“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.
CHAPTER 57
At three in the morning, Geraldo Segura put on his backpack and slipped out of his hotel on Sumner Place in Brooklyn. He stopped at an all-night market and bought a bottle of Poland Spring, two KIND bars, and the early editions of the New York Post and the Daily News.
He ate the energy bars and drank the water as he walked to the Flushing Avenue station. Then he climbed the stairs to the elevated subway platform, caught an eastbound J train, and scanned the papers.
A picture of the detective wielding a pair of bolt cutters to free Nathan Hirsch was on the front page of both. The Post headline said
HERO COP SAVES LYING LAWYER
He turned the page and read the banner above the lead story:
THAI BOXING CHAMP IS HOTEL BOMBER
There were two pictures of him: one from his high school yearbook, the other from his fighting days in Thailand. At this point, he looked like neither. He’d come to New York with a bagful of professional disguises, and for this outing he’d aged himself twenty years, his head bald on top, with a fringe of mousy gray hair on each side. A matching beard obscured his face.
The details in the article were sketchy because the 911 tape had not yet been released, and Hirsch, who would have lied anyway, had been hauled off before the media could descend on him.
The Daily News coverage was the same as the Post’s, but the caption above his Muay Thai photo made him smile:
The Most Wanted Man in New York
He carefully tore the page from the newspaper, folded it, and put it in the pocket of his Windbreaker. He couldn’t wait to show it to Jam.
He remembered the day he met her. She had come to Klong Prem prison not for the boxing but to watch her older sister parade around the ring in a bikini, holding up a card announcing the number of the next round.
“You’re from America?” she asked him after he’d won four matches that day.
He smiled. She was cute. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Who was your favorite president?” she asked.
“Abraham Lincoln.”
“Then he’s the one I’m going to read about,” she said, flashing a bright smile. “Thanks.”
He was twenty-two at the time. Jam was only twelve.
She came back for his next match and told him she’d read three books about Lincoln. “I cried when they shot him,” she said. “What’s your favorite book that you read when you were my age?”
“To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.”
And so the friendship took hold. Soon Jam would start visiting between boxing matches, and the prisoner and the schoolgirl would talk about literature, philosophy, history, and her favorite subject, America.
“Whenever the girl comes,” Pongrit Juntasa instructed his guards, “let her in. She makes him a better fighter.”
That may or may not have been true, but by the time he was twenty-eight, Geraldo Segura had become Rom Ran Sura, the best Muay Thai boxer in Southeast Asia—with his sights set on the rest of the world.
Special prisoners are afforded special privileges, and one evening Segura was given a hot shower and clean clothes and driven to Juntasa’s house. A guard escorted Segura to the dining room, where the head of the Department of Corrections was standing next to a table set for two.
“Rom Ran Sura, your most recent victory at the World Combat Games has once again brought great honor to the kingdom,” Juntasa announced. “As a reward, His Majesty has graciously reduced your sentence by another seven years.”
Segura silently did the math. He had been fighting for his freedom, and with this latest grant from the king, he would be out by the time he was fifty years old. He thanked his benefactor.
“I have one other gift,” Juntasa said. He raised his hand, a door opened, and Jam Anantasu entered.
“It is her eighteenth birthday,” Juntasa said. “The age of consent. Enjoy your evening.”
He left the room, and Segura stood there, barely able to breathe. Jam was a vision, a goddess in a white-lace dress, her shimmering black hair cascading down to her bare shoulders, her lips parted in a shy smile, her smoldering eyes locked on his. She was no longer a child. She was a woman—the one he wanted to spend his life with. If only she was willing to wait.
They dined. They drank. They talked. They laughed. And then they adjourned to a bedroom suite, where the air was filled with soft music and the scent of jasmine, and they made love by candlelight.