by Norman Green
Something came and went across Gelman’s tortured face. Was that a smile? “The faithless king,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s me,” I told him. “God’s not so favorite son. Gelman, I think you got the worst job in New York City. What did you do to deserve this?”
“Emmmah, my uncle owns the hotel.”
“Wow, I finally get to meet a guy who really does have a rich uncle.”
Gelman squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “Nnnn-not really. Hee only owns the hotel, not the building. It’s the lease that’s worth something, nuh-ah not the hotel, because when someone decides to build condos here, they gotta b-b-buy him out. Hotel barely pays the bills.”
“Interesting. What about the street-level space? He got that, too?”
Gelman shook his head.
“You know who does?”
He shrugged. Stutterer’s shorthand.
“Still, why’d he stick you here? Are you being punished?”
He gestured at a dog-eared copy of something called Elementary Mathematics from an Advanced Standpoint. There were a couple others, with equally fascinating titles. I mean, I can make change for a buck, but you know . . . “Ennn-ahh, not very spiritual,” Gelman said.
“Seriously. You understand that shit?”
“Um, yeah. Buuuut I don’t understand the Torah. So here I am.”
“How the hell did you get interested in mathematics?”
“I can’t remember being, ah, nnot interested in it.”
“Does your uncle know that someone’s running a whorehouse in his hotel?”
Gelman shrugged.
“He doesn’t care?”
“He heee’s in Israel.”
“I see. So he’s in the Promised Land looking for God while the rest of us chase pussy in Los Paraíso.”
Gelman nodded, grinning, then caught himself at it and looked around nervously to see if anyone was watching.
“Is it true what I hear, that some of you guys smear Vaseline on your glasses so that you can’t see the girls?”
“Y-yes. Bee-cause what you can’t see won’t tempt you.” Gelman took off his glasses and held them out for me to look at. Although his expression didn’t change, he didn’t look quite so tortured without them. “But I don’t nnnneed to bother.”
Coke bottles. “You know something, Gelman, the next time I start thinking my life sucks I’m gonna come here and hang out with you for a while. Okay?”
He snorted and put his glasses back on. “Okay.”
“Do you read the papers? Did you hear about all the trouble the Secret Service got into down in Colombia a while ago?”
He nodded. “Reading the Nnnew York Times is aaah-nother sign of being Esau and not Jacob.”
“I know all about being Esau. And Jacob was a fucking weasel. Anyway, the thing in Colombia happened because one of them didn’t want to pay the girl. Well, between you and me, someone in D.C. decided that we need to take a more proactive approach. And apparently some of the ladies upstairs have become very popular in some political circles uptown, up by the UN. Uncle Sam is very concerned about that. There is some thought that the whole thing leaves some of the people on our side vulnerable. You with me so far?”
He nodded again.
“How many girls do they run out of that space?”
Gelman reddened and his vocal cords slammed shut.
“Schmoo. God made ’em look like they do for a reason. You’re a young guy, you’re supposed to notice. Looking ain’t a sin and I won’t tell your uncle. How many?”
He looked down at his shoes. “Ahh, sssss, ah, um, seven regulars, and a few part-timers.”
“There, that was easy. And how many guys?”
“Thhhh, ahh, thhhhh, umm, thhhh . . .” He gave up, held out three fingers.
“Three guys. Same ones all the time?”
“Yeah. Two um, Japanese. One black.”
“You sure? You think they could be Chinese?”
“I, ahh, wow. Could be. And wuh, ahh, one white guy, comes on Mondays. Usually.”
“The money man,” I said. “El Tuerto. You know anything about him? He ever talk to you?”
Gelman shook his head. “Nnnever. He never even looks at me. Enn-ah, nobody ever talks to him.”
“What’s he look like?”
Gelman shrugged. “Older. Skinny. Face like a fuh-ah, fist.”
“Okay. On the back of the building, do you have fire escapes?”
Gelman nodded.
“Okay. I want a room. At the back of the building, okay, and one floor under theirs. Put mine next to a fire escape. I’ll pay you cash for two weeks, plus an extra hundred to stay quiet about it. Does that work?”
It was not easy to see unless you were looking for it but the place might have been something, once upon a time, she might have been a bit of a mujer de la vida herself, but now she was just another old blowser, way past her expiration date. The stairs to the upper floor ran around a central atrium, and dim light filtered down from a filthy skylight far above. The staircases were slowly losing their battle with gravity, the steps leaned toward the inside, and each of them groaned when I put my weight on it. The key in my hand did not have one of those plastic drop-in-any-mailbox tags on it, either; that system relied a little too heavily on the goodwill of the user. At the Hotel Los Paraíso you paid a twenty-five-dollar deposit on your key. No honor system here, strictly capitalism. No tickee, no washee, sucka.
Three more flights up, that made it the fifth floor, and that’s where I encountered my first sign of life. It was a kid; he stood frozen stiff right in front of one of the room doors. Looked to be about five or six. Dark hair cut by someone in the bowl style, obsidian eyes, white shirt and tie, pants carefully creased, old-fashioned tie shoes all shiny, tiny sport coat. But for his environment and uncertain ethnicity he looked for all the world like some little red state preschool shitbird all dressed up for church. He had a large paper name tag on a string hanging around his neck, it was the kind used by the New York City school system so as not to lose too many kids. Emblematic of how bad this kid had it, the name tag wasn’t even his, the original name printed on the tag had been crossed out and his name was scrawled underneath. It was hard to read the writing, particularly in that dim light, but the first name might have been Hector, and the second one might have been Sammikrishnasomefuckingthingoranother. When the kid saw me he trembled from the top of his head all the way to his shoes, but he stood his ground.
Six years old, max.
The goonas have some sense of humor.
The room behind Hector’s door was apparently in use, because the sounds made by the current occupants came through clear enough. Squeak, unnh, squeak, unnh, and then, rapidly, squeaksqueaksqueak Aaaaaaagh. Not a great performance, really, but sometimes the actors are too used up to do much more than read the lines.
I looked at the number on my key; my room was next door. Perfect. “Hello, Hector. You don’t need to be scared of me, okay?”
The kid didn’t answer but he quit shaking. Maybe he nodded, or maybe I just imagined it, who knows. I stood there looking at the kid, fishing for something else to say. Ask him if he’s hungry, I thought.
Yeah? Why? You gonna feed him, I asked myself. You gonna fix that stupid haircut that somebody gave him? Buy him a coat if he’s cold? What? Ask him if he’s okay? He’s not okay, he’s fucked, he’s fucked worse than his five-year-old brain can comprehend, and there isn’t shit you’re gonna do about it. I took another step, meaning to walk on by, and just then the door behind Hector opened and a guy came out. No distinguishing features, just a neighborhood guy getting his nut, not seeing anything he didn’t wanna see, stepping past the kid like he wasn’t there.
Saw me, though.
A woman appeared in the doorway behind Hector, the resemblance told you she had to be the kid’s mother, and she, too, was way past her prime. I got one good look at her before she flopped down behind the kid and wrapped herself around him, her hands sh
aking, but not just with fear. Hers was the more frantic, fluttering palsy of the confirmed cokehead. She squeaked, dragged the kid backward into the room, and kicked the door shut.
The kid’s eyes never left my face.
The guy looked at me, then looked past me to see if there was anyone else with me. Nobody. He saw that I was alone; to him that meant I wasn’t a cop. He put a hand in a back pocket, stuck his chin out. “You got a prollem?”
“Yeah, I got a problem.” Nobody with any brains carries a pistol in their back pocket, it’s too easy to shoot yourself in the ass that way. Probably a knife. Maybe seeing Hector had gotten to me. I leaned in and whispered to the guy. “Pull it. Let’s go, cabróne, pull it.”
The guy froze, the wheels turning slowly in his head, and then he edged away slowly, his back to the wall, both hands in view. I watched him go down the stairs.
My new room had a distinct smell, but I could not quite identify what it was. It was probably a combination of things; call it overtones of human sweat, hints of dead mouse behind a wall, strong undercurrent of a not very clean bathroom, stale and dusty finish due to the window being closed for a long time. I stepped into the room anyway, closed the door behind me. One window. One metal bed frame, twin size, topped by one mattress that I would not allow any part of my body to touch. One metal desk, two drawers, graced by one metal lamp. One metal straight-backed chair. A closet-sized bathroom. One metal steam radiator under the window, with no steam in it.
My lost paradise.
The light in the ceiling didn’t work but the lamp on the desk did. I closed the door to the bathroom, undid the latches holding the window closed and forced it open. I hoisted myself over the radiator and out onto the fire escape. The metal steps leading to the upper floors were missing, I guessed that whoever ran the enterprise up there was more concerned with uninvited guests than with burning up in a fire. No matter, the lack of steps was not a barrier and I climbed up the rusting framework as quietly as I could.
Which was pretty damn quiet.
Incursion was one of my specialties.
They’d painted the inside of their windows black.
Again, it was not a barrier, one of the windows was missing a little triangle-shaped section of glass in an upper corner. Someone had taped a piece of paper over the break but another someone, presumably someone who’d preceded me to that exact spot, had poked a needle-sized hole in it. I stood up slowly and looked in, waited for my eye to adjust.
I was looking into a room pretty much identical to mine, only this one had a woman in it. She lay sprawled unmoving on the bed, long hair hanging down over the side. There was a large bag on the desk; it looked like the sort of thing a lot of women carry with them everywhere. There was something beside it on the desk, roughly the size and shape of a prescription bottle. Not for nothing, but when you have to knock yourself out at night, you are in trouble. Her door was open. Someone in the hallway outside her room stopped and stood in the doorway.
The guy was massive. Overbuilt, head too small for his body, arms forced out from his sides a bit due to the size of his guns. I couldn’t see the guy’s face but I assumed that he was the one my friend Luisa from across the street had called the Worm. He had to be the enforcer. I waited, completely still, watching him and wondering if he could sense my presence, somehow. After a moment or two, he moved on.
Barriers to a successful incursion come in various forms. In a newer building, your obstacles are generally electronic. You have to worry about security systems, which usually include perimeter alarms, guards, closed circuit TV, and so on. The answers to these problems are not always high-tech, despite what you might expect. Say for example that you are targeting a building which has a perimeter alarm that you must get past. You must assume that there will be sensors at all of the points of entry. So, about a week before your projected date of entry, you visit the building during the day, preferably late in the afternoon, and you disable one of the sensors. If you choose wisely and work carefully, this can be done with something as innocuous as a tiny piece of cardboard with some foil on one side and stick-um on the other. What typically happens next is that the alarm refuses to set that evening, and at least one of the security guards will make some overtime because management will have to pay someone to babysit overnight. As soon as the building opens the next morning, you visit and you remove your cardboard strip. When the service tech arrives, everything works normally. He pronounces the system healed and moves on. A day or so later you repeat the whole performance. Keep it up and soon enough the management will be sick of paying overtime and everyone will be cursing the alarm system.
You get the idea.
In an older building, or an ancient one like the Hotel Los Paraíso, the obstacles tend to be physical in nature, like a window that hasn’t been opened since Moses’ boat ride through the bullrushes. The wooden windows at Los Paraíso were of the standard casement variety, and not the kind assembled in a factory somewhere, either. When the place was built, they had a craftsman on site who basically put the windows together from scratch using strips of wood and panes of glass. In theory, the window slides up and down in a wooden track, or at least it would if it hadn’t been painted about a hundred times. The sliding part of the window is held in place by a wooden slat, one on each side, nailed in place. Remove one of these slats and the window will swing open just like a door, and you’re in. Of course, the wooden strip has been nailed in place for a century or two and will not come off without a lot of loud shrieking, which, for my purposes, would be counterproductive. There is, however, a particular brand of penetrating oil, and if applied liberally and allowed to soak in for a few days . . .
I climbed the rest of the way up, checking the windows as I went. The rest of them were all painted black, too, and were intact, besides. Up on the roof there was a small hatch instead of a door. Probably had a ladder inside to let you climb out, but it’s too easy to wire up an alarm on a hatchway, and too easy to rig a booby trap inside it, too. No way I was going through there until I’d had a look at the inside of it. No, my entry point was going to be the drugged woman’s window. I went back down the fire escape and climbed back into my room, mentally going over the supplies I was going to need. This being New York City, they’d all be easy enough to find, and thanks to McClendon, price was not an issue.
My room smelled a bit better than it had, and I toyed with the idea of leaving the window open, but that was not a great idea. I was not the only B&E artist in the city. I latched the window closed again, went over to the inside of my door and listened.
I opened the door a crack and looked out.
No kid.
He was inside, I guessed, sheltered for the moment in the questionable graces of his mother’s well-traveled bosom. Drop it, I told myself. There’s nothing you can do. My own mother hadn’t exactly been Florence Nightingale, and I’d made it okay, hadn’t I? Nature sows her seeds with mindless enthusiasm, and if a thousand fall for every one that makes it, or ten thousand, or ten million, what of it? As long as one or two survive, life can go on. A salmon gives her life to lay fifteen thousand eggs in a cold mountain stream, and of that number maybe one or two will live long enough to return the favor. A bull shark’s pup, alive in its mother’s womb, will kill and eat as many of its siblings as it can, and will so enter the world having already murdered and cannibalized to improve its own chances. You’re looking for sympathy, it’s in the dictionary, as the saying goes, in between shit and syphilis.
But how could you not root for the kid?
Yeah, okay, so his mother made her living on her knees. Yeah, if another customer came along she’d stick him back outside in the hallway, and yeah, she’d feed her jones, of course she would, she had no other choice. Still, she’d managed to iron the kid’s pants and shirt, she’d given him that haircut even if she’d butchered it, she had, for crissake, shined his fucking shoes. She had gotten him all dorked up and ready for school just like all the other mothers had done to
their sons.
And every afternoon when he got home from school he’d do what he had to do, he’d stand out there in that hallway with more backbone than any five-year-old ought to have, or need.
God.
It made me want to pray even as it trod on whatever shoots of faith might still be alive inside me. Dear God . . . What the fuck are you doing?
I heard the stairs creak as someone climbed up. I pulled my door shut again. I heard a heavy thump as someone knocked on her door, heard murmured voices.
Bet your house that the kid is back in the hallway again.
There it is, man.
Deal with it.
I listened carefully to see if I could hear the goonas laughing, but there was nothing.
It was another twenty minutes before I could leave. I wanted to head for my other hotel room, the relatively clean one over on the West Side, but I still had a couple of things to do, first.
I needed to get somebody who worked out of the top floors of Los Paraíso to talk to me. Obviously it wasn’t going to be one of the pimps. Yeah, we’d probably reach that point eventually, but I wasn’t ready for them yet. My best bet was one of the ladies, if I could isolate her somewhere away from the hotel, I could wave some money at her, and since she was probably a capitalist at heart, I felt pretty sure she or one of her compatriots would talk to me. Once I got back down on the street, I waited over by the bodega to see if any good candidates came out, and it didn’t take long.
They made an odd couple. The woman was a tall, healthy blond in high heels, the guy was a relatively short Asian dude in a gray hoodie and shades. Guy kept the hood pulled up over his head, he looked a bit like a turtle that had not yet decided whether or not it was safe to come out; but the woman walked as if she were on display, modeling for an invisible audience. My cabdriver and I watched from down the block. They reached the corner and the blond hailed a cab. When a yellow taxi pulled over to pick them up they did a bit of a role reversal, the guy hung back, took another drag on his cigarette before throwing it in the gutter, acting exactly like a guy who was worried about being seen by someone he knew. His companion walked over and opened the cab door for him, he scuttled inside, then she walked around to get in behind the driver, tossing her hair back and swinging her butt, oozing confidence and availability as she went. If my driver thought their behavior strange, he didn’t say so, he just pulled out into traffic as the taxi accelerated away from the curb.