Kockroach (15 page)

“It was. Now it’s your place. Cooney signed the deed over to me and I’m signing it over to you.”

“Me? Why?”

“It’s what you want, isn’t it? A place out of the city. A plot of grass. A fence.”

“Stop that, all right? Just stop it. You know too damn much.”

“I don’t understand about the fence, it’s like putting yourself in a cage.”

“I was getting ready to sell you down the river. Why would you do this for me?”

“When I was young, I was left to scuttle for myself. I survived but it was always on my own. I never knew it could be otherwise. And then, after the change, I was a blank in this world.”

“What change?”

“You found me and took me to Abagados and taught me chess. Whatever I have become, it is because of you.”

“You means you weren’t a gangster before this? Is that the change?”

“I was a blank, I did not even know enough to know I was looking for something, but I was. I was looking for you.”

“So if I took you to a garage, you would be some crummy car salesman?”

“Want to buy a Buick?”

“Or if I took you to a fire station, you would be saving lives now instead of taking them?”

“I was a blank.”

“You was a piece of clay and I was your Old Dudley. Oh God, I really stepped in it, didn’t I? I really am damned, ain’t I?”

“We are brothers now, Mite. Our possibilities are intertwined. For me it is so foreign a concept, I wouldn’t even know it existed if there wasn’t a word:
we
. You want a house with a fence, we want the house, and here it is.”

“What do you want in return?”

“Loyalty. The loyalty of a brother.”

“I never had no brother.”

“I’ve had hundreds, thousands.”

“I won’t even ask. I won’t even frigging ask, you freak. But since you’ve had so many you needs to clue me in. What does that loyalty-of-a-brother crap mean?”

“It means, Mite, I won’t eat you unless I have to.”

Istvan stops the big brown car at Kirschner’s Delicatessen, double-parking in front of the entrance. “The usual?” says Istvan.

“I’ll take care of it,” says Kockroach. “Wait here, both of you.”

“Get me a pastrami,” says Mite. “Funny how thinking you’re getting whacked and then not getting whacked it builds an appetite.”

Mite and Istvan stay in the car as Kockroach steps out, looks around, heads into the store.

“Look who it is,” says the short man behind the counter, his round gray head barely peeking above the white porcelain surface. “Always a treat it is to be seeink you. You want maybe potato or spinach?”

“No knish tonight. They’ve been hard to swallow lately. Give me two pastramis.”

“Don’t tell me. On rye, no mustard, no Russian, nothink but meat.”

“You got it, sweet pea,” says Kockroach before heading to the rear of the store, through a small kitchen, out the swinging back door into an alley. Hunched amidst the Dumpster and cans is a tall man in a beige raincoat, his bony wrists sticking out of the raincoat sleeves.

“I’ve been waiting,” says Albert Gladden, Kockroach’s real estate man.

“That’s your job,” says Kockroach.

“I made the changes you asked for in the deed to the property in Yonkers. As soon as I file the deed, the house becomes his for as long as he lives. Shall I go ahead?”

“Yes. Anything else?”

“An opportunity has arisen. There is a foreclosure on three contiguous brownstones on the East Side. Run-down
but worth more than they will get. The price will be high and we’ll have to sell some of the Harlem holdings to secure the financing, but I think it’s a good trade.”

“Do it. Did you bring the keys?”

Gladden hands him a jumble of metal. “This is to the back. Three locks. They think they have the only copies.”

Kockroach tosses the keys in his hand, feeling their heft, seeing the dark ribbons of possibility that flow from them. “Is there insurance on the building?” he says.

“Some, but the building itself is not worth as much as the land so the insurance only covers the cost of demolition in case of a fire.”

“Get more.”

“It doesn’t make—”

“Get more,” says Kockroach. He grips the keys tight in his palm. “If things go bad, I might need to disappear for a while. I want you to continue as you have so far. But I will be back and I will expect an accounting.”

“Of course, Mr. Blatta.”

“Do not disappoint me.”

“Never, Mr. Blatta.”

“How’s the wife?”

“She’s a whore.”

“Lucky you,” says Kockroach.

In the alleyway at the side of an old, crumbling warehouse, Kockroach waits as Mite fiddles with the keys. The alley leads around to a loading dock in the back. The warehouse is
dark, only a thin strip of light illuminates the side door, where Mite works the keys into the three locks. He has all three keys inserted, but it is hard to tell whether an individual lock is opened or closed. No matter what combination of turns he applies, the door stays tightly locked. Kockroach stands patiently as Mite works.

“What the hell is this place?” says Mite.

“Open the door.”

“I’m trying. You got a flashlight?”

“I don’t need a flashlight,” says Kockroach.

Finally a combination works, the door opens with a shriek to Mite’s push. Kockroach steps through the open door and Mite follows. It is cool, clammy, oily and dark. It smells of must, of sulfur. The windows are painted over, the thin light from the alley dies at the doorstep. Kockroach climbs a set of impossibly dark stairs with nary a hesitation, the stairway echoes with Mite’s fumbles as he follows.

“Hey, Jerry, what’s up?” says Mite. “Turn on a light or something.”

Kockroach reaches the top of the stairs and stops. Mite bumps into his back and bounces off.

“Is that you, Jerr?”

“Welcome,” says Kockroach.

“Where are we? I can’t see a thing. What is this place?”

“Our future.”

There is a hiss of light, a flickering flame from a safety match. The diffuse light seems to flow outward slowly, like a fluid, as if Einstein’s theory had died at the doorway. With
the slow movement of the light, it takes a moment for the scene to compose itself, but it does, it does.

A great space, its far corners still lost in shadow. Piled here and there, front and back, in some insane order are crates, and cartons, green military boxes, stacks of rifles, stacks of bombs. It is an armory, huge and endless, filled with bullets and grenades. Giant guns on tripods, standing like insects ready to march to war. Squat mortars and mortar shells piled haphazardly like bowling pins. Stacks of giant Chinese firecrackers which are not Chinese and not firecrackers.

Kockroach moves the match to his teeth, where a cigarette waits. He lights the cigarette and carelessly tosses away the still-lit match.

“Jesus, Jerry,” says Mite as the match lands on the floor, sputters, and dies harmlessly. Darkness returns as slowly as it was erased. “Who owns all this? The frigging army?”

“The
Nonos
.”

“The stuff he’s collecting?”

“The stuff, yes.”

“And you have the key?”

“We have the key.”

“It’s enough to wipe out the frigging city.”

“That’s what I’m planning on.”

“You’re going to blow it up, you’re going to level everything?”

“The
Nonos
has set up his pieces. I’m advancing mine. Let’s kill all the pawns and see who survives.”

“I felt it first time I ever looked in them eyes. You’re Hubert, you son of a bitch, ain’t you?”

“I am what you have made me,” says Kockroach.

Because cockroaches are not religious creatures, they have no theology, none of the glorious jewels of thought that inevitably follow from a simple belief in God. The very concepts of faith, purpose, redemption, grace, life after life, concepts that have warmed and informed the hearts of humans for millennia, have no meaning for a cockroach. But there is one theological concept of which each cockroach does have some understanding, a concept burned into its genetic history and hardwired into its DNA by the crises of the past.

At the end of the Devonian age, 360 million years ago, a great cataclysm occurred. It is unclear whether this cataclysm arose from the sulfurous fire of volcanic eruptions, from the deep freeze of an extended ice age, or from some terrible extraterrestrial impact, but what is clear is that this disaster destroyed a great majority of the newly evolved species on the earth. It was from the shadow of this mass extinction that the first cockroach emerged. Another mass extinction, 248 million years ago, killed up to 95 percent of all marine species, and still another mass extinction, 64 million years ago, caused the destruction of 85 percent of all animal species, including the mighty dinosaur. The cockroach has experienced hellfire from below, ravages from above, the very shifting of the earth, and survived when others, bigger, stronger, smarter, had been blown
away as if dust. And through these searing experiences, the order itself has gained firsthand an understanding of one towering idea of Western religion.

For a cockroach it has no name, this cataclysmic destruction, this mass extinction, this tectonic shift in life from which only a cockroach can emerge. It is simply a fact of existence, something of which it is aware, just as it is aware of water and air, of the sound of footsteps, the smell of feces. For the order it has no name and so no word enters Kockroach’s mind as he stands among the massive piles of armaments and explosives, but Kockroach knows of it in the blood and the bone and the marrow, knows of it as clearly as if his ancestors had tapped him on the shoulder and explained it all, and in so knowing he understands exactly where now he stands.

And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done. And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great
.

Armageddon.

The train,
it shivered as it pulled out of Penn Station, heading west, and I shivered with it. I wasn’t alone in that train, they was two of us, and we leaned on each other and had our arms around each another and we whispered pledges of undying fidelity one to the other as the train took us both out from the city and into the great empty West. But stills I shivered.

It wasn’t only the late night cold or the effect of the row of martinis I’d swilled. And it wasn’t only the new adventure we was embarked upon, just as I had planned, though not as I had planned. I was facing the future, as blank as a white sheet of paper with just one black fact upon it which I could try the rest of my life to erase without succeeding, and that was terrifying, sure it was, but it was interesting too to see the black fact clear for the first time, so it wasn’t only that which caused my shivers. It was something else, something I had spied outs the corner of my eye, just a glimpse of a thing, a silhouette against a backdrop of hell, something what would haunt my dreams through the long bland years to come.

After the Boss he showed me that pretty white house in Yonkers with my name on the deed, Celia and me we had ourselves some options. But there wasn’t no time to waste. I had
been inside the warehouse, had seen the guns and bombs. You see something like that under the thumb of a guy like the Boss, you don’t wonder if it will go off, you only wonder when and how far you gots to run to get out from under it. The next night the Boss had planned to meet up with Moonstone’s boys at the warehouse, to load a convoy of trucks and take the whole damn arsenal up to Harlem, leaving clues what blamed Tartelli for the theft. It was all coming to a head, the explosion was only hours away.

So I set up the meeting what would decide it all, the fate of my life and Times Square to boot, set it up at our usual place, Jack and Charlie’s place with them wooden jockeys standing guard. I bought a new shirt and a new tie and a new pair of roach-stompers with points at the toes, and I ordered the best champagne in the joint because that’s what I thought it took. And it was flowing, missy, but then shouldn’t it flow on the night what sets you on the direction you’ll follow for the rest of your cursed life?

“What’s the big surprise, Mite?” asked Celia, sitting next to me at our table, her blue eyes shining in the candlelight, brighter than ever I saw them before, her face more alive, more beautiful, her whole being more vibrant, like she was a different girl altogether, a different girl playing at a different pitch. And tell me if I was a fool to think she had an inkling—the hints I had been giving had not been so subtle, not so subtle at all—and it was the inkling that had brought the flush of life to her cheek.

“You ever been out west?” I said.

“Where, like Montana? Wyoming? The Wild West?”

“I’m talking California.”

“California?” Her eyes lit even brighter. “Hollywood?”

“I don’t know, anyplace. Just California.”

“No, I’ve never been. Girls from small towns in Ohio get one move. I came to New York.”

“You want to go?”

“California? Sure, Mite. Who wouldn’t? See some stars, see the Pacific.”

“Not for a visit.”

“Mite?”

“Call me Mickey, can you do that? Just for the night.”

“Sure. Mickey. I didn’t know you minded.”

“I don’t, it’s just that some things are changing and maybe others ought change too. I got an opportunity out there. California. I thought I might go for it.”

“In Hollywood? In the movies?”

“No, not the movies. I ain’t the Bogart type, am I? What would I say, ‘Here’s looking up at you, sweetheart’? No, not the movies. Agriculture.”

Her laughter was lighter than ever I remembered it.

“Mite? Excuse me. Mickey. Mickey? What do you know about agriculture?”

“Things grow, you hire Mexicans to pick the things what grow, trucks take them away and you gets money in return. Seems like an easy racket to me. Hey, don’t laugh, I’m serious here. I could do it, why not?”

“Because you’re a street kid. You’d be lost on a farm.”

“Not a farm. I’m talking trees here. And maybe I don’t want to be a street kid no more.”

“Oh, Mite, this again? I thought we were going to have fun tonight. I thought you had a surprise.”

“I do. I did. So how about it?”

“Mite—Mickey I mean. You know I love you, you know it, but don’t be one of those dreary people who can’t accept the good that’s come into their lives, who have to question the worth of everything. Let’s just have fun tonight, let’s just be gay. You’re on top, in the greatest city of the world. Why would you want to go anyplace else? You should find someone for yourself, spend a night or two dancing at the Stork Club, live it up.”

“How about Yonkers, then? I got a line on a place in Yonkers. Nice white house, grass, picket fence, the whole schmear, and just a train ride into the city. A great place for kids.”

“Kids?”

“What do you say?”

“What do I say about what?”

“Look.” I glanced side to side, lowered my voice. “It’s gonna explode, the whole thing down here. It’s gonna be ugly and I don’t want to have nothing to do with it. I can’t take it no more. My suit’s so tight it’s choking me. I’m getting out.”

“You need a vacation.”

“It’s more than that. I got plans. I got dreams other than this dream. So if I gets what you’re telling me, you’re thinking Yonkers over California. It’s a suit and a tie and a commute to the city instead of long sunny days in the orchard. Fine. What about advertising? Maybe I could snag a job selling toothpaste. Who knows? I got skills I can use in a different way than I’m using them now. And truth be told, I got a feeling he’s going to end up on top somehows anyway.”

“Mite?”

“Mickey, right?”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“California or Yonkers? Take your pick.”

“Jesus, Mite—Mickey, I don’t know.”

“But if you had to choose.”

“I suppose anything’s better than Yonkers.”

“So that’s it then.”

“What?”

“Look, I got something I need to ask you.”

“Sure, Mite. What? Anything.”

It was time, I was ready. I had practiced for hours in my room. I had bought the ring from State Jewelers, next to the Loews State, the ring a gaudy diamond on a thin gold band. I stepped out from around the table, took the box out from my jacket pocket. I ignored the look on her face, a puzzled worried look, and slipped to one knee. The box, it opened with a muffled snap. The diamond it truly sparkled in the dark room, sparkled as if lit by a strange inner fire, as if it were the brightest thing in the entire room, in the entire city, as if it had fallen into that box right out from the midnight sky.

And then and there I let slip the words I knew she was hoping for, the words what I was sure would give her everything I supposed she ever could have dreamed.

Late the next day, I climbed to the roof of a building on the West Side, pigeons fluttering about within a wire cage, the birds cooing their sad unrequited songs.

“Shut up,” I said as I kicked the coop.

I slipped a block in the jam to keep the door from closing on me and then hopped from one roof to the next till I was across the street from that warehouse. The sun was still out but the fat part of the afternoon had already passed. Night was coming and I wanted my view. I deserved it, I had earned it.

I laid flat on the tar, peeked my head over the shallow lip of the roof, and waited for it all to happen. It was like the whole of the city was a white-suited jazz band and I was the leader with my baton, like Benny Goodman or the Duke. Introducing Mickey Pimelia and his Mighty Mites.

Who the hell said I couldn’t be no swell?

The sun set, the light faded, the night turned cold, the sky above grew dark and empty, the stars elbowed out of the heavens by the lights of Times Square just a few blocks off. It was time for the rhythm section to open with a wild dangerous beat, soft yet insistent, thump thump, thump. I raised my baton with a flick of my wrist and the drums started in and it began.

I never saw Blatta show. I thought I’d spy the brown Lincoln but I spied nothing, he must have slid in with Istvan through the alley entrance without so much as giving the street a sniff. But he was there, I could sense it, the way you can sense a bloodsucker landing on your neck even afore the needle nose pricks the skin. And when the trucks started arriving like a bass line plucked note by note, one after the other in a rhythm as steady as the drummer’s beat, I knew it for sure. The line of trucks passed the front of the warehouse and then slipped into the alleyway that led to the loading dock at the back. Blatta was there, and now so was J. Jackie
Moonstone and the bulk of his boys, ready to pick Abagados’s arsenal clean.

But tonight it wouldn’t be so easy, tonight there’d be crashers at the party. Mite had seen to that. Good old Mite, loyal Mite, brother Mite.

It wasn’t no surprise to me when, soon as the trucks they slipped down the alley and enough time had passed for the occupants to slip inside, the street it came alive like a sweet serenade of saxophones, blowing one against the other, with a licorice stick dancing riffs around them all. Slowly, quietly, as if in response to my very direction, an army rose from the gutters, as insidiously as if an army of insects, and then another and then a third, lining up on the various sides of the building. Three armies, armed and dangerous, led by three bosses standing now side by side by side right out in front.

Tartelli. Zwillman. Abagados.

Abagados lifted a hand, and like a solo blast from the big trombone, a pane in a warehouse window, it was blasted into shards of light.

“Blatta, you
poutana,
” Abagados yelled in a voice shocking strong. “Show you stinking face.”

There was silence. Then another window shattered, this time broken from inside the warehouse, and Blatta’s voice poured into the street in a starkly inhuman yet hearty yelp. “Hello,
Nonos
.”

“Everything in there it is mine,” said Abagados.

“Come and get it.”

“And how be your new black friend?”

A single shot sounded from the warehouse and dust kicked up at Abagados’s feet. Tartelli and Zwillman, along with three of their gunsels, all dived away. Abagados flinched not at all.

“He’s swell,
Nonos,
” shouted the Boss. “He says hello.”

“Before, we would had to hunt you both,” said Abagados. “Now there no need.”

“I’m always easy to find,
Nonos
. Look to the money, that’s where I am.”

“I never trust you.”

“Trust?” Blatta yelled back. “You humans and your words. Are you ready to fight,
Nonos
?”

“No,” said Abagados in a weary voice. “Not fight. In my life I had enough fight.” He paused, let his shoulders slump for a moment, and then raised his jaw. “But I ready to kill.”

Just then an explosion from inside the warehouse blew out the entire first floor of windows, scattering shards of glass across the street and high in the air, so that small slivers landed atop the far rooftops, even landed atop of me, pricking my exposed skin like sharpened teeth.

Abagados wasn’t no doomed Confederate general, there wasn’t going to be no valiant charge into the teeth of the enemy’s firepower. The boys ringing the warehouse was only there to keep them what was inside from getting out. Earlier that day Nemo had taken a squad into the warehouse, a squad what included me, and set it up just the way he wanted. We took the ammunition out of them boxes, so them big guns they couldn’t hurt you unless they was throwed at you. And we wired up the explosives so that a series of fuses lit from outside
could start the thing inside to going kaboom. And missy, now them fuses they was lit.

It wasn’t going to be a battle, it was going to be murder, pure and simple.

Them fuses they was lit, just like I expected, but they was lit too soon. I looked left, looked right. It was time for the coronets, as if led by Louis Armstrong hisself, with his fanfare entrance and his sweet tone of righteousness. But where was them coronets? I was wondering just that when a second explosion blew another set of glass choppers chewing through the sky.

Where was them coronets?

And then they opened up, as if I had brought them in myself with a swift wave of my baton. Lieutenant Nick Fallon, Vice, and his army of coppers came a-charging. They came a-charging, but not with no chorus of paddy wagons, no ma’am. This wasn’t going to be just another raid with all them gunsels down in the street ending with a short pull in the poky afore the mouthpieces showed with piles of cash to spring them like springs. There wasn’t no paddy wagons because there wasn’t going to be no survivors. Lieutenant Nick Fallon, Vice, sent his army down both sides of the street, two battalions with guns blazing, like a loud blast of brass, shooting away at them boys outside the warehouse, forcing them back, back, back toward the very building they had set to blow.

The entire underworld was going to go up in one great torrent of fire and brimstone to slake the hunger what was burning inside my own damned soul.

It wasn’t that she laughed, with me kneeling on the floor before her. I been laughed at near all my life, laughter I can take. It wasn’t the laughter, it was the bitterness what was beneath it. Like who did I think I was? Who did I think she was? Did you ever kiss me, Mite? the laughter asked. Did you ever want to kiss me? Do you desire me like a man desires a woman, and don’t you think I deserve that? Don’t you think me worthy of that? Mite? How dare you, Mite.

I had never felt so small in all my life, smaller even than when them Thomasson twins took their turns with me. I knew what her laughter it was saying, what it was shrieking. And it was while I was still on my knees, and feeling the acid truth of her laughter wash through me, that I decided to follow her and see where she was getting what she couldn’t get from me.

And I found out, without a doubt, and threw that moldy old lemon at his door, damn me to hell.