The Nightworkers

by Brian Selfon

  Lipz.

  She uses his shoulder, his arm, for support. The contact gets something going in him. Warms her, too, he knows, and now she’s on her feet before him. Five foot nothing, weed breath, a general air of crazy. “You look like shit,” she says. He follows her eyes as she scans the room, lingering at the laundry area before turning back to him. “The fuck, he makes you iron his undies?”

  Henry looks down and sees that he is, in fact, still holding his uncle’s boxers.

  “Fuck.” He throws the boxers over at the laundry area. “We got into a fight.”

  “Let me guess.” She indicates the boxers, now on the floor. “You lost.”

  “He didn’t ask me to wash his … Jesus.” She’s getting on his bed. Taking off her hoodie, and she’s got nothing on underneath but a sports bra. He turns away, goes to his draftsman’s desk, and comes back with her phone. Tosses it on the bed beside her. Avoids direct skin-to-skin contact.

  “You remembered! Is it…?” She powers it on. “You fixed it!”

  She catches him looking at her sports bra. He turns away. Lipz is sexy, but in a dirty way. Though a weed and vodka girl now, she has a history with hard drugs. She also has a history of combat with her exes, and a kind of genius for self-destruction.

  She shifts on the bed. “So what’d your uncle say?”

  He walks a few paces away. Picks up his uncle’s boxers, refolds them, puts them in the right pile. “I brought it up. I said maybe I could get a cut, and things kind of spun out.”

  Lipz lets out a snort-laugh. “The fuck I care about your cut?”

  “We talked about—”

  “My cut. That’s what we talked about. Me. I hooked you up with Red Dog, I get a piece of that. Listen, I just read this thing by Michael Lewis…” She goes off about managed investment funds, alternative portfolios. Finder’s fees, basis points. She wants more than a point, she’s saying: she wants a point and a half. Henry’s not following. Lipz is annoyingly well read for a heroin dealer. But she’s low level, and Henry’s sense is she may never even have met Red Dog. He’s never met Red Dog, and her accounts of him are rather spare. But Red Dog is the heroin distributor in Bushwick, and he’s become a major client for the family. And it’s true that she was the one who introduced Henry to Red Dog’s lieutenant. She made that connection—she’s right, he owes her something. He’s reflecting on this when he sees mud on his sheets.

  “Lipz, your fucking boots.”

  She gives him a “Who, me?” look. Then she pivots and hovers a boot over his pillowcase.

  “Jesus, can you just … Fuck. I told you. I’ll give you half my cut—when I get a cut. It’ll happen, my uncle told me.”

  Lipz rolls her eyes. “You’re too trusting.” She swings her legs around so her feet are off the bed. “And how much laundry are you going to have to do,” she says, “before your uncle … Fuck it, this isn’t even why I came.” She takes out a cigarette. “Tiger.”

  “I thought you broke up.”

  She blazes, blows out smoke over her shoulder, looks Henry in the eye. “Fucking cuntface took my stash. My whole bag.”

  Henry watches her smoke, trying to figure out the alarm going off in his head. Tiger is Lipz’s mostly-ex. He’s a big, rough guy, a low-level slinger like Lipz. Lifts weights all the time—“diesel,” as Lipz says, sometimes about Henry himself—and freakishly vain about his hair. Gets minor alterations twice a week: on Monday he gets buzz lines; on Friday he’ll go for tints, slants, or dye dots. “My ugly pretty boy,” Lipz sometimes calls him. Not today, obviously. The alarm in Henry’s head is still going off. Tiger is, or should be, what was it …

  “I need my stash back,” she says. “You’re coming with me.”

  “Says who?”

  “Your debt.”

  Henry blows a sigh. He goes to the laundry area, comes back with the pile of his own clothes, which he folds and sorts on his draftsman’s desk. “This is a bad idea.”

  “It’s not an idea. It’s a mess you’re going to make with me.”

  “Lipz, you can’t go out and get caught up in some shit.”

  “Says who?”

  “Your criminal record.”

  When Lipz smiles, there’s a sinister light in her eyes. “I beat that thing.”

  “The word murder is in your file.”

  “Indicted but not convicted.”

  “That’s not a win, Lipz. Half a year in the psych ward—”

  “And I was laughing every second.” Another smoke blow, her expression darkening. Memories obviously coming back to her. “Fucking pedophile. I’d kill him again if I could.” It was Lipz’s stepdad, and Henry regrets bringing him up. Lipz was still in high school when it happened. The bastard’s hands, and then her baseball bat …

  Change the subject.

  “Okay, Tiger’s a bitch,” Henry says. “But you don’t need this. How much is a bag? Three hundred?” He reaches for his wallet. “I’ve got maybe fifty now, over the next couple of weeks—”

  “It’s not about the money.” Lipz stubs out her cigarette on the sole of her boot. Still looking down: “You ever read the Bible?”

  “Jesus.”

  “No, I’m talking first season. Book of Job. You read that?”

  Henry watches her flick her cigarette at the can. A long shot, but it lands. “Not lately.”

  “So there’s this brother called Job. He’s a farmer, and his crops die. And he’s a husband, and his wife dies. Then his kids. And his house falls down. And he’s covered with scabs, and he’s all disgusting and shit.”

  “There are scabs in the Bible?”

  “Everything’s in the Bible. Nothing new under the sun. Hey!” She snaps her fingers. “Put down your socks. Listen.”

  Henry looks down at his hands. He has, in fact, taken up his laundry again. “I’m listening. Book of Job. Lot of bad shit happening.”

  “And the worst of it—the worst thing that happened to him—was he had no name in the street.” Lipz makes a little kaboom motion with her hands.

  And Henry thinks, Really, that’s the worst? Not the wife, the dead kids?

  “No name in the street,” Lipz repeats. “Disgrace. And that’s what’s happening to me. Because of Tiger. And there’s more.” Her words speed up, and she gets on her feet. Moves her shoulders, her fists, as if revving herself for a fight. “He’s talking shit. About me. About you. He’s saying he owns me, fucking bitch. Who owns me? I own me. You taught me that.” She’s getting worked up, shadowboxing, shuffling her feet to the rhythm of her words. “Take my shit? Fuck no. I’m getting it back. But take my name? Better believe, Tigey, I’m getting your balls, dropping them in a hot pan with some hot oil—”

  “Okay, okay,” Henry says, with a shudder. “What’s he saying about me?”

  “Just the old bullshit,” Lipz says, with a what-evuh hand flap. “You’re a bitch, you’re a faggot.” Then her expression changes, and she looks at Henry with something close to a gotcha smile. “He’s saying you hide behind your uncle. Like a child. That’s what he’s telling everyone.”

  He studies Lipz. Hiding like a child—is this something Tiger really said, and she just remembered it? Or is this something she made up, knowing it would boil his blood?

  Either way, he’s going to throw someone against a wall.

  My name in the street. Faggot. Hiding. Uncle Shecky.

  Uncle Shecky who won’t give him a cut, won’t let him use Emil tomorrow. Won’t let him be.

  “Fuck it,” Henry says. “Let’s get him.”

  “Easy, killer.” She puts her hand to her head and cracks her neck. “He’s up at his aunt’s tonight. But he’s back tomorrow.”

  Henry helps Lipz up and out the basement window. He’s securing the latch when he hears a buzz. He goes back to the nightstand and picks up his phone. A message from Emil: Got work?

  Henry lowers his phone. Uncle Shecky said don’t use him. But the smoke from Lipz’s cigarette is still in the air, and her voice�
�a part of his life for so long—reminds him that Uncle Shecky doesn’t manage the runners anymore.

  Henry lifts his phone again. You’re on.

  chapter 5

  Late morning the next day, Emil wakes from a dream in which his whole childhood home—the yard, the tiny room his mother kept as a shrine to her long-dead father (photographs, diplomas, medals, and his rifle), the tattered flag over the garage, the bunk beds little Emil shared with the ghost of his stillborn sister—all of it exists impasto. In the dream, the living room is rearranged, all the furniture turned to face the walls, and the shadows they cast sway like gray-black balloons. An unexpected effect. Unexpected solution, Emil realizes, now fully awake. His pocket sketchbook and 2B pencil are ready for him on the nightstand. He doesn’t even sit up, already working.

  The big commission of the summer is a major project—a mural that’s to cover the whole back wall of the Thirsty Bear. He’ll get eight thousand dollars for it, if he does it right, but there have been shadow problems from the beginning. Even in Emil’s head—even as an idea to paint toward—the shadows have been wrong. His first attempt at a fix was to shift the light source, his second to re-center the piece, his third was to … But before the dream he never thought to rearrange everything, to spin round all the objects in place. So drastic, so simple. His pencil fills page after page. He has to sharpen it twice.

  “It’s morning,” he hears from Imani, in bed beside him. “Do you have to be so fucking productive?” Imani’s a workaholic herself, dreaming up high-concept video games for an unprofitable start-up. He suspects that, on the whole, he’s had a bad effect on her creative life. Game ideas used to come from tequila, tequila from misery, but with him—and she tells him this all the time—she’s the happiest she’s ever been. She’s “in a good place.”

  Emil likes the notion that he’s a kind of geography. Idea for a future work, after the Thirsty Bear mural is signed and paid out: part self-portrait, part landscape. Trees and buildings inside, legs and arms as mountains.

  The vision fades as Imani removes the sketchbook from his hands. Rolls him onto his back. In the morning Imani does not smell her best, and there’s a faint crust under her nostrils, the AC making autumn of the summer nights, but Emil doesn’t recoil. The female body with all its funk turns him on. He forgets the pencil. Knows his priorities.

  Hours later, outside, he’s on his way to the pickup. His first big one—Henry has hyped it up for months. Promised him he’d make extra. Emil checks his latest burner—a new one every couple of weeks—and there’s a text from Henry. Arrived last night, just the digit 1. This is part of the code Henry taught him during his training weeks. The 1 is just a check-in, asking without asking whether he’s ready for the job.

  More than you know, Henry.

  Curbside, a car slows, a black Ford SUV. It idles as if the driver wants directions. The training kicks in: Emil turns away. He takes an imaginary call on his burner, says, “nuh-uh,” and “for real?” to the air. The car is gone. It’s nothing, of course, but Henry warned him of “blues” and “wolves.” The principal breeds of those who would hunt him. And you have paranoia without letting it have you, Henry promised him. It can be a kind of performance, a mime show if you keep your spirit clear. If your luck holds. It’s a decent philosophy, Emil supposes, but even Henry isn’t faithful to it. Look at how quickly he brought Emil into his family’s business. Just as an errand boy, but still, absolute trust from the beginning. Well Emil likes him right back, and he feels bad about missing Henry’s text from last night. Henry could well have been pacing and shitting himself. He lives and breathes the street, but he worries like a mom.

  Emil texts back 3, the all-clear code, and then picks up his daily coffee and banana from the Muddy Cup. The coffee shop is new to Bushwick, but they’ve already put up a couple of his paintings. They’ll keep half the money if something sells, and in the meantime he gets his breakfasts comped. It’s a fair trade: they don’t have his best work.

  Back outside, Emil scans the street, looking out for blues and wolves—performing paranoia, as he was taught. Smiling over Henry’s lessons.

  “Here’s rule one about carrying the bag,” Henry said to him once, quoting his uncle. “Never forget it could get you killed.”

  For Emil, training had been more than just safety lessons. Henry opened his eyes to a whole city that lay hidden just below the one he knew. Dumpsters, gym lockers, coffee shop toilet tanks—almost anything, it seemed, could hide a bag of cash. (“Client money,” Henry explained. “We don’t ask, they don’t tell.”) Banks that didn’t look too hard at IDs, ATMs known to have bad cameras, post offices where money orders were processed like stamp sales. (“I’ll give you the names and the numbers,” Henry said. “Just get the money in and walk away.”) The thermos of coffee Henry brought for them to share, and his endless questions about art. How intently Henry listened. And Emil, too, how scared he’d been on his first runs.

  Now he walks with his sketchbook out. Pausing, here and there, to draw.

  Storefronts and debris, traffic cones and potted plants, kids and moms and hipsters, and now a Sanitation Department road crew, half lean, half beefy. Details move through his 2B pencil. One of the beefy guys reminds him of his stepdad, himself a foreman, originally from Ronkonkoma. Young Emil had loved hearing that town’s name, the syllables at once hard and childish. Ronkonkoma: a toy jackhammer of a word. In his memory his stepdad is always lying on the couch, always dozing with the TV on. And Emil is painting at the kitchen table, while Mom scowls, forever cross-armed from the doorway. “Contain your mess,” she used to say. No art teacher gave him better advice.

  He should reach out to Mom now, he knows, while he remembers. While there’s still a breathing Mom he can reach out to—his stepdad’s stroke taught him that. But it’s a lesson he forgets and forgets, and so he forgets it now. The pickup site has come into view.

  Alan’s Happy Falafel is on Wyckoff Avenue near Troutman Street. He’s already there. To reach its back lot, however, Emil must walk an extra half block to Jefferson Street. “Sharp left,” he hears Henry’s voice, “then squeeze between the brownstones.”

  At last he’s in the lot where Alan’s Happy Falafel keeps its garbage and recycling bins. Everything in place, everything exactly how Henry described it. This can be dangerous work, Emil reminds himself—blues and wolves—but it doesn’t feel like it. The sun shines happy over Emil’s little corner of Brooklyn; he has never felt more comfortable. And so he pauses at the bins and sketches. Takes a moment to consider, on paper, composition options, different angles and shadows. Those two brownstones, the gap between them, the seeming fakeness of this physical truth—they mean nothing to him, but for his hands nothing else exists.

  Then the pencil is back in its case, the sketchbook again in his pocket. The leftmost bin open, he pulls out semitransparent blue bags packed with plastic, glass, and metal. A strange tint, the blue on the white yogurt containers, on the black and brown and green soda bottles, on the crushed metal cans. Another image to lock away. Or maybe to lose.

  At the very bottom of the recycling bin is, as promised, a black trash bag. (Henry switches between white and black for the pickup bags, changing every few weeks.) It’s packed with cash, Emil knows. He gives it a squeeze, feels the lumps. Dense. Firm.

  The bin restocked and closed, trash bag at his feet, Emil feels Henry’s smile. Emil’s an old hand now, as his stepdad used to say. Old hand, a wonderful expression for an artist. Emil sends Henry another all-clear text. Pickup done, easy enough. Bigger bag, much heavier, but otherwise it’s just another job. At this moment there’s nothing between him and a clean, quick drop.

  Nothing, that is, except for a quick stopover. Sorry, Henry. Won’t take but a minute. And though he knows he’ll feel sorry tonight, he can’t let himself dwell on this now. He has work to do.

  Back between the brownstones. Out of the shadows, onto Jefferson Street. And just as Emil steps into the sun, a gate creaks
open. Windblown, it seems, and it leaves him with a haunted feeling.

  Picking up his pace, Emil wonders how he can get this feeling on canvas. He thinks about brush heads and finish, and at one point steps within ten feet of the man who has been following him.

  part two

  the woman with twisted hands

  chapter 6

  Nearly thirty years before the murder of Emil Scott, a baby girl—tagged Zera, with no family name—is dropped off at an orphanage in Montenegro. Zera is twelve when a well-dressed bachelor appears at the orphanage and says he’s always wanted a daughter. He pays the “administrative fees” in cash, and he will sell her again and again.

  In the dark house where she is kept, the other girls tell her to forget everything. Close your eyes, hear nothing, say nothing. Katja, a few months older, is her survival mentor. “Lights off,” she says, pointing at her head. Zera keeps her lights on, though, because she can’t help herself. “Welcome to the Paradise House,” she hears in a dozen languages as the men come in for the girls who are kept in the dark house. She remembers faces, scars, tattoos, and smells. Her mind is always mapping escape routes, and her eyes are always on the doors and windows. Always watching the locks and noting where they keep the keys. The well-dressed bachelor beats her when she breaks free. Beats her more the second time. She is bruised, blistered, scarred, and sometimes infected, but the men still come for her. After they are spent, or before they are up and ready, some talk about their daughters. On August 23, the Sunday before her seventeenth birthday, she breaks several of her fingers to get out of the manacles. Her hands will heal badly, but she is free. She looks at them and thinks of Katja. She remembers the men who bought and sold her.

  Then comes the war. Refugees are accepted here and there, far from the Paradise House, and Zera finds herself in the hands of a charity that’s actually charitable. An anti–human trafficking nonprofit that has a partner organization in New York City. She attends high school in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, then graduates from CUNY with a degree in criminal justice. Not quite eight years out of the Paradise House, Zera Montenegro, as she is now called, sits across a desk from a round-bodied alcoholic in a blue uniform. “Why do you want to join NYPD?” he asks.