Breathe in grace, p.1
Breathe in Grace, page 1
Breathe
in
Grace
A Zev Evans Novella
James
LePore
Dedication:
To my friend Peter Dalton.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
The Story Plant
Studio Digital CT, LLC
PO Box 4331
Stamford, CT 06907
Copyright © 2016 by James LePore
Cover image © 2016 by James LePore
All images in this book © 2016 by James LePore
Story Plant Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-61188-238-4
Fiction Studio Books E-book ISBN-13: 978-1-943486-92-2
Visit our website at www.thestoryplant.com
Visit the author’s website at www.jamesleporefiction.com
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by US Copyright Law. For information, address Studio Digital CT.
CHAPTER 1
I took a break from the recital and went to a small alcove near the Pound Ridge Community Center’s library. I would have smoked if I was still smoking but there is no smoking allowed anywhere in the world. Next to global warming, the worst thing that exists in the world is smoking. Third would be guns. I breathed deeply, something I do to replace cigarettes and to tamp down the constant low-grade anxiety I’ve lived with since I was a kid. I do mantras: breathe in grace/breathe out anger, breathe in pride/breathe out shame, breathe in clarity/breathe out confusion. . . . …Sometimes the anxiety is high-grade. Then I have to take drastic measures, like a ten-mile run, or a weekend of good bourbon, or bad bourbon, it doesn’t matter.
It’s this anxiousness that got me thrown off the NYPD. (It also got me ejected from the Army, the end result of an incident I was involved in in Samarra in 2004. I will get to that later). Don’t panic, I didn’t kill anybody. I broke a guy’s jaw and both arms one night when I was moonlighting as a half-assed security guard. I was twenty-two, a rookie, and was restless and pretty wound up after the intensity of the academy. I couldn’t sleep much anyway, so when a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to make a hundred bucks watching some freight cars at the Fresh Pond Yard on Long Island, I gladly said yes. I asked my friend Johnny Scoglio, a fellow rookie, if he wanted to split the hundred with me. I knew he needed the money. He already had twin boys, and his wife was pregnant again. I heard a grunt and when I looked under one of the cars I saw Johnny flat on the ground and a guy all in black, including a black woolen hat, kneeling over him, pummeling him with a rock the size of a softball. I scrambled under the car and in under five seconds the guy was moaning on the ground. I lifted Johnny up and checked him out. There was a bruise on his temple and his left hand was hanging limp. I told him to go home, which he did.
It turns out the cars we were guarding were filled with fancy computers, and the guy on the ground was the yard foreman’s son. The father went berserk, which to me was just a cover-up of his own criminal activity. You could only guess what it was. Likely getting the kid to cop a couple of laptops not knowing there would be two guys guarding the cars, not one. But the father had connections, so I was forced to resign. This was easy for the department to do as I was still in my probationary period, had few rights, and no friends higher up. The kid smirked the whole time at the review board hearing. His jaw had been unwired at that point, but it was satisfying to see that his arms were still in casts. Also, I think the smirking might have been painful, so that was a good thing too. There’s always a silver lining.
Of course you’re noticing how I digress. It’s the anxiety. To return to the subject, when I was in the alcove doing my breathing exercises, I heard a man and a woman arguing. I looked around the corner and saw them a short distance away, at the end of the hall near a wall-to-ceiling window. I stepped out of the alcove to let them know I was nearby, but they didn’t notice. I liked the alcove and am not one to cede territory, so I just stood there, hoping that when they spotted me they’d go someplace else to argue. I could now hear them better than when I was in the alcove.
“You’re done when I say you’re done,” the guy said.
“I can’t do it,” she said. “I can’t.”
The guy grabbed her arm and she tried to pull away, but he pulled her back to him. They were standing close to each other now, face to face. If you had just come on this scene you would think they were lovers about to kiss passionately. Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara. Instead of kissing her, he held her tightly by the shoulder with his left hand and slapped her across the face with his right. Whack. Her head jerked to the side.
She tried to pull away again, but he pulled her back and said something I couldn’t hear, a smile on his face that that really wasn’t a smile.
He spotted me then. We took a good look at each other. He had dark eyes and a beard with a white line in it––a scar where the hair didn’t grow. I usually don’t like people looking at me, but in these situations, the reverse is true. I wanted him to really see me, to remember me. He let go of the woman’s arm and gave her a slight nudge. She slipped past him and walked away.
I never saw her face––her back was to me the whole time––but I made a quick assessment as she made her way to the exit at the end of the hallway. Tall, maybe five-eight, short brown hair and a good shape, by that I mean some meat on her bones. She held her head high. Good for you, I thought. Fuck him. The silver buckles on her boots sparkled for a second as she stepped into the bright sunlight. When I turned back, the guy was gone.
I decided to head home. I go to the community center to listen to live music. It’s one of the few things that calms me, that lulls the wild horses that stampede in my head when they’re not grazing or sleeping, which is not often. This one was Christmas songs by a gal playing piano all alone on the stage, very jazzy, very pretty. But the guy with the scar had ruined it. I am a worrier and now I was worried about the woman with the nice body and the silver buckles on her boots, and what would happen if she didn’t do what the guy with the scar wanted her to do.
CHAPTER 2
When I start worrying, I have to do something. Otherwise . . . well, otherwise things will not be good for me, or for the people around me, which is why I live alone. I do not go off half-cocked, however. I can act deliberately when there is no immediate danger. Even when there is, I am pretty cool. In this case, I was lucky. I saw scarface walking to his car, followed him, and memorized his license plate. If I hadn’t done that I would have lost a week of my life worrying and probably drinking way too much.
Fortunately for my liver and my mental state, Johnny Scoglio, who now has four kids and a master’s in computer science, is the head of computer security at the NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau. To get this job you basically have to be the world’s best hacker, which Johnny probably is, although this is something known to no one except me and the chief of his bureau. Johnny thinks he owes me because I lost my job that night at Fresh Pond and he didn’t. He doesn’t, but if he did, he’s paid me back a hundred times over. He has gotten me information that has saved my life more than once. He also has many friends throughout the counterterrorism law enforcement world in the U.S. and overseas. He doesn’t care about search warrants and probable cause. He has fed information, all of it illegally obtained, to colleagues at local, state, federal, and international agencies, that has prevented more than one mass killing. He is a god in their minds. His bureau chief, a crusty Jew who fought in the Israeli army before migrating to New York, allows Johnny to do this because he knows that in a crisis, if he ever needs a favor in a hurry, he can call on about a hundred people who will drop everything to help him, which of course means helping the people of New York, the greatest city there is.
Scarface’s plate came back to Mohammed Asani, age forty, at an address in the Bronx. Mohammed immigrated from Tunisia in 2007 and got permanent status when he married an American woman, Linda Manning, in that same year. The picture Johnny sent me of Manning was of a woman with medium length blonde hair and blue eyes. Was it the woman Asani slapped? Maybe. I had only seen her from behind. She could have cut and dyed her hair. Asani was naturalized in 2010. His picture matched the guy I saw at the concert, the slapper, including the beard and the scar on his right cheek. At the bottom, Johnny wrote, No known TT’s, his shorthand for terrorist ties. So Mohammed was just another new American citizen toiling away at whatever in the most densely insane of New York’s five boroughs. And slapping women in the face during a piano recital in rural Westchester County.
I would pay Mohammed a visit. I couldn’t get him bracing her with his left hand and hitting her with his right out of my head, of her head snapping sideways. I needed to replace it. What would I do when I met up with him? I don’t know. I’m a jumble of nerve endings. I sometimes let them dictate events.
Before I saw Asani, I would stop by and see my friend Eva, who lived not too far from him in the Bronx. Eva is a hot Cuban woman who calls me Popi and sometimes will have sex with me, though not lately as her husband is visiting from Mexico. She sends me clients and had called to say one was ready to retain me. She had 5K in cash for me. I do not kill
CHAPTER 3
Eva lives in East Tremont, which is, I feel safe in saying, one of the worst neighborhoods in the country. It’s all five and six story tenements, no trees, garbage in the streets, with gangbangers, drugs, and fear everywhere. The last time I was at her apartment there were two black kids taking turns whacking an ATM machine with a sledgehammer on the sidewalk in front of her building. This was in broad daylight. People passed them like it was nothing, which is the best strategy to have if you live there. Don’t notice, or, if you do, look away quickly, or better yet, cross the street. Fast. Everything is nothing until it happens to you. When it does happen to you, you could easily be maimed or dead. Being able to, one, not notice, and two, run, are very important survival skills in the ghetto. If I was a television network I’d do a reality series where they drop a suburban couple in the ghetto and follow them as they try to survive. That’s just one of the many oddball things that occur to me as I breeze through my days and nights. If you continue reading, you will probably hear more of them so please bear with me. It’s a tic that I have given up fighting.
If you’re wondering how Eva can live here and not get raped or killed, it’s because the first two floors of her building are taken up by a guy named Edison (I don’t know his last name, and wouldn’t tell you if I did) and his large family. Edison is the head of a Jamaican gang that has taken over most of the rackets in Tremont. Eva calls him el jefe. They have done business together for years and no one will cross her or disturb her in any way lest Edison does something unspeakable to them. I have met Edison in passing a couple of times and I think he knows that I too am capable of doing unspeakable things, so I am allowed to come and go.
Eva keeps mannequins in her apartment. She says she has plans of making clothes and selling them, but I’ve never seen one of her mannequins with clothes on. They’re always naked. Some have limbs missing, or the limbs stick out at weird angles. On some, she’s used a magic marker to rearrange their faces. What Eva does best, the only thing she does as far as I can see, is broker things. She won’t get you an untraceable gun, but she’ll connect you to someone who can. You want to move some stolen jewelry, she’ll hook you up. You need some forged documents, she’ll send you to the right person. Etcetera. For these connections, she takes a fee. This means that people have to trust her, on both sides of the transaction, which is an amazing thing in the ghetto, but she’s pulled it off.
The client that Eva has currently hooked me up with is an old guy named Jose whose grandson needs a kidney transplant. They’re both illegal. The kid’s fourteen years old and in end-stage renal failure. He gets his dialysis three times a week at the ER, which New York pays for. The kid’s parents are dead. The grandfather is too old and is not a match anyway. The waiting list is a hundred thousand-plus, which the kid can get on, but, assuming by some miracle he gets near the top quickly, will have to prove he can pay for post-op care, which is expensive. (“No way, Jose,” said Eva, making a dumb joke). They want to go back to Guatemala for the surgery. They have been in contact with a broker, who says fifteen thousand dollars will cover everything. They want me to travel with them to protect them and the cash they’ll be carrying and to make sure they don’t get fucked. I have done some research on transplant tourism, and am skeptical of a lot of things relating to the deal. Nevertheless, because it’s Eva, I’ve agreed to talk to the grandfather.
“You’re early,” she says.
“I thought we’d catch up.”
“You mean fuck.”
“Is that so bad?” I tried to look sheepish and thought I pulled it off. Of course, I’m no judge.
“Hector’s here.”
“Where?”
“Sleeping.”
“I can give him a sedative.”
“Popi . . .”
“I have to make another stop,” I say. “I’ll be back.”
“Where?”
“Bronx River Avenue, near the Expressway.”
“For what?”
“Business.”
“How long will it take?”
“An hour. I’m not sure.”
“OK, Jose is coming at nine.”
“Maybe you can help me,” I said. “I’m looking for a guy named Asani. He’s got a beard with a white scar line.”
I watched the look in Eva’s big brown eyes change from playful to serious.
“You know him?” I asked.
“No.”
“What?”
“There’s a mosque over there in a strip mall. I hear the head guy has a beard with a scar line.”
She had my full attention. Not that she didn’t before, but this was a different kind of attention. “Yes,” I said, “and?”
“That’s just it. There’s no and.”
“Nothing?”
“No, and you know this neighborhood. There are no secrets here. Everybody’s up everybody else’s ass. I would have heard something.”
I smiled.
“Why are you smiling?” Eva asked. “I’m being serious.”
“I like when you say ass.”
“Popi.”
“Say it again.”
“Ass.”
“Say pussy.”
“Pussy.”
“How about that sedative?” I said. I reached into my jacket pocket, where I keep a small pharmacopeia in a leather pouch. My anti-seizure pills, Phenobarbital, which I haven’t taken in eleven years but keep renewing the prescription, are in it, along with a couple of throwaway syringes in cellophane and vials of various things that are useful to have on hand in case they’re needed.
“Popi . . .”
“Yes, mi amado.”
“That look in your eyes.”
“Yes?”
“It is like a drug to me.”
“Good.”
“But Hector goes back to Mexico tonight. He’ll miss his flight. You don’t want that.”
“Right. I’ll see you later.”
CHAPTER 4
The address I had been given for Asani was in a small strip mall set below street level. Looming behind it was one of the brick and concrete walls that carried the Cross Bronx Expressway over and through what I have been told was once the leafiest of New York’s five boroughs, but was now a shithole of crime and anger. I parked in the parking lot of a bar next door and climbed over a rusted-out cyclone fence to the so-called mall, which consisted of four stores with glass doors and plate glass windows. No lights were on in any unit. Diagonal parking bays, all empty, ran across the front with a sidewalk in between. Next to the mosque was a tax preparer’s office. The units on either end were dark and looked untenanted. I can smell alarm systems, and the mosque’s front door definitely looked wired. Arabic lettering on the plate glass window read: East Tremont Islamic Center. I know this because I read and speak Arabic (and a couple of other languages). The guttural sounds of the Middle East come easy to me, probably because I am half Jew. The other half is Sicilian. My life story is interesting, but not really relevant now. My name—another oversight, sorry—is Zev Evans. My friends, the few that I have, call me Z, or Zevon (a reference to the half-moon scar on the top of my head where an Army doctor put a plate in to patch a hole in my skull in 2004. Like Levon from the Elton John song, I wear my war wound like a crown. It’s their idea of a joke).
