by Brian Selfon
Henry’s crayons keep working. He hardly looks at them, but the playbills, which he’s sat before a hundred times, hold a new and unexpected fascination for him. It’s as though they’ve been behind a curtain and now here they are. They’re nothing like the glossy booklets from the Broadway shows Henry went to with his uncle years ago. These are cheap printouts, folded and stapled. And yet here they are in real frames.
He hears a noise and his thoughts blow away. He looks down at what his crayons have made and recognizes his uncle’s face, narrow and with frightened eyes. An unhappy smile as Henry looks at the bent line he’s made for his uncle’s mouth. “You never know someone,” he says for his uncle, “till you get your nose up their money.”
Your turn, Emil. What’ve you got for me?
Henry grabs a sheet of scrap paper, a pencil. He flips through the pages of the ledger, goes back to summer, back to the day of Emil’s first carry. He focuses on the left side of the open book: the runner logs. Everything here is in black ink, and this is Henry’s own handwriting. Henry’s pencil moves over the scrap paper with no hesitation. He copies dates and figures, and in less than fifteen minutes, he’s written out a complete schedule of Emil’s pickups and deposits. These transactions have always been documented, but they’ve never been itemized like this—all of Emil’s work for the family is now in one place, a single timeline, the records not intermingled with those of other runners. Henry looks down Emil’s list. Here’s $4,998 from Benny the roofer, and there’s a $4,998 confirmed wire through MoneyGram. Here’s $813 from Chabad House, and there’s a $813 confirmed money order through a Duane Reade in Williamsburg. And so on. Emil’s whole short career as a runner: he never pinched a dollar.
It’s done, Henry checked it, but he takes a second look at the schedule he’s drafted. There’s still a large space on the right side of the page. Something’s missing. He’s traced money moving through Emil—but hasn’t confirmed that the money made its way back to the clients. Hasn’t looked at records from the family’s transactional accounts. This is Uncle’s Shecky’s side of the business, but Henry’s helped with it, and he understands how it works. The money goes through these accounts—usually at least two—before it goes back to the client. Henry flips ahead a few pages in the ledger. Focuses on the right-side pages. Here the ink is blue, rather than black, and the handwriting his uncle’s, rather than his own. Henry completes his schedule more carefully now. Because this is his uncle’s work, he can’t decode everything on autopilot. Several times, he wonders if he’s getting things wrong. He thinks he might be wrong, it’s quite possible he is wrong, only—
He’s not wrong. There’s a pattern.
Emil didn’t skim. Most runners do, sooner or later, whining to Henry that their $500 bag had only $450 in it. Or it must’ve been that Payomatic teller with the red hair: she’s got the quick hands and the side game, everyone knows about her. Henry’s heard every weak-ass excuse. His fists know what to do with them. But this wasn’t Emil. Whether by wire transfers, money orders, or good old-fashioned cash deposits, the money he picked up went into the system. All of it, every time. Emil was different, as Henry had reassured Uncle Shecky. He did his job.
But he was also doing something else. Internal inquiry, account closed, account frozen—starting this summer, two to four weeks after nearly every transaction Emil touched, something bad happened to a family account. Subpoena. Court order. Service from law enforcement. There can be no doubt now—
Come on, kid, fucking own it. There hasn’t been real doubt for some time. The police weren’t watching your boy. They were steering him.
“You fucking tool,” he says aloud. But at least half his anger is toward himself. If Emil was a tool, Henry was one of the people who’d used him. Henry had promised he’d go to his uncle after he had everything worked out. So here it is, the thing he worked out: his friend was a rat. And Henry had put a load of cash on him, made him a moving target, gotten him killed, and put the whole family in danger.
Henry opens the window. Breathes in the night, returns to the desk. A dead minute passes.
Then a summer breeze comes in, and like a ghost hand, it turns a page of the ledger. Opens it to a loose sheet of paper.
Henry picks it up. Blue ink, no cross-outs or corrections. Every seven has a midline, every zero a slash, and there’s no dollar sign anywhere. Uncle Shecky’s hand.
And the numbers are the same as Henry’s.
His hands shaking, Henry puts his uncle’s schedule next to his own. Every digit is the same, the fucking layout is the same, and why wouldn’t it be? It was Uncle Shecky who taught Henry how to do this.
Uncle Shecky who checked the records first, and saw Emil for what he was.
Poison.
And a new kind of rage is moving Henry now, a fury with red intent, and he’s on his feet, his hands shaking as he shreds the schedules. He’s ripping up time, he’s ripping out mistakes, he’s ripping apart not only the dead snitch but the man who had him murdered. Henry remembers his uncle’s face, that guilty-surprised expression when the money spilled out of the briefcase. And his uncle’s meetings with Vasya, and it’s so obvious now—how could he have missed it?—there was no loan from the Paradise Club, only a return. Pleasure doing business, here’s the money we found on the guy we killed for you. So let’s give it up for the trusted partner, and mad props for Uncle Shecky. Old man cuts a loose end like a motherfucker.
Careful what you teach, old man.
Henry picks up the gun.
chapter 45
Five nights back, Shecky can still feel the oil from Vasya’s goodbye handshake when he accepts that he can no longer look away from what he’s accountable for. He will stop nothing in motion, but he will see what he is and know what he does. Still out in the dusk, still on that bench with the pigeons, he uses a new burner to call Vasya. “Have your contractor find me in Maria Hernandez Park,” he says. “I will personally lead him to the ‘problem.’”
“You, there on the spot?” Vasya is sputtering. “It’s a terrible risk. Think about—”
“Me being there eliminates all risk,” Shecky says. He regrets that they’re barely keeping to their code-speak. There are moments, though, when a misunderstanding is more dangerous than a wiretap. “What if your contractor finds the wrong person? I’ll make sure he doesn’t. And don’t worry—she won’t be spooked if she sees me. She’ll think I’m bringing her money. And another—”
“Enough, enough!” Vasya’s voice, usually slick as his hand oil, is now a squeak. In the ringing quiet that follows this, Shecky catches his breath, and supposes his partner is doing the same. “You’re right,” Vasya says at last. “You trust me, I trust the contractor, and so now I will trust you two together.”
After blanking and dumping the new phone, Shecky stops at Hava Java, washes up in the bathroom, and gets a light coffee to go. He takes out his old phone and responds to the messages he received this morning:
Meet me tonight, he writes. I’ll make things right for you.
About damn time, she shoots back.
He sends the where and the when. She agrees immediately, and apparently without suspicion. Funny, how the mind works. She’s a smart girl, obviously—she figured him out. Henry and Kerasha didn’t, but they have their love to blind them. But her love—her name—is at stake, and she can’t see past it. She probably thinks this is the beginning of a partnership between equals.
And then it’s nighttime. He checks for messages from the kids: nada and nada, surprise surprise. Then he heads out to watch a murder.
* * *
At a bodega near the southeast entrance to Maria Hernandez Park, Shecky stocks up on snacks and magazines. A bag of pretzels, two bottles of pomegranate seltzer, a baggie of loose-leaf tobacco and some papers—fucking heck, why not—and, carrying all this in a black plastic bag, he takes a slow stroll around the park. At long last, the rendezvous.
A fug of infused marijuana, the muttered words “fucking dickr
ider,” draw him to a secluded gazebo. The pillared marble structure is built like a Greek temple—a site of sacrifice, how perfect—and though he tries to remember some choice lines from Antigone, that part of his brain is walled off.
He gets close enough to see Lipz settling on a bench, smoking and doing something on her phone. He finds a bench for himself—nearby, but secluded—and shoots a text to the contractor: Arrival.
He rolls a cigarette and lights it on his first match, despite the breeze and his being out of practice. He lets it slow-burn in his hand. This bench is creaky old wood, not like the stone benches in the gazebo, and every shift of his weight seems to announce him to the night. He wonders how many lonesome hours he’s spent waiting in the quiet like this—he, who fears a silent house above all else. He draws on the cigarette, and twelve years roll back.
* * *
It’s the summer of hope, less than thirty-six hours before Henry is to move in with him. Shecky Keenan scrubs the house, giving it the whole floor-to-wall vinegar rubdown. He takes a rag to the corners and counters and windows and even the slats of the venetians. Before 4:00 a.m., his excitement too big to be roofed, he rushes out into the still-black morning. He actually jogged. Forty-six years old, bony and breathless, wrecked ankles, but here he is, bopping up and down under the street lamps. He passes slouched junkies, flattened drunks—Brooklyn lawn furniture, Dannie used to call them. This morning she’s a happy spirit. Parkside, he ascends a little hill, and come sunup, the world is for him.
At the park’s northwest entrance he finds bustle and light. Three trucks are already here, another is pulling in. Two women crouch on the asphalt and line up poles thick as standpipes. Adjustments, readjustments, then they fasten the connectors. Light rope ties the poles to waterproofed canvas. Men appear, and the five-person team secure and pull from different corners. The morning’s first vendor tent rises up: Bushwick’s weekly farmers market is alive. The bread man stacks loaves while his partner uses a thick marker to write prices on index cards. Teams, most consisting of unshaven men and pixie-cut women, open crates. Shecky walks among them, inspecting the cucumbers, the tomatoes. The peaches are heaped chest-high. Across the way is Katti the Fish Girl—years later, he will partner with her and help her open a storefront on Howard Place—and she’s layering ice over pink, gray, and yellow fillets. Full daylight now. He recognizes hake, swordfish, and cod. Katti closes the cooler she just emptied and opens another. Now out with the scallops, out with bluefish, gutted and cleaned but otherwise whole. Eyeballs still in place.
“Too early for a sale?” Shecky asks.
“Never too early to take a buck,” Katti says, changing to a new pair of rubber gloves. She’s a young woman with an easy smile but hard, mercantile eyes. “What’s your fish?”
He points to a stack of orange fish, wide and thick-bodied. “Those got a name?” Like the bluefish, these fish are gutted but whole.
“Porgy. Good eye, these are the best I’ve got today. Look at you,” she adds, as if now addressing the fish directly, “selling yourselves before the market opens.”
“Hard to cook?”
“Can you turn on an oven?”
Shecky smiles. “Just figured it out last month.” And reading cookbooks, for the first time in his life. Testing out recipes, even went into Manhattan for a class. He’ll be cooking for two now, and he wants to do it right.
“Here’s what I do.” Katti leans toward him and lowers her voice, as if she were taking him into her confidence. “There’re eight hundred ways to cook the thing, but I say keep it simple. Porgy isn’t the kind of fish you need to hide under a layer of seasoning. Just add salt and pepper.”
“Butter?”
“Of course. And it goes in the oven at three-fifty. Just put a fork in it after ten minutes. If it goes in easy, you’re done.”
“You bake it?”
“The oven does the baking. I have a glass of wine.”
Shecky thinks the porgy is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. “This is it,” he says. This big-eyed fish will welcome his nephew home. And the moment the fish is bagged and double-bagged, he feels the weight of it. His nephew is coming to live with him—a boy, entrusted to him, will share his meals and his roof. Will ensure that his life will always be peopled and that his house will never again be quiet. Shecky feels as if awakening from a sleep he was unaware of. Gone, at last, are the battles with the city’s Department of Youth and Children Services—a bureau created and staffed by mis-wired robots. Gone, at last, are Henry’s Florida aunts, who never wanted the boy at all, but fought him for a piece of Alessandro and Molly’s tiny trust. All that scheming drama is nothing now. Hear this, Brooklyn, take a look at this fucking fish.
I got a family.
* * *
It’s been more than a decade since he brought home that fish. Years since he last saw the boy who couldn’t sleep alone, or even the eager adolescent Shecky took into his business. And here Shecky sits on a park bench at two in the morning, losing another night’s sleep for the kid—who doesn’t even know, and mustn’t ever learn, what’s being done for him.
Shecky’s cigarette burns forgotten in his hand. His mind drifts down the streets surrounding the park, and he tries to picture the gray and indefinite figure of the man he’s waiting for. Did he stop at an ATM on the way here, like an everyday normal person on his way to work, maybe the Bank of America on Knickerbocker.
The Bank of America on Knickerbocker.
It was at this branch, Shecky remembers with a sinking feeling, that luck first turned against the family. Shecky remembers the notices from various banks. Remembers the headaches and night sweats, and the losses he took, developing new channels for his clients’ money. And leaning forward on his park bench now, putting a hand to his forehead, Shecky remembers that miserable night he holed up in his office, reviewing his ledger. Scheduling out the closing and freezing of his accounts, and determining that the point of inception, the event that started everything, was a cash deposit at the Bank of America on Knickerbocker. So who made that deposit? Shecky put his records side-by-side with Henry’s. It was obvious. One runner, and no other, had touched each of the closed accounts. Shecky sat back, crossed his arms, and smiled. He felt as though a great cleansing wind had blown through his life, carrying away his doubts and confusion. All was clear now: the banks were backing away because of the cops, and the cops were coming close because of the runner.
He picked up the phone.
He put it down.
A warning bell was ringing in his head. He’d been hearing it for a while now, even before he’d finished his timeline. Of all the runners, of all the people it could be—why did it have to be this one? “He’s an artist,” Henry had said, with a small, almost embarrassed smile, the first time he told Shecky about Emil Scott. Henry had looked so hesitant, so vulnerable. “Do you think … sometime … maybe he could come by for dinner?”
But now Shecky had the phone in his hand. He had to make this call. This was a non-choice, but still he hesitated.
For a moment.
“We have a personnel problem,” he told Vasya. A hard stillness grew cold in his chest. “Just one person.”
And the problem was gone within twenty-four hours.
* * *
Dimly, as if coming out of a dream, Shecky becomes aware of approaching footsteps. He tosses what’s left of his cigarette. He stands up from the bench and shakes the outstretched gloved hand.
“Where is he?” the man asks.
“She,” Shecky says, “is over in the gazebo.”
The surprise on the man’s face is unmistakable. The contractor had come to kill a man. The floppy pretext Shecky invented for being here in person was justified after all. If Shecky weren’t here, this man would now go off and murder—who knows? Shecky forces himself to take a good look at the man, a large and strange creature who seems to be studying him in turn. He wears a backpack slung over one shoulder. Shecky’s heard just a few words but t
hinks he’s picked up on an Eastern European accent. A whiff of pomade gives Shecky his second startle of the night: he knows this man. It’s the barber they call Matt.
“Well then,” Shecky says, “no point in…” He nods toward the gazebo.
Matt smiles, showing his big teeth. “She won’t feel a thing.” Already unzipping a side pocket of his backpack, he walks to the gazebo, unhurriedly but directly.
Enough already, Dannie says—once again the big sister who got him out of the wicked box. Who came for him always. You’ve heard me say this to the players, but you don’t have to rip your heart out. You’ve faced what you’ve done. You’ve owned this already. Leave.
But Shecky’s hands are shaking and he can’t roll a second cigarette. Then the match won’t light, and then, Jesus fuck, this is too much, he can’t just—
Shecky charges the gazebo and arrives in time to see Lipz sitting on the bench, illuminated by the ghastly streetlights, looking around expectantly—looking for him. And the barber called Matt stands behind and over her, raising a small tube as if it’s a dagger.
“Wait,” Shecky says, though later he won’t be certain he said it loudly enough, or even that he said it at all.
Matt presses the tube into the girl’s arm and immediately smashes the base of the tube with the palm of his other hand. She lets out a squeak, then a cry, as he backs away. The tube spinning on the ground, her cry becomes a roar, and her body convulses, and she kicks herself off the bench and hits the stone floor hard with a terrible sound. And her screams continue, and Shecky turns away but makes himself look back, and she writhes so violently her body seems to bounce off the stone floor. Matt, meanwhile, is smiling. He’s putting the tube back into his pocket. His flat, broad face shows bemused, if mild, surprise as the girl roars and bangs herself against the ground, arcing her back, her feet pushing her up and turning her round and over. She moves as though her flesh is in flames, and she thrashes and then—and this horrifies Shecky more than anything that has already come—she sits upright. A peaceful slump. Her back is to Shecky, so he can’t know what her face shows or what she’s looking at, but for a few seconds she’s silent, and then her body falls forward and stops moving. A half minute passes.