Chapter 31
MARINA
"Told you I was around," Ray says.
I do not answer. My hands are in my lap, together, because the man behind me has told me to keep them there and shown me why, and my feet are bare, because I did not have time for shoes, because I did not have time for anything.
I opened the door because he said your fiancé and I stood there with my hand on the chain deciding, and while I was deciding somebody came up the back stairs and took the door off its chain with his shoulder, and the chair went over, and here I am.
Barefoot. In the black jeans and a sweater. The strip in my shoe, on the floor of an apartment in Sunset Park, four thousand one hundred and sixty dollars that was for leaving.
I left without it. That is almost funny.
"You're quiet," Ray says.
"You want me to talk."
"I want you to know how it is. So you don't do anything.
" He drives with his left hand. The right is in his lap, in a cast, a dirty one, the fingers sticking out of it purple and wrong, and every time he changes gear he has to reach across himself, and every time he does it his mouth goes thin.
"That's all. You know how it is, you sit nice, and it goes easy. "
"How is it."
"It's a job." He says it to the windscreen. "Somebody wants you somewhere. I'm the somewhere. I hold you till he comes and then it's his problem and I'm on a bus to Florida with enough to stay there. That's how it is."
"Who."
"Don't know."
"You don't know who's paying you."
"I know a voice on a phone and I know an envelope in a box. That's what I know. That's what I've known for eleven years, little girl, and it's kept me in cigarettes, so don't." He reaches across for the gear. His mouth goes thin. "Don't push."
I do not push. I sit with my hands in my lap and my feet cold on the floor of the Buick, and I look at the cast, and I think about a man in a kitchen saying I broke his hand the way you would read a list, and I do not know whether I am glad or sorry, and it does not matter, because Ray is changing gear with his mouth thin, and a man who is in pain is a man who is thinking about the pain.
That is something. I put it where I put things.
Rosebank.
Of course it is Rosebank. Where else would he take me.
Tompkins Avenue at three thirty in the morning with the streetlights orange and nobody on it, and he goes past the deli and past the stoop and pulls up at the building, the building, with the fire escape and somebody's plant on it, and the man behind me gets out first.
He is big. That is all I get. Big, and a knit hat, and a face that does not want to be looked at, and he opens my door and takes my arm above the elbow and I go where the arm goes.
Not upstairs. Down.
There is a door under the stoop that I had forgotten.
A basement door, metal, and Ray has a key to it, of course he has a key to it, he had a key to everything in this building for four years, and it opens on a smell of damp and old boilers and a flight of concrete steps with a bulb at the bottom, and the big man takes me down them, and I count.
Eleven. There are eleven steps, and I count them, because I counted them when I was fourteen, and I know that there is a pipe that runs along the wall at the bottom at the height of my shoulder, and I know that the boiler is on the left and the storage cages are on the right, and I know where the drain is.
There is a chair.
Just a chair. A kitchen chair, wooden, in the middle of the floor under the bulb, and the big man puts me in it and stands back against the wall by the steps with his arms folded, and Ray comes down slowly, one hand on the rail, and stands in front of me.
He has the lighter.
The Zippo. In his left hand now, because the right cannot hold anything, and he opens it, click, and I hear it, and I am fourteen, and I make myself not be.
I make myself be twenty-five in a chair in a basement with a man in a cast in front of me, and I look at the lighter, and I look at his face, and I read it.
He is frightened.
Not of me. Of the phone. He keeps looking at it, it is in his coat pocket and he keeps touching the pocket with the cast, and his eyes go to the steps every time a car goes by on Tompkins, and I understand, sitting there, that Ray Donato has never once in eleven years met the man who pays him, and that tonight he is going to, and that he is more afraid of that than of anything the man on the hill did to his hand.
"How long," I say.
"What."
"Till he comes. You said you hold me till he comes. How long."
"He'll come when he comes."
"You don't know."
"I know what I know."
"You don't know when, you don't know who, you're sitting in a basement with a broken hand waiting for a man you've never seen to walk down those stairs, and you think he's bringing a bus ticket.
" I say it evenly. I say it like I am telling him the drink he ordered.
"Ray. I've stood behind a bar for ten years.
I know what it looks like when a man's been told there's a payoff.
It looks like you. And I know what it looks like when there isn't."
"Shut up."
"He cut a man's throat on the expressway. Forty minutes after the job. Did you know that? The driver. Belt on, engine running. Forty minutes."
The lighter goes click.
"He cleans up," I say. "That's what he does. That's the whole of what I know about him and it's more than you know, and you've got me in a chair for him, and when he comes down those stairs you're going to be the second thing in this basement he doesn't need."
"I said shut up."
"Then make me."
He comes at me. He does. He comes at me with the lighter and the cast and his face gone the colour it went in the restaurant, and the big man by the steps says, "Ray," once, flat, a warning, and Ray does not hear it, he has his good hand in my hair and my head back and the lighter open an inch from my face, the flame going, and I can feel it, I can feel it on the skin under my eye, and I do not close my eyes.
I look at him. I look at him the way I looked at him when I was fourteen and he put a cigarette out on my wrist and I did not cry, and I watch him see it.
"You didn't even cry," he says. Through his teeth.
"No."
"You just looked at me."
"I'm looking at you now, Ray."
His hand shakes. The flame shakes with it.
And I move.
Not up. I am in a chair with a man's hand in my hair, up is not a direction I have.
Sideways. I go sideways and down, off the chair, the way you go under a bar when a glass comes, and his hand comes with me because it is in my hair and it pulls, it pulls hard, and I do not care.
The pipe. The one at shoulder height along the wall.
There are bottles under it. There were always bottles under it, the super kept his empties there in 2011 and nobody has moved them since, and my hand finds one in the dark by the boiler, a neck, glass, and I bring it up against the pipe as hard as I have ever done anything.
It goes.
The sound is enormous in a basement. Ray lets go of my hair.
He lets go because the sound is behind him and he turns his head, he turns his whole body, a man with a cast turning to see what broke, and I have the neck of a bottle in my hand with the bottom gone and the edges where the bottom was, and I put it in his leg.
The thigh. High up. Not the inside, I do not know enough for the inside, I just know the thigh is big and it is there, and I put the glass in it with both hands and I turn it, and he screams, and it is not the scream from the restaurant, it is a different one, and I let go of the bottle and leave it in him and I run.
The big man is between me and the steps.
He is not, though. He has come off the wall towards Ray, towards the scream, because that is what a man does, he goes towards the noise, and there is a gap between him and the rail, and I am small, I have always been small, I have got through gaps in bars that men could not get their shoulders through, and I go through it.
He gets my sweater. I feel it, the back of it, his hand closing, and I keep going and the sweater comes over my head and off, and I am on the steps in a T-shirt and bare feet with eleven of them to go and I take them three at a time.
The door. The metal one. It is open, he did not shut it, of course he did not shut it, and I go out under the stoop into Tompkins Avenue at four in the morning in a T-shirt with no shoes and blood on my hands that is not mine, and behind me Ray is screaming and the big man is coming up the steps, and I run.
I do not know where I am running.
That is not true. I know exactly. My feet know.
I am running down Tompkins towards Bay Street the way I ran when I was nine, the way I have run a hundred times in dreams, and the cold comes up through the sidewalk into my feet and the air goes into my chest like glass and I do not stop.
The stoop. The deli. The corner. There is nobody.
There is nobody on Tompkins Avenue at four in the morning and I am running down the middle of it past the parked cars with the big man's feet behind me, not close, not far, a man who does not run for a living behind a woman who has spent ten years on her feet, and I am faster, I am faster than him, and I do not know for how long.
I get to the corner.
There is a car. Just one. Coming up Bay Street from the direction of the bridge, fast, with its lights off, and I see the shape of it before I see anything else, high and square and black, and it sees me, I know it sees me, because the lights come on.
Both of them. Full. On me, in the middle of the road, in a T-shirt, with my hands out.
The Range Rover.
It does not slow down. It comes straight at me the way the Camry did, the way everything does, and I stand in the road and I do not move, and it stops. Dead. Ten feet from me, rocking on its springs, the engine going, and the door opens, and he is out of it before it has stopped rocking.
He does not say my name.
He comes across the ten feet and he puts his hands on me, on my face, my arms, my hands, turning them over, looking, looking for the blood, finding it, finding it is not mine, and his face is doing a thing I have never seen it do and never want to see again, and then his eyes go past me.
Up Tompkins. To where the big man in the knit hat has stopped running, fifty yards back, and is standing in the middle of the street looking at what has come round the corner.
Salvatore takes his hand off my face.
He has no watch on. I see that. I see his bare wrist as he takes his hand away, and I know what that means, I have known since the restaurant, and he says, very quietly, not to me, "Get in the car, Marina."