“Let’s go inside,” Lupe said.

  “Inside?” he mumbled. Seconds later, they were in front of a door. He pulled it open and was surprised to see a massive ballroom. Much like the restaurant, the ballroom was a once upon a time regal place. Decorated in exquisite deco, the paint was peeling while the once picturesque pillars were stained and chipped.

  The wooden floors, once a place where couples waltzed, had buckled years ago. The floor reminded Ferrara of the couples he saw dancing at the resort where he used to work. He’d learned a lot about Americans at that place, where older white couples talked to him about food, music and the art of romance. When their wives weren’t around, the men loved talking about sex.

  On the side of the room, caved into the floor was a broke down baby grand that a now dead pianist used to play George Gershwin and Cole Porter tunes on as the sequined and tuxedoed crowd lost themselves in good times, good music, good fortune, good liquor and cigarettes. Walking deeper into the room, he noticed a massive bar with stools in front. Ferrara and Lupe sat on the stools. After taking in the decayed grandeur of the rooftop, he chuckled.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Everything. Where the hell are we?”

  “It’s my secret hideout. When I first moved into the Lafayette, there was an old white woman I used to run errands for. She’d lived in the neighborhood for forty years and told me stories about the roof gardens and ballrooms. One day, I decided to explore, and I stumbled on a few hidden places.” Suddenly, Lupe stopped talking, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Innocently, Ferrara touched his face. “Thank you. You saved my life.”

  They both stood up and smiled. In that decayed room, they kissed passionately. And then, as though there was a big band in his head, he began humming “Moonlight Serenade.” Though he didn’t know the song’s title, he’d heard it many times as he watched resort guests gracefully gliding across the dance floor. There was a beautiful innocence to the song, and for the next three minutes he and Lupe forgot they were fugitives on the run.

  Afterwards, they sat in one of the dusty lounge chairs, where they cuddled and eventually, after wiping the dust from the chaise lounge, made love. Prior to that moment, Ferrara was a virgin, but, already mature beyond his years, he felt as though he’d finally taken the last step into manhood.

  Come morning, they awoke to the sound of cooing pigeons and the sun in their eyes. He felt on top of the world, and then reality sank in. “I can’t leave without saying goodbye to my mother,” he told her.

  Lupe sighed. “It’s a mistake, I tell you. But, if you insist, what can I do? I’ll meet you downstairs in an hour. If you’re not here, I’m going to Philly without you.”

  A soft rain fell as Ferrara walked towards the Lafayette Hotel at seven o’clock in the morning. Ferrara saw the flashing red lights on top of the police cars and an ambulance from a block away. The closer he got to the building, the heavier his footsteps felt. As though he were wearing hundred-pound metal weights on each foot, he didn’t know if he should slow down his pace or move faster. Turning into the building’s entrance, he saw his sister’s sorrowful face glaring from the window of the caseworker’s office.

  “That’s her son!” a voice yelled. Yet, before the police could stop him, he dashed up the dirty staircase. Within moments, he was on the ninth floor. Although it was crowded with real police, African security guards, and hotel workers, no one tried to stop him as he dashed down the dirty hallway and rushed into his room.

  A few men were milling in front of the bathroom when Ferrara pushed by them and saw his naked mother hanging from the shower by a thin bath towel, rosary beads hanging from her right hand. Bile rose in his throat as he stepped backwards and stared. Tears rolled down his face, and he felt faint. Outside, thunder clashed, and it began to pour. His mother’s beautiful face was blue, her tongue hanging out. There were black marks around her neck; her bowls had exploded, and the bathtub was filled with shit. A blue fly landed between her eyes.

  One of the cops turned away from the corpse and saw Ferrara behind him. It took a minute, but suddenly there was a flash of recognition on the cop’s pale face. “Isn’t that the kid who put Kelly in the hospital?” the plainclothesman yelled. “Get that punk in bracelets and over to the fucking precinct NOW! What’s wrong with you guys; how the fuck did you let him get this far.” The cops placed Ferrara in cuffs and pushed him out of the room, down the hall and into the creaky elevator. He figured the only reason they didn’t beat his ass was because the caseworkers were also in the hall. Downstairs, he saw his sister’s sad face, and he felt deeply ashamed. Stepping into the downpour, the cops banged his head against the roof of the squad car a few times before pushing him inside the ride.

  Seconds later, just as the car was about to turn on 8th Avenue, he saw Lupe walking down the avenue towards 48th Street and the garage where Raymond Torres parked his car. Ferrara knew that he’d never see her again, but he’d think about Lupe Santana until his dying day, holding on to the memory of first love and last night of happiness.

  Back to TOC

  The Money Party

  (inspired by the song “Get on the Good Foot”)

  Mysti Berry

  After Justine started walking with a cane, she avoided the server room get-togethers. She’d been a young techie herself, back before cell phones and iPads. Nowadays, she couldn’t bear the way the young ones’ laughter cranked up after she said her goodbyes and closed the door behind her. So, she stayed at her workstation testing the code that Brett and the other developers wrote. 3:30 PM was too early for her to drink, anyway.

  Brett breezed by her with a six-pack under his arm, headed for the server room. He stopped long enough to stare at his image on the large computer screen at his desk. The young coder started to adjust his blond hair but then just smiled at himself instead. Justine thought he looked like a pigeon transfixed by its own image in the plate glass along Market Street.

  “You gonna finish testing my code today?” He said, still looking at himself. It took Justine a minute to realize he was talking to her.

  “Sure thing.”

  Brett was one of the few at work who appeared to have no empathy for her or anyone else. His code was always the sloppiest and took the longest to test, and he was the quickest to blame her if his module had bugs once it got into production. A few months back, she’d started just rewriting his code, as that took less time than finding his bugs. Brett had never seemed to notice, and the group’s quality metrics had risen. Win-win, as Brett would say.

  He finally turned away from his own image and looked at her. “You keep working on my code, I’m sure we’ll both get a promotion.”

  She was working on his code, all right. He and everyone else would get the surprise of their lives when she was done.

  Near 5 PM, Justine sat, staring at the Enter key, ready to strike. She felt it calling to her, like a cartoon Satan.

  “You going home soon?” Her boss, Nitin, stood at her side, smiling down at her. Justine gasped, and her hand stopped hovering, snapping to her chest in a fist. The director of engineering was a wee bit too handsome for Justine at the best of times. Being nice to her when she was this close to committing her first crime was too much.

  “Didn’t mean to sneak up on you. Just don’t want you to stay too late—time for the weekend to begin!”

  Justine said, “Yup. Just working to get this last module clean.” Justine worked in QA—quality assurance engineers who looked for logic bugs and other problems with code before it was added to the core system.

  Nitin sat down in the chair next to her. He smelled of IPA and ozone—he must have come from the Friday night party in the server room, where Brett had gone with his six-pack. He stared at her, his head cocked, for a long moment.

  “You seem worried lately, Justine. Are you okay?”

  She stifled a laugh. The earth was on fire, government was gridlocked, and her neighborhood was full of people who were hungry. What wasn’t there to worry about? Every fourth person near her was someone who’d given up on ever getting a job, much less a good one. In San Francisco, you were never far away from the absurdly rich or the obscenely poor.

  “I’m fine, thanks for asking. I just wish I knew what these code modules were for. I could test them better if I knew.” Justine stared at her hands, blushing. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d lied to her boss.

  Nitin reached out and patted her forearm awkwardly. “My favorite thing about you. Fighting for quality every day—you know you are our best QA person, right? We hear from our customer how happy they are with this project, so maybe take a deep breath and relax? You enjoy Monday off with the rest of the company, okay? Quarterly reset!”

  Justine smiled and patted Nitin’s hand in return. She used the gesture to hide her other hand as it pressed the Enter key. Quarterly reset indeed.

  Justine hadn’t expected the fallout from her single keystroke to be so immediate or so widespread. Her own neighborhood shivering and shimmering like a living beast by the time she crutched her way off the Muni train pleased her, at first. But as the night wore on, and the mood turned anarchic, she wondered how so many people could have been affected. It was supposed to be just one…

  Neighbor Dave’s girlfriend Marilynn rang Justine’s buzzer in a staccato burst that made Justine smile. It sounded so joyful. Her pretty young neighbor smiled up at Justine, who slid open the window upstairs instead of clambering down. It took forever for Justine to get down the stairs these days.

  “Don’t need you for babysitting tonight!”

  “Oh? Did your date cancel on you? He’s crazy, whoever he is.” Marilynn had come into Justine’s life as her neighbor’s son’s girlfriend, but when the boy ended up in Santa Rita prison for a stretch, Justine had just sort of adopted them all. Marilynn shared her life with Justine in funny vignettes and advice about which locals were safe to hire for house repairs and which were long on talk and short on skills. Justine returned the favor with babysitting when she wasn’t downtown working on other people’s software. Justine liked to help and loved having children in her life, even if they weren’t her own.

  Marilynn held her infant on one hip and motioned for Justine to come down. After Justine let her in the security gate, the young woman leaned in to talk. Her wild hair moved in the wind that always whipped down the steep curve of their street. She was backlit by the streetlamp and her hair looked like a Madonna’s halo as she spoke.

  “I don’t know why, but the government or somebody decided to give us enough money to move the hell out of here. I was checking to see if we could pull $20 out of the account for pizza today and it said ten-thousand-plus! Now my slum-ass landlord, sorry for the swear, can keep his damn deposit and we can move back home and help Mom. Her first winter without Dad. I took it all out just before closing, just in case. That’s not a crime, right?”

  She patted a stuffed diaper bag as her toddler shouted from the car double-parked in the safety lane. She zipped it open long enough for Justine to see the green bills stacked neatly to one side of the disposable diapers.

  The young boy called out, “Bakersfield or bust! Come on, Mommy!”

  The young woman whispered to Justine. “You didn’t give us this money, did you?”

  “I don’t have that kind of money. But I’m glad you’re getting the good luck you deserve. You take good care of your children in the Valley, okay?”

  Marilynn blew Justine a kiss and then ran to the City’s oldest Honda, slipping her infant into the car seat with a practiced hand, and then clambered in behind the wheel, pushing boxes and bags around to get at the parking brake. She waved goodbye out the window as she drove off, just as a long round of M80s fired off. People were in the streets, talking and laughing, but to Justine it didn’t feel like a holiday. It felt like the start of a war.

  She was happy for Marilynn, but terrified for what had gone wrong.

  During one of her many long nights fixing Brett’s code, he had let slip that they were working on something for a bank. That’s when she’d had her inspiration and started planting very small bits of code in all of Brett’s modules, going far beyond her QA mandate. After months of dithering, she’d finally pushed the final code and set off a chain of events that should have affected one branch of one bank.

  Judging by the wild mood of her neighborhood and Marilynn’s experience, the effects of her monkey-wrenching were far too broad. Not everyone who was celebrating used the bank that they were consulting for, and certainly not Marilynn, who used the local credit union. Justine tried to visualize what might have happened, but the only thing she could think of terrified her.

  She went to bed, but sleep never came. In her neighborhood, the money party was on.

  At 6:00 AM, two FBI agents appeared at her door and asked if they could speak with her. The first agent asked, before any preliminaries, why she was shaking.

  Justine said, “It’s been a crazy night here. The news…I’m a little scared about all this.”

  Her father had tried his best to teach her poker once, and given up: he said he couldn’t teach someone who had the opposite of a poker face. Now, though, she was in a world of fear, and his lessons came back to her fast and thick: stick close to the truth, volunteer nothing, figure out what they believe. She hoped her age, decrepit in software years, her cane, and the relative modesty of her home, would persuade the agents that she knew nothing.

  The woman, Agent Sandy, said, “We think it likely that someone was trying to hide a bigger crime behind all this chaos.”

  Is that what they really think?

  Justine asked, “But you don’t know who?”

  The agent leaned in. “Most of it went from random strangers with money to random strangers without money. Very hard to figure out who was behind all that activity.”

  Justine fought to keep her face neutral. They were so close to understanding why she’d done it.

  Keep as close to the truth as possible.

  She said, “I’m really at a loss here. Our software company is a bit of a widget shop—we just work on modules without really knowing where they go.”

  Agent Sandy leaned in even closer to Justine, making her lean back. “Brett on your team said he told you it was banking.”

  Justine knew that if she threw Brett and his wretched work ethic under the bus as he had done to her—if Agent Sandy was even telling the truth—the betrayal would make her as suspicious as him.

  “That would be against the rules. Brett wouldn’t do something like that…”

  The male agent, Agent Brown, wrote in his notebook and then said, “Your manager told us you two didn’t know.”

  She wondered if the agents noticed that she’d committed the liar’s first mistake—not actually answering the question. Agent Brown let the statement hang in the air, making Justine feel like she had to say something.

  Volunteer nothing.

  Maybe he was deciding to give charming Brett a second look. Justine hoped against hope that Brett snorted coke or had other expensive hobbies. She knew her own financial life was as dull and easy to verify as a zip code.

  Agent Sandy leaned back and put her hands in her lap, like a child. Signaling trust. Though if you have to send a signal, how much trust is there?

  She said, “Here’s what we’re thinking. Someone from your company injected code into the entire banking system in the western United States, creating this financial chaos, to hide an embezzlement of funds. Most of you high-tech workers have fat bank balances, but for example, your teammate Brett got a ten-thousand-dollar deposit last night. Along with about five hundred thousand other people.”

  Justine’s gasp of surprise was genuine. The code she wrote should have stayed in the one branch she’d chosen, the one bank that Brett had mentioned. This scope was far beyond what she thought she’d done.

  Agent Sandy leaned in again, her face open and friendly. “If you know something about Brett, his lifestyle or his problems, you’d be doing him a favor by mentioning them now.”

  Justine realized what they were after—the three elements of the fraud golden triangle: need, opportunity, and rationalization. Justine guessed the FBI had identified Brett’s need—any tech bro with a low bank balance was doing something seriously wrong with their money. They also knew he could rationalize—he’d quickly blamed her for the problem, even though he knew none of the facts. Now the FBI needed to figure out if he had opportunity. And Justine wanted to give it to them, without giving herself away. She’d written the code module so anyone with a checking account balance of over $5,000 wasn’t a recipient of the money taken from the city’s millionaires, and then she’d pushed her savings months ago, all of it, into her checking to make sure she was over the limit. She was working for other people, not to feather her own nest.

  What she wasn’t sure of, of course, was how much actual cash on hand the rich possessed. She wasn’t sure it would be enough to redistribute across all the people who lived paycheck to paycheck, even in a town as notoriously rich as San Francisco. Justine did know that the people who operated the real controls of the economy and the law would classify what she’d done as a crime, but she felt, she genuinely felt, it was just a first step at reparations. And a warning to those who had tried to push ninety percent of humanity into a hole they’d never escape, like a damn science fiction novel. She held onto that feeling of righteousness so that it, not fear or guilt, would play across her face to the FBI agents.

  They began a dull grind of questions, nailing her down to place and time of the previous day, so that if she tried to finesse something in the future, they could catch her in lies.

  After several hours, she had led the agents, without ever saying it herself, to believe that her hated co-worker, the light-and-oxygen-sucking-beast-from-Harvard Brett had done it. Back when she thought it would hit one branch of one bank, she felt sure that Brett would be blamed for carelessness, reviewing and accepting code with such a “bug” in it. She’d designed the code to look like a logic error, the kind that sloppy coders make all the time, the kind of thing she was meant to catch. Her plan had put her job in danger, too, but she didn’t care. She was tired of silently assisting the cyber barons of the world.