by Susan Daitch
When I arrived at the first car, I had no place left to loop to. The F was aboveground by now, zipping past auto-repair shops, yeshivas, party centers, Washington Cemetery. I love it when trains go aboveground. The landscape flattened out as the train approached the shore, and when the doors opened there was an ever so faint smell of the sea. Aboveground there’s cellphone service, and the few passengers remaining were busy chatting and texting. That should have been a signal to me. I should have thought of what that meant, but I didn’t. My only thought was that I’d lost the gym bird.
Looking out the window at Neptune Avenue, past the projects, playgrounds, a huge Mickey D’s, I wasn’t paying attention to anyone in the car until the New York Aquarium stop, when I finally turned to look down the car. The bearded man from the Mubarez Alomari bodega was a few feet away. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses that could have been taken from the prop department of Hill Street Blues, so I couldn’t tell exactly what he was looking at, but there was no way he just happened to be on the same train as I was. Parrot Girl called him. He knew what stop and which car. My luck he was in the vicinity.
The next and last stop was Coney Island–Stillwell Avenue. I ran out the Stillwell Avenue–Mermaid Avenue exit. To the left were the vast dinosaur-skeleton-shaped rides: the Cyclone, the Thunderbolt, the Steeplechase. I ran past a twenty-four-hour check- cashing joint, and On the Run Pizza. The building on the corner was a theater, or what had once been a theater but was now the site of some unknown combination of construction and abandonment. Sheets of plywood meant to close off the first floor were torn away and a rutted path led to something like a fire escape snaking up the side of the building. At each floor I tried to open the door leading into the building, but they were sealed shut, and I didn’t have seconds to spare to try to pry them open. Footsteps on the metal stairs, maybe a couple of floors below me, were closing in. I didn’t have to turn around to see whom they belonged to.
At the top floor, with no access to the roof and no place left to go, I pulled at the sheet of metal that sealed the floor from the outer stairs. It peeled off like the plastic on top of a carton of ice cream; strategically placed nails came loose and fell to the pavement below. The top floor was four or five stories up, and appeared to have been used for storage, but a few rays of sunlight came from boarded-up windows that had lost pieces of the planks that had once covered them. Film cans, broken pieces of furniture, rows of movie-theater chairs were scattered around. All was silent except for the sound of water dripping. I wasn’t sure how solid the floor was. There were areas where the wood had rotted away. I figured spaces close to columns offered the most support, so I hopscotched between them and sections that bore the weight of a tank-like overturned projector, and then a row of ancient movie seats, attached to one another like a leatherette caterpillar. I looked over the edge of an area where the floor had fallen through. Four floors of abandonment slept below: rusting struts, popcorn counter, mice and rat tracks etching rodent script in the dust, lichen-covered caryatids that had once framed a screen. I could pause for only a second. My pursuer had entered the floor. Some things, like coughing, you can’t control, and his hacking alerted me to his entrance. I reached a spiral metal staircase that led to the roof. He followed in my hopscotching footsteps. This should have worked for him, but a weak spot under one of the row of seats gave way, and he fell, or part of him did. One leg dangled below the floor while the rest of him struggled to climb out. Should I have gone back and lent him a hand? Maybe. But I didn’t. Continuing up the stairs, registering that he wasn’t yelling for help, I looked back to see the row of chairs start to slip down the hole in the floor as if they were being sucked into a whirlpool of discarded furniture. If the trapdoor to the roof hadn’t opened, I would have been stuck in the abandoned building, unable to return the way I came, but it gave, and I was on the roof. Seagulls and sunshine, a view of the ocean. I jumped down to the roof of the next building, a shooting gallery, and paused to admire the scenery. A DJ working in one of the arcades below played Sinatra’s “My Way,” followed by the Sid Vicious version. That was about all the time I had—four minutes of two renditions of “My Way”—before I heard coughing and I was no longer alone on the roof.
The next roof was too far below to jump safely, but a rotating sign swung close enough that if I could time my jump I could land in it, and jump farther down from there. The roof belonged to Eddy’s Bump Your Ass Off bumper cars. The top of the revolving sign was a red Corvette convertible. You didn’t have to be a parkour expert to make the jump, but it wasn’t as easy as jumping off a curbstone, either. Oscar’s Spider-Man doodle spoke to me. I timed my launch and landed in the driver’s seat. It was a real car that Eddy’s had hoisted up to the roof, and, theoretically, if it hadn’t been attached to a pole you could have driven it over the edge and onto Surf Avenue below.
Man Bun companion was right behind me, and jumped, landing on the hood of the car. It was, like the hood of most cars, slanted and slippery, and he started to slide off. As the Corvette revolved, if he fell onto the roof he’d probably be injured, but if he fell when the car was in rotation, jutting over the sidewalk, he wouldn’t survive. One hand grabbed the top of the windshield, which promptly cracked from the impact. Glass fell on me, into the car, onto the seats and the dashboard. He hoisted himself farther up until his face was an inch from mine, but he had very long legs, and it wasn’t easy for him to swing himself into the passenger seat. The mirrored sunglasses had disappeared somewhere along the route. His eyes were dark brown, almost black, and round, or maybe, because he was a drying thread away from dropping off from the world of the living, the tough guy was on leave. I reached out my hand. He grabbed it and was able to land in the seat next to me. He put his arm around me, whether as an embrace or to do damage I didn’t wait to find out but looked over my shoulder, held my breath, and jumped again. This time I landed on a slanted aluminum awning, long and hot, then I slid down to the sidewalk about six feet below. My left ankle was twisted a little and felt odd when I put weight on my foot. If he made it down, I couldn’t outrun him, but I started to limp away as quickly as I could, which was hardly more than a few feet. I glanced over my shoulder. I couldn’t help myself.
He looked over the edge of the car, then jumped, falling like a starfish onto the awning. Though he was lithe, the awning couldn’t take his weight, and he was propelled into a Dumpster. I limped back and looked in.
He was twitching but unconscious. Man, did it smell. This was not a neighborhood that put a lot of stock in the process of recycling or composting. Since no one was separating out the glass and metal, sharp objects had sliced his bare arms and cuts on his legs bled through what had been carefully pressed jeans. Bricks and broken pieces of cinderblocks had done some damage to the back of his head. Holding my breath, I climbed in, intending to go through his pockets. I wanted a name or some indication of who the guy was and whom he might be working for. I was sinking up to my knees in garbage when I heard someone shout. My private moment was about to be cut short.
“Hey.” A young man’s voice came from a few feet away.
“What?” I poked my head up. It was a guy in his early twenties, holding a skateboard covered in skull decals.
“Any good diving in there?”
“Nope. It’s all pretty rotten.” My new friend was a Dumpster diver. “Why don’t you try the alley behind the Applebee’s farther down Surf Avenue?”
“There’s no alley back there. No one knows where they throw shit out.”
I knew an Applebee’s had gone in as developers tried to mall-ify Coney Island and make it look like everyplace else, but I had no idea whether there was an alley behind it. They had to put their food garbage somewhere. His footsteps came closer.
“Are you sure? I usually find decent shit in there. Pineapple pizzas from On the Run that people order and never pick up. That kind of thing.” I had to say something to get this guy to scram.
“On the Run doesn’t do pineapple
pizza.” He caught me on that one, but I’m not sure it mattered. The guy sounded very stoned.
“Holy Christ! Don’t come any closer! This is really disgusting!”
“What is it?”
“A dead beagle. Worms already in it.” There was no furry mammal extant or otherwise that I was aware of amid the piles of torn blue and black plastic trash bags, but I needed the skateboarder to get lost. It worked. I heard footsteps retreat, so he was obliging without offering to help me out of the Dumpster. Help that, in truth, I neither needed nor wanted, but still, the Dumpster diver was doing it his way and looking out for number one. No surprise there.
I went through Man Bun’s pockets. I found a coupon for fifteen percent off a Staples Mailmate 12-Sheet Cross-Cut Shredder, a Film Forum membership card, a receipt from a Chipotle; no doubt he was planning to use this as a deduction on his income-tax forms, among his itemizations. In another pocket, I found a pack of king-sized Parliaments. Blood began to pool under his butt. Using two empty potato-chip bags as gloves—bags that didn’t appear to have been peed on by dogs or humans—I gingerly turned him over. There was a Glock 18 tucked under his belt, between his jeans and his hoodie, that bore a discreet Cyclones insignia on the back. The gun, I took. Since he was turned over, there were two more pockets to be searched, one more blood-soaked than the other. In the former, there was nothing. I wiped my hands on my jeans. Not a smart idea, but nothing else was available. The other pocket yielded a blood-tinged piece of paper with a heart printed on it, along with a telephone number. I figured it was a girlfriend. So much for having a moment with a guy on top of a rotating Corvette ad for bumper cars, but I stowed it anyway.
A phone lay between a crumpled pizza box and a cluster of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups. It had to be his, and not only was it on; there was no password. I could look at anything. First up were pictures of me. Lots of them. Including the ones that had been taped to my door.
The gun was loaded, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to use it if I needed to. My father had kept a Smith & Wesson Sig Sauer P226 Equinox 40 with night sights in his trailer in the yard, and he knew how to use it, often practicing at a shooting range. I went with him from time to time, but that was so long ago that any practice I’d done couldn’t be said to count anymore.
I called 911 to anonymously report that there was an injured man in a Dumpster, then called the number on the slip of paper and got a recording for Valentine Shipping and Trucking. I didn’t leave a message after the tone. Climbing out of the Dumpster and looking at the Wonder Wheel, whose lights were starting to come on, I unfolded the calendar page from Svalbard’s Bakery, with its grid of empty squares apart from the date when Birdwell had done his inspection. The name of the business that distributed the calendar was torn off, still wedged under the computer at Svalbard’s office, but the telephone numbers matched. So it was Valentine’s, a company that, like many businesses, gave out free holiday calendars as a way of advertising its services. It was an unlikely, romantic-ish name for a trucking and shipping company, but the slogan made sense: “Over water, over land, Hearty Movers are in demand!” I hadn’t gotten a good look at the trucks that picked up baked goods from Svalbard’s, but I vaguely remembered a heart logo on the side of one. Svalbard’s wasn’t a huge operation. It was the kind of business that I would have thought had its own van or delivery truck, rather than employing the services of what must have been a large company like Valentine’s that included international shipping.
Not sure where to put the gun so it wouldn’t be noticed was a problem. Back pocket, shirt pulled over it—that seemed passable for the time being. I tried to remember what my father had shown me about shooting. As an early do-it-yourselfer, he had once also made his own bullets, and, because he wanted me to understand how things work, it was a project that we worked on together, pouring lead into a mold held by a vise in his workshop. It was my introduction to the element that turns up in so many pigments.
I got back on the F train, stepping off at Smith-Ninth, and grabbed an espresso from Bean & Heard, then waited for the B61 bus to Red Hook and the address of Valentine Shipping. Summer days were longer, but it was getting toward evening. I wasn’t sure whether I hoped Valentine’s was closed for the day or not.
A text popped up on my phone.
John Garfield’s real name was Jacob Julius Garfinkle. Known as Julie. No relation.
How had Garfield gotten the number of my current disposable? That meant he also knew my location. I opened the phone, snapped the SIM card in two, broke the phone in half, and threw the pieces into an empty lot just before the B61 appeared, rumbling down Ninth Street.
Chapter 23
The offices of Valentine’s Shipping were in a renovated warehouse, not a trailer perched next to the docks as I’d expected. The lobby was all blond wood and brushed aluminum, but it also contained scattered bronze sculptures by Tom Otterness: little top-hatted men hauling bags of lucre, drinking martinis, scratching a money-bag head, stopping to examine an oversized coin or two. The miniature Monopoly-game figures were of the same vintage as the figures on the platform at Fourteenth Street, for the A, C, and E trains. I’d always loved those little capitalists. If there was art in the lobby, especially these particular sculptures, there was a good chance there was art in other parts of the building. I told the security guard that my name was Star Hammersmith, and that I’d been sent by Claiborne’s to do a condition report on a painting upstairs. I showed him my driver’s license acquired courtesy of Knox Barkley.
“Seventh floor,” he said. “I’ll have to unlock the floor.” He walked around the desk, almost tripping on a diminutive bronze man, called the elevator, and unlocked the door from the inside. It was a coffin-size elevator, and the concept that you couldn’t come and go unless someone with a key unlocked a floor was not a very calming thought. If there was a painting I could pretend to work on, I would go on automatic and do what I knew how to do.
The page of the Svalbard calendar was 2001, with Jake V. listed as president right under the phone number. I assumed that he was still alive and in business, and that he was the man I was going to see.
The elevator doors opened to a short hallway smelling of newly cut wood. This was the top floor of the warehouse. It looked as if the landlord was biding his time before Valentine lost its last container ship to Somali pirates, and the premises would barely need retooling to accommodate any number of up-and-coming startups willing to pay high rent for a Brooklyn waterfront address with more than decent parking, gorgeous sunset views, rising coastal water levels, and hurricane path be damned.
Behind double glass doors was the office of Jake Valentine. A young man, blond, built like a football player, sat behind a cluster of screens. He was eating fried chicken that smelled of fresh herbs like thyme and oregano and had been packed in a disposable wicker box. This was not KFC, though a can of Ballantine’s stood nearby. He was too young to have been the director of a company in 2001, so who was he? Behind him hung a Jeff Koons painting of a balloon dog. Koons made—or, rather, had made for him—huge high-chromium stainless-steel balloon dogs with transparent color coating that sold in the neighborhood of $60 million the last time one came through an auction house. The paintings of the sculpture sold for less but were no bargain imitation, either. The man and I made eye contact, but he continued speaking into his cell.
“I was really sweet to her—I told her to blow it out her ass.” He chuckled to himself as he spoke to whoever was on the other end of his phone. “She called me an amuse-douche. What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t even know. Hey, I gotta go. I got someone here.”
I tried to pretend that I hadn’t heard anything. What could I say? He did sound like an amuse-douche. The seventh floor was hot. The air-conditioning must have been broken, because electric fans were scattered around the office. Near the doors I’d entered through was Charles Ray’s eight-foot sculpture Boy with Frog. The original is white painted stainless steel, but there is at least on
e copy, at the Getty Museum, that was made of fiberglass over a steel armature. From where I was standing, I had no way of knowing if this was the original or one of the copies. Someone had put a pair of black-and-white nylon Brooklyn Nets shorts over the boy’s gigantic head, so that the elastic stretched over his crown and the shorts themselves hung down over the back of his wavy hair. The man got off the phone. He wasn’t sweating. He stood up, wiped his hands on his khaki pants, walked toward me, and introduced himself. Jake Valentine. Junior.