Dead I Well May Be

10: A STOLEN CAR TO OYSTER BAY

Ramón turned out to be a brief, enigmatic, but useful presence in my life. He oozed charm and charisma. Gentle, quiet, persuasive, but that’s what they sometimes said about the Führer, and you couldn’t forget that Ramón’s crew was responsible for about a murder a week, although he might say in justification that this was only self-defense. Not that my hands were completely clean on that score (if you counted Dermot) and in any case what was my excuse for the murders yet to be?

They got me a flat on 181st Street on the fifth floor of a building that looked right over the George Washington Bridge and the Hudson. The apartment was amazing, with hardwood floors and long windows and modern appliances, twice the size of the place I’d been in on 123rd Street, and the neighborhood was good. The 180s near the river was a little Jewish section in the middle of Dominican Washington Heights. Mostly older folks, who got on well with the majority community.

My apartment was airy and wonderful. At night, when I wasn’t working, I’d sit and look out the big bay living-room windows. There’s a bit in Citizen Kane when one of Kane’s buddies is being interviewed in a nursing home and in the background you can see the GWB, and that’s exactly the view I had-except in color.

Nominally, I had become part of Ramón’s inner circle: a “lieutenant.” He employed me as a bodyguard, and a shifty little man called José gave me an Uzi submachine gun and a Colt.45 semiautomatic. I’d fired a Colt ACP before, a huge, loud, terrifying weapon that was standard issue to U.S. Army officers for seventy years, so the gun must have had some good qualities. I, however, couldn’t shoot the thing. I mean, it’d blow the head off anything closer than twenty feet, but for me, at least, it was horribly inaccurate at distance. Also, the magazine would jam, and it made me jump when flames would come out of the barrel. And, of course, I hadn’t fired an Uzi. The British Army would never countenance such a silly and vulgar weapon, and I mistrusted it right from the start. I wore a custom jacket that Ramón had a tailor make up for me and carried both guns in shoulder holsters, but the Uzi I kept on the right-hand side without the clip in to make it a bit more comfortable.

Ramón never once revealed his real plans for me and I, for one, simply could not buy his story of needing reliable men. The morning after our meeting, a van showed up for my stuff, such stuff as I had. I didn’t see Ramón for the next few days. He told me about the apartment on the phone and hinted that he might meet me there, but I waited for him and he didn’t appear. The super saw me in and around and refused a twenty-dollar tip.

The next day, José showed up with a tailor. He gave me five hundred dollars in hundreds and told me to get some shirts and a pair of shoes. A man came and installed premium cable and a phone. Furniture was delivered from Pier 1.

A couple of days after that, a car came for me and took me down to a restaurant near Ramón’s place. It was early evening and Ramón introduced me to the lieutenants, who were polite but not particularly friendly. Everyone spoke Spanish all the time. After the introductions I was fitted out with my weapons, and I just sat there sipping Corona.

My whole role in the setup seemed completely false and out of place, but Ramón did his best to make me feel comfortable by having the occasional conversation with me in English about sports and the weather. At eleven o’clock, after what I suppose had been a getting-to-know-you meeting, I rode a cab back to 181st Street.

The next day, I was summoned down again. This time to his loft. The lieutenants were out pounding the beat and I was alone with Ramón, José, and the two bodyguards.

My real job was the unspoken thing between us. He knew that I suspected that it was all a fabrication, and what’s more, he knew that I knew that he knew, but he kept his lip shut.

Ramón, if I’m your bodyguard, why don’t you want me to live here? I asked him.

You’re my bodyguard on important occasions. You have a very special role, Michael, he said. That seemed to end the conversation, and I nodded. Ramón went back to his paper.

I spent the afternoon there. Ramón went into his study and closed the door, and in the evening, the lieutenants came back again with the money.

If you’ve seen any of the druggy ghetto-fabulous films of the ’80s and ’90s, you might have the wrong impression of Ramón’s lifestyle. It’s true that he lived in a nice loft, but there was only one girl (Carmen, a slender, frumpy little thing who lived with her mother at night and only sometimes came to see Ramón in the evenings) and no partying, and no one was allowed to sample the product. Ramón’s place contained a white sofa, a dozen white leather lounge chairs, a huge stereo, many CDs, a few coffee tables, but also an enormous mahogany bookcase with books in English, Spanish, and French. The living room must have been the size of a basketball court and the furniture appeared so tiny in this space that it had an ascetic feel to it. Ramón, I think, enjoyed bucking people’s expectations of him. He often had people up there, and it was never the way they expected it to be. An old building in the 150s on the river, huge and bare, overlooking a gloomy, leafless park. It sat above three derelict floors of an old middle school. To get up to it, you had to climb the outside fire escape. I suppose that this was for security reasons, although it’s conceivable that he could have just been saving his money for the time when he could have the whole building done over in suitable style.

Since most of the boys spoke to one another in fast Dominican Spanish, I was more or less cast as an outsider from the beginning. No one made an effort to get to know me, and I got the impression that they believed that I was one of the boss’s whims and would be disposed of when (probably in a few weeks) Ramón tired of me. Since no one made an attempt to engage me in conversation, I took to wandering around the place when Ramón was in the bedroom or in his private study-the only two areas that were out of bounds. I often went out on the balcony for a breath of air, although the air was always a bit dodgy because of the huge sewage plant on 138th Street. I would have enjoyed a smoke, but I’d given it up. Back inside, the boys were chatting and ignoring me. Ramón’s bookshelf was interesting: about a thousand books, but fewer than a dozen had their spines broken. Clearly, when Ramón had come into money he’d bought the books all at once to fill out the bookcase, but whether they were a pose or he actually intended to read them I’m not sure.

So there’s me reading his books or having a breather outside; Ramón and José are in the study and the other lieutenants are making up baggies. Every day like the first day of school, awkward, unpleasant.

In Ramón’s organization, he had about two or sometimes three dozen people working for him on an informal basis. A core of five lieutenants, all Dominican: Sammy, Iago, Pedro, Moreno, and the number-two in the outfit, José. There were two bodyguards, one nineteen-year-old Cuban guy called Devo (like the band), though everybody called him Cuba, and another Dominican guy called Hector. Outside of these seven and me (who became formally the third bodyguard), the rest of the employees were all cannon fodder. At night, the lieutenants would make up the baggies in a lab Ramón had built himself at the back of his apartment-small and white, stinking. It wasn’t out of bounds, but the lieutenants saw it as their fiefdom and kept the bodyguards and even José out of there. In the morning, the lieutenants would distribute the baggies to the safety men, who would hold them, and then sellers would hit the streets. Once you’d bought a bag, you’d go to the safety man, who was in an alley or fake store, and if everything was cool, he would give it to you. For every one person selling the five- or ten-dollar baggies, there would be three others keeping an eye on the street and another man who accompanied you to the safety man. Typically, a seller could make about three hundred dollars an hour, up to two or three thousand a day. The seller saw about 5 to 10 percent of what he made, depending upon the caprice of Ramón’s lieutenants. I estimated that Ramón was probably taking in sixty thousand a week. I don’t know if he had to pay off anyone or what exactly his expenses were, but clearly it was a bloody gold mine.

No one seemed to have any moral qualms about selling crack to addicts who would prostitute themselves or steal or go to the lengths of robbing their own family and pawning their kid’s possessions to pay for the stuff. Ramón never seemed to give any lectures about not selling to kids or waifs or madmen, but then I don’t speak Spanish, so maybe he did.

Ramón owned a Mercedes, but he drove it himself, and there were very few extraneous expenses.

Ten days had gone by, and every afternoon I had reported for work and hung out doing nothing until evening and then gone home. I’d done bugger-all to earn anything, but I consoled myself with the thought that I had over a thousand dollars now saved, and because of all the plantains and rice and beans, I had gained about ten pounds and was getting stronger.

The time would come when I’d have to say goodbye to this purgatorial existence, when I’d have to do what I’d come to New York to do, but I figured I could build myself up for a wee while yet. Ramón had not revealed why he really wanted me around, and I was beginning to think that he really was just a whimsical eejit who had taken a shine to me.

I made my own routine, and I usually went over there at around one or two in the P.M. The mornings were my own, and sometimes I’d haunt the old places where I used to live in the city. I had a job to do, but I had to wait, not for a sign exactly, or an alignment in the heavens, but I had to know that the moment was right.

My favorite place in the late morning was 125th Street. None of Darkey’s boys would ever be down there, and for me it was old and familiar and I felt like a tourist now that I was living on 181st. 125th, badland and desperateland but almost a home. Sometimes I’d walk by Mr. Han’s Chinky, but I wouldn’t go in, and now and again I paid Jim a visit in the Blue Moon.

When I was feeling particularly good I would set myself projects. I’d try and do five parks in a day, or go from river to river. Or try to find the highest spot in Manhattan. One day I walked the entire length of Fifth Avenue for no reason at all. I was so late I had to call Ramón and tell him I wasn’t coming (Ramón, of course, didn’t seem the least concerned or interested). Fifth Avenue starts in abject poverty and dislocation in Harlem, but by the time you hit Central Park, you’re in the territory of millionaires and that stays with you all the way down to the Village. I didn’t stop in anywhere; I brought a water bottle and a hat and just walked. The canyons opening up and the people getting fancier and more white. Cats and stray dogs and rats disappearing and being replaced by pigeons only. Schoolkids at first in jeans and big jackets and then in blazers and ties. The soundtrack growing steadily all the while: crying radios and jackhammers and people and cars. I’d walked the whole length on a fake foot.

Impressed by this success, I did the walk of Broadway, too, but I had to do it over two days, and I only walked the Broadway that’s in Manhattan, for, of course, it goes up into the Bronx (and on to Westchester), but up there is too near the Four P., which was risky. Broadway isn’t so linear an ascent from chaos to civilization. It has its ups and downs, poverty rising and falling like a sine curve. It begins in water, and you can see animals and boats. And then south through park and project, black and Spanish and then black and then Spanish again. A crazy cinema. Bodegas. The Audubon Ballroom. A funeral swelling out from a Mormon church, sorrow seeping through the walls and out the windows. Then, below 120th it gentrifies as Columbia University breathes her love and influence into the surrounding streets, and then there’s life for a few blocks and below 99th it becomes the Upper West Side. All the way down Broadway through the theaters, brick stacks, construction sites, porno shows, shops, holes in the ground with the whiff of sulfur.

Yeah, those were three good days, and I was almost happy.

I saw Ramón the night after Broadway and asked him if there was anything he wanted me to do.

Nothing, he said.

I wasn’t satisfied with this. I was ready for something. Trouble, heavying, even a minor cutting-out expedition. But Ramón was all patience. Annoyingly so.

Get yourself strong. Relax, I’ll tell you when I need you, he said. Walk, move.

I did as I was bid.

I went everywhere. From river to river, from island to mainland and back. The PATH and the subway and the M4 bus.

I went to dour Saint Pat’s and I went to Riverside Church and the great Saint John the Divine, surely the holiest place in the city outside of Monument Park in Yankee Stadium. (For even a Mick who’s never seen a baseball game in his life has heard of Gehrig and Ruth and Mantle and DiMaggio.)

I went south, and I had a scare in the Upper East Side when I saw a boy I knew called Roddy McGee coming out of a bar on Third Avenue, so after that I avoided the Mick zones and the neutral zones and kept mostly to greater Harlem. But that was ok. I liked it there. I absorbed Harlem, I took it in and became part of it. I went all the way from the West Side Highway to the Triborough Bridge, from Sugar Hill to Manhattanville, from Washington Heights to Inwood Park.

The walking was making me stronger, but Ramón noticed how I moved and gave me a telephone number. He didn’t say anything.

I called the number, and it was a doctor who specialized in the rehabilitation of amputees.

I went to see him, and he was an old guy in a nice building off 48th Street, which I supposed meant that his practice did very well.

He was a Vietnam vet, and although he had not seen combat, he had worked in navy hospitals in Saigon for two stints, in 1966-67 and 1969-70.

We had a consultation and X rays and he put me on a treadmill. After it was done, he recommended that I have corrective surgery to shorten my stump to make it more balanced and comfortable, with a cleaner tuck at the end.

I absolutely refused. The thought of cutting off more of my fucking leg was utterly absurd.

But Dr. Havercamp was not to be browbeaten by a civilian patient a third his age, so he sat me down and explained everything in detail.

A minor operation. One night in the hospital, a week of rehabilitation. Weekly visits for the next few months. I’d be running the New York marathon this time next year.

He convinced me and bullied me a little, and I saw the sense of it.

I told Ramón I’d need a week, and Ramón said take all the time in the world, and although I hadn’t told him why, the night before my operation he showed up with a dozen books and magazines and chocolate and a massive jar of vitamin pills from the GNC.

Take these every day, he said, pointing at the pills.

I will, I said.

He asked Cuba to step outside for a moment and when he had, Ramón said confidentially:

Things will be easier now, you’ll see.

And as was the case with most things, Ramón, of course, was right.

Out of the surgery. Morphine dreams. An old trope, the drowned world, New York devoid of people and absorbed like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat into the jungle. Forest stealing up on buildings, sending seeds here or a root over there or a sapling through there and the whole becoming one organic mass of vines and creepers and glass and concrete. Flamingos in Jamaica Bay, eyries in the Chrysler Building. Seas of orchids on the railway stop at 125th. Dandelions and flowering plants on the fire escapes of tenements. Mahogany and teak and spreading elms. Marshes in the East River and every tunnel a river and every railway a path for animals. The Hudson freezes and over come deer and coyotes and bear. I can see blue-tongued iguanas and lizards, snakes. Piranha and alligators in the reservoir in Central Park. Vultures in Times Square. Jaguars surveying the horizon from the fastness of the roof on PS 125.

Yes, it’s an old trope and a common one in New York. A place of escape. Either in the primordial past or apocalyptic future, and you have to be careful about this kind of thinking. Raphael (according to Ramón’s copy) in Paradise Lost warns Adam about these kinds of thoughts. Think, Raphael says, only what concerns thee and thy being. Dream not of other worlds.

These flights of fancy, though, were helping me cope. An alternative New York was a better place to be, sometimes, than my own head.

A couple of days later, I was on my feet. Visits to the doc. Back up to Ramón. Out again.

I was walking and dreaming and killing time, but I wasn’t avoiding the issue. No, I’d seen the future and I was aware that I was in it. Aye. I was dandering and dreaming, but I wasn’t mitching my responsibility.

Strong again. A hundred push-ups, a hundred sit-ups, a long walk every morning. I would eat a big breakfast of eggs and plantains, yellow rice, black beans, and then in the second part of the day I would go over to Ramón’s and hang out and get my money.

It was ok.

If you could take the vibe, Ramón’s was all right. Awkward, dull, Ramón’s men always a little afraid of me. Ramón had obviously told them something that had upset them. It didn’t help that they already were a superstitious, suspicious, freaky, paranoid bunch. They hadn’t bullied me or kidded me; but they were still contemptuous. And they were afeared, jumpy. They kept their distance. Once Moreno tried to stare me down, but he broke first. Cuba was the only one who had much time for me. It was a shame, because from what I’d seen of Dominican culture, it reminded me of Ireland.

Cuba’s English was better than the others’, and occasionally, while I’d be sitting at the window thumbing through some book, he’d wander across and spend the afternoon with me. He was a kid and didn’t know what he wanted in life and spoke frequently of joining the marines. We’d talk about girls and films and sometimes politics. Cuba was a big guy, well over 220 pounds; he hated Castro, and one day, to bait him, I said I’d wear a Che T-shirt, and he gave me a long and impassioned argument about the evils of communism, Castroites and Che. Stuff he’d got from his dad, mostly garbled. He had a thing against Ricky Ricardo from the Lucy show, but he never articulated this objection clearly. Cuba had fled the island with his father and brother in 1984, and they’d gone first to Spain and then come to the United States. Apart from Castro, Cuba’s other main theme was the stupidity and shortsightedness of Dominicans. Dominicans robbed their children to buy crack, Dominicans had no musical culture, Dominicans had no literature, Dominicans thought they could play baseball, but everybody knew that Cubans were the stars of the baseball world. Dominicans would make nothing of themselves. In whispers he said that even Ramón couldn’t escape.

Sometimes we’d drag Hector over, and the three of us would play a retarded version of poker with four cards showing and a fifth blind in your hand. Cuba was very good at this, and though we were only playing for pennies, he would get excited when at the end of a session he’d be a dollar or seventy-five cents up over the pair of us. It took me a day or two to realize that the cards were marked, but I played anyway, for the company.

About this time in New York City, there were two hundred murders a month and most of those were drug-related, so occasionally you’d hear gunfire out in the street. Hector, Cuba, Ramón, and I would be around in the afternoon, Ramón in his study doing whatever it was he did and me and the boys playing cards and out there in the street would be the odd gunshot.

It was the lieutenants’ job in the daytime to protect their part of the street. Usually the lieutenant and a couple of the watchers would be armed. There were so many independent pushers back then that every once in a while one of them would get uppity and think they were the original Jesus Christ and try to muscle in on Ramón’s hard-won turf. The watchers or the lieutenants would shoot them. I’d hear about this, but I saw little of it. Back home, you’d kneecap them, but here they just killed them.

We weren’t involved. The bodyguards’ job was to protect Ramón, not to patrol the street. Moreno would tell Cuba, and Cuba would tell me-it disconcerted me. These people were out risking their lives, and what was I doing? What was my role in the scheme of things?

He didn’t tell me anything, but Ramón had been watching me, waiting for the time he thought I was ready. Whether the incident with Moreno forced his hand, I don’t know.

It came a day when Ramón, José, Hector, and Cuba had disappeared in the big yellow Mercedes. I was left completely alone in the house throughout the afternoon, and seeing it as a test of loyalty, I didn’t venture into any of the forbidden areas, such as the study or Ramón’s bedroom. I hung out on the balcony staring at the Hudson.

By six o’clock, the lieutenants started showing up with their day’s profits. Not that their street dealers didn’t work at night, but Ramón was always strict about having his accounting at the same time. Tonight, though, Ramón wasn’t there, and I was. The lieutenants eyed me suspiciously and got themselves beers from the fridge and sat on the sofa and the white leather chairs to wait.

The boys were drinking and doing an excellent job of not seeing me. After a while, they put the stereo on and started fucking around with Ramón’s stuff.

I went over and told them to cut it out.

They asked me who the fuck I thought I was, and Moreno stood up and started cursing me out a few inches from my face. He’d clearly had it with me. A freeloading fucking Yankee who Ramón was fucking in love with or something. He was yelling, and his nose was an inch from mine now and I was thinking, So this is how it ends, the fucking ignominy of it. Me and him grabbing our pieces at the same time. Me getting one off, the lads spraying me so that I’m more hole than cheese.

Moreno was shouting at me and showing me a bullet scar in the shoulder he must have taken in loyal service to Ramón.

Fuck it, Moreno, I said. You boys wanna see a real fucking wound?

They didn’t understand, but they stopped while I rolled up my trouser leg, took my foot off.

They didn’t know.

Moreno shut up. All of them shut up.

In that silence, standing there with my foot off and feeling utterly ridiculous, Ramón came back.

He slipped in as normal, dressed in a coat too big for him. He looked at us for an embarrassing moment and said nothing. He was with his boys, and he muttered something to José, and José said something in Spanish, and everyone went back to the lab. He called me over, and I sat next to him on the white sofa. I gathered my wits and pulled myself together. He waited until I’d strapped my foot on again.

You’re bored, he said.

I shook my head.

Are you strong? he said.

I nodded.

He came straight to the point. His voice was low and in a whisper.

Michael, they stagger things now, they’re careful, different places, but we know their meeting is tonight in the old place, and if you want to go we can give you a lift up there.

I didn’t need to be told what meeting or who he was talking about. It was time for business.

Ok, I said.

Ramón drove me. We didn’t talk. He was smoking a cigar and listening to some crazy Dominican music low on his CD system. He left me ten blocks from the Four Provinces and asked if I needed anything. I told him I was ok. I walked to the spot where I’d waited for Bridget, the alley between the buildings that gave me a good view of the front door.

I waited for three hours, until it was after midnight. Come on, Darkey, come on, Darkey, come on, Darkey, I was saying over and over. But no bloody Darkey.

People going in and out, strangers, all of them. Ramón had said something about a change in routine, but I didn’t see how that would affect the regulars at the Four P. Eventually, though, at near to bloody closing, I did see a couple of old stagers I recognized, and a wee while after that, Mrs. Callaghan appeared at the side entrance with a box of rubbish. But even so, it was getting late, and I was thinking that Ramón’s intelligence wasn’t all it was cracked up to be when who should appear in all his Lundy-Quisling-Vichy glory but Big fucking Bob.

I recognized his ugly shadow before I saw him slinking out the side entrance of the Four Provinces, swaying a bit and singing. Cramped, I staggered to my feet and went after him. He was walking down the alley next to the Four P., heading for the empty lot that people used as a car park. I ran across the waste ground and pulled out the Colt. Bob didn’t know I was after him even though I was making enough noise to wake the dead and damned, a sort of a half-run, galumphing, and making progress but not exactly doing Warp Factor 8. Bob had stopped at the corner of the lot, and when I got to the street a little up from the bar, he climbed into a red Honda Accord and drove off. I leveled the.45 and took aim, but he was so far away and in the dark and with that gun I’d never get a good shot off. I ran to the main street and flagged down the first car I saw. A cream-colored Cadillac, turning at the corner, probably pulling into the same car park for the Four Provinces. The driver either didn’t see me or was ignoring me. I sprinted over and pointed the Colt at the windshield.

Hey, fucker, I yelled.

The driver was a bald man in his forties, dark lawyer suit, somewhat distracted, fiddling with his seat belt, playing around with it, and trying to turn into a space at the same time. He didn’t see or hear me and was still driving and almost hit me.

I banged his window and turned the gun on him.

Get out of the fucking car or I’ll fucking kill you, I said in pure West Belfast, and that was enough to get his attention.

He stopped the car and looked at me white-faced. He was shitting himself, perhaps literally. I opened the door.

Get the fuck out, I screamed.

He was sweating and nearly crying.

My seat belt’s stuck, it’s stuck, it’s stuck, he was saying in a complete panic.

I leaned over and clicked the release button.

Get out, I said. He still didn’t move, so I had to tug the fucker out by his lapels.

He tumbled onto the pavement.

I pointed the gun at his head.

Wait until morning before calling the police, understand, otherwise I fucking kill you and your fucking wife and your fucking dog. Geddit? I said, and got into the car without waiting for a reply. There was a huge box of Huggies blocking the view out the passenger-side window. I chucked them out, stuck the vehicle in drive, and headed off. Bob, of course, was nowhere now to be seen. Jesus.

I drove down the road. Tons of traffic. I turned the corner, heading her up towards Broadway. He’d either have gone left or right. I decided on left and went fast and by pure jammy-dodger luck at the turn across Van Cortlandt I saw him.

Driving cautious, drunk-man speed, but keeping a cool head and not too slow. He was heading east either up the shore or onto Long Island or maybe even doing a turnabout to go down into Manhattan. I tried to think if I’d ever heard anyone speak about where Bob lived, but I didn’t recall it ever coming up. He tried to make a traffic light and then aborted the plan and stalled the car, coming to a screechy stop. He was a bit freaked, and he took a couple of tries to get it going again. Someone behind honked him, and I saw Bob undo his seat belt as if he was going to get out of his car and have words.

Bob, stay in the car, don’t get yourself arrested, you big shite, I was saying.

He changed his mind about the seat belt and got going again. He took a wrong turn or two and had to double back, and I wondered if he was being especially clever trying to figure out if there was a tail on him. But he wasn’t that smart or collected-just half blitzed probably.

He took us on a path through the South Bronx and somehow we ended up in Queens. Bob pulled in at a newsstand and got himself some cigs and a Coke and a copy of Penthouse. The newsstand was fairly isolated and I thought about doing it there, but this was no place for business; and besides, I wanted to have a word with the big ganch. So I let him go. He drank the Coke, and it improved his driving.

We went together out past La Guardia and Shea and I became reasonably convinced that Bob lived somewhere on the North Shore of Long Island. It was late and traffic was light and I had a job keeping the big cream-colored Caddy far enough away to avoid getting in Bob’s paranoid rearview mirror.

The highway was brightly lit and the cars going too fast, but at least it was an automatic so that my left foot wasn’t always on the clutch. It was the first time I’d driven since I’d come back from Mexico and the straps that held the foot onto my leg had almost given way on the run across the waste ground. I wasn’t in the mood to do any Long John Silvers, so I was glad they’d stayed on. I made a mental note, though, to go see Dr. Havercamp about those running lessons he was offering before.

Yeah.

The adrenaline was coursing through me. Hours on an OP and suddenly seeing the target will do that for you. And I’d dreamed about Bob, dreamed of this very event, of this very night.

We drove out farther onto the island. The surface of the road went clay-colored and the lines voided themselves into two lanes. I wound the window down, the air cooling my damp skin.

Highway lights, trucks, petrol stations, the city in the rearview, and even in all this light, pollution, stars. Saturn and Venus and a labyrinth of concordances bringing me onward.

Onward to the inevitable. No, it wasn’t Darkey’s night, but maybe it was Bob’s. Aye, and suddenly, there was a cheerlessness within me. And perhaps almost a creeping reluctance. If Bob could only keep driving forever, if only he could keep going. All the way through Nassau County and Suffolk, all the way to the end of Long Island, where there are potato fields, where Gatsby had his mansion, and on out into the blackness of the Atlantic. Yes, keep driving, over the ocean, and like Alcock and Brown, we’ll crash somewhere near Clifden. I know this pub in Galway town, this lovely pub, we’ll pull in and have a jar and be on our way. Tell ya, Bob, you think the Guinness in the Four Provinces is good, there they take a year and a half to pull your pint.

A session, and then we’ll be off. Sea dogs and rose petals and away from that coast across the Great Bog and up to the mysteries of the Boyne Valley. We’ll be in Newgrange for the solstice, where the pagans brought the returning sun. And down at the river. King William was here and James over there. We’ll climb Tara and look out over the fifths. And then across another sheugh, I don’t know, we’ll hit Cumbria and the lakes and the Yorkshire Dales. We’ll go over oil rigs with their great burning lamps of fire. On east through the Baltic and Russia, and we’ll meet the sun again somewhere in the vast wastes of Siberia.

Bob, please understand me, real pain isn’t in the body, no, you may think that, but believe one who knows, it isn’t in the body or the mind. It’s in the spirit.

You’ll see. You’ll see soon.

Trucks, cars.

The teeming anthills, the moon, kisses of houselight in the shadows. A service station. American girls in jeans and white shirts. Fill your tank, Bob, and be about your way. Don’t stop, if you know what’s good for you. His black shirt, his little eyes, his hands like the claws of scorpions.

Amigo, despierta, I’m coming. I’m coming.

His fat paw on the lever. He puts in exactly ten dollars and curses when it comes up ten dollars and one cent. You need to lower your blood pressure, Bob. You need relaxation techniques. Yoga, tai chi, meditation. Chant the Om for an hour. Om mani padme hum. Maybe it’ll help. You’re too stressed. Look at ya. He turns and gazes towards the girls. Says something. One laughs, at him or with him? Who can tell? He twists his neck back and rubs it. Stress. Maybe it’s a conscience, no? Not bloody Jiminy. But hurry now, Bob, pay. Get your candy bars, you have your smokes already. Pay, go. Back to your car. Hurry. Go.

Amigo, despierta, I’m coming.

Yes…

He came out muttering and shaking his head. He got back in and stalled the car again. He tried to talk to a girl in a black Corolla, but she wasn’t interested. He drove. I edged out of the shadows next to the car wash. Only another fifteen minutes and his turn signal went on. We cut off the highway somewhere I’d never heard of. People lived here. It was a community. Big houses, streets. Near the water, but actually I had no idea at all where we were. A while ago, there’d been a sign pointing out something to do with Theodore Roosevelt back on the motorway, but this place wasn’t it. It wasn’t anywhere. Quiet town, nice, pretty, I liked it. He drove away from the shops and the town center and up a tree-lined street that was denuded of leaves, of cover. Bob stopped his car and paralleled it into a spot. He got out and went up a path. His house was a white bungalow with a metal fence around a small garden. There was a shriveled pumpkin on the doorstep. When was Halloween? I’d missed it. I was outside of time, somehow. Had the election taken place? Who won? Who was president? The weeks had blurred. I parked the car slowly. Parking’s not my strong suit. Driving’s not my strong suit, but parking’s worse, and I didn’t want to bump anything and have the fucking neighbors coming out and asking me where my fucking parking permit was. Somehow, I squeezed in the big Caddy and crossed the street.

I paused at a tree near Bob’s front gate and checked the road for dog walkers and insomniacs and other assorted trouble. Nothing.

Bob was in the living room, and he’d put the TV on. He got up and went into, presumably, the kitchen, got himself a six-pack of beer, came back, and sat there. He opened a cold one and drank and flipped the channels. He wasn’t going to shower? No, Bob wanted to calm his nerves after driving drunk all the way home. He would have a few drinks, and then he’d get his shit together. Shower, get out his wankmag, go to bed with a job well done. Another day, another drive home blitzed to fuck and no casualties. No probs for Bob. He drank his beer and tossed the can over his head into a trash can. It didn’t go in. I was out there too long. I checked the street again. Yeah, Bob, you’re the only victim tonight, mate, sorry. Have a beer and get your head straight, you poor love, it must be shite having to do things all by yourself and with a bunch of new boys, most of whom were green around the gills. Jesus. And what with Ramón piling on the pressure and everything. Poor old Darkey, poor old Sunshine, poor old Bob.

I opened the front gate and went down the path. His garden was dry and unkempt. There was rubbish in it. I stared at the pumpkin, which was carved in far too nice a way for Bob to have done it (unless he had hidden talents). I opened the screen door and stood for a moment in a tiny porch. Letters lay trampled into the floor, a bill, a vote reminder, a yellow envelope from a debt collection agency. I picked them up and looked them over and set them down again. I turned the handle on the front door. It was locked. Fuck. He wasn’t so drunk that he hadn’t locked the front door. Well, good on you, mate. At least you weren’t a total useless shite.

I opened the screen door again and went around the side of the house until I was in the backyard. More garbage, tires, a cement mixer. I tried the back door. It, too, was locked, but there was a top window open in the kitchen. I peered through and checked inside. All seemed to be ok. I put my hand through the top window, flipped the handle on the big side window, and pulled it open all the way. The kitchen door was closed, but under it you could see the flickering light coming from the TV in the front room. I climbed through the window and onto the sink. I was about to go into the living room when I heard Bob get up. I pulled out the Colt and waited there, but he was only swishing the curtains over, and I heard him sit down again. I chambered a round, opened the kitchen door, and went straight into the adjoining living room. The light was on and I adjusted for a moment. Bob’s back was to me, and the local news was on the telly.

Bob, I said.

He dropped his beer can and started to get up.

Hands on your head, Bob, it’s fucking Banquo, I said.

He puts his hands up, but I think the reference probably eluded him.

Holy fuck, Bob said, and when he turned round to face me, he was white with terror. His hands fell into a pleading gesture.

Hands on your head, Bob, or I’ll shoot you.

He put his hands back up, and I motioned for him to sit down in the chair. I turned it around so that he was completely facing me. I sat in a wicker chair opposite. He was smiling weakly at me. Even for Bob, it was stomach-churning.

Christ, Michael, am I glad to see you. Sunshine finally got you boys out, he said he would. But why the gun? Jesus, you don’t think I stooled you boys or anything? Ask Darkey. Jesus. Mike. I mean, come on. You know me.

He’d confirmed everything I suspected in one big slabber. The stupid fuck. I nodded.

Listen, Bob, it’s important that I know when Sunshine told you about the plan, I asked him quietly, calmly.

What plan?

Bob, just tell me, was it organized a long time, like weeks in advance or was it something that took place in that last couple of days?

No, man, you’ve got it all wrong. I didn’t fuck you guys over. It was a straightforward deal. It just went wrong. You know that. Just fucked up, Bob said, dripping with sweat.

Bob, listen to me. I know nearly everything. Look, have yourself a beer and throw me one. No, roll me one, I said, and we both laughed a little.

Bob picked up a beer and rolled it over, opening a fresh one for himself. I opened mine with my left hand, the right pointing the barrel of the.45 at Bob’s chest. The can was Budweiser, but it was so cold you couldn’t taste it, so it was ok. Bob was more relaxed now and leaned back in the chair.

Bob was just over six foot and about two hundred and fifty pounds. I’ve seen heavier men carry it better and I felt bad for him, for a moment.

Ok, Bob, now listen to me. Please don’t waste my time denying the fact that Sunshine had you set us up. It’s only going to irritate me, and it’s a really foolish move to irritate a man who’s pointing a.45 at you. Don’t you think?

Yes.

Ok, now all I have is a few questions. When did Sunshine tell you about Mexico?

Uhhh, uhh.

Come on, Bob. I’ll fucking shoot you right now.

Ok, I was against it. Totally against it. I said so. It was that week, I was as surprised as you guys. I didn’t know about it. It may have been in the pipe for longer, but it was sprung on me that week.

I nodded. It was that week. So maybe Bridget’s trip to me had been the final straw, or the missing piece of evidence. I wondered why Darkey hadn’t just had me shot and dumped me. It puzzled me and I thought for a moment. It was unnecessarily torturing Bob, but the big guy could handle it. The only thing I could come up with was that Darkey did it for the sake of Bridget’s feelings. I mean, she’s smart. She doesn’t look it, but she is. If I just disappeared she’d twig, she’d know he’d murdered me, and Darkey was probably right to think that that might sully the romantic atmosphere. Whereas all of us, all of us, remember, disappear in bloody Mexico, rot there, it seems like an accident. Bridget thinks, Well, gee, Darkey wouldn’t sacrifice his whole fucking crew just to kill Michael. No. He wouldn’t do that. That’s fucking insanity.

I smiled. Aye, sadly, that was it. Sunshine’s plan, no doubt. The whole crew would disappear, and she’d be distraught over me. But she’d forget me in time, and maybe she’d just have enough of a wee suspicion of ill will to be more careful with Darkey’s affections in the future. Yeah, that was it. I saw it all. The whole thing.

It had been a cascade of events. A horrible escalating fucking disaster. Andy gets the crap beaten out of him, possibly by Shovel. Scotchy thinks it is Shovel, so we get rounded up and I do a Belfast six-pack on him. I’m so shook up, I tell Bridget I need to see her the next day. She comes down and doesn’t check her fucking arse. Boris Karloff is on her tail. The evidence gets passed on, it’s all confirmed, it’s all fucking true, and Sunshine starts organizing things. In the meantime, unfortunately for Sunshine’s filthy conscience, I save his bacon at Dermot’s, but that doesn’t change Darkey’s mind. He’s cold like that. You make your bed, you lie in it.

The sequence was perfect. The events projected and fixed in reels, and I had no choice about the next act.

How much did you give the Mexicans? What did it cost to get rid of us?

Michael, listen, you’ve got it all wrong, I-

How much, Bob? I insisted.

He wiped his brow, looked at me.

There was a hundred thousand dollars. I was to take twenty-he began, but he couldn’t finish.

Christ, I was worth that much? I ought to be flattered.

Bob’s room was bright. He had ferns. I liked ferns. They followed the Fibonacci series, they were orderly. I got up and grabbed the cushion from underneath the wicker seat. I rolled the cushion as tight as I could with one hand. Bob was leaning forward in his seat, a curious but not frightened expression on his face, as if he was watching me attempt origami or something. Things are going a wee toty bit better now, he was probably thinking.

What did Sunshine say had happened to us? I asked him.

He took a sip of his beer.

He didn’t say anything, he said to forget about youse, Bob said.

Jesus, weren’t you curious? I mean, for fucksake, Bob.

Look, man, you don’t ask too many questions, you don’t want to know, you know?

I know, I said.

I pushed the cushion against the muzzle of the.45. Bob looked even more confused.

Hey, Michael, you’re not doing wha-

I shot him in the chest, and then I got up and moved close and shot him in the head. The first shot had killed him, but it was an old lesson. The noise had been awful, even with the cushion, but probably outside in the street they’d assume it was a car backfiring or a firecracker. Did they celebrate the Fifth of November in this country? Guy Fawkes Night. I wasn’t sure.

I went outside, bold as brass, and walked casually back to the Cadillac. The street was deserted, and as far as I could tell, there was no one staring at me from behind net curtains.

Heading out of town, I noticed that the fuel gauge was on empty, so I had to stop for petrol. I pulled in and got five bucks’ worth and headed in the direction of the highway.

On the way home I got lost on three separate occasions trying to get back into Manhattan, but finally sometime after four, I made it to the building on 181st. I drove the car ten blocks north and dumped it where I knew someone would take it. I walked to where I could get a clear shot at the water and threw the.45 into the Hudson. I’d ask Ramón to get me a new piece tomorrow.