A Dark and Broken Heart (8 page)

I’m thinking right back at him, “Hey, buddy. You’re what? Thirty-five years old, and you’re still wearing a name tag to work. You tell me who made the wrong career decision.”

But I say nothing. This guy’ll spit in my chicken if I piss him off
.

I tell him, “Thanks,” and I take my chicken back to the car and eat it
.

I sit there chaining smokes, like I don’t want to breathe the air down here. Whatever six thousand toxic chemicals they put in my Luckies is one helluva lot cleaner than the shit they get to breathe in the Yard
.

I have spoken to fifty people, maybe more. They don’t want to know. They say they don’t know the girl before I even show them the snap
.

I say, “Look at the picture before you tell me you don’t know her,” and they get that defensive light in their eyes, all superior and condescending. And then they look at the picture without really looking at it, and they say they don’t know her again, and it’s little more than an echo of the first denial
.

Makes me wanna smack them. Smack them hard. Hard enough to go down and stay down
.

“
Don’t screw with me,” I want to say. “You have no idea the whirlwind of shit I can bring down around your life if you screw with me. Today I killed three people. Three white people. Three pedophile loser scumbags sure, but I killed them for pissing me off less than you are pissing me off right now
.”

But once again, I say nothing. I was raised up polite, see?

And it is then—just then—as I am thinking these thoughts, as I hold the lighter to the tip of the last cigarette I will smoke before I get out of the car and start down the other side of the street, that my cellphone goes off
.

I think, “What the hell now?” and I take it from my pocket and turn it over, and I see the name flashing on the screen
.

And my heart stops for a moment. My heart stops and my stomach sort of swallows itself, and I feel the hairs on the nape of my neck stand to attention, and I feel my scalp tighten
. . .

The phone won’t stop
.

I hesitate, my finger hovering over the little green telephone, and then I push it
.

“
Yes,” I say, and already I can hear it in my voice. The edge. The nerves
.

“
You gotta come see him,” the voice says. And it doesn’t matter whose voice it is. It could be the president of freaking Cuba, for all that it
matters. It’s just that the message will have come from him, and him directly
.

“
Get me Madigan,” Mr. Sandià will have said, and there won’t have been the slightest doubt in his mind as to whether or not I would comply
.

“
Now?” I ask, like six feet of stiff shit
.

“
No, dickhead,” the voice says. “Why don’t you come next Christmas?
”

The line goes dead
.

Oh fuck, I am thinking. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck
.

13
PROMISE ME

H
is name wasn’t always Sandià. His name used to be something else, and something before that, but none of these names was the one with which he was born.

Now he was just Mr. Sandià, and this was the name by which he was known and the name that everyone used.

Anything that went before didn’t matter.

Madigan sat for a while in the smoke-filled car.

He felt nauseous, light-headed. He wished he hadn’t taken the lithium back at home, and then he thought that the smartest thing to do would be to take another one. And so he did.

He chewed it dry, and it tasted bitter in the back of his throat, and he took the empty cup from Chicken Shack and pulled off the lid. There was a half inch of melted ice water in the bottom. He drank it, sucked the last ice cube into his mouth and chewed it. He lit another cigarette, opened the window, tried to breathe deeply and couldn’t. His chest was too tight. Everything was too tight. He loosened his tie, his top button, even his belt. He opened the door and let the cool air in, and then he slammed it shut and started the car. He tried to clear his throat. It was tourniquet-tight. His fingers drummed nervously on the wheel.

Come on
, he thought.
Lithium, lithium, do your worst
.

He was at the junction of a 119th and Pleasant before he could even get his thoughts straight.

Mr. Sandià wanted to see him.

That morning he—Vincent Madigan—ably assisted by three dead scumbags, had busted one of Sandià’s houses. Sandià’s courier and accompanying entourage had been massacred in a hail of gunfire, and all the money had gone. Four hundred grand, give or take some change, more than three hundred and sixty of which was in a bag under the floorboards on the upper landing of Madigan’s own house. Next to that bag were several boxes of pills—everything from Demerol and Quaaludes to Dexedrine and
Bennies. Besides that there were three unlicensed handguns, a Tec-9, about ten grams of coke, and a half dozen wraps of smack. What a field day Walsh would have. And what a fun time Madigan would have explaining it all away. Walsh had nothing. IA never had anything. They relied on informants and snitches within the division, and they never got them. They said they did, but they lied, just like most everyone else. Walsh was not only chasing Madigan, he was after Charlie Harris and Ron Callow and a dozen others. Some rumor that three or four of them had lifted a crate of Zegna suits from Evidence, sold them on to whoever was interested. Those suits had gone missing for sure, but it wasn’t the suits that were the item of interest. The suits went into a furnace, and the six kilos of grass that has been vacuum-packed in coffee cartons and buried at the bottom of that crate had been trafficked into the network within twelve hours of leaving Evidence. That hadn’t been Madigan’s gig. Weed was bullshit. Six kilos? Jesus, you could make that much money off of three ounces of coke if it was cut right.

No, Duncan Walsh had nothing, and hell, the guy was out of there within three months if the grapevine was anything to go by. He’d move on up, gold shield clutched in his greedy, sweaty paws, and end up behind a desk in the chief of police’s administrative division, bullshitting war stories from the good old days when he busted cops for smoking reefer in the precinct garage.

Madigan was off-track. Thinking about Walsh and IA and Zegna suits was avoiding the issue. Sandià had called.

You gotta come see him
.

That meant nothing. It inferred and implied and gave away nothing. The message was always the same, the same tone of voice, the same kind of call. Didn’t matter what you were doing or where the hell you were. Your kid’s first birthday party, and if you don’t stay your wife is going to divorce you. Your daughter’s marriage, and you’re right there in the damned church about to give her away to some slick-haired dentist out of Yonkers with a brand-new Lexus and a weekend chalet on the edge of Blue Mountain Lake. It didn’t matter. You were summoned by Sandià, you went. End of story.

Despite the lithium, Madigan’s nerves were all over the place. He thought about taking another, but he didn’t want to be drooling and tongue-tied like some hopeful kid on prom night.

This was it.

Showtime.

He turned left at the lower end of Paladino Avenue and started on up toward Sandià’s tenement. Sandià was up top, right there at the peak of the mountain, six floors beneath him filled with Hispanic junkies and hookers and dealers and loan sharks, the topmost level a fortress of solitude and safety. You wanted to get to Sandià you had to walk a gauntlet of security like no other. The mayor, the chief of police, the state senator? Not a prayer. The security around such people was a tissue-fine web of nothing compared to that provided for Sandià.

Madigan parked fifty yards away. In and of itself, there was no concern that his car would be seen and identified, either by his colleagues or the assholes that prowled this neighborhood and kept Sandià informed of who was around and what they were after. Madigan was supposed to be in the area. He was looking for the girl. That was the official line. The unofficial line? Well, anyone who was
anyone
in the Yard knew that he and Sandià had a working relationship. In reality, it would take six divisions of cops and most of the National Guard to bust open Sandià’s tenement. It was a castle. Perhaps it was the last bastion of real opposition to the mayor’s progress machine. There would be no gentrification here. Perhaps Sandià was paying the world to take no notice. Madigan knew some things, but not others. He knew more than most, but when it came to whatever
working relationship
that might have existed between Sandià and the real powers that be, well, Madigan was in the dark. There was an uneasy alliance, a tenuous rapport, and for as long as Madigan could remember it had held in this part of the city. Raids happened, of course, but it was always the little guys who bit the bullet. It was in the dealers’ houses, in the crack dens, the cluster of dilapidated condos where Sandià’s hookers plied their trade that the busts were made. Never here. Never up close and personal.

Madigan started walking back the way he’d come. He’d left both his guns in the car. Take them with him and they’d keep them until he came out again. Unless he was up for a suicide mission, there was no hope of killing Sandià on his home ground. And before today there had been no reason to kill him. Before today he hadn’t hit Sandià personally and directly.

And if Sandià already knew that Madigan had taken the house that morning, well, Madigan would be dead within the hour. His head, hands, and feet would be a dozen pounds of hamburger by
nine, most of it in the New Jersey swamps, a little in the East River, maybe some in the Hudson. By midnight the fire department would be traipsing through the wet, smoldering wreck of his house, and the office of the chief of police would be making a statement to the
New York Times
about how sorely Madigan would be missed by his colleagues and his family.

And Sandià would make sure that his connection to Madigan never saw the light of day.

It was that simple. It was always that simple with Sandià.

At the lower entrance to the tenement Madigan was waved through into the foyer. Here he went through the customary pat-down—collar, shoulders, underarms, waist, thighs, calves, ankles. His hip holster was empty, as was the one at his ankle. He was escorted to the elevator, and one of the apes rode up with him. Nine floors, all of it in silence, the aged elevator clunking and creaking every foot of the way. The ape didn’t smell so good. He needed a good hosedown. Maybe six three, two ten, two twenty perhaps, his face like a wet sack of sneakers. He had a buzz cut all over, but at the sides there were lightning streaks cut down to the scalp. He had a vicious scar dissecting his left ear, and right down to the edge of his jaw. The ear had been severed, but had knitted.

“Machete,” the ape said, aware that Madigan was staring.

“That so?”

“Sure is.”

“Gotta smart, huh?”

“Just a little.”

“Wouldn’t want to see the guy that did that to you,” Madigan ventured.

“You ain’t gonna,” the ape replied.

The elevator shuddered to a halt.

Madigan waited for the door to slide back. The lithium had slowed his heart, but he could feel the pressure of his own blood in his veins, in his brain, in the arteries in his neck. His hands were moist with sweat. His scalp itched something fierce. He needed to be the way he always was with Sandià—respectful, yet nonchalant and unhurried. They had history together, all of fifteen years, all the way back to the Gangs Division. Back then Madigan had been twenty-seven, Sandià something around forty. He owned a piece of a half dozen things. Nothing was big by itself, but everything together made him matter. He had some cars, some girls, a couple of chop shops, a few runs in and out of the cargo bays at JFK for
cigarettes, liquor, videos and electronic gear. He had a crew of three or four dozen. They weren’t a gang. They didn’t wear colors or fly flags. Sandià was too smart for that. No, Sandià knew where to invest his time and resources. Start with the cops already on the take. Get them on your side. Those that weren’t, well, there was always a way. Put a couple of girls in a hotel room, make a call, have a cop arrive for a possession bust, maybe a solicitation or something. The girls take care of the cop so as not to get the ticket, and everything is on film. The cop gets a couple of stills in the mail, he faces a costly divorce, a screwed career, or he gives word to Sandià every time there’s a planned raid on a traffic route.

Madigan’s own introduction to Sandià’s little world had been a mutual thing, a river that ran both ways. Back then, the mid-90s, there were things going on that made today’s business pale in comparison. Madigan was still married to Angela, his first wife. He went up to Manhattan Gangs in July of ’94. Cassie had been two years old and a handful. Neither he nor Angela were sleeping so good. They were fighting, but still at the stage where they didn’t fight around Cassie. There was some vague semblance of their former relationship, perhaps even the belief that they could work through their problems and survive. A year later it would be a different story. A year later they were sleeping in different rooms, Cassie in with Angela, Madigan in the den with a bottle of Jack. It was a bad time, and would stay bad until the final split in early ’97. Madigan already had something going with Ivonne Moreda, a girl he met in July of ’94, the same month he came out of the 12th Patrol and went into Gangs. He’d been twenty-seven, she was all of nineteen, and he had her up for possession with intent to distribute, resisting arrest, unlawful possession of an unlicensed firearm. He hadn’t gotten laid for a year. She was a drop-dead perfect ten. It didn’t take long for her to convince him that there was a better way to iron out the situation than throwing her in the jail with a crew of crack whores and gangbangers. They stayed together until September of ’99, and Adam—their son—had been born in November of ’96. He was a beautiful kid. He was quiet and calm and he looked like all the best of Madigan, all the best of Ivonne. He was the kind of kid who’d solicit admiration from people no matter where he went. Now Adam Moreda was thirteen, Ivonne was thirty-four, and Madigan hadn’t seen either of them for as long as he could recall. But Ivonne had been Madigan’s introduction to Sandià, if not directly, then certainly indirectly.
The Hispanic gangs were a world apart from the blacks and the Orientals. The Hispanic gangs—Los Carniceros, El Equipo Séptimo, and Los Fantasmas among others—were vying for bit-and-piece territories all around Louis Cuvillier Park, west to the FDR, north to the junction of MLK Jr. and First by the Triborough. There were incidents. People got stabbed and shot and gutted and burned. Then it all went quiet. Nothing for days. Madigan spoke to Ivonne, and she just smiled. She said, “It’s him. The Watermelon Man. Mr. Sandià. He has it all worked out. He gets them all working together instead of fighting between themselves. He is the mayor of East Harlem now. He has some people killed and now he is the big boss.”