by Brian Selfon
Emil’s smile was unforgivably mischievous. “You’ve got a certain…” But then he must have caught something in Henry’s expression, intuited that additional criticism, or even a tease, would be cruel. Emil’s smile changed and he didn’t complete the thought.
“Come on, man,” Henry said. “Just fucking say it.” If humiliation must come, it should decimate. “What do you think?”
Emil’s answer was to turn Henry away from the three-year-old failure. To point at a space on the wall where nothing hung. “How about there?” Emil asked. “What are you going to make there?”
That night Emil retaught Henry brushwork from scratch. At one point Henry became so frustrated he snapped his stippler in half and stabbed the canvas. Put two fingers into the fabric, ripped it open, and then smashed up the frame. Emil waited for him to catch his breath and then said: “We’re going to the Greif.”
The Greif, a boutique gallery in downtown Brooklyn, was not open at eleven o’clock on a Monday night. But Emil had a friendly ex—an old encounter, he called her—who could let him in at any hour. She wanted to join them and chat; Emil told her to wait outside. To Henry he said, “I want you to feel something.”
He led Henry to an abstract of reds and blues. “Be right back.” Emil walked off, and Henry had a premonition that he was falling into a prank. That Emil wouldn’t return, would leave him alone in this strange space. Then, one by one, the lights went out. Henry was gripped by excitement, by raw fear. Anything could happen here. He heard ti-tap ti-taps, Emil’s hard-soled shoes on the naked concrete. Then Emil was beside him. The smell of sweat and kush. The voice. “No color now. No composition, just texture,” Emil said. “This is how I learned.”
Emil took Henry’s hand—no man except his father had ever touched Henry like this—and skimmed Henry’s fingertips along the canvas. “He used a Filbert here,” Emil said. “And over by the edge he used the liner brush. A stippler’s somewhere in the middle—where is it—here.”
Henry felt the different textures, guided by that rough hand.
He’s still trembling when Lipz calls out to him from the bed. “Hey. I have something to tell you.”
Henry turns, not enough so she can see his face.
“I told Red Dog what you said. How Tiger got cuffed, and the police they let him go. Like right away. And I told Red Dog you thought that was kinda sketch.”
Henry turns a little more.
“Red Dog had a guy look into it.”
Henry turns the rest of the way. “And?”
“And what do you think.” She sniffs. “It doesn’t look good.” Lipz is one of the hardest people Henry knows, but even she has her moments. “I mean, Tiger’s a bitch, but…” Another sniff. “You ever wish you didn’t know something?”
chapter 29
The following morning, the close of breakfast. Second coffees are steaming on the table when Shecky puts before Kerasha the grand project that had him awake all night: countersurveillance.
Lacey Atkinson is Shecky’s across-the-backyard neighbor. The Atkinson house has an extra story over Shecky’s, and directly below the southeast window is a cable switchbox. A surveillance camera mounted on this switchbox will have a clear view of their shared yard. Swiveled 40 degrees clockwise, the camera will cover the alley between Shecky’s house and the brownstone next door. Swiveled 120 degrees counterclockwise from the starting point, it will cover the street corner where his block adjoins Maria Hernandez Park. Now nudge it up, just a few degrees. The camera will cover a full quarter block of Hart Street between Bushwick Avenue and Evergreen.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Shecky leans in toward Kerasha and gives the table a hard tap. “We have a way of watching our watcher.”
Shecky takes out and holds up, with some pride, his eraser-smeared diagrams. Last night he penciled angles and calculations on sketch paper he’d rescued from the recycling bin; traces of Henry’s hesitant drawings can still be seen around Shecky’s own work.
“Pretty clever, right?” he says, when it becomes clear that Kerasha won’t say it herself. “Not bad for a law school dropout.”
Kerasha meets his eyes, her expression somewhere between amused and annoyed, and Shecky fears he’s being dismissed. Does she pick up on his fear? Pity him? Who can say. But whatever the reason, her little smile vanishes, and now she’s giving his diagrams a slow second look.
A shrug. “Yeah, maybe.” She reopens her book.
Shecky is stung but unfazed. His next step is to see his backyard neighbor. Lacey is a widow, barely seventy but already half past senile. Seventy is an age that would have terrified Shecky just five years ago. Now he accepts that it’s part of his own continuum, if he’s lucky, a few steps ahead but on the same path. You build your life and then watch it fall apart. That or you die early, and those are the options.
He chats up Lacey and gives a plausible pretext for putting up a ladder against the back of her house. “That damn switchbox,” he says. “It’s giving me all kinds of grief.”
Lacey looks confused but says, “Do what you do.”
Shecky tries not to notice that she’s forgotten her pants again. Averting his eyes, relieved to be putting some distance between himself and those knobby legs, he prays his own dying will have more dignity. Hopes that whenever his reckoning comes, he won’t be so completely alone.
As he reaches his back porch, his business cell vibrates, the screen flashing a P. He steps inside his house to take the call. “Cousin?” The conversation is quick and coded.
“I got the letter from Aunt Maria,” Vasya says. Meaning: The Paradise Club acknowledges receipt of this month’s transfers.
“And how’s she holding up with the arthritis?” Shecky asks. Meaning: Did you get all the money?
“Just fine, thank you,” Vasya says. “Truth is, we don’t bother to count it, half the time.”
He dropped the code—Shecky hears this like the roll of distant thunder.
“You always come through for us,” Vasya continues.
Fucking reckless, Vasya. This isn’t an improv show, just say the goddamn lines. Shecky wonders what’s going on with Vasya, what he’s not saying, but a phone call is no place for that kind of conversation. He hangs up feeling unsettled. The code is for you, Shecky wants to remind Vasya. I don’t just value my partners—I actually care about them. Maybe more than I should. And this mounted camera—it’s for you, too. My security enables yours—
And with this he reenters his house.
“Kerasha? Henry?” Gone, he already knows, recognizing the lonely-house smell. Feeling within himself the rise of that old black panic.
On his dining room table he unboxes and assembles the surveillance camera he picked up yesterday. A half hour passes in numb focus, and then the green “ready” light flashes twice. Needing only his ladder now, Shecky returns to the kitchen, opens the basement door, and is still holding the knob when he feels a powerful, rough hand close over his wrist.
* * *
“Not a sound,” the man says. Shecky doesn’t speak as he’s turned around by the wrist. His back now to the staircase, he has an uncanny sense that he’s already been pushed, is already falling backward. The man is a kid, though, maybe a few years older than Henry. Not quite as tall, but more muscular, and with wide, powerful shoulders. Red pants. A wifebeater, huge arms. His head is heavily bandaged, and Shecky remembers the old rule about wounded beasts.
“Not a sound,” the man says again, now digging his nails into Shecky’s wrist, “listen to her first.”
“Oh, just fucking let him go,” a familiar voice says. “What’s he going to do, call the police?”
Shecky shouldn’t have been surprised, but he is—he’s horrified—that her turns out to be Henry’s worst and craziest friend. And now her army boots are clumping across his linoleum floor. “Hi again,” she says. “Remember me?”
Shecky feels something flare up inside him. “Of course I remember you.” He could spit. “I fucki
ng fed you. And if you’re looking for Henry—”
“This isn’t about Henry.”
“—he’s not—”
“This is about you.”
Shecky concentrates on his breathing, the way he does on stage. His wrist hurts more, then it hurts less, as his hand pulses and grows numb. His frustration is beyond. He’s in his own kitchen, he’s near an old-fashioned landline phone—he’s near his fucking knives—but he can’t move an inch. Two against one might as well be a million against one. The only question is how much they’d hurt him before he’d hit the floor for the last time.
“Actually…” Lipz looks half amused and half sad as she studies his face. “This isn’t about you either. This is about two hundred and fifty thousand things that aren’t you.”
At last the big guy lets go.
Shecky massages his wrist. It hurts more as the feeling comes back. He thinks, absurdly, about his ledger, about whether he’ll be able to code and log new entries.
“Look at me,” Lipz says. “Listen to me. Henry’s my boy. I love him, and I’ll love him till I have to kill him. And I even love you, in a fucked-up kind of way. That breakfast here. That meant a lot to me. Especially because I know damn well you don’t want me near your fucking house.” Shecky almost protests, but he sees the I-fucking-dare-you look in her eyes. “I’m saying love,” she continues. “You’re hearing love. I’m feeling love. But love wouldn’t stop me, wouldn’t slow me down, if I needed to cut you to get my money back. Or cut Henry. Here’s how it works.”
She hops on the kitchen counter, her army boots banging against the cabinet.
“The lost money—Red Dog says it’s on me. He says I brought you in, I vouched for you, I put my name on you guys.”
Shecky feels a tightness in his chest. “You brought us Red Dog?” He’d assumed Henry’s connect was someone sane and responsible. Someone who didn’t have a murder on their rap sheet. “Fucking Henry—”
“I know, right? Because where’s my cut?” Lipz kicks cabinets in a marching rhythm. “There’s no justice in Brooklyn. Bag’s gone missing. And I didn’t touch it, but my name’s on it. So what do you think? Am I going to let that go?”
Shecky watches her boots scuff the doors of his kitchen cabinets. Can’t take it. “That’s all between you and Red Dog,” he blurts out. “I can’t help you. You need to leave.”
And now she leaps off the counter. And she’s holding, Shecky notices too late, one of the same steak knives he took stock of just moments ago. She brings the knife close to his nose. “Red Dog trusted you with his money. You were supposed to clean it. You fucking lost it. Red Dog says it’s on me? Fuck no, I’m putting it on you. I…” She turns suddenly, throws the knife into the sink, and puts her hands to her head. “Fuck! You think I like this?”
He backs away.
“My name is all I got,” she says, catching her breath. “And there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to you—to Henry—to get my name back.” She comes closer, so close he can feel her breath on him. “I know you understand me.”
“I can’t get your boss his money,” he says, holding himself back with great effort, “I can’t do my business with you up in my face like this.”
She studies him and he knows she will cut him. But then she just nods to the big guy, and at last both of them are out the door.
* * *
Shecky Keenan is alone in his kitchen, shaking. And then all at once the shaking is over and he’s up and he’s holding his diagrams. The security camera is more than a clever idea, it’s a necessity—he can’t have gangsters surprising him in his own kitchen. This is his home, the people he loves live here. He will protect it.
Diagrams into pocket, ladder to the backyard. He raises the ladder, leans it against Lacey’s house—carefully, carefully—so as not to leave marks on Lacey’s yellow paint. Do what you do, he tells himself, his bad ankles screaming as he ascends. The switchbox is directly above him now; he should have positioned the ladder a foot farther to the right. Never mind, he’ll reach above, he’ll grope. He unclips the camera from his belt. A few screws, a double-sided adhesive pad, and it’s ready to be mounted.
But when Shecky reaches over to press the camera against the switchbox’s flat top, his hand brushes up against a solid object. Something is already on the switchbox. Groping, he feels the sticky crumble of some animal in decay. Another shot of adrenaline hits him when he feels a metal bowl flanked by small glass panels. He can’t detach it. Can’t figure out what it is.
Shecky descends (damn the ankles), shifts the ladder, climbs back up (now the left knee is screaming), and then he sees it, compact and metal and blinking. It’s a pole camera, already installed just where he told Kerasha it should be. Only it’s not here to watch over the family. It’s looking down on it.
A police camera.
They got here first, they picked his exact spot, and Jesus knows how long this blue eye has been facing his home. What has it seen? Henry with his girls, Shecky moving files in his office, Kerasha slipping in and out at odd hours. It’s horrifying, what he doesn’t know, the evidence they could already have. He feels utterly defeated.
And yet there’s also a kind of validation in this. He worked through the night guesstimating his property lines, considering every angle for the camera, practical or impractical, every possible height for mounting. He sketched until his forearms were gray with smeared graphite, and though this morning Kerasha doubted him (“yeah, maybe”), and though in truth he’d doubted himself, his math was right after all.
Thump.
The unexpected pleasure he’s taking in his own defeat is kicked aside as his ladder inches across the ground, then sways. Thump. Shecky grips the switchbox. The ladder begins to fall away from the house. He fumbles at it with his feet, trying to kick it back into place. Thump.
“Hey there,” she says. Thump. “Hey again.”
Shecky hugs the switchbox with both arms. Tries to use his feet to bring the ladder back against the house.
Thump. The ladder swings to the side this time, and while Shecky’s feet become tangled in the second-to-topmost rung, he manages to grab a drainpipe with his left hand. Immediately he feels it bend under his weight.
Thump. The ladder bounces against Lacey’s painted wall, scratching a wide, dirty rust mark.
Shecky catches another corner with both hands. Half hanging at an odd angle, he’s looking down, and Lipz is smiling up at him. Eyes red, cheeks wet. There’s no muscleman this time. Shecky understands, fully now, that she’s the one to fear.
“Hi there,” she says, bringing her heavy army boot against the bottom rung. “Just wanted to remind you I’m serious.”
She stomps—
Thump.
Shecky tries to answer but manages only a noise. The ladder sways, tilts. Shecky grips Lacey’s window ledge, grabs the bracket of a window AC unit. Feels it slide out of position.
“Just don’t forget me,” she says, smiling and crying up at him, stomping and kicking his ladder again and again. Thump, thump, thump. “Don’t forget my name.”
Shecky hooks his arm over one of the AC brackets, wraps his foot around the side rail of the ladder, and feels himself swaying toward and then away from the house. He’s still hanging against the house when he realizes Lipz has walked off. He’s been dismissed, he supposes, and is at liberty to drop at his leisure. His heart racing, he considers his peril, his powerlessness, and most of all his humiliation before the police, who must have been watching this whole time.
chapter 30
The day Emil Scott goes missing, Zera returns to the alley on Bond Street between Livingston and Schermerhorn. She’s done this walk before, she’s been doing it all afternoon; and yes, she’s doing it again now.
She squeezes between the brown brick wall and the place where the van was parked when he left the alley. She holds her tracking phone and matches, as closely as she can, the footsteps of her missing informant. Out of the alley. Left on Bond Street, right on
Schermerhorn, she walks down the steps to the subway platform. Her badge in its leather case hangs from the chain around her neck. Her service gun is strapped against her hip. Also strapped: her Taser. Eyes are on her, she feels them, as she waits on the platform. At last the train. She boards. Her hands disappear under her crossed arms. She looks left to right to left again, and again, without letting her eyes find anyone. Or be found.
Aboveground, she reactivates her tracking phone and pulls up her informant’s movement history from the morning. She follows the red dot—where it was, not where it is—past a Lebanese restaurant, past a pawnshop. Past a narrow alley between two brownstones.
No.
She backsteps.
She goes into the alley and here are the dumpsters and garbage cans she already searched this afternoon. She pictures her informant as she saw him at the van. As she saw him at that picnic bench, where she met him back in the spring. And then she pictures him here. She sees him picking up a bag of money. She sees him, in another scenario, arriving here but then changing course. Sensing that something wasn’t right. Nothing unusual here, jobs get messy all the time, he’s not her first informant. But he is, she acknowledges, her first to disappear.
Emil Scott has always been different, she reflects. Part of every informant’s job when they come with the money bag to the police is to brief her and Kurt on every detail—“however insignificant,” Zera tells them—while the officers count and take pictures of the cash. Emil’s accounts have always been extraordinary, such a flood of odd details. Zera remembers how, despite herself, she came to marvel at his visual memory. And eventually to share in his excitement about the strange things he saw, and to look forward to the sketches he brought.
Which, of course, she has always carefully photographed and vouchered.
Resuming her walk, she takes out her phone. Pulls up pictures of his sketches: a battered shoebox beneath a car, a cat beside the shoebox, one eye open. A pilly sweater, one arm still crossed over a pile of cash. Zera’s other informants seem determined to see little and remember less, erasing the world as they move through it. Whereas Emil, in his own way—in her way, really—keeps his lights on.