by S. J. Rozan
Then one day she was there, in his hallway. Appearing like a vision amidst all the trash there, like the faces of the saints people were always seeing in a pizza somewhere out in New Jersey. Where they lived used to be a nice building, for nice people, with marble floors and mosaics, and art deco metalwork on the doors. Now the people were not so nice, they left their garbage out in the hall, where the paint peeled off the walls in long strips, and the roaches and the waterbugs swarmed around rotting paper bags full of old fish, rotted fruit, and discarded coffee grounds. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen, suddenly appearing there before him, just as he got home from work in the early summer evening, with his muscles aching from loading the trucks all day, and the climb past five flights of busted elevator.
Yet he hadn’t even thought about what she was doing there—at least not until much, much later, after it was too late to do any good. He hadn’t thought about anything much at all, he had simply reached out and touched her hip—the boldest thing he had ever done in his life—as she tried to move past him in the hall.
And to his surprise she didn’t try to pull away but stayed there, stopped by his hand, those great brown eyes looking right back at him. The first thought that occurred to him was how tall she was with those long legs, her gaze nearly level to his. The second was how bad he knew he must smell, his shirt and jeans soaked through with sweat, and smeared with blood, the way they always were after another day filling the bellies of the trucks.
Yet he could not let go of her, could not stop looking at her there. He moved his other hand to her hip and pulled her slowly to him. Then he touched her all over, petting her long, pitch-black hair; caressing her smooth brown flesh through the open back of her blouse. Still resting his other hand on her hip, as if she might try to move away. But she didn’t.
The hard part was finding a place to be together. They would have gone to the movies, but there were no more movie houses in the neighborhood, they had all closed up years ago. Sometimes they went up to the roof and made love under the water tower, where they could hear the nighttime rustle of the pigeons in their nests. But you never knew who might be up on the roof—kids fooling around or firing guns; junkies shooting up. They couldn’t even go up at the same time, there was too much of a chance they might be seen.
Instead they went to the games. It was cheap enough to get in, only two-fifty to sit up high in the upper deck. They would climb up to the last row, where they were cloaked in the shadows and the eaves of the big park. From the leftfield line, Luis could just make out where they lived—staring out now from inside the gleaming white, electrified stadium that looked like a fallen moon from the roof of their building. From where they sat too, they could see the fires out beyond the stadium walls, more and more of them every night, until it looked as if the whole Bronx was burning down that summer.
“It’s all goin’,” Mercedes said one night, while he watched in amazement as apartment buildings he had passed his whole life—buildings that had seemed as large and eternal as mountain ranges—went up in flames. “We should go with it.”
“What about Roberto?” he had asked, but she just made a disdainful shrug, and turned back to her beer.
Roberto didn’t care where she went in the early evening. That was when he did his other business—dealing horse, coke, bennies, guns; whatever he could get his hands on, out of his basement kingdom. Even so, they always made sure to sit up in the last row, and they would touch each other only when something big was going on and the rest of the stadium had turned its full attention to the field. He would lose track of the game, but he was always attuned to the rise and fall of the cheers, breaking like the waves on Jones Beach.
“He’s a pig,” she told him. “He hurts me, you know. When I say somethin’ he don’ like, or just when he’s drunk.” She had leaned her back toward him, lifting her soft pink shirt to show him the bruises Roberto put on that exquisite skin. Luis felt as if he were on fire when he saw those marks on her, he wanted to go out of the stadium right then and there and find Roberto in his basement.
“Every night, I wanna die before I go back to that bruto,” she told him.
But she did go back. They both did. Nights when the Yankees were out of town were the worst. Then all he could do was stand by the kitchen window, looking to catch some glimpse of her going by on her walk through the courtyard, while his mama cooked dinner and asked him what was so fascinating down there. He would watch her moving through the trash to Roberto, the same as always—arms folded over her breasts, head down. Only now she would look up at Luis where he stood in the window, even though anyone might see her.
He walked slowly up the hill of 158th Street with his cheap suit and his cheap suitcase and his little package in the brown paper bag. He turned onto Gerard Avenue and then he was there, in front of the old building. Like everything else, it was disconcerting in its familiarity. It seemed so much the same, only cleaner, the bricks scrubbed, most of the graffiti gone. Even the high red, locked iron gate that had surrounded the front entrance was gone, completely vanished. Easier and easier.
He lowered the suitcase to the ground and stood there for a moment. Feeling the package in his inside suit pocket. Looking up at the floor he knew she was on—his old floor. Mercedes—this close now. He picked up the suitcase and went up the front walk, grabbing the door as a pair of laughing kids came dashing out. He stepped in, marveling at how clean and new everything looked here too. The walls were painted a bright new color, the layers of grime scrubbed off the floor so that he could make out the original mosaic work in the marble again; the outlines of a big fish about to eat a little fish, who was about to eat a fish that was littler still.
He almost walked past the elevator, from the force of a habit suspended thirty years ago. But then he noticed how the door gleamed, all the original silver-and-gold art deco work shining brightly. He pulled tentatively on the door, got inside, and pushed a button. To his astonishment, the elevator started to rise.
He couldn’t stand to see her walking through the trash in the courtyard, a woman like that. Not that the stadium was much better. They had just spent two years rebuilding it, but it was an ugly place; the grime already ingrained in the rough concrete floors, old hot dog wrappers and mustard packets and peanut shells blowing up around their ankles, and spilled coke sticking to their sneakers. He wished he could take her someplace better, someplace worthy of her.
“It’s no better anyplace aroun’ here,” she told him. “No wonder they want to burn it down.”
As the season went on, he was more and more preoccupied with thinking about what she wanted, what they could do. He didn’t follow the games much, though the Yankees were supposed to have a great team. Instead, they behaved like a bunch of soap opera queens. The players fought with the manager, the manager fought with the owner. Everybody fought with everybody, it was in all the papers. A crazy season.
Then, as if they had finally decided to get serious, the team came back to the stadium in August and began to win game after game. The crowds grew bigger, the games quicker and more intense. Suddenly, it seemed as if everything had become much more urgent. Mercedes had started to talk about going away somewhere. She told him that she thought she could become an actress on television down in Mexico, even if she was Puerto Rican; maybe even go to Los Angeles and get on American TV.
She had never talked like this before, and Luis had the uneasy feeling that there might be layers of her that he had never previously suspected—that she might be much smarter than he would ever be, able to effortlessly conceal certain desires from him. But he didn’t really care. Sitting next to her there in the upper deck, just looking at her beautiful face, the gentle slope of her breasts, her bare legs. Touching her, absorbing her scent, sitting next to him game after game, he felt as if he were falling again, enveloped by the wave. There was nothing about her that didn’t surprise him, didn’t excite him down the whole length of his body.
“But how do we do t
hat?” He had bit. “How do we go away?”
“We need money.”
“Sí.”
“He has money. We could take it.”
“He’d come after us for sure then.”
“Yes, he would,” she said, then looked him in the eye, her gaze as level and meaningful as that first evening he had touched her in the hall. “If he could.”
All that August, he pretended he didn’t get her meaning. The Yankees kept winning and the fires kept burning, more and more of them. But he knew she was right, that it was all going. Every week, he walked past another store closed on the Grand Concourse, even the bodegas boarded up. The streets were filling with broken glass and old tire treads that nobody bothered to clean up; the fire engines screaming past him, night and day. In the evening, after his job, he would climb the five flights of stairs past the same broken elevator. Making his way down the hallway with its same bags of garbage and its roaches; the dingy hospital-green paint peeling off the walls, a single bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. There was nothing more for them there.
But to kill him—
“You really wanna leave him alive, be lookin’ over our shoulders for him the rest of our life?” she asked him, straight out, in the last week of August, during a game where the Yankees were battering Minnesota.
“No.”
“All right then.”
“All right,” he said slowly, and when he said it he had that marvelous falling sensation again.
Yet he still agonized over how to do it. Sometimes late at night he could hear Roberto working down there, even up on the fifth floor. When he wasn’t dealing, he was always doing something vaguely sinister with his saws in a corner of the basement—cutting up something, making something; the shrill sound of metal cutting into metal echoing all the way up to Luis’s sweltering bedroom when he was trying to sleep. It kept the whole building up, but nobody dared to complain.
He knew it wasn’t just talk what they said about Roberto. Luis had seen him chase some junkie who had cheated him clear across the courtyard, tackling him and pummeling his face with his .38 until it was a bloody mess. The junkie had laid down there for half a day, before he was finally able to drag himself away, with nobody so much as daring to call the police.
“Mercedes, I don’ know if this is such a good idea—”
“You said you would do it,” she replied before he could back out any further, a mocking, angry look across her face. Then she held his hand. “Let me take care of everything. All you have to do is be a man.”
He agreed to let her make the plan, thinking just maybe she was smarter than he was. She told him it would have to be done before the end of the season. He didn’t understand why, but she assured him they needed the big crowds.
“We need the noise,” she explained. “To get away. Leave the rest to me. I know where his guns are. I know where his money is.”
She set it for the last weekday afternoon game of the season—so they would do it before his compañeros came around, before all the junkies were up and looking for their next fix. The weather had finally broken, and there was the first taste of fall in the air. The day was cool and overcast and he remembered that she looked more beautiful than ever, wearing a short baby-blue rain slicker over her shirt and shorts. It was also the first time that he could remember seeing her nervous—looking up repeatedly at the gray, swirling skies, wondering if the game was going to be called.
They had gone to the upper deck as always, and there, to his amazement, she handed him one of Roberto’s .38s, wrapped in a brown paper bag—the weight of the gun surprisingly, thrillingly heavy in his hand.
“You got this from him?”
“Tha’s right. You know how to use it?” she asked him, her face more serious than he had ever seen it.
“Course I know how to use it!” But he was still worried. “Don’ he got more?”
“Not anymore,” she told him, pulling back the edge of the baby-blue rain slicker, showing him the handle of another pistol shoved into the belt of her shorts there. His stomach nearly convulsed, but the sight of it there both excited and comforted him, knowing that they would be doing this together.
She waited until the Yankees began a rally, got a couple men on. Then she stood up abruptly, motioning for him to hurry.
“C’mon. We don’ know how much time we got.”
He saw that she had already plotted the best, quickest route out of the stadium, past the perpetually broken escalators. They were back on the street within seconds, legging their way rapidly up the hill on 158th. Luis had felt his knees shaking under him, hoping it wasn’t visible to her—consumed by that falling sensation again.
They reached the building and ducked down the metal steps at the side, walking under a brick archway to the courtyard. She had gone first along the littered path, telling him to wait in case Roberto was watching. But they could already hear the whine of his saw, knew that he was preoccupied with his mysterious work. They could hear another sound as well. The noise of the crowd from the stadium beginning to rise—a short, tense, staccato cry, signaling something good; a hit, a walk, a rally in the offing. She looked back at him and bit her lip, touching the handle of the gun at her side.
“Hurry,” she ordered.
They went in the basement door, Mercedes first, Luis following. The whine of the saws stopped, and now Luis could only hear the noise from the stadium, gathering, growing. He could see Roberto in the far corner of the basement working on something over a pair of sawhorses. He slowly unbent and turned to face them as they came in, scratching at his hairy stomach. He looked as if he had just gotten up, Luis thought, his eyes squinting dully at them through his hideous insect glasses.
“Wait for it,” Mercedes told Luis.
“What? Wait for what? What he want?” Roberto asked, looking back and forth, from one to the other.
Mercedes didn’t answer him, only wandered casually off to one side, pretending to look at something, so that they formed a triangle with Roberto at the top. She put her hand on her hip—and then Luis could hear it. The cheers like waves, louder even than the blood pounding in his head. That low prolonged hiss, like the first lap of the waves coming in—
He thrust his hand inside the paper bag, felt the handle of his .38.
“Wha’s that? Money?” Roberto’s eyes gleamed with a sudden interest.
Luis said nothing, using the growing noise to slip the safety off. Feeling her eyes on him from the shadows across the room.
“What you doin’ here anyway?” Roberto turned his gaze on her, his brow creasing with suspicion. “You supposed to be at the game.”
Luis let the paper bag float to the floor, raised his arm. Roberto waved a hand at him dismissively, his eyes still on her.
“You go away, come back later. I don’ do business in the day,” he said.
That’s when the wave crashed over them all, the noise from the stadium suddenly one long, atavistic roar. He aimed the .38 at Roberto’s chest and fired, then he walked forward, firing again as fast as he could, making sure to steady the gun with both hands. The first shot tore through Roberto’s hairy bull chest and spun him around. The second one ripped into his back just under the shoulder blade, the third going through his neck and spraying a geyser of blood against the wall as Roberto fell forward over the sawhorses and Luis realized that he was almost on top of him, where his body was jackknifed like the butchered hogs that Luis loaded onto the trucks all day.
That was when he felt the blow in his side, just below the rib cage. The next thing he knew he was on the basement floor. Surprised by it at first, the gun skidding away from his hand and his head bouncing off the concrete. He was certain Roberto hadn’t had time to reach for a weapon, he hadn’t even had time to put his hands up, and Luis laughed to himself, thinking that he must have slipped on something. He struggled to raise his head from the floor, and he wanted to make a joke to Mercedes, but he realized he had been almost deafened from the sound of
so many gunshots in so a close space, the cheers from the stadium still sweeping over him, even through the ringing in his ears.
He saw that Mercedes had her gun out too, and that she was approaching Roberto, her wonderful legs moving across the room in long strides. She took one look at him splayed over the sawhorses, then thrust the gun into the dying man’s hand; wrapping his fingers around it and making them fire another shot into the dark recesses of the basement. After that she went over to the wall, removed three bricks, and took a couple of packages out, pushing them up under her windbreaker before she replaced the bricks. Only then did she come over to Luis where he lay on the concrete, staring down at him, her big brown eyes thoughtful and almost sad.
“What?” Luis shouted into his deafness, still unable to understand that she had shot him. “Was this part of the plan?”
“Oh, yes it was, cara mia.”
She knelt on the floor beside him. Her cheek against his cheek, the exquisite smell of her flesh still redolent even through the metallic odor of the guns and the blood.
“You did just fine, amado!” she shouted into his ear, and smiled down at him more affectionately than she ever had before.
Then she ran out the basement door, screaming bloody murder.
Luis got off the elevator at his old floor—her floor now. He shuffled down the hallway, one hand still carrying his suitcase, the other one clutching the paper bag inside his jacket. He was not really surprised to see that the hall too was now immaculately clean and bright, and freshly painted; all the bags of garbage and the roaches were gone.
He walked down to the end of the hall, to his door—her door. There he stopped, frowning, surprised to see that it was slightly ajar. Suspicious, he gave it a soft push with one hand, just enough to let the door swing open another couple of feet, and dodged back to one side as he did so. But nothing happened. There was no noise, no reaction. Only a wave of heat emanating from within, something else he remembered well enough. That, and something else. There was a terrible smell of decay, something putrid, coming from deep within the apartment. He sniffed at it curiously for a moment, and silently lowered the suitcase to the hallway floor. Then he pulled the gun he had picked up at 124th Street out of its paper bag and went inside.