The old tiled floor, inset with strips of marble, was partly covered with worn Persian rugs, blue, red, pink. Dark, heavy oak furniture stood in front of the fireplace, where real logs burned. On the walls were lamps with ruffled glass shades, one of them cracked, one missing a bulb. Near the elevator was a large Obama poster. HOPE, it read.
Heavy blue velvet drapes and silky swags framed the windows, which looked out on a courtyard. Snow fell on a terrified city watching its money go down the drain. Money was New York’s blood and marrow.
I waited in the lobby for Diaz. Louis Armstrong was singing “Winter Wonderland.” The speakers were by the fireplace. The lyrics took hold of my brain. Only Louis could have made it sound OK. In this fucking festive season, the whole city was a mess of noise, too much traffic, too many tourists, and, God help me, the music.
I wanted to get out of here. Diaz was still with the cashmere coat. The man glanced at me, then asked Diaz something and slipped a bill into his hand.
Every building in New York has its own system, but it’s a seasonal thing, the Christmas cash, the yuletide tip. Leaning against the wall, I saw people dropping envelopes on Diaz, pushing money into his hand. Any way you looked at it, this was the annual payoff, this was how you got your packages faster, your cabs sooner, your kids looked after, your late night activities—parties too loud, people too strange—ignored.
New York, unlike any place on Earth, lives in its buildings as if they’re minute city-states. The people who service them have real power; without them, nothing works.
“Carver Lennox,” said the guy who had been talking to Diaz. “You’re Artie Cohen. Lily’s mentioned you,” he added, though I knew it was Diaz who’d given him my name. “Welcome to the building. Anything you need?” He was plenty self-confident. I figured him for his late thirties.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Christmas party tonight,” he said. “Whole building coming over. Sugar Hill Club. You’d be welcome. Lily can give you the address.”
“I know where it is.”
“Good for you.” He nodded slightly and moved on toward the long hall off the lobby.
Diaz finally strolled over in my direction and said, “Right, I’ll show you the parking spot, man.”
“Just tell me.”
“You won’t find it without me.”
“You only have one elevator here?” I put my hand in my pocket. Diaz watched me get out my wallet. His tone changed.
“Three,” he said. “Two for residents, one for service—we call that one the prayer elevator.” He laughed without much humor. “You gotta say a prayer when you get in it. Just like there’s two sets of stairs, main one, and they got another one back by the garbage chute that’s on every floor.” He paused. “Saw you with Mr. Lennox.”
I waited.
“President of the co-op board,” he said.
“Right.” I knew Diaz would retail anything I said. He was the kind of guy who made a living off gossip. “Can we walk? The elevator looks like it’s stuck.” I extracted a twenty and gave it to him.
“Sure,” said Diaz.
“Where you from?” I asked.
“Cuba,” he said.
Diaz pulled open a heavy door that led to a stairwell. I followed him to the basement.
“You work here every day?”
“I live here, man, or I’m supposed to, down in the basement where they got what they call an apartment. It’s a shit hole. Usually I leave one of the other guys in charge, he don’t mind much, ain’t got nowhere else to go.”
“Who’s that?”
“They call him Goofy, the Goof, ’cause he don’t have all his marbles, you know? He help out. Do some maintenance work.” He grinned. “He’s OK unless you let him play around with them fuse boxes.”
CHAPTER 10
Bare bulbs overhead lit the basement with a creepy glow. The walls were clammy. I could hear water falling somewhere. I was lost.
Diaz had left me in the basement, pointed in the direction of the parking lot beyond the back door and told me to check but if there was a space, then move my car from the front. After that, he turned, went back through the door, and disappeared.
I tried to get my bearings. I found myself in a subterranean maze with only a few windows, high up in the walls and barred with black metal. I tried to trace my steps back to the stairs. I was lost.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice echoed back at me.
I looked into what turned out to be a vast laundry room, with modern washing machines and a couple of ironing boards. Nobody around. Beyond it was another space lined with huge metal racks. Old-fashioned drying racks, rusted now, each with the number of an apartment and underneath a gas heater. Looked like nobody had used them for decades. I slid one out; it rattled with age.
I backed up, opened another door. In front of me was a boiler room the size of a basketball court. Machines clanked and hissed. The door of one of the boilers was open. Inside was the orange flicker of flames.
Another room was full of electrical stuff, skeins of wiring, fuse boxes, weird pieces of equipment, some obviously broken. Next door was space for maintenance equipment, all left helter skelter on the floor—cans of paint, stepladders, tool kits, a pair of work boots splattered with pink paint.
“Hello?”
The whole basement was like the guts of some ancient ocean liner, the Titantic gone to seed, the crew absent.
It was freezing. I could just hear the sound of traffic over my head. I must be under the street, I thought. There were sounds coming from every direction, the clank of machinery, voices, animals—I heard a dog yap—all echoing through the long halls.
I passed a row of doors, each one marked with an apartment number. I rattled a few of the doorknobs, and when one opened, I almost fell into the long narrow space onto something that looked, in the dim light, like a body before I realized it was only a dressmaker’s dummy.
I reeled back, stumbled to my feet, and laughed at myself. I was a cop with a gun and I was scared of a dummy. Heard the walls laugh back. As I backed out, voices came from the next room, voices arguing, but when I banged on the wall there was only silence.
Storage rooms, I thought. Servants quarters, maybe, once upon a time.
When I got back to the main corridor, there was only a faint oyster-colored light that came through those windows with the bars like a prison. There was no way out as far as I could see.
And then, suddenly, from the corner of my eye, I saw something scamper away down the corridor, something small and hunched and wearing red. It could have been an animal, but what was the red? Was it red? A rat in a coat? A cat in a hat? Was it Diaz? The Goof?
There was somebody down here who didn’t belong, somebody living in this basement, someone, or something, who ran like an animal, ran when I got near.
My cell phone didn’t work in the basement.
I was confused. I went into a room and realized somebody lived there—there was a cot, pile of clothes, jeans, dirty T-shirts, a jacket. Plastic sheets were hung under the ceiling. Water dripped. Something scampered on the floor again; this time it was a rat, a rat that ran over my shoe, brushed my ankle, and ran under the bed.
Was I hallucinating? On edge because of Lily, because she was somehow convinced she’d killed an old Russian on the fourteenth floor? Because of an old doctor who had been friends with the dead woman and who believed in assisted suicide? Call it assisted suicide. Call it killing people.
Lily seemed to know them all, seemed to have made a life in the building with them. In the snapshots on the dead woman’s mantel, there had been three that included Lily: Lily with the old doctor, Lily with Simonova, the dead Russian, Lily with the young cop—Radcliff—his arm around her.
I don’t like closed spaces. I couldn’t see a way out. Was I losing my mind in this basement in Harlem?
“Hello?” I started to jog down the long hallway. “Hello?”
There had been times the past year when I’
d thought I was losing it. After Valentina was murdered; after I went to Moscow to find her father, my best friend, Tolya; after I made a deal with a bunch of creeps to get him free; after I got him home and thought he was going to die from a massive heart attack.
During the summer, I’d thought I was going crazy. I had found myself laughing at the wrong things, and more than once I just burst into tears. It was July, maybe August, when I’d started coming uptown, sitting drinking at the Sugar Hill Club, listening to the music and hoping Lily might show up. But she never had, not until election night.
Now, suddenly, there was a faint, long, low howl in the basement, or was it just a noise from the laundry room, one of the machines giving up the ghost?
I began to laugh again—nerves, fear—and then I started to run, chasing the thing, jogging toward it as it receded, running faster and faster until it was out of sight. I ran until I almost crashed into a young woman. She was picking up laundry she had spilled all over the concrete floor.
“Thank you,” she said when I helped her stuff the damp clothes into the yellow plastic basket she was holding. She thanked me, but she looked nervous. Her skin was very black, she wore a white shirt, a pink sweater, and jeans.
“I’ll take your stuff upstairs if you want.”
“It’s fine, thank you again,” she said. She had a French accent.
Somewhere a dog barked. She cringed.
“What is it?”
“There are djinn in this building and they take this form, of black dogs.”
“What?”
“Djinn,” she said again. “What you call evil spirits,” she explained, just as Virgil Radcliff appeared. He greeted the woman in French; she hurried away. “Marie Louise,” he said. “She’s from Mali.”
“She believes that stuff?”
“You think it’s stranger than believing, say, that Jesus was the result of virgin birth, then turned up again after he was dead? I mean, come on, Artie, religion, witchcraft, whatever. All the same.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I parked out back. Easier to get in through the basement. I left something upstairs.”
“At Lily’s?”
“Right.”
“The woman from Mali lives here?”
“Marie Louise cleans here for several of the inmates,” he said. “Did I say inmates? Residents, I mean, since you were asking. And you, Artie, you’re down here why, exactly?”
“You want to show me where you park?”
“Sure,” he said. “You got lost, right? Happened to me; it’s like an underground maze here. Even a cop can scare the shit out of himself, Artie, if he doesn’t know his way around.”
As we walked, Radcliff talked pretty much nonstop, telling me about the building as we passed spaces that had once housed shops, a cafeteria. One of the huge spaces had an empty swimming pool with blue-tiled walls.
He told me there’d been a hair salon where the owner ran a numbers racket. “You hear his ghost still hangs out down here,” said Radcliff.
“Squatters down here?”
“Probably. You can get in through the courtyard.” Suddenly Radcliff stopped. He looked up. So I did, too. Carver Lennox was coming toward us carrying a large rectangular box.
“Virgil, good to see you, my brother,” said Carver, stopping so he could put out his hand, which Radcliff shook briefly. He wore round horn-rim glasses. His mouth was full of expensive pearly veneers. He was an ugly young man, but he’d had himself polished and buffed, and he dressed with style. “Came down to get some wine out of my cellar. I keep a nice little wine fridge in my storage room,” he added. “Hello again,” he said to me. “You guys working on something here?”
“Just visiting,” said Virgil.
“Hey, listen, can I show you something? I think you’ll like this.”
Virgil shrugged.
From the box, Carver removed a heavy bronze plaque. He held it up with two hands. On it were the words: THE BARACK OBAMA APARTMENTS.
“Nice, right?” said Lennox. “Good name change, don’t you think?”
“How do the residents feel?” said Virgil.
“A few of the older ones think we should keep the name as it is, that this is a landmarked building—it is, you know—and it’s wrong to change, but they’ll come around, you know? Most people think the president-elect is a little more important than a dead musician, don’t you agree?”
Virgil kept quiet.
“I know you do, Virgil. Of course you do,” he said, putting the plaque back in the box. “Yeah, and say hi to Lily,” he added. The low, polished voice had a tinge of, what was it? Menace? No, it was just a sense that Carver wanted his way and always got it. That he knew everything that went on in the building and that he was in charge. “Well, don’t forget the party tonight, Virgil.” Lennox’s voice was bland now, cool and smooth as pudding. “You, too, Artie. It will be a special occasion. Good food, plenty to drink.”
“You must be doing well,” said Radcliff.
“Surely, I’m a lucky man,” he said with a cocky smile. “Well, then, see you, my brother, I have to get along to a party at the Princeton Club first.”
“Goldman Sachs,” said Radcliff after the guy had gone. Said it like it was a curse.
“What kind of name’s Carver?”
“Named after George Washington Carver. Big African American hero. Revolutionized agriculture, cotton, back in the last century. He was like this Renaissance man, or so many people thought back in the day.”
“You don’t like it that he wants to change the building’s name?”
“It’s the high-handed way he just does what he wants. People here love Obama, of course they do, but they’re old, Artie, since you’re asking, and they don’t like change.”
“What’s Lennox’s deal with this building?”
“Says he wants to return the place to its former glory, which is why he’s trying to get his hands on as many apartments as he can, however he can.”
“Where does he live?”
“Up on the fourteenth floor, one of the big penthouse apartments up there with Mrs. Simonova, the Hutchisons, Lily.” Radcliff’s phone rang. “Give me a minute,” he said and wandered away to the other side of the hall, his back to me, talking into his phone. He turned. He had a cigarette in his mouth. He looked up at a No Smoking sign and shrugged.
When he finished his call, Radcliff led me toward the back door of the building.
“I was wondering, how come nobody knows Simonova is dead yet?” I said. “How come nobody stopped by her apartment if they’re all so cozy?”
“Yeah, I was asking myself the same damn thing, Artie. Usually, they’re all on the job, you know, checking up on each other, and if one of them even gets a cold, Lionel Hutchison is right there.” He paused. “It’s like Grand Central station up on that floor,” said Radcliff. “Everybody in everybody’s business. They visit, they listen for each other, soon as they hear footsteps in the hall, they pop out of their doors, you know? You stand there waiting for the elevator and somebody opens the door and leans out and says, ‘Oh, hello, I was just looking for my cat.’ There are no cats on the fourteenth floor,” Radcliff said. “Yak yak yak in the hall. The building’s their life. They can talk your fucking ear off.” It was the most pissed off I’d seen Radcliff yet.
“You’ve been in all the apartments?”
“I got asked by the Hutchisons for coffee and cake a few times, and every time Celestina Hutchison would mention they were expecting a visit from a niece or a granddaughter, and I knew she made me for a good catch, and she’s thinking, What’s he doing with that white woman who’s older than him?”
“Lily.”
“Your business is their gossip, Artie, since you were asking.”
“They make you nervous?”
“Cranky,” said Radcliff. “The only thing you need to know is if anyone dies, Carver Lennox will be waiting to snap up the apartment. He wants the building; he wants to run
it. He wants it for the money he can make and for the power. Fucking Goldman Sachs.” He came to a heavy door and pushed it open.
“Where are we going?”
“Place to park, isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Right.”
“Out back,” said Radcliff. “It’s for the help.”
CHAPTER 11
Christmas.” Virgil Radcliff looked at a party supply truck with a pink elephant on it parked out back of the Armstrong. “I wish it was over already,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
“Doesn’t matter. Listen, you can park out here.” He gestured to an area surrounded by eight-foot metal fencing topped with barbed wire, where half a dozen cars were parked. It was cold as hell, snow falling hard.
“Where’s your car, Artie?”
“By the front door.”
“Come on, I’ll go with you, help you with the wrath of Diaz. He probably already called the precinct to give you a ticket. He’s a creep. He has another guy he hangs with, sometimes helps him out.”
“This guy he calls the Goof?”
“No, that’s just some poor kid who hangs around. The other guy is his pal from Cuba. Name of Fidel Castro, named for El Jefe. They spend most of their time nosing around the tenants, or playing cards in the basement and planning how they’ll go back when things change in Cuba, and how the Mets are gonna win next year.”
“Fat chance.” I wondered why Radcliff was being so accommodating. Maybe he was trying to make up for his having Lily instead of me.
We headed for the street, went past a gas station and around toward the front of the building.
“I’ve been thinking, Artie, we’re both a little uneasy about Simonova, right? So why don’t you take another look, if you feel like. You have the time?”
“Sure. But how come? You suddenly don’t buy she just died?”
“You want to look around, I’m with you, I’ll back you up,” was all he said. “I won’t get in your face if you want to do that.”
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