by Norman Green
It was a short trip, they stopped in front of a big hotel in the East Forties. The guy got out, leaving the blond in the back of the cab. I got out of the Town Car and followed. The guy went in past the hotel front desk, turned left and went into the hotel bar. I don’t much like bars but I went in anyhow, stopped just inside the door while my eyes adjusted to the gloom. My mark chose a table in a far corner, where he was almost invisible. I took a seat at the end of the bar, right next to the servers’ station where the waiters from the adjoining restaurant did their business. I was half hidden behind the draft beer taps and stacks of glasses, but I could still see. I had a mike clipped to my shirt pocket, thing looked just like a pen. I clicked the top of it to turn it on, thumbed the earpiece into place and fiddled with the mike until I had it focused on my mark’s table.
It didn’t take long.
Guy and a kid. Guy looked fat and successful, wore a pale gray silk suit, kid was mid to late teens, dressed like a kid, jeans and T-shirt, baseball cap pulled down low. There was something about his face, I didn’t catch it right away, but I got a better look when the two of them sat down across from the guy in the hoodie. Kid’s face looked like melted plastic and his nose was mostly gone. I got one look and then he was slouched low, looking down at the floor, hiding as best he could.
“Mr. Salazar?” the suit said. His voice was a bit muffled but I heard him clear enough.
The hoodie heaved a giant sigh. “You didn’t tell me about the face.”
“Does it matter?” the guy asked, his tone harsh. “You need more money? Because . . .”
“C’mon, Dad, let’s go,” the kid said, his voice barely audible, and he started to rise.
“Mikey, you sit your ass down in that fucking chair and you don’t move until I tell you to.” The kid collapsed back down, sat with his chin down on his chest and his shoulders hunched. I felt my plan slipping away, and I swear this time I could hear the goonas laughing at me.
Yeah, funny.
“My girl’s gonna hafta say,” the hoodie guy said.
“Look,” the suit said. “We’re both businessmen here . . .”
“I can’t make her do something she don’t wanna do.”
“Dad, let’s just go.” The kid was, again, almost inaudible.
“SHUT UP, Michael.”
“Let me call her.” The hoodie guy got on his phone, murmured something I didn’t catch. A hefty waitress walked up and stood at the service bar, her bulk between me and the table in the corner. I leaned back, peered around behind her and watched as the hoodie guy put the phone back into his pocket and they all waited in uneasy silence. The waitress got what she came for and departed. A moment or so later the blond walked in behind me and swayed across the floor, over to their table. “Charlene,” the guy said after she sat down. He gestured at the kid. “This is Michael.”
“Hello,” she said, and she must have seen his face then. “Oh my gawd.”
“Your call, hon.”
The kid was crying, I think. The suit spoke up, his voice husky. “Listen, I can make this worth your while . . .”
“You hush.” Charlene stood up out of her chair, walked around behind the kid, knelt and put her arms around him.
“It’s okay,” the kid said. “You don’t hafta . . .”
“Poor Michael,” she said. “You must be so lonely.”
He started crying in earnest then and we all waited for him to get a handle on it. I should have gone, it was obvious that my brilliant plan wasn’t going to fly because there was a line there I couldn’t cross. I found I couldn’t move, though, I had to see what she would do, but the booze behind the bar was starting to look good, so I knew I had to get out soon.
The blond still had her arms wrapped around the kid. “All right, Michael,” she finally said, and she held her hand out, palm up toward the hoodie guy, and she waggled her fingers.
Gimme . . .
The kid started to say something and she hushed him.
“No, now, no talking. You do what I say and everything will be fine. Come with me, now.” The hoodie guy laid something in her palm, probably a key card, and she and the kid got to their feet. She almost enveloped him, and when they walked past me and headed for the elevators, I was the one hiding his face.
You are not safe.
Not from me.
If I want your social security number, I can get it. If I want access to your credit cards or your bank accounts, I can get that, too. I can beat your alarm system, and if you lock your baubles up in a safe I can open it, or failing that I can steal the whole goddamn thing, and there really isn’t much of anything you can do about it. Neither the gentry nor the serfs have really caught on yet but the feudal system is finally dead, your castle and your moat cannot protect you no matter how many locks you put on the door or how many passwords you put on the account. This is the new reality and the shape of human life is slowly changing to accommodate it. Privacy is finished, and personal property is on life support. Get used to it.
Two o’clock in the morning, the hour when lost dogs and lonely old men die, when honest people are asleep and both the cops and the bad guys have forted up somewhere, their real business done, and they’re either passed out or in the station house filling out the paperwork. I made my way up the battered and rusting trellis that was all that remained of the fire escape at the Hotel Los Paraíso. It took me a good half hour to get my targeted window open, but it was not a barrier, not really, all that was required was patience.
Once inside, I stopped and waited. The whole place was asleep, if felt as though the hotel had a heartbeat of her own and it had slowed down to almost nothing. A woman lay on her stomach on the bed in the room I was in, long blondish hair obscuring her face, which was turned to the wall. Her breath rattled in her throat. I could hear a mouse scratching inside a wall somewhere, mouse made more noise than I did. He’d left behind a few turds about the size of caraway seeds, and I left behind a few camera lenses about the size of the buttons that hold a preppie’s collar attached to his shirt. An exceptional housekeeper would have had no problem finding either, really, but exceptional housekeepers are even less common than exceptional thieves, and I had no fear of encountering either one inside the Hotel Los Paraíso. I did find one thing of more than passing interest, up on the top floor, most of the room doors were missing. One of them seemed to pass for an office, and they had a safe bolted to the floor. I didn’t bother to open it because they had a shopping bag sitting on top of the safe and it was about one quarter full of bills, banded into little stacks. Leave the shit alone, I told myself. You did what you came to do, get out now . . .
Hey, man, I’m a thief. I mean, I knew I was in there for information, not for money, but it’s like this: You invite a plumber over your house, he’s gonna find something wrong with your plumbing. You go see a proctologist, what do you think he’s gonna wanna look at? I took four of the stacks. Thought about taking the whole bag but I didn’t do it. It made me think, though. No more room in the safe? I guessed that they hadn’t wanted to move the cash, probably not since I started hanging around. Seemed a good bet that El Tuerto, whoever he was, didn’t want to show his face, but he couldn’t wait forever. Cash in a paper bag is the sort of thing that will give almost any coward the heart of a hero, at least for a half hour or so, and who wanted to deal with that?
I went back out into the hallway. I decided to check out of few more of the rooms on the top floor before I left, and the first one I passed by was occupied by one of the Chinese pimps. He was asleep in a chair, cowboy-booted feet stuck straight out in front of him. I stared at him a little too long, I guess, and he stirred, and it was then that I heard it.
Sounded like someone had left a television running, tuned to some foreign language station, it was just a low mumble, barely audible. I backed away from the door, headed further up the hallway as I heard the guy coming the rest of the way awake. You see what you get, I told myself, if you had kept your mind on your busine
ss and left the money alone . . . We were on the top floor, just below the roof, and I was rapidly running out of hallway. It was a little easier to see there, too, ambient light pollution filtered through the dirty glass of the skylight over my head, not a good thing at all. One of the rooms I passed had a woman in it, she was down on her knees, holding a rosary, clicking the beads; she was the source of the low mumble I’d heard. I didn’t know the words, not in her language and not in mine, either, but I got the drift. Mother Mary, I’m really in some deep shit this time, could you cut a girl some slack . . . Just past her room, on the opposite side near the very end of the hall there was a tiny alcove that held another window, but this one had been painted black like the others, and that’s where I took shelter. The Chinese pimp clomped down the hall, not bothering to try and be quiet. I think the only reason he didn’t spot me was because he had his mind on the girl.
“Stupid bitch!” he yelled. “What did I tell you about this shit? You fucking wake me up with this bullshit . . .” She rolled into a ball on the floor, and he kicked her in the small of the back. She cried out in pain, and the noise seemed to energize him. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” He kept on kicking her, she kept on crying out, not six feet from where I stood.
I could have killed him. Should have, maybe. He got tired of it, finally, pulled a pistol out of his jacket pocket. He went down on one knee, grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled hard, stuck the barrel of the pistol in her ear like he wanted to shove it right into her skull. “Do you want to die right now?” he hissed.
All I could do was watch.
She just cried.
“I might even be doing you a favor,” he whispered. “There are worse ways to go, you know.”
She inhaled sharply, went silent.
“That’s better. This is the last time I’m telling you.”
I heard the wooden floorboards creaking as something heavy made its way in our direction. It was the Haitian. He halted just behind the pimp, his back to me, so close I could have reached out and touched him. He just stood there silent, waiting. The pimp stood back up, ignored the Haitian and stomped back to his room. The Haitian watched him go, then he went into the woman’s room, knelt down, held out a hand. “Take this,” he told her. “It will help you sleep. Take it. Now swallow it. Let me see you do it.”
Apparently she complied, because he stood back up, stood there looking down at her a moment, then he, too, made his way back down the hall.
She pushed herself into a seated position, reached up, fished the pill out of her mouth and tucked it into a pocket before lying back down and curling herself into a fetal position on the floor. I’m guessing she was saving them up, waiting until she had enough to take her out.
I waited another forty minutes before I moved. She wasn’t sleeping, I know she wasn’t, but she didn’t make a sound when I left. It felt like I should have done something, but I didn’t know what that something might have been.
Chapter Eight
My phone rang twice that morning. It didn’t wig me out like it had at first; I was getting used to it. For a couple of years I had been so disconnected from everything that I had forgotten what it was to have people wanting to talk to me. Initially I thought that losing the phones, the Internet, my fixed addresses and my profession would free me, and it did feel like that for a little while, but looking back, I thought, that day, that maybe my whole take on that experience had been based on flawed assumptions. For one thing, the fault with me had never been in the technology. And my problems had not been with the other people, either; that may have been the answer I wanted but it was the wrong one. Okay, maybe my sabbatical from the world had been therapeutic for a while, but I think I got it that morning. Maybe it was Michael, the suit’s kid, or maybe it was Hector, the kid in the hallway, who knows, but I got it. A single molecule, in and of itself, is nothing, does nothing, has no effect on anything. I cannot exist all on my own, I have to be a part of something.
People were calling me now.
I was alive again.
Go figure.
The first caller was Annabel Wing. “Mr. Fowler,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I . . . I have a confession to make.” She spoke as though each word pained her, like she didn’t want to talk to me at all, but forced herself anyway. “I haven’t been . . . entirely truthful . . . with you.”
“Why Ms. Wing. I’m shocked.” I expected to get some kind of reaction out of that, maybe a little chuckle, but I got nothing, she went on as if I hadn’t spoken at all.
“Could you stop out . . . and see me . . . this morning.”
“Of course. Where should I meet you?”
“My home.” Her voice broke and she coughed, a shallow little rasp with no air behind it. Then she gave me her address, and she asked me how soon I could be there.
I looked at the hotel’s alarm clock beside the bed, guessing at the severity of the morning rush hour traffic and my ability to get my ass in gear. “Give me about an hour and a half, Ms. Wing,” I told her. “Look for me around eight o’clock.”
“I’ll see you then,” she said, and the line went abruptly dead.
Odd. But then I didn’t know her very well, and she did strike me as an odd bird. What kind of mother blows off the memorial service for her only daughter? Even if there’d been some risk involved, you’d think she’d have gone.
The second call came when I was walking through the hotel lobby. It was Klaudia Livatov. “How about you stop by and see me this morning,” she said. “I’ve got a couple things I’d like to show you.”
I looked at the clock in the lobby, and then I looked outside at the cabs waiting by the curb. I figured I could make it if I grabbed a taxi instead of riding the train. With a little luck I could see Klaudia, check out what she wanted me to look at, and maybe even make arrangements to go back and see her later. You know, to discuss.
Yeah. Cab fare didn’t count for a lot, not when you were thinking about someone like Klaudia . . . I figured, worst case scenario, I might be a little bit late to see Annabel. I figured she could live with that. “On my way,” I told Klaudia.
I find it difficult to reconstruct with any clarity what happened when I got to Klaudia’s place. There are some things I think I know for sure: I know for a fact that she made a pot of coffee when I got there, that she had an old laptop up and running on her little glass table, and that she’d printed out some stuff for me to read. I know we spent some time talking about her research, although I think she did most of the talking. I know I found it hard to concentrate, I know she was wearing a pair of black running shorts and a polyester T-shirt, and I know that at some point, as I sat there vainly trying to focus on the computer screen, she sat down next to me and put her hand on my thigh.
Everything else is subject to interpretation.
The problem is that I cannot be sure that I am not amplifying my memory of those events in light of what happened later, that I do not color in those images now as I look for meanings that may not have been present at the time. Or is it simply that all prophecies are initially misunderstood? That all messages from all gods are only unraveled long after the fact, when you look back and ask yourself, how come I couldn’t see that? I have the impression that I unwrapped Klaudia Livatov like a little kid who had just gotten the most incredible Christmas present of his life, and that she was much more like the kid who tears the box in half to get at what’s inside. I have no memory of any conversations we may have had, I don’t recall any talking, really, although there must have been some . . . I don’t think either of us thought to close the blinds. I think I remember the feel of that rough canvas rug against my back. I think I may have lost track of myself, that for a while I was no longer clear about exactly where Saul stopped and Klaudia began. For what seemed an eternity I hardly felt anything at all, my brain seemed too stunned to comprehend much of the input, but then right near the end I think I felt everything for both of us, through her nerve en
dings and mine, I tasted her thirst and mine, I was burned by her fire and mine. I/we/she had come through a long, dry, and difficult passage, but now that baked and arid country was behind us and by God we were finally and gloriously drenched.
She got up, afterward, padded across the room to her kitchen. At the sight of her walking away and then coming back with those two white coffee mugs I was reborn. I remember her laughing. I remember the coffee was cold by the time we got to it.
We talked, afterward, some small part of my brain made conversation, whether intelligent or not I cannot say, and again it was about the work she’d done on McClendon’s list of names. Anything else we may have said has escaped me now. I think I would have sworn, at the time, that Klaudia Livatov knew far more than I did about who we were, she and I, but I may have been profoundly wrong about that. In the gray landscape of memory where information slowly morphs into conjecture and wishful thinking, it’s very hard to know any one thing for certain.
I will say this: Ignore the data at your peril.
I say that I remember, and I think I really do, but I can’t swear to it. I came out of a fog walking aimlessly on Houston Street, unsure if I was headed west or east, feeling like a man who wakes up out of a dream fighting to hang on to the images even as they fade like smoke in the breeze. I thought I had to check myself, see if my shoes were on the right feet, or if I had my shirt on inside out. I stopped on the corner of Houston and the Bowery and waited for the world to come back into focus. When the cobwebs were mostly clear, I flagged down a passing taxi to take me out to Flushing.