“You carrying?” I asked.
“It’s not that,” he replied as he nodded. “He’s bad times. You know, with Marina. I don’t know how you can hang with him. I see him, I remember I won’t see her. I don’t know.”
“All right, D,” Leo cautioned.
I sat on a stool at the crook in the bar. I was thinking about a walk around the Village or over to McSorley’s for a dark ale and a liverwurst-and-onion sandwich with their tart, spicy mustard. (Colman’s, made fresh, then aged.) Then maybe a trip to the Guggenheim’s SoHo branch to see what hadn’t been sent to Bilbao—the Rauschenbergs, perhaps, or Max Beckmann’s work—and avoid inanities in flashing lights, someone’s trite attempt to turn something like the news zipper in Times Square into art. I debated whether to go home first to drop off the bankroll and leave a note for Bella and Mrs. Maoli.
And I thought of Turner, of dirt and grime and blood and semen, and an alley cat in search of marrow; where philosophy gives way to a blow to the head, and a job not done until everything is in its place.
He hadn’t gone anywhere. He might be streetwise, he might be as hard as a hammer, but he’s 14 and a lifelong New Yorker. With no coin in his pocket and no time on the run, he had to stay here. There was nowhere else for him to go.
And no one for him to go to.
They’d squeeze him hard. Until he gave them something that put him in the middle of it.
“Leo, let me have the .38,” I said, remembering Turner’s speed with a knife.
Without hesitating, Leo went between the taps and dug with his hefty hand for the piece. I heard the tape pull away from the bar. He brought it out and handed it to me. I shoved it into my jacket pocket.
“You free tonight?” I asked Diddio. “Early?”
“I guess,” he shrugged. “I got John Scofield at Bird-land, but I’m cool ’til midnight.”
“Dinner,” I instructed.
I looked at Leo, who nodded. We had a deal: If I use it, I toss it. Neither of us were licensed for firearms.
I tapped the bar with a knuckle.
Diddio followed me outside. The sun had made its way above the brick towers, and Hudson was bathed in a dull, wan light. Across the street, on the corner of North Moore, a UPS truckdriver chatted with the florist; under his brown jacket, he wore shorts, despite the midday chill. She wore a green apron and smiled as he joked and tucked his clipboard under his arm.
“Terry. We OK? I mean, maybe I shouldn’t mention Marina?”
“No, no,” I said quickly. “I’m thinking of something else.” I tapped his slender arm.
“You know, we never talk about her.”
I hesitated. “I don’t, D. But it’s all right. If you want to, I mean.”
“Gabby asks me all the time,” he said.
“I imagine she would.” Behind him, a gray Volvo missed the yellow and ran the red.
He thrust his hands into his pockets. “Terry, I read that story and I heard what you’ve been saying,” he began, his voice soft, almost whispering. “The one kid gets abused by his father and is out on the street. The other guy, the painter, falls in with a wack crowd, probably because he needs someone to tell him he’s not a dweeb. You know what I mean? Like, if his dad was solid, he would’ve done better?”
He squinted as he looked up at me.
I said, “I’m with you.”
“Gabby says you’re happy you did good and all…”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it happy, D.”
“No, I guess I’m saying…I mean, tonight is the third time I watched Gabby this week—”
“Hey, D, if you’re busy—”
“What I’m saying is maybe you should think about her, Terry.”
I felt my stomach tighten. “I think about her all the time, Dennis,” I said sharply.
A scrawny cat, eyes wide, head cocked, stood before me. He was frightened yet oddly defiant. “I ain’t saying nothing, Terry. But the one you got to save is her.”
“A little melodramatic, D, no?”
He shrugged as he looked down at his black sneakers. “Maybe. But my point—”
“I get you,” I told him, as the fire started to die down. “Look, D, I’m clear on this thing.”
“She’s five stars, Terry, you know. And Marina was my friend.”
I nodded. I took a breath. “I appreciate the advice. I do.”
“I don’t want you coming home dead, man.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“And now you got a gun.”
“To back me up. Nothing more.”
He said, as he shook his head, “Us losing Marina fucked up everything.”
“I know, D. Believe me.”
We stood in silence as a short young woman with an oversized black portfolio walked by, leaving behind the scent of her raspberry shampoo. Her braided ponytail hung halfway down the back of her peacoat.
“All right. I had my say,” Diddio announced.
“You did good, D,” I replied. “I’m with you.”
“I’m still invited for dinner?”
“Anytime you want.”
I stuck out my hand, but he came forward and hugged me awkwardly. His head pressed against my sternum.
As he stepped back, he said, “You get yourself killed and everything’s doubly fucked.”
“Sure, D,” I said.
Mrs. Maoli had baked a chicken with a sprig of fresh rosemary and we ate it with a hearty side dish of panfried potatoes with black olives and a gentle sprinkling of red pepper flakes. Diddio and I sipped a black-cock chianti from Tuscany, Bella Yoo-hoo from the bottle. The radio offered a series of dances by Wernick, and I ignored their demands to change the station, refusing to eat a succulent chicken breast and tangy Ligurian olives to the sounds of Steppenwolf and Moby Grape.
“Dad. A word, please,” she said as I pulled on a hooded black sweatshirt.
Diddio was hunched over the kitchen sink. “Doing the dishes,” he’d said. “It’s so Alice Nelson, man.”
I followed my daughter to the back of the house. We stopped in the living room, tidy now; Mrs. Maoli is a whirlwind on Thursdays.
“I got a 105 on my French test,” she began.
“As you said.”
“And I already finished my project on Descartes.”
I replied, “Well, you wrote about how he wasn’t Fermat. To irritate Mr. Bannister.”
“He’s a putz,” she muttered. “But”—she held up a finger—“the point is, I did it. Almost a week early.”
“OK.”
“And I’m watching Dennis again.”
“A profitable endeavor,” I said. “Don’t hustle him in chess tonight, Bella. Stare at the TV or something.”
“Whatever.” She waved her hands impatiently. “I think you’ll agree I’m doing well in school.”
“Bella, what is it?”
Quickly, she said, “Glo-Bug is having a party Friday night. I have to go.”
“You have to?”
“Well, if I can’t go, she won’t do it.”
“I see.”
She inched toward the arm of the sofa and leaned her hip against it. I could see the anxiety in her pretty face. She began to knead her hands. “So …?”
“Will there be boys?”
“Little Mango. Some others.”
“What about Mrs. Figueroa?”
“She’s got a date. But it’s not a make-out party or something like that, Dad. We’ll just watch MTV, go online, listen to music. You know.”
“What time?”
“I’m going to help her get ready. From six to about midnight?”
“Midnight,” I said.
“I have to help her clean up.”
“Of course.”
“So …?”
“Sure,” I said, “why not?”
She sprang toward me and threw her arms around my waist. “Thanks, Dad. Really.”
“Sure, Bella. You deserve a good time.”
She hugged me, then loo
ked up. “You’ll be all right?” “When? Tonight?”
“No. Friday night,” she replied. “Do you have something to do?” She stepped back. “I mean, we haven’t been apart on a Friday night since Mama and Davy died.”
“I’ll come up with something, I’m sure,” I said.
“And we’ll play B-ball on Saturday?”
“Absolutely.”
I put my hand on her head as I walked by. I went toward the stairs, past Marina’s sea-arch of Vìgnanotica and cliffs at the Gargano coast, the lake near Campobasso.
From upstairs, I could hear Bella squeal in delight as she used the kitchen phone. I slid into my leather coat and dropped the .38 in my side pocket.
I decided to head north along Greenwich, and to stay on Greenwich, and I stopped to see if Addison had someone on me, and when I saw no one, I moved on.
I reached Jane a little before nine and I set up on the corner, outside the white halo cast by the streetlight, across from the leaking hydrant, the abandoned building Montana and his crew used to get out of the cold, to hide away. “Back again,” I thought, as memories of Amaral returned. In the distance, the clamor at Little West 12th, refrigerated delivery trucks coming and going; a horn honks, brakes squeal, the groan and rush of a heavy engine. The scent of salt from the Hudson, the rank odor of rotted food and waste from the wire basket to my right; old newsprint kicking up Greenwich, caught in temperate wind. Someone had pissed in a Colt 45 bottle and left it at the curb.
And I stood for an hour, counting passing cars and Postal Service wagons; and I listened for boats on the river, but heard only the rush of traffic on Tenth and a siren blare as the blue-and-white headed uptown and the rattle of an old truck as it found a pothole hidden among the cobblestones. I shifted and tried to find house lights on the Jersey palisades. I leaned against the cold brick, I counted the cracks in the sidewalk. Thin magenta clouds seemed translucent.
I went toward the building.
SIXTEEN
Inside, murky darkness was offset by the tinsel strands of moonlight that oozed through the back of the old tenement, and the floor buckled and creaked as I groped my way to the stairs to my right. I continued, guiding myself by using the dirty banister, taking the steps one at a time, catching the soles of my running shoes on the chipped linoleum. Incomprehensible graffiti covered the cracked, dust-coated walls.
The earthy scent of human sweat, of cobwebs that had been brushed aside but not removed, surrounded me as I went on, and I thought I heard the rustle of rodents well above me or far below me through gaping holes in floorboards, the insistent scraping and gnawing of rat’s teeth on paint chips and waste.
I stopped on the first-floor landing. It was littered with old beer cans, cigarette butts and fast-food wrappers, and I nestled in the dark corner and waited for the sound of breathing, of people moving softly, stealthily; and when I was sure the place was vacant, when I thought I heard silence, I looked for a place to go. The door to the apartment to my right had been removed and replaced with a tin sheet that had been peeled away; now it hung limply from the frame, and I decided to step into the blackness that lay beyond the portal.
I inched inside and went carefully toward where I thought the center of the room would be, on my way to the dots of cloudy light that trickled through pin-sized holes in the tin that covered the windows on West. As I dragged my feet along the decayed floor, I felt something against the side of my shoe. I kicked; a mattress.
I moved along the edge of the mattress until I felt against my shin what I’d expected to find, and I bent down to turn it on, groping for the small plastic switch. A bare bulb in a cheap lamp clicked on, casting a coarse glow into the room.
I stood up and looked around. The floor was littered with crack vials and spent matchbooks and used condoms and crumpled wrappers and an old rag of a towel; the mattress had been soiled with urine and semen. At the edge of the light’s rim, there was a makeshift table, a splintered spool that had once borne cable at some nearby construction site. On it was a tin that had held takeout food, a plastic fork; and a cat with yellow eyes who’d been interrupted as he pecked at the remains. He hunched his back and stared at me defiantly, as if daring me to go for the tray. Instead, I leaned over, killed the light and shuffled backward for the black corner of the room.
Twenty minutes later, they came up the stairs and there was giggling and a man’s voice, coarse and throaty, full of lust and excitement and a vague sense of discomfort as he asked, “Where are we going, baby?”
“Easy, easy,” a girl replied. “This is where we are.”
I heard the cat bound from the table and scurry away from his visitors.
And then they came into the room and she told him to wait. I heard her scamper expertly across the mattress and reach for the lamp.
“Where are you, baby?” the man asked.
She snapped on the light.
He saw me before she did. “Hey, what the fuck—”
I had the gun raised and pointed at him.
She was young, no more than 16, and she had on too much eye makeup and, under a short fluffy coat, a red tube-top that surrounded her small breasts and revealed her ribs and a sunken stomach. She wore a black miniskirt and her legs were like frail sticks that extended into her cheap stiletto-heeled boots. Her pasty skin was dotted with blemishes. She tried to stay calm, but she was confused and that frightened her.
“Toss me your wallet,” I said to the man.
He was stocky and his red-striped tie was away from his unbuttoned collar. His dark suit was disheveled.
He dug into his back pocket and did as I’d asked.
“You bitch,” he spat.
As I opened the wallet, I heard a smack. The girl spilled onto the mattress.
“Hey,” I shouted, “asshole. Back off.”
“She set me up. Pimp.”
“Shut your fuckin’ mouth.” I looked at his driver’s license. “Eugene.”
I threw his wallet toward him. When it landed on the filthy floor, he bent over to pick it up. He wobbled as he stood, the rush of alcohol throwing him off-balance.
“Go back to Port Chester, Eugene,” I said. “Be a good boy and maybe I won’t call Mrs. Eugene.”
He tried to glare at me, but his eyes kept drifting to the .38 in my right hand.
“And give her what you owe her,” I added.
The girl on the mattress looked up at me.
The man fumbled and came up with a twenty. He crumpled the bill and tossed it down.
She scrambled to grab it.
“Go,” I told Eugene.
He went.
The girl was staring at me.
“Get up,” I told her.
“Who are you?” she asked.
I shoved the gun into my pocket. “Batman.”
I reached out to help her up, taking her small hand in mine and lifting her without much trouble.
“I’m looking for Montana. The kid with the scar. You know him?”
“You’re a cop.”
“Where’s Montana?”
“He didn’t do it,” she said as she backed off the mattress.
“I know.”
She looked at the small bandage under my chin. “Oh, you’re the guy he cut. You are tall. But not seven feet.”
I said, “He needs to come in. He needs a lawyer and he’d better tell it straight.”
She ran her hands along her thin forearms. Her costume jewelry jangled. “He’s got nobody now,” she said sadly.
“One thing at a time …”
“Cherry.”
Of course. “Cherry, let’s help him with this first.”
She looked at me. “Your aura. It says you’re all right.”
“I’m all right,” I said.
She hesitated. “He’s not the only one who needs money.”
“We’ll settle up after we see him, Cherry.”
She nodded. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
I followed her south on Greenwich and she led me to a brick warehouse that butted up against West. On the narrow side street, the scaffolding held up a walkway that went the length of Charles at the second-floor level. A blue tarp hung off the silver rails and flapped in the wind off the river. The broad building’s ground-floor windows were boarded with plywood and the plywood was covered with bills for movies, rock shows.
“He’s in there,” Cherry said.
I looked up, following a battered, snakelike cylinder used for funneling heavy refuse from the upper floors. “It’s a big building.” The sky was a black dome dotted with flickering stars.
“He’s in the basement. He’s been there since Sunday.”
I shook my head.
“I’m sure he is.”
I said, “Call him.”
“No, no. I’m not with this, mister. And don’t you tell him I was here.”
“Tell him there’s money to be made.”
A FedEx truck came up the street and continued on. A Toyota passed us for the second time, its driver no doubt searching in vain for a parking spot.
“I’ve got to go,” she said, as she shuffled to ward off the cold. She held out her hand. I slapped a twenty into her palm.
“They tell you to get off the streets, don’t they? City Services.”
She replied, “Where am I going to go?”
“Go home.”
“Shit,” she said, “it’s better out here.” She tugged on the tube top and slid the bill between her tiny breasts. “Don’t tell him you saw me.”
She turned and went between parked cars to the other side of Charles and headed toward West.
I waited until she turned north on the wide avenue, then looked for a way inside the warehouse. Behind me, closer to Greenwich, there was a break in the scaffolding and I moved toward it.
A sturdy wooden ramp led to makeshift front doors held together by a thick chain and a lock. I noticed that the chain hung loose between the door’s square handles and when I went up and tugged on it, the doors moved apart. It was enough space for a small boy like Montana to squeeze through, but I couldn’t fit. Instead, I used the chain for a boost and I went up on the scaffolding, pulling myself up on the cold bars.
Closing Time Page 25