In order to help Bruce out, it wouldn’t be as simple as giving the Ghouls back what was taken. We’d have to direct them to something larger than Bruce. Another gang. A snitch within their ranks. Someone directing Bruce’s actions for something bigger, more destructive. Get them thinking Bruce was just an instrument and they’d focus their attention on fighting that war. I’d need to get close to them to figure out just what that trigger might be.
In the meantime, we just had to keep Bruce and his mother safe. And that I had a plan for.
I looked at my watch. Not enough time had elapsed, so I did some push-ups, a few sit-ups, a hundred crunches and some light tae kwon do in the mirror. When it seemed like Fi would have had enough time to cross the city, pick up my mom and then head off to Lamps Are Us, I called my mother’s house.
“Ma,” I said into her answering machine (a Record-A-Call from 1979, to be precise), “I have some friends I’d like you to meet. I’ll bring them by around dinner-time. You’re just going to love them both.”
6
Urban warfare isn’t any fun. Ask any soldier what they’d prefer and they’ll tell you that a clear, fixed target on a battlefield with a linear objective, replete with a front and a rear, is much easier to control than going door-to-door in a burned-out city. Gettysburg or Fallujah, basically, and if you’re a betting man and you’re betting on your life, you’ll take Gettysburg every time.
Problem is, no one fights conventionally anymore. They’ve all seen Black Hawk Down and Full Metal Jacket, they’ve all watched CNN and Al Jazeera and they all play first-person shooter video games. Thus they all know that fighting inside buildings and alleys is the great equalizer to light manpower.
So when you’re in a densely packed urban environment and looking for possibly hostile targets, it’s wise to look as nonthreatening as possible. Most spies spend their whole lives in slacks and a button- down shirt. It doesn’t matter if they are working in the Pentagon or Darfur: Slacks and a button-down shirt are almost always plain enough to be completely unnoticeable, because when you’re a spy it’s important never to dress to bring attention. You want to blend in.
On the rare occasion you need a disguise, it’s imperative to remember that it’s easier to look older than younger, poorer than richer and that if you want people to think you have a limp, put a rock in your shoe. That way, you’ll actually limp.
So when I went to the apartment of Nick Balsalmo’s girlfriend in Little Havana, I tried to look as innocuous as possible, since I wasn’t sure if I was going to stumble onto a dead body, or a booby trap or a bunch of bikers waiting to kill whoever showed up at his house. I opted for jeans, a T-shirt, a straw hat and ugly shoes with no socks. Looking obviously lost is a good way to avoid trouble, even in a war zone.
I also had two guns on me, because there’s never been a single person who thought being overly armed was a bad thing. When you’re not sure how many bullets you might need, bring as many as you can hold.
Little Havana is just that: little. Densely packed with businesses, shops, bars, the streets of Little Havana feel like they’ve been cut and pasted into Miami from any of a dozen towns in Cuba. Salsa and merengue bleat through cars and the open windows of small apartments above storefronts and there seems to be an open-air restaurant on every corner.
For the most part, Little Havana is safe. There are plenty of families, which means people tend to look out for their own, but then there’s also plenty of Families, too, so the crime in Little Havana can be organized and brutal. That Nick Balsalmo, who wasn’t Cuban, was living in Little Havana with his girlfriend didn’t necessarily mean that he was being protected, but a guy like him living in the same neighborhood as Cuban crime families meant something.
The address Bruce gave me was a three-story stucco apartment building not far from the domino park off of Calle Ocho where, even though it was getting late in the afternoon, old-timers in guayaberas were still throwing bones and whooping at one another. On one side of the building was a liquor store and on the other was a cigar shop and then two doors down there was a McDonald’s and a Domino’s. That was the weird thing about Little Havana-it looked like Cuba apart from how much it looked like any neighborhood in Any-town, U.S.A.
Nick and his girlfriend-whom Bruce only knew as Maria-lived on the second floor of the building. The front door of the building was locked and required the person living in the apartment to buzz you up, so I found Maria’s name and hit the button. The system rang their number and a mechanical voice announced that their voice mail was full.
Not a good sign.
The door had an electric strike lock activated by discontinuing the electrical circuit by hitting a number (or a series of numbers) on the phone’s keypad. These locks usually confound people intent on breaking in because they don’t understand how easy they are to break. Most electric strike locks in older buildings are fail-safe, which means they need electricity to stay locked, which gives you two easy options:
Find the electrical path to the door in the wall and yank out the cords.
Go to the side of the building, find the power box, and turn off the power. You might need to pick the padlock on the box, but as long as you have two paper clips, this should take only about five seconds.
Or you can do what I did: Wait three minutes for a young woman to walk out the door, smile at her, say “thanks” and she will hold the door open for you while you gather your materials and walk inside. The nice thing about people is that they are usually very polite and helpful, even when letting perfect strangers into their home.
I climbed a flight of stairs to the second- floor landing and made my way down the hall. There were six apartments on the floor and all of them, except for the one at the end of the hall, had their front doors wide open. As I passed each one, I could hear the drone of televisions, the cacophony of too many people in a small space having arguments and the wail of more than one child. I peered into each apartment and was struck by how similar they looked-a galley kitchen opening into a large living room, which opened onto an outdoor balcony. I could smell cooking meat and deep- fried vegetables, human sweat and something that smelled vaguely like vinegar, but more pungent.
The closer I got to the last apartment, however, the more I began to notice a different smell.
A smell that reminded me of Kosovo. Of Iraq. Of Afghanistan.
You never get used to the smell of decomposing people. Smell it once and no amount of deodorizer or lye or bleach will hide the smell from your nose for too long. Dead bodies smell like rotten lamb, and fecal matter, and rotten fruit, and spoiled milk, wrapped in burning garbage, but worse. Dead people smell like no other dead animal for simple evolutionary purposes. It gets the living moving… and fast.
In this case, however, someone had gone a long way to hide the smell, because as I stood outside the door, I could decipher it only as an undertone. My guess was that whoever was dead inside the apartment-and my guess was that it was probably both Nick and Maria, because biker gangs aren’t known for leaving witnesses-was being absorbed by an acid, probably in the bathtub.
“You know the guy who lives there?”
I turned and saw a balding man of about fifty. He had about fifty keys on a belt chain and wore a short-sleeved work shirt that was pocked with sweat across the chest. It said RAY in cursive over the breast pocket. I had the sense that he wore this shirt every day but didn’t bother to wash it.