I shrugged at the perfect cross he was describing. It was true enough—every gang put out hits on
suspected
rats, so it had to happen. You start suspecting you’ve
been
suspected, and…
He dragged deep enough on his cigarette to reduce it by half—guy had lungs like bellows. “Few years ago, there’s this guy—Felton, I think his name was. Anyway, he’s East Coast,
big
player in one of the max joints in Jersey. Second-in-command. He gets out, ready to kick it off. ‘Rahowa’—know what that is?”
“Racial Holy War.”
“Yeah. This guy, he’s not going out to work, he’s going to start blowing things up, bring on the revolution. Naturally, being an amateur, he screws up. All that time Inside, he never learns anything about crime? Fucking amazing. Anyway, he gets caught passing some funny money—I mean, real
silly
shit that he made on a Xerox machine or something.
“So back Inside he goes. And that’s when it hits the fan. This guy, he’s half mud. And his mother, the white half, she’s a dyke. Probably got some Jew in her, too. So, naturally, the
real
white guys put him on the KOS list.
“But he never turned rat!” the AB man said, pride overruling everything else in his voice. “He never rolled, and he could have given them a
lot.
So who’s more old-school? Who’s more real? Who’s more loyal? A nigger passing for white, or a white passing for a man?”
“That’s not a question.”
“Right. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. But I had to say it, because otherwise nothing I’m going to say now is going to make sense, all right?”
“You’re still talking.”
H
e stubbed out his cigarette. Reached toward his shirt pocket, then stopped, as if he was trying to prove something to himself.
“You’re at the bottom of a long steep hill. There’s an enemy waiting for you at the top. He holds the high ground, and he’s comfortable up there. If you stay where you are, you starve to death. But you can’t rush him. You can’t charge up that hill. You’ll be out of breath, your muscles will lock up on you. Even if you make it to the top, you’re easy pickings. So what do you do?”
“Depends on what you’ve got,” I said. Emotionless as a mathematician reciting a theorem.
“Give me some examples.”
“Trick him into coming down off that hill. Blow the whole thing up. Get a sniper to pick him off.”
“No,” he said. Not disrespectfully, just giving me more facts.
“Sneak up the hill, then. Take your time—more important that he doesn’t see you coming,” I said, reciting my ghost brother’s mantra. “So, when you make your move, you’re as close to ready as you can be.”
I didn’t bother to say, “Don’t fight fair.” In the world we share, that’s the air we breathe.
“That’s right. That’s the only way. And you know what
gets
me up that hill? What gets me close enough to make a fight of it?”
“Money.”
He nodded.
“And you know where there’s a lot of that, but you can’t put your hands on it yourself,” I said.
“You’re asking, or telling?”
“Guessing.”
“I went to Silver for a reason. I’m not going anywhere near a Brand for this one—not one on the street, I mean. You never know who’ll turn. Not anymore. Silver, he knows this, too. So—remember what I said about ‘references’? There’s only one I care about: can you be trusted? You know what Silver told me about that. But he told me something else, too. He told me you were the smartest guy he ever met.”
I didn’t react.
“I’m dying,” he said. “Doctors told me I got a year, maybe a year and a half.”
I watched him, waiting.
“I’m not just rolling over for it. I spent what I had, used up a lot of favors. There’s a place over in Switzerland where they’re supposed to have been doing stuff with stem cells for a
long
time. Years and years before that asshole we got running this country said it was illegal. Anyway, supposedly,
supposedly,
they’ve got a way to beat this…thing I got.”
“For money.”
“I need a million and a half, cash,” he said. “That’s for everything. Getting over there—I got no passport—getting fixed, few months in their clinic, then coming home.”
I kept my face expressionless. All this for another ex-con with some dream heist he conjured up in the darkness of his cell. Now all he needs is for someone to put the right string together, take all the risks, and, if it actually works, give him his piece. If the poor bastard was looking at me for it, he was rolling a pair of one-dot dice.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. And he probably did.
He tapped another smoke out of his pack, lit up. “It’s
not
that. This is as real as steel. Got enough patience left to hear the rest?”
“Ask Silver.”
“W
hen we started, the Brotherhood was…rotating. We’d have guys Inside, guys on the bricks, guys making the return trip. Outside, race war was just yak-yak. But Inside, once it moved from the occasional flare-up to…to the way we lived
all
the time…we had to change the rules. The rules about getting in, I mean. It wasn’t enough to say you’d
die
for the race—that was something you
could
do, not something you
did
do. Acid test, like I said before.”
“Blood in, blood out.”
“Yeah. No more ‘get in the car.’ The car was too big. More like a bus; even a convoy of buses. Only one driver, just a few in the front seats. The rest were passengers. And passengers, they have to buy tickets. If you came to us for protection, you paid for it. If you came to us to
be
us, you had to pass the test.
“What that meant—sooner or later, what it
had
to mean—is that we had some guys who were never going to rotate. Killing a man Inside, it used to be you got some A.C. time. But the worse it got, the harder they came down. Turned cases over to prosecutors out in the World, not the kangaroo court they run behind the Walls.
“So, instead of just losing some good time, you got actual charges. Which means, all of a sudden, the Man was holding a lot more cards. You with me?”
“Sure. Anyone with the power to add to one sentence has the power to cut another one.”
“Right. So some of us ended up with a string of Life-Withouts on top of what they were already doing. The shot-callers now are the guys who’re
never
going home, see?”
He got a nod out of me, nothing more.
“Mercy is always a symptom of weakness,” the dying man said. “It’s just another form of fear—you’re secretly afraid that if you don’t spare your enemy, someday your enemy might not spare you.”
His eyes, so light a brown they were almost colorless, held all the empathy of an alligator waiting in shallow water for something—anything—to walk too close to the riverbank.
“I was one of those on rotation. Got out before it went crazy. By the time I came back, I was already one of the Originals—nobody thought to even
ask
me to prove in. I kept going…in and out…always affiliated, though.
“I met Silver when the feds had us both—him short, me a little longer. He went on—you know his story—and now he’s got two life sentences. He owes one to the State, and one to us.”
He took a deep drag of his cigarette, giving me a chance to ask him a question without interrupting. I signaled him to keep talking.
“No matter what we called ourselves in the World, Inside we went back to being together. It was when the feds had me that I met this guy—the one who’s the key to everything. He was in for business stuff. Not the kind of stuff you’d expect to see a Level Six joint for. So, the way I saw it at first, he must have been a stand-up guy, because they
always
offer those business boys some soft ride if they give people up.
“He needed us. No chance he was going to prove in—that wasn’t him. And he could pay for protection. So we did business. Nothing special. We did it for a lot of guys, even Mafia bosses.
“One day, out of nowhere, this guy, he gets me alone on the yard. And he tells me why he kept his mouth shut when the feds dropped him. He had something to trade, all right. Something so big he probably could have walked away with probation—maybe even immunity and relocation. But he didn’t want that. He wanted the money. The money these other guys—three other guys—owed him. At least the way he saw it they owed him. He’d been waiting years—I mean, a
lot
of years—to collect what he thought was coming to him. But he knew it had to be done just right, and he wasn’t man enough for the job.”
“So he came to prison to find the right guys?”
“No,” he said, giving me a look I couldn’t interpret. “What he did was, he fucked up his life. Tapped these other guys for ‘loans,’ started businesses, went belly-up every time. So he started stealing. Cooking the books, skimming, that kind of bullshit. The tax guys nailed him first, then the locals piled on.
“That’s when he realized the truth. He was born to fail at anything he ever tried. That was his destiny. It didn’t matter how many chances he got, he’d mess them all up. What he needed was one T-rex score, so he could live in the Philippines—he never explained
that
one to me—for the rest of his life, live like a god.”
I shrugged my shoulders. We’d both heard this one before. Hell, I thought I’d been about to hear it again a few minutes earlier.
“What he had was some information. Three guys—three
rich
guys, from the best families—had committed a real ugly murder. Gang rape, torture, you name it. Then they killed the girl—and I
mean
a girl; she was, like, twelve, thirteen years old. When they did it, two of them were fifteen, the other was sixteen. This was in 1975. Today, they’d be in their forties.”
“He wanted you to get them to buy the proof he was holding?”
“Yeah. He knew he couldn’t pull it off himself. You need a whole crew for something that complicated. Besides, he was scared of them. Or at least of the muscle their kind of money can buy.”
“But you never did it?”
“No. One, it isn’t the kind of job you farm out; you’ve got to be in control yourself. Two, even if it worked, the money would get whacked up so many ways before I saw any myself, it wasn’t worth the risk.”
“So?”
“So he never tried it, either.”
“How do you know?”
“This guy, he found me. Just a couple of months ago. He’s been out for years. Now he’s just a pathetic little piece of shit, owns some kind of two-bit strip club, kicks back to everyone who says ‘Boo!’ to him, drives an old Caddy, wears cheap jewelry, gets a free blow job whenever he wants one.”
“Not the paradise in the Philippines, huh?”
“No. I guess whatever scheme he had didn’t play out. But he still wants it to happen. That whole life, I mean. Says he can do it on a half-mil. I collect that, whatever’s left is mine.”
“So you want me to get it done, and I get to keep whatever’s over two million?”
If he thought I was being sarcastic, he let it slide. “These guys—check them out for yourself first, be as sure as you need to be; I got the names—could come up with a couple of mil
apiece.
Wouldn’t even make a dent.”
“That’s if this guy—the one who came to you—is for real.”
“What’s he get out of making it up? He’s pretty sure I can get the job done on these three guys, but he
knows
I can get it done on him, this easy,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Plus, he’ll
show
the proof…provided I say I’m ready to make the move.”
“So how’s he know you won’t just move in, get the other three to pay you, and walk away with it all? Leave him with nothing?”
“He’s one of those guys—you know the kind I’m talking about—he
wants
something to be true so bad, he
needs
it to be true so bad, that it turns into truth in his mind. He needs me to be an Aryan of Honor—my word is my bond. In his mind, I’d never cheat him.”
“’Cause he’s
with
you,” I said, letting the AB man know I understood the difference.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice as cold and unyielding as an iceberg. “He knows what I am; his kind is always studying mine. I let him tell me everything he knows, make a ton of money out of it, and walk away without giving him his cut, that wouldn’t be honorable. Wouldn’t be merciful, either.”
“T
hat door you talked about, it swings both ways.”
“You mean, what’s to prevent
you
from burning
me
?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“What do you care? What should it matter?”
“If you were to cross this guy, what could he do about it? Nothing, right?”
“Right,” he agreed.
“So?”
“Ah, I get it. You want to know what I think I’m holding that I could use if you crossed
me.
”
“You were me, wouldn’t you want to know?”
“I would. But I wouldn’t want you to take the answer the wrong way.”
I made a “come on with it” gesture.
“Silver.”
“Silver? You’re saying you got plenty of soldiers on the streets? And if I walked away with the money, you could find me. Or…?”
Not saying it aloud—the one threat that could change everything. If this guy was what he said he was—and he must be something close to it, for Silver to have reached out for me, and vouched for him in the bargain—and any threat to my family came out of his mouth, he wasn’t going to die of cancer.
“No, no. Not that,” he said, raising his hands as if he was warding off evil spirits. “Do I know bad guys? Absolute fucking psychos who’d take a week to kill you, and come a thousand times while they were doing it? Sure. But they’re not…they’re not
with
me any more than this other piece of shit is.
“That’s what I was telling you. That long story I made you listen to. Silver’s my ace. Not because he’s down with the Brotherhood—the old-school Brotherhood, when our honor
was
our life—but because he says your word—your real word, the one you give to your own people—makes one of those girders holding up a bridge look shaky.”
I cocked my head at an “I’m listening” angle.
“Look, you got a guy with you,” he said. “Black guy. Silver says people Inside call him the Prof. Used to be a preacher or something? Little guy, always talks in rhyme? Silver told me he heard him say this: ‘Lying to a sucker is just playing a role. But lying to your own is giving up your soul.’”
“I’m listening,” I said, out loud this time.
“No, you’re not, man. You’re not tuning in. See, Silver says this Prof, he’s got everyone’s respect: all the time he put in, he always walked it righteous. So, when he talks, everybody listens. But
you,
it’s much more than that. It’s like he was your father or something.”
I didn’t say a word. Just watched. Watched a man walking across a tightrope in a high wind, suspended over a shark tank.
“Silver, he says you and him, you’re brothers. For real, brothers. One of your own, see? You’d never lie to him. It just wouldn’t be you.”
“And?”
“And it’s not me you’d be giving your word to, it’s him. Silver.”
“
If
I did that, what’s in it for him?”
“He doesn’t want anything,” the AB man answered, knowing I’d check for myself. “Silver said you already did things for him he wouldn’t trust another man on earth to do. He says you know things about him that could get him done in a heartbeat. And you never would. He says you already fixed him up with a great lawyer. And, if he ever needed anything, you’d take care of it for him. He knows he’s risking all that by saying you can trust me.
“Now, me, I figure a man doesn’t get to be your brother behind what he says, or some silly-ass tattoo, or just hating the same people you do. A man gets to be your brother because of what he
does.
Am I right?”
“By me you are.”
“And Silver, he’s your brother?”
“He is.”
“And that’s my insurance. I want to be able to get a message to him—my own way—and tell him you gave your word. To him, I mean. Nothing cute: so long as I play it laser-straight with you, I get my cut. Can I do that?”
“Yeah. You can do that.”
“I’ve got a satchel with me. I know you already went through it. Nothing in there but paper, and a cassette tape. I’m leaving it here when I go. All you need to check out everything I told you. Everything except the guy himself, of course. You go through it. Decide if the peach is as ripe as I say it is. You think it is, you think it’s worth climbing the tree to get it, you call me, and I’ll do whatever you say after that. You don’t think so, just call and say one word, and I’m out of your life forever. Your name will never come out of my mouth again.”
Meaning: no matter what I decided, he was going to take the shot, play the only cards he was holding. And if he couldn’t pull it off, so be it. He was going out the same way he came in. Because there’s one thing you
do
take with you when you go: your rep.
I walked over, shook his hand.
“Close your eyes,” I told him. “Your drink will be here in a minute.”