“Uh,” he said. “Robbie?”
“Hi,” I said.
He rubbed his chin. I hadn’t seen Mitch in days, even though he lived right under us—the kind of thing that might not make much sense to noncity people. Mitch looked terrible, hair all messy, face unshaved for a week or more. Immediately after he’d lost his Wall Street job, I’d heard him playing his saxophone pretty much nonstop, but now I realized the sax had fallen silent.
“Up early?” he said. “If it’s early. Feels sort of early.”
Uh-oh. Was Mitch on something or other? This wasn’t like him at all. He was usually so crisp and decisive.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said. “An early walk.”
“Me too,” he said, gesturing toward the door.
“After you,” I said.
He paused, gave me a sort of sideways glance. “What grade are you in, again?”
“Seventh.”
“Where?”
“Thatcher.”
“Thatcher,” he said. “Good school. Not cheap.” He licked his lips; his tongue looked dry and crusty. “Think your parents would be interested in buying the place?”
“What place?”
“This.” He tapped the wall. “The building where you live. Nothing like home ownership—isn’t that the dream?”
“You’re selling the building?”
He rubbed his face again, a little too hard. “Everything’s on the table,” Mitch said.
“I’ll, uh, mention it,” I said.
“You do that.” He opened the door. I backed into the shadows, but as I did, saw that the street, at least the section in view, was empty, no sign now of Dina.
“Well?” said Mitch, holding the door. “Do I look like a doorman?”
For sure not. I went out, checking up and down the street for Dina. Gone. Mitch turned toward the river. I went the other way, would have gone the other way from him, no matter what.
18
Once my dad said—quoting somebody, I think—that in dreams begin responsibilities. I’d had no clue what that meant, but maybe now I was inching toward it, because I found myself headed for the Flatbush Family Detention Center, last night’s dream of Tut-Tut buried alive still somehow wakeful in my mind, making me worried and anxious.
A big white bird—maybe a seagull, but what was a seagull doing this far from the shore?—was perched on the tall dark wall of the detention center. As I walked toward the archway, its head turned, as though following my progress. I got more worried and anxious, for no reason I could explain, and was running by the time I reached the archway.
No one to be seen in the yard beyond those double-barred gates.
“Tut-Tut?” I called. “Tut-Tut?”
No response. I laid my hand on the charm, hoping it would do something. Nada. The charm had lost some of its power, for sure, maybe all; or it just didn’t care. But how could it not care about Tut-Tut?
“Tut-Tut!”
My voice came back to me, bouncing off the hard bricks of the inner wall. And what was that white thing lying by the wall’s base? Not a . . . ? But yes: a shoe; a sneaker; a laceless sneaker, once mine, then Tut-Tut’s, and now?
“Tut-Tut!” I shouted at the top of my lungs.
For a moment, more silence. Then I heard footsteps, the kind hard shoes make, and a man in a green uniform appeared in the yard. He saw me and glared.
“What’s all this racket?” he said.
“Where’s Tut-Tut?”
“Huh?”
“Tut-Tut. You’ve got him locked up in here.”
“You’re talkin’ about a detainee?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s no fraternizing with the detainees.”
“What does that mean? I just want to talk to him.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s my friend.” I pointed through the bars. “And that’s his shoe over there. Why isn’t he wearing it?”
The guard turned slowly and looked back. When he faced me again, his expression wasn’t quite so belligerent. “Stuttering kid?” he said.
I nodded. There was way more to Tut-Tut than that, but this wasn’t the time.
“They moved him.”
“Where?” I thought, Haiti? “Where!”
“No need to shout. You got the loudest mouth I ever heard on a kid. He’s in the Annex.”
“What’s that?”
“Smaller facility. He’ll be safer there.”
“Safer? From what?”
“Some of our customers in here ain’t so good at minding their manners.”
“Oh, my God—is he hurt?”
“He’ll be all right. It’s nicer over at the Annex.”
“Where is it?”
The guard named a street I knew, not far from the Gunn Tower construction site. “Number one thirty-three.”
• • •
I took the train, got off at the stop near the site, turned the corner and started down the street the Annex was on. The wind was picking up, blowing sooty particles around, sooty particles that scratched at my face and eyes. I came to number one thirty-three. It was a plain concrete building, three stories, with barred windows and a guard at the front door. On one side of the building stood an apartment building with a convenience store on the ground floor; on the other side there was a narrow alley with a sign reading ABSOLUTELY NO PARKING. I walked down the alley.
At the rear of the building was a yard surrounded on three sides by a fence topped with razor wire. This yard was bare just like the yard at the detention center, featureless pavement with a round drain cover in the middle, and much smaller. No one was in it. I gazed up at the windows on the back wall, none of them barred, probably on account of the fence.
“Tut-Tut! Tut-Tut!”
And all of a sudden there he was, behind one of the windows on the third floor, his face looking so small, and not at all clear through the grimy glass.
“Tut-Tut!” I waved kind of frantically.
He waved back. Then he tried to open the window but it wouldn’t budge. His lips moved. I couldn’t hear him at all, although just from how his lips were moving I knew that he was stuttering his worst. He went back to waving. We waved at each other. A big form appeared behind Tut-Tut.
“Tut-Tut!”
He got grabbed. I caught a glimpse of some huge guard pulling Tut-Tut away from the window. I waited for maybe ten minutes, and he didn’t come back.
• • •
I walked away, going nowhere in particular, and after a while, an idea hit me. That was always strange—although it hardly ever happened to me—an idea zooming in from out of nowhere. I went into a store and bought a can of purple spray paint, purple being Tut-Tut’s favorite color for tagging.
Not long after that, I was back at the Gunn Tower site. Rain was slanting down now, rain mixed with snowy white streaks, and the air was growing colder. No work seemed to be going on, from what I could see—the crane loomed motionless behind the fence—and the windshields of the cars and trucks going by were all foggy, plus the pedestrians had their heads bowed against the weather. No one had any interest in one lone kid.
I crossed the street. Police tape was still up around the spot where Mr. Wilders had died, and a few bouquets lay on the pavement. I glanced around, stepped under the police tape, aimed the spray paint can at the plywood fence and, in my best imitation of Tut-Tut’s style, wrote Mr. Wilders Lives!!! Wrote it big and tall. Then—zoom!—what was this? Another idea out of the blue, so soon? Yes! How about adding an image of the Canarsee stone head, the one Ashanti and I had seen in the museum case. Not easy, especially given my low level of artistic talent, but I was all set to take a swing at it when I noticed a long black car idling in front of a deli on the other side of the street. That’s a sight you see in the city, limo drivers grabbing a
soda and sandwich on the fly, so my gaze swept right over it.
And then, sort of on its own, swept slowly back. The front doors of the limo were opening, and two men were getting out. The driver: Harry Henkel, now wearing a tight little ski hat that made him look more ratlike than ever. The passenger: Mr. Kolnikov, trench coat collar curled up around his thick neck. They saw me, no doubt about it. I took off. They tried to cross the street but got blocked by the traffic, suddenly very heavy.
I’m a pretty fast runner, actually faster since I started playing basketball for the Thatcher seventh-and-eighth-grade team. Ms. Kleinberg’s a great coach, covers all the details, including how to run faster. Claw the ground, don’t push at it! No long sloppy strides—shorten up! Head steady! Relax! I was doing all that right now—except for the relaxing part—as I raced past the main entrance of the construction site, the artist’s rendering of a skyscraper-sized Sheldon Gunn showing off his tower looming over me. As I came to the first cross street, I glanced back to see if I was being followed, maybe not the best time for that; at least I probably should have checked the light first.
BLAAW! BLAAW! A bus, coming right at me, honked and honked again. I glimpsed the face of the driver, scared out of her mind and also real mad at me. She swerved. I swerved. More honking came from all around, plus from behind, I heard screaming brakes. And maybe a thud and a cry of pain, but I was too focused on darting through the traffic to be sure. I charged onto the sidewalk across the street, turned right, and sped on, taking one more glance back. And there was Harry Henkel, picking himself up off the street and getting yelled at by a furious driver. He limped back toward the opposite sidewalk. What about Kolnikov? No sign of him at all. Had I lost him? I ran toward the nearest subway station, halfway down the block, still running my hardest, even if I was in the clear. Claw the ground! Short strides! Head up! I was steps away when a long black car—the long black car—squealed to a stop beside me and Kolnikov jumped out. I practically ran right into him! He was even raising his thick arms to catch me.
I zipped sideways, just like a running back in football, and Kolnikov grabbed nothing but air. As I went past, I saw him close up, especially those eyes, the pale blue of icy winter mornings. “Stop right there,” he said, and called me a bad name, but of course I didn’t stop. In fact, I got hit by a brainwave: Why not run back across the street, through all that traffic again? Who would expect that?
BLAAW! BLAAW! Another bus! More honking, braking, shouting. And me, making all these moves, the fastest, dartingest moves of my whole life. What I didn’t take into account was how hard the rain was falling, and also how it had turned mostly to snow, and all of a sudden, right in the middle of the street, I lost my footing and went sliding on the pavement, sliding and sliding with an enormous dump truck bearing down right at me.
BLAAW! BLAAW! Was I going to just slide by, a mere body length or two in front of it? No, not quite—I wasn’t going to make it. “Charm! Do something!” I cried that out loud. But no. Not a thing. So what was the point of all this? Was the charm just going to sit there and let me—
The front wheels of the dump truck thundered past, inches from my head. I kept sliding, totally helpless, sliding and sliding and—and right under the truck and out other side, just ahead of the next set of wheels. I popped up on the sidewalk—practically right in the astonished face of a newsstand guy covering his papers with a tarp—and kept going.
I took one last look back. Kolnikov and Henkel were standing by the long black car, having an argument with a meter cop. The meter cop was . . . yes! . . . writing a ticket. I got a lot of satisfaction from that, and was still enjoying the scene when Henkel snatched the ticket and got behind the wheel. But Kolnikov did not join him in the car. Instead he started peering around, his head turning slowly in my direction. I ducked into the doorway of the store right behind me.
“May I help you?”
I turned. The store happened to be one of those antique places—not the fancy Manhattan type where if, as Nonna liked to say, you had to ask the price then you couldn’t afford it, but the funky type my mom was fond of, full of what my dad called junk. There was only one person in the store, a woman clad all in black except for the fox stole around her neck, the kind of fox stole with the fox’s head still on it, first time I’d seen one in real life.
“Um,” I said, at the same time noticing that the woman’s hair was pretty close to the color of the fox, except too bright to be natural. “I’m just sort of . . . uh, looking.”
“For anything in particular?” the woman said. The glass eyes of the fox seemed to be watching me suspiciously.
The answer to her question was no: just looking meant looking for nothing in particular. But this woman didn’t seem to be playing the game that way, and all I wanted at the moment was to stay off the street, so I blurted the first thing that came to mind.
“How about Canarsee objects?” I said. As I spoke I felt the charm—heating up now at last but when I didn’t really need it—a bit late on the uptake, little guy—and no doubt for reasons of its own.
“Canarsie objects?” she said. “Like souvenirs from the Canarsie Pier?”
“Do they sell souvenirs?” I said. I didn’t remember any of that from my one visit.
“I’m not familiar with that part of Brooklyn,” the woman said.
“No problem,” I said, getting the idea from her voice that she was from some other part of the country, maybe the Midwest. I myself was Brooklyn born and bred. “I’m actually talking about the Canarsee Indians.” The charm warmed up some more, like it was encouraging me. I moved a bit deeper into the shop.
“The Canarsee Indians?” the woman said.
“They lived here first,” I told her. “Right here in Brooklyn, before the Europeans. They were actually part of the Lenape people.”
“And they made art?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “The museum has—” I paused. A small TV stood on a shelf in a corner of the store, and I suddenly realized Dina DeNunzio was on the screen. I walked closer. She was wearing her cool red jacket, standing in a hospital lobby and talking to a tall guy in a white coat who was gazing down his nose at her.
“And the cause of death, doctor?” Dina said.
“Blunt-force trauma to the head,” said the doctor. “In layman’s terms.”
“Layman’s terms—thanks, doctor,” Dina said. “And what was the nature of the blunt-force trauma?”
“Nature of the trauma? Not following you.”
“In layman’s terms, how did Professor Wilders’s skull get bashed in?”
The doctor gave her a disgusted look, like she’d said a bad word. “His injuries are consistent with a fall from a height of ten feet or more onto a concrete sidewalk. I’m told by the investigating officers that the deceased had been attempting to scale a high fence.”
“But so far,” Dina said, “no eyewitness has come forward to verify that assertion, so it has to remain an assumption, doesn’t it?”
“The deceased died of head injuries consistent with a fall,” the doctor said.
“But are you sure that’s what happened?” Dina said. “Could a blunt force from something other than a fall be the cause of those injuries?”
The doctor opened his mouth, closed it, glanced off camera, as though for help.
“And if not,” Dina said, moving in on him, “why not?”
“I can’t comment on that,” the doctor said.
“So it remains a mystery?”
The doctor’s voice rose. “I never said that! It’s no mystery.”
Dina faced the camera. “Back to the studio.”
“What’s that all about?” said the storekeeper, standing behind me.
I turned to her and, as I did, glimpsed a man through the shop window: Kolnikov. He was walking quickly by, cell phone to his ear. Meaning he’d lost me, right? Had to be. A sensat
ion of relief swept over me, and with it, kind of as a bonus, came another brainwave: How about if I followed him? Any reason why not? I got the nagging feeling there might have been, but there was no time to reason things out.
“Hey, thanks,” I said, hurrying to the door.
“Wait! What about the museum? That sounded inter—”
19
Snow now, for sure, but not the soft puffy kind. This snow came angling down on my face in hard and icy pellets. They didn’t seem to bother Mr. Kolnikov, striding along half a block in front of me. He was Russian, right? Maybe Russians got so used to snow it stopped affecting them. Kolnikov was the only pedestrian around not bending into the wind, but bearing himself straight and tall, the snow starting to coat his broad shoulders. He turned right at the first corner, disappearing from view. I ran to the corner, reaching it just in time to see him ducking into a restaurant. The sign hanging over the sidewalk read HAPPY’S PLACE.
I slowed down as I went by, glancing through the streaky window. Happy’s Place was pretty dark inside, seemed long and narrow with two rows of booths stretching into the gloom. There were a few shadowy customers, but all that stood out was Kolnikov’s blond head. He was sitting with his back to the door, not too far from the rear of the restaurant. By the time I’d absorbed all that, I was a few steps beyond Happy’s Place. I found myself coming to a halt, then moving, as though not really under my own control, back toward the door. This seemed to be a day for irresistible brainwaves, and besides, the charm was—but no. It had cooled back down, like it hardly had the strength to come alive for more than a minute or two. No time to puzzle that out. I entered the restaurant.
No one gave me a glance. I took in the scene: an old couple sitting silently in a booth to the left, a woman doing a crossword puzzle to the right, some empty booths and then Kolnikov alone in a booth, phone to his ear. At the very back was a swinging door to the kitchen, weak light entering through its small round window. Without any sort of plan in mind, I slipped into the booth right in front of Kolnikov’s. The top of his head was just visible over the leather-covered barrier between the booths. And then I thought, No in here has seen me. It’s like I’m not even here! So why not keep slipping on down, Robbie? Finding no reason not to, that was what I did, easing myself down into a sitting position on the floor. It was nice and dark under the table, although kind of sticky. A half-eaten french fry on the floor glistened dully with ketchup. I realized I was hungry and fought off a crazy urge to eat it. It hit me for the first time that maybe I had something in common with Pendleton, a completely whacked-out thought.
The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor Page 14