Down Here

by Andrew Vachss

  “I never heard of one that did,” I told her, pure truth.

  “Here we go,” she said. “You know the Maurice Avenue switch-off?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I once worked as a cab driver. To get perspective for a piece I was doing.”

  “Okay, now just follow it around until we get to Sixty-first.”

  “That’s Maspeth, right?”

  “Yes, it is. Not many people from the City know that.”

  “That’s one of the things about having a car,” I said. “You go places where the subway doesn’t.”

  “I have a car, too, remember? Turn . . . there! Yes. Now just go along until I tell you to turn again.”

  “You like that Audi?” I asked her.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Whoever did the interior-design work on it was a genius.”

  “Is it pretty quick?”

  “It has a turbocharger,” she said, almost smugly. “I got a ticket when I went upstate for a ski weekend once. The officer said he clocked me at a hundred and ten. But he only wrote me up for eighty-five.”

  “If it had been me, he would have written me up for a hundred twenty.”

  “Because your car is so fast, you mean?”

  “No. Because I’m about the polar opposite of a pretty girl.”

  “That’s cynical,” she said, grinning to show me she didn’t really think so.

  I followed her directions for a few minutes, watching the densely packed little houses give way to flatland.

  “There!” she said.

  “Where? That’s not a restaurant. It looks like—”

  “An old factory?” she said, pleased with herself. “That’s what it was, once. Now it’s condos. And one of them is mine.”

  “Okay, I get it. You want to change out of your work clothes before we—?”

  “I do want to change,” she said. “But I also want to cook. Okay?”

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  “What did this place use to make?” I asked her, following her directions to drive around to the back.

  “Some kind of containers, I think. Metal. As I understand, the conversion to plastic would have been too expensive. And the work wasn’t there anymore, anyway.”

  “This is pretty neat,” I said, looking at a vertical steel-barred fence with an inset gate.

  “Use this,” she said, handing me a credit-card-sized piece of plastic.

  I inserted the card in the slot, and the gate swung open. We were facing a four-story building that looked like poured concrete, painted the color of cigarette smoke. Laura reached in her purse, pulled out a remote garage-door opener. She pressed the button; a triple-wide steel door rolled up soundlessly as the gate closed behind us.

  Inside, there were individual spaces for parking, enough for thirty or so cars.

  “Use number seven,” she said. “It’s mine.”

  I backed the Plymouth in carefully—the car in stall number six was her silver Audi.

  “That’s slick,” I said. “You own the space on the other side of it, too?”

  “Actually, I do. But I don’t just own the parking spaces; they come with the units upstairs. So I have six slots; you get two with each apartment.”

  “You own three apartments?” I asked, cutting the ignition with the car in gear so the engine wouldn’t diesel on me—big-block Mopars will do that sometimes.

  “Me and the bank,” she said, flashing a quick grin.

  We got out, me extra-carefully, so that the Plymouth’s door wouldn’t ding her Audi.

  “You don’t have to worry,” she said, standing by the front fender. “There’s a lot of space between the slots. This used to be the loading bay for the factory. Even with two slots per unit, we have a ton of space left over. See that?” she said, pointing to a chain-linked enclosure to my right.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s for storage. Every unit-holder gets a certain amount of space in there, too. You supply your own lock.”

  “Damn! Something like that in Manhattan would set you back a—”

  “If you think this is a bargain, wait till you see upstairs,” she said.

  “There’s an elevator,” she said. “But I always walk. Sometimes, it’s the only exercise I get all day. Do you mind?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she unlocked the stairway door and started up ahead of me. Halfway up the first flight, I realized Michelle had read Laura Reinhardt better secondhand than I had in person; if she was suffering from secretarial spread, I couldn’t see a hint of it.

  Her unit was on the top floor. Two locks, deadbolt and doorknob. She stepped inside, flicked on a light, said, “Well?”

  The apartment opened directly into a broad expanse of hardwood floor, bleached so deeply it was almost white. The side wall was exposed brick, beautifully repointed. At the end of the room was a corner-to-corner set of pale-pink drapes. She hit a switch and the drapes parted, revealing a floor-to-ceiling glass wall.

  “Jesus!” I said.

  I wasn’t acting. The wall opposite the exposed brick was a complex arrangement of brass piping, holding what looked like teak shelves. Hardcover books with somber jackets alternated with framed photographs and an assortment of small objects I couldn’t make out from where I was standing. Modernistic furniture was scattered about as if at random, but it looked so . . . tailored that I figured it for a professional’s touch.

  “Come on,” she said, “I’ll give you the quick tour.”

  I followed her into a kitchen that I knew the average yuppie would commit several felonies for. A stainless-steel refrigerator-freezer lorded it over a granite-block island and a black porcelain double sink. The cabinets looked like they had been fashioned from the same teak as the bookshelves. The stove didn’t appear to have any burners on it. A chrome table sat off to one side, with eight matching chairs. An eat-in kitchen, big enough to hold Thanksgiving dinner.

  Before I could ask about that, she was on the move again.

  “My office,” she said, pointing to a spacious room with a window facing the same direction as the one in the living room. It looked like high-tech heaven, mostly in carbon-fiber black. A flat-screen computer monitor; a multi-line phone with both wired and cordless handsets; one of those fax-photocopier-scanner things. Under a desk with a black marble top, a large paper-shredder—my money was on cross-cut.

  “There’s more,” she said, pulling me by the hand.

  We passed a blue-tiled bathroom, a bedroom—“It’s really a guest room,” she said—and then came to a room dominated by a big-screen TV and a single white leather recliner. “If I were a man, I’d probably claim this was a den,” she chuckled.

  The master bedroom was a good three hundred square feet, with plenty of room for the queen-sized bed with a Mondrian-pattern headboard, and a garage-sized closet. The attached bath had a two-person Jacuzzi, and it didn’t cramp the area. One wall was a triptych of mirrors.

  “How big do you think the whole thing is?” she asked, walking back toward the living room.

  “Twenty-five hundred?” I guessed.

  “Closer to thirty-five,” she said. “See what I mean about a bargain?”

  “I guess that depends on what you paid. But I can’t imagine anything like this going for less than—”

  “Right around four hundred,” she said.

  “About the going rate for a decent two-bedroom on the Upper West Side.”

  “You wish,” she said. “For that kind of money, you’re buying a rehab project.”

  “Well, this one sure didn’t come the way it is now.”

  “Oh, that’s true,” she said, perching confidently on one of the modern chairs. “But I didn’t have to do structural stuff. It wasn’t really all that expensive. And it’s a good investment.”

  “That I can believe,” I said, sitting down myself.

  “I’m going to go change,” she said, getting to her feet. “Take a look around, you’ll see what I mean.”

  I listened to her
heels click on the hardwood floors. Couldn’t pick up the sound of a door closing anywhere, but that didn’t tell me anything—the walls were thick, and the bedroom was a couple of sound-muffling turns away.

  She’s gone from arm’s-length to “make yourself at home” pretty damn quick, I thought. But there were too many possibilities, dice tumbling in my head.

  I stood up, made a slow circuit of the living room. In one corner, I found a white pillar so smoothly mounted it looked as if it had grown from the floor. On its base, a black-glazed pot sat in a tray of gray pebbles, still gleaming from its last watering.

  Inside the pot was a bonsai tree. Magnificently sculptured, thick-trunked, with a complex branch formation . . . but no fruit, and only the occasional leaf. Dangling from the branches were dozens of tiny glass bottles: some clear, the others in shades of green, blue, red, and brown. Each bottle had markings of some kind—pieces of labels, smears of paint, logos, brand names.

  I’d seen bottle trees before. In a lush back courtyard of a palatial mansion in New Orleans, and a dirt patch that passed for the front yard of a shotgun shack in Mississippi. But a miniature one? In the middle of a New York living room?

  I fanned my hand rapidly in front of the branches, listening hard. The tinkle of the glass was so faint I couldn’t be sure I actually heard it.

  “Like my tree?”

  She was standing behind me, not quite close enough to touch. Wearing a tangerine kimono that came to mid-thigh. Her feet were bare, and her dark hair glistened, as if she had just showered.

  “It’s . . . exquisite,” I said.

  “I’ll bet I’ve been working on it longer than you have on that car of yours,” she said.

  “Working on it? You mean, keeping it—?”

  “No. I made it. I bought the bonsai, but you have to prune them to get the exact shape you want. It’s constant work. The bottles . . . I took a course in glass blowing, and I figured out how to do the rest.”

  “How did you get them all marked?”

  “It’s just a form of miniature,” she said. “Painting, I mean.”

  “Another course you took?”

  “Actually, it’s something I was always good at it. In school, sometimes I’d draw whole pictures no bigger than my fingernail. With a Rapidograph. For some projects, the most important thing is to use the right tool.”

  “Did you want to be an artist? Wait, scratch that. You are an artist. I meant, did you want to make it a career?”

  “Oh, never,” she said. “It was always just for me. From the beginning. Once I make something, with my own hands, I can never let go of it. I’ve always been that way. That’s the hardest part of what I do. I make deals, I put together packages, I devise strategies . . . but I can’t keep them. I have to let go of them. Otherwise, they’re worthless.”

  “I never thought of it like that,” I said. “I guess because I’m no artist. I know some people write books just to be writing them. Because they need to, I guess. For me, that would be the waste. If nobody ever gets to read it . . .”

  “Ah,” she said. “Your book.”

  “I was just—”

  “You like me, don’t you? Pardon my bluntness, it’s just the way I am. The way I have to be, in my business.”

  “Yeah. I do like you.”

  “So this is . . . confusing for you, yes? You want information from me. For your book. And, like you said, it’s not professional to, I don’t know what, get involved with a . . . Oh, that’s right, you said I wouldn’t be a source. Whatever you said I was, it wouldn’t be . . .”

  I took a step toward her, put my hands on her shoulders. I’m not sure how the kimono came off.

  She was slim from the waist up, with small round breasts set far apart, but her hips were heavy enough to be from a different woman. Her thighs touched at their midpoint, and her calves were rounded, without a trace of definition, tapering radically to small ankles and feet.

  “You don’t smell like cigarettes,” she said, her face in my neck. “I wish I knew how you did that. No matter how many showers I take, or what perfume I use, I always—”

  I parted her thighs. She was more moist than wet, tight when I entered.

  The bed was too soft. I stuffed a pillow under her bottom, reached down, and lifted her legs to my shoulders.

  “I hope you don’t think—” she said, then cut herself off as she let go, shuddering deep enough to make me come along with her.

  “I do that sometimes,” she said, later. She was lying on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, smoking. “Talk too much. When I’m nervous. It only happens in . . . social situations, I guess you’d call them. When I’m at work, I guard my words like they were my life savings.”

  “Everybody has pressure-release valves,” I said. “They’re in different places for different people.”

  “Where’s yours?” she said.

  I put my thumb at the top of her buttocks, ran it gently all the way down the cleft until I was back in her sweet spot. “Right there,” I said.

  “That’s a good place.”

  “It’s not a place,” I said. “It’s a person.”

  “I thought they all looked alike in the dark,” she said, teasingly.

  “Looking isn’t what does it for me,” I said, moving my thumb inside her.

  She rolled away from me, then tentatively put one leg over. “Do you mind?”

  For an answer, I shifted my weight, so she was straddling me.

  She made a little noise in her throat.

  “Sit up,” I told her.

  She did it. “Oh!” she said, bouncing a little.

  “You’re not going to take a shower, are you?” she said, much later.

  “I can use the bathroom in the other—”

  “No, I didn’t mean that. I just . . . I just like how you smell. Like you smell now. You can take one before you go, okay?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Cooking is not one of my hobbies,” she said, later, standing in her ultra-kitchen. “And I never took a course.”

  “You still want to go out? There’s a diner on Queens Boulevard that never closes. It’s not the Four Seasons, but it’s got a fifty-page menu—got to have something you’d like.”

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “I already feel like a guy who expected a Happy Meal and got filet mignon,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” she said, smiling. “And you already figured out we’re not going to get any talking done here, right?”

  “I’ll drive,” she said, electronically unlocking her car as we walked toward the stalls.

  “Is there anything under here?” I asked, pointing at the concrete floor.

  “Oh, there’s a basement of some kind. For the . . . power plant, I think they called it. The boiler, things like that. The utility people go down there to read the meters—they’re separate for each unit—and the phones lines are all down there, too.”

  “I figured they had to be somewhere,” I said. “And running power lines up the side of a building like this wouldn’t be too stylish.”

  “Not at all,” she agreed, climbing behind the wheel. She turned the key and flicked the lever into reverse without waiting for the engine to settle down—there was a distinct clunk as the transmission engaged.

  She drove out of the garage, piloting the car with more familiarity than skill.

  “Queens Boulevard, you said, right? I think I know the one you mean. On the south side?”

  “Yep.”

  “We’re not urban pioneers, you know,” she said.

  “I don’t know what you—”

  “Where I live. It’s not like it’s a depressed neighborhood. It’s solid, middle-class. A good, stable population. Low crime rate. Our building may be upscale for the area now, but that won’t be forever. It’s not like those people rehabbing brownstones across a Hundred and Tenth Street, in Manhattan.”

  “And you’re not displacing anyone, converting a factory,” I said.


  “That’s right. The people around us, they were thrilled when they heard what was going on. Instead of an abandoned building where kids can get into trouble, or that the homeless could turn into a squat, they get something that actually improves their property values. Adds to the tax base, too.”

  Why are you telling me this? I thought, but just nodded as if I gave a damn.

  She drove the Audi like an amateur, going too fast between lights so that she ended up stopping for all of them. Or maybe she mostly used the car for those upstate trips she had talked about, wasn’t used to city driving.

  “There it is,” I said, “just up ahead.”

  She made the left, swung into the parking lot. It was relatively empty—well past dinner, and too early for the night owls.

  We walked inside, followed a young woman in a pale green dress toward the back.

  “Would you prefer a booth or a table?”

  “A booth, please,” I said. “As private as possible.”

  “You can take that one there,” she said, pointing. “But this place can fill up just like that,” snapping her fingers.

  “I know it can,” I said, slipping her a ten. “And if we end up surrounded, I know it won’t be your fault.”

  Laura ordered a Greek salad and a glass of red wine. I made do with a plate of chopped liver, potato salad, and coleslaw, French fries on the side. Not Delancey Street quality, but decent enough. And I was hungry.

  “What good would it do him?” she said, out of the blue.

  “Your brother?”

  “Yes. I did a little . . . well, ‘research’ would be too strong a word. Just a little looking around in the . . . genre, I guess you’d call it. The books I found, they’re either about how an innocent man was finally freed, or they’re an attempt to get him freed. Don’t you think that’s accurate?”

  “Pretty much,” I conceded.

  “Well, except for the people still in prison—I mean, anyone could see what good a book would do them—the other ones, the people who were the . . . stars, I guess you’d call them, didn’t they get money, too?”