His dinner comes. He folds the shaved meat and peppers into the pita and takes huge bites of the roll. He slurps at his coffee.
“Dennis requests one thing,” he says, still chewing his food. “Hear me out before you say anything. I will do my job tonight for Dennis if it kills me. He wants the remaining registers, of course. Do this please. But this thing that you are working on. This money club. This is important.”
“I’ve made my report on it. He already knows what it is and what it isn’t.” I had written that Kwang took no profits and made no interest, that he just redistributed funds at the end of every week, like any ggeh.
“Yes, I know, Parky. Now Dennis would like an additional item. You have offered some useful facts and analysis but he requires material. You say you regularly make printouts of the list of club members for Kwang. Good. Now make one for us. You will do this?”
I think of the list of Kwang’s people. His best and most loving. In some way I see it as the expression of the past seven years of his life, who he has been at the camp meetings and rallies, at the picnics and races and high school wrestling matches. I almost hear their voices as I open the envelopes, the stiff new bills that rush in to us in even greater tides now that he is publicly troubled, sounding out in marginal English their love for him, their devotion.
“Why does he want it?” I ask Jack.
“I do not ask such things,” he answers, already nearly finished with his meal. “I am happier with limited knowledge.”
“Propose something,” I ask, to push him into saying anything, which can always reveal. “For your friend.”
Jack wipes his mouth and sighs. “Okay, friend. Last week, two men were waiting for the elevator on our floor when I got out. I did not recognize them. I asked Candace who they were. She said they were Dennis’ friends, from Arizona.”
“Dennis has no friends.”
“Right,” Jack replies. “So I assumed they were clients. But I tell you, Parky, I can smell that type right away.”
“What?”
“Cheap cologne and cheap shoes,” Jack says. “I noticed one of them was filling out an expense book. Of course I didn’t ask Dennis. But it was clear. Baptiste thought so, too. You can ask him. Federales.”
“Government people?” I say.
“You add it up,” Jack says. “Now, if they were visiting Dennis because of Kwang, which I am not saying, then why? You say he is legitimate, except there is a minor fact of thousands of dollars coming in through the basement of his house every week.”
“I described every stage for you. I saw everything. It’s clean.”
“Of course you did,” Jack says, waving his finger at me. “But look at this. This could be of keen interest to the revenue service. You say you redistribute almost all of the money. But maybe you don’t know. He has lost a lot of money in some businesses, yes, since becoming a councilman? A small fortune. Maybe he thinks the people owe him something back. Maybe you are running just one of his money clubs, of which there are a dozen, or two dozen.”
“You and Dennis have all the angles.”
He laughs at me. “Dennis and I cannot fool you. Whatever you wish to believe about what happened at Kwang’s office is your right. So remember this. I am the one who has been an arsonist and murderer, Parky, not Dennis. Dennis is not a man in that way. He is not a doing creature. He will falsely take credit whenever he can, big talker he is, but that is all. Now, I am seeing what you write of Kwang, the way you present him with something extra. It is evident that you cannot help yourself. Something takes you over. You must see how this is a ripe condition. So could it be that the honorable John Kwang is deceiving you, Parky, and not just the other way? Is it possible that through all of your genuine respect and admiration, he is using you?”
Jack spreads his hands on the table, his favored stance rhetorical. Of course I can’t reply. He snorts and goes back to the rest of his plate of pepperoncini, taking them neatly like candies, one by one. When he’s done he calls for more coffee and tea.
“I did not come to make trouble for you, Parky,” Jack tells me, taking my hand. “You can think I am right or I am crazy. Either way it will not hurt us, I hope. We are brothers, yes, Greek and Korean? Like it or not, Parky, ours is a family. Pete, Grace, the Jimmys. Me and you. I know it is a sad excuse for one, but what else do we have?”
“It’s an orphanage, Jack,” I say. “And there’s a Fagin.”
He shakes his head. “Whatever you say. I am not schooled. What I know is that America is not so open. People like you and me can only do what is necessary. We are not the ones who have the choices. Maybe we feel outside of things, and are smart enough, and we also know our own. So what is better, Parky, for who we are?”
“Nothing better,” I tell him.
“Right,” he says. “So you will please give us the list. Soon, yes? Dennis will probably like to send someone down for pickup.”
“I’m not sure what I can give you,” I answer.
“Well, you figure it out,” he says, with some finality. He takes out some bills to pay for dinner. He calls the waiter, who slowly walks over. Jack points up at him with his finger and says something, his tone suddenly sharp, raspy, and vicious. The waiter carefully takes the money and goes away without speaking.
We rise to leave. He folds up his wallet with his big hands.
“He spit in my coffee,” Jack says, watching the man walk every step to the register. “I told him I loved it. Now he will always wonder when this crazy Greek will come back for him.”
When you are someone like me, you will be many people all at once. You are a father, a dictator, a servant, the most agile actor this land has ever known. And all throughout you must be the favorite chaste love of the people.
John Kwang tells me this. He tells me this at night when I work in the basement of the house. He tells me this when we walk the lovely empty 4 A.M. streets of Flushing, and in the all-night Korean restaurants full of taxi drivers and dry cleaners, where we share plates of grilled short ribs and heated crocks of spicy intestine stew and lager imported from Seoul. He tells me these tips of survival as if preparing me for his rank, his position, his singular place in the city that he is letting slip from his grasp.
He is no longer moving in his customary way. He looks old and weary, like he’s standing still. He decides to make a brief appearance for the media in the foyer of the ruined offices (against the repeated warnings of Janice, who hates the shot — all that shadowy wreckage and defeat), and with the barrage of questions and arc lights and auto winders he actually falters. Perhaps for the first time in his public life he mumbles, his voice cracks, and even an accent sneaks through. He doesn’t seem to be occupying the office, the position. He gazes listlessly at the cameras and responds like a man stopped on the street, dutifully answering each part of each question, answering the follow-ups, searching through the mess of his emotions for reasons this could happen.
Total amateur hour, Janice grumbles to me. The only good thing, she says later, is that he finally steps down from the microphones before the volleys of questions about that morning’s still unconfirmed news, which is that Eduardo Fermin was renting his own apartment in Manhattan. Otherwise, she adds, it might have been official, a complete meltdown. But they shout after him anyway as he makes his way out: how did a volunteer and night student afford $1,000 a month? How come even his parents didn’t know? Who was he, and what was he doing, to have this other life?
In the next staff meeting, Janice gives us the official last word, come directly from John. He knows nothing about it. By my longtime habit and practice I put myself in Kwang’s place, and I know it must be something with the ggeh, his paying of Eduardo, the apartment being a generous gift, what he thought his protégé deserved. I would have offered good Eduardo the same. There is, however, another notion, another idea steadily working itself through my thoughts: that perhaps Eduardo was taking money from John Kwang, stealing from him and his people, the very ones we are working for all day and all night.