The Importance of Being Dangerous (18 page)

The three looked at each other, all of them wondering who let Raul stay in the room too long. “What kind of question is that?” Sidarra asked him.

“Nah, brother,” Griff said without looking up. The song “Purple Haze” came on overhead. “We teach tolerance in here.”

But Koob wouldn't have it. He stepped into the darkness and right into Raul's face. “The fuck is the matter with you?” he whispered angrily. “What? Who are
you
now, motherfucker? Ted Koppel?” His eyes squinted sharply and he looked like he was about to slap the assassin. “You supposed to be in Attica, right? You couldn't hate a honky in Attica if you wanted to up there. Now please let me handle my business, and you handle yours, all right?” Jimi Hendrix's music, feedback over lyrics, wailed in the background. “Griff,” Yakoob said, turning deadpan to him, “what
is
that shit?”

Matter-of-factly, yet a little unsure he wanted to say it in front of Raul, Griff stated, “It's a rare song about the approach of a male orgasm.”

Koob's expression didn't change. “How 'bout you give us a fucking break on the acid trip?”

Griff nodded and headed out of the curtains to change the CD. Sidarra stepped toward the chastened hard-on sitting in the darkness.

“Look, baby,” she told him gently but firmly, “nobody's hating in here. We're just borrowing from those who took from us, and that's really about it. You doin' a good job, Raul. Just stay good, my love. And stay quiet, okay? We got you.”

Raul straightened up like she had just sung “Happy Birthday” to him. “It's all you, Miss Sidarra,” he said with pride.

But Yakoob thought Raul was better off gone and had sent him out the back door by the time Griff returned to the lounge.

“Um,” Sidarra began, “
I
have a question.” The occasion of Raul's early departure was her cue to raise a concern that had first started to bother her around the time Griff finally told her about Koob's sick bet on Eagleton's death. “How are we paying the roughneck?”

Yakoob and Griff immediately looked at each other. “Salary—” Griff said.

“Small percentage commission,” said Yakoob at almost the same time.

“What?” she asked. “Which one?”

“I meant that he always gets something to live on,” Griff explained, but it wasn't smooth. “Sometimes we treat him as an expense. Sometimes he just gets a dividend.”

“That's some tricky shit,” she said, leaning her cue against the wall and turning to face them.

“What I meant was he's got to get something on each take,” Koob tried to say, his old demeanor returning. “He gotta get a salary 'cause he's still doin' a lot of everyday shit like little jobs, investigating shit, getting descriptions—”

“Of what?” she asked, hands on her hips.

Koob tried a glance at Griff, but Griff knew better than to look back at him. “You know, places,” Koob answered. “Whether a company exists. Whether a guy got what his account statement says he got. You know, motherfuckers say one thing on paper and got a whole 'nother thing for real.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Sid, if he do a real peep, like he just got through doing for us with the Solutions account thing you wanted, he should get a small cut,” Koob said a little more convincingly. “A percentage. Don't you think?”

“You were gonna tell me about that, right?” Sidarra asked, hands still fastened to her her hips. “I mean, just what the hell is that?”

“Be cool, Sid. You just asked how the nigga gets paid,” Koob assured her.

“Does he know he'll get a cut?”

Koob again looked at Griff and would not answer until Griff
finally looked back at him. There was no hiding the conversations behind her back now.

“Yeah. We told him,” Griff answered.

“‘We,'” she declared. “
‘We'
told him? I never told him a damn thing.”

“That's on me,” Griff said. He was abusing his authority with her, and they both knew it. That's the thing about attraction. It sits in the background of conversations that should take place and allows them not to happen. “I was supposed to ask you at your party Sunday, but I, uh, obviously didn't get the chance.”

Then the new and improving Sidarra, directed by attraction, did a strange thing with the revelation of being left out: she let it go. Sidarra found
herself
changing the subject and talked on and on about her job at the Board of Miseducation. She updated them on every last part of the new chancellor search, candidates from big-city school districts around the country turning New York down, and how her favorite was the long shot, a black woman named Dr. Grace Blackwell from Gary, Indiana. Sidarra went on about the old chancellor. His widow was in the news. Had they seen it? Just shakes of the head. Attraction seemed to want the evening to end on a pleasant note.

EVEN IF SIDARRA SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BEFOREHAND
, there was no mistaking it once Michael received her two gift-wrapped peace offerings: Michael was a person who'd gone giftless for many years. She handed him the boxes and his eyes lit up with pure joy behind his glasses. The skin on his neck inched back suddenly, and he couldn't stop smiling. Michael didn't know he was being bought, yet he was happily sold. In one box was a Cartier watch with the smallest diamond on the tip of each hand. It was hardly the top of their line, but it was more watch than Michael had ever owned. In the other box was a pair of matching cuff links. The set was a closeout package, but Michael could have cared less. “I think I forgot one of your birthdays along the way,” she told him.

Michael stammered in speechlessness and kept staring in disbe
lief at the gifts. “I don't know what to say, darling. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“You like?”

“I love 'em.”

Michael loved them so much that he wore them all the time. For a man who didn't own a shirt with proper cuffs, this was no small feat. He found a way to attach the cuff links to regular shirtsleeves. For a token booth vendor in New York City, he was the lone guy in a system of hundreds who wore cuff links to work. People noticed too, usually women his age and older. They would watch him counting their money and dishing their tokens and occasionally say into the thick bulletproof glass, “Nice cuff links.” Unfortunately, he often couldn't hear them. The millennium was near, but New York City had not yet figured out how to make exchanges between subway riders and token booth vendors audible through the partition. The vendors had a microphone they could use when it suited them, but customers would have to yell things. So they did. “Nice cuffs!” Then, all the way down the platform and sometimes over the roar of arriving trains, you could hear Michael's proud voice boom over the loudspeaker: “Thank you, my dear. Thank you very much.”

Of course, it wasn't Michael's birthday. It was more like Sidarra's guilt about a relationship that was paralyzed by her infatuation with a married man and Michael's inability to do anything to change that. It was also a calculated setup to get a ride out to the Short Hills Mall in New Jersey, because Michael had a car and no place else to be on a Saturday. They had never gone there before, but Sidarra had heard from enough people that it was Jersey's version of Fifth Avenue. Raquel rode along too. After weeks of constant pestering, Raquel had won out in her quest to have her mother see more of Michael. They all had a date with McDonald's, she said, and other things to go over. Unfortunately, Sidarra
and Michael had very little to say to each other. So on the drive across the George Washington Bridge and down the turnpike, they did what people do who are at a loss for words and scenery. They talked about other people and passing cars.

“That man looks like my brother Alex,” Sidarra said, pointing into a white sedan. “I heard from Alex the other day,” Sidarra said.

“Oh yeah? How's he doin'?”

“Fine. He's very happy about the schools his kids attend. Says they're really good out there. You know his girls are nine, eleven, and fourteen.”

“No, I didn't know that. This is the brother in New Mexico?”

“One of them. He and Charles both live there. Charles doesn't have kids. He's not married. Charles and I don't really speak. Alex and I don't talk very often either.”

Silence ate up the turnpike again. “That's family for you,” Michael finally added. “You don't get to pick 'em.”

“True enough.” She stared at the lanes of cars ahead of them. “But we had a nice talk. It was good to catch up a bit.”

“I bet.”

Suddenly Sidarra saw a sleek gold car with a wide chrome grille come up beside them on the passenger side. “What is that, Michael? I think that's the one. What kind of car is that?”

Michael glanced over and immediately laughed. “That's a Mercedes, baby. Want me to get you one?”

Sidarra couldn't take her eyes off it. Raquel pressed her face against the back window to see it better. “Yes, I do. That's the one Alex was telling me about. He said it's a good car.”

Michael's face scrunched up a bit. “No question about that. What? You need a car now?”

“I was thinking about it.”

“Great!” Raquel squealed from behind them. “Let's get a car, Mommy! That's a great idea.”

“Grandpa always wanted a Mercedes, Raquel. That was my daddy's favorite.”

“Not this again,” Michael sighed. “Where you gonna park a Mercedes where you live? On the street? Ha!”

“Wherever my father would have parked it,” she shot back.

“You know how much that car costs? You can't even drive, can you, Sidarra?”

She was barely listening, fascinated as she was by the lines and the slope of the windows. She imagined a debonair Roxbury Parish behind the wheel on his way to the rich people's mall with his wife and daughter and granddaughter beside him. “What are those little things on the headlights?”

Michael begrudgingly craned his neck to the side so he could see out the passenger side. “Tiny windshield wipers, Sidarra.” He added a short breath between each word for emphasis, then repeated it. “Windshield wipers. On the goddamned headlights. Wonder what the rest of us will do without a set of those.”

Sidarra remained transfixed by the car. “I would want mine in blue,” she said.

“Light blue,” Raquel chirped.

Michael shook his head, hit the accelerator, and sped away.

 

SIDARRA AND RAQUEL SHARED A MOTHER-DAUGHTER FACT
neither one said aloud: they were not in New York anymore. This place was different. Michael had his own fact to keep quiet: he was getting as lost as could be. Apparently the State of New Jersey wished to keep the exact location of the Short Hills Mall a secret. The signs on the highway—those that existed at all—came up in a bunch and informed him that an exit he needed or a “route” he should take was about ten feet ahead. He missed several. He was always in the wrong lane when the roadway forked or the exit-only lane appeared on the left instead of the right. As Michael
cursed the state, its governor, and every other driver on the road, Sidarra and Raquel quietly took in the houses and scenery of another land.

When they finally parked in a lot at the mall, they immediately discovered that the people in this world also celebrated Christmas. But it felt to Sidarra and her daughter like a different Christmas—not their Christmas—they were visiting. The people of Short Hills spared no holiday expense. The mall glimmered with decorations. All the Christmas trees were perfectly trimmed and lit up two shades above a sparkle. The ceilings were bright, the floors shiny and clean, and holiday music played not from speakers but from live quartets of classical musicians sprinkled at various points across the corridors. Raquel had never seen carolers before. There was Fendi, Neiman Marcus, Gucci, and every other store you could want. You felt so good about being there that you wanted to spend every cent of someone else's money.

Sidarra made a mental map of the stores she intended to get to. Some she could do with Raquel and Michael, but for others she'd have to find a way to lose them. For that she'd also need to map their stopping points—an arcade, a Santa line, the food court where the McDonald's was.

“You guys hungry?” she asked. “You're not supposed to shop on an empty stomach, you know?”

“Why not?” Raquel asked.

Sidarra wasn't actually sure. She herself often shopped hungry. “I think it's because hunger makes you stupid and irritable. Suppose you're in a dressing room trying on some clothes you're not sure fit right. How are you gonna be able to make the right decision if you can't think straight and start getting mad at the pair of pants?”

Raquel thought about it for a second. “Is that really true, Mom?”

“For some people it is.”

“
I'm
sure as hell hungry,” Michael grumbled, still fighting mad
about the roads of New Jersey. “And I know straight where we're going—right, Rock?”

“I know too,” she smiled.

So Sidarra was able to leave them over McDonald's Happy Meals. She said she just wanted to go back to a window and look at a bag she passed. There was in fact more than one bag. Sidarra's alias bought three, but Sidarra was the one who had to carry them back to McDonald's. And she'd have to come up with an explanatory lie for Michael.

“Can I have this delivered?” she asked the Fendi cashier.

“Of course. Would you like it gift-wrapped as well?”

Pleased with her own quick thinking, Sidarra grinned. “Yeah. Yeah, why don't we do that?” She promptly had the bags sent to her job at the Board of Miseducation. Then she went back to another couple of stores and did the same thing. When she returned to Michael and Sidarra, she was empty-handed; they were fat, full of French fries, and giggling hard. After an hour or so of family shopping, she dropped them again in the kiddie arcade and ran off to pick up a couple of outfits at Chanel. Fourteen quarters of video games later and Sidarra was back with them, not a bag in sight.

The alias could be a strange thing for the old Sidarra, a quiet shopping companion who never said no to the costumes of confidence the new Sidarra wore all the time now. It had become a habit she could now afford to break. If she wanted to come back to the Short Hills Mall, her alias would have to stay home next time. And Sidarra wanted to come back—even if she had to drive herself. She wanted to be the same woman out in the world that she was in the lounge at the Full Count. She also wanted Raquel to see her mother handle her business without having to hide her fear that somebody with a badge might someday tap her on the shoulder. This way of life could not become a way for life, she thought, as they walked toward a Nine West shoe store. It couldn't last forever.

“Hey, Mommy, wanna pretend we're poor?” Raquel said loud enough for half the people in the store to turn around.

“That's not funny,” Sidarra snapped in a sharp whisper.

“What?” Raquel wondered loudly. Fortunately, Michael didn't do women's shoes and stayed outside with the latte they hoped would keep him and the fun going longer.

“Lower your voice, Raquel, and stop playing!” Sidarra stared firmly into her daughter's eyes, but Raquel just looked confused. “When I whisper to you, you don't keep talking loudly, okay?” Raquel nodded sheepishly. “Now, we're not playing that game anymore.”

Raquel was obviously embarrassed. She glanced around at the strange people from New Jersey looking at her so curiously, and she obediently sat down to make herself disappear. She didn't know what her mother was so mad about. They were in a shoe store. Didn't she remember the game? For her part, Sidarra paid more attention to the scene they made than to Raquel. She smiled one of those you-know-kids smiles to whoever would take it and pretended to take great interest in a pair of burgundy boots. Raquel withdrew. When Sidarra pointed out that they happened to have a small children's shoe section, Raquel politely shook her head and went back to waving her legs under the bench.

“Well, sweetie, how 'bout you help Mommy pick out something?”

Raquel shrugged. This was quiet resistance, a late-blooming insolence Sidarra figured Raquel must have picked up in private school. To things she once got excited about doing, she now showed indifference. It was a tough tactic.

“Hey, Raquel. If these boots were a new car, what color should they be?”

That did it. Eyes widened. Interest returned. And the two embarked on a short search for sensible shoes. When Michael ap
peared in the doorway, a man-sized presence reeking of coffee, they knew it was time to go.

At the cashier, Sidarra reached in her purse for her alias. Raquel's face was unusually close, and she watched her mother fiddle for her wallet. Her scrutiny threw Sidarra off. Maybe it was the Payless ShoeSource episode coming back to mind, and she wasn't convinced that their poverty was past. Maybe it was the fear of going to jail in New Jersey where her New York friends would never be able to find her again. Whatever it was, Sidarra couldn't bring herself to pay with the alias. There were boxes of shoes on the counter, four for Sidarra and one for Raquel.

“They're all comfortable. How much is enough, baby?” she asked Raquel. “Two is probably just enough,” she declared, and told the cashier she would not be needing the other two pairs today. With a little more confidence, Sidarra pulled a few fifty-dollar bills from her wallet and handed them to Raquel. “Handle your business, child.”

Raquel beamed and took the bills from her mother's hand. “Okay!”

 

IT WAS EASIER FOR SIDARRA
to buy the Mercedes-Benz her father never owned than it was to explain to her daughter why they weren't playing poor anymore. In fact, Sidarra could do most of the transaction over the phone, and they delivered her sky blue sedan to the brownstone a few days later. It was amazing how few questions got asked with the right size down payment. The municipal credit union was more than happy to finance the rest, and given Sidarra's new and improved credit rating, at a rate even Michael would call ridiculous. Except that Michael didn't get to call it anything. He got left out of the Mercedes loop on account of his demonstrated tendency to interfere with her happiness. It
wasn't just the constant attraction to Griff; Michael couldn't keep pace with her. He couldn't follow her money. She kept having to look back over her shoulder for him. Michael was also kept from knowing what Sidarra was fast discovering about having money: every purchase is easier. People who present themselves as having money get breaks, discounts, and a friendlier path than folks who look hard-up. You pay twice for being hard-up. And you wait a lot. Sidarra couldn't have waited for that car if she'd wanted to. It arrived just in time for her to drive herself to work, inconspicuously retrieve her Short Hills “presents” from the mailroom, and drive them home again. Of course she knew how to drive. But as Raquel was too eager to point out, she just drove slowly.