Hell's Kitchen (24 page)

“Somebody broke into my apartment last night. Can you find out who did it?”

“Why you ask me, you think I do that too?”

“If I thought you did it I wouldn’t be asking you.”

Ramirez considered. “I don’t got real good contacts in the Village, you know.”

“How’d you know I lived in the Village?”

“I said I got no real good contacts. I no say I don’t have
any.”

“Ask around.”

“Okay.

“Gracias.”

“Nada.”

They’d walked far north on Ninth Avenue, almost out of the Kitchen. Pellam leaned against a lamppost on the corner while Ramirez disappeared into a tiny bodega. When he came out he was carrying a thick envelope, which he slipped into the pocket of his tight jeans.

There was sudden motion from the alley nearby.

“Shit.” Ramirez spun around, reaching into his jacket.

Pellam dropped into a crouch and stepped toward a parked car for cover.

“Who the fuck’re you?” Ramirez said.

Pellam squinted into the gloomy opening of the alley. The intruder was Ismail.

“Yo, cuz,” the boy said, glancing uncertainly at the Latino. The boy stepped forward uncertainly.

Ramirez glanced at him like he was a roach. “Man, you come up on people like that . . . I thinking I oughta cap you ass.”

Ismail’s cautious eyes swept the sidewalk.

To Pellam he said, “You know him?”

“Yeah. He’s a friend of mine.”

A faint grin seemed to cross the boy’s face.

“A friend of yours?” Ramirez spat out. “Why you want a little
moyeto
like that for a friend?”

“He’s okay.”

“He okay?” Ramirez muttered. “He come sneaking up on me again, he gonna be one dead
okay
friend of yours.”

“Hey, Ismail, how come you’re not at the Outreach Center?”

“Dunno. Just hanging.”

“Hear anything about your mother and sister?”

He shook his head, eyes slipping from Ramirez’s scowl to Pellam’s face. And for a moment Ismail seemed just like any other child. Shy, uneasy, torn between fear and yearning. It hurt Pellam to see this vulnerability. The street defiance was somehow easier to take. He thought about Carol Wyandotte’s assessment. She was wrong. It
was’t
too late for him. There had to be some hope.

Pellam crouched down. “Do me a favor. Go on back to the Outreach Center. Get some sleep. You eat anything?”

He shrugged.

“Did you?” Pellam persisted.

“I ’jacked some beer,” he said proudly. “Me and a homie, we drank that.”

But Pellam couldn’t smell any liquor on the boy’s breath. Childish bravado.

Pellam gave him five dollars. “Go to McDonald’s.”

“Yeah! Hey, you come by and see me, Pellam? I show you some good shit. We play basketball, I know all the moves!”

“Yeah, I’ll come by.”

The boy turned to leave.

Ramirez called out brusquely, “Hey, punk. . . .”

Ismail stopped, looked back cautiously.

“You got big feet?”

The round, dark face stared up at him.

“I ask you a question. You got big feet.”

“Dunno.” He looked down at his tattered sneakers.

“Here.” Ramirez tossed the box of basketball shoes toward the boy. He caught it awkwardly. Looked inside.

His eyes went wide. “Shit. Be Jordan Air Pumps. Shit.”

“They no fit now, not too good,” Ramirez said, “but maybe, you don’t sneak up on people, you live long enough to grow inta them. Now you do what he tell you.” Nodding at Pellam. “Get the fuck outa here.”

When he was gone Ramirez said to Pellam, “Let’s go celebrate my deal.” He tapped the pocket where the fat, white envelope rested. “You drink tequila?”

“Mescal I drink. Sauza I drink. Margaritas ’re disgusting.”

Ramirez exhaled a derisive laugh, as he always seemed to do when somebody stated the obvious, and started off down the street, impatiently gesturing Pellam after him. Plans for the evening had apparently been made.

*   *   *

They split the worm.

Ramirez hacked the poor thing apart with an honest-to-God
West Side Story
switchblade as they sat in a smokey little Cuban-Chinese restaurant near Columbus Circle.

Pellam told him about location scouting in Mexico, where he’d spent hours with the off-duty gaffers and grips and stunt people, bragging about their psychedelic experiences ingesting fat white mescal worms. “I never felt anything though.”

“No, man,” Ramirez protested. “These guys, they fuck up you mind.” And downed his portion of the worm.

After they finished two plates of tamales each they strolled outside. Ramirez stopped at a package store and bought another fifth of mescal.

Working their way downtown, Ramirez said, “Man, here it’s Saturday night and I no got a woman. That sucks.”

“That waitress at the bar. She was flirting with you.”

“Which one?”

“The Hispanic one.”

“Her?” He scoffed. Then he frowned. “Hey, Pellam, lemme give you some advice. No say ‘Hispanic.’”

“No?”

“That’s no good no more.”

“Tell me what’s politically correct. I’d like to hear it from somebody who says ‘mick’ and ‘nigger’.”

“That’s different, man.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“Just is Ramirez announced. Then he continued. “Whatever country somebody come from that’s what you say. Dominican. Puerto Rican. I’m
Cubano.
If you gotta use one word say ‘Latino.’” Ramirez took a hit from the bottle. He began reciting, “‘
Apostol de la independencia de Cuba guia de los pueblos . . . Americanos y paladin de la dignidad humana.
’ You speak Spanish?”

“A little. Not enough to understand whatever the hell you just said.”

“Those words, they on the statute of Jose Marti on Sixth Avenue. Central Park. You ever seen it?”

“No.”

“Ah,” he said, sneering. “How you can miss it? It thirty-feet high. His horse, it up on two legs and Marti is staring down Sixth Avenue. He look kind of funny, like he no trust nobody.”

“Who was he? Marti?”

“You don’t know?”

Art fims aside, history in Hollywood is pretty much limited to very unhistorical Westerns and war movies.

“He fought the Spanish to get them out of Cuba. He was this poet. He got exiled when he was fifteen or sixteen and he travel all over the world to fight for Cuban independence. He live here in New York for a long time. He was a great man.”

“You ever been back to Cuba?”

“Back? I never been there.”

“Never? You’re kidding.”

“No, man. Why I go there? Havana got traffic jams and slums and dust, it got
las muchachas
and
las cerveza.
It got
hombres embalaos
on ganja. Crack too now probably. It just like New York. I want a vacation, I go to Nassau with a beautiful girl and gamble. Club Med.”

“It’s your home.”

“Not
my
home, man,” he said sternly. “Was my
grandfather
’s home. Not mine. . . . There this guy at a warehouse I use sometimes,
Señor . . .
” Ramirez stretched the word out to work contempt into his voice. “Buñello.
Loco,
this
viejo.
Look at him—he want everybody call him ‘Señor.’ ‘I have to live in
los Estados Unidos
for now. But I am
Cubano,’
he say. ‘I was exiled.’ Oh, man, I gonna punch him out he say that one more time. He say, ‘We all going back someday. We all going to sit on sugar plantations and be rich again and have
los moyetos,
you know, blacks, do all the work for us.’
Puto.
Man, my father couldn’t wait to get out.”

“Your father, was he a revolutionary?”

“
Mi padre?
No. He come here in fifty-four. You know what they call us then? Latinos who come to America?
They call us ‘summer people in winter clothes.’ He was a kid when he left. His family, they live in the Bronx. He was in a gang too.”

“You mean a club.”

“Back then crews, they was different. You move into a new neighborhood, you go one-on-one with the leader. You know, you got it up from the shoulders—you fought with your fists. Until you do that, you was nobody. So while the
fidelistos
were burning plantations and shooting
batistianos
my father, he was in this circle of punks and fighting this big
puto
on a Hundred Eighty-sixth Street. Got the crap beat out of him. But, after, they all went to drink
cervezas
and rum and he was jumped in. They give him a name. They call him, ‘
Manomuerto.
’ That was the day he prove his heart. That’s what they say. ‘Proving your heart.’
Su corazón.
”

“Where’s your father now?”

“Left six, seven year ago. Went to work one morning, sent my brother Piri home with half his pay envelope and say he call sometime. But he never call.” Hector Ramirez laughed loud. “Who know? Maybe he in Havana.”

A bunch of tiny worms were taking tie-dyed trips in Pellam’s brain. He hadn’t had that much really, five or six shots.

Okay, maybe more.

And, okay, maybe there
was
something psychedelic about the little critters.

As the two men plunged further into the dark heart of the Kitchen he realized Ramirez was talking to him.

“What?”

“Man, I asked you what the fuck you really doing here?”

“What am I doing? I’m drinking tequila with a criminal.”

“Hey, you think I’m a criminal? I got a conviction?”

“I’m told you do.”

He thought for a moment. “An’ who told you?”

“Word on the street,” Pellam muttered ominously.

“You no answering my question. What’re you doing here?”

“My father,” Pellam answered, surprising himself with his candor.

“You
father. Where you father? He live here?”

“Not any more.” Pellam turned his eyes north, where easily a million lights glimmered with different types of brightness. He took the bottle back. “I worked on this film a few years ago.
To Sleep in a Shallow Grave.”

“I never hear of it.”

“It was about a woman who comes home and finds her father may not have been her father. I was just scouting locations but I rewrote part of the script too.”

“Her mother, she a puta?”

“No, just had an affair. She was lonely.”

Ramirez took the bottle, swallowed a mouthful, nodded at Pellam to keep going.

He said, “My mother lives upstate. Little town called Simmons. No, you never heard of it. I went to see her, this was two Christmases ago.”

“You buy her a present?”

“Of course I did. Let me finish my story.”

“Good you remembered her. Always do that, man.”

“Let me finish. We drove out to see my father’s grave like we always do when I’m there.” Another sip. Then another. “We get out to the grave and she’s crying.”

They were deep into the Kitchen now and turned into the stinking cobblestoned alleyway that led to Ramirez’s kickback.

“She’s got a confession to make, she tells me. It turns out she doesn’t think her husband was my father after all.”

“Man, that was one big fucking surprise.”

“Benjamin—her husband, the man I
thought
was my father—was away a lot. Traveled all the time. They had a fight about it, he went off on a trip. She took this lover. After a while he leaves. Ben comes home. They patch things up. She’s pregnant, can’t tell what day it happened, you know. But she’s pretty sure it’s not Ben’s. She’d been brooding about it ever since he died. Telling me or not, I mean. Finally she finally broke down and did.”

“Fuck up you mind, hearing that. So why you come here?”

“I wanted to find out about him. My real father. Didn’t want to meet him. But I wanted to know who he was, what he did for a living, maybe find a picture of him.”

“He still here?”

“Nope. Long gone.” He explained how he’d found the man’s last known address but he’d left that building years before and there were no other leads. Pellam had contacted the vital statistics departments in the five boroughs of New York City and all the nearby counties of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. No response.

“Gone, huh? Just like my padre.”

Pellam nodded.

“So why you stay?”

“I thought I’d do a movie about Hell’s Kitchen. His neighborhood. He lived here for a while.” Pellam held up the bottle. “Well, here’s to your padre, the son of a bitch.” He drank from it.

“Here’s to
both
of ours. Wherever the fuck they are.”

Pellam was just handed the bottle back when he felt, for the second time in several days, the chill of metal on his neck. This time, too, it was a gun muzzle.

*   *   *

Ramirez rated three thugs, Pellam only one.

“Fuck,” the Latino spat out as two of them gripped his shoulders and the third frisked him carefully, taking his automatic pistol and his knife. Another grabbed the mescal bottle and flung it into the alley.

“Only spic faggots drink this shit.”

Pellam heard the bottle crash.

Grinning, Ramirez nodded to the man who’d spoken, said to Pellam, “This is Sean McCray. I no know why he here. Most Saturday nights he got a date—at home with his dick.”

Which earned Ramirez a fist. It slammed into his jaw. He staggered under the blow.

Pellam recognized McCray from the table in Corcoran’s bar the other day. He’d been sitting near Jacko Drugh.

“I remember him,” Pellam said.

Which, for some reason, earned Pellam a fist too, though he got slugged in the belly. He doubled over, gasping, breathless. His minder, a large man in a black leather coat like Drugh’s, dragged him to the middle of the alley, dropped him in a pile, turned back to Ramirez.

The young Latino struggled, tried to kick one of
them. But they just started beating him. When they stopped, Ramirez gasped, “Man, you stupid fucking micks.” He seemed more exasperated than anything else by their behavior.

“Shut up.”

McCray leaned close. “I had a little talk with O’Neil. He told me you two were in business together. Which I can’t say surprised me.”