The Angel of Montague Street

by Norman Green

  “No,” Silvano said. “Thank you for your story.”

  “You ever find that guy you were looking for?”

  Silvano had been adrift, mentally, listening with half an ear. “Did I ever what? Oh, Noonie. Nunzio, my brother. No, I didn’t find him. He worked at that place, though, Black and White, that place where you were liberating part of your heat exchanger. I got lucky and got hired on by one of the construction foremen working on their new building. I figure, I hang around there long enough, I might get a lead on what happened to him.”

  “You didn’t tell me he was your brother. And what do you mean, ‘find out what happened to him’? You think he met up with some trouble?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do.” He sighed. “I guess it’s only fair that I should try to explain, so you should know what’s going on, if I’m going to be camping out here for a while.”

  “Blanche told me what happened.”

  “Well, then, you got an idea who’s looking for me.”

  Henry put a finger on the end of his nose and pushed it over sideways. “The deviated septum crowd.”

  “That’s them. I’ll leave in the morning if you think they’ll cause you problems.”

  “We’ll wait and see,” Henry said. “No real reason to think they should come looking down here. Besides, this place ain’t so easy to get into. Or out of.”

  “Door was open, downstairs.”

  “Yeah, but Blanche knows the dog, and the dog knows her. Otherwise, you’d have never gotten to the door.”

  “Suppose I shot the dog?”

  Henry had a sly look on his face. “Okay, fine. But there’s two of them, and you never even saw the other one, did you?”

  “Oh, shit.” Silvano shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Plus, I do lock up most times. And in the morning, we’ll have to go over a few procedures so you don’t trip any of my security systems while you’re staying here.”

  “Security? What security?”

  Henry grinned. “I’m an inventor, remember? They might be unusual, but they are effective. Tell me about your brother.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Silvano rubbed his face with both hands. “Noonie was like Blanche, except he was crazier than her,” he said, starting in. “Cleaner, but crazier. He had a good heart, but he had too much energy, he couldn’t sit still, and he didn’t have any of those social filters that most people use to keep themselves out of trouble. You know what I mean? Like, he was smart enough, in some ways, but if he had a thought in his head, it came rolling right out of his mouth. No filter, nothing to make him pause and think before he said something. Same with other things. He got an itch, he hadda scratch, right then and there. If he got the urge to, I don’t know, go swimming in the river, for example, he’s going. He had that thought in his head, there was no room for anything else. Nothing to tell him, hey, the water’s dirty, or it’s cold, or it’s deep, or his mother would be pissed, nothing like that.”

  “He must have been a joy to grow up with.”

  “Oh, man. I spent half my time fighting with kids wanted to kick his ass, and the other half kicking his ass myself, trying to get him off the next crazy shit he had in his head. Anyway, my old man put him in a hospital when he was twelve, because he’d gotten to be too much to handle. That’s the first part of the story.”

  “Okay.”

  “Second part. My old man was a bookie. Mostly. He did a little bit of shylocking, but he didn’t like it as much, in those days he did mostly the horses, college sports, some high school, even. Said it was more civilized. But he was not a good guy. Nice enough to talk to and all that, friendly, everybody liked to drink with him, but if my mother’s father, Domenic, told him to put you in a oil drum fulla concrete, my old man didn’t ask a lot of questions, and you got disappeared. Know what I mean?”

  “I get the picture.”

  “Okay. So, not too long after they put my brother away, I got thrown out of high school for like the third time, and I wound up joining the Army.” He looked over at Henry. “I’m skipping over a lot, here.”

  “All right by me. Tell the parts you want to tell.”

  “All right. My mother’s father was the guy that was really mobbed up, my father just sort of worked through him. That’s the way it worked, back in those days. My grandfather’s name was Domenic Scalia, he’s dead now and ain’t nobody crying over it. His grandson, my cousin, same name, is the guy who’s after me now. Little Dom, they call him. He and I had what you might call a falling out. Years ago, before I went in the service. Those were his guys in the hotel.”

  “That had to be, what, ten years ago? What’d you do to him?”

  “That’s another long story.”

  “All right. So I understand this right, you want to find out what happened to your brother before these guys find you. Again. Is that it?”

  “Some plan, huh?” He shook his head again. “Maybe I should just grab one of those two assholes down at Black and White and bounce them up and down, see what comes out.”

  Now Henry was shaking his head. “That won’t do you any good,” he said. “You have to take this in logical order. They eat a lot of rabbit, over in France. Did you know that?”

  Silvano was mystified by the sudden leap. “No.”

  “Yeah, lotta rabbit. They got a recipe for rabbit stew, okay, line one of the recipe says, ‘First, catch one rabbit.’ They don’t assume anything, you see what I mean?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I get it.”

  “You want to do this right, you got to catch the rabbit, first. You ain’t got the rabbit, you’re nowhere.”

  HE WENT TO BED thinking of the old man’s story, the bad-smelling German and mortar fire, and the later part of it, too, Henry coming home, growing slowly back into a human being. It was a small comfort to know that other men and other generations had been through it, too, that he wasn’t the first guy. The dream was worse, though, after he fell asleep, it was the same one, the PBR barreling up the river with him sitting alone on the stern because the guys on the boat never wanted to talk to you. He counted the islands as they roared past, gripping the M-16 with both hands. When they came to the final island, the boat dropped him off. He had barely hit the water when the boat started taking fire, and she reversed engines, clawing her way back out into the channel, opening up with everything she had, tracers arcing into the brush over his head. He came to on the floor, like always, scrambling for cover, heart pounding, ears ringing from phantom gunfire.

  FOUR

  HENRY WAS UP EARLY, impatient to be gone. Silvano listened groggily as Henry showed him his security systems. “You might feed the dogs,” Henry told him. “I gotta be going. Besides, it might make them like you a little.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Silvano told him, and Henry left him standing there with a big bag of dry dog food in his hands.

  He went without shaving, and he wore Blanche’s hat, a stained T-shirt, and a ratty pair of jeans. Two blocks up on Van Brunt, he happened across a car service running out of an old storefront. The guy behind the desk inside eyed him doubtfully. “I need a ride,” Silvano told him. “Up to the Heights.”

  The man rubbed his mustache. “Eight dollar,” he said, making no move to pick up his radio.

  Silvano watched him, wondering what the guy was waiting for. “Yeah, so?”

  The guy rubbed his thumb together with his first two fingers. “Eight dollar,” he said again.

  Oh, yeah, Silvano realized, I forgot, I’m a bum. “I got the money,” he said, and he took a ten out of his wallet.

  “Okay,” the guy said, reaching for the radio. “You wait outside.”

  “All right. You got a card? I might need you to come get me, later.”

  SILVANO LIMPED DOWN Middagh Street, carrying his shopping bag. To his surprise, he found that the disguise liberated him somewhat from his eternal hypervigilance and the need to stop and scope out the street every hundred yards or so became less oppressive. He was getting into it, he imagined himsel
f living on the street with nothing, no home, no family, no job, and no prospects, nothing beyond what to eat next, where to get enough money for the next bottle. Yeah, he thought, and die alone, no one to give a damn who you were or what you did. There was nobody in Special Ed’s alley, but he ran into a prosperous-looking fat guy on his way back out. The guy gave him a look and passed him by, then apparently thought better of it.

  “You looking for Ed?”

  “Yeah.”

  The guy shook his head. “He was supposed to take out the trash for me yesterday and he didn’t do it. That’s not like him. I’m a little worried.”

  “You think something happened?”

  “I don’t know.” The guy hesitated, then went on. “A couple of men stopped in to see him the other day. I happened to be upstairs by my back window, watching, and it looked to me like they were giving him a hard time. I didn’t know if I should call the police or what, but Ed gets so upset when anyone tries to help him, he’s always accusing me of meddling in his business.”

  The guy shook his head. “Poor bastard. I hope he’s all right.”

  “Yeah, me too. Maybe I should go look for him.”

  “You know where he goes, during the day?”

  “I got an idea.”

  “You know, that would be great if you could find him. I can’t be here Monday to take out the trash, and I hate to miss it twice running.” The guy fished around in his pants pocket, came out with a roll of bills, peeled off a one and handed it to Silvano. “Buy him a beer, if you see him, tell him I need him back on Monday.”

  “Okay,” Silvano said, looking at the dollar bill. “God bless you, sir.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” the guy said, walking away. “Don’t forget to tell him about Monday.”

  There was a car service guy parked out in front of the Castle Arms with his motor running. Silvano walked up to the driver’s window and showed him a twenty. The driver rolled down the window, looked at him suspiciously.

  “What you wan’?”

  “I need a half hour,” Silvano told him. “I need you to drive me around, over on the other side of the Manhattan Bridge. I’m looking for a guy, and I don’t think I can find him on foot.”

  The driver snatched the bill out of his hand. “All right, maricon,” he said, growling, “but you don’t gonna get sick in my car. You unnerstan’? You trow up in my backseat, I kick your fokking ess.”

  Silvano had to smile. “Sure you will. Let’s go.”

  The guy gave him more than a half hour, it was closer to an hour later when they were back in front of the Castle Arms. “Sorry for your fren’,” the driver said. “Maybe he sick, maybe he stay home.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” Silvano tipped the guy a five. “Thanks.”

  “HEY, CUTIE! HEY!”

  Elia had just come out of the grocery store. She turned, looking for the speaker, who was standing a few feet up the sidewalk. He was a vagrant, bent over, carrying a brown paper shopping bag. He was wearing a stained brown canvas jacket and shoes with no laces, toes leaking out through a split along the side. Why do they all have to do this? she wondered, shaking her head. The guy was making kissey noises now. She could hardly see his face behind the long matted yellow hair and the hat he had pulled down across his eyes. Why me? she thought. What am I, some kind of magnet for these jerks?

  “Get lost, creep.” She turned and walked away.

  The bum convulsed with strangled laughter, wheezing and slapping the leg of his jeans with his free hand. “Wait for me, sugar,” he said, limping after her.

  She turned and walked backward, eyeing him. There was something familiar about the guy, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Can’t blame him for trying, she thought, but she gave him the finger anyway. He broke up again, slapping his leg and croaking his strange laugh.

  The city’s full of them, she thought, shaking her head, turning front and walking swiftly down the sidewalk. Just a thrill a minute. Why does it have to be? she wondered; I meet a doctor or a stockbroker and he runs away like a scared rabbit, but every fucked-up guy within a hundred yards thinks I’m Miss January. She glanced back over her shoulder to see if he was still following, but he was nowhere in sight.

  Men.

  How is it, she asked herself silently, they can go directly from extended adolescence into old fogeydom without ever passing through adulthood? And yet, every single one of them was more than ready to tell you how to live your life, where you should go, what you should do. It was the same old story, as far back as she could remember. Her parents had not been young when they’d moved from Turkey to the United States, and her father, in particular, had never really understood that a woman could be a real person, as real and as independent as any man. Her mother had continued to live according to the patterns of the life she’d known in the old country. If she’d had any opinions, she’d kept them to herself.

  Ah, so what, she thought. So you had to stand up for yourself. Who hasn’t? And so your parents weren’t much help, so you have to work during the day and go to school at night. They got you here, didn’t they?

  She turned off Smith Street onto her block, and he was waiting there, in fact he was sitting on her stoop, that wino in the brown jacket, the one from outside the store. In a fraction of a second she was pissed, balling her fists, clenching her teeth. If this guy thought for one second she wouldn’t clean his clock . . .

  “How’d you get here ahead of me?” she demanded angrily. “Who the hell are you?” And how did you know I live here? she added silently, with a twitch, a tiny shiver at the back of her neck.

  “Don’t hurt me, okay?” The guy spoke in a different voice than the one he’d used before, and she stopped, her heart racing, but then the guy reached up and grabbed his hat, wadding the crown up in his fist, and when he took it off the hair underneath came off with it.

  “Silvano! You asshole! Are you trying to scare me to death?”

  He held the wig in his lap, stroking it like it was his pet rat. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just wanted to find out if this little getup here was gonna work.”

  “Whew,” she said, still recovering. “Well, it worked on me. I was about ready to pull this pistol out of my bag and put a couple rounds into your skull.”

  “Damn,” he said. “You really have a pistol in there?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know? What the hell are you doing, anyway?”

  “It’s a long story,” he said.

  She looked at her watch. “I got time.”

  SHE LIVED IN A STUDIO on the top floor in the back. “This is the same color as my room at the Montague,” he told her.

  “They must’ve had a sale on it, forty, fifty years ago when they painted last,” she said. “Have a seat.” She went into her phone-booth-sized kitchen. “Don’t go getting the wrong idea. I only asked you up so I wouldn’t be seen talking to some wino. I don’t want my neighbors thinking I’m that desperate.” There was part of a bottle of Portuguese rosé screw-top in her fridge. She fished it out and poured two of her four glass tumblers half full.

  When she turned around he was sitting cross-legged on one of the pillows she had strewn around on the oriental rug, and he was looking at the travel posters of the Mediterranean she’d tacked up on the walls. Well, it’s the pillows, the floor, or the daybed, she thought, there ain’t no chairs. She hadn’t thought of that in a while, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had someone come up. He didn’t seem to mind.

  “I’m disappointed,” he said, accepting the glass. “I just naturally figured it was because of my roguish charm.”

  “Yeah, sure.” She sat on the floor across from him and leaned back against the bed. “So what’s with the wig and all that?” She was eyeing the shopping bag suspiciously. He sighed. She watched him thinking it over.

  “We can get to that in a minute.” He pulled a picture out of his pocket and handed it to her. “You recognize this guy?”

  “Noonie,” she said
, looking at the picture. “You a cop? You with those guys doing surveillance?”

  “Surveillance? What guys?”

  “No,” she said, angry, shaking her head. “You first. Who the fuck are you? Is your name really Silvano? God, I hate men, you’re all such liars. What about that story you told me, was that all bullshit after all? What’s your real name? Let’s start with an easy one.”

  He looked at his hands folded in his lap. “Silvano Iurata,” he said. “That’s my real name. I am not a policeman of any kind. Noonie was my brother.”

  “How could you be related to Noonie? He always told the truth.”

  “Yeah, he had a lot of problems like that.” He looked up at her. “Elia, I think somebody killed him. Never once that I know of did he ever mean anyone harm, but he did something or he saw something or he knew something, and somebody killed him for it. I would really like to know who it was.”

  “Oh, God,” she said, her anger bleeding away. “I’m sorry. We never found out what happened to him. I just thought . . . I figured he moved away, or something. He was your brother? I’m sorry.”

  He sighed. “Yeah, me too. You never heard anything about him, after he disappeared? Nobody said anything about him?”

  “Well, not really. One day he just stopped coming around. For weeks after that, we all walked around with one eye open for him, but he never came back. He and Sean had been just about joined at the hip, they used to go everywhere together. Even Mr. O’Brian kind of liked him. He would take him along, sometimes, when he went off on his little projects. Everyone was so sad he was gone. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt him.”