I tidied the office, ditching the gunked-up ashtrays, collecting empty soda cans, and hunting for shoes. Managed to find a pair, but one was black, one was brown, and both were lefts. I kept looking. I needed to make a good impression on Owl.
His call couldn’t have come at a better time. The money was sweet, but so was the opportunity to learn some secrets from an old master, maybe turn my life around. And, if things went well—at least didn’t go sour—possibly get some future work from the agencies where Owl had friends. I’d been waiting for this, for a break to fall my way. If only I didn’t blow it.
I kept up the search for footwear. Minute later, still hadn’t located a matching pair, but it was okay because the buzzer hadn’t rung yet either. But that wasn’t okay.
He couldn’t have gotten lost, only a few dozen feet from the corner. I went to the intercom and pushed the button to unlatch the downstairs door and heard the latch buzz and clack.
I opened my office door and poked my head out, calling his name, but the only sound in the stairwell was my own voice.
Just furrowing my forehead over that when the morning’s white-noise blackened to pitch with a sudden thick-sick meat-thud sound and a mangled-pig squeal of swerving tires. Brakes screeched and…then nothing. The city struck dumb.
Without even thinking about it, I was out of my office and going barefoot down the steps three at a time, not caring as my office door swung shut behind me, as if I knew in advance what it was, what I would see before I saw.
Nothing paranormal about it though, only me naturally imagining the worst that could happen. Because had it truly been a premonition, I would have at least known beforehand to grab my keys on the way, instead of locking myself out.
Chapter Two: FOOTWORK
I opened the street door and looked out. What I saw started me running to the corner of Twelfth Street and Second. I didn’t even hear the door close behind me, because ahead in the gutter was a bundle of clothes with a man inside them.
Head cracked clean open from impact with the granite curb. Pale-pink, white-haired scalp ruptured, a skull shard sticking out and an emission of brain like a pupal discharge. Bits of gravel studded his forehead, cheeks, and chin. His eyes were open, but each pointed off in another direction like clocks of different time zones, Istanbul and L.A.
I didn’t have to touch him to know he was dead.
That’s not why I had to touch him.
I took a deep breath, like right before swimming to bottom, then sank to one knee and reached out for him. Lifeless flesh and bone which could not do me ill.
With my right hand, I went through the motions of seeking a pulse in his throat, while with my left I went through his jacket pockets.
I was quick and graceless. The first pocket I clawed for and dug in was empty, and when I pulled my hand back out, the lining came out along with it. The next pocket yielded folded papers, and within, something hard, flat and flexible like a credit card. I palmed them and, shielding my movements with my bent-over body, shoved it all down the front of my jeans. Then started standing up again, backing up, shaking my head in pantomime of no-he-ain’t-going-to-make-it.
But I must’ve stood too fast or shook my head too solemnly, because suddenly I was a little sick at my stomach. A headrush of sparkles blotted out vision. I felt myself losing balance, losing sense of up and down. Not sure where I was, what I’d been doing or what I was going to do next. I sucked in deep breaths to keep it all together, to look normal, blend in.
I rode out the nausea, until my vision cleared again and I discovered I was still standing on my feet, but that was the only welcome news it brought me.
It was a clear, too-bright September morning, quarter to ten, at a busy Lower Manhattan intersection. I had a dead man at my feet and plenty of people—witnesses—all around.
Pedestrians, shopkeepers, deliverymen, and tourists, who’d been frozen in the shock of the sudden accident, but now were thawing out and beginning to creep closer.
I looked to see if anyone had seen what I’d done, but none of the naked looks of horror were directed at me.
The car, the one that must’ve struck him making its right turn onto Second, was pulled over to the curb thirty feet down the avenue. It was a livery cab, a black Lincoln towncar with a small dent now in its right front side panel as innocuous as a dimple in a bowler hat. The driver, a gray-bearded Sikh in a lavender turban, stood neck-high in the wedge of his open car door, his eyes unblinking, unbelieving.
Diagonally across the intersection was a traffic surveillance cam mounted far up on the wall of the corner building, the seven-story apartment building with the giant yellow pig painted on its blank side. The camera was a narrow box-like affair trained on the intersection. The spot where Owl lay would be just out of frame.
As more people converged, I eased into reverse. I had to go, I couldn’t stay. No, I had to go.
Barefoot, no I.D., and I’d just rolled a dead guy. Not a reaction I could easily explain, not even to myself, let alone any authorities. I didn’t know what I was thinking, maybe even calling it thinking was a stretch, trying to sanction the mob of forces that controlled me just then.
Bottom-line: I hadn’t seen—only heard—the accident. There was nothing I could tell the cops that wasn’t self-evident. An old man had stepped off the curb and been hit by a car still at the scene. Open and shut.
Except, that meant Owl had been going away from my door.
I shook it off, like a lingering effect of dizziness.
Maybe he’d had some sort of seizure, or gotten confused and wandered heedlessly into the road. No way to know for sure. Relating my share in the tragedy would only cloud the situation, and add to it more tragedy, my own.
Getting into the sights of the cops has never boded well for me. I’d done nothing recently, nor was I afraid they’d fit me up out of whole cloth. However, the police have a lot of open cases in their files and they’re like seasoned off-the-rack salesmen, always measuring you with their eyes. “What are you, 34 medium? I got something looks like it was made for you. Sexual assault in NoHo—fit you like a glove. Here, try it on.”
And why? Because they’re corrupt, evil, or lazy? Nope, it’s just every time they close a case, an angel gets its wings.
Frenzied sirens gibbered five, six blocks in the distance.
One last look down at Owl. Would that be me someday? Dying in harness? Nah, I’d never last that long, not in this business at least, I was already on my way out. But not as out as Owl, he was well out of it. I still had lumps coming.
I made a hasty sign of the cross, turned to go, and—
There was this blond kid staring right at me.
Kid about fifteen with bangs the color of varnished oak hanging down over his eyes. He was dressed in baggy drab pants full of pockets down both legs and a white Mickey Mouse t-shirt, the mouse in his famous red shorts with big white buttons. Leaning against the corner building, balancing a skateboard on the toe of one sneaker, the kid kept staring right at me, or maybe just beyond, it was hard to tell because of his bangs.
I didn’t try, I got going. And didn’t stop at my building, but shuffled past. If that kid, or anyone else, had seen me going through Owl’s pockets, the last thing I wanted was to be traced back to my building. Maybe if I’d had my keys on me I would’ve chanced it, but without them I’d have to buzz my upstairs neighbor and hope she was in. It wouldn’t do to hang around waiting to find out.
A police cruiser pulled up to the curb and I continued putting distance behind me. Until things cooled down, it was best I had a little walk around. But that also presented a problem: nothing else for it, I needed shoes.
On the sidewalk were pulpy brown smears, broken beer-bottle glass, syrupy yellow puddles, Con Ed metal plates possibly live with stray voltage, rusty old screws. I had to watch my step; this was New York City and I was in trouble again.
Just like that. An odd mixture of emotions vied in me: exhilaration and repulsion, like whe
n handfeeding a reptile.
I headed for the far end of the block.
The surge of traffic on Second Avenue registered as a steady throb against the soles of my feet, and when a flatbed truck ran over a pothole, the shudder traveled up my skeleton and rattled my back fillings.
I heard the EMS van arrive behind me—doors opening, radios squawking—but I didn’t look back. At Eleventh I turned right round the corner and let myself breathe again when I was out of sight.
This stretch of East Eleventh was a residential side street, apartment buildings and three- and four-story brownstones with garbage barrels lined up in front.
I began lifting lids, looking for a pair of shoes roughly my size. I pick through garbage on a semi-professional basis, so I made short work of it, but without success.
Gingerly walking on down the block, I passed under a sidewalk tree, a ginkgo. Its pink cherry-size seed pods, fallen to the ground and mashed underfoot, stunk of vomit. Stepping on them felt like I was walking over open eyes.
I needed shoes. Comfort aside, if anyone had seen what I’d done and was now telling the cops, I didn’t want to fit their A.P.B. description of “barefooted man seen leaving.”
But not to worry, this was the East Village, there’d be shoes. Time was you couldn’t turn a corner in this neighborhood without coming across a tossed-out pair of two-tone loafers, or snakeskin cowboy boots, or zebra-striped high-tops, or glittery platform pumps. Things couldn’t have changed that much.
This is the East Village, I told myself, there’ll be shoes.
Unless, of course, the neighborhood had changed that much, like the rest of the city around it, diluted and deluded, desecrated and desiccated, its character and flavor all but gone. If so, then I was lost here.
Your neck of the woods, Owl had said. Yeh, ’cept these weren’t my woods anymore, and now there was only my neck.
I passed a walkdown basement entryway beneath a building’s front stoop where years ago I’d been beaten up by three guys.
Maybe I’d never known the city all that well to begin with.
I cautiously rounded a shattered fluorescent tube.
Ahead of me, lined up along the curb for collection were a discarded computer monitor, a VCR, what looked like a scanner/printer or maybe it was a fax machine, even a miniature satellite dish. A decade before on this block, the danger would’ve been stepping on a junkie’s discarded needle, not stubbing a toe on obsolete tech.
I lifted more battered lids, but the closest I got was finding a collection of old neckties all knotted in a jumble, like a hive of silk. There weren’t any shoes.
A young goth couple with matching raccoon eyeshadow approached me and clomped by in black buckled combat boots which I watched pass near my toes with equal parts fear and envy.
And then I looked up and there they were, sitting atop the lid of the next garbage pail over. A pair of black leather men’s dress shoes.
I pounced, snatching them up as if away from rival hands.
Size ten or eleven, with dusty tops and slightly curled toes. I turned them upside down, knocked the heels together, shook them, undid the laces, shook them some more, then peered inside. All clear, nothing creepy was living in them. Yet.
I leaned against a lamppost, getting a glimpse at the bottoms of my feet, already jet black.
I tried on the shoes. A loose fit, but better than too tight. I did up the laces, then took two steps. Their backs bit into my naked ankles like angry lobster claws, but their bottoms crunched nicely over a bit of broken glass.
I shined the dusty tops against the back of my pantlegs. A fine dust remained in the creases, highlighting spidery lines in the leather like wrinkles in an old man’s face. Crow’s feet. Owl’s eyes.
I spit and tried shining them again against my pantleg, but the impression continued to linger like Marley’s ghost.
With my head high, I crossed the street and walked to the spiked iron fence of St. Marks-in-the-Bouwerie church. The back gate was open and I entered the churchyard and found a flat surface to unload the papers I’d culled from Owl’s pockets. It was a cracked marble slab, a vault stone with most of the lettering worn away by centuries. I could only make out part of a name: PHILIP HOAP—. I spread out the papers.
At first, it didn’t look like much, except for a worn $20 bill, paper soft as felt. Which equaled 24 minutes of my time. Or 96 at the pro rate I’d quoted Owl.
The hard, flat, flexible thing wasn’t a credit card but a magnetic card key for a hotel room, the Bowery Plaza at Third Avenue and St. Marks Place. It was four blocks above the Bowery and three degrees below a Plaza, but the receipt for the room quoted a reasonable rate and had the room number printed across the top and the date—9/2/08—when George Rowell had checked in.
The other papers were two leaflets—sale handbills, one for a men’s discount clothing store and one for a Persian rug wholesaler, both in Chelsea on West 21st—a pink pasteboard receipt for a parking garage, and an empty chewing gum wrapper. Wintergreen. I turned them all over, but he hadn’t jotted anything on the backs.
The only other thing was a business card, one of mine. The card stock was flimsy; I’d printed it up on my own computer. My first set of cards from the year I opened the office. So long ago, I hadn’t begun to include my e-mail address or the 212 on my number. Back then there was no other Manhattan area code.
I’d given a stack to Matt and a few other operatives at Metro, to hand out if anything came within my line. For all the work it got me. Matt probably used most of them to pick gristle from his teeth, but he’d given one at least to Owl.
I refolded the papers and stuck them in my back pocket. The twenty I put in my front right pocket with the card key. I brushed off my knees and left the churchyard by the front gate, onto the cobblestoned triangle of Abe Lebewohl Park.
Across Second at the southeast corner of Tenth was where Abe’s Second Avenue Deli used to be. Gone now, replaced by a glass- and neon-fronted bank, with rows of ATMs looking like exposed public urinals.
The deli had been at that location since the days of Yiddish Theater but couldn’t survive there into the new century. Change is part of the city, its one constant—I accepted that—but the old businesses weren’t being replaced by new ones starting a new tradition. Instead, commercial rents had bloated out of proportion, squeezing out longtime occupants; rents so high only banks and cell phone stores could afford the inflated leases.
The people who moved into the neighborhood now didn’t even know the Second Avenue Deli had been there, didn’t know what they were missing. Why did they move here now? Would I even want to move here now? I only stayed because…because…
I shelved the thought, a problem for another day. Today had its own problems. One was just rolling up behind me.
I heard a grinding sound like a ballpoint pen drawing endless circles on a glass tabletop.
He slid up alongside. The blond kid on his skateboard. He had been looking at me after all.
He rode parallel. Standing on his board, he came up to about my chin. Grinning ear-to-ear, he had angular, pointy features like a Bali devil-mask.
“Nice kicks, dude.”
“Thanks,” I said, not turning my head, giving him my profile like Lincoln on the penny.
He cackled, laughing so hard I thought he was going to fall off his board. See, it’s all in the delivery.
Getting himself under control, he said, “You…you look …like a clown.”
I said nothing, wondering what his game was and if it was one I played. My sweaty feet made squishy noises in the alien shoes. He mimicked the sound with his mouth and it got him cackling all over again.
When we got to East Ninth Street I stopped. The light was against us. But the kid swept on like Mr. Magoo, sailing out into the middle of the road without looking either way.
A taxi cab racing through the intersection to beat a changing yellow slammed on its brakes in a screech of smoking rubber. Its front grille stopped barely a
foot from the kid. The cabbie leaned on his horn, but since he had a fare in the back, drove on without making any more of it.
The kid waited placidly on the other side of the street for me.
None of my business if he wanted to play grab-ass with death, but I told him, “You almost got it, junior.”
“Got what?” His blue eyes all bright innocence.
“Squashed.”
He shook his head. “Never happen.”
“Happens all the time, an old guy just got killed a couple of blocks back.”
His eyes gleamed.
“What did you take off him?”
“How’s that?”
“The old man, what chew get? I saw it. I saw you.”
He had a put-on street accent and a knock-off attitude, which told me nothing about him except that he flipped through magazines and channel-surfed. His face was tanned, freckles clustered around his nose. Blue eyes flashed behind his veil of dirty-blond hair.
“Money, what? C’mon, tell me,” he whined. “I could go back, y’know, and tell ’em what I saw.”
I stopped.
“You saw it, the accident?”
He cackled.
“Accident? Right.” His voice turned level and cold. “I saw what you did.”
“Then that makes you a witness. You should go back and tell them.”
He said, “I could say I saw more.”
“Uh-huh? Like?”
“Like you shoved the old guy in front of that car. I could tell them I seen that.”
That plank slap sound I’d heard beneath my window.
I said, “Were you practicing your ollies on the corner when it happened?”
“Ha, practicing? I got it down—I kill ’em every time.”
He stopped briefly to demonstrate, making his board jump up by stepping hard on the back end. He had my interest now but not for his SK8R moves.
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