Strip

8

MANCO KAPAK LISTENED to the music, always heavy on the bass and terribly loud so the girls wouldn’t lose the beat in the noise of the club. Whenever they lost the rhythm, their bodies stopped moving, and they looked like marionettes—not still, but sort of hanging from invisible threads until they caught the beat again and let it animate them.

Usually he fled the music and kept his eyes off the girls after their first day on the job. The girls were only his way of ensuring that customers came. The men paid the cover charge that didn’t even guarantee them a seat, let alone a table, and they were still forced to buy the minimum two watery drinks. They didn’t have to tip the dancers and the waitresses, but nearly every one did, because denying a partially clothed woman anything was beyond most men’s power of self-control.

There really was no need for Kapak to personally screen every dancer who worked for him. There were more beautiful young women in Los Angeles than there were in heaven. They came from everywhere in the world looking for something to do that would put them in front of people’s eyes. Siren and Temptress had hundreds of applicants a year. Any of the managers could have chosen well enough.

And Kapak wasn’t so much interested in operating that part of the business as he was in keeping it credible. A reasonably intelligent observer had to be able to believe that the dance club in Hollywood and the two strip clubs were the main source of his income. That was all he really needed them to accomplish.

What he was doing was taking the money he made from other enterprises and combining it with the nightly receipts from the clubs. Each night at 2:00 A.M., when the state required him to close, he and his people would go to the clubs, count the night’s receipts, and prepare a bank deposit slip for the money. Added to the money that had come in from each club would be a few dollars that had come in from his short-term loan business. But the rest of the money was cash he was laundering for Manny Rogoso’s drug business.

He’d had a call from Rogoso on his home phone today while he was out, and it was making him a bit uncomfortable. Rogoso had never called him there before, and it showed a new kind of recklessness. Drug dealers were a volatile, unstable bunch, and Manny Rogoso was worse than most. It seemed to Kapak that he had become more violent and crazy in the past couple of years. Kapak didn’t get involved in any direct way with the world of drugs, but anybody who could read a newspaper knew that the big gangs of drug suppliers just over the border in Tijuana had been fighting among themselves and against the authorities for years. There were assassinations and kidnappings, and big gun battles every week involving dozens of men on a side. Army troops were stationed on the streets to keep order. Rogoso seemed to be taking on the mannerisms and attitudes of the big narcotrafficantes he dealt with. Kapak liked to keep things quiet and peaceful, and, when possible, legal.

A long time ago Kapak had learned an expensive lesson. The way the government got people they couldn’t catch in the act was catching them with money they couldn’t explain. When he was young he had left Romania for Hungary, and then gotten to Czechoslovakia with his wife, Marija, early in the brief summer of 1968 that ended when the Russian tanks rolled in to remove the liberal government. It had taken them until 1979 to make it to the United States. Then he had gone to work with a group who smuggled stolen cars from the upper Midwest into Mexico to sell them to Central and South Americans. The buyers were supplied with papers saying they had driven into Mexico and were simply returning home with their cars.

Kapak had started out as a driver for the car thieves, then realized that the Mexican distributor who sold the cars southward was the only irreplaceable person, and made a separate deal with him. Kapak built a second healthy business of his own based on the observation that the one car bringing his four drivers back to the United States was otherwise empty of cargo.

He never got caught for smuggling or car theft or anything else he’d done. He got caught in a tax audit. One day there was a letter from the government telling him to come to a meeting, and a few weeks later there were treasury agents with guns strapped to them tearing his house apart looking for money and evidence of secret bank accounts. He lost everything to them.

To this day, he was sure that some of the cash he had hidden in his house had probably ended up in the pockets of treasury agents. Why should government agents suddenly behave differently than they had for five thousand years just because they were in a new country? He had never counted all the money he had been stuffing behind the insulation in the attic. The agents had taken it to their office to count it and had given him a receipt to sign with a number on it. Of course he had signed. Government agents were all the same, no matter where they lived. If you didn’t sign, more of them came the next time.

So he had lost all his money, his house, his cars. Going to jail for thirteen months had also lost him Marija and the children, John and Sara. Marija had used the time while he was in prison to take up with their neighbor the periodontist, and to write letters to everyone back in Hungary and Romania to tell them he was a criminal and in jail. It was accurate enough and had not startled anybody on his side of the family, but a cousin of hers had written to him to say it had been a shock to some of the people who didn’t know him well.

He had been in love with Marija, a beautiful woman who had put up with quite a bit in private, but who could not stand public embarrassment. He was lucky that he wasn’t deported to Hungary, or Spain, his last stop before America, or even all the way back to his birthplace, Bucharest. He probably would have been, except that the hard-line Communists in charge in those days would have made some kind of political point about the people who left home being degenerates. The American authorities didn’t want that.

Since then he had paid his taxes, tried to comply with all of the small laws, and reserved his risks for the big, profitable infractions. It had worked for a long time, and he didn’t miss the money he had paid for taxes, permits, licenses, and assessments. A government that left people alone most of the time was worth a lot of money.

His cell phone vibrated in his pocket, and he stepped into the back hallway outside the office to answer it. “Yes?”

“Mr. Kapak?” It was the voice of Morgan, the manager at Siren. “I thought I should let you know that one of Mr. Rogoso’s people called a minute ago. They said he’s coming here.”

“To Siren?”

“That’s what the guy said. He was conveying the message that Rogoso was on the way.”

“Thanks, Morgan. He probably just wants somebody to know he’s coming so they’ll pay attention to him. I’ll drive over and meet him.”

“Should I get one of the girls to keep him distracted until you’re here? Maybe give him a lap dance and so on?”

“No. Give him what he pays for and nothing else. Which of my guys is there right now?”

“Jerry Gaffney. Guzman and Corona.”

“Good. Can you reach any of them?”

“Jerry’s right in the office.”

“Put him on.”

After a bit of shuffling, Kapak heard Jerry Gaffney come on. “Mr. Kapak.”

“Jerry, I want you to handle Rogoso until I get there. He’s apparently coming to deliver the cash himself.”

“What should I do?”

“Keep a gun on you, and maybe a second one he won’t see. Meet him outside the door. Smile and be friendly, and take him right into the back office. Make him feel important, but get him out of sight so we don’t have him drinking and scaring people and attracting attention.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“I hear Guzman and Corona are there.”

“They’re out in the club.”

“Tell them to stick close to you. Rogoso hardly ever goes anywhere without Alvin and Chuy, and they talk to each other in Spanish. Corona and Guzman will pick it up first if what they’re saying isn’t good. Rogoso will give you some cash. He’ll tell you how much it is, but count it. Then get him out of the club. Be friendly, but don’t show any weakness. He’s always looking for it.”

“Are you coming?”

“I’m leaving Temptress now. I should be there in fifteen or twenty minutes. You’d better get ready for him.”

“Right. See you.”

Manuel Rogoso arrived at the door of Siren a few minutes later in a black four-door Maserati. The driver sat in front of the entrance for a few seconds, goading the engine into a grumble a couple of times while the three men in the car studied the building and the parking lot. Then the car glided forward and made a wide turn into a space in the middle of the lot. Two men got out of the front seat and stepped to the right rear door. They were both big men who had obviously lifted a great deal of iron to get that way. Both wore lightly tinted glasses, leather jackets, boots, and black jeans. One of them opened the door and Manuel Rogoso swung his legs out and stood.

Rogoso was only five feet seven, but he too was a body builder. The impression he gave was not of a small man: with his wide shoulders and thick limbs he seemed to be a creature designed for fighting. As the three men walked away from the car, they moved stiffly, listing a bit from side to side.

Jerry Gaffney was leaning against the front of the building smoking a cigarette a few feet from the door. As Rogoso and his men approached the door, he pushed off the wall and stepped in front of them as he flicked his cigarette away. He held out his hand, smiled, and said, “Mr. Rogoso. I’m Jerry Gaffney. Mr. Kapak asked me to welcome you to Siren.”

Rogoso’s eyebrows pinched together in a scowl. “Where is he?”

“He’ll be here in a few minutes. He was over at Temptress when he got the call that you were coming here. Come with me, and we’ll go inside where we’ll be comfortable.”

Jerry Gaffney stepped in and nodded to the bouncer, who stepped back to let the four men pass him. Gaffney led them along the front of the bar past the gaggle of customers three-deep waiting for drinks.

Rogoso stopped for a second. “How about getting us a drink?”

“I’ll have drinks sent in, so we can hear ourselves talk.”

Rogoso didn’t look happy. He glanced up at the face of his driver and bodyguard, Alvin, then at Chuy and conveyed irritation, but he went with Jerry Gaffney to the hallway that led to the back room.

Gaffney stopped, reached out to detain a passing waitress, and said, “Honey, we’d like some drinks in the office, please. Gentlemen, what would you like?”

“Three zombies,” Rogoso said. “With 151 rum.”

“Got it,” the woman said, and walked off toward the bar.

Gaffney opened the office door and the three men entered. Sitting in chairs on either side of the door were Guzman and Corona. It was not lost on Rogoso that there were now three men from each side in this one relatively small room, all of them armed.

Rogoso spoke to Guzman and Corona in Spanish. “I remember you two. If you want to make some real money you can come work for me.”

Guzman said, “No, thanks. I don’t want to be a drug dealer.”

“Oh, I wasn’t offering anything like that. You’d need some balls to deal. I just figured two matching Honduran boys could shine both my shoes alike.”

Alvin and Chuy and Rogoso laughed, but Guzman and Corona stared at them, their faces unreadable. Gaffney said, “What’s that all about?”

“Nothing,” said Corona. “He’s just telling jokes.”

Rogoso seemed frustrated. “How long is this going to take?”

“I don’t know,” said Gaffney. “Mr. Kapak said he would be around twenty minutes.”

Rogoso took off his raincoat and set it on the table along the wall. He unzipped the lining and revealed a row of pockets full of money, and began taking the stacks of cash out of it and tossing them on the table with an audible flap. When he was finished, he said, “This is eighteen thousand five hundred dollars. I don’t have time for him to drive over here at ten miles an hour like an old lady.”

Gaffney took the money and began counting rapidly, laying each thousand to the side as he finished counting. Alvin and Chuy, Guzman and Corona stared into each other’s eyes and occasionally touched the pocket of a coat or behind their backs, the places where they had hidden their weapons.

There was a knock on the door, and Guzman backed to the door and opened it. The waitress tried to come in, but Corona stood and said, “I’ll take the tray.”

She looked unwilling, because she could probably see at least some of the money, and she wanted her tip. She caught sight of Rogoso and his men, and seemed to reconsider. “All right.”

“Bring her in,” Rogoso said.

“No, that’s okay,” she said, and started down the hall.

Alvin and Chuy brushed past Guzman, ran three steps, and caught up with her. They seemed to lift her by her elbows, then turned around, walked back with her, and shut the door.

Rogoso came close, smiling. “Are the zombies any good?”

“Sure. But I just deliver them. I don’t make them.”

He took one from the tray and held it up to her lips. “Taste it for me.”

“I’m not supposed to drink when I’m working.”

“Sip it or I’ll think you put something in it.” He pushed it against her mouth and began to pour.

The waitress looked at Gaffney for help, but he was still counting rapidly, unaware of her, so she took some in and gulped. She started to cough, and Rogoso put his hand on her back and patted it, hard. “Here. You’d better finish it and bring me another one.”

Gaffney said, “You made a mistake. It’s not eighteen five. It’s only seventeen thousand.”

Rogoso put the glass down and glared at Gaffney. “I think you’re wrong.”

“No, I’m not. I put each thousand in a stack on the table as I went along. You can count it for yourself. Did you forget some, leave it in the car by mistake?”

Rogoso looked at Alvin and Chuy, then saw they were staring at Guzman and Corona. While he was teasing the waitress, Guzman and Corona’s guns had somehow found their way into their hands. The two men still sat where they’d been, but each of them had a gun resting on his lap.

The stillness lasted for a few seconds without anyone lowering his eyes or moving. Then Rogoso said, “I’ll take a look.” He released the waitress, who hurried out the door to return to the club.

He went to the table, picked up a thousand-dollar stack, riffled through it, and set it aside, then another. Next he counted the stacks. “I guess you were right. I counted wrong. Only seventeen thousand here.” He shrugged. “I probably left the rest on my desk.” He glanced at his watch. “Now we’ve got to move on. Tell Kapak I’m sorry I missed him”

“Sure,” said Gaffney. “Want me to ask him to call you?”

“No,” said Rogoso. “This eighteen thousand was the only business we had with him tonight”

“Seventeen thousand”

“Right.” He smiled. “See you around” The three men went out the door toward the club. Gaffney and Guzman and Corona followed them to the parking lot, and then watched them drive away.

Later, when closing time had come, Manco Kapak looked at the ranks of tall stacks of bills on the counting table in the back office at Siren. He was momentarily tempted to do some skimming—just fold a few hundreds into his pocket. It would be stealing from nobody. But by now his attitude toward the Internal Revenue Service had become a superstitious dread. He put both of his hands in his pockets and watched his three men putting the money into the maroon canvas deposit bag.

When they were finished he knelt by the wall and opened the locked desk drawer where Gaffney had stored the seventeen thousand dollars in cash that had come from Rogoso’s drug business. He added it to the twenty-one thousand that had come from the food, liquor, and cover charges, and the house’s rental fees for private lap-dancing rooms.

Kapak put the money together, wrote in the total on the deposit slip, and handed the canvas bag to Jerry Gaffney. Corona and Guzman slowly tugged on their sport coats over their thick arms.

Tonight Kapak wanted to maintain the impression of trust. He had been around long enough to know that some people could be trusted. But he did have a precise sense of what each of his associates could understand, remember, and do. He had an approximate sense of what their financial thresholds were and tried hard not to exceed them. He could be confident that Corona and Guzman would guard his thirty-eight thousand dollars, transport it, and get it into the night deposit of the Bank of America branch, even if St. Michael and all the angels stood in the center of Ventura Boulevard swinging fiery swords to stop them. But he would never have asked Corona and Guzman to deposit five or six hundred thousand. He would not have asked Jerry Gaffney to deposit any money with his brother, Jimmy. They could never be counted on to watch each other. They were a conspiracy from birth.

He walked out with the three men and stood by the doorway to watch them get into Jerry Gaffney’s car and drive off. He could see that the majority of cars still in the lot belonged to his employees. The rest belonged to young men who didn’t see any need to hurry home. He could remember being young and feeling that way. Even boys who were good at arithmetic couldn’t quite get themselves to believe that there would be thousands of other nights just like this one, so they could afford to stop and let the girls go home.

It didn’t seem necessary to stay around here while the bouncers herded the last few customers out and the rest of the staff finished cleaning the place up. They knew enough to lock the doors. Kapak got into his black Mercedes and started the engine. As he pulled away from Siren, he saw the front door open again and the last group of customers file out. The big lighted sign high on the pole above the flat-roofed brick building went out and the door closed, but the floodlights on the parking lot would stay on until dawn. At 6:00, Harkness the day manager would be in opening things up and preparing the building for the morning deliveries: liquor, soft drinks, linens, bar napkins, food. By 9:00, they’d have the place restocked, and the cooks would start preparing for the lunch crowd. The first of the dancers would arrive around 11:00 to limber up and put on their costumes. Most of the early shift had kids they took to school in the morning. They arrived with no makeup and hair either in ponytails or under scarves, carrying cups of coffee. They left in the early afternoon, out the back door to the lot to pick up the kids. Then the sequence of evening shifts would begin again.

He drove along Vanowen Street at forty, not taking a chance that a cop would pull him over, search the trunk, find the money he was going to add to the take at Siren, and think it was his lucky day. When Kapak drove late at night, he always saw cars driven by people who appeared to be drunk, nearly all of them young men. He supposed he deserved the risk because he was one of the bar owners who made them that way.

The drinkers in their twenties who were his main customers didn’t bother him. The generation now in their thirties and forties were different. They were the first Americans he hadn’t liked. They drove around in their ridiculous fat SUVs with phones clapped to their ears talking about things that couldn’t possibly amount to anything, and they didn’t care if driving a vehicle they couldn’t even steer with one hand made them kill you. When they were on foot they demanded to be first in line, to get theirs first. They sincerely believed in their own importance. The men were loudmouthed and pushy, trying to be intimidating when they didn’t get what they wanted, but most of them had never felt a serious punch or heard a shot fired. The women were self-obsessed and lazy. They were greedy for money and wanted to dress like movie stars. They neglected their children, hired immigrant women to raise them, but wanted other adults to refer to them as “moms.” Seeing them grow up had been like watching a disease arrive and take over a herd of cattle. All he could do was hope that they died off before the disease spread further.

Kapak liked the young ones best—the teenagers and the ones in their twenties. For some undetectable reason, most of them were good, steady, serious people. Maybe it was because life had steadily gotten harder as they had grown up. It wasn’t just the girls, either. It was inevitable in his business that the dancers were young. But he found the boys to be hard workers too. He hired young people for nearly every job that became vacant.

He drove toward Temptress. It was exactly 3.3 miles along Nordhoff Street. He loved the broad, straight boulevards of the San Fernando Valley. They were relics of the period when he had arrived in Los Angeles over thirty years ago, when people were still optimistic about the place they were building and believed it had to be planned on a grand scale. After closing time, these streets were nearly empty. If he picked the middle lane, he could sometimes drive the whole way without deviating an inch, timing the lights all the way so his foot barely touched the brake. It was what he imagined driving a train would be like.

He thought about Marija and the kids for the second time in an hour. Marija could easily have died by now. She had been only two years younger than Kapak, and he was sixty-four. The women in her family were pretty but delicate, and didn’t live long. John would be thirty-eight by now, and Sara, thirty-six. It seemed impossible, but those were the numbers. Whatever they were going to be, they were by now. He hoped—but it didn’t matter what he hoped. It was done. She had given herself to another man, and he had not gone to claim his children. His life had gone another way. There had been many nights when he lay in bed in his big, expensive house and wished that she could somehow have seen him—what he had accomplished, what he had. Every time he had thought about that scene, he had tried to picture her repentant and regretful, but the vision was cloudy and insubstantial. If she had really been there, she would have been bitter and contemptuous. After ten years or so, he had stopped thinking about her very often. She wasn’t even a person anymore, just a word and a faint, faded picture in his memory.

He drove into the parking lot at Temptress and surveyed the cars in the lot. They were all ones he had seen here many times: the manager Dave Skelley’s green Chevy Malibu, the head bouncer Floyd Harris’s blue Kia, the white Volvo that Sherri Wynn had bought a couple of years ago. Kapak felt affection for that car. Sherri needed to keep up the payments, so she’d had to become the best waitress in the place to get enough tips. He could tell there were nights when she was considering selling it so she could get the pleasure of being moody and hostile, but she hadn’t yet.

He parked close to the building under the lights, took the briefcase from his trunk, and walked to the front door. He knocked, and Floyd Harris opened the door and stuck his head out to be sure there wasn’t anyone lurking behind Kapak outside the range of the security camera. Floyd’s face was set in the expression that kept order, but it changed as he pulled the door open and held it. “Hi, Mr. K.”

“Hello, Floyd.” As Kapak entered, he held his head high and his chest out and looked around him with a hawklike glare, his eyes going everywhere, as though there were things that someone was scurrying to hide from him. He strode into the bar area looking at the two bartenders cleaning up, and then into the main room, and stopped. The three busboys looked up from wiping off tables and mopping, so he nodded his head once and smiled at each of them and turned on his heel to enter the kitchen. The big industrial dishwasher was humming as it sterilized the racks of glasses. The kitchen floor man had emptied the garbage cans, steamed them, and replaced the plastic liners, and was just completing his last floor-mopping of the night.

Kapak said, “Everything looks good, guys. But take a close look before you go, because the inspectors would love to find something wrong.” He always said that.

Kapak moved on. He had planned to catch a few of his employees sitting down somewhere instead of working, but he had seen nothing of the kind. He had only one more stop. He walked across the bar area between the rows of small, heavy steel tables with their chairs upside down on them and into the manager’s office.

Dave Skelley was standing at his big, empty desk finishing the evening’s count with Sherri Wynn. Skelley had opened the top of his white shirt and tossed his black uniform jacket on the couch, but Sherri’s waitress uniform was cooler—a satin vest, black briefs and tights, and high-heeled shoes. Skelley looked up. “Hi, boss.”

“Hi, Dave. Sherri. What sort of business did we do?”

“Nineteen thousand six hundred forty-two dollars. No fights, no breakage to speak of, no wear and tear on anybody tonight.”

Sherri smiled in a way that could only be called professional. “And how are you tonight, Mr. Kapak?”

He suspected she was hoping to get something—a small raise, a bonus, a present that would take the pressure off her to come up with the car payments for a while. She would always remind him that she was there and smile a little when she talked.

Kapak said, “Who’s going to make the deposit tonight?”

“Harris and I and the Russian,” said Skelley.

“Is he around? I didn’t see him.”

“He called a few minutes ago. By now he’s waiting in the lot.”

“Three guys. Good,” said Kapak. “And this goes to the Wells Fargo branch in Simi Valley. I’ll make out the deposit slip.” He set his briefcase on the desk, took out a deposit slip, read the total again from Skelley’s tally sheet, added twelve thousand dollars to it, and then took the twelve thousand dollars of Rogoso’s drug profits from his briefcase and added the stacks of bills to the ones on Skelley’s desk. He took his briefcase and stood up to watch Skelley putting the money into the canvas deposit bag.

Kapak walked out with Skelley and watched him get into the Russian’s big Toyota Sequoia with Harris the bouncer, then watched the car go out to the street. He considered getting into his own car and driving off, but instead turned around and went back to Skelley’s office. Sherri was still there in her waitress costume, sitting on the desk and swinging her feet. When she saw him she slid off, looking a bit embarrassed.

“Still here, eh?” he said.

“Yeah. I didn’t know if you needed anything else, so I thought I’d stay and see.”

“You’ve been doing a good job, Sherri,” he said. “The reason I came back is that I’ve been meaning to give you a little bonus.” He reached into the bulging pocket of his sport coat and pulled out a stack of bills marked “One thousand.” He had been planning to include it in the bank deposit, but for some reason he had changed his mind. He handed her the money.

“Wow, thank you,” she said. She looked at the money, then at him. She cocked her head. “What do I have to do for this?”

“Nothing. At least nothing you haven’t already been doing. It’s been nice to have somebody around who smiles.” He stepped backward, toward the door.

“I can do that,” she said. She took a quick step toward him and placed a kiss on his cheek before he opened the door and went out to his car.

He sat in the car, started the engine, drove out to the edge of the parking lot where there was a little dip to the street, and stopped. He stared into the darkest spaces he could see—the shadowy alley between a warehouse and the little factory where they customized car parts, the narrow strip of weedy land where the disused railway tracks disappeared at the back of a strip of stores. Joe Carver could be out there right now, watching for his chance.