by Susan Daitch
“Let’s say the owner of a building has higher-paying tenants ready to take over a lease; I convince the older tenants that it’s in their interest to accept the offer that’s on the table and start packing. Starbucks, Five Guys, Target, 7-Eleven all pay many times more than that cluster of ninety-nine-cent stores managed by Bengalis with Salvadorans at the cash registers. It may not sound nice or fair, but it’s just the way things work in cities. Why shouldn’t landlord X optimize his properties?” This wasn’t said so much defiantly as mockingly. Slouching against the wall while waiting for a turn with the darts, Luke was a kind of magnet, and he knew it. He didn’t have to exert any conscious energy. Everything would come to him.
“I thought you worked for a moving company.”
“You could say that. Roy works with me.”
“Isn’t he a lawyer?”
“Everybody needs legal counsel from time to time.”
I didn’t say anything, but I must have looked skeptical. Did he do his work with a crowbar, convincing folks it was ‘in their interest’ to get a move on? A look of hostility crossed his otherwise preternaturally calm face.
“What’s so strange about that?”
A target became available, and we played in near-silence, except when he felt that he had to show me how to stand and how to throw. He stood behind me with his arm around my waist, hand on my throwing hand. “Like this, like this,” he kept saying. I didn’t like being explained to, but I was barely listening, concentrating on the warmth of his body. It was like falling down a crevasse and trying to get a toehold in the ice in order to crawl out, now that I knew what lay at the bottom. Nothing. The more I tried to pull away, the closer Luke shifted. He didn’t know anything about me, but as far as he was concerned there was nothing to know. Sometimes I envy people who are so sure of themselves and their place in the scheme of things, even if they’re spraying acid, getting fumes in their own eyes. I lost every round.
When I looked back at my table, Demetrius was gone. Luke has a way of making people disappear from Jacky’s. It was my fault this time, as I should have known.
Chapter 13
Garfield may not have taken the Dagbent twins seriously, but I needed to. To him they were like ghosts no one was seeing except me. I had no desire to come face to face with them; still, I made a trip on the R train to Bay Ridge, to Svalbard’s Bakery. The idea was to watch from a distance. I didn’t want to tangle with Sharkbooty and Hawkbait. What was I hoping to find? Vats of lead white? Depleted tubes of Krazy Glue? Maybe nothing that obvious, but if Garfield believed the Dagbents were hardly more substantial than ghosts I had to pull the sheet off them.
Since moving to New York, I’d had a kind of Bay Ridge envy. Not because of the big houses with the massive Christmas-light displays but because it was a world away from the society that was Claiborne’s. Here were intact, happy families where everyone had what they wanted and no one grew bitter striving for things that were out of reach and not all that, anyway. I knew that wasn’t true, but when I was in the neighborhood I found that I had a strange stake in the illusion that such satisfaction and comfort existed.
The bakery was located next to an empty lot that had been turned into a city vest-pocket garden. That Svalbard’s Bakery was closed was no surprise. It was the middle of the night, but the back, where the baking was done during the night, was in full swing. Much of the back of the building, more garage doors than wall, was open, so delivery vans could pull up and load boxes or dispatch large quantities of ingredients. Positioning myself behind a stack of trays on a rack just outside a rolled-up garage door, and boxes of bread, cakes, and pastry ultimately due to be loaded onto a truck, I could see out, but no one was looking in my direction. As far as they were concerned, there was no need to look at the assembled rack until the delivery truck arrived.
One of the twins came out from around the back, where the baking was done. He was covered with flour, but the trash bag he carried was enormous. How many eggshells, butter wrappers, empty cartons of milk and cream, flour sacks could it contain? The air smelled of vanilla and cinnamon, of comfort food, though the idea of comfort was an elusive island located somewhere in the distant lower bay, far from where I was standing. I was too far away to tell if it was Per or Ove, but whichever he was the fellow was talking to himself and gesticulating as if he was arguing with an imaginary opponent. It was like watching a mime. I saw no evidence of a phone or Bluetooth. Once he was back inside, I crossed over to an alley, where I could look through a smudged, dirty window into the back where the baking was done. The window was open a crack at the top, so I could hear murmurs of what little conversation there was. Mostly, the bakers worked in silence. Not even a radio.
Svalbard’s was a family business. There were five people at work: an older man, presumably Mr. Svalbard, Juni’s father, Per, Ove, and two Mexican workers putting trays of pastry in the ovens and taking them out again.
Out of the blue, Per grabbed the hands of one of the Mexicans and held it over the spinning blades of a giant electric mixer. I’d heard nothing—no angry dialogue, no threats, no warning. All had been quiet. He just reached over and grabbed the man’s hand. He pulled away, but Per was stronger, and drew him closer and closer to the blades. I noticed that both Mexicans were missing fingers. So was Svalbard. Then Ove grabbed the other Mexican, ripped off his shoe, and dragged his foot over to the mixer. I ducked down. I didn’t want to watch, so I ducked and turned quickly, nearly knocking over a pile of empty oil tins. I needed to get as far away as I could, as fast as two human feet could take me.
I backed away around the corner, then around another corner, till I got to the front of the shuttered bakery. The metal gate was tagged with graffiti. Heart pounding in my sinuses, I listened for a minute, maybe two. The only sound was of an industrial exhaust fan, as if the only danger in Svalbard’s Bakery was the risk of developing white-lung disease from inhaling flour dust. I leaned against the corrugated metal, a halo of red spray paint—an S or a 5, part of somebody’s tag—surrounding my head. It looked like old-style tagging. Once the Dagbents arrived in the baker’s life, I’m guessing, little attention was paid to upkeep, like painting over graffiti, or the taggers, sensing bigger criminals afoot, stayed away. I shut my eyes and inhaled deeply for a moment. The R train was only a couple of blocks away. If I could make it to the subway, I would put as much distance between myself and this place as possible. I would be home free.
When I opened my eyes, I was face to face with Per Dagbent. Calmly, as if he were only waiting for a performance to begin, he reached into the pocket of his white baker’s jacket, pulled out a Parliament, and lit up.
“Who says smoking is bad for your health, yo? I go out on break and find an old friend.” The “yo” and the Norwegian accent made strange bedfellows, but he said “old friend” the way German war criminals speak in English-language movies. This was no cinematic moment.
“Looks like Christmas came early this year. Hey, Ove, look what Saint Nicholas brought us.” He leaned around the corner, then turned back to me, leaning one elbow against the grating next to my head. He smelled like fresh butter and sugar, but it was cloying and overwhelming. I wanted to gag. “We look for you. We try to scare you off, but you come to us. You can’t stay away. Nice.”
“Santa made a mistake.” I dodged his arm and made a run for the subway, for Eighty-sixth Street, where there might be people milling around. Per stumbled as he grabbed me. I twisted away, but didn’t get far. He grabbed me around the neck and threw me to the ground, but the earth is a very stable place to be. You don’t have to keep your balance, and for me, at any rate, my legs are much stronger than my arms. I kicked Per hard in the stomach, and he went down but not out; he crawled across the sidewalk to return the slam. Trying to shield my face from his punch, I jabbed him in the nose with the point of my elbow as he leaned in. I could feel soft cartilage give slightly, but I was no match for Per, who was twice my weight, and it was like angering a mad dog who wou
ld only attack more fiercely. Blood dripping from his nose, he yanked me upright by my hair and, with one arm around my neck, dragged me toward the bakery.
“Looks like Ove can’t hear me. I’ll have to take you to him, love.”
“Love.” Jesus.
He grabbed my ankles and started to drag me, but tripped on an empty oil tin and went sprawling. I kicked him with all my strength directly between his legs and began to run, but he grabbed my leg and jerked me to the ground. I fell again, but twisted out of his grasp.
I limped toward the corner, hoping that a car with a Good Samaritan at the wheel would appear on its way to the Verrazano Bridge, but Per had gotten up and was right behind me. He tackled me, but I counterpunched as if my life depended on it. Which it did.
Per’s eyes had narrowed so much with anger that the hawks’ beaks couldn’t pry the lids open. Even slightly disabled by my punching and kicking, he picked me up, carried me into the bakery, and threw me onto a stack of flour sacks. They were not soft. The Mexicans stared in shock and confusion, then they retreated to the back. The one who had been about to lose his foot, or at least some toes, put his worn green running shoes back on. No socks.
For a few minutes, the room was completely silent. Svalbard looked like a beaten man. What they held over his head to make him compliant I couldn’t say. He stirred a vat of cherries bubbling in syrup, looking down into its ruby-colored depths, plunging the paddle in as numbly and as affectless as if he were rowing to Greenland.
Boxes of gloves, the kind worn by people who work in the food industry, were stacked on a shelf. No wonder they never left any prints. Svalbard wore a hairnet over his bald head, probably from habit. The others didn’t bother. City health inspectors had no doubt been bribed away from this place.
The back of the bakery was quiet and dimly lit only by a few blinking fluorescent tubes swaying overhead. Per searched my pockets for a phone with the speed of a skilled pickpocket, found the disposable, and tossed it into a mixing bowl full of a soapy sludge of detergent and batter. Once I’d been frisked, Per and Ove seemed to think they had all the time in the world to dismember me piece by piece and flavor the meringues. They moved as if in slow motion. The pouches under Svalbard’s eyes were big enough to store bottle caps, if that were remotely necessary. His eyes swiveled in my direction as headlights from delivery trucks swept across the space. The delivery vans had arrived to pick up the racks of bread, cakes, cookies, and the like stacked at the back entrance. In less time than it would take for one of the truck drivers to put a foot on the driveway, Per had hustled me into a small windowless room. Hustle isn’t an entirely accurate word to describe his motion. He pushed me so hard, my head cracked on a crate of what turned out to be mixer parts. I heard the door lock, then blacked out. I assumed I was in a storage closet, but when I came to I groped around and found a dangling string that turned on a light, a bare overhead bulb. The room looked as if it had once been an office. The Dagbents probably weren’t much for organizational paperwork, and Svalbard appeared only to be going through the motions.
On the desk amid piles of pink, yellow, and white orders and invoices were pictures of Svalbard’s daughter, Juni. She was storybook beautiful, the kind of girl who is always chosen to be the princess in the school play, while for the others, the closest they get is a princess backpack. But then the princess obsession ended, and she became a soccer player. The drawers were so full of papers and pieces of hardware, bolts, wingnuts, hinges, small spare parts related to the machinery in the other room that it was difficult to open them without making noise. Most of the papers were related to the bakery business that went back decades, printing faded, pages crumbling in my hands. At the bottom of one drawer, I found a blue leather-bound photo album with sprays of silver jonquils embossed on its cover. It was a wedding album commemorating Juni’s marriage. She looked radiant and happy, as did most of her family. Red-faced from too much aquavit, her father did not smile in any of the pictures. He still had a head of wiry blond hair that must have begun to fall out a short time later. The groom had been sliced out of all the pictures.
I opened the crate I’d knocked my head on, and among the mixer parts I found a six-inch kneading hook for making bread dough that could have doubled as a Captain Hook appendage. I put it in my back pocket, though it stuck out and it was likely they would find the thing before I could swing it at anyone’s facial tattoos. An ancient bottle of aspirin from a brand that had gone out of business was buried under chewed pencils and a handwritten list of prices, circa 1983. I swallowed a couple of pills anyway, even if the expiration date was sometime in the Napoleonic era. Behind the desk was a small wheeled table with another monitor on it and a VHS system just underneath, all connected but covered in dust, as were a few of the tapes Svalbard must have watched during downtime: The Late Show, Fat City, Cutter and Bone, The Deer Hunter, Animal House. On top of the monitor was a clipboard that listed deliveries. Though a line of rust marked the top page, this appeared to be almost up to date, and I noticed that among the deliveries were a fair number to JFK, Newark, the Navy Yard, and a few piers. It was possible that Svalbard’s was delivering to restaurants and concession stands at these locations. The computer was so old that its monitor was one of those big, boxy ones. A row of four troll dolls with furry hair were arranged across it. Under the desk was a tower that had slits for floppy disks. I turned it on anyway. The screen-saver image was one of the Three Stooges getting a pie in the face. Svalbard at one time had had a sense of humor, but you couldn’t blame him for losing it.
Under the computer, a paper calendar from 2001 was tucked into a moldering leatherette blotter. It was from a company whose name, printed at the top of each page, was stuck under the heavy old monitor. All that was visible was its slogan: “Over water, over land, Hearty Movers are in demand! Since 1972.” Squares were filled in with birthdays and business notes from a happier time. Written in felt-tip pen, in the square for Friday, September 7: “Empire & Gloaming Insurance, inspection, re: fire damage.” The squares immediately following September 11, 2001, were blank, then notation picked up again. There was nothing unusual about the blanks. I imagined business had stopped for much of that dark historic week. Perhaps it had been that number of years since the depressed Svalbard had cleaned his office, now apparently used as storage. I took distraction where I found it and drew on the nearly empty calendar page, then I tore off the page, folded it several times over, and shoved the paper into my back pocket.
There were no sounds coming from the other side of the door. It had been locked and bolted from the outside. Then I heard the sound of trays being rolled and machinery starting up. Even if I could break out, there were only Dagbents on the other side.
The smell of baking is supposed to be a happy, cozy-mozy smell that conjures up homey memories, but it only made me think of blades slicing into flesh, the cracking of the thin bones of fingers and toes. I must have dozed off, because I woke to total darkness. The lightbulb had sputtered out. I groped in four directions and found only walls that seemed much closer together than when I had actually seen them. Had they moved closer in the darkness, or was I only imagining the shift?
Breaking things into their smallest parts—molecules, atoms—took my mind off the feeling of being completely trapped, at least for a while. Sugar causes amino-acid catalyzed-caramelization reactions in which a sugar aldehyde or ketone is converted to an unsaturated aldehyde. The chemistry of baking isn’t so different from the chemistry of paint, except that one yields edible results and the other one should never, as a rule, ever be ingested. I hadn’t eaten in hours and should have been starving, but even the smell of fresh-baked bread was nauseating.
I had no idea how much time had passed; the ancient computer wasn’t telling me. I would have liked to nod off again as the only form of escape possible, but, for me, desire for sleep and the ability to konk out never go hand in hand. I thought of Jeannette Bender in her dark domicile made of car parts and toaster ovens
, not knowing the time, date, or who was president, but maybe not caring, either. I didn’t have to wish for sleep in futility for long. The door opened. A muscular man stood in the electric bakery light, a flour haze haloing his head, white apron with an embroidered elf insignia tied tightly around his waist. It was shark eyes.
“You must be Ove,” I said, trying to make friendly conversation.
No answer.
Chapter 14
I’d braided my hair and pinned it up underneath a beanie that read, “Afro-Punk Summer Festival 2014.” It was from one of Marnie’s jobs. Ove gently removed the knit cap, unpinned and unbraided my hair, and began to stroke it free.
“Let me do this one,” he said in a monotone to someone in the room.
“No. I caught her.”
“But I saw her first. This one is mine.” He put one arm around my neck, replacing that of his brother, who gave a little resistance, then ceded to his twin. Both of my hands were pinned together by Ove’s other hand.
“No one will hear you scream,” he assured me, then he turned to the Mexicans. “Remove the mixing bowl.”
The bowl was the size of a small bathtub. The heavy-duty mixer was designed for batches of dough that a small bakery would need to process on a nightly basis.
“Wipe down the blades.”
Pale-yellow dough was cleaned away.
“Start the mixer.”
Ove jerked his head toward a huge beat box, just like the one that blared salsa in the pop-up flea market down the street from my apartment. The gesture was a cue to Per to start their heavy-metal mix-tape compilation. Ove took my left hand and walked me over to the electric mixer.
“We start it slow, then we turn up the settings. See, it goes up to twelve. All the way up to twelve,” he said in mock wonder. “Very nice. Twelve is faster than a speeding bullet. We start feeding in your lovely hair.” He continued to stroke it. “The rest will follow.”