Shadow of a Thief

by Norman Green

  But they were just kids, really. Sure, they would probably put the screws to me if I gave them the chance, but still . . . And if they were armed, they didn’t show it. My best guess was that they weren’t carrying, this being New York City and all. New York will not pass up the opportunity to put your ass away for a while if she catches you with a pistol. Most street gangs operate within well-defined boundaries, and within their respective territories each gang will secrete a pistol here and there, the hiding places being known to all the gang members. That way the weapons are available if they are deemed necessary, with much less risk of getting your soldiers jammed up by any of New York’s Finest. I didn’t think these two guys had had enough time for that.

  They separated. One of them came around the corner of the air duct I was hiding behind and I clotheslined him. He went straight down, clutching his throat, and I kicked him hard in the ribs. Not hard enough to do any permanent damage, but hard enough to keep him discouraged for a while. The second one heard the noise and came running. Again I stepped out of the shadow; I hit the second one with a hard right to his temple. He was tougher than the first guy, he shook it off and went for a high leg kick but he was a little wobbly. I ducked the kick and hit him again, almost in the same exact spot. He staggered back, and I could see from the look on his face that he was reconsidering his career choices, but he had taken someone’s money and now he had to earn it. He squared up and came at me again. Most of these guys think that you’re going to back up or run, which is the instinctive and wrong reaction. Get up into their space, as counterintuitive as that seems, because then most of their practiced moves stop working. I threw an elbow at his chin, which he ducked. “Who sent you?” I figured Mac was wrong and Annabel was right, so it had to be either Peter Kwok or Li Fat. “What do you want from me?”

  He didn’t react at all, didn’t even look at my face, but he kicked me in the outside of my thigh, which hurt a lot, so I head-butted him a little harder than I had intended to. He went down hard, his head caroming off the metal support for the ductwork I’d been hiding behind.

  Done for the day.

  You get so sick of this shit. If you’re a plumber, I wonder if you get so tired of plumbing that eventually you reach the point where you never want to look at another broken toilet, ever again.

  And it’s the strangest sensation, even when there’s a fire raging in one part of your brain, in another part of your head there’s a voice telling you that you’re an idiot and that you should have gone to dental school instead. Here were two more guys who were probably going to hate me for as long as they lived. That’s the problem with this kind of thing—it never stops. Yeah, confound my enemies, God, but please don’t let ’em find out it was me that dropped the dime or else we’ll have to kill ’em all.

  Call it the neutron solution . . .

  I searched them both and I didn’t learn much; they carried no ID, no weapons, not even a cent in their pockets. The first kid was still half conscious, he moaned when I touched him. “Who are you?” I asked him. “Who’s paying you?” He didn’t answer, not in English, anyhow. I still had no clue where he or his buddy came from. The only thing I picked up from these two was that they both had hard calluses on their hands, the kind you get from hours and hours of hard work, and not from hoisting bricks or turning wrenches, either. I finally decided that there was nothing more for me up there, and besides, there was still one more guy, the one who’d been driving the gypsy cab.

  The two on the roof, you could think of them as freshly graduated engineers, they had all the qualifications on paper but they hadn’t yet learned how things worked in the real world. I guess you’ve gotta learn somewhere. The thing is, man, it’s hard to be something. It’s hard to be anything. It’s practice, and school, and late hours, and apprenticeship, and getting smacked around for doing it wrong, no matter what you’re trying to be, you’re gonna take some lumps along the way. So why would you pick street punk when you could learn how to do something normal for the same amount of work? Of course, the person I really needed to ask that question was myself.

  The building roofs were divided by low parapet walls. I hopped the nearest one and tried the roof door for that building but it was locked, and so was the next, but the third door opened for me and I went down, trying to be as quiet as I could. There were a couple of kids playing in one of the hallways, they watched me with bright eyes as I went by. I silently wished them luck as I passed, because with that hallway for a front yard, they were probably gonna need it.

  I slithered out the front door. Instructor I had once claimed that you could pull in your aura, sort of shrink your psychic emission to the point where no one would notice you. I never knew if it worked or not. I always figured it was me people noticed, not my aura, but you know, why not, what the hell?

  Maybe it helped, who knows, or maybe my aura-shrinking skills were weak. Further testing would be necessary. I got down to the sidewalk and maybe six steps closer to the guy before he noticed me.

  Black guy. I gotta admit I was surprised, because the concept of integration still has a ways to go in the realm of street rats. The dude was out of his cab, standing in the middle of Thirteenth Street about halfway between his car and the open door to that first tenement when he saw me. He took two steps toward the car before he decided he wasn’t gonna make it and took off running west on Thirteenth, toward Third Avenue.

  I don’t have the right build for running. Too much beef, for one thing, and my inseam might be a little short for a guy my height. I thought I had no shot to catch the guy, he put on a real burst, he went zero to max in a heartbeat, and to tell you the truth, I don’t know why I bothered to chase him, if I’d had time to think about it I probably would have gone through his car instead. But I did it anyway, and I guess the patron saint of lost causes decided to cut me a break that night because when the guy got to Third and tried to cross in the middle of the traffic, he T-boned a yellow cab and went down in the middle of the street. In the midst of honking horns and drivers yelling in some pidgin combination of English and who knows what he bounced up and took off running again. I had gained on him some, though, I kept up my Gimli the dwarf imitation as the guy made the far side of Third. He wasn’t looking so good anymore, though, I didn’t know if it was the impact with the cab or too many cigarettes or what but his form was definitely suffering as he continued west on Thirteenth. His arms were windmilling all crazy as he turned to look back to see if I was still coming, he should have kept his eyes on where he was going because he tripped over something in the street, flew across the hood of a parked car and face-planted on the tailgate of the truck parked in front.

  I stopped running at once.

  I walked across Third Avenue trying to catch my breath and pull my aura back down again, but it’s New York City, you know what I mean, so whatever you’re doing, they seen worse, and they got business of their own anyway. Nobody paid much attention to the guy, or to me, either.

  He lay senseless, facedown in the gutter between the car and the truck. I stood there looking down at him for a moment hoping he wasn’t dead, waiting to see if anyone was going to come and see if he was all right, but everyone seemed to just flow on by.

  I rolled the guy over. He was bleeding from a gash on his forehead and his right eye was closing up. He was going to have one mother of a headache. I wrestled him over onto the sidewalk and leaned him back against the front tire of the car he’d slid across. There was an empty pint bottle of Barton Reserve under the car, I fished it out and plopped it in his lap, just for effect. Somebody walks by, maybe they see the bottle, figure me for a soft-headed Samaritan instead of a creep.

  “Hey, buddy.” I put a finger under his chin and tipped his head back but he was still out cold. I let go of his chin, and his head rolled down onto his chest like all the bones in his neck had been removed. “Yo, buddy.” I tried to find a pulse in one of his wrists but I couldn’t feel anything, so I tried at his neck and there it was. He was al
ive, at least.

  I sat back on my haunches and waited. It took him a couple more minutes to come around. “Fuck me,” he mumbled, and his head stirred. He held one hand up to his face but he didn’t touch it, it must have hurt him too much. “Oh my God . . .”

  “You all right?” I asked him. “I was thinking maybe you broke your neck.”

  He looked up and focused on me with some difficulty. I think he recognized me after a moment; he had kind of a funny spasm and then he went all stiff. “Whaddaya want,” he said, and then he looked around, like someone was supposed to show up with the answers. When they didn’t, he looked back at me. “What . . . what’d ya do to the other two?”

  “They wouldn’t talk to me so I threw ’em off the roof,” I lied. “Used to be, that always worked. Know what I’m saying? You talk to the first guy, right, and when he won’t talk, you just chuck him over. That way, the second guy is cooperative as hell. Didn’t work this time, though, the second guy just kept gabbling in Japanese, so I chucked him over, too.”

  “Chinese,” the guy mumbled.

  “Whatever,” I said, warming to my role. “You come to this country, fucking speak English. So now what do we do with you?”

  “Oh Jesus,” he said, and he crossed himself convulsively, twice, wincing from the pain the movements caused him. “Jesus help me . . .”

  “Jesus ain’t here,” I told him. “All’s you got is me. So how come a brother like you is working with two Chinese guys?” I was still down on my haunches in front of him, maybe two feet away, and I was keeping my voice low. And that one quad where the guy had kicked me hurt like hell.

  The guy began breathing faster and faster, his chest heaving like somebody running a race. “Oh God,” he moaned. “OhGodohshitohJesusChrist . . .”

  “Relax,” I told him. “Just tell me what’s going on. Was it Peter Kwok or Li Fat?”

  “Ogun,” he said, looking around wildly. “Ogun . . . he’s gonna fuckin’ kill me . . .” He squeezed his eyes shut and began to cry, and then all at once he screamed. “HELLLLP! Somebody HELLLLP!”

  “What gun?” I asked him. “Nobody’s got a gun. What are you talking about?”

  “Ogun, you fuckin’ moron! Ogun! HELLLLLLP MEEE!”

  If it was an act, it was a good one. I became conscious of someone standing behind me on the sidewalk but I kept my eyes on my guy, who had quit screaming. “Ogun,” he whimpered, “OhshitohJesus . . .” His fingers closed reflexively on the empty whiskey bottle in his lap. He rolled over on his hands and knees and scrabbled away from me.

  And I let him go.

  It felt like dereliction of duty.

  He jumped to his feet all spastic, looked like he’d gotten jabbed in the ass with a cattle prod, and he took off west again, ran unsteadily down Thirteenth Street, still had the bottle in one hand. I felt like I should have chased him, I should have done something but I didn’t have the appetite for it so what I did was, I let him go. “Ya c’yan ‘elp ’im,” a voice behind me said. I stood up and turned to look; she was one of those religious women who wear their skirts down to their ankles. Island lady, by the accent.

  “No?”

  She shook her head. “Ya c’yan do nuttin’ fer da man until he stop drinkin’, stop smokin’ nat chemical.”

  “Maybe not. Ogun, he kept saying Ogun. Is that a name? Does that mean anything to you?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I ain’t hear ’im say nuttin’,” she said. She knew who or what ogun was, I could feel it, but she wasn’t going to talk. “ ’Im gone now, anyhow.”

  Sergeant Schultz in a dress, just what I needed.

  Anyway, picture a bead on a wire, one end of the wire is Mac and his money, at the other end is Annabel, the tongs, and their ancient hatreds. The bead just moved in Annabel’s direction.

  When I got back to my hotel room I sat on the bed and listened to the movie the guy in the room next to me was watching. I couldn’t hear the dialogue, assuming it had some; mostly what I heard was music, explosions, gunfire, and some occasional screaming. Ever notice how people who die in movies tend to just flop over dead? Screaming, in movies, is the exception. Too distracting, I suppose. It’s usually the soundtrack that gets you. And why is it that there’s music playing every time you’re ready to press the go button on some irrevocable decision that your reptile mind has convinced the higher functioning parts of your brain to go along with?

  Maybe it’s just that there are some journeys that must be undertaken with the eyes of reason clamped resolutely shut. As the movie approached what I assumed would be the end of the final act, the pretend explosions crescendoed, echoing through the wall like the music of some manic bass player in the middle of a meth burn. No, wait, I was wrong. The next to the last scene. The final scene would be the wrap-up, the sunset, hearts and flowers, and the justifications for it all. Real life is ugly compared to the movie versions, sticky, messy, generally unfair, painful as hell on occasion. As science continues to push the limits of human lifespan, you have to wonder, really, how much of this shit do they think we can take?

  I did not accept Mac’s story of my conception, and I could not believe that Melanie Wing was really my sister, that she was any closer to me than anybody else on the planet, but I found I had adopted her somehow. My logical mind must have been otherwise occupied when my inner reptile decided, Yeah, she’s mine. Otherwise, I think that first night in that hotel in Manhattan would have been my last. I even thought about it, sitting there on the bed listening to that guy’s TV. It would have been easy enough, just take a little more of McClendon’s money for my troubles and leave the rest where it was, call him up and tell him that Melanie was gone and nothing was going to bring her back, that it was most likely just some random creep who would eventually get his, somewhere along the line. Revenge being one of God’s professions, why not leave it to him?

  I couldn’t do it. Just a bad day, I told myself. Don’t give up this easy, give it another day. Go to see Klaudia Livatov, Melanie’s scared and virginal little mouse of a BFF. Give McClendon a little bang for his buck, put on a show so he can salve his conscience.

  And me, mine.

  Growing up with a mother who saw and heard things that weren’t there gave me pretty good powers of recall, because it became critical to me that I hang on tight to what my senses told me was real. I closed my eyes and mentally reviewed Mac’s paperwork, and after a while I came up with the phone number for one Marcus Reiman, alleged erstwhile love interest of Melanie Wing. I called the number, got the recording, left my message.

  Chapter Five

  I sat in the hotel restaurant and stared at my greasy breakfast. I wasn’t thinking of Melanie Wing or her father, the good Reverend McClendon. I was wondering how long I had to stick around before I could escape again, and I was wondering if I ought to cross the border and head up into Canada this time, really get lost, just keep heading north and east until I found a place with no other people at all, where I could stand on the shore until the racket in my head died away completely, no matter how long it took. I would have a few bucks this time around and brother, I knew how to be poor; if I lived on brown rice and fish I could stay up there a long-ass time, and when the noises stopped and the echoes died away maybe I could actually hear something, maybe then I’d know what to do with myself. Does every man dream this dream or is it just me, and why aren’t there caravans of old Winnebagos driven by assholes such as myself, and why is it such a seductive thing, this idea that you ought to just hoist your sails and go? And when you got where you were going, would it be the same shit all over again, would I wake up restless and itchy, and . . .

  My phone rang.

  Scared the shit out of me.

  I had to pull the thing out and figure out which button took the call. “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Fowler?” Male voice, and not one I remembered hearing before. “Is this Saul Fowler?”

  Bastard knew both of my names . . . “Who wants to know?”

  “Mr. Fowle
r, my name is Marcus Reiman. I’m, ahh, I was friends with Melanie. Melanie Wing. You left me a message? We should meet up, Mr. Fowler, because if you, ahh, if there’s a chance you can find out who, ahh, you know, whoever did it, I want to help. You know what I mean? Whoever did this . . . They shouldn’t just walk away.”

  “No.”

  “If there’s something I can do? There ought to be something. Can we get together and talk about this?”

  “Yeah.” Dreams of fishing for salmon up on the Labrador coast faded out and drifted away. “Yeah, absolutely. Where and when?”

  “How about this morning?” he said. “I work at Beth Israel. If you got here in about an hour, that would work for me.”

  I met him in the lobby. He was waiting just inside the emergency room entrance, just like he said he’d be. Pale green scrubs, short wiry hair, glasses, five-eight or so; he made me the moment I walked in. “Marcus?”

  He walked up and shook my hand. He was beefier than he looked, had a strong grip. “Saul?”

  “Yeah. Can I buy you a coffee?”

  They had a Starbucks in the lobby. I found myself liking Reiman because he didn’t order a mochachino grande or some shit, he asked for a coffee, large, and he didn’t put any soy milk in it, either. We sat down at a table by a window. I couldn’t be sure what McClendon had told him so I stuck to my standard story. “I never met her. After I found out about her I wanted to know who she was and what kind of person she’d been, but it seemed to me that she’d just vanished. Everyone I talked to had written her off. Even the PI firm that McClendon hired, Whelen and Ives, didn’t seem all that interested in her, and they were getting paid.”

  “I didn’t write her off, I assure you.” The guy was intense. “Whelen and Ives, yeah, I remember the guy. Suspicious as hell, seemed disappointed he couldn’t pin it on me. Wasn’t a pleasant conversation.”