Sick Like That

by Norman Green

  Another hour and she reached the New York Thruway, and somewhere in the foothills of the Ramapo Mountains her radio station turned to static, so she shut the radio off. The Thruway speed limit was sixty-five, but no one seemed to pay it much mind. Sarah found a semi that wasn’t speeding too much and she slotted herself in behind it. She wasn’t afraid to go faster, but apparently her mother’s Pontiac was, it quivered in fear at anything much over seventy-five. The traffic roared past Sarah and her guardian like water flowing past two rocks in a stream. Nobody thinks too much about the law, she thought, not really. The real rules that we follow are the unwritten ones. You can exceed the speed limit, but not too much, call it ten miles per, just to be safe. You can beat your wife and kid, her father had done it for years, just don’t do it in public. Try not to draw blood and you’ll probably be all right.

  And so on.

  Her truck deserted her, got off, and left her on her own. She continued on at more or less the same rate and pretty soon a station wagon fell in behind her. You are the leader now, she thought, not the follower, and it made her a bit uncertain. She was uneasy for a mile or so, but then she lectured herself. Really, Sarah, grow up. You’re on your own, it’s up to you to decide how fast is fast enough, and all the rest of it. Your father is gone, your mother has no sense, and Frank is not around. No one can tell you what to do. You’ve got to figure it out for yourself.

  She thought back to her Catholic childhood, Sunday School, and the story of Adam and Eve in paradise. “‘You guys see this tree?’ God said. ‘This is the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. Don’t touch it. You hear me?’ ” The nun teaching the class had missed the entire point of the story, even as a child Sarah had been sure of it. “Follow the rules! Listen to your elders!” But Sarah had seen through it, she had been sure that the story was not about coloring outside the lines, because the surest way to get someone to try something is to tell them they can’t have any. How dumb could God be, not to see that? He had to know, he had to have done it on purpose. Even as a child she’d had the impression that Adam and Eve hadn’t become fully human until they’d broken the rule. Up until then they’d been children doing what they were told and staying out of trouble, but after that they had finally become fully human, with not only the right but also the obligation to decide what they would do, and become.

  It’s no good waiting for Frank or your father or some other asshole to come along and tell you what to do.

  You’re a big girl now, Sarah. It’s on you.

  She held it to just a hair over seventy, all the way to her exit.

  Twelve

  “I haven’t forgotten how much I owe you.” The speaker was a black man, Salathiel Edwards, a detective in the NYPD.

  “I don’t look at it like that, Sal,” Alessandra told him. They were in a coffee shop on Henry Street in Brooklyn.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know another way to see it,” he said. “You walk into the station house, I don’t know you from Adam, you hand me a murder, an attempted murder, a major drug operation, and an organized crime figure, all wrapped up with a bow. I mean, come on. Get real.”

  “I’m telling you, Sal, that’s just the way it worked out. Those guys came after me, I wasn’t on some kind of crusade.”

  “Don’t matter,” Salathiel said, shaking his head. “Amounts to the same thing either way. I got a commendation out of the deal, the assistant DA got a nice shiny ‘Hero’ badge to wear on his chest, and what did you get? You got a hearty ‘Thank you’ from the city. You got screwed.”

  “So okay, tell you what, get me one of those parking permits they’re always screaming about on the news radio stations.”

  He looked at her. “I can’t promise it, but I’ll work on it. You have my word.”

  Al didn’t know whether to believe him or not. “Cool,” she said. “I was surprised when you guys got Caughlan, though. What did you put him away for?”

  “Spitting on the sidewalk. They got him for tax fraud, he’ll be out in eighteen months.”

  “You’re kidding.” In the course of her work on Daniel “Mickey” Caughlan’s behalf, Al had uncovered a traitor in his inner circle. She could only surmise what had happened next, but odds were good that it wasn’t pretty. “I figured, you know . . .”

  “Some of his former, ahh, associates have not been seen in some time. We were all pretty energized, for a while we had fantasies of taking him down. Silly us. We were on him and his, Al, we were on him tight, and we came up empty. He must have hired someone to come in and clean up for him.”

  “Really?”

  “Come on. Please. There was even a certain faction within the department that liked you for it.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Listen, you had the motive, probably had the opportunity, sure as shit had the means. I hadda do some checking up on you, but we didn’t have any bodies, so nobody got too serious about it.”

  Funny, she thought, they let Sal do the footwork on me, even though they knew she had handed him the case. “You find anything interesting on me?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “Fascinating. Among other things, I found out you got booted out of the academy, and I found out why.”

  “Didn’t like getting groped,” she said. “I coulda told you that.”

  “Not sure I’d like it, either,” Sal told her. “That instructor you tagged had it coming. He’d been smart enough to knock it off after you got the door, he might have got away with it.”

  “Yeah, well, all I did was bruise his ego. He got off easy.”

  “Bruised his ego, and knocked out a couple of his teeth, but I ain’t talking about that. He just kept it up after you were gone, and he got himself suspended late last year. Now he’s facing a departmental hearing and a class-action civil suit.”

  “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” Al said.

  “Agreed. But the relevant point here is, you want back into the academy, I can get you in.”

  “Are you serious?” Alessandra was stunned. She had thought that the book on that part of her life was closed forever.

  “Dead serious,” he said. “I can hook you up, big time. You could probably even join the class-action suit if you wanted to.” He stared across the table at her. “You should consider it,” he said. “The pay isn’t horrible . . .”

  “No,” she said.

  “Retire after twenty.”

  Twenty years was far too long a span of time to have much meaning to her. “I dunno, Sal,” she said. “Maybe six months ago I’d have done it. Now . . . Now I got this partner, you know, and I don’t wanna run out and leave her hanging. Plus, I’m beginning to think this thing we’re doing might work out. I think we got a chance to make it. So, no, but thanks for thinking about me. I’m good.”

  “Great opportunity,” he told her. “I don’t know how long this window stays open.”

  “I got you,” she said. “I’ve really got to think about this.”

  “Well, don’t think too long,” he told her. “What was it that you wanted to see me about?”

  “New business,” she told him. “Calls itself Palermo Imports. Just opened a warehouse on Staten Island.”

  “Never heard of’em,” he said.

  “The paint is still wet,” she said. “Palermo Imports is owned by this guy calls himself Paolo Torrente. What they do, in theory, they bring in wines from all over Europe and they sell ’em in the U.S. Or they plan to. I think it’s just a cover, I think they’re bringing in something a lot more profitable than wine.” She told him about the two big crates she’d helped them unload.

  Salathiel Edwards took out a pad and started writing in it. “Palermo Imports,” he said as he wrote. “Paolo Torrente. Okay, we’ll get someone over there to take a look. I’ll even let you know what we find.”

  “I got pictures of the crates,” she said. “I can e-mail ’em to you if you want.”

  “No need,” he told her. “We can send a Fire Department guy to go loo
k at their sprinklers or some shit, and we’ll have a Narcotics guy tag along. Those guys, you don’t have to get fancy with them, all you do is point and shoot. If there’s something there, they’ll find it.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “But there’s something you ain’t telling me about this,” he said. “You got a client mixed up in it?”

  Sarah Waters, she thought, or Frank, or even Frank Junior. “Someone in trouble,” she told him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “What is it about you and trouble? Listen, for real, this place comes up dirty, you are gonna have to sit down and be straight with me on this.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “All right.”

  “One last thing,” he said, and he hesitated.

  “What,” she said.

  “This thing with you and Mickey Caughlan . . .”

  Alessandra held up a hand, closed her eyes.

  “I know, I get it, he’s a client. It’s business. But if you seen things about Caughlan that he didn’t want you to see, he might be thinking you’re just one more loose end he needs to get cleaned up. You get what I’m trying to tell you? So watch your back.”

  “Sal, you’re making me paranoid.”

  He shook his head. “If they’re really out there, it ain’t paranoia, it’s self-preservation.”

  Things got a little more complex once Sarah got off the Thruway. The exit ramp dumped her onto a traffic circle, her directions said nothing about a circle, she went around it twice before winding up on a road that took her across a bridge and into Poughkeepsie. She pulled over, read through her printouts again, then turned around and went back to the circle. You would think, she told herself, that a place as famous as Woodstock, New York, there would be a big sign pointing you in the right direction, but there wasn’t. She found the route number she was looking for, though, and forged on.

  Five minutes later she was shaking her head. You’ve been in Brooklyn too long, she told herself. You need to get out of town a little more often, God, who knew that you could be in the middle of a wilderness, practically, in so short a time? Okay, it wasn’t exactly a wilderness, but there weren’t many houses, there were trees growing all over, not many other cars, and hardly any traffic lights at all. She found herself looking at the houses, wondering what kind of people lived in them, what their lives were like, how she really really needed to get Frank Junior out to some kind of a camp this summer, and God, how much was that gonna cost?

  Woodstock, when she finally found it, was nothing like what she’d thought it would be. She’d been expecting a sort of neo-hippie, new age Disneyland, maybe even with a big toothless statue of Wavy Gravy, but it was just a dozen or so blocks of touristy stuff, T-shirt stores, arts and crafts, T-shirt stores, places to buy fringed leather jackets, Tshirt stores, health food emporiums, Tshirt stores, and so on. She found the side street Jacob West lived on, passed it by, found a parking spot two blocks farther on. She got out, locked the car, wrapped her coat tightly around her against the cold wind, and headed back.

  She found it. It was a small, dove gray Victorian house set about fifteen feet back from the road behind a matching gray picket fence. The first floor was occupied by something called The Austin Gallery. The second floor was apparently an apartment. Sarah went up the walk and climbed the steps to the porch. The front windows on the first floor went almost all the way from the floor to the ceiling, and she was drawn by the bronze figures she saw through the window next to the entrance, so she opened the door and entered the gallery.

  There didn’t seem to be anyone home.

  Standing inside the front door, she looked into the room to her right at a statue of a nude woman right in the center of the room. It was done in about three-quarter scale. The woman was down on one knee, bent over with the knuckles of one hand on the ground. Her head was turned, almost as if she were watching Sarah come through the entrance. Even though she was not full sized, her presence filled up the room. She was well muscled for a woman, which made Sarah think briefly of Alessandra, wondering, you know, but it was really the look on the woman’s face that gave the figure its power. There was something in the expression, Sarah could not quite put her finger on it, but the longer she looked the surer she became that there was something unhealthy about this woman, that in life a wise man would not be drawn by her nudity.

  A wise man would back away, slowly.

  She turned, was startled by another sculpture hanging on the wall next to the door. It was also bronze, perhaps two feet square, it was a man’s face, he was emerging from the base metal like a man coming up from a deep pool. The face was tired and drawn, it was the face of a man beyond pain, who not only knew that he was lost and beaten but had accepted it, given himself over to it. There was a line down low on his neck, a scar . . .

  It was the face of defeat.

  It pulled at her, she stopped a foot away and stared.

  What she saw there was not the look of death but of a life sentence, she knew that this was the face she would wear every day for as long as she lived if something should ever God forbid happen to Frank Junior. The feeling surged over her, she stood rooted to the spot, fumbled blindly in her pocketbook for a tissue to wipe her damp face. She heard footsteps behind her, but she did not turn around.

  “He does that to some people,” a voice said.

  Sarah turned her head and looked. He was a slim man, a bit taller than average, dark hair and eyes, a trim goatee shot through with a trace of gray, a hooked nose.

  “Jacob?”

  He went pale. “Who are you?” he said, backing away, his voice wild. “Who . . .” He started to run, tripped over the bronze nude woman, went down awkwardly, his head made a hollow thunk when it hit the wooden floor.

  He lay motionless.

  Sarah wiped her nose on her tissue. “Oh for crissake,” she said.

  The exhibition space took up most of the first floor, but there was one back room that held a desk in one corner and a couch in another. Sarah thought about dragging Jacob West in there and wrestling him up onto the couch, but that seemed, upon reflection, like it might be beyond her, so she took a pillow from the couch, brought it out, and put it under his head. Then she wet the towel that she found hanging next to the sink in the tiny bathroom in the back hallway behind the office, sat down next to West, and began to wipe his face.

  He came out of it a minute later, came out of it like a man in agony. Groggy, he rolled over on his side and retched, curling up like he had a sharp pain in his stomach, but when he was fully awake he rolled back, his eyes wide. “She sent you, did she send you . . . Are you . . .”

  Sarah held on to him, gave him the towel. “Not exactly,” she said. “Here.”

  He took the towel and mopped his face. “What do you mean, not exactly? Is she here? Does she know—”

  “She hired me to find you,” Sarah told him. “I haven’t told her anything yet.”

  He flopped back down on the pillow and closed his eyes. “God,” he said. “God, my head hurts.”

  “Who is he?” Sarah said. “That man, the one by the door.”

  Jake opened his eyes and looked up at her. “My father,” he said.

  Right around the corner from Al’s old apartment on Pineapple Street there was a pizza joint named Fascati’s, and she missed it. It was about a half hour’s walk from there to the place she lived now, and there were a couple of pizza joints that were closer, but she had tried one and been unimpressed, looked in on another one and decided that it maybe wasn’t the cleanest place in the world. So it’s not that far away, she told herself. Why settle? Why not get what you want? In the matter of pizza, at least, what she wanted was easily defined and perfectly attainable. She wanted a couple of slices of heaven served up by a surly counterman, so she decided to take herself there.

  As she walked up Henry Street from Atlantic Avenue toward the Brooklyn Bridge, the closer she got to Pineapple the stronger her feelings got, alienation and regret kept in check by a sense of the fami
liar. I used to belong here, she thought, and not that long ago. This was my neighborhood . . . She had loved everything about it, right up until the night she was assaulted, right over there in an alley you couldn’t even see from Henry Street, right by where that gypsy cab was parked half up on the sidewalk. Even though the thugs who’d attacked her had moved on, some to jail, some to parts unknown, and one or two to whatever hell one inhabits between incarnations, she had never felt the same afterward, never quite attained the same level of comfort. It was very close to the same feeling she’d had on that cold day when she had found her mother on the kitchen floor: This was my place, this was where I belonged. This used to be home, and now it isn’t . . . Still, she told herself, if I ever make a million bucks I’m going to come back here, I’m going to get a place in one of these buildings and I’m gonna stay there until I get the feeling back . . .

  A guy came out of the front door of her old building on Pineapple, crossed the street, sat on the hood of the gypsy cab, the one that was halfway on the sidewalk. He yanked a BlackBerry off his belt, punched a few buttons, held it up to his ear. Tall guy, white hair, big nose, half a belly, red face.

  He didn’t look like a Brooklyn guy.

  Dublin, maybe.

  You could, of course, move to Brooklyn from Dublin, but it would not take too long before you lost that wide-eyed, apple-cheeked, hiya buddy openness. Your elbows got a little sharper, your eyes got a little darker, you walked with a little more tension in your shoulders. Brooklyn does that to you, it enforces its own standards, and either you adapt or you go home.