Looking back, he couldn’t remember why he’d taken on the junkie whore, Alice. Most of Free Billy’s other girls just used grass, maybe a little coke if a john offered it or they struck lucky and managed to hold something back from G-Mack, not that he didn’t search them regularly to keep that kind of theft to a minimum. Junkies were unpredictable, and just the look of them could put the johns off. But this one, she had something, ain’t nobody could deny that. She was just on the verge. The drugs had taken some of the fat off her, leaving her with a body that was just about perfect and a face that gave her the look of one of those Ethiopian bitches, the ones that the modeling agencies liked on account of their features didn’t look so Negro, what with their slim noses and their coffee complexions. Plus she was close to Sereta, the Mexican with the touch of black to her, and that was one fine-looking woman there. Sereta and Alice were Free Billy’s girls and they made it clear to him that they came as a pair, so G-Mack had been content to live with the arrangement.
At least Alice, or LaShan as she called herself on the streets, was smart enough to realize that johns didn’t like track marks. She kept a stash of liquid vitamin E capsules among her possessions, and squeezed the contents onto her arm after she shot up to hide the evidence. He guessed she shot up in other parts of her body too, secret parts, but that was her business. All G-Mack cared about was that the marks didn’t show, and that she kept herself together while she was hooking. That was one good thing about heroin users: they got the nod for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes once the drug kicked in, but thirty minutes later they were ready to go. They could almost pass for normal then, until the drug started wearing off and they got sick again, all itchy and antsy. Mostly, Alice seemed to have her habit under that kind of control, but G-Mack still figured when he took her on that the junkie didn’t have more than a couple of months in her. He could see it in her eyes, the way the hunger was biting more deeply now, the way her hair was slowly turning white, but with her looks he could still get good money on her for a time.
And that was how it was, for a couple of weeks, but then she started holding back on him, and her looks began fading more rapidly than even he had expected as her addiction deepened. People sometimes forgot that the shit sold in New York was stronger than just about anywhere else: even heroin was about ten percent pure, as against three to five in places like Chicago, and G-Mack had heard of at least one junkie who arrived in the city from the sticks, scored within an hour of getting there, and was dead of an OD one hour after that again. Alice still had that great bone structure, but now it was just a little too obvious without a decent cushion of flesh over it, and her skin was growing increasingly sallow in complexion as the junk took its toll. She was willing to do just about anything for her supply, so he sent her out with the worst kinds, and she went to them smiling, didn’t even ask most of them if they’d put a rubber on before she went down. She ran out of vitamin E, as it cost her money that she needed for junk, so she started injecting between her toes and fingers. Soon, G-Mack realized, he would have to cut her loose, and she’d end up living on the streets, toothless and killing herself for $10 Baggies down by the Hunts Point market.
Then the old guy had come cruising in his car, his big-ass driver calling the women over as he slowed. He’d spotted Sereta, she’d offered him Alice as well, and then the two whores had climbed in the back with the withered old freak and headed off, once G-Mack had taken note of his plate. Didn’t make no sense to be taking chances. He’d talked to the driver too, just so that they were all clear on how much this was going to cost, and so the whores couldn’t lie to him about the take. The driver brought them back three hours later, and G-Mack got his money. He searched the girls’ bags and found another hundred in each. He let them keep fifty of it, told them he’d look after the rest. Seemed like the old guy liked what they’d shown him, too, because he came back again a week later: same girls, same arrangement. Sereta and Alice enjoyed it because it got them off the streets and the old man treated them nice. He fed them booze and chocolates in his place in Queens, let them fool around in his big old tub, gave them a little extra (which G-Mack very occasionally let slide; after all, he wasn’t no monster . . .).
It was all nice and easy, until the girls disappeared. They didn’t return from the old man’s like they were supposed to. G-Mack didn’t worry about them until he got back to his place, and then an hour or two later he took a call from Sereta. She was crying, and he had trouble calming her down enough to understand what had happened, but gradually she managed to tell him that some men had come to the house and started arguing with the old guy. The girls were in the upstairs bathroom, fixing their hair and reapplying their makeup before heading back to the Point. The new arrivals started shouting, asking him about a silver box. They told him they weren’t leaving without it, and then Luke, the old man’s driver, came in, and there was more shouting, followed by what sounded like a bag bursting, except Alice and Sereta had spent enough time on the streets to know a gunshot when they heard one.
After that, the men downstairs went to work on the old man, and in the course of their efforts he died. They started tearing the house apart, downstairs first. The women heard drawers being opened, pottery breaking, glass shattering. Soon the men would make their way upstairs, and then there would be no hope, but suddenly they heard the sound of a car pulling up outside. Sereta risked a glance out of the window and saw lights flashing.
“Private security,” she whispered to Alice. “They must have set off an alarm somehow.”
It was one man, alone. He shined a flashlight on the front of the house, then tried the doorbell. He returned to his vehicle and spoke into the radio. Somewhere in the dark, a telephone rang. It was now the only sound in the house. After a couple of seconds, Alice and Sereta heard the noise of the back door in the kitchen opening as the men left. When they were certain that all was okay, the women followed but not before they had wiped down the bathroom and bedroom, and retrieved the tissues and used condoms from the trash.
Now they were scared, afraid that someone might come after them, but G-Mack told them to be cool. Neither of them had ever been printed by the cops, so even if any prints were found, there was no way to link them to anything unless they got into big trouble with the law. They just needed to stay calm. He told them to come back to him, but Sereta refused. G-Mack started shouting and the bitch hung up on him. That was the last he heard of her, but he figured she’d head south, back to her own people, if she was scared. She was always threatening to do that anyhow, once she had enough money saved, even if G-Mack figured it was just the empty posturing and pipe-dreaming that most of these whores went in for at some time or another.
The death of the old man — his name was Winston — and his driver made the news, big time. He wasn’t real wealthy, not like Trump or one of those guys, but he was a pretty well known collector and dealer in antiques. The cops figured it for a robbery gone wrong until they found some cosmetics in the bathroom, left by the women in their panic to flee the house, and then they announced that they were looking for one, maybe two women, to help them with their inquiries. The cops came trawling the Point, after it emerged that old man Winston liked to take a ride around its streets looking for women. They asked G-Mack what he knew, once they tracked him down, but G-Mack told them he knew nothing about it. When the cops said that someone had seen G-Mack talking to Winston’s driver, and maybe it was his women who were with him that night, G-Mack told them that he talked to a lot of people, and sometimes their drivers, but that didn’t mean he made no deals with them. He didn’t even bother denying that he was a playa. Better to give them a little truth to hide the taste of the lie. He had already warned the other whores to keep quiet about what they knew, and they did as they were told, both out of fear of him and out of concern for their friends, because G-Mack had made it clear to them that Alice and Sereta were safe only as long as the men who did the killings didn’t know a thing about them.
But thi
s wasn’t any botched robbery, and the men involved tracked down G-Mack just as the police had done before them, except they weren’t about to be fooled by any show of innocence. G-Mack didn’t like to think about them, the fat man with the swollen neck and the smell of freshly turned earth from him, and his quiet, bored friend in blue. He didn’t like to remember how they had forced him against a wall, how the fat man had placed his fingers in G-Mack’s mouth, gripping his tongue when he uttered the first of the lies. G-Mack had almost puked then on the taste of him, but there was worse to come: the voices that G-Mack heard in his head, the nausea that came with them, the sense that the longer he allowed this man to touch him, the more corrupted and polluted he would become, until his insides began to rot from the contact. He admitted that they were his girls, but he hadn’t heard from them since that night. They were gone, he said, but they’d seen nothing. They had been upstairs the whole time. They didn’t know anything that could help the cops.
Then it had come out, and G-Mack cursed the moment he had agreed to take Sereta and her junkie bitch friend into his stable. The fat man told him that it wasn’t what they knew that concerned him.
It was what they had taken.
Winston had shown Sereta the box on the second night, happy and sated from his hours of mild pleasure, while Alice was cleaning herself up. He liked displaying his collection to the lovely dark-haired girl, smarter and more alert than her friend as she was, explaining the origins of some of the objects and pointing out little details about them. Sereta guessed that apart from the sex, he just wanted someone to talk to. She didn’t mind. He was a nice old man, generous and harmless. Maybe it wasn’t very smart of him to be trusting a pair of women he barely knew with the secrets of his treasures, but Sereta at least could be relied upon, and she was careful to watch Alice just in case her friend might be tempted to take something in the hope of fencing it later.
The box he was holding was less interesting to her than some of the other items in his possession: the jewelry, the paintings, the tiny ivory statuettes. It was a dull silver, and very plain in appearance. Winston told her that it was very old, and very valuable to those who understood what it represented. He opened it carefully. Inside, she saw a folded piece of what looked like paper.
“Not paper,” Winston corrected. “Vellum.”
Taking a clean handkerchief, he removed it and unfolded it for her. She saw words, symbols, letters, the shapes of buildings, and right in the center, the edge of what looked like a wing.
“What is it?” she said.
“It’s a map,” he said, “or part of one.”
“Where’s the rest of it?”
Winston shrugged. “Who knows? Lost, perhaps. This is one of a number of pieces. The rest have been scattered for a very long time. I once hoped that I might find them all, but now I doubt that I ever will. I have lately begun to consider selling it. I have already made some enquiries. We shall see . . .”
He replaced the fragment, then closed the box and restored it to its place on a small shelf by his dressing table.
“Shouldn’t it be in a vault or something?” she asked.
“Why?” said Winston. “If you were a thief, would you steal it?”
Sereta looked at the shelf. The box was lost amid the curios and little ornaments that seemed to fill every corner of Winston’s house.
“I was a thief, I wouldn’t even be able to find it,” she said.
Winston nodded happily, then shrugged off his robe.
“Time for one more, I think,” he said.
Viagra, thought Sereta. Sometimes that damn blue pill was a curse.
When the men offered him money for any information that might lead to the whereabouts of the whores, it didn’t take G-Mack more than a couple of moments to think about it and accept. He figured he didn’t have much choice, since the fat man had made it clear that if he tried to screw them over he would suffer for it, and someone else would be running his whores as a result. He put out some feelers, but nobody had heard from either Sereta or Alice. Sereta was the smart one, he knew. If Alice stayed close by her and did as she was told, maybe cut down on her habit and tried to get straight, they might be able to stay hidden for a long time.
And then Alice had come back. She rang the doorbell on the Island Avenue crib and asked to come up. It was late at night and only Letitia was there, because she’d come down with some kind of puking bug. Letitia was Puerto Rican, and new, but she had been warned about what to do if either Sereta or Alice made an appearance. She allowed Alice to come up, told her to lie down on one of the cots, then called G-Mack on his cell. G-Mack told her to keep Alice there, not to let her go. But when Letitia went back to the bedroom, Alice was gone, and so was Letitia’s bag, with $200 in cash. When she ran down to the street, there was no sign of the thin black girl.
G-Mack went ape shit when he got back. He hit Letitia, called her every damn name he could think of, then got in his car and trawled the streets of Brooklyn, hoping to catch sight of Alice. He guessed that she’d try to score using Letitia’s money, so he cruised the dealers, some of them known to him by name. He was almost at Kings Highway when at last he saw her. Her hands were cuffed and she was being placed in the back of a cop car.
He followed the car to the precinct house. He could bail her out himself, but if anyone connected her to what had happened to Winston, then G-Mack would be in a world of trouble, and he didn’t want that. Instead, he called the number that the fat man had given him, and told the man who answered where Alice was. The man said they’d take care of it. A day later, Boy Blue came back and paid G-Mack some money: not as much as he’d been promised but, combined with the implicit threat of harm if he complained, enough to keep him from objecting and more than sufficient to make a considerable down payment on a ride. They told him to keep his mouth shut, and he did. He assured them that she had nobody, that no one would come asking after her. He said that he knew this for sure, swore upon it, told them he knew her from way back, that her momma was dead from the virus and her poppa was a hound who got himself killed in an argument over another woman a couple of years after his daughter was born, a daughter he’d never cared to see; one of many, if the truth be told. He’d made it all up — accidentally touching on the truth about her father along the way — but it didn’t matter. He put what they gave him for her toward the Cutlass Supreme, and it now sat on chrome Jordans, number 23, in a secure garage. G-Mack was in the life now, and he had to look the part if he was going to build up his stable, although he had driven the Cutlass only on a handful of occasions, preferring to keep it carefully garaged and visiting it occasionally like he would a favorite woman. True, the cops might come asking about Alice again once they found out that she’d skipped bail, but then again they had other things to occupy them in this big, bad city without worrying about some junkie hooker who took a skip to get away from the life.
Then the black woman had come around asking questions, and G-Mack hadn’t liked the look on her face one little bit. He had grown up around women like that, and if you didn’t show them you meant business right from the start, then they’d be on you like dogs. So G-Mack had hit her, because that was how he always dealt with women who got out of line with him.
Maybe she’d go away, he thought. Maybe she’d just forget about it.
He hoped so, because if she started asking questions, and convinced some other people to ask questions too, then the men who paid him might hear about it, and G-Mack didn’t doubt for one minute that to safeguard themselves they would bind him, shoot him, and bury him in the trunk of his car, all twenty-three inches off the ground.
It was a strange situation in which Louis and I found ourselves. I wasn’t working for him, but I was working with him. For once, I wasn’t the one calling the shots, and this time what was occurring was personal to him, not to me. To salve his conscience a little — assuming, as Angel remarked, that he had a conscience to begin with — Louis was picking up the tab for whatever expen
ses arose. He was putting me up in the Parker Meridien, which was a lot nicer than the places in which I usually stayed. The elevators played vintage cartoons on little screens, and the TV in my room was bigger than some New York hotel beds I’d known. The room was a little minimalist, but I didn’t mention that to Louis. I didn’t want to seem to be carping. The hotel had a great gym, and a good Thai restaurant a couple of doors up from it. There was also a rooftop pool, with a dizzying view over Central Park.