“How’s what, Lefty?”
“You wanta go to a party. You live to party, right?”
The last party Pellam could recall attending had been two or three years ago. He said, “I’m party animal, Lefty.”
“McKennah pokes the social beast all the time. Drop my name and you’ll get in. I’ll make some calls. Find out where and when. I’ll call Spielberg.” (Spielberg’s assistant, he meant. And the call would finally end up with an assistant’s assistant located in an entirely different town than the chief raider of the lost ark was in.)
“My undying gratitude, Lefty. I mean it.”
“So,” the producer said coyly, “research, huh, John?”
“Research.”
Silence while the signals of ambition bounced off a satellite somewhere in cold space and shot back down to earth. “I’ve been hearing things, John.”
“What? That Oakland’s losing and the Cardinals’re winning?”
“Somebody in some post-pro house out here was telling somebody I know you’ve booked editing time.”
“That’s a lot of somebodies,” Pellam observed.
“And that’s not the only thing I’ve heard.”
“Isn’t it?”
“A couple studios’ve tried to get you to scout for them but the word is you’re out of the scouting business.”
Somebody told somebody about something.
The Word in Hollywood was as quick as the Word on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen.
“Naw, naw, I’m just on vacation.”
“Oh. Sure. Got it. And you need a good editor to clean up that footage you took of Mickey and Goofy when you were at Epcot. Sure.”
“Something like that.”
“Come on, John. I always had faith in you.”
A safe way of saying that whatever had gone down, however bad it looked for Pellam (and it’d looked pretty bad at one time), Lefkowitz hadn’t abandoned him. Which was, with some creative recasting, slightly true.
“It’s always warmed my heart knowing that.”
“So? You’re trying to get something on, aren’t you?”
“It’s a little thing, Lefty. A small project. You wouldn’t be interested. All I need at this point is domestic distribution.”
“You got financing? And I didn’t hear about it?” He whispered this.
“It’s a very small project.”
“Your Palm D’or and your L.A. Film Critics award were for small projects too, you’ll recall.”
“Distribution, I was saying.”
Producers love distribution-only deals because if the film bombs they don’t lose millions. It’s a percentage arrangement. The execs don’t get the Academy awards and they don’t get as rich but they don’t get as poor either and hence don’t get fired as soon.
“My ears’re turned your way, Pellam. Talk to me.”
“I’m in a meeting now-”
“Yeah, with who?”
“A lawyer. Can’t really go into it.” Pellam winked at Bailey.
“Wall Street? Which firm?”
“Hush, hush,” Pellam whispered.
“What’s going on, John? This could be big. A new Pellam feature.”
If Lefkowitz found out he was slavering over a documentary he’d hang up the phone in an instant and the Pellam he had always been behind one hundred per cent would cease to exist. Distribution for the art-house circuit meant selling the film to a total of about one hundred screens around the country, like the Film Forum in New York and the Biograph in Chicago. Feature films went to thousands of multiplexes.
Pellam, deciding he didn’t feel guilty, said, “You get me in to see McKennah and I’ll have my lawyer here give you a call.” There was a pause that screenwriters call a beat. “I may have to burn some bridges but I’d do it. For you.”
“Love you, Johnny. I mean that. Sincerely. Oh, about McKennah, you know he’s an unchained shit, don’t you?”
“I just want to crash his party, Lefty. I don’t want to sleep with him.”
“You have that lawyer call me.”
They hung up.
“Was that,” Bailey asked, “a Hollywood person?”
“To the core.”
“Do you really want me to call him?”
“I wouldn’t do that to you, Louis. But I do have a legal question.”
Bailey tipped the jug of wine into his cup once more.
Pellam asked, “What’s the sentence for carrying an unlicensed pistol in New York City?”
There were probably some questions that gave the lawyer pause and some that surprised him. This wasn’t in either of those categories. He answered as if Pellam had asked him about the weather. “Not good here. It’s technically a mandatory sentence but the judge has some discretion. Unless of course you’re a felon. Then it’s a year mandatory. Riker’s Island. And the sentence comes with several large boyfriends, whether you want them or not. You’re not talking about yourself, are you?”
“I’m just asking theoretically.”
The lawyer’s eyes narrowed. “Is there something about you I should know?”
“No. There’s nothing you should know.”
Bailey nodded to the window. “What do you need a gun for anyway? Look outside, young man. You see tumbleweeds? You see cowpokes? Indians? This isn’t the streets of Laredo.”
“I don’t think that’s a lock, Louis.”
EIGHT
From somewhere in his apartment building Pellam heard that song again, strident and loud. It must’ve been number one on the rap charts.
“… now don’t be blind… Open your eyes and whatta you find?”
A large stack of videocassettes sat at his feet, representing several months’ worth of taping. They weren’t edited yet or even organized beyond subject and date written in his sloppy handwriting on first-aid tape stuck to each cassette. He found one and slipped it into a cheap VCR that rested precariously on a cheaper TV.
Through the wall came the steady bass thud of the song.
“It’s a white man’s world. It’s a white man’s world.”
The screen of the cheap Motorola flickered reluctantly to life, showing this:
Ettie Wilkes Washington sat comfortably in front of the camera. She’d wanted to be filmed in her favorite rocker, an oak relic her husband Eddie Doyle had bought for her. But even the slight rocking motion had been a distraction and he’d moved her to a straight-backed chair. (As a young assistant Pellam had worked on Jaws and remembered Spielberg telling the director of photography to bolt the camera to the deck of Robert Shaw’s boat during the location shots. The seasoned DP wisely suggested that they better shoot handheld – or else risk sending sea-sick audiences racing for restrooms around the country.)
So Pellam had moved her to an overstuffed armchair. He’d wanted her in front of a window, with the construction work going on outside. You could also see, in the frame, another antique – an old rolltop desk, filled with papers and letters. On the wall behind it hung a dozen pictures of family.
“You asking ’bout Billy Doyle, my husband? I’ll tell you, he was a funny man. Nobody like him I ever met. I’ll tell you what he looked like first of all. He was handsome, yessir. Tall and, well, you know, very white. We’d walk down the street together. He always made me take his arm. Didn’t matter whether we were uptown near San Juan Hill, where the blacks were mostly, and they didn’t like mixed couples, or in Hell’s Kitchen, where it was white. The Irish and Italian boys there didn’t like mixed couples either. We got glares from everybody. But he always had me on his arm. Day or night.
“And he’d always go to clubs with me when I sang. He’d sit at a table with a whisky in front of him – the man loved his whisky – sit there, th’only white man in the whole place and he kept getting looks. But after a while nobody’d pay any attention to him. I’d look down from the stage and there he’d be, eating chitlins and talking with a couple, three men, smiling up at me, knocking them on the shoulders and saying I was his ga
l. Then I’d look down and see him arguing. I knew he was talking ’bout Billie Holliday and Bessie Smith.
“But the thing about him was he never found himself. And that was hard for a man. Hardest thing there is, a man who doesn’t come into his own. Sometimes he doesn’t really have to find it. Sometimes he just ends up someplace and digs his heels in and some years go by and that’s who he is and he’s all right with that. But Billy was always looking. What he wanted most was land. To own something. That’s the funny thing – it’s why we never really had a home, because he wasted all his time on these schemes to get a building, get some land. He wanted it bad and that was why he served that time in jail.”
Documentary filmmakers should never intrude. But off camera a surprised Pellam asked, “He did time?”
But just then Ettie shifted in her chair and looked up, turned her head. Pellam remembered that Florence Besserman, Ettie’s friend from the third floor, had come to the door unexpectedly. The tape went blank. She’d never finished the story about Billy Doyle’s criminal history and Pellam had agreed to come back – on the night of the fire, as it had turned out – to record the details. Pellam now rewound the tape to the beginning and found what he’d been looking for. Not Ettie but some footage of pretty, pudgy Anita Lopez, apartment 2A, who spoke in her machine-gun voice, her fireengine-red nails flying everywhere, despite Pellam’s reminders to keep her hands still.
“… Sí, sí, we got gangs. Just like what you see in the movies. They got guns, they get into trouble, they drink, they got cars. Boom-boom, these big speakers. Ai! So loud. Used to be the Westies. They gone now. What we got is we got the Cubano Lords, they is the big gang now. They got a apartment and they don’t mind if everybody know where. I tell you. On Thirty-ninth, between Ninth and Tenth. Oh, they scare me. Don’t say nothing to nobody I told you. Please.”
Pellam shut the VCR off. He dropped to his knees and inventoried the canvas bag, which contained everything an astute documentarian ought to have: the Betacam, the Ampex deck, the Nicad battery pack, two extra cassettes, a cardioid mike with sponge wind guard, steno notebook, pens. And a Colt Peacemaker single-action pistol. Five of the six chambers loaded with.45-caliber shells. The rosewood grip was battered and sweat-stained.
He was thinking of what his mother had told him just before he’d left the placid town of Simmons, N.Y., en route to Manhattan last May. “That’s a crazy city down there, New York is. You keep an eye out, Johnny. You just never know.”
Pellam had lived long enough to understand that, no, you never did.
He walked west along the sweltering concrete of Thirty-ninth Street. On doorstep sat a heavy woman, holding a long, dark cigarette and rocking a dilapidated baby carriage. She read el diario.
“Buenos días,” Pellam said.
“Buenas tardes.” The woman’s eyes swept over Pellam, examining the jeans, the black jacket and white T-shirt.
“I wonder if you could help me.”
She looked up, exhaled as if she were smoking.
“I’m making a movie about Hell’s Kitchen.” He held up the camera bag. “About the gangs here.”
“No gangs aquí.”
“Well, some of the young people. Teenagers. I didn’t mean to say ‘gang.’ ”
“Faltan gangs. No gangs.”
“Somebody told me about the Cubano Lords.”
“Es un club.”
“Club. They have a clubhouse here, right? Un apartmento? I heard it was on this street.”
“Buenos muchachos. No shit happen ’round here. They make sure of that.”
“I’d like to talk to them.”
“Nobody come here, nobody bother us. They good hombres.”
“That’s why I want to talk to them.”
“And look at las calles.” She waved her hand up and down the street. “They clean, or what?”
“Could you give me the name of who’s in charge? Of the club?”
“I don’t know none of them. You no hot in that jacket?”
“Yeah, I am. I heard they hang out around here.”
She laughed and returned to the paper.
Pellam left her and crisscrossed the neighborhood – over to the river and back again, skirting the squat, black Javits Convention Center. He didn’t find what he was looking for (which is what? he wondered. A half-dozen young men standing around like George Chakiris and the Sharks in West Side Story?).
A young Latino family walked toward him – the couple in tank tops and shorts, a teen girl in a short tight dress. They lugged a cooler and blankets and toys and lawn chairs. Dad’s day off, they were headed for Central Park, Pellam guessed. He was watching the family vanish toward the subway when he saw the man on top of the building.
He was about Pellam’s age, a few years younger maybe. Latino. He wore close-fitting jeans and a T-shirt, brilliantly white. He stood on the roof of a tenement, looking down, with dark eyes that even from this distance seemed to beam displeasure.
The man leapt from one building to another and was directly above him. Pellam could see only a silhouette. He was making his way east, along the roofs of the tenements.
Pellam turned and headed in the same direction. He paused at the corner, lost sight of the young man. Then, a sudden flash of white disappeared into a crowd of workers along Tenth Avenue. Crossing the street fast, Pellam tried to follow but the man had vanished. How the hell had he done that? He asked the workers if they’d seen anyone but they claimed that hadn’t seen anybody and the alley they stood in front of – the only place the man could have escaped – was blind. Barred windows. No doors. No exit.
Pellam gave up and returned to Thirty-sixth Street, wandering toward the charred remains of Ettie’s building.
It wasn’t the noise that warned him but its absence; some raucous hammering from the construction site across the street suddenly dulled, the sound absorbed by the young man’s body and clothing. Without even looking sideways at the running footsteps Pellam set the bag down and reached inside. He hadn’t yet found the Colt when a piece of metal – a pistol barrel, he guessed – touched the back of his neck.
“The alley,” the voice said in a melodic, Spanish accent. “Lessgo.”
NINE
His thick brows were knitted together and beneath them his lids dipped slightly as if he was nursing a deep grudge.
They stood in the alley behind Louis Bailey’s building, on greasy cobblestones. The smell of rotten vegetables and rancid oil filled the heavy air. Pellam stood, crossed his arms, glancing down at the tiny black automatic pistol.
Then he studied his captor again. A pink, leathery scar traversed the man’s forearm. It was recent. On his hand, in the Y between his thumb and forefinger, was a blurred tattoo in the form of a dagger. Pellam lived in L.A.; he recognized a crew insignia when he saw one.
Pellam asked, “Habla inglés?”
The man looked down into the bag. Keeping the automatic trained on Pellam’s chest he bent down and lifted the Betacam partially out.
“Appreciate your leaving that alone. It’s-”
“Shut up.”
The man didn’t find the Colt. He lowered the camera, stood up.
“You’re a Cubano Lord,” Pellam said.
He was as tall as Pellam. Most Latinos he knew were shorter. “I’ve been looking for you,” Pellam said.
“Me?”
“One of you.”
“Why?”
“To have a talk.”
His eyebrows twitched in surprise. “You talking now.”
“I’m doing a film on Hell’s Kitchen. I want to talk to some of the people in gangs. Or is it a club?”
“The other day, what you doing?”
“The other day?”
“What you looking for? Talking to people? On the street here. You taking pictures. What you do that for?”
Pellam remained silent.
The young man let a disgusted sigh ease from his lungs. “You gonna say we did it? You gonna say we torch th
at building?”
“I’m making a film. I-”
The terse young man’s brows nestled closer. “There a TV news show here. In the city. Latino station. You never hear of it, I know. They slogan is ‘Primero con la verdad.’ You believe in that? Is la verdad siempre primero with you? The truth?” Arms crossed again, he lifted a hand to his chin and with a callous thumb rubbed a short, deep scar below his mouth. “You some kind of reporter? You some kind of Geraldo?”
Pellam nodded toward the cobblestoned alley. “This where you play basketball? Have bake sales? Pony rides for the kids? All those things a club does?”
“What’re you asking me, man?”
“I heard some of your boys were hanging out here just before the fire.”
“You heard… So that make it true? A white man say los Cubanos burn down a building, so it true. A black man say it, so it true.” Pellam didn’t answer and he continued, “You no think this old nigger lady do it. You think I do it. Why? ’Cause you like niggers more’n you like spics.”
Pellam didn’t think more anger could be inside the young man but more anger now flooded his face. He shifted his weight on expensive running shoes and Pellam wondered if he was going to shoot. He glanced sideways for a place to roll. Wondered if he could get to his Colt in time. Decided he couldn’t.
Make the call – apologize or get tough?
Pellam frowned, leaned forward. He spat back, “I’m here to do a job. You don’t want to answer my questions, that’s your damn business. But I’m not interested in any fucking lectures.”
The dark eyes narrowed suddenly.
I’m gonna get shot. Hell. Should’ve kissed ass. Knew it.
But the man didn’t pull the trigger. And he didn’t pistol-whip him either – the second option, Pellam’d figured.
He put the gun away and walked around the front of Ettie’s building, gesturing Pellam after him. He ducked under the police line and walked up the stairs to what was left of the tiny entryway. Pellam dug the Colt out of the bag and slipped it into the back waistband of his jeans. He lifted the bag and walked out to the sidewalk.
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