The Informant (34 page)

Lydia had some news of her own. Something special for Neil. “Spoke to Dávila this morning.”

“I think he wants to get next to your teddy bear, specially if you’re sitting on it.”

“Neil!” She laughed; he joined her. “Now, be nice. When I spoke to Dávila, he said Cristina Reina—”

“Yeah, well, I’m down on your friend Jorge. I ask him to fix me up with her, get me next to Miss Reina, and what does my man Jorge say? Says time’s not right to move in. Keeps telling me to wait, cool it, he’ll let me know when’s the best time to set up a meet between us. I came right out and accused him of being scared shitless of her, and he admitted he was. He’s sleeping with her, but he’s scared to death of her. If I can get next to her while she’s still in New York, wow! Get me a lot of brownie points. She’s the only thing between me and you-know-who.
Numero uno.
She’s his number-one lieutenant while the first team’s in Europe and Mexico, but Dávila’s pissing in his pants. Nothin’ I can do will make him approach her about sitting down with me.”

“Neil, I got Dávila to set up a meeting for you with Cristina Reina.”

Silence.

“Then: “You
what
?”

“Dávila did it. Did it for me.”

“You’re kiddin’?”

When Lydia smiled, her jaw ached, but she smiled anyway. “Dávila likes me, I told you. I asked him, and he did it.”

Neil shrieked into her ear. “Holy shit! Jeeesus Christ! You did that? You really did that?”

She closed her eyes, both hands gripping the receiver, the warmth of his excitement running quickly through her. “I did it for you.”

“Goddamm it, Lydia, you are too much! I mean it. You know what this means? You’re getting me next to the lady who’s working for the man behind the biggest fucking deal … Oh, my God, my God, I can’t believe it!”

“He says he’ll push for a day and time soon as possible, ’cause he don’t know how much longer these Florida people gonna be in town. It was all right to ask him, wasn’t it?”

“Shit yeah. You don’t know how many times I pushed that chubby little bastard to do it, and how many times he said no, he wasn’t even going to try. You don’t know what this means to me.”

“Puts you up close, right?”

“Up close? You don’t get this close to an importer in a million years. Look, I’m coming over to see you.”

“Oh, you don’t have to. You’re supposed to be off today. Your wife—”

“
I’m coming over now!
” He was firm, not an ounce of doubt in his voice, and Lydia trembled with an excitement that was almost totally sexual. She closed her eyes against those thoughts, but they remained.

“Lydia, remember that promise I made you just before Christmas? I said something to you about Dominic León.”

“I remember.”

“Okay. I got to make one stop, then I’ll be over to see you.”

“Neil, I know ’bout what you promised me, but you don’t have to do—”

His voice was calm, strong. “I’ll see you in a little while.”

The lock pick was as thin as a piece of spaghetti, only seven inches long, and the color of burned toast. Neil had kept it as a reminder of the first time somebody had tried to kill him. He’d taken it from a junkie in Cleveland during a fight in which the junkie had tried to stab Neil in the throat with it, succeeding only in gouging the back of Neil’s left hand.

Using the pick on the one lock on the door of Dominic León’s room at the Hotel Elliot, Neil opened the door in six seconds.

Inside, he held his breath, listened, heard nothing, and exhaled slowly, wiping sweat from his face with the back of the gloved hand that held the lock pick. Nobody here, nobody, answering his knock, but let’s just stand still and check it out to be sure. Placing the pick in his right-hand overcoat pocket, he looked around the small, cheaply furnished room and shook his head in mild pity. A nothing room, just the kind of hole you’d expect a loser and off-the-wall chump like Dominic the witch to live in. The Elliot was an armpit, twelve dollars a day or sixty-five a week, in advance, naturally. Neil thought it was only slightly better than living in Central Park inside a cardboard box.

Okay, let’s see what
House Beautiful
’s missing by not dropping by. A bed to Neil’s left, sagging mattress, dust under the bed, along with two pairs of boots, three pairs of shoes, all worn, all expensive. Dominic lives good. At the foot of the bed, a tiny rickety desk, one wooden chair, a lamp with a torn yellow paper shade on the desk. Also on the desk: one folded copy of the
Daily News,
a Cuban newspaper, two Cuban girly magazines, an ashtray that hadn’t been emptied in too long, one stick of Juicy Fruit gum, a ball-point pen. On the floor, a blue-and-green throw rug, dirty, worn, stained.

Directly in front of Neil, an unwashed window, half-hidden by beet-red draperies. To the right, a wooden chest of drawers, middle drawer missing, top drawer pulled halfway out, shirts and underwear visible. On top of the chest, two books of matches, another Cuban magazine, and propped up against the wall, an oblong mirror, cracked, peeling from behind, a two-foot glass square of bad luck.

Neil looked at himself in the mirror.
Holy shit, is that me?
A bad-looking sucker. I’m ugly enough to kick King Kong’s ass. Jesus.

He wore dark green sunglasses to hide his eyes, and a black woolen cap pulled down to his eyebrows to hide his forehead and hair. Three strips of white adhesive across his nose hid that, and his jaws were fat from the cotton inside his mouth. He sweated inside the long green army overcoat he’d bought twenty minutes ago at an army-navy store across from the Port Authority Terminal on Eighth Avenue but what the hell, he had to do something to make himself unrecognizable.

He grinned at his reflection in Dominic León’s distorted mirror. Oh yeah, oh yeah. I look wacko enough to be in an armpit like this. I look like the kind of turkey who gets his ass hauled in just for looking weird on a Thursday.

He patted his left overcoat pocket. His own room key was there, along with a small present for Dominic León. Neil had registered at the Hotel Elliot under the name Dick Hurtz (from high school: “Who’s Dick Hurtz?” “Mine, teacher”). He’d paid for one night, using his key with its large red plastic disk as his right to walk the halls, holding the key in his fingers where it could be seen.

But the few people he passed in the halls, most of them old, lifeless men, didn’t seem to care if he had a key or not. They shrank from him, leaning back against the walls to let him pass, and the brutal truth behind this action didn’t get through to Neil until minutes later when he’d had time to think about it. The Hotel Elliot was a jungle where the young and strong preyed on the old and weak, and Neil, being young, was the enemy.

Time to get cracking. If Dominic the witch returned and found Neil here,
Jesus.
It was Neil’s guess that Dominic was out chasing money to get him over this gun deal. What else could he do when there were guys on the street hot to waste him unless he paid them back? Dominic’s ounce of cocaine was good only for chump change, just a few dollars, say eighteen hundred dollars if the cut was good, and less if the cut was bad. Depending on how much he and his friends had borrowed from the loan shark, the money from the coke could barely cover the interest.

No. Dominic couldn’t afford to lie around his room counting cockroaches and watching the paint peel. He had to get out and hustle if he wanted to live.

As for learning Dominic’s room number, all Neil did was hand the desk clerk an empty envelope with Dominic León’s name on it and watch the clerk put it in slot 244. Dominic the witch wasn’t a transient, he was more or less permanently living there, and as such, he had a slot to call his own.

Get moving.
Neil found the stash in the second place he looked. Not in the top of the toilet, but in a small air vent over the bathtub, in a plastic bag wrapped in the sports section of the New York
Times.
Would have been one of my last choices, thought Neil, who in his experience at searching for dope had learned that some people hid it well but most didn’t.

Making the switch was hard, because he had to do it with gloves on. Ordinarily, nobody gave a shit about ripoffs in transient hotels, but Neil had to be careful. Dominic León had cops keeping an eye on him, and if it looked as though anything in this room had been touched, the cops might dust the place for prints. Chances are, they wouldn’t, but Neil had too much to lose if they did, so he worked hard at being careful.

That’s why he did everything in the bathtub, working slowly to eliminate mistakes, his ears keen for the sound of somebody coming through the front door, and his mind already made up about what he’d do if Dominic came in. Make it look like a takeoff, an attempted robbery. Just punch out Dominic in a hurry and run like hell. But he wanted to give Lydia more revenge than that, much more.

First he flushed Dominic León’s cocaine down the toilet, flushing it twice, making sure there wasn’t a grain of white powder on the toilet seat or the inside of the bowl. Then, on his knees and leaning over the bathtub, he refilled the plastic bag with the same amount of white sugar, his little present for Dominic the witch. He poured slowly, spilling a little sugar in the tub, but no sweat, he’d take care of that before he left. He sweated. God, he sweated in the army overcoat and woolen cap, and the cotton in his jaws tasted like bricks, and working with gloves on was awkward, frustrating.

Carefully he rolled the plastic bag of sugar back into the newspaper, placing it back in the air vent, keeping the two screws as loose as he’d found them. Then, turning on a faucet, he washed the spilled sugar down the drain, took off his wool cap, and carefully dried the tub.

Seconds later he opened the front door a few inches, saw an empty hall, and stepped out. The door locked automatically when he shut it behind him.

Down in the lobby, Neil had to sit for almost an hour pretending to read the
Daily News
, but finally the desk clerk left and was replaced by someone else.

For ten dollars, the new clerk gave Neil the envelope from slot 244, and when Neil, his back to the clerk, ripped the envelope to shreds and dropped the pieces in his overcoat pocket, the desk clerk never blinked. In New York, not all the squirrels were in the park. In a joint like the Hotel Elliot, you had Looney Tunes coming and going every day of the week. What’s another one more or less?

M
AS BETANCOURT PRONOUNCED SENTENCE
on René Vega. “He goes.”

“Why?” asked Blind Man. Seventy-three-year-old Blind Man stored his heroin and cocaine in two Brooklyn churches, and despite his sightless eyes he could simultaneously play excellent chess while stroking the bare back of a naked young Hispanic boy sitting at his feet.

“Shana Levin’s father,” said Mas. “He is rich, and the rich buy justice. He is demanding justice for René killing his daughter. Justice or revenge, both are the same, but what does it matter? The father is important, and he can pick up a telephone and frighten people. He will see that the police arrest René Vega, and when they do, René will consider what he has to do to stay out of jail. What does that mean to you, my friend?”

“Trouble.” Over the telephone, Blind Man’s voice had the same slight whistle and hiss it had in person, as though his false teeth were loose while at the same time his mouth was watering at the thought of a delicious meal.

“Trouble,” repeated Mas. “I thank you for telling Christina that René could not be a mule for us. Cristina agrees with me that we take no chances. René doesn’t know everything, but he knows enough to start some kind of investigation.”

“Agreed. It will not be easy making contact with René again, but I will have Jesus work on it.” Jesús Colon was Blind Man’s top lieutenant.

Mas nodded, his eyes on the cook in the kitchen of the Rellena Restaurant on Third Avenue and Seventieth Street. Two other cooks had been asked to leave while Mas was on the phone. The one remaining cook was almost totally deaf, and wise enough to concentrate on slicing cucumbers with a rapid, quiet efficiency, never looking at Mas or at René Ateyala and El Indio, both of whom sat at the other end of the long wooden table facing the cook, both of them eating steaming hot bowls of
frijoles negros
, black bean soup.

“
Hey, hombre
,” said Mas. “Tell Jesús to make it look natural. Use a ‘hot shot.’ That way, people won’t be askin’ so many questions.”

“
Sí
.” What did Blind Man care? René was young, pretty, but he wasn’t as important as the white heroin Blind Man would be receiving from Mas in the spring, heroin Blind Man had paid three hundred thousand dollars for in advance. Mas was the leader, the man in charge, doing what was best for everyone involved.

A “hot shot,” just one injection, would remove the problem of René Vega. A heroin overdose or a mild dose of heroin heavily cut with strychnine or battery acid. Mas Betancourt, who saw in Shana Levin’s murder the prophecy of the dead
babalawo
—“a woman … danger to you”—wanted René Vega dead as soon as possible. The only heroin on the street was one or two percent. A shot of eighty percent heroin would kill any man alive. It was the same as a bullet in the brain, swift and efficient. As for strychnine or battery acid, nothing to worry about there. Both could be counted on to do the job under all circumstances.

Blind Man said, “How is Pilar?”

“Fine. She’s doing more exercises, raising her arm above her head higher and higher every day. She’ll be better when I get her to Spain, but everything’s going well. God is kind sometimes. My nephew says that.”

“Ah, Rolando. Our own little priest. He is well?”

“Loves Paris restaurants. Says Mexico City is becoming more expensive.”

“
Sí
.” Blind Man hissed and whistled. “Well, let me call Jesús and take care of things.”

“
Gracias, hombre.
Happy New Year.”

“
Lo mismo a usted.
Same to you. Please give my love to Pilar.”

Walter F. X. Forster’s worry about his own ass found him in a mean mood this morning. On this particular sentence, he pounded his desk with every word. “
I want to know about Jorge Dávila!
”