But as I grew confident, I also grew impatient. I wanted more chips to play with, more capital, more leverage. By mid-morning I had inched my way up to nearly $35,000, which was fine, but to make a proper dent in the market I’d probably need, as a starting point, at least double – but probably three or four times – that amount.
I phoned Klondike, but they didn’t provide leverage of more than 50 per cent. Not having much of a history with my bank manager, I didn’t feel like trying him. Neither did I imagine that anyone I knew would have $75,000 to spare, or that any legitimate loan company would shell out that kind of money over the counter – so, since I wanted the money now, and was fairly confident about what I could do with it, there appeared to be only one other course of action left open to me.
11
I PUT ON A JACKET and left the apartment. I walked along Avenue A, past Tompkins Square Park and down towards Third Street to a diner I often used. The guy behind the counter, Nestor, was a local and knew everything that went on in the neighbourhood. He’d been serving coffee and muffins and cheeseburgers and tuna melts here for twenty years, and had observed all of the radical changes that had taken place, the clean-ups, the gentrification, the sneaky encroachment of high-rise apartment buildings. People had come and gone, but Nestor remained, a link to the old neighbourhood that even I remembered as a kid – Loisaida, the Latino quarter of store-front social clubs, and old men playing dominoes, and salsa and merengue blaring out of every window, and then later the Alphabet City of burned-out buildings and drug pushers and homeless people living in cardboard shelters in Tompkins Square Park. I’d often chatted to Nestor about these changes, and he’d told me stories – a couple of them pretty hair-raising – about various local characters, old-timers, storekeepers, cops, councillors, hookers, dealers, loansharks. But that was the thing about Nestor, he knew everyone – even knew me, an anonymous single white male who’d been living on Tenth Street for about five years and worked as some kind of journalist or something. So when I went into his place, sat at the counter and asked if he knew anyone who could advance me some cash, and fast – extortionate interest rates no obstacle – he didn’t bat an eyelid, but just brought over a cup of coffee and told me to sit tight for a while.
When he’d served a few customers and cleared two or three tables, he came back to my end of the counter, wiped the area around where I was sitting and said, ‘Used to be Italians, yeah? Mostly Italians, until… well…’
He paused.
Until what? Until John Gotti took it in the ass and Sammy the Bull went in the Witness Protection Program? What? Was I supposed to guess? That was another thing about Nestor, he often assumed I knew more than I did. Or maybe he just used to forget who he was talking to.
‘Until what?’ I said.
‘Until John Junior took over. It’s a fucking mess these days.’
I was close.
‘And now?’
‘The Russians. From Brighton Beach. They used to work together, them and the Italians, or at least didn’t work against each other, but now things are different. John Junior’s crews – apparently – couldn’t turn over a cigar stand.’
I never had the measure of Nestor: was he just a fly on the neighbourhood wall, or was he connected in some way? I didn’t know. But then, how would I know? Who the fuck was I?
‘So lately, round here,’ he went on, ‘there’s this guy, Gennady. Comes in most days. He talks like an immigrant, but don’t let that fool you. He’s tough, just as tough as any of his uncles that came out of the Soviet gulags. They think this country is a joke.’
I shrugged my shoulders.
Nestor looked directly at me. ‘These guys are crazy, Eddie. I’m telling you. They’ll cut you around the waist, peel your skin – peel it all the way up to over your head, tie a knot in it and then let you fucking suffocate.’
He let that one sink in.
‘I’m not kidding you. That’s what the mujahedin did to some of the Russian soldiers they captured in Afghanistan. Stuff like that gets passed on. People learn.’ He paused, and did a little more wiping. ‘Gennady comes in, Eddie, I’ll talk to him, but just make sure you know what you’re doing.’
Then he stood away from the counter a little, and said, ‘You been working out? You look terrific.’
I half smiled at him, but didn’t say anything. Clearly puzzled, Nestor moved on to another customer.
I sat there for about an hour and drank four cups of coffee. I glanced at a couple of newspapers, and then spent some time trawling through the expanding database I had between my ears, picking out stuff I’d read about the Russian mafia – the Organizatsiya, Brighton Beach, Little-Odessa-by-the-Sea.
I tried not to think too much about what Nestor had told me.
At around lunch-time, the place got busy and I began to consider the possibility that I was wasting my time, but just as I was about to get up and leave, Nestor nodded to me from behind the counter. I looked around discreetly and saw a guy in his mid-twenties coming in the door. He was lean and wiry and wore a brown leather jacket and sunglasses. He went and sat in an empty booth at the back of the diner. I stayed where I was and watched out of the corner of my eye as Nestor brought him down a cup of coffee and chatted for a few moments.
Nestor came back up to the front, collecting some plates on his way. He put the plates on the counter beside me and whispered, ‘I vouched for you, OK, so go and talk to him.’ Then he pointed a finger at me and said, ‘Don’t fuck up on me, Eddie.’
I nodded and swivelled around on my stool. I strolled down to the back. I slipped into the booth opposite Gennady and nodded hello.
He’d taken the sunglasses off and left them to one side. He had very striking blue eyes, a carefully maintained stubble and was alarmingly thin and chiselled. Heroin? Vanity? Again, what did I know? I waited for him to speak.
But he didn’t. After a ludicrous pause, he made a barely perceptible gesture with his head that I took to mean I could speak. So I cleared my throat and spoke. ‘I’m looking for a short-term loan of seventy-five thousand dollars.’
Gennady played with his left ear-lobe for a moment and then shook his head no.
I waited – waited for him to say something else – but that was obviously it. ‘Why not?’ I said.
He snorted sarcastically. ‘Seventy-five thousand dollars?’ He shook his head again and took a sip from his coffee. He had a very strong Russian accent.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘seventy-five thousand dollars. Is that such a problem? Jesus.’