Crouching, I crept along the runway on tottering planks in search of another entrance, along a row of windows boarded from the inside. About a third of the way up the block, I found a loose board and pressed against it. It gave, but didn’t come away from its mooring. I worked it with the heel of my hand until it was away from the frame, then worked my fingers in until I could hold the top to prevent it from falling. When I leaned against it, it started to give way at the side. I twisted until it peeled away, and I slid in the opening, my hood catching for a moment on the sharp corner of the plank.
The floor was freshly poured concrete and the beams were exposed. Yellow-plastic cages protected the light-bulbs, some of which glowed timidly. I went toward where the makeshift entrance had been, guessing that there might be a stairwell. There was, and it was sturdy, reinforced cement from when the old building was new. I took it down, going slow.
As I reached the first-floor landing, I could hear two male voices in animated conversation, as comfortable as two friends over cocktails. I could smell burning wood, and as I reached the entrance to the basement, I heard the wood crackle, snap and hiss.
I hung back. Montana had his hands out by the flames that danced above an oil drum. His wavering shadow was cast long and thin behind him to the far reaches of the concrete basement. The other guy, his back toward me, was talking, scuffling; and Montana was watching, taking in his tale, and then he let out a high-pitched laugh.
I came out and stood in the door frame and Montana didn’t see me. But then he did. His expression dropped and he let his hands fall to his sides.
I stepped up.
“What?” his friend asked as he turned. He was a redhead and his face was splattered with freckles. He had thick arms, unlike Montana, who was small, sinewy. He looked hard and like he knew how to use his hands. I made him for 17 or 18; he’d been on the street longer than Montana had been.
“I cut your ass,” Montana barked at me.
“You’ve got to come in,” I said. “They’re going to find you and hang it on you.”
Montana came around the flaming barrel and pulled out his knife. “I told you to fuck off.”
“Your semen was on the Club,” I said. “They think you’re in on it.”
“Fuck that,” he said. “Amaral did it. Everybody knows.”
“Only I know.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the redhead grope for a piece of wood that stood above the spitting flames.
I moved to my left, closing toward Montana, but out of reach of the redhead if he swung the plank.
“You tell your friend if he pulls that, I’ll cram it down his throat,” I said.
The redhead put his hand on the wood. As Montana came closer, he said, “What we’re gonna do is fuck you up.”
“I’m bringing you in, Andre,” I said.
The redhead looked at Montana. “Andre?” he asked.
And I bolted forward and sent the redhead against the barrel. It tipped over and I stepped back, squared and, as he recovered, I caught him flush on the jaw. He went back and stumbled against the bottom of the hot barrel and he let out a yell.
I turned and Montana moved toward me, his arm extended as he loosely fingered his switchblade. “Come,” he gestured. “Come on.”
I put my left arm in front of me, to use the leather sleeve in case he took a quick swipe at me before I could pull the .38.
“Don’t make it happen like this,” I warned. “It’s different now.”
“Let’s do it, then,” he said as he crouched down. He had the blade pointed at my waist.
I brought my right hand around the grip of the gun.
Suddenly, a horrifying, high-pitched scream ripped the room. I looked to my right. The redheaded kid had rolled into the fire. His oversized jacket was ablaze.
“Christy!” Montana shouted. He dropped the knife and grabbed for his friend, latching onto the bottom of his jeans and tugging him away from the burning wood and debris.
I slid Leo’s piece back into my slacks and whipped off my jacket. I used it to beat against the kid until the flame died.
I saw that his jacket had quickly burned through and the back of his neck and hair had caught fire. The skin on his right hand had already begun to bubble and blister.
“Call somebody,” Montana shouted, as Christy moaned as he tried to stand.
I grabbed the cell phone from my belt and I hit speed dial. As I waited, Montana went to his knees. He looked at me, then went back to Christy.
Addison answered the phone on the fourth ring.
When I finished, I looked up. Montana was gone.
I figured he would bolt for the front exit. It was the right move, if he was swift about it: He’d be able to squeeze through the narrow gap between the steel doors; I couldn’t and he’d be gone by the time the cops came. But as I ran toward the stairs, I heard scuffling above me and I realized he was going up, where it was crowded with construction material and debris. There’d be places to hide and maybe there was a way out I hadn’t seen.
I figured I could outrun him and, with a longer stride than his, I’d catch up fast. I heard the slap of his soles echo on the stairwell’s concrete walls and the ruffling of his down jacket as he turned hard on the newel posts. And then there was silence: He’d chosen a floor. I quickly calculated, took the stairs and followed into the dull light. We were on the eighth story of the building.
As I entered the floor, I saw him dart sideways and duck behind a dented Dumpster. There were similar heavy containers throughout the room and I slid behind the closest one to my left. It was tipped tight against a round column.
A caged lightbulb hung among the distended cables in the exposed ceiling, and I could see clearly despite its weak glow. Star-speckled darkness entered through the circular opening where the hollow trash-cylinder hung.
I was secure where I was. If the little man had nothing more than his blade, I didn’t have to move until he did.
There was silence and then it was split by the wail of sirens along West.
“Andre,” I shouted.
No response. I could see his feet near the Dumpster’s wheels.
“They’re coming,” I said.
“They come here they get nothing,” he replied. His voice was high-pitched yet confident. “I got places.”
I said, “Don’t let them hang it on you.”
The sirens grew closer and, through the cracks in the tin sheets on the windows, I could see faint traces of blue-and-red lights.
“Andre—”
Suddenly, he bolted to his right and I came around the post, around the container.
He was going to the trash cylinder. He was going to try to slide down the side of the building.
He ran frantically across the dusty floor, through the dim, scattered light. Far below, sirens howled.
I quickly cut the distance between us, but he made it to the rubber cylinder before I could and, with an acrobat’s agility, he leapt feet-first into the dark hole.
I skidded toward the opening and I saw his dreadlocks rattle as he began his slide.
Then he vanished. I stopped.
And then he screamed.
I looked into the black cylinder. Turner was caught on the jagged rods and harsh nails that held the cylinder together; his left arm was pinned above him on ragged steel against the thick rubber tube. And that had saved him: Had he not been caught, he would have tumbled eight stories through the razorlike shards and jutting edges of the industrial trash that was caught in the cylinder. He would have been shredded as he tumbled toward the debris down below.
He quaked and screamed again, in pain, in terror. The slice in his arm told him what would happen if he came loose and went down.
He was eight feet below me. I kneeled to reach in and I could barely touch the fingers of his left hand.
He started to twist.
“Don’t,” I shouted. “Don’t shake loose.”
He hissed. “It’s in me, man,” he
said, “a nail! Something.” Looking over his right shoulder, he peered directly into my eyes.
“See if you can brace yourself with your legs,” I said.
He spread out and pressed his right foot against the rubber.
I leaned in, grabbing on to the outside of the cylinder with my left hand. “Give me your right hand,” I said.
He tossed up his right arm and I caught him by the tips of his small fingers.
I inched forward. I was in the space now, eight floors above the hard street; only my left forearm, hand and leg were beyond the cylinder. The opening was wide enough to send us into the abyss.
His fingers crept up my right hand until he grabbed my wrist.
There was a glimmer of hope in his eyes.
“We’ve got to get you off the spike,” I said.
“It’s in me,” he repeated fearfully.
“Come up my arm,” I told him.
He tried to slither up, but could only get to my elbow.
“Hold on tight,” I said.
My left hand trembled as I stiffened.
I looked into the blackness beyond him.
“Brace hard with your legs,” I said.
When I saw him push against the cylinder, I let go with my left hand. Now he was supporting me, with his legs and the tight clamp above my forearm. My knees were pressed hard again the outer edge of the cylinder.
I reached under him with my left arm and lifted him, keeping him flat against the cylinder so that the jagged shard would go out as it came in.
He screamed again. It echoed eerily in the tube.
But he was loose and he knew it. He tried to snake up toward me. I had him tight and, with a heave, I pulled him to me.
I tumbled backward onto the floor and he fell on top of me.
The left sleeve of his down coat was shredded and his left hand was slick with blood.
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t run.” I scrambled to my feet.
“I ain’t,” he muttered as he looked at his bloody hand. “I’m not.”
I gasped for air. “Tourniquet,” I managed.
“I can’t feel—I can’t feel it,” he said. “But it’s all right.”
He was flat on his back. I reached down to lift him.
I thought, Someone’s son got saved.
I listened for footsteps in the stairwell. Sirens continued to wail.
The EMS ambulance had only one bed, and Christy McMahon was on it, his raw skin being treated quickly for the short ride to the emergency room. I sat on the wooden ramp with Andre Turner under the streetlights and stars. I’d tied his belt around his thin bicep. That seemed to halt the blood flow.
I told him I knew a lawyer who’d help him and I told him to keep his mouth shut until the lawyer told him to open it. And I told him he could do a lot worse than having his lawyer get in touch with Langhorne.
He kept nodding. He might’ve been listening.
I stood when I saw Addison’s big black Buick sweep onto Charles and ease in next to a blue-and-white. “Stay put,” I said.
Turner reached down and put his finger into a drop of blood on the ramp. He muttered something under his breath.
I went over to the curb as Addison stepped from his car and I pointed to Turner, who was now hunched inside his shredded down coat. He had his collar up above his dangling dreadlocks.
“That’s your boy,” I told him. “He needs help.”
I watched as Addison went over and talked to Turner. Then he led him to the patrol car and ushered him into the warmth of its backseat.
The EMS ambulance pulled away, its bright lights whirling, its harsh siren blaring. Another blue-and-white came along West from the south. Addison beckoned to one of the uniformed cops and she came to him. Then she went to join Turner, who sank with resignation as she came toward the car.
Addison came back to me. “Don’t tell me you knew where he was all along.”
“Have a little faith, Lieutenant,” I replied.
“And I thought I told you to be careful.”
I pointed to the blue-and-white at the curb. “There he is,” I said, “ready to tell you all about Amaral.”
He nodded.
“And I’m going home.”
I went east to Greenwich and turned south on familiar cobblestone, heading toward the silver Twin Towers, their crowns hidden in low-lying clouds.
SEVENTEEN
I sat on the long sofa in the airless waiting room, my knees drawn more closely to my chest than I’d preferred but not so tight as to warrant a complaint. The Business Week, National Geographic, Weekly Reader and Wired magazines on the nearby table were testimony to the diversity of Harteveld’s clients, and to the conceit that neurosis knew few boundaries. To my right, from behind the white counter, John kept a wary eye on me, as if I might suddenly turn either violent or conversant. I tried to ignore him and went on reading Nagel’s biography of John Quincy Adams as I leaned against Bella’s overcrowded backpack, with its patches and symbols and scribbles done in fluorescent yellow Magic Marker: Someone had penned a swearword on the bag and Bella had converted it to Puck, adding in parens, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Billy Shakes.
Earlier this morning, after I’d learned from Tommy the Cop that Vuk had given up Lin-Lin and Edie, I went over to the Strand and was caught up in the endless stacks, the packed shelves, the vast array of titles on tables, on the floor and in the aisles, and the musty smell of printed paper and bound books, and the lurking browsers, studious yet assertive. I wound up with six books in a flimsy shopping bag, including the Nagel, a Paul Auster for Bella and a coffee table book on Ghirlandaio that she and I would give to Judy when we went to see her tomorrow night at her place in Gramercy Park. Her son and his fiancée were staying with her; she sounded fine, despite Edie’s betrayal, and was threatening to expand the gallery rather than merely repair it. A bit of bravado, no doubt, but so characteristically Judy Henley Harper that I took it as a sign of a proper recovery.
On the way back to TriBeCa, I stopped in Washington Square Park and sat on the lip of the dry fountain, and I thought for a moment about Andre Turner. Everett Langhorne had gotten him a bed at Harlem Hospital, not merely to fix his wound but to buy time to figure out how to convince Turner to turn his life around. As a surprisingly harsh wind pushed in and the sun went behind angry clouds, I thought about Langhorne. A persuasive man, I told myself. Maybe he’d find someone to take Turner in. As I left the fountain, I allowed myself the illusion that it would work out for the little man.
Now I came off Harteveld’s waiting-room sofa, standing to stretch my legs, coincidentally, at the moment that my daughter bounced down the hall. She was all smiles, her burden, if not lifted, at least lessened.
“You’re up, Pops,” she said. To John, she added, “My word for today is ‘conflagration.’”
I said, “Bella, I’m not up.” My next connection with Harteveld would wait. “Play a quick one with John and let’s rip, OK?”
She sighed and went for her coat.
John said, “Fax me.”
We headed west on 60th, going toward the park, and I thought of mid-October, when there would be a kaleidoscope of colors, an unimaginable splendor that belies the inevitable surrender to November winds, to age, to the relentless logic of nature’s cycle: bare trees; thin, knotty branches that seem to grope for the sky; brown leaves ground to dust. With winter yet to come, it was too soon to think of new leaves, buds that blossomed and a warm, lustrous sun. A pleasant afternoon in the fall doesn’t suggest summer, only the burden of the days ahead.
Bella held my hand as we passed the Pierre and the Sherry Netherland hotels and their uniformed doormen, who blew their hot breath into their white gloves to gain a moment of added warmth.
Across the street, steam rose from the rickety cart that carried chestnuts and pretzels.
“You hungry?” I asked, as I shifted her backpack on my shoulder.
“No,” she replied, “I don’t want to eat before
I go to Glo-Bug’s. I’m not cold either. Because I am properly dressed. Dad, you have to get a winter coat. Something long.”
“Maybe I’ll get a cape.”
“Get one of those things Sherlock Holmes wears. It’s like a cape.”
“The word ‘pelerine’ comes to mind, but I’m not sure why.”
We stopped at the cart. I asked for two bottles of water and placed the bills in the squat man’s calloused hand.
I gestured to a bench in front of the thick brick retaining wall. As we sat, I pointed to the crowd across from us that poured from F.A.O. Schwarz.
“Maybe you ought to take some of that money you’ve got stashed away and spend a little bit of it,” I said.
“No, I’m saving for something.”
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet. But I want to be ready when I see it.”
The tip of her nose was red and I reached to cup it, to make it warm.
“You washed your hands at Dr. Harteveld’s,” she observed.
“Yes. How do you know?”
“You smell like Dial soap. She has Dial soap in the ladies’ room, too.”
“Pretty clever, Bella.”
“The cut is healing,” she said, pointing to my chin.
The body heals, I thought.
“Tell me again how you fell,” she continued. “Or admit it was something else. Like it had something to do with you saving that kid. Admit it.”
We cracked the plastic caps on the water bottles. I took a drink: The water was cold and crisp.
“Well, I’ll admit this, Bella: My feet are frozen.”
“Now it’s you who’s being clever. Get good shoes like mine and you won’t be cold. A good hat and good shoes: that’s the secret to staying warm.”
“Bella, you’re wearing bowling shoes Diddio stole for you and an old man’s fedora.”
She stood and pointed to the Plaza. “We can get a cab over there.”
I hoisted the backpack as I left the bench and took another long pull of water to finish the bottle. I spun the white plastic cap back on, spotted a trash can near the curb and tossed the clear, thin bottle toward it. The bottle hit the rim and bounded away.
Closing Time Page 26