Slow Motion Riot (13 page)

"This is a guy who buys his
wife a television antenna for an anniversary present," Richard Silver
said.

"You should give him a
chance," his lawyer, Larry McDonald, told him.

The two of them were sitting in a
Long
Island
restaurant called Captain Nemo's Seafood Bar and Grill. All
the wooden chairs had anchors on the back and legs shaped like dock ropes. Live
fish tanks were built into the walls and each drink had a plastic swordfish
stirrer. The lighting was dim and a little musty, like an underwater grotto.
Larry McDonald and Richard Silver kept watching the door to the men's room.

"He's been in there a long
time," Richard Silver said. "What's he doing, writing the
Torah?"

"He's just nervous,"
Larry said in his airy singsong voice. "He's never done anything like this
before."

Larry was not a bad lawyer, but he
was no Jimmy Rose. There was something a little off about him. The paleness of
his skin, the thinness of his wrists. His habit of sighing and letting his
voice trail off. Richard glanced at the men's room door again as the boy
dressed in a first mate's uniform brought him his tuna fish sandwich.

Richard told the boy to hold the
rest of the food until the third man in their party came back to the table. The
boy left and Richard shook his head.

"Captain Nemo's Seafood,"
he said. "With Bobby Kennedy I had dinner at '21.' You believe that?"

Larry sighed. "Life is very
funny..." his voice trailed off.

"Now, I'm spending July Fourth
with a forty-thousand-dollar-a-year bank manager from Syosset. What kind of
world is this?"

"I don't know..."

"Yeah." Richard turned
his eyes to the bathroom once more and then leaned across the table.
"Listen, Larry, you sure about this guy? The last thing I need is a
pain-in-the-ass federal probe. I already got this probation thing."

Larry held up his wrists, like he
was offering to let Richard slash them. "This is my second cousin.
Practically my blood."

"Then why do I have to be
here?"

"He wanted to meet you,
Richard. The last time he was in
Manhattan
,
I showed him some of the buildings you put up. He was very impressed."

Andy Altman finally came out of the
bathroom. Richard sized him up all over again. A small-boned man in his early
forties, with a boy's sparse mustache and a few strands of black hair
stretched, hopefully and impractically, across an expanse of pink scalp. Sears
blazer, purple Izod shirt, cheap loafers. The kind of guy Richard used to beat
up for his lunch money and his baseball cards when he was a kid. Taking small
steps, Andy returned to the table and sat down between Richard and Larry.

"I'm sorry," he said
shyly. "My stomach's been bothering me."

"It's all right," Larry
said, patting his hand. "We had the waiter hold your food."

"So, Andy," Richard said
in a low voice. "You thought about what we were saying?"

"Well." Andy cleared his
throat and peered over at the waiter to let him know he wanted his food now.
"There were a couple of things I wasn't quite clear on."

Richard's brow furrowed. "What
don't you understand? You have the easy part."

For the third time, Larry took the
napkin with the diagram on it out of his breast pocket. "It's just like we
said before, Andy," he said in a voice that was just a bit above a
whisper, "you hardly have to do anything. When Richard's friends bring in
the deposits, you just don't fill out the IRS report. Don't worry about the
Cayman
Islands
. Somebody else will go down there to handle things
..."

"Larry, Larry, Larry."
Andy shut his eyes and nodded. "I know how money laundering works."

"Sssh." Richard Silver
looked like he was about to leap across the table and clamp a hand over Andy's mouth.

"I understand all that,"
Andy said in a softer voice. "What I don't understand is where Richard's
friends get the money from. Are these Mafia people or something?"

There was a long silence. Richard
waited until the waiter put down Andy's seafood platter and left before he
spoke again.

"Why would you wanna know a
thing like that?" he said in a quietly intimidating voice.

"I don't know." Andy
seemed to shrink a little in his seat. "I just wanted to know. I thought
it'd help me make my decision."

"Listen, Andy, when you get an
opportunity, you take it. If the men who built
Long Island
had hesitated, we'd be sitting in a potato field now, instead of this fine
restaurant." Richard looked over at the waiter and tapped his empty Diet
Coke glass.

"That's right," Larry
said. "You never know when something's going to come along and change your
life."

The waiter brought Richard another
Diet Coke while Andy held a skewered shrimp over the flame in the middle of his
platter.

"I remember something that
happened a few years ago that changed my life," Larry said, a long gray
hair protruding out of his nose. "I had a very powerful client with a lot
of friends in what the newspapers call the organized-crime community. Anyway,
he was very fond of me and he invited me to a big party at his penthouse on the
East Side
. And I wanna tell you, it was the wildest
thing. He had a swimming pool built into the roof of his penthouse. And when
you went downstairs, there was a window so you could watch people swimming from
under water. So I looked in, and he had all these naked boys in the pool."

Richard scratched his head.
"You talking about Frank Raggi?"

"This is somebody you don't
know," Larry said. "Anyway, I went downstairs and I'm watching this.
And these boys were like dolphins the way they swam. A lot of the time, they
had their heads out of the water, so all you saw were their legs and torsos.
But every once in a while, one of them would swim by and take a little nibble
at another guy's cock and balls. It was like the Aqua Show. The most erotic
thing I ever saw in my life."

Richard shifted uncomfortably in
his seat. "And then what?"

"What do you mean, Then
what?'" Larry asked.

"What'd you tell your wife
when you got home?"

"I told her I'm a fag."

"What?" Richard nearly
spit out his soda.

"You didn't know that? I'm
gay. Sure. And I never would've known it if I hadn't of gone to that party.
That's what I was saying to Andy here about opportunities."

"Shit." Richard sat still
for a moment, watching an angel-fish eat a baby minnow in a nearby fish tank.
"I never knew that about you, Larry."

"I only brought it up to make
the point with Andy. I know it doesn't have any effect on our
relationship."

"Of course not," Richard
said, covering his mouth with a napkin. "So what do you say, Andy? Are you
gonna be with us?"

Andy had done nothing but eat for
the last few minutes.

His seafood platter, which started
off with twelve items, had just two mangled pieces of calamari left. He sat
back, rubbing his stomach.

"Could work out, I
guess," he said.

"What's the problem?"
Richard Silver asked.

"The ten percent you were
talking about. That only comes to a thousand dollars if I help you wash ten
thousand."

Richard put his glass down and
looked at Larry again. "So?"

"So," said Andy,
loosening his belt a couple of notches and suddenly sounding more confident.
"I was thinking you could probably afford to add on another five
percent."

"I see you already know all
about opportunities," Richard said. "We'll see about your five
percent. That's more than we were thinking of."

"Well, at least, throw in
dessert tonight," Andy said. "I think I still feel a little
hungry."

I don't suppose there's much I can
say to explain why I call Maria Sanchez for a date on the Fourth of July. I
guess I could claim that I care so much about my job that it spills over into
my personal life. But the truth is that I'm kind of drunk and horny and I've
been thinking about her a lot lately. Besides, it's the holiday and I've got
nothing else to do.

My hand shakes a little as I'm
dialing her new number, because I know I'm not supposed to be doing this. But I
got one drink past my inhibitions a half hour ago and I figure I have to seize
the moment now or let it pass forever.

By the second ring, though, I
suddenly realize I could be making the mistake of a lifetime and blowing my job
on a drunken whim. I'm about to hang up when I hear somebody picking up on the
other end and immediately recognize Maria's voice saying, "Hola."

Hanging up now would make me feel
like I was making a dirty phone call or something. "Yeah, Maria," I
say, fumbling for a cigarette and trying to figure how to get out of what I'm
about to get myself into. "How you doing?"

"Mr. Baum," she says in
an excited voice. "I can't believe it's you calling."

"Yeah, neither can I."

"What are you doing?"

I put the cigarette down and start
mashing up my Silly Putty. "Well, I, you know, like to check in on my
clients over the holidays. Because, um, they can be really stressful times, you
know. So I want to make sure everything's okay."

There's a long pause. I try to
think of an excuse to get off the phone right away, like an airplane is about
to hit my apartment.

"What are you doing, Mr.
Baum?" Maria says in a very calm, deliberate voice.

Panic bounces my heart around like
a basketball. She's on to me, I think. This is the end. On Monday she'll tell
my supervisor, Ms. Lang, that I called her up and asked her out on a date, and
then I'll get fired. And I'll end up on the street, begging for quarters and
trying to sell old copies of Freud on the Unconscious and Penthouse Forum on
sidewalk blankets like the scuzzy guys in my neighborhood.

"I told you what I was
doing," I say, backtracking furiously and praying it's not too late.
"I'm just calling all my clients and making sure they're all okay."

"No," Maria says firmly.
"I mean, what are you doing tonight?"

I stop and take a deep breath.
"Nothing, I guess. What're you doing?"

"I'm not doing nothing
neither."

The words come out of my mouth
without my permission. "So," I say, "you wanna see some
fireworks?"

By ten, we've made our way to the
Battery Park esplanade in lower
Manhattan
.
Behind us, yuppie couples walk arm in arm and high-rise buildings glitter like
too much expensive crystal jammed onto a narrow shelf. Down the river, toward
the
Verrazano-Narrows
Bridge
,
fireworks deliver a series of shocks to the sky.

Maria is standing right next to me.
She smiles and bounces up and down when a particularly colorful rocket scatters
over the skyline. The mother-of-pearl smell coming from her keeps me by her
side and reminds me I don't have any real excuse for being here with her.

"Oh, look at that one,"
she says. "It's just like a flower."

The rocket bursts open right over
our heads. It's red at the center and the petals are blue and it keeps opening
wider and wider until it seems like it's going to take over the whole sky. Only
it doesn't make me think of a flower. It makes me think of pussy. Which just
goes to show how long it's been.

"I'm so glad I came
tonight," she says as the sparks in the sky fade.

"I am too."

That's the strange thing. I am glad
she came with me. It's so obviously and so unambiguously wrong that I can't
help being turned on by it. Her hair shines in the promenade lights and her
pupils reflect the sparkle of another rocket going off. I find that I can't
keep my eyes off the curve of her lower lip.

"Maria, I wanna ask you
something," I say haltingly.

"Yes, what is it?" There's
something sweetly eager in her voice that breaks my heart and makes me want to
take her in my arms right now.

The whiskey haze in my head lifts a
little, so that I may more clearly hear the tiny devil I imagine on my right
shoulder and that boring harp player on the left. "Maria," I say.
"Do you ever think about our meetings after you leave the office?"

For a moment, her mouth hangs open
and though I can't see the rest of her face in the evening light, I have a
feeling she's blushing. "Yes," she says. "Yes, of course, Mr. Baum."

I decide I don't like it that she
keeps calling me Mr. Baum while I'm using her first name. It reminds me of the
office, which in turn makes me think of her original crime. And that makes me
even more uncomfortable than I was in the first place. So I start mashing up
the Silly Putty in my pocket. A green rocket streaks across the sky and
fragments in front of the Statue of Liberty. "What do you think about our
meetings?" I ask.

"I think about the things you
say." She looks up brightly as though someone was murmuring something
exciting in her ear. "I remember everything you tell me."

I'm feeling that heady rush, like
I'm about to either get laid or punched out. The harp player on my shoulder
keeps telling me she's seventeen, but who asked him? "What parts do you
remember most?"

She puts her fingers on her lips
and looks thoughtful. "I think about how you tell me to work on my typing
and to go to the Job Corps interviews..."

"Yeah, yeah, I know all that.
But I mean..." I watch a yellow rocket shoot by and make a wish on it that
I sort of hope won't come true. "Do you think about me?"

"You?" She gives me a
smile like a Beach Boys' song in the dead of winter—a promise of something
better ahead. "I think about you always. You're like one of
los
angeles
guardianes."

The yellow rocket fizzes out.
"What is that?" I say. "A minor league team or something?"

"No," she laughs.
"It's a guardian angel. You're my guardian angel."

A second ago, her guardian angel
wanted to stick his tongue down her throat. Now, I'm nodding my head like I
know what the hell she's talking about.

"When I was young," she
says, "and all the bad things happened to me, when my uncle would come to
my bed, I always prayed for the guardian angel to come and make everything all
right. Because otherwise no one would save me."

"Uh-huh." I am now three
feet tall and shrinking because of the things I've pictured her doing in
graphic detail over the past few hours.

"And now I have my guardian
angel," she says, taking my hand and kissing me chastely on the cheek.

"Hey, Maria," I say,
flushing with embarrassment and making sure my fly is still zipped up.
"I'm just a regular shmo. You know?"

"I know you won't let anything
bad happen to me," she says, skipping down the esplanade and looking over
her shoulder like she wants me to follow.

I suppose I could chase after her,
hoping vainly some spark might strike between us, but I chose to bring her here
and as Maria's guardian angel, I choose to bring her home in a cab which costs
$23.75. Then I take the subway back to my neighborhood and stop at the bar on
Seventh and Avenue B for two scotch and sodas, a favored drink among
disappointed guardian angels, I believe.