Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

For example, once when Skinflick and I were high I asked him if he was planning to join the mafia himself. We were walking to Jack in the Box, since Skinflick and I both had an easy susceptibility to what potheads call “the munchies.” [20] Expand the mind, and the body will follow, you might say, but it never seemed to make me fat, and Skinflick was fat already.

“No fuckin way, dude,” he said. “And even if I wanted to, my father would kill me.”

“Huh,” I said. “By the way, who did your father kill to get into the mafia?”

“No one. He got a dispensation cause he was a lawyer.”

“You believe that?”

He belched. “Absolutely. The guy doesn’t lie to me.”

Skinflick did seem to have an incredibly smooth relationship with his father, although the one book he claimed he’d ever read in its entirety was The Golden Bough, by James Fraser. Which, aside from being a weird choice for the only book you’ve ever read, is essentially about patricide, and how the origins of civilization lie in intergenerational struggle. The golden bough is what young slaves in a primitive society Fraser discusses pluck when they want to challenge the king to a duel to the death, with the winner keeping the crown.

Skinflick denied that this showed any hostility toward his father, though. He said he’d only picked up The Golden Bough because Kurtz is reading it in Apocalypse Now, and had stuck with it because its ideas about freedom and modernity appealed to him.

“For instance,” he once said, coincidentally while he and I were riding with his father in his father’s car, “people are always bitching about how their primitive fight-or-flight instincts are being repressed, and how they’re depressed because of it. But I can shoot a shotgun while I’m driving down the freeway . No one in history has been that free.”

“You can’t shoot a shotgun standing still,” his father said.

My own relationship with David Locano seemed unreal. He had insisted on giving me forty thousand dollars for killing the Virzis—“Throw it out if you want,” he had said—then never mentioned the incident again, even when we were alone.

Once, though, when I came over and Skinflick was out renting a movie, and Mrs. Locano was out doing whatever, he and I sat at the kitchen table and he asked me if I wanted another job.

“No thanks,” I said. “I think I’m done with that line of work.”

“This isn’t that line of work.”

“What is it?”

“It’s just talk.”

I didn’t stop him.

“Paranoid Russians won’t talk on the telephone,” he went on. “I need you to go to find some guy in Brighton Beach and ask him what it is he wants to say to me.”

“I don’t know Brighton Beach at all,” I said.

“It’s easy,” Locano said. “Particularly if you’re not me. It’s tiny. You go down to Ocean Avenue, ask in a bar called the Shamrock, they’ll know the guy. He’s a big deal guy.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Probably not as dangerous as driving there.”

“Huh,” I said.

I should back off for a moment and note that there’s a concept many criminals become obsessed with, which is the idea of turning out .

The template for it is the classic aspiring pimp who needs to find a woman to work for him. No professional will do it, because they all have pimps already. So he picks a girl from the neighborhood, as sheltered and unworldly as possible, and courts her. Plays up a big romance, then one day tells her he’s in big trouble if he can’t get some money fast, and that a friend of his is willing to pay a hundred dollars to screw her once. After she does it, he acts disgusted with her, and beats her and degrades her, then gives her narcotics for the pain. Once she’s hooked and working steadily, i.e., has been “turned out,” he moves on to Bachelorette #2. Lovely species we belong to.

Today the turnout can be found in any number of situations. The most literal is prison, where the idea is to progress as quickly as possible from lending your cellmate a cigarette to hiring him out to large groups in return for a double-A battery or some smack. Most instances of it are more subtle, though, and have to do with the many ways in which people enter into, or are led into, or believe they are led into, lives of criminality.

I knew all this. I’d read Daddy Cool . I knew that what David Locano was doing was turning me out. And that even if the job I’d just accepted didn’t require violence, taking it meant I was willing to get violent later on.

I just allowed myself to ignore those things.

I drove to Coney on a sunny Saturday. Put one of my silver, wood-handled .45’s, unsilenced, in the inside pocket of my anorak and took my grandparents’ Nissan across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan then over the Manhattan Bridge out of it. Took the highway all the way down through Brooklyn. I was able to park at the Aquarium, midway along the Island, just by dropping David Locano’s name. They didn’t even check a list.

I’d been to the Aquarium as a kid, and also west along the boardwalk to the old amusement park. Eastwards, into Brighton, was a mystery.

It was jammed. Gangster-looking young blond guys in fluorescent sweat suits so bright they stung your eyes, and old people on the benches with bathing suits and socks on, with towels over their shoulders even though they were two hundred yards from the water. Also huge families of Hispanic people dressed for summer and Orthodox Jews dressed for winter. Everywhere you looked someone was beating a child.

The beach curved away as I entered Little Odessa. The buildings looked like sets from a tenement movie. Elevated subway tracks above Ocean Avenue, and in the shadows down below ancient storefronts with either their original signs or new wooden ones in Cyrillic. I found the Shamrock within a couple blocks. It had a neon sign of a clover leaf, with the power off. I went in.

The Shamrock had a cedar bar, splintered floor, and barfed-up beer smell that were probably from back when it was actually Irish, but it was better lit than you’d expect, and the small square tables had laminated red gingham tablecloths. Two tables were taken, one by a man and a woman and one by two men.

The bar started by the door. Leaning against the wall behind it there was a young blond woman who didn’t look much older than I was. She had dark circles under her eyes and a thinness like maybe she’d missed out on a few key years of nutrition back in the Old Country.

Her English was good, though.

“If you want food you can sit at a table.”

“Just a club soda,” I told her. “I’m looking for Nick Dzelany.”

She came off the wall, toward me. “Who?”

“Nick Dzelany,” I said, this time accentuating the “D.” I felt myself blushing. “Dzelany” is hard enough to say when you think you’re doing it right.

“I don’t know him,” she said. After a moment: “Do you still want a club soda?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Is there another bar around here called the Shamrock?”

“I don’t know.”

When she brought my drink, in a ridiculously narrow glass, I said, “Is there anyone you can ask?”

“Ask about what?”

“Nick Dzelany.” I said it loud enough to be heard at the tables, in case those people knew him. “I was told people here knew him.”

The bartender seemed to think, then she went and got a pen off the register. She brought it back with a napkin. “Spell, please.”

I did. I was pretty sure I got it how David Locano had showed it to me, but I wasn’t completely sure, and I was getting less sure by the moment. Maybe Locano had gotten it wrong himself.