A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (The Midnight Series Book 3) (60 page)

Beyond a doubt, the black team moved with the idea, energy, effort, and precision that we would be the champions of the junior division of the Hustler’s League. Ricky Santiaga was so confident and certain that he prepared twenty-four-karat-gold championship rings for each of the eleven members of the team. The rings had never been mentioned at the start of the league with the other rewards being offered to the top players. None of us expected them. And, they were not ordinary rings that could be purchased from a catalogue, a retailer, or a trophy shop.

Coach Vega, one afternoon after another rigorous practice, let the whole team walk but held me back. Panama Black, the team captain, Machete, and each team member minus Dolo were used to Vega holding me back and then requiring me to put in extra time, extra laps, extra suicides, extra layups, extra squats, and extra dribbling and handling exercises, as though he was trying to force me to repay the team for the time and the practices I had missed while I was traveling. A few times, some of my teammates stayed back to watch him overwork me. Although my teammates showed me love and welcomed me back, I knew they were secretly satisfied that I was being punished and trained twice as hard as they were. I didn’t mind.

On that particular afternoon the coach held me back,
something out of the ordinary occurred. “Meet my boss tomorrow outside of Junior’s Restaurant at noon,” Vega told me.

“For what?” I asked.

“Don’t ask. Just do it.”

On the corner of Flatbush and Fulton, I waited in my sweats with my ball in my grip as usual. I didn’t see him. It was 12:12. Caught off guard and slipping, I smiled when I finally recognized he had been there all along, seated in a ride that was the opposite of any whip I ever saw him push or even lean on. It was a 1972 Oldsmobile Delta 88. No rims, just wheels, not blacked out and customized but with the windows spray-painted black, like it was done by an amateur artist or a small child. His driver’s-side window didn’t ease down. It staggered, revealing that the driver was rolling it down manually.

“That’s you,” I said, not as in asking him if he was himself, but verifying if he was the same man I knew, pushing that piece-of-shit car where he was seated in the driver’s position.

“Get in,” he said. I did. “There’s a time and place for everything,” he said once I was seated on the ugly black velvet cushioned seats. He pulled off.

Moments later, on a fucked-up block in Bed-Stuy, he pulled over, then parked in front of an abandoned building. “First stop,” he said, and we both got out.

“Hold up,” I told him. “This ain’t a ballpark. It’s not the address you gave me for your vending machine delivery, either. Looks like there is no business between you and me right here,” I said. He smiled.

“You gave your word,” he said.

“Remind me,” I said, but I was one hundred percent doubt.

“You owe me a game of chess on a broken-down board in a broken-down place. Now if you wanna back out, just let me know,” he said calmly in his casual denim wear, and I noted it was my first time seeing him out of Gucci loafers or Tod’s and into Air Force Ones.

He’s already playing chess
, I thought to myself. Between his jalopy and his clothes, this fucked-up block and the broke-down building
he chose, it was his method of intimidation and mind control. That had to be the reason he didn’t notify me in advance that today was game day. I’m sure he gave himself the time to prepare and sharpen his game and his psyche.

I had only managed to get in one session of practice with my man Marty Bookbinder. I had phoned him, placed an order for a book and a map, and then invited him to meet me in a Queens cafe I had carefully chosen one evening to deliver my purchase and play a couple of games of chess. He accepted eagerly.

“Let’s go,” I told him. We walked.
Everything with this dude is a test
, I thought.

Reverse aromatherapy, the place stunk of mildew and dog shit and some other odor I didn’t recognize. Thought,
if he had to go through all of this, maybe his chess game is no good.
Then I warned myself not to underestimate him, because maybe that was part of what he wanted me to do, in his setup.

On a cardboard dollar-store board, on a rickety card table, in an empty room without walls, we both sat on cheap metal folding chairs. I could hear footsteps and movement above and below me.
He needs me to feel uncomfortable and surrounded and filled with fear of the unknown.
I had no fear. The championship games between the two top teams in the junior league were a week away. He had a vested interest in not doing anything to damage his investment. I took some deep breaths. On the tabletop he flipped the hourglass and it was on. He had the white pieces, the first move.

I was silent while he thought and even as he advanced his pawn. After a few minutes of play, I realized that he would say something each time it was my turn, just to throw me off. “Think on it,” or “Careful now,” or “Are you sure?” On my simplest moves he would even comment, “You give your pawns up too easy. You should appreciate them more.” I checked how we would maneuver to hold onto his pawns, even allowing one move where he sacrificed his knight to save one of them.

Ultimately, I had lost each of my pawns except one, but held onto
my queen, one knight, two bishops, and one rook. Half an hour later, I ate up his rook using my bishop. He devoured my bishop using his queen. But then, his king was left open except for the two pawns guarding him. I advanced my black knight and said “check.” Soon as he got ready to move his pawn to gobble up my knight, he realized that once he did, his king would be exposed to checkmate. He chose to move his king to the left instead to avoid my knight, which was of course limited to L-shaped movements. I advanced my one remaining rook from the back of my side of the board, straight all the way to the back of Santiaga’s side of the board. “Check,” I said. As soon as he realized that the only way out for him was to use his queen to eat my rook and save his king, but that if he did, he would lose his queen with my follow-up move, he leaned back. He was paused so long that even the sand had run out of his favor. “Why don’t you call?” he asked me.

“Take your time,” I said just to mess with his head, and flipped the hourglass back over to emphasize it. He then moved his queen to gobble my rook. My one remaining bishop ate his queen.

“Game over,” he said. But it wasn’t rightfully over. He still had moves he could make.

“You have moves open—why quit?” I asked, using the word
quit
to push him to play on to the finish either way.

“Don’t you know?” he asked me. “The game is always over once a player loses his queen.”

“But one of your three pawns could become your queen,” I said. But why was I helping my opponent?

“A pawn can only pretend to be a queen. But only a queen is a queen,” he said. It sounded to me like this was his philosophy on life.

“You want to talk about life, or do you wanna play the game?” I baited him. Our first game ended in a stalemate.

“Rematch?” I asked him. He accepted and we began. But at a certain point, I purposely let him have it. He looked at me hard.

“Sloppy move,” he said. “That’s unlike you.”

“Your move,” was all I responded. I had decided I would lose the game. But in the real world I would play my position and somehow
win in some other way. I was grateful to him for a few reasons. That was enough. He used the opening, dominated in the game until he called checkmate.

*  *  *

“Second stop,” he said after his Oldsmobile plowed down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, not cruising but with great effort. Now we were in another beat-up neighborhood located in Queens, the opposite of the area I lived in, about to head into the side entrance of a brown brick three-story commercial building on a block of small businesses where any customer might think it was too risky to shop.

We got out. I didn’t ask any more questions. I knew he knew by then what I was game for, and what I wasn’t.

The front door was solid steel, no window or placard stating what they were selling or what a customer could expect. He pressed a buzzer. The loud buzz responded with an even louder buzzer. Santiaga opened the then unlocked door and we were one step inside, facing a gold gate from floor to ceiling, like cell bars that even a slim body couldn’t slide between. It was locked and there was only a dim light, which revealed a set of stairs, the wall to the right lined with tall stalks of real sugarcane. Without our pressing a buzzer, a buzz sounded and the gate opened. We walked down. Each step was painted with a clean wide gold stripe.

In the basement, nothing was renovated or plush. The floor was made of some kind of rock and there was a huge tree stump, metal benches, and tables.

“My man Khan,” Santiaga said, introducing me to a brown-skinned man who had a three-foot-long ponytail, longer than a horse’s and beyond his backside. It almost concealed the long, thin scar that ran across the back of his neck that confirmed that someone had once tried to cut his head off.
He survived murder.
His hair was not manly, but his mannerisms were. His voice was rough, but he sang his words to an unfamiliar rhythm. Similar to Jamaican but not Jamaican, I could tell. He had to see the confusion in me as my mind tried to place him
as having originated from either Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, or Kashmir. His name was Khan, and that is definitely a Muslim name.

“Guyana, Indian,” he said without me asking, and he pointed to the small model flag of Guyana he had posted on a drink mixing stick and mounted on one of his tables. “But me grow up rough like dee African.” He pushed his fist forward and bumped knuckles with Santiaga. When he withdrew his hand, I saw his fingers were worn and ragged and some of his fingertips burnt. Looked like he had either tried to seer off his fingerprints, or he had strangled a few men who all had thick muscular necks. Maybe one of them was the one who had tried to chop off his head.

“He’s one of my champions,” Santiaga told him, referring to me. “I’m gonna need eleven rings, twenty-four-karat dark gold. Size his finger,” Santiaga told him. “Khan makes jewelry with the same kind of passion that you play ball,” he said to me. The Indian pulled from his jeans buckle loop a set of about thirty steel rings and chose one out of all of them. It fit exactly on my finger.

“See what I mean?” Santiaga asked me. “Precision,” then he reached into his denim shirt and pulled out a Zip Lock bag. My mind prepared for the worst because of what Ameer’s father had once mentioned to us about the Hustler’s League. I started suspecting and speculating that it was cocaine or crack in the Zip Lock, but it wasn’t. “That’s fifteen ounces of gold, 425.24 grams,” Santiaga said, handing it to Khan. I checked it out. It looked like the light brown sugar my Umma used in some recipes. “Got it from your guy in the DD,” Santiaga said to him.

“ ‘Ira the Jew,’ or from Levi?” Khan asked.

“Ira—he’s the more trustworthy of the two,” Santiaga said. I knew then that DD stood for Diamond District. Of course I had been there in many of the shops, wholesalers and retailers in midtown Manhattan. And of course I recalled eagerly that Santiaga had an apartment on the east end of that money block that led straight to the diamond district.

Khan took the bag and hit an intercom button. A young girl, about Naja’s age, quietly stepped down the stairs and without words
rolled up Khan’s ponytail and pinned it in place with a pure gold, uniquely crafted barrette that looked like it came from some royal family’s treasure chest. It fit over the bulk of the wrapped-up ponytail and held it in position on his head like a crown. She handed him a red bandanna, then turned and left.

Khan went to a worktable that had a black stone top. He opened Santiaga’s Zip Lock of pure gold and spread a thin line of it onto the stone. He dropped a few drops of a solution onto the gold, saying only two words, “Nitric acid.” The line of gold did not dissolve in the acid. Then he chose another bottle and dropped another solution, saying, “Nitric acid plus hydrochloric acid.” The gold disappeared. “Genuine, yes mon,” he declared. Santiaga nodded his head in approval.

Khan was a chemist, a genius scientist in an urban laboratory customized especially for him. Unlike any jeweler I had ever encountered, Khan made his jewels by hand, from scratch, like a baker making a pineapple upside-down cake. Taking inventory now, in his space was a gas tank, and an oxygen tank, and a huge container plastered with a red warning sticker that said
SULFURIC ACID
. There seemed to be enough items down there that with one tiny mistake, the whole building would explode and be leveled. Santiaga observed me staring at the sulfuric acid and said suddenly, “It’s lethal—burn the skin right off your body in twenty seconds or less. Some stupid stick-up kid tried to rush this spot. That acid got thrown in his face. Gave him a whole new look and a whole new outlook. That was before my man Khan got the steel door and gates installed with the camera and the buzzer locks.”

There was a hammer—no, a mallet—that was lying on the tree stump. I picked it up as Khan worked his skill at his station. The handle was solid and the head was heavy as barbells and even heavier than an ax. In the corner of the room were some machines that looked like they came from the seventeenth century, with hand cranks and spinning metal wheels. He had metal saws and heavy sharp shears and every version of pliers, some thick enough to trim bushes or to pull fingers out of their sockets and some tiny enough
to pick up the tiniest of diamonds. All of his tools could be converted into deadly weapons. I was imagining that he probably could make some wicked knives, better than a blacksmith. I envisioned designing a diamond-handled gold sword for my second wife, a weapon worthy of her caliber. Or maybe something more creative, tiny swords that could be worn as hair ornaments to hold her thick bun in place. When she needed them as a weapon she could just pull it from her hair and fire it into the eye of her enemy.

The intensity of the fire from his blowtorch captured my attention. “Don’t look ’pon it directly. You can blind yerself,” he warned. “Almost two thousand degrees,” he said and I was amazed to see that the gold changed from powder to liquid gold, then poured inside of two molds that each sat inside two identical clay dishes filled with sand. He pressed the two clay dishes together. The liquid gold solidified into the shape of a ring. He dipped it into some solution. An hour and a half later, he handed me my gold championship ring. It was warm in my hand. He took it back and went to one of the antique machines, flipped a switch, and buffed and polished the ring lovely on a spinning cylinder lined with heavy brushes. “Dis is de prototype. Me can do ’nough tings to make it one of a kind. If you don’t like, I torch it, it turn back to gold liquid in tree seconds. Maybe you want fer put a diamond pond dat?” he asked Santiaga. Santiaga reached into his denim shirt again and pulled out a smaller Zip Lock half filled with diamonds.