Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-six
Iris was still with Gabe when she got a phone call from Rapacine. She had never heard her friend sound so distraught, or so French.
“They took Jasmine, mon chaton, they took her!”
“Who, the landlord?”
“Or one of their maggots—Iris, they took her from my home! Jasmine was outside on the patio, she likes when the sun warms the stone, et ma bichette, she sleeps there after she takes breakfast. But that toilet de merde, I heard it running and I went to fix, and when I returned, she had vanished!”
“Okay, don’t worry. I’ll come and help you look for her—”
“No, she is not missing, she was taken! I saw! I saw him take her on the ring!”
Iris didn’t follow. “What ring?”
“Roh!” Rapacine growled in French frustration.
“The video camera! My neighbor next-door, she has the camera ring, all rich people have cameras! And so I ask her, please show me this morning on the video, et voilà! He is there, fils de pute, sneaking up on my Jasmine, la pauvre, she is deaf , tu la connais, and he snatch her and he shove her in a trash bag, a black trash bag, and he took her!”
Iris’s stomach dropped. Gabe had been questioning her with his eyes during the call, and she met his gaze with a shake of her head in the universal It’s bad gesture.
Rapacine was shouting but her voice was cracked with pain. “But the trash men have come and gone, if that is where he put her. Je te promets, if he harms one hair on her head, I will cut him from his chin to his couilles, je m’en fous !”
“Listen, I’m in Brooklyn but I’m coming over right now. We’re going to get her back.” She hung up, wondering if she had just lied to Mme Rapacine for the first time.
She caught Gabe up, and without hesitation, he insisted on coming with her.
—
On the way to Rapacine’s, Iris and Gabe learned that the closest sanitation garage to her brownstone was on Spring Street, off the West Side Highway near the Holland Tunnel, and that residential trash pickup had been that morning between eight and nine.
It was now almost eleven, so if sanitation had picked her up, Jasmine had been in the trash bag for at most three hours.
Not wanting to waste another minute, Iris updated Rapacine, and they went straight to the garage.
There they pleaded their case to the first sanitation worker they found, a husky guy named Dave.
He was sympathetic but realistic. “Look, I’m an animal lover too, so I hate ta break it to ya, but a trash truck ain’t just a rolling dumpster.
It’s a compactor . If they threw the bag with the cat into the hopper… ” he grimaced.
Tears filled Iris’s eyes. Gabe put a hand on her shoulder.
“I ain’t saying there’s no hope! But fair warning, it’s a long shot.
” Dave tapped the screen of a handheld device.
“The truck that serves 23 Bank Street is headed to drop off at the waste transfer center, it’s a temporary holding location.
If you want, you can go there and sift through whatever they got for a coupla hours before they load it up onto a barge, and then it’s off to a landfill.
It’s a needle in a haystack, but I seen people pull lost engagement rings outta there. ”
While Iris took down the address of the waste transfer center, Gabe asked, “How big a haystack are we talking? How much trash do you guys pick up in a day?”
“Twelve thousand tons,” Dave said. When Iris groaned in exasperation, he added, “But we’re organized.
We track our trucks with GPS, so we know where and when each pickup is made.
And when we drop it off, we organize the garbage by section of neighborhood it came from.
So someone can help you narrow down the general area. ”
Iris and Gabe locked eyes. His dark brows tilted upward, as if to say I’m down if you are.
“Are you seriously up for this?” Iris asked, touched.
“A cat has gotta be easier to find than an engagement ring. We’ll go down there and call her name.”
“Jasmine is deaf.”
Gabe’s shoulders sank. “Do deaf cats still meow?”
Iris didn’t know. But she knew they had to try.
They had already said their goodbyes when Dave called back to them, “One more thing—” His gaze fell disapprovingly on their feet, Gabe in Adidas pool slides and Iris in flip-flops. “I suggest ya change your shoes.”
—
Thirty minutes later, they were at an enormous warehouse containing a massive pit of garbage.
She and Gabe were both wearing plastic hooded jumpsuits, a poor man’s hazmat suit, provided to them by DSNY, plus blue latex gloves and N95 masks.
They had stopped at Iris’s apartment so she could change into rubber rain galoshes, and Gabe wore a pair of old running sneakers (left behind by Ben).
They both had scissors on a twine wristband to cut into the trash bags, which proved to be unduly optimistic that the bags would stay closed—the garbage was loose and everywhere.
Even through their masks, the smell was fetid.
A sanitation department supervisor explained that the trash was divided into eight sections and helped them figure out which quadrant to begin in based on Rapacine’s address.
Gabe jumped in first and landed with a squish.
“How is it?”
Gabe gave a thumbs-up. “C’mon in, the water’s fine!”
Iris had never loved him more. She waded in after him, her own leg sinking knee-deep into the white and black bags. “How is my ankle already wet?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Gabe said.
They called the cat’s name even though she knew Jasmine couldn’t hear.
Doing something felt better than doing nothing as they stumbled through the ocean of refuse.
At one point Gabe got them both excited when he saw a furry white leg, but it was only a soiled plush toy.
As suggested by the supervisor, they cut open bags in search of mail with addresses to see if they were getting closer to Rapacine’s at 23 Bank Street.
Iris sliced open a new bag that spilled wet spaghetti like entrails. “I don’t want to think about the germs and bacteria.”
“Do you think this is like getting a vaccine, or a thousand? Maybe we’ll be invincible!”
Iris’s heart leaped when she saw movement inside a nearby bag.
“Jasmine!” She grabbed the twist-tie closure of the trash bag, yanked it upward like carrot greens, and cut off the top in one scissor snip.
She frantically rifled through balled-up dirty diapers, a rotisserie chicken carcass, and mealy coffee grounds to get to the bottom where she heard rustling.
Her scream made Gabe bound toward her. “What? What is it?”
“A rat!” She pointed at the newly freed rodent streaking over Hefty hill and dale.
Gabe laughed. “ Euugh . Welp, Godspeed, little dude. And hey, at least he was alive—that’s promising!”
“Hey, I know that truck!” Iris pointed at a trash truck slowly rolling in to park in the queue.
Unlike the row of identical boxy white DSNY trash trucks, this one was graffitied in a riot of Keith Haring–style text and graphics.
From the busy labyrinth of black-on-white lines appeared words like Compost, Dont Litter, Stay Clean, Essential Workers along with pop art emblems of the city, like a hot dog, a boom box with legs, a basketball with a comet tail, a mouth with tongue wagging, and a pizza slice.
It didn’t always serve her neighborhood, but Iris had definitely seen it before.
Iris clambered through the heaping muck, harder than jogging through the ocean, and at last reached the ladder to hoist herself out of the pit, with Gabe not far behind. She jogged toward the Haring truck, leaving juicy bootprints in her wake, and flailed at the men who had just descended from it.
Iris caught her breath, pulled down her mask, and asked, “Excuse me, have you—”
The driver held up a hand. “Don’t ask me about the cat.”
They were too late. “Is she…?” her voice caught.
He crossed his burly arms over his chest. “Whoever threw him out like that don’t deserve him. And I’m already attached.”
“She’s alive?” Gabe had appeared beside her.
“You have her?” Iris’s heart leaped with hope.
“Damn right I do. I was about to toss the bag in the hopper when it moved. So I sliced it open and there he was, a snowball of fur. He rode up front with us for the rest of our rounds, wasn’t even bothered by the truck noise, my kinda guy.”
“It’s a girl, her name is Jasmine.” Iris didn’t burst his bubble by sharing that Jasmine was deaf, not simply suited to trash collection.
The driver narrowed his eyes. “You got pictures or something to prove this is your cat? How’s I know you aren’t the asswipes who threw him out?”
They explained the whole situation, and instantly the sanitation driver was on their side.
“Fuckin’ scumbags. I thought someone in that building was messing with the trash before, but I draw the line at innocent animals. C’mon up.”
Iris realized he meant up into the trash truck. The driver gave her a hand climbing into the cabin and Gabe hopped up behind her. The driver pointed to a cardboard box wedged between the seats. Curled up inside was Jasmine, stained and sticky, but safe and sound.
Iris removed her blue latex glove and stroked her soft head, and the kitty immediately began to purr. Then she felt Gabe take her other hand in his.
She looked at him with tears in her eyes, full of gratitude to have this man by her side, even, or especially, with them both smelling like a landfill—not her perfume.
—
When Iris and Gabe hand-delivered Jasmine back to her mom, Mme Rapacine embraced her beloved pet with tender kisses and murmured French, and when the cat had had enough of being cherished, Rapacine hugged Iris with enough force to nearly knock her off her feet.
But after the happy reunion had taken place, Iris could sense a change in her friend’s demeanor.
Rapacine recounted in a dispirited tone taking the surveillance video to the police precinct, where she’d felt disrespected and ignored.
She had wanted to press criminal charges, but the police hadn’t taken the animal cruelty angle seriously and instead blamed her for letting her cat outside without a collar.
Rapacine spoke to them hunched on her chaise, her distracted gaze glued to the cats reacquainting themselves with each other.
She appeared enervated, more her age, as if this battle for her home had taken its toll.
Iris had wanted Rapacine to soften her stance against the landlord, but not like this.
It seemed the fight had left her, and with it her signature verve.
Iris assured her that she would find her a new tenants’ rights lawyer, but for the first time, Rapacine appeared too tired to have an opinion about it.
She gave Iris only a wave of permission or dismissal and left to draw a bath in the kitchen sink for Jasmine, letting Iris and Gabe see themselves out.