Ashok reappeared after fifteen minutes. He held up a New York State driver’s license for me to see. On the license was a photo of a man, clean-shaven with short dark hair, looking serious but not worried. The name on the license was Tony Mendes. The date of birth made him forty years old. This was the passport to my life of perfect freedom. The perfect freedom of not being encumbered by any restraints. Of being able to come and go as I pleased without explaining or answering to anyone. Where government had no record of my existence and credit bureau computers couldn’t track me. I was the trackless man who left no footprints, electronic or otherwise.
My heart was pounding so hard it felt like I was suffocating. I couldn’t suck air into my lungs. I leaned back against the counter for support. This must be what asthma sufferers experience, I thought. It was a hellish feeling.
Ashok must have seen my reaction because he said, “Are you not well?”
I nodded and took a deep breath. “Yes, I’m all right.” Maybe I shouldn’t have been so honest but I told him, “I’m just a little scared.”
“There is no need to worry. Your future will be happier than your past.”
I wanted to kiss him again. This little ancient withered ghost of a man. His timeless civilization was buoying me with its eternal optimism. It made me feel less uncertain about my decision.
Ashok put the license in his shirt pocket and went behind the counter to stand in front of the cash register. He put his fingers on the keys of the register and looked up at me. “The price of the license for you, my friend, will be one thousand five hundred dollars.”
I thought I had misunderstood him. “What?” I said.
“One thousand five hundred dollars,” he repeated without emotion.
“But that’s outrageous,” I shouted. I took another breath and said, a little more evenly, “That’s a lot of money.” As I tried to recollect our conversations, I realized we had never discussed price. It never occurred to me that an identity card could cost so much. I felt an overwhelming sense of desperation.
The little old man smiled serenely. “You said you would pay whatever the price was. Do you not remember your own words?”
I tried hard to remember what I’d said. The old man was so confidently replaying my words for me. He might have been right. I could have said that. I probably did. How unfair it was when someone used your own words against you.
“But that’s too much money,” I said. “I won’t pay that much.”
Ashok wagged his head from side to side. “That is the price, my friend.”
“I won’t pay it. I don’t have that much.”
He smiled knowingly. “Do you remember the affidavit with the signature that Haresh notarized for you?”
I blinked. “Yes. So what?”
“Well, then, my friend, I think you have much more than that money.”
It would have been apparent even to a casual observer, from the way he said it, that I was not his friend. Somehow I had been slickly maneuvered into a checkmate position on a chessboard. “I don’t want to pay that much money,” I said.
“Ah, yes. That I can understand. No one wants to pay so much for something he desires. However, the things one desires are usually quite expensive. That is the very nature of desire.”
There was no pleasure in just standing there helplessly listening to a cardboard philosopher. All I could think of, over and over, were the words of Kipling, Here lies a fool who tried to hustle the East. “OK, then,” I said. “You can keep the goddam card. I don’t want it.” I turned and pretended to head for the door.
The old man didn’t try to stop me. I made my way slowly to the front of the store. But it was no good. He knew he had me. I had committed too much. I had passed the point of no return.
I stood in the doorway and waited for him to call me back but he made no sound or gesture. I knew I'd lost. There was nothing I could do but turn around and admit that I needed the license more than anything else right now.
Putting my hand on the door jamb, I turned and glanced back at him. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was inspecting the cash register carefully, studying the keys as if they held the secret of some ancient ritual. His fingers played over the keys like a silent keyboard. He was somewhere deep inside that cash register.
I sighed and walked back to where he was standing. He looked up at me, but his look was not one of triumph. In fact, he appeared almost sad.
Maybe if I appealed to his better nature… “What can you do for me?” I said. “Can you help me out and give me a lower price?”
“I wish for you I could do better but, you know, that is the price. There are always risks and expenses. This is not all profit for me. I have to pay the man who supplies the item in question and…” He waved his hand that fluttered like a little bird in a great circle around the store. “The rent is quite high and…”
I cut him off. Perhaps it was impolite of me. “Yeah, yeah, I know. And you probably pay very high taxes also.”
Here he smiled. “I see your sense of humor has not entirely deserted you. Of that I am glad.”
“Sure. But can’t you lower the price a little?”
He shook his head. “I am sorry but that is the price for you.”
What could I do? I made an about-face and turned my back to him so he couldn’t see. I hunched over and leaned into a corrugated carton, pulling the roll of bills from my pocket. Slowly I counted out fifteen hundred dollar bills. It was an agonizing process. As I peeled off each bill, it felt as if a layer of skin was being stripped off my body.
I gave him the fifteen hundred bucks. He took the money and counted it, examining each bill carefully as he did. When he had finished counting, he put the money in his pants pocket. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and handed me the driver’s license.
“Please make good use of this,” he said. “It will bring you good fortune.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything. All my words had been spent together with a big chunk of my cash. I just wanted to leave the premises. There was a queasy feeling in my stomach. I turned and headed for the door. As I left the shop, an insignificant pawn in the Great Game, I felt secure in the knowledge that I had been given a professional hosing by the very best.
CHAPTER XVI
The neighborhood was marginal, to use a generous word. There were some boarded-over storefronts and piles of trash on the sidewalk. But it was not altogether devoid of hope because there was a Starbucks on one of the four street corners and a scented candle shop diagonally across from it. If people could afford to buy scented candles, this would surely demonstrate that the neighborhood was not downwardly mobile.
The sky had cleared somewhat and it was no longer drizzling, but the day was still very hot. I had been wandering around the area of Seventh Avenue and West Fourth Street for several hours, looking for an apartment. This was one of the locations that seemed to have the lowest rents in the classified ads in the Village Voice. But the apartments I saw were either too expensive or too dismal.
My forehead was covered with sweat. I took out my handkerchief and wiped my face. Across West Third Street, I could see a sign in a ground floor window. The sign was too small to make out from where I stood, so I crossed the street. It was hand-printed in block letters on cardboard and read, APT TO RENT. Did it mean they were inclined to rent or that they had an apartment to rent?
I tapped on the glass. There was no response, so I tapped again. After a minute, a hand pulled back the curtains and a woman’s face appeared in the window. I pointed at the sign. She nodded, held up an index finger and let the curtain fall.
It took a couple of minutes for her to come to the door. I could hear her heavy step pounding slowly down the hallway. She opened the door cautiously. She was a ponderous woman of sixty or sixty-five, wearing an old flowered housedress with a tear at the shoulder. Her hair was gray and pulled back in a large bun. Wisps of hair stuck out where she hadn’t been able to tuck them in. Her face was deeply lined and
scarred by acne. But what caught my attention was the fact that she was wearing hob-nail boots on a hot summer day. The boots weren’t calf-length or anything like that—they came up to a couple of inches above her ankle—and the laces were untied, but they must have been awfully hot. That was why her step sounded so heavy coming down the hallway.
She scrutinized me carefully. Then she said, “You want see the apartment?”
“Sure, if it’s not too much trouble. Is this the apartment?”
She shook her head angrily, as if I was expected to know. “No, not this. Next door. Next one.” She jerked her head in the direction of the apartment. Her accent came from a region somewhere east of the Danube. Her voice was deep and guttural, reminiscent of a Magyar drill sergeant on a day when his hemorrhoids were troubling him. It was evident she’d forgotten whatever she’d learned in her Dale Carnegie course.
She just stood there arms akimbo, powerful and firm, like one of those massive Gaston Lachaise sculptures of muscular women who gave no quarter and brooked no interference.
“OK, then. Can you show it to me?”
She nodded reluctantly. “Shoo. No problem. I show you. Follow me.”
I almost saluted in response to her order. As it was, I involuntarily stood to attention. She closed the door behind her and locked it with a key which she had on a large ring that probably held thirty or forty keys. I followed her to the next apartment building, slowing down to match her pace. It looked almost the same as the building we had come from, except that it was five stories tall instead of four. It was constructed of the same gray brick. There was the same external fire escape. The difference was that the first building had no apartment below ground level, whereas this one did.
The Magyar drill sergeant opened a gate and led me down four concrete steps. Her boots scraped and tapped on the steps, one by one. There were a couple of galvanized garbage pails at the foot of the steps. She moved to one side and searched through the key ring until she found the right key. I couldn’t see how she could tell the keys apart. They didn’t have any markings on them and they all appeared the same to me. Maybe a different type of intelligence was required. A key gene for recognizing patterns without words.
“This the apartment,” she grunted, belaboring the obvious. The door was a heavy steel one and the windows had those fire guard bars on the inside. There weren’t any curtains on the windows, so you could see that there was no furniture in the apartment.
The door squeaked as she opened it. She stepped inside and motioned me to follow her. “Come,” she said.
I could hardly do otherwise. I looked around. It wasn’t a monk’s cell, and it didn’t look like van Gogh’s room in Arles, but it wasn’t much more lavish than those. There was a hardwood floor and moldings on the walls, which raised it above the level of a pure hovel. And it had pretty flowered wallpaper. But it was very small.
“This is studio,” she said, reading my mind, as if somehow calling a cramped apartment a studio would lend it an artistic air.
“It’s a small studio.”
“Studio supposed be small,” she explained to me by way of definition. Maybe she thought I came from a faraway land where people didn’t know that a studio was supposed to be small.
I walked around and took a look. There was one room, really. It was about twelve feet by fourteen feet. There was a tiny kitchen to the left of the room facing the street and a tiny bathroom to the left at the entrance. That was it.
“It’s very small,” I repeated, more to myself than to her.
She folded her arms across her massive chest. The flesh hung down from her upper arms like two pig bladders. She glared at me. “You don’t want?” she said, as if daring me not to take the room.
“I didn’t say that. I’m just trying to make up my mind.”
“Go walk round. Take a look,” she ordered.
There wasn’t much room for me to take a walk around. It wasn’t as if this were Versailles and I was going to stroll around the grounds. I stepped into the minuscule kitchen. The only good thing about it was that it had a small window that opened onto the street. Of course, it was below ground level but I could look out the window and see a building across the street and a patch of gray sky. It was like the apartment in My Sister Eileen where the actors could see the legs of the pedestrians on the sidewalk outside as they walked by. There was a half-refrigerator, a small stove and a sink. It smelled of disinfectant, as though it had just been cleaned. It was a good smell.
“Did you just clean this?” I asked her.
She straightened and her chest swelled. “I clean everything. Everything is clean,” she added, a bit redundantly.
I wanted to ascertain her position in this transaction. “Are you the landlady?”
She nodded. “Yes, I am landlady.”
“So you’re the landlady and you clean also?”
“Yes. I do everything. I own and clean and fix all.”
I didn’t ask if she could fix an emptiness of the spirit. “That’s good. You do everything. That makes it easier.”
“Well, you want apartment or not?” She glanced at her watch. “I have no time.”
“We didn’t talk about the rent,” I reminded her.
“Nothing to talk about. Rent is eight hundred. You give me first month, last month, one month security.”
This was the Russian method of negotiating. She’d learned her lessons well. All those decades of Soviet occupation hadn’t been wasted after all. Take it or leave it. Stalin stolidity. Nothing subtle or artful about it. There was nothing of the souk where bargaining was in the bloodstream.
I knew better than to try to haggle. The Magyar would probably bite my head off and impale it on a pike, and then dance around on my testicles with her hob-nail boots. It was getting late and I was tired. The odds were good that I wouldn’t find anything better today or even tomorrow. I’d seen most of the available apartments in the neighborhood. I didn’t want to look any further. The place wasn’t perfect, but it was the best I’d seen at the lowest price.
I nodded. “OK, I’ll take it.”
“Good. You be good tenant.”
I didn’t know if this was meant as a compliment or a warning. I wasn’t taking any chances.
“I’ll be a good tenant,” I reassured her.
She squinted at me. “What’s you name? You got ID?”
Pleased with myself at last, I smiled. “Yes, I certainly have ID. My name is Tony Mendes.”
I held out my hand, but she didn’t take it. She just glared at me. “Let me see ID.”
I pulled out my wallet and handed her my newly-minted and extortionate driver’s license. She examined it for a minute. This would be the first test. Would she accept it as authentic or would she toss me out on my ear as a tin-plated fraud? She finished looking at it and gave it back to me.
“Where is Troy?” she said.
“Upstate New York.”
“Don’t know it. Never heard it.”
I was going to say, most people from east of the Danube have probably never heard of it, but I thought better of it. “It’s a city in Upstate New York. Nice place,” I added, unnecessarily.
“You got other ID? Credit card? Something?”
I took a deep breath and tried not to panic. “No, no…I don’t believe in credit cards,” I said lamely. “I always pay cash.” I told myself I would have to get a fake credit card or print up one of those impressive-looking vending machine business cards where everyone can become the instant CEO of a non-existent company.
She shrugged. “OK. Pay me cash now.”
“Certainly,” I said. I took the bankroll out of my pocket and gave her twenty-four hundred dollar bills. She put the cash in the pocket of her housedress and turned to leave.
“Can I have a receipt?” I said to her back. I was a slow learner but once I learned a lesson, I never forgot it.
She turned toward me. There was a sly expression on her face. It was the first indication that a hu
man being resided in that bulky frame. “What? You no trust me?”
I spread my hands, palms up, facing her. “I trust you, all right. It’s just that I’d like some written proof that I paid you in cash. It might slip your mind at some time in the future and then where would I be?”
She looked at me in a different way. “Shoo. No problem. I give you receipt. Everything proper, you see.”
“Thank you very much. I appreciate it.”
“You got furniture?”
I shook my head. “Not yet. But I’ll have some furniture in a few days. I’m expecting it to come shortly.”
She seemed to accept this. “OK. I give you key. When you move in?”
“I’ll move in tomorrow, if that’s alright with you.”
“Shoo. That’s good,” she said. She waved her arm expansively around the place. “Apartment all ready for you. Nice and clean. You keep it that way. No fights. No trouble.”
“You don’t have to worry,” I said. “The last thing in the world I’m looking for is trouble.”
CHAPTER XVII
I was exhausted, wiped out by the stress and excitement of the day. But there was a feeling of exhilaration, too. And the pleasant prospect of a tranquil future before me. That was all I wanted. To be left alone. There was a line from a movie, The Yakuza, which said, “He was a lone wolf. He neither gave orders, nor took orders.” Just like Samuel Johnson, I was a harmless drudge.
Back in the hotel room, I collapsed on the bed. My driver’s license may have indicated I was forty, but my body betrayed the painful truth that I was fifty. Those were the ten years that paid you back in kind for the ravages you committed against your youth.
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