Blue Belle

'The world I live in, it's a lot deeper underground than any subway. It's a world where you can buy a baby's heart.'

I held her against me. 'Don't ask questions so much, little girl. I only got ugly answers.'

She pulled back from me, dry-eyed. 'You saw this? You saw this yourself?'

'Yeah. Guy's kid was in the hospital. Dying. Needed a transplant. It was in the papers, on TV. Looking for a donor. Baby only had a few days to live. He got a call.

They promised him a baby's heart. Fresh. All packed and ready for transport to the hospital. Twenty-five thousand, they wanted. He made some calls - a lot of calls. A cop I know sent him to me. I went down the tunnel.'

'What happened? Did they have the heart?'

'Just like they promised.'

'You took it? The baby was saved?'

'Yeah.'

She nodded. 'Damn their souls to hell.'

'I don't do souls,' I told her. 'Just bodies.'

97

The handball court was in the shadows of Metropolitan Hospital, just off 96^th Street near the East River. Once the tip of Spanish Harlem, it was now liberated territory - the yuppie land-grab machine wouldn't be satisfied until gentrification ate the South Bronx. I liked it better the old way, when the human beings lived in the tenements and investment bankers lived in the suburbs. Now we got plenty of rehab apartments for tomorrow's leaders. And more people living in the streets than they have in Calcutta.

I parked under the East Side Drive overpass and walked over to the court. Ten minutes to one. I watched people playing: handball, paddleball, basketball. No stickball. People working too. Working the cars. Selling flowers, newspapers, clean windshields. Ninety-sixth Street was the DMZ when I was coming up. North was theirs, South was ours. Now it all belongs to someone else - they just let us play there while they're at work downtown.

'These chumps can't play no basketball.' A voice behind me. Pablo. The lack of a single Puerto Rican in the NBA makes him crazy.

He was wearing his white doctor's-coat over a black turtleneck, his round face looking the same way it did when he walked out of Harvard fifteen years ago.

'Gracias, compadre,' I said, thanking him for coming. He shook hands the way he always does, using both of his.

'Something bad?' he asked me, standing close.

'I have to meet a man. Tonight. He hurt one of my brothers. He said it was a message. I don't know what's on his mind. I want to walk away - tell him I got no beef with him. But he might not go for it.'

'You have Max.'

'Can't use him for this, Pablo. It may be Max he wants. He's a karateka. Been going around the city, challenging sensei in their own dojos. Max, I think his name may be in the street over this. You know Lupe? The guy who sets up the cockfights?'

Pablo spat on the ground. 'I know him. Mamao. A punk. Tough talk - no cojones.'

'He set up a match. Between this guy I have to meet and a Jap. Duel to the death.'

'I heard about that. In Times Square?'

'Yeah. That's what I mean. Seems like everybody's heard about it. Max fights this guy, he's got no win. Probably have cops in the audience.'

Pablo looked at me. 'Max wouldn't walk away from a challenge.'

'So he doesn't get to hear one.'

'I see. You want your back covered when you meet this guy . . .?'

'Mortay.'

'Muerte?'

'Yeah. I don't know how he spells it, but it means the same thing.'

'He's not a problem for us?'

'Not for you. Not now. I'm working on something, and I just bumped him accidentally. How he's tied in - if he's tied in - I don't know for sure.'

'You chasing a missing kid?'

'Dead kids. The Ghost Van.'

Pablo's round face went hard. His eyes were dark, flat buttons behind his round glasses. 'Baby-killers. That van comes into our barrio, we'll make it a ghost.'

'It just works off the river, near Times Square. I got a lot of threads, but no cloth.'

'This Mortay . . . he knows?'

'I don't know. I'm not gonna ask him. He lets me walk, I'm gonna promise him I won't come his way again. He wants me off the van, I'm off the van.'

'That's what you'll tell him.'

'Yeah,' I said, lighting a smoke.

'What time is your meet?'

'Midnight tonight. The playground behind the Chelsea Projects.'

'How many people do you need?'

'Just one,' I told him. 'El Canonero.'

Pablo's lips moved. Just a tic. Nothing else showed in his face. 'He only does our work.'

'I don't want him to take anybody out. Just be around, break a couple of caps if he has to. He can do it from a distance. I figure maybe the roof . . .'

'He only does our work. He is not for hire. My people are soldiers, not gangsters.'

'They do what you say.'

'They follow me because they follow the truth. My personal friendship is with you, hermano. I can commit only myself.'

I put my hand on his shoulder. 'I understand what you say. I respect what you say. But there are two reasons why he should do this.'

'Yes?'

'He does only your work. More than once, I have also done your work, this is true?'

'True.'

'El Canonero does this work tonight for UGL, it is UGL I owe. Comprende?'

He nodded. Rubbed the back of his neck like it was stiff. A young Hispanic woman in a blue jogging outfit stopped her slow circuit of the courts and trotted over. He took her aside, speaking in rapid-fire Spanish. She took off, running hard now, heading for the street.

We watched the basketball game. It wasn't in the same league as the semipro action at the court on Sixth Avenue in the Village, but it was intense. I asked him about his kids. Pablo's got a lot of kids - the oldest one's in college, his baby girl's still in diapers. He's never been married. Takes care of all his children. He never seems to make anybody mad with all his tomcat stuff, not even the women who have his babies. Most of them know each other.

I met Pablo in prison. He wasn't doing time - he was doing his residency in psychiatry. His supervisor was a wet-brain who did five-minute interviews with the cons before they saw the Parole Board. And handed out heavyweight tranquilizers any time they shoved the Rx pad under his nose. I was the wet-brain's clerk - a scam artist's dream job. Five crates of cigarettes and you got the prescription of your choice, twenty crates bought you a 'fully rehabilitated' write-up for the Board. It only took Pablo a month to read my act, but he never said a word. I was on to him faster than that. He wasn't studying mental illness among convicts - he was recruiting.

The woman in the jogging suit ran back to us, pulled Pablo aside. Pablo turned to me. 'You parked close by?'