The Importance of Being Dangerous (22 page)

“What's the matter?”

Griff saw Raul leaning against a gate down the block, completely inattentive to the cold. “I'm hoping it's just a guardian angel,” he said. “But we gonna find out.” Griff peered through a crack for another moment, thought, He's trouble, to himself, and turned back into the room.

FOR RAUL
, being dangerous had not always been such a wonderful thing, but the choice was made for him very early in his life. Yakoob was among the few who could remember that Raul once had a smile, which he wore like a uniform beside his dad back in the time of salsa and Harlem River fishing. Benny's boy was sweet, with an almost pretty face, and a squat, premuscular frame. Not just his father's favorite child, but a beloved sidekick to all those who, like Koob, saw them coming back together, tackle box and rods in hand, from a Sunday sunrise on the pier, or heard Raul's ready six-year-old giggle from behind the bulletproof glass and over the boom box playing EI Gran Combo. Benny went through a lot of jobs but liked to sell tré, nickel, and dime bags of Mexican skunkweed out of a small storefront on Third Avenue. The dark place always smelled of fried food, cheeba, and aged cat piss. Back there behind the partition, eating tinfoil plates of
chichirrón de pollo
with rice and beans next to his daddy, was Raul, usually being
admonished to keep his sticky fingers off the merchandise, or hugged. He was one of those boys who, like young dogs, wanted to be hugged often; Benny had been the same way. One day, the music, the hugging, and the smiling ended when Benny stepped out from behind the bulletproof glass to deal with a loud customer and got shot in the face. Raul happened to be the only other person back there, alone to watch his
papi
die. He didn't know what to do.

Neither did his face. Sometimes a look won't take because the look can't set, and what happened to Benny removed from Raul's young face the possibility of any foreseeable smiles. Instead, the pup that loved hugging assumed the cool pose of a very mean dog. Now, in that part of Spanish Harlem at that time, once the boy leaves your face you better look sullen or be looking for a gay way downtown. Boys seldom showed their teeth after age eleven; Koob was excused because he was funny. But Raul took it to the level of a rare few—young guys who had a lot of need, little to say, and felt physical pain many days after other guys did. He
never
showed his teeth, even when he talked. Guys as old as his father, like Koob, knew that that made Raul especially dangerous. And eventually, usually after a spectacular act of heart or evil, guys like him left the block for prison.

There was the time as a twelve-year-old when Raul stood outside the Martinez bodega watching drug dealers play dominoes on one side while a game of chess was under way on the other. Koob was there, drinking malta beside Manny, a sometimes junkie dealing crack in the days when people still called it “base.” Manny was winning the dominoes game; across from him was his smack dealer, Hector, who was losing badly to a good customer. Hector hesitated on a move and miscounted.

“Ho, siit [Oh, shit],” Raul said aloud to himself, publicly emphasizing just how bad Hector had fucked up.

“What?” Hector spat, turning around in disbelief to see the kid
with dead eyes mocking his game. “Shut the fuck up, little nigga!” he said. “And get the fuck outta here.” He pointed for Raul to walk away. The other men laughed in the shade and glanced back at the rickety card table where the game was played. Raul turned and looked over at the chess game for a moment, but he didn't move. “Yo, you hear what I said?” Hector repeated. Everyone knew Hector was always strapped. “I will fuck your little ass up.”

From his fold-up chair, Hector stared over at Raul. Raul took a breath and stared back. The man was at least thirty. In those days, everybody spat a lot, especially in the summertime, but for men spitting was always the thing to do. Hector spat almost as an afterthought, or as a prelude to some more emphatic gesture. The gob fell near Raul's imitation Nikes that his moms bought him on Fordham Road in the Bronx. Raul looked down at the spit on the sidewalk, and before it could register with anyone else, he spat back and caught Hector on the shoe. The corner, a cross-generational jury at least eleven men deep, stiffened with shock. Hector broke wild, forgetting it was a kid who spat on him, and pulled a pistol from inside his jacket. He wasn't gonna shoot Raul just like that. He was gonna beat his face and his neck with the handle a few times, make him bleed and cry and eat shit instead of dying. Hector stood up and got in one clear blow, straight across Raul's temple. Raul's switchblade was out of his back pocket before the blood could appear, and suddenly Hector's right shoulder was cut in three places. He was very fortunate that the chess players could hold Raul back; one of them suffered a two-inch gash just for being there. Nobody died that day. But nobody forgot it, least of all Yakoob, who had to love Raul's nerve to avoid it. This was no longer a child. Benny's boy had become a dog.

Raul's grandmother didn't want a dog in the house, and she ran the apartment while his mother was at one of her three jobs. Between Spanish soap operas and Spanish game shows, she had a different idea about what the young man of the house should be
doing if he wasn't going to school, like getting a job himself. She never cared for Raul's father, who she thought was an angry loser, and she resented his son for slumping around her apartment like the living monument to his failures. His grandmother only spoke Spanish. When she started with him, he would talk back only in English. That would spark long yelling fights where only he knew what they were both saying. If Raul stuck around till evening when his mother got home, he could hear his grandmother talk bad about him before getting kicked out. Back on the block he'd smolder on street corners.

Cheeba became Raul's best friend, and he ran with it wherever it would take him. Cheeba never looked wrong at him or questioned what he wasn't doing. It spoke Spanish when Raul felt like it, English when he didn't. And when cheeba hooked up with PCP, Raul could fuck and fight all night. Manny called it angel dust or Crazy Eddie. The first time he rolled some into a joint for Raul, it was like light. It clarified just what he wanted to do. It expanded the world Raul knew beyond eight square blocks of Spanish Harlem and sent him on endless subway rides. Pulsing atop a train bench, quivering inside his own skin, Raul could always get there quickly on PCP, wherever “there” was. He would ride until his body stood up and walked out the open doors. He would climb the stairs into the night, winding up in Astoria, Queens, the Lower East Side, East New York, Brooklyn, or Williamsburg, occasionally finding girls who would fuck a crazy guy, often fighting just to see the blur of blows, up for days with a crew of users he'd meet, asleep for days more someplace. Usually near the river, taunted by rats, awakened by another sunrise without his dad.

His grandmother was right: he was gonna have to find a job if he wanted to come home again. Raul only came uptown to get his dust from Manny; back around the way, he might bump into Yakoob and ask him for a couple of dollars. But mostly, working meant
empty aluminum cans in the early nineties. The homeless trolled the streets like walking boysenberries, bulging with black garbage bags full of tin. You got a nickel a can, and Raul could collect some cans. You needed fifteen dollars for a Bowery bed, plus the twenty dollars a day for pizza, Puerto Rican fried chicken, orangeade soda, and cheeba unless he was hallucinating. That's a lot of cans. You had to stand around dirty while people finished lunch in midtown. You had to go into the alleys. You had to climb inside of Dumpsters. You had to kick ass just to keep what you had, and since you were kicking ass anyway, you might as well take from a motherfucker who's not trying to make bed money at all, some motherfucker sleeping in a box someplace waiting to get his cans jacked. Which was helped by being dangerous, because the fearful put up less resistance—unless they were drunk. Raul nearly had to kill a big drunk for his cans one night, and that's how he finally went to jail.

At Rikers, Raul got constitutionally clean—he dried out of his PCP addiction—and institutionally mean—he perfected his ability to hurt other men. His chiseled body stayed close to barbells as Raul sought revenge on the power he lost without PCP to guide him. Impressed by his rehab progress and attracted to his efficient violence, some of the guards let Raul smoke straight weed with them. That's how he met Blane, the pot dealer. Blane was a friend of a friend of a Rikers guard who would eventually help Raul find the raging whiteboy weed that had all but replaced the Mexican skunkweed and the dime, nickel, and tré bags it came in.

And that's where Yakoob found him in 1994 or '95, living back home in the projects, thugging on occasion, but mostly selling pretty good cheeba he got from a whiteboy on the Upper East Side. At twenty years old, Raul was master of nothing except the sound of other people's bones breaking. Yet he had a soft spot for the little black boys around the city who sold candy bars to white folks for their ghetto basketball raffles. He had a hope one day for
a fine-ass woman to protect just like a queen. And though it seemed doubtful that Raul would ever enjoy another sunrise, he was grateful for an older guy like Koob, who always remembered his pops with a kind word that meant a lot. Oddly enough, shooting a whiteboy in the face on the Upper East Side had been the very catalyst he needed. And by early 1998, over a year back from his Philly makeover, Raul bought all the candy bars he could fill his pockets with, stood sentry over Sidarra much more than she knew, and had sunrise, if not sweetness, in his eyes again.

 

YAKOOB NEEDED HIM NOW
. His Fidelity Investments bank heist had gone well in almost every predicted respect. Once he became a customer and gained a password, the firewalls came down before his tired eyes, and money began to relocate. Through a complex series of steps, Yakoob made the computer identity known as Cavanaugh withdraw $15,000 to $20,000 apiece from the popular identities known as Dukovny, Yamaguchi, and Roisman, and deposit them into Cavanaugh's own IRA. Even Marissa Arpel chipped in a few thousand. Over the space of seven to ten business days, the new money in Cavanaugh's IRA would disappear into the dummy account linked only to a fictitious company located at Koob's address. These became transactions to be proud of. Within just four months, the Cicero Club's stock investments made with the booty were worth three times the initial transfer. This time Sidarra was told.

But what Yakoob neither told Sidarra nor could even share with Griff was that, in his mind, the second half of the plan snagged and had to be finished somehow.

Yamaguchi was the first to notice the hit on his account. He had been a customer of Cavanaugh's for many years; Cavanaugh had attended Yamaguchi's daughter's wedding. Roisman demanded the investigation by the bank; Dukovny called the police.
But Yamaguchi was a friend and a techie. He refused to press charges and instead hired his own investigator. Why, he wondered, would Cavanaugh withdraw stolen funds from an IRA days later? He would simply lose a third of his theft to the IRS. Besides, as a techie, Yamaguchi suspected a hacker, even if it was the first at Fidelity, and Cavanaugh was no hacker. Fidelity wasn't so sure, but the evidence was good enough to prevent them from firing Cavanaugh outright.

So Yakoob kept seeing him sitting at his desk whenever he would stop into Fidelity to check. The longer he saw Cavanaugh still in place, the angrier he got. There were days when the feeling got so bad, it seemed Koob might just be able to do what Raul could do—overcome all physical fear and launch his body into another person's. He wanted to take a crowbar to Cavanaugh's knees, smack his ass with a belt, and make him piss on himself. If he could, he would have done these things personally so that Cavanaugh was very clear about who did it and why. But that was not Koob's way. It was Raul's, however. And now that it had shown itself to be a danger he could harness, Yakoob had to admire just what his young friend could do.

EVERY GAME BEGETS ITS WINNERS
, and every winner deserves a party to celebrate her prize, but for almost two years the Cicero Club had been quiet about its bounty. Together they had never saluted each other with gusto. Sidarra and Griff had begun to celebrate theirs a little more openly, first to Koob, then, in small but meaningful steps, to the world. Now that Belinda was in Tokyo, Sidarra held his arm when they went places together. They allowed themselves a night at the opera, downtown dinners with a nightcap of Village jazz, and they had strolled the marble halls of late nights at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the whole crew had never had a celebration, let alone one in the manner they could now easily afford. Sidarra's fortieth birthday finally provided occasion to get a little loud about their slow roll to mischief.

The milestone, thanks to Griff, came alive with laughter and an unusual game of Whiteboy for one perfect night. Sidarra declared the Full Count a “nigger”-free zone—the word could not be ut
tered—and wore the gold lamé dress. Yakoob made her open his present first, a silver tiara lined with jewels, mostly rubies, and at least one large emerald in the middle. Raul brought her a giant lavender teddy bear at least four feet high and stuffed with bags of sensimilla and various kinds of chocolate bars. Griff promised her a surprise to come later. And all was good at the Amistad until Clarence Thomas had to get mentioned.

Nobody had ever nominated a black person during a game of Whiteboy before, and both Koob and Griff sat uneasy on their stools, unable to intolerate. Sidarra rolled on, pointing out rightwing decisions the Supreme Court justice had supported. She pocketed three balls in a row off the bad sex jokes Anita Hill recalled Justice Thomas making when he was her boss. Koob and Griff remained stumped. What could they say? They couldn't mount a defense. Plus, it was her birthday. Sidarra was down to her last ball.

“‘High-tech lynching,'” she laughed. “Can you believe the words even left his mouth?”
Spop!
And the last ball made persuasion. “He should be whacked.”

Q, who still managed the club Griff now owned, had closed the place down for a private party. The Whiteboy game over, Griff's birthday surprise for her was getting ready in the main room, and Sidarra proudly wore the bejeweled tiara slightly askew atop her slicked-back hair. Yakoob, however, still had something to say about the only black justice on the Supreme Court. But first he had to remind himself he was still in a “nigger”-free zone that night.

“C'mon, Sid,” Koob complained, “it's your day, no doubt. There's nothing you don't deserve. But killin' a justice? A super-judge? You can't really be serious about offing the brother.”

Sidarra looked up from under the pool table lights. She noticed more than birthday looks in the eyes of the men in her crew. Griff, Koob, now Raul, and even the giant teddy bear with his cheeba
and chocolate guts spilling open, they were all stuck on something she couldn't figure out. She lifted her gold-lamé-covered body off the Amistad and rested her Uncle Cicero's cue stick gently against a velvet wall. Then she surveyed their faces again. It was clearly more than the birthday libation and the fine herb. Something wasn't quite right.

“Who said anything about
killing
anybody?” she asked. “I nominated Justice Thomas, who is, at the very least, a stupid fool none of y'all can find a good word for. I got persuasion. He's the next joint, and the motherfucker's accomplished a lot by humiliating black folks, so he
should
be our next joint. Remember, Koob? We do what we do to do what we gotta do.” She strode slowly over to the front of the table, leaned back on it, crossed her arms, and took a careful study of each guy. “But who said he's gotta be ‘offed'? Maybe a good whack on the head, but not
‘offed.'
”

It was as though she had Raul's Glock on them all, the kind of stickup where each intended victim knew better than to even look at the others. So, for a minute, nobody spoke.

“Just a figure of speech, baby,” Griff said coolly.

“That's what I thought,” she said, stepping closer to his face.

“You right, you right,” Koob tried to help out.

“Then what the hell is all the panic about?” she snapped at him. “Y'all act like nominating him or any other black man is, like, um, fratricide. That's not the game,” she paused. “Let
him
be a broke nigga for a minute. It might give him some perspective. Right?”

“I thought this was a ‘nigga'-free zone tonight?” Yakoob asked.

“It is,” Sidarra shot back. “Birthday privilege.” She checked them again with a long, sweeping look that accidentally ended with Raul. “So how tough can it be?”

Raul nearly raised his hands. His dick, never within his control in Sidarra's presence, pressed hard against his pants like it had something to confess. “Yes, ma'am,” he said.

“It can be done,” Griff said calmly, pretending he believed his
own words and finally stealing a look at Yakoob as he sipped his Hennessy. “Nothin' but the Secret Service to worry about,” he mumbled.

“All right then, fellas,” she said, and relaxed a little. “Thanks for picking my birthday to act like I'm proposing some kind of racial mutiny. I mean, damn.”

Yakoob tried as always to lighten things up. “Nah, baby. Don't bug out. I'm just playin' with you. It's your joint. Ease up.”

The song changed around them. The mood felt sticky. They tried to play on for fun, freestyle. After a few shots, Griff led Sidarra into the dressing room for a private moment while Raul took his first-ever turn on the table.

“Please, sugar, don't let the vibe out there steal your good time. This is your night.” Griff squeezed her to his body. The warm feel of his loins against her was now a reminder of private hours before and of a future neither could quite see their way to when they first met that evening in 1996. “There's more to come, baby,” he said into her ear. “I told you I have a surprise for you.”

Sidarra squeezed his ass to her and stared at his chest for a moment. Then she looked up. There was something more to say. “I had another birthday thought, Griff.”

“What's that?”

“I think we should disband the club after this joint. After Thomas. We've made enough money. Raul's more than paid us back. Now, with you and me like this, we don't need, we don't need to keep doing things in the dark. I'm not sure it's right. The more we do, the more we run the risk…” She left it there.

They squeezed each other harder. Griff sighed, kissed her temple, and pulled back so he could see her whole face again. “I hadn't really thought about it, but you may be right. With Belinda gone, there's no real need in my life to, you know. So I'll think about it. I hear what you're saying. Then why Thomas?”

“I don't know, I was just reading about him the other day,” she
admitted. “You talk about humiliating black folks. Can you really beat this guy? And, Griff, isn't he the thug multiplier in reverse?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, just 'cause he's black, all his Uncle Tom sins come down on black folks tenfold, right? He's much worse than any white guy we've taken a few bucks off of. I think a guy like that is an appropriate joint.” She tried to keep a straight face for him.

“Appropriate, huh?”

“You know, equitable. Don't you think?”

“May I make a suggestion?”

“What's that?”

“I think we leave Mr. Thomas alone. That's a dangerous motherfucker, and I have a lot of experience with dangerous motherfuckers. They tend to go down on their own anyway.” He searched her eyes.

Sidarra giggled into his turtleneck. During the song change, she could hear commotion coming from the pool lounge or beyond. Then it stopped, and it felt like Griff wanted to pull away.

“Wait, Griff,” she said, holding him firmly. “Okay. I guess that sounds right. But I have to know something.” She searched his hazel eyes again. “If there were something going on behind my back among you all, you gotta tell me now.”

Griff silently held her gaze for a few seconds. Twice he looked ready to say something unexpected. Twice he restrained himself. “Of course I would. But it's a surprise, and it's just about time for you to see it for yourself. Now,” he smiled broadly, “let's go see what I got you for your birthday.” She started to beam with anticipation as he led her out of the dressing area. “Fellas,” he said to Koob and Raul, who stepped in from just outside the maroon curtains, “now that Mr. Justice Thomas is safe again, let's show the lady what she got.” Griff began to lead Sidarra toward the curtains out to the main bar. “Handkerchief, please,” he said to Raul. As he
reached over to hand him a black scarf, Raul gave Griff a long sideways look of pent-up menace. It was as if they had been enemies forever. Griff ignored the look and began to blindfold Sidarra. “Is everything set?” he asked Yakoob. Yakoob nodded. Sidarra could feel her heart flutter a little in her chest. “Okay, let me adjust your crown,” Griff added. “All right. Gentlemen, the curtains.”

And out they walked. “Surprise!!!” came the roar of about a dozen people seated under floodlights near a stage Q had set up for the night.

Griff eased the blindfold off of Sidarra's face and she scanned the scene with her mouth open wide. In the middle of the small crowd was a three-story white cake. On each table was a bottle of more Cristal on ice. Q stood proudly behind the bar along with Jeanette. On the small rented stage was a full band setup, including a drum set, piano, acoustic bass, guitar, and some horns, all flanked by a tremendous bank of speakers. In the center under a spotlight was a lone microphone on a stand.

Sidarra took in the crowd as Griff led her closer to them. There was Darrius and Justin, Yakoob's wife Marilyn, Aunt Chickie, and a tall, heavyset man Sidarra nearly couldn't make out in the low lights. She was shocked to see her aunt there, but as she approached her, the strange man stepped into her path.

“Happy birthday, Sidarra,” he said, and grabbed her in a bear hug.

She couldn't believe it. “Alex?” It was her brother Alex from New Mexico and his wife Claire behind him. “Alex, how did you know? How did you get here?”

“Well, I know because you might remember I was there for the first one. How we got here is your friend Griff flew us out for the occasion. How are you, baby? You look smokin'.”

Sidarra shook with happiness. She practically climbed onto her brother, hugging him so hard. “You folks don't understand,” she
kept saying to everyone in the room. “This is my big brother. This was my guy. I haven't seen him in…” And then she just went back to kissing his cheeks and holding him tight.

Alex held her in his strong arms and pulled back a little to search her face and her eyes. “There's my baby girl,” he whispered. “I missed you.”

Music began to play. Sidarra finally let go of her long-lost brother to ask Aunt Chickie where Raquel was if she wasn't with her.

“Michael filled in,” she said. “Raquel's safe at home with him. Have a good time. Don't worry about it.”

After she kissed everyone in the crowd and swallowed a few toasts, Sidarra wasn't sure how to approach the five men in dapper suits smiling a little awkwardly near the stage. “Um, Griff, do I know these cats, or are they just folks Q couldn't get out before this all started?” she whispered.

“No, sugar. You never met these guys in person, but you know something about them, I'm pretty sure. In fact,” he called out, “maybe it's time they step up to the stage.” The men stood up as one and bowed to Sidarra. Griff introduced each of them by name, and each kissed her hand. Then Griff climbed up the step to the stage, pulled the mike out of the stand, and said, “Sidarra, unfortunately Anita Baker was not available to sing ‘Happy Birthday' with us tonight. So we got the next best thing to help us out. Ladies and gentlemen, Queen Sidarra, all the way from the Motor City, please welcome Anita Baker's band!”

Sidarra stood in a mouth-open stupor near tears while the band took their instruments onstage. Griff had to hold her to keep her knees from buckling. The horn player named Georgie seemed to be the crew's front man, and he stepped to the edge of the stage when they were all strapped in. “One, two—one, two, three, four,” he counted, and the house began to sing “Happy Birthday” with a gusto (and a backup) nobody had heard in a long time. Sidarra jiggled and jumped like a prom queen, squeezing Griff's
hand for support and smiling uncontrollably. Song after song, the band played, the champagne poured, the aroma of fresh pot smoke drifted in from the rear, and soon inhibitions went down like party cake. Then, with a very purposeful look and a demand for quiet, Aunt Chickie approached Sidarra.

“My darling niece,” she began, “there is a reason Mr. Griff got this particular band for you tonight, you might have guessed. There's a reason your brother and his wife came all this way to see you. In case you were wondering, this is not the time to be sweet and silly and shy, okay? This is what you call a once-in-a-lifetime thing. The man here bought you a nightclub, a crowd, and the band you been singing with for more nights than I can probably remember. Here's the list, baby,” she said, handing Sidarra the paper with a prearranged list of Anita Baker songs and breaking role just long enough to smile. “Do what I
know
you can do.” Aunt Chickie kissed her and left her alone under the spotlight.

And Sidarra sang.

She got down like she was meant to get down. She sang from Anita's first album and she sang from her last. Sidarra sang from the bottom she had known and she sang for the top she would see. She sang past the boys who had forever looked just beyond her shy smiles. She sang sweet goodbye to Michael, and she sang for her brother as only he knew she would sing one day. She sang notes she had never quite reached before. Sidarra sang like she came from a world in which the lyrics to these songs still made good sense, like love calls from rotary phones with sympathetic operator assistance, a world in which people saved up important words for letters and paid important bills with money orders. She sang for her daughter who was not there to hear her mother take back her voice, and she sang for her parents who would never hear it again. She sang in thanks and she sang in sorrow. And she sang as if she would never get this chance again.