The Importance of Being Dangerous (9 page)

BY THE END OF THE YEAR
, the Board of Miseducation released its preliminary autumn standardized test scores. In the districts that always did well, the scores improved. In the poorest ones, they stayed the same or declined. But an inside joke was emerging for those who looked hard enough to see it: enrollment was dropping in many of the districts where failing kids struggled. Somehow the dropout rates remained the same but the kids were disappearing. Sidarra knew this had never happened before, yet no one in her unit was talking about it. The newspapers missed it too. Instead, they reported small miracles occurring at one school or another under the chancellor's new plan. But the praise was lies to Sidarra. She came home to the truth. She saw her daughter's homework. Even the teachers didn't deny what was up. At Raquel's school, learning had gone to pot.

However, the biggest challenge for Sidarra at work was not standing out. For someone struggling with a pay cut and demoted
to boring tasks well beneath her abilities, she sure looked good. Her nails were always done. Her perm was always fly. Her clothes had become Desiree Kronitz's envy. It takes a fair amount of energy to camouflage success. Before she got to work, she'd have to take off certain jewelry and put it in her purse. Sometimes she would cut the labels off her blouses so no one standing behind her could sneak a peak at her shopping habits. On Tuesdays especially, Sidarra would leave for work perfectly made up. A block from her office, she'd go into the same restaurant bathroom and wipe some of it off. She'd return at five-fifteen to put her face back on. The waiters there adored her.

“Something is different about you,” Desiree said one morning, confronting Sidarra in the hallway. She looked Sidarra up and down and wagged her finger too close to Sidarra's face. “I'm not sure what it is, but I'm gonna find out.”

You keep wagging that finger like that and you're gonna find something else out about me, Sidarra wanted to say. Instead, all she said was: “I'm sorry, Desiree. Did you say something?”

“Don't play dumb with me, sistergirl. What's going on with you?”

About this time everybody needed to just back up and take a puff. Sidarra decided to walk on. “I'm in love. That's all.” And she returned to her cubicle.

 

ON THEIR WAY DOWNTOWN
to play pool, Yakoob told Sidarra and Griff that he had to make a stop. “To get that good shit,” he smiled. “Just a quick hookup with my boy.”

“I don't have a lot of time tonight,” Sidarra said.

“We're not even getting out the car.”

This time they were heading to a hall on the East Side, a small place for gamblers and serious players who minded their business. If you were too good in some places, you could draw a crowd.
Here they could care less. Time taught these things. Time also rearranged the seating in Yakoob's old Chevy Cavalier. Sidarra and Griff preferred to sit in the back on the cracked vinyl upholstery.

Koob's pager went off on his hip. “This is the cat you get your cheeba from?” Griff asked him while they speeded down Second Avenue.

“Yeah. Raul's no joke. He's kind of a kid. Don't be mad if he doesn't smile at you. His dope is strictly two hits and you're good.”

“Wow, it's been a long time,” Sidarra said. She was still deciding whether she'd get high. “Last time I smoked pot I remember you had to smoke a whole joint.”

Yakoob knew Raul from around the way. Raul always had a hookup for the kind of whiteboy weed that's particularly hard for many brothers to find. It seemed odd that as the millennium approached, white guys continued to enjoy such an advantage in weed quality, but so it was. Raul, however, was the ambassador of high-octane at a reasonable price. On East Eighty-eighth Street, Koob turned the corner and pulled over to wait for Raul to come out of a building. He double-parked and they sat. The wait grew long. Finally they saw a short, squat Puerto Rican-looking guy in a Kangol and black baggies leave the vestibule real quick and hurry toward the Chevy, checking both ways over his shoulder. He looked fresh out of jail, with frizzy cornrows slept on about two weeks too long.

“Uh, damn, Koob,” said Sidarra. “This your boy? He looks a little hard.”

“And dangerous too,” said Griff.

“He is,” Koob said as Raul made it to the passenger door. “But we're gonna drop him off in a minute.”

No they weren't. Raul had a little trouble with the handle, and they could see his wide-bottom jaw getting very serious under his long-haired, half-slice mustache. Sidarra didn't say anything, but
she thought he looked like a muskrat. Raul got in, didn't smile or say hello, just said, “Drive this thing, brother. On the quick, I ain't playin'.”

Even in the dark, Yakoob could see that Raul had blood on his AND l's. Suddenly he too got real serious and took off down the street.

“What's up? What's going on?” Griff asked, like he had radar.

“Who dat?” Raul asked Koob.

“Tha's my boy. It's cool. He a defense lawyer and she a teacher.”

“
Was
a teacher,” Sidarra mumbled.

They drove to the FDR Drive real quiet. Koob didn't know which way to go all of a sudden. “Which way, motherfucker?” Koob asked.

“Up. Go up!” Raul said.

“Hey, excuse me,” Sidarra finally said. “What's going on?”

Nobody said anything. Raul was breathing kind of hard, and Koob, who you'd think would speak up for the two in back, was mum. They got to the Willis Avenue exit, and the old engine chugged and strained to get up the ramp. They listened to the wheeze of the tires roll onto the grates as they headed over the bridge to the Bronx. That's when Koob finally asked what happened back on that block.

“I smoked him,” Raul declared with the flat tone of someone finishing a cigarette.

“You mean you
got
some smoke?” Sidarra asked.

“You what?” Koob asked again.

“I 'on't know, man. I had to. Motherfucker just tried to get big on me for the last time, you know wha'm sayin'?”

Nobody did. What happened was, this white guy named Blane sold high-quality pot to white folks. Blane even delivered. But not to people like Raul. It was once the other way around. Raul used to hook Blane up, used to connect him to dealers Raul knew in Washington Heights who could get cheap dope from Jersey. After
a while, Blane found a high-end source and got too large to need Raul anymore. Raul became a regular old customer who got no breaks, no discount, nothing even for his own stash. For a long time Raul thought all that was kind of fucked up, but what could he do? Raul was a criminal. And he smoked
a lot
of weed, almost all the time. So what could he say? Well, that night, Blane got too bold with him. Blane tried to punk him, short him on the weight, but Raul figured it out and asked him what the fuck he was trying to do. Blane had no answer. He was just doing it 'cause he could. Raul was not the kind to play that smug shit, and he didn't get played. So when Blane told him to just get the fuck out of his house if he wasn't happy, Raul made himself happy, pulled out a .45, and shot Blane dead in his face. Then he took about a pound of weed and walked out.

“Hold up,” Sidarra said in that voice to keep a scared thug calm. “Nobody dies over marijuana, now c'mon.”

“This had nothin' to do with cheeba,” Raul said. “He disrespected me.”

They were all quiet again for a minute while Yakoob drove the car up the Deegan to no particular place. Sidarra was the only one who did any talking. Raul seemed to listen to her; she made him explain. Yakoob was straight scared. He and Raul had grown up in the same neighborhood, but he was older than the kid and he wasn't like that. Griff had one hand to his forehead and the other in Sidarra's. As he stared out the window at Yankee Stadium, he knew right away this was all about as fucked up as it could get. The only thing he didn't know was whether this vitamin-shaped roughneck Raul was finished shooting. They needed to get Raul out of the car so they could figure something out.

That happened naturally because homicide had worked up Raul's appetite. He directed Yakoob up into some uncivilized piece of the Bronx where he liked to go for Chinese takeout. Bloody shoes and all, Raul got out and left them at the curb.

“Hey, y'all. I'm sorry,” Koob tried to tell them. “I didn't know. I just had no idea.”

“Well, let's just go, Koob,” Sidarra said. “Just drive the fuck away, now! Let's go!”

“Can't do that, Sid. He's smarter than he looks. He'll come back after me. He might even come back after
you
.”

“Well, we have a choice,” Griff said. “As it stands, we're in this. It's pretty unavoidable. D.A.'s gonna try to charge us as accessories even if we turn right the fuck around now and give him to them.”

“What? For some dumb little nigga with a grudge?” Koob asked him. “No way, man. How's that gonna happen? What about you? You got friends down there. That's your world. How they gonna charge
you
? And if they can't charge you, how they gonna charge me and Sid?”

Good thing there was a line in the Chinese restaurant. Everybody on it looked like they were on lunch break from a murder. “He shot a
drug dealer,
” Sidarra said. “C'mon, Griff. Aren't drug dealers expendable down at Centre Street?”

“Not white ones who live on the Upper East Side and sell pot to other white folks. Get ready to see his family on the news already represented by a lawyer. Get ready to see it made into a break-in. He's not even gonna look like a drug dealer when the
New York Post
gets into this.
Those
are his friends. For all we know, the D.A. on this one could be a customer. They're damn sure not
my
friends. Once they know who I am, who Sid is, they're gonna blow this thing up. They might try to use us to charge your boy with capital murder.”

“What's gonna happen to us, you think?” Yakoob asked like he was eight years old.

Griff stopped thinking fast for a second and sighed out the window. “We testify in exchange for a deal. I doubt we could serve
any kind of time for this. But my career and Sidarra's career, well them shits mighta just ended tonight.”

Sidarra grew cold. She had her long fingernails up around her temples and she was staring down into her lap, thoroughly and completely pissed off. Her heart raced in her chest, and when she looked up again she could see her own shadowy face in the rearview mirror. Raquel. Aunt Chickie. Even Michael. Sidarra suddenly became very cool and to the point. “Look, this is very ugly. Koob, I don't know your stupid little friend, but I work too hard to go down in any shape or manner for this thug or the silly son-ofabitch he just shot. Now, Griff, what if I just don't cooperate? Before this little muskrat motherfucker comes back in here with his shrimp-fried-rice afterglow and really makes me mad, just what other choice do you think we have?”

Griff clasped his hands together and stared at the back of Koob's seat. Raul had made it up to the front of the thug line and was handing some dollar bills to the guy behind the counter. Griff looked up at both of them, his face dark. “Cover him. Try to make this shit straight-up go away. Put his ass someplace on the down low for a few months, I don't know, lose him somewhere in Philly. If they ever catch him, we're his highly credible alibi.”

“Yup, but he gotta pay something for this,” Koob said, stiffening up in the seat. “For real. You can't just roll a human and slide like that, can you?”

They all seemed to exhale at once. They imitated each other's nervousness, running their hands through their hair and shifting in their seats. “All right,” Sidarra declared. “I'm clear. For now, he's in the club.”

By the time the little rock with creases for eyes and not even a bag for the carton of Hunan chicken he was wolfing was back in the car with them, Cicero's Investment Club was telling Raul how he was gonna work for them from now on. And, yes, you
can
roll
another human and slide back into the daylight if you're a thug with no other shit to do and you've got three adults directing traffic. If he would aspire to henchmanship, Raul could be useful; and they would make it so until the debt was paid.

The funny thing is that the same weed Blane died for was so good that, after smoking a single joint of it back up at the Cloisters, they were already thinking of a list. On that particular high, they began to devise a purpose and new financing angles. They didn't exactly say it all yet, but some version of it was in all three of their heads at some point that night. They found a place to put Raul till they could get him to Philly. Then the three of them found a safe place to have drinks and talked. While they schemed, Yakoob announced a major discovery: Solutions, Inc., the educational consultants, was taking steps to go public as early as the summer. Griff discovered a side of himself that took no prisoners. Koob found out he might prefer to be rich than funny. Sidarra felt what it was like to be the accidental queen of a small kingdom. And Raul, sitting up on somebody else's couch watching TV, discovered the importance of being dangerous.

“
RAUL'S BACK
,” Yakoob announced as Sidarra stepped into the truck. Two subwoofers and a blistering rap made it hard for her to hear. “You'll see him tonight. How do y'all want to handle it?”

“You know what?” she said. “I don't even think I want to see his ass. I'm just really not in the mood. Is he trained yet? Can you just ask him to obey or something?”

“It's all good, baby,” Koob replied.

“We got a new place we're going to, sugar,” Griff said, trying to ease her mind. “Enough of that downtown bullshit. You could use a castle.”

I could use an unmarried Griff, she wanted to say. Sidarra was on her period this particular Tuesday, and it would be three or four more days before she was due for good humor. “Whose car is this?” she asked irritably.

“It's my new ride, baby,” Koob proudly answered. The truck was a shiny black Cadillac Escalade, tricked out to the max with
Corinthian leather seats that swiveled a half dozen ways, a navigational system, two DVD players, a 50-CD changer, a drink cooler between the second and third row of seats and Sprewell rims. “Since neither of y'all even own a vehicle, I'm 'bout to be the only nigga making car jokes from now on. Dig?”

Sidarra made the same sucking sound with her lips she once made daily in high school to show how unimpressed she was. “This is no way to lay low, Koob. This car beats the hell out of that jalopy you had, but it's too ostentatious.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” he wanted to know as they drove up St. Nicholas. “You tryin' to say I got my head in the sand?”

“Nah, dog. She means you're showing too hard,” Griff explained.

“And could you turn the damned music down just a few decibels, please?” she said.

He lowered the volume on the stereo. “Damn, Sid. Are things that bad?”

She didn't answer.

“We're doing pretty well, actually,” said Griff. “And we're in a position to start some shit.”

“Well, I would certainly appreciate that,” she said. “I'm not feeling so good, okay?” Tonight, Koob and Griff sat up front together while Sidarra sat in the back and ached. “I don't want to know details, Koob, but I was wondering,” she asked. “Raul's been lost in Philly for almost four months?”

“Mark my words, girl, Philly is the biggest motherfuckin' place on earth as long as you a nigga. I can't speak for the others. You might could find them. But I kid you not: a well-stashed nigga with a fresh haircut is as good as gone forever in Philadelphia.”

The brand-new tires eased like Isaac Hayes onto Edgecombe and rolled further uptown. As the quiet street inclined, all of Harlem spread out below them. A few blocks later, Sidarra's view from the window was interrupted by the brick wall of a narrow alley
between two buildings. Koob one-handed the squeeze into the private little lot in back, and within minutes Sidarra found herself and her company standing inside the doorway at Q's club, the Full Count.

Q, a tall, dark brother built just bigger than a bull yet quicker on turns, stepped his bald head into the low light of the doorway and hugged Griff, then Koob. Q and Griff had become poker acquaintances in the Full Count's back room, but if Griff had ever run for office, Q would have managed his campaign. He was a loyal ex-cop, a careful businessman, and looked like he could still play linebacker at a Division I school. “My brothers,” he said like he was ordering his favorite drink, “your boy's already in the back. Oh, you gotta be kidding,” he said, pausing to look at Sidarra. “Who made this creature?”

“I'm not your ‘this,'” she said, walking past him. “And I'm still in progress.”

“This work of ancestral beauty, darling. That's all I meant. Females couldn't
buy
disrespect inside these walls. I'm Q. Welcome home, baby.” He shook her hand like a giant gentleman. “What you drinking?”

“Sidecar, Mr. Q.”

“Like you never tasted. You got a coatroom in the back. Griff'll show you.”

The Full Count was underground, an old-school whiskey bar without the knife fights. It still smelled like 1973, though, and the carpeted areas were low shag. Back in the day, it was one of several preferred after-hours homes for Harlem's political power brokers; with new power brokers came new haunts. Now, it was a neighborhood bar, a well-kept hole in the earth with no windows. Except for red bulbs and blue on the ceiling, the low neon lights burned up into the faces spread across the oval-shaped bar. Marvin Gaye spoke for everybody from several speakers embedded in the walls. The pimp or two in the house was the low-lying and discreet
kind. He was probably sitting near a postman, a bookkeeper, or an older middle manager. It was two-to-one men to women, but half the men were fifty-plus; most of the women were quicker than that. As the three of them walked through it all to a maroon curtain in back, Sidarra had to wonder why they had never been here before.

“Check this out,” Griff said, standing before the curtain. He pulled it back and Sidarra stepped through to what had been a nasty poker den until a few weeks ago. Now, it was a true VIP lounge; fully equipped with its own sound system, several dark blue velvet couches built into the walls, three small tables surrounded by comfortable stools, a bathroom and changing area, and smack under the long light fixture in the center, a $12,000 Brunswick eight-footer with brick-colored felt. “This is
my
ride,” he beamed at Koob. “I should say ours now. I named her Amistad.” Their eyes studied the pool table, then roamed the room with kiddie delight. The place made you want to take off all your clothes and just play. “We needed a new office, and the rent's not so bad.”

But seeing Raul sitting on one of those couches at the far side of the room momentarily put the play on pause. His compact, bulging body was somehow cut into a very dapper gray suit with faint brown pinstripes. His Guccis shined. Just as Koob said, Raul's cornrows were gone, replaced by a short Dominican curl with a nice fade above his ears and the most impeccably sculpted facial lines a barber ever cut. Raul sat tight, reticent and extremely glad to see them. He was ready, as he told them, for business. “Help yourself to some candy,” he said in his flat murmur of a voice, and pointed to a huge cache of Nestlé Crunch, Snickers, and M&M's candies with which he had decorated the tables before they'd arrived.

“Would you please excuse us for a bit, my man?” Griff asked him.

Raul nodded respectfully and disappeared into the darkness of
the room beyond the curtains. The pleasure was all his. Out in the Full Count's main room, Raul could finally exhale. Once he settled onto a bar stool alone, it struck him that he'd never felt like this before. His whole body swelled up, and he could not hold back a constant grin. Raul had never been in anybody's VIP lounge. And though he'd been asked to leave, being in their company, even briefly, made Raul more visible than he could ever remember being.

Inside the curtains, Griff had new business on his mind. Something big and dramatic to match the new setting. His eyes focused elsewhere as if he were preparing to make an opening argument. “Not a lot is liquid right now, but we're seeing some filthy gains, my people,” Griff reported. “The stakes are about to climb, and I think the game needs more justification. That's just my view. The target person or company has to be a major player in the black people humiliation business. That much hasn't changed and I think you should still have to nominate a target like before, but I think you should have to kill at least thirteen balls straight to reach ‘persuasion,' not eleven. If you have a problem with somebody's nominee, wait your turn. If you get a turn, you gotta drop at least four balls—not just two anymore—to ‘intolerate.' Okay? It should be harder all the way around. Comments, questions, suggestions?”

There were none. So such were the new rules of Whiteboy. As if on cue, Yakoob fired up a monster spliff, the Ohio Players grooved from the stereo, and the game was on.

“Nominate, Griff. It's on you, dog,” Yakoob told him.

Now for the argument: “I've been thinking about something Sid said to me on the way to Koob's comedy act,” Griff started, toothpick in his mouth. He walked over to her with his stick in his hands. “She said that life may be too short to ever sacrifice your voice.”

“I said that?”

“Something like that. I don't remember it exactly, but it was very powerful. It got me thinking about getting some real power and a booming fucking voice.”

“I'm hip,” Koob nodded.

Griff was excited to find a taker and stepped toward Yakoob. “Did you know that Solutions, Inc. is a Fortune 500 company already?” From their expressions it was clear they did not. “Well, I think we have to get in on this Solutions, Inc. IPO. We gotta own a big piece of that slave ship right now, on the cheap, just before it goes public. So I nominate the whole fuckin' company.”

He stood before the break, settled his eyes on the fat rack, and lowered his body down into the kitchen like a crane. Griff had the best break of them all, but he usually scratched. Scratch on a break, you just sweeten life for the next up.
Pop!
The stick punched whitey, and Griff's whole body snapped out of its sockets like a bad bone. The thirteen, four, eight, and eleven balls all dropped on the break in that order, and Griff didn't scratch. Sidarra was still skeptical. Now he had to declare his point.

“One point two million kids in the New York City public schools, about half black. That alone makes those bastards eligible.” Griff's eyes never left the Amistad. The balls spread virgin across the table, loose change looking for a pocket. He was ready to run them all down. Griff had too-good power yet bang-bang aim, and he preferred the real long balls on a line. He could hit 'em so hard they got dizzy for holes.
Bam!
Four in the corner, sets up the six opposite side. Griff's body did a James Brown spin.

“This is only their sixth year in business,” he declared next. “They already remastered a dozen school districts in cities across the country—thanks to Sid's boss, Eagleton, the star director on their board. Six, cross corner, whitey splits the nurse, ten in the side.” He stroked, jerked English underneath, and the cue ball dropped the six, spun back between two balls touching, and sent
the ten right where he said he would. By rule, Griff needed only one more ball for persuasion.

Yakoob had been deep in thought, studying the balls arrayed before them like a poker hand. “This one ain't gonna be easy, brother, gettin' hold of private company stock,” he said. “Shit,” Koob laughed, “it'd be quicker to place a bet online, kill the fucking schools chancellor, and collect.”

Griff looked over at him and grinned. “I thought you were a badass.”

“Nah.
Raul's
the badass. I'm just good,” Yakoob answered.

The air was too thick with testosterone, and it was time for Sidarra to cut through the nonsense. “Hold up,” she snapped impatiently. “There's no way for us to buy Solution shares before the IPO, Griff. And the price will be too high afterward. You know that. You're either in already or you're invited to buy in at the offer price. But we're strangers. Koob can't just hack our offshore funds into a purchase. C'mon.”

Yakoob immediately deflated, but she was right. Until then they had managed to gain as Solutions gained by following its portfolio and buying stock in the companies it owned stock in. If they could have bought Solutions stock before, they would have done it outright. Sidarra seemed to intolerate without having to take a single shot.

“No, baby, but he doesn't have to. We can do it all together.”

“How so?” she said, sliding back on her stool and folding her arms across her chest.

Griff let his cue rest against a velvet wall, walked closer to them, and leaned back on the Amistad. “This is the angel round of financing for Solutions.”

“The angel round?” she repeated skeptically.

“Yeah, the last one before the IPO. This is when preferred venture capital and affiliated investors get invited to pump them up
before they go public. I even know one of the vice presidents who handles the deals there.”

“You
know
him?” she asked incredulously.

“I don't know him personally, but I know who he is. Apparently a real dick named Goldman. My wife's investment house is one of the banks doing the offering.”

The mention of his wife, even if not by name, broke an unwritten rule in her head, and Sidarra's skepticism got a jolt of bitterness. “It sounds convoluted, too many steps,” she said. The look on his face as she spoke indicated for the first time that maybe Griff had a problem with people disagreeing with him. So she pushed it. “I don't think it's worth doing. I think we probably leave it alone.”

But Griff was not angry. He leaned his fingers on the table and searched for words. All the dance of body English was done for now, and he reached for another type of persuasion. “You're right that it's not easy. And it's probably risky. We would have to be angels. This is how they do it. This is how the ones who know each other make each other richer and more powerful. So we'd have to become one of them—or come off to Goldman like one of them.”

“How do you do that, homes?” Koob asked, not sure whose side of the argument he wanted.

“We have to create an entity that sounds like one of their affiliated investors, their angels. That entity buys in as if it should have been in all along.”

“How're they not gonna know we're not who they don't know?” Koob asked, twisting up his lips. “We don't even know who they know, and that shit's probably locked up in company files. I can't just go online and learn that.”

Griff took a deep breath, stood up, and held his cue with both hands in front of his chest. “Well, we're gonna need to get some inside knowledge about that somehow, because Belinda's taken all
that stuff back to her office. And then we're gonna have to get a little lucky. One of us is gonna have to catch Goldman at his desk when he's in the right mood to fuck up. From what I hear, he's either flustered or half drunk by late afternoon. If we sound like money he knows, the phone call should be quick. Then I'll follow up with the paperwork and we wait for the day to come.”