The Empire of Ice Cream Read online

“What really caught her interest, though, were the pieces. She said they were beautiful, golden monsters. The guy didn’t like to be disturbed in the middle of a game, but she had to ask him if they were real gold. He told her, ‘Yes, solid gold. This set is very rare, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Very old—goes back to the sixteenth century.’ The best part of Maria’s story was that he kept the set in a drawer in his hutch—no lock.

  “So we had a blind guy in a wheelchair with hundreds of thousands of dollars of gold without a lock. Of course, I made a plan to swipe it. I had Wolfe get Maria to tell him what time she walked the guy—Mr. Desnia was his name—in the afternoon, so we could get a look at him. I thought about doing the job when they were out of the house, but in that neighborhood during daylight hours, I knew someone would see us. We drove by them slowly a couple of days later as she pushed him down the street.

  He was bent over in the chair, his bald head like a shelled peanut, looking thin and haggard. His hands shook slightly. He wore dark glasses, no doubt to cover his fucked up eyes, and a black, tight fitting get-up like what a priest would wear but with no white collar. ‘That’s the guy with our gold,’ I said after we drove past them. ‘A blind guy in a wheelchair?’ said Mars. ‘Jesus, he might as well just hand it over now.’ We decided not to wait but to do the job the next night.

  “The cops had our prints, so we went and stole some plastic gloves from the grocery store, you know, the kind you could pick up a dime with. We told Maria we’d cut her in if she kept her mouth shut and left the back door unlocked on her way out the night of the job. She agreed, I think because she was in love with Wolfe, which shows you where her head was at. I warned the other guys, whatever they did, not to speak each other’s names during the job. The plan was to get in there, cut the phone wire, put a gag over the old guy’s mouth, and swipe the gold. Plain and simple, no one had to get hurt.

  “The big night came and we spent the early part of it here, in The Tropics, building up our courage with shots of Jack. When it got to be about midnight, we set out in Mars’s Pontiac. We parked on the next street over, snuck through the yard there, and scaled this ten-foot stockade-like fence into Desnia’s backyard. We were all a little high, and climbing over was rough. I didn’t bother bringing a flashlight, ’cause I figured if the guy was blind we could just turn the lights on, but I did bring a pillowcase to carry the gold in and a crowbar in case Maria was wrong about the lock.

  “Maria had left the back door open as planned. We sent Cho-cho in first, as usual. Then, one at a time, we entered into the kitchen. The lights were out there and it was perfectly quiet in the house. All I remember hearing was the wall clock ticking off the seconds. A light was shining in the next room over, the living room. I peeked around the corner and saw Desnia sitting in his wheelchair, a big blanket covering his legs and midsection, dark glasses on. If he could see, he would have been looking straight at me, which was a little nerve-wracking. To his left was the hutch.

  “‘Let’s go,’ I whispered.

  “The second I spoke, he called out, ‘Who’s there? Maria?’

  “Cho-cho moved around behind Desnia with a piece of duct tape for his mouth. Mars said to him, ‘Take it easy and you won’t get hurt.’ Wolfe stood there looking confused, as if he had just come off his high. I got down on my haunches and had to open two drawers of the hutch before I found the board and pieces. It struck me as odd that he didn’t keep them in a box or a bag or something, but the entire board was set up inside the drawer. It took only a second to swipe every one of them up and toss them in the pillowcase. I didn’t bother with the board.

  “I was just going to tell the others, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ when Desnia reached up and pulled the tape off his mouth. Cho-cho tried to lean over and stop him, but the old man drove his fist straight up, connected with Cho-cho under the chin, and sent him sprawling backward into the corner of the room where he knocked over a lamp and fell on his back.

  “With his other hand, the old man flung something at Wolfe that moved through the air so fast I could hardly see it. A split second later, Mike had his hand to the side of his head and there was a sharp piece of metal sticking out of it, blood running down across his face. He went over like a ton of shit. Me and Mars were in shock, neither of us moving, when Desnia flung off the blanket and pulled out this big fucking sword. I’m not shitting you, this sword was like something out of a movie. Then he leaped out of the chair. That’s when Johnny decided it was time to book. Too late, though; the old guy jumped forward into a crouch, swung that sword around, and took a slice out of Mars’s leg like you wouldn’t believe. I mean the blood just sort of fell out all over the place and from the lower thigh down was hanging on by a piece of gristle. He hit the deck and started howling like a banshee.

  “Desnia wasn’t done yet, though. Following the slash on Johnny, he twirled around toward me like a goddamn dancer, and swung the sword again. Luckily, I had the crowbar and held it up in front of me at the last second. It deflected the blow but the blade still cut me on the left side of my chest. I don’t know where it came from, just an automatic reaction, but I swung the crowbar and took him out at the ankles. As he went down, I looked up and saw Cho-cho crawling out through an open window. I dropped the crowbar, grabbed the pillowcase tight, ran across the room, and dove headfirst right behind him.

  “Man, I wasn’t even on my feet before Desnia was sticking his bald head out the window, getting ready to leap through after us. We ran into the backyard, to a corner where there was a shed with a light over it, but there was that damn ten-foot fence. My first thought was to try to jump it, but forget it, Desnia was already there behind us. He would have just slashed our asses. We backed against the fence and got ready to brawl.

  “He walked slowly up to us, with the blade at his side. In the light from over the shed, I could see he had lost his glasses, and I don’t know how he could have swung that sword the way he did, because his eyes weren’t just fucked up, he had none. No eyes, just two puckered little assholes in his head.

  “When Desnia was no more than three feet away, Cho-cho held up the crucifix that hung around his neck, like in a vampire movie, to protect himself. The old guy laughed without hardly a sound. Then he lifted the sword slowly, brought it to Cho-cho’s neck, and with a flick of the wrist just nicked him so he started to bleed. With that, Desnia dropped the sword and turned around. He took two steps away from us and his legs buckled. He went down like a sack of turnips. In the distance I could hear Johnny still screaming like mad, and above his racket the sound of the police siren. Cho-cho and I used the side of the shed to scrabble up over the fence, and we got away with the gold.

  “Sounds crazy, right? The old man turning into fucking Zorro at the drop of a hat? But I’m telling you it was serious. The Martian died that night on the old man’s living room rug. The blade had sliced an artery and he bled out before the ambulance could get there. On top of that, the old man was found dead from a heart attack. But get this, Wolfey got away. While we were out in the backyard up against the fence, he came to, pulled the metal thing out of his head, and split before the cops got there.

  “We left Mars’s car where it was and he took the rap for the whole caper. Maria kept her mouth shut. We all went into hiding, laying low for a while. I had the chess pieces stashed under a loose floorboard in my mother’s bedroom. What was good was that I was pretty sure no one else even knew Desnia had the chess pieces, so the cops didn’t know they were stolen. I thought if we just chilled for a while, I could fence them and we’d be set. Still, I was spooked by what had happened, Johnny’s death and the way it went down. I could feel something wasn’t right.

  “About two months after the heist, I got a call at like three in the morning from Cho-cho. He said he knew he wasn’t supposed to call but he couldn’t take it anymore. He was having these dreams that scared him so much he couldn’t sleep. I asked him what he was dreaming about and he just said, ‘Really evil shit.’ A month after t
hat, I heard from someone that he’d finished the job they started on him in Brooklyn when he was a kid. He’d hung himself in his mother’s attic.

  “The year wasn’t out before both Maria and Wolfe went down too. I’d heard that he’d taken to staying in his grandfather’s shed all the time. She was joining him now on a regular basis, and they had begun taking pills, ludes and Darvon, and drinking while huffing the Zippoway, and that just ate what little there was of their brains, melted that Swiss cheese like acid one night. I should have been sadder at losing all my friends, but instead I was just scared to death and started living the clean life, laying off the booze and dope and getting to my crappy job at the metal shop every day on time. I never even went to Cho-cho’s funeral.

  “After that year ended, I let another six months go by before I started looking around for a fence. I knew it would have to be somebody high class, who dealt in antiques but was willing to look the other way when it came to how you acquired what you were selling. I did some studying up on the way it worked and spoke to a few connections. Eventually, I got the phone number of a guy in New York and the green light to give him a call. Nothing in person until he checked out you and the goods you claimed to have.

  “I got the pieces out from under the floorboards and really looked at them for the first time. The bigger pieces were about four inches tall, and the smaller ones, which I guessed were pawns—I didn’t know shit then about chess—were three inches. They definitely seemed to be made of solid gold. Half of them were figures of monsters, each one different, the work on them really detailed. The other half, I don’t know what they were, but I recognized one as being Christ. The smaller ones looked like angels. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

  “The day finally came when I was supposed to call the guy, which I did, from the pay phone in the back of Phil’s barbershop. I was nervous, you know, sweating how much I was gonna get and still scared at all the ill stuff that had gone down. Well, the phone rings, a guy answers, he tells me, ‘No names. Describe what you have.’ So I told him, ‘Gold chess set from the sixteenth century.’ But the minute I started describing the individual pieces, the line went dead. That was it. At first I thought it was just a bad connection, or I needed more change. I called back, but no one would pick up.

  “Then shit started to really slide. Dreams like Cho-cho described, and I took to drinking again, but drinking in a way I never did before. I lost my job, and on top of it all my mother got the cancer. I was reeling and it took me a while, like two years, to get it together to deal with the damn gold again. Just by luck, I guess, I ran into a guy who knew this guy, a Dominican, who fenced stuff from break-ins out in the Hamptons. I met him one winter afternoon over in the parking lot at Jones Beach. Thinking it might be a setup, I only took three pieces with me.

  “The wind was blowing like a motherfucker that day. It was like a sandstorm even in the parking lot. The guy was there when I pulled up, sitting in a shiny black Cadillac. We got out of the cars. He was short, dark-skinned, wore sunglasses and a raincoat. We shook hands, and he asked to see what I had. I took two of the pieces out and held them up for him to see. He took one look at them and said, ‘Isiaso,’ and then made a face like I was holding a couple of turds. The guy didn’t say anything else, he just turned around, got in his car, and drove away.

  “And that’s the way it went trying to fence them. I’d give it a shot, be turned down, and then get swamped in a lot of bad circumstance. Then I just wanted to unload them and take whatever I could get. Even this guy, Bowes, who bought gold teeth down on Canal Street in the city wouldn’t touch them. He called them La Ventaja del Demonio, and threatened to call the cops if I didn’t leave his shop. It wasn’t until after my mother passed away that I decided to try to find out about them.

  “Imagine me, Bobby Lennin, failer of classes and king of detention, in the library. I don’t think I’d ever been in the fucking place in my life. But I started there, and you know what? I discovered I wasn’t as stupid as I looked. There was some real pleasure in researching them. It was the only thing that offset the depression of drinking. In the meantime, old man Ryan took pity on me and gave me a job bartending here at The Tropics. I barely managed to keep myself from getting too screwed up until he went home in the evening, so as to keep the job.

  “Yeah, I scoured the library, got interlibrary loans, all that good stuff, and I started to crack the story on the chess set. Then, when the Internet came in, I got with that too, and over a period of long years, I put it together. The set was known as The Demon’s Advantage. Scholars talked about it like it was more a legend than anything that actually existed. It was supposedly crafted by this goldsmith in Italy, Dario Foresso, in 1533, commissioned by a strange cat who went by the name of Isiaso. The dude had no last name as far as I could tell.

  “Anyway, this Isiaso was from Hispaniola, now the Dominican Republic. In 1503, I think it was Pope Julius II declared Santo Domingo an official city of Christendom. It was the jumping-off place for European explorers who were headed to South and North America. Isiaso was born the year the pope gave the two-fingered salute to the city. Our boy’s father was Spanish, an attaché to the crown, there to oversee the money to be spent on expeditions. You know, basically an accountant. But his mother was a native, and—here’s where it gets creepy—said to be from a long line of sorcerers. She was an adept of the island magic. Isiaso, who was supposed to be like a genius kid, learned the ways of both parents.

  “When he was in his twenties, his old man ships him off to Rome to finish his education. He goes to the university and studies with the great philosophers and theologists of the time. It was during these years that he comes to see the battle between Good and Evil in terms of chess—the dark versus the light, etc., with the advantage going back and forth. Strategy was part of it, and mathematics along with faith, but, to tell you the truth, I never really completely understood what he was getting at.

  “Somehow Isiaso gains wealth and power very quickly. Rises to the top of the heap. No one can figure out how he came by his wealth and those who cross him meet with weird and ugly deaths. Anyway, he has the funds to get Foresso to undertake the set. And Foresso is no slouch—an apprentice to Benvenuto Cellini, greatest goldsmith who ever lived. ‘Many thought Foresso was his master’s equal’ was how one book put it.

  “Okay, you with me? Enter Pope Paul III, a later successor to Julius II. He’s this big patron of the arts. Michelangelo worked for him at one time. He hears tell of this incredible chess set being created by Foresso and goes to the guy’s studio and checks it out. Later, he lets it be known to his underlings that he wants the chess set for himself. He sends someone to see Isiaso, and the guy tells him the pope wants to buy it off him. Isiaso has other plans. He knows the Vatican’s going to be funding a university in Santo Domingo, and he tells him what he wants in exchange is passage home and a professor job at the university. I got the idea from my reading that it might have been difficult for him to get the job because he was half-native.

  “He’s surprised when the pope’s go-between says, ‘Cool, we’ll cut the deal.’ What Isiaso doesn’t know is that the Vatican has had their eye on him as a troublemaker, and they want him out of Rome anyway. On the voyage home, the ship drops anchor for a day off a small, uninhabited island. Isiaso is asked if he would like to go ashore and witness a true paradise on Earth. Being a curious guy, he says yes. He and a sailor go to the island in a rowboat. They explore the place; but in the middle of looking around, Isiaso suddenly realizes that he’s alone. When he makes it back to the beach, he sees the sailor in the rowboat heading back to the ship.

  “The ship pulls up anchor and splits, stranding him there. It was the plan all along. They wanted him out of Rome, but they were too afraid of his supposed magic to come right out and boot his ass. So they got the chess set and got rid of him, and the legend has it that he put a curse on the chess set. Legend also has it that if you play the demon side of the board, you can never los
e. You could play fucking Gary Kasparov and not lose. But at the same time, the person who owns it is doomed, cursed, screwed, blued, and tattooed, and you can’t give it away, you can’t throw it away. Believe me, I’ve tried and it’s a shit-storm of misery and the dreams just get too intense. The only way to unload it is to have it stolen from you, and in the process blood must be drawn. Die with it in your possession, and you ain’t going to be seeing paradise.

  “Now,” said Lennin, “what do you think of that? I swear on my mother’s grave that it’s all completely true.” He lifted the bottle and filled each of our glasses. “And the biggest kicker of all is that I dug all this up on my own. Man, I could have gotten through high school and college, for Christ sake.”

  “So, you believe in the curse?” I asked.

  “I’m not gonna bore you with how many times I tried to dump the pieces,” he said.

  “You don’t seem cursed, though,” I said.

  “Well, there’s cursed and then there’s cursed. Look at me. I’m a wreck. My liver is shot. I’ve been in and out of the hospital five times in the last year. They told me if I don’t quit drinking, I’m gonna die very soon.”

  “What about some kind of addiction center where they can treat you?” I asked.

  “I’ve tried it,” he said. “I just can’t stop. It’s my part of the curse. I’m in here every day, throwing back the booze, it doesn’t matter what kind it is, and staring at that mural, a castaway like Isiaso. It doesn’t make any sense, but I swear that’s his hand in the picture, down in the corner by the bathroom. All my attempts at relationships went south, all my plans to better myself dried up and blew away. I’m slowly killing myself. You see,” he said, lifting his shirt to show me his sagging chest, “the scar is right here, over my heart, and my heart is poisoned.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” I told him. “You were always kind to me when I was a kid.”