Closing Time

by Fusilli, Jim;

He started walking and he reached Downing. He waited for a car to pass, then he continued, slouching as he strode.

  I crossed Sixth and trotted back to Bella.

  TEN

  Mango brought her not to the court, but to the playground, with its jungle gym, racks of rubber tires, plastic ponies on huge springs, scooting preschoolers and their contented mothers. Her back to me, off-white towel slung over her shoulder, Bella watched as two craggy-faced men in the corner hunched over a cement-and-stone chessboard. I knew next-to-nothing about chess and, fortunately for the two ancient men, neither did Bella or she’d be telling them what to do.

  The contest in the Cage had found its flow, but from this viewpoint, it seemed a mass of scuffling black bodies surrounded by a diffident crowd. When the battered orange ball rose toward the basket, it seemed to come from deep in a pit. Then, cheering or recrimination, both shouted with insolence.

  “She didn’t want the swings,” Mango said affably. He added, “I told her I’d push.”

  “She was probably afraid you’d throw her over the fence. Christ, Jimmy, what the fuck did you let her see that for?” I pointed to the other side of Sixth, to the diner.

  “What? You were a hero. Man, you was in there like Rambo.”

  I shook my head. “She doesn’t need that.”

  He ignored my remark. “So, am I in or what?”

  “In what, Jimmy? There’s nothing.”

  “Hey, Terry, don’t bullshit me, all right? You’re looking for the guy who bombed the gallery.”

  “Who told you that?” I feared his reply. Did Bella tell his son, the little JJ Hunsecker, the Liz Smith of the fifth grade?

  “Who told me? Tommy. Who the fuck else?”

  I was going to ask him how his brother had found out, but I let it slide. Tommy was like an old-style beat cop: He seemed to know everything that went on in his neighborhood, and he had his finger in more than a bit of the action.

  “What’s the reward? Give me a ballpark. Five Gs? Ten?”

  I looked over his head. Bella was sitting on the bench now, next to the man playing the black pieces. She had the basketball in her lap.

  “No reward, Jimmy.”

  “So, what are you, fuckin’ Robin Hood?”

  I’ve never taken a dime for these things I do. I don’t need to, thanks to Marina’s success and my book. Nor do I want to: Something about the coin devalues the mission.

  But try explaining that to one of the Mango brothers.

  I said, “The woman who was hurt in the explosion was Marina’s agent.”

  Mango took off his straw hat and held it over his chest. “God rest her soul,” he said solemnly. “Your wife had real class.”

  I nodded. The old man explained his move to Bella.

  “Somebody’ll get that nut fuck someday, Terry, that fuck that did it.”

  Mango quickly returned the hat to his head, once again concealing his Larry Fine hairline. “So, I mean, to get back to my point. Money: There’s always more than enough to go around, you know what I mean? This Harper broad: She’s flush, right? She’s got to have something stashed somewhere.”

  “Forget it, Jimmy. Judy’s a friend.”

  He said, “Who’s got your back, Four? And how can you do two things at once?”

  “Two things?”

  “You’re trying to chase down the guy who killed the spook cabdriver.”

  Mango was like an incessant bug, buzzing near your ear. You either had to move away from him or swat him down. The problem was, if you tried to swat him, you had better succeed. Once in Big Chief’s, Leo was tending bar when he saw Mango get into a thing with a smarmy, condescending guy about my height with a Schwarzenegger build. In a heartbeat, Mango was on the guy: He threw a left to the guy’s temple, then a right to his jaw, before the big man could get his hands up. The guy went down fast, and Mango jumped on his chest, sat on him and punched him hard in the throat. Then he leapt up to watch the gagging, gasping man spasm, then cough up blood and bile. The whole thing took less than 10 seconds. Later, after EMS had gone, after Tommy the Cop got his brother out of the back of a squad car on Greenwich, when Big Chief’s was empty, the lights were on and the restaurant staff was sweeping up, Leo found a rusted railroad spike under a table not far from where Mango jumped the big guy. Leo, who said he watched the incident from the start to its sudden end, never saw Mango pull the spike, never saw him switch hands with it, never saw him toss it away.

  “You need a partner.”

  I looked at him.

  “You’re full of shit, Terry, you say you don’t.”

  “Maybe I got something else for you,” I said finally.

  “I don’t leave the house for less than two Gs.”

  “I’ll give you $20 an hour.”

  “Done,” he said quickly.

  I gave him Amaral’s address, the condo on 14th, not the place he lost way uptown. “Grease the doorman, find out what Amaral looks like and tail him.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. Where he goes, when. Who comes to see him.”

  “I’ll milk the shit out of this.” Mango beamed.

  “Don’t dump this off. You’ve got to tail his ass, Jimmy.”

  “Got it, partner,” he said. “The clock’s running, ain’t it?”

  “Go take a fuckin’ shower.”

  I left Mango and walked over to retrieve Bella. She was standing now, the fedora tipped to the back of her head.

  As I approached, I said, “Give the man back his hat.”

  “We made a trade, Dad. Cool, no? How does it look on me?”

  I turned to the man, 100 years old, curved over the board, his gnarled, bony fingers sliding a black rook. He looked up at me and smiled, revealing two long teeth. He raised his hand and tapped the beret.

  I shrugged. “Looks great, Bella,” I said. “Say goodbye to your friends.”

  She did and we walked toward the opening in the gate, toward Sixth.

  “So I guess I got to know Jimmy Mango a little better,” she suggested.

  I held her hand. “He’s nuts. Don’t pay attention to him.”

  “You know, his son is different,” she said. “They look the same, but he’s different.”

  The light changed and we went across the avenue. “If the kid takes after his mother, he’s lucky.”

  I asked Diddio to ease off the weed and take another late-night sit, and shortly before 1 A.M. I went directly to West Street and headed north, toward Little West 12th, where Aubrey Brown entertained his last fare.

  The night had finally taken on a chill, and as I walked near the river I could hear the black water slap against rotted pilings, and I could smell salt and feel the bite of the bitter wind. Thick clouds had swept away the stars, and the dull glow of the flickering streetlights cast eerie shadows. The mottled blacktop, where during the day houseplants and macramé and woven baskets were offered by mobile vendors, where Rollerbladers shimmied and played, had been abandoned. I saw no one in front of me, and traffic heading south, toward the Battery, was sporadic and unreliable. In a mile or so, there would be gay bars and lovers on the tar slab called Hudson River Park, and the flow of pedestrians on Christopher Street. Then, as I continued north past the bus terminal, a few scruffy auto-repair shops and a car wash and, nearer to Ninth, steel-and-glass apartment towers, chic new restaurants, timeworn diners and the ghosts of Herman Melville and a livery-cab driver with vacant, haunting eyes. But now, with the Hudson to my left, and broken bottles and stubborn weeds under me, and parked cars—lifeless, hollow-eyed sentries—to my right, I was alone. As I shoved my hands into the pouch of my hooded black sweatshirt, I realized I was at least anxious and maybe a little bit afraid.

  Diddio had turned up late—“She did four encores; what could I do?”—and he was toasted, of course.

  “You really are the poster boy for pot, D.”

  “I had a rough day,” he explained. “I had to do my laundry.”

  I checked my pocke
ts: wallet, a little cash, keys, cell phone. “Yeah, it’s brutal.”

  “You wouldn’t understand. You got a machine in your basement.” Suddenly, he seemed wistful. “That’s living.”

  “Look, I appreciate you coming over,” I said. “I know a critic needs to be out on Saturday night.”

  “Nah. I was going to check out a show at S.O.B.’s, but it’s no problem. Sharon Stone, believe it or not, is cutting a live album, one of these Cybill Shepherd/Diane Keaton things. Big show-biz audience. I was thinking of pitching something to Parade magazine. Man, do they pay. It’s, like—”

  “D, you need to go to the show, go. I can do this tomorrow night.” But I wanted to do this now.

  “No, no,” he replied, waving his hands. “I don’t want to cut in on your action. I’m glad to see you got something going on.” He stopped and sighed. “Maybe I’ll get a date one of these years.”

  “D, what are you talking about? ‘Date.’ Do you think I’d go on a date like this?”

  I gestured to my black running shoes, black jeans and gray t-shirt under my black sweatshirt.

  “I would,” he said.

  I gave him a cold bottle of skunky beer and sent him inside to watch TV. If Bella woke up, I told him, he should encourage her to go back to bed.

  I locked the door behind me.

  I’d reached West 10th, having passed Canal and West Houston and the Village, quiet factories, abandoned flatbed trucks in a litter-strewn yard, muscular men in leather on Pier 34, a rundown hotel. There was a burst of activity on the east side of the wide street: three, four people in a circle of animated conversation, others walking south toward the bars on Christopher, a young couple cuddling, teasing, pecking on the steps of an empty warehouse, the queue outside a nameless nightclub. I kept moving, and two blocks later it was suddenly quiet again and I could see no one on the street in front of me. And then I looked to my right, to the corner of Charles, and inside a black Lincoln, a woman in a fluffy faux fur eased herself onto the lap of a man who’d slid over to the passenger’s side of the front seat, and she began to roll her hips and thrust her chest and the man threw back his head as he readied to shudder. A couple in their mid-30s, she with the early edition of the Sunday Times under her arm, he with a leash attached to a dog I couldn’t see, walked casually by the car without peering inside, either not noticing or pretending not to. Meanwhile, when I looked back into the Lincoln, I saw that the woman had completed her task, and without ceremony, she opened the passenger-side door and walked away on shaky heels, patting down a silvery skirt that barely reached her thighs. Twenty-five dollars or so lighter, the sated man remained where he was, his head on the red pads of the big car’s seatback, as he caught his breath.

  Up ahead, the Gansevoort Market was silent. And once again I realized that on a Friday night, a man could be murdered on Little West 12th Street and no one would notice.

  The hooker had disappeared, but I decided to follow and, hopping the divider, I headed across the empty highway to Charles and went into the hazy light on the corner, then passed the sagging man in the car. As I moved east, I heard the big roar of the Lincoln kicking in, and then the man drove past me and I watched him go. When I looked back toward where I was headed, I saw her out of the corner of my eye, in the shadows on a side street, and she saw me and she smiled. I imagined she thought she’d make $50 in five minutes. I rubbed my warm hands against my cold cheeks.

  She leaned against the graffiti-covered brick of the squat building behind her. “You going out?”

  “I think I’m looking for something different.”

  As I stepped closer, I saw that she was a hard case. Her speckled face was stretched tight over her skull, and black roots threatened to overtake the short-cropped, platinum-blond hair above it. Though her shoulders were wide, she was flat-chested; her legs were more sinewy than shapely, and her fingers, which rested on her thighs, were thick and her hands were large.

  “What do you need, baby?”

  In the distance, music, electronic and pulsing. The street was empty. “A boy,” I said, perhaps too directly.

  She slowly raised her hands along her thighs and slid her thin silver skirt up her leg, revealing a deliberate hole in her black stockings. And at the center of the hole, amid a tuft of dark hair, was a small, flaccid cock.

  “I got what you need.” His inner thigh glistened in the pale light.

  I shook my head.

  “You want a boy to suck, maybe. Is that right, honey? We can do that, baby.” He started tugging on his penis, trying to make it jump to life.

  “No, no, don’t do that,” I said, grimacing. “Christ, put that away.”

  He dropped the skirt. Suddenly, his voice was husky, at least huskier than it had been. “What’s your fuckin’ deal, man?” he barked.

  “I’m looking for a boy. I told you that.”

  He came off the wall and started away from me, click-clacking down the barren street, toward parked cars and dented garbage cans.

  “Wait—”

  He turned. “I’m working. I got no time to play games.” I followed. “I’ll pay. What do you get?”

  He paused. “Fifty.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. I dug into my pocket. “Here’s thirty dollars.”

  He snatched at the two bills. I pulled them back and handed him the ten.

  “This kid has got a big scar.” I traced from above my eye to below my lower lip. “He’s young, about thirteen or fourteen.”

  “You his father?”

  I shook my head. “He’s black.”

  “What makes you think he’s here?”

  His former friend Delroy Henry said he was living on the streets and working as a prostitute. You could get boys on the piers near Little West 12th, and underage girls, and a transvestite who could get you off by easing you between his scrotum and the petroleum gel on his firm inner thigh.

  “He’s here. They call him Montana.”

  “I don’t know nobody’s name,” he said, “and I don’t ever want to know.”

  “He’s here,” I repeated.

  “There’s a tribe in the abandoned building.”

  “Where?”

  “Tenth, on the other side of the market,” he said. He had his eye on the twenty. “Go in on Jane Street. The fence won’t hold.”

  “A couple more quest—”

  “Hey, man,” he snapped, “I’ve got to keep busy. Give me my money and get the hell out of here.”

  “Were you out here last Friday night?”

  “I’m out here every night, Jackson.”

  “What do you know about the cabdriver who got killed?”

  “Somebody gets killed every day, man. Sometimes it happens here.”

  “Anybody see anything?”

  He smiled. He laughed.

  I reached out and gave him the $20 bill. He snatched it and walked off, tugging at the collar of his cheap fur.

  The rain had finally come as a delicate mist. In the distance, the top of the Empire State Building glistened in the haze.

  I thought he’d be on the piers, huddled in an old Sealand container or behind the Sanitation Department plant, or under Pier 34; he’d take a john behind the remnants of construction work—gaping, rusted pipes; pyramid piles of plastic tubing; mounds of broken concrete and soil; an overturned Portosan—or near the lapping water, or by the run-down shack where the tugs docked, and he’d lean back and let it happen. And that’s how I would find him: I would position myself on the rotting planks near Little West 12th and wait to be approached, and I would insist on a black boy, a pretty one, with dreadlocks, and he would appear. As I pushed up Tenth, I told myself to focus, to be clear. It could still work, but I’d have to be alert as I went to Washington to come around to Jane: I’d be in the shadows, isolated, surrounded by old, imposing buildings and thick walls, with no easy way to break free. Once in place, I’d have to let him come to me. I told myself, This is how it’s done.

  I came to the market
: All blacktop and tainted brick, it was empty, as ghostly as if it had been deserted years ago, and there on the north side of Little West 12th was the derelict building that the transvestite had mentioned: battered, graffiti-scarred, silver metal plates over its windows, discarded tires, gangly weeds cracking the concrete that led to its foundation. In an attempt to make it presentable, in another of Giuliani’s cosmetic moves, the city had painted its façade an odd mustard-yellow and thrown up a cyclone fence. From Tenth, it looked like a neglected building that the city had tried to make less of an eyesore, somewhat passable; from the side street, it was no different from the rancid, crippled structures in the South Bronx that had long ago lost their tenants to rabid rats and desperate junkies.

  The new TriBeCa my ass, I thought as I turned down Little West 12th.

  Washington Street was hushed and dark; it was the street, I realized, that the transvestite had walked down as he left me, and I listened for the electronic music and the edgy patter of his heels, but no sound came from the void. And then, a car on Tenth, moving fast.

  I headed toward Jane, walking along the cyclone fence, bracing myself against the scent of stale urine. Near a yellowed, crumpled newspaper and a broken Pepsi bottle I saw a cat; I saw it before it saw me. I stopped. It gnawed on the sinew of a chicken bone; then it caught me in its gold, translucent eyes, and hunched its back to defend its meal.

  Then I turned and saw him and the blade flashed, and he missed me on the first pass. But he brought it across again with a high, backhand swipe and he caught me on the point of the chin. Blood spurted.

  “Next one’s your throat,” he spat, as I turned my back to him.

  He stepped up and pressed his body against mine.

  I crouched, then stood still.

  “I watch you. I find you,” he hissed.

  I spun and caught him square in the face with an elbow, and I knew I’d hurt him bad, stopping him for at least an instant.

  He hunched over, his hands at his face. The switchblade was on the wet concrete. I bent and grabbed it, dizzy, from the blood, the rush, fear. I steadied myself.

  “You broke my nose, fucker,” he said, his voice muffled by his hands. He was small, a boy.