90 Church Read online

  “What did you mean the other day when you said you know what Dewey does. What does Dewey do?”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, our job is to go into Harlem or wherever there are drug dealers and buy dope. Just like when Pike sent you uptown to get killed. What happened to you happens all the time. Dewey’s a killer; he protects undercover agents, like he protected you. We need guys like Dewey to stay alive. The government doesn’t care if you get killed or not. We’re in a war.”

  Then Michael walked a few yards to the corner and pointed down the street toward the Hudson River and the New Jersey shore and said, “I’ve never been to Ohio. That’s it over there, isn’t it, across the river?” While still pointing at New Jersey he looked at me. “There are many terrible forms of addiction, all of them just waiting for you. If you become an agent you’ll wish to God that you never left Ohio. You’ll see. In the end you will become addicted to something just to stay alive and you will kill everything you love.”

  A week later, as I was leaving, Agent Michael Giovanni came into Group Two and asked, “Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  Without any expression he said, “You’re my partner, you’re going to work now.”

  Being Michael Giovanni’s partner was more pointless than being alone in the office. He had me follow people for no reason. I followed a man until 3:00 in the morning, only to learn that he had nothing to do with anything. I think he made me do this for practice, but maybe just to wear me down. Once he said he was investigating a mob guy who I learned from the files had been dead for ten years. Yet every humiliation made me more determined not to give up, not to let Michael crush me. Week after week, I rode with him only to do his errands, get his lunch, park the car, get some coffee, call the office, get the car washed. I didn’t even know when work began, or was over, nor could I name a single case we were working on.

  My name was still not on the roster of the new agents scheduled to go to Washington for training, so my fear of being fired grew. The more despondent I became the more I wanted to give my life meaning and purpose.

  While I waited for Michael’s nonsensical orders, I roamed the streets of Manhattan every night with my cheap, lightweight gun and pretended to be hunting for drug dealers. To cure my frustration I drank. Every morning I smelled like liquor. I avoided talking about 90 Church with Daisy. My hung-over mornings at home depressed me and worried her. She would ask, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” or “Why can’t you talk to me?” I was slipping away into another world and didn’t know how to stop it.

  After about three weeks I had had enough. It was midnight and I was alone in the car outside a small restaurant in the Bronx, waiting for Michael, and as usual, I had no idea what was going on. The restaurant was closed and dark, except for a light in the back, which I assumed was the kitchen. Michael had told me to stay in the car: “Under no circumstance, come into the restaurant. This guy is very dangerous.”

  I sat there, thinking about the other times, being the butt of his jokes. I was never sure who to follow or watch on stake-outs. I stared at the small light in the back; all of a sudden I didn’t care about what I was supposed to do. I left the car, walked down a small alley, and quietly opened the side door. There I saw a man wearing a waiter’s jacket standing against the back wall, his pants down around his knees. He held a gun to Michael’s head, which was buried in the man’s naked crotch. In a panic to save Michael I drew my gray revolver and shot the man in the chest. The gun exploding in my hand made everything seem unreal. The man fell sideways, dropping his gun.

  Michael jumped up, leaped forward, blotting the blood on the man’s chest. “My God, my God! What have you done?” He wiped his mouth and looked at me, picked up the gun from the floor, and put it in his holster. He stared wildly around the room, then said, “Go to the car. Open up the trunk and bring my briefcase. Hurry!”

  I stood there shaking and grunting. Eventually, in a trance-like state, I stumbled to the car and got the black attaché case from the trunk. When I got back, the man’s pants were pulled up. Michael opened the briefcase, found a revolver in a plastic bag, and put it in the dead man’s hand, squeezing the fingers several times on the trigger and barrel to be sure there would be fingerprints. He stood up. “You will do and say as I tell you. If you tell anyone what you saw, if you tell anyone, ever, what he was forcing me to do, that he had a gun to my head, you’ll be dead. Do you understand? I must live with this, not you. If you tell anyone I will kill you.”

  When the police arrived, Michael was cold as ice. He explained that the dead man was a suspect in a big drug case, and that I, Michael’s partner, had shot in self-defense. The cop found a gun and bag of heroin on the dead man.

  In the car, Michael said, “I’m going to write this up and you’re going to swear to it. You shot a drug dealer and saved my life, that’s all.” His eyes were red and teary. “Do you understand?”

  The horror of it all put me into a trance. I didn’t really know what he was saying. I had already seen four people killed in front of me, but this was different. Before it was like a bad movie. I was part of this, I was the one pulling the trigger. Michael drove to one of his bars and got out. “Take the car home; I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I managed to drive across the Williamsburg Bridge toward home, trying to pretend nothing had happened. Once across the bridge I pulled over and got out. Trembling, I leaned against the side of the car and threw up. Each time I wretched my guts I would look up at the cold blue night sky and it would make me do it again.

  At home, Daisy woke up as I got into bed. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  I had vomit all over my shirt and knew she could smell it. I tried to lie but I could feel her silence and her eyes staring at me through the darkness. I started to cry in short little squirts and puffs. “I killed someone,” I gasped through the tears and snot running down my face. She didn’t touch me; there was a long silence. Then I said again, “I shot him, I had to.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “It’s all right,” I answered. “Everyone will say I did the right thing. I’ll be accepted now. I know now I’ll be accepted.”

  “The right thing? Killing someone is the right thing to do to get accepted? I’ve tried to understand. You smell of booze every night and you say you don’t fit in. You hate those people and yet you go to work every day to be part of them. None of it makes any sense. Now you kill someone to be accepted … I guess now you’ve got what you wanted. Tonight, finally, you’ve joined the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.”

  There was something else that she couldn’t know. It was the terrible logic of 90 Church. I was beginning to like what I was doing. For now, it was something I had to hide so I could go on living.

  * * *

  The next morning my hand hurt from a cut that I didn’t notice the night before. It was from shooting my cheap lightweight gun. The gun that Dewey had said wasn’t any good for killing people. At the office, as usual, I sat at my little table, waiting for Michael. George Blanker came in to the group and put his hand on my shoulder. “Thank you, son. I understand you killed a dangerous drug dealer and saved Michael’s life last night. Good for you. I know Michael will thank you, too.”

  In the afternoon I saw the report; it said that Michael and I were both interrogating the suspect. He had a criminal record. When Michael turned around, the man drew a gun from his pocket, and I outdrew him and fired in self-defense to save Michael’s life. There was a picture of the dead drug dealer. He looked younger than me. This time, without hesitation, I signed the report even though I knew it was a total lie. Michael asked me what had happened to my hand. I told him it was from my gun. He didn’t seem to care.

  The next day there was a small box on my table. It was gift-wrapped like a box of candy, but when I picked it up, it was heavy. There was no note. Not even sure it was for me, I opened it. It looked like a .45 automatic; but much smaller. It was bright blue chrome, with whi
te pearl grips. I took it down to the shooting range in the basement. The Range Master said it was a Walther PPK, expensive, reliable, and accurate. I shot about twenty rounds with it even though my hand still hurt. When I returned to my desk Michael was there and I said, “Thank you.” He nodded once. Now everyone called me by my name and said hello and good-bye. Finally I was accepted, but it was an empty feeling.

  Alone at home that night, I sighted down the shiny blue barrel and pretended I was shooting at drug dealers. The fact that I had killed someone and lied on my second federal investigation report was already a distant memory. I tried not to think about Michael or how much liquor it would take to erase the memory of that forced, perverted act from his already tortured mind. I was an agent now and that seemed more important than Michael’s misery.

  I tried to tell Daisy the same lie that was in the official incident report, how I saved Michael’s life and became a hero. I know she tried hard to believe it. She wanted it to be true. Everyone lies about something; even my father lied to my mother about his secret love affair. I loved Daisy and we had never lied to each other. But this was something very different. Now things were changing. Daisy could never understand. I was an agent fighting crime. I was being trained by the best agent in the Bureau. I told myself that someday she would be proud of me and that would be enough to heal things. It wouldn’t be fair for her to worry about the evil of my job. I had to lie to her. I had saved Michael’s life and was keeping a dark secret; what difference did it make that I had lied on a report? Michael would always owe his life to me and protect me. I knew that someday that would be very important.

  PEPPER

  Now I was truly Michael’s partner but even though I had been on the job for two months I did not understand any of his cases. One day as we drove through Greenwich Village, he told me to pull over. A Puerto Rican dressed in bright clothes, with lots of jewelry and a stingy-brim hat, came over to lean on the car. His name was Pepper. Michael told him to get into the back seat. “Pepper, I want you to meet somebody. Do you see this guy here in the front seat?”

  Without looking at me, Pepper said, “How could I miss the fucking stiff?”

  Michael chuckled. “This stiff is going to be your roommate. He’s going to live with you for a while.”

  Michael reached over into my pocket and pulled out my credentials. “You won’t need these. Go with Pepper. You want to be an agent, you want to understand drugs, go with Pepper. Live with him.”

  Before I could protest I was standing on the sidewalk with this stranger, watching Michael drive off. Pepper took me to his apartment in the East Village. The whole neighborhood was old, crumbling brownstones with people sitting on the front steps with nothing to do but throw things in the street. Pepper’s apartment was in the middle of the block and very different. It was luxurious, with a remote-control lock on the street-level front door and expensive comfortable furniture. After he made me a drink he said, “If you want to learn, do as I tell you. First of all, take off your coat. You look ridiculous.” He gave me one of his bright colored jackets. “You want to meet addicts? You want to learn about drugs? Do as I say. Otherwise, neither one of us is going to stay alive.”

  I would go home late at night and return every day to Pepper’s apartment by noon. I met his customers. I saw how addicts lived and how they fed their habits. On an average, they stole two hundred dollars a day just to pay for their drugs. I watched them shoot heroin into their arms and their legs and thighs until their eyes rolled back. I saw girls, teenagers, whoring in the streets just to get a five-dollar bag of heroin. I saw one addict whose leg was so damaged that the skin fell around his ankle like a cheap sock, exposing meat and bone. I saw people covered with red and black sores shaking all the time, eating sugar out of the bag, stuffing it down their throats. I saw them lie and cheat each other, and steal from their families. I saw all of this because they came to Pepper with their pitiful stories, lies, and schemes. They came to us because they had to, because Pepper sold them heroin. He was good at it – no money, no dope, no excuses, no exceptions. If you were Pepper’s customer your life was over, but you kept on living. Any decency you ever had just melted away, replaced by an obsession for drugs. Your only hope was to die as soon as possible to save your family and the people you loved. Decency and honesty became an ongoing con used to trick people. I could feel the sense of power Pepper had over their lives. It didn’t disgust me like it should have.

  Every day I watched the parade of dirty junkies coming and going to Pepper’s fancy apartment as they spiraled down into hell.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day, as Pepper was counting his money and arranging his bags of heroin, the buzzer sounded from downstairs. He walked over to the wall intercom. It said, “Open, it’s Mars.” Pepper backed away and stared at me, then rushed over to his desk drawer and pulled out a revolver and pointed it at my chest and in obvious panic said, “Put your gun on the table or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

  That all too familiar feeling of cold fear gripped me, I laid my gun on the desk and stammered, “Pepper, what’s happening here?”

  He put my gun in the desk drawer and walked back toward the intercom, pushing the button to open the door two levels down.

  He wiped sweat off his forehead. “Mars, Mars La Pont, my connection. If they see a gun on you they’ll kill us both. If you make one weird move then I’m going to kill you. Just be cool and we both may live through this. Do you understand?” He put his gun in his pocket and we both stared at the door.

  There was a gentle knock. Two smiling black men entered and immediately looked me over. Both were well-dressed in leather and silk with expensive boots. One was huge, an obvious body builder. The other, smaller, covered with gold jewelry said, “Hey Pepper, who’s the mope?” He was pointing to me.

  “He’s a runner, a little muscle, he’s okay, I swear he’s okay, Mars.”

  Mars stared at me and chuckled, then turned to Pepper while pointing to his huge muscular companion. “This here is Starbuck; that’s what you call muscle. Pepper, if this mope of yours ain’t okay you’re going to be in the street down there without the benefit of the elevator.” He looked at me then at Pepper. “I’ve got something for you and you’d better have something for me.”

  Mars reached down to his boot and pulled out a long white rubber tube and laid it on the desk. “Best shit in months, cut only once. Me and Starbuck can’t keep it. Everybody wants some. Now where’s my twenty grand?”

  Pepper scrambled to his desk and began to stack money in piles, counting out loud while Mars looked on smiling. Then Mars pulled out a small leather pouch and poured white powder on the glass coffee table. With quick taps of a razor blade he scraped out four lines of cocaine. Then he rolled up a dollar bill. Starbuck was first; he sucked it up with a big gasp and rolled his eyes like a child eating ice cream. Then he pulled out a huge chrome revolver and pointed to me. I knew what this was all about. This was a test. If I didn’t do this I would be dead in seconds. The sweat poured down my back as I sucked a line of cool burning cocaine into my brain. Starbuck put his gun away and gathered up the piles of bundled cash and put them in a black leather pouch he carried on his shoulder like a woman’s purse. As the sweat continued to roll down my back the buzzer sounded again. Everyone turned and stared at it. Starbuck again pulled his chrome revolver ready to shoot it off the wall.

  Pepper flipped the intercom button. “Who is it?”

  “Maureen.”

  “Not now, Maureen, I’m very busy.”

  “Yes, now, Pepper, I was here earlier, there was no one home. Now, Pepper.”

  “Not now, Maureen. I said come back later.”

  “Somebody’s coming out, I’m in.”

  Pepper flipped the switch over and over, “Not now, not now.” But the intercom was silent. He raised his hand to his head, “Jesus Christ, this is like Grand Central Station. She’s on her way up.”

  After a few minutes there was a knock on the
door. Starbuck holstered his gun and we waited for Pepper to open the door.

  A beautiful white middle-aged woman dressed in a tailored expensive skirt and jacket stood in the doorway, a striking image of sophistication. She gave all of us a small nervous smile. “Oh, I didn’t know you had company.”

  Pepper tried his best. “It’s alright, they’re friends, they’re just leaving.”

  Mars grinned and ran his tongue over his lips. “My, my, my, look at them threads, designer for sure. Sweet mama.”

  Maureen tried to ignore him and said to Pepper, “I’m in a hurry, do you have what I want?” She fumbled for money in her designer purse.

  Pepper sorted through the bags of heroin on the desk. “Sure, I’ve got it here for you. Here it is, let’s settle up later, okay?”

  Mars got closer, into her personal space. “I ain’t seen such a pretty creature like you in such a long time.”

  She backed away. “Please, I came here to score. I don’t want any trouble.” She pulled out a wad of cash.

  Mars laughed. “Trouble? No trouble. Pretty lady wants to score, big wad of money, my, my, my, got you a sweet little customer here, Pepper. Put your money away, today the dope is not for sale, no ma’am, not for sale. Not today.”

  Maureen stepped back. “Please, no, please.”

  Mars grabbed her purse and tossed it up in the air. Pepper caught it. “Not for sale. Not today. Tell you what, Starbuck and I want to play. We want to play with you.”

  As Starbuck smiled, her whole body began to shake. Pepper pleaded, “Please Mars, let her go, don’t do this.”

  Mars’s eyes grew wild. “Shut the fuck up. Here’s the deal, white Scarsdale lady. Starbuck here and I are gonna go in the bedroom and party with you. Afterwards you can have all this dope free. Your money is no good today. What was your name?”

  She was terrified, but managed, “Maureen.”

  “Maureen, I like that. Come on, Maureen, let’s get it on.”