South by South Bronx (9 page)

On the third day, Myers excused himself. “It's not like I don't love you, but I have to meet with the FBI. They're trying to horn in.” He had this habit of calling on the cell phone. “Where are you?” he would ask. I was driving under the 5 train. Spook had a million cousins. One of them told me he had just gotten a visit from him where she lived on Fordham Road, so I headed out there. I knew Spook had a place he used to rent on White Plains Road. I had barely scraped the door with my fist when it swung open. I quickly pulled out my gun, moving into the apartment carefully. The place was a mess. Drawers pulled out, clothes thrown everywhere, a floor lamp tipped over. Too late. I got on the horn and called Jack. I was too late. Cop cars under the el. Lieutenant Jack and I smoking cigarettes on the stoop.

“Did you tell Myers?”

“I left him a message,” I said. “He's downtown.”

“What do you think?”

I couldn't put the uneasy feeling into words. The door was open but the lock wasn't busted. The place was ransacked, gone through, searched. A broken lamp, kicked-over table and chair, the general disarray of a fist fight.

“I think they took him,” I said, now thinking about what Myers said, about “others” out there also in on the hunt. If there were “others,” they must be well-informed, because who knew about this place? How could some outsider sneak into town, find Spook unguarded, and take him? We questioned neighbors, street people,
bodegueros
. Nobody saw or heard anything. Lieutenant Jack and I snapped into rhythm. It was almost the old days again. I took the opportunity during another cigarette break to fill him in on everything—clearance or not, I didn't give a damn because it was cop business and I wanted him in on it, I wanted him knowing. It was a calm cigarette moment for us.

“You really think this guy did it,” Jack asked, “swiped all that cash?”

“Sure he did,” I said. It was mostly the cigarette talking. “He took it and hid it.”

“So the feds are looking for it?”

“Yeah,” I laughed. “Isn't that a kick?”

“Good thing I don't know anything about it,” Jack said. We both laughed like two small town cops making fun of the ways of the big boys. We laughed until the coughing came, some cigarette gone the wrong way. Too deep an inhale. A wet-eyed sting.

“They should pin a medal on him for ripping off some creeps, instead of chasing him like a rat,” I said.

“Maybe they would,” Jack said, “if they could find him.”

I called Jaco, Wiggie, and Quique, three of Spook's district chiefs. I told them I had reason to believe Spook got grabbed, but after leaving messages and talking to Jaco, all I got was the feeling that they didn't know shit, either about what Spook had been doing or where he would be now. Spook had the habit of clearing out. He would go underground for weeks. He was not the type people would file a missing-person report on.

When Myers appeared, he seemed glum. He kept his hands in his pockets and seconded my feeling.

“They took him,” he said. “We need to search some of his other places. Did you contact his brother?”

“I left a couple of messages,” I said. “He hasn't gotten back to me.”

Myers pulled out his flip-pad. “What can you tell me about a guy named Santo Romas?”

Memory bursts. Quick flick and there was a cigarette. Like I was back on home turf. Click. Flash. Light.

“Santo Romas, a.k.a., Sancho P., a.k.a., Smooth, real name Louis Santo Romas. Fenced stolen goods, forged documents. Credit card fraud. Caught him a year ago when Spook tried to turn some ready cash into jewelry.”

“Jewelry?”

“Diamonds, stones. Fine-cut shit. When cash needs to be shrunk portable size.”

“Well, some flunky just arrested this character at Kennedy Airport last night. He had ten thousand bucks on him. Fresh bank stuff. He should've turned it into stones! The ATF thinks it's a drug case, but I think … a definite person of interest in this case.”

I was feeling a funny tremor. A low, thumping bass note.

“Where was he going?” The cigarette was making me sick.

“Mallorca.”

“Excuse me?”

“Miami,” Myers said. “Looks like the guy thought it was retirement time. Maybe you should come with me downtown tomorrow to talk to him.”

The headache was back, hammers pounding a spot right between my eyes. I stared at Jack across the street laughing with some cops. I felt suddenly cut off from him, from them, from an old life.

“We have a record of Spook calling him. Looks like they did business recently.”

“You know that? You bugged Spook's phone?”

Myers smiled smug, a bit of confidence through the glumness.

“Sure,” he said. “It's what led me to David Rosario. Every person he has had contact with, done business with. How could I not get on his brother? For a guy who isn't involved in the business, he sure did a lot of phone time with Spook recently.”

Why was he talking about David again?

“Everything leaves a trail.” He nodded significantly.

“And how long have you been bugging David's phone?”

Myers took a moment to answer. “This investigation is almost a month old.”

The nausea was coming back. Fucking cigarettes. I puffed away.

“It would take me that long just to get permission from a court to use a wiretap,” I said.

“Yes, my friend, we're all aware of cop speed. My motto has always been,
Once you have the equipment, use it
. Obviously, a lot of the material gathered would not be admissable in court due to methods used to acquire it. But who says we'll ever need to go before a court? We're moving at federal speed here, Sanchez. No reason legality has to become a speed bump.”

Maybe a migraine. Lights too bright. The bad taste in my mouth made me spit. I ditched the cigarette, saying to myself now,
Yeah, for sure I will quit
. A Puerto Rican with ten thousand in cash will never make it past Customs.

“I'm going to head up to Kennedy Airport and bring the guy downtown,” Myers said. “Maybe we can talk to him.” As if Santo Romas would need a translator.

“Okay,” I said, surrendering to some overpowering flow, an inevitable energy. Somehow I felt I was pursuing myself, across tenement rooftops, waiting patiently parked down the street. Those stones hitting my back window. There was a famous dictator who said it once.
What really happened doesn't matter. What counts is winning. After that, the winner can tell the story whichever way is better.

I was saying that. It was almost a prayer.

12.

She was a dancer.

Leni Riefenstahl

was born in 1902, in the Wedding district of Berlin. Her mother dreamed of having a daughter who would become a famous actress. One day Leni went to a film audition and happened to stroll by the open door of a dance studio. She was enthralled, signed up for lessons. Convinced her mother that this was what she was born to do. Soon she was doing recitals and getting rave reviews in Berlin newspapers. She might have stayed a dancer if not for a film she saw called
The Mountain of Destiny.
She was so enthralled that she hunted down the director and told him that starring in his next film was what she was born to do. It is not really clear what she did to the director, but not only did she star in his next film,
The Holy Mountain,
it was also dedicated
To
the dancer, Leni Riefenstahl.

Leni danced her way through a couple more films, though now she had become convinced that filmmaking was what she had been born to do. She decided to shoot her own film, wrote a script called
The Blue Light,
and after many hardships managed to shoot it. The picture opened to mostly favorable reviews, but the experience was disenchanting. Filmmaking is expensive, and it wasn't easy getting sophisticated Berlin producers to finance her kitschy ideas about mountains and naked nature girls doing dances by shimmering moonlit lakes. If directing was a man's world, then maybe it was time for a new world order. When she went to hear Adolf Hitler speak in February 1932, she was enthralled and wrote him a postcard begging to meet him. Just so happened that Hitler had already noticed her doing that nature dance by a shimmery moonlit lake in
The Blue Light
. He offered her a job he knew she was born to do, complete with the promise of an unlimited budget, unlimited access, and enough film to give her imagination free reign.

It was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Leni Riefenstahl insists to this day that she was forced into making films for the Nazis, but it is very likely she saw Hitler as that big producer she could charm into doing her bidding. She was carving a path through terrain just like the short guy with the mustache.

Was remembering so hard? Was telling the truth such a chore?

She stepped out on the fire escape.

The gun was in her hand.

She went down the steps slowly, knees trembly weak. She gave the bed a last look, where she had left him.

He was not moving.

He lay like sleeping. It brought a strange guilt. She knew he had been drinking, that coming back to consciousness would always be slow. She hadn't killed him. She hadn't hit him so hard. She hadn't. She had gone out the window and turned back. She watched him as he lay sleeping. Like she did the first time she came.

He knew nothing.

She righted the chair that had fallen over in the kitchen. Swept up the sugar cubes, wiped away the spilled milk. Put the roll of tape back under the sink. She decided not to tie him up. She would not come back, but rather jump into the next square and hope for more open doors. And yet leaving, and leaving him there lying like that. A churning disquiet.

“I was a bad dream,” she said into his ear. “I never happened.”

Now going down those fire escape steps.

“I never happened,” she said. “I was never here.”

Like using an eraser. Like taking it back. A record was skipping. A record was stuck.

She was a model.

Anne Sexton

was born in 1928 and lived all her life in the Boston area. Princeton, Newton, Weston, Cambridge. Roxbury—clatter of the T across cobbled streets to the Harvard Square station. The pictures, so many pictures. A dark-eyed beauty posing like Rita Hayworth, like a '40s sex kitty with big smoldering eyes born to stun to startle to take prisoners.

She carried a bulging portfolio of snaps, but modeling fell from her like dead skin. She got married instead, in 1948. To start out as one thing and become another. The search for definition, for a definition one can live with. You become something until it doesn't become you anymore.

Anne Sexton became a poet. Wife, mother of two, she tried to kill herself and in a mental hospital discovered she could write. Drumming out lines passionate strange. Poetry did not save her from suicide but it did save her long enough for her to write eight books. She had dark ghosts following her, but when she wrote, she was as courageous as ARMY WAR HEROES. She blew houses down with cluster bombs of words, with images that stuck in the mind like thumbtacks. She wrote about crimes that dropped on her as if from a high building. The poem was “The Legend of the One-Eyed Man.” The titles of her books seemed to reflect the struggle between staying alive or popping the escape hatch. By her last book,
The Awful Rowing Toward God
, it sounded like she had made up her mind.

She carefully snuck past the windows on the lower floor. Street sounds. Buses stop and go. That kid going,
Yo Ritchie!
and the scrape of the
piraguero's
shaver against the block of ice. Down another flight. As she reached the window, she squatted. She strained to hear, pressed against sharp brick.

The window was open a little from the bottom. The blinds were drawn but the slats were slanted to let sun in. She could see inside, past the wispy smoke of thin lace curtains.

The room was large. There was a bed, a bureau, a small table. An expanse of floor covered in shiny red linoleum. She recalled the candlelight, the Mexican girl's fringed dress. The CD player sat on the bureau like a fat silver bullet.

The gun was in her hand.

Women are born twice
, Anne Sexton wrote.

She was an actress.

Marlene Dietrich

was born in 1901 in Schöneburg, a district of Berlin. She was a spoiled young blonde, attracted to the theater. Her mother packed her off to study music instead in Weimar, the home of Goethe. Marlene soon tired of the violin and returned to Berlin, to sign up at the Max Reinhardt School to study acting. She appeared in plays and, in 1923, her first movie. In most cases, she was just the pretty blonde with the legs. By 1928 she had appeared in thirteen films, was married five years, and had a four-year-old daughter. She was nearing thirty by the time Josef von Sternberg cast her as his “Lola” in
The Blue Angel.
Her career had run its course in Berlin. No one seemed willing to give her a contract, so she took Sternberg up on his offer and went with him to Hollywood. They made seven films together, Marlene crafting the look while Sternberg handled the camera, the lighting. Marlene would never look more beautiful than she did through Sternberg's eyes. They both created a presence mightier than substance, a huge glamour myth that destroyed any semblance of reality. She would forever treasure those films, love notes from a man entranced, a man she could work together with. She saw them as fine art, beautifully crafted paintings, no matter how trite, no matter how slight. After Sternberg, she made countless films, throwaway pictures, legs, a face, a smoldering cigarette. She was under contract, a working actress going where the jobs were. “I sell glamour just as another sells fish or shoelaces,” she said. Too much praise made her grumpy. It was nothing special.

While she was working in Hollywood, the Nazis took Berlin. (They would eventually take Paris, the other city she loved.) Marlene was not enthralled by Hitler. She had no illusions about what he represented. The Nazis courted her, offering her vast sums of money if she would return to Germany, renounce Jew Hollywood, and become a true Aryan again. She made what she later called “the only decision possible,” even though her mother and older sister insisted on remaining in Berlin. While Leni Riefenstahl shot her films glorifying the Nazis, Marlene became a United States citizen. When the war came, she went to work for the USO, singing and entertaining American troops. The only way to beat the Nazis was from the outside. It must be painful to live abroad while your hometown gets bombed into the Stone Age.

The war wrenched Berlin away from her. It took her mother six months after its end. By the time she returned to Germany fifteen years later, she had remade herself from glamourous actress to glamourous
chanteuse
, living off old glory like a veteran wearing medals. She loved singing those old sentimental Berlin songs, but when she came back to Germany to sing them, there were protests and stink bombs. Some people hated her for leaving. Some people hated her for coming back. She never returned again, feeling spurned. She settled in Paris, and died there. She wrote her memoir,
Thank God I Am a Berliner
, in French. She sang her love songs to the city from afar, from Paris New York Rio de Janiero Moscow and Warsaw, where she walked to the monument and laid flowers for the dead. She fought for her country. She turned her back on her country. She fought for her country by turning her back on her country.

Safety off. Creaky floor. Moved past toilet, tiny frosted window asparkle with sun. Goofy flowered shower curtain. The living room canyoned out after that. Cushy furniture, thick curtains. Entertainment center—stereo TV speakers a wall of CDs a shelf of ceramic knick-knacks froggies carrying Puerto Rican flags an ashtray that said BIENVENIDO A LA ISLA DEL ENCANTO—“I thought I might see you again,” he said, not even flinching.

Not a line on his face moved, so stone clear-eyed as he sat there at the kitchen table. Blazing cigarette tip. Like he was expecting her. Stared at her and not the gun, as if it wasn't there. As if you can ignore a gun if a woman is holding it.

“I was hoping it wasn't you, though. I was hoping it was someone else.” His voice calm steady. Thin blue plume of smoke up. “Because if you were someone else, I would have dropped you.”

The eye patch gave his face a sullen, frozen-stiff feel. A statue talking, the way he sat so bolt upright. He moved only to bring cigarette to lips, to tap ash into Puerto Rican ceramic. Pictures of palm trees, a beach. Those fucking tree frogs.

“I would've dropped you when you stopped in the bathroom to check out the goofy flowered shower curtain.”

A blur of movement. Subtle enough she saw the gun. Almost invisible so steel-black against black matador pants. In his lap, no sudden move. He had the drop on her; she had the drop on him. He exhaled like he detested such scenes.

“You should put the gun away,” he said.

She did not take her eyes off the gun in his lap, the hand lying casually beside it on his thigh. Her arms aching, a rubber band about to snap, and she couldn't be sure about not squeezing the trigger. A sneeze would do it, a pinkie flick.

The coffee pot started gurgling. What is it with Puerto Ricans and coffee? It pissed her off to hold the gun in a stance like that while he seemed so remote and untouched by threat. The angle he tilted his head to keep her in sight of his one eye reminded her of a caged panther staring back. He turned his face a little to receive cigarette to lips. A slow, thin puff.
I have remembered much about Judas
.

She shook off the intruding Anne.