Bronx Noir

“It’s no better anyplace aroun’ here,” she told him. “No wonder they want to burn it down.”

As the season went on, he was more and more preoccupied with thinking about what she wanted, what they could do. He didn’t follow the games much, though the Yankees were supposed to have a great team. Instead, they behaved like a bunch of soap opera queens. The players fought with the manager, the manager fought with the owner. Everybody fought with everybody, it was in all the papers. A crazy season.

Then, as if they had finally decided to get serious, the team came back to the stadium in August and began to win game after game. The crowds grew bigger, the games quicker and more intense. Suddenly, it seemed as if everything had become much more urgent. Mercedes had started to talk about going away somewhere. She told him that she thought she could become an actress on television down in Mexico, even if she was Puerto Rican; maybe even go to Los Angeles and get on American TV.

She had never talked like this before, and Luis had the uneasy feeling that there might be layers of her that he had never previously suspected—that she might be much smarter than he would ever be, able to effortlessly conceal certain desires from him. But he didn’t really care. Sitting next to her there in the upper deck, just looking at her beautiful face, the gentle slope of her breasts, her bare legs. Touching her, absorbing her scent, sitting next to him game after game, he felt as if he were falling again, enveloped by the wave. There was nothing about her that didn’t surprise him, didn’t excite him down the whole length of his body.

“But how do we do that?” He had bit. “How do we go away?”

“We need money.”

“Sí.”

“He has money. We could take it.”

“He’d come after us for sure then.”

“Yes, he would,” she said, then looked him in the eye, her gaze as level and meaningful as that first evening he had touched her in the hall. “If he could.”

All that August, he pretended he didn’t get her meaning. The Yankees kept winning and the fires kept burning, more and more of them. But he knew she was right, that it was all going. Every week, he walked past another store closed on the Grand Concourse, even the bodegas boarded up. The streets were filling with broken glass and old tire treads that nobody bothered to clean up; the fire engines screaming past him, night and day. In the evening, after his job, he would climb the five flights of stairs past the same broken elevator. Making his way down the hallway with its same bags of garbage and its roaches; the dingy hospital-green paint peeling off the walls, a single bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. There was nothing more for them there.

But to kill him—

“You really wanna leave him alive, be lookin’ over our shoulders for him the rest of our life?” she asked him, straight out, in the last week of August, during a game where the Yankees were battering Minnesota.

“No.”

“All right then.”

“All right,” he said slowly, and when he said it he had that marvelous falling sensation again.

Yet he still agonized over how to do it. Sometimes late at night he could hear Roberto working down there, even up on the fifth floor. When he wasn’t dealing, he was always doing something vaguely sinister with his saws in a corner of the basement—cutting up something, making something; the shrill sound of metal cutting into metal echoing all the way up to Luis’s sweltering bedroom when he was trying to sleep. It kept the whole building up, but nobody dared to complain.

He knew it wasn’t just talk what they said about Roberto. Luis had seen him chase some junkie who had cheated him clear across the courtyard, tackling him and pummeling his face with his .38 until it was a bloody mess. The junkie had laid down there for half a day, before he was finally able to drag himself away, with nobody so much as daring to call the police.

“Mercedes, I don’ know if this is such a good idea—”

“You said you would do it,” she replied before he could back out any further, a mocking, angry look across her face. Then she held his hand. “Let me take care of everything. All you have to do is be a man.”

He agreed to let her make the plan, thinking just maybe she was smarter than he was. She told him it would have to be done before the end of the season. He didn’t understand why, but she assured him they needed the big crowds.

“We need the noise,” she explained. “To get away. Leave the rest to me. I know where his guns are. I know where his money is.”