CHAPTER TEN
?
RIAN
The radio on my hip made the noise a man makes clearing his throat, and then said my name.
“Rian. Loading level’s clear.”
Six in the evening, and the loading level under our tower on Ocean Drive was holding the day’s heat. Hot concrete, cold garbage in the bins by the freight door. At the north end the fire door stood open on a wedge of cardboard.
I keyed the radio.
“It’s not clear. I’m standing in it.”
“Say again?”
“The north fire door’s propped open with a piece of cardboard. Come down here and look at it.”
Bogdan Petrenko took his time answering.
“That’s not our guys. That’s the kitchen delivery. They were in and out of there at five with crates on both arms.”
“It’s my building, Bogdan. Everybody in it’s our guys.”
I walk this tower myself every week, every level and both stairwells. The men I pay to walk it leave the far doors for last.
There was a bin four feet away. I put the cardboard in my jacket pocket instead, next to a hand wrap that was not mine.
The freight elevator came down and gave me Bogdan.
“I walked this level at four and that door was shut at four,” he said. “I’ll put it in the book.”
“Put in the book that it’s been propped since five.”
“They don’t want to badge in and out with their arms full, they’re thinking about the truck—”
“I know why they do it,” I said. “Tell me why nobody’s pulled it out since.”
“I’ll talk to them.”
“You won’t. I will.”
Bogdan put his hands up and grinned at the floor, and his sleeve slid off his wrist.
“That’s a good watch.”
“My sister.”
I counted. One. Two.
“You’ve got a sister now.”
“Cousin,” he said, and laughed at himself. “Cousin, sister, over there it’s the same word. Her husband’s people are in the business up the beach.”
“What business is that.”
“Jewelry. Watches. He gets it at a number nobody outside the family gets it at, and he wanted me to have something decent on me while I’m driving decent people.”
Two-tone, gold and steel, stones around the bezel, a size too big for him so it rode down over the back of his hand.
“You want one? He’d do it for you. No obligation, I could just—”
“I break watches. I’ve broken every watch anybody ever put on me.”
“Everybody says that until there’s a good one on their wrist.”
That watch cost more than the car he drives it in. I put it away where I put things, which is not a notebook and not a conversation with my brothers. Then I took the service stair.
Bogdan came anyway, breathing through his nose.
“How many floors is this.”
“Fifty, and then one more.”
“There’s an elevator in this building. Two of them, and one of them’s mine to drive.”
“Keep up,” I said.
He kept up as far as forty. Then he said what he had ridden down to say, in the voice men use for weather.
“Who’s doing the cage paperwork these days, is that still Marisol?”
“Why.”
“My cousin’s kid needs work. I figured the cage is a booth and a window and a chair, and a kid could do a lot worse for himself than—”
“Still Marisol,” I said. “Same as always.”
“Yeah? Good. That’s good. I’ll tell him.”
It was not Marisol. Bogdan did not correct me and did not ask again, which is what a man does when he has what he came down for.
Two flights later he tried again.
“Let me ask you something, and don’t take it wrong.”
“You’re going to ask it either way,” I said.
“And if the pakhan asked you for something you didn’t like?”
“Then I wouldn’t like it, and I’d do it. I’ve never told that man no. Thirty-four years, not one time.”
Bogdan whistled through his teeth and kept climbing.
“That’s a long time to agree with a man, thirty-four years.”
“It isn’t agreeing. Agreeing is a thing a man does with an opinion. I don’t have one on the subject and I’ve never needed one.”
He let it go. The stones in that bezel took the stairwell light on every step. At fifty I sent him down to the cars.
The gym smelled of nothing. The mats had been hosed and dried in long clean streaks. The bag hung dead still and the tape was back in the drawer, because I put it there.
The mirror runs the west wall with a hairline crack from the floor to hip height. I stood there longer than a walk-through needs.
Mary’s hands had been flat on that glass.
I put them there. Her tits against it when I pushed her forward, the whole soft heavy weight of her going exactly where I moved it, her breath fogging the glass by her mouth, the noise she made when she quit arguing.
The taste of her cunt came back with no effort.
Her ass in my hand, the give of it, how much of her there was to hold.
My cock remembered all of it while I stood there with a radio on my hip.
“Get out of here,” I said, to nobody.
I checked the fire exit. Locked from the outside, free from the inside.
“Fifty’s showing me an open door on the panel,” Osiel said. “That you?”
“That’s me. It’s the fire exit and it’s shut now.”
I put a hand on the tape drawer and took it off again.
“Nothing to see, Osiel. Go check the roof.”
“What am I looking for on the roof?”
“The roof,” I said.
“Roof’s been clear every night for eleven years.”
“Then it’ll be clear tonight and you’ll have told me so.”
Fifty-one takes a key card. Mine works and she still has none, and I have never used it without making noise first, because Mary lives up there.
The kitchen was empty. The island is one slab of black stone, warm to the hand at any hour, and I put my palm on it for no reason. The pale ash stool had been dragged to the north corner. I put it back where she keeps it, and could not swear that was her place and not only where I remembered it.
My phone went in the elevator, and my brother does not say hello.
“Anything?”
“Two cars. Same as last night. Same men, and they’ve stopped pretending.”
“Leave them,” Nicolas said. “And she doesn’t go down to the street on her own from tonight.”
“Does she know that?”
“She’ll know when it comes up.”
Nicolas was gone before I had the phone off my ear. I have never once told my brother no.
?
Osiel had the lobby door when I came out after Nicolas’s call.
“You’re going over there.”
“I’m going over there.”
He held the glass open for me anyway.
“Both of them, or the one?”
“The gray one. The gray one’s been out there twice.”
Two Chargers, nose to tail under the streetlight across from the porte-cochere, one black and one gray, engines off, windows down, four men doing nothing. The sidewalk gave the heat back through my boots and nobody moved while I crossed.
I did not touch the black one. I put both hands on the roof of the gray one and leaned down to the open window, which is not touching a man and is not opening a door. My brother can have the difference.
“Tell Vasily Sokolov the doorman on this building counts cars.”
The one in the passenger seat had a gray head and a face like a shop with the gates down.
“He knows. That’s why we’re parked in the light.”
“How long are you sitting on my street?”
He thought about that longer than the question deserved.
“As long as we’re told to sit on it. It’s a public road and we’re not blocking your door.”
“You got a name?”
“No.”
The driver kept his eyes on the windshield.
“You’ve got a name. You don’t feel like handing it over in the street to a man leaning on your car.”
“That’s right.”
There was a version of that minute where I took him out through the window by his collar and the rest of the night was cleanup. I have that version of every minute of my life. It is most of what I am.
I stood up off the roof. My hands had opened and closed once on their own.
Here is the arithmetic. A man hides a car when he still wants something off you.
He parks it under a light with the engine off when the counting is done—when the table has told him yes and all that is left is a date.
Sokolov’s bratva, down out of Brighton Beach, sitting on my street like a man collecting a debt already paid.
I carried it back across the road.
“They been there since five,” Osiel said.
“Since five in the afternoon.”
“One of them’s bought a water off the place with the umbrellas and tipped the girl twenty percent.”
I looked back at the cars. Nobody in either was looking at me, and that took work.
“Log every plate on this block. Every night. By hand, in a book, with a pen.”
“You want me to write down every plate on Ocean Drive. By hand.”
“By hand.”
Osiel looked up at the black domes on the ceiling.
“There’s cameras on every corner of this building.”
“There’s cameras.”
He got the rest on his own, which is why he has had that door eleven years. The cameras belong to the building, and the building has people in it.
“My mother said I’d end up a poet.”
I laughed. One syllable, out loud, and I hated it before it finished. Osiel had the grace to look at the ocean.
“When Mary Warren comes down for a car, I hear it before the car moves. And she doesn’t go through that glass on foot—not for coffee, not for air.”
Osiel took his hand off the glass.
“And if she asks who I’ve called?”
“Tell her. She’ll get in anyway.”
?
Nine o’clock and I was on Mary Warren’s block on Calle Ocho. It was Thursday.
I parked across from Warren’s and sat with the engine off until the car stopped ticking. Then I got out, because a man sitting in a car on that block gets remembered.
The front case had been dark for seven years. Mary baked behind it, after the street had gone to bed. The block smelled of dryer exhaust off the coin laundry and lavender off a hosed sidewalk. Two doors along, four men had a domino table under a bulb and one was losing badly.
The window was black. I had rehung the hand-painted sign when I came for her pastry box. Now the streetlight caught it from underneath. The paint had gone the color of weak tea. The W went first, repainted in a white bluer than the rest, the only part that belongs to this decade.
Two of the domino players had looked up at me twice, so I walked to the corner.
“Colada?” the kid said. “It comes with the cups.”
“Café cubano.”
“Sugar or no sugar?”
“Whatever way it comes.”
He knocked the portafilter twice against the rubber bar, and behind me the domino table went up.
“How many cups you want?”
“One.”
I drank it standing up, because I could not make myself sit anywhere, and walked back.
I had the wallet open under the light when I paid. The inside seam had worn through along the fold, because of what lived behind it and how often it came out.
It is a photograph of the front of a shop in daylight. The gates are up, there are things in the case, and the sign is still white. It was taken from the curb I was standing on. There is nobody in the frame at all.
I put it back. The wallet went into my jacket next to the cardboard wedge and the hand wrap, and I stood with my hands empty in front of a dark window and did not go in.
I wanted Mary Warren on the other side of that glass with her back against her own counter and my mouth on her, and I would not have given that reason to a priest.
I had been standing there twenty minutes when a gray sedan came around off Seventeenth and stopped across the street from Warren’s with its lights on.