Kockroach (12 page)

“No more teasing, baby. Let’s just get to it.”

“I can’t,” she says.

“You can’t? Don’t act shy now, you tease. Come on, baby, Papa needs to sing.”

“Got to go,
baby
.”

“Oh no, no you don’t. Not till I say you go, understand? Get on your knees, bitch, or I’m going to rip apart your—”

“Hello, Rocco,” says Kockroach, taking a step from the shadows.

Rocco Stanzi’s head swivels as if slapped. “Blatta?”

“Wait for me in the car.”

The woman nods and scampers out of the alley, tucking her blouse in all the while.

“Hey, Blatta, what are you doing? I was just about to get a little action here. Can’t you wait until—” Stanzi stops speaking, looks at the girl rushing off. “One of yours?”

Kockroach takes another step forward.

“What, you didn’t hear the news? They didn’t tell you?” Stanzi grapples for his pants, pulls them up, fiddles unsuccessfully with the belt. “There’s a citywide truce. Zwillman’s guys and your guys and our guys, all of us, we’re on the same side now. Didn’t you hear?”

“I heard,” says Kockroach.

“Good, yeah. Isn’t that something? One day we want to rip each other’s guts out and stamp them into the dirt, the next we’re bosom buddies. You want a drink or something, to celebrate? No hard feelings about that thing we had, right? That’s all past us now. It was only business. But now we gots bigger fish to fry. Moonstone’s a bear, he’s going to be tough. But together, man, we’re going to fry his black ass. And let me tell you, no one’s gladder than me to have you on my side. You want a drink? Let me get you a drink. To celebrate our
alliance. On me. We’re on the same side now, right? We’re partners now, right?”

“Right,” says Kockroach.

“Good, great.” Rocco Stanzi, his belt still undone, his pants held up with one hand, reaches out his other. “Partners?”

Kockroach steps forward, takes Rocco’s hand in his own. “Partners,” he says. They shake on it, once, twice—and then Kockroach squeezes.

The bones in Rocco Stanzi’s hand press against each other, press into each other, grind into each other, grind and twist and split.

As Rocco Stanzi begins to scream Kockroach’s free hand dives at Stanzi’s throat and clamps hold. The scream is choked off like a stalled engine. Still gripping hand and throat, Kockroach lifts Stanzi in the air.

Stanzi, face now bursting red, swings his arm and feet wildly. He kicks Kockroach in the chest, in the legs, grabs at his eyes. Kockroach pulls Stanzi close, holds him face to face so the flailing limbs lose their leverage. Kockroach’s breath washes across Stanzi’s purple face. Stanzi’s pants drop, binding his ankles together. His flailing grows wilder. Kockroach’s smile deepens. The grip on Stanzi’s neck tightens. Stanzi’s struggle eases. Stanzi’s breathing falters, fails.

After, Kockroach slaps the dust off his pant legs. He takes a bag out of his jacket pocket, the brown paper bag with the greasy bottom. From the bag he pulls out a small brick of pastry. He takes a bite. Potato. Kirschner’s has the best knishes in the Square, they have them delivered daily from Yonah
Schimmel’s on the Lower East Side. He takes another bite and then leans over Rocco Stanzi’s body, opens Rocco Stanzi’s slack jaw, jams the rest of the knish in Rocco Stanzi’s mouth so that it sticks out like a thick beige tongue.

“Nothing personal, pal, just beeswax.”

Kockroach puts the bag back in his pocket, wipes his hands on the dead man’s shirt, heads back to the car.

Kockroach has a hobby.

It is a very human trait to have a hobby, a pastime with which to while away the hours, and so one might be surprised to learn this of Kockroach. It is hard to imagine him dabbling in watercolors, working with wood, collecting stamps from foreign countries. But Kockroach’s hobby is not philately.

Greed and fear, fear and greed. For a cockroach, a perfect hobby would combine the two, obsessively collecting something that also provides protection. Guns would seem then perfect, but Kockroach does not carry a gun and has never fully understood their allure. Oh, the mechanics he understands. Pull a lever and a shard of metal flies out and puts a hole in an enemy at a distance. Marvelously efficient, yes, but the fascination, the glorification is beyond him. Cockroaches don’t fight at a distance, they fight up close, claw to claw, mandible to mandible, the desperate hot breath of your adversary pawing across your face. That is how it has always been done from time immemorial. To kill from a distance seems to Kockroach unnatural and, in a way, obscenely human. No, a cockroach wouldn’t turn to guns for protection,
instead it would want to somehow collect territories, places in which it is safe, holes, crevices to hide. And this indeed is Kockroach’s hobby.

He collects real estate.

Kockroach’s realtor is a tall mournful man with knobby wrists named Albert Gladden who, before he met Kockroach, managed a few desolate properties scattered along the West Side. Albert owed Big Johnny Callas a debt that was on the books still when Johnny mysteriously disappeared. When Kockroach paid the awkward, mournful Albert Gladden a visit in the dusty office in one of his buildings, the realtor raised his palms and sadly pleaded poverty before proposing a deal: a deserted tenement on Ninety-fourth Street in exchange for the debt.

Kockroach toured his new building, sniffed the ruined plaster, bent his head beneath the leaking roof. In the dining area, his foot stepped through a rotted floorboard. The house smelled of old trash, of dead rats, of animal droppings, of desolation: it smelled wonderful.

Immediately Kockroach wanted more.

Now Albert Gladden works out of an office on a high floor in the Empire State Building, managing the properties of a generically named holding company whose primary shareholder he never reveals and whose empire continues to grow under Gladden’s watchful eye. He has a staff of four, including a title man, and each morning finds him carefully perusing the list of property foreclosures. He is still mournful and awkward, Albert Gladden, but now he lives on the East Side, drinks aged Scotch, smokes hand-rolled cigars, is married to a former Rockette with
sturdy legs and breasts like huge smothering marshmallows.

As Kockroach drives through the city, he enjoys passing by the properties he owns, run-down brownstones in Harlem, shabby apartment buildings, shabby storefronts, sad sagging hotels like the Murdock, including the Murdock, old industrial buildings, ragged office buildings with long empty halls, a deserted warehouse teetering two blocks off the Square, which Gladden rents to Abagados without ever divulging the name of the true owner. And now, in his inside jacket pocket, Kockroach holds the deed to a large white house in Yonkers that he has just obtained from Cooney. He has a plan for this house, but if this plan of his fails, then he will leave it to his realtor to decide whether to keep it and rent it out or to sell it and use the proceeds to buy something in the city. He leaves everything to Gladden, allows him to buy, rent, sell as he sees fit so long as Kockroach is kept completely informed. Gladden makes his reports in person, at clandestine midnight meetings in deserted alleys so that Kockroach’s hobby is kept secret. The only building Albert Gladden is forbidden to sell is the original property on Ninety-fourth Street, sagging, leaking, stripped of all pipe and wire, its front boarded up with plywood, a disaster of a ruin before which the brown Lincoln is now parked.

Istvan taps his fingers on the steering wheel, the woman is asleep alone in the backseat.

Kockroach roams through the dark ruin, stepping around holes in the floorboards, ripping cobwebs from his path,
kicking piles of trash, splashing through puddles. The building sags, shifts, strange sounds emanate from the walls, the floors, joists settling, timbers splintering, plaster cracking loose from lathes as if the house is an old living thing falling into senescence. He breathes deep the smell of feces and decay, molder, rot. Home, it smells of home. In this place, of all the places he has been since his molt, he can best remember what he was.

He stops in a stray beam of light floating through the cracked window of the rear door, standing now before a beaten and blackened stove, so worthless with misuse and age it has survived the multiple strippings of the property. Atop the stove sits the photograph Kockroach took from the room where he first awoke with this body. He keeps it in this house for safekeeping. He picks it up, stares at the face that is identical to his and the woman’s face beside it. For Kockroach the photograph has become a talisman of both his past and his future. He puts the photograph back upon the stove and stoops down on the filthy wooden floor. He reaches out a hand. From a crevice beneath the stove he sees two strands of brown, waving softly.

He waits.

The strands wave softly, wave, softly wave. And then, slowly, jerkily, with scurries and stops, a lone cockroach emerges and makes its way toward the outstretched hand, stopping just before it, letting its antennae brush the hand’s flesh. The cockroach stays there, motionless for a second, for two, before rising slightly on its hind legs. With the tip of his forefinger, Kockroach gently strokes the arthropod’s
chest. The cockroach sways affectionately into the touch.

Kockroach takes the greasy paper bag from his pocket, reaches inside, pulls out the second Kirschner knish. He twists off a piece, rolls it into a ball, lays it on the floor.

The cockroach approaches carefully, rubs it with its antennae and then mounts the tiny ball, working the greasy piece of starch with its legs, devouring it with its ironlike mandibles and chitinous teeth.

Kockroach twists off another piece, and two more, and ten more, laying them side by side by side.

In the crevice beneath the stove he sees two more softly waving strands, and then two more and then twelve more. One by one the cockroaches emerge, one by one, one by one by one, from under the stove, from a crevice in the corner, through the holes in the wooden floorboards of the dining room, dropping like a battalion of airborne from the ceiling, they stream forward in a great army, scurrying madly now to the feast. The floor itself is alive with their frantic race.

“There is plenty, my brothers,” he whispers.

Kockroach twists off more pieces, leaves them in his palm, lets the army swarm over his hand as they battle for the food, swarm so thickly not a speck of flesh is left uncovered. He places the remainder of the pastry on his shoulder and the army drives forward until his hand, his arm, his shoulder and neck, his entire right side is covered with a boiling mass of brown. The feel of them dancing on his flesh, piling one on the other, scurrying around his neck, across his face, nibbling his fingernails, his eyelashes, is lovely, warm, scratchy, familiar, rich,
sensuous, luxurious, loving—loving. A connection between word and emotion is suddenly made.

So that is what it means.

“Oh my Lord,” says a deep voice at the rear doorway.

Kockroach doesn’t startle at the interruption. Without jerking his body or shaking off any of the swarm, he turns his head and smiles at the man in the now-open doorway even as a cockroach dashes from his mouth to his ear.

“My good Lord. Blatta, you are one aberrant son of a bitch, yes you are. Don’t be denying it.”

“Want to feed my friends?” says Blatta.

“No no no. I spent enough nights with those critters biting at my toes. My bedroom was like a gymnasium when I was growing up. They’d come in, work the light bag, do a few rounds just to keep in shape, then hang in the corner and smoke reefer, snickering at my skinny ass, at the hand-me-downs I was forced to wear. I fed them enough to last me.”

The man in the doorway wears a powder blue suit, a powder blue hat. He has a long nose, a small pursed mouth. In one hand he holds a gold-tipped walking stick, the other sports a diamond as big as an eye. His skin is as black as the coal from which the diamond was formed. His name is Moonstone.

“No surprises?” says J. Jackie Moonstone.

“No,” says Kockroach.

“They’re carving me up like a turkey, Blatta, like it’s Thanksgiving already and I’m the only thing in the forest that gobbles. Well, they’ll find critters in the forest other than turkeys, won’t they? What about Stanzi?”

“Stuffed.”

“And they’re going to blame Zwillman, like you said?”

“Like I said.”

“So everything is smooth, no problems?”

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Like what, for example?”

“Like nothing I can’t handle.”

“You’re holding out on me, Blatta, not a good way to start. Is your boy Pimelia on board?”

“He will be.”

“You’re sure.”

“One way or the other.”

“My Lord, you are marvelous, Blatta, yes you are. A couple weeks from now it’s just going to be you and me, just you and me on top of the heap.”

“And then it’s between us.”

“No sir, no more fighting. There’s more than enough to keep us jazzed and balled the rest of our lives. Whatever split of the other’s turf you think is fair is fine with me, just leave me with what I got now and I won’t fight it. I know enough not to mess with someone who keeps roaches for pets. We’re going to get along like brothers. Here, what you asked for.”

Moonstone drops onto the floor a handful of small wax-paper bundles, each tied with a bright red string. A mass of cockroaches sprints from the rest and swarms over the bundles until all that can be seen is a writhing mass of brown.

“Just like you asked for,” says Moonstone. “Waxy Red, finest scat in New York City. Pretty soon you’re going to have
them hooked too. Pretty soon you’ll be selling to every roach in the whole damn town.”

“How low would I have to be,” says Kockroach, “to give poison like that to a cockroach.”

Over the rooftops to the east, the first tentacles of dawn reach through the sky like a warning. Istvan is pulling the Lincoln up to the hotel. The woman in the car, awake now, leans her head on Kockroach’s shoulder.

“You want me?” she says.

“Not tonight.”

“Please, Jerry, let me come up. We haven’t been together in ages. I miss you.”