Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

“You ever been back to Cuba?”

“Back? I never been there.”

“Never? You’re kidding.”

“No, man. Why I go there? Havana got traffic jams and slums and dust, it got las muchachas and las cerveza . It got hombres embalaos on ganja. Crack too now probably. It just like New York. I want a vacation, I go to Nassau with a beautiful girl and gamble. Club Med.”

“It’s your home.”

“Not my home, man,” he said sternly. “Was my grandfather ’s home. Not mine… There this guy at a warehouse I use sometimes, Señor …” Ramirez stretched the word out to work contempt into his voice. “Buñello. Loco , this viejo . Look at him – he want everybody call him ‘Señor.’ ‘I have to live in los Estados Unidos for now. But I am Cubano ,’ he say. ‘I was exiled.’ Oh, man, I gonna punch him out he say that one more time. He say, ‘We all going back someday. We all going to sit on sugar plantations and be rich again and have los moyetos , you know, blacks, do all the work for us.’ Puto . Man, my father couldn’t wait to get out.”

“Your father, was he a revolutionary?”

“ Mi padre ? No. He come here in fifty-four. You know what they call us then? Latinos who come to America? They call us ‘summer people in winter clothes.’ He was a kid when he left. His family, they live in the Bronx. He was in a gang too.”

“You mean a club.”

“Back then crews, they was different. You move into a new neighborhood, you go one-on-one with the leader. You know, you got it up from the shoulders – you fought with your fists. Until you do that, you was nobody. So while the fidelistos were burning plantations and shooting batistianos my father, he was in this circle of punks and fighting this big puto on a Hundred Eighty-sixth Street. Got the crap beat out of him. But, after, they all went to drink cervezas and rum nd he was jumped in. They give him name. They call him, ‘ Manomuerto .’ That was the day he prove his heart. That’s what they say. ‘Proving your heart.’ Su corazón .”

“Where’s your father now?”

“Left six, seven year ago. Went to work one morning, sent my brother Piri home with half his pay envelope and say he call sometime. But he never call.” Hector Ramirez laughed loud. “Who know? Maybe he in Havana.”

A bunch of tiny worms were taking tie-dyed trips in Pellam’s brain. He hadn’t had that much really, five or six shots.

Okay, maybe more.

And, okay, maybe there was something psychedelic about the little critters.

As the two men plunged further into the dark heart of the Kitchen he realized Ramirez was talking to him.

“What?”

“Man, I asked you what the fuck you really doing here?”

“What am I doing? I’m drinking tequila with a criminal.”

“Hey, you think I’m a criminal? I got a conviction?”

“I’m told you do.”

He thought for a moment. “An’ who told you??”

“Word on the street,” Pellam muttered ominously.

“You no answering my question. What’re you doing here?”

“My father,” Pellam answered, surprising himself with his candor.

“ You father. Where you father? He live here?”

“Not any more.” Pellam turned his eyes north, where easily a million lights glimmered with different types of brightness. He took the bottle back. “I worked on this film a few years ago. To Sleep in a Shallow Grave .”

“I never hear of it.”

“It was about a woman who comes home and finds her father may not have been her father. I was just scouting locations but I rewrote part of the script too.”

“Her mother, she a puta?”

“No, just had an affair. She was lonely.”

Ramirez took the bottle, swallowed a mouthful, nodded at Pellam to keep going.

He said, “My mother lives upstate. Little town called Simmons. No, you never heard of it. I went to see her, this was two Christmases ago.”

“You buy her a present?”

“Of course I did. Let me finish my story.”

“Good you remembered her. Always do that, man.”

“Let me finish. We drove out to see my father’s grave like we always do when I’m there.” Another sip. Then another. “We get out to the grave and she’s crying.”

They were deep into the Kitchen now and turned into the stinking cobblestoned alleyway that led to Ramirez’s kickback.

“She’s got a confession to make, she tells me. It turns out she doesn’t think her husband was my father after all.”

“Man, that was one big fucking surprise.”

“Benjamin – her husband, the man I thought was my father – was away a lot. Traveled all the time. They had a fight about it, he went off on a trip. She took this lover. After a while he leaves. Ben comes home. They patch things up. She’s pregnant, can’t tell what day it happened, you know. But she’s pretty sure it’s not Ben’s. She’d been brooding about it ever since he died. Telling me or not, I mean. Finally she finally broke down and did.”

“Fuck up you mind, hearing that. So why you come here?”

“I wanted to find out about him. My real father. Didn’t want to meet him. But I wanted to know who he was, what he did for a living, maybe find a picture of him.”

“He still here?”

“Nope. Long gone.” He explained how he’d found the man’s last known address but he’d left that building years before and there were no other leads. Pellam had contacted the vital statistics departments in the five boroughs of New York City and all the nearby counties of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. No response.

“Gone, huh? Just like my padre.”

Pellam nodded.

“So why you stay?”

“I thought I’d do a movie about Hell’s Kitchen. His neighborhood. He lived here for a while.” Pellam held up the bottle. “Well, here’s to your padre, the son of a bitch.” He drank from it.

“Here’s to both of ours. Wherever the fuck they are.”

Pellam was just handed the bottle back when he felt, for the second time in several days, the chill of metal on his neck. This time, too, it was a gun muzzle.

Ramirez rated three thugs, Pellam only one.

“Fuck,” the Latino spat out as two of them gripped his shoulders and the third frisked him carefully, taking his automatic pistol and his knife. Another grabbed the mescal bottle and flung it into the alley.

“Only spic faggots drink this shit.”

Pellam heard the bottle crash.

Grinning, Ramirez nodded to the man who’d spoken, said to Pellam, “This is Sean McCray. I no know why he here. Most Saturday nights he got a date – at home with his dick.”

Which earned Ramirez a fist. It slammed into his jaw. He staggered under the blow.

Pellam recognized McCray from the table in Corcoran’s bar the other day. He’d been sitting near Jacko Drugh.

“I remember him,” Pellam said.

Which, for some reason, earned Pellam a fist too, though he got slugged in the belly. He doubled over, gasping, breathless. His minder, large man in a black leather coat like Drugh’s, dragged him to the middle of the alley, dropped him in a pile, turned back to Ramirez.

The young Latino struggled, tried to kick one of them. But they just started beating him. When they stopped, Ramirez gasped, “Man, you stupid fucking micks.” He seemed more exasperated than anything else by their behavior.

“Shut up.”

McCray leaned close. “I had a little talk with O’Neil. He told me you two were in business together. Which I can’t say surprised me.”

Another one of the men said, “Tell him what happened. To O’Neil.”