by Gerry Boyle
She caught herself.
“In a manner of speaking.”
I shrugged.
“How are you getting back to Brooklyn?” I asked Christina.
She tossed the paper aside, stood and stretched. The skirt lifted, along with Ellen’s eyebrows.
“Gerard could drive Christina to Brooklyn after he drops you,” Ellen said. “You two work it out. Jack, I may call with questions.”
I nodded. There was method to her generosity. She had the exclusive—and the source tucked away in the guest room.
Ellen rode down with us in the elevator. When the doors opened, we stepped out, but Dominic wasn’t at his post behind the security counter. As we stood, he came in from the street.
“TV,” he said. “Waiting for Mr. McMorrow. And they want to talk to a ranking editor about tomorrow’s story. The big interview with him and the profile. I told ’em to wait outside.”
I turned to Ellen. She didn’t seem at all surprised.
“You leaked it already?”
Ellen shrugged.
“It’s a big story and it’s an exclusive, and it’s going online anyway, and you’re—”
“Tired of all this,” I said.
We walked to the garage door but opened a single door beside it. Christina stepped out onto 43rd Street as the Lincoln pulled up. We walked to the car and climbed in the back, my bag safely under my arm on the seat beside me. Gerard pulled away and we bent low as we passed the Times entrance, where five satellite TV trucks were parked.
And then we were in Times Square, hunched together in the backseat as the car inched through the Mardi Gras crowds, bound to have a good time even without Johnny Fiore.
“Where to, Jack?” Gerard asked, looking at me in the mirror.
“Brooklyn, please, Gerard,” I said. “Manhattan Bridge.”
As he swung south, I thought I saw Christina smile.
13
Gerard looked at the deserted street, the graffiti-swabbed walls, the windows halfheartedly broken.
“This is where you live?” he said.
“It’s developing from the bridge out,” Christina said. “Some great stuff is happening.”
Gerard looked around. The street was narrow, with cobblestones showing through the asphalt and loading-dock doors facing the curb. The wall beside us was windowless brick. There was a mound of black trash bags in the gutter and something or someone had torn them open, strewing papers and cans into the street.
We stopped. Christina got out on her side, her skirt white, her legs pale against the stone and brick. She looked like a half-clad waif, the ghost of a drowned woman. I got out and shouldered my bag.
“It’s a loft, Gerard,” I said.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I got kids. You give ’em a nice house with a lawn and a pool and they wanna live like your grandparents did, right off the goddamn boat.”
As he spoke, he peered into the side mirror. I looked back and saw a white minivan pass slowly on the cross street at the end of the block. Gerard watched it in the side mirror as it disappeared.
“Followed us all the way down,” he said.
“Cops,” I said.
“I’ll wait,” Gerard said.
Christina fumbled with a padlock on a rolling overheard door, then bent and took hold of the handle and, before I could help her, pulled the door up. It made a grating rumble, then was quiet. Inside the truck bay were dim shapes of boxes and crates. There were no lights showing.
“Come on, McMorrow,” Christina said, her arm raised over her head. “Going up.”
I thanked Gerard. He looked at Christina again and peered at the mirror. Christina yanked on the door and it rolled down with a loud, echoing clatter. And then it was still. And blindingly dark.
“Saving on the electric bill?”
“I gave up. As fast as I put the bulbs in, the landlord takes them out. He wants everybody out.”
“Apparently,” I said.
“I complain to the Loft Board,” she said, from somewhere to my left. “His lawyer calls my lawyer. They’ve become good friends.”
“A silver lining.”
“Hey, I’m used to it. When the elevator’s off, I just count the steps.”
“How many are there?”
“Eighty-two.”
From the darkness, Christina chattered on. She said there were two other loft tenants: a potter on the fourth floor, and a painter and his family on the fifth, on the other side of the elevator shaft. The potter was in the hospital with cancer, and the painter was in the Adirondacks for the summer. The first floor was vacant, filled with machinery once used to make buttons for US Navy uniforms.
I heard a knocking and then the sound of the lock hasp snapping shut on the inside of the overhead door.
“Here, McMorrow, take my hand.”
I reached toward her, found the hand, and clasped it. Christina led me as I shuffled across the pavement. I kicked something, and it rolled and bounced and shattered.
“Homeless,” Christina said. “If you leave the door open, they come in here and drink. But they’re okay.”
We moved along a wall until Christina found the padlock for the elevator. She let go of my hand and I heard her keys jingle, and then the door slid open. A light glared overhead. I squinted. She stepped into the elevator nonchalantly. I followed. She slid the door closed, pulled a cage over, and hit a button in a battered box on the wall. The elevator roared to life and we started up.
Christina, her hand on her hip, looked at me and smiled.
“This the only way in?”
“There’s the fire escape, but you have to climb across my bed to get to it.”
She grinned. I didn’t answer.
“It’s great, Jack. Still raw. Dumbo, I mean. You’d like it here.”
“That’s what I like about my part of Maine. It’s real.”
“Right. This is like SoHo was before it got ruined. They’re gonna have to drag us out.”
The elevator stopped with a jarring bang. Christina opened the doors, then reached back to turn out the light. We were in darkness again and she brushed against me, and I could feel her breasts, her breath. She took my hand again, and led me down a hallway. The keys jingled, and a door fell open and we stepped into the white-walled expanse of the loft, hidden away like a vast room on the Underground Railroad.
Christina closed the door, fastened the locks top and bottom, and then turned to me.
“You’re safe now, Jack,” she said.
I looked at her and our eyes met, and I saw the mischief in hers.
“I hope so,” I said.
Christina led the way.
There was a cavernous main room, fifty feet across, with varnished wood floors and a ceiling strung with massive beams. On one side, there were leather couches and bookcases halfway to the ceiling, and a television screen so big it made the place look like a seatless theater.
I followed Christina to the kitchen.
It was high-tech, done in her funky open-checkbook style. The doors of the double-wide refrigerator were pasted with photographs, gallery notices, arty cryptic messages, and cartoons. In one of the photographs, three men and two women posed beside a rock-walled pool, with a turquoise sea behind them. The men, wearing Speedos, were handsome and in shape. The women, wearing bikini bottoms and nothing else, were in shape, too. Christina was on the right.
“San Felice Circeo, an hour outside of Rome,” Christina said. “A few of us had just had it up to here with New York. So we grabbed our passports and went. Barely brought any luggage.”
“I noticed,” I said.
I thought of Roxanne, sitting in smoky kitchens with frightened kids and angry parents. I thought of Clair on his tractor, his wife Mary in her vegetable garden. I remembered what it was about Christina that had been so zany, so refreshing, so childlike. But so frivolous.
She opened the refrigerator and took out two bottles of beer. Corona, ice cold. She held hers against the front of
her bare neck and a rivulet of condensation ran off the bottle and down her chest.
I looked away.
“Once this place heats up, it’s impossible to get it cool,” Christina said. “I wanted air conditioners, but they said they’d have to replace the windows, and they’re really old and beautiful. So I sit. And sweat.”
“Feel cooped up?”
“No, I work. I get out. I have a car. A four-wheel-drive thing. I keep it up around the corner in a lot. You can’t leave anything on the street.”
I thought of my house in Prosperity, Maine; it didn’t even have locks.
She said, “Salud,” and we lifted the bottles and drank.
I felt myself sigh inwardly as I gulped the cold beer, and then I was reminded of Butch in the pub, saying he’d gotten into booze too heavily. I put the bottle down.
“You okay?” Christina said.
I shrugged.
“I keep thinking I’ll wake up and this will be just one of those weird nightmares that seems to go on forever. Not you. The rest of it.”
“It’s history, McMorrow. You’re part of history. Look at it that way.”
“Thanks.”
“So, how ’bout a tour? I’ll show you my piece of Brooklyn.”
I saw the bathroom, with a palm tree and whirlpool tub for six. The gym, with several pieces of chrome equipment and mirrors on the wall. Christina’s studio, with paint-spattered floors and floor-to-ceiling windows. Easels were grouped in a cluster like people at a cocktail party.
On the easels were small canvases, all painted a reddish ocher. I peered more closely. They were paintings of bricks, each varied slightly. Some were cracked. Some were dark with soot. Some had splotches and streaks of graffiti. A couple had bugs. There were dozens of them.
“And when you stack them up?”
“You make a wall,” Christina said. “In the show, there’s one panel, one painting, of a child peering out from the dark. Just the eyes and the cheeks.”
“From behind the wall?”
“He’s bricked up. Isolated. Like we all are, by circumstances. By our very existence as individuals. After all is said and done, we’re alone.”
I looked at all the bricks.
“Sad,” I said. “But interesting.”
“A lot of people think so. They like it. Important people. I mean, I’m getting serious attention. But you don’t have to say you like it if you don’t.”
“But I do.”
“Thanks. You know, I used to need everybody’s approval, but it’s not an issue anymore, really.”
She smiled to herself.
“It’s a woman thing. We’re raised to please. Once I realized that and I was able to shake it, I felt like this awful weight was lifted off my work.”
“Good for you, Christina,” I said.
“Thanks, Jack,” she said, and with a swish of her hips, she led the way out the door and on to the bedroom where I would stay. Philippe’s.
It was whitewashed and spare, with my duffel bag beside the bed, stacks of CDs, a computer. There was a cordless phone, a cell phone in a charger, a telescope on a tripod near the window.
“He didn’t take his stuff?”
“A bag and a carry-on. Christophe will buy him new things. You need a telescope?”
I shook my head and looked around. The phone rang and Christina went to the main room to answer it. I went to the open window and glanced up the block.
The white minivan was parked at the corner. As I watched, it pulled away slowly and moved out of sight. I waited, looked out on the empty streets, the still factories, the ash-white sky.
And there was the van again.
It crossed the intersection at the bridge end of the block. Slowed and stopped beside a razor-wire-ringed lot. I took a step back from the window and watched as the passenger window slipped down, a hand reached out and adjusted the side mirror, and then withdrew.
The window closed. The van sat. I listened, heard Christina speaking quietly in the other room. And then she hung up and I heard her cross the big room, heard the bathroom door close.
I walked back to the bed, picked up my duffel, and unzipped it.
Took out the envelope and tore it wide open.
14
There was a message on a piece of yellow lined paper. It was Butch’s schoolboy scrawl.
Jackie. Here’s some of the stuff. You see a pattern? I do. Great seeing you. I’ll call you in a couple days and we can talk. I got more. Butch.
The next page was an NYPD incident report. It was stamped confidential—not for public release. It was dated August 13, 1989.
The cop had interviewed one Lucretia Jones, a clerk in the office of the mayor. Jones had reported receiving a telephone call from a Hispanic woman who wanted to speak with the mayor. The woman had identified herself as Maria Yolimar, of 486 West 165th Street, Washington Heights. She said her husband, Julio Yolimar, had disappeared.
Subject was insistent that mayor knew husband’s whereabouts. When advised to call local precinct to report him as a missing person, subject said police took husband to jail and now he cannot be located. Jones said subject insisted Fiore knew her husband Julio Yolimar because Fiore ran the courtrooms. Jones advised that Fiore is mayor and subject Maria Yolimar said he was in charge of courtrooms when husband disappeared. Asked when this occurred, Yolimar said a year ago. Became hysterical and abusive before Lucretia Jones terminated call.
Subsequent investigation showed subject Yolimar had called on prior occasions. Other City Hall staff interviewed remembered similar conversations, always in July. No actionable threat to mayor. Jones advised that if subject calls again, advise her she is liable for prosecution for telephone harassment.
To the police report, Butch had stapled newspaper clippings, printouts from microfilm. The headline on one said “Man Nabbed in Tourist Stabbing.”
That story was from the Times, page 25, the metro cover. It said Julio Yolimar, thirty-one, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, had been arrested in connection with the robbery and stabbing of a French tourist on Park Avenue at 86th Street.
I looked at the date. July 30, 1988. The tourist, a physician from Rouen, was reported in critical condition with a stab wound to the chest at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. His wife, who was with him at the time of the robbery, was not injured. The stabbing was part of a rash of similar attacks on tourists, the story said. A spokesman for the office of Manhattan District Attorney John Fiore pledged a thorough investigation and swift prosecution of the case. The French attaché in New York City, Jacques Rioux, said his government had “serious concerns” about the safety of visitors to New York.
There was a similar story from the Daily News. Then some sort of memo, again stamped confidential. It was from the New York City Department of Investigation, to David Conroy, deputy mayor for operations.
Re: Vincent H. Digham III v. Mayor John Fiore and City of New York.
David: Our investigation indicates nothing that would lead to a need for quick settlement here. After all, the DA’s office only recommends bail conditions; the courts set them, and for that reason I think we are effectively shielded from civil liability. However, from a public-relations standpoint, I think the city would be well advised to make this case disappear quickly and quietly from the media. For reasons that are difficult to discern after all these years, it would appear that Vladimir Mihailov was offered bail opportunities far more lenient than the norm, considering the seriousness of the charges against him. Could be problematical. All best, George.
Attached to the memo were clippings: The New York Daily News, August 19, 1988, page 2: “Man Injured in Assault Is Heir to Fortune.”
His name was Vincent Hillary Digham IV (pronounced DIE-um), the story said. His family had made its money by inventing plywood. Now they ran the Digham Foundation and the Vincent H. Digham Trust. Digham IV was attacked, the story said, as he left a posh East Side bar called Edinburgh. Digham IV was twenty, a student at Yale Univ
ersity. He was struck with a club as he got into a high-performance BMW coupe. The suspect in custody was Vladimir Mihailov, thirty-one, of 1283 Brighton 4th Street, Brighton Beach. The motive, police said, was car theft. As of press time, Digham remained in a coma.
I continued on.
There were three more cases, all similar.
One included a sheaf of letters written to Fiore both when he was Manhattan district attorney and when he was mayor. The writer was one David Tilbury, who lived in the Village. Tilbury’s wife, Mary, was an anthropologist who taught at New York University. On the night of July 9, 1988, she was attacked as she left the subway station at Sheridan Square, her skull fractured and her ear nearly torn off. A city teenager, Lester John, was arrested the same night, charged with felony assault and released the next day on $2,000 cash bail.
In the first letter Tilbury wrote:
You now say that you cannot locate this monster, who nearly killed a defenseless woman in order to gain possession of her purse and $28 and change. I would suggest you take the $2,000 he forfeited and use it to pay police officers to locate the man. He is 19 years old, an eighth-grade dropout and lifelong New Yorker. I do not think he has fled to the South of France.
The next letter was a repeat of the first. The third was a threat of a lawsuit. It was copied to the governor, a congressman, and the attorney general of the United States. It was dated July 2, 1998.
Dear Mayor Fiore:
I am writing to inform you that I have located Lester John. He is living at 123 Lorraine St., Apt. 212, in the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn. According to a private investigator whom I hired, John lives with his aunt, Lynette Stephens. It is a second-floor apartment, with the entrance at the center of the block. Stephens works as a toll taker for the New York subway system. John does not work. I expect to be informed of his prompt arrest and prosecution.
David Tilbury
26 Carmine St.
New York, N.Y.