by Norman Green
“Exactamente.”
“So a guy on the street tells me that Ogun is going to kill him,” I said. “What’s he talking about? Is he really afraid of a spirit?”
She glanced past me, at her little statue in the corner. “Oshun,” I said. “I remember her. She’s the female spirit. Maybe not completely sane.”
“The first woman,” she said reproachfully. “I don’t think so you want to mess with her.” She had her chin held high again.
Counselor, you’re badgering the witness . . . “Luisa, please understand. I’m not trying to poke holes in any of this. My problem is . . .” I paused for a beat or two to let her hear that, to let her see that I knew it was my problem.
Which it was.
“I am not a believer. But I need to understand, when this guy on the street, just the other day, says to me that Ogun is going to kill him, what’s he thinking?”
She was still feeling insulted. “You are like the blind man in the train station,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“You think maybe something big is up next to you but you can’t see nothing, and everything that you’re thinking is wrong.”
“First of all . . . Okay, never mind. Back to Ogun. The male spirit.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Ogun wants to be good, but because he’s a guy, he messes up now and then. Who comes up with this stuff?”
That got a smile. “Ogun is very old. From Africa first, then Cuba, now here. You ever hear somebody say, I don’t gonna do this an’ that until the spirit moves me?”
“I suppose.”
“So your friend from the street, he doesn’t think so Ogun comes down from the sky to step on him.”
“No? So what’s he afraid of?”
“When a spirit looks at you,” she said, “how does he see?”
“Luisa, you’re asking the wrong guy. I could never . . .”
“From up there?” She pointed up at her ceiling. “He watches us from the sky? Like ants? No. I don’t think so you are that stupid. The spirit sees you from in here.” She pointed at her eye. “Or maybe he goes inside you so he can see what you see. Feel what you feel. Do you know what is a shadow?”
She’d lost me.
“A spirit comes to you sometimes. Happen to everybody once in a while, but nobody knows what is it. Work this way: Say Ogun hate that guy you see on the street. Okay? When you see that guy next time, maybe Ogun comes to you and fill you with his power. Ogun become your shadow. So what happens?”
“Yeah.” I couldn’t deny having felt the phenomenon, of being momentarily stronger than I had a right to be, or less sensitive to pain. And angrier, no doubt, but I wasn’t going to attribute that to Ogun, just to adrenaline and my own loss of control. But being shadowed by Ogun was a way to understand it. “I get it. You’re saying that God goes inside you . . .”
“You felt the shadows, then. Most men have. And all women.”
“You mean Ogun could shadow a woman?”
She shook her head. “Boys with the boys, girls with the girls.”
“So my man on the street, he thinks he did something to piss off Ogun and he was afraid Ogun would come to me and make me kill him.”
“No,” she said. “Your man on the street is too stupid to understand what I tell you. He is only escare of a man who pretends to have the shadow of Ogun.”
“How do you know?”
She closed her eyes. “I know,” she said, and she bobbed her head in the direction of the Hotel Los Paraíso.
And then I did get it. “You’re talking about that big Haitian guy. The one they call the Worm.”
She nodded once.
“Why do you think he’s just pretending?”
“God is never the chulo,” she said, and she had her chin up again, but not like before. Her face was twisted into an expression of disgust. “Never.”
“Chulo?”
“Pimp.” She filled the word with disgust.
“What if it isn’t God? What if it’s Ogun?”
She shook her head. “All spirits belong to God.”
“Luisa, your universe is a complicated place.”
She gave me a look. “Not so much, I don’t think so.”
“But you’re sure the Haitian is pretending.”
“Just a man who use the dark to escare the children, and the weak,” she said. “This is an old story.”
The cops had been to my hotel to talk to the night manager. The nice one, over on the West Side, not Los Paraíso. The guy didn’t say he’d seen the cops but he didn’t need to, I don’t know what they told him but he was shaken. He apologized all over the place because he’d packed up my shit and rented my room. “They told me they had you in custody,” he said, quivering. “They said it wasn’t likely that I’d ever see you again. They said to hold your belongings until they came back with a warrant. But look at it this way, we saved you three nights’ worth of charges.”
“Yeah, great,” I said, counting the days. “Don’t you mean four nights?”
“Well, technically, since checkout time is eleven . . . You’re right, let’s make it four days.” He took back the bill and revised it, seemed happier after I paid him. He even rented me another room.
Next to the elevators.
They were hydraulic, and they groaned and sighed as people went out for the night or came home to bed. I can’t say it bothered me; elevators or not, my new room still beat the hell out of the last place, because if there were any rats in this one they stayed politely out of sight. I expected I’d feel better after some room service and a nice long shower, and I did, but only marginally. I didn’t feel like watching television, and my window did not provide much in the way of distractions. There are some nights when you can’t think, at least not productively. The committee convened, those inner voices from my past came out and they sat in judgment, comparing my present difficulties to my historical flaws.
I did not care to wait for a verdict; in that court I have no shot.
It occurred to me that, for once in my life, I did not have to be alone.
I got dressed again, went outside and took a cab downtown. She did not answer her phone in the usual manner, she just picked it up and waited. I knew she was there, I could feel her. For maybe ten seconds we breathed at one another over the phone like a couple of pervs. “Where are you,” she finally said.
“Houston Street.”
“I knew you’d come.”
I walked back out of there a couple of hours later feeling so wrung out that I could barely navigate. The world was not as pointless as I’d thought, or so it seemed, and I knew, at least for that one night, what life was for, for that one night I believed utterly, because while I was clearly the product of a long evolutionary process of trial and error, Klaudia, just as clearly, had come directly from the hand of an artist; there was no other explanation that made any fucking sense. My life would never reach any higher, that’s what I thought that night as I stumbled down Houston Street looking for a cab, I worshipped at the temple of Klaudia, and no church bell ever rang louder.
Chapter Eleven
I wanted to talk to Marc Reiman again. He was the guy who’d fallen hard for Melanie. He was also the guy who had told me what a shy and retiring budding spinster Klaudia was. He’d known Mel in life and I hadn’t, and he’d known Klaudia, too. He seemed like a rational guy.
The discrepancy bothered me. Could he have been wrong about them both?
He worked out at a gym right next to the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, which was a block south of his apartment. When I talked to him on the phone, he agreed to meet me at a greasy spoon downstairs from the gym. “I guess you’re an East Side guy,” I told him.
“Funny, isn’t it,” he said, “how New Yorkers will go uptown or downtown a lot easier than they’ll go east to west, or vice versa. Must be those long avenue blocks, they must make you feel like you’re walking farther. Hey, wait a minute . . .” He shook his head. “Never mind.
Doesn’t work.”
“What doesn’t work?”
“I was gonna say that whoever killed Mel must be an East Side guy, otherwise he’da put her in the Hudson, but I was only assuming he’d dumped her in the East River. But where they found her, it could have been either one.”
“True. It’s a thought, though, because she was an East Side girl. Lived over here, worked over here, too. Assuming this wasn’t a totally random thing . . . But that doesn’t really work, either. You remember that guy from Long Island who was driving in, picking up prostitutes in the East Village and offing them? So our guy could be from anywhere.”
“Couple of years ago,” Reiman said. “Yeah. Guy probably knew the neighborhood, though, probably knew where he could find a parking spot for his truck. Is this what you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Not exactly. I’m getting some very mixed messages about what Melanie was like. And the same thing keeps happening with Klaudia Livatov, too, for that matter.”
“Really? Like what?”
“Well, with Klaudia, for example, you gave me the impression that she was a timid little mouse.”
“Yeah,” Reiman said. “Timid is exactly the right word. Quiet, scared . . . that’s her.”
“Okay. And it ain’t just you. Melanie’s landlady described Klaudia in almost the same exact terms. But when I met Klaudia, I didn’t get that from her at all. With me, she’s been . . .” Yeah? What? “Aggressive,” I told him. “Confrontational. Anything but timid.”
“Wow,” Reiman said, eyeing me. A waiter stopped by and interrupted his speculations. He repressed a smile and ordered his breakfast, and then I did the same. Most of the women I’d known tended to make you want to scratch your head, but Klaudia made you want to smile.
Which, apparently, I’d been doing. Something new, for me.
“Wow,” he said again. “I know that look. You and Klaudia? Really? I’d have never guessed that, not in a million years. What do you mean, aggressive? I mean, apart from the ways that aren’t any of my business.”
“She told me that she’d gotten pissed off. She said when nothing much happened after Melanie died, when no one seemed to care all that much, from then on she’s been angry all the time. She said she felt like she’d been invaded by this other personality, one she doesn’t recognize.”
Reiman shook his head. “Personality is formed very early in life, and it’s generally not a very malleable thing. The only way what you’re talking about makes any sense is if this new Klaudia is who she really was all along. I mean, from what I know of her I can’t see it, but it’s possible.”
“When I asked her how old she was, she said she was twenty-six, but that she felt like she was ten thousand and twenty-six.”
He’d stopped smiling. “Odd,” he said. “You might want to tread carefully with her, Saul. I mean, it’s not hard to subscribe to the theory that all women are crazy, at least to some degree, but Klaudia might be . . . Okay, what I’m trying to say is that if she really did suffer some kind of psychological dislocation after Mel died, there might be some serious issues there.” He scratched his chin. “You know what, I just assumed that Mel’s killer was a guy. I’d hate to think it even possible that someone like Klaudia . . .” He looked at me. “Might be useful to know a bit more. Where she came from, what kinds of things she’s been through.” He shook his head. “I hate this. I hate thinking that someone I know might have killed Mel.”
“I don’t care for it much, either.” It had not occurred to me until that moment that Klaudia was as much a logical suspect as anyone else. “But here’s the really odd thing. I’ve been getting the same kind of conflicting stories about Melanie, too. And again, it’s her landlady and you telling me one thing, and outside parties telling me something else.”
“Really? I’m not wrong about Mel, I know I’m not. Who is this third party, and what are they saying?”
“The good Reverend McClendon hired a private dick to look into Melanie’s death, not too long after she was found. The guy didn’t come up with a lot, but his impression of Melanie was very different than yours.”
“Yeah,” Reiman said. “I remember the guy. What did he say?”
“Said Melanie had been a good woman, but a bad girl. Said he thought she’d been repressed by her mother. That when she got out on her own, she went a little wild. Indulged in some risky behavior, and ultimately she paid the price.”
Reiman was shaking his head. “Bullshit,” he said. “No fucking way. Besides, Mel wasn’t repressed. She was just a late bloomer. No way.”
“You remember anything else about the guy? The ex-cop investigator that talked to you.”
He thought for a moment. “It isn’t fair for me to talk about him, I only met him that one time, but . . .”
“Do it anyway,” I told him.
He shook his head. “Cops always think the worst about you,” he said. “It’s just how they are. Nobody likes that.”
I got a call from Klaudia. “I checked into that flophouse you told me about,” she said. “Down on Tenth. The building is owned by a holding company that turns out to be the Diocese of New York. Huge company, got stuff everywhere, they seem to like to buy and hold for the long term. I called them up and talked to one of their property managers. I would bet they don’t have much to do with anything that goes on there. I mean, yeah, they own it, but it’s like one tiny piece of a big picture. Lady I talked to said they had a number on the books for it, meaning, someone comes along and offers them more than they have it valued for, they’d sell. The lease on the upper floors is held by Gelman and Gold, LLC. They’re pretty small, they got some warehouses in Queens, the building on Tenth is the only residential property they have. Lease for the bottom floor is held by Shield Investments, which is an incorporated proprietorship owned by a guy named Francis O’Neill. I assume it’s a guy, although I suppose Francis could be a woman.”
“Or a mule,” I said. “Gelman and Gold, that’s gotta be Shmuley’s uncle, who’s in Israel. You suppose the Diocese of New York knows that someone’s running a cathouse out of one of their buildings?”
“You know, the same thing occurred to me, so I when I talked to their property manager, I asked. She got a little huffy. Said they probably had thieves and adulterers in every property they owned.”
“Some people got no sense of humor. You talk to anyone at Shield?”
“No,” she said. “Number I got for them connects you with an answering machine, says please don’t leave a message, text your issues to a second number. I texted my number to them but nobody called me back, not yet.” She gave me the phone numbers, and I texted Shield Investments, told them I wanted to discuss the property on Tenth.
Jenny Soo was a freelancer who wrote mostly for Chinese-language newspapers, but she’d gotten a story about Mao’s legacy in the Daily News, which was how I found her e-mail address. She agreed to see me and I met her in Flushing, in that same McDonald’s where I’d had coffee with Annabel Wing just days before. Jenny was on the short side, and chubby, with a round face, bright eyes, and a quick smile. It was midmorning in Queens, and the usual mad currents of humanity swirled all around us: halal street vendors, an old man in a blue turban selling papers, a fat white guy in an MTA inspector’s uniform, an old black lady carrying a Macy’s shopping bag that was almost as big as she was, Falun Gong protestors setting up a gruesome display about the black market in human organs, all right there on the sidewalk outside the windows. Every minute or so it seemed that the whole cast of characters changed, but there was something timeless about the way it all flowed by while we sat there inside Mickey D’s. “Thanks for seeing me,” I said.
“How can I help you?” She had the bubbly sort of personality you don’t often see in a reporter, and I guessed if she stayed in the business she’d lose it before long.
“What can you tell me about the Green Pang Tribe? I understand that’s the tong that sort of runs this part of Queens.”
The lights i
n her eyes dimmed with caution, or maybe it was fear. “Are you in trouble, here?” she said.
“Not yet,” I told her. “But I expect I will be soon.” I told her about Melanie, and about Annabel Wing’s murder. She was shaking her head before I finished.
“This doesn’t sound like them,” she said. “Not to me. Green Pang is super-organized. They are all about discipline. Nothing gets done without permission, and a high-profile killing of a civilian is completely opposed to everything they believe in. If Annabel Wing, or her daughter, had done anything to merit this kind of response from the Green Pang, she would have simply disappeared. Completely. Or she’d have suffered an apparent heart attack. You have to understand, Mr. Fowler, these guys are not cowboys. They’ve been doing business for centuries. Maybe not in Queens, I’ll give you that, but they come from a very old tradition. The Green Pang is about money, first and foremost, and they handle their business quietly. And they are extremely good at what they do. I’m surprised, frankly, that you’ve heard about them at all.”
“Okay. What about the Mott Street Merchants Association?”
She eyeballed me for a moment before she answered. She may have been a reporter, but she was obviously uncomfortable with my chosen subject matter. “The same answers would apply, for the most part. Although there are some subtle differences.”
“Like what?”
She looked away and swallowed, then came back to me. “Green Pang is run by a guy named Li Fat. Rumor has it that there are a bunch of warrants out on him, but I don’t know that for a fact. He hasn’t been seen in public for years now, but I don’t know if anyone is trying all that hard to find him.”
“What about Mott Street?”
“Chinatown,” she said, looking at me sideways. “Downtown Manhattan. Run by Peter Kwok. Kwok took over when his father died. At the time, no one thought Peter would last a month.”
“Too soft?”
“Not at all,” she said, and she glanced around. “Peter has a reputation . . . They say he is unstable, and short-tempered. A Chinese man without patience will be thought of as a baby. Immature, weak. So everyone thought that the old men would take him out, but that never happened. Not yet.” She stared down at the table between us. “Annoying Peter Kwok is not something anyone is liable to do more than once.”