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  This Lukas guy is a bad act and a bad actor. He doesn’t do his job and then he finds somebody else to take the fall. But that’s not going to happen today.

  I wait for Jules to begin: Okay, here’s what—

  Then I give Lukas the burn:

  You want them, Lukas? Because, hey, you can have them. I dropped by the place today around lunchtime, third time in the past two weeks, and let me tell you what I did. I sat, that’s what I did, I sat and I counted the customers. Half hour’s worth. This is at noontime, mind you, and they’ve got sixteen people in and out of there. Sixteen people, thirty minutes. At best they’re serving maybe fifty lunches a day, maybe fifty dinners. So tell me this, Lukas. That kind of business, what are they doing with four, five, six deliveries of meat a week? Why do they need all those trucks coming in and out, in and out?

  Lukas is lost. He’s deep in a forest and he’s lost. Finally he says: I talked to these people, Mr. Berenger. I talked to them. Lukas sounds pissed off, but at me, not them. That’s his problem, and he better get it fixed.

  I tell him:

  They’re working outside you, pal. They’re fucking your wife and your dog and you don’t even know it.

  Okay, okay, Jules says. I’ve heard enough. You get your butt out there, Lukas—

  Wait a minute, Jules, I tell him. I can take care of—

  He doesn’t even look at me.

  Lukas, he says, I want you to get your butt out there and I want you to shut them down. And I want it done day before yesterday, you got me?

  Jules—

  The guy isn’t deaf. He just isn’t listening.

  Okay, he says. One other thing.

  Now, at last, he’s talking to me.

  The Philly drop. Give it to Trey Costa.

  Done, I say, and hustle my shoulders inside my suit. It’s getting warm. A little too warm. So I ask him, first thing: What’ve we got here, Jules?

  Jules looks at Lukas. Get lost, he says. Lukas tries to smile at him and backsteps quickly and carefully to the door and then he’s gone.

  Jules looks at CK. You told him, CK. Is that right? You told him?

  CK nods.

  Jules turns to me and says: He told you.

  He told me squat, I say. He told me where, which is to say New YorkCity, which is sort of like saying, oh, Rhode Island. He told me when, which is to say this weekend. Lots of hours in there. He told me who, which is to say twenty or so million people. Though he did say niggers, so maybe that cuts things in half. Didn’t know we were dealing with gangs again, Jules. Thought we were out of that trade. Thought that kind of action might get some people locked up for something like the rest of their lives. Might get some people dead.

  It might, he says. That’s why you’re going along for the ride. To make sure those things don’t happen.

  Who’s going with me?

  You have Mr. James. Spoken as if Two Hand isn’t in the room.

  I look at Renny. He isn’t going to like what he hears, but it’s true: If you really need muscle, the kid’s not enough, Jules.

  I know that, he says. His eyes squinch tight. A bloated piglet. Will you just listen? It’s taken care of. And with that he gives a little jerk of the head toward the door.

  The two guys on the couch?

  There’s nothing else to say. Jules starts this shuffling-around thing, pulling open the drawers of the Famous Desk, pawing inside for the matches he can’t light, the cigarettes he can’t smoke. After a while, he comes up with his favorite play toy, the Barlow knife, and he says: It’s not your problem.

  These guys are our backup, and you’re telling me it’s not my problem?

  It’s not your problem. This is Mr. Kruikshank’s run. Have you got a problem, CK?

  All heads turn. The psycho smile, straight from a toothpaste commercial:

  No problem.

  Anyway, Jules is saying. These guys, they’re steady. Rock steady.

  Oh, yeah, I tell him. They sure look like Gibraltar to me. Did you check out the pants on the little guy? Were they hanging off his butt or am I just imagining things? Tell me something else, Jules. And I don’t want People magazine, I want Consumer Reports. I want who and how, and what I really want to know is … why.

  Which brings us to the moment. Jules points the Barlow knife down. He stabs it right into the top of the Famous Desk, one of these antique Chippendale things, must have cost him twenty grand, and he digs awhile and he cuts a big chunk of mahogany right out of it. Looks at what he’s done like an artist taking in his canvas. Blows air. Then:

  What do you do with the money I give you, Lane? Spend it, right?

  I nod.

  You ever put any aside?

  Like in a bank?

  Yeah, he says. Like in a bank. Or the market.

  The bank, I tell him. Savings account, checking account. An IRA, too.

  What about the market?

  Nope.

  He gives me that you asshole shake of the head. Then he starts back to work on the Famous Desk. This time it’s a gouge in the side.

  Let me tell you something about investments, he says. You play the stock market, you do this thing like a dog race, and you lose. Now maybe, every once in a while, you get the long shot, but that’s not what the market is all about. Buy low, sell high, sure. But that doesn’t happen enough to keep you ahead of the game. It’s about the long haul. Meaning that the winners are the ones who know how to ride the fucking tiger.

  You have to hang in there, and if you’re gonna hang in there, you’ve got to diversify. That’s what it’s all about. So I play the market, sure, and I’m playing this bullshit biotech thing at the moment. Who knows, maybe one of these monkey-murdering brain barns is gonna get us a cure for AIDS and get me more bank than a Saudi. But that’s the side bet, that’s the one for fun.

  The one for winning, my friend, is what they call diversification. A diversified portfolio. I’ve got Paramount. I’ve got U.S. Steel, Glaxo. I’ve got Lockheed Martin; shit, they’re at fifty-four bucks and in three years I bet they’re topping a hundred again. Bell Atlantic. Even some iffy internationals. I have money in gold, in futures, in municipal bonds.

  And there is a reason that I’m telling you this, Lane.

  Yeah, I tell him. Clear as crystal, Jules. Hedge your bets. Diversify. So you’re telling me that this pair of yard monkeys out there is Paramount Pictures?

  Okay, so maybe that is going a bit far. Jules yanks the knife out of the Famous Desk and shows me its point.

  Sit down and shut your pie hole.

  Jules, I—

  Sit down, sit right there on the divan, and shut your fucking pie hole.

  I do what the man says. Like I have an alternative.

  What you have out there, whether you like it or not, he tells me, is cash. Cold cash. Big cash.

  Jules, I say. No offense, okay? But what you’ve got out there are a couple guys rolling in so much cash they buy their clothes at Sunny’s Surplus. Who the fuck are these guys?

  He doesn’t answer, just gives me a blank look that sends me this signal that hits the top of my head like lightning.

  No, Jules.

  But the look says it all: Yes yes yes.

  Oh, shit. I’m up off the divan. U Street?

  Renny Two Hand leans in, and the kid’s got guts; he actually talks. Not the U Street Crew, Mr. Berenger.

  Say it, Jules, I tell him. Say it: No, not, never.

  Those tight lips tell all. It’s U Street, all right. USC. Then he says the words:

  Big money.

  The world is starting to turn sideways.

  Right, I tell him. Oh, yeah, Jules. Big money, all right. Drug money, gang money, crazy money.

  Renny starts to say something: Just how are we supposed—

  Then he stops because no one is giving him the time of day. He crosses his arms and leans back into the wall. My turn again.

  How many?

  The floor is definitely tilting.

  How many, Jul
es?

  These two, he says. And a few more, meeting you in the Apple. This is no big thing, Lane. This is a milk run. This is money in the bank. And they’re gonna make it happen.

  Then—

  Listen close now. The little one, the one with the rag on his head? That’s DeJuan Wilkes. You call him Juan E. You call him Lil D. Better yet, you call him Mr. Wilkes. He’s Doctor D’s half brother.

  Oh, shit. I’m telling myself as much as him, which is when Jules says:

  The other one, though, is trouble.

  The other one? When the first one is the half brother of D.C.’s own King of the Streets, Deacon Bailey, Doctor D—and that’s D as in Death—it’s the other one who’s trouble?

  The yellow one’s the real gangster. Remember the First Union pull?

  Of course I remember the First Union robbery. So do most folks who live in and around the capital. Bloodbaths are hard to forget. Especially the ones videotaped in color on security cameras and broadcast on CNN for about a week after. Before the First Union gig was history, the body count ran to two guards, a teller, a customer, and some poor guy just walking his dog on the street outside. Two perps in ski masks, one with an MP 40, the other with a Mossberg pump, chewed the living daylights out of a First Union branch office six blocks from the Capitol Building while making an unauthorized withdrawal of around $40,000. In the pursuit, D.C. Police got one of them, about forty-seven times by the look of what was left of his raggedy-ass Impala. The other one got away.

  Now Jules is telling me that he’s sitting right outside the door.

  If he gets loose, gentlemen, make sure you’re not in the way. But that’s not gonna happen, is it? Right, Lane? CK?

  No, sir, CK tells him. Then: I mean, yes, sir, it’s not gonna happen.

  Jules nods back at him like this is all yesterday’s news.

  Okay, so you go clue in our new business partners. Otherwise, that’s it. Except for you, Lane. We need to talk, so … gentlemen?

  The party’s over. CK and the rest of the guys are dismissed, and Jules decides he’s done with his whittling. He glances down the edge of the blade, cutting the world in two. Then he puts the knife away and comes over to me, gives me the arm-around-the-shoulder routine.

  Burdon, he says.

  You were always a good soldier, he says.

  Right now I need a soldier, he says.

  A good soldier, he says.

  The words are one thing. The way he’s saying them is another. They’re as phony as a kiss from a whore. But I listen, and I look like I’m listening, and that’s when it starts becoming clear.

  The U Street Crew, like all good pimps and dealers, is no doubt cash-heavy, and that cash is dirty, and what do they need? Guns.

  So Jules does Doctor D a deal: not just for guns, but for guns and a little laundry service … more guns and more money. Clean money. He brings some of Doctor D’s soldiers along for the ride north to keep the buyers, these New York brothers they call the 9 Bravos, in line. The Bravos don’t care, and they don’t scare either. But if shit happens, and one of the U Street Crew goes down, they’ve bought themselves war. Which means that Jules gets protection for free.

  A nice plan. A sweet plan.

  But a little too much of a plan for something that’s supposed to be a milk run.

  We’re almost to the door when Jules says: I’ll see you at the wedding.

  That one’s so far out of left field that I don’t have a word for him. So I just say: Wedding?

  Sunday? he tells me.

  Then I remember. The invitation. To the wedding. His daughter, his only daughter, Meredith, the one in the photo he keeps on the Famous Desk. She’s getting married on Sunday, and Jules has hit the big time: She’s marrying a senator’s son.

  I’ll be there, I tell him. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.

  As Jules shows me the door, he draws me into an awkward hug and says:

  Burdon Lane. You’re my coonhound, son. You never bark up the wrong tree, do you?

  I get the feeling I’m the kid being sent off to his first day of school.

  He says: Don’t go changing that now.

  paint it black

  So now we got niggers.

  This is the kind of thing that comes along and makes you wonder, late at night, covers to the chin, when maybe all the world but you is sleeping, whether you can walk this walk forever. The kind of thing that tickles you with how you’re going to be fifty years old, and soon. How you really might be needing Social Security after all. The kind of thing that worms around inside you and then starts to dig and dig deep and, sooner or later, makes you crazy.

  U Street’s been walking their walk for five years, maybe more, boiling up out of the days when the gangbangers were a bunch of punk nobodies, loudmouthed kids who carried scrap iron and ponied white daddy for the mob. Until the day came when the mob was gone and mobbing took over. There was a shakeout, there was a body count, and then there was the U Street Crew.

  Fact of life: There are the guys you elect and then there are the guys who really run things. Sometimes, not that often but sometimes, they just happen to be the same guys. Happens a lot over there in Dirty City.

  But nobody elected Doctor D, the man behind U Street. Born Deacon Bailey. Fifteen-year-old mother, father unknown, raised by an aunt when his mother sucked too much cock and crack and died at the ripe old age of twenty. Started as a lowlife turf bandit in a jumbled graffiti-marred wasteland they call Montana Terrace and worked his way up, pimping, moving drugs, moving guns, moving money, and pretty soon he’s got his posse. These guys are predators, and it’s not about the block, not about the hood, it’s about lebensraum. They move upstream, getting out of retail and into wholesale. One day the good doctor gets indicted for four homicides, assault, reckless endangerment, use of a firearm in a crime of violence, obstructing justice, everything but a parking ticket. Nobody would talk, so nothing would stick. Newspapers call him the “Teflon Con.” He orders killings like they’re pizza, mostly rival cocaine lords, gets cuffed, and rides out a couple months in D.C. jail before the prosecutors no-paper him, let him walk. First day out, he puts down the Low Four Crew, personally blows the balls off a renegade dealer in front of about a hundred people, none of them available to testify at trial. Not guilty. Now he’s King of the Streets, probably employs as many people as Washington Gas and keeps half the city, the Mayor included, supplied with crack and smack.

  Another American Dream come true.

  But it does make life a bitch for us businessmen. Dirty City was a major market for us, and this kind of action cuts into the profit margin. Hard to say whether life’s better with these guys or without them. I mean, consider what the gangbangers did to the straw-man game.

  Round about midnight on the third of April, 1991, somebody took some target practice on the corner of 14th and H Streets North West. That’s about—what? Two blocks from the White House. It was a classic drive-by. A pimp by the name of Maurice Overby did a swan dive into the gutter with a new zipper cut into his chest and throat. Near his body they found eleven spent casings and an Intratec DC-9 assault pistol.

  Decent weapon, the TEC-9. Converted to full auto, it spits twenty rounds in the blink of an eye. Couple years later, some wacko walked one into D.C. Police Headquarters and, can you believe it, took out a cop and two FBI agents. And he still had a round for himself.

  The TEC-9 that did Maurice Overby was purchased at the Richmond Police Equipment Company. Bill of sale read Otis Campbell. ATF Form 4473 read Otis Campbell. But this Otis Campbell guy owned the gun for maybe twenty, thirty minutes.

  It’s called the straw-purchase scam, and here’s how it worked. We would camp out in Richmond or Roanoke and recruit the usual suspects—homeless, drug addicts, welfare types—and send them off to the gun shops with a shopping list and a fistful of dollars. One old lady, Aunt Becka they called her, eighty years old if she was a day, bought about sixty handguns for us in three months. She did work, and she got paid:
Twenty-five bucks a gun. Probably paid the rent and bought her grandkids some toys and clothes, which is a lot more than George Bush ever did for them.

  The straw-purchase scam couldn’t last. Especially when the Stanton Terrace Crew and the 1-5 Mob started going at each other. And then along comes U Street. Too much competition.

  But once it’s over, the Feds, as always, finally wake up and it’s an election year, so they come down hard. On who? The gun stores. Plugged Richmond Police Equipment for filing false sales reports. Lennie Skittings owned that store. Nice guy. Single father, couple kids, trying to pay off the mortgage like the rest of us. People come by, show the right kind of ID, fill out the right forms, pay with the right bills, what’s he supposed to do? So Lennie Skittings pleads guilty, closes down his store, and then one fine Saturday he takes a long ride into the country and blows his mind out with a .38.

  Gangbangers started simple. Back in the days, they would break into houses, usually one of the neighbors, to steal their guns. Then they got on to the straw-man game. Now they got the drugs, so they got the money, and they get volume discounts. They get deals. They get all-expense-paid trips to New York City.

  Like CK says, as if it needed saying: You got to remember one thing. You can’t trust these guys. They’ll kill their brother; shit, they’ll kill their mother if she gets in the way. They kill each other all the time. And if they kill each other, where do you think a white guy stands when he comes round the neighborhood?

  So: You can eat with these guys, you can drink with these guys, and, if Jules Berenger says it, you can goddamn work with these guys.

  But you cannot trust them.

  A couple black guys used to run with me. One of them, guy named Abednego Jones, was smart. I’m not talking street-smart, though he had all that stuff too. AJ was smart.

  Tell you how smart this Abednego Jones guy was: He retired. AJ was putting his money aside, or maybe he skimmed some here and there, and one day he just said: Thanks, but no thanks. Bought himself a little house in Sarasota and moved his wife down there and sits in the sun all day long, feeds the birds, goes fishing when he wants. I wonder if he gets a tan.