Gate 76 Read online

  I’m sitting on the end of the weight bench, getting ready to do another set while the TV keeps playing the video of the plane.

  The skinny kid turns to me and says, “I watched your fight on YouTube.”

  “Which fight?” Like I don’t already know.

  “That one you lost to—what’s his name? Perkins. The contender.”

  That fight.

  * * *

  It was a priest who first got me into the gym. I had moved to Brooklyn from Philadelphia and lived in a filthy little apartment with my father’s father, who was a worthless drunk. He had once been strong, but a stroke left him unable to swallow solid food. So he mostly lived on beer and shuffled around the apartment. Out on the streets, there was no one to defend me but me, and I got good at it. I got a reputation, and people mostly left me alone.

  This priest, an old Puerto Rican guy named Father Sanchez, kept telling me I was headed for trouble, and when I said I wasn’t, he’d say, “Yeah? What’s your plan, kid?” I’d say my plan was to stay out of trouble, and he’d say that wasn’t a plan. Without goals and skills and timelines, it was just a hope.

  He brought me into Jimmy Rizzardi’s gym where this kid JoJo was working out against a trainer who wore body padding and big black mitts. JoJo glided around the ring like a dancer, moving side to side and popping out quick shots against the trainer’s gloves. He had a natural grace and fluidity that was impossible to teach.

  Sanchez, the priest, pointed up at JoJo and said, “The Bible says God made man in his own image.”

  Jimmy Rizzardi came up and asked what I thought of the kid in the ring. I said I could lay him out with one punch.

  “You want to give it a shot?” Rizzardi said. “Hey JoJo? You wanna spar?”

  JoJo smiled at me and said, “Hey Freddy, step on in.” Then he laughed and added, “It ain’t like on the streets. You can’t do me like you do those other guys.”

  Rizzardi wrapped my hands and put on my gloves and headgear. He told me no hitting below the belt, nothing to the back of the head, and don’t hit him if he’s down or gets spun around.

  JoJo had this big white smile on his face, and I was gonna go in there and wipe it off. Rizzardi said get to it, and JoJo’s trainer stayed in the ring to make sure we kept it clean.

  I went right at JoJo and swung and missed. He popped a short jab in my face, and then I didn’t know where he was. The guy moved sideways like a crab. I went at him again, swung and missed. He popped me three times in a row. Nothing too hard, but it got me confused. How could anyone put three punches together that fast? I never even saw them coming.

  I started getting frustrated, swinging harder and harder. Big, wide, winging punches. Sometimes I swung so hard, my feet came up off the floor and I lost my balance. Every time I missed, he’d hit me two, three, four times. None of them felt too bad, except for a couple I walked right into.

  JoJo started talking to me. “Plant your feet, Freddy. A punch ain’t nothing if your feet off the ground.”

  I kept missing, and I was getting winded. JoJo kept landing short, quick shots right up the middle, and he never looked tired.

  After a few minutes, Rizzardi called a halt. He said, “You got a good chin, kid.”

  I said, “Chin? Did you see the bombs I was throwing? If I’d have caught him, he’d be dead.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t catch him,” Rizzardi said. “You swing like you’re expecting him to stand still.”

  When he took my headgear off and I saw myself in the mirror, I was surprised at how my face was marked up. That guy hit me everywhere. Rizzardi and JoJo and the other trainer were all looking at me, and Rizzardi said, “That really didn’t bother you? All those punches?”

  “No,” I said. “Not really.” That was nothing compared to what my dad used to do to me back in Philly.

  “OK,” Rizzardi said, “come over here and hit the heavy bag.”

  I took a few swings at it. The same wide, winging hooks I had been throwing in the ring. And each time, thwack! The bag would dance, and the chain it hung from would jingle. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

  “All right,” said Rizzardi, “now hit the speed bag.” He took me over to the little black bag, shaped like a teardrop, that hung on a short chain about six feet above the floor.

  I couldn’t hit the thing. I’d smash it once and it would flail around so fast, I’d have to wait for it to stop.

  “Don’t hit it so hard,” Rizzardi said.

  “What’s the point of tapping it?” I said.

  “Look at your face,” Rizzardi said, and he turned me toward the mirror. “Those taps add up.”

  Rizzardi taught me patience, persistence, and discipline. It took him years, but he taught me to take the long view instead of going for the quick win all at once. Pick a strategy, work through it, and give it time. When I look back on it now, I don’t know what the guy saw in me or why he stuck with me as long as he did. But somehow, over time, he brought me around, and I started thinking through what I was doing, instead of just flailing away.

  In my first twelve amateur fights, I went six and six. The six I lost, I lost for the same reason. The game plan didn’t seem to be working in the first round. The other guy was faster than me, or he was moving in ways I couldn’t figure out, so I abandoned the plan and started winging big knockout punches.

  Rizzardi told me that when I quit on the game plan, it showed I didn’t believe in myself. If I didn’t believe in myself, why should he believe in me? He threatened to dump me.

  The next few fights, he said, “I expect you to lose the first round without abandoning the plan. If I see you winging punches, I’m gonna throw in the towel.” So I stayed patient, even when I was sure it was all going wrong.

  I won twenty-eight fights in a row.

  Whenever I got cocky, Rizzardi would make me spar against guys who were way out of my league, and he’d watch them beat the crap out of me. I was stubborn and couldn’t admit someone got the better of me until I had a thorough thrashing. I had spent the first eight years of my life getting beat up by my dad, so my response to being hit was always just—I’m going to kill you. No one will ever put me in that position again. You even think about hurting me, and I’ll fucking kill you.

  That’s the attitude Rizzardi spent years working out of me. He taught me to observe and think, to understand my opponent, to give my plan several rounds to unfold, to expect setbacks, and to stick to the plan even when things looked bad. I don’t know why any man would spend that much time trying to instill discipline into such a stubborn, hardheaded kid.

  But it paid off. I finished my amateur career with a record of sixty-four and nine. In the pros, I trained harder, I trusted my teacher, and I trusted myself. I won my first twelve fights by knockout.

  For years, I worked in a fish market during the day and spent my mornings and evenings at the gym. When I didn’t smell like fish, I smelled like sweat, and the girls had no interest in me.

  When I was twenty-five, my pro record was twenty wins and one loss, with nineteen knockouts. I was fighting in front of crowds of a few hundred, and I had a little bit of a following up in New York. Not much, but a few dozen people knew my name and hung around to say hello after every fight. I wasn’t making any real money as a boxer, but I thought I should have been.

  Then along comes this new promoter named Mancuso. Everyone calls him Slim. He’s got a few fighters, and he’s getting them good exposure. He tells me I have the skills, and he can get me the money. He signs me to a contract and puts me with a new trainer.

  This trainer… I couldn’t figure out what the hell was wrong with him. He’d have me sparring, I’d take a couple hard shots to the ribs, and he’d just clap and say, “Good work. Keep it up.”

  Rizzardi used to yell at me when he saw me getting tagged like that. “How the hell’d you walk into that one? Look at your feet, Freddy. You’re tripping all over yourself, walking right into his power. Ci
rcle the other way and keep the jab on him so he can’t load up!”

  The new guy didn’t push me at all. I should have realized something was wrong.

  On the promotion side, though, Slim knew his job. He got me six fights in eighteen months, and he was turning out big crowds. Four, five, six hundred people. That may not sound like much, but boxers come up the same way stand-up comics do. You spend years putting on your best show in front of a bunch of heckling drunks in some depressing little clubs, but if you do it well, word gets around and the crowds get bigger. Eventually you get the attention of the right people. That’s the way it all seemed to be moving.

  Slim had me fighting in front of the cameras, but I had these nagging doubts about the opponents he was putting me up against. I had fought some tough, highly skilled guys under Rizzardi, each one better than the last. The guys Slim was lining up for me were no better than second-year amateurs. They looked tough on camera, which is why Slim picked them. He made sure that when I knocked those guys out the highlights made it onto ESPN and Fox Sports. They started calling me The Wrecking Ball because of the way I was powering through opponents.

  There was another heavyweight up in New York, a guy named Alvin Perkins, who was also getting some press. He had twenty-six wins and no losses, with sixteen knockouts. By then I was twenty-six and one with twenty-five knockouts. The promoters talked about the match for nine months before it came off. One of us would be moving up to bigger venues. Maybe Madison Square Garden. Maybe an undercard in Vegas.

  The other thing I should have paid more attention to—other than that loser trainer—was Slim’s main line of work. He wasn’t a full-time promoter. I mean, he was good at it, but mainly he was a bookie and a loan shark. When he switched me to the new trainer, he also gave me a bodyguard. A big fat guy named Chuck DiLeo. I didn’t need a bodyguard. I didn’t have enough fans to mob me and no one would bother robbing me because I had nothing to take.

  DiLeo was a bottom-rung enforcer who collected payments from people who owed Slim money. He’d pick me up from the gym in his Camaro and we’d go get four hundred bucks off some college kid who cried when you twisted his arm, or eight hundred from an old man who couldn’t pay until his Social Security check came in. Slim never trusted DiLeo with the tough cases. He wouldn’t send him on a job that required a gun because he knew DiLeo was a coward. Even though he was six-six and over three hundred pounds, DiLeo wouldn’t hit anyone unless he was sure the guy wouldn’t hit back. It took me a while to figure out that I was DiLeo’s bodyguard. I was the extra muscle he brought along to make collecting easier.

  This was the team I had around me when I went into the fight of my life. I knew that lazy trainer wasn’t going to get me in shape, so I asked Slim to put me back with Rizzardi. He said that couldn’t be done. Those were his words. Couldn’t be done. Like it was up to someone else. That was a bullshit answer, and I knew it.

  So I took it upon myself to do the work. I went back to the principles Rizzardi taught me. I ran extra miles each morning. I wrote out a chart of what to eat at every meal for sixty days and I stuck to it. I doubled my sit-ups and strengthened my neck, so the punches wouldn’t rock my head so bad. I snuck back into the old gym—Slim didn’t like me going there—and found better sparring partners. I did all this on my own. I wasn’t gonna let an opportunity slip by after ten years of hard work.

  * * *

  The skinny kid’s still looking at me, waiting for my comment on the Perkins bout.

  “Tough fight,” I say. I stand up and grab my water bottle and walk away, but he follows me past the weight rack, past the TV that keeps showing the video of the plane.

  “What happened?” he says. “It looked like you were winning.”

  “I was winning.”

  Leave me alone, kid. Don’t you get it?

  “Then why’d you quit? You had the guy. Why’d you stop punching?”

  That’s really the wrong question.

  “I guess it wasn’t my night,” I say.

  “What happened in your next fight?”

  The kid has this luster in his eyes, like he’s looking for a hero.

  “There was no next fight. Drop it.”

  “But why would you quit after you—”

  I pull up short at the entrance to the locker room. “What do you want me to say? That I gathered up my courage and bounced back and it all turned out OK? You want some fucking moral to comfort you? Work hard. Put your heart into it, and it’ll all work out. Is that what you want to hear? Because that’s not how it works.

  “The way it works is a fucking airplane blows up and a bunch of people who don’t deserve it die for no fucking reason at all. That’s how it works. The way it works is somebody decides they need to get paid, and if they have to ruin a guy’s career or kill a hundred and eighty-eight people, they don’t fucking care. You understand that, kid? Because the sooner you get it, the less time you’ll waste being surprised and disappointed.”

  All the shine goes out of those dark, soulful eyes. He looks like a dog whose owner just walked out on him.

  Sometimes I fucking hate myself.

  4

  By 8:45, I’m in the office. Bethany and Leon are at their desks, digging through the passenger list from the Hawaii flight.

  The office is a big room on the second floor of a 1980s building on M Street, with a light gray carpet, overhead fluorescents, and big windows that look out onto the newer buildings across the street. Attached to the main room is a private side-office for Ed. He keeps his door open when he’s here, closing it only for private conferences.

  Bethany brought in a few plants to make the place look less sterile. I’m not sure how much of a difference it made. Most of the time, I’m just staring at my monitor.

  Bethany came to us a couple years ago from a public library in Silver Spring. She walked in one day, put a résumé on my desk, and said, “OK, let me tell you what a reference librarian can do for you. Do you know what kinds of records are scattered across our nation’s libraries that have not yet been digitized?”

  “What?” I didn’t even understand the question.

  “Google can’t answer everything, you know.”

  She went on for a few minutes about how to find obscure bits of information while I sat there taking stock of her. She was in her midtwenties, a little above average height, with a thin curveless build, like a young boy. She had fair skin with light freckles, pale blue eyes, blonde eyebrows, and long straight strawberry-blonde hair that she kept pushing away from her face as she talked. You couldn’t see her blonde eyelashes at all until she was right in front of you. Her lack of color and curves made her look like she’d been washed and ironed too many times, but she was earnest and animated, expressing every point with her whole face, her long arms and thin hands.

  She had obviously done her research on us and what kinds of information we needed to dig up. She also had a folder full of résumés under her arm.

  I interrupted her while she was saying something about the Homeland Security Digital Library. “Excuse me—how many résumés are in that folder?”

  That stopped her in her tracks. “Um, what?”

  I realized then that she had rehearsed the whole spiel. My question threw her, and she lost some confidence.

  I asked again. “How many résumés do you have with you?”

  “Ten. But I only have four targets today.”

  “What do you mean targets?”

  She opened the folder and showed me a set of neatly printed pages listing information about each company, including what they did, who held key positions, who was responsible for hiring, what types of information they needed, and which online resources could help them. She even had notes on each company’s history and culture.

  “Where’d you dig all this up?” I asked.

  “I’m a reference librarian,” she said. “This is what I do. Only right now, they have me reading story-time to preschoolers, bec
ause they don’t need a reference librarian.”

  She said she was a year out of school and couldn’t find a job she liked. She didn’t show well on a résumé, so she preferred to go looking for work in person. “It’s impossible to stand out in someone’s inbox against five hundred other candidates.”

  At the time, we were digging up dirt on political candidates in Virginia. I called Ed and told him we needed to hire this woman. We did, and she hit the ground running.

  Leon is a different story. He’s a tall, thin kid, about twenty-four, with a high-top fade and pants that never quite reach his ankles. He grew up in a part of Northeast DC that’s become gentrified recently. Ed goes to church with his aunt.

  Leon is comfortable around the computer and awkward around people. He spent most of his youth indoors, playing video games. How he got by in that neighborhood without getting beat up all the time, I have no idea. Maybe the other kids didn’t think he was worth the effort.

  Before he came here, he had drifted through a few minimum wage jobs. He tried delivering pizza, but that lasted just two days. You can’t put this kid in front of customers, because he just blurts out whatever crosses his mind. Watching him interact with others can be downright painful. Like, “Have you been putting on weight?” is not the right way to open a conversation with a woman. I don’t know why he doesn’t get stuff like that, but he doesn’t. He’s also very literal about everything. If you say it’s raining cats and dogs, he looks out the window and corrects you. “No, man. That’s just water.”

  Leon’s desk faces the wall, because he doesn’t like to be distracted by people walking by. He likes to be alone with his computer the way most guys like to be alone with their girlfriends. He’s tenacious when he digs for information, but he gets off track easily. He’ll find some bit of data that interests him but has nothing to do with the case he’s on—like changes in census data, or unexpected spikes in commodity prices—and he’ll start digging into that. We know when he’s getting off track, because he talks excitedly about the numbers. Bethany can usually rein him in. She can also hand him the most mind-numbing work, and he’ll happily scan through reams of data that would make a normal person’s eyes glaze over. He gets a little too into it sometimes. I’ve seen the kid get into a staring match with his computer and win.