“Yeah? Around here?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How long back?”
“On Christmas Eve.”
“On Christmas Eve for this?” Lugo winces. “That is cold. Who the hell would . . . You remember who collared you?”
“Uh-huh,” the kid mutters, then looks Lugo in the face. “You.”
An hour later, with the kid on ice back at the Eighth, good for another hour or two’s worth of gun-wrangling, which would probably go nowhere, and a few more hours’ worth of processing for Daley, the arresting officer, Daley good and taken care of, they were out again looking to get one for Scharf, a last-call drive-around before settling on one of the local parks for an if-all-else-fails post-midnight curfew rip.
Turning south off Houston onto Ludlow for the fiftieth time that night, Daley sensed something in the chain-link shadows below Katz’s Deli, nothing he could put his finger on, but . . . “Donnie, go around.”
Lugo whipped the taxi in a four-block square: Ludlow to Stanton, to Essex, to Houston, creeping left onto Ludlow again, just past Katz’s, only to come abreast of a parked car full of slouched-down plainclothes from Borough Narcotics, the driver eyeballing them out of there: This is our fishing hole.
ONE
WHISTLE
At ten in the morning, Eric Cash, thirty-five, stepped out of his Stanton Street walk-up, lit a cigarette, and headed off to work.
When he had first moved down here eight years ago, he was seized with the notion of the Lower East Side as haunted, and on rare days like today, a simple walk like this could still bring back his fascination, traces of the nineteenth-century Yiddish boomtown everywhere: in the claustrophobic gauge of the canyonlike streets with their hanging garden of ancient fire escapes, in the eroded stone satyr heads leering down between pitted window frames above the Erotic Boutique, in the faded Hebrew lettering above the old socialist cafeteria turned Asian massage parlor turned kiddie-club hot spot; all of it and more lying along Eric’s daily four-block commute. But after nearly a decade in the neighborhood, even on a sun-splashed October morning like this, all of this ethnohistorical mix ’n’ match was, much like himself, getting old.
He was an upstate Jew five generations removed from here, but he knew where he was, he got the joke; the laboratorio del gelati, the Tibetan hat boutiques, 88 Forsyth House with its historically restored cold-water flats not all that much different from the unrestored tenements that surrounded it, and in his capacity as manager of Café Berkmann, the flagship of come-on-down, on the rare days when the Beast would take one of its catnaps, he enjoyed being part of the punch line.
But what really drew him to the area wasn’t its full-circle irony but its nowness, its right here and nowness, which spoke to the true engine of his being, a craving for making it made many times worse by a complete ignorance as to how this “it” would manifest itself.
He had no particular talent or skill, or what was worse, he had a little talent, some skill: playing the lead in a basement-theater production of The Dybbuk sponsored by 88 Forsyth House two years ago, his third small role since college, having a short story published in a now-defunct Alphabet City literary rag last year, his fourth in a decade, neither accomplishment leading to anything; and this unsatisfied yearning for validation was starting to make it near impossible for him to sit through a movie or read a book or even case out a new restaurant, all pulled off increasingly by those his age or younger, without wanting to run face-first into a wall.
Still two blocks from work, he stopped short as he came up on the rear of a barely creeping procession that extended west on Rivington to a point farther than he could see.
Whatever this was, it had nothing to do with him; the people were overwhelmingly Latino, most likely from the unrehabbed walk-ups below Delancey and the half-dozen immortal housing projects that cradled this, the creamy golden center of the Lower East Side, like a jai alai paddle. Everyone seemed to be dressed up as if for church or some kind of religious holiday, including a large number of kids.
He couldn’t imagine this having anything to do with Berkmann’s either, and in fact the line not only went directly past the café, but solidly and obliviously blocked the entrance; Eric watching as two separate parties gingerly tried to break through then quickly gave up, stopping off to eat somewhere else.
Peering through one of the large side windows, he saw that the room was uncharacteristically near empty, the midmorning skeleton staff outnumbering the customers. But what really got his gut jumping was the sight of the owner, his boss, Harry Steele, sitting alone in the back at a deuce, his perennial sad man’s face shrunken by agitation to the size of an apple.
At least from where Eric stood now he could finally see where the line was headed: the Sana’a 24/7, a mini-mart run by two Yemeni brothers, three blocks west of Berkmann’s at the corner of Rivington and Eldridge.
His first thought was that they must have had a huge Powerball winner the day before, or maybe the state lottery had climbed into the hundreds of millions again, but, no, this was something else.
He followed the line west past the fresh ruins of the most recently collapsed synagogue, past the adjoining People’s Park, until he got to the corner directly across the street from the Sana’a, the shadows cast by its tattered two-year-old GRAND OPENING pennants playing across his face.
“Hey, Eric . . .” A young Chinese uniform, Fenton Ma, working the intersection, nodded his way. “Nuts, right?”
“What is it?”
“Mary’s in there,” Ma said, getting bumped by the ripple effect of the crowd he was holding back.
“Mary who.”
“Mary the Virgin. She showed up in the condensation on one of the freezer doors last night. Word travels fast around here, no?” Taking another bump from behind.
Then Eric saw a second crowd shaping up across the street from the one at the side windows: a crowd watching the crowd, this crew mostly young, white, and bemused.
“She’s he-ere,” one of them called out.
Eric was always good at weaseling his way through a mob, had plenty of practice just trying to get to the reservations pulpit at Berkmann’s dozens of times a day, so he was able to pop into the narrow deli without anyone behind him calling him out. Directly inside, one of the Yemeni brothers, Nazir, tall and bony with an Adam’s apple like a tomahawk, was playing cashier-doorman, standing with a fat stack of singles in one hand, the other palm-up, fingertips flexing towards the incoming pilgrims.
“Say hello to Mary,” his voice singsong and brisk, “she loves you very much.”
The Virgin was a sixteen-inch-high gourd-shaped outline molded in frost on the glass doors fronting the beer and soda shelves, its smoothly tapered top slightly inclined to one side above its broader lower mass, reminding him vaguely of all the art-history Marys tilting their covered heads to regard the baby in their arms, but really, it was kind of a stretch.
The people kneeling around Eric held up photo phones and camcorders, left offerings of grocery-store bouquets, candles, balloons—one saying YOU’RE SO SPECIAL—handwritten notes, and other tokens, but mainly they just stared expressionless, some with clasped hands, until the second Yemeni brother, Tariq, stepped up, said, “Mary says bye now,” and ushered everyone out through the rear delivery door to clear space for the next group.
By the time Eric made it around to the front of the store again, Fenton Ma had been spelled by an older cop, his shield reading LO PRESTO.
“Can I ask you something?” Eric said lightly, not knowing this guy. “Have you seen her in there?”
“Who, the Virgin?” Lo Presto looked at him neutrally. “Depends what you mean by ‘seen.’ ”
“You know. Seen.”
“Well, I’ll tell you.” He looked off, palming his chest pocket for a cigarette. “About eight this morning? A couple of guys from the Ninth Squad went in there, you know, curious? And kneeling right in front of that thing is Servisio Tucker, had killed his wife up on Avenue D maybe six mont
hs ago. Now, these guys had been turning that neighborhood upside down looking for him ever since, right? And this morning alls they did was waltz on in and there he was, on his knees. He looks right up at them, tears in his eyes, puts out his hands for cuffs, and says, ‘OK. Good. I’m ready.’ ”
“Huh.” Eric entranced, experiencing a fleeting rush of optimism.
“So . . .” Lo Presto finally fired up, exhaled luxuriously. “Did I see her? Who’s to say. But if what I just told you isn’t a fucking miracle, I don’t know what is.”
On bright quiet mornings like this, when Berkmann’s was empty, delivered from the previous night’s overpacked boozy freneticness, the place was an air palace, and there was nowhere better to be in this neighborhood than sitting in a lacquered wicker chair immersed in the serene luxury of a café au lait and The New York Times, sunlight splashing off the glazed ecru tiles, the racks of cryptically stencil-numbered wine bottles, the industrial-grade chicken-wired glass and partially desilvered mirrors, all found in various warehouses in New Jersey by the owner, Harry Steele: restaurant dressed as theater dressed as nostalgia. For Eric personally, the first few moments of coming in here every day were like the first few moments inside a major-league ballpark: getting that whooshy rush of space and geometric perfection, commuting as he did from a three-room dumbbell flat with one of its two windows overlooking the building’s interior airshaft, which was supposed to provide cross ventilation but in fact had served, since the year of the McKinley assassination, as a glorified garbage chute.
But with nothing to do this morning but rerack the newspapers on their faux-aged wooden dowels or lean against his pulpit, shaking like a flake from drinking coffee after coffee served up by the two probationary bartenders, even that momentary pleasure was denied him. In his jumpy boredom he took a moment to study the new hires behind the stick: a green-eyed black kid with dreadlocks named Cleveland and a white kid—Spike? Mike?—who was leaning on the zinc bartop and talking to a chubby friend who had successfully breached the procession. This friend, Eric could tell, was even more hungover than he was.
People said that after fourteen years of on-and-off working for Harry Steele, Eric had come to look like him; both had those dour baggy eyes like Serge Gainsbourg or Lou Reed, the same indifferent physique; the difference being that with Harry Steele, this lack of physical allure just added to the mystique of his golden touch.
A waitress from Grouchie’s who had all seven dwarfs tattooed in miniature tramping up the inside of her thigh had once told Eric that people were either cats or dogs, and that he was most definitely a dog, compulsively trying to anticipate everyone’s needs, a shitty thing to say to someone you just slept with, but fair enough he guessed, because right now, despite his constant “I am more than this” mantra, his boss’s helpless exasperation had him humming with the desire to act.
At least Steele was no longer alone, sharing his small table now with his dealer, Paulie Shaw, a sharp-faced ratter whose alert eyes, spit-fire delivery, and generally tense aura reminded Eric of too many shadow players from back in the shame days. Passing on a fifth cup of coffee, he watched as Paulie opened an aluminum attaché case and from its velvet, molded interior removed a number of rectangular glass photo negatives, each in its own protective sheath.
“ ‘Ludlow Street Sweatshop,’ ” holding it up by its edges. “ ‘Blind Beggar, 1888.’ ‘Passing the Growler.’ ‘Bandits Roost’—that one right there, as I told you on the phone, worth all the rest combined. And last but not least, ‘Mott Street Barracks.’ ”
“Fantastic,” Steele murmured, eyes once again straying to the milagro line, to his empty café.
“Each one personally hand-tinted by Riis himself for his lectures,” Paulie said. “The man was light-years ahead of his time, total multimedia, had sixty to a hundred of these fading in and out of each other on a huge screen accompanied by music? Those uptown dowagers had to be crying their balls off.”
“OK,” Steele said, half listening.
“OK?” Paulie ducked down to find his eyes. “For the, for what we, for the number we discussed?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Steele’s knees pumping under the table.
The hungover kid sitting at the bar abruptly laughed at something his friend said, the rude sound of it bouncing off the tiled walls.
“Mike, right?” Eric tilted his chin at the probationary bartender.
“Ike,” he said easily, still leaning forward on the zinc like he owned the place.
He had a shaved head and a menagerie of retro tattoos inside both forearms—hula girls, mermaids, devil heads, panthers—but his smile was as clean as a cornfield; the kid, Eric thought, like a poster boy for the neighborhood.
“Ike, go see if they want anything.”
“You got it, boss.”
“Chop-chop,” said his friend.
As Ike came from behind the bar and headed for the back deuce, Paulie pulled up the velvet interior of his booty case to reveal a second layer of goods, from which he took out a large burnt-orange paperback.
“You’re an Orwell man, right?” he said to Steele. “Road to Wigan Pier, Victor Gollancz Left Wing Book Club galleys, 1937. What you’re looking at right now doesn’t even exist.”
“Just the Riis plates.” Steele’s eyes yet again straying to that barely moving line. “I cannot fucking believe this,” he blurted to the room at large.
“How about Henry Miller,” Paulie said quickly, burrowing into his case. “You into Henry Miller?”
Ike’s shadow fell across the table, Paulie half twisting around and rearing back to eyeball him. “Can I help you with something?”
“You guys want anything?” Ike asked.
“We’re done,” Steele said.
“Henry Miller.” Paulie pulled out a hardback. “First-edition Air-Conditioned Nightmare, pristine wrappers, and get this, inscribed to Nelson, A, Rockefeller.”
Out on Rivington, an argument broke out in Spanish, someone being bumped into the window of the café with a muffled thud.
“This neighborhood,” Steele said brightly, looking directly at Eric for the first time this deader-than-dead morning. “A little too much mix, not quite enough match, yeah?” Then he turned to his dealer: “How are you fixed for splinters of the True Cross?”
“For what?”
And with that, Eric, the boy-faced dog, was out the door.
A block from the restaurant, his heart thundering as he wondered exactly how he’d go about doing what had to be done, someone called, “Yo, hold up,” and he turned to see Ike walking towards him, lighting a cigarette.
“You going to see the Virgin?”
“Sort of,” Eric said.
“I’m on break, can I come with you?”
Eric hesitated, wondering if a witness would make it harder or easier, but then Ike just fell in step.
“Eric, right?”
“Right.”
“Ike Marcus,” offering his hand. “So, Eric, what do you do?”
“What do you mean, what do I do?” Eric knowing exactly what he meant.
“I mean other than . . .” The kid at least quick-witted enough to cut himself off.
“I write,” Eric said, hating to tell people, but just wanting to get them both off the hook.
“Oh yeah?” Ike said gratefully. “Me too.”
“Good,” Eric said briskly, thinking, Who asked.
His only viable project right now was a screenplay, five thousand down, twenty more on completion, anything about the Lower East Side in its heyday, Aka Jewday, commissioned by a customer from Berkmann’s, a former Alphabet City squatter turned real estate gorilla, who now wanted to be an auteur; everybody wanting to be an auteur . . .
“Are you from here originally?” Ike asked.
“Everybody’s from here originally,” Eric said, then, coming off it: “Upstate.”
“No kidding. Me too.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Riverdale?” Then, grabbing Eric’
s arm as he put on the brakes: “Oh, check this out.”
The roof of the massive synagogue had caved in just two nights before, leaving only the three-story back wall with its lightly damaged twin Stars of David, shafts of sunlight streaming through the chinks. In the lee of that wall, the cantor’s table, Torah ark, a menorah with the spread of a bull elk, and four silver candleholders still stood like props on a stage, an intact row of six pews further enhancing the suggestion of an open-air theater. All else was reduced to an undulating field of rubble, Eric and Ike pausing on their way to the mini-mart to stand on the roped-off sidewalk with a gaggle of kufied deli men, off-duty sweatshop workers, and kids of various nations all cutting school.
“Check this out,” Ike said again, nodding to a large Orthodox in a sweaty suit and fedora, his ear glued to his cell phone as he picked his way through the hilly debris to rescue the tattered remains of prayer books, piling loose and torn pages beneath bricks and chunks of plaster to keep them from blowing away. Two teenagers, one light-skinned, the other Latino, were following him and stuffing the salvaged sheets into pillowcases.
“Looks like one of those modern stage sets for Shakespeare, you know?” Ike said. “Brutus and Pompey running around in full camo with Tec-9s.”
“More like Godot.”
“How much you think he’s paying those two kids?”
“As little as he can get away with.”
A tall young guy wearing a kelly green yarmulke emblazoned with the New York Jets logo stood next to them writing furiously in a steno pad. Eric had the uncomfortable impression that he was taking down their conversation.
“Who are you writing for?” Ike asked without edge.
“The Post,” he said.
“For real?”
“Yup.”
“Excellent.” Ike grinned and actually shook his hand.
This kid, Eric thought, was a trip.
“So what happened here, man?” Ike said.
Lush Life Page 2
