Chapter Five
What do you wear to an appointment with your private investigator?
Simon stands above his dresser, scratching through his hair, before realizing it doesn’t matter.
Nomi saw him yesterday with his shirt open.
Admittedly, she’d come to his apartment, his space; this meeting will be in her space. But it’s not a big deal.
Except he’s spent a month and a half being mindful of how he presents, whether he blends in, and now—confronted by an outlier situation, where he’s not sure of the rules—he finds himself at something of a loss.
Americans are a paradox, Flores said. They like to talk about independence and individuality, but they actually love the homogeneous. They prefer things and people to be “regular”—just like them.
Apart from managing his headaches, Simon’s biggest challenge and most constant sensitivity has been around how to stay homogeneous.
Choose the correct clothes. Wear your hair the correct way.
Speak with the correct rhythms and intonation and casual slang.
Blending in is vital if he wants to stay off official radar, of course, but it’s also a pathway to figuring out where he might belong—or who he might become—in the absence of a real identity.
He’s aware of how easy it might be, when you don’t know who you are, to simply fall through the cracks of daily life and become a nobody.
Shapeless, formless nobodies are everywhere in New York: on street corners, in alleyways, beneath overpasses, in dumpsters.
Imitation, then, is a guardrail. He can’t “be himself” because he doesn’t know what that entails, but he can imitate others, and that’s usually enough to both give him form and allay suspicion.
So he’s accustomed to playing a role. But now he has to figure out what the role of “amnesiac guy on his afternoon off” looks like, and perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s coming up blank.
There’s a knock at the apartment door.
Dammit. He grabs jeans, a white shirt. “Hold on!”
It’s the second time he’s opened the door on Nomi while barefoot, but at least this time his shirt isn’t unbuttoned.
She’s leaning one hand on the doorjamb and doesn’t seem to care. “Hi. Look, I know I said two thirty, but I have to do a thing.”
“A thing?”
“A thing, yeah, a thing.” She drops her hand, half turning and clearly in a hurry. “I’ve gotta go see a guy. Another guy, I mean. So can we take a rain check?”
He’s been agonizing over clothes for nothing. “You have to see another guy.”
“Yes, I’ve gotta catch a train in—” she checks her watch—“in, like, fifteen minutes. I’ve gotta be there before he takes off at four. So, rain check?”
He realizes suddenly that she’s dressed for action: black combat pants, black tank, black leather jacket. The shitkicker boots are still the same. She’s taken out some of the metal in her ears.
He narrows his eyes, thinking of the Italian fax sheet from yesterday with its ugly mug shots and intimidating list of prior charges. “Is this something to do with Lamonte?”
“No. Yes.” Nomi shifts on her feet, impatient. “Kind of. Look, I don’t have time to—”
“I’ll come with you.” He’s already pulling on his boots.
“What? No, you don’t need to—”
“Yeah, I do. Lamonte doesn’t play nice, remember?”
“Do you think I’m an idiot?” She gives him a hard stare, her urge to move tightly reined and vibrating beneath her skin. “I’ve been doing this job for two years. I take precautions, okay?”
She opens the side of her jacket. The matte black object tucked into the holster under her armpit is a gun, Simon realizes. Interesting.
It still doesn’t sway him. Yesterday’s glimpse into Nomi’s world has intrigued him, and his desire for answers to his personal quest is like a persistent itch. He grabs his trench coat, which holds keys, cash, cigarettes. “Where are you going on the train?”
“What? Flatbush, I’m going to Flatbush. But—”
“That’s, what, an hour away? We can talk on the train, then I can jump another train back home while you go about your business.” He pulls the door closed behind himself.
“You’re crazy,” she blurts.
“A little, probably,” he admits. “Come on, you’ll miss your window.”
She throws up her hands, but she’s either given up or run out of time.
Downstairs and out on the street, she walks fast enough that he’d be struggling to keep up if he wasn’t nearly a foot taller with a longer stride.
They’ve already crossed Greenwich Street, heading for Hudson.
Nomi dodges a teenage white girl with a dog on a string lead, ignores the crosswalk sign and strides straight across the Hudson intersection like she’s bulletproof.
Simon hauls after her. “Where are we getting on the subway?”
“West Fourteenth and Eighth Avenue—keep up.” For a while, the pace is brisk, and he knows she’s still annoyed. But after cutting past an art space near the corner of Gansevoort and turning left near Jackson Square, Nomi’s lope settles down.
Behind them, Eighth Avenue is afternoon-quiet, enjoying the lull before it revs back up again with its small army of red delivery trucks and white-coated meat workers pushing hand trolleys.
Ahead, both the Greco-Roman pomp of the New York County National Bank and the wedding cake tiers of the Bankers Trust Company high-rise seem vaguely insulted to be sharing space with pizza shops, delicatessens, liquor stores, peep show signs.
The Port Authority Building looms in the distance.
But they’re not going that far up; Nomi clatters down the subway stairs, and Simon follows behind, saying goodbye to the sun.
They buy their tokens and get to the platform about ten seconds before the next train arrives. The carriage isn’t too packed, but it has that subway smell of urine, old body odor, and hot steel. Graffiti is everywhere, and the nearest seats glisten with fresh spray paint; Simon chooses to stand.
Nomi holds the pole beside him. Her posture seems more relaxed now they’re locomoting, but her face is hard to read.
“What?”
“I’m wondering if you’re still mad,” he says.
“I just don’t need a bodyguard, okay?”
“Fine. No bodyguarding. It’s only . . .” He lets his gaze float as he thinks of a way to explain why he’s gate-crashed her afternoon activities. “I’ve been trying to figure this out on my own for a long time, so I’m ready to get started. Call me overeager.”
“Overeager, huh?” Her stance softens as the train bumps along.
He shrugs. Farther along the carriage, a guy in a business suit smokes a cigarette; now Simon kind of wants one.
“Okay, I’ll buy that.” Nomi seems resigned, if not entirely content. “You’re still the weirdest client ever.”
That almost makes him smile. “You should’ve seen me when I first regained consciousness.”
But it’s not really funny. He remembers that time as a transcendental whirl with no discernible pattern: He’d wake up to morning light, wake up again at night, wake up crying, wake up mid-conversation.
He could never remember blacking out. His tongue had been dry and fat in his mouth, and he’d been barely lucid, his mind a bouncing roulette ball.
He’d asked Flores a million questions—Where am I?
How did I get here? Who are you? What is happening? —but could never retain the answers.
“What’s it like, having no memory?” Nomi is examining his face.
It’s the most awful thing you can imagine. Simon doesn’t want to say that, doesn’t want to scare her. He keeps his expression neutral. “I don’t know what it’s like any other way, so I can’t really tell you.”
They get off at Fourth and Washington Square, changing to a B. There’s a panhandler in a flat cap in their carriage; Nomi waves him off, finds them both clean seats. But she’s also apparently been watching Simon’s eyes flick around.
“You don’t ride the subway much, huh?”
He’s ridden the subway exactly four times, including the time he traveled from Penn Station to the West Side on the day he arrived in the city. It took one train trip for him to figure out he had a problem with it. Now he only uses the train out of absolute necessity.
“I don’t like being underground,” he admits.
“Claustrophobia, as well as amnesia?”
“Not normally. Just on the subway.” He winces. “I really need to buy a bike.”
“Bummer about the subway. The train’s the best way to get to know New York.
” Her mouth twitches in an almost-smile as she lifts her chin at clumps of other passengers farther down.
“You get the whole smorgasbord on the train—goths, geeks, gays, punks, New Romantics, New Wavers, homeys, rappers . . . It’s a cliché, but NYC really is a melting pot. ”
Not as homogeneous as Flores thought. Although there’s a kind of homogeneity in everybody dressing in their group’s fashion to show their individuality. So are Americans more loyal than individualist? Simon doesn’t know, and it’s disturbing because he’s supposed to be one of them.
“I can only compare it to New Orleans,” he says.
“You came in through New Orleans?”
“By way of the Gulf of Mexico. I spent three weeks on a fishing boat from Ciudad del Carmen.” It’s not a wholly pleasant memory.
But Felipe Brava was a patient man, standing on deck to smoke his endless supply of Flor Morada tobacco and talk about what Simon should do once they arrived in the USA.
“The boat captain was connected to Sofia Rosa—she keeps the top floor room open for new arrivals. I had my paperwork already, from a contact in Mexico.”
“So checking your fingerprints might be complicated.” Sallow flashes slide across Nomi’s face from the fluorescent droplights outside as they pass through a station.
“I’d like to exhaust other ways of figuring out my identity before we start trying fingerprints and rap sheets,” he concedes. “I want to stay under the radar, if possible.”
“It’s possible. Tough, but possible. You said you’d been in America seven weeks?”
“Yeah. Six weeks on the West Side, plus it took me five days to get from New Orleans to New York.” Simon glances at a kid, probably about twelve, sleeping on a seat across the aisle. “I was down to my last dollar when I got the job at Gennaro’s.”
“They’re always looking for staff—high turnover.” Her gaze sweeps over him, taking in details. “I think I’m going to start with missing persons from the US East Coast, from November 1982.”
“Why the East Coast?” Just as he asks, the sun returns at last as the train emerges from the tunnels at the opencut Prospect Park station. He can breathe slightly better now.
Nomi shrugs. “I don’t look at you and think California or West Coast.”
This he finds intriguing. She’s more well versed in the homogenous groups of this country, in the same way he could probably explain to her the difference between a Guatemalan cardamom farmer and an ORPA fighter, if she cared to ask. “How can you tell?”
“You have a kind of European look. Did you pick those clothes?”
“Yeah, from Goodwill. Why?”
“Your style seems east. Not west, not flyover states. And your skin’s very pale. Is that your natural hair color?”
He touches his nape without thinking. “I guess. Flores shaved my head for surgery, and this is how it grew back. Is it important?”
“Well, with your coloring, and if you dress like that instinctively, it makes me think East Coast. Maybe even New England.” She glances out the window before standing up. “It’s someplace to start anyway. Okay, this is our stop.”
They’ve emerged at Church Avenue, near Prospect Park, and there’s a ton of traffic in the street, a lot of trash on the sidewalk. Nomi leads a winding path past locksmiths, T-shirt sellers, hair braiding stores, down one side street, then another.
Steam rises from the drains, and the sun that Simon appreciated on the train is now making him sweat. “Who’s this guy you’re going to see?”
She throws him a look. “Weren’t you going to go back to Manhattan?”
“I’m avoiding getting back on the train. I promise I’ll stay out of your way.”
“Right,” she mutters.
“Seriously, I can behave. So who is he?”
Obviously reluctant, she spills anyway. “His name’s Ricki Cevolatti. He’s a small-time good guy who does jobs for Lamonte, according to my sources. He’s supposed to be at this address until four o’clock, when he leaves to start work at one of Lamonte’s clubs in Greenwich Village.”
“So you just want to talk to him.”
“That’s the plan. I have a few questions.”
Simon raises his eyebrows. “And he’s going to talk to you?”
“I can be very persuasive.” Nomi’s gaze is flat as she opens the other side of her jacket: A badge hangs from the inside pocket, one he recognizes.
It gives him enough of a jolt that he stops walking. “You’re a cop?”
“Ex-cop.” She doesn’t seem excited to be talking about this. “I’ve been out two years, but I managed to hold onto the tin. Come on, it’s nearly three thirty, let’s move.”
The entrance to Cevolatti’s tenement is right next door to a Vietnamese seafood place, and the smell of rotting bass is strong as they take the outside steps.
Nomi checks the names on the letter boxes inside the door at right, but most of them have been scratched out and written over too many times to be useful.
“I was told he’s on the second floor, apartment twelve.” She wrinkles her nose. “God, it smells in here.”
They go up the stairs, and Simon avoids touching the banister. Linoleum peels at the edges of the second-floor hallway.
Cevolatti’s apartment door is unlatched.
Nomi steps to the side and draws her weapon, goes into a mode that Simon hasn’t seen before. “Get back from the door,” she whispers, then, louder, “Hey Ricki, you home? What’s happening, man?”
No answer.
Nomi meets Simon’s eyes briefly, pushes the door open with her elbow, ducks inside.
Abiding by his self-imposed rule to keep out of her way, Simon only sets one foot over the threshold before he hears her say, “Oh fuck,” through a thickened throat; then he moves faster.