American Gangster (8 page)

This is especially so since the vast majority of Marta's customers are not the sort likely to turn up in the pages of
Cigar Aficionado
or talking on cell phones at Nat Sherman, where the business class slavishly plunks down $13 apiece for Monte Cristos, Cohibas, and other Dominican-grown knockoffs of the famous Cuban brands. These suspenders-wearing junior brokers and their walk-in humidors almost killed cigar smoking as a regal, if stinky, bad habit in the Big Apple.

Thankfully, none of these foul airs sully the dense smoke inside PB Cuban. Here, all cigars—be they robusto, corona, or perfecto—are $5 or less, a suitable price to the minions of the Flower District, one of the few remaining local trade neighborhoods in midtown, a blue-collar stomping ground for Jamaican bus drivers, Bangladeshi computer repairmen, and Ukrainian electrical contractors with vivid memories of the day Chernobyl melted down.

“People come in on their lunch hour and relax for a moment,” Marta reports, remembering the day she first decided to bring a couple of metalframe
chairs from her apartment on Twenty-first Street and set them up on the linoleum floor between the cigar display case and the storefront's neon-lit plate-glass window. Martha soon began brewing up potent, thickly sugared espresso, which she serves free of charge to her customers in thimble-sized plastic cups. A coatrack was soon installed, so customers need not sit about in their heavy outer garments. Should a lunch-hour regular care to bring a bit of Scotch to accompany his corona, Marta cleared a shelf. Now perhaps a dozen bottles sit there bearing handwritten labels, such as
ALAN
'
S
—
NO TOUCH
.

How the couch in question arrived under the water-stained ceiling at PB Cubans is “a funny story,” Marta says. Seems that one of her “good customers,” Andrew DeForrest, formerly of southern Tipperary and currently an installer of midtown-office-building bathrooms, happened to be passing his lunch hour in his preferred manner, letting his mind go while puffing on one of PB Cuban's “brilliant” robustos.

“Nothing could be better,” says DeForrest, an impressively huge man known for carrying a five-inch curved blade on his ample belt. One day it occurred to DeForrest, whom Marta refers to as “Mr. Le Florist,” that however perfect life inside PB Cubans might be, it could still be more perfect.

“Martha,” said DeForrest, “if you only had a comfortable couch here, I'd never leave. I'd live here and sleep on it.”

Then, “like magic, with the words barely out of my mouth,” DeForrest recounts, a man wearing a stocking cap stuck his head in the door of PB Cuban. “Hey,” he said with a surreptitious hiss, “anyone wanna buy a couch?”

“How much?” replied DeForrest without pause.

“Twenty bucks,” said the man.

DeForrest rose and went with the seller around the corner. A few moments later, DeForrest returned with the couch on his back, Paul Bunyan style. He set the couch against the wall to the right of the cigar case and sat down.

“This is a comfortable couch,” DeForrest said in his manly brogue. “I think it might be the most comfortable couch in all of New York.” With that DeForrest closed his eyes and slept for the rest of his lunch hour.

More than two years later, Marta's couch remains, exactly where DeForrest placed it. And true, it doesn't look like much. It is bulbous in the manner of a half-deflated blow-up doll, and its linty variety of fake Naugahyde is not recommended for prolonged contact with bare skin. But to sit on it! To sink into its squishy pillows! Perhaps it's the presence of swaying palm fronds outside the storefront window (this is the Flower District, after all), but sitting on Marta's couch, bathed in the pink-and-blue light of the PB Cuban neon sign, following the curl of smoke snaking from the end of a short corona is to be transported. As has been noted by a number of smokers, the awning of the gypsy fortune-teller next door offers “a true vision of the past, present and future—your choice.” To sit on Martha's couch goes this several steps better, offering, for a nicotine-enabled moment, accessibility to all states, at the same time.

Today, a good group has assembled. Present is Tom the computer man, sad about breaking up with his girlfriend. DeForrest, back from Ireland, is here in his wide-brimmed outback hat. Chris the painter has come over from F.I.T. Steve, the stand-up comic, commandeers the left side of the couch. Recently, Steve got a job coaching public speakers. According to polls, Steve announces, public speaking is the third-greatest fear held by mankind, right behind drowning. “Incredible,” he says. “People would rather be shot in the head than talk in front of a crowd.”

For each regular, Marta offers both cheeks to be kissed and a cigar. In her canny, sphinxlike way, she knows everyone's particular passion.

This doesn't mean an occasional wrong number doesn't turn up. This afternoon, a beefy, cajoling man from Budapest brought discord to PB Cuban. Speaking in the hushed but insistent tones of a post Soviet black-marketeer, the man was under the impression that Marta sold “real Cuban” cigars, not this “Dominican crap which is not even worth smoking.” Rudely declining Marta's offer of a cup of espresso, the Hungarian kept up this harangue, even disparging Enrique's impeccable rolling technique.

This was the last straw. One cannot simply enter Marta's pleasure salon and sling around this bullshit.

“Hey, shut the fuck up, Martha got the best cigars in New York!” screams Steve. “Better than your shit
Fidelista
Cohibas!” Several other regulars join
in, holding up the honor of PB Cuban. It takes a lot to rouse a smoker once settled on Martha's couch, but this Hungarian has managed it. DeForrest has now joined the discussion, jacket thrown open to show off the pearl handle of his knife. No one here has ever seen the laconic Irishman mad, nor have they cared to. Eventually, the muttering Hungarian stalks out, much to everyone's relief.

The assembled smokers notice our hostess has a tear in her eye. She has been touched by this defense of PB Cuban. “I feel such a love from my good customers,” Martha says, her hands upon the cigar case. “It is such a love I feel I do not deserve.” But as anyone who has ever spent a blissful half hour sitting on Martha's couch, the most comfortable in New York, knows: of course, she does. All that love and more.

Nothing stirs the heart more than the possibility of the miraculous among us. Father Zlatko Sudac came from Croatia to the Bronx, and to Brooklyn, bearing the stigmata, the mysterious wounds of Christ. Or did he? From
New York
magazine, 2002
.

“Which one is he,” asked the seventy-year-old lady from Yonkers. “Near blind” seeing “only gray shadows,” the woman was one of twenty-five hundred souls who had come to the Immaculate Conception Church in the north Bronx on this rainy, windswept evening, hoping to be healed.

“The one in the purple vestments,” said the lady's companion, leaning on her cane. “The one who looks like God.”

Truly, there was no mistaking the presence of Father Zlatko Sudac, who now sat in a velvet-covered chair to the right hand of the altar at the Capuchin Roman Catholic church. In his early thirties, the young priest from the island of Krk, off the Adriatic coast of northern Croatia, his long russet hair pulled tightly away from a parched, pasty complexion, thick brows arched above deep-set, mournful brown eyes, appeared as a vision of sorrow. Only moments before he had spoken of love, and the unsurpassed
joy of ultimate devotion, but now everything about the body language of his frail frame, the way he alternatively rested his head in his spidery hands and craned his long neck so as to scan the crowded church, suggested an otherworldliness of suffering.

“Can you see
it
?” the half-blind woman asked her companion.

“Yes. On his head … I see …
a notch
,” replied the second old lady, squinting hard behind her thick glasses.

This much was visible: an indentation perhaps an inch long, like a coin slot, in the middle of Father Sudac's (pronounced Soo-
dots
) wide, flat forehead. It very well could be, as many in the church commented upon, the horizontal plane of a Cross that, it is said, appeared on Sudac's brow in October of 1999. This was followed a year later by markings on the wrists, feet, and side, five in all, outward signs that the former philosophy student and Croatian soldier had received the
stigmata
: wounds corresponding to those suffered by Christ on the Cross.

In what has been a most difficult time for the Church, with seemingly another appalling headline of sexual and financial abuse every week, news of Father Sudac's stigmata has been greeted with both skepticism and a hopeful expectancy. The first widely accepted stigmatic since the revered Padre Pio (the Italian priest who will officially canonized this June), Father Sudac has become the hottest ecclesiastic ticket in town since his arrival in the New York area last fall. At the Immaculate Conception those unable to fit into the standing-room-only chapel huddled on the church steps where, in forty-degree weather, they listened to the three-hour mass through a loudspeaker. Two masses at Our Lady of Pompeii in Greenwich Village attracted upward of four thousand people. At St. John the Baptist in Paterson, New Jersey, fire marshals, fearful of the seriously overcrowded conditions, attempted to clear the room, leading one firefighter to grouse, “I'll run into any burning building, but throwing people out of mass? They don't pay me for that…. The man could be a saint, for chrissakes.”

It was no surprise God had chosen this particular time, in the horrific wake of 9/11, to send a messenger like Father Sudac, said Patty Fioreillo, a thirty-year-old secretary who had driven from Peekskill to the Immaculate Conception mass. The world was a mess, Patty said, more so than we
were willing to admit. People had deluded themselves into thinking the materialism of TV commercials, the rat race of work, and “me-first ethics” were the actual state of things. It was like the movie
The Matrix
, she said, where the consensus reality was generated by computers. “We, as human beings, have two choices,” Patty said. “We can either accept the soulless here and now, and a lot of lazy people will do that. Or we can fight against it, try to be who we are supposed to be: those made in God's image.”

“9/11 raised the stakes,” Patty asserted. The terrorist attacks “punched a hole in the fake reality,” she said, drenched from two hours of waiting in the rain to see Father Sudac. The battle wasn't between “political versions of Good and Evil the way Bush says.” After all, Patty continued, what did someone like Bush know about Good and Evil? Goodness was Truth, Evil was lies—what the world needed wasn't more armies, killing innocent people. It needed messengers like Father Sudac, those “gifted in the Spirit.”

The fact that Father Sudac was in the world, now, was “very hopeful,” said Patty. “I pray for him, every day.”

According to
The Catholic Encylopedia
, compiled in 1912 and still a commonly used source, the first known receiver of the mystical stigmata was Saint Francis of Assisi, afflicted while in deep prayer inside a hut on Mount Averna in 1227. Suddenly, according to Felix Timmerman's re-telling of St. Francis's experience, “it was as if the heavens were exploding and splashing forth all their glory in millions of waterfalls of colors and stars.” Inside the “whirlpool of blinding light” was “a fiery figure with wings nailed to a Cross of fire.” It was Jesus Christ. His wounds were “blazing rays of blood” that pierced Francis's hands and feet with nails and his heart with “the stab of a lance.” The fiery image, “like a mirrored reflection, impressed itself into Francis's body, with its love, its beauty, and its grief.” Then, “with nails and wounds, his soul and spirit aflame, Francis sank down, unconscious, in his blood.”

Sudac, whose wounds have been declared “not of human origin” by Vatican doctors at the Gemelli Clinic in Rome, has a somewhat less dramatic description of his holy affliction. It happened at “a friendly get-together in one family's house,” the priest said in his only interview available in English, adding only that events generated “a tremendous fear of
the Lord” that “surpasses myself.” Asked if he has pain from the Cross on his forehead, Sudac says, “It doesn't hurt me, except when I am in prayer, then I feel it pulsing. On first Fridays and other certain times, it's known to bleed and leak as though it is crying.”

Sudac has also spoken of the other “gifts of the Spirit” he has received since his stigmatization. These include “levitation, bilocation, illumination, and knowledge of upcoming events.” Bilocation is particularly “interesting gift,” Sudac says. “You have the feeling you are in one place, but your heart and imagination are somewhere else.” The priest says he didn't exactly know he'd been in two places at the same time until “some people had come forward and confirmed it all.”

One would like to engage Sudac on these matters, to discuss how and why, as with other stigmatics, the skin around his wounds never blackens or putrefies. Or whether his stigmata smells “like roses and tobacco,” as witnesses said Padre Pio's did. But this conversation will have to wait as Sudac, who speaks no English, does not give interviews to the American press. Nor does he display his wounds of Christ, save the “notch” on his forehead. Perhaps this is why the archdiocese is vague at best concerning Sudac. The only thing they'll say is, “Father Sudac is a priest in good standing.”

Asked if Sudac's refusal to display his wounds created any doubt in his mind, Tom Robles, a postal worker from Flushing, says no. “The Vatican says he's legitimate. I go with that. I am a man of faith. If I didn't have faith I couldn't believe in anything. Then where would I be? Where would any of us be?”