front of women. This time I will, but it will cost him dearly.”

What have I done to deserve this? Durrutti asked himself.

Rook extricated himself from the Saab and was overheard saying to Sugar, “You stay here, doll. I'll handle this shit. It'll only be a minute. Play the radio or something while you wait. I got some nice tapes. You like Art Pepper?” He was grim-faced and hoary, his eyes hidden behind a pair of Armani sunglasses. His mouth was a bulletin board of tension. His neck was terraced with wrinkles. Closely shaved, his skin was dehydrated. In the bright sunlight he seemed old and not very menacing.

“Friend,” Maimonides greeted him. A famished grizzly bear's smile cut into his chapped lips. “We are overjoyed to see you. Yes, indeed.”

Ephraim had lost weight due to nervous agitation and being cuckolded. The Brooks Brothers suit he wore didn't fit him. He stalked over to the Seville with a cheesy vinyl briefcase in one hand, ignoring the cars racing in the road. “Friend? Over my dead body. For fuck's sake, Maimonides. You too, Ricky. The only reason I'm doing this is because I want to keep the peace. Unlike you assholes, I'm not a selfish guy. I put the people before myself. So where's my fucking money, please?”

Maimonides examined the dirt under his fingernails.
“What's the rush? It's a beautiful summer day. San Francisco at its finest.”

“Don't be an idiot. You, I have no time for.” Ephraim unloaded the briefcase onto the hood next to the laundry bag and unlatched the lid. The case snapped open with a squeak, revealing five stacks of used twenties. He said with unconcealed envy, “Christmas came early this year for you cocksuckers.”

Rook glowered at Maimonides. His forehead was varnished with sclerotic anger. His ears were black with wrath. Giving away money made him very emotional. “You bastards have been the death of me. You have no idea how far I'm going out of my way to be cool over this.”

Maimonides was derisive. The baby fat on his cheeks was sunny, the first sign of health a junkie has when he reduces his intake of opiates. His big hands were knotted with purple veins and bunched into scabby fists. “Incorrect. You should know the rules of the game. You started the problem. I solved it.”

Rook disagreed with Maimonides's point of view. He pawed the laundry bag of cash and said, “This is a solution? How interesting. Can you tell me how? But first, I wanna know what the problem was.”

“That's easy. You were bad mouthing Ricky.”

“I guess there's no such thing as freedom of speech. To set the record straight, Ricky stole my fucking girlfriend. I went to talk to him about it and he disrespected me. He didn't have to do that and he didn't have to sleep with her.”

“Fuck you,” Durrutti shot. “I didn't steal nobody. I—”

Maimonides cut him short. “You know what I'm saying, Ephraim. I shouldn't have to tell you this. You talked behind his back. Better you should kill a man than to dishonor him like that. You have to treat people with respect. R-e-s-p-e-c-t. Because you refused to do that, we did what we had to do. You fuck me. I fuck you.”

Ephraim's cheeks were pocked with dismay. Losing weight had been accompanied by a loss in self-confidence. He slapped himself in the forehead and asked, “Have I gone insane? So what if I talked behind his back? What is this? A police state?
Oy gevalt.
I want to live and let live, but this ain't fair, you no-goodnik.”

“Is that how you see me?” Maimonides said. The laundry bag of money and the briefcase were forgotten. He had his own self-esteem issues. Getting mocked by Rook made him feel every year of prison he'd done and he was speechless.

Ephraim was taken aback by the display of pain in Maimonides. All he wanted was his money. His erstwhile crony was too complicated for him. Too involved. He glanced longingly at Sugar in the Saab. “That's what you are, ain't you? You've always been that. Since day one. What? You gonna tell me things are different with you nowadays? I think not.”

The floodgates of denial broke open in Maimonides. He said low with anguish, “No, they aren't. And they never will be. I am who I am. What the hell. But we used to work closely together.”

“That, I don't know about,” Rook said with genuine regret. “Maybe it's the mood I'm in, but I don't recall this
close friendship. You must be thinking about some other Ephraim. The Ephraim who had zilch. The Ephraim who sold
schlock
at the flea market. That Ephraim doesn't exist anymore. Things change.”

“Screw you,” Maimonides booed. Angered by Rook's self-absorption, a mud slide of rage seeped into his belly. “Then you have forgotten many things.”

“By necessity,” Ephraim replied. A Muni bus barreled past him with a deafening diesel groan. “I worked with lots of people over the years. Too many. You were one of them. But you know what the past was like for me?”

“What?”

“I was dropping dead from hunger five times a day.” He nodded at Sugar, who was sitting quietly in the Saab's front seat. “See that ring on her finger? Me and her are getting married. We're going to Hawaii for two months. We're going to go do some drinking at the beach. Have a piña colada or whatever. Get a suntan and look at the volcanos.”

The diamond engagement ring on Sugar's slender hand was large enough to pay the rent on Durrutti's room at the El Capitán Hotel for a million years. The marriage announcement was a coup d'état in the country of his heart. His inability to maintain a romance with Sugar had been hampered by many things, including himself. News of her upcoming marriage to Rook flummoxed him. Durrutti imagined the two of them making love on a deserted beach in Hawaii and knew he was going to get leukemia from the very thought of it. She gazed at him through the windshield with her eyes telling the whole story. He'd disappointed her. He couldn't hold a candle next to Ephraim Rook.

Ephraim stuck his head in the Saab's window and kissed Sugar on the lips.

That was Rook for you. Tasteless. A billboard of self-promotion. Conceited to the point of no return. On a satellite headed to Pluto. You didn't need a crystal ball to see Sugar's future. She was with him in the satellite. Just the two of them. The fanaticism on Ephraim's doughy face said it all. The pin pricks of insecurity in his eyes spoke volumes. A mania translatable in any dialect. Sugar was more than his trophy; she was his church and religion. He was going to nail her to the cross of his devotion.

Maimonides absorbed the lovefest with a sober eye. Broaching the topic of friendship with Ephraim had been in vain. Better he should talk to the monkeys in the zoo about it. He spoke, plain and unaffected. “The problem with you, Rook, is that you want everything your way. You've got Durrutti's girl. You have your money back. But that ain't enough, is it? You have to congratulate yourself, too. The big advertisement. Just like a fucking nobody who knows he's nobody.”

That touched a nerve. Ephraim broke off the kiss and showed his capped teeth. “Don't you ever let up? I don't want to hear no more out of you!”

Revenge had been long in coming. Later Maimonides would tell people it was kismet. Unable to suppress himself he bonked Rook in the nose with a neat backhand, sending him headlong to the ground, where he landed on his plump duff. The laundry bag slithered off the Seville's hood and gamboled a few feet in the other direction before hitting the tarmac and popping open.

One hundred dollar bills, clouds of them, sloshed onto the sidewalk in a fluttery, confetti-like trail. Some of the cash wafted in the gutter; more drifted toward Hunt's Donuts. A band of mariachi musicians saw the money dance around a sewer vent and they chased the paper in their cowboy boots.

Rook sat up and didn't move. Then he buried his head in his hands and sobbed. It was no different than watching a man expire. Slowly and without grace. Durrutti had a vision in which the accountant was a skeleton collecting dust in a lead-lined coffin. Sugar herself was an old woman, her beauty gone. The
barrio
was a ghost town; tumbleweeds rolled in and out of vacant storefronts. The banks had been looted. Abandoned cars were overturned on the sidewalk. The El Capitán Hotel was in charred ruins.

Durrutti snagged a glimpse of Sugar as she hurtled out of the Saab to comfort her husband-to-be. Her high heels clacked across the cement. He kept a vigil on her hips as they swayed in the cocktail dress. He was getting seasick from how she moved. Being on Mission Street didn't help. Maimonides put the attaché case Ephraim had left with them under his arm and said, “You don't look so well, Ricky. You constipated? C'mon, let's get out of here.”

A
ugust waned into September. Following months of fruitless investigation, Agent Kulak told Durrutti with a straight face that Paul Stevens was never considered a viable suspect. The Fed said he'd known Paul was dead from the start—Durrutti had been baited and manipulated by the cop to draw Jimmy Ramirez into the open.

Ricky did what he was supposed to do and kept his lips sealed. Kulak harassed him, but he said he wouldn't talk again without a lawyer. The summer seemed to have been a furious dream and he wasn't sure if any of it had been real.

Maimonides assured him over a monk's breakfast of black coffee, saltine crackers and margarine and Marlboro cigarettes in Hunt's Donuts. “Hell, Ephraim Rook and his wife are in Hawaii. On Maui. I hear Ephraim has angina. Got it from playing golf. He's in the hospital. Some honeymoon.”

Durrutti visited Arlo in her room. The exquisite she-boy counseled him as the two of them reclined against dowdy
kapok pillows on the bed. “Just because the girl married that old man doesn't mean you have to stay all depressed. You'll bring yourself down that way, sweetie. Think of what she did as a gift. She wants money and security? She wants to be a breeder? So do I. But good riddance to both of them, that's what I say.”

Arlo was sporting a black silk Frederick's of Holly-wood negligee. A pink boa was draped around her swan's neck, cascading over her fragile shoulders and falling to her knobby knees. She hadn't shaved in days; a brown stubble streaked her cheeks, highlighting the pallor on her face.

Her husband was at the sink shaving her head; Jackie's gigantic skull was covered with a layer of Noxema shaving cream. The rest of her was sheathed in a yellow silk bed sheet that she'd tied around her waist. The Ruger was on the dresser next to an unlit votive candle.

“See,” Arlo said, trying to comfort Durrutti. “When a girl gets tired of a man, it has to do with a lot of things. Money—how much she needs. The future and what she wants from it. Then there's her history with her daddy and her family's expectations. And the good times she thinks she has to have and the rest of the goddamn stuff. She might not even know what she wants. Most people don't. And never will. But I've got the antidote to all that nonsense. Brewed just for you. Now do you want this new type of dust that I've been talking about? This is truly magical shit. It'll take you to Sirius.”

Arlo scared up a sherm from her bra and ran the length of it under her nose while claiming, “This motherfucker
is vibrating with a unique spiritual power. Can you feel its karma?” She handed it to Durrutti, clicking her fingers and saying in a demanding treble, “That'll be ten bucks.”

Durrutti forked over the ten spot. While relieving him of his money, one of Arlo's negligee straps fell off her shoulder, exposing a nipple pierced by two gold rings. She vogued, conscious of Durrutti's eyes on her. Feeling sympathetic, Arlo reached out and patted his arm indulgently, making a cooing noise. “You be a good girl and smoke that sherm and get some sleep. When you wake up, you'll feel a whole lot happier.”