“Fuck you lookin’ at?” Dusty asked.
She was on the way to the bathroom, wearing a cotton robe over a short nightgown, crossing through the kitchen to get to the hallway beyond. She shared a bedroom with Ham, did her homework in there, tried as much as she could to stay out of any parts of the house where Mr. Dusty Rogers might be sitting around shooting up.
“You hear me?” he asked.
When he wasn’t doing dope, he was drinking booze. Matter of fact, he sometimes did both together. He’d cook his heroin, shoot it in his arm, then nod off for three, four hours sometimes, looking like he was dead sometimes, his chin on his chest that way, his eyes closed, sitting there in his stupor. She hated him like poison; her mother had taken him in over her protests.
She walked on by him now without saying a word to him.
He nodded in righteous agreement with whatever he’d been thinking about her, and poured himself another glassful of Thunderbird.
The kitchen divided the apartment into two uneven spaces. The bedroom she shared with Ham was on one side of it, to the left as you came in from the outside hall. To the right was a small living room, the bathroom, and her mother’s bedroom. As she approached the bathroom, she could hear the television turned up loud in her mother’s room down the hall. They never used the living room, because the only window in it opened on the air shaft, with a grimy brick wall opposite. If she and Ham ever wanted to watch TV, they had to ask her mother if they could come in. More times than not, Dusty was in there with her, lying on the bed in just his undershorts and his stupor. Luretta’d just as soon read a book, anyway.
You turned on the bathroom light, there was always a flurry of activity around the soap dish, where the roaches broke into a mad rush for cover. She wondered why roaches seemed to enjoy eating soap so much. Actually, she didn’t mind them as much as she minded the rats. She was always afraid when she sat on the toilet bowl that a rat would come up and bite her. She always checked the water in the bowl before sitting down, making sure nothing was swimming around in there. She peed now, and then flushed the toilet and washed her hands and her face in preparation for bed.
She didn’t bathe in the tub but every other night. Hot water ran out pretty fast in an apartment building this size, city didn’t care how many tenants called to complain long as the landlord kept paying the taxes. Yes, miss, we’ll see to it right away. Sure. Same as they saw to garbage collection, or snow removal, or electrical wires hanging from the hallway ceilings, you could get electrocuted just walking by. She brushed her teeth, rinsed, spat into the sink, put her brush back in the yellow plastic cup that was hers, alongside her mother’s red one and Ham’s blue one, dried her hands on her towel, and opened the bathroom door.
Dusty was standing in the hallway just outside.
“What takes you so long in there all the time?” he asked.
“Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t know you were waiting.”
She started moving past him in the narrow hallway. In her mother’s bedroom down the end of it, she could still hear the TV blaring. Somewhere outside the apartment, she could hear people arguing in one of the Middle Eastern languages, she didn’t know which, the words harsh, the cadences strange.
“What’s your hurry?” he said, and grinned.
“Out of my way,” she said calmly.
But she was scared to death.
“Why, certainly,” he said, and stepped aside, still grinning, and as she was starting to walk past, he grabbed a big piece of her ass and squeezed hard. She wriggled out of his grasp, scurried through the kitchen like a roach running from a suddenly blinding light, rushed into her bedroom, and closed the door behind her. There was no lock on the door.
Ham hadn’t come in yet.
Twelve years old.
It’s ten p.m. Do you know where your children are?
Except that it was already eleven thirty.
She cleared the books spread on her bed, pulled back the covers, climbed in, and turned out the bedside light. The room was frigid. She pulled the blankets up under her nose and tried falling asleep, knowing there was no lock on the door, afraid Dusty would come into the room after her, afraid rats would scurry over the bed and gnaw at her face, afraid Ham wouldn’t come home at all one of these nights, and they’d find him dead in the street the next morning.
At a little past midnight, she heard his key in the lock.
He tiptoed through the kitchen, came into the bedroom, undressed in the dark, and climbed into the bed across from hers. She did not let him know she was still awake. She did not ask him where he’d been or why he’d stayed out so long. In seven hours, she had to get up, and get ready for school. She hoped before then Dusty would die of a self-administered overdose.
It took exactly eleven days to get to Alonso Moreno.
The two men who’d agreed to do the job were both imported from Sicily. They spoke only broken English, but that didn’t matter because they planned to present themselves as emissaries from Rome. To two skilled assassins like Luigi Di Bello and Giuseppe Fratangelo, Moreno meant nothing and Colombia meant less. For that matter, even Andrew Faviola was of little importance to them, even though the scheme they’d been hired to execute had been conceived by him. The only thing that had any meaning for them was the million dollars they would share when the job was done. Faviola had paid them ten percent on a pair of handshakes. Now all they had to do was earn the remaining nine hundred thousand.
It was common knowledge that Moreno had for years courted the Catholic Church in his native country. His constant traveling companions, in fact, were two priests respectively and respectably named the Reverends Julio Ortiz and Manuel Garcia. These two clerics sat with Moreno on the board of directors of the charitable organization he’d founded for the elimination of slums in Bogota, Medellin, and Cali. They appeared with him at rallies and benefits where they praised to the heavens all the wonderful things Moreno was doing for Colombia, forgetting to mention that the millions he distributed to the poor and the needy — and the Church — had been obtained by flooding the United States of America with cocaine. Andrew had read in Time magazine that Moreno had recently petitioned the Pope for a private audience. That was all he needed to know.
The papal stationery was provided by a forger in Rome, premised on a letter stolen from the Vatican mailbox.
The letter was typed on a Macintosh Ilsi computer, in English, by an associate in Milan whose native language was Italian. It had all the authenticity of someone writing uncertainly in a second language:
Sr. Alonso Moreno
Rancho Palomar
Puerto Ospina
Putumayo, Colombia
Dear Sr. Moreno:
His Holiness has learned from your request for a private audience and wishes to converse with you the availableness of several dates this summer.
Please be advised that to the middle of February, will be coming to Puerto Ospina on their way to Bogota two holy fathers of the Franciscan Order to consult with you. They are the friars Luigi Di Bello and Giuseppe Fratangelo. It is the wish of His Holiness that you make them welcome.
Yours forever in Christ,
