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“You want some of this, man?”

 

I turned and waved my left hand to Quincy, who was holding out a blunt.

 

“Nah, man. I gotta go to work soon and I gotta be straight.”

 

“Straight? Yo man, this ain’t nuthin but some weed, kid! What, you can’t handle your smoke no more?”

 

“Yeah, right, nigga! I know you lace your shit with some dust! What, you trying’ to make me go in there buzzed so them people can fire me? Nah, man, I’m straight.”

 

Quincy grinned at me, took a puff and exhaled, looking at me through the smoke. We were sitting in Quincy’s car outside of my building. The car, a brand new Honda Accord, was parked near the intersection of South Road and Edgar Avenue. Quincy had bought the Accord a few weeks ago and he had it hooked it up like a dream. As I sat in the passenger’s seat, I looked around the interior and marveled at it. The car had expensive wood paneling and leather everything, individual heating under the front driver and passenger’s seat, and more fancy gadgets than that Knight Rider shit on television. There was a CD and tape deck with ten speakers, and Quincy was showing me earlier that when he turned the car off there was a security panel that slid over the stereo system and prevented it from being stolen. Not like anyone could break into it anyway: There were no door handles, it was opened and started by the remote control on his key ring. The darkest tinted windows I had ever seen and shiny chrome rims completed the look. Quincy was proud of his ride, and was always talking about it.

 

“Yeah, them little crack heads around here ain’t never seen shit like this before. They can’t mess with my ride.”

 

I was impressed. I had known Quincy since Junior High. Over the past year I had seen Q, as he liked to be called, was living large. Quincy was still smoking on the blunt and looking at me.

 

“So yo, you gonna kick it with me later or what, man?”

 

I nodded in response.

 

“Yeah man, I’ll roll with you when I get back from Brooklyn. You want me to page you?”

 

“Nah, I’ll call you later. I gotta go see my man Dean over by Farmers this evening. I’ll catch you later, all right?”

 

“Cool, just call me when you get back, Q.”

 

We exchanged pounds, and I opened his door and stepped outside. It was early, about 7:30 in the morning, and the public housing project known throughout the city as the “Forty Projects” was just coming to life. I looked up and down the street as I waited to cross Edgar Avenue. A couple of cars rolled by slowly, seeming to epitomize the attitude of the early morning in dead-end city. Slow, unconcerned, don’t-really-give-a-fuck. The sunlight peeked through the few trees and many tall, bleak looking buildings lining the street, giving the illusion of a warm morning when in reality it was about forty-five degrees. As I crossed behind a slow moving bakery truck, I pulled my down jacket closer around my frame and looked back towards Quincy’s car. The Honda was truly a thing of beauty; a sleek, silver automobile that seemed to hug the road. As Quincy pulled away from the curb, his car gliding over the asphalt, the stereo system started pumping out the new Puff Daddy remix. I felt the old yearning in my chest as I watched the car.

 

I want one of those. I want get paid like that. And I will too.

 

I opened the lobby door of my building and walked towards the elevator. The heating vents hissed noisily, and the pungent smells of body odor and stale urine wafted through my nasal passage. A quick look around led to the discovery of a sleeping derelict curled up in a corner by a heating vent, just past the elevator and next to the door leading to the basement laundry room. I knew the old man. His name was Anthony Rowe. At one time he was one of the biggest drug dealers in these parts. I remembered him from when I was a kid, back in like ’83, dressing up in flashy red suits and patent leather shoes, jheri-curl juice dripping onto his shoulders. Someone had told me Rowe had gotten busted by the cops, sent upstate to some shit hole prison where they punked him out. By the time Anthony Rowe came back to the Forty Projects he was an old, lifeless addict, craving any drug he could get his hands on to relieve the reality of his existence. I looked at the huddled, sleeping figure and quickly turned away. The elevator arrived just then and I stepped aside to allow a young girl pushing a baby carriage to get off. I kinda remembered her from junior high, Sherice or Sherelle or something like that. I said hello, and she stopped to chitchat, her doe-shaped eyes peeking out from under a baseball cap pulled low over her braids.

 

“How you doin’ Dion?”

 

She was younger than I was by about two years, which would make her around sixteen or seventeen, but her face had the look I had seen all too often on a lot of the girls in the neighborhood. A mixture of youth, cockiness and growing awareness of her sexuality.

 

“I’m cool. How you been?”

 

“Chillin’, chillin’. You still goin’ out with Tonya?”

 

I looked at her. Shorty looked pretty good, standing there in her cropped top blouse, tight jeans and leather coat. I couldn’t check her out fully under the coat, but I remember seeing her over the summer around the way. Shorty was boomin’. Nice, thick thighs, nice butt, them little breasts that pushed up against her cotton shirt. No bra.

 

“Naw, me and her just friends, y’know? It ain’t like that no more. She supposedly going out with this kid who’s some manager or something at Popeye’s on Eastern Parkway. I’m doing that single thing right now.”

 

I paused and stared at her. I knew what she wanted to hear; she had been checking me out since last summer. She had even told a friend of hers I know that she thought I was cute. If only I could remember her name!

 

“What about you?”

 

“Me? I’m single too. I just don’t wanna be bothered with all these little boys around here, y’know? I need a man now. Them trifling brothers around here, they be fronting like they on something positive but they all about getting some, and I ain’t no tramp.”

 

I remembered her name now. Sherice. The baby she got is Charlie’s little girl. Last I heard Charlie was doing a bid up north for manslaughter. Hey, he ain’t going to be around for a while…

 

“So what you doing later? You wanna get together, go see a movie or something?”

 

She made a face, and for a second I thought, Oh shit, she’s gonna dis me!

 

But after a couple of seconds she smiled.

 

“All right. What time?”

 

“Uhmm… like, about eight. Eight o’clock. Cool?”

 

Right at that moment the derelict, Anthony Rowe, shifted and made a loud sound that sounded like a cough. I glanced at him fleetingly and I turned away from the fresh wave of body odor created by his shuffling. I turned back to her as Sherice’s baby girl started to cry. She was still smiling.

 

“Alright, Dion. I’ll see you around eight. My apartment is 406.”

 

“406. Cool, cool. I’ll see you later then.”

 

I went upstairs, feeling very happy with myself and got ready for work.

 

Let me explain what this work deal is all about. I got this job working for Evan Cohen through my aunt, Joyce DaCosta.

 

Aunt Joyce worked as a legal secretary at one of those big Manhattan law firms. She was a hard working, bible toting woman. Upon my release from the Spofford Correctional Facility, where I was an unwitting [and unwilling] guest of the state, Aunt Joyce felt that she had to throw a bone to her younger brother’s only child. She spoke to one of the attorneys she worked for and he in turn arranged an interview with a cousin of his who ran an investment company in downtown Brooklyn.

 

The chain of events and people leading to my job was a curious one, to put it mildly. Aunt Joyce was a religious zealot taken to reading her bible at least six times a day. When she wasn’t doing that she was harassing people on the subways with her loud prophecy of imminent fire, death and eternal damnation if every single soul taking the D train did not repent and run willy-nilly to the nearest church. Preferably hers. But this eccentric lady hooked me up with Evan Cohen. Mr. Cohen was a short, plump man; the first person I had ever seen who fit the definition of “fleshy.” Not quite fat, a little more than chubby. His face was fleshy, his fingers were short and squat and he just kind of… jiggled.

 

At our first meeting, I was chaperoned by Aunt Joyce. Evan looked at me curiously, like I was unusual. It was kind of like how I had looked at this albino waterbug I saw when I was visited my grandparents in Fort Lauderdale a few years back. Like me and the albino waterbug, I guess he probably did not see too many convicted felons in the course of his business day. I really couldn’t blame him, after all I was a criminal. That wasn’t always the case though.

 

At the time of my being sent to jail two years before, I was completing my senior year at Brooklyn Tech. The entire school knew who I was: the sixteen-year-old whiz kid from the Forty Projects. I was getting the type of attention usually reserved for basketball recruits, stacks of mail with college applications, brochures and the like. Telephone ringing all day with offers to “fly out and see our facilities.” People who had lectured about but never actually seen what a low income housing project really looked like were knocking on my door, trying to entice me to campuses far away. Pepperdine, Duke, NYU, MIT and Princeton, they all wanted to be the one to enroll Young Master Dion DaCosta, Boy Wonder.

 

Until the day I went to Uncle Barry’s shop for a beef patty.

 

Uncle Barry was the oldest of the DaCosta clan, older than Aunt Joyce was by a year and my father by five. If you looked in the dictionary under “black sheep” Uncle Barry would be right there in all his glory. Uncle Barry was a tall, slim man with dark deep-set eyes in an angular, handsome face and dreadlocks that reached his waist. He was dark skinned and very charismatic, a real ladies man. Every time I saw him he had a different girlfriend, and he would counsel me often about the wiles and ways of “big people business.”

 

This particular day I had stopped by his patty shop on Church Avenue to get some free food. Barry’s shop sold Jamaican cooked food, beef and chicken patties, Caribbean newspapers and ganja. Not necessarily in that order.

 

On this day I was hanging out in the back storeroom with Three-Foot Johnny. Johnny worked for Uncle Barry and normally he was in charge of regulating the sale of the weed. I once overheard Uncle Barry and some of his friends joking about Johnny and the prodigious size of his member, hence the nickname. Since then I have looked at him with awe and reverence. On this day Johnny was busy bagging out a shipment of weed that had recently come in. I was on my second patty and watching this process intently. A blue Reebok travel bag was on the floor next to Johnny’s foot, and it was stuffed with some high-grade marijuana from the Cockpit region of Jamaica. Johnny had told me that Uncle Barry was in Family Court haggling with his ex-wife over child support. Half an hour after I had walked in to get some food, NYPD kicked in the front door of the shop and grabbed the young man at the front counter. He surrendered quickly, but not before pushing the alarm buzzer running from the register to the back storeroom. Johnny sprang to his feet, peeped through the small eyehole in the door and threw the travel bag to me.

 

“Yow, youthman, run with this! Carry it go home and call Uncle Barry. Run it out now, youth! Police de yah!”

 

Even as he was talking I could hear loud voices, and pounding on the other side of the metal door separating us from the front of the store. My mouth went dry and I started to get very nervous.

 

I grabbed the blue Reebok bag and ran out the back door, my mind in a state of shock. I was a pretty fast runner, but the bag was cumbersome and I got about two and a half blocks before a plainclothes officer grabbed me and threw me on the sidewalk face first.

 

The judge was not very sympathetic to my pleas of innocence and bad timing. I was the nephew of the nefarious Barry DaCosta, a known purveyor of mass quantities of illicit hallucinogens. I was in a known drug location, in the processing area and had been caught trying to escape with over seventeen pounds of marijuana. NYU was out of the plans; the only “higher learning facility” I would be visiting was one of New York State’s Bed n’ Board for Black Folk.

 

While in jail I had devoured all of the books and magazines a very repentant Uncle Barry sent to me. By the time of my release I had acquired more knowledge of networks and programming than most college graduates. After all, computers had been my specialty in high school. But no high tech, Silicon Alley business was going to hire me and no college scholarships were open to a convicted drug trafficker. Not even one who had scored 1480 on his SAT’s. No escape for me until Aunt Joyce stepped in.

 

Evan Cohen owned the brokerage firm of Martin, Rogers and Associates. Yeah, I know, his name was not Martin or Rogers, but trust me, it was his baby. He told me that first day of how he had started it from a small, one-desk pony to a multimillion-dollar corporate steed. Evan Cohen was a man who took his father’s small fortune and made a bigger fortune. The name was thought up by an ad agency guy who told him it would sell better in Bloomington, Miami and Memphis than Evan Cohen Limited. So Martin, Rogers and Associates was born.

 

Evan was very skeptical of me at first, even after Aunt Joyce had given me a glowing recommendation. So he put me at an empty terminal and told me to run a report on the year to date activity of a particular account. I did it in ten minutes, when his accountants were taking an hour per report.

 

I was hired on the spot.

 

In seven months I had moved from help desk technician to supervisor in the margin department, handling what the company employees called the “Five-O” accounts. Not Five-O as in police, but as in account transactions valued at over $100,000. That’s American Dollars, son. I handled orders and sales over the telephones and the Internet, and I had been given free reign to develop a better system for the reps to handle multitask orders. Evan had given me a raise when I moved to my new position; I was now making $35,000 a year. But unbeknownst to Evan, I had developed the program with a little twist designed to augment my own bank account.

 

My deception was so simple it was funny. I would buy the requested shares for a selected few client accounts that I had screened beforehand. If I got an order to buy, say, 1000 shares of Intel stock, I would buy 1,100 shares. The extra 100 shares went to a dummy corporation set up for that purpose. Cash out the stock within the day; transfer the proceeds through another dummy company and two numbered accounts in the Cayman Islands and viola! Advanced embezzlement. I had… earned… close to $750,000 in just under six months, not including interest. Who says a brother can’t make it on Wall Street?

 

I got to work at 9:55am, after taking the J train to downtown Brooklyn as usual. I didn’t own a car, and even though I could easily afford one right now, I didn’t want to raise any suspicion. I had requested vacation time for the coming week, and I had purchased an air/hotel package to California, and from there I was thinking about maybe traveling the world for a little while.

 

As I walked through the revolving door into the lobby of the office of Martin, Roger and Associates I was feeling very confident in my future.

 

Everything got very, very, bad the second I sat down at my workstation. There were two interoffice e-mails waiting for me. One was from the night supervisor Duey Newman. Duey wanted to know if I could run a list of people who had accessed the account of one Sal Salaganta within the last month. The second e-mail was from Evan Cohen himself, requesting that I come into his office when I got in. I looked at the time. It was 10:06. The e-mail was sent at 9:50. The notification features of the e-mail system meant that if Evan was sitting at his desk, he would know that I had just opened his e-mail. Knowing the hyperactive nature of Evan Cohen, if I wasn’t in his office in five minutes he would be in mine in seven.

 

I got up from my desk, a sense of trepidation running up and down my body like an electric current. My head felt really light, and my brain was trying to work but everything felt like slow motion. Salaganta’s was one of the accounts I had fleeced. I tried to imagine the possible scenarios. Were they onto me already? Could it be possible? Were police officers waiting in Evan’s office right now, ready to humiliate me in front of everyone? My mind raced furiously, as I absently chewed on a fingernail. An image of the broken, homeless bum Rowe flashed into my head and I quickly blocked it out. What should I do? Run now and hope I have time to get back home, grab my newly acquired false passport and get out of town? Or should I try to bluff my way through till lunch and then make a run for it? I made up my mind, took a deep breath, and walked down the hall to Evan’s office.

 

I knocked and entered his office, my stomach churning in anxiety. I had a strong suspicion that the jig was up.

 

Evan was sitting there, his 5’8″, 300-plus pounds frame overflowing from his leather seat. Across the polished oak desk from him, and close enough to me that I caught a big whiff of Drakkar Noir cologne, was a gentleman I had never seen before but from whom I got really bad vibes. He was a tall, solid looking man with thinning black hair and a deep tan. He rose to his feet as I walked in, and my gaze caught sight of the walnut handle of his shoulder-holstered gun.

 

Evan was saying something to me, but I did not hear him. My attention was riveted to the stranger who was now towering over me as I stood there, his Roman nose and hard dark face giving me twice as many tremors as I had before I walked in the room.

 

Evan was still talking.

 

“…Mr. Salaganta is here because there seems to be some problems with their account. I wanted you to come in because I know if anyone can get to the bottom of this, you can.”

 

Dominic’s open hand was extended to me and looming near my chest area, as if he were waiting for my pounding heart to leap out of my mouth and land beating in the palm of his hand.

 

A thought flashed through my mind. I never imagined my heart could beat so fast and I still be alive! Slowly I held out my own hand and shook the hand of Mr. Salaganta. I was amazed to lose sight of my wrist and fingers in his massive grip, and I managed to stammer something that sounded like “pleased to meet you.”

 

Salaganta’s hard eyes in his even harder face stared back at me, and I began to feel the onset of a fresh ulcer popping somewhere in my stomach. I turned my eyes back to Evan, my hand still trapped, my eyes pleading painfully for some type of help.

 

“Mr. Salaganta, Dion here is our top programmer. I am confident that with him giving it his full attention we will have this wrapped up shortly.” He addressed me.

 

“Dion, Mr. Salaganta and his father don’t want the police involved, not if it can be avoided. They are very private people and prefer to handle indiscretions… privately.”

 

I still hadn’t gotten my hand back, and through the pain going up and down my arm it suddenly clicked in my head. Sal “Double S” Salaganta, the alleged second in command of the Genovese crime family. The man who was reputed to have once publicly dressed down John Gotti in a restaurant because he failed to come over and pay his respects quickly enough. He was a legend, but if I remember correctly he was also close to seventy. So this man-mountain crushing my metacarpals into fine powder must be his son. I attempted to sit and my hand was released. Reluctantly. I sat in a chair across from Evan and stared at my almost pulped hand. There was still a tingling sensation going up my arm and I tried to mentally shift gears. Confession was out of the question; I had no doubt Dominic would only be too happy to get a workout on me. I was only five-seven and a half, and even though I carried a solid 170 pounds on me, I was giving up about seven inches and close to a hundred pound to Dominic Salaganta. Evan was still talking.

 

“Do you have any idea on where to start?”

 

I pretended to be thinking, which I certainly was, and finally I asked.

 

“How much money is missing from Mr. Salaganta’s account?”

 

Dominic supplied the answer readily.

 

“$157,650.70.” He paused, then added. “That’s over the last two months.”

 

His eyes never left my face, even as I steadfastly refused to make eye contact.

 

I whistled softly. I impressed myself with the extent of my criminology. I wondered if they had checked on the other accounts I had siphoned money from. I recited the names to myself. Goodman, Gentille, Squire, Boyd and Schekman. I had a little over $750,000 sitting in two numbered accounts, and I might not live long enough to see a dime of it.

 

“Well, ah, First off, the security measures in our program are of such a nature that there’s always footprints.”

 

Dominic frowned, his eyes briefly moving from my face to Evan.

 

“Footprints? Whose footprints?”

 

“It’s not actual footprints, Mr. Salaganta it is a term we use for electronic trails; the way to back track through a system and determine who accessed each account, what time and what was done. It would take a couple of days to accurately figure out who got in but…”

 

“I ain’t got a couple days. Try to hear what I’m saying. I want this information tomorrow. What I want right now is a list of everyone who has worked on this account in the last two weeks.”

 

My heart was beating so fast I felt they could hear it.

 

“Well, Mr. Salagan-…” Evan was starting to sweat profusely. I was momentarily entranced by the relentless growth of a stain under his left armpit. He was probably as nervous as I was. He shouldn’t be, I was the one who had scammed one of the biggest gangsters in New York out of over $100,000. He could lose an account; I could lose my kneecaps.

 

“I don’t wanna hear excuses, Evan. As a matter of fact, what I do wanna hear is the names of everyone with access to Papa’s account. I am assuming only people with special access can get into the account, right? So it should be a short list, right Dion?”

 

He was staring at me again.

 

“Ah… yeah… yes. Well, actually I guess so, y’know? I mean, if someone from outside knew how to circumvent the system, theoretically, using a remote station they could access the server, and that would be harder to trace.”

 

Dominic Salaganta rolled his eyes and looked at Evan.

 

“Jesus Christ, what is he saying now? That some kid from Okey Doke, Iowa could be behind this? What kind of fucking operation are you running here?”

 

Evan stammered as he responded. The sweat stain was getting bigger and a matching one was now under his right armpit.

 

“Mr. Salaganta, I assure you we will get to the bottom of this very quickly, and again, I am very sorry for this undue hardship…”

 

Mr. Salaganta shrugged his shoulders, rose to his feet and scowled at me as he prepared to leave. He was truly an intimidating figure.

 

“All right, gentlemen, I expect to hear from you within the day. You have my card, Evan, let me know when you have something.”

 

Mobsters carry business cards? I smiled to myself at the thought and Dominic caught it. He took a menacing step towards me.

 

“What are you laughing at? What, You think this if funny? My old man is out a hundred grand and you’re laughing?”

 

I started to feel light in the head and wobbly in the knees and I braced for a hit but he just turned to Evan.

 

“What a fucking outfit! Jesus, I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner!”

 

With that he opened the door slamming it so hard behind him that Evan’s NASD certificate fell off the wall nearest me. I jumped as it crashed to the bleached oak floor. Evan was looking at me as his fingers began to beat a staccato pattern on the desktop. He was clearly very agitated.

 

“Any ideas?”

 

I shook my head.

 

“Not, yet. This is a complete shock to me, but I’ll get working on it right away, sir.” I never called him sir, and I guess that’s why he gave me the strange look that he did. I said nothing more, I just walked out of his office.

 

The rest of the day was a blur, like one of those scenes in a movie where everyone is whizzing by and the main character is in super slow motion. At 6:30pm I logged out of my terminal and left the building. I got on a J train headed to Jamaica and tried to think of what I could do to get out of this situation.

 

I was so deep in thought that I almost missed my stop. I exited the subway and walked the few blocks home. I knew mom wasn’t home; she worked nights as an aircraft cleaner at JFK and was rarely home before midnight. It was still light out, and I suddenly remembered my date with Sherice.

 

I ran into my building in a half-trot, running up the stairs two at a time. I reached my apartment at 7:20pm. I had told Sherice I would meet her at 8.

 

I flicked on the stereo in my room, put in a mix tape and it started blasting a jam from Kurupt and Snoop. I turned on the shower and then remembered I had a nickel bag stashed in my sock drawer.

 

I rolled a blunt in my bedroom as the shower pattered on without me. I was unwinding a little bit, the music blasting throughout the house. That’s probably why I didn’t hear the first knock on the door. I was sitting on my bed in my boxers, smoking the blunt, in full lounge effect, when I finally heard it. It was a hard insistent ratatatat, and I felt my heart jump for the second time today.

 

Silently I crept across the darkened living room to the front door and snuck a quick peek through the eyehole. I almost fainted when I saw who was there.

 

Dominic Salaganta, my own personal demon, was standing outside my front door. A hundred thoughts raced through my head in the three or so seconds that I stood frozen at that spot. I had flashbacks; the Italian hoods I had know at Spofford, guys who were hard-core criminals but would speak in hushed tones about people who were connected to any of the five Mafia families in New York. I remembered hearing harrowing accounts of Mafia retaliatory tactics, and shit, I had seen Good Fellas! I felt a sudden urge to pee. Slowly, I backed away from the door, looking around carefully to avoid any chance of bumping into something and being heard. The next sound I heard intensified my fear tenfold. There were keys being inserted into the lock of my front door, and as I watched in horrified fascination, the knob turned slowly.

 

I sprinted quietly and quickly back into my bedroom, and was slightly relieved to hear the chain-lock snap back and hold the door shut. I stood in the middle of my bedroom, the music still blasting, and looked around frantically. Where the hell could I hide? I ran back into the hallway as I heard Dominic talking loudly, still outside my slightly ajar front door. It took a few seconds after I had run into my mother’s room to realize he had been calling my name.

 

“Hey, Dion! Open the door, buddy, I know you’re home. I want to talk to you for a minute.”

 

BUDDY? Hell no, I ain’t gonna open that door! What am I, stupid? I looked under the bed; too tight a squeeze, and probably the first place he would look. I was beyond frantic at this point. I heard a Crack! from outside and realized it was the front door giving way. I rushed into my mother’s walk in closet and quickly pulled the folding door shut behind me.

 

There were a few moments of eerie, nerve-wracking silence while I waited in the closet, sweat trickling down my neck and forming a rivulet down my spine. I reached out with my right hand for some kind of weapon, and was struck by the absurdity of my thinking. What the hell kind of weapon am I going to find in here? I saw a shadow pass into the room as I peered through the wooden slats in the closet door.

 

I heard heavy, labored breathing, and it fell into a syncopated rhythm with my own fearful heartbeat. I was alternately wondering why I was cowering like a punk even as I was silently making a multitude of promises to a god I had tried to forget. I watched Dominic get down on his knees and peer under the bed. Briefly I considered rushing past him out the open door and hightailing it to freedom. Even before I could will my immobilized limbs into action he was back on his feet and heading towards the closet. I couldn’t see a gun, but I was sure he had one. I watched in horror. The few seconds it took him to cross the room to the closet where I stood frozen, deer-in-headlights like, seemed like a hazy dream sequence. I saw a set of huge, fat fingers grab the edge of the closet door, caught a scent of Drakkar Noir and then the door was pulled open. For the second time that day I was face to face with Dominic Salaganta.

 

I saw a smile begin to creep across his face. He began to say something, and that’s when I hit him in the face with my mother’s shoe.

 

I couldn’t get a full extension on the swing; after all I was in a closet. What I lacked in strength I made up for with adrenaline. I heard a yell, then another, and then what felt like an enormous vice grabbed my neck. I swung again and again, getting lucky the third time as I felt some relief in the pressure around my neck. Almost immediately there was an explosion of pain and little twinkling lights inside my head, followed by another scream. Stupidly I realized through the haze of pain that the screams were mine. Dominic had punched me in the face, and as soon as that thought crystallized in my brain he punched me again. My neck was still in a death grip, my knees could no longer support my weight, and my mouth was full of blood and what I guess were loose teeth. My arms were still flailing wildly as I started to black out. I fell in a thrashing heap to the floor, half in, half out of my mother’s closet. With another burst of energy that only someone in utter desperation could summon, I started swinging the shoe that I still clung to as though it were the last life preserver on the Titanic.

 

I heard a grunt from above me and a huge knee crunched down on my chest. I kept up my feeble assault with the shoe and barefooted kicks even as all the air left my body. I twisted to my knees and felt a forearm encircle my already stretched neck. The smell of sweat and blood and now putrid cologne assailed my nostrils, and I bit down deep and with feeling into Dominic’s hairy forearm. I heard a yelp and him calling me a “fucking asshole” as my teeth sunk deeper still into his flesh. Out of my good eye I got a reflective glimpse of our death struggle in the vanity mirror. I looked like a Jack Russell terrier attacking the postman, standing there in my boxers and hitting this guy twice my size with my mother’s pumps. In the mirror I saw Dominic’s free hand come around to slug me again. I moved to avoid it while swinging at his face with the shoe. Instead of avoiding the blow I actually turned into it, accelerating the force of his fist into my jaw. I fell hard to the carpet in a heap. I was stunned, I think I may have passed out for a few seconds. My body tensed reflexively in anticipation of being hit again. But it didn’t happen. The next thing I recalled was when I rolled to the side and away, trying to scramble to my feet. Dominic Salaganta lay sprawled on his back on my mother’s carpet. My mother’s red pump was sticking out of his left eye. He wasn’t moving, and I just stayed there for a long while staring numbly at his prone body. I realized he was probably dead, and I got to my feet painfully, slowly. The gravity of my present dilemma was fighting for attention in my brain with the ridiculous pain I was feeling.

 

I had just killed Dominic Salaganta.

 

I sat down on the edge of my mother’s bed, an act that would have gotten me a stern tongue lashing if she had seen me. Considering the body on the floor and the way I looked she might not mind.

 

“Oh shit,” I managed to mumble through rapidly swelling lips. “What have I done?”

 

I held my head in my hands, and fresh waves of pain shot through my neck, arms and stabbed down my torso. My mind felt dull. I truly had no clue of what to do next. My tape was still playing outside, and the mix-tape DJ was cutting up something by Busta Rhymes. I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them quickly, as even that slight action to clear my head produced tremendous pain. After a few more seconds like that I decided on my next course of action. The date was out. I needed to get out of town. Now. I don’t know where I could go and be safe, but I knew that I could not stay here. This, That, was Dominic Salaganta. I had killed him. That meant my life expectancy options had narrowed down to either going to go to jail or ending up as fish food. Not to mention the issues my mother was going to have if I didn’t move the body.

 

In the middle of my ruminations I heard my telephone ringing. I stared around the room, trying not to move my head or my body. After five or so rings I located it on the floor near the doorway, and shuffled over to it. It was Quincy on the other end, and as I heard his voice the beginnings of a plan started to form in my head.

 

“Whaddup, man?”

 

“Yo, Q, I need you to come over here, man. I’m in some serious shit, man.”

 

“What happened man? What kind a trouble?” My head was throbbing and I struggled to speak coherently.

 

“Yo, I need to leave town like tonight. Yo, I fucked up big, man”

 

There was silence on the other end. I began to feel as if I may have made a mistake in saying anything to Quincy. I spoke up again, with much effort and desperation.

 

“Yo, Quincy? You still there? Talk to me man!”

 

“What happened, D? Is this some shit that’s gonna involve the cops? I don’t need Jake all over my ass right now, kid.”

 

“Q, I can’t talk on a cell phone, nigga! You gonna help me or not? I’m in trouble here, man!”

 

There was another short silence, then a deep sigh.

 

“Alright, man, but I hope this ain’t no shit to do with your stupid ass uncle, cause that nigga is like a walking wiretap…”

 

“Yo, where are you?”

 

“I’m downstairs.”

 

“Well, come on up, man!”

 

The wait for Quincy was one of the most torturous times of my short life. I had moved into the living room, put on some clothes and shut the tape off. Dominic had closed my front door behind him, I guess so that my neighbors wouldn’t hear my screams and whimpers of mercy. I paced the living room a few times before sitting down on the sofa. As soon as I did, there was another knock on my front door. I got up as quickly as I could, and opened the front door to the beaming figure of Quincy, decked out in a Yankees cap, a crinkly, bright yellow warm-up suit and brand new Air Jordans.

 

He looked at my face and grimaced.

 

“Damn, nigga! Who fucked you up like that?”

 

I led him wordlessly to my mother’s bedroom and pointed to the lifeless body on the carpet.

 

His mouth fell open and he covered his mouth with his hand.

 

“Ohhh shit.” He turned and looked at me. I was shaking slightly, and he glanced back at the body then at me and shook his head.

 

“You did this?”

 

I nodded. He was still staring at the body, then at me. And then back again.

 

“He was trying to kill me, yo.”

 

I walked slowly back to the kitchen, poured myself a glass of lemonade from the refrigerator as he stood staring from me to the body.

 

“Want some?” I rasped. My throat was still throbbing and raw.

 

Quincy shot me a disgusted look and sat down at the kitchen table.

 

“What! Yo, you just killed some white boy in your apartment and you’re offering me something to drink? Is this some bugged out Martha Stewart shit or what?”

 

I was actually impressed that Quincy knew who Martha Stewart was, but I knew this was not the time to be thinking about that. It had been barely thirty minutes since I had gotten home, and very soon somebody’s going to notice Dominic’s not home yet. And Dominic was not just some ordinary white boy.

 

The sudden, jarring sound of the telephone ringing caused both Quincy and I to jump. I stared at it as it rang two more times then I went into my mother’s room and picked up the cordless on the fourth ring.

 

“Hello?” My voice sounded muffled, probably because of my swollen and still bleeding lips. There was silence, then a man’s voice responded.

 

“Dion? Is that you?”

 

“Yeah, yes. Who is this?”

 

“It’s me Evan Cohen. I’m sorry. Did I disturb you?”

 

“Nah, ahh… no, Mr. Cohen. Sorry, I’m… ah, I had a little accident. Why, ah, what can I do for you?”

 

There was another period of silence, and when he spoke again his tone had changed.

 

“I guess you had a visit from our friend, then?”

 

“Huh?” was all I could muster. I was totally confused now.

 

“Didn’t Dominic come to see you?”

 

I turned around, glanced at the body and gingerly stepped over it towards the door before answering.

 

“Yes, he did. How,.. How do you know about that?”

 

Evan laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound, kind of like a half-wheezing hilarity.

 

“How do you think he got your address, Dion? Duey Newman was working on the situation from home and he caught on to your little plot… I must tell you, I was furious, and when I told Dominic Salaganta, boy, he wanted a piece of you in the worst way.”

 

I looked at the dead body and kicked him in the side. Evan continued.

 

“But, y’know, his father didn’t want to do that. I mean, if it were my money, I would have… Anyway, that’s beside the point. I guess you criminal types are more similar than you’re different.”

 

I ignored the insult, mostly because my mind was still trying to understand what he was saying to me. Something was not adding up.

 

“What are you talking about, Mr. Cohen?”

 

There was a very long silence now, and I felt truly, totally confused by the turn this whole day was taking.

 

When Evan spoke again, his tone was quizzical, and I could picture his cherubic cheeks and fat eyebrows wrinkling.

 

“He didn’t tell you?”

 

“Tell me what?”

 

“Wait a minute, is he still there, Dion?”

 

I looked at the body.

 

“Nah, he’s gone.”

 

Evan sounded like I felt. Bewildered.

 

“His father wanted you to go to work for them. He said your little embezzlement scheme would help them with their money laundering. Basically, he told me I didn’t have a choice in the matter. That’s really strange that he did not talk to you about it.”

 

Quincy was still sitting on the chair in my kitchen. I was standing in the hallway with my mouth wide open, and at that point I decided Dion DaCosta was going to make a career change. Immediately.

 

“You know what, Mr. Cohen, I want to thank you for everything, but I really have to go now.”

 

He started sputtering something but I cut off the phone and turned to Quincy. I had my fake passport in my sock drawer, and I knew there was no looking back now. I didn’t want to leave a dead body in my mother’s bedroom, but hey, I didn’t want there to be two dead bodies up in here either.

 

“Yo, Quincy, I need a ride to the airport.”

 

Quincy got up, and I could tell he was going to start asking me a million questions. I cut him off with a wave of an open palm.

 

“I’ll tell you on the way to Kennedy.”

 

We walked slowly out of my building and into the frigid evening. I looked back at the place that had been my home all of my life, and thought about everyone I was leaving behind, probably never to see again. I hated to leave my mother in a jam like that, but sticking around wouldn’t help either one of us, and the further I was away from her the better off she would be from here on in.

 

The bum from earlier this morning was sitting on a bench nearby, and he raised a bottle in our direction as we walked by.

 

“All right, fellas. You all look ready to party. Handle your business, black men!”

 

I smiled again, despite my pain, I was feeling strangely happy, giddy again. I nodded towards him and raised a fist.

 

“Yeah, old man. I’m going to do just that.”

 

“Where you goin’ go?” persisted Quincy.

 

“Someplace, nice, warm and far away from here.”

 

“You need anything, bro? Cash or something?”

 

I laughed. It sounded weird to me, but hell everything that happened today was weird.

 

“I don’t need a thing, man. I already planned for my future, and it starts tonight.”

 

I don’t think Quincy got it, but he would. Everybody would get it real soon.

“You want some of this, man?”

I turned and waved my left hand to Quincy, who was holding out a blunt.

“Nah, man. I gotta go to work soon and I gotta be straight.”

“Straight? Yo man, this ain’t nuthin but some weed, kid! What, you can’t handle your smoke no more?”

“Yeah, right, nigga! I know you lace your shit with some dust! What, you trying’ to make me go in there buzzed so them people can fire me? Nah, man, I’m straight.”

Quincy grinned at me, took a puff and exhaled, looking at me through the smoke. We were sitting in Quincy’s car outside of my building. The car, a brand new Honda Accord, was parked near the intersection of South Road and Edgar Avenue. Quincy had bought the Accord a few weeks ago and he had it hooked it up like a dream. As I sat in the passenger’s seat, I looked around the interior and marveled at it. The car had expensive wood paneling and leather everything, individual heating under the front driver and passenger’s seat, and more fancy gadgets than that Knight Rider shit on television. There was a CD and tape deck with ten speakers, and Quincy was showing me earlier that when he turned the car off there was a security panel that slid over the stereo system and prevented it from being stolen. Not like anyone could break into it anyway: There were no door handles, it was opened and started by the remote control on his key ring. The darkest tinted windows I had ever seen and shiny chrome rims completed the look. Quincy was proud of his ride, and was always talking about it.

“Yeah, them little crack heads around here ain’t never seen shit like this before. They can’t mess with my ride.”

I was impressed. I had known Quincy since Junior High. Over the past year I had seen Q, as he liked to be called, was living large. Quincy was still smoking on the blunt and looking at me.

“So yo, you gonna kick it with me later or what, man?”

I nodded in response.

“Yeah man, I’ll roll with you when I get back from Brooklyn. You want me to page you?”

“Nah, I’ll call you later. I gotta go see my man Dean over by Farmers this evening. I’ll catch you later, all right?”

“Cool, just call me when you get back, Q.”

We exchanged pounds, and I opened his door and stepped outside. It was early, about 7:30 in the morning, and the public housing project known throughout the city as the “Forty Projects” was just coming to life. I looked up and down the street as I waited to cross Edgar Avenue. A couple of cars rolled by slowly, seeming to epitomize the attitude of the early morning in dead-end city. Slow, unconcerned, don’t-really-give-a-fuck. The sunlight peeked through the few trees and many tall, bleak looking buildings lining the street, giving the illusion of a warm morning when in reality it was about forty-five degrees. As I crossed behind a slow moving bakery truck, I pulled my down jacket closer around my frame and looked back towards Quincy’s car. The Honda was truly a thing of beauty; a sleek, silver automobile that seemed to hug the road.  As Quincy pulled away from the curb, his car gliding over the asphalt, the stereo system started pumping out the new Puff Daddy remix. I felt the old yearning in my chest as I watched the car.

I want one of those. I want get paid like that. And I will too.

I opened the lobby door of my building and walked towards the elevator. The heating vents hissed noisily, and the pungent smells of body odor and stale urine wafted through my nasal passage. A quick look around led to the discovery of a sleeping derelict curled up in a corner by a heating vent, just past the elevator and next to the door leading to the basement laundry room. I knew the old man.  His name was Anthony Rowe. At one time he was one of the biggest drug dealers in these parts. I remembered him from when I was a kid, back in like ’83, dressing up in flashy red suits and patent leather shoes, jheri-curl juice dripping onto his shoulders. Someone had told me Rowe had gotten busted by the cops, sent upstate to some shit hole prison where they punked him out. By the time Anthony Rowe came back to the Forty Projects he was an old, lifeless addict, craving any drug he could get his hands on to relieve the reality of his existence. I looked at the huddled, sleeping figure and quickly turned away. The elevator arrived just then and I stepped aside to allow a young girl pushing a baby carriage to get off. I kinda remembered her from junior high, Sherice or Sherelle or something like that. I said hello, and she stopped to chitchat, her doe-shaped eyes peeking out from under a baseball cap pulled low over her braids.

“How you doin’ Dion?”

She was younger than I was by about two years, which would make her around sixteen or seventeen, but her face had the look I had seen all too often on a lot of the girls in the neighborhood. A mixture of youth, cockiness and growing awareness of her sexuality.

“I’m cool. How you been?”

“Chillin’, chillin’. You still goin’ out with Tonya?”

I looked at her. Shorty looked pretty good, standing there in her cropped top blouse, tight jeans and leather coat. I couldn’t check her out fully under the coat, but I remember seeing her over the summer around the way. Shorty was boomin’. Nice, thick thighs, nice butt, them little breasts that pushed up against her cotton shirt. No bra.

“Naw, me and her just friends, y’know? It ain’t like that no more. She supposedly going out with this kid who’s some manager or something at Popeye’s on Eastern Parkway. I’m doing that single thing right now.”

I paused and stared at her. I knew what she wanted to hear; she had been checking me out since last summer. She had even told a friend of hers I know that she thought I was cute. If only I could remember her name!

“What about you?”

“Me? I’m single too. I just don’t wanna be bothered with all these little boys around here, y’know? I need a man now. Them trifling brothers around here, they be fronting like they on something positive but they all about getting some, and I ain’t no tramp.”

I remembered her name now. Sherice. The baby she got is Charlie’s little girl. Last I heard Charlie was doing a bid up north for manslaughter. Hey, he ain’t going to be around for a while…

“So what you doing later? You wanna get together, go see a movie or something?”

She made a face, and for a second I thought, Oh shit, she’s gonna dis me!

But after a couple of seconds she smiled.

“All right. What time?”

“Uhmm… like, about eight. Eight o’clock. Cool?”

Right at that moment the derelict, Anthony Rowe, shifted and made a loud sound that sounded like a cough. I glanced at him fleetingly and I turned away from the fresh wave of body odor created by his shuffling. I turned back to her as Sherice’s baby girl started to cry. She was still smiling.

“Alright, Dion. I’ll see you around eight. My apartment is 406.”

“406. Cool, cool. I’ll see you later then.”

I went upstairs, feeling very happy with myself and got ready for work.

Let me explain what this work deal is all about. I got this job working for Evan Cohen through my aunt, Joyce DaCosta.

Aunt Joyce worked as a legal secretary at one of those big Manhattan law firms. She was a hard working, bible toting woman. Upon my release from the Spofford Correctional Facility, where I was an unwitting [and unwilling] guest of the state, Aunt Joyce felt that she had to throw a bone to her younger brother’s only child. She spoke to one of the attorneys she worked for and he in turn arranged an interview with a cousin of his who ran an investment company in downtown Brooklyn.

The chain of events and people leading to my job was a curious one, to put it mildly. Aunt Joyce was a religious zealot taken to reading her bible at least six times a day. When she wasn’t doing that she was harassing people on the subways with her loud prophecy of imminent fire, death and eternal damnation if every single soul taking the D train did not repent and run willy-nilly to the nearest church. Preferably hers. But this eccentric lady hooked me up with Evan Cohen. Mr. Cohen was a short, plump man; the first person I had ever seen who fit the definition of “fleshy.” Not quite fat, a little more than chubby. His face was fleshy, his fingers were short and squat and he just kind of… jiggled.

At our first meeting, I was chaperoned by Aunt Joyce. Evan looked at me curiously, like I was unusual. It was kind of like how I had looked at this albino waterbug I saw when I was visited my grandparents in Fort Lauderdale a few years back. Like me and the albino waterbug, I guess he probably did not see too many convicted felons in the course of his business day. I really couldn’t blame him, after all I was a criminal. That wasn’t always the case though.

At the time of my being sent to jail two years before, I was completing my senior year at Brooklyn Tech. The entire school knew who I was: the sixteen-year-old whiz kid from the Forty Projects. I was getting the type of attention usually reserved for basketball recruits, stacks of mail with college applications, brochures and the like. Telephone ringing all day with offers to “fly out and see our facilities.” People who had lectured about but never actually seen what a low income housing project really looked like were knocking on my door, trying to entice me to campuses far away. Pepperdine, Duke, NYU, MIT and Princeton, they all wanted to be the one to enroll Young Master Dion DaCosta, Boy Wonder.

Until the day I went to Uncle Barry’s shop for a beef patty.

Uncle Barry was the oldest of the DaCosta clan, older than Aunt Joyce was by a year and my father by five. If you looked in the dictionary under “black sheep” Uncle Barry would be right there in all his glory. Uncle Barry was a tall, slim man with dark deep-set eyes in an angular, handsome face and dreadlocks that reached his waist. He was dark skinned and very charismatic, a real ladies man. Every time I saw him he had a different girlfriend, and he would counsel me often about the wiles and ways of “big people business.”

This particular day I had stopped by his patty shop on Church Avenue to get some free food. Barry’s shop sold Jamaican cooked food, beef and chicken patties, Caribbean newspapers and ganja. Not necessarily in that order.

On this day I was hanging out in the back storeroom with Three-Foot Johnny. Johnny worked for Uncle Barry and normally he was in charge of regulating the sale of the weed. I once overheard Uncle Barry and some of his friends joking about Johnny and the prodigious size of his member, hence the nickname. Since then I have looked at him with awe and reverence. On this day Johnny was busy bagging out a shipment of weed that had recently come in. I was on my second patty and watching this process intently. A blue Reebok travel bag was on the floor next to Johnny’s foot, and it was stuffed with some high-grade marijuana from the Cockpit region of Jamaica. Johnny had told me that Uncle Barry was in Family Court haggling with his ex-wife over child support. Half an hour after I had walked in to get some food, NYPD kicked in the front door of the shop and grabbed the young man at the front counter. He surrendered quickly, but not before pushing the alarm buzzer running from the register to the back storeroom.  Johnny sprang to his feet, peeped through the small eyehole in the door and threw the travel bag to me.

“Yow, youthman, run with this! Carry it go home and call Uncle Barry. Run it out now, youth! Police de yah!”

Even as he was talking I could hear loud voices, and pounding on the other side of the metal door separating us from the front of the store. My mouth went dry and I started to get very nervous.

I grabbed the blue Reebok bag and ran out the back door, my mind in a state of shock. I was a pretty fast runner, but the bag was cumbersome and I got about two and a half blocks before a plainclothes officer grabbed me and threw me on the sidewalk face first.

The judge was not very sympathetic to my pleas of innocence and bad timing. I was the nephew of the nefarious Barry DaCosta, a known purveyor of mass quantities of illicit hallucinogens. I was in a known drug location, in the processing area and had been caught trying to escape with over seventeen pounds of marijuana. NYU was out of the plans; the only “higher learning facility” I would be visiting was one of New York State’s Bed n’ Board for Black Folk.

While in jail I had devoured all of the books and magazines a very repentant Uncle Barry sent to me. By the time of my release I had acquired more knowledge of networks and programming than most college graduates. After all, computers had been my specialty in high school. But no high tech, Silicon Alley business was going to hire me and no college scholarships were open to a convicted drug trafficker. Not even one who had scored 1480 on his SAT’s. No escape for me until Aunt Joyce stepped in.

Evan Cohen owned the brokerage firm of Martin, Rogers and Associates. Yeah, I know, his name was not Martin or Rogers, but trust me, it was his baby.  He told me that first day of how he had started it from a small, one-desk pony to a multimillion-dollar corporate steed. Evan Cohen was a man who took his father’s small fortune and made a bigger fortune. The name was thought up by an ad agency guy who told him it would sell better in Bloomington, Miami and Memphis than Evan Cohen Limited. So Martin, Rogers and Associates was born.

Evan was very skeptical of me at first, even after Aunt Joyce had given me a glowing recommendation. So he put me at an empty terminal and told me to run a report on the year to date activity of a particular account. I did it in ten minutes, when his accountants were taking an hour per report.

I was hired on the spot.

In seven months I had moved from help desk technician to supervisor in the margin department, handling what the company employees called the “Five-O” accounts. Not Five-O as in police, but as in account transactions valued at over $100,000. That’s American Dollars, son. I handled orders and sales over the telephones and the Internet, and I had been given free reign to develop a better system for the reps to handle multitask orders. Evan had given me a raise when I moved to my new position; I was now making $35,000 a year. But unbeknownst to Evan, I had developed the program with a little twist designed to augment my own bank account.

My deception was so simple it was funny. I would buy the requested shares for a selected few client accounts that I had screened beforehand. If I got an order to buy, say, 1000 shares of Intel stock, I would buy 1,100 shares. The extra 100 shares went to a dummy corporation set up for that purpose. Cash out the stock within the day; transfer the proceeds through another dummy company and two numbered accounts in the Cayman Islands and viola! Advanced embezzlement. I had… earned… close to $750,000 in just under six months, not including interest. Who says a brother can’t make it on Wall Street?

I got to work at 9:55am, after taking the J train to downtown Brooklyn as usual. I didn’t own a car, and even though I could easily afford one right now, I didn’t want to raise any suspicion. I had requested vacation time for the coming week, and I had purchased an air/hotel package to California, and from there I was thinking about maybe traveling the world for a little while.

As I walked through the revolving door into the lobby of the office of Martin, Roger and Associates I was feeling very confident in my future.

Everything got very, very, bad the second I sat down at my workstation. There were two interoffice e-mails waiting for me. One was from the night supervisor Duey Newman. Duey wanted to know if I could run a list of people who had accessed the account of one Sal Salaganta within the last month. The second e-mail was from Evan Cohen himself, requesting that I come into his office when I got in. I looked at the time. It was 10:06. The e-mail was sent at 9:50. The notification features of the e-mail system meant that if Evan was sitting at his desk, he would know that I had just opened his e-mail. Knowing the hyperactive nature of Evan Cohen, if I wasn’t in his office in five minutes he would be in mine in seven.

I got up from my desk, a sense of trepidation running up and down my body like an electric current. My head felt really light, and my brain was trying to work but everything felt like slow motion. Salaganta’s was one of the accounts I had fleeced. I tried to imagine the possible scenarios. Were they onto me already? Could it be possible? Were police officers waiting in Evan’s office right now, ready to humiliate me in front of everyone? My mind raced furiously, as I absently chewed on a fingernail.  An image of the broken, homeless bum Rowe flashed into my head and I quickly blocked it out. What should I do? Run now and hope I have time to get back home, grab my newly acquired false passport and get out of town? Or should I try to bluff my way through till lunch and then make a run for it? I made up my mind, took a deep breath, and walked down the hall to Evan’s office.

I knocked and entered his office, my stomach churning in anxiety.  I had a strong suspicion that the jig was up.

Evan was sitting there, his 5’8″, 300-plus pounds frame overflowing from his leather seat.  Across the polished oak desk from him, and close enough to me that I caught a big whiff of Drakkar Noir cologne, was a gentleman I had never seen before but from whom I got really bad vibes. He was a tall, solid looking man with thinning black hair and a deep tan.  He rose to his feet as I walked in, and my gaze caught sight of the walnut handle of his shoulder-holstered gun.

Evan was saying something to me, but I did not hear him. My attention was riveted to the stranger who was now towering over me as I stood there, his Roman nose and hard dark face giving me twice as many tremors as I had before I walked in the room.

Evan was still talking.

“…Mr. Salaganta is here because there seems to be some problems with their account. I wanted you to come in because I know if anyone can get to the bottom of this, you can.”

Dominic’s open hand was extended to me and looming near my chest area, as if he were waiting for my pounding heart to leap out of my mouth and land beating in the palm of his hand.

A thought flashed through my mind.  I never imagined my heart could beat so fast and I still be alive!  Slowly I held out my own hand and shook the hand of Mr. Salaganta.  I was amazed to lose sight of my wrist and fingers in his massive grip, and I managed to stammer something that sounded like “pleased to meet you.”

Salaganta’s hard eyes in his even harder face stared back at me, and I began to feel the onset of a fresh ulcer popping somewhere in my stomach.  I turned my eyes back to Evan, my hand still trapped, my eyes pleading painfully for some type of help.

“Mr. Salaganta, Dion here is our top programmer.  I am confident that with him giving it his full attention we will have this wrapped up shortly.”  He addressed me.

“Dion, Mr. Salaganta and his father don’t want the police involved, not if it can be avoided.  They are very private people and prefer to handle indiscretions… privately.”

I still hadn’t gotten my hand back, and through the pain going up and down my arm it suddenly clicked in my head.  Sal “Double S” Salaganta, the alleged second in command of the Genovese crime family.  The man who was reputed to have once publicly dressed down John Gotti in a restaurant because he failed to come over and pay his respects quickly enough.  He was a legend, but if I remember correctly he was also close to seventy.  So this man-mountain crushing my metacarpals into fine powder must be his son.  I attempted to sit and my hand was released.  Reluctantly. I sat in a chair across from Evan and stared at my almost pulped hand. There was still a tingling sensation going up my arm and I tried to mentally shift gears. Confession was out of the question; I had no doubt Dominic would only be too happy to get a workout on me.  I was only five-seven and a half, and even though I carried a solid 170 pounds on me, I was giving up about seven inches and close to a hundred pound to Dominic Salaganta.  Evan was still talking.

“Do you have any idea on where to start?”

I pretended to be thinking, which I certainly was, and finally I asked.

“How much money is missing from Mr. Salaganta’s account?”

Dominic supplied the answer readily.

“$157,650.70.”  He paused, then added. “That’s over the last two months.”

His eyes never left my face, even as I steadfastly refused to make eye contact.

I whistled softly. I impressed myself with the extent of my criminology.  I wondered if they had checked on the other accounts I had siphoned money from.  I recited the names to myself.  Goodman, Gentille, Squire, Boyd and Schekman.  I had a little over $750,000 sitting in two numbered accounts, and I might not live long enough to see a dime of it.

“Well, ah, First off, the security measures in our program are of such a nature that there’s always footprints.”

Dominic frowned, his eyes briefly moving from my face to Evan.

“Footprints? Whose footprints?”

“It’s not actual footprints, Mr. Salaganta it is a term we use for electronic trails; the way to back track through a system and determine who accessed each account, what time and what was done.  It would take a couple of days to accurately figure out who got in but…”

“I ain’t got a couple days. Try to hear what I’m saying. I want this information tomorrow.  What I want right now is a list of everyone who has worked on this account in the last two weeks.”

My heart was beating so fast I felt they could hear it.

“Well, Mr. Salagan-…” Evan was starting to sweat profusely.  I was momentarily entranced by the relentless growth of a stain under his left armpit.  He was probably as nervous as I was.  He shouldn’t be, I was the one who had scammed one of the biggest gangsters in New York out of over $100,000.  He could lose an account; I could lose my kneecaps.

“I don’t wanna hear excuses, Evan.  As a matter of fact, what I do wanna hear is the names of everyone with access to Papa’s account. I am assuming only people with special access can get into the account, right? So it should be a short list, right Dion?”

He was staring at me again.

“Ah… yeah… yes.  Well, actually I guess so, y’know? I mean, if someone from outside knew how to circumvent the system, theoretically, using a remote station they could access the server, and that would be harder to trace.”

Dominic Salaganta rolled his eyes and looked at Evan.

“Jesus Christ, what is he saying now?  That some kid from Okey Doke, Iowa could be behind this?  What kind of fucking operation are you running here?”

Evan stammered as he responded.  The sweat stain was getting bigger and a matching one was now under his right armpit.

“Mr. Salaganta, I assure you we will get to the bottom of this very quickly, and again, I am very sorry for this undue hardship…”

Mr. Salaganta shrugged his shoulders, rose to his feet and scowled at me as he prepared to leave.  He was truly an intimidating figure.

“All right, gentlemen, I expect to hear from you within the day.  You have my card, Evan, let me know when you have something.”

Mobsters carry business cards? I smiled to myself at the thought and Dominic caught it. He took a menacing step towards me.

“What are you laughing at?  What, You think this if funny?  My old man is out a hundred grand and you’re laughing?”

I started to feel light in the head and wobbly in the knees and I braced for a hit but he just turned to Evan.

“What a fucking outfit! Jesus, I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner!”

With that he opened the door slamming it so hard behind him that Evan’s NASD certificate fell off the wall nearest me.  I jumped as it crashed to the bleached oak floor. Evan was looking at me as his fingers began to beat a staccato pattern on the desktop.  He was clearly very agitated.

“Any ideas?”

I shook my head.

“Not, yet. This is a complete shock to me, but I’ll get working on it right away, sir.”  I never called him sir, and I guess that’s why he gave me the strange look that he did. I said nothing more, I just walked out of his office.

The rest of the day was a blur, like one of those scenes in a movie where everyone is whizzing by and the main character is in super slow motion. At 6:30pm I logged out of my terminal and left the building.  I got on a J train headed to Jamaica and tried to think of what I could do to get out of this situation.

I was so deep in thought that I almost missed my stop. I exited the subway and walked the few blocks home. I knew mom wasn’t home; she worked nights as an aircraft cleaner at JFK and was rarely home before midnight.  It was still light out, and I suddenly remembered my date with Sherice.

I ran into my building in a half-trot, running up the stairs two at a time. I reached my apartment at 7:20pm. I had told Sherice I would meet her at 8.

I flicked on the stereo in my room, put in a mix tape and it started blasting a jam from Kurupt and Snoop. I turned on the shower and then remembered I had a nickel bag stashed in my sock drawer.

I rolled a blunt in my bedroom as the shower pattered on without me. I was unwinding a little bit, the music blasting throughout the house. That’s probably why I didn’t hear the first knock on the door. I was sitting on my bed in my boxers, smoking the blunt, in full lounge effect, when I finally heard it.  It was a hard insistent ratatatat, and I felt my heart jump for the second time today.

Silently I crept across the darkened living room to the front door and snuck a quick peek through the eyehole. I almost fainted when I saw who was there.

Dominic Salaganta, my own personal demon, was standing outside my front door.  A hundred thoughts raced through my head in the three or so seconds that I stood frozen at that spot. I had flashbacks; the Italian hoods I had know at Spofford, guys who were hard-core criminals but would speak in hushed tones about people who were connected to any of the five Mafia families in New York. I remembered hearing harrowing accounts of Mafia retaliatory tactics, and shit, I had seen Good Fellas! I felt a sudden urge to pee. Slowly, I backed away from the door, looking around carefully to avoid any chance of bumping into something and being heard. The next sound I heard intensified my fear tenfold. There were keys being inserted into the lock of my front door, and as I watched in horrified fascination, the knob turned slowly.

I sprinted quietly and quickly back into my bedroom, and was slightly relieved to hear the chain-lock snap back and hold the door shut. I stood in the middle of my bedroom, the music still blasting, and looked around frantically. Where the hell could I hide? I ran back into the hallway as I heard Dominic talking loudly, still outside my slightly ajar front door. It took a few seconds after I had run into my mother’s room to realize he had been calling my name.

“Hey, Dion! Open the door, buddy, I know you’re home. I want to talk to you for a minute.”

BUDDY? Hell no, I ain’t gonna open that door! What am I, stupid? I looked under the bed; too tight a squeeze, and probably the first place he would look. I was beyond frantic at this point. I heard a Crack! from outside and realized it was the front door giving way. I rushed into my mother’s walk in closet and quickly pulled the folding door shut behind me.

There were a few moments of eerie, nerve-wracking silence while I waited in the closet, sweat trickling down my neck and forming a rivulet down my spine. I reached out with my right hand for some kind of weapon, and was struck by the absurdity of my thinking. What the hell kind of weapon am I going to find in here? I saw a shadow pass into the room as I peered through the wooden slats in the closet door.

I heard heavy, labored breathing, and it fell into a syncopated rhythm with my own fearful heartbeat. I was alternately wondering why I was cowering like a punk even as I was silently making a multitude of promises to a god I had tried to forget. I watched Dominic get down on his knees and peer under the bed. Briefly I considered rushing past him out the open door and hightailing it to freedom. Even before I could will my immobilized limbs into action he was back on his feet and heading towards the closet. I couldn’t see a gun, but I was sure he had one. I watched in horror. The few seconds it took him to cross the room to the closet where I stood frozen, deer-in-headlights like, seemed like a hazy dream sequence. I saw a set of huge, fat fingers grab the edge of the closet door, caught a scent of Drakkar Noir and then the door was pulled open. For the second time that day I was face to face with Dominic Salaganta.

I saw a smile begin to creep across his face. He began to say something, and that’s when I hit him in the face with my mother’s shoe.

I couldn’t get a full extension on the swing; after all I was in a closet. What I lacked in strength I made up for with adrenaline. I heard a yell, then another, and then what felt like an enormous vice grabbed my neck. I swung again and again, getting lucky the third time as I felt some relief in the pressure around my neck. Almost immediately there was an explosion of pain and little twinkling lights inside my head, followed by another scream. Stupidly I realized through the haze of pain that the screams were mine. Dominic had punched me in the face, and as soon as that thought crystallized in my brain he punched me again. My neck was still in a death grip, my knees could no longer support my weight, and my mouth was full of blood and what I guess were loose teeth. My arms were still flailing wildly as I started to black out. I fell in a thrashing heap to the floor, half in, half out of my mother’s closet. With another burst of energy that only someone in utter desperation could summon, I started swinging the shoe that I still clung to as though it were the last life preserver on the Titanic.

I heard a grunt from above me and a huge knee crunched down on my chest. I kept up my feeble assault with the shoe and barefooted kicks even as all the air left my body. I twisted to my knees and felt a forearm encircle my already stretched neck. The smell of sweat and blood and now putrid cologne assailed my nostrils, and I bit down deep and with feeling into Dominic’s hairy forearm. I heard a yelp and him calling me a “fucking asshole” as my teeth sunk deeper still into his flesh. Out of my good eye I got a reflective glimpse of our death struggle in the vanity mirror. I looked like a Jack Russell terrier attacking the postman, standing there in my boxers and hitting this guy twice my size with my mother’s pumps. In the mirror I saw Dominic’s free hand come around to slug me again. I moved to avoid it while swinging at his face with the shoe. Instead of avoiding the blow I actually turned into it, accelerating the force of his fist into my jaw. I fell hard to the carpet in a heap. I was stunned, I think I may have passed out for a few seconds. My body tensed reflexively in anticipation of being hit again. But it didn’t happen. The next thing I recalled was when I rolled to the side and away, trying to scramble to my feet. Dominic Salaganta lay sprawled on his back on my mother’s carpet. My mother’s red pump was sticking out of his left eye. He wasn’t moving, and I just stayed there for a long while staring numbly at his prone body. I realized he was probably dead, and I got to my feet painfully, slowly. The gravity of my present dilemma was fighting for attention in my brain with the ridiculous pain I was feeling.

I had just killed Dominic Salaganta.

I sat down on the edge of my mother’s bed, an act that would have gotten me a stern tongue lashing if she had seen me. Considering the body on the floor and the way I looked she might not mind.

“Oh shit,” I managed to mumble through rapidly swelling lips. “What have I done?”

I held my head in my hands, and fresh waves of pain shot through my neck, arms and stabbed down my torso. My mind felt dull. I truly had no clue of what to do next. My tape was still playing outside, and the mix-tape DJ was cutting up something by Busta Rhymes. I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them quickly, as even that slight action to clear my head produced tremendous pain. After a few more seconds like that I decided on my next course of action. The date was out. I needed to get out of town. Now. I don’t know where I could go and be safe, but I knew that I could not stay here. This, That, was Dominic Salaganta. I had killed him. That meant my life expectancy options had narrowed down to either going to go to jail or ending up as fish food. Not to mention the issues my mother was going to have if I didn’t move the body.

In the middle of my ruminations I heard my telephone ringing. I stared around the room, trying not to move my head or my body. After five or so rings I located it on the floor near the doorway, and shuffled over to it. It was Quincy on the other end, and as I heard his voice the beginnings of a plan started to form in my head.

“Whaddup, man?”

“Yo, Q, I need you to come over here, man. I’m in some serious shit, man.”

“What happened man? What kind a trouble?” My head was throbbing and I struggled to speak coherently.

“Yo, I need to leave town like tonight. Yo, I fucked up big, man”

There was silence on the other end. I began to feel as if I may have made a mistake in saying anything to Quincy. I spoke up again, with much effort and desperation.

“Yo, Quincy? You still there? Talk to me man!”

“What happened, D? Is this some shit that’s gonna involve the cops? I don’t need Jake all over my ass right now, kid.”

“Q, I can’t talk on a cell phone, nigga! You gonna help me or not? I’m in trouble here, man!”

There was another short silence, then a deep sigh.

“Alright, man, but I hope this ain’t no shit to do with your stupid ass uncle, cause that nigga is like a walking wiretap…”

“Yo, where are you?”

“I’m downstairs.”

“Well, come on up, man!”

The wait for Quincy was one of the most torturous times of my short life. I had moved into the living room, put on some clothes and shut the tape off. Dominic had closed my front door behind him, I guess so that my neighbors wouldn’t hear my screams and whimpers of mercy. I paced the living room a few times before sitting down on the sofa. As soon as I did, there was another knock on my front door. I got up as quickly as I could, and opened the front door to the beaming figure of Quincy, decked out in a Yankees cap, a crinkly, bright yellow warm-up suit and brand new Air Jordans.

He looked at my face and grimaced.

“Damn, nigga! Who fucked you up like that?”

I led him wordlessly to my mother’s bedroom and pointed to the lifeless body on the carpet.

His mouth fell open and he covered his mouth with his hand.

“Ohhh shit.” He turned and looked at me. I was shaking slightly, and he glanced back at the body then at me and shook his head.

“You did this?”

I nodded. He was still staring at the body, then at me. And then back again.

“He was trying to kill me, yo.”

I walked slowly back to the kitchen, poured myself a glass of lemonade from the refrigerator as he stood staring from me to the body.

“Want some?” I rasped. My throat was still throbbing and raw.

Quincy shot me a disgusted look and sat down at the kitchen table.

“What! Yo, you just killed some white boy in your apartment and you’re offering me something to drink? Is this some bugged out Martha Stewart shit or what?”

I was actually impressed that Quincy knew who Martha Stewart was, but I knew this was not the time to be thinking about that. It had been barely thirty minutes since I had gotten home, and very soon somebody’s going to notice Dominic’s not home yet. And Dominic was not just some ordinary white boy.

The sudden, jarring sound of the telephone ringing caused both Quincy and I to jump. I stared at it as it rang two more times then I went into my mother’s room and picked up the cordless on the fourth ring.

“Hello?” My voice sounded muffled, probably because of my swollen and still bleeding lips. There was silence, then a man’s voice responded.

“Dion? Is that you?”

“Yeah, yes. Who is this?”

“It’s me Evan Cohen. I’m sorry. Did I disturb you?”

“Nah, ahh… no, Mr. Cohen. Sorry, I’m… ah, I had a little accident. Why, ah, what can I do for you?”

There was another period of silence, and when he spoke again his tone had changed.

“I guess you had a visit from our friend, then?”

“Huh?” was all I could muster. I was totally confused now.

“Didn’t Dominic come to see you?”

I turned around, glanced at the body and gingerly stepped over it towards the door before answering.

“Yes, he did. How,.. How do you know about that?”

Evan laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound, kind of like a half-wheezing hilarity.

“How do you think he got your address, Dion? Duey Newman was working on the situation from home and he caught on to your little plot… I must tell you, I was furious, and when I told Dominic Salaganta, boy, he wanted a piece of you in the worst way.”

I looked at the dead body and kicked him in the side.  Evan continued.

“But, y’know, his father didn’t want to do that. I mean, if it were my money, I would have… Anyway, that’s beside the point. I guess you criminal types are more similar than you’re different.”

I ignored the insult, mostly because my mind was still trying to understand what he was saying to me. Something was not adding up.

“What are you talking about, Mr. Cohen?”

There was a very long silence now, and I felt truly, totally confused by the turn this whole day was taking.

When Evan spoke again, his tone was quizzical, and I could picture his cherubic cheeks and fat eyebrows wrinkling.

“He didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Wait a minute, is he still there, Dion?”

I looked at the body.

“Nah, he’s gone.”

Evan sounded like I felt. Bewildered.

“His father wanted you to go to work for them. He said your little embezzlement scheme would help them with their money laundering. Basically, he told me I didn’t have a choice in the matter. That’s really strange that he did not talk to you about it.”

Quincy was still sitting on the chair in my kitchen. I was standing in the hallway with my mouth wide open, and at that point I decided Dion DaCosta was going to make a career change. Immediately.

“You know what, Mr. Cohen, I want to thank you for everything, but I really have to go now.”

He started sputtering something but I cut off the phone and turned to Quincy. I had my fake passport in my sock drawer, and I knew there was no looking back now. I didn’t want to leave a dead body in my mother’s bedroom, but hey, I didn’t want there to be two dead bodies up in here either.

“Yo, Quincy, I need a ride to the airport.”

Quincy got up, and I could tell he was going to start asking me a million questions. I cut him off with a wave of an open palm.

“I’ll tell you on the way to Kennedy.”

We walked slowly out of my building and into the frigid evening. I looked back at the place that had been my home all of my life, and thought about everyone I was leaving behind, probably never to see again. I hated to leave my mother in a jam like that, but sticking around wouldn’t help either one of us, and the further I was away from her the better off she would be from here on in.

The bum from earlier this morning was sitting on a bench nearby, and he raised a bottle in our direction as we walked by.

“All right, fellas. You all look ready to party. Handle your business, black men!”

I smiled again, despite my pain, I was feeling strangely happy, giddy again. I nodded towards him and raised a fist.

“Yeah, old man. I’m going to do just that.”

“Where you goin’ go?” persisted Quincy.

“Someplace, nice, warm and far away from here.”

“You need anything, bro? Cash or something?”

I laughed. It sounded weird to me, but hell everything that happened today was weird.

“I don’t need a thing, man. I already planned for my future, and it starts tonight.”

I don’t think Quincy got it, but he would. Everybody would get it real soon.

From the author:
A short note about "The Right Stuff": Comedian George Carlin is notorious for his version of "Stuff" as part of his comedy routine... but by no means is this stuff any of his stuff. This here is my stuff...




I've got plenty of stuff. I've got big stuff and little stuff... stuff to set stuff on and stuff to keep stuff in. There's woolly stuff and fluffy stuff... cool stuff and dull stuff... sparkly stuff and even some stuffed stuff. There's smart stuff... which can do some real neat stuff... if you talk to it nice. And then there's dumb stuff. It doesn't do much of anything... but sit there and act like stuff. Which is what most stuff does anyway... most of the time... when you're not there. Then there's the low-to-the-ground stuff... and the high-up-off-the-ground stuff. The high-up stuff I can never really get to... so I just leave it alone. Less stuff to worry about.

Sometimes people come around and look at the stuff. It gives them something to do I guess... while I'm busy with other stuff. Sometimes people will say, "Hey, where'd you get this stuff?" or "You know, you need more stuff." I used to think so too. I used to think how happy I'd be if only I had some more stuff.

When I was a little kid... I used to think too... that while I was sleeping... my stuff would come to life. And that the stuff on the shelves and the stuff in the closets would get together and do secret stuff... or maybe just have a party. I never knew this for sure, but I always suspected it... even though I could never catch the stuff at it.

And have you ever noticed how you can never go anyplace for very long? Because... well... what are you gonna do about the stuff? You can't just leave the stuff alone. And if you asked somebody to watch the stuff for you... they could for a while... but you gotta understand... so now who's watching THEIR stuff? It's a vicious cycle.

Then one day... I was waiting at a bus stop... watching all the people running around trying to figure out how to get stuff. Some people where trading stuff they didn't want for stuff they did want. Others were just plain giving stuff away. Then there were the ones shoving other people out of the way so as to get at the best stuff first. And then too... there were always a few who mostly just wanted somebody else's stuff. I guess that's how wars get started.

I got to thinking... "GEEZ... what's all this STUFF about anyway?"

Well... it's like when you open up stuff... and look inside. There's stuff inside most any kind of stuff. People are like that too. You look inside them... and WOW... there's stuff in there! GREAT stuff! If you ever felt like paying attention to that stuff... you'd notice it... peeking out at you from behind somebody's eyes. Now there's the REAL stuff! It's the only stuff you really need to get by on. So... to get the really GOOD stuff... you could set aside all the other stuff... and make some friends I guess... just by letting people look at your stuff. They'd probably even let you look at theirs. And that just makes me think, 'You can never really have enough... of the right stuff."

It’s only been six months, but the way time has been moving for me it might just as well have been six years since I moved into the quiet little garden bungalow in south Berkeley. So many things can happen to a man’s life in six months that it seems an untenable task, a labor as unfulfilling as sorting the grains of sand on a long beach, this, the telling of the why and wherefore of how one finds oneself standing at any particular place.

 

On the surface everything was fairly simple. Downright predictable in a late twentieth century sort of way. My wife left me early this fall. Or rather, told me to leave her. She called me at my office late one Friday afternoon and told me not to bother coming home because the locks were already changed and she probably wouldn’t be there anyway. She had some place important to rush off to and didn’t have much time to talk. She said a couple of other things too. Stuff about how distant I’ve become and how unhappy she was and something about needing a change in her life that I really couldn’t possibly expect to understand. Those were her words, not mine. But I don’t quite remember everything she said. It was hard to concentrate. I felt a little ill, like I had a fever coming on and I began to sweat just a little, right on the sides of my head, just above my eyes.

 

I was used to taking orders from her and she was used to my silence, so I let the receiver hang away from my head for a long moment while I looked out the window down to the street below. My face being held hostage to a blank stare as I tried to think about what all of this meant. I could see a long chain of pre-schoolers; two and three-year-olds being taken on a walk by their teachers. They were heading across the busy swell of 14th Street to the tiny green triangle of Snow Park. The kids were holding on to a long rope. A strong looking rope, maybe an inch thick, with a huge knot tied every four feet or so. Every kid had their hand firmly gripped around their knot. Every last one of them happy and secure as a squad of ducklings bouncing along behind heir mother, their view of the world falling no farther than the knot on the rope directly in front of them. I watched the long line of kids cross the street. Saw each of the kids make it across and up onto the curb. I saw them, at a word from their teacher, let go of the rope and take off running, happily burbling about the blue sky and the green grass before I put the phone receiver back to my ear and said, okay sure. Where do want me to go, what do you want me to do? But the line was dead. And she was gone.

 

Six months is a long time to remember the detail of feelings and I would be falling prey to the construction of a fiction if I said that I felt much more than a buzzing dullness when I met the Realtor at the tiny house to pick up the keys to my rental. Time and action were moving slowly for me these days, having only the week before quit my job and given myself the present of a few months of a retreat that I hoped wouldn’t turn into a wholesale surrender, and small, ordinary interactions were becoming increasingly more difficult for me to understand. Joy seemed to be far away and gone, but as of yet, nothing had stepped in to take its place. Not sadness, not terror, not loneliness. Just a kind of flattened lethargy, a weariness that hung heavy around me like a rain soaked coat with a rusted-shut zipper. I thought I at least ought to have felt some kind of profound sadness when I walked into the quiet house, a late afternoon sun splitting the faded wood floors like a knife. After all, tonight would be the first time sleeping without my wife, or at least without her reflected presence shouting out from every corner, for a solid 12 years. But all I can honestly remember thinking as I sat on the living room couch was that this house smelled like Berkeley. I hadn’t lived in Berkeley since my college days but I can remember like it was yesterday, the signature herbal teas, brown rice and coffee thick as roofing tar leave in wooden walls. It sometimes seems that every house I’ve ever been in, in Berkeley, has had a previous occupant that cooked curries and baked 10-grain basil and pimento bread. I used to call Berkeley houses whole grain houses back in the jaded days of my youth. But just then I breathed deep and lolled about with the profoundly comfortable feeling of being home.

 

The cottage was short and straight in design. A one-story wood frame forest cottage on a flat, sunny street in south Berkeley. Nondescript in every way, right down to the dying bougainvillea vines over the a splintered arch that ushers one up to the front steps. I entered the house without thinking. Walking in a direct line from the front door, a person walking without purpose could make it through the entry hall, dining cul-de-sac, through the kitchen and out a flimsy screen door onto an ivy screened porch in about twenty paces. The house, though empty, seemed altogether too noisy with the respective ghosts of the previous tenants. Not to mention all the ghosts of my own that tailed me, room to room, doorway to doorway. But the porch I instantly saw as my point of refuge. Walled in on three sides by an ancient sagging trellis, overgrown into a tangle of passion flower and Kiwi vines. It felt like a cave of wonders and I sat down on a rickety metal chair that was stuffed into one corner behind a leaf strewn table. A light breeze worked its way through the vines, along with just enough of the mid-afternoon sun to lay a light glow over the table, bringing with it a hint of the coming fog, which clocks in most every afternoon around three. I remember being able to almost set my watch by a Berkeley summer day’s fog bank.

 

Damn, I thought as I settled back into the not uncomfortable chair. Is this what I’ve come down to, living my life in a panorama of indigo memories? I always used to wonder what it would be like, to be one of those odd, Berkeley urban hermits. You could see them everywhere in the old days and you still can; scurrying about with an unruly sheaf of papers stuffed under one arm and reading a smeared copy of The Nation with the other, while bowling their way down Durant Street like a rat on a mission for more cheese. No, I don’t have the requisite burned-out Ph.D. look about me to pull that off with the proper élan. But it would be easier than I might care to admit to park myself in this back porch oasis for far too much of every day. Living on strong coffee and pastries bought every morning during a furtive, dawn foray down the street to the local bakery. It surely wouldn’t take long before people were noticing my furtive coming and goings and wondering what it must be like to be me.

 

I was just thinking how brilliant I was for coming up with the original idea of an afternoon coffee fix when I first heard the sound that would become my daily companion. A tinkling run of notes on a piano from somewhere off and through the barrier of vines. A thick sheaf of notes, then a dark, softly hit chord. Plaintive, saddened but somehow forward looking. Then the left hand settled in with a supporting movement running into an upward drifting string of chords and melody and counter melody. This wasn’t little Suzy or Benjamin doing their daily scale exercises. Not by any incredible stretch of the imagination. This was heartfelt and deeply hued music. But not the harsh, intellectually driven, bombastic chest-thumping stuff I always seem to hear the times I’ve gone to see the symphony or the ballet. And it certainly didn’t feel like the musical equivalent of a gaudily covered romance novel which is what so much music for the piano sounds like to me. This was soft and assured, even when the movements were dark and angular. Matured lines spoken from, with and to experience. I sat mesmerized, all thoughts of going out and looking for food and drink pushed to the back of my mind. I heard the tune all the way through. A tune either impossibly long or incredibly chard couldn’t tell for sure, time seemingly stopped while the magnet of the notes drew me into different swells of text, sub-text and emotion. Maybe it was my weakened emotional state leaving me prey to accepting rides from strangers, but I was taken on a series of turning twisting streets through my own internal emotional landscape. I felt happy and sad, disheartened and afraid, invincible, and as vulnerable as a child fallen out of his crib and left to cry alone. All in ten minutes time. What was this song, who was the player? I eagerly awaited the next song, but there wasn’t one to be had. A few seemingly random brushing of the keys, a couple of phrases played over from the first performance. Key phrases that the player obviously wasn’t happy with, played over two or three times as if to cement the proper locution and control. And I’m thinking, if the notes were played any finer, any closer to the magical plateau of perfection, my heart might have been ripped from my chest. I lay in wait for the next tune, but it never came. I fought the urge to shout through the cover of vines to ask for another song, but for once in my life I showed a reasonable degree of social discretion. I somehow gleaned that having an eager audience, the player might color the tune differently, and I wanted to hear the music played by the artist, solely for the artist. I only had to wait.

 

And reward came the next afternoon. At the stoke of 2:30, just as I could begin to smell the fog on the leading edge of the westerly breeze, the notes from the mystery piano began to float through the greenery. I immediately recognized the tune as one and the same as was played the day before. Impossibly beautiful, serene and assured, and yet emotionally jolting as the scrambled thoughts from a long running fever dream. Again I was transported, brought alive, made to laugh at all the tiny vagaries of my closeted little life. How such beauty and complexity could exist close enough to almost touch and yet be invisible behind screen. I held myself aloft and listened with my whole body. Afraid to move lest I scrape the leg of the chair and momentarily block out a note or a chord. The song ran through my veins like a drug; easing, blocking, fine-tuning and rearranging the way the afternoon looked to me. But in all too short a time it was over. And like the day before, a brief five minutes of brushing over a few lines, repeating a run or two until it felt right and then silence.

 

And so my days took on a modest form. Mornings were spent rustling about the small house that felt too large by half-again. I was on the verge of becoming one of those types who hold long, detailed conversations with themselves while making the morning coffee and it made me laugh to think where that might lead. But I guess the fact that I could still laugh at myself was a sign that I wasn’t completely gone around the bend with the neurosis of my isolation. The house seemed uninhabited, even by myself, as I bounced around the four walls, changing seats with each section of the daily newspaper. It seemed so right somehow to read about all the amazing things going on to real people out in the real world. I knew I’d have to join them again someday, but for now I was comfortable only in my own company, however thin that shield may have been.

 

Around 1:00 or so each afternoon, I would make myself a modest lunch and sit out on the porch with a book, waiting for the music to appear. It never began before 2:30, nor later than 3:00. The piece of music never changed, and after a month or so of hearing the one piece and nothing else from their fingers, I gave up on the idea that the pianist was rehearsing for a particular performance. Obviously, someone with such a great degree of skill at their instrument must be capable of playing dozens, if not hundreds of pieces. But the one was all I ever got to hear.

 

Of course I was intensely curious about the player and kept an eye, in passing, on the equally small, red trimmed house. At first, I hoped that the player would be a youngish woman with long braided, yellow hair and flowing skirts who would, seeing me emerge from my house on my daily errands, ask me in for a cup of coffee. Or, if I was exceptionally lucky, a glass of wine over which we would fall deeply in love with each other; living happily ever after within the folds of her music and the mythic poems I would write in her honor.

 

Yeah, right. All I saw when walking past the house or looking out my front window, was an old man, bent and white with age, working his way down the front steps and out of his yard. He left first thing in the morning and returned promptly at 12:25 each day. I can’t recall ever seeing him leave the house at night or in the late afternoon, but then I’m not a detective and I’m sure he had more to his life than one trip out into the world each day.

 

As I said, he was small and gray and stiff. Nothing in his appearance spoke to the depth of emotion that rang forth from his piano each afternoon. I held out hope for a short while that his granddaughter, she of the yellow hair and hippie skirts was slipping in and out of the house when I wasn’t around. But before long I realized that I was glad that there was no beautiful young woman. Glad that the maker of the music didn’t have any physical impact on me. In a small way I was already in love with the very fact of the old man’s existence. Cloaking the desirability of the music within the folds of sex, or any of the other land mine of human relations would strip it of much of its power.

 

One day, against many quietly voiced protests, I found myself walking up the path to his door. I had decided that I needed/wanted to hear the music with less of a barrier. I also wanted to know the name of the tune that had added such a firm structure to my life. I’d gone on one or two occasions to a couple of the more esoteric vinyl record stores in Berkeley hoping somehow to find a recording of a song that I didn’t know the name of by a composer or performer that I didn’t have a clue to. I queried a couple of clerks, even going so far as to try and hum the tune. I’m sure the clerks remembered me after I left, probably told a few good stories that night over dinner or happy hour about the loony who came into their shop that afternoon. But to their credit they were mostly kind and helpful and didn’t treat me like the obviously crazed person I was. But then, Berkeley is a town built upon the shoulders of the obsessive and the slightly demented and I wasn’t all that different than a good many of the people roaming its streets. So finally, instead of living in ignorance, I decided to just go up, knock on his door and ask him about the song. What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe he wouldn’t even speak English. In which case I could pretend to be a political activist and get him to sign a petition or something. I certainly looked the type. And its always a good idea to have a plan ‘A’ at the ready.

 

Up his path I walked. Past the neatly pruned rose bushes and up the cracked paint steps to his door. I could hear the sound of my three knocks echo quickly through his house. There was a short wait of silence, then I heard muffled steps, slowly working their way toward the front of the house.

 

Of course I noticed his hands first. The fingers were long and slender and anchored to an almost brutishly strong palm. While the rest of his body was quite old and withered, his hands remained youthful and strong. It was as if all the energy he could conjure up was directed to the flow and grace of his fingertips. Even holding his balance against the door frame, there was a certain grace and ease with which his fingers moved and shifted to hold him perfectly still and erect. It was as if he was playing a silent sonata against the rough wood. He stood propped up against one side of the doorway looking out at me expectantly. And suddenly, I had nothing much to say. “I’m, uh, your neighbor, Phil,” is all I could manage to produce. Its not that I’m shy or often tongue-tied around people. I have reclusive tendencies but I’m a relatively garrulous recluse when the mood strikes me.

 

“Of course you are,” he said. “Please come in. I’ve seen you many times in front of your house. Phil, hmm. What kind of name is that? English, perhaps? Please, do come in.”

 

I was led into a small dark room and motioned to a settee. Well, a couch really. But there was a certain dignity about the old man and the old, one might be tempted to say lacquered look of the furniture and decorations in the house, that I felt that he must call his couch a settee. Or perhaps, a divan. I sat down and he excused himself for a moment and went off to his kitchen to get us a cup of tea. I resisted the urge to go and inspect his bookshelves. A habit I freely indulge in when I first come in to most peoples houses. But here I felt it might be seen as impolite. Sooner than I would have thought the old guy must have had a pot already on the stove, he was back with a tall blue porcelain carafe and a service, perfectly outfitted for two. For one split second, I was transported into a Somerset Maugham novel, my favorite literary fantasy. A glance down at my unwashed jeans and dusty tennis shoes pulled me out of high tea on the French Riviera at Maugham’s and back to this tiny, slightly stuffy living room in south Berkeley.

 

“I’m sorry. My manners, what can I be thinking,” he said, pouring out a cup to the brim with dark brown tea and aiming it my direction. His whole body slightly trembling with effort to bend, but his hand steady and true. I involuntarily reached up to take the cup, watching him step shakily to me, but he held up his other hand. “No, it is quite all right, young man. My body is old and it shakes, but my hands, God be blessed, when given a task still remain firm and resolute.”

 

He took up his own cup and sat back in a stiff-backed chair he had drawn up next to the couch, took a sip and smiled at me.

 

“I am Alexander Rokusek. And you, Phil, are my neighbor these three months and now you come to see me. Call me Sasha, please. It would make me more comfortable. ” He saw my eyes start when he mentioned how long I’d been living in my bungalow “Yes, three months. You are surprised? An old man has little to do with his time except to spy upon his street. Of course I see you when you go out and about your business. I hope you will forgive this small hobby of mine, watching the world rush by in all its whirlwind of activity. An old man has very little else to fill his days. So I watch…and I speculate.

 

“And you play the piano. I’ve heard you play the piano, when I sit on my porch in the afternoons. I wanted to ask you, I wanted to know.”

 

“You want to learn piano? Oh, I don’t think so, I no longer teach. I no longer have the patience for it. It’s funny, Phil. One always thinks that old age brings wisdom and patience. That’s what you think, isn’t it. But I will tell you, the older I get the less time I feel I have to spare for that which does not directly affect me. And I have so much myself left to learn of the piano in the days I have left on this earth that it would feel to me a crime to spend any time teaching another. So please forgive me, do not think me to be impolite if I choose not to teach you of the piano.”

 

“No, Sasha. I don’t want to learn to play the piano. I’ve no desire to play, just to listen. I’m curious about the song I hear you play every day. What is it called?”

 

“The song you hear me play? It is a simple piece. And I work on it most every day. It is coming along. Yes it is coming.”

 

“But it is so beautiful, Sasha. And you play it perfectly every day. If you’ll forgive me for being perhaps a bit more poetic than is necessary, I don’t think I could live without hearing you play that song every day.”

 

“Poetry is good for the soul, Phil. It will keep you alive on this Earth longer than any other Medicine. So promise me that you will never apologize for being or feeling poetic. But perfect? Do not take offense, Phil, but what could you know of perfection. It does not exist within a piece of music. And the piece of music you speak of, this song, is a long way from being mastered by me. Sometimes I am afraid that I will die while it is still my master and not the other way around.”

 

“But why do you play only the one song? And why only once a day? You must know hundreds of other pieces of music.”

 

“Yes, Phil. I know many pieces of music. There is much beauty in the world. Perhaps if I tell you a story you will understand why I play my song every day in an attempt to play it to the furthest reach of my meager abilities. Do not worry, Phil. It will be short story. It will be finished before your tea is cold. Oh, my manners again. Your cup.” Sasha reached over the small glass table between us and slowly and laboriously re-filled my cup with the dark, bitter tea, without losing a drop.

 

“There. You are comfortable? Yes, okay. My story? Many years ago, Philip. You are a Philip, not a Phil are you not? You are to an age where Philip might begin to fit you better. So if you don’t mind, I will call you that. Yes, many years ago I lived in a town in the country where I was born. Havrnck was a small village in a small green valley in the south of Czechoslovakia. Our town was small and our fields were small but the land in Bohemia is lush and our town was well supported We were able to have a small school of our own, two churches and even a music teacher. I fell naturally toward music, and if I am not being too immodest, it quickly fell into me. I was forever sneaking to it whenever the work of the fields and my schoolwork could be put aside. Sundays were the finest because with the exception of the harvest time, no one was compelled to work on a Sunday and my parents being religious but not without feeling felt that my wanting to sit at the piano from sunrise to sunset on even the most beautiful Sundays was an act of faith as strong as any they had seen within the wall of the town’s church. They held out hopes that I might one day win a scholarship to the conservatory in Prague. I secretly wanted to go to Vienna when I reached an age but I kept this to myself. I knew my teacher’s feelings about Dvorak and about the love he had for the music of our country. The music that made us all feel the heat of our patriotism. And I knew that that was the music he would want me to study. So life went. Work, study music.

 

“Now, Philip, you are not to think that we were like your American hillbillies, cut-off from the world in our little valley. We had a radio and we knew what went on in the world. So it came as no surprise when one fine, blustery Fall afternoon, just as the village was stirring back to life after taking its noon meal, the Germans marched into our valley and into our village, all shiny leather and curled lip arrogance. I remember it as if it was yesterday.

 

“Being fifteen and fit, I had taken to the fields and woods with the other boys and young men. We had it in our minds to fight and kill a German or two, but in reality, all we wanted to do was stay out of their way and thus avoid being a mourned corpse before our next birthday. We had heard all the stories flying from one town to the next of German atrocities. Were we cowards to leave our families, our sisters and mothers and sometimes our aging fathers behind? No! We were Czech and strong. But we knew that the Germans only wanted to kill the young boys and young men. The ones that might hold up a long barreled rifle against them or cut their throat while they slept drunkenly as all Germans do after drinking our sweet Bohemian wine. So when the Germans marched into town we watched from the woods with hatred at what they might do in our absence.

 

“The German army is nothing if not efficient. They marched straight into the center of town, went from building to building, house to house and pulled everyone out into the town square. Old, young, sick and frail. It made no matter. All were bullied out into the crisp Fall day that now had lost most of its sweetness. They were angry, of course when they saw that there were no boys over the age of eight or men under forty to be found. Angry but not surprised. They knew just what was happening. They were well trained and this was not their first Czech village.

 

“A group of officers sat down to wait, taking over the largest table on the outdoor court of the village cafe. Laughing and ordering the serving girl, Marta was her name, I remember it all, to bring them the best wine and cheeses and whatever bits of pate and cold meat she could find. They told her to save her Czech beer, so they might use it later to bathe in. Ah, to be home in the biergartens of Munchen drinking real German beer. That is what they wanted. Not to be forced to subsist on this piss-water Czech beer, which is all they’d been able to find since the beginning of this campaign. In no time they were half drunk, chairs pushed back and boots muddied from tromping across our fields lounged atop the tables, soiling the fine embroidered linen Marta spread out so evenly every morning. She did her best to wear a smile and serve them as quickly as she could, pretending not to mind their clutches and thinly cloaked suggestions as to what other things they would like served to them. She was badly frightened by what they might do if they felt even the smallest slight come from her or anyone else in the village. We had all heard the stories of how any kind of resistance was met. So as soon as she could, she said that she needed to fetch more wine and sent her aging grandfather Helmek, out to bring them more cheese. Fortunately for her, and for Helmek, the soldiers were getting too drunk to care one way or another for a lowly Czech serving girl. Preferring to boast and thump their chests and talk loudly of the strength of the Aryan race and to laugh their rough horse laughs at the feeble resistance put up by the Czech army and partisans. How they wished that there had been more fight in the Czechs so they could have shown what the German army was really capable of. ‘Wine. More wine, schnell, schnell.’ The bastards were running poor Helmek ragged. He was not so young in those days, though I could see by the look in his eyes that he remembered the man he was thirty years back and wished even half his strength back so he could club their thin German heads together. ‘Music, we want music. Hey old man, don’t turn your dirty Czech back on me when I’m talking to you.’ The biggest and drunkest of the officers shoved back is chair so hard it fell into another table and crashed to the ground. ‘Hey, you. Old dog, come back here. I’m talking to you. I told you I wanted to hear some music.’ Helmek kept walking away toward the kitchen, while the other soldiers began to laugh and taunt the big soldier, who by now had adopted a glower and a flexed knee stance as if he was waiting for a fight to begin. The soldier pulled out his Luger and fired two shots into the air. ‘Can’t you hear me old man. I want to hear some music.’ By now his friends were near doubled up with laughter at this unexpected carnival. Some of them were shouting for the big drunk to sing, since he couldn’t get the waiter to provide any music. Bets were being taken on whether he would sound more like an ox or a sheep. Marta cowered in the kitchen and Helmek kept walking. I could see this all from behind a hedgerow not fifty paces from the cafe. I wanted to run out and throttle the bastards. But what could I do, I ask you? Nothing, that’s all. I stayed hidden and hoped that nothing bad would happen. Helmek passed through the rope-hinged door to the kitchen leaving the red-faced officer standing in the middle of the cafe patio, a gun in his hand and his fellow officers burying him in hard laughter.

 

“A short minute later Helmek came back out through the door with three bottles of wine. ‘Oh, you’re back already,’ the drunken soldier started in. ‘And what’s with this wine? I told you I wanted to hear some music. What’s wrong with you, are you mocking me, are you, you Czech pig?’ Helmek tried to slide past him with the wine and said, ‘I’m sorry, I thought you said you wanted more wine. I must have heard you wrong.’ The soldier swept a bottle out of Helmek’s hand as he moved quickly past, and leveled the gun at the back of his head. ‘Maybe you can hear this the better old man?’ And he shot him dead. Right there in the middle of the cafe. I had never seen anything more cold-blooded or horrible in my life. But this was only 1938 And What did anybody yet know of horror in 1938 I ask you? The big drunken soldier bulled his way through the kitchen door and dragged poor Marta out. She saw her Grandfather laying in a pool of blood and brains and began to cry and shake. ‘Now you, Czech bitch. By God you’ll get me some music. Do you want to end up like this old dog?’ Marta just began to cry harder. The soldier gripped her roughly and shoved her back up against a heavy wooden table. ‘I’ll have some music out of you one way or another, you bitch.’ And he proceeded to push her until she was laying flat on her back across the table. To a tremendous cheer from his compatriots, he pulled her skirt up high, exposing her for all to see. The poor girl, she tried to kick and fight but he slapped her twice hard right across the face and she went back down, stunned senseless. He began to rub up against her, roughly kissing her tear-streaked face. ‘Sing for me, Czech songbird. Sing loud enough for your whole town to hear.’ Marta, regaining some of herself raged against the drunken lout and tried to push him off. It was then that we all heard the notes of a piano begin to sound. It was my music teacher. Not quite young and swift enough to hide with us in the forest, nor old enough to safely be seen in town, though all the good it did poor Helmek, I can’t say– he had remained hidden in his cellar to watch alone. But poor Helmek’s fate and Marta’s predicament had drawn more out of him than he had been known to possess. He was sitting at the battered old upright piano that was used mostly for folk songs and drinking songs on Saturday night at the cafe. A piano vastly unworthy of his skill and very much unused to producing the depth of emotion than came from his fingers at this moment. He began to play clearly and strongly and with no lack of patience, a passage from Dvorak’s Symphony #9, The New World Symphony, arranged in the spur of the moment by himself; all the sweeping strings, darkly quiet fissures and thundering brass coming flowing out of the old upright piano like a Spring river swollen with the melt of Winter’s snow. My teacher’s head was thrown back, eyes closed and he played with the blank faced concentration of a man who might never stop, so deeply was he lost in the music. The seated officer’s laughter stopped as if it had run up against a brick wall and the animal holding down Marta twisted his head toward the sound as if facing a pursuer.

 

“Marta, seizing her moment, pulled free from under the soldier and disappeared in a rush and a wink. ‘What is this crap you play?’ said the officer turning angrily toward the piano. ‘Play some real music for your betters. Some German songs. Play us a tune we can sing to.’ The Officer, his gun back in his hand, advanced on my teacher, who played on, ignoring everything but the swell and beauty of music. I have heard Dvorak performed many times but never have I heard him played with more force, with more immediacy than by my teacher, while threatened by a gang of murderous soldiers, on an untuned piano with many beer and wine stiffened keys.

 

“The officer buoyed by alcohol and indignation bellowed up to my teacher who played with his back to the Germans. ‘I told you to stop playing this primitive music. You Czechs only wish you were Germans, only wish your music could reach to the level of ours. Stop now or you’ll finish your song like old Grandpa over there.’ He gestured to the inert form of Helmek, who by now had run out of blood to shed and lay as if sleeping off a drunk in a spread of red flowers. When the music continued, the officer raised his gun and leveled it at the back of my teacher’s head. ‘You stupid Czechs. Must you all learn your lessons the same way?’ He glared with arrogance and disgust. Just as it appeared that my music teacher would meet the same fate as Helmek, Marta rushed back from the kitchen with a 14” meat chopping knife held in front of her like a flag. She swung it hard at the German officer’s neck, trying to kill him as one would kill a chicken. Suddenly sober, the soldier whirled and fired as if he was a dancer in a ballet. Marta dropped in a bloody heap not three steps from her Grandfather, the knife clattering harmlessly to a stop at the German officer’s feet. Still my teacher played on. Dvorak, glorious Dvorak. I felt my heart become frozen, stiffen and then break, all in one breath.

 

“A roar of motors and dust brought our scene back to a different reality. The German column was beginning again its advance. Most of the drinking party of officers pulled up to their feet and began moving out of the cafe. They had bigger fish to fry than our little town with its one cafe and two churches. The drunken officer still stood faced off with the still, bleeding Marta and dead Helmek. He seemed uncertain as to where to turn. Perhaps he was even drunker than he appeared. He lowered his gun at Marta and fired twice more, her body leaping with each intrusion. ‘She tried to kill me, you all saw that didn’t you?” he said to the other German soldiers who were still moving toward the exit. They all, to a man ignored him. He turned back toward my teacher, who finishing the movement, stepped away from the piano and looked upon the sad scene with the eyes of one who put his hand to the fates. I don’t think he wanted to die just at that moment. But I do think that he could see the future of our village, of our country and I don’t think he had any expectations beyond the walls of the cafe.

 

“The soldier began to raise his gun, which I think he thought had enough bullets to kill everyone in our town, but was forestalled by another officer. ‘Come on, Gert. Stop wasting time. If it’s killing you want there’ll be more you can stomach tonight. We are called to advance and they say that there is a group of stupid Czechs that thinks it can fight with Germans, 25 kilometers in front of us. Forget this stupid old man. He’ll get his before too long. Come on, we’re already falling behind the column. And with that he took his fellows arm and pulled him out of the cafe, leaving my teacher standing at the piano wondering where in the world his next step would lead him.

 

“That is the tune you hear me play, my new friend. I play what I can of the New World Symphony because for me this is the only piece of music that holds onto a meaning. I play it to remember. I play it for Marta and for Helmek and for my old music teacher. Though I haven’t seen him or my village since that day. The war took me many places, far and away from Havrnck. I was even in Vienna once. But for me there was no place at the most famous of the conservatories. I play this piece from my memory and try to take from it again, from my own hands, a fraction of the passion that was given to me that afternoon.”

 

I sat, looking for a long moment at my stone cold tea, still resting on the glass table top where Sasha had placed it for me. “Will you play for me now?” I started to say, but Sasha was already moved to the piano and was taking a series of deep breaths, his eyes closed to this pallid time we think of as our all encompassing world of troubles and importance.