“WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG, Gallo?” Tommy Monroe looked at his watch. “I thought I told you to be here by eight at the latest. It’s almost nine.”
Micah Gallo shrugged. “I had a few errands to run and traffic coming over the Queensboro was stacked up.”
Monroe frowned and took a sip from the highball glass. “What were you doing in Manhattan?”
Gallo felt his face flush. “Just some shopping and met a friend for late lunch.”
The big Irishman narrowed his eyes and studied his “protégé,” then grinned and shook a sausage-sized finger at the younger man. “You was off getting laid,” he said, smirking. “A little afternoon nooky. Am I right? I am, aren’t I?”
Gallo used the excuse to hide his slip about his previous whereabouts. He smiled and looked sheepishly around the Jay Street Bar as though caught in the act. “Yeah, an old flame. It was just supposed to be lunch.”
Monroe belly-laughed. “Yeah right, ‘lunch,’ and I’m drinking Coca-Cola.”
“What’s the big deal about being here by eight, anyway? We meeting somebody?”
“Nah,” Monroe said, shaking his head. “Just got some shit to go over regarding the legislature for next week.”
Monroe glanced up at the television that was hanging on the wall opposite the table where they sat and motioned for the waitress. When she came over, he held up his empty glass. “I’ll take another and whatever my young friend here wants. And see if you can get the tube switched over to the news.”
“What’s on the news that you’re so interested in?”
Monroe glanced sideways at him. “Nothing in particular. I just like keeping up with current events, you know. And maybe there’ll be some news about Yankee spring training.”
Gallo shook his head. “Too cold outside for me to even be thinking baseball already.”
“Yeah, but rookies report in a few weeks,” Monroe pointed out. “Then the pitchers and catchers. They’re all down in Florida while we’re freezing our nuts off up here. Lucky stiffs.”
Gallo nodded. “Yeah, lucky.” He was glad to have the conversation turn to something other than where he’d been. He wasn’t meeting a friend for a late lunch. He wasn’t shopping or getting laid. He’d gone to Il Buon Pane to listen to Rose Lubinsky talk about her book . . . and to tell her that he was sorry. That he wished he had her courage; that he wished he hadn’t given in to the bullying and threats and wanted to be forgiven and be there at her side when she spoke to the politicians about a bill that would change the course of charter schools for the betterment of the children of New York forever.
But even before he got out of the cab outside of the bakery, he knew that it was too late for him. That he’d been bought and corrupted and didn’t have the inner strength to go up against Monroe and the union. He just hoped that he might get a moment to speak to her outside of anyone else’s hearing to say he was sorry, wish her luck, and then leave to meet his master.
Except you didn’t even have the balls to do that, he thought. He’d walked in the door shortly before Lubinsky began her talk and stayed in the front part of the store while other people filtered in and moved forward to take seats. He’d stayed back in the shadows as she went to the podium but then he heard a familiar voice behind him.
“Well, Micah Gallo, what brings a pendejo like you to a nice place like this.”
Gallo immediately recognized the sing-song, Latin-accented words as belonging to an angry Alejandro Garcia. He’d turned around and found himself looking down into the short, broad-shouldered young man’s smoldering eyes.
Caught off guard, Gallo didn’t know what to say. All the things he’d considered saying to Rose Lubinsky weren’t intended for anyone else. “I was just . . .”
“Just what, panocha? Spying for your punk boss?”
Deep in his gut, Gallo felt a sudden warming of the old anger and temper that had been a part of him back when he and Garcia were both leaders of their respective Latino gangs. Garcia in Spanish Harlem; Gallo in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Back then, they’d been a lot alike in many ways. Both had grown up on the hard streets where they’d had to learn to be a man when most boys their ages were still playing kid games and were curious about girls. They’d both also exhibited the kind of leadership and decision-making skills that had earned them the respect and leadership among older teens.
Although separated by the East River and with little opportunity for contact, Gallo and Garcia had been aware of each other but not rivals. For one thing, they weren’t with the big, drug-dealing inner city gangs; theirs were more the old-fashioned neighborhood gangs, as much a collection of friends as anything else. They could be violent if pushed or defending their “turf,” but mostly they avoided trouble and just wanted to be left alone.
Back in the day, a challenge like Garcia’s would have been fighting words. But not anymore, so he just shook his head. “I don’t want any trouble, Alejandro. I just saw that she was having a book signing, and I wanted to wish her luck.”
Garcia had glanced at the front of the room. Rose Lubinsky was looking over the crowd, smiling and nodding at friends. Then she’d looked up and spotted the two of them and her smile faltered.
Gallo blinked to clear his eyes of the tears that had suddenly sprung into them. But Lubinsky had turned to say something to the small man who had escorted her to the stage.
“I think you better leave,” Garcia said. “She doesn’t need your kind of luck. You’re free to go back and report that you followed her here and did your job. Otherwise, we’ll see all of you union pendejos in Albany next week.”
Again the old anger flared for a moment but it faded just as quickly. He might have once been a hard-nosed street gangster who had clawed his way out of the ’hood and put himself through college. He may have overcome enormous odds to go on and get his teaching license by working two jobs and avoiding the people and circumstances of his past life. He may have once been so fired up about the charter school movement—so committed to helping kids like himself—that he’d taken out enormous loans, put his house up for collateral, and sunk every cent he had in the Bedford-Stuyvesant Charter School. That brave, altruistic young man was gone; he’d first lost everything, and then been replaced by a spineless “yes man” addicted to fast cars, loose women, nice clothes, a luxurious condo, and . . . la vida fácil, the easy life.
So Gallo turned and left without responding to Garcia or looking back to see if Rose Lubinsky was watching anymore. Outside, he shivered both from the cold and his warring emotions. The lighting was weak and everyone was bundled against the cold but for a moment one face some twenty-five feet away from him looked familiar. But the young man disappeared back into the crowd and he wasn’t sure.
“Yo, Micah, you going to order something?”
Monroe’s gruff voice brought him out of the memory. His boss and the waitress, a bottle blonde wearing too much makeup, were both looking at him, waiting for him to order. “You’ll have to forgive him,” Monroe said with a wink, “he spent the afternoon getting busy, if you know what I mean.”
Gallo blushed as the waitress laughed. “Yeah, I’ll have a beer.”
“What kind, honey?” the waitress replied sweetly, obviously taken with his dark good looks.
“Uh, Schaefer.”
Monroe made a face. “You still drinking that swill? At least order a microbrew or something decent.”
Gallo shrugged. “It’s what I grew up with, and I like it. Just a Schaefer, please.”
When the waitress left, Gallo turned back to Monroe. “So what’s so important?”
“Stopping this fucking bill is what’s important,” Monroe replied. For the next half hour, he went over the strategy for the next week: who needed to have his or her arm twisted; places and hands where some cash might do some good; favors that needed to be called in.
“To be honest, it wasn’t going to be enough.”
“Wasn’t?”
“Isn’t,” Monroe corrected himself. “It isn’t going to be enough. You know what I meant.”
The way he said it—all worried and angry—made Gallo wonder if the man was cracking. “Maybe we’re pushing back too hard,” he suggested. “Maybe we can still reach a compromise. It would take some adjustments, but maybe we can figure out a way to work with the charter schools, and still keep the union strong.”
Monroe looked at him for a moment like he was nuts, then laughed, or more accurately, snorted. “Adjustments? What adjustments? Adjusting to being out of a job? Adjusting to a prison cell? Or have you forgotten that part of the bill means someone will be poking around in the books? We tried to compromise with that bitch, she wasn’t budging. We’ll all hang if she gets her way.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.”
Monroe gave him a funny look. “No? Where do you think all the money for your playboy lifestyle comes from?”
“My salary,” Gallo replied. “And bonuses.”
“Yeah, and where do you think those bonuses come from,” Monroe shot back. “We’re not I-fucking-BM and you’re not a shareholder. Bonuses, Christ, don’t make me laugh.” He leaned across the table and pointed his finger in Gallo’s face. “Listen to me, buddy boy, I’ve been taking care of your ass, but you better remember who buttered the bread. You’re in this up to your eyeballs. I go down, you go down; we all go down together, which means, we do whatever it takes to make sure this bill doesn’t pass.”
Gallo hung his head. It doesn’t get any more clear than that, he thought. The asshole not only bought you, he made sure that if you ever did grow a set of balls, and tried to do anything about it, he’d cut them right off.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Monroe said suddenly.
Looking up to see what the Irishman was talking about, Gallo followed his eyes to the television. It took him a moment to realize what he was looking at beyond the words “News Alert!” flashing on the bottom of the screen. A car was burning and people were rushing about.
“Hey Julie,” Monroe bellowed. “Turn up the tube, would ya?”
Standing next to the bar, Julie the waitress pointed and pressed the TV remote and a newscaster’s voice broke through the background noise of the pub: “. . . where an apparent car bomb has exploded outside this Midtown bakery where charter schools association president and author, Rose Lubinsky, talked about her new book . . .”
Slowly Gallo rose to his feet, his eyes wide with horror, his jaw slack. The newscaster continued: “. . . gang of neo-Nazi skinheads earlier clashed with neighborhood residents and supporters of Mrs. Lubinsky . . . early reports are one dead, two in critical condition, numerous injuries . . . District Attorney Butch Karp is at the scene . . . reports of one arrest . . .”
Gallo turned toward Monroe. “Did you do this?” he asked, his throat suddenly bone dry and his voice coming out as a croak.
Monroe sat back in his seat and laced his fingers together behind his head as he studied Gallo. Then he shook his head. “Fuck no,” he said. “It was probably those Nazi assholes. They didn’t like her ’cause she was a Jew. Hope they all fry in hell.”
“I got to go,” Gallo said, grabbing his coat off the back of the chair.
“Yeah, sure,” Monroe said. “This is upsetting news. But Micah . . .”
“What?”
“Who butters your bread?”
“You do, Tommy.”
“Attaboy, you just remember that and you’ll be fine.”