Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

Dumped, as if they thought I was dead.

Like the other guy in the van.

In a bodega three blocks away I bought coffee, juice, three scrambled eggs, home fries, and a New York Giants sweatshirt off a kid delivering newspapers. I wasn't sure I'd be able to keep the food down, but I ordered it anyway. The cook, a big, authoritative man, told me I was in Queens. He let me use the bathroom, where I took off my reeking button-down oxford. I could barely move my arms, I was so stiff. A cockroach lay inside the sleeve. I washed my chest and armpits and face with paper towels, threw away the shirt, then put on the sweatshirt.

"You got jacked, right?" said the cook when I came out, rubbing a hand over his pear-shaped belly. He kept a pen behind his ear.

"Something." My head was a mess. Fourteen-odd hours later.

He set the ketchup in front of me. "No, no, let me tell you something, I'm telling you, you got jacked. You don't remember nothing, right? That lot, it's like, what, three, maybe four times aJimmy, how many times we see guys get dumped where the old paint factory used to be?"

A voice from a back room. "Howafuck I know?"

"Don't give him no never-mine," the cook told me. "His wife got mental-pause and it got him, too. Guys get fucking jacked and they throw them in that lot because it's just off the expressway. One guy, it was a hooker and she had him pull over his car and when she got his dick out there was another guy waiting, then another time this guy was left there, couple of sickos, they taped a dead cat against his head, fuckin'-unbelievable-tha'shit, trying-a scare him, and this other time they threw fucking toxic waste out there, the government came with all the white moon suits, you know, we sold like two hundred cups of coffee."

"They didn't get all of it!" came the voice behind the door.

"What? What's that, Jimmy?"

"They didn't get all the fucking toxic waste."

"What d'you mean?"

"They left you, didn't they?"

I looked at my watch. "What day is this?"

"What day?"

"It's uh, it's Tues day, guy."

"No, I mean the date."

"The date? Let me- what's the date, Jimmy?"

"Howafuck I know?"

The cook slicked his hand across his head and checked a spattered calendar next to the cash register. "It's the first," he declared, "first of the month."

March 1. The day I was to start work. I was due at work in three hours, showered, shaved, in a new tie- walking human capital. It took me another moment to remember I didn't live anywhere anymore. I checked the cash in my wallet.

"You guys do me one more favor?" I said.

"What. Anything, name it."

"I want you guys to call me a car into Manhattan."

"Can't."

"Why?"

"I'm driving you myself."

"No, no, that's all right."

"Come on, it's twenty minutes." The cook reached for his coat. "Jimmy, take the front." He pointed at the front door. "We're slow today, anyway. It's a slow week. Actually, the year's been pretty slow, matter of fact."

We drove in silence in an old Chevy Caprice that looked repainted. Maybe an old taxi. I was immensely grateful. I asked the cook to drop me in midtown.

"So, did you know these people who jacked you?" The cook turned his eyes onto me, and beneath their penetration, I couldn't lie. "Or was it just a surprise, wrong place-wrong time?"

"Basically I knew them," I said.

The cook nodded, as if he expected to hear this. "Let me tell you something," he said. "I used to be a cop. I retired. I got tired and I retired. But I seen a lot of things."

I went rigid. "All right."

"You want to go on, right, you want to avoid more trouble?"

Had I shot a gun? Did I remember doing that? "Absolutely."

"Don't try to get revenge."

"It's not like that."

He wheeled the car through Spanish Harlem. "Just listen to me. Don't try to get revenge, don't try to explain it to a bunch of people, don't tell nobody, don't tell the police for freaking sake, don't do nothing. And don't go back to those people, don't associate, don't talk about it."

"Okay." I realized I hadn't told him my name.

"You got out with your skin, right?"

"Yeah."

"You're lucky."

"Just go back to my old life, let time pass."

He nodded as he pulled the car to a stop. "Yeah. Go back to your regular life and stay there. Die old."

How do you walk into your hotel at eight o'clock smelling of garbage, have no change of clothes, then two hours later arrive at a new job looking great in a new suit? Answer: It can't quite be done. I hurried stiffly into the hotel, showered, shaved, cleaned up, then padded downstairs in pants and a hotel bathrobe, bought a ridiculous red sweatsuit in a gift shop on Fifth Avenue, returned to the room, changed, then took a cab to Macy's, which opens at nine, bought a suit off the rack, shirt, tie, belt, socks, shoes, dressing in the little changing cubicle, then took the subway to work- and arrived seventeen minutes late.

But it didn't matter. Dan was on the phone with someone- his new mistress, I learned later. That morning, after he had introduced me to the other principals (younger men and women straining on their leashes, eager for glory and promotions and big bucks) and the new assistants (three battle-hardened fiftyish women, attuned to health care benefits and flexible hours to see their grandchildren in school productions), and after I had inspected my office (decent, but nothing like my former one, which had a helicopter view of Lexington Avenue), after I had asked my assistant to order me stationery and a corporate American Express card, after I had established my new law firm e-mail account and signed the employment tax form, after I had done all these functional things and more, I slipped away to a pay phone on the street a few blocks away and dialed Allison, first at home. No answer. Then I dialed the restaurant. A recording came on, in her voice. The restaurant would be "closed for annual cleaning" the next three days, but would reopen on the weekend. Please call after 3 p.m. Friday to confirm or make reservations. And so on. I called Jay Rainey's number. I still had his keys. Nothing. I called Martha Hallock, but she hadn't heard from Jay. Neither had I, I said.

I returned to my office, pushed the little bit of paper that was on my desk, made phone calls using a voice that sounded like mine, then returned to the hotel at the end of the day. From there I called Judith's attorney and left my new work number.

Here, now, is where I begin to equivocate, to confess I told no one anything, to squirm my way free. A lawyer can be disbarred in ten minutes for being party to illegal activities, so naturally I considered going to the police, telling all that I knew and letting them sort everything out. But I didn't, really, know what might come of it, except trouble for myself. Poppy had been killed by Lamont, whom I might have shot. Gabriel and Denny, I suspected, were dead, given how violently they'd reacted to Ha's lovely pieces of sushi. Of course, these men had families somewhere. People would want to know what happened to them. But nothing I could say was bringing them back. Moreover, the matter with Marceno and the land was still unresolved. Poppy was dead, and whatever had been scrawled on the HAVANA ROOM napkin was with Jay Rainey. Don't tell nobody, don't tell the police for freaking sake, don't do nothing. This, I reflected, was good advice. Illegal, immoral, unethical, unlawyerly, selfish, cowardly, flat-out wrong, and utterly reprehensible. But excellent advice nonetheless, and I quietly reported for work each morning, eager to lose myself in the business at hand, waiting each hour for the time that Timothy would arrive in the city. Timothy, my boy, my own lost child.

The following Saturday, I saw a small item in the metro section of the Times about one Harold Jones, a New York City rap club owner found next to a Dumpster behind a McDonald's in Camden, New Jersey. This was H.J. He'd last been seen alive in his limousine in the Overbrook section of Philadelphia late the previous Tuesday. Some boys had stolen the limo and joy-ridden it around for several days, H.J. apparently dead in the back, and they were wanted for questioning. I bought the Daily News and the Post to get the whole story. They played it smaller than I expected, probably because he had died out of town and there were no good photos and H.J. wasn't well known, anyway, except among certain black kids who went to his club. He wasn't a musician, didn't produce records. So went the cultural logic. Just a small-time businessman, in fact. Just another fat black guy with a gold watch pretending to be richer than he was. I ended up walking to the newspaper shop at Grand Central Station and buying the Philadelphia papers. The reporting was more detailed, and between all four papers, I could get a lot of the story. But I read that his driver didn't remember him taking any drugs. The paper said toxicology reports were inconclusive. Who knew what he had in his bloodstream at any given time? He'd gotten in his limo after a meeting in midtown, carrying a leather bag, hollered something, and been driven to Philly. Fell asleep in the car, said the driver. The driver got stuck on the New Jersey Turnpike, finally reached Philly, the black neighborhood of Overbrook. Big house, big party. The driver said he'd opened the limo door, swore he saw H.J. sitting in the limo. Soon people were in the back with him. Talking, partying. The limo driver admitted he ended up in a back room for the rest of the night. The limousine itself was found parked on the football field of a high school in Chester, Pennsylvania, a dying industrial town hanging off the underbelly of Philadelphia. How Harold Jones ended up in Camden, New Jersey, and his car twenty miles away in Chester, Pennsylvania, was unknown. The police found "drug paraphernalia" in the backseat of the car as well as "an undisclosed amount of cash." This would have been whatever was left of the extra purchase money I had negotiated for Jay, money originally earned, when you thought about it, by Chilean vineyard laborers thousands of miles to the south. I was surprised any remained at all. One could picture the scene, people finding H.J., a fat bag of cash, loud music outside a house, confusion, hours passing, rumors of a dead man, move the car, yo, not on my property, gimme them keys, move his dead ass someplace else. Which they did.