The Angel of Montague Street

by Norman Green

“Who said anything about that?”

  “Stop, okay? You think I’m some kind of fucking moron? I got a look at your service records, Iurata. Whether you did what Little Dom thinks you did or not, you were no paragon of virtue when you went in, and it didn’t look like the Army changed you much. You spent a fair amount of time in the stockade. And detached to the Defense Department, what the hell does that mean? My guess is, somebody figured out what you were good at, so they pointed you at people they didn’t like and let you go do it.”

  “So what.”

  “I’ll tell you so what.” The guy was scowling, and his voice got louder as he went on. “You went from Brooklyn to Viet Nam, then Thailand, the Philippines, California, Oregon, I miss anything?”

  “Nothing important.”

  “Fine. And what did you do, in any of those places? What did you build? Did you have any lasting relationships? Wife? Children? Employers? Friends? Anything?”

  Silvano sat with that for a heartbeat. “No.”

  “No.” His voice dripped sarcasm. “Let me guess. The Army was the only discipline you ever had in your entire life. Outside of that, you have never held a steady job, not a legal one, anyway, you have never submitted to any kind of authority, when you have money you spend it like a drunken sailor, you only tell the truth when it suits you, you have no idea where you’re going with your fucking life, you’re irresponsible, you’re reckless, and you will fight anyone, anywhere, at the drop of a fucking hat. Am I right?”

  “Not entirely.”

  “Bullshit. That’s a typical criminal fucking profile.”

  “What do you want from me? You want me to show you my library card? You want to see if there’s any points on my driver’s license? You only work for virgins?” He paused to gather himself. “You think the whole world is just like recess at grade school, don’t you. Follow the rules, play fair, be nice, listen to the teacher, and everyone lives happily ever after. Well, it don’t work that way.” It flashed on him then, the last time he saw his uncle, his grandfather, standing silent, smoldering. It felt so real, he could smell the old man’s cigar breath, he could feel the same paralysis he’d felt then, waiting for the old man to make up his mind. He shook his head, pulled himself back to the present. “Listen,” he said, “you got to play the cards you get. I could have been smarter, I admit it. But I did the best I could. You think you know everything, I’m telling you, you know dick. I wanted to whack Domenic, I don’t need shit from you. I could pull the plug on him any time, be back on the beach in Malibu before you assholes even find the body, you would never make me for it. Probably wouldn’t even try, wise guys killing each other, who gives a fuck. Go ahead, tell me you would stay up all night worrying.” He stared at the guy. “What I want is to find out what happened to my brother, that’s all.”

  “Suppose you do find out what happened. Then what?”

  Silvano deflated, sagged in his chair. “I don’t know. Visit the grave. Apologize.”

  “He was always telling people you were coming.” The guy’s voice got quieter. “Coming to visit him. Did you know that?”

  Silvano stared at the guy. “No.”

  He hesitated, but then he seemed to decide that he was going to continue. “Your brother had a lot of friends. A few in particular, a panhandler named Special Ed, a minor league crook called the Dutchman. You need to write this down?”

  “No. The government doesn’t always put its instructions in writing, either.”

  “Fair enough. He worked off the books in three places that I know of. One, he helped out the porters at the St. Felix Hotel, I don’t think they paid him anything, I guess he did it for the company. Two, he used to run errands and wash trucks at Black and White Armored Car Service. They always gave him something for his trouble. And three, he used to clean up at some supermarket, place is down at the end of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Not too far from Black and White, come to think of it. They didn’t pay him anything at the market, but he was robbing them blind, anyway. He had the knack for it, they tell me. Some of the other, aah, sidewalk entrepreneurs were very impressed with his abilities.”

  “I’m not surprised. Tell me about Black and White. What do they do?”

  The guy smirked. “I thought that would catch your interest. Black and White is a small company. Armored trucks and vans. They do cash transport, collections, and deliveries from check-cashing storefronts and small to medium stores all over Brooklyn and Queens. They also do a mobile check-cashing service. Some of their bulletproof vans are set up with windows and cash drawers in the back, and they’ll go park out in front of some big place with lots of payroll, like a factory or a hospital, sit out there Thursday and Friday, cash checks all day long.”

  “What’s in it for them?”

  “They get a cut, like three percent or something.”

  “No kidding. They clean?”

  “Squeaky.”

  “You sound real sure of that.”

  He shrugged. “Place is owned by a guy name of Joseph O’Brian. Guy’s practically a hermit. No bad habits, don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t snort, don’t gamble, don’t whore around. Plus, three quarters of the guys he’s got working for him are either retired or off-duty cops. It’s a clean operation, no funny stuff. Nobody like you ever goes there.”

  Silvano decided to let that go. “What can you tell me about those two guys you said Noonie was running with?”

  “The Dutchman went missing about six months before your brother did. We didn’t find him, either, though I doubt anybody looked too hard. The guy had a lot of enemies, most of the other transients didn’t like him. It’s a hard life, living on the street. Shit happens to you, you ain’t got a sister or a brother to come looking, nobody even notices you’re gone. Nunzio went around looking for the guy for a while, but he, you know . . .”

  “Yeah, I know. What about the other one, Special Ed?”

  The guy shook his head. “Just a gimp. Just another lost soul, wandering around talking to people that ain’t there. Waiting for someone to drop a net over him. Nothing there. Nothing at all.” The guy stared at him for a few minutes. “That’s about all I got.”

  “I appreciate your time.”

  “Thank Johansen, don’t thank me.”

  THEY WORE BLUE work clothes, each guy’s name along with the name of the hotel stitched on the shirt pockets. They were carrying black plastic garbage bags out of the dark interior of a back door of the hotel and stacking them in a big pile on the sidewalk. Silvano walked up to the biggest one, a white guy about six foot four, heavy, had Navy tattoos on his forearms. “Excuse me,” he said, taking one of the pictures of his brother out of his pocket. “I wonder if you can help me. I’m looking for a guy, I was told he used to hang out with you guys.”

  The guy stopped what he was doing, and so did the others. They watched as he accepted the picture and looked at it. “You a cop? Ex-cop? Rent-a-cop?”

  “None of the above. He was my brother.”

  “Yeah?” He looked at the picture a few seconds longer, handed it back. “You want Marvin,” he said, pointing at the open doors. “He’s carrying bags over from the elevator. This guy was Marvin’s buddy.”

  “Thanks.” He took back the picture, stepped through the doors into the darkness. The stench of rotting garbage in the enclosed space was overpowering. Silvano’s sense of smell was as acute as his hearing, and he held in some special part of his memory an enormous reference library of scents, and from time to time, unbidden, it would spring into life and fill his head with the essence of some far-off experience, hammering him with the stimuli of some lost and unreachable event. In the space of a half dozen steps, he found himself transported, ripped back through time to a dark and stinking hole in the ground half a world away, bombarded by the smell of fear, shit, and the unmistakable odor of Mother Nature reclaiming what was hers from the body of some poor bastard, weeks dead. He felt his knees buckling and he struggled to remain upright. Just then a palsied hand reached o
ut of the darkness and took him by the elbow, urging him to move, guiding him down a hallway, away from the smell.

  “This way, buddy. C’mon, this way, you’ll be all right.”

  Silvano found himself sitting on a wooden bench in a locker room that was flooded with fluorescent light. The smell was different there, it was the sharp tang of living, sweating men, and though no perfume, it was preferable to the hallway.

  Sitting across from him was an emaciated shell of a man. He wore the same kind of uniform as the men outside, and his shirt pocket identified him as Marvin. He wore aviator glasses with pale green lenses, topped by a boonie hat. He pulled a jay out of his shirt pocket and lit up. “You coming back to us yet?”

  Silvano rubbed his face with both hands. Second one today, he thought. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m all right. Just, for a minute there . . . That fucking hallway smelled exactly like a VC tunnel.”

  Smoke and words came out of Marvin’s mouth. “Dead men and punji stakes.”

  Silvano looked at him. “How are you making it?”

  He shrugged. “I have good days and bad days.” He offered Silvano the joint. Silvano reached for it, took a hit, handed it back.

  “So do I.” He patted his shirt pocket for the picture of his brother, but he noticed Marvin holding it in his hand, looking at it.

  “You must be Silvie.”

  “Yeah. Silvano.”

  “Noonie used to talk about you all the time. ‘When Silvie comes to see me,’ everything was ‘when Silvie comes.’” He looked up. “Oh, hey, I’m sorry. You all right?”

  “Yeah.” He shook his head, fighting himself. “No, actually, I’m fucked up.”

  Marvin held out the joint. “Get more fucked up.”

  “No, you know, I . . .” The hell with it, he thought. “One more hit.”

  “Attaboy. You know, your brother was one of a kind.”

  “Ain’t that the fucking truth.” Silvano handed the joint back.

  “You ever notice, it’s the ones that’s got the least are the most willing to share with you. Especially if I was having a bad day, you know . . .” He glanced at Silvano. “Like the one you’re having. When he was around, it would just kind of dissipate. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because all he ever cared about was right now, you know what I’m saying? No past, no future. Like, he would enjoy hauling trash just as much as anything else he did. He didn’t carry any baggage around. No baggage at all. If I could only learn that, Jesus.” He sucked a big hit from the joint, then fished an alligator clip out of a pocket, stuck the joint in it, held it out.

  Silvano shook his head. “You know, I really got—”

  “One more, chrissake, finish it off.”

  “All right.” He could feel the dope pulsing throughout his body like blood through his veins. “Did you know anybody that hated him? Was he into anything heavy?”

  “No, hell no.” Marvin took the clip back from Silvano, pinched it out, dropped it, roach and all, into his shirt pocket. “Noonie didn’t know from heavy.”

  “Can you tell me anything about a couple of guys he ran with? The names I got are Special Ed and the Dutchman.”

  Marvin laughed softly. “Christ,” he said. “What a pair. Well, the Dutchman was a guy name of Lenny Deutch. Dead, they tell me, and unlamented. He was your basic scumbag, always looking to hustle you, steal your shit, or sell you a dime bag of oregano. I doubt if anyone was surprised he got popped, if that’s what did happen. He was the kinda guy, you had to figure eventually he would get shot just for being annoying. Special Ed is still around, though. He shouldn’t be too hard to turn up. Easy to pick him out of a crowd, that’s for sure.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he’s fucked, that’s why. I mean, maybe we all are, but him more than most. More than anyone I ever met. All you need to know, he’s maybe three and a half feet tall, and he’s fucked. Believe me, you don’t recognize him from that description, you’re blind.”

  “You know his real name?”

  “No. Don’t know if he does, either.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  “He lives in the basement of a building over on Middagh. I don’t know the number, but if you turn down Middagh off Henry, okay, you go down about half a block, you’ll see an alley on your left, just go down in the back there. More likely you can catch him on the street. He pushes a shopping cart around, collects junk. He mostly works the neighborhoods on the far side of the Manhattan Bridge. You hang out down on that end of Henry, you’ll probably see him coming back, late afternoons.”

  “All right. Listen, thanks for pulling me out of that hallway. Thanks for the herb tea.”

  “No sweat. Can I have this picture?”

  “Yeah, I got more. That’s the phone number of the Montague, on the back. You think of something else, you can leave a message for me there.”

  “Okay. One other thing. Special Ed is pretty, aah, skittish, I guess you could say. Might do well if you took along a half pint of something to calm his nerves.”

  “All right. Is there a different way out of here?”

  Marvin got to his feet. “Yeah, sure. Come with me.”

  IT WAS ONLY a few blocks to Middagh Street. Silvano followed Marvin’s directions and found the alley off Middagh with no problem, it was an ell-shaped alley that led to the back of a row of apartment houses and brownstones. There was no way to know which of the basement doors would lead to Special Ed. He walked back out of the alley and headed for Court Street, which would take him over to Atlantic Avenue.

  He turned right when he got to Atlantic. There was a big Middle Eastern restaurant on the corner. The front door was open and Silvano caught a whiff of unfamiliar spices as he went by. The place had once been a storefront, and there were tables in the windows, white tablecloths, black chairs, plain white dishes, old silver cutlery. The next building housed a Syrian grocery, beyond that was a Lebanese bakery, and so on, all the way down the hill to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. There were a few more commonplace establishments mixed in, bars, antique stores, a witchcraft store with the windows painted black, a repair shop with a yellow sign that said FLAT FIX. Two guys inside were drinking beer. A tiny store next door had a sign painted on the window, GLASS CUT TO SIZE. A withered old man sat in the doorway insulting everyone who passed by.

  “Where’d you get that shirt?” he asked a guy coming up the block, in a voice that sounded like Grandpa McCoy. “Find it in the back of a cab?” The guy looked at Silvano and rolled his eyes, continued on without comment. “Hey, pal,” the old guy said to Silvano. “Your fly’s open.”

  Silvano checked reflexively.

  “Made ya look, ya dope,” the old man cackled.

  Silvano shook his head and walked on by, passing the brown brick hospital at the bottom of the hill. There was a parking garage attached to the side of the hospital, bigger than the hospital itself, butted up against an exit ramp from the BQE, which crosses over the end of Atlantic Avenue and comes to earth on the far side. Go under the overpass and you’re on the waterfront. To the right is Furman Street, trucks parked in a long line on one side, the highway roaring overhead, freighters tied to the docks. No wonder they call them tramps, Silvano thought, looking at the rusted hulls that all seemed to list to one side or the other. Most of them had Greek or oriental names, the Olympic Line or something or other Maru. Not one of them looked like the sort of ship you’d trust your life to in Lower New York Bay, let alone the vast and cold Atlantic.

  Straight ahead was an MTA bus garage on a concrete pier behind a chain-link fence. To the left of the MTA lot, between the BQE and the waterfront, was an industrial wasteland of empty lots and concrete buildings without windows. The closest building, next to the bus lot, also behind a fence, bore a sign that read BLACK AND WHITE ARMORED CAR SERVICE. A construction crew was busy building an addition onto Black and White’s building. The addition looked like it would ultimately be bigger than the original place. The exterior was being made of con
crete blocks, reinforced on the inside with sheets of steel. Silvano could hear the ripping sound of a mig welder above the more familiar racket of skillsaws and hammering. Out in front, four squat, muscular trucks sat in the parking lot. They were painted dull black with white doors, and there were stainless steel gun slots under the windows. Two black guys had the nose of the one closest to the street tilted up and they were looking at the engine. A black Cadillac sedan was parked in front of the trucks, and a heavily built young white guy with black hair and a goatee was leaning against it, just behind the open driver’s door, and from time to time he berated the two black men in a loud voice. Noonie worked here, Silvano thought, in this place. He remembered the money strips the cops had found in Noonie’s hotel room. Maybe that’s it, he thought. Maybe he was walking out with more than just paper wrappers, maybe he was taking their money, maybe they caught on, maybe they decided to put him out of his misery.

  There was an old automobile skeleton just down from the yard, half on the sidewalk and half in the street. It had been stripped and burned, but there were still some salable parts on it, because a red-faced old white guy with a long white braid was working on getting the radiator out. His tools consisted of a straight handled pry bar, a screwdriver, and a pair of slip-joint pliers. He had a shopping cart parked nearby, half full of car radiators and pieces of scrap metal.

  Silvano wandered over to watch him work. “Hey, old-timer,” he said. “Tough way to make a buck.”

  The old guy replied without looking up. “Ain’t so bad,” he said. “I seen worse.”

  Silvano thought about the price of scrap, and the labor necessary to harvest it. “Wouldn’t it be easier just to get a regular job? You’d have to make more money than you’re making doing this, have enough for a few amenities.”

  The old man straightened up. “Had my fill of regular jobs,” he said. “Got all the amenities I need. Besides, you don’t look all that employed yourself.”

  “I am currently between positions,” Silvano said. “What I’m doing, I’m looking for a guy, people called him Noonie. Used to hang around down here.”