The Importance of Being Dangerous (8 page)

“Okay, so here we go,” Griff continued. His expression started to lock up again. “I owe you a reason and at least one ball in a pocket every time I step to the slate.” Sidarra and Yakoob grinned at each other and waited for Griff to start. He had eleven balls to go. “The first is, there's a new bonus structure in the D.A.'s office downtown. They give Christmas money to the ones who can put the most brothers in jail by New Year's.”
Bang!
Griff shot with authority. Two balls went into opposite corner pockets. “Second, there's a Southern company, Great Walls, it's public, that does new prison construction. They had profits last year of seven billion dollars, but most people never heard of 'em. They specialize in high-tech solitary confinement units. Lockdown—that's where the money is. Twenty-three-hour days inside, no inmate contact, workouts in a cage, electronic monitors watching you all the time. Drives sane brothers mad, makes mad brothers kill themselves, but it cuts manpower needs by about sixty percent.”
Spank!
Griff let go and dropped another ball in the side. “Thirdly, they have two wardens on their board of directors, I found out, one from the largest penitentiary in Georgia, the other from Texas. Each of their prisons has already broken ground on a combined total of twelve hundred new solitary units.”
Bop!
He aced again.

“Here's the really sick shit. The governors of both states once sat on Great Walls' board. Each state legislature appropriated the money for the construction projects as a discretionary item in recent crime bills. Really can't be reviewed or challenged in court.”
Spop!
Another ball dropped in the far corner. “Just so happens, with heavy lobbying from political action committees from these same two states, Congress just passed a federal statute changing the designation of certain felonies—particularly those connected in any way to crack cocaine—to fall in line with tough mandatory
sentences.”
Pop!
Two balls dropped cold. The cue ball spun on the edge of a pocket, but would not fall.

Griff waited until the ball stopped spinning before he continued. He had now given five reasons and dropped at least as many balls. “The states are gonna use that federal law as a model. By next year, half of them will have the equivalent penalties under their own laws.”
Bang!
Other than the cue ball, there were just two colored balls left on the table. He'd shot so efficiently he had to pause to align his reasons with the few remaining targets. “But check this out: The statute also comes with a special designation for certain kinds of prisoners. If they exhibit one of like three behavioral signs or commit any prison infractions, they're now eligible for solitary.” Griff looked up to make sure they followed him on the point. “Solitary used to be considered cruel and unusual, reserved for the baddest of the bad. But with Congress making it ordinary well, now an inmate could get it for pissing on the toilet seat.”
Spop!
One ball left. “If they
had
toilet seats in prison.”

“Wait. Wait. How can they do that nonsense, Griff?” Sidarra interrupted.

“Because they can.” He lined up the final shot. “And wanna hear the kicker, my love? Three members of the board of this Southern company I've been talking about are president, CFO, and CEO of another company, a shadow conglomerate. What did you say was the name of that educational consulting firm that's got the contract to overhaul New York City's public school curricula?”

“Solutions, Inc.,” she said.

“There you go.”
Boom!
Down went the last colored ball. “I, uh, I rest my motherfuckin' case.”

The table was still except for the Whiteboy spinning in the middle.

Yakoob sat back in his chair with an expressionless gaze in the manner of a person who had just gotten hip to something that might have increasing importance to him if he allowed himself to
grasp it. He knew the room had just expanded, if not his world. He couldn't wait to get at Griff's list of companies and names.

“Seven billion dollars?” Sidarra asked.

“Blood money, baby,” Griff said, leaning his palms on the felt. “So I've nominated Great Walls as a target investment, and,” he added, sizing up their approving looks, “I think I got persuasion.”

“Wait a minute, Griff,” Sidarra interrupted, spreading her fingers in the air. “If this is so good, why don't we just sell off our current stocks and use our money to buy Great Walls stock? There's nothing sneaky about that.”

“Because none of us really has any money, baby,” Griff answered matter-of-factly.

“You got that right,” Yakoob muttered.

“And even if we did, I'm not about to use my own hard-earned money to buy into this evil, unethical machine. Why should I when I can use some other evil bastard's money to buy up this evil on my behalf?” He was dead certain.

Sidarra and Yakoob were still thinking. “Not our own money, huh?” Sidarra repeated.

“No, baby. Not ours,” Griff confirmed, his eyes intense. “Triangle trade. From bad money to blood money to us. Next we gotta play for the names of bad folks to bankroll us. Okay?”

Sidarra pulled a ball from a pocket and tossed it around in lone angles around the felt rails. She remembered something Yakoob had said a while back about the alias credit card: that nothing was free, that what they got they got from somebody else. She thought about Desiree Kronitz at work. She remembered the day she peeked into the chancellor's office and saw Desiree in a tight pink outfit surrounded by laughing white men in suspenders. She even thought about her boss, Clayborne Reed. Then she remembered her brother Kenny.

“Nothing can be traced back to us?” she asked nervously. Griff and Koob seemed to watch her nervousness extra carefully, which
only made her more nervous. “I mean, you're talking about running around cyberspace—or whatever you call it—with somebody else's wallet. Don't they call that identity theft? Don't people go to jail for that?”

Koob spoke up softly. “I don't think so, but that's Griff's department. Look, anything can be traced unless it's done right. You have to keep the amounts small. You gotta take off your boots and tiptoe, you see what I'm sayin'? The people who get caught are the dudes who get too greedy, sleepy, and I'm not trying to do that.”

“Trying is not quite what she's talking about, brother,” Griff said. “People do go to jail for this. Shit, it's stealing—even if it's justified. So before anything happens, before a dime flips our way, we're gonna have to see what you do, how you do it, and how nobody knows who takes from the pot, Koob.” Griff held him in his gaze. “Now, Sidarra asked you the ultimate question: Can
you
do it right?”

For once, as he looked down at the floor, no joke could be found on Yakoob's face. Which was suddenly very important to Sidarra. Griff's conviction was palpable and seductive, but she wasn't sure at this moment if some of it wasn't what a lawyer learns to do with words. Yakoob was different. What you saw you got, except for his hidden gift—to work the mystery of computers. She had to believe in that on faith, and that he would do it right even if she couldn't understand it. For Koob it was a step beyond anything he'd ever imagined doing. He had never been the key to anything before. Their gazes rained down on him like the judgment of parents, but they weren't his parents. They were his friends.

He composed himself and looked back up at them with a firmness. “Yeah, I can do it. I can do it right. It'll be tricky, but with a little help, some knowledge, I'm on it.”

Both Sidarra and Griff exhaled in relief. “All right,” Griff said calmly, and turned toward Sidarra.

She realized her hands were trembling a little as they clutched
the pool cue. Sidarra knew she needed money in the worst way. She couldn't go on limping along forever without collapsing. She could feel the many aches this plan might heal, but wasn't sure about the anger. It seemed that, like Griff, this required getting in touch with a certain kind of anger. She admired his anger, she was intoxicated by his words, but she was also done taking her cues from other people. Maybe she had to want this business with her own anger. Sidarra's pains had to come together with other people's pains—poor people, helpless people, black people—and theirs with hers. Personal revenge alone wouldn't justify it. Or maybe she should just go along to sustain the crush. No, at this point in her life, wanting Griff wasn't enough to take this risk. No, maybe not anger, and definitely not infatuation, but something else, bigger than both, would have to justify the very adult decision to play this game: protection. Sidarra decided she was finally going to protect herself. That felt instantly right.

The long nails on her fingers stopped trembling, and she looked up hopefully at both men. “Okay,” she said.

“There you go,” Griff declared, then reached for a new rack.

They named themselves after Sidarra's famous uncle Cicero, the first black pool champion. Over the next several games of Whiteboy, they played for names, the nominees whose bank accounts and credit cards became “joints” for Koob's modest withdrawals. For the first (and last) time, Koob wrote them down on the yellow slip of paper Griff had given him and took them home. Cicero Dean's Investment Club was officially in business.

IT TOOK YAKOOB MUCH LESS
than the twenty-four hours Griff gave him to check through the list, test some security walls, and devise a strategy for getting cash access. Alone late at night, his wife Marilyn asleep in the next room, Yakoob enjoyed a cannabis-induced meditation before the computer screen. What was once a lock picker's hobby to break code was now becoming a mission of personal redemption. He got so good he surprised himself. The firewalls never talked down to him, never called him stupid or questioned how much schooling he had. They would merely stand fast against his keystrokes until he could go through them, becoming one brick, then another, until he was his own hole and the barrier was broken. Staring, staring at the glowing symbols, Yakoob patiently typed permutations until eventually, one night or another, he'd find himself inside a program, where he could have his way with multiple identities and the federally insured fund amounts representing other people's luck.

If withdrawing their cash was painstaking, the stock payoffs took even more time. That was the idea, for the club members to let time pass slowly, to let a gain arise imperceptibly, as if it never happened and wouldn't be missed. That's why nobody's life became a lavish affair. To the world, each of them tried to stay pretty much the way they had been before, despite the roles they were playing and the way it made them feel inside.

One day back in mid-October, Jeffrey Geiger, the young assistant district attorney, went to the ATM near the courthouse where he always went after work, put in his card, entered his PIN, and discovered that he had–$76.21 in his checking account and $96 in savings. His square jaw dropped in its sockets, and within minutes he was on his cell phone to his father. Before he could get out a full sentence, his father was cussing loudly into the phone.

“What the fuck happened to my money market, son? I gave you access because I was sure you would—” and the cell phone went dead. His phone bill check had bounced.

Jeffrey pushed all the buttons he could, but the phone company was two steps ahead of him. “Out of Service” flashed for about ten seconds on the little screen before the thing shut down.

That was how the grand strategy began. Six months, some lawyer fees, and several hundred hours of telephone and letter-writing grief later, “joints” like Jeffrey Geiger and his no-nonsense father would probably get their bank to insure the fraud. But by then Cicero's Investment Club had used the cash to start an offshore shell corporation based in the Caribbean with accounts in Swiss banks. Yakoob named Griff president under the initials “G.H.C.” only, himself the chief executive officer with just “Y.B.J.,” and, with her permission, made Sidarra the chief financial officer with the alias he'd used for her fake credit card, “D.G.” They had each made short lists of people they knew had profited from humiliating black folks; they subjected the nominees to grueling games of Whiteboy; and the losers soon learned that they were on the hook
for small nuisance losses of about $2,500 apiece—they took $5,000 from Geiger. The shell corporation accumulated a quick infusion of about $50,000. They would buy stock in the meanest, richest companies they could find, like Great Walls. That stock kept rising. By the final quarter reports of 1996, not even a full year since they had all met at the Central Harlem investment club, Yakoob, Griff, and Sidarra had, on paper, twelve times their original stock investments.

 

FOR SIDARRA'S PART
, the money was a balm to her many still-open wounds, but it was not what completely accounted for a distinct sexiness she often began to feel. Having money made her open to new things. Making money with Griff made her especially open to him. The magical way Yakoob could turn a game of Whiteboy into cash on paper made her life begin to seem a little unreal, like she had been simply walking on the wrong side of the street all the time. Somehow, with her grief perhaps lifting a bit, she crossed over. It didn't seem to take much more than that.

One night, she and Griff decided that it was time to see Yakoob perform onstage at an underground club in Harlem.

“But why, sweetheart?” Michael pleaded with her before she left. “Why can't I come out with you tonight to see this guy you know? I love comedy. You know that, Sidarra.”

“It's people from work, darling,” she explained. “It's not something I want to do. It's something I
have
to do. Please, baby. I promise I'll be back early.”

Michael had no idea. He'd heard of Griff only when he wasn't listening. He let Raquel distract him. Whenever she was around, he had a tendency to focus on the child. When Sidarra mentioned her investments, he had the attention span of a pigeon. So that night she left him for her new mischief. And somewhere in her heart, a song.

Sidarra met Griff at their coffee shop wearing caressable silk and rayon just in case the comedy club was dark. He wore a black trench and black suit with royal blue shirt and smiled without speaking when he saw her, then grabbed her firmly into his chest. However much he held back, she was getting to know the intensity of his feelings. It would break through immediately when they met alone, then he would have to do something awkward to regain his composure. After all, he was out on the streets of his own neighborhood with a woman not his wife. This time he followed up the hug with an oddly generous exchange with a panhandler.

“Griff, why would you give a crackhead five whole dollars?” she asked as they walked away.

“Because he's being priced out of Harlem,” Griff quickly replied with a laugh. “I don't know. Because I can. Maybe I shouldn't have. Next time, he just gets a buck.” This was how he burned off his jones for her. “I promise.”

Because Sidarra was crossing streets and living mischief, she slipped her arm into his and they continued walking the several blocks toward the comedy club.

“Tell me. Were you always gonna be a lawyer?”

“Pretty much.”

“That sounds like a lack of imagination,” she said.

“It was. I thought about being a state assemblyman, but I would have to run for office. You have to get people to like you if you're gonna run for office, and I don't really like people that much. A more creative person—like you—probably could have made more with that dilemma, but I'll be all right.”

People were looking at them, and he was flirting badly. By now Griff had realized that he enjoyed people looking at them together; his being excited to be beside this woman deserved attention. He enjoyed flirting, too. The last time it felt so good he was too young to cherish it. Yet Griff was a stranger to this side of the street, and he occasionally looked nervously to the other side.
Blood-money stock investing with stolen identities sat surprisingly well with him. Griff had concluded that the proper balance of his life might actually require some low-level criminality. The only thing that scared him was his wife.

“What did
you
do to be creative?” he asked Sidarra.

She stopped to think. “I sang my heart out in long, floppy hats.” They laughed together. “Usually in front of the mirror.” They kept walking and turned down a side street. “I used to believe I was channeling God. Nothing made me feel better.”

He stopped and looked into her eyes. “Would you sing for me, Sidarra?” Griff asked sheepishly. “What would you sing if you sang to me?”

Everybody needs life to happen to them, and nobody knows when it will. That's why Sidarra let her shoulders go. She took a step backward with Griff's hands in hers and giggled. His eyes looked so expectant alone under a streetlamp. The air turned warmer all of a sudden. The solid faces of brownstones on both sides of the block turned the winds away.

“Donny Hathaway or Temptations version?” she asked.

Griff looked baffled by the question. “Um, Donny. Whatever it is, give me Donny Hathaway's version, sugar.”

Sidarra cleared her throat and right there on the quiet side street she began to sing Donny Hathaway's version of “A Song for You.” She looked down as if she were waiting for her voice.
“I've been so many places in my life and time…”
she began. Her voice had the clear quality of pearls flying. The song swelled in her chest. Sidarra closed her eyes and pushed the notes even beyond her register. Griff's eyes glassed over in disbelief. He knew only to keep holding her hands. Sidarra paused for the chorus, took a deep breath, and came up from down under:
“I love you in a place where there's no space or time. I love you for my life. You're a friend of mine.”

The song ended. The night suddenly blew cooler. Griff opened his coat to swallow her up.

“Thank you, Sidarra,” he said, holding her a little more freely. “That was you, precious. That was precious.” He pulled back and looked into her face. “You know?” he started to say. Instead, Griff leaned forward to kiss her. She closed her eyes and waited for the touch of his lips on hers, but they landed on her cheek. It was the right feel—warm, moist, assertive—but the wrong place.

 

AT A COMEDY CLUB
tucked in an underground bar, Griff and Sidarra sat together in the darkness, smiling expectantly and holding hands to a song still in their heads. Yakoob was going on about an eight-year-old son he didn't have.

Kids are a trip. Nowadays they're just full of opinions and whatnot. Like, now my son wants to be a criminal when he grows up. Ever since we saw a cop riding horseback down the street in New York City. Blew his mind. He says, “Hey, Dad, why the fuck they got cops on horse? Doesn't that ruin the element of surprise?”

Funny or not, something about Yakoob's set made Sidarra go out the next day and buy that gold lamé dress once and for all.