After dinner we polished off an order of sweet fried sesame balls and two pots of bo-lay tea while Q gave me everything he had on Jessup and Jewel. Then he helped me craft a cover story I never could have invented on my own.
“It’s a little over-the-top,” I said. “Can we make it more…I don’t know…realistic?”
“You mean like the Nigerian prince scam? Zach, you know the old saying ‘You can’t make this shit up’? Sometimes the more unbelievable something is the more people are willing to believe it.”
“You think they’ll buy it?”
“You think you can sell it?” he fired back.
I shrugged. “Early on, I worked undercover for Narcotics. I remember my first day on the street. I hadn’t showered or shaved for a week, my clothes were stained and raggedy, and I was totally convinced that I was the most authentic wreck of a junkie ever to try to make a buy. I approached the dealer, and the first thing he says to me is ‘Take off your shoes.’”
Q started laughing before I even got to the punch line. “And I bet you had on a nice clean pair of socks,” he said.
I nodded. “Dumbass rookie mistake. After a year I transferred out because I hated smelling like the inside of a Dumpster, but by the time I left I’d gotten pretty good at lying. I guess I’ll find out if I still can pull it off.”
“Drug dealers are hard to con because they think everybody’s a narc. Jessup and Jewel are two-bit hustlers who have no reason to suspect you’re undercover. You’ll do fine. Just act like the guy in those old Westerns: you’re Black Bart walking into the saloon.”
“More like Caucasian Bart,” I said, “but I get your point.”
I paid the check and found a store in Chinatown that sold burner phones. Then I walked to Grand Street and took the D train uptown to the Bronx. It was a forty-five-minute ride, which gave me plenty of time to repeat my cover story to myself till it was second nature.
I got off at Bedford Park Boulevard and walked another eight blocks to Webster Avenue. The club was called Rattlesnake. If you could call it a club. It was more of a dive bar with a sandwich board on the sidewalk that said LIVE MUSIC TONIGHT.
There was no line, no velvet rope, just a guy in a muscle shirt sitting outside. He nodded at me and said, “Welcome to the Snake. Two-drink minimum.”
It was relatively crowded for a Tuesday night. Close to a hundred people, most of whom checked out the white guy, then went back to what they were doing. I went to the bar, ordered a beer, and found a table near the back, as far from the music as possible.
Two minutes later, just as Q had predicted, a good-looking man with shoulder-length dreads and a black beard flecked with gray pulled up a chair and flashed me a warm, gracious smile.
“Garvey Jewel,” he said. “You with a label?”
I barely looked up from my beer. “No.”
“You just into hip-hop?”
“Not a fan,” I said.
“Then you in the wrong room,” Jewel said, his smile morphing into a challenge. “And if you’re here to cop some blow, you really in the wrong room. This place may look low-rent, but the old lady who owns it keeps it clean. Nobody underage. Nobody dealing. Just a bunch of people who come for the drinks and the music.”
“I’m in the right room. But I didn’t come for the music.”
“Then why you here?”
“Same reason I go to the parking lot at Home Depot when I’m looking for day workers.”
“What kind of day work you talking about?”
“Night work, actually. Not too dangerous, and it pays well.”
“How well?”
I bent low and leaned forward, clasping my hands on the table. This was the moment of truth, and I dug down, hoping to channel the gravitas of Al Pacino and the psychological instability of Christopher Walken. I dropped my voice to a whisper. “More than you and your partner made last Wednesday night on the Upper East Side.”
He pushed his chair away from the table, and his hand instinctively went to the waistband of his pants. “You a cop?”
I didn’t flinch. “Answer me this, Garvey. Do you think the NYPD heard about your little blindman’s bluff game at the Mark hotel, but there were no African American cops around, so they sent one lone white guy up to the Bronx to arrest you? Or do you think maybe you bragged to some woman who was sucking your dick, and she told her friend, who told her friends, who told their friends, and it finally got back to me?”
“Fucking Inez,” Jewel said. “She got a big mouth.”
Q had been right. “Guys like Jessup and Jewel won’t be happy with a fat wad of money,” he had told me. “They need to impress people with how they got it. Let him think the leak came from a girlfriend.”
“What if he calls her on it?” I said.
“She’ll deny it,” Q said. “But he won’t believe her. He’ll believe you.”
“Don’t be mad at Inez,” I said to Jewel. “She brought us together, didn’t she? Now, would you like to hear what I have to say, or should I leave?”
“Wait here,” he said, and walked toward the front of the room.
Two minutes later, he was back with his partner, who was wearing an Apple Watch on his wrist, just like the blind man in Reitzfeld’s story.
“Twenty-five words or less,” the new guy said. “And it better be good.”
“Saturday night,” I said. “Serious poker game in Jersey. The buy-in is a hundred and fifty grand. I’ll be on the inside. I’m going to need some…”
“Some what?” Apple Watch said. He looked around, wondering why I had stopped. “Nobody’s listening. Keep going.”
“That was twenty-five words,” I said. “I was counting on my fingers.”
“You’re a piece of work,” he said, extending a hand. “Tariq Jessup.”
I shook his hand and dropped my next whopper. “The name is Johnny Wurster,” I said. “My friends call me Johnny Fly Boy.”
“You a pilot?” he said.
“Back in the day, a couple of gorillas came over to my apartment and tossed me over a seventh-floor balcony. I bounced off an awning and landed on a three-hundred-pound doorman. I’ve been Johnny Fly Boy ever since.”
The two of them laughed. “Okay, Mr. Fly Boy,” Jessup said. “You just bought yourself a few thousand more words. Tell us about this poker game.”
I told them all about it, and they hung on every word. I was their Nigerian prince.