Loud Pipes Save Lives

by Jennifer Giacalone

  “Anyway, I think it really makes a difference to things, having you in office, at least from the law enforcement side,” she said brightly. “I think that it makes the police force a lot more apt to be more careful about profiling and abusive arrests. Corey and I have talked a little about that.”

  Tommy nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah. He gets it.”

  Maggie pounced. “Is that why you appointed him?”

  Tommy smiled. “Well, I appointed him because he’s qualified.”

  She feigned injury, with a sparkling smile on her lips. “Oh, Tommy. Don’t treat me like a reporter. There are lots of qualified people. You could have tapped any commissioner from any Republican administration over the last twenty years if you wanted.”

  He chuckled. “Maggie, you know he’s qualified. He ran Midtown South, while he was also serving as Borough Commander for all of Manhattan, for a whole year, during the Walsham thing.”

  “The Walsham thing,” as he delicately referred to it, was a scandal that had forced the Manhattan Borough Commander, John Walsham, to retire rather suddenly, and due to some internal dysfunctions within the department, Connolly had had to do both the job of borough commander and chief inspector at Midtown South. Somehow, Midtown South had better numbers than it ever did during that time.

  “But,” Tommy finished, “to be honest, when you get down to it, you have to trust the people you appoint to these kinds of positions, and I trust him. Our family’s known the Connollys for a long time, and they’ve always been rock-solid.”

  “I don’t doubt it for a minute,” she said enthusiastically. “Resilient, too. Didn’t his father lose pretty much everything in the dotcom bust?”

  “Yes. But Corey managed to get their affairs straight after his dad passed. And now, here he is. Commissioner.”

  “There he is,” she agreed, smiling. There was a pause that would have become awkward if it had gone on a split-second longer. But she knew when to end a conversation and this was her moment. “Tommy, I won’t tie you up one more minute. I’ve got six hundred things to get on top of today and I’m sure you do too.” She stood up.

  Tommy got up and escorted her to the door. “Thanks, Maggie. Say hi to your brothers for me.”

  Tommy was a good guy. She was going to feel a little bad about cleaning his clock in the next election.

  But only a little. And probably not for very long.

  8

  Easy Rider and the Warehouse of Secrets

  “When someone seeks,” said Siddhartha, “then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”

  –Siddhartha

  “Yeah, you just tell the car to go back up First Ave. and then swing around. We’re right in the middle of the block. We’re the only house that has ramps on it. You really don’t have to pick me up, though. I can get there on my own.”

  “That’s okay,” Erik replied breezily. “You’re on the way.”

  “You live in Chelsea. I live on Beekman Place. How is it on the way when we’re going to the bottom of Manhattan?”

  Erik basically had to come all the way over from the West Side to the East Side, uptown about fifty blocks, only to turn around and go even further downtown than where he came from.

  “My dyslexia includes an inability to read maps. I’ll be there in two minutes, Quin.”

  He hung up.

  Since Ainsley had sort of slipped away from him lately, caught up with this new girlfriend of hers (he was a little jealous, he’d admit it), Quin had found himself keeping more company with Erik Schulze than he’d ever expected. It mostly seemed to take the form of Erik inviting him to sit on other charity boards with him, which they did together and then usually had lunch or dinner or something around it. Quin’s family seemed to have completely unraveled, so it was nice to connect with someone else. He had a game coming up this weekend, and Ainsley had a tournament coming up soon, so he knew at least there’d be those times that they’d see each other. Maybe he’d even get to meet the mysterious Khady, finally.

  But in the meantime, Erik was easy to talk to, brimming with concern that felt almost paternalistic (though not quite, somehow), bringing Quin books he thought he might like (“I’m not much of a reader, but my brother is really fond of this one.”). Quin was surprised to discover (though he probably shouldn’t have been) that Erik’s knowledge of modern art was pretty extensive; it seemed nearly as good as his mother’s. In fact, it was almost entirely Erik’s doing that Lyonsbank was so heavily involved in supporting the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney; there was even a new modern wing going up at the Whitney which would be named for Erik’s father, Frederick.

  “Was that Erik Schulze?” his mother asked coolly, emerging from the kitchen.

  “Yes. We’re going to a board meeting for the Lower Manhattan Preservation Committee. Someone’s trying to knock down some historic theater or something.”

  Eleanor frowned at him. “Quin, I’m thrilled that you’re involved in charities and doing good, and I’ll gladly write a million checks for anything that you feel is worthwhile, but—”

  “But you don’t like that I’m doing it with Erik Schulze,” he finished.

  “No, I don’t. Those people are nothing but a problem. I know you think Erik seems nice, or he seems different from the rest of his family—”

  “Mom, you don’t understand. He’s a good guy. And he knows almost as much about art as you do.”

  “Maybe, and maybe I’m wrong. But I don’t trust him, and I don’t like you spending so much time with him. I’m not often wrong.”

  Quin scowled. It was true, she wasn’t often wrong. She was a scary judge of character, and her instincts were near perfect in most other things too. It was what had made her such a good art dealer. She’d bought up a bunch of Warhols when he was nobody, and sold them at a tremendous profit (except for the one that hung in their living room, the one that looked like a bunch of electric flowers—you had to keep some of the good stuff for yourself).

  But it was more than a matter of good taste: she’d even been savvy enough to buy up some Damien Hirsts well before he was anyone. Even though she found his work obnoxious and precious, she knew it was going to blow up, and it did. But she didn’t keep any of those; who the hell wanted to look at a chopped-up cross-section of a shark all the time?

  “Well, it’s not like you’ve exactly been very present, you know,” he pointed out, his voice becoming edgy. “Ever since Ainsley got Dad’s bike, she’s never here either. And Finlay and Lil? We never see them; it’s like they’ve been taken over by aliens.”

  “I was present when you needed it most,” she said, looking a little hurt.

  “Well, I don’t know what you do with your time anymore, but I need to be around people, and I wish it could be my family, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going that way right now.” Quin heard the car pull up out front. “Look, my ride’s here.” He started wheeling himself toward the door. “Mom, I will never stop appreciating what you did for me when I was at my worst. But you know, you have to come back to life, at some point.”

  He departed, leaving her standing alone under the electric-flowers painting, which was, of course, perfectly lit.

  Like everyone else these days, it seemed, Quin had a few secrets. His big secret was that he’d been working on getting his own license to ride a bike. Erik had recommended a craftsman who customized bikes for people with disabilities, and Quin was looking forward to being able to surprise Ainsley with being able to go riding with her.

  Erik Schulze had a lot of advice when it came to holding his family together, because that had become his job in the Schulze family: his father hated his brother, his brother hated his sister, and his sister hated, well, nearly ev
eryone (Quin still shivered at the mention of her name). They sounded even more dysfunctional than the Sparrs, which somehow made Quin feel a little better.

  Nobody was home the day they delivered Quin’s bike. Erik’s craftsman had simply advised him to get a bike with an automatic transmission, so all of the bike’s functions were operated by hand controls. He’d helped him settle on this one: a cherry-red Ridley Cruiser, that looked and sounded exactly like a custom V-twin. He was going to be rolling around on what was, for all intents and purposes, a flaming red chopper. He was going to feel like Peter Fonda in Easy Rider.

  He suited up.

  Getting on was a little tricky, but he’d get quick at it, just as he eventually got quick at hoisting himself into cars and collapsing his chair with one hand. After he’d gotten himself on it, he pulled out his phone. He logged into the Find My Phone app using Ainsley’s password (how could he forget: the one time she asked him to find her phone a few weeks ago, she’d told him, with some embarrassment, that the password was “flamingcunt”). The screen pulled up the map and showed him exactly where her phone was: somewhere out in the ass-end of Brooklyn. He zoomed in, worked out the address, and then entered it into the GPS. Was she ever going to be surprised, he thought gleefully.

  The pipes roared as he guided the bike down the block, up First Avenue, and over the bridge. This was an entirely different level of freedom than the one he’d managed all this time, dragging his spring-loaded wheelchair around in hired town cars with tinted windows. He couldn’t believe that it took him losing his legs and his family to figure out that this was such an amazing way to spend your time. It wasn’t a mystery to him anymore why Ainsley was gone so much. This, and a girl? He’d never be home either.

  He arrived at the warehouse, at the end of a pretty blasted-out looking block, not far from the water, in Sheepshead Bay. There was nobody in the street, which was riddled with potholes and sparkled here and there with sprays of broken glass. He checked the phone finder one more time and there was no question about it, Ainsley was in that warehouse. He pulled the bike up as close to the door as he could, took off his helmet, and pounded on the door with it. Then pounded on it again. A few minutes went by, and then he pounded on it again and started calling his sister’s name.

  He was getting ready to pull away, when the door opened. A pretty girl with short black curls and dark eyes leaned halfway out. “Can you please stop making so much noise? We don’t want to bother our neighbors.”

  Quin, a little taken aback, looked at her. He looked around at the blasted out buildings with their windows that were alternately boarded-up or simply gaping, with no glass in them; he couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. She was smiling a little at him. “Um, sorry? I, uh, I think my sister’s here. I was just looking for her.”

  “Who’s your sister?” she asked.

  “Um, Ainsley? Do you know her?”

  She looked as if she was considering how to answer that question. “I can’t confirm or deny anything,” she said finally. “I don’t know you.”

  Awkward pause.

  “That’s a nice bike,” she said.

  “Thanks. It’s brand new. I just got it today.” He noticed her hand, dangling at her side, holding a copy of Siddhartha. “What do you think of him?”

  She looked down, realizing he meant the book. “Who, Hesse?”

  “No, Siddhartha.”

  Her eyes twinkled a little. “I like him. He’s a good guy, but he’s uncomfortable in his skin. He doesn’t learn until the end how to dwell in who he is. I think that’s probably how it is for most people.”

  Quin smiled. “Yeah. I like the way Steppenwolf deals with that discomfort better, though.”

  The girl shrugged and wrinkled her nose a little. “Yeah, it’s a great book, but I’ve never liked that whole duality of man theme, even when it’s done well like that. It forces a binary choice when most people are a collision of a lot of things, not just two.”

  “I find Harry relatable,” Quin said, getting ready to defend his favorite character in all of literature.

  “Oh, yeah? You part wolf?” she asked, now becoming flirty in a way that Quin had not been on the receiving end of in a very long time. When was the last time a pretty girl looking at him with anything other than Florence Nightingale pity? He couldn’t remember. He’d passed on a lot of pity sex.

  He grinned. “Some people say.”

  They paused for a moment, grinning at each other and not knowing what to say. Quin finally said, “So, uh, if my sister is in there, which I realize you’ve said you can’t confirm or deny, tell her I was here and that I want her punk ass to come riding with me.”

  “Well, if I do know your sister, which I can’t say if I do or I don’t, and I do see her, which I can’t tell you if I will or I won’t, I’ll tell her you were here.” Smiling, she took a pen from behind her ear, which she’d clearly been using to underline passages in her book. Then she took his hand, and wrote something on the back of it. “What’s your name?” she asked as she was writing.

  “Quin,” he said, wondering if this was actually happening.

  “Quin,” she repeated. “Okay. Nice meeting you.” She gave him a last smile—a last brief, warm look with those dark eyes with their thick lashes—and slipped back inside. The heavy steel door clanged shut.

  He looked down at the back of his hand. It had a phone number, and a name: “Nadia.”

  9

  The First Strike of Phaedra’s Fist

  “You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.”

  –Zen and the Art Motorcycle Maintenance

  They sat, five around a table for six in the diner across from the station, the girls clustered together on one side, looking at Empress with either trepidation or doubt. Except Nadia, who just looked curious, watchful.

  Empress noticed this immediately. She also noticed Nadia’s book. “Siddhartha,” she remarked. “And it looks like it’s not the first time you’ve read it.”

  Nadia nodded. “Yeah. I get something different from it every time.”

  “That makes it a good book. It also makes you a good reader. How’d you end up with this bunch?”

  “I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I saved up and bought a bike.”

  Nadia wasn’t going along with these acts of vandalism out of peer pressure, but, Empress could tell, out of loyalty. The bike was a spiritual path for her, and the women in the group enabled and supported her relationship with the bike. So they had her loyalty. Interesting.

  A young waiter came by, his style of service impressively enthusiastic for three-thirty a.m. Empress impassively ordered five burgers, medium-well, and Cokes. The girls sat quietly.

  Empress knew this was one of the only women’s riding clubs around, and maybe the only one that had a lot of younger women like these four, barely out of their adolescence. It was also, judging from the makeup of the group sitting in front of her, remarkably diverse.

  “So,” Empress began, looking first at Vea. “There are some very dangerous parts of Kingston. And,” she added, looking at Nadia and Khady, “Brooklyn. Am I correct in assuming all of you have beaten the shit out of someone at some point?”

  After a hesitation, they all nodded wordlessly.

  Empress pulled out a newspaper. It was the Citizen, the one local New York broadsheet that SparrMedia troubled itself to print. She flipped through to an inside page with a very small image of a man’s smiling headshot above a blurb that was about four sentences long. The headline read: “Celebrity Fitness Expert Acquitted on Domestic Abuse Charges.” She turned it around so the girls could get a better look. “Recognize this guy?”

  “Yeah,” Vea said, “the guy with all the subway ads.”

  “What about him?” Nadia asked.

  “He’s a wife beater. And you four are going to go fuck him up,” Empress said, matter-of-factly.
>
  Khady was skeptical. “But the courts acquitted him.”

  “The courts aren’t always just. Evidence can be tampered with. Technicalities can be invoked. Judges can be bought,” Empress answered. “Everyone who knows this man knows what he was doing to his wife. What he’s going to continue to do to his wife now that he's being allowed to go back home. I’m giving you the opportunity to stop that from happening.”

  They looked at each other in silence as the waiter arrived with their food. Empress took the check from him immediately and handed him a large bill, instructing him to keep the change.

  “Now. Do you want to go back to smashing windows over bullshit and getting pinched for it? Or do you want to start doing things that mean something?”

  Empress replaced Ainsley’s custom vintage Indian with something that called a little less attention to itself: a black Kawasaki Ninja 650R, an extremely popular (and therefore common) bike that handled hard stops from high speeds and would never have trouble starting up, even on cold days, which the city had its share of.

  She changed other things too. She located a new clubhouse for the girls and gave them a new name: Phaedra’s Fist. Nadia seemed to like it, and Empress knew she’d explain to the others when she’d fully sorted it out herself.

  She knew her little enterprise would grow; it would become something other than what she herself even planned, something better. She would pick girls who each added something particular, something unique. Empress had always had a diamond-sharp insight into the ways that people’s jagged edges might happen to fit together.