by Chris Vola
By the time men in cheap suits who might as well have had the word DETECTIVE tattooed across their foreheads started coming around and asking questions, Vanessa had guessed, more or less correctly, what had happened, except for who had committed the act; Enzo wasn’t exactly well liked. She pleaded with Ryan to leave Brooklyn with her. They could go to Manhattan, or to South Jersey to crash with her parents for a while. She could get him a job at her father’s contracting business, laying roof tiles and digging in-ground pool foundations. Or they could go anywhere; as long as they were together it didn’t matter.
For most of the next week he avoided giving her any semblance of a real answer. Maybe she took his near-total silence as being louder than any excuse he could try to stumble through. Or maybe she was just scared about a possible retaliation from one of Enzo’s less-than-upstanding business associates. In any case, when Ryan came home from a meeting with his financial advisor on the sixth or seventh day after Enzo’s disappearance, Vanessa—along with her threadbare duffel bag and dog-eared notebooks—was gone.
He tracked her to the Bedford Avenue subway station (this was when the L line was still being called the LL), where she had already purchased a token and was waiting on the Manhattan-bound platform, wearing one of Ryan’s white undershirts and eyeliner that was thicker than her usual mascara. Ryan jumped the turnstile; he could feel the vibrations of a Manhattan-bound train, knew he would have at most two or three minutes to convince her to stay.
She nearly leapt away when he gently touched her arm, and she would have fallen onto the tracks if he hadn’t held on tight. And though she was clearly shocked that he’d found her, he could tell by her flushed face and crooked half smile that part of her was impressed, flattered by his doggedness.
But after she’d calmed down and he had one last moment to state his case, he choked, literally. He couldn’t tell her why he had to remain in Brooklyn, why she really would be safer with him than she could ever know. Maybe a part of him still couldn’t believe that Vanessa had fallen into his life the way she had, that he didn’t deserve the brief contentment she had brought him. As the train—one of the clunky, toasterlike R38 models with more rust stains and graffiti than bleary-eyed commuters—closed in on the station, Ryan managed to croak out a lame excuse for a good-bye.
Vanessa just stood there, eyes wet, smiling sadly, and he could see that she was confident in the choice she had made. He couldn’t blame her.
In the seconds before the train doors opened, she leaned in, kissed his cheek, and thanked him for everything he’d done for her.
“You’ll find me when you’re ready,” she whispered.
He knew as soon as she said it that he’d never find her, that their time together was always meant to be temporary, that he would slowly fade from her thoughts, an uncomfortable reminder of a careless—and nearly fatal—youth.
But four decades later he had found Jennifer, another lucky accident that brought back in a sudden rush everything he’d felt for Vanessa, but stronger, a more acute urge. Maybe it was because Jennifer was older and knew what she wanted; she and Ryan were closer to being on the same page.
Whatever the case, he’d failed Jennifer just like he’d failed Vanessa, except this time it was worse. Instead of revealing himself and letting her decide whether she believed him, whether she wanted to continue the relationship, he allowed his fear of rejection to take over, to cocoon himself in a silence that festered until it had reached a breaking point. And because of that he’d gotten her caught up in something terrible, something he didn’t even fully understand.
He would go to Manhattan. He would return to humanity and suffer with the rest of them, probably more than most of them, if his disease continued to progress as it had before he was turned. He didn’t care how long it would take his own body to weaken and rot. The only thing that mattered now was that he couldn’t allow himself to be totally responsible for the destruction of one of the only two people he’d ever truly cared about.
And if she was already dead, the humans wouldn’t be the only ones who would suffer.
* * *
The train began to lumber along the track and Ryan felt someone watching him. He turned to his left, where a postcard version of a Russian grandmother—her white hair mostly covered by a red-and-yellow floral headscarf—was staring up at him, her forehead creased in concern, the only other passenger in the car who wasn’t asleep or immersed in a personal electronic world.
“Whatever it is that pains you, honey,” she said with a thick Slavic accent, “it will pass.”
Ryan loosened his death grip on the pole, unclenched his jaw, and relaxed his facial muscles, removing the stress furrows that he hadn’t realized were plainly visible. He nodded at the woman, avoided eye contact, and took a vacant seat across the aisle as the train picked up speed and shot into the subterranean blackness where Brooklyn ended and Manhattan began.
13
Nicki stood up, placed her phone in the bag, and checked out her reflection in the glass portion of the car’s doors as the train approached the Eighth Avenue station, its final westbound stop.
Ryan took a breath and prepared to do the same, half expecting to collapse before he could leave his seat. Maybe his previously damaged lungs wouldn’t be able to handle the pressure, or the reappearance of old bad blood after so many years would shock his system to the point of no return, past consciousness and into the darkness that he’d imagined was tightening its grip around his throat since the train had crossed over into Manhattan and made four additional stops.
But as he slung his backpack over his shoulders, tested his still-steady legs, and glanced at his reflection that looked the same as it had for as long as he could remember, nothing happened. He could still easily read the fine print on the advertisement for an online food ordering service at the far end of the car. He knew that the sixtyish bald man wearing an unseasonal black leather jacket and standing to his left had been suffering from non-Hodgkin lymphoma for about five years and that the disease had recently progressed from stage two to stage three. And, as the train doors opened and he walked out onto the well-lit platform, he could single out Nicki’s scent from the masses of jostling passengers, knew without seeing her that she was heading quickly toward the stairs that led to the station’s upper mezzanine and eventually up to the street.
Maybe, Ryan thought, the rules that he’d been taught, the boundaries that affected nearly every aspect of his existence, had been misinterpreted. No one he knew had ever returned—human or otherwise—to Brooklyn after leaving the tribe. Maybe it was all an outright lie.
It was only in the last few days that he’d begun to realize how much the tribe’s so-called elders had withheld from him, even if he had never been the most curious initiate. It was more than a little shady that Natalia hadn’t shown him the stacks of papers written by Arthur until the night her house was supposedly broken into, while Frank was conveniently (or strategically) out of the room. And what about Frank? Had their relationship always been one long sequence of manipulations? What did he stand to gain from working with the Manhattan tribe? And what would be the point of Manhattan exhausting a seemingly significant amount of resources to collect the statues unless they did possess uniquely powerful properties?
These were questions that could wait. Ryan needed to focus on the task at hand, while he still had the strength to correct his mistakes, while he could still track the prey that would lead him to Jennifer or, if she was already gone, whoever was responsible.
While he could still watch them die.
He walked up two levels of stairs and emerged into a midafternoon light—no less brilliant than when he’d left Williamsburg—that was partially obstructed by a massive beige HSBC bank building and a smaller, green, copper-domed repurposed bank that now housed a CVS. The traffic lanes and wide sidewalks that composed the corner of 14th Street and 8th Avenue swarmed with map-wielding Europeans, Citi Bikers, sweat-drenched power-walkers screaming into their
phones, dog walkers, halal cart vendors wearing headscarves and vacant expressions, fresh-off-the-clock professionals chattering and streaming in and out of a deli/salad bar and a discount liquor store.
It was a density of sound and movement that rivaled some of Brooklyn’s busiest avenues at rush hour, even though Ryan knew from his research that this borderland between the neighborhoods of Chelsea and the West Village wasn’t especially high on the island’s tourist or commercial hierarchies. The buildings in his immediate vicinity were on the smaller side, most of them six or seven stories, but Ryan had the weird sensation that he had tunneled out into a claustrophobic valley of Steve Madden and H&M-wearing insects surrounded by imposing giants, like the unmistakably stagnant and sweetly putrid air was being trapped by the silver reflective towers rising thirty blocks to the south in the Financial District and the similar ones that dotted the Midtown skyline to the north, the direction Nicki was currently heading.
Ryan shook himself free from the architecture’s sinister spell, took a long breath, and zeroed in on Nicki’s freshly ponytailed head and her bare upper back, watching her weave through the throngs on the west side of the street about a hundred yards away, passing a Banana Republic storefront.
As he crossed the street he briefly looked up to where the Empire State Building’s needle point peeked out between two nearby water towers, then lowered his gaze to focus on his target.
He quickened his pace until he was about fifty yards behind her, what he considered an appropriate distance—close enough not to lose her in case she made any sudden changes in direction or decided to get back on the subway or hop in a cab, but far enough away that he wouldn’t attract the attention of anyone else who might be watching Nicki’s movements or accompanying her unseen. For the next several blocks she continued in the same direction, past banks, cafés, boutiques, art galleries, and gay bars, gaggles of fashion types strutting gingerly in four-figure footwear over the trash-strewn and gum-speckled pavement, bicycle delivery guys on their breaks cackling and sipping from paper-bagged beverages, and sickly hustlers who reeked of bad coke posted up in front of the occasional porn shop, the last vestiges of a seedier time that Ryan remembered well. Whether you were in Chelsea or Williamsburg or Cobble Hill, gentrification always looked more or less the same.
His familiarity with the environment gave Ryan some confidence, but he knew he had to stay alert and, more importantly, wary. When Nicki stopped at the corner where 21st Street intersected with 8th Avenue, he ducked out of her range of vision and leaned against a magazine kiosk until the pedestrian signal changed from an orange palm to a white silhouette and Nicki was well across the street, heading west. Her pace slowed as she continued on the tree-heavy block that was lined by neat row houses, chained bicycles, and a well-maintained playground, and Ryan hung a little farther back, not wanting to draw attention in the now sparsely trafficked residential area.
She continued west on 21st Street, across two more similarly quiet blocks before turning right on 10th Avenue. Ryan broke into a jog to catch up, turned the corner around the side of a three-story redbrick bookstore, and found her standing in front of the shop’s entrance, facing him and intensely digging for something in her bag. Drops of perspiration were condensing on the bottom rim of her sunglasses, and Ryan detected a slight muscle twitch above her right eyelid. As he started to reach for the gun tucked under his belt, she took out her phone from her purse, pressed it to her ear, turned, and continued moving in the direction she’d originally been heading. Her heart rate hadn’t increased when he’d turned the corner. She hadn’t seen him.
He pretended to browse through the discount book cart next to the shop’s front door for a few moments, letting Nicki create some distance between them. As he tried to stop the adrenaline flowing through his trembling hands, he wondered why he hadn’t been able to sense that she’d stopped. Maybe it had only been a momentary lapse of concentration when he’d lost sight of her. Or maybe it was the start of something worse. Either way, he couldn’t allow his mind to drift in that direction while Nicki was still in motion.
She walked uptown another eight blocks, phone plastered to the side of her face, before crossing 10th Avenue at the intersection with 29th Street, just south of the Lincoln Tunnel, where the shadows cast by a massive, prisonlike U.S. Postal Service processing facility darkened the sidewalk and most of the traffic area. She headed west on 29th for a few yards, passing a storefront with an awning that said NIGHTLINE DELI, and stopped at the entrance of an unassuming five-story brick building sandwiched against a much larger, under-construction luxury condominium complex. She fumbled around in her bag, found her keys, and entered the front door.
Ryan felt a minor jolt of anxiety, jogged across the avenue, and stopped on the side of the street opposite the building she’d disappeared into, where a fenced-off empty lot took up most of the block. He stood for several seconds, studying the building’s rows of narrow windows and the rust-covered fire escape that connected half of them, trying to figure out his next move.
A light went on in an open third-floor window, one of the few that wasn’t obscured by a curtain or an air conditioner. Ryan could see wooden kitchen cabinets, a wall calendar featuring a basket of golden retriever puppies, and a framed print of Salvador Dali’s Geopoliticus Child. Nicki appeared behind the glass for a moment, her sunglasses off and her long dark hair flowing freely over her shoulders, and yanked down the shade.
Part of Ryan wanted to break into the building and the apartment immediately, to chain Nicki to the wall like what had been done to Jennifer, torture her until she told him what he wanted to hear, hate-drain her and leave her empty corpse to the large rodents that were scurrying back and forth between the vacant lot’s wooden-slab-covered fence and an adjacent Dumpster. But even though he couldn’t be sure how much time he had left, he knew that in this case, it would be smarter to exercise a little patience. The apartment might be wired to alert her or her employers the second he tried to break in, to destroy any sensitive information that might be available on her phone or a computer. And there were always cameras. You were always being watched by someone, regardless of whether the person at the other end of the tube had a motive for it—Big Brother was no longer a fictional concept, if it ever had been. He also had no real insight into how the Manhattan operation was structured. Nicki was more than likely a small pawn in a much larger game. Anything she thought she knew might actually turn out to be worthless.
He decided that the best move was to not make contact, to continue to follow her while his body showed no signs of deteriorating in the hopes that she would lead him to someone or something that would allow him to find Jennifer. If that didn’t pan out, he could act on his original impulse.
The first order of business was to get away from the exposed sidewalk where he was currently standing and starting to look like a major stalker. The lot behind him—an apocalyptic graveyard of trash and rubble, from what he could see in the small gaps in the wood boards—might be a good place to camp out of sight (there didn’t seem to be any active construction going on), but he couldn’t jump the seven-foot fence without the possibility of attracting the attention of a pedestrian or a passing motorist.
To his left, at the far end of the block, an old elevated railway ran perpendicular over the street. From his ground-level vantage point Ryan could make out rows of vegetation lining the track on both sides, as well as the occasional human head passing by.
Ryan remembered it as the West Side Line, the primary route for bringing produce into and out of the numerous warehouses that had covered much of Chelsea, the Meatpacking District, and the West Village. Today, he’d read, most of the meat being exported came in the form of steroidal knuckleheads stumbling out of clubs at five in the morning and heading home to Jersey or Long Island. The abandoned railway was now called the High Line, a newly created park featuring quaint walkways and seasonal plantings and stretching from 34th Street in the north to Gansevoort Street in the so
uth. Even though going into the park would provide the best views of the street and the immediate area, he couldn’t risk losing sight of the building to find the nearest entrance, no matter how close it was. Nicki would need less than a minute to exit the apartment and be gone forever.
Scanning the shaded area under the High Line overpass, Ryan noticed a sizable—but not particularly obvious—opening where the construction fence ended and the structural support of the overpass began, less than a foot wide, barely enough space for him to squeeze through. He walked over to the spot, swiveling his neck to maintain visual contact with the building, and waited a few minutes until the sidewalk was free of pedestrians. He tossed his backpack over the fence and quickly shimmied through the opening, tearing his shirt and pants in the process. He reached down and felt where the fence’s metal had deeply punctured his thigh, where the skin had already healed itself. There was no pain.
He fished a white plastic bucket from one of the debris piles that covered the entirety of the lot, flipped it upside down, and took a seat. From where he was sitting he had a direct view of Nicki’s window, and through a gap in the fence he could see the building’s front entrance. No one could enter the lot without ample warning and he was virtually invisible to anyone passing by on the street.
He took a breath, then rubbed his eyes with fingers that were no longer trembling. All he had to do now was wait.
14
The shade went up just before eleven the next morning.
Nicki appeared for a moment in the window, her hair pulled back into a tight knot on top of her head, wearing a loose gray T-shirt that was a far cry from the suggestive outfits she’d worn in Ryan’s previous encounters with her. She moved out of sight and exited the building a minute later in gym shorts and running shoes, a hefty black North Face backpack slung over her shoulders. She went into the deli, came out carrying a small plastic bag, and headed west. She passed under the High Line a few feet from where Ryan had been sitting for the previous eighteen hours, unblinking, with no interruptions besides two huge rats that had gotten a little too curious during the night and were now lying stiff on a nearby pile of rotting New York Posts.