Malone sleeps for just an hour, because he wants to be out in Staten Island before the kids get up and start ripping open the presents under the tree.
He doesn’t wake Claudette when he gets up.
He gets dressed, goes into the little galley kitchen, makes himself an instant coffee and then goes to his jacket and takes out the present he got her.
Diamond earrings from Tiffany’s.
Because she’s crazy about that Audrey Hepburn movie.
Malone leaves the box on the coffee table and goes out. He knows she’ll sleep until noon and then make it to her sister’s for Christmas dinner.
“Then I’ll probably hit a meeting at St. Mary’s,” she said.
“They have them on Christmas?” Malone asked.
“Especially on Christmas.”
She’s doing well, she’s been clean for almost six months now. Hard for an addict working in a hospital around all those drugs.
Now he drives down to his pad, on 104th between Broadway and West End.
When he separated from Sheila, a little over a year ago now, Malone decided to be one of those few cops who lives on his beat. He didn’t go all the way up to Harlem, but settled for the outskirts on the Upper West Side. He can take the train to work or even walk if he wants, and he likes the neighborhood around Columbia.
The college kids are annoying in their youthful arrogance and certitude, but there’s something about that he likes, too. Likes going into the coffeehouses, the bars, hearing the conversations. Likes to walk uptown, let the dealers and the addicts know he’s around.
His place is a third-floor walk-up—a small living room, a smaller kitchen, an even smaller bedroom with a bathroom attached. A heavy bag hangs from a chain in the living room. It’s all he needs; he’s not there much anyway. It’s a place to crash, shower, make a cup of coffee in the morning.
Now he goes up, showers and changes clothes. It wouldn’t do to go back to the house in the same clothes because Sheila would sniff it out in a second and ask him if he’s been with “huh.”
Malone doesn’t know why it bugs her so much, or at all—they separated almost three months before he even met Claudette—but it was a serious mistake to have answered Sheila’s question “Are you seeing anyone?” honestly.
“You’re a cop, you should know better,” Russo said when Malone told him about Sheila freaking out. “Never give an honest answer.”
Or an answer at all. Other than “I want a lawyer, I want my delegate.”
But Sheila had freaked. “‘Claudette’? What is she, French?”
“As a matter of fact, she’s black. African American.”
Sheila laughed in his face. It just cracked her up. “Shit, Denny, when you said at Thanksgiving you liked the dark meat, I thought you meant the drumstick.”
“Nice.”
“Don’t get all PC with me,” Sheila said. “With you it’s always ‘moolie’ this and ‘ditzune’ that. Tell me something, do you call her a nigger?”
“No.”
Sheila couldn’t stop laughing. “You tell the sistuh how many brothuhs you tuned up with your nightstick back in the day?”
“I might have left that out.”
She laughed again, but he knew it was coming. She’d had a couple of pops so it was only a matter of time before the hilarity turned to rage and self-pity. And it came. “Tell me, Denny, she fuck you better than I did?”
“Come on, Sheila.”
“No, I want to know. Does she fuck better than me? You know what they say, once you try black, you never go back.”
“Let’s not do this.”
Sheila said, “Because usually you cheat on me with white whores.”
Well, that’s true, Malone thought. “I’m not cheating on you. We’re separated.”
But Sheila was in no mood for legalisms. “It never bothered you when we were married, though, did it, Denny? You and your brother cops tapping everything with a pussy. Hey, do they know? Russo and Big Monty, they know you’re stirring tar?”
He didn’t want to lose his temper but he did. “Shut the fuck up, Sheila.”
“What, are you going to hit me?”
“I’ve never laid a goddamn hand on you,” Malone said. He’s done a lot of bad things in his life, but hitting a woman is not one of them.
“No, that’s right,” she said. “You stopped touching me altogether.”
Problem was, she had a point about that.
Now he shaves carefully, first down and then up against the grain, because he wants to look clean and refreshed.
Good luck with that, he thinks.
Opening the medicine cabinet, he pops a couple of 5 mg Dexes to give him a little boost.
Then he changes into a pair of clean jeans, a white dress shirt and a black wool sports coat to look like a citizen. Even in the summer, he usually wears long sleeves when he goes home because the tats piss off Sheila.
She thinks they were a symbol of his leaving Staten Island, that he was getting all “city hipster.”
“They don’t have tattoos on Staten Island?” he asked her. Hell, there’s a parlor every other corner now and half the guys walking around the neighborhood have ink. About half the women, too, come to think of it.
He likes his tattoo sleeves. For one, he just likes them, for another, they scare the shit out of the mopes because they’re not used to seeing them on cops. When he rolls up his sleeves to go to work on a mope, they know it’s going to be bad.
And it’s hypocritical, because Sheila has a little green shamrock down by her right ankle, as if you couldn’t tell she was Irish just by looking at her, with the red hair, green eyes and freckles. Yeah, it doesn’t take a $200-an-hour shrink to tell me that Claudette is the exact opposite of my soon-to-be ex-wife, Malone thinks as he clips the off-duty gun to his belt.
I get it.
Sheila is everything he grew up with, no surprises, the known. Claudette is a different world, a constant unfolding, the other. It’s not just race, although that’s a big part of it.
Sheila is Staten Island, Claudette is Manhattan.
She is the city to him.
The streets, the sounds, the scents, the sophisticated, the sexy, the exotic.
Their first date, she showed up in this retro 1940s dress with a white Billie Holiday gardenia in her hair and her lips a vivid red and perfume that made him almost dizzy with want.
He took her to Buvette, down in the Village off Bleecker, because he figured with a French first name she might like that, and anyway, he didn’t want to take her anywhere in Manhattan North.
She figured that right out.
“You don’t want to be seen with a ‘sistuh’ on your beat,” she said as they sat down at the table.
“It’s not that,” he said, telling a half-truth. “It’s just that when I’m up there, I’m always on duty. What, you don’t like the Village?”
“I love the Village,” Claudette said. “I’d live down here if it weren’t so far from work.”
She didn’t go to bed with him that date or the next or the next, but when she did, it was a revelation and he fell in love like he didn’t think was possible. Actually, he was already in love, because she challenged him. With Sheila it was either a resentful acceptance of whatever he did or an all-out, red-haired Irish brawl. Claudette, she pushed him on his assumptions, made him see things in a new way. Malone was never much of a reader, but she got him to read, even some poetry, a little bit of which, like Langston Hughes, he even liked. Some Saturday mornings they’d sleep in late and then go get coffee and sometimes prowl bookstores, something else he never thought he’d do, and she’d show him art books, tell him about the vacation to Paris she took all by herself and how she’d like to go back.
Shit, Sheila won’t come to the city by herself.
But it isn’t just the contrast to Sheila that makes Malone love Claudette.
It’s her intelligence, her sense of humor, her warmth.
He’s never met a kinder person.
It’s a problem.
She’s too kind for the work she does—she hurts for her patients, bleeds inside from the things she sees—and it breaks her, makes her reach for the needle.
It’s good she’s hitting the meetings.
Dressed, Malone grabs the wrapped presents he bought for the kids. Well, he bought all the presents for the kids, but Santa gets the cred for the ones under the tree. These are Malone’s gifts to them—the new PlayStation 4 for John and a Barbie set for Caitlin.
Those were easy; finding a present for Sheila was a bitch.
He wanted to get her something nice, but nothing romantic or remotely sexy. He finally asked Tenelli for advice and she suggested a nice scarf. “Nothing cheap, from a street vendor like you assholes usually do last minute. Take a little time, go to Macy’s or Bloomie’s. What’s her coloration?”
“What?”
“What does she look like, dummy?” Tenelli asks. “Is she dark, pale? What color is her hair?”
“Pale. Red.”
“Go with gray. It’s safe.”
So he went down to Macy’s, fought the crowd, and found a nice gray wool scarf that set him back a hundred. He hopes it sends the right message—I’m not in love with you anymore, but I’ll always take care of you.
She should know it already, he thinks.
He’s never late with the child support, he pays for the kids’ clothes, John’s hockey team, Caitlin’s dance classes, and the family is still covered on his PBA health insurance, which is very good and includes dental.
And Malone always leaves an envelope for Sheila because he doesn’t want her working and he doesn’t want her to have a what-do-you-call-it, a “diminution” of her lifestyle. So he does the right thing and leaves a fat envelope, and she’s grateful and hip enough never to ask where the money comes from.
Her dad was a cop, too.
“No, it’s good you do the right thing,” Russo said one time when they were talking about it.
“What else am I going to do?” Malone asked.
You grow up in that neighborhood, you do the right thing.
The prevailing attitude on Staten Island is that men can leave their wives, but only black men leave their kids. Which isn’t fair, Malone thinks—Bill Montague’s probably the best father he knows—but that’s what people think, that black men go around knockin’ they bitches up and then stick white people with the welfare bill.
A white guy from the East Shore tries something like that, he’s got everyone up his ass—his priest, his parents, his siblings, his cousins, his friends—all telling him what a degenerate he is and showing him up by picking up the slack themselves.
“You did that,” the guy’s mother would say, “I couldn’t hold my head up going to Mass. What would I say to Father?”
That specific argument don’t cut much weight with Malone.
He hates priests.
Thinks they’re parasites, and he won’t go near a church unless it’s a wedding or a funeral and he has to. But he won’t give the church any money.
Malone, who also won’t pass a Salvation Army bell ringer without putting at least a five in the bucket, won’t give a dime to the Catholic Church he grew up in. He refuses to donate money to what he thinks is an organization of child molesters that should be indicted under the RICO statutes.
When the pope came to NYC, Malone wanted to arrest him.
“That wouldn’t go down so well,” Russo said.
“Yeah, probably not.” With every cop over the grade of captain elbowing each other aside to kiss the pontiff’s ring or his ass, whichever was presented first.
Malone ain’t crazy about nuns, either.
“What about Mother Teresa?” Sheila asked him, when they were arguing about it. “She fed starving people.”
“If she passed out condoms,” Malone said, “she wouldn’t have had so many starving people to feed.”
Malone even hates The Sound of Music. It was the only movie he ever saw, he rooted for the Nazis.
“How could anyone hate The Sound of Music?” Monty asked him. “It’s nice.”
“What kind of shitty black man are you?” Malone asked him. “Listen to the fucking Sound of Music.”
“That’s right,” Monty said. “You listen to that rap shit.”
“What you got against rap?”
“It’s racist.”
It’s been Malone’s experience that no one hates rap and hip-hop more than black men above the age of forty. They just can’t stand the attitude, the pants hanging off their asses, the backward baseball caps, the jewelry. And most black men of that age aren’t going to let their women be called bitches.
That just ain’t gonna happen.
Malone’s seen it. Once, back before it fell apart, he and Sheila and Monty and Yolanda were on a double date, driving up Broadway on a warm night with the windows open, and this rapper on the corner of Ninety-Eighth saw Yolanda and yelled out, “You got one sweet bitch, brother!” Monty stopped the car in the middle of Broadway, got out, walked over and clocked the kid. Walked back to the car, didn’t say a word.
Nobody did.
Claudette, she doesn’t hate hip-hop, but she listens to mostly jazz and makes him go to the clubs with her when one of the musicians she likes is playing. Malone likes it okay, but what he really likes are the older rap and hip-hop guys—Biggie, Sugarhill Gang, N.W.A. and Tupac. Nelly and Eminem are all right, too; so is Dr. Dre.
Malone stands in his living room and realizes that he’s been spacing out, so the Dexedrine hasn’t kicked in yet.
He locks up and walks to the garage where they park his car.
Malone’s personal vehicle is a beautifully restored 1967 Chevy Camaro SS convertible, black with Z-28 stripes, 427-cubic-inch engine, four-speed manual transmission, tricked out with a new Bose sound system. He never takes it to the precinct, rarely even drives it in Manhattan. It’s his indulgence—he uses it to go to the Island or on joyrides to escape the city.
Now he takes the West Side Highway downtown and then crosses Manhattan near the 9/11 site. It’s been more than fifteen years and he still gets mad when he doesn’t see the Towers. It’s a hole in the skyline, a hole in his heart. Malone, he don’t hate Muslims but he sure as hell hates those jihadist cocksuckers.
Three hundred and forty-three firefighters died that day.
Thirty-seven Port Authority and New Jersey police officers.
Twenty-three cops ran into those buildings and didn’t come out.
Malone will never forget that day and wishes that he could. He was off-duty but responded to the Level-4 mobilization call. Him and Russo and two thousand other cops went, and he saw the second tower fall, not knowing at the moment that his brother was in it.
That endless day of searching and waiting and then the phone call that confirmed what he already knew in his gut—Liam wasn’t coming back. It was Malone had to go tell his mother and he’ll never forget the sound—the shrill scream of grief that came out of her mouth and still echoes in his ears in the gray hours when he can’t sleep.
The other gift that keeps on giving is the smell. Liam once told him that he could never get the smell of burning flesh out of his nose, and Malone never really believed him until 9/11. Then the whole city smelled like death and ash and scorched flesh and rot and rage and sorrow.
And Liam was right—Malone never has gotten the smell out of his nose.
He puts Kendrick Lamar on the sound system and blasts it as he goes through the Battery Tunnel.
The phone rings when he’s on the Verrazano Bridge.
It’s Mark Piccone. “You got a couple of minutes today for me?”
“It’s Christmas.”
“Five minutes,” Piccone says. “My new client wants to get this taken care of.”
“Fat Teddy?” Malone asks. “Shit, his trial won’t come up for months.”
“He’s nervous.”
“I’m headed for the Island,” Malone says.
“I’m already there,” Piccone says. “Big family thing, I thought I’d try to make my escape late afternoon.”
“I’ll call you.”
Malone comes off the bridge near Fort Wadsworth, where the New York marathon starts, gets off on Hylan and drives down through Dongan Hills, past Last Chance Pond, and then takes a left onto Hamden Avenue.
The old neighborhood.
Nothing special about it, just your basic East Shore block of nice single-family homes, mostly Irish or Italian, a lot of cops and firefighters.
A good place to raise kids.
The truth is he just couldn’t stand it anymore.
The incredible freakin’ boredom.
Couldn’t stand coming back from busts, the stakeouts, the roofs, the alleys, the chases to what, Hylan Plaza, Pathmark, Toys “R” Us, GameStop. He’d come home from a tour jacked up from speed, adrenaline, fear, anger, sadness, rage, and then go to someone’s cookie-cutter house to play Mexican Train or Monopoly or nickel poker. And they were nice people and he’d feel guilty sitting there sipping their wine coolers and making small talk when what he really wanted was to be back on the street in hot, smelly, noisy, dangerous, fun, interesting, stimulating, infuriating Harlem with the real people and the families and the hustlers, the slingers, the whores.
The poets, the artists, the dreamers.
He just loved the fuckin’ city, man.
Watching them ball at Rucker, or standing up on the terrace in Riverside Park watching the Cubans play baseball down below. Sometimes he’d go up to the Heights and Inwood to check out the Dominican scene—the domino games on the sidewalks, the reggaetón music blaring out of car stereos, the street merchants hacking coconuts open with machetes. Go into Kenny’s for a café con leche or stop at a street stand for the sweet bean soup.
It’s what he loves about New York—you want it, it’s there.
The sweet, fetid richness of this city. He never really got it until he left his Irish-Italian blue-collar, cop-fireman Staten Island ghetto and moved to the city. You hear five languages walking a single street, smell six cultures, hear seven kinds of music, see a hundred kinds of people, a thousand stories and it’s all New York.
New York’s the world.
Malone’s world, anyway.
He’ll never leave it.
No reason to.
He tried to explain it to Sheila, but how do you do that without bringing her into a world you don’t want to put on her? How do you go from a tenement where the mommy-daddy combo is so fucked up on crack, and you find a baby dead for a week, her feet chewed by rats, and then take your own kids to Chuck E. Cheese’s? You supposed to tell her about that? “Share” that? No, the right thing to do is put a smile on your face and talk to the tire salesmen about the Mets or what-the-fuck-ever because no one wants to hear about that and you don’t want to talk about it, you just want to forget it, and good luck with that, ace.
That time Phil and Monty and him get an anonymous tip, go to this address in Washington Heights and they find this guy tied to a chair, his hands had been cut off for skimming some smack off the top of a shipment and he was still alive because the people who punished him also perfectly cauterized the wounds with a blowtorch, his eyes were bulging out of his skull, his jaw broken from clenching it so hard, and then they had to go back to a cookout and stand around by the grill with the host like guys do and he and Phil looked at each other over the grill and knew what the other was thinking. You don’t talk to other cops about that shit because you don’t have to. They already know. They’re the only ones who know.
Then there was the birthday party.
Malone don’t even remember which kid’s birthday it was—some friend of Caitlin’s maybe—and it was another one of those backyard parties and they had a piñata strung from the clothesline and Malone was sitting there watching them whack the thing and he’d spent all week in court on a heroin dealer named Bobby Jones and the jury came back not guilty because they just wouldn’t believe that Malone had seen “Bobby Bones” slinging smack from across the street. So Malone was sitting there and the kids were swinging this stick at the donkey over and over and over again and they couldn’t break it and finally Malone got up, took the stick from a kid, smashed the fucking donkey into smithereens and candy came flying out all over the place.
Everything stopped.
The whole party stared at him.
“Eat your candy,” Malone said.
He was embarrassed and went into the bathroom and Sheila followed him in and said, “Jesus, Denny, what the fuck?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” she asked. “You embarrass us in front of all our friends and you don’t know?”
No, you don’t know, Malone thought.
And I don’t know how to tell you.
I can’t do this anymore.
Go from one life to another, and this life, this life, feels . . .
Stupid.
Phony.
This is not who I am.
Sorry, Sheila, but it’s not who I am.
So this Christmas morning a sleepy Sheila meets Malone at the door in a blue flannel robe, her hair disheveled, no makeup on yet, and a coffee cup in her hand.
Still, he thinks she’s beautiful.
He always has.
“Are the kids up?” Malone asks.
“No, I slipped them some Benadryl last night.” Seeing the look on his face, she says, “That was a joke, Denny.”
Malone follows her into the kitchen, where she pours him a cup of coffee and then sits down on a stool at the breakfast bar.
He asks, “How was Christmas Eve?”
“Great,” she says. “The kids argued over which movie to watch and we settled on Home Alone and then Frozen. What did you do?”
He says, “A tour.”
Sheila looks at him like she doesn’t believe him, her expression accusing him of being with “huh.”
“You on today?” she asks.
“No.”
“We’re going to Mary’s for dinner,” she says. “I’d invite you, but, you know, they fucking hate you.”
Same old Sheila—the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Actually, it’s one of the things he’s always liked about her. She’s black and white, you always know where you stand with her. And she’s right—her sister Mary and her whole family hate him since the separation.
“That’s okay,” he says. “I might swing by Phil’s. So how are the kids?”
“You’re going to have to have ‘the talk’ with John soon.”
“He’s eleven.”
“He’ll be going into middle school,” Sheila says. “You wouldn’t believe what goes on these days. The girls are giving blow jobs in seventh grade.”
Malone works Harlem, Inwood, Washington Heights.
Seventh grade is late.
“I’ll talk to him.”
“Not today, though.”
“No, not today.”
They hear voices from upstairs.
“Game time,” Malone says.
He’s standing at the bottom of the stairs when his kids come pounding down, their eyes lit up at the sight of the presents under the tree.
“Looks like Santa came,” Malone says. He isn’t hurt that they squeeze past him to get to the loot. They’re kids, and anyway, they come by it honest.
“PlayStation 4!” John screams.
Well, there goes my present, Malone thinks, knowing no kid needs two PlayStations.
How could they have grown so much in two weeks, he wonders. Sheila, she probably don’t notice because she’s with them every day, but John is shooting up, just starting to get a little gangly. Caitlin has her mother’s red hair, although it’s still really curly, and those green eyes. I’m going to have to build a guard tower on the house, keep the boys away.
His heart hurts.
Shit, he thinks, I’m missing my kids growing up.
He sits down in the same easy chair he used to every Christmas when they were still together and Sheila sits on the same cushion on the sofa.
Traditions are important, he thinks. Habits are important; they give the kids a measure of stability. So he and Sheila sit and try to establish some order and make the kids take turns so their Christmas isn’t over in thirty seconds, and Sheila enforces a torturous break for cinnamon rolls and hot chocolate before they go back to the presents.
John opens Malone’s gift and feigns enthusiasm. “Oh, wow, Dad!”
He’s a kind kid, Malone thinks. Sensitive. Can’t let him go into the family trade, it would eat him alive.
“I didn’t know Santa was handling this,” Malone says, a subtle dig at Sheila.
“No, it’s great,” John says, improvising. “I can have one upstairs and one downstairs.”
“I’ll take it back,” Malone says. “Get you something different.”
John springs up and wraps his arms around Malone.
It means everything.
Gotta keep this boy off the Job, he thinks.
Caitlin loves her Barbie set. Comes over and gives her dad a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you, Daddy.”
“You’re welcome, honey.”
She still has that kid smell.
That sweet innocence.
Sheila is a great mom.
Then Caitlin breaks his heart. “Are you staying, Daddy?”
Crack.
John’s looking up at him like he didn’t even know this was a possibility but now he’s hopeful.
“Not today,” Malone says, “I have to work.”
“Catching the bad guys,” John says.
“Catching the bad guys.”
You’re not going to be me, Malone thinks. You’re not going to be me.
Caitlin, she ain’t giving up. “When all the bad guys are caught, will you come home?”
“We’ll see, honey.”
“‘We’ll see’ means no,” Caitlin says, giving her mother a sharp look.
“Don’t you guys have presents for us?” Sheila says.
The excitement deflects them and they hustle to get their gifts from under the tree. John gives Malone a New York Rangers knit cap, Caitlin has a coffee mug she decorated in art class.
“This goes on my desk,” Malone says. “And this goes on my head. I love them, guys, thanks. Oh, and this is for you.”
He hands Sheila a box.
“I didn’t get you anything,” she says.
“Good.”
“Macy’s.” She holds up the scarf for the kids to see. “This is beautiful. And it will keep my neck so warm. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Then it gets awkward. He knows she needs to start the kids getting dressed to go over to her family’s, the kids know it too. But they also know that if they move, he’ll leave and the family will be broken again, so they sit still as statues.
Malone looks at his watch. “Oh, wow. I can’t keep the bad guys waiting.”
“That’s funny, Daddy,” Caitlin says.
Except her eyes are all teary.
Malone gets up. “You guys be good for Mom, okay?”
“We will,” John says, already adopting the role of the man of the family.
Malone pulls both of them to his legs. “I love you.”
“Love you, too.” Sadly. In chorus.
He and Sheila don’t hug because they don’t want to give the kids false hope.
Malone goes out the door thinking that Christmas was invented to torture divorced parents and their children.
Fuck Christmas.
It’s way too early to show up at Russo’s, so Malone drives out to the shore.
He wants to time his arrival for after dinner to avoid the death-by-pasta ordeal that Donna is planning. The idea is to get there just for the cannoli and the pumpkin pie and some laced coffee.
Malone parks in a lot across the road from the beach and sits in the car with the motor running and the heat on. He’s tempted to go for a walk but it’s too cold out.
Taking a pint bottle out of the glove compartment, he sips on it. Malone is a heavy drinker but nowhere near being an alcoholic and normally wouldn’t drink this early except the whiskey warms him up.
Maybe I would be an alkie, Malone thinks, except I have too big an ego to be a stereotype.
The alcoholic divorced Irish cop.
Who was it, yeah, Jerry McNab, drove out here one Christmas afternoon and put the gun under his chin. His off-duty weapon. Alcoholic divorced Irish cop blows his own brains out.
Another stereotype.
The guys from the One-Oh-One made sure it went down he was cleaning his gun so there’d be no problem with the insurance or the pension and the claims guy knew better than to fuck with them so he pretended to believe a guy was cleaning his gun at the beach on Christmas.
Except McNab, he was scared of going to jail, doing time. They had him, too, dead to rights, on video taking money from a crack dealer in Brooklyn. They were going to take his shield, his gun, his pension, put him behind bars, and he couldn’t face it. Couldn’t face the shame his family would go through, his ex-wife and kids seeing him in handcuffs, so he ate the gun.
Russo had a different interpretation. They were discussing it in the car one night, killing time on a surveillance, and Russo said, “You stunatzes got it all wrong. He did it to save his pension, for his family.”
“Didn’t he put anything away?” Malone asked.
“He was in a sector car,” Russo said. “He couldn’t have been making that much, even in the Seven-Five. He dies in an accident, his family keeps the pension and the benefits. McNab did the right thing.”
Except he didn’t save, Malone thinks.
Malone does.
He has cash stowed away, investments, bank accounts where the feds can never lay their paws on it.
And he has another account, over on Pleasant Avenue with the guineas, what’s left of the old Cimino family crew in East Harlem. Those guys are better than banks. They won’t rob you or throw your money away on bad mortgage loans.
I’ll take an honest mobster over those Wall Street cocksuckers any day, Malone thinks. What the general public doesn’t get—they think the Mafia are crooks? The guineas only wish they could steal like the hedge fund guys, the politicians, the judges, the lawyers.
And Congress?
Forget about it.
A cop takes a ham sandwich to look the other way, he loses his job. Congressman Butthole takes a few million from a defense contractor for his vote, he’s a patriot. The next time a politician blows his brains out to save his pension will be the first time.
And I’ll pop a champagne bottle, Malone thinks.
But I ain’t going the way of Jerry McNab.
Malone, he knows he’s not the suicide type.
I’m going to make them shoot me, he thinks, looking out at the dune grass and the weathered hurricane fence. Hurricane Sandy did a number on Staten Island. Malone made sure to be home that night, sat with Sheila and the kids in the basement and played Go Fish. Went out the next day and did what he could to help.
They nail me, I’ll do my time and fuck you and your pension.
I can take care of my family.
Sheila don’t even have to go up to Pleasant Avenue, they’ll come to her. A fat envelope every month.
They will do the right thing.
Because they’re not in Congress.
He gets on the phone and calls Claudette.
“You up?” he asks when she answers.
“Just,” she says. “Thank you for my earrings, baby. They’re beautiful. I have something for you.”
“You gave me my present last night.”
“That was for us,” she says. “I have the four to midnight. You want to come through after?”
“I do. You going to your sister’s today, right?”
“I can’t think of a way out of it,” Claudette says. “It will be nice to see the children, though.”
He’s glad she’s going, he worries about her being alone.
The last time she used, he gave her a choice—you get into a car with me and I take you to rehab or I put you in bracelets and you can detox in Rikers. She was furious at him but got in the car and he drove her up to the Berkshires in Connecticut, this place his West Side doctor found for him.
Sixty grand for the rehab, but it was worth it.
She’s been clean since.
“I’d like to meet your family sometime,” he says now.
She laughs softly. “I’m not sure we’re ready for that, baby.”
Which is code for she’s not ready to bring a white cop home to her family in Harlem. Be about as welcome as a Klan member at a black home in Mississippi.
“Sometime, though,” Malone says.
“We’ll see. I need to hop in the shower.”
“Hop,” he says. “I’ll see you later.”
He pulls the Rangers cap over his head, zips up his jacket and shuts the motor off. The car will stay warm for a few minutes. He sits back and closes his eyes, knows the Dexedrine won’t let him drop off, but his eyes are sore.
Perfect timing at Phil’s.
They’re just clearing the dinner plates, the house is Italian-American chaos with about fifty-seven cousins running around, the men gossiping by the television, the women chattering in the kitchen, and Phil’s dad somehow managing to sleep through all of it in the big easy chair in the den.
“The fuck you been?” Phil asks. “You missed dinner.”
“Got a late start.”
“Bullshit,” Phil says, showing him in. “You been out doing that Irish brooding thing, you dumbass donkey. Come on, Donna will fix you a plate.”
“I’m saving room for the cannoli.”
“Yeah, well, you’re going home with Tupperware, don’t even try.”
Phil’s twin boys, Paul and Mark, come up to say hello to their uncle Denny. They’re typical South Staten Island Italian teenage boys with the gelled haircuts and the muscle shirts and the attitude.
“They’re spoiled assholes is what they are,” Russo once said to Malone. “Spend half their time in the mall, the other half playing video games.”
Malone knows that isn’t true, that Donna spends all her time chauffeuring them around to hockey and soccer and baseball. The boys are good athletes, maybe scholarship good, but Russo won’t brag about them.
Maybe because he misses so many of their games.
Their daughter, Sophia, is something else. Russo has even talked about moving across the river because she wouldn’t have a chance of winning Miss New York, but she might have a crack at Miss New Jersey.
Seventeen, she looks like Donna, tall and leggy and with charcoal-black hair and surprising blue eyes.
Freakin’ gorgeous.
And she knows it. She’s a sweet kid, though, Malone thinks, not as conceited as she could be, and she adores her dad.
Russo downplays it. His line is “I just gotta keep her off the stripper pole.”
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s a concern,” Malone said.
“And not knocked up,” Russo said. “It’s easier with a boy, you just got one dick to worry about.”
Sophia comes up and gives Malone a kiss on the cheek and with a disarming show of maturity asks, “How are Sheila and the kids?”
“They’re good, thanks for asking.”
She gives his hand a sympathetic squeeze to show she’s a woman and understands his pain, then she goes into the kitchen to help her mother.
“It go okay this morning?” Russo asks.
“Yeah.”
“We should grab a minute to talk.” Russo shouts, “Hey, Donna! I’m taking Denny down to the basement, show him that tool kit you got me!”
“Don’t be long! Dessert’s coming out!”
The cellar’s as clean as an operating room, a place for everything and everything in its place, although Malone doesn’t know when Russo finds the time to actually be down here.
“It’s Torres,” Russo says. “On Carter’s pad.”
“How do you know?”
“He called this morning.”
“To wish you a Merry Christmas?” Malone asks.
“To bitch about Fat Teddy,” Russo says. “I’m betting that fat pig went crying to Carter, who jerked Torres’s chain. Torres says we need to let him eat.”
“We don’t keep him from earning,” Malone says.
If a guy earns outside the borough, he keeps 100 percent. But if he or his team earn inside Manhattan North, they kick ten points into a fund that everyone shares.
Kind of like the NFL.
Any of the teams can range anywhere, but as a matter of practicality, Washington Heights and Inwood are Torres’s team’s profit center.
But now it looks like he’s on Carter’s pad.
Malone won’t go on a pad. He’ll rip drug dealers, work the system with them, but he don’t want to be an employee or a wholly owned subsidiary.
Still, he ain’t going to war with Torres. Life is good right now, and when life is good, you leave it the fuck alone.
Malone says, “Piccone will take care of Fat Teddy. I’m meeting him later.”
Malone has this random thought that Torres is setting them up, wearing a wire, but tosses it out of his head. They could squeeze his shoes until his bones break and Torres wouldn’t give up a brother officer. He’s a wrong, brutal cop and a greedy prick, but he’s not a rat.
A rat is the worst thing in the world.
They’re quiet for a second, then Russo says, “Christmas, it don’t feel the same without Billy, does it.”
“No.”
It was always a thing at Christmas, to see what woman Billy would bring over that year.
A model, an actress, always some hottie.
“We better get upstairs before they think you’re sucking my joint,” Russo says.
“How come they won’t think you’re sucking mine?”
“Because no one would believe that,” Russo says. “Come on.”
The cannoli is as good as advertised.
Malone has two of them and sits out a debate about the relative merits of the Rangers, Islanders and Devils, because Staten Island is right in that triangle where you could legitimately root for any of them.
He’s always been a Rangers guy, always will be.
Donna Russo catches him in the kitchen scraping his plate and takes the opportunity to ambush him. She’s no fucking bullshit. “So, your wife and kids. You going back?”
“Yeah, I don’t see that in the cards, Donna.”
“Get a fresh deck,” Donna says. “They need you. Believe it or not, you need them. You’re a better person with Sheila.”
“She don’t think so.”
Malone doesn’t know if that’s true. They’ve been separated for over a year, and while Sheila says she’s good with getting divorced, she keeps dragging her feet on the paperwork. And he’s just been too busy to push it.
What you tell yourself, anyway, Malone thinks.
“Give me that plate,” Donna says. She takes it and jams it into the dishwasher. “Phil says you got something on the side in Manhattan.”
“It’s not on the side,” Malone says. “It’s in the center, I’m not married anymore.”
“In the eyes of the church—”
“Don’t give me that bullshit.”
Malone loves Donna, known her all his life, would die for her, but he’s not in the mood for her housewife hypocrisy. Donna Russo knows—she has to know—that her husband has a gumar on Columbus Avenue and gets strange every chance that comes up, which it does a lot. She knows and she chooses to ignore it because she wants the nice house and the clothes and the kids in college.
Malone don’t blame her, but let’s keep it real.
“I’m sending food home with you,” Donna says. “You look thin, are you eating?”
“Italian women.”
“You should be so lucky,” Donna says. She starts filling large plastic containers with turkey, mashed potatoes, vegetables and macaroni. “Sheila and I are taking pole-dancing classes, she tell you?”
“She left that out.”
“It’s great cardio,” Donna says, filling his hands with the containers, “and can be very sexy, too, you know? Sheila might have some new tricks you don’t know about, buddy boy.”
“It wasn’t all about the sex,” Malone says.
“It’s always all about the sex,” Donna says. “Go back to your wife, Denny. Before it’s too late.”
“You know something I don’t?”
“I know everything you don’t,” she says.
He says good-bye to Russo on his way out.
“She bust balls about you and Sheila?” Russo asks.
“Of course.”
“Listen, she busts my balls about you and Sheila,” Russo says.
“Thanks for having me.”
“Fuck you, thanks.”
Malone puts the food in the backseat and calls Mark Piccone. “You got time now?”
“For you, always. Where?”
Malone has a wild hair. “How about the Boardwalk?”
“It’s freezing.”
“All the better.” Won’t be a lot of people out there.
It’s empty, all right. The day has turned gray and a fierce wind is coming off the bay. Piccone’s black Mercedes is already there, a couple of cars, people escaping their family dinners, an old van looks like it was dumped there.
He pulls up alongside Piccone’s driver’s side from the opposite direction and rolls down the window. Malone don’t know why every lawyer has to drive a Mercedes, but they do.
Piccone hands him an envelope. “Your finder’s fee on Fat Teddy.”
“Thank you.”
The way it works—you bust a guy, you give him a defense lawyer’s card. If he goes ahead and hires that lawyer, the lawyer owes you a taste.
But it gets better.
“Can you straighten it out?” Piccone asks.
“Who’s riding?”
“Justin Michaels.”
Malone knows Michaels is a player. Most ADAs—assistant district attorneys—aren’t, but enough are that a cop who’s well connected, and Malone is, can get two licks at the spoon. “Yeah, I can probably straighten that out.”
By slipping an envelope to ADA Michaels, who will find that the chain of evidence got jacked up.
“How much?” Piccone asks.
“Are we talking a reduction or a nol pros?” Malone asks.
“A walk.”
“Ten to twenty K.”
“And that includes your cut, right?”
Why is Piccone busting balls? Malone wonders. He knows as well as I do that I take my taste from Michaels. It’s what I get for being the cutout, so two fucking lawyers don’t have to embarrass themselves by acknowledging to each other they’re for sale. Also, it’s safer for them, because a cop talking to a prosecutor in the hallway is a daily event and doesn’t look suspicious. “Yeah, of course.”
“Make the deal.”
New York, New York, Malone thinks—the town so nice they pay you twice.
And anyway, he owes Teddy for the tips on the gun source.
Malone pulls out of the parking lot.
He’s gone three blocks when he sees the car tailing him.
It ain’t Piccone.
Fuck, is it IAB?
The car gets closer and Malone sees it’s Raf Torres. Malone pulls over and gets out. Torres pulls in behind him and they meet on the sidewalk.
“The fuck, Torres?” Malone asks. “It’s Christmas. Shouldn’t you be with your family, or your whores or something?”
“You get this straightened out with Piccone?” he asks.
“Your boy will be okay,” Malone says.
“That bust should have been over the second he mentioned my name,” Torres says.
“He didn’t mention your fucking name,” Malone says. “And what makes you think you can provide cover for one of Carter’s people?”
“Three grand a month,” Torres says. “Carter isn’t happy. He wants his money back.”
“The fuck I care he’s happy?” Malone says.
“You have to let other people eat.”
“Help yourself,” Malone says. “Just dine outside Harlem.”
“You’re a royal prick, Malone, you know that?”
“The question is, do you know that?”
Torres laughs. “Piccone kicking to you?”
Malone don’t answer.
“I should get a taste of that,” Torres says.
Malone reaches to his crotch. “You can have a taste of this.”
“Nice,” Torres says. “Nice talk on Christmas.”
“You want to take Carter’s money, that’s your business,” Malone says. “Knock yourself out. But he needs to know he’s bought you, not me. He slings on my turf, he’s open season.”
“If that’s how you want it, brother.”
“And you’re betting on the wrong horse,” Malone says. “If I don’t bring Carter down, the Domos will.”
“Even after losing a hundred keys of smack?” Torres asks.
“Fifty,” Malone says.
Torres smirks. “Whatever you say.”
It’s fucking freezing out.
Malone gets back in his car and pulls out.
Torres doesn’t follow him.
On the drive back to Manhattan, Malone puts Nas on and pumps it up loud. Sings along—
I’m out for presidents to represent me / Say what?
I’m out for presidents to represent me / Say what?
I’m out for dead presidents to represent me.
Whose world is this?
The world is yours.
It’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine.
If I can hold on to it, Malone thinks.
If DeVon Carter taps into the Iron Pipeline, he’s going to leave Domo bodies strewn all over Manhattan North. The Domos will retaliate and we’ll be freaking Chicago before we know it.
That ain’t all.
Carter was talking about the Pena rip, then Lou Savino, and now Torres is making noise about it?
It’s too risky now to try to move the Pena shit.
And the Pena shit could put you right where Jerry McNab was.
Maybe you’ll luck out and go sudden from a heart attack or a stroke or an aneurysm, but if not, when the time comes you can’t take care of yourself . . .
Jesus, you’re a morbid piece of shit today.
Man the fuck up.
You got a job you love.
Money.
Friends.
An apartment in the city.
A beautiful sexy woman who loves you.
You own Manhattan North.
So they can’t touch you.
No one can touch you.
Dwellin’ in the Rotten Apple
You get tackled or caught by the devil’s lasso . . .