“Yo. Damn it,” he grumbles. “It’s a goddamn filthy pig sty here. Look at the floor, look at that pile of dirty plates.” Accusingly, he looks at Maria, who is responsible for doing the dishes. “Time we have a house meeting and we divide some house-hold chores.” Outside, the dogs start to bark. “Damn it,” Frankie swears. “Upstairs, you guys.”
“Fuck it,” Maria swears back, and disappears into attic after throwing a sneaker that lands in the pan with mashed potatoes.
“Don’t let them in,” Frankie calls to Ment who is taking a look. “These creeps only want to sniff around here.”
Moments later, a fat black guy with a big beer bottle pokes his nose around the corner. It’s Chuck, a house friend who stops by quite often.
“I’m sorry, my nigger. Tonight is not the right night,” Frankie tells him. “We are expecting these slimes from the Coalition.”
Chuck feels the tension and discreetly pulls out.
“Bunch of assholes,” Frankie mutters. “They promised to bring my birth certificate last week.” I suggest he pick it up himself. Frankie never thought about that. He doesn’t even have the phone number and address of the Coalition. Maria and the baby come down. It is getting late. Nobody expects the Coalition anymore.
“I need these assholes like I need a hole in the head,” Frankie raves on. “I have been homeless for ten years. Never got more out of them than some lousy-ass sandwich.” We open a few beers and play music. Slowly, the dark clouds above Frankie’s house are passing by. Fatima took a new pregnancy test: This time it was negative. And after consultation with his friends, Frankie’s deserted his stupid plan to rob Vanessa’s mother. He has even come to terms with his terminated relationship with Vanessa. “The bitch sure was a good fuck for three months.”
Maria grasps her head in exasperation. “Oh Frankie, you are terrible.”
34. BURGLARY IN THE TUNNEL
Bernard and I inspect the damage made by the burglar. The door of Bob’s bunker is in two pieces, the upper part dangling on the chain, it still has the lock to which only we have the key. It must have been Bob, thinks Bernard, searching for a crumb of crack in the shag carpet. Yesterday, Bernard bumped into him on the block where he was canning. When Bob said out of nowhere that he had not been in the tunnel, Bernard already smelled a rat.
Inside, nothing has been taken, nothing even moved. We find only a piece of paper on Bob’s favorite coffee table: a form for Bob to re-apply for his SSI benefits. Bernard and I exchange a glance of mutual understanding. Perpetrator and motivation have been established.
Bernard gives the windows and doors a second inspection. One sheet of plywood has been carefully pushed away. This is the way Bob must have crawled in, on his desperate quest for a hit. Judging by the splinters, the door must have been smashed from the inside.
“Aha,” Bernard says. “Now I understand everything. The idiot panicked and wanted to get out as fast as possible. Duke, I always told you, I should have been a detective.” Bernard says it with no trace of irony.
Bernard has also had a burglar. His drawers have been rudely opened and the smart denim shirt I gave him has disappeared. It is not likely that it was the Kool-Aid Kid. After doing some time in prison, he has been spotted again in the tunnel. Sometimes, he rummages through Bernard’s place in search for food, but he never leaves a mess. Maybe Bob was responsible, but there’s no way to prove it.
The Kool-Aid Kid and Bernard are getting along better, sometimes he treats Bernard to prime quality crack. “That’s his way to pay for all the stolen eggs,” Bernard told me last time, his tone reconciliatory. “Somehow, he has good manners.”
The Kid is on the run from a gang in Brooklyn, we now know, because of a drug deal that went wrong. His brother has already been killed, executed point blank, and the Kid is next on the hit list. That’s why he is always armed with a small nine millimeter. At the moment, the Kid makes his living by dealing crack. Bernard once saw the Kid working on 33rd Street, right around the corner from the police precinct.
I repair Bob’s door and step on a dead rat. Lately, there has been a nasty smell of rotting dead bodies around my bunker. A little further down, one of Tony’s cats is slowly disintegrating after being hit by a train. Bernard and Tony fight every day over who has to bury the remains. Soon, that will no longer be necessary because rats have been nibbling away at the dead cat.
Tony’s other cats sometimes catch a baby rat, but since Tony spoils his cats too much with hearty snacks, they only eat the heads. Maybe baby rat heads are delicacies for cats. Tony picks up the decapitated baby rats and slings them away by their tails. Most of the time, they land in front of my door.
Tony is two-for-oneing at Sloan’s. I want to comment on the dead baby rats, but Tony is too busy talking to a girl that wants to sell him a few bottles. The girl has only been homeless a few weeks and doesn’t understand a thing about the canning business. She has never heard of WeCan and she always arrives too late on garbage days, so she is only left with the glass bottles that are too heavy for most can people. She even doesn’t know the expression “dead can.”
Tony patiently explains everything to her in a hoarse voice. I take over when his voice has totally broken down into a squeaky whisper. When we have finished discussing cans, we start to talk about the tunnel. The girl has heard a lot about it from other homeless people. They even have a baby there, she says softly.
A bit shocked and surprised, I ask her where she got that information. Scared, she looks at me like she has just given away a deep dark secret. I go get some coffee to put her at ease, and continue the interrogation. She heard it from a guy that used to live in the tunnel, and some time ago visited his old friends there. Buddy is his name.
Now I understand. Buddy the snitch, kicked out personally by Frankie. I promise to be discreet and the girl tells me the whole story.
According to her, Buddy had visited Frankie and Ment and had seen the baby. For days, he had been nagging other homeless people about how irresponsible it was to have a baby down there. Finally, tormented by doubt but convinced he was doing the right thing, Buddy reported it to the police. Full of remorse over betraying his old friends, Buddy had cried a few times the following week. Mystery solved and it was obvious. Buddy the slimy creep. The girl sees me getting angry and excuses herself. It’s time for her to get her daily shot of heroin.
“See you, honey,” Tony whispers to the girl. He lost his voice at the horse races. He had put the last of his money on his favorite horse. Tony cheered the animal with hysterical screams, but it let him down just before the finish. He lost his money and his voice at the very same moment.
“Didn’t you stop betting?” I ask.
Tony shrugs his shoulders. “That’s life,” he croaks with great difficulty and proceeds to sort out his cans. To save money, he has fired his assistant.
35. IN THE LION’S DEN
“We could have kicked out everybody by force a long time ago,” Captain Doris Combs says. “The fact that we have not done so proves we are sincere and honest.”
I have penetrated the lion’s den and am facing Captain Combs, the feared Amtrak police chief, in her office three stories down in Penn Station. Captain Combs is a big, strong, black woman with steely, piercing eyes.
“I guess you heard a lot of bad things about me,” she grins.
“Well, people say a lot things…” I answer evasively.