by John Shannon
‘Making something good, man,’ Vartabedian mused. ‘Remaking something better. The whole motherfucking creative process. It just floats there inside you.’ He puffed hard and blew a ring, then blew a smaller ring that passed through it. ‘Sometimes it’s better than sex.’
‘Speak for yourself.’
Moses Vartabedian had to admit he was letting himself get carried away just a little at that moment, but he had four more buildings on hold, set for after the Fortnum. ‘You’re the rehab artist, dude. Don’t lose that feeling. You should go with it.’
‘I’ll take a good blow job over a rehab, V.’
‘Sometimes a blow job is just a blow job,’ he said, eyeing his cigar and smiling. Freud was dead. ‘You know, they’re doing amazing things with the old Cecil two blocks from the Fortnum. Actually promoting it as a European-style hotel, whatever the fuck that is.’
‘Roaches, you think?’ Eddie said slyly.
‘Nah, the place itself isn’t so bad. Intimate and quaint, I bet. It’s the location.’
‘Yeah, these classy Euro tourists, I bet they get a kick out of stepping over winos to get to their taxis. I bet the owner doesn’t advertise the Cecil had an Australian serial killer staying there.’
‘Jesus, I wouldn’t even advertise we had Bukowsi, and I know for a fact he stayed at the Fortnum for six months.’
‘No shit? I loved Buk. He leave anything behind?’
‘You mean that would grow in a Petri dish?’
Wolverton smiled, then laughed. ‘Nice one, Mose. I meant a poem in his Gideon’s or some scribbling on the wall. It’d be worth a pretty penny.’
‘Cokehounds stole everything in that room years ago. Amazing what they think has street value. I had a smelly guy try to sell me a clapped out Bic pen for ten cents once. Jesus, it was plastic see-through and clearly had no ink in it. Right out front of the Fortnum, as a matter of fact.’
Wolverton shrugged. ‘I’d like to do a study of the scribblings in the bathrooms there. I could probably get a Ph.D. in folklore. But you’re the guy insists we scrape the plaster back to brick, expose all the ducts and pipes the way those loftheads love it.’
‘I should put out a rumor the Fortnum is haunted. I swear, these mix ‘n’ match spiritual kids today, they’d do tours.’
They waited in silence for a moment, as Vartabedian puffed away and watched the last of the deep red ball winking out on the north side of the Deloitte & Touche, leaving everything in the western sky banded scarlet. He relished the puzzled thoughts he seemed to be drawing out of Eddie Wolverton, whizzing around in the air around them. Something was making the man edgy, and finally the architect came out with what it was.
‘You got the Katzenjammer Kids out of the picture, right, V? I mean that big guy that looks like Custer and his sidekick, the little knife-man. They’re a loose-cannon sandwich. I don’t want any association with those nutcases. If the gutter press finds out, it’s like you been raping some high school boy. Reputation is delicate, Moses.’
‘True, true. I admit – they were a bad idea from the git-go, but they came highly recommended as fixers. So McClatchy got it wrong. I already yanked them off the case totally, today, and told them to stay home or else. I’ll go talk to the old tenants myself in the morning. Everybody’s got a price, in a very civilized world. Maybe I got to give some big bucks to their favorite Jewish cause. No problemo.’
‘There!’ the girl said excitedly, pointing.
It was a lot closer than he’d expected. A vertical neon sign hadn’t yet flickered on, if it ever would, but it was just readable in the reddish dusk. T– – – – –num. The dangly part of it, clearly he Fort, had swung free from one neon tube and was hanging upside down. It would probably never light up again.
Jack Liffey had dived back into Mike’s Market to ask about the missing-boy poster in the window, and the clerk had immediately suggested either St Michael’s or the Fortnum down the block. He didn’t bother asking why. It hardly mattered. His first impression of the Fortnum, with Millie almost snarling out the car window as he parked, was an expanse of cracked wired glass where the lobby should be, one window covered with raw plywood, which may have gone back to the Reagan administration.
‘I’m just a little slip of a thing,’ Felice said, ‘but I’ll help you all the way with this, mister. But only if you help us find Clarence.’
‘I promised I would,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘I keep my word.’ Most of his attention was focused on a big black high-boosted Dodge truck down the street, on the far side of the road, with what might have been two faces inside the murky windshield. The dusk denied him a good look at the men inside, but something about the look of them, the way they held themselves, and the damn truck itself, teased a few neurons that hinted at the thugs who’d kicked him around. He was here and he was still there, feeling it in his ribs, all at the same time. He wondered if everybody lived in overlapping realities.
‘My dad was a Polack,’ Felice announced to him, apropos of nothing. ‘He was always teaching me to sing the Polish national anthem, but I only remember the first line.’
‘Lord, what’s that?’ Jack Liffey said, hardly listening. He was waiting for a giveaway movement from the truck, but nothing came.
‘It’s Jeszcze Polska nie and something something. He always told me in English it means, “All is not yet lost.” He was that kind of man for his family. You could count on him to help you, you know?’
‘Good for him. It’s a wonderful human trait.’ Not so great for a national anthem, though, Jack Liffey thought. He tried, but he had trouble bringing a sense of irony to bear. He was too worried about the men he might be seeing in the truck. OK, stay alive, Jack. All is not yet lost.
‘Let’s look inside this place,’ he said, and he touched the pistol in the small of his back for a little reassurance. ‘I have a hunch this is the place.’ He wasn’t sure how strong the inclination was, but what he really wanted to do was walk straight over to that boosted truck and blast them both with his pistol, on general principles – guys who would throw a wheelchair-bound man around like a sack of potatoes.
This impulse to shoot them wasn’t like remembering. It was happening now, in his head. Long ago, he’d killed a man, pretty much in cold blood, when he’d been left no other way to save Eleanor Ong and himself from a world of thugs, but that killing still invaded his dreams off-and-on like a rogue fact disguising itself as other things.
He knew he wasn’t a samurai, or anything even close, but he’d known one, of sorts, an American Nisei incensed by what had been done to his family. And from him he’d learned that even samurai – men of supposedly pure and ferocious honor – weren’t allowed to exterminate people just like that. They needed a validation. He’d heard of things past guilt, but he’d never found anything past guilt himself except a lot more guilt. How come you never got over things like that? It mattered on a night as iffy as this one.
* * *
‘Cripes, this is got to be a smack dream,’ Steve McCall said. ‘But I don’t do smack.’ A man who could only have been their wheelchair guy, the big old guy who’d pounded on their roll-up door – Liffey, he remembered the name. He got out of the little white pickup followed by a skinny bedraggled woman, and then a wraith of a girl-child and they trotted right into the Fortnum, with the wheelchair guy stalling a bit at the door to look around like a Secret Service ace, scouting the President’s line of march. And doing his best not to look straight at their Dodge. Which was pretty weird, too, when you figured their shiny new hi-rider was the only other vehicle on the block and, basically, downright peculiar on Skid Row.
‘That’s that guy that braced us,’ Rice Thibodeaux said. ‘Cha cha cha.’
‘Sure looks like him, only he must have been to the Holy Rollers since we saw him. He’s got his legs back. Man, this really weirds me out.’
‘Nothing weirds me out,’ Thibodeaux said impassively. ‘Not if I can stick it with a knife.’
‘Well, tonight
might just be the fucking night, my friend.’ McCall was losing patience with the whole assignment, with Vartabedian, and with a world that had never even come close to giving him his due. ‘I have a feeling that funny little fuckers like that old guy are going to get their just deserts tonight. I feel it deep in my pancreas. And those asshole old Jews in the Fortnum, too.’
‘Now you’re talking, man. I had dealings with Jews down in Carolina, and it was always best to take them out right away.’
McCall sighed. ‘Can we not go to massacre mode right off the bat?’ he suggested. ‘I’m not really comfortable with mass-murder. Maybe we can hurt somebody and still make some money here.’
‘Oh, yeah, money. That’s always a kick. But, you know, Steverino, in the end Nietzsche and I don’t give a shit what you citizens think.’
The expression ‘citizens’ put his back up; it caught out his vanity in some way. McCall was mildly sorry he’d ever gotten stuck with this feckless little psycho, but war taught you that when push came to shove, in a violent universe, that’s who you wanted on your side in the end. Keep your sob-sisters and your sensitive souls, your poets and religious junkies. When it was wartime, you wanted a stone realist who’d kill everything in sight and get you out of the box canyon alive.
Jack Liffey hit the little brass ring-a-ling bell on the hotel counter one more time, but it was becoming obvious that on this night the hotel crew had all abandoned ship. And that probably meant a ferocious monsoon was imminent.
Felice cupped her mouth and hollered up the staircase in a surprisingly penetrating halloo, ‘Maeve, is you up there, girl? This here’s Felice!’
He wondered if there was any logic to thinking Maeve and Conor were in the same place this night.
Only a Steinbeck logic. Wherever people are in trouble, there I will he, he thought. Or whatever it was Tom Joad had said at the end.4
He held up his hand to keep Felice from yelling again so he could listen. Faint harmonica music wafted down the staircase and singing. It sounded live. And there was a separate hiss, like a big deflating balloon.
‘Maeve!’ he bellowed. ‘Conor!’ It set his throat on fire to yell.
The music stopped abruptly, so maybe his restored voice had got through. He stared upward into nothing. Into more darkness, inky, sinister. It was like his nightmares, maybe everyone’s nightmares. Maybe we were all just a long trail of ants, bearing the same insights off into the unknown.
‘Hello?’ a man’s voice called down faintly. Somebody wanting to sound like he was in charge. ‘Who’s there?’
For some reason Jack Liffey’s eyeballs ached, staring so hard into that formless darkness. He began to make out the suggestion of a landing half a flight up.
‘Jack Liffey. And friends.’
‘Wait,’ another male voice said, and then, ‘Dad!’
‘Maeve!’
‘You can talk!’
He almost laughed. ‘Just like any parrot! Only not as smart. Can we come up?’
‘Uh, that’s a bit tough.’
‘Explain tough!’
‘We got a blockade!’ the man’s voice called. ‘We made it impenetrable. Nu, so maybe you could come back tomorrow, Mr Maeve.’
‘Dad,’ Maeve overruled, ‘who are these friends, please? The guys up here are expecting real gangsters. They’re afraid.’
Jack Liffey looked at the skinny woman and child. ‘I don’t think there’s any danger right now. This is the woman and girl you dropped off at the shelter.’
‘Felice! Millie!’
‘Hi, Maeve,’ Felice called. ‘Your daddy said you were missing.’
Jack Liffey could hear people disputing upstairs for a while. It was becoming absurd, like hearing drunks carrying on in a locked men’s room when you needed it badly. Finally Maeve called down, ‘Dad, come up a floor and a half and I’ll get you in. Watch out for the hot steam. It’s one floor up.’
Jack Liffey went ahead of their party, and the world started to get even darker, and damper. No lights were on anywhere. At the top of the second flight, he kept to the right, feeling the wet heat off to his left and hearing the ugly hiss grow insistent. He tested the blowing spout of steam with an outstretched hand and yanked away when he found it grew scalding fast. The source had to be superheated vapor, like from a boiler. There was a little outside light from the end of the hallway, and as his eyes adjusted he could see that the enraged fizz seemed to be erupting from an open rectangle on the wall.
‘Stay all the way to the right, folks,’ Jack Liffey called behind him. ‘On the left, the steam gets hot enough to burn.’
For some reason, nothing was really worrying him. The vitriol of weeks of bondage to the wheelchair seemed to have drained out of him, and he was freewheeling now on a kind of recovery euphoria. He’d been intimate with drugs and drink long ago, and this was as good as that, he thought – a buzz like a couple of serious drinks.
Up another half flight of regathering darkness, he came up against a wire barrier that was almost invisible. Wires, hard edges. A flickery lantern light began to move around on the upward side to help a little. He made out a tangle of innersprings and random chairs that had all been taped and wired together.
‘Jack here!’ he called. ‘How the hell did you folks figure on getting out of here for food?’
A small balding man in a brown wooly suit stepped into the lantern light. He was doing his best to look fierce, arms akimbo, but really only managed to look like a constipated Leprechaun.
‘We don’t anticipate the standoff lasting forever, Mr Liffey. We just have to make it known we’re still here. If we slow the whole process down, maybe Vartabedian Enterprises can’t strip everything out of the hotel and go forward with the loft conversion.’
He could sense the worry underlying the man’s voice. How simple and true, he thought. ‘This is going to be yuppie lofts? This?’
‘I know, man. Feh!’
‘Maeve, come out and talk please,’ Jack Liffey called.
Then a door slammed well below them and they all turned abruptly. Probably the street door since a faint purr of the ambience of the outside world abruptly ceased. Uh-oh, he thought. Incoming.
‘Tell me you didn’t know they were right behind you,’ the little man challenged.
‘Man, look, I’m your best friend. Believe me. My daughter’s up there. But we’re stuck on the wrong side of your barrier.’ He touched his .38 momentarily. ‘Does one of the guys you’re expecting have golden dreadlocks?’
McCall and Thibodeaux stared up the linoleum staircase, listening to the faint voices under the insistent fizzing sound and feeling something like a condensation on the air, vaguely warm.
‘What the hell?’ McCall said softly. ‘The boiler’s fail-safe. I worked on this shit in Chicago. You can’t fire it up if there’s no back pressure in the steam line.’
‘Only bitches got teats,’ Thibodeaux said. ‘But then you and me got teats.’
The big man’s evil eye came around on him. ‘Why are we talking about this? Is this more of your Nietzsche shit?’ McCall said.
‘And here we are.’ The little man took out a big ugly K-bar Special Forces killing knife that he’d picked up somewhere. ‘Yo, fuckers. This has all been unacceptable from the beginning.’
Thibodeaux turned and charged up the steps, well ahead of McCall, who sighed and then plodded after him in his long-suffering way, heading into the unintelligible howl of the world and in no particular hurry to run himelf into another hornets’ nest. Then Thibodeaux screamed up ahead of him, and McCall heard the knife drop to thunk into the linoleum.
* * *
Maeve was wriggling her way down the outside of the barricade like a caterpillar, forcing her way underneath, ripping tape free and shoving aside corners of bare bedsprings, pushing under and through the tangled mass of junk. The lantern up above showed her progress.
The two short old men beside the lantern were not very pleased to see how easily she was getting through, ev
idently suspecting a kind of treason.
‘You gotta crawl under stuff the way I’m doing,’ Maeve announced to those below.
‘You left a path for the shaygets to get at us!’
Maeve ignored the complaint from above as her head emerged at the bottom, pushing aside a big oblong of torn plywood. ‘Quick! Everybody.’ She beckoned them to follow her back up. ‘Stay in the corner over here. Push stuff up or away really hard and tuck under.’
They heard running footsteps down below and then a terrible scream. Jack Liffey decided not to argue about anything. Maeve lifted the plywood for the little girl first and then Felice, and then she wriggled ahead to hold the bedsprings open at the next level. Jack Liffey went last, holding up his own barriers.
‘Gentlemen, give us a hand!’ Jack Liffey called. Reluctantly the men began to tug at the upper reaches of the barricade.
Maeve seemed a bit jittery. ‘I better seal it back! Dad, go past me.’
It was a lot harder than it looked, since he was bigger than any of them and sapped by his weeks of immobility. He went over on his back and wormed himself up the stairs, pushing with his legs, the bare bedsprings riding painfully across his face and scraping down his body. Maeve wriggled behind him, carrying a roll of silver duct tape, waiting for him to clear a little space for her.
Thibodeaux came running blindly down the steps, his hands clapped to his eyes, and McCall tried to catch him, nearly bowling them both over in near darkness. McCall lifted him up bodily and held his still running feet above the steps as the man whimpered and cried.