Condemned (20 page)

“That's the one.”

“Yeah, we've got him. You coming in?”

“Yes. Could you drop a Notice of Appearance on the desk for me, in case he comes up early?”

“For you, my man, all things can be done.”

“Black, right?” Sandro said, remembering that Clarence liked Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch.

“That's not necessary,” said Clarence.

“Yes, it is,” said Sandro.

“You're the best. Call me back in about half an hour.”

“Perfect.”

“You have to go to court?” Marini asked as Sandro put down the phone. The salad was ready.

“Later,” he replied, dialing the number he had written on the pad beside the phone. “Flor?”

“Is Ray Ray okay? What's happening? I'm on pins and needles.”

“Everything's okay. He should come up before midnight.”

“So long? My God. Where should I go?”

“To bed. There's nothing you can do, and I'll get him out.”

“I can't go to bed. I'm too nervous. I spoke to Tony, he called me. He said he was going to be around the club—probably the game. You know how he is—so he said he'd meet me. Tell me where and when. Ray Ray'll want to see a friendly face.”

“One-hundred Centre Street.”

“That's right downtown there?”

“Exactly.”

“What time?”

“Just to be sure, around eleven.”

“Thanks, Sandro.”

After everyone had finished their pasta and salad, Senator Galiber arrived. Marini brought out a cake with an array of lighted candles on top. Every one sang “Happy Birthday” to Tatiana, “Happy Anniversary” to Sandro, and the two of them blew out the candles together. Another bottle of chilled champagne was opened, and more toasts were made. After bidding their guests good-night, Sandro and Tatiana took a cab—the Ferrari wasn't for mere transportation—to the Criminal Courts Building.

At 100 Centre Street, Sandro brought Tatiana to the Arraignments courtroom where she sat on a bench near the front. He told her she would be able to watch the entire city pass before her eyes while he went to the holding cells to find Ray Guitierrez. The detention area, in the basement, on the north side of the courthouse, was called Central Booking, the place where every arrestee in Manhattan was brought to await arraignment.

“Guitierrez,” Sandro shouted as he stood in the center of a wide corridor between many large cells each holding at least thirty prisoners. Some of the prisoners were on the floor, others were leaning against the walls, most of them were in a state of terminal drowsiness.

“Hey, here I am. I'm your client,” a black prisoner shouted.

“Yo,” called a voice from another cell. A young man with long, dark hair, an open shirt revealing a thick gold chain around his neck, came up to the bars.

“Raymond Guitierrez?”

“Yeah.”

“I'm Sandro Luca. Tony's lawyer.”

Other prisoners were milling around in a semi-circle, curious, listening.

“You wanna give us a break or what?” Guitierrez said, turning to glare at the other prisoners.

“Yeah, big man,” said a large black man in tattered clothes, without shoes. “You lucky your feet too small.”

“Yeah, really.” Guitierrez stared at him.

The black man moved back into the crowd of prisoners.

The young man reached through the bars to shake Sandro's hand. “How long before I get out of this rat-trap?”

“An hour or so.”

“Anything I have to do, besides say ‘not guilty'?”

“I don't think we'll even get that far. You ever been arrested before?”

“I had a Y.O. a few years back. Selling fireworks.”

“Youthful Offender? For selling fireworks?”

“It was a truckload, a big truckload. It belonged to somebody else, you know? But seeing how I was a kid and they'd give me a Y.O., I took the heat for the whole load.”

Sandro nodded. “I'll go upstairs, see if I can speed things up.”

“Great. The room service here sucks.”

Very nice young man, Sandro thought to himself as he made his way up the steel staircase toward the courtroom. He thought about Flor wanting her son to be a lawyer. Probably save his family from having to pay fees to get him out of jail.

“Sandro,” Tony Balls exploded loudly from the middle of the lobby. The sobriquet derived from Tony Balls' brazen, outspoken ways. In a sense, Tony Balls was flamboyance, personified. He was tall, thick of frame and face, with alert eyes, rough voice, manicured finger-nails; his hair was stylized, parted on the side, and combed up over the top to cover his baldness. His clothes were loud, making the same statement as everything else about Tony Balls:
Here I am! So What?

In a sense, Tony Balls was a dinosaur, a throwback to an era when large men roamed the earth, men who were known as ‘wise guys', ‘the boys', ‘the Syndicate', the ‘Mafia'. Those men stood on top of the crime world, keeping everything in order with military structure and discipline, containing under man-hole covers beneath their feet, all dis-organized, sleazy, penny-ante criminality. In turn, the authorities kept constant tabs on the giants of the underworld: they knew who the wise guys' wives were, their children, their girlfriends, their meetings, their associates, their activities; they even knew what days they met their girlfriends, what they liked to drink. The world was in order then. There was an efficacy to Organized Crime; it kept its collective eyes on riff-raff criminals, kept them in their place, and the Government, in turn, kept their eyes on its members, careful that they did not overstep the invisible chalk-mark. Occasionally, examples had to be set for brazen violations, of course, but all-in-all, everyone knew his place under the sun. The world was relatively peaceful.

Then, an unnatural cataclysm occurred, a rash of prosecutions spearheaded by Gaspar Mastrangelo, a ruthlessly ambitious U.S. Attorney, a mean-spirited, obsessive compulsive, whose father had been ‘half-a-wise-guy', who had an overwhelming need to bend over backward to “clean up the streets”. All the ‘boys', particularly the leaders, were rounded up and prosecuted. The prosecutions succeeded up to a point: John Gotti was convicted and given ‘life' for conspiring to kill Big Paul Castellano in order to take over the Gambino crime family; ‘Fat Tony' Salerno was given fifty years, which, because of his age, was, to all intents and purposes, life; Junior Persico of the Colombos was in the Can as well; so was Vic Amuso of the Luccheses. The media reported that the Genoveses were ruled by an incompetent who roamed the streets in pajamas and bathrobe, too addled to be put on trial.

By blowing the megaliths off the manhole covers that contained the cesspool of disorganized crime, law enforcement could no longer count on criminals to act with any semblance of order. Now, hordes of unknown and unorganized criminals oozed out of every sewer: Albanians, Asians, Russians, Pakistani, Uzbekestani, Ukraini—law enforcement couldn't name them all, much less know anything about them. These new world criminals committed depredations and disappeared faster than officials could pronounce their names.

When Tony Balls returned from his seven year stint at F.C.I. Lewisburg, he found himself in a disorganized world. Nothing was the same. There was no crew to speak of left in the streets. He was outside now; his ‘friends' were all in. There were no easy pickings. There were no friends to hang around with all day. What's more, he was broke. If it weren't that his wife and kid were working—Christ! his wife working. An
infamia.
And, what was worse, there was no respect from the suckers in the street. Working stiffs and shop-keepers didn't run, jump, stumble at the sound of his footsteps. The world was very different, and Tony was struggling, trying to revive, or at least, relive it the way it was.

Flor, Tony's
cummad
—Hispanic, with jet-black hair, bright red lips, loud pants suit—was standing next to him in the lobby of the Criminal Courts Building. During the years Flor had been with him, through meeting her family and friends, Tony Balls had learned to speak Spanish creditably. Tony Balls hugged Sandro, kissing his cheek.

“I'll be right with you,” Sandro said to Tony Balls and Flor. “My friend Tatiana is inside.” Sandro walked to the courtroom and signaled to Tatiana. She came out to the corridor, and the two of them joined Tony Balls and Flor.

“Tatiana, meet Tony and Flor,” Sandro said,

“Glad to know you,” Tony Balls said, smiling. “Tatiana? What a name. Beaut-aful, right, Flor?”

“Beaut-aful. Is that Russian?”

“Yes.”

“I bet you're Russian, right?” Flor laughed.

“What a brain you got, Flor,” Tony Balls laughed loudly. “You think I stay out of trouble for nothing, Counselor? With Flor and you thinking for me, I got it made.” He laughed exuberantly. “You know this guy's the best, right?” Tony Balls said to Tatiana.

“I think that he is,” she said.

“You shoulda' seen him in my case. His summation at the end was three and a half hours. Three and a half hours! When he was finished, he collapsed on the table in the courtroom.” Tony Balls not only expounded but also demonstrated, putting his head down on the empty circular information desk in the center of the lobby. “When the Judge asked the D.A. if he was ready to sum up, he said, Your Honor, this guy is so convincing, I have no Summation'. You remember, Sandro?” Sandro shook his head, bemused. “The jury told the Judge,” Tony Balls continued “I'm the only guy that got a standing acquittal. When the Judge wanted to send the jury out to talk about the case, the jury just stood up in the box and told the Judge we have a verdict already, Judge. He said: ‘What? You can't do that. You have to go out and come back'. So they went to the jury room, turned right around, and said ‘Not Guilty'. Right, Sandro?”

“Except for the acquittal, I hardly recognize the case,” Sandro said. “In the first place, I couldn't talk for three and a half hours.”

Tony Balls burst with laughter, filling the capacious vault of the lobby. He put his arm around Sandro's shoulders. “What's going to happen with the kid?”

“He'll be R.O.R.'d—”

“That's what you said,” said Flor, “released—?”

“In his own recognizance—without bail,” said Sandro. “And that's it. He'll go home with you.”

“Thank God. Can you get to see him? Give him these.” Flor handed Sandro a package of cigarettes.

“I just saw him. He's fine. They don't allow smoking in there.”

“My God, he must be climbing the walls without his cigarettes.”

“He okay with all those mutts down there?” said Tony Balls.

“He seemed to be doing just fine. Clarence,” Sandro called, seeing a man walking through the lobby toward the Clerk's office. “Excuse me a minute.”

“Hello, Sandro.” The two shook hands.

“Do you think you can get this kid up so I can get the case called and get out of here?”

“Yeah, sure. What's his name again?”

“Guitierrez, Raymond.”

Clarence made a note on a small piece of paper he took from his pocket. “I'll have somebody bring him up.”

“I'll be back to see you tomorrow. What time do you get here?”

“I usually get here about four-forty, quarter to five.”

“I'll see you then.”

“That'll be great, just in time for the weekend.” They both laughed. Clarence went into his office. Sandro rejoined Tony Balls, Flor, and Tatiana. “Let's go into the courtroom,” he said. “Raymond's case will be called in a few minutes.”

“Then we'll all go over to Ferrara's and have a cannoli,” Tony Balls said loudly, laughing.

“I can't wait for Ray Ray to be a lawyer,” said Flor as they walked toward the courtroom, “going to trial, doin' all those things lawyers do.”

“That will be a wonderful accomplishment,” said Sandro. Tony Balls opened the door to the courtroom.

Alphabet City : June 19, 1996 : 1:58 A.M.

Spinning red, white, and yellow strobe lights flashed from the roofs of a phalanx of police cars and ambulances, pulsing into the darkness of Alphabet City. Images were freeze-framed in the background of rotting tenements: figures in doorways cringing away from the commotion; tattered scavengers bent into garbage cans; sleepy-faced women in nightgowns, men in tee-shirts, leaning on window sills. Police radio transmissions squawked through scores of portable radios simultaneously.

“What the fuck's going on, man?” mumbled a skinny unshaven black man from a doorway across from the center of the activity.

A second man—wide eyed, hands thrust down into his pants pockets—stood in the same doorway, shivering, as his unblinking, rapidly shifting eyes followed the gurney that was being rolled toward an open ambulance.

“Hey, hey,” the skinny black man called to a policeman a few feet away. “What's happening, man?”

The policeman gave the black man a hard look and turned back toward the ambulance.

“Fuckin' pig,” the skinny one muttered.

“What did you say, scumbag?” snarled the cop, turning quickly.

“Nothing, man, nothing.”

“Better not.” The cop turned again toward the ambulance.

“Fuckin' pig,” the skinny man muttered more softly.

The other man began to shudder uncontrollably. “I'm getting the fuck away from you.” The other man moved rapidly to another doorway. “Sick fuck!” he called back toward the doorway.

A knot of policemen surrounded the back of the open ambulance as the E.M.S. attendants lifted the gurney. A small, dark figure lay inert, almost lost, on the expanse of white sheet, almost too small for the securing straps to hold.

“Hold it a second,” called out a voice from a Channel 7 camera crew on the sidewalk. “Bullshit,” said a grim-faced female E.M.S. attendant. She jerked her head to the side, directing several police officers out of the way as she pushed the gurney to the edge of the ambulance. The front legs of the gurney folded under as it slid inside.