The Informant (31 page)

He still wears black, as though carrying the night with him. Jacket, pants, open-neck silk shirt, boots. All as black as his heart. Black as his mind.

Dominic said, “This Hundred Dollar Man, he’s good for you, I bet. No, I
know
he’s good for you, I am sure of it. He gets around, Manhattan, Jackson Heights, Union City, and you’re with him, and I know he treats you good, right?”

“Dominic, I have to go soon.” She looked at her watch. To hell with this
mayombero.

“You think of me once in a while.” He was telling her, not asking her.

It was true, and she was ashamed of it.

He had been a ruthless, demanding lover, in bed giving her all she’d hoped for, taking more than she knew she ever had, but in time, his cruelty had simply become … cruelty. Behind the pain he’d given her was only pain, and she’d come to see that the love she’d been giving him was the only love that would ever exist between them. His hold on her had been incredible; her mind and body had belonged to him, she had been unable to hold anything back.

She had wanted to leave him, but couldn’t. So she’d stayed and been terrified, used, degraded. He had been the one to leave, and that had hurt her beyond anything she thought possible. She suffered; then, eventually and silently, she thanked him for leaving her.

“Lydia, tell the truth. Have you ever felt as alive as you did with me?”

She closed her eyes, closing out
his
eyes. “Dominic, please leave. I should never have let you in.”

“Ah, yes, but you did. Come sit by me.”

“No.” She opened her eyes wide. Her head felt light, as though her brain were wrapped in ice.

He said, “You began by loving me, and now you end by judging me.”

“All love is that,” she said.

“I’m in trouble, Lydia. I need money.” He sounded confident, but under it was desperation.

“So? Why you come to me? You must have other women, plenty women.”

“They can’t help me.”

“You mean they know you for what you are.”

He gave her the meaningless smile once more. “What am I?”

“You hurt people, and you know it. You get them to love you, then when you learn how to hurt them, you do. It’s a game with you, nothin’ else.”

He snorted, crossing his legs, pointing a forefinger at her. “A philosopher. A beautiful philosopher you are. I like your hair that way, long. It catches the light. And your breasts, they …”

She folded her arms across her breasts, narrowing her eyes, on guard against him.

He grinned, his green eyes moving up and down her body. “Relax, Lydia, relax. Haven’t seen you for a long time, remember? You and Olga. This trouble I got—”

“No, Dominic.” She wanted him out of her home, out of her life.

“I owe money to some people, and they want it right away. Can’t keep stalling them much longer.”

“Jiving them, you mean. What you do? You gamble? You promise somebody dope and you burn them?”

The smile eased off his face. The bitch was smart; she knew. A street-smart woman always knew what was going down. Was Lydia always this smart? He couldn’t remember. He was amused to see her defy him like this; it was a puppy chewing on your ankle. Dominic’s polite contempt for her made him tell the truth.

“I went to a shylock for money to do a deal for some guns. Actually, three of us are in on the deal, but I told them I would hold the money.”

“You talk good, Dominic.”

“Yeah, I know. So I got the money, see, and we had a couple of days before the deal goes down, and I hit a few cockfights.” He grinned.

She nodded. “You gambled the money on somebody’s rooster, and you lost, and now the shylocks and your partners, they all angry at you because there’s no guns and no money, and your friends, they still gotta pay back the loan.”

He clapped his hands together twice, a bitter smile on his handsome face. “
Brava, brava, brava.
Well, now you know, and if I don’t come up with it …”

“That’s your problem, Dominic. Now, get out. I gotta leave.”

“Lydia, please …” He stood up, the smile gone, and he knew he was pleading, something he had never done in front of her in his life, but what choice did he have? He needed money to stay alive.

“Lydia …”

She stood up, her back to him, remembering all the humiliation and agony this man had given her, remembering his betrayal, remembering that he must never be allowed near Olga.

“Leave.”

“I need money, woman.” Pleading, hurt, a growing anger in him.

“No money for you!” She hugged herself, shaking her head.

Goaded by his fear, by the knowledge that unless he got money soon he wouldn’t stay alive on the street, and to be refused by
her
, by this whore he had once allowed to crawl naked at his feet, by
her!

“Goddammit, bitch!” Swinging her around to face him, he backhanded her in the face, sending her hair flying, making her cry out.

The blow released her from fear.

She remembered everything he had done to her, the hurt, the desertion, what he was, and she clawed at his face with both hands, raking her nails down the right side of his face and across his nose, leaving bloody lines as she shrieked at him, at this knower of the dead who made money from the blood of men, women, children.

“Whore! You fucking whore!”

Dominic’s fear was now the dominant force in the room, and coupled with Lydia’s defiance, it made him deadly. He used his fists on her face, breasts, shoulders, and a screaming Lydia tried to block him. No woman was going to put him down, scratch his face, say no to him. No woman, especially this little whore he had once used and thrown away.

She backed away quickly, lost her balance, fell.

He was on her, and she felt his breath hot on her ear, smelled the tobacco and cologne on him, felt his unshaven cheek roughly scrape the left side of her face. She was on her stomach, one of her hands protecting her face, screaming at him, squealing with pain when he punched her twice in the kidneys.

He stopped hitting her, but still knelt over her, and, breathing hard, he unbuckled his belt, certain that the one way to bend this woman to his will was to
break
her. Using one knee, he pressed down on her spine, one hand yanking down her panty hose. Then, shifting his knees, he roughly pulled up her dress. She squirmed, twisted, fighting him, fighting the pain he’d given, fighting against what she knew he was going to do to her.

He kept her face down into the floor, one hand in the crack of her buttocks.

“You got to learn, Lydia.” Sexual excitement made him breathe faster. “You got to learn, woman, and I’m gonna teach. …”

He entered her brutally, pushing as hard and as fast as he could, a hand gripping her hair and keeping her face jammed into the floor, and when she screamed, his green eyes suddenly seemed extraordinarily bright.

“S
OMETIMES YOU GOT TO
treat a woman hard, you know?” Israel Manzana bit a black olive in half, chewed part of it, and stared at the bit he held between his thumb and pinkie finger. “But I tell you, I don’ like what happened to Lydia.”

Neil nodded, combing his mustache with his fingers. “You Cubans call that macho, right?”

Israel Manzana reached for another black olive. “Woman got to know you on top. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with comin’ down on her if you got a reason. But Dominic León, he don’ got no reason ’cept he’s crazy.” Olive still between his ringers, Israel made the sign of the cross.

You too, thought Neil. Big dope dealer scared shitless by Dominic the witch.

Israel Manzana spoke with a lisp, fluttering his hands when he talked, shooting his cuffs to show off the thin gold bracelets he wore on both wrists. “Now, Lydia, she’s a nice girl, I mean, a lotta people, they like her, ’cause she’s a child, you know? She always wanted to be a dancer, some kinda entertainer, and it’s like she never grow up, like she still tryin’ to be somebody, so I guess that’s why everybody like her. She don’ hurt nobody.”

Somebody hurt her, thought Neil, his mind on Lydia, still in the hospital, and his eyes on Israel Manzana, sitting across from him in the last booth in the Casa Picadillo restaurant in Washington Heights. Israel, who had never weighed over a hundred and twenty pounds in his life, wore a blue pinstripe suit too large for him. He had a small bony face, gray hair, and wore dark glasses day and night.

“Dominic’s maybe a little crazy,” he said, shrugging his small shoulders and turning down the corner of his nickel-sized mouth.

“More than a little, and more than maybe,” said Neil softly.

“She’s your friend, but she’s not your woman. I say that, ’cause if she your woman, then you gotta do something about it, right?”

“That’s the Cuban way?”

Israel Manzana smiled. “That is a man’s way.”

Neil nodded, eyes on Manzana’s hands.
That is a man’s way, but what can an agent do without blowing a case and ruining his career and letting the world know that the woman lying beaten and raped in a west side hospital is his informant.

And that’s why Neil, his mind on Lydia tonight, let Israel Manzana do most of the talking. Neil’s mind wasn’t on the quarter kilo of cocaine he would be getting from Israel Manzana sometime during the next three hours; it was on Lydia and Dominic León, a man Neil hated more than he had ever hated anyone in his life.

Neil watched Israel Manzana casually roll
postizas
around in his fingers.
Postizas
were spurs that were fastened to a rooster’s legs with tape and glue, to be used in a cockfight as slashing, killing weapons. The razor-sharp spurs Manzana held were three inches long, handmade out of gold, and worth three hundred dollars. Like other Hispanics in New York, Manzana owned fighting roosters, pitting his birds against those of other owners and betting on matches that sometimes ran from eight at night until four or five o’clock the next morning.

Israel Manzana also owned the Casa Picadillo restaurant, with its cockfighting pit in the back beyond the kitchen. While he and Neil sat in the booth completing their cocaine buy, customers ate at the counter and other booths around them, served by Cuban waiters in short gold jackets and shiny black pants. Neil, who was in the restaurant alone, with Kirk Holmes and Katey outside in darkened doorways waiting, knew that Israel Manzana wasn’t alone. The waiters were his men, and so were some of the Cuban customers around them.

Neil watched men walk into the restaurant with bags—shopping bags, pillowcases, even sheets pressed into service as bags. Inside the bags, roosters crowed, or tried to claw and peck their way out. The men, all Latins, disappeared through a small door that was guarded by a large black Cuban who stood with both arms folded across his massive chest, saying nothing. But his eyes were alert for strangers, troublemakers, anyone who didn’t belong.

The cockfights were to last through the night and into the next morning, ending at dawn. Money would be won and lost, and birds would die horribly while men cheered and cursed and the owners of birds that were bleeding and ripped apart would suck the bloody wounds and blow in the bird’s mouth in an attempt to revive it so that the bird could continue to fight. Neil had been taken to cockfights by Lydia and other Cubans and didn’t like them. Too crowded, too much screaming by men who had money bet on some poor rooster, and more than once somebody had pulled a knife over a bet that either had been misunderstood or wasn’t going to be paid at all. To hell with cockfights. After the first one, after he’d watched three roosters slashed and pecked into a gory death, Neil had even lost his taste for fried chicken.

When he’d told Lydia this, she’d laughed.

Lydia.

“She’s at Roosevelt, and you don’t go there till I say so.” Walker Wallace dropped papers on his desk, placed both hands on the edge, and leaned forward toward Neil, ready to battle him, because he knew he’d have to on this one.

Neil frowned, not believing what he’d just heard. “Walker, my snitch gets hurt by some freak and ends up in the hospital, and now you’re telling me I can’t go see her? What the fuck’s going on?”

“Listen to me, Neil. This is a criminal case. There’s cops down there still trying to get more of a statement from her than they’ve got. I don’t want you being interviewed or your name on anybody’s list, not with what you’re working on right now. We got Jorge Dávila down there listening, acting like a friend of the family. He’s Cuban, he blends in with Mrs. Sánchez and some of them other Cubans. You don’t, so just cool it. Dávila’s already called in twice. He told us who did it.”

“Who?”

“Cuban named Dominic León. He’s the father of Lydia’s kid, and he’s got a sheet, a lot of it as a hustler working cult and religious scams in Latin communities. Dávila says that Cubans look on León as some kind of witch, somebody with devil powers.”

Neil threw his hands in the air. “Let’s pop him.”

“No. This isn’t federal, this is local. Dominic León’s been popped before, twenty-three times to be exact, and he’s, walked most of the time. He’s been grabbed on dope possession, guns possession, Murphy-game cons, assault, rape, living off whores, extortion, stolen credit cards. Pick something, he’s done it. Man’s a fuckin’ sweetheart. A hard-on from the word go. Neil, I want you to know why I’ve kept you here for the past forty-five minutes instead of letting you go to the hospital.”

Neil fought for self-control. “Walker, she’s ours. We’re supposed to protect her. Ain’t nothin’ like this supposed to go down with her.”

“Neil, we protect when we can, where we can. We ain’t no fuckin’ mind readers. If we knew León was coming back on the set, we could have … I don’t know, done something. We send somebody over to talk to him, lean on him, we might have been able to keep him away. But we didn’t know. Hell, his name wasn’t even in her jacket, so don’t bring up that shit ’bout taking care of informants. We do what we can, that’s it.”

“Walker—”

“Neil, shut up, okay? I’m still group head, and you’re still an agent workin’ for me, and if I got to pull rank, I’m pullin’ rank. There’s a buy goin’ down tomorrow night, remember? You and Israel Manzana, a little matter of some cocaine in exchange for some color TV’s. I know it’s fuckin’ Christmas Eve and all, but what does that mean to dedicated public servants like you and me? All right. I want you to remember that we had an agent killed around here a few days ago
—”