The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (16 page)

“You can make whatever repairs you want,” she said, “but I refuse to let you pay for the parts.”

He agreed to give her the receipts, but would only do so when he couldn’t afford to cover them himself. Soon he finished the electrical work and plastered some of the walls. The following day, a neighbor stopped by—Ellis Dansberg, a licensed plumber. Paul asked him a dozen questions about fixing the leaky and rusted pipes.

“You wanna make sure you turn off the water to the branch you’re cutting,” Ellis explained in a loud, unmodu-lated voice. “You can use a hacksaw, but be careful not to leave burrs. I’d dry fit and solder as much of the extension on the ground as possible …”

He found plumbing more difficult than electrical work and was careful to only take on smaller repairs, making detailed notes as the man spoke.

Paul suddenly realized that it had been nearly two weeks since he had been back to his hotel room, and he was already in arrears. He called to learn that his scant possessions—mainly an archive of clippings about Robert—had been tossed out of the hovel.

The two of them began developing a comfortable routine: Lucretia would come home after work at 5:30 and praise Paul’s latest renovations. Then she’d prepare a meal for both of them, trying to make him feel at ease. Usually around 9 o’clock, exhausted, Paul would silently head up to his room, shower, brush his teeth, and go to bed. Lucre-tia never tried to stop him, just wished him goodnight.

“It’s my dream to someday hear the banter of children, even grandchildren, in this house,” Lucretia said to Paul one morning as she held a pipe for him in the kitchen. He was soldering it to another piece.

“And someday, when you find Mr. Right, you will.”

He spent the following week tapping the walls for rotten laths, ripping them out, loading the chunks of broken plaster into boxes, and piling them into dumpsters around the neighborhood at dusk. He mixed new plaster and started repairing the walls. Once through with that phase, he asked Lucretia what colors she wanted for the ceiling, walls, and baseboards.

“Let’s go to Jack’s together,” she suggested.

They headed to the local hardware shop on East Trem-ont Avenue and selected four different paints, along with rollers, brushes, drop cloths, and turpentine. This time, Lucretia put on her old shirt and overalls and joined him in the ambitious paint job, a base and two top coats.

When they finished the living room, it looked so wonderfully different that she began inviting a stream of neighbors to come visit. They hadn’t even begun painting upstairs. Lucretia’s old friend Lori Mayer, who lived with her husband Bill in the house directly behind hers, came across the backyard and inspected the gorgeous remodeling. Another of her dear friends, May Kearne, and her huband Jimmy, both teachers at the local high school, thought the place looked positively dreamy.

26

P
aul’s marathon renovation job inspired Uli in his work with Root. The man’s repressed feelings for Lucretia catalyzed Uli’s growing attraction to his new friend.

One day, when Paul found some wilted flowers on the porch, he asked what was up. Lucretia casually answered, “Oh, it’s just Leon.”

“Who’s Leon?”

“Leon Timmons Skacrowski.” She explained that the man’s mom and Maria had been the only two Jamaicans living in the area thirty years before; both had married half-Jewish men, so he and Lucretia had become childhood friends and then teenage sweethearts.

Leon’s father had died about ten years before, leaving him an old scrap-metal yard on the south side of Crotona Park in Morrisania, commonly referred to by East Trem-onters as the “slum.”

“You should go to a game with him,” Lucretia said. “He loves baseball.”

“That’s the one thing the Bronx has over anywhere else—the Yankees.”

“When the Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson, Leon switched allegiances.”

“The
Brooklyn
Dodgers?” Paul replied. “Last time I went to Ebbets Field, I fell through one of the damn seats.”

“Leon will be happy to show you all the new ones.”

For the next five days all went well. The laborers were moving an impressive amount of rubble. One of the diggers even commented to Root, “We’ll be out soon, no thanks to you.”

“That one doesn’t like you much,” Uli observed.

“He’s really paranoid,” Root explained. “He keeps telling the others I’m some kind of CIA agent.”

At one point Uli noticed a fat young miner ending his shift who looked strangely familiar. Since another miner, the only black one, was due back momentarily, Uli quickly switched wires and pulled out the younger fellow’s possessions, replacing them with the black man’s items. Moments later, the black miner and the young, bespectacled man converged simultaneously at the mouth of the same tunnel. Uli heard a quick squabble break out, then saw the young man crawl out to the large silo and say, “Something screwy’s going on here.”

“What are you talking about?” Root asked.

“For starters, someone changed the path of my wire and I don’t know where my things are!”

When Uli approached, the younger miner seized a rod from the ground as if he was being attacked.

“Just relax,” Root intervened. Turning to the young miner, she spoke quietly: “Look,
we
redirected the wires, but we did it for a reason.

“What reason?”

“You seem fairly lucid, so I’m trusting you with this. I have a diagram I can show you.”

“What diagram?”

“There are six tunnels going in six different directions that offer the best chance of getting out of here. Do you understand?”

Uli was now able to see the fat young miner’s face up close. Suddenly identifying the man, Uli lurched over and shoved him to the ground. “You’re Manny Lewis,” he snapped, then turned to Root. “He killed my friend Oric outside Cooper Union in Rescue City!”

“I didn’t kill anyone!”

Uli had his knees on the fat boy’s arms so he couldn’t budge.

“Hold it!” Root shrieked.

“He was a Pigger spy.”

“I should have killed you then!” Manny started to squirm.

“You’ll never have the opportunity,” Uli spat.

“Root, if you let me go, I’ll work with you …” the young miner appealed as Uli started strangling him.

“Wait a sec!” Root cried out. “We’re here now and we need people on our side.”

“Can’t you see he’s lying? He’s just trying to save himself!”

“That’s not true!” Manny said in a high, constricted voice. “I only went after you because of who you are.”

“Who is he?” Root asked, as she tried to pull Uli off.

“Former FBI,” Manny said, gasping for breath.

“You’re FBI?”

“You’re nuts!” Uli shot back at Manny.

“He worked for COINTELPRO in the ’60s. Hoover’s right-hand boy.”

“I suppose the Piggers told you that,” Uli said.

“No, I recognized you from your photo. So did others who were content to just let it go—but I said no. This guy did everything from planting false evidence to illegal wiretappings.”

Uli slowly climbed off the kid and tried to think whether any of this made sense. Then he said what he remembered most clearly. “My name is Paul Moses.”

“That’s a total lie,” Manny replied.

“I was born in New Haven, my siblings were Robert and Edna, my parents were Bella and Emanuel, and I attended Princeton and fought in the Mexican Revolution.”

“The Mexican Revolution was something like seventy years ago!” Manny countered. “You’d have to be a century old.”

“Then it was a different Mexican Revolution, cause I remember being there,” Uli said.

“Look, we’re all buried alive, living like rats in some massive underground crypt. We could die here,” Root reasoned. “Our only chance of getting out of is by working together.”

Manny said he was willing to accept a truce. Uli didn’t respond—he was still wondering if what the boy had said was really true. Either way, it didn’t matter; Root was right: They were all stuck down here and they needed the kid’s help.

They decided to alter their plan accordingly. Manny quit digging and began helping Root to redirect the miners into the selected tunnels. Meanwhile, Uli stayed alone at the top end of the Sticks to feed and tend to the laborers. Though all seemed to be going well over the next few days, Uli felt a growing anxiety that it was just a matter of time before the other miners discovered they were all being duped.

27

P
aul came downstairs around dinnertime one evening to find Lucretia sitting with her childhood friend Leon Skacrowski over a cup of coffee. The shaggy-haired half-Jamaican youth was rocking back and forth slightly as Lucretia chatted about old times. She introduced them.

“Sorry, I didn’t know you had a visitor,” Paul said.

“Actually, we’re about to go see a movie,” Lucretia replied.

“A movie?”

“Yeah, and if we don’t leave now we’re going to miss the beginning,” Leon added. Lucretia grabbed her jacket.

“Would you mind watching Toto?” she asked Paul. He said that was fine.

This day marked the beginning of Lucretia’s renewed romance with Leon. She seemed to be saying to Paul:
If you don’t take me, this slow-witted man will.
One morning several days later, when Paul came downstairs and found Leon sitting at the kitchen table reading the sports pages, he realized that she had done the unthinkable—Leon had spent the night.

“I tell you,” the young man said with pride, “now that the Dodgers have grabbed the pennant, there’s nothing stopping them.” After finishing his fourth heaping bowl of corn flakes, Leon thanked Lucretia for the wonderful night and left.

Paul exited the room in dismay. His renovation of Lu-cretia’s house was nearly complete, so he had begun working on her overgrown garden in back and along the sides of her house. He had already cut down three dead trees and spent the day uprooting half a dozen thornbushes to lay down a flower bed. Late that afternoon, Paul stormed into the kitchen, sweaty with cuts and scabs, and shouted, “Is this is your way at getting back at me? If so, that’s fine, but you’re only hurting yourself!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Sleeping with that moron is what I’m talking about!”

“What business is—”

“You and I both know that you could date a thousand guys smarter and more handsome.”

“I’ve known Leon all my life. He’s a trustworthy man.” Lucretia stared blankly at the far wall.

“I’ll tell you what I think. I think you’re dating a big dumb man just to spite me.”

“And how about you?” she cried out with uncharacteristic fervor. “Why don’t you admit why you’re still here?”

“Twenty years ago I promised your mother I’d do some repairs and—”

“You finished weeks ago!”

Paul slumped down next to her and looked at the ground. “For me, the definition of love is … the supreme generosity of spirit beyond all selfish desires.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying a person who feels truly worthless has no right to love someone else. I mean, the most loving thing I can do is leave here now and never look back.”

Lucretia rose and gently wrapped her arms around Paul. Leaning forward, he delicately kissed her on the lips.

Uli could almost hear the quickening of Lucretia’s soft breaths as he washed and fed the laborers. It took him a moment to realize that there were faint screams coming from the direction of the distant silo. Then he heard feet racing by his cave. He hoped that one of the miners had actually broken through into a new shaft and scurried toward the silo. When he reached the high-ceilinged room he discovered five miners surrounding Manny, who was bleeding profusely and backing toward a dark corner. Before Uli could intervene, the Italian miner came up from behind and cracked the kid across the skull. The others rushed in and started beating him viciously. Root was nowhere to be seen. Uli ran back up to the storage area to look for her. Almost immediately, two other miners rushed in from the Mkultra.

“They got the kid!” Uli shouted, pretending to be among them. Two other miners hurried down, joining the mob. Uli recognized one of them, who he and Root had labeled “Dave.” Together they headed down into the silo.

“What happened?” Uli asked him.

“We found out that this bastard and that bitch were screwing with us.”

“How?”

“From that,” he replied, pointing up.

Uli glanced nervously at the corpse hanging from the wooden tower.

“I knew one of them had cut down Xolotl’s body and replaced it with some other body,” Dave said, motioning up to the suspended cadaver. “So I told everyone to be on the lookout and we discovered they were switching wires on us.”

“Why would they do that?” Uli asked.

“The same reason she killed the other woman,” said another miner who was listening in. “She’s CIA! She’s deliberately trying to make us waste our time here.”

“Where is the bitch anyhow?” Dave asked.

“One of the guys grabbed her, but she hit him with pepper spray and ran away,” the second miner replied. “He got a solid punch off. Broke her fucking nose. We raced after her, but she disappeared in the offices.”

Uli looked over to Manny Lewis’s bloody body, which had been unceremoniously dumped in a corner.

“There’s another guy too,” the Italian said, his vest also smeared with blood.

“Yeah, I remember a third guy,” Uli heard someone else chime in.

Eventually the miners simmered down and began milling around. Several crawled back down into the Convolution toward their caves.

28

F
our months after their encounter across from Grand Central Station, Paul Moses finally broke down and asked for Lucretia’s hand in marriage. She wondered to herself how much longer it would take to get him to start producing children and money.

The first goal was easy. He initiated sex as soon as she woke up every morning and at night before bed—pregnancy was inevitable. Work, however, he rarely mentioned.

One Sunday after breakfast, as Paul flipped through the
New York Times,
Lucretia picked up a section of the paper he had tossed aside. It was the employment listings.