by John Hart
“You know me in every way that matters.”
“You were shooting at those men. You just threw guns in the river. Jesus, I can’t even say that without sounding absurd.”
She kept her head still, but Michael saw that she was ready to break. Her friends were dead, and Michael’s answer was a lie they both recognized. He touched his chest and said, “What’s in here hasn’t changed. I swear to you, that’s true.” She refused to blink, and a kernel of panic crystallized in Michael’s chest. “You’re the only thing that matters to me. Everything we’ve experienced, everything we’ve shared.”
“No.”
“I swear on our unborn child.”
“Don’t.”
“What?”
She searched his eyes, and Michael saw in hers the annihilation of faith. “Don’t swear on my baby,” she said, and they both understood the power of the words she’d chosen.
Michael turned his face to the sky, then looked back down and saw the police car. It rolled past on the street, moving slowly. Behind glass, an officer’s face swiveled toward the parked car and the patch of grass where they knelt. “We need to go.” Elena followed his gaze, and some part of her understood. “Now,” Michael said.
She looked at his face, then at the police car, which had stopped a hundred yards away. If she chose to call out or run, Michael could do nothing to stop her. “I’ll need an explanation,” she said.
“You’ll have it.”
“The truth.”
“I swear.”
Michael touched his chest a second time, and the air between them crackled with charge. Love scored with fear. Dark energy. The knife blade beneath them felt very real, and Michael knew the keen edge of it could slice them apart in the next second. Elena knew it, too, had the same prophetic glimpse; but in the end, she nodded, followed him to the car, and neither doubted it was love alone that gave her legs the strength. On the sidewalk she took in the police car, the far, black smoke. A siren throbbed in the distance as people died and a piece of the city burned. Elena looked once at the father of her unborn child, then got in the car, her features very still, her small hands twisted pink in the womb of her lap.
Michael started the Navigator and accelerated into traffic. The cop was still there, then the road curved and he was gone. Michael turned east, away from the river. “We need to get out of the city,” he said.
“Why?”
The word was small.
“I have enemies.”
She sank lower in the seat, and Michael checked the mirror, hating truth for being so absolute. Elena wrapped her arms around her knees. At his apartment, he circled the block, then stopped. Elena leaned forward and peered up through the glass. “What is this place?”
“My apartment.”
“But you don’t have…” The words trailed away. “I want to go home,” she said.
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I need you to trust me.” Michael opened the door.
“Why are we here?”
“We need money.” He studied the street, the neighboring windows. “You should come up.”
He walked around the hood and opened her door. A lady passed, walking a small dog. Birds called from trees down the street, and Michael saw that Elena was smoothing her hands across the fabric of her dress, pulling it tight on her thighs, then balling loose folds in her hands. When she descended from the car, he led her onto a small stoop, then inside and to the third floor. Michael checked the apartment before allowing Elena to enter.
“Come in. Please.”
She stopped five feet inside the door, eyes restless on this place where Michael had lived.
“It’s just a place,” he said.
She touched a painting on the wall, a book on the shelf. “You’ve had this all along?”
“I almost never come here.”
“How long?”
Anger flashed in her eyes, the first flicker of heat he’d seen. “Five years,” he said. “Maybe six. It doesn’t matter.”
“How can you say that?”
Michael had no answer. “This will only take a second. Just … wait here.” He made his way down the hall to the smaller bedroom. In the closet, he stripped off his bloodstained clothing and put on a different suit, new shoes. He chose two handguns from the racked weapons, then pulled a duffel bag from the shelf and opened it on the floor. One of the guns, a Kimber nine millimeter, went into a carry holster and onto his belt, under his jacket; the other, a Smith & Wesson forty-five, went into the bag with five spare magazines. He turned to the cash. On the lowest shelf, next to boxed ammunition, he had $290,000 in banded hundred-dollar bills. He tossed them into the duffel as Elena appeared in the door behind him. She hesitated and Michael let her take it in—the sight of steel, the smell of gun oil, cash, and English leather. “I have more,” Michael said.
“More what?” Her eyes were on the rowed guns.
“More money.”
“You think I care about money?” The same heat, skin flushed.
“No. I—”
“You think I’ll stay for money?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Elena touched her stomach. “I’m going to be sick.”
“You’ll be okay.” Michael’s voice was colder than he’d planned, but Elena’s accusation hurt. He’d mentioned money only so she’d know he could provide for her. Hide her. Keep her safe. He moved for the door, and she followed.
“How much more?” she asked.
“Enough.”
“Please tell me there’s an explanation for all this.” She caught his arm, and he stopped. “I need something.”
They were in the hall. It was empty. Elena was on the balls of her feet, a bird ready to fly. “I have a story,” he said.
“About?”
“Beginnings. Reasons. Everything.”
“And you’ll tell me?”
“Yes, but later. Okay?”
“If you promise.”
“I do.” He turned on his heel, and they moved to the bottom of the stairs. Michael checked the sidewalk, then ducked back inside and hugged her fiercely. Her hair was warm on the bottom of his chin, and he wanted to tell her one more lie: that everything would be fine, that life would go back to normal. “We have to move quickly. Head down. Straight to the car.” He pulled her across hot concrete and into the car. She spilled loosely into the seat. From where they were, Michael had two options to get out of the city fast. He could go north to the Holland Tunnel or east to the Brooklyn Bridge. He rounded to the driver’s side, got in, and cranked the car. Beside him, Elena sat with her eyes closed. She mouthed silent words, and it took Michael a second to understand the thing she was unwilling to say out loud.
Please, God …
She made a hard knot of her fingers.
Make it a good story …
* * *
Michael drove north through the city, then out through the Holland Tunnel and south on the interstate. Beside him, Elena watched the city fall away. “I’ve never been out of New York,” she said.
“Maybe this will be good, then. A chance to see the country.”
“Is that a joke?” she asked.
“A bad one, I guess.”
Miles clicked onto the odometer, the silence painful. “You said you have a story.”
The sky outside was a summer sky, a lover’s sky. They were in Jersey, and her voice could have belonged to a stranger.
“It’s about two boys.”
“You?”
“And my brother.”
“You don’t have a brother.” Michael waited, and she nodded. “Ah. Another lie.”
“I’ve not seen him since I was ten.” Sun pushed heat through the windows. Michael showed her a photograph. Colorless and cracked, it was of two boys on a field of snow and mud. Their pants were too short, the jackets patched. “That’s me on the right.”
She took the photo and her eyes softened. “So young.”
“Yes.”
“What’s his name?”
“Julian.”
She traced Julian’s face with a finger, and then touched Michael’s. Color moved into her face, the empathy that was one of her best traits. Her accent thickened as it did when she got emotional. “Do you miss him very much?”
Michael nodded, knowing that she would listen, seeing it in her face, the way it softened. “They say you don’t remember much before the age of two, but that’s not true. I was ten months old when Julian was left naked on the bank of a half-frozen creek. He was a newborn. It was snowing. I was with him.”
“Ten months old?”
“Yes.”
“And you remember this?”
“Bits and pieces.”
“Like what?”
“Black trees and snow on my face.”
Elena touched the photograph.
“The silence when Julian stopped screaming.”
* * *
Elena kept her eyes down as Michael spoke of two boys dumped like trash in the woods, of cold water and the hunters that carried them out, of long years at the orphanage and his brother’s deterioration. He spoke of crowded rooms and sickness, of conflict and boredom and the indifference of malnutrition. He explained how strong kids learned to steal and weak ones learned to run; how older kids had the power to hurt. “You can’t imagine.”
Elena listened carefully as he spoke. She listened for lies and half-truths and the tells that would reveal them. She did this because she was smart and wary and carrying a child that meant more than her own life. But there was honesty in him when he spoke: flashes of anger and regret, a fire banked long in his heart. “Hennessey died on the bathroom floor. I took the knife and I ran.”
“To protect your brother?”
“Because I was the oldest.”
“You ran and took the blame with you?” Michael said nothing, but Elena knew from his face that the statement was true. “What happened next?”
Michael shrugged. “Julian was adopted.”
“And you were not.”
He shook his head.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“It is what it is.”
“And once in New York?”
Michael rolled his shoulders. “The city is not a good place for a boy alone.”
“What do you mean?”
Michael slipped into the left lane, passed a slow-moving car. His voice did not change when he said, “I killed a man nine days after I got off the bus.”
“Why?”
“Because I was small and he was strong. Because the world is cruel. Because he was drunk and insane and wanted to set me on fire for the fun of it.”
“Oh, my God.”
“He found me asleep near the docks, and doused me with gasoline before I could get to my feet. He had one foot on my chest, trying to get the match lit. I remember his shoes, black, tied with white string; pants so crusted with grime they crunched under my fingers. The first match didn’t light. It was damp, I guess. Or he stripped the sulfur. I don’t know. God, maybe. The second match was in his hand when I put the knife in his leg. Right in the side, just above his knee. It hit bone and I twisted it until he fell. Then, I put it in his stomach and I ran.”
Elena shook her head, no words.
Ten years old …
Michael cleared his throat. “There was a lot of that on the street,” he said. “Insanity. Random violence. That’s the unpredictable stuff. Beyond that, it’s easy to spot. People try to own you. They try to control you, put you to work, use you, screw you. Whatever. If a kid on the streets can’t go to the authorities, he doesn’t have much. I was lucky, I guess.”
“How?”
“I was strong, fast, knew how to fight. Iron House gave me that. It made me alert and unforgiving. What I didn’t know until I landed on the streets was that I was smart, too. That people would see that, and that I could use it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“One kid on the streets is vulnerable. Two together are better, but still not safe. A dozen, though, or twenty, that’s an army. Ten months after stepping off the bus, I had six kids working for me. Six months later, I had another ten, some younger than me, some as old as seventeen, even eighteen. We slept together, ate together. And we did jobs. Smash and grab. Burglary. Tourists were always an easy mark. Eventually, people started to notice.”
“Police?”
Michael shook his head. “Gangs, mostly. Some small-time hoods. We weren’t getting rich, but there was value there. Electronics, jewelry, cash. Some people figured it’d be easy to come in and take what I’d built. Kids, they figured, would be easy to scare, easy to co-opt. It was an untapped market, a low-risk opportunity. It got violent.”
He touched the white line on the side of his neck, and Elena asked, “Not a glass door?”
“Another lie. I’m sorry.”
She knew the scars he carried: two on his stomach, three on his ribs, the long one on his neck. They were pale, slightly raised, and she knew the feel of them, cool under her lips.
“We were living under a bridge in Spanish Harlem, maybe seven of us at the time. We’d been there for a few weeks. We moved around, you see? A week in one place, a month in another. I guess we stayed there a day longer than we should have, ’cause some local gangbangers showed up one afternoon. They didn’t want a thing other than to beat the crap out of us. There were only four of them, but everybody else ran.”
“The other children?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“I stayed.”
“And?”
Michael shrugged. “They cut me, I cut them back; but it was only a matter of time. Eventually, they got me down. One of them stepped so hard on my wrist it broke bones. They pinned me down. I should have died.”
“What happened?”
“Someone came.”
Something in the way he said it made Elena think this was the crux of it. A half mile of industrial buildings slid by on greased skids: metal slabs on dark tarmac, chain-link fencing and sodium lights on tall poles. Elena said, “Michael?”
“I’d heard of him but never seen him. He was just a name to me, then, someone to know about, a man to avoid. He was ruthless, people said. A criminal. A killer.”
“Mafia?”
“No. Not Italian. Nobody really knew what he was, although some said Polish; others, Romanian. Actually, he was American, born in Queens to a Serbian prostitute. An orphan, I later learned. He was there when the fight started, a long car on the other side of the street. His window was down. He was watching.”
“While you fought?”
“They got me down, put a knife here.” He touched the line on his neck. It was seven inches long with a jagged twist in the middle. “I was pretty sure they were going to kill me. I was bleeding. They were working themselves up. I saw it in their faces. They were going to do it. Then he was just there.”
Michael blinked and relived it: Crooked legs in a navy suit. Dark hair salted white.
“He looked lost,” Michael said. “That was my first thought. This man is lost and dumb enough to smile about it. Then I saw how fear came over the men who were beating me. They stepped back, hands up. One of them dropped his knife…”
Do you know who I am?
Michael could still feel the steel in the old man’s voice, but there was no way to explain it. No one else could fully grasp what the voice meant that day, what it meant now.
You should leave.
“They didn’t stay to talk.” Michael cleared his throat. “They just ran.”
“Michael, you’re sweating.”
Michael palmed sweat from his forehead. He still saw the old man’s face: a narrow jaw and thin eyebrows, eyes as dark and dull as stone. Two men were with him. They stood while the old man squatted at Michael’s side. He was in his forties, lean with city-pale skin and narrow, maimed hands. His teeth, on the bottom, were crooked and white.
I don’t know. I just couldn’t.
How old are you?
Twelve.
Your name is Michael?
Yes.
I’ve heard about you.
But Michael was fading. The blue suit rustled as the old man stood. What do you think, Jimmy?
I think he’s a tough little shit.
Shoes scraped concrete. Light dimmed as Michael bled, and words came down like fog off the river.
That my son was such a boy as this …
Michael was sweating heavily, suddenly warm in the car. He felt the old man’s face, papery and hot under his hand. He felt brittle ribs and a failing chest, the old man’s final, sucking try at breath. “He taught me everything I know,” Michael said. “He made me what I am.”
“You’re pale. Jesus, Michael. You’re white as a sheet.”
“He gave me a home.” Michael’s voice faded as the car drifted left. “He gave me a home and I killed him.”
* * *
Little else was said for the next three hours. Elena asked, but Michael shook his head, spoke in fragments. “He was dying. I loved him.”
“And they want to kill you for this?”
“And because I’m with you. They think I’ll sell them out. Go to the cops.”
“For me?”
“For a normal life.”
“Would you do that?”
“No.”
Michael pictured the old man nine days ago. Jaundiced and stripped of flesh, he was propped up with a view of the river. Michael took his hand and told him for the first time about Elena: how he felt, why he wanted to quit the life. He apologized for keeping her a secret.
She’s special. I don’t want this to touch her.
This life?
Yes.
The old man understood. She loves you?
I believe that she does.
The old man nodded yellow tears. She is a gift, Michael, and rare for men like us.
Men like us?
Men for whom life makes very few gifts.
But how do I tell her?
The truth? You don’t.
Never?
Not if you wish to keep her …
“Michael?” Elena’s voice was worried.