Kockroach (11 page)

“And a liter of retsina,” said another.

“Any moussaka left in the pan?”

“Maybe some bread and feta.”

“And the retsina.”

“This isn’t a party, Cos,” said Nemo. “This is business.”

“Is that what it is, sweet pea?” said the Boss, barging through the door. “Business?”

“Thank you for joining us, Jerzy.”

“I had a thing to deal with.”

“We hope it came off all right,” said Nemo.

The Boss, he kept smiling as he strided to the head table. When he reached Mr. Abagados, he stuck a hand into his jacket. He pulled out a bundle of cash and dropped it in front of the
Nonos
. With his chin still on his chest, the old man reached out his three-fingered claw and took hold of the stack.

The Boss then he moved along the head table to the other side of Nemo, where he pulled out a chair and sat down as if that were his very spot, right there beside Nemo, number three, which it was. He had risen fast, had the Boss. With my brains and his cold brutality, he had become an essential member of the Abagados outfit, especially as the outfit geared for war. Big Johnny Callas had been letting things slip as he tried to slip hisself into the glitter of Square society, but the Boss and me, we didn’t care about no ball stars or starlets. We
brought order back into the territory. And when one of the Italian boys from the east started inching into our territory, a savage brain-dead hood name of Rocco Stanzi, Blatta ended that with silent efficiency, leaving two pizza cowboys broken and Rocco slinking like a slug back east, carrying his ass in a duffel. That was the final bit, the little power play what put Blatta at the head table.

“We are being squeezed, gentlemen,” said Nemo, “like a ripe tomato. We have every organization in the city looking with envious eyes at all we have done to develop our territory. When we took over the Square it was a place of honest revelry and burlesque, with only a few pitiful operations that barely wet a whistle. Now who doesn’t want to own it? The raiding operation run by that greaseball Stanzi was just the most recent attempt at our territory, and not all have turned out so well. At the same time you know it is not enough that we stay still because, in the world in which we live, you stay still you might as well paint red circles on your back. But to where can we expand? To the east is Tartelli. To the south is that madman Zwillman. And to the north we have the most troublesome of all, that
nothos mauvros,
J. Jackie Moonstone and his colored all-stars.

“Everyone wants to expand, everyone is eyeing their neighbors like they eye their neighbors’ wives. The fuse is lit. That’s why we’ve spent the last months enlarging our ranks, building our arsenal, sucking up all the surplus war materials we could graft our hands onto and placing it into a secure location known only to the
Nonos
and myself. We are ready, but for what? If we let it get out of control, we are going to end up
ripping each other to shreds like wild dogs. And then, with blood on the streets, the last one standing will inherit nothing but indictments.

“So we’ve come up with a better plan. The
Nonos
has brokered a series of agreements that serves to divide much of the disputed territory. Zwillman gets the South Bronx, Spanish Harlem, and Washington Heights. Tartelli gets the main part of Harlem from river to river. We get south Harlem and the area north of our current territory.”

“But that is all Moonstone’s turf,” said one of the men. “What does he say about it?”

“He is delighted to help out,” said Nemo. “He has invited us all to the party.”

“Really?”

“No, not really,” said Nemo. “We have no choice but to wipe that
nothos mauvros
off the map. Moonstone has bigger numbers than all of us individually, which is why he’s the biggest threat, but together we can destroy him. So long as we work together.”

“When do we start?”

“When we give the word, not before. Moonstone is a barbarian, anyone tips him off it will be ten times as bad for all of us. But the purpose of this meeting is not to start a war with Moonstone, it is to let you all know that we now have new friends. Do you trust
koproskilo
like Tartelli and Zwillman? Neither do I, but for now they are our friends. It’s like Roosevelt making kissy-face with Stalin during the war. We’re going to be allies until it is over, save Berlin for later. No actions against them, no incursions, no fights. We’re going to
be allies until it is over, and then we will turn on them like savages.”

“It ain’t gonna be so easy making love to stinking Tartelli’s boys.”

“You don’t have to sit on their faces, Cos, you just need to make nice until Moonstone is taken care of. And we all have to take care of that
nothos mauvros
when the time is ripe. Are there any questions? Do you all understand how crucial it is we all follow direction? Do you all understand what is at stake?”

As the meeting was breaking, Nemo, he gave me the signal, a surreptitious flick, so I didn’t storm out the joint with most the rest of them, the Boss included, back to the street to take care of business. Instead I stayed at the Acropolis, buying drinks for Stavros and the boys, cracking jokes and rolling dice for quarters to pass the time, as if I had nothing but time to pass. After my third beer I hopped off the bar, hitched up my pants.

“Remember, boys, you never buys the beer, you only rents it.”

So what if the joke was as stale as the brew they served in that joint, a cloud of laughter followed me as I headed to the bathroom. I could still hear it as I rounded the corner, slipped through the kitchen, and nodded at the gunsel guarding the back room.

He let me pass.

We was alone, the two of us. Nemo made hisself scarce,
quite the feat for someone the size of Nemo, and so it was just me and Mr. Abagados at the table, sitting across the one from the other. He was still pitched forward, leaning on his cane, still in his posture that seemed to be one of sleep. But now his eyes instead of being closed were open and focused like twin gunsights on me.

“Tell me, Mickey, how goes things with that girl?”

“Good,
Nonos,
things with Celia are going good. You know.”

“Does she yet understand how you feel?”

“I don’t know, maybe. She gots to suspect, what with all the cash I’m laying out on her. You don’t give pearls to your palsies, now do you?”

“But you didn’t yet say.”

“No, not yet. The time it ain’t just ripe. I don’t got nothing set up, no place to take her that she’ll want to be, and I don’t want to be scaring her off untils I does.”

“With women is always better to scare than to bore.” Abagados, he reached into the outside pocket of his jacket. “Let me show you this.”

From out his jacket pocket he pulled his loppy three-fingered hand, closed over something big and round, as big and round as a grenade. Slowly, he turned over his palm and flipped his hand so as to roll the object across the table at me.

I snatched it off the table afore it fell into my lap. “It’s a lemon.”

“Tell me, of what does it smell?”

I took myself a sniff. “It smells like a lemon.”

“No, Mickey, no. Close your eyes, try again. In my village was grove
lemoni
. The owner, he paid children climb top branches and pull down fruit. The smell I still remember. It brings back the child. Roll it in your hands, breathe.”

“This come from Greece?”

“California. I bought my own grove in California. Place to retire when my time here is over.”

“That’s a good racket, I’d bet, letting the sun do all the work and then picking fruit off them trees like they was dollar bills.”

“You’d think yes. The foreman he knows
lemoni,
and he is Greek, but he is also thief. I need someone watch him, someone I trust. Someone sharp enough to turn sun into money.”

I took the lemon in my hand, rolled it back and forth, lifted it to my nose, let its fragrance, sweet and rich, rise through me like a Louis Armstrong song, like a movie kiss.

“What does it smell like, Mickey?”

“Like a lemon.”

“See, that’s why I enjoy you. You know how to hold back. You are a man who will go far.”

“How far?”

“Think three thousand miles to the west.”

Without saying nothing, I took another sniff.

“And not alone, you understand,” said the
Nonos
. “Never again alone. This is dangerous time. The wolves are circling. They smell something too. What do they smell?”

“Lemons?”

“Betrayal. And this I found in my life. Two sweetest scents
in all the world,
lemoni
fresh from tree and betrayal. The wolves are circling and I need something from you, my friend. Something of the utmost importance.”

When I left the Acropolis that night, I had a lemon in my hand and a knot of fear in my gut, but more than that, dead in my sights I had my main chance. It ain’t no easy thing to change the world; how much harder is it to change yourself? Some, they say it can’t be done, that early on the bones is thrown and everything after is simply a matter of the odds. An Alvin like me what makes good is still just an Alvin what hit his point. It’s easy enough to believe it, to shrug your shoulders and say there is nothing to be done and go on going on. It’s easy enough, except I had an example to guide me. Jimmy Slaps, what stood on that crate and proclaimed his change to all the world afore he placed the gun to his head.

And it didn’t much matter to me if the change claimed by old Jimmy Slaps, it didn’t take, if soon as the chamber it clicked empty he slipped back into his old ways, flashing his newly gapped grin as he threw the dice or peeked at his hole cards. His face it grew longer, his raincoat it grew grimier, the gaps in his smile grew wider, the odds against him grew filthy long.

Last I saw of Jimmy Slaps was in an alleyway off Forty-fourth where he spun the cylinder like you spin the dice and put another gun to his head. Before him in a box lay assorted bills, a fiver, two tenners, a pile of ones, the paltry payoff for which Jimmy Slaps was letting once again the odds work their smooth magic on his life. It hadn’t been enough no more to watch the odds work on the cards or the dice or the ponies.
Once he had a taste of the ultimate bet, the yes-or-no play of the revolver, he couldn’t think of nothing more. He couldn’t stop hisself. Time after time he was betting with his life.

And now, so was I.

When I left the Acropolis that night, I had a lemon in my hand and a knot of fear in my gut. I tossed the lemon in the air and hoped to hell it worked out better for me than it did for good old, dead old, Jimmy Slaps.

Kockroach waits patiently
in the car. He has an inhuman patience, the patience of a fly on the wall, a spider in its web. Istvan taps the steering wheel with his fingers as they wait, but Kockroach moves not a muscle. The car is parked half a block before the restaurant, behind a wide truck that bars much of the car’s view of the street, but from the rear seat Kockroach can see the entrance of the Acropolis. He waits, patiently.

“Maybe he went out back,” says Istvan.

“No,” is all Kockroach says.

“You want I check he’s still there?”

“No.”

Istvan taps his fingers. Kockroach waits. The door opens and a small man in a green suit and a green fedora steps into the night. There is something in his hand, something small and yellow. The man tosses it into the air.

“What is he holding?” says Kockroach.

“
Lemoni,
Mr. Blatta.”

Kockroach watches as Mite turns down the street and walks away, toward the Square, still tossing the lemon up and down. In the past, Kockroach would only have seen a man with a lemon, but that was before he learned the ritual of
chess. Now, Kockroach can see the ribbons of possibility float through time, Mite’s ribbons, flowing out from the Acropolis, slithering toward some great prize in the time to come.

“What are you up to, Mite?” says Kockroach out loud.

“You want me to follow?” says Istvan.

“No need.” It is like the ritual of chess, being played out by the two of them on the streets of the city. And Mite, as usual, is planning a trap. But Kockroach has taken to heart the lessons of the ritual, he has plans of his own now, his own ribbons of possibility reaching out like clawed legs to strike at the future, to battle it and subdue it and turn it to his will.

“To Yonkers then?” says Istvan.

“Yes, to Yonkers.”

The Lincoln pulls away from the curb, turns left on Eighth, and begins heading north, toward a place called Yonkers. Kockroach has never stepped foot there, Yonkers, has only heard the name a few times, Yonkers, but already he likes it. Yonkers. Yonkers. It feels in his mouth like the sound of lamb bones crunching between his teeth.

The house is large and white and sits on a leafy street on the crest of a hill a few miles north of Yonkers Raceway. A shallow white picket fence surrounds the front of the property. Outside there are lights blazing, streetlights, security lights, a light on the post that announces the address. Outside is bright, inside is as dark as terror.

“Wait here,” says Kockroach before slipping quietly out of the car. He makes a quick circle around the house, spies the
weakness with an unerring instinct, crawls through the gap in the basement window, dusts off his suit, straightens his glasses, his tie, his hat, begins his ascent up the stairway.

Since his earliest days in this strange body, Kockroach has learned much about the humans. They are a species, he has discovered, governed by emotion. Some of these emotions he understands, emotions such as greed. Greed is the second strongest of all cockroach emotions. His incessant hunger is merely a manifestation of his boundless greed, for a cockroach always hungers, always, even with its belly full and its uric acid spent. To see something is to want it, a speck of starch, a drop of water, a shed plate of chitin, a cozy hiding place, a female rising on her hind legs, to see something is to want it, need it, got to have it. But a cockroach’s greed has boundaries, a cockroach’s view is necessarily limited by its height and size, the narrowness of its territory. How much more can a human desire with its better viewpoint, its stronger eyes, its ability to traverse great breadths of territory.

Yes, Kockroach understands greed, and its cousin envy. For why should one human have something when Kockroach himself could have it just as well, be it food, be it a woman, be it money, be it turf, be it power, be it favor in the eyes of the great god of smoke rising high over the Square. Kockroach knows not Abel but understands Cain.

Other emotions Kockroach has yet to fathom. Love is a word he hears in every song and in every one of the movies to which Mite drags him, it is a word he overhears in many human conversations, yet of it he still has no understanding. It has something to do with sex, yes, and sex he understands, sex
is the one thing that travels pure from one species to another, but love, he suspects, is something more. It has to do with the mashing of lips, the clenching of bodies without the purpose of procreation, the swelling syrup of thick music when one set of huge eyes on the movie screen stares into another. All he knows for sure is that every human wants it, and so, therefore, does he: greed and envy work their magic beyond the realm of understanding.

Just as he has no understanding of love, he has no understanding of hate. Yes, he can be violent, brutal and swift, but it is all for him a matter of business, a matter of greed. He does what he must to get as much as he can. It is never personal because for Kockroach nothing is personal. Even to see Mite slink out of the Acropolis long after he should, even to assume he is plotting something with the powers inside, even that is not a personal affront. Mite has greed too, of course he does, is he not also a creature of this world? To see him toss that lemon up and down causes no hate to flash across Kockroach’s calm. Kockroach doesn’t hate, he handles.

Similarly Kockroach fails to understand the way some humans are angry at other humans simply because of the sound of their last names, the shape of their eyes, the color of their skins. To him they are all of the lower orders, all humans, and to differentiate among them because of color or accent or the vowels in their last names is to differentiate among different orders of feces, all tasty, sure, but still.

And pride, embarrassment, vanity, all things that seem to cripple humans have no meaning for a cockroach. Such traits denote a struggle to change, to grow, to fulfill a dream of be
coming something different. But cockroaches don’t dream of being crickets and singing sweetly into the night, don’t dream of being spotted hawks and soaring to great heights, don’t dream of being humans and expressing all the world’s joy and sorrow in discrete lines of poetry.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world
. What human would not have wished to write such a line, what cockroach would even consider it, though for a cockroach it be more apt? Cockroaches embrace their cock-roachedness. If they have a charm that is it. They are content with what they are and so are beyond vanity, beyond the possibilities of pride and embarrassment, beyond poetry.

But with all Kockroach still cannot understand of the human matrix of emotion, there is one emotion other than greed that he understands completely. If you could examine the twin strands of a cockroach’s emotion, rising like the twining strands of its DNA, you would find fear and greed, greed and fear, fear and greed, always the two, one with the other, yes and no, stop and go. It is greed that drives a cockroach forward, toward the wet slop of goop upon which it desires to feast—a near-uncontrollable desire to obtain, to mount, to devour—but it is fear that stops him cold, that spreads his antennae, that sends him sniffing for predators before he heads once more toward the goop. Fear. It is why cockroaches sleep in the tightest spaces, why cockroaches are silent, why they scurry, why they scurry in darkness.

Kockroach understands fear, and in dealing with the human he has learned that, of all the emotions, it is fear that drives it,
fear even more than pride or vanity, hate or greed, even more than the mysterious joys of love. Fear of hunger, fear of pain, fear of dismemberment, fear of insects, fear of a stranger rising unbidden in your very own house, rising step by step, silently, in the darkness, up your stairs while you sleep, rising to your kitchen, opening your refrigerator, devouring your food with great noisy chomps while the light bathes his front, ripping meat off bones, swallowing raw eggs whole, and, though still not sated, wiping the residue off his mouth with the back of his hand before passing the door of your mother-in-law’s room and rising ever farther up your stairs, skulking past your three sleeping children, entering your very own bedroom, sitting on the side of your very own bed, where you and your wife sleep the sound sleep of the unsuspecting.

Shaking you awake in the darkness.

Startling you awake with a shake in the darkness.

“What? What?” you ask, as if the darkness itself will hold some answers. And it is the darkness itself that responds, darkness in the shape of a shadow, a shadow with broad shoulders and a fedora cocked on its head, a shadow whose voice is both twittering and deep, the deranged voice of fear itself.

“Cooney,” it says. “Cooney. You’re late.”

Kockroach sits in the back of the car as it speeds through the Bronx toward Manhattan. He examines a spot on the cuff of his shirt, a dark splatter. He rubs at it with his thumb but the splatter has soaked into the fabric.

“Back to the Square?” asks Istvan.

“Yes,” says Kockroach, still rubbing futilely at the spot, “but first stop at Kirschner’s.”

In Manhattan, the brown car double-parks in front of a small storefront, Kirschner’s Delicatessen. In New York, all creatures have a favorite deli, even cockroaches, especially cockroaches. The neon beneath the name reads: open all night.

“The usual?” says Istvan.

“Two.”

“Hungry tonight, Mr. Blatta?”

Kockroach doesn’t respond. It is a foolish question; he is hungry every night. After a few moments, Istvan steps out of the delicatessen with a brown paper bag, nearly translucent with grease on the bottom.

With the car again on its way south, Kockroach opens the bag, takes a deep whiff. The rich oily scent, starchy and sweet, reminds him of his childhood.

Sitting now beside Kockroach in the back of the car is a woman with dark hair piled high. Her heels are spiky, her earrings dangle, her white blouse is tucked into her tight gray skirt: a secretary tarted up for a late night assignation with the boss. The look is catnip for conventioneers. Her thin mouth shifts and wriggles like a nervous worm on a hook. The brown car jerks east between two cabs on Forty-second Street.

“He was going to stiff me, the bastard,” she says.

“Never use my name.”

“I had to tell him something.”

“Lie.”

“My momma taught me never to lie. Whoring was okay, but not lying. Is it the truth what I heard about Sylvie?”

“None of your beeswax.”

“Okay. Sure. She’s been tough to take lately anyway, still thinking she was some kind of queen bee even with her junkie shakes. She’s better off on them piers, how skinny she got. I’m tired and hungry and my dogs are barking. What’s in the bag?”

“It’s not for you.”

“C’mon, Jerry. I’m hungry. Just a bite. It smells good.”

“I need something from you, sweet pea.”

“Of course you do.”

She slips off the seat onto her knees, begins to unhook his belt buckle. He pushes her away.

“There is a man in a bar.”

“There’s always a man in a bar,” she says.

“He’s tall, thin, his suits are expensive and too tight. You can tell him by the way his hair grows down to his eyebrow. You’ll go in. He’ll make a move. You’ll promise him a freebie and take him to the alley behind the bar.”

“Then what?”

“That’s it. I’ll take over from there.”

“Never knew you liked the other side, Jerry.”

“I like everything, sweet pea. And you mention my name again, you’ll be strolling the piers with Sylvie.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Here we are. Hair down to his eyebrow. Put on a smile and make nice.”

Kockroach waits in the alley behind the bar. He stands stock-still, in the darkest crevice of shadow, well out of the single shaft of light that pierces the darkness. He waits with his inhuman patience.

He doesn’t imagine what is happening inside the bar, the music, the smoke, the laughter and slapped backs, doesn’t imagine the woman sitting on her stool, turning her head, smiling at the tall man in the tight suit, taking a cigarette from her purse, placing it in her fingers, waiting for the man to leave his friends, step over and light it. Kockroach doesn’t imagine the repartee, the sexual innuendo, the flitting erotic imaginings that slip through the man’s brain as the woman places the lit cigarette in her mobile lips. He has already worked out the moves in advance and so now he simply stands there. The brick of the alley is weeping. A cat scampers around a puddle and jumps atop a metal trash can. The intermittent sound of cars passing by the narrow alley rises and falls in an endless series, the closest Kockroach has ever gotten to the sound of ocean waves. If you ever wondered what a cockroach was thinking when standing motionless on your kitchen floor, don’t. It doesn’t move, it doesn’t think, it merely waits for the proper stimulus.

A world opens, the sound of trumpets and piano, of talking, of clinking glasses and celebration, then the sound dies
with a slam. He hears footsteps, a spark of laughter, a growl.

“Where you going, baby?” A man’s voice. “Here is fine. Why not here?”

“C’mon, silly.”

“To where?”

“Someplace private.”

“This is private enough, what I got in mind.”

“Just over here.”

They step into the narrow shaft of light. The man’s suit is tight, his glossy black hair pulled back from low on his brow. There is a bland cruelty in his eyes.

“You’re a hot one, ain’t you, baby?” he says.

He roughly opens the woman’s white blouse, popping a button as he reaches for a breast. He grabs hold of her rear and squeezes.

“One hot baby.”

He leans his mouth into her long pale neck. The woman unbuckles his belt, pulls down his suit pants. His knees are bony, bristly. He takes his hand from her rear, yanks down his own boxers, reaches now under her skirt, growls and laughs at the same time.

With a quick press of her arms, she pushes herself away, leaving him alone in the light, his pants and boxers pooled around his ankles.