Running of the bulls

CHAPTER TWENTY

Spocatti stood between the heat of two double-parked vans, looking across to the grimy brick building Maggie Cain had just entered. He was in the roughest part of the South Bronx-Hunts Point-where the haze of poverty and decay was so strong here, it clung to his clothes and cut off his breath.

He knew this neighborhood.

When he was a boy, several family members lived here. At that time, his father owned a successful restaurant in Little Italy, and so, because they had money, it was Spocatti’s family who drove here on Sundays to visit the relatives. Then, Spocatti would sit next to his father and listen to his two uncles discuss their hopes and dreams to find better jobs and move their families out of this place.

It didn’t happen. Though they wished for a better future, his uncles’ alcoholism and drug abuse prevented them from having it.

That was thirty years ago. And while this place had seen a push in the ‘80s in an effort to revitalize it, the attempt failed. Looking around, Spocatti thought it looked worse than ever, particularly after the recession.

Even now, on the cusp of sunset, transvestites and prostitutes were working the streets and street corners, drug deals were being made in backrooms, private clubs were thriving in shadowy basements-and disease was running rampant.

With the Meatpacking District now bright with boutiques and trendy restaurants, the South Bronx, in a sense, had taken its place among those areas in the city where the fringe could thrive. Were you a trucker in need of a blowjob? Come to Hunts Point. Married businessman into a bit of kink? Come to Hunts Point. The area was morphing even deeper into the corrupt underworld some craved.

Spocatti was amused to find how comfortable he was here.

He looked at his watch. Cain had been inside three minutes. Whoever had dropped her here was gone. He looked across to the two scantily clad transvestites clicking toward the building and watched them walk down the narrow cement steps. They rapped on a door he couldn’t see, screamed something above the sudden roar of music, and were let inside.

Private party.

Password protected.

He’d seen it before. The people who threw these parties gave every queen and whore working these streets a password that allowed them entrance. If business was slow, they could come to a party, perform for the guests, earn that night’s dinner. Maybe even a taste of whatever drug was circulating that day.

So, why had Maggie Cain come here?

He left his shiny metal enclave and stepped into the street. Trucks rumbled past. At the street corner, four transvestites were leaning against a black Mercedes. They tapped on its hood, shook their asses in front of the darkened windows, bent down to blow kisses, circled and posed. One of them looked up at him and smiled.

Spocatti smiled back.

The easiest way inside that building was on her arm.

She said her name was Diva Divine.

She was taller than him and black, her platinum blonde hair worn in a teased flip. The long white gloves that stretched up her emaciated arms hid the veins she’d ruined with needles, but her makeup-heavy and smeared in the moist August heat-couldn’t conceal the day’s growth of beard that shadowed her face in a dusting of black. Spocatti thought she had the exhausted, sunken look of someone who had seen every rotten thing twice-and remembered it.

He led her behind a large truck and listened as she spoke.

“You got the fiercest queen in the city, baby. Fiercest. Diva’s gonna rock your world.”

Her drag was a tight white tube dress that was fraying at the hem, stained with food, blotched with sweat. Her four-inch heels-red as her lipstick but more even in color-were badly in need of repair. She snapped her fingers above her head and swayed slightly, as if she were drunk. But she wasn’t drunk. She was coming off a high. Her eyes were the same as his brother’s had been just before the high left him-bright brown panes of glass.

He pointed to the building Maggie Cain had entered. “I need to get inside that building,” he said. “As in now. Can you do it?”

Divine fluffed her wig with long, chipped-black nails. “You got enough cash, Diva D. can take your beautiful ass anywhere you want to go.”

“How much?” he said.

“Lots.”

“Be specific.”

She sank against the truck and reached up inside her tube dress, eyelids fluttering as she scratched something he couldn’t see.

A limousine swung in front of the building. Spocatti turned and watched a well-dressed couple leave the car and hurry down the cement steps. A rap on the door, a firestorm of music, silence.

Ten minutes had passed. Maggie Cain could be anywhere.

He gripped Divine’s arm. “How much?”

Startled, she reared back.

“How much?”

Real fear in her eyes. She shrank away from him. “I don’t know. Let go of me. You’re hurting me!”

He gave her a hundred.

The door was large and solid, painted black, windowless. Spocatti could see strobes of red light pressing through the cracks around the edges. In the space beyond, he could hear the driving, crashing beat of industrial music. Here, the air smelled of something spoiled, as if the building itself, along with its inhabitants, were failing in the searing summer heat.

Divine knocked twice, waited, knocked again, and the door parted on its heavy metal chain. Music and light blasted the stairwell. Divine stuck her face into the two-inch crack and shouted: “It’s me, Frankie! I gotta guest!”

“Private party, Divine. No guests.”

“Don’t play that shit with me, Frankie. Let me in!”

“No guests.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, he ain’t a cop!”

“You know the rules.”

“You want the damned password?”

“It ain’t gonna help.”

“Then what I really know is you.” She turned to Spocatti, eyes suddenly focused, alert. “The greedy mothafucka wants some money. Gimme another hundred.”

Spocatti moved right, looked at Frankie’s profile through the four-inch crack. He was tall and muscular; bulging, black leather pants; black leather vest; black leather head mask with an open zippered mouth. His nipples were pierced with shiny silver lightning rods. His torso and arms were a colorful palette of bold tattoos. He leaned down to pull on his boots.

He was alone.

Spocatti dipped his hand into the pouch at his waist and gripped the gun. “I don’t have another hundred,” he said.

“Then gimme what you got.”

He checked the silencer, flicked off the guard, looked around him. Nobody. But Divine, who missed nothing on these streets, saw the gun and put her hand over his. She shook her head at him, reached inside her bra, removed the hundred he’d given to her, stuck it through the crack. Frankie snagged it.

“You satisfied now, Frankie?” she called. Her eyes never left Spocatti’s. “You happy now, darlin’? That’ll buy you a week’s worth of meds and God knows your infected ass probably needs it. Bigger tramp than me.”

She forced the gun back into its pouch. “No,” she said to Spocatti. “No.”

Spocatti lifted an eyebrow at her. “You’re telling me what to do?”

“This is how I eat, baby. This is what I do. I don’t need no trouble here. Just be cool. I’ll get you inside.”

And she did.

The door closed, swung open again and Frankie stood there, folding the bill into a neat square. He smiled at Spocatti, reached out to slap Divine’s ass. “Welcome to Heaven,” he said.

Heaven was straight down a staircase that leaned left.

Lights flashed and skidded up the black walls, giving the illusion of movement within shadows too dark to judge depth. The floor thudded with the driving beat of industrial music. The air was cooler here, and it smelled of sweat and rotting wood. At the top of the staircase, Divine turned to him. “I got friends here,” she shouted above the music, backing down the stairs, white gloved fingers tiptoeing along the rail. Itching to get away from him. “I gotta see them. You’ll be okay alone? Just a few minutes?”

Spocatti moved down the staircase after her. “Is this the only way out of here?”

She nodded.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, baby. Why?”

He looked over her shoulder and saw in the sudden ricochet of light the moons and planets of six faces peering up at him from the darkness of the stairwell, only to disappear and reappear again in different order. It was as if this universe was realigning itself, unraveling. He took Divine’s arm and led her down the stairs. “Tall woman,” he said in her ear. “Early thirties. Shoulder-length dark hair. Scar on her left cheek. Striking. Name’s Maggie Cain. Find her and you’ll get your money back, plus another grand.”

“Plus another grand?”

They paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked left. The basement was as cavernous as it was captivating. Low ceilings were strung with spinning lights, thick rotting beams jutted at odd angles from the dirt floor, crowds of naked people were twirling to the music.

In one of the twelve metal cages lining the walls, someone in a Bush mask was sucking face with Obama’s twin. In front of them, a train of men trotted past, their identities smeared and distorted by the plastic wrap wound around their grinning faces. In the moment before he left her, Spocatti looked at Divine and saw on her face the wall she’d been building since childhood. Anger. Despair. Resentment. A surprising vulnerability. Never had she suspected that this would become her life, yet here it was.

Her tough luck.

He moved through the shifting wall of bodies and saw Maggie Cain almost immediately. She was across the room, her face pressed between the bars of a metal cage. Inside the cage, a heavy-set woman with nothing but a ball gag in her mouth and a pink ribbon in her hair was circling an elderly man lying naked on his back, his Tinker Toy legs lifted and parted in stirrups. Cain was talking to the man, who seemed disinterested in what she was saying.

Spocatti was interested.

He pushed forward and stepped within earshot, but he was too late-Maggie Cain was already pulling away. “You’re a fool, Alan, just like the rest of them.”

As she turned, Spocatti turned with her, showing her his back as she slipped into the crowd. He waited to make sure she wasn’t moving toward the exit before turning to glance at the man in the cage. He pressed a coke inhaler against his nostril and made kissing noises to the woman while he snorted the drug. He giggled and he laughed, and Spocatti, who never forgot a face, recognized him from the photographs Wolfhagen sent months ago, when the job was initially proposed and accepted.

He was Alan Ross, another of Wolfhagen’s former moles, who had testified against Wolfhagen for his own personal immunity. He’d stolen confidential information for Wolfhagen but he’d done no time in prison for the millions he’d ripped out of the world’s hands. He was on Wolfhagen’s list and he was to be murdered along with the rest of them.

Had Maggie Cain come here to warn him?

He looked around for her, saw her talking to a man at the makeshift bar, and knew that if she had warned Ross, he couldn’t let the man leave here alive.

He also knew that if he didn’t do this quickly, he’d lose her.

He moved to the rear of Ross’ cage and swung open the door. The woman looked around and growled a low warning at Spocatti as the club’s lights fanned out and dimmed to blackness. Ross’ head jerked up. “Who’s there?” he whispered.

Spocatti stepped right, eyes on the woman.

“Mama?”

The lights again, all of them, lifting from floor to ceiling.

“Tell me it’s you.”

Spocatti bent down and gripped the woman by the throat. “Get out of here. Now. I’m fucking him, not you.”

The woman started to laugh, but Spocatti stopped her with a slap across the face, which startled and thrilled her. He could see that she was high, so he slapped her again, this time so hard that the ball gag sprang free from her mouth and for an instant, her eyes became clear. “Get out.”

The woman left on all fours.

Spocatti leaned down and cupped Ross’ face in his hands. He brushed away the sweaty white hair cobwebbing the man’s forehead and traced a finger around the man’s mouth. He kissed him, felt Ross’s tongue slide across his lower lip, tasted the man’s self-hatred on his breath, sensed him relaxing beneath his touch, and became aware of shapes and shadows moving closer to get a better look at the man in street clothes kissing the freak. One by one, they left, disinterested.

Spocatti waited for the lights to dim and finally they did. He pulled out his iPhone, set it to record and discretely put it next to Ross. He shielded it with his lowered body so nobody could see it. Now, the camera faced Alan Ross’ head.

He curled his lips away and said just loud enough for Ross and the camera to hear, “You sent Wolfhagen to prison and now he’s having you murdered. Tell me how it feels, Alan.”

The man blinked in recognition at the sound of Wolfhagen’s name. His eyes flicked up to Spocatti, then across to the iPhone, where the room’s lights were causing an electrified firestorm to gather and crash in the center of the device’s glass panel.

“Who are-?”

Spocatti gripped the man’s head and, in an instant, twisted it. The sound of neck bones breaking was dulled only by the sharp blast of music. But Spocatti heard it and, as he gently rested Ross’ head back onto the table, he slipped the iPhone into his pocket and stepped away just as the man lost control of his bladder and colon.

Lights still low, Spocatti moved away from the cage and into the crowd. He glanced back and saw pooling on the floor all of the rotten life that was leaving Ross.

He stared at it for a moment and knew that in this crowd, it wouldn’t go to waste. It would attract an animal of a different sort.