Beat the Reaper

  My own relationship with David Locano seemed unreal. He had insisted on giving me forty thousand dollars for killing the Virzis—“Throw it out if you want,” he had said—then never mentioned the incident again, even when we were alone.

  Once, though, when I came over and Skinflick was out renting a movie, and Mrs. Locano was out doing whatever, he and I sat at the kitchen table and he asked me if I wanted another job.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I think I’m done with that line of work.”

  “This isn’t that line of work.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s just talk.”

  I didn’t stop him.

  “Paranoid Russians won’t talk on the telephone,” he went on. “I need you to go to find some guy in Brighton Beach and ask him what it is he wants to say to me.”

  “I don’t know Brighton Beach at all,” I said.

  “It’s easy,” Locano said. “Particularly if you’re not me. It’s tiny. You go down to Ocean Avenue, ask in a bar called the Shamrock, they’ll know the guy. He’s a big deal guy.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “Probably not as dangerous as driving there.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  I should back off for a moment and note that there’s a concept many criminals become obsessed with, which is the idea of turning out.

  The template for it is the classic aspiring pimp who needs to find a woman to work for him. No professional will do it, because they all have pimps already. So he picks a girl from the neighborhood, as sheltered and unworldly as possible, and courts her. Plays up a big romance, then one day tells her he’s in big trouble if he can’t get some money fast, and that a friend of his is willing to pay a hundred dollars to screw her once. After she does it, he acts disgusted with her, and beats her and degrades her, then gives her narcotics for the pain. Once she’s hooked and working steadily, i.e., has been “turned out,” he moves on to Bachelorette #2. Lovely species we belong to.

  Today the turnout can be found in any number of situations. The most literal is prison, where the idea is to progress as quickly as possible from lending your cellmate a cigarette to hiring him out to large groups in return for a double-A battery or some smack. Most instances of it are more subtle, though, and have to do with the many ways in which people enter into, or are led into, or believe they are led into, lives of criminality.

  I knew all this. I’d read Daddy Cool. I knew that what David Locano was doing was turning me out. And that even if the job I’d just accepted didn’t require violence, taking it meant I was willing to get violent later on.

  I just allowed myself to ignore those things.

  I drove to Coney on a sunny Saturday. Put one of my silver, wood-handled .45’s, unsilenced, in the inside pocket of my anorak and took my grandparents’ Nissan across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan then over the Manhattan Bridge out of it. Took the highway all the way down through Brooklyn. I was able to park at the Aquarium, midway along the Island, just by dropping David Locano’s name. They didn’t even check a list.

  I’d been to the Aquarium as a kid, and also west along the boardwalk to the old amusement park. Eastwards, into Brighton, was a mystery.

  It was jammed. Gangster-looking young blond guys in fluorescent sweat suits so bright they stung your eyes, and old people on the benches with bathing suits and socks on, with towels over their shoulders even though they were two hundred yards from the water. Also huge families of Hispanic people dressed for summer and Orthodox Jews dressed for winter. Everywhere you looked someone was beating a child.

  The beach curved away as I entered Little Odessa. The buildings looked like sets from a tenement movie. Elevated subway tracks above Ocean Avenue, and in the shadows down below ancient storefronts with either their original signs or new wooden ones in Cyrillic. I found the Shamrock within a couple blocks. It had a neon sign of a clover leaf, with the power off. I went in.

  The Shamrock had a cedar bar, splintered floor, and barfed-up beer smell that were probably from back when it was actually Irish, but it was better lit than you’d expect, and the small square tables had laminated red gingham tablecloths. Two tables were taken, one by a man and a woman and one by two men.

  The bar started by the door. Leaning against the wall behind it there was a young blond woman who didn’t look much older than I was. She had dark circles under her eyes and a thinness like maybe she’d missed out on a few key years of nutrition back in the Old Country.

  Her English was good, though.

  “If you want food you can sit at a table.”

  “Just a club soda,” I told her. “I’m looking for Nick Dzelany.”

  She came off the wall, toward me. “Who?”

  “Nick Dzelany,” I said, this time accentuating the “D.” I felt myself blushing. “Dzelany” is hard enough to say when you think you’re doing it right.

  “I don’t know him,” she said. After a moment: “Do you still want a club soda?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Is there another bar around here called the Shamrock?”

  “I don’t know.”

  When she brought my drink, in a ridiculously narrow glass, I said, “Is there anyone you can ask?”

  “Ask about what?”

  “Nick Dzelany.” I said it loud enough to be heard at the tables, in case those people knew him. “I was told people here knew him.”

  The bartender seemed to think, then she went and got a pen off the register. She brought it back with a napkin. “Spell, please.”

  I did. I was pretty sure I got it how David Locano had showed it to me, but I wasn’t completely sure, and I was getting less sure by the moment. Maybe Locano had gotten it wrong himself.

  She took the name over to a phone at the far end of the bar and made a call. It went on for minutes, in Russian. At one point she got strident, then apologetic. Not once did she look at me.

  She came back over. “Okay, I found out who he is. I am supposed to take you. Even though I am working.”

  “Sorry,” I said. I got off the stool. “What do I owe you?”

  “Four fifty.”

  Whatever. It was Virzi money. I left a ten. The bartender didn’t look at it, just lifted the gateway and came around the bar.

  “This way,” she said, leading me toward the back.

  We passed through a tiny kitchen where a fat blond woman was sitting on an upside-down plastic bucket, smoking and reading a hardcover book in Cyrillic. She didn’t look up. The bartender undid the three locks on the door on the other side and led me out into the alley.

  Almost immediately she tripped on a pothole and went down, squealing and grabbing her ankle. I went down with her, catching her. Thinking, but not fast enough.

  There was a noise behind me, and something tore into the back of my head. I managed to twist as I tripped forward over the bartender, and jammed myself to a stop on one leg.

  But there were three guys facing me, and one was already hitting me again with brass knuckles.

  I blacked out so fast I barely felt the hit of the opposite wall.

  I blinked awake and my eyes filled with water even though I had tunnel vision. I felt like I was suspended face down by my arms and legs. I was incredibly thirsty. I also felt like there was someone standing on my head, trying to kick the back of my skull off.

  The only parts that turned out to be true were the headache and the thirst. As I blew snot out my nose and squeezed my eyes clear, I could see I was on the ground floor of a burned out building, with the whole wall in front of me blasted away. I was overlooking a wasteland of dunes of loose bricks and broken concrete, hot in the light from the blue sky.

  And I wasn’t suspended, though my upper body was hanging forward. I was in a wooden chair, with my arms and legs bound with gaffer’s tape.

  I heard some words in Russian, and someone smacked me in the torn up mess at the back of my skull. Stupid pain—stupid because I knew it was just surface, but it made me cry out any
way—ran down to my right ankle and also around my head into my right eye socket. There were more words in Russian.

  They stepped into my field of view. The three guys from the alley—one still holding the brass knuckles with bits of my scalp on it—plus a new guy.

  The new guy in particular had that look of foreignness that makes you wonder whether your face gets changed by speaking a different language, or by drinking water with too much cadmium in it or something. He had a pointy chin and a broad, high forehead, so that his face was a downward-pointing triangle.*

  When my eyes adjusted to his blocking out the light I could see that his face also had deep lines in it for an otherwise young-looking guy. It was part of a generalized runtiness.

  “Hello to you,” he said. “Are you looking for me?”

  I leaned back to look up at him. The chair creaked and shifted beneath my weight, and I suddenly felt a whole lot better.

  “I was looking for a guy named Nick Dzelany,” I said.

  “I am that guy.”

  “Is there something you wanted to tell David Locano?”

  “David Locano?”

  “Yes.”

  Dzelany looked around at the others and laughed.

  “Tell him to go fuck himself,” he said to me. “Actually, I’ll tell him myself, by sending him your head. That’s something I like to do. Did he tell you that?”

  “No, he didn’t.” Nor had I noticed, somehow, until that moment, that Dzelany was holding a machete. Slapping its blade against his thigh. He slowly raised it and put the flat of it against the side of my neck.

  This is what happened next:

  I thought, I should do something.

  I felt the thought race down my spine. I tried to pull it back. I wasn’t ready. Then I realized that it was too late to pull it back, and that trying to pull it back would just fuck it up. So I went with it.

  I stood up out of the chair, fragmenting it by jamming my arms forward and my legs backward. Dzelany was right in front of me, the top of his head just below my sternum. I triple-slapped him.

  The triple-slap is from that lovely martial art called kempo. You bring your hands together like you’re clapping, but with the right slightly higher than the left, and slightly faster. So that an instant after you slap Dzelany on one cheek with your right hand, you slap him on the other cheek with your left. Then you bring your right hand back across, slapping him again with the back of it. The speed of the three strikes is disorienting: it’s too much to think about, like when you hold all four legs of a chair out toward a lion and its brain shuts down.

  I didn’t really triple-slap Dzelany, though. After I’d slapped him twice I back-handed him not with my open right hand, against his cheek, but with my closed right fist, against his temple. Never do this. It’s guaranteed to take someone down, and might even kill him. It got Dzelany right out of my way.

  So I jumped straight forward, toward the man with the brass knuckles. I was still in a hammering mood, and brought my right fist down toward his face.

  He flinched back, but that’s the beauty of a hammering strike: if your target tries to get out of range, your fist (or foot, or whatever) keeps going forward as well as down, so you still eventually hit something. In this case it was the guy’s right collarbone, which didn’t even bend, just spat its middle third downwards into his chest, collapsing him.

  Strategically I could have done this better, since there was now someone to my left and someone else to my right, and neither one of them was all that close. But the mere fact that there were two of them was an advantage. People who aren’t trained in coordinated combat almost always fight worse when they’re in a group, because they tend to stand back and wait for their friend to do the hard part.

  I turned to the one on my left. Jumped backwards away from him over the wreckage of the chair and horse-kicked the guy behind me in the solar plexus,* aiming for the wall two feet past him.

  The guy I was still facing started to pull a gun, and got it out of his leather blazer just as I jammed my forearm, with the arm of the chair still taped to it, into his throat, carrying both of us to the wall behind him. When I let him go, he fell to his knees and made some awful noises, but not for very long.

  I picked up his gun, a fancy Glock, and, after I realized it didn’t have a safety, shot each one of those four assholes in the head. I took their wallets so I’d know who they were, and as I was searching them I found my .45 on the guy with the brass knuckles. Which figured. Nothing that ugly stays lost.

  It took me longer to get the tape and wood off of me than it had to triple the number of people I’d killed.

  At four PM I rang the doorbell of the Locanos. Mrs. Locano answered it and screamed. I knew why from looking in the rearview mirror as I’d driven there, after I’d walked back to the Aquarium from the Flatbush Flatlands, staying off the boardwalk. I looked like I’d been ax-murdered.

  “Oh my God, Pietro! Come in!”

  “I don’t want to get blood on anything.”

  “Who cares about that!”

  David Locano came into sight. “Jesus, buddy!” he said. “What happened?”

  Together they helped me into the house, which I appreciated because it kept me from touching the walls.

  “What happened?” Locano repeated.

  I looked at Mrs. Locano.

  Locano said, “Honey, excuse us.”

  “I’m going to call an ambulance,” she said.

  “Don’t,” Locano and I said together.

  “He needs a doctor!”

  “I’ll get Dr. Campbell to come to the house. Go get some stuff set up in the bedroom.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “I don’t know, honey. Towels and shit. Please.”

  She left. David Locano pulled over a chair from a wooden desk they kept mail on in the hallway, so I wouldn’t have to sit on the living room furniture.

  He crouched beside me and whispered. “What the hell happened?”

  “I asked for Dzelany. They set me up. Three guys plus him. I got their wallets.”

  “You got their—?”

  “I killed them.”

  Locano looked at me a moment, then hugged me gingerly.

  “Pietro, I am so sorry. I am so sorry.” He backed off to look me in the eye. “But you did good.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I promise you’ll get paid for this.”

  “I don’t care about that.”

  “You did good,” he said. “Jesus. I think you might be really fucking good at this.”

  This was an interesting moment in my life. The moment when I should have said, “I’m out of here,” or “I’m scared shitless,” and “I’m never doing that again.” But when I chose to instead express my pathetic need for the Locanos, and my rapid-onset addiction to bloodshed.

  “Never lie to me again,” I said.

  “I didn’t—” Locano said.

  “Fuck you. And if you do, and I end up killing an innocent, I’m coming after you next.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  We were already negotiating.

  7

  At seven forty-two AM I fall asleep in my armchair again and my head hits the wall. Proving, interestingly, that no amount of stress on earth can keep you awake through Attending Rounds.

  Attending Rounds is when a large group of people convenes in one of the ward lounges and goes through the patient list to “make sure we’re on the same page” and satisfy the legal requirement that someone actually qualified to be making patient-care decisions at least hears about these decisions after they’ve been made.

  This person is the Attending Physician, a real-world doctor who comes in and supervises the ward for one hour a day for one month each year, in return for which he gets to call himself a professor at a prestigious New York medical school that, as far as I can tell, has no other connection with Manhattan Catholic whatsoever. In keeping with the clarity goals of healthcare terminology, the Attending is th
e person present on the ward least.

  This particular Attending is one I know. He’s sixty. He always has superbly expensive-looking shoes, but what has truly earned him my admiration is that his usual answer to my asking him how he’s doing in the morning is “Terrific. I’m on the nine a.m. back to Bridgeport.”

  Right now he’s supporting his head with one hand, which his jowls overhang like the corners of a tablecloth. He has his eyes closed.

  The other people in the room are: an intern who’s one of the counterparts to Akfal and me but for the ward at the other end of the building (she’s a young Chinese woman named Zhing Zhing, who sometimes gets so depressed she needs you to unbend her limbs for her), our combined four medical students, and our Chief Resident. We have the lounge to ourselves, because we kicked out the herd of bathrobed patients who were watching TV in the hopes of dying somewhere outside of their hospital beds. Sorry, folks. There’s always the hall.

  But Jesus fucking Christ am I tired.

  One of the medical students—not even one of mine, one of Zhing Zhing’s—is reading an incredibly long list of obscure liver function test results, verbatim. These tests should not have been ordered in the first place. The patient has heart failure. And since they’ve all come back normal, you would think the med student would at least spare us having to hear them.

  And yet, no one screams.

  I have a waking hallucination that there’s moss growing up one of the walls, then I feel myself falling asleep again. So I try the trick where you keep one eye open—the one the Chief Resident can see—and hope that means half my brain is getting some rest. My head bangs off the wall again. I must have drifted off.

  Now it’s seven forty-four.

  “Are we boring you, Dr. Brown?” the Chief Resident asks.

  The Chief Resident has finished her residency but has chosen to stay on at ManCat for an extra year, in a manifestation of what I believe is still called “Stockholm Syndrome.” She’s wearing a fairly hot skirt suit under her white coat, but also her usual facial expression, which would go well with her saying “You took a shit on my shoes?”

  “No more than usual,” I say, trying to rub my face into wakefulness. I notice there actually is moss growing up one of the walls, though my double vision is exaggerating it.