The Devil Read online

  We let the real Brink’s guy go inside and get the pickup. When he came out through the alley (and he always came out through the alley—he never went out through the front), Lily put the thousand-watt smile on him and played out whatever gambit was going to work for that guard.

  Just like she always knew what gambit was going to work ahead of time, Lily also knew which route was going to work—and which one wasn’t. Sometimes she cursed like a sailor when the truck pulled up and then led me through a warren of evil-smelling back alleys to another pickup point. There was never a reason to move that I could see, but I went along willingly enough.

  Once the guard stopped to talk to her, it was my turn. I never had to do anything but hit him with the gun. She’d position the guy so his back was to the place where I was hiding. I’d just step forward and smash the Glock into the base of his skull until he went down. At first, it took two, three, sometimes four hits to get the guy on the bricks. By the end of those thirty days, I could get him the first time, every time.

  Practice makes perfect, just like they say.

  Come to think of it, I don’t even know if that Glock had any bullets in it. Funny I never thought of that until now.

  I have no idea how no one saw us hanging around before the heists, or walking back to her warehouse off Third in Gowanus with a bag full of cash. A redhead wearing a Brink’s uniform over skin that looked like it would sunburn under a night light, and a dazzling Kool-Aid red-haired woman dressed in a black leather minidress should have stuck out like sore thumbs, but no one so much as glanced our direction. Not once.

  After doing stickups with Lily for a month, and spending all my time with her, I was gone. I mean, the real me, the war hero, was just gone. I wasn’t even the ghost of a war hero anymore. The war hero was her victim too, you see? I was enthralled, ensorcelled, bewitched—whatever you want to call it.

  The last Brink’s robbery ended just like the first thirty-two: with a shopping trip up and down Fifth. She didn’t buy a single thing for herself—not ever. I thought that was weird because I never saw her wearing anything but that black leather minidress and those knee boots or thin air. I never said anything, though, because in either outfit, she was a vision of heaven.

  No, she never bought anything for herself. She bought me presents instead. Few of them were anything more than expensive trinkets that I had no real use (or desire) for, but she did buy me a beautiful Bowie knife forged from Damascus steel, complete with a hand-carved hilt and engraved leather sheath. Then she decided I needed a nice belt to wear the thing on, which is how I ended up with a python-skinned Gucci belt with a buckle like a tiger’s head. It was twelve-hundred dollars. For a belt, for Christ’s sake.

  She was right, though. The big Bowie knife looked great hanging from it, even though it was probably illegal to wear it like that.

  Her gaze crawled over me once I got the belt buckled. “It looks nice.” Then she looked me in the eye. I thought my heart was going to explode. I’d been with women—a few, anyway. I was no Romeo, but I did all right. But I’d never had such a high-wattage look turned on me and—well, let’s just say it had a rather noticeable effect on me.

  She tilted her head to the side with a crooked smile on her face. “Done shopping?” she asked in a light, playful voice.

  All I could do was nod and swallow. There was just something coming off her—a scent, maybe. Or witchcraft, I don’t know. Whatever it was, my throat was dry, my knees were shaking, and I thought I was going to be injured for keeps south of the belt buckle if something wasn’t done to alleviate the pressure.

  Laughing, she took me back to the warehouse. When we got inside, she turned to face me with a little smile on her lips. Keeping her eyes on mine, she dropped the bag of loot and reached behind her. I heard the zipper of her dress, and it sounded like the trumpets of Heaven.

  I didn’t think any more blood could fit where blood goes when a man is excited, but I swear the sound of the zipper almost made me pass out from lack of blood to my brain.

  She slid out of the skin-tight leather minidress and kicked the boots off. She was stark naked underneath. I have no idea how I never noticed that before that moment, but let me tell you, from that moment on, I found it very hard to think of anything else.

  I fucked the devil, and she was…well, Jesus Christ, she was fantastic. She was also savage and demanding.

  Oh, and the color of her hair was natural after all.

  That first time, it was… I don’t know how to describe it, but she hadn’t lied to me in the alley back in the beginning. She got me high on her body. And you know what? I didn’t feel like shit afterward. No, no. I felt like doing it again and again and again, and she didn’t seem to mind at all.

  After I was too sore to go on, we got up to treat the long scratches and bloody fingernail marks all over my torso. She hummed as she dabbed here and there with antiseptic ointment. The song was eerie, almost frightening, and sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before—although it did remind me of stuff I’d heard in small villages while I was in Iraq.

  “Lily, what’s that—”

  She put her finger to my lips, silencing any more questions without breaking the tempo of the song she hummed.

  The song was full of long, drawn out, mournful sounds and dissonance. I swear she was humming more than one note at the same time, making clashing, jangling chords. I have no idea how she did it, but there was something in the song—something that loosened me up inside my head.

  I felt free of the coke for the first time since I’d taken my first taste.

  When she was done humming, when she was done treating the scrapes and skin burns that she’d inflicted on me in her passion, she turned to me with a solemn look. Her expression scared me down to the soles of my feet. I’ve never been looked at like that by anyone else.

  “Robert, we need to talk about something that is very serious,” she began, eyes roving the room. “I let you taste your reward this afternoon. In a typical situation, I wouldn’t do this, but I like you, Robert. I like you a lot. And, like I said back in that alley, you are meant for great things.” She looked me in the eye. “You are meant to be by my side. I’ve been alone for a long time, so I let my guard down. I let you taste the reward before I even asked you to perform the task that would earn it. This is serious, Robert—as serious as death—and I need you to understand that.”

  Feeling like I was moving in slow motion, I nodded, never taking my eyes off hers. I’m not sure I could have had I wanted to.

  “There is a man. He’s… Let’s just say he’s offended me. He’s cheated me. He used me, Robert, in a very repugnant and low way. I helped him rise to the top of a certain organization, and once he got there…” She sighed, and the sound brought goose bumps to the skin on my back and arms. “He took his reward, and then he abandoned me.”

  I could feel her rage thrumming in the air, although there was nothing in her face or her luxurious body that betrayed any hint of even annoyance. Her rage surrounded us like an invisible fog of caustic fumes. It burned when I breathed it in. My eyes watered from its sting. “I’ll kill him,” I said, and I meant it.

  She nodded as if she had expected no other response. “Ah, Bobby, I know you would, and that’s why I can’t tell you who he is yet. Yes, he will die painfully. But first, I want to hurt him, Robert, and for that, we need an organization of our own. One that rivals his. I want him to wonder who is behind it. I want him jumping at shadows. I will be there when he dies, no question. But when we torture him—when we take everything away from him—he has to know that he is powerless in the face of my wrath.”

  I nodded so hard and fast that the vertebrae in my neck all cracked at once. “That bastard will know, Lily. He will know how much we hate him. Tell me that motherfucker’s name, and I’ll go tell him right goddamn now. I don’t care who he is, I’ll—”

  She patted my cheek, and my rage cooled. “Not yet, dear Robert. First, you have to promise me.”
/>   “I promise,” I blurted. “Anything for you, Lily.” I was surprised at how savage I felt, how diabolical. It was as if those feelings were at the core of me and always had been, like those words were always there, just waiting for that moment. I remembered her saying that I was meant to be by her side, and at that moment, it seemed like either that was true, or there was no such thing as truth.

  She smiled and patted my cheek again, dragging her fingernails through my stubble this time. “I know. But this is important. You must promise me explicitly, Robert, that you will stick with me. You have to…” Her shoulders hunched, and her breath hitched like she was fighting back tears.

  “Oh, Lily… Oh, baby, I’ll never treat you like that bastard did. Never, baby. I swear on my eternal soul.”

  She looked at me for a long moment, teary-eyed and mournful, and then a sunny smile broke over her face. “Oh, Bobbicito, you are a marvel.”

  “I’ve heard I’m a marvel in the sack, too,” I said and waggled my eyebrows like some twisted, ginger version of Groucho Marx.

  “Oh, you are, papi, you are.”

  It took months for those scratches, abrasions, and crescent-shaped fingernail marks to scab over. I had to leave her for the healing to start.

  I built the devil an army, and she was magnanimous in her rewards.

  Lily forbade me to recruit Russians, so the first man I brought to her service was a Dominican named Johnby. He lived in Brooklyn proper.

  It was easier than I thought it was going to be.

  He was in an alley in the West Village, selling little bags of crack for a buck or two to hipsters. He was wearing old, faded jeans and a once-white T-shirt that had a tear on the seam of one sleeve. He wore his hair scalp-short and sported a fierce-looking goatee. He looked like a man with nothing to live for.

  He was perfect.

  I walked right up on him and shoved the dreg who was standing there wheedling and whining aside. “This is beneath you,” I said to Johnby.

  “No shit,” Johnby said. “You got something better for me to do?”

  I looked him over with a critical eye. “I’ve got something better for a man who knows how to be loyal and how to do as he’s told without asking questions.”

  Johnby darted looks up and down the alley.

  I didn’t blame him. I looked about as much like a criminal mastermind as I looked like an underwear model, despite the cool clothes and Gucci belt.

  “And just what would I have to do without asking questions?”

  “That’s a question, brother, if I were to be technical about it. You’d have to do whatever the boss wants us to do.”

  “No questions?”

  “Not if you are smart. Not if you enjoy breathing.” I tried to sound menacing, something Lily had told me not to do, but Johnby took it as a joke instead of as a threat.

  “You’re funny, chan. Which is good because you ain’t got much El Cuco in you,” he said with a small smile.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I muttered. “Rule number two: no Spanish slang. The boss does enough of that, and I don’t speak a word.”

  He laughed. “Okay, boss man, okay.”

  It was that simple. Of course, Lily did most of the real work with her hoodoo pinwheel stare when I brought him around to the warehouse later that afternoon. When we arrived, Lily was standing there as if she knew we were coming and had been waiting. In fact, I had the distinct impression that she was standing in the exact spot and in the exact pose as when she’d given me a pep talk before sending me out to find our first recruit. Like she had just stood there and waited, still as a statue. It was unnerving.

  “Lily, this is Johnby. Johnby, this is the real boss. She’ll tell you what you can call her.”

  She looked at him long and hard for an uncomfortable minute. Johnby stood there as calm as thick cream, looking back at her while I fidgeted and shuffled my feet.

  Finally, she nodded in a curt manner. “You’ll do, montro. Believe me when I say this next bit. Take it to heart, put it in your sock, write it down and read it every day, Johnby. I’m no muelu, inteendo? If I say something, you better believe that I mean that shit.”

  Johnby shrugged and nodded. “Whatever you say, boss.”

  “You know it, montro. If you ever cross me or Bobo over there, you’ll find out first hand.”

  “Find out what?”

  “Que yo soy el diablo,” she said with a harsh edge to her voice. She looked at him, all hard and severe. “I mean it, John-john. I’m the fucking devil.”

  Johnby just shrugged. “Jevi, mayimbe,” he said.

  Lily looked a little confused.

  “It means: it’s cool, boss,” said Johnby.

  She flashed a secret little smile at me. “He’ll do, habibi, he’ll do.”

  I smiled back at her. “Good.”

  “Get me some more.” She pointed at me. “He talks, Johnby, you stand there and look like the baddest chingado walking. He’s the boss, you’re the muscle.”

  We got two more men that day. Both were Dominican. One of them was Johnby’s first cousin. Lily gave them both the same introduction she gave Johnby.

  Later that night, Lily and I had just finished one of our hours-long love-making sessions. I sat up and leaned against the headboard of the fancy bed she had in a small room in the back of the warehouse. I chuckled.

  She looked at me with curious eyes. “What, Bobs?”

  “It’s funny how you tell everyone you’re the devil, baby.”

  She rolled on her side and looked at me, languid and distant. “Yeah? Why is that funny, Bobby?”

  “Because everyone knows the devil’s a man and you don’t have a tail or anything. Who ever heard of a woman devil?”

  She chuckled deep in her throat.

  At first, I thought it was funny—cute, even. But it went on and on and on. She kept chuckling without taking a breath, making that same heh-heh-heh noise like a malfunctioning robot and looking at me with dead, glassy eyes.

  I admit it freaked me out a little. Okay, a lot. The freak was starting to turn into fear when she stopped, but she continued to stare at me unblinking, like a snake. Like one of the raptors from Jurassic Park.

  “Father of lies, right? Red guy, tail, horns?”

  “Yeah.” My voice shook a little when I said it because I wasn’t sure if it would bring out crazy Lily or funny Lily.

  “That was the best one I ever told.”

  “What was?”

  “That I’m the Father of Lies.” She laughed, a deep-throated, thundering laugh as unlike her previous chuckling as night is to day. “As you can see, I’m no one’s father. I’m the daughter of night and sister to wind and storm. The Ifrits call me mother, though I never gave them birth. I am mimicked by succubi and incubi, both. I am chaos by nature, and everyone knows my name.”

  “You’re really creepy, sometimes, Lily.”

  “Lilu said something like that to me once, right before I ate his demonic soul.”

  I slid down into the bed. “Maybe we should talk about something else.”

  She patted my cheek and laughed.

  Over the next few months, we built a criminal organization that rivaled anything I’d ever heard about. I recruited every day while Johnby stood behind me and looked menacing.

  We sent our recruits to Brighton Beach to sell coke. Spectacular coke. I have no idea where she got the coke, as Lily never seemed to leave the warehouse, but she got it by the metric assload. The funny thing is, even though it was primo coke, I was never tempted. Not once. Everything she’d said in that alley was true, from beginning to end. It was just white powder.

  I knew the Bratva wouldn’t let it go on for long, so when Johnby came back to the warehouse late one evening looking scared, and with blood smeared all down the side of his shirt, I wasn’t surprised. He stood in front of us, looking down like he had never seen stained concrete before. He kept opening his mouth and then snapping it shut.

  “Coño, montro. Dique,”
said Lily.

  His eyes snapped up to meet her gaze. “Three of our dealers. Dead. Butchered, Bratva-style. Product’s gone, mayimbe. They left the money blowing in the wind, as if it was beneath them.”

  “Well, then,” said Lily with a delighted smile. “Let’s have us some fun.”

  It was all over the news. Gang warfare in Brighton Beach. Blood in the streets.

  Lily was single-minded and as savage as a tigress. She had a razor-sharp focus—like an apex predator set loose in a barnyard. She spent the blood of our gang as fancy-free as she’d spent the money we’d stolen from all those Brink’s vans.

  If the Bratva made a move on our dealers on the east side, we walloped them on the west. If they beefed up security near the boardwalk, we stole their product and raided their numbers-houses in the north. Lily seemed to know in advance what they were going to do—just like she’d known about the Brink’s drivers. It was unnerving.

  No, it was fucking scary.

  I killed my friend for the devil, and she was ecstatic.

  During a long night of murder and mayhem, we found ourselves alone, Lily and me. I don’t know what happened to the rest of the crew. Some we never saw again. I assume the Ruskies took some of them fishing, if you know what I mean.

  “We should go find some of the others or go back to the warehouse, Lily. They don’t need us out here.”

  “It’s okay, kisa.”

  “What’s a kisa?”

  “It’s Russian for pussycat, Bobbycakes.”

  I stared at her. It was, to my memory, the first time she’d ever answered a question about one of her little foreign slang words. She smiled and patted me on the cheek with the barest hint of a caress. “You are so cute when you are surprised. I’ll have to do it more often, vozlyublenny.”

  I didn’t want to push my luck, so I didn’t ask her what that meant. “We should get back to the warehouse, Lil. There’s no telling who’s out cruising the streets looking for us.”

  “No, no, Bobo. Tonight, it ends.” Her voice was hard, but there was an ecstatic note as well.