Soul Patch (28 page)

 

ON A SATURDAY night, about a month after the shootout at Martello’s, we dropped Sarah off at my brother’s house and I took Katy to dinner. Things had gotten better for us, but we never did have that talk about Nebraska. I guess my brushes with death and infidelity had woken me up to what I had. Sometimes, though, I still wonder about what would have happened if Fishbein hadn’t died under the wheels of that bus. Would I really have had the courage to confess my sins of omission and complicity to Katy? I guess I’ll never know.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“It’s a secret. Don’t worry, I think you’ll like it.”

After I parked the car, I reached in the back for the brown paper bag I’d brought home from work that day, and tucked it in the crook of my arm like a baby.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a surprise,” I said. “I think you’ll like it.”

When we strolled up to Cara Mia, Señora greeted us at the door.

“Table for two,” I said. I pointed to an empty two-top in a dark corner. “Can we sit over there?”

Señora smiled approvingly and showed us to the table.

“What’s this all about?” Katy asked.

I didn’t answer and asked the waiter for two empty wine glasses and a corkscrew. When he brought them, I pulled the bottle out of the brown paper bag.

“Mateus Rose! Moses Prager, I haven’t had Mateus Rose since—”

“Do you remember the first time I kissed you?”

“On the corner of Second Avenue and East Ninth Street in the Village. You called me a
vance
. You said it was Yiddish for a wiseass woman who wants to be kissed.”

“That’s right.”

“Moe, come on, what’s this about?” she asked again.

“It’s about the past, and about leaving it behind.”

I grew up very close to Coney Island—in the shadow of Coney Island Hospital, actually, on Ocean Parkway, which was sort of the borderline between Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach, not Coney Island. Then again, Coney Island isn’t an island, but a peninsula. Go figure! So given the fictionalized nature of the world in which I grew up, I felt it only proper to invent a part of Coney Island called the Soul Patch. Don’t bother doing Google searches, because, as far as I know, the only two places in which the Soul Patch exists are in my head and on the pages of this novel. I suppose my hope is that it will now reside in a third place.

 

NOTHING IN WRITING, maybe nothing in most professions, is so hard as following up success. Therefore
Soul Patch,
coming, as it did, on the heels of my most popular novel,
The James Deans—
a book nominated for the Edgar, Shamus, Barry, Anthony, Macavity, and Gumshoe awards—was quite a difficult task. I had been faced with a similar situation after the first book in the Prager series,
Walking the Perfect Square
, had received unanimous critical acclaim. It was on the strength of that acclaim that Penguin (Viking/Plume) bought the rights to
Walking
and the next two Moe books. Unfortunately, given my experiences with the follow-up to
Walking
,
Redemption Street
, I was less than optimistic about the book that would be
Soul Patch
. As I’ve often joked—half-joked, really—
Redemption Street
was the first book to ever go directly from the printer to the remainder bin. Why, I wondered, would things be any different this time around?

But things
were
different this time; they were worse. Because, in spite of the fact that
The James Deans
went to a second printing and of all the nominations and the book winning the Shamus, Barry, and Anthony awards, Penguin was considering dropping me. To their credit, they made no secret of it. So here I was riding high on my most successful book, but unable to fully enjoy it as the axe was always visible out of the corner of my eye. Normally, I would have begun writing the next book in the series three weeks after finishing
The James Deans
and would have had it finished within six months. However, because of my predicament, I didn’t write the next book in the series. I had been advised that it was nearly impossible for a series like mine—much acclaim, but middling commercial success—to move from one house to another. Writers write, that’s what we do. So instead of sitting on my hands and waiting to hear from Penguin or writing another Moe book that might never see the light of day, I wrote a novel called
Hose Monkey.

Enter Bleak House Books. Bleak House was an independent publisher from Madison, Wisconsin, with a taste for edgy fiction. Jon Jordan, a friend and publisher of
Crimespree Magazine
, had mentioned
them to me and I mentioned them to my then agent. One look at the manuscript of
Hose Monkey
and Ben Leroy of Bleak House bought it and its sequel. Trouble was, I still didn’t have Penguin’s decision and couldn’t risk publishing under my own name with a different house if Penguin did decide to re-up me. “Tony Spinosa”—my pen name—was born. In the intervening months, Tony Spinosa began the sequel to
Hose Monkey
, Bleak House Books was bought by a larger independent publisher, and Penguin dropped the axe on me. I still remember the day I got the letter from Penguin informing me that I could purchase my books at a discounted rate before they sold them off to someone else. That was a very very dark day in my life and, for the next few weeks, it was difficult for me to think of myself as anything else but an abject failure. My bank doesn’t accept critical acclaim for mortgage payments nor do they see awards as collateral.

Normally, I would shy away from giving you all these business-related details, but you need to understand where I was financially and emotionally if you’re going to understand where
Soul Patch
came from. Bleak House had indicated that they would be interested in discussing doing more Moe Prager books if Penguin dropped me. They were good to their word, bought two new Moe books, and gave me a fairly generous advance for a small publisher. Generous, yes, but nothing like the money I’d gotten from Penguin. Still, the cloud of failure hung over my head and I was in a pretty dark place. All you need do is look at the cover of the original edition of
Soul Patch
—featuring a photo I chose—to see where I was at.

Although other books of mine are grittier, bloodier, more violent—
Hose Monkey, Empty Ever After, Tower, The Fourth Victim
—none is emotionally darker or more claustrophobic or more desolate.
Soul Patch
is a book of betrayal because in it, Moe discovers that the men with whom he served in the 60th Precinct, the men whom he has loved and mythologized, the men he trusted to have his back, had, in fact, stabbed him in the back. Nothing can hurt Moe more because his time as a cop is something he treasures beyond all rationality. For Moe, it is like finding out that the solid steel base on which you’ve built your life is actually made out of beach sand and can be destroyed by a few drops of rain or by the truth being exposed to the sun. Even Moe’s beloved Coney Island is shown to be much less than the romantic vision to which he stubbornly clings. The Coney Island in
Soul Patch
is
a place of unfulfilled promises and lies. It is a rotting hulk, an empty place where the excitement, the rides, the shrieks of laughter, the scents of French fires and hot dogs are artifice, used to cover an underlying violence. Even Coney Island, a tiny peninsula at the tip of Brooklyn, is racially divided.

In
Soul Patch
the reader can see the first hairline fractures in Moe’s marriage. And, perhaps more painfully, Moe sees them too.

Later in the book, Moe crosses a line which, when I first conceived the series, I could never imagine Moe crossing. He kisses another woman. So, not only is Moe betrayed, he betrays, if only somewhat innocently. Of course, that other woman is the reincarnation of or, more accurately, the self-reinvented version of someone who pre-dated Katy in Moe’s life by five years. Carmella Melendez is yet another human piece of Moe’s past, his Coney Island cop past, who isn’t what she seems. At every turn, Moe is reminded that he cannot trust anyone, not even himself. He, too, is corrupted. Corruption, particularly political and police corruption, is always a major element in the Moe books, but in
Soul Patch
corruption is pervasive. It’s far more than an element. It’s what the book is about.

Coney Island, too, is always featured in the books, but in
Soul Patch
it is its own character. And nowhere else in the series is it as allegorical. The first line of the prologue states:

“Nothing is so sad as an empty amusement park. And no amusement park is so sad as Coney Island.”

By the end of the book, Moe is as empty and as sad as Coney Island. He has shed all his old friends, his old beliefs, and begun the long painful descent into the dissolution of his family. As Donald Maass writes in his
The Fire in Fiction
:

In the end,
Soul Patch
garnered three award nominations, including a 2008 Edgar Award nomination for Best Novel. I was incredibly honored to have been placed in the company of nominees like Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon, Benjamin Black, John Hart, and my friend and co-author of
Tower
, Ken Bruen. People often ask me how much of Moe is autobiographical. It’s an impossible question to answer accurately. But what I can say is that emotionally, Moe and I have never been closer than when I was writing
Soul Patch
. The sting of getting dropped by my publisher has faded, but the joy derived from having written it continues.

 

An original short story by Reed Farrel Coleman.

MUCH TO THE dismay of Petersboro’s children, Halloween that year had been graced with very ungothic weather. The winds of central New York State were so still that the mounds of fallen leaves piled high in every front yard remained as inert as bronze sculptures. The closest thunderstorms were hundreds of miles away in the Ohio Valley and the temperature, though not quite summery, made life beneath the ghoulish greasepaints and cheap plastic masks nearly unbearable. Even the sun seemed unwilling to cooperate, fighting desperately not to be pushed down beneath the rim of the earth.

At the edge of the woods behind his house, Vijay Patel stopped to look back at the big Queen Anne Victorian from which he had just stealthily escaped. He hesitated, making certain his movements had gone undetected and that he wasn’t being followed. His parents’ room was still dark. In his little brother’s room the dim glow of the nightlight—Raj was still afraid of the dark—leaked through the sides of the window shades. “Good!” Vijay said aloud, as if to convince himself before venturing into the woods. Somewhere, not too deep below the surface, he wished he had been caught trying to sneak out.

He clicked on his flashlight and made for the rendezvous with the other boys. Vijay had always been a loyal, obedient son and had never dared anything so bold as he was attempting tonight, but he was finished pretending belonging wasn’t important. He ached to fit in, finally. Through two previous moves—first from Cupertino to Boston and then Boston to Dallas—he had suffered the loneliness and indignities that came with being the new kid in school. Vijay further suffered the added burden of his Indian heritage. Pride is a fragile thing in the heart of a twelve-year-old boy and he did not think he could bear being called “sand nigger” or “7-Eleven boy”_ yet again. No, not again, not for any price. His dad had signed a multi-year contract with IotaSoft and had actually purchased the old Victorian, which Vijay could no longer make out through the thicket behind.

Twenty minutes later he emerged from the woods and, as the others had promised, he could see their bonfire burning a few hundred yards ahead, up the hill in the parking lot of the dilapidated strip mall. He held his flashlight to his watch.
11:45
,
right on schedule.
He hesitated once again, turning slightly back toward home. Then remembering the thousand little cuts from his time in Boston and Dallas, he started up the hill.

The fire was brighter now. On the asphalt leading into the deserted shopping center, Vijay noticed the words GOBBLE HILL spray painted in big block letters on the road. The white paint was wet, fresh. The edges of the letters, however, were shadowy and indistinct, as if someone had painted these same letters over and over again, year after year on the same spot, but had failed to perfectly trace the outline.

Gobble Hill. Yes, Vijay had heard the place mentioned since his late August arrival in Petersboro. Adults whispered its name with their hands over their mouths like old ladies talking about cancer. The kids in school whispered it too, but with awe and reverence. As Halloween approached, he heard it more frequently. He had made some tentative inquiries about the place, to no good end. Tonight he would have his answers, but at what cost, he wondered?