The Monkey Rope Read online

  “And that’s all?”

  She nodded.

  “I was just thinking,” he said, “that I saw him right before he got caught, and that was the last time. Until now.”

  They had just begun their slow turning on the traffic circle at Grand Army Plaza. The cab followed the circle around the grandiose monument to the soldiers of the Civil War. The huge public library, in whose quiet rooms he had spent hundreds of evenings studying, which now was home to as many homeless as scholars, stood to the left. Around the circle, and on the right, as they began their arc, was the entrance to Prospect Park. He thought the cabbie might veer off into the winding roads of the park, but the car stayed in its lane until it squarely faced the library. The cabbie looked over his shoulder, started to turn the wheel, and then cursed under his breath. Seymour caught his eye as he turned again to look behind him.

  “Bastard wouldn’t let me in,” the cabbie said, and Seymour nodded.

  They crawled around the circle until they reached the spot where they could angle onto Flatbush Avenue, and Seymour knew the centrifugal force of twenty years would now spin him home.

  He had been right in guessing their destination, and the knowledge helped ease the full shock of stopping in front of his old house, the brick and stucco building he had thought now belonged to an entirely new generation.

  He and Lois got out of the cab wordlessly. On the stoop sat a number of teenaged Blacks. He counted five, three girls and two boys, ranging in age from about twelve or thirteen to the oldest, and most sullen, a young man who looked to be almost twenty. They smiled at Lois, and then their eyes took his measure. He waited for somebody to say something, a greeting, or a curse, but they remained silent. Lois waved at them, and steered Seymour away from the stoop toward the rear of the house. They stopped before the cellar storm doors, freshly painted a bright green, and secured by a shiny padlock. She knocked three times, sharply, and then slipped a key into the lock. It clicked open and she lifted the lock free. Seymour started to help her lift the doors, but she stayed his arm.

  “It’s better if I go first. Wait here for me until I call for you.” She descended the steep cement steps and disappeared inside. A few minutes later, she stuck her head up into the opening and beckoned him in. He made his way down the steps, and as he did, she pulled the doors down and slid a heavy wooden security bar into place. For a second, they were thrown into darkness. A heavy curtain hung across the doorway at the bottom of the steps. Lois pulled it aside and led him into the basement.

  The first thing he noticed was how clean and attractive the place was. He had half expected to find the old furnace next to heaps of dusty coal spilled half across the cement floor, as in the days when he had lived in the house. He remembered waking up early on frigid winter mornings and listening for the clang of coal against steel as Mr. Constantino stoked the furnace, and then some time later, the first hiss of steam from the paint-encrusted radiator in his room rising against the chilled air. Instead, he discovered a paneled room about fifteen feet square with doors leading to the back and to one side. The room was carpeted with self-adhering tiles that, he saw, had been carefully laid. The room also held a sofa, an easy chair, and a glass and brass coffee table, all of clean, contemporary style. One wall was lined with walnut shelves that were filled with books. Lois noticed his surprise.

  “What did you expect? Cages? Or mirrors and water beds?”

  He smiled.

  “They’re in the back,” she said with a forced laugh that did not hide her anxiety.

  He felt like he was on a date, and that she was concerned about the impression her place made on him.

  “It’s very nice,” he said. “I didn’t know what to expect.”

  He tried to think of something else to add, but the scream of an infant from behind the side door drew his attention to Junior who entered the room, holding a baby, about a year old, red faced and howling, squirming against the thick arms of its father. It was stifling in the room, and the baby wore only a bedraggled plastic diaper that threatened to slide down its chubby legs as it gathered its stomach for each scream.

  “I was just going to change Jennifer when I heard the knock,” Junior said as though Seymour were not there.

  “Here, let me take her,” Lois said. Junior handed the infant to her, and the baby stopped screaming for the second that it hung, suspended, between the two adults. Then as Lois drew her to her breast, she began again. When Lois reached the door, she looked back at Junior.

  “Your friend is here,” she said, “just like I promised.”

  She brushed at her eye as she walked through the door. She cooed at her baby and rocked her in her arms, then shut the door behind her.

  Junior turned to Seymour and extended both his arms. He was a tall, muscular man with straight, luxuriously thick and shiny black hair that he let grow long enough to cover his ears and reach almost to the base of his neck. When he walked, his hair swung away from his ear and revealed a diamond stud. Both arms bore tattoos, a snake clutched in the claws of an eagle on one, and the words “Do It!” on the other. His eyes flashed intensely, like highly burnished slivers of steel. He wore jeans with a thick black belt buckled on the side, and a sleeveless undershirt, and his thick chest hair spilled over the top. His hands looked gnarled as if they had been crushed and inexpertly set, though oddly, the fingers were long and almost delicate.

  He grabbed Seymour’s hand and squeezed it just hard enough to cause a twinge of pain, and then he drew him to his chest and embraced him.

  Seymour looked toward the door behind which Lois had disappeared, but it remained closed. He felt trapped and abandoned, shocked into sobriety, wondering why he was in this room with this man, wondering and yet knowing that his life had permitted him no other choice, and that this meeting would have to be in this place. It was as certain as his sure knowledge that Junior had not changed, he had only become more subtle. Instead of the cherry bomb, it would be a request to do something significant, something he would have to stomach, however, unhappily, to pay his debt incurred in front of that jewelry store. He had always known that he and Junior had not squared accounts, that quite possibly they never could.

  He fixed his eyes on the belt.

  “Some things haven’t changed,” he said.

  Junior ran his fingers over the thick leather.

  “Not much, anyway, but I took the studs off.”

  “I guess that counts as progress.”

  Seymour felt drawn into their shared past, and he willed himself to resist.

  “Look, you figured I would come if you used Lois as bait. And you were right. You’ve always been right. And so I find you living just where I left you twenty years ago. Well, what the hell, what the hell is going on?”

  Junior turned serious, his face now half scowl, and half an appeal for help, just like, Seymour thought, a wounded boar, savage and dangerous, but with eyes informed with a bright intelligence.

  “I’ll make it short and sweet. I’ve done time. I’ve hustled, I’ve pimped. Yeah, don’t look like that, for Lois, too, when a lot of shit was going down, and we were both pushed to the wall, but I didn’t start her in the business. You, of all people, should be able to figure that out. No, getting back into it was her idea. She had been retired, hadn’t sold her ass in years, but we would both be strung out real bad, in bed holding on to each other to try to make the room stop spinning, and to throw the fuckin’ shakes off our backs, just wanting a little time, a little relief—a little smack. We’d be too wasted to do anything but try to lie still, and she would say, ‘I can get us some money’, and she wouldn’t say how. I knew, and finally I said if you’re gonna do that I’ll get the Johns, I don’t want you gettin’ mixed up with no perverted dude that’s gonna use you until you ain’t no good to nobody, and so I became,” he paused, “her agent, and we did okay.”

  “I guess I’m supposed to congratulate you for being so good to her,” Seymour said. Junior grabbed him by the shoulders an
d pulled him close, his eyes burning into Seymour’s.

  “Look, I don’t need none of your wise-ass stuff. What do you know about it anyway?”

  Seymour freed himself. “Nothing, you’re right, I know nothing about it.”

  “That’s right. I wouldn’t let her take no spooks, or chinks, just ordinary, horny, middle-class white and bright Americans, just like you.” He leered for a moment. “But forget that. It’s history. Or it was until I got busted again, when we were trying to leave that all behind us, and just make it, with the baby.”

  “And?”

  “And like I said, the pigs wouldn’t let me. I got busted last week. For dealing.”

  “Were you?” Seymour asked. He did not know why he bothered to try this question. He had decided to believe Junior, to credit at least the urgency of his appeal. But Junior’s eyes blazed.

  “Do you think I’d have called you for help if I was? Do you think I’d even let you know where I lived, and how I lived? What do you think I am, anyway? If you’re gonna ask stupid questions like that, you might just as well leave. I’ll say good-by,” he smiled, “to your old girlfriend for you.”

  He stepped back from Seymour and began to pace around the room. He moved slowly, his body erect and solid, tilted a little forward. Seymour felt the constrained energy and noticed the balance and sureness of the step—the walk of somebody not accustomed to making mistakes and ready to take advantage of another’s weakness. He experienced again the feeling of helplessness he remembered from childhood, the sense that Junior’s will was irresistible, and that this will was destructive, just as the cherry bomb had been, and it no more than an extension of the child-man who had thrown it, the explosion a realization of his energy in a moment’s fury. The remorse that had followed had been a flimsy graft, fit only for a brief flowering of sympathy and then decay.

  “Let’s get something straight,” Seymour said in a voice that cracked into a snarl. “Just let’s cut the bullshit. I came here to find you again. I didn’t know it would be here, but I should have known. This is where it began, and where it should end. If you’re still pimping for Lois, if I’m the John in this deal, well, that’s okay, too. Tell me your story, and if I can, I’ll help you. We owe each other. Now, let’s see what the terms are going to be.”

  Junior’s face broadened into a smile.

  “That’s my man. I knew you’d come through for me. It ain’t much of a story. I mean the bust was dirty. Should be easy for you to cripple. I was searched, man, with no cause. Sure, maybe I was holdin’, but I don’t deal, and it wasn’t much anyway. They were just lookin’ for me.”

  Seymour sat down on the sofa. He looked toward the door that led to, he supposed, their bedroom. Light seeped out from under the door, and he could hear music, some blues tune deep in bass and piano. He turned back to Junior.

  “Just tell me about it.” He hesitated. “I haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, lately, you know.”

  “It’ll come back,” Junior said, his face now serious. “But that’s it, isn’t it? Like you said, we owe each other.”

  Chapter Two

  It had been so easy that Seymour felt betrayed. The terms confirmed his knowledge that the bargain struck in the explosion, and renegotiated in the pulse of red light that illuminated Junior’s thick body hurled before the onrushing police, that promissory note, was now being called in by John P. O’Riley, III, an Assistant New York County District Attorney.

  In a brief telephone conversation O’Riley told Seymour that he would be happy to discuss Mr. Constantino’s case over lunch as soon as he was through in court. Seymour had caught up with him at the Manhattan Criminal Court, and had sat in the back of the courtroom while the prosecutor delivered his summation, demanding that the defendant, a teenaged Black man accused of selling crack to junior high students, be found guilty and locked up for as long as the law permitted.

  “But your chap, now,” O’Riley smiled, “is a different story.” Seymour noted the affectation, which joined the tweed cap and silk ascot, and the briar pipe. When Seymour had introduced himself to O’Riley outside the courtroom, the prosecutor had thanked him for responding so promptly to his invitation to discuss Junior’s case, which they could do over lunch.

  They walked to Mott Street and stopped before a store window that displayed freshly slaughtered and plucked ducks, their skins mottled in the afternoon sun. They entered a doorway that opened to stairs leading down to a tiny restaurant, no more than five or six tables in the basement of the building. They sat down at one of the bare wooden tables and ordered from a waiter whose broad smile was not diminished by the absence of front teeth.

  Seymour was not prepared for amiability. From his days as a public defender, he knew of O’Riley’s reputation as a headline-grabbing law-and-order advocate who often declared that the defendant he had just prosecuted had been treated too gently.

  “Now, your chap,” he repeated after the waiter had shuffled off to the kitchen with their order, “is quite another sort. Oh, he has a record as long as my arm, and he has done his time, but I’d hate to send him away again. It would be very unfortunate for him, seeing how he has that little baby now.”

  Seymour felt his guard rise. He took a sip of water and forced a smile.

  “Well,” he said slowly as he put the water glass down, “I’d like to see him get another chance to build a decent life for himself and for his family.”

  “Exactly my point,” O’Riley boomed. Seymour looked around, but the other patrons seemed absorbed in their meals. O’Riley leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “You see, I too have a history of involvement with your friend. I put him away, once before, a long time ago. When he was first starting his career. But I’m sure you know all about that.”

  The recognition flashed through Seymour’s mind, but he only set his expression into an attentive stare.

  “Oh, come now,” the prosecutor smiled, “don’t play cat and mouse with me. I’m sure you know. The bungled robbery, a vacation at the work farm until our boy decided to shorten his stay.” He sighed. “I’ve always regretted that one. I was too easy.” O’Riley poured himself a cup of tea, sipped it, and then wiped his lips with his napkin as if to remove the memory of his weakness along with the drop of tea on his lips.

  For a moment, Seymour believed that O’Riley somehow knew that it was his arm that had extended through the broken glass to snatch the ring. He felt the prosecutor’s hot breath coming too close.

  “History is always interesting,” he said, “but let’s talk about now. Your search won’t hold. Nothing like probable cause. I’m going to move to dismiss.”

  O’Riley smiled. “Don’t waste your time. You’ve been away too long in the corporate world.”

  “Do you always research opposing counsel?”

  “Sometimes that’s more important than precedent.”

  He paused while the waiter set the steamed dumplings on the table, then attacked one with practiced ease, clamping the dumpling between his chopsticks, dipping it in the duck sauce, and bringing it to his mouth.

  O’Riley dabbed his mouth with his napkin. “Maybe we’re getting off to a bad start here. We could prosecute, and probably make it stick. What I would like to suggest, though, is that, given the circumstances, our personal involvement with the young man, perhaps we can be a little more creative, save the taxpayers some money, and do some good at the same time.”

  Seymour reached for a dumpling, but it slid off his chopsticks.

  “What do you have in mind?” he asked.

  O’Riley smiled. “Here, let me show you. You can’t squeeze the chopsticks too hard, just enough to grab it. Otherwise, it’ll pop out.

  “Now, what I have in mind for your friend is something like these chopsticks. I want to squeeze him, but just hard enough. And you are going to do the squeezing, if you go along with the idea.”

  “Meaning?”

  “We’ll knock the dealing charge down to posse
ssion, seventh degree, a misdemeanor, conditional sentence, no probation.” O’Riley paused for effect. “And the condition is that your chap behaves himself, that you find him suitable employment, and see that he keeps his nose clean.” He beamed. “Beautiful, isn’t it? A new kind of reformation for the reformable, hitherto misguided young man, given a new chance under the salutary moral influence of a life-long friend, a spotlessly clean member of the community—you.”

  Seymour processed the rolling speech, picked out the morsels of fact. A marvelously good deal for Junior, better than could have been expected. For himself, perhaps a problem, maybe worse.

  “Why all this generosity?” Seymour asked, “and why is Junior the recipient?”

  O’Riley lowered his eyes as though reviewing his poker hand before offering his bet.

  “It’s really not all that generous, considering the revolving door our system has, regrettably, become.” He picked up his chopsticks and jabbed them in front of him. “But the real point is not the revolving door, but who is going in or out.” His eyes brightened. “We have to change our focus, stop beating up on the little players. They’re only symptoms of the disease anyway.”

  “So what’s new? Nobody ever claimed that Junior Constantino was major league.”

  “Of course. But he clutters up the system, and distracts our attention from our real mission, which is to bring the full weight of the law down on the heads of those who use people like your friend.” He reached for another dumpling. “Instead of wasting my time, and that of my staff, preparing to shove Mr. Constantino into that door, we can concentrate on making a case that will stick against the head man, and believe me the door will swing only one way for him.”

  Seymour saw the game.

  “So when do you announce your candidacy for District Attorney?” he asked.

  O’Riley sat back, and brought his napkin to his lips again.

  “Ah, so you see, don’t you,” he said slowly, “why I need your friend? And you, too. A new program is nothing without the right face.”