Kockroach

by Tyler Knox

  I had questions, sures I did, but I buried them and went about my life. And with old Uncle Rufus’s benediction I began to feel things I hadn’t felt in a long time. Connected, is what I mean. I saw a kid in trouble and I was that kid in trouble and I helped him out with a dime or a dollar when I could. I’d look at a Joe struggling with something and I’d feel the strain and lend a hand so I could struggle with him. I wasn’t no saint, believe you me, but I was feeling things again.

  And then I found Champ. And he filled a hole even Hubert hadn’t dug. And Chi-town, when it all slipped into place, became for me a different world where different dreams was dreamed in colors I never knew existed.

  But Chicago was dead to us now, both of us, and we couldn’t never go back, and so there we was, crossing the Hudson, heading into the Apple, another place that had died to me.

  Rate I was going, Santa Cruz would be all I had left.

  But first I was coming back to the big town, chasing my ghosts, coming home. Funny, ain’t it? I grows up in Philly, spends eight years in the distant wilderness of the Midwest, yet it’s New York what I still thought of as home. What did that Joe say, the Joe what wrote all those long sentences that fly around like twittering birds and end up nowheres, didn’t he say you can’t never go home again? Well, maybe he was right, but there we was, the two of us, driving over the Georgie W., trying to make a liar out of him as I reached out for some shadow barely glimpsed in the midst of an apocalypse. You see, them questions I had buried had risen from the dead and it was time to finds some answers.

  “Head south off the bridge,” I says. “We’ll check out first the Square.”

  The Square, Times Square, my square, ever the same and yet. And yet.

  The signs, sure, still there, brighter than before, but different faces, different products being hustled to the mokes, different names on the movie marquees, half of them with sex in the title or tagline. “Raw Naked Violence.” “Sex Without Shame.” The whole scene filthier, seedier, sad. The Astor Hotel, the grand old dame of the Square—shuttered up for the wrecking ball. The Latin Quarter—all shot to hell. The Roxy, the frigging Roxy—gone. The life of the place had been chewed off by Sister Time.

  I stepped in the Automat, the land of promise for me as a boy, but it too was changed completely. Once an elegant refuge full of promise, a direct link to the grand parade flowing outside its windows, now it was dirty, muted, inhabited by a bunch of low-life bums sitting miserably alone at the tables, no punch or laughter or thrilling sense of possibility.

  “What are we doing here?” says Champ.

  “I don’t know,” I says. “But in my life I’ll never feel older than I feels right now.”

  The only moke I recognized at the Automat was, believe it or not, Tony the Tune, still eating his Salisbury steak, still humming away, aged not a day since I left. I went over to ask him where everyone else had disappeared to, but afore I got two words out he blew me off.

  “Get away from me, you little scalawag. I got no time to waste on the likes of you.”

  It was the loveliest thing I heard since we crossed the Hudson.

  On the street, I met a hustler with his T-shirt and tight jeans and I asked about Tab, but alls I got was a drugged-out pout and a halfhearted come-on, more pathetic than enticing. The hookers was all strangers too. Not a one of our girls was still on the street. There had always been turnover, sure, that was the nature of the game, but I hadn’t noticed how relentless it was whilst I was in the middle of it. But in eight years it must have turned over a couple times or more. Still I took aside what girls I found and asked them some names. Blatta? What’s that? Abagados? Who? Fallon? Nothing. Who’s in charge now? I asked. A name I never heard of, a name I didn’t want to remember.

  “You ever hear of Pinnacio?” I says, but not a one a them did.

  The legends was all dead.

  In the Paddock was a barkeep I never seen before, a broad bus with a bully boy’s face who eyed Champ a good long moment afore wising up and giving him a beer.

  “Does a copper name of Fallon still come in here?” I asks.

  “Who’s asking?” he says.

  “Just someone what used to work the Square is all.”

  “Who were you with?”

  “Blatta.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Abagados.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “The extent of what you ain’t heard of would float the Hindenburg.”

  “I got nothing for nobody I never heard of. Get lost.”

  “Answer his question, Pops,” says Champ with that soft ruined voice of his, “and we will.”

  The barkeep glances again at Champ, takes in his dark face, scarred and mashed, his ears engorged from rabbit punches, his neck thick from all that training, his huge hands laying still and heavy on the bar.

  “There’s an old wino comes in sometimes, begging for drinks,” says the barkeep, talking to me but his eyes all the time on Champ, which was the way of it. “Goes on and on about how he used to be somebody before he starts the shouting and we need to toss him. He says he was a cop and once I heard his name, something like Fallon.”

  “Where can I find him?” I says.

  The barkeep snorts. “Where do you think you find winos like that?”

  It didn’t take long. I had picked up a new line of work in Chicago. It was all part of that strange feeling I had that I wanted to lend a hand to those what needed it. Not as a charity, that wasn’t my way, but in a manner what fit my talents and proclivities and could earn me an almost honest dime. I had done such a job detecting that thing between the Boss and J. Jackie Moonstone, I thought maybe I could actually make a go of the detection racket. So I stripped some leaves off my wad from Uncle Rufus and rented an office, set up a phone, hired a dame with attitude to answer it, and just like that I had my new line.

  Mickey Pimelia, P.I., licensed and all.

  Fallon wasn’t hard to find for a licensed gumshoe. He was holed up in a sad sagging flophouse on the Bowery, a fleabag called the Sunshine. I bought him a sandwich, what kind didn’t matter, he probably couldn’t taste the difference no more, and a jug of rotgut wine, anything harder he wouldn’t be able to stomach, and Champ and me, we walked past the suspicious eyes of the night clerk and climbed the hotel’s stairs to pay our respects.

  The stench was enough to stagger you, piss and puke and crap like it was rubbed along the walls, the rot of ages. Cockroaches climbed the banisters and clung to the ceiling.

  “Go away,” was the response to our banging from the other side of the door.

  “I’m looking for Fallon,” I said, “Lieutenant Nick Fallon, Vice.”

  Pause. “He’s dead.”

  “I’m an old friend.”

  “He doesn’t have any.”

  “I got some food and some wine for him.”

  “Keep it,” says the voice, but then we hears the sag of bedsprings and the shuffle of feet and the door it opens.

  “Mite,” says Nick Fallon when he gets a good look at me out of his rheumy eyes. “You look like dick.”

  “But you, Lieutenant, you’re the goddamn queen of England.”

  He glances at Champ, back at me, raises his eyebrows, takes the wine out of my hand.

  “You don’t wants the sandwich?” I says.

  “What do you take me for?” he says.

  Think of a balloon, all pumped up and proud, its belly sticking out with the authority of the inflated, that was Lieutenant Nick Fallon, Vice, when I knew him when. He was inflated by his position, by his arrogance, by his secret ambition to out-Broderick Johnny Broderick and become a legend hisself. But then the air leaks out as it always leaks out until the balloon is only a ghost of what it was. That was Fallon now, in his ragged suit pants, his filthy undershirt, the sockers with his toes sticking out. He had aged a quarter of a century in the eight years I was away, disheveled hair white beneath the grease, bristly gray beard, skin a haggard sack of wrinkly
white rubber hanging off his bones. A deflating balloon with only the final desperate hope that if it drinks enough it will shrink all the way to nothing.

  “Oh, Mite, it was something it was, when that warehouse blew into the sky.” We weren’t so much in a room as in a closet, with only a bed, a locker, and one bare bulb hanging through a chicken-wire ceiling. Fallon was lying on his side on the stinking mattress, gay almost under the influence of the wine, half-empty bottle in his hand, cackling at the grand old times when the Square it was his oyster waiting to be slurped and swallowed. “You should have seen it.”

  “I seen it all right.”

  “It lit up the night sky like a second sun.”

  “I said I seen it.”

  “The greatest piece of crime fighting ever to hit this town. Wiping out four crime organizations at once. Front page of every tabloid. ‘Fallon’s War,’ they called it. But it wasn’t just mine, was it, Mite? Have a drink with me.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Old times.”

  “Get that out of my face.”

  “Afraid of my little germs?”

  “Your germs they the size of small dogs. I can hear them barking.”

  He smiles, takes another long pull of the wine.

  “You find all the bodies?” I ask.

  “Most.”

  “You find Blatta’s?”

  “I said most.”

  “But not Blatta’s?”

  Fallon shrugs. “Gone. Disappeared. Poof. Maybe incinerated, maybe not, who knows? Who could know? Except it wasn’t just his body that disappeared.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “Where’d you go off to anyways?”

  “Fiji.”

  “Fiji, huh? That where you found Queequeg over there?”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  “Don’t be sore, Mite. I just see you found your game after all.”

  “Talk to me about Blatta.”

  “Sure, Mite. Don’t be so touchy. Was a time you’d eat any crap I’d serve.”

  “It’s a new day, palsy.”

  “You don’t need to tell me. When the Square was still my territory, I kept a file on every hood whose name I even heard whispered. Had a file on you inches thick and a file on your boy Blatta too. There wasn’t much there, no one talked about him, it was mostly rumor and a stray piece from a snitch here or a whore there. He was more like a ghost than anything else, with the way you were protecting him. Some in the department even thought he was someone you made up on your own to project some authority. But I had seen him coming out of that hotel of his, heading to his car, I knew he wasn’t a ghost. And then, after my victory, he disappeared like the rest of them. No body, but no Blatta either. Case closed, right? File sent to storage and life moves on.

  “So one day I’m out of the territory, me and a dame are celebrating, a real special dame, a high-priced hooker doing a pal a favor, which was why I was where I was. This is three or four years after, understand. I’m on the Upper East Side, strange place the Upper East Side, and I was heading down to the El Morocco, and I see this big brown limo slip up the street. The driver has an eye patch and he looks familiar and that’s what draws my attention first. And then I notice the back window is open and there’s a face looking at me and I’m looking back and son of a bitch if it’s not who I think it is.”

  “Who?”

  “Blatta.”

  “Go on.”

  “So the next day what I do is send a request to the dead-file room, the morgue, to pull his file and word comes back there isn’t a file. How can that be? I made it myself. I send a request to the morgue for yours, since you two were so tight, and yours isn’t there either. So I pull the whole Abagados file, the whole thing. My desk is covered with paper, and I go through it page by page, the first time anyone’s looked at it since it all went down, but it wasn’t the first time anyone’s looked at it since it all went down. See, someone else had combed through it with a razor blade and every mention of Blatta or you had been sliced out so neat you wouldn’t have known it had ever been there unless you were the guy that put it there in the first place, understand? Far as the department knew, you and Blatta, the two of you never existed.”

  “Who could do something like that?”

  “Someone with the pull of an elephant. It takes pull to get hold of a file from the morgue and take it to a place where you got time to razor it clean. The same kind of pull it takes to haul my ass before the Police Corruption Commission, to get six witnesses to testify to everything I ever done which was hunky and not dory, and then to strip me of my rank, my job, my pension, my life. That kind of pull. Which is how I ended up here, in this lovely abode. Sure you don’t want a drink?”

  “Revenge for what you did at the warehouse.”

  “No,” said Fallon. “You’re not getting it, are you? I didn’t end up on Bowery Row because of what I did at the warehouse. I ended up here because I happened to glimpse a face in a window.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And if he could do that to me, Mite, for just glimpsing his face, imagine what fun he’s going to have with you.”

  Yonkers in the twilight.

  Sounds like a swing-band ballad, don’t it? Yonkers in the twilight, dancing cheek to cheek. What’s the matter, missy, you don’t like my chops? As if Louis Armstrong’s got a voice of velvet.

  We was parked on a hill, Central Avenue down to our left, the Bronx River down to our right, and we was waiting. In front of us sat a lovely white house with a picket fence. Cooney’s old house. My old house, except it wasn’t really my old house, first because it wasn’t really never my house since I never lived there, and second it wasn’t my old house, like in something that had passed away long ago, because my name, imagine that, was still on the deed. A life estate, the clerk said, which meant it was mine until I died. But I hadn’t paid no taxes on it, had I? And yet the taxes they was paid. And I hadn’t been up on the ladder painting that siding, had I? Yet the house it was still all nice and white.

  “So who paid them taxes?” I asks the property clerk, a tenner slipped along with the question to grease the wheels of information.

  “The reversionary party,” he says.

  “What the hell does that mean?” I asks.

  “The party to whom the property reverts after the death of this Mickey Pimelia listed on the deed.”

  “And who might that be?” I asks.

  “Mickey Pimelia? Never heard of him.”

  “No, the other thing, the reverberating party.”

  “Reversionary party. It looks like a corporation.”

  “Go ahead, holding it in is bad for the kidneys.”

  “Something called Brownside Enterprises,” he says. “In the city. With an address in the Empire State Building.”

  Can you smell him, missy? Can you? I could, like I was a bloodhound. I was on his trail, I was getting closer, and the blood scent it was coursing through me like a drug. It was only a matter of time afore the Boss and me we was finally, after all these years, once again face to face.

  “What are we doing here, Mick?” asked Champ.

  “Just want to see who’s been living in my house.”

  “I mean in this city, this state. Didn’t you hear what that wino said? He wasn’t jiving us, Mick. This Blatta of yours, he ruined that cop just for catching his face. Can’t imagine what he’s going to do with you once you track him down.”

  “He’s going to give me a hug and wrap a mink round my shoulders.”

  “Don’t you start getting all biblical on me, Mick. Had enough preaching when I was a boy to know life doesn’t work out like the stories. Lazarus isn’t rising, and those we betray, they don’t give us minks.”

  “You singing the blues, Champ?”

  “Who has the right if I don’t, Mick, tell me that. Who the hell more than me has the right?”

  I first met Champ in an uptown Chicago joint when I was looking for some muscle in the new line I was trying. I asked him
to tag along to some West Side motel one night and he came in mighty handy when the mark didn’t like me taking that flash picture of him and his secretary tied all in knots. The mark, he lunged, but afore he could get his mitts on the camera, Champ grabbed him by the neck so tight the mark’s yard near popped. Then I knew, Champ, he was just what I needed. See, most gumshoes carried a gun, but I never thought guns made much sense. You bring out a cannon and someone’s liable to start shooting. I had firsthand experience where that ended, with me on a roof watching the world go mushroom. Hell with that. Champ, he kept things clamped down cool. One look at Champ and even the most pissed-off Joes, they settled into reason.