The Informant (21 page)

“You jealous?”

She pointed her chin at him, hands on her hips, the high wearing off as her anger grew stronger. “I do what I say I do for you. Okay, so tonight we party with dealers, talk, listen, ’cause you got to do your job and I got to keep out of jail. Okay. But if I want to have some fun, that’s my business. If I want to dance with a man, talk with a man, that’s my business.”

“Not when you’re with me.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah
oh.
Tell me something: if you’re
working
, what’s all the laughing and shit going on between you and Lonnie Conquest?”

“What do you think? He’s in dope, ain’t he? He’s a distributor who’s starting to connect with Cubans. He’s here because he’s been asked to be with them on Mas Betancourt’s deal. He’s also been lucky with his mules. He’s using black kids under sixteen. That way, when they get busted, they don’t do no time, ’cause they’re juveniles.”

“Who told you all this?”

“Morena. He’s one of Enrique Ruiz’s lieutenants. Can I go back inside now?”

“Not yet. Lay off the pills. That’s not a request I’m
telling
you to lay off.” He was waving a finger at her like he was her father.

She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, then looked at Neil. “Look, you don’t own me, remember that I do what I want. Pills, men, exactly what I want.”

“You’re wrong. I
do
own you, lady, from your long hair right on down to your nice new platforms. You mess up, and you go down. You ought to know that by now.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“What’s eating you tonight? You’ve been looking for trouble ever since we got here.”

Lydia waited until the elevator stopped and more people got off and went in to the party. It had been building up inside of her for days, and now she let it out She narrowed her eyes, spitting her anger directly at Neil.

“I
trusted
you,
trusted
you all the way, and what happens to me? Your people are trying to send me to Miami, and I don’ wan’ to go. They call me in, they tell me I no got a choice, I got to go or I go to jail—”

“Raiser. That son of a bitch.”

“You better believe it, baby. He made me feel like I was nothin’, like I hadn’t done nothin’ for you people, and that ain’t right, man. I work hard for you, I really do.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Lydia pulled at her red handkerchief as though trying to shred it with her bare hands.

“Neil, I’m scared. I no understand what’s goin’ on. Raiser, he’s a crazy man. I can tell.”

He snorted. “It’s that damn Santería religion of yours, that voodoo shit.”

“It’s not voodoo and it’s not shit. I believe it.”

“Okay, it’s real. You’re right about Raiser. He just ain’t nice.”

Lydia sighed, turning her face away to stare down at the floor. “I called you all day, and you weren’t there. Called you at the office, at home …”

He put his hands on her shoulders and made his voice softer. “Lydia, I was out on the range. We’ve got to qualify every three months. I spent the whole day out there shooting at targets.”

“Nobody at the office knew where you were, and nobody answered at your house.”

“The thing with the office is, nobody’s ever sure where
anybody
is. Cat could be working the street or cheating on his wife. Sometimes an agent just doesn’t tell anybody where another agent can be found. You never know who’s doing the asking, and why. ’Bout my crib, you know I keep two phones there, and nobody’s supposed to touch the special number except me. My wife …”

Lydia looked up quickly. “Why she no like me?”

She saw the look of surprise speed across Neil’s face. “How the hell do you know that? That Santería shit again?”

“It’s not shit! Stop callin’ it that! I look at you, I can tell.”

Neil lifted her chin gently with his fingers. “Now who’s jealous?” He smiled when he said it.

Suddenly Lydia hated Neil. Pushing him aside with both hands, she felt hot tears splash her face, and she ran, ran right into Enrique Ruiz, who blocked her path, his arms wide, a huge smile on his small, handsome face, which was bright with perspiration. A large black Cuban cigar was clenched between his even white teeth.

“Hey, heyyy, you two! Enough of this. I want you should come inside with everybody, see the baby before we put him to bed. My wife gon’ take him downstairs to her cousin’s, so my kid can get some sleep. Hey, Lydia, hey, this no night to cry, this a night to celebrate.”

She felt Enrique’s arm around her as she wiped her eyes. Why had she done that? Why had she pushed Neil, why was she crying? She didn’t hate Neil. What was wrong with her tonight?

Enrique, one arm around Lydia, another around Neil, walked them towards his front door. He was a small man, pleasant and friendly, and had entertained his party guests with excellent amateur magic tricks that he practiced almost every day of his life. Lydia liked him, liked his wife, and was happy for them and their son, their first child.

And then she thought about what she had done, that she had set him up with Neil, that sooner or later Enrique would go to prison because of what she and Neil had done to him. And what would happen to Isadora, his wife, then, to their son?

Lydia twisted away from Enrique’s arm and ran ahead in to the party, disappearing into the crowd.

Enrique turned to Neil, smiling and frowning at the same time, shrugging his shoulders and turning his hands palms up as if to say: What did I do?

Neil said, “Wasn’t you. Just something she and I have to work out.”

“Lydia? Neil.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Where’ve you been? I’m calling since one o’clock this morning. You left and didn’t even tell me you were leaving. Hell, that was embarrassing, I mean, leaving me there by myself, but I … I, well, I thought you might be upset …”

“I’m okay. Okay.”

Neil looked at his watch. Four-fifteen in the morning. He was home, whispering so as not to wake up Elaine and Courtenaye. Goddamn Lydia freaked out tonight. Just disappeared from Enrique Ruiz’s party, and nobody knew where she was. Neil had worried about her.

He said, “About Raiser, I’m working on it. I’ve submitted my report with my reasons why they ought to keep you here.”

Lydia sighed into the telephone. Her voice was slurred. Probably still high, still bombed out on something. “I got friends in Miami, you know? I talk with them. They say plenty people get killed down there in drugs. They say dealers walk around carrying rifles in the daytime. People wear army clothes, what you call them?”

“Fatigues?”

“Yeah, fatigues. They look like they gonna fight Castro, but they just dress up like that all the time, you know? They shoot you quick in Miami.”

Neil sighed, leaning back on the couch, quickly glancing at the closed door to his and Elaine’s bedroom. “Lydia, you’re not in Miami yet. Hang in there. Give me a chance, okay?”

Her voice was suddenly muffled, as though her hand was over the receiver. Neil heard her say something in Spanish and heard a man reply in Spanish.

Neil said, “Who’s that? Somebody there with you?”

Lydia sounded emotionally and physically tired.

“I don’ wan’ to be alone tonight. I don’ wan’ to be alone.”

Neil stood up, twisting the telephone cord around his right fist, feeling the swift heat of
something
explode inside of him. Jealous? No way, no goddamn way. But something …

“Morena. Is he there? Did you come home with that bastard, that—?”

“You got a wife, you got somebody. I got to have somebody.”

“Lydia? …”

The line went dead; then the dial tone filled Neil’s ear.

In the darkness of Neil’s apartment, the light from his small kitchen threw a long, thin yellow island on the gray living-room carpet. Neil stood with the receiver pressed hard against his ear, eyes closed, wondering what was happening to him. Whatever it was, he’d better fight it, because he couldn’t let anything crazy happen between him and an informant. It was too crazy, too impossible even to think about.

But he sat alone on the couch for a long time before turning out the kitchen light and going into the bedroom to lie beside his sleeping wife.

Walker Wallace sat behind his desk scratching his chin with one finger, eyeing Neil with the mild disbelief one accorded a man who’d just announced he planned to kill himself.

“You beat him, Neil. God help your ass.” And Walker Wallace got up, walked out of his office, leaving Neil alone there. He had fled as though Neil were a leper.

You beat him.

Neil had beat Saul Raiser, and Lydia wasn’t going to be sent to Miami; she was being kept in New York, and Neil was still assigned to work her, to continue investigating the super deal being put together by Mas Betancourt, his Cubans, and the blacks. Justice and New York both felt the case Neil was trying to make could be a big one. At the rate Neil and Lydia were rolling over dealers and distributors, in six months this case could involve as many as forty narcotics traffickers, more than enough to give Neil’s career the one big boost it needed.

But watch out for Saul Raiser.

God help your ass.

Saul Raiser was now an enemy, and in Neil’s excitement at the good news, he took a moment out for sober reflection. If he failed now, if Lydia’s information turned bad or she betrayed him or if his luck just exploded in his face, Raiser would be down on him like a hungry hawk swooping down on a crippled lamb. Neil couldn’t afford to fail now.

His heart jumping with excitement, he sat behind Walker Wallace’s desk and dialed Lydia. Her line was busy.
Come on, come on.

He hung up, chewed on his thumbnail, and gently pounded the desk with his fist. He dialed again. Still busy.
Come on, Lydia, give me a chance to play God. Get off the phone.

Lydia gently patted the bruises on Shana Levin’s face with a washcloth soaked in cold water.

“He’ll kill you one day, you know. I keep telling you, but you won’t listen.”

Shana sniffled. “He’s … he’s crazy. One minute he’s nice, the next minute, I just don’t know.”

“René’s my cousin … Hold still. He’s my cousin, but he’s not right in the head. Something, I don’t know. Something is wrong with him, but he won’t see a doctor. There. Can you see out of that eye? God, it’s ugly! Turning purple, and it’s almost closed.”

Shana Levin gently pushed Lydia’s hand aside, blinking and flinching as the hand passed close to her face. “I can see, kinda.”

“Kind of, huh. René know you’re here?”

“Don’t think so. He had to go to the airport to pick up something.”

Lydia patted Shana’s blond hair into place. “Something. Sure, something. We know what something is.”

Shana nodded, then shivered. “Snakes.”

“Snakes?”

“Swear to God. He tells me snakes, and I look at him like he’s nuts or something. He says Blind Man has a package coming in today, and it’s in a glass case full of snakes, hidden on the bottom. Nobody’s going to stick their hand in a case full of snakes from Chile, so what ever’s in there ought to be safe, right?”

“Guess so. Snakes.
Dios mío.
René don’t know nothin’ ’bout no snakes.”

“You’re right, He’s just going to drive out there in a panel truck, pick up the case, then drive it to some zoo over in Brooklyn. That’s it. He wasn’t all that happy about it, but you know how it is. Somebody tells you to go, you go.”

Lydia sighed. “Yeah. What did you two argue about this time?”

“What did we argue about? Oh, God. Nothing, believe me, it was nothing. I said something about my parents having two homes. He just came on with an attitude. Like I was putting him down, so he starts beating on me.”

Lydia gently pushed Shana ahead of her and out of the small bathroom. “Shana, you love René?”

The battered woman nodded yes, eyes welling with tears.

Lydia’s voice was soft, as she put her arms around Shana. “You’re a fool. Don’t ever love nobody who can’t love you back.”

And Lydia thought of Neil Shire.

B
ARBARA POMAL ORDERED
LANGOSTA
a la catalana,
stewed lobster; Rolando, the priest, ordered
frijoles colorados,
red bean soup to start, followed by
filete de puerco,
filet of pork; Mas Betancourt ordered
gazpacho,
with a main dish of
ropa vieja,
“old clothes”—shredded beef, green peppers, black beans, tomatoes; Luis DaPaola, Mas’s third trusted lieutenant, ate lightly, ordering
rueda de serrucho frita,
fried swordfish and nothing else. In Casa Cervantes, a Cuban restaurant on West Seventy-ninth Street and Broadway, the four were carrying out a ritual common to Cuban narcotics dealers, the discussion of business over a long, leisurely meal in a public place surrounded by other Cubans, where strangers or intruders would be immediately obvious.

Luis DaPaola owned Casa Cervantes. He was a quiet and brutal man, slim and handsome, chain-smoking Turkish cigarettes and wearing only expensive double-breasted suits in pinstripe gray, except in summer, when he wore gray short-sleeved jumpsuits.

Called Mr. Gray because of this wardrobe, Luis DaPaola followed the Cuban custom of hiring as waiters only those men who wanted to work for him in narcotics as subdealers, couriers, cutters in mills, hit men. In a restaurant owned by any Cuban dope dealer, a waiter’s job was a trial period, a time for the dealer to observe and indoctrinate, to investigate a recruit while teaching him the narcotics trade.

Rolando, the priest, held Barbara’s hand, fingering the blue-diamond bracelet on her left wrist. “
Bonito mi Barbara.
Very, very pretty. Expensive?”

“
Sí
.”

“A bargain?” He meant was it stolen.

“You know better.”

Rolando winked at her. He did know better. Barbara Pomal avoided stolen goods as well as the use of all credit cards, since both could only bring her unwanted attention and increase the risk she ran working for a major heroin and cocaine importer. Credit cards meant a record of her trips to Europe, Mexico, South America. So she paid for her plane tickets in cash, using a different airline for each trip, arranging to fly out of the country from New York as well as from Washington, D.C., Toronto, Montreal, Cleveland, Chicago. Barbara Pomal, so careful with her travel plans, was also too careful to buy stolen diamonds.