When Business Becomes Personal

Sergei and I walk from Ocean Boulevard back to Wang’s Everything’s a Dollar in hopes of finding Billy Mangos hanging with some of his kids. If he’s not there, logic says he’s at Lite-A-Line or, if he’s fresh with new money, maybe King’s Grill, this first-rate seafood place on Pine Avenue.

I smoke a cigarette as we walk.

Sergei says, “Nick Ray much nervous.”

“I suppose.”

“Worry much. Everything fine—-never work again when you get money.”

“That sounds good,” I say, though I’m not sure it is. While I’ve always hated work, hated and resented every job I’ve ever had, I’m not sure what I’d do if I had a bunch of free time.

“Is good, Nick Ray. Is very good not to work.”

“You ever work?”

“Work now, Nick Ray. Not working very hard work.”

“No,” I say. “I mean straight work—punch-in punch-out kind of stuff.”

He nods. “When first came to United States, work as dishwasher.” He looks at me as we come to a stop at Ocean and Long Beach Boulevard. “Work as garbage collector in Russia—pay very well. Then wash dishes when come here.” The light changes and we start walking. Sergei says, “Work sixty, seventy hours and man pay me dollar an hour. When I find out about your minimum wage, I choke him and take exactly what owed me out of register.”

“You choked him?”

He nods.

“You choked him dead?”

“No, Nick Ray. Just choke to pass out. Then take what was mine. Add up hours, multiply by minimum wage.” He sniffs. “Little-boy math.”

“So that’s all you took?”

“To penny, Nick Ray. What is owed Sergei.” He taps his temple. “Always know—always collect—always to penny. Sergei never round up, never round down.”

We get to Wang’s Everything’s a Dollar and do a quick scan, and there’s Billy Mangos, surrounded by a few teenage punks who think he’s hot shit but they’ll grow older and realize what a loser he is. By then, they’ll be replaced by another crop of sad-faced, lonely disenfranchised boys. These are the same unrooted kids that the white supremacists like those Metzger idiots recruit. Dumb and pliable as modeling clay.

When we get to the table, Billy Mangos sends the kids away and says, “I hear we have a problem.”

I point at his gaggle of deadbeats walking away from the table. “That’s our fucking problem. One of your clowns ripped me off.”

Billy Mangos is eating Buffalo wings that are the color of Cheetos. He wipes his mouth with a greasy napkin that’s smeared the same orange as the wings. “Now—how do we know that it was one of my boys?”

I start to say something, but Sergei holds up his hand. “Not know. But have hunch.”

Billy Mangos says, “A hunch? Fuck you and fuck your hunch. Now let me eat.”

Sergei barely raises his voice when he says, “I break your wrist. Stick fork through hand.” I check his face and there’s no tell. Either he’s learning to bluff or the poison in his face is working, or he means it. There’s no way to know. He grabs Billy Mangos’ wrist.

“Fuck off,” Billy Mangos says.

Sergei takes a fork and puts it on the back of Billy Mangos’ hand, which he’s got pinned on the table. Sergei says, “Stick fork in hand—then spin you around table until wrist breaks.” He starts to put slow weight on the fork and I see the skin on Billy Mangos’ hand start to gather white around the prongs of the fork.

Billy Mangos says, “I didn’t know you had anything to do with that VCR.”

“Fuck with friend, fuck with me,” Sergei says. “Where the rest of Nick Ray’s things?”

Sergei leans down on the fork, and I see blood pooling around the prongs.

Billy Mangos starts to shake, his face turns a pale red, and he’s pounding the table with his free hand. The silverware on the table bounces and rattles each time his free hand comes down. Some people are looking over at us and Sergei leans harder and you can hear crunchy noises from the hand.

“Tell us things,” Sergei says.

Billy Mangos says he’ll tell us where the computers and the rest of the things are as soon as Sergei lets go of his hand.

“Wrong order,” Sergei says. “You talk—I let go.”

Billy Mangos blurts out that Mario did it, and that the rest of the stuff is at Billy Mangos’ warehouse space, which is up in Carson near the Arco oil refineries about ten miles north of here.

Sergei lets go of his hand and tells Billy to give him the directions and the key to the storage locker.

“I’ll go with you,” Billy Mangos says.

Sergei says no.

“I’m not going to trust you with my locker,” Billy says.

I say, “Fine—so you can rip us off, but we can’t be trusted?” I push him hard in the chest and his chair slides awkwardly back on the tile. “Is that how this works?”

Sergei pulls me away from Billy and says, “Nick Ray, wait outside.” He looks in my eyes and nods—the look says, Go outside—this is not a matter of debate.

I go out to the corner, and through the windows I see Billy Mangos hand over a key to Sergei, who says something and shakes the same hand he was breaking up with the fork a minute ago. He takes a chicken wing and starts to come outside. When he gets to where I’m standing on the curb, he holds out half of the chicken wing.

“Want, Nick Ray?”

“I don’t eat meat,” I say.

“This not meat,” he says. “No orange meat in world.” He holds it close enough for me to get the smelling-salts wallop of the hot sauce in my tearing eyes. If I could smell, it would probably hurt. I shake my head as my sinuses flood and some blood trickles onto my upper lip. He throws it onto the sidewalk near a pigeon that hops away at first and then approaches the tossed meat, carefully walking sideways. The light changes and we start to cross Long Beach Boulevard on our way, I’m guessing, to my car and to the storage lot in Carson, and Sergei says to me, “Sorry to make you go outside, but never make business personal.”

“What you were doing with his hand wasn’t personal?”

Sergei shakes his head. “That business. You getting angry.”

“You weren’t angry when you were busting up his hand?”

“No, Nick Ray—cannot be angry and do business.”

“But you can push a fork through a man’s hand and not be angry.”

Sergei looks confused. “Not personal. When business become personal, bad things happen.”