The Importance of Being Dangerous (10 page)

Sidarra's doubts relaxed just slightly. “How much are you thinking about buying?”

Griff smiled. “As much as we can. At least two hundred thousand dollars. We'll stand out at less than that.”

“Nah, sweetie,” she said. “That's most of what's there.”

“It's a risk, no doubt,” he quickly responded. “Bu, it's not our money anyway. And the payoff will be enough to turn all of us white, even Koob.”

“Yeah?” Koob said, ignoring the joke. “How much?”

This time Sidarra answered. “I would think it's on the order of eight, maybe ten times the purchase value, depending on when and if we sold.”

“Then finish the game,” Koob declared.

“Don't blink now,” Griff said. His best shot coming up was a high-line diagonal, two in the downtown corner, with a slight kill so he could smoke the company joint with the five off the cushion.

“The percentage of black male children under fourteen diagnosed with special ed needs, learning disabilities, or pharmacologically treated conditions is, like…”
Bam!
Whitey came rushing, crushed the two across the table, dropping it with a thwack. Griff jumped out, straightened up, and spun. He especially liked to spin.

“Sixty-four,” Sidarra said suddenly, smiling now with butt-naked approval. “Sixty-four percent.”

“Okay then,” Griff exhaled gently.

There was a pause. “You sure you wanna do some Securities
Exchange Commission federal-style shit?” Koob asked a little nervously.

“Practically every single one of my clients in a holding pen today came through Chancellor Eagleton's watch,” Griff declared. “That's one dangerous motherfucker.” There'd be no more intolerance this time. The game was done. They all looked at each other for a minute. A song ended. A brief moment of silence ensued. “Koob, you better let your boy back in here.”

Koob went to fetch Raul from the bar. Sidarra smiled all the way over to where Griff was standing to say: “You pretty damned pleased with your fine self, huh?”

His grin took on a little mischief. “Yup.” He couldn't hold back the giggle. “What'd the man say a while back? Let no one fuck asunder.”

“How's Raul gonna work on this?”

Griff turned away from her. “We'll see. Koob's always got ideas about how to use him. The guy can find things we don't want to be around. Maybe he finds some executive's briefcase in a cab. Surveillance. You know.”

“That's all?”

“I don't see why not.”

“Okay then. Please be right.” She leaned up on tiptoes and kissed the side of his lips. “And thank you, sugar.”

Yakoob came back through the curtain with Raul behind him. They sat down on one of the velvet couches to finish a drink.

It was now time not to let all Griff's body jive and gyrations go to waste. Sidarra promptly challenged him and him alone to a round of straight pool. And though his body was just as magnificent doing its theatrics after every shot, Sidarra just as promptly beat him three games in a row. Because she appreciated how to play the balls gently and the value of a slow roll.

MONEY CAN BUY HAPPINESS
, but it can't aim at hurts. Money's joys distract from old pains, but cannot cure them. Happiness, or money, just seems to work that way, which may be why drug addicts wake up from nights of euphoria only to hate their lives all over again. Sidarra did not hate her life. At times now it even seemed to hold a little promise. Like Raquel. Like a roomful of men, not her brothers, who worked for her survival and a little more. What she hated in a deep, unspoken place was not being able to share any of that promise with her mother or her father. A little bit of grief always lingered behind every accomplishment that went unshared with them. She also hated that she was nearing forty and had not found the love who would share the limelight she once imagined singing under. She hated not really knowing for sure if she was desirable to a special man. Sometimes she hated her brothers for not protecting her from bad men. She hated that, other than herself, her daughter had only Mrs. Thomas to rely on,
sometimes Aunt Chickie, and some occasional fast-food laughter with Michael, a good but inadequate older man. She hated the bad decisions that seemed so right at the time. Money couldn't answer those “whys” or buy out the regrets.

The Full Count was nice, almost perfect, except that Sidarra always thought she saw men like Raquel's father sitting at the bar there. It had the look of the places men run to. Her mother's mirror in the storage room brought these unkind thoughts alive one afternoon. Sidarra had taken a personal day from work and planned to catch up on paying bills that had accrued to her real name, not her alias. That didn't last long before dresses in boxes and hats on hooks distracted her. She put on her favorite Anita Baker album and joined every note. Anita Baker's band would fit a place like Q's well, she thought. But it didn't take long for all those “sweet surrender”-type lyrics to bring back Sidarra's regrets. Like the image of Raymond, Raquel's father. Ray was not a postman or a pimp. He was a camcorder man she'd met one day at a hot dog stand outside of City College where she was a senior. He was a sophomore, he said. The conversation should have ended there, since Raymond was not in fact anybody's sophomore. He was just a hungry guy with thick black curls, the right lines, and a frankfurter jones. Sidarra was already twenty-nine. He was like fourteen, or so he later seemed. She had missed out on a straight run of college; she got interrupted by career misguidance, course credits that didn't add up to anything, debt that did, and the substitute teaching jobs she had to take in order to stop asking her parents for money. Her brothers had cost them enough. Along came Ray.

Ooh. He has green eyes, she thought, almost aroused already. Green eyes. Long, pretty lashes.

“It's better without the bun,” Raymond told her. She knew it was a stupid line, but he didn't seem to mean it that way. There was no furtive look, no ridiculous tongue action. He was either
very young or kind of mysterious. “I mean, you split it open, you mix mustard
and
ketchup in the slit, and the juices sort of come alive in your mouth. Why am I telling you this?” he asked.

Because he really
was
stupid. Raymond was what Aunt Chickie later declared “a stupid fool.” Yet there had been so few of them in Sidarra's life until that point. Everyone needs at least one completely stupid fool. They make life fun and interesting. They talk about what little they know as if it's the only thing in the world, which conveys a kind of sincerity, and sincerity can be sexy if it's attached to green eyes and long lashes. Sidarra already knew that she was boring. Men might whistle at her ass on the street, but it was certifiable fact by the time she was about twenty-seven: she was nobody's lounge singer. She was dull. A substitute teacher. Someone who loved children. Someone who suffered from poor advice. So this time, when Raymond asked her if she wanted to actually share a naked hot dog and see if he was right, she ignored all good sense and said yes.

They were in bed together three hours later. The size of his dick alone told her she was right to act on impulse. He wouldn't stop slapping her with it. He waved it all over her body like a metal detector wand. He wanted her to hold it, cup its pulse, squeeze it, slide Vaseline on it, and put it inside her the way she liked it. And he said these things sincerely, things that had been said in other ways before but were clearly lies. These were not so clear. It would take months before she admitted what lies they were. Instead, she just wanted to feel good. Raymond could grope her for hours. He was the first man to hold her vagina in his mouth. He sucked her nipples like a wild infant. It didn't matter if he was a boy. She was a girl in more ways than she cared to confess. In her room on lower Morningside Avenue, she played catch-up on fun with him. She had never thought through her pussy before. She had never had orgasm with a man. She had never masturbated after lovemaking. Clearly she was in love. In love at that age meant admitting
the part about masturbating; it even meant allowing him to see her do it. Which led to the whole thing getting out of control, his filming her with a camcorder he produced somehow, and Sidarra drinking too much cheap wine from a box a few times so he could record more sex. If you could string together onto one film all the hours Sidarra backslid with Raymond, it would not seem like a lot for one life. Yet the tape would always contain those precious few moments when one afternoon Raquel was conceived.

The aborted engagement, like the end of a fond dream, remained a burning moment in Sidarra's life. Like the videotapes Raymond disappeared with soon after he learned she was pregnant. His attentions were not love after all. He was only twenty-one, it turned out. Had maybe one job. Might have been bisexual, she heard from a friend of his she bumped into on Christopher Street. Whatever Raymond was, he was wrong and he was gone. And after Sidarra went on to finish her final graduate credits with Raquel showing under her shirt, her parents helped her see the truth of it all: she had been a stupid fool (but would not stay that way) and she would be a mother (forever).

The cat was staring up at her now, sensing something was not right. Sidarra turned off Anita Baker, folded up the dress she was wearing, and went shopping. Her alias credit card had not yet visited Saks Fifth Avenue.

 

IT'S NOT EVERY DAY
you find yourself inviting a twenty-two-year-old murderer over to your house to sit on your couch and look at your stuff, but money can bring that too. Raul had never been to Yakoob's apartment before and sat, quiet as dull pain, in his pinstriped suit, suppressing his awkwardness. Yakoob had a lot of things—several computers on a wraparound desk, stacks of manuals, hundreds of music CDs, clean rugs, nice plants, some artwork, soft, deep furniture—and everything was neat. He watched a little
nervously as Raul's tiny eyes scanned what would be nice to rob. It was good that Marilyn was at work, that she knew nothing of this part of investing, because out of all of it she would hate this guy the most.

“How's your moms?” Koob asked. Raul just nodded. Koob poured a little gin into two glasses sitting on the coffee table between them. He raised his and said, “To your pops, man.” Raul smiled, reached over, and touched his glass.

Koob sat with his hands on his knees and tried to figure out how to have this meeting. “Okay then, nigga, as you know, you owe.” Raul nodded again. “I mean, that Philadelphia shit for four months was cheap, but not free. There's some heavy stuff in the works, and you gotta do your part for us.” Again Raul just nodded. “You gonna have to leave that thug shit behind, 'cause this ain't that kind of game, son.”

Raul reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a fat, cigar-sized blunt. “Yo, can I smoke in here?”

“Yeah, yeah. Do your thing. Now,” Koob continued, “there's things you gotta know and things you don't ever need to know. We need you to get some information.” Raul's eyes perked up in the middle of a long toke, followed by three very abrupt gasps, which Koob waited for. “You ever been inside an office building in midtown?”

Raul exhaled in a mad cloud and began coughing loudly. “No,” he blurted.

“How 'bout a corporation? You know what a corporation is?”

Raul shook his head and looked at the joint. “Nah.”

“Think you could tell the difference between a desktop and a laptop?”

Raul casually wheeled around in his seat and gestured toward Yakoob's desk of computers. His eyes opened as wide as they could. “You know, basically,” he said, and held another large toke in his chest.

Damn, Koob said to himself, shaking his head a little. “You ever been in jail before, nigga?”

“Hell yeah, nigga.”

“What for, nigga?”

“Nigga, it's done, a'ight?”

So Yakoob had to school him right then and there, sometimes about things he was still learning himself. While Dr. Dre rapped mad rhymes in the background, Koob pulled out a subway map and showed him where certain offices were. He got on the computer to show Raul the names of companies located in those midtown offices and what their names would look like when he got in there. He explained about corporations, global conglomerates, geopolitical monopolies, and revolving credit—anything he could think of to convey the seriousness of the situation. Raul was duly impressed. He was not quick, but he liked learning his creditors' terms.

After a few hours they took a break and chilled to more music. Raul piped up almost sweetly. “Yo, Sidarra's fine.”

Yakoob heard him getting too comfortable and tried to squash it by speaking to him in Spanish. “Don't worry about that. Don't try to get close to that. Just handle your business. Forget Sidarra. Forget Griff.”

“He's trouble,” Raul answered flatly in Spanish, but it wasn't clear what he meant—good trouble like respectably dangerous or bad trouble like a potential victim.

Yakoob looked hard at Raul. This might be tougher than he expected. He spoke in English again. “No, homeboy. Griff is the reason you're not in fucking prison today. You owe that brother the most.” Koob reached for a pack of cigarettes and lit one up in silence. “The trouble is the company I was telling you about before. The trouble is the head of the New York City school system, Jack Eagleton—
that
motherfucker is the only trouble you need to concern yourself about. That's the guy trying to make sure every
little blood in school today comes out dumber than me and twice as dumb as you, dig?”

Raul nodded slowly, fooled by the math. He stared at the carpet, thought briefly, and pulled a Nestlé Crunch bar from another pocket. “So let me just smoke him,” Raul said in Spanish.

“This ain't
Scarface,
yo!” Koob nearly screamed in English. “This shit is high-tech!”

Raul looked up at him almost plaintively, confused and unconvinced. “So what the fuck y'all want me to do then, Koob? Shit, I want to be down too.”

Koob smiled. “We want you to study on what I've been tellin' you and shit. We want you to get up in the company offices, act like a stupid motherfuckin' janitor who can't speak English, whatever you gotta do, however you got to play it, and steal me a laptop out of a vice president's office and then get it
back
in there the next day.”

“What if what you need isn't on his laptop? What if it's on another laptop?” Raul asked to Yakoob's utter surprise.

“Don't overthink it, my brother. Don't be all
Mission Impossible
and shit.” Yakoob then reached into his pocket and pulled out a small folded piece of paper. “Here's the name and the address of the company. Solutions, Inc. Here's the guy's name. Brett Goldman. Can you do that for me?” Raul paused and nodded again; his tight lips barely cracked a smile. “Solid. 'Cause that's what we need. For you to be the epoxy on this thing.”

“What the fuck is epoxy?”

“Glue, nigga. We need you to be like glue, 'cause glue rolls slow before it gets hard.”

 

IF SAKS FIFTH AVENUE EVER GOES OUT OF BUSINESS
, it will be because women have given up the dream of happiness. It was a place that in all Sidarra's years in New York City she revered too
much to enter. She used to slow down in front of its window displays. She might even get an idea for something she would seek in a cheaper version someplace else. But she understood it as a place for the happiness of others she would never be. Which was okay. As long as the dream remained open for business, flaunting its high-brow perfection between St. Patrick's Cathedral and Rockefeller Center, Saks would exist as the standard below which every other store labored, as the way happiness ought to look when all doubt is removed, and as a place she just might enter confidently one day. That day had come.

Sidarra's thirty-nine years resembled confidence as she walked through the doors in her newest spring dress, but she wasn't feeling it. Inside the bustling lobby, all the beauty and jewelry counters looked cut from the same gem. They sparkled with pinch-me clarity. The suave shoppers in motion buzzed like it was Grand Central Station. She could smell good taste in the perfumed air. Everywhere she looked, it was a great place to be a white woman with a gold card.

Sidarra's alias probably was white, but not all the privileges extended to Sidarra, who started feeling very black in a hurry. The kind of jewelry on view in the cases was entrancing. It was nice to spend time with the genuine version of the handbags she saw copied by the street vendors in Harlem. She couldn't wait for the makeup counter. But none of that prevented Sidarra from the distinct impression that she was being ignored. You try to look past being looked past. You try not to believe it or get hard-faced. Then it keeps happening. The cologne sampler ladies seem to catch some other woman's eye just before they see you. The idle salesclerk keeps remembering something she forgot to do when you approach. It's just a feeling confirmed by the accumulation of small moments. You're invisible—until someone bumps into you without speaking.