The Informant by Marc Olden Page A

anxious to play tug-of-war with the master’s newspaper.
    “Sure do. Gray’s a nice color for you. Has an elegance about it. You ought to wear dresses and skirts more often, not just pants. Dresses suit you.” Even if they are stolen.
    Pretty René and his business partner were peddling stolen property. Neil was as sure of that as he was of the number of toes he had on both feet. Anyway, it was true; Lydia did look nice in that stolen gray dress. Nothing wrong in complimenting your snitch. A woman is a woman is a woman, and they all need stroking.
    “So René’s in the dress business instead of traveling to New Jersey?”
    Lydia nodded in agreement. “Yes. He spends money like water. He’s generous with Olga, with me, even with Shana. He’s got his good side.”
    “Rolando the priest.” Rolando was the only name on the priest that René had overheard.
    “Yes.” Lydia rolled down the window and blew cigarette smoke at the darkened park. “I’ll try to find out if it’s a first or last name, but it’s probably a first name.”
    “Be careful with René. Don’t question him too much. Let him do the talking if you can. Watch yourself. You say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, and you’ve got a problem. We won’t be backing you up twenty-four hours a day, so you’ve got to be cool, got to know what you’re doing, understand?”
    She nodded slowly, bringing the cigarette to her mouth with a tiny hand containing four rings with huge colored stones. “I’ll be careful.”
    Don’t dwell on the hard times, thought Neil. She could get wasted, but don’t remind her any more than you have to. “You keep working like you’re working, and you won’t have to spend a night away from Olga.”
    “You mean that?” Her hand went out quickly to his arm, her face full of trust.
    What the fuck am I saying? thought Neil. Can I promise her that? Jesus.
    “I mean it.”
    At the after-hours club, over drinks costing five dollars each, Bad Red got down to business.
    He liked Neil. Bad Red wanted to see all them nice Eye-talians out there in the suburbs get rich, so he was going to do a tasty deal with Neil.
    Two keys of cocaine, seventy-five percent pure guaranteed. Bad Red just wanted to be friends with Neil and his people. Bad Red, Lonnie Conquest, and Julius Shelton.
    Neil’s heart almost pushed its way up to his throat. Two keys of that kind of pure was at least a hundred thousand dollars. That meant Lonnie and Julius, two black country boys, were well connected. That meant Neil was rolling over people, moving up.
    His mouth was dry, and the excitement almost made him run to the bathroom and piss his heart out, but Neil agreed to a hundred and ten thousand dollars, the biggest buy of his life.

8
    P ARIS.
    To make sure they weren’t being followed, Rolando, the priest, and Barbara Pomal went sightseeing. Near Notre-Dame they stopped at the Esmeralda Café for ham sandwiches and wine. Around the corner from the Cluny Museum, they found a patisserie and bought flan, delicious custard pastries, then walked back to the beautiful medieval courtyard at the Cluny Museum’s entrance and sat on a bench, eating slowly, talking softly.
    Their eyes never ceased to move in all directions. The priest and the Cuban woman were as alert as hungry eagles. To be careless now was unthinkable; at stake was a dope deal involving more heroin and more money than anyone in America had ever put together. Carelessness would, at the very least, cost Rolando and Barbara their lives.
    In narcotics, buyers and sellers were cautious to the extreme and paranoid as a way of life. They sensed surveillance where there was none, they read betrayal where it didn’t exist. Buyers and sellers lived on the edge of an abyss that was both imaginary and real.
    Surveillance, arrest, ripoff, violence, did exist; they were as much a part of dope as glassine envelopes and dirty hypodermic needles. The fear of these things, however, was an even bigger part of