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  Sandy was waiting for me on the porch with a glass of wine in her hand. She had turned the house lights off and lit about a dozen candles all over the porch. I told her I was sorry and she just looked at me through her tears and said she understood. I hugged and kissed her, she poured me a glass of wine. I explained how I couldn’t tell her I was an agent, but from now on I would never keep anything from her. She smiled sadly. I finished my glass of wine and told her I would spend the night with her. She answered strangely, “You don’t have to. I know you were just doing your job.” I hugged and kissed her again. “No,” I whispered. “Can’t you feel how I feel?” She smiled, holding me against her soft, long, blonde hair.

  Just then, a bolt of lightning hit me. It came from the dark sky, lighting up the woods. I was knocked off the porch and onto the wet lawn. As I tried to get to my feet, I could see Sandy standing in the candlelight, smiling. Then she stopped smiling and her words pounded in my ears so loud it hurt. “He was my brother. He protected me. He was all I had. You came here to kill him, you son of a bitch.” She mocked me, “Can’t you feel how I feel?”

  The lightning struck me again. I fell down holding my ears and pushing my face into the muddy grass. The thunder was deafening. I got to my knees and raised my hands for Sandy to help me. Something very terrifying was happening to me. She just stood there with the wine glass in her hand, laughing. Her laughter sounded as loud as the thunder and I staggered away, stumbling and falling, trying to get to the car. The laughter and the thunder came after me again. I fell onto the driveway, holding my ears. I crawled to the car and managed to open the door and climb inside.

  I started the engine and began to drive away. Once again, the thunder shattered my ears. I tried to cover my head and steer at the same time down the winding dirt road. My right foot froze on the gas pedal. I could turn the steering wheel but I couldn’t take my foot off the accelerator; my foot was frozen. I knew if I didn’t find some way to remove my foot from the accelerator, I would crash. I used every ounce of energy in my body to move my foot while trying desperately to stay on the road, but it wouldn’t budge. I started to scream and cry. I couldn’t stop the car. I lost control. With horror, I watched the car slide into a tree.

  After the crash I was on my back lying across the car seat. I could feel blood coming from my nose and a tingling all over my body, but I was still alive. I began to have a strange sensation in my foot – the one that had been frozen to the accelerator. I looked down and saw it was beginning to swell inside my boot. I ripped my boot and sock off to relieve the pressure but my foot continued to swell and tingle even more. Soon it became as large as a basketball and was still growing fast. I raised my foot, smashing it against the ceiling of the car. Now it was as big as a huge balloon, more than three feet across! It started to push me down into the seat. My own foot was crushing me between the seat and the car roof. I reached in my pocket and pulled out my knife. The only way I could save myself was to cut the huge balloon that used to be my foot. I slashed at my ankle. Blood spilled out on my hand and made the knife slippery.

  I woke up in the hospital and remembered everything … Silkey and Dewey dragging me out of the car. I was screaming and fighting them, trying to cut my foot off. Now I laid in bed with my leg in a cast. Silkey just looked at me and said, “We’ve got the cunt. Don’t worry.”

  “I don’t want anything to happen to her, let her go. It wasn’t her fault.”

  Dewey looked at me and said, “She gave you LSD. What do you mean, it wasn’t her fault? Get real, she tried to kill you! I say we take her back to the City with us, give her to Michael. He’ll find fun things for her to do, she’s got a great body.”

  My eyes were getting warm and blurry. I pleaded, “No, please don’t give her to Michael, please let her go.” I turned away so they couldn’t see my face.

  RECOVERY

  Dewey wrote the case report. It said that an unknown person slipped LSD in my drink and that I crashed the car while avoiding a deer crossing the road. I spent the next two weeks at home, playing with Mark and trying to salvage my relationship with Daisy. The doctors had tied the ligaments and muscle back together in my foot so well there was only one long scar along with a dozen small stab wounds that were stitched closed. Daisy couldn’t understand how I got so many cuts on my foot from a car crash. I could never tell her the truth.

  No one was really sure what the long-term effects of LSD might be, so, for a while, people at the office treated me with caution. Pike and Michael and the others downplayed it and said I would be all right, but I wouldn’t be assigned any cases.

  It was my four-year-old son who first noticed the change in me. Mark looked at me, blinked and pointed to my eyes, then he laughed. If you try hard enough you can force your eyelids open wider, giving your face a surprised or bewildered look. My eyes were open wider than usual. I stared into the mirror at least ten times a day to see if I looked better, wondering if there was really anything wrong with me at all.

  Every day my anxiety grew over my wide-eyed condition. I began to think it was getting worse. I still had the cocaine from Eric so I began snorting it in secret to calm me down and cure my condition. Twice a day I would stare into my son’s face to see if he would laugh at me. When he laughed I would snort more coke. Daisy was pleased that I was spending more time with Mark.

  Despite my emotional problems that were growing worse every day, I began to come into the office a couple days a week to talk to other agents and do research. I got to know Del Ridley and Jerry Ramirez better. They began work at the Bureau the same day I did, but worked smaller cases. Ridley was religious and married to Sarah, a beautiful fashion model. He hated the way the Bureau operated, especially the case reports and money. Jerry Ramirez was Puerto Rican and had two children. He had been a Customs agent. Since he spoke Spanish, Jerry was needed undercover and was doing very well, although most of his cases involved small-time Puerto Rican dealers.

  I also became friends with agent Tony Roma, “Tony Roma from Roma,” who had transferred from the Rome office. He had worked undercover for years in Italy, supplying information on the Mafia and shipments of drugs coming in to the U.S. He was shy and very quiet. I learned from Michael that Tony’s cover was blown in Italy and he had to come to the U.S. for protection. The Italian Mafia had tortured and killed his teenaged brother in Rome. He never really got over it so he just put in his time at the office and left at 5:00. Tony Roma had no future and could not face his past.

  Agent Roma told me how heroin comes into the United States. Poppies are grown in Turkey and the “Golden Triangle” in Asia, then converted into morphine and shipped to Marseilles, where secret laboratories convert it into heroin. Then it is shipped to Italy, distributed to Mafia crime families, and smuggled into the United States through New York. The Bureau was the only agency that was brave enough to fight the Mafia. However, the Mafia would not retaliate against the agents as long as they made small cases. Roma said that Michael and Dewey didn’t play their game and they were already dead. It was just a matter of time. I remember that Louis Turko had said revenge was coming when Dewey tweaked his nose, the night Charles Stuckey got shot. Roma told me that Turko had made bail and was back on the street. The federal judge who let him out was Carl Wineburg. Michael suspected Wineburg of having Mafia connections through the unions, who supported his political friends who got him the judgeship.

  I liked to sit with Tony Roma while he ate his lunch and listen to his stories of adventurous cases. He ate the same thing every day, first carving slices from a dark purple sausage roll, then from a hard cheese block, and taking small sips of wine from a peanut-butter jar.

  One day Pike saw him and said there was no drinking allowed on the job and made him stop. Since agents drank all the time while working undercover or on surveillance Dewey saw the whole scene as ridiculous and went around the office, telling the other agents, “Hey, Pike says no drinking on the job,” getting a laugh everywhere he went.

 
As the days passed, coke and liquor seemed to help me recover, although I would still get a laugh from Mark when I stared at him with my wide bulging eyes. But oddly, no one else seemed to notice this physical change in me. Daisy thought I was drunk all the time, but she didn’t say anything. She knew what I was going through and believed I would pull myself out of it. Michael was also concerned because he spent more time with me in the evenings than ever before. He didn’t like to drive, so at the end of the evening I would drop him off at odd places, sometimes at a penthouse on Park Avenue, or a dark, deserted street in Harlem. One night, after we had about ten drinks, I was so drunk I could hardly drive. I had to snort cocaine to sober up. Michael told me to drop him off at an upscale apartment building by the United Nations. At first the doorman stopped him, but then backed away like he was afraid. Michael didn’t carry a gun, yet I never worried about him. He was like a terrible monster loosed upon the city.

  I drove downtown toward home. I took a short cut through the empty streets of the Bowery and stopped at a red light. There were no cars, no people, just a deserted street. All of a sudden, I heard loud strange noises: whistles, banging of steel upon steel, and escaping steam. Then a huge green garbage truck came lumbering down the cross street in front of me. It was enormous, with black greasy tires taller than my car. Its dark green side had hydraulic arms and compression levers that were almost two stories tall. The whistles and bells and clanging were deafening. I saw small garbage men in gray jumpsuits swarming all over the side like ants on a dead animal. They leaped and swung from handle to handle, platform to platform, carrying garbage cans or tools like wrenches or oilcans.

  The huge truck belched steam as it rolled to a stop only a few feet from the front of my car. I could see the face of one of the scampering workers as he swung by one hand, carrying a garbage can with the other. It was Domenic Scarluci! Another female creature came down the side; face first, like a giant lizard crawling down a wall. Her hair pulled back, oil smeared on her face, it was Lisa Marie! I saw the faces of the others too. I saw Eric and Calvin dumping garbage and tending to the many moving parts as they leaped and jumped from the top to bottom and side to side like frenzied monkeys. I saw Charles Stuckey, just like the rest, too intent on his work to even give me a single glance, yet he was swinging by one arm just a few feet in front of me. I saw another creature with a pump oil can. At first I didn’t recognize the face with the hair pulled back, under a dirty hat. She crawled up the side of the truck then stopped and stared back at me. It was Maureen from Scarsdale. They all had the same blank stare on their faces: the look of being dead.

  The huge truck banged the overhanging traffic light as it lurched forward with a great calliope of noises and rolled out of sight.

  I sat frozen, unable to think or move. Then I jammed the accelerator to the floor, screeching rubber. I turned into the intersection after the truck. In less than a block I pulled over and got out, pointing my gun back and forth. Shaking and crying, I stared at the empty, silent streets. Finally I wiped my eyes and drove home.

  TASTY

  The next morning I snorted a line of coke and looked in the mirror. My eyes didn’t seem to bulge anymore, but I didn’t want to test them out by staring into Mark’s face. I knew from my training and street experience that coke, unlike heroin, was not physically addictive. It was, however, very dangerous because it was psychologically addictive. I was scared, very scared about what the LSD had done to me. I knew that my hallucinations were caused by anxiety, and the coke, for all its dangers, had calmed me down and restored my confidence. Everyone else could see how normal and self-confident I had become. Pike wanted me back on the street, making buys of heroin from broken-down junkies, but Michael argued it was too soon. I would get hurt. Pike insisted and introduced me to Tony Degaglia – my own Mafia informant – and we became friends. I even visited his mother’s house, where she made us dinner. She was a sweet old lady, and an incredible cook. I had the best Italian food ever, better than any restaurant in the city. Every meal had three or four main dishes, pasta, meat, etc. She believed her son Tony could do no wrong and I was probably a bad influence. Tony was all that she had left in her life and it was more than enough. I told Michael about her and the wonderful meals.

  Tony took me to a great party. He let everyone know I was a buyer. They didn’t believe him. There was a line of coke laid out on the coffee table. I knew what they wanted to see.

  I picked up a straw and sucked up a line. They smiled and followed me with their straws. I liked the taste of cocaine and I knew the difference between good and bad coke.

  We partied most of the night. Girls came and went. By the party’s end I had sucked up at least five lines of coke and was so drunk that I couldn’t drive, so I spent the night at Tony’s mother’s house. The next morning I had no fear or desire to use cocaine at all. I understood addiction and knew that I could control it, but I didn’t know why I believed this.

  A few days later, Tony told me about a heroin dealer named Noodles. Noodles was Italian but not Mafia. He was at the party and had asked Tony if I was interested in buying pure heroin. Tony set up a buy for ten thousand dollars and told him I wanted three ounces. I didn’t tell Michael because I knew he would pull me off the case. I went straight to Pike. The buy was to take place outside a dark tenement building in the Bronx. I met Noodles in the street and showed him the money. Dewey and Silkey were on foot, hiding about a half a block away. Pike remained in his car even further down the street.

  Noodles said the drugs were hidden on the second floor of the abandoned building, so the two of us walked in and up to the first landing. As I got to the top of the dark stairs a man appeared out of the shadows with a pipe and hit me on the side of the face. The two of them began to beat me. When I fell to the floor, they started kicking and stomping me. I could feel Noodles reach into my pocket and take the ten thousand dollars, then continue to hit me. I screamed and cried for them to stop while they pushed my face into the filth on the floor. The more I cried and screamed, the more they kicked and beat me. I pushed my tongue on the filthy floor to keep from crying like a baby. Finally, they left.

  I was gasping and crying so hard I couldn’t yell for help. I crawled on my hands and knees down the stairs into the street. Dewey and Silkey dragged me over to the side of the building and sat me up; Dewey looked in my eyes for a concussion. Blood, tears and snot covered my face. As I struggled to breathe, gulping air through my loose front teeth, I saw Pike drive up in his car. He parked and charged up the sidewalk yelling, “What the fuck is going on here? What happened? Where is the government money? We’ve got ten grand on this case!”

  Silkey tried to explain. “It was a set-up. They beat and robbed him.”

  Then Pike turned to Dewey. “It’s your fault. It’s all your fault. You’re nothing but a killer faggot.”

  Dewey said nothing. He just stood there, well-dressed, a tailored schoolboy with a big smirk on his face and a big strand of red hair covering one eye.

  “We didn’t lose the money; he hung onto it until we got here,” Silkey lied. Dewey just stared back at Pike with an even bigger grin.

  “Aren’t you going to ask about the car?” I blurted out. “To see if there’s any damage to a government vehicle? That’s all you fucking care about, nickel-bag cases from broken-down junkies and protecting government cars and government money. You don’t have the balls to go up against the Mafia like Michael and Dewey.” I was shouting through the tears. “You don’t give a fuck what happens to us –” Silkey gently kicked my leg and I stopped yelling and stared back at Pike.

  “You’d better have the junk – or ten grand – on my desk in the morning,” Pike said, turning away toward his car. Dewey just stood there with his smirk, still not saying a word.

  My face was swollen, one eye was closed, and there was a four-inch gash on my cheek. Dewey and Silkey took me to Lennox Hospital for stitches then drove me home.

  I kept the light off so Daisy couldn’t s
ee my face as I crawled into bed, but the next morning as she came out of the shower she saw me. “My God, my God, now what?” She covered her mouth so hard she slipped and almost fell on the bathroom floor. I assured her, “It’s alright. Looks worse than it is. Got mugged trying to make a buy last night, it’s okay.” Mark came into the bathroom and stared at my swollen face. At least this time he didn’t laugh.

  At the office it was as if nothing had ever happened. Silkey wrote a report that said that an unknown drug dealer tried to rob me last night, but I wouldn’t give up the ten thousand dollars of government money.

  I had been beaten and almost killed, but it wasn’t even mentioned in a report. Dewey took the ten thousand dollars out of his gambling stash and put it on Pike’s desk to save my job.

  Later, Tony Degaglia called. He said Dewey had told him what had happened. Tony said he didn’t know Noodles and had no way to find him to get the money back. We agreed to meet for a drink later that afternoon at a bar on Beacon Street on the edge of Chinatown. I told Dewey that I was going to meet him.

  I got to the bar early and sat at a table. My face was swollen so bad I could hardly drink and the vodka stung my cracked lips. My front teeth were loose and my gums kept bleeding. As I waited, someone came up from behind and gently placed his hand on my face, so softly I could hardly feel it. After a few seconds Michael removed his hand from my swollen face and gave me a half smile. Then he reached in his pocket and took something out and placed it on the table in front of me. Without saying a word he turned and walked out. It was an old egg timer, in the shape of a chicken with a white dial. It could have been an antique. I was in so much pain that the object had no meaning to me. I was on my second drink when Degaglia came in. He was shocked and sorry to see my face.

  He began right away. “I swear I don’t know Noodles, I can’t help you. It’s just the cost of doing business. I’ll keep my eyes open, and sooner or later he’ll turn up. Dewey said there was another guy. Did you see him?”