“Half the country’s from the neighborhood.”
“True dat,” Beck allowed, taking a stool, lightly slapping a nervous riffle on the bartop, then signaling to the new bartender, who at first simply gave him the once-over as he continued to wipe a few wineglasses, then stepped to him as if picking his way barefoot through broken glass.
And Eric just flipped, flinging himself nearly halfway across the zinc. “Can I speak to you?”
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” the bartender said as if Eric was out of line.
Cleveland, the other bartender, the dreadlocked one, stepped in to take Eric’s order. “What you need, boss.”
Eric waved him away. “You.” Pointing at the new guy, now drawing a draft beer for the reporter. “Right now.”
“May I finish serving this first?”
Eric waited, embracing the stall to stoke his fury.
“What’s your name again?”
“Eric,” the bartender said.
“Eric, huh? No kidding, so’s mine. So what’s your problem, Eric, you think you’re destined for better things?”
“Excuse me?”
“How utterly, utterly unique.”
“Excuse me?”
“Let me tell you something. This right here isn’t about researching your next role. It’s a job. In fact, we’re paying you. And I’m gonna tell you something else. It’s proactive. Customers don’t come to a bar for the drinks, they come for the bartender. Any bartender worth a shit knows this, but you, you stand there, got a one-word answer for everything: huh, uh, duh, yes, no, maybe. You make people feel like losers, like they’re your punishment from a jealous God or something. I swear, Cleveland?” Nodding to the Rastahead at the far end now. “The guy makes a martini like he’s got hooks for hands, but he’s twice the bartender you are because he works it. Everybody’s a regular with that guy, and he never stops moving, never comes off like this gig is some demeaning station of the cross on his way to the Obies. I mean, watching the two of you back here tonight? It’s like a blur and a boulder. And to be honest, right now even with the traffic the way it is, I’d rather cash you out on the spot, have him work a solo, or draft one of the waiters or even come back there myself than let you pull this ‘I’d rather be in rehearsals’ crap ten more minutes, you hear me?”
“Yeah.” The guy had gone pale.
“I’m sorry, say what?” Cupping an ear.
“Yes.” Wide-eyed. “I hear you.”
“Excellent. Just remember. No energy? No gig. Talk. Smile. Do it. You’re hanging by a thread.”
“Can I say one thing?” Half-raising his hand.
Eric waited.
“I happen to be in med school.”
“Same difference,” Eric said, thinking, Sort of, yeah, no, most definitely, even worse, I happen to be, like Little Lord Fauntleroy, Eric turning away, then seeing Yarmulke head down the bar, obviously having overheard the whole thing, fuck him too, then bumping into that waitress again, starry-eyed Stella, Eric fending off an anarchic pulse of desire. “Now what,” he said. “We have a third ass-grabber on our hands?”
She reared back as if slapped. “I just came to thank you for the table switch,” giving him a flush-faced once-over. “It’s working out well.”
“Good,” he said, waited until she turned away, then returned to the coal cellar.
One of few remaining pre-tenement rookeries in the city, 24 East Broadway was squat and rambling, on a block filled with similarly ancient and amorphous buildings, the door to the street at this late hour kept open via a strip of duct tape blocking the lock.
Matty and Yolonda began trudging up the stairs to the top floor with a copy of an assault complaint signed by the victim Paul Ng, which had been filed three weeks earlier; two dark men and a gun, three blocks from the Marcus homicide and at roughly the same time of night. Ng, a Fujianese restaurant worker less than two years in-country, had made the complaint, Matty guessed, most likely against his will, but had no choice in the matter because he had almost been run over by Quality of Life as he stood dazed in the middle of Madison Street five minutes after the deed, his pants pockets turned out like elephant ears and blood dripping from a corner of his pistol-whipped mouth. If Matty had to guess what happened next that night, he’d say Ng had spent half an hour cruising the neighborhood in the back of the bogus taxi looking for the perps, a fruitless exercise because one dark-skinned kid looked like another to him, the cops themselves probably halfhearted about it too given their own experience with dozens of other Paul Ngs in that backseat.
Then, Matty still guessing here, as Quality of Life headed back to the precinct to hand him over to the detectives, Ng probably really began to wish they’d never come across him, maybe because of a sketchy immigrant status, or because he lived in an illegal squat, or because of bad associations with cops back home, but most likely in addition to some or all of the above, because the time spent reporting the stealing of money was time away from the making of money, which was the only realistic way to start recouping your losses, so . . .
But Matty was only guessing.
The top floor of 24 East Broadway had only one apartment, this door slightly ajar too, Matty looking at Yolonda, then pushing it wide as he knocked and droned, “Hello, police,” his ID curled in his hand. The first thing they saw stepping inside was a rough pyramid of men’s shoes, maybe two dozen pairs, either black slip-ons or plastic shower clogs stacked beneath a department-store still life of buckshot pheasants and a powder horn. No one came to the door, but Asian pop drifted from down the hall.
“Hello, police,” another desultory shout-out, and then they began walking towards the music. The place was a modified railroad flat, basically a long central corridor flanked by rooms, most of which had been divided and divided again with Sheetrock into cells, each with a foam mattress topped by a twist of sheets, save for two larger rooms, one on either side of the hallway, both bare of furniture other than what looked like extrawide bookshelves bracketed into the walls in vertical stacks of three. On a few of these planks men were either smoking in the dark or asleep, each man still awake slowly rolling to face the wall as the detectives shadowed their doorway. The railroad ended in a wider kitchen, where four other men were sitting around a table eating something nesting in tiny shells and a broccoli-like green off sheets of newspaper, and a fifth was singing into a microphone while facing the monitor of a karaoke machine. On a Formica counter behind the dining table sat a fish tank holding a single carp so large that it couldn’t turn around, Matty thinking the fucking thing must have lost its mind years ago.
“How you doing,” he said, unnecessarily flashing his ID.
The men nodded in greeting, as if two police just strolling through the flat unannounced was business as usual, then turned their attention back to the singer. Only one short-limbed, compact guy, beaming and vigorous, flew out of the kitchen and returned with two more chairs. “Sit,” pointing at the seats, then gesturing for them to check out the pipes on the guy with the mike. “Sit.”
“Not now,” Matty said, slow and loud. “We need to talk to Paul Ng.” Then, “He’s not in trouble.”
The karaoke song came to an end, the guy with the mike passing it to one of the others.
“Sit,” the energetic guy repeated, still beaming like the sun.
“Where’s Paul, Ng,” Matty blared flatly.
“No.”
“No what.”
The next man began his song, which sounded like a Chinese cover of Roy Orbison’s “Dream Baby.”
“No what.”
“Maybe you’re pronouncing it wrong,” Yolonda offered.
“No, I’m not. That’s how that kid Fenton says it.” Then blaring, “Paul Eng.”
“Jesus, you don’t have to yell,” Yolonda snapped, “they’re not deaf.”
“Fellas, stay with me on this. Who’s Paul Ng.”
The men had no reaction except to look from the singer to the cops with expectant grins a
s if to see whether they dug him.
“What’s your name?” Yolonda asked the chair carrier.
“Me?” The guy laughed. “No.”
“No? Your name is No?”
“Huh?”
“Dr. No,” Yolonda said.
“What’s his name.” Matty pointed to the singer.
“Good, huh?”
Matty turned to Yolonda. “Are they playing us?”
She shrugged, squinted at the fish.
“Look, we’re gonna come back and come back and come back until . . .”
“OK.” The chair carrier waved goodbye, still smiling.
“Let’s just come back with Bobby Oh,” Yolonda said.
“Oh’s Korean.”
“OK. We’ll bring that kid Fenton, then.”
They left the apartment without another word, but before they could start down the stairs, that compact chair carrier came out into the hallway and, grabbing Matty’s arm, beckoned for them to follow him up the short stairs that led to the roof door, the landing up there wedge-shaped beneath the slant of the eaves and littered with discarded vials, matches, burnt spoons, and hypes. Standing a few steps above the police, the guy then went into a brisk, efficient mime of shooting up, stabbing a forearm with his thumb, saying “Psssht!” then acting out the woozy stagger of some kind of bellicose junkie. “Arrgh! You fight me! Pssht! Arrgh!”
“What the hell does he expect,” Matty said, “keeping the street door open like that.”
“You come more!” the guy said.
“Yeah, we’ll keep an eye out,” Yolonda said mildly. “Have a good night, now.”
Steven Boulware walked into Berkmann’s by himself and with an air of peripheral alertness headed directly for the bar.
Eric hadn’t thought about the guy since the murder. Disoriented, a little frightened even, he had no idea what to say or how to act. As Boulware brushed past the pulpit, however, it became apparent that he didn’t recognize Eric at all.
But he could bank on people recognizing him, his face having been on the cover or in the first few pages of all the dailies hanging on the café’s newspaper dowels. Both the local TV stations and CNN had been replaying sound bites from his earlier presser all evening.
Standing sideways at the packed bar, he signaled for a drink from Cleveland, Eric seeing the recognition come into the bartender’s eyes, seeing the recognition of the recognition come into Boulware’s eyes, the quickening in his face, Boulware hunkering in for a gratifying evening.
Waiting until Boulware was served, Eric left his post and signaled for Cleveland to come to the short end of the bar.
“Listen to me.” Laying a hand on his arm. “That guy? From the news? Whenever he’s close to finished, serve him up another. Don’t wait. I don’t want him to have to ask for a drink or see an empty glass in front of him all night.”
“You want me to say it’s on you?”
“No.”
“All right.” Cleveland nodding, almost smiling, misinterpreting Eric’s anonymous largesse.
Matty was leaning against a car hood a few doors down from the urban still-life that had blossomed in front of 27 Eldridge. The shrine was a few days old now and threatened to span the width of the sidewalk from stoop to curb.
The offerings, as far as he could tell, represented three of the worlds that made up the universe down here: Latino; Young, Gifted, and White; and Geezer/Crackpot/Hippie—no word from the Chinese.
There were dozens of lit botanica candles, a scattering of coins on a velvet cloth, a reed cross laid flat on a large round stone, a CD player running Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” on an endless loop, a videocassette of Mel Gibson’s The Passion still sealed in its box, a paperback of Black Elk Speaks, some kind of unidentifiable white pelt, a few petrified-looking joints, bags of assorted herbs, coils of still-smoldering incense that gave off competing scents, and a jar of olive oil. Taped to the brick directly above all this was the front-page headshot of a smiling Isaac Marcus from the first day’s New York Post, the headline his now notorious last words: NOT TONIGHT MY MAN (Matty had no idea who fed that to the papers), alongside of which someone had cryptically put up an old tabloid photo of Willie Bosket, the fifteen-year-old urban boogie boy of the 1970s who famously killed someone on the subway “just to see what it felt like,” and next to that, a homemade handwritten rant, “Amerikkka’s war on poverty is a war AGAINST the Poor,” the rest of it illegible. There were even memorial tokens anchored to the tenement facade from flagpole-like riggings so that they dangled directly above the murder spot: an open umbrella suspended upside down like a buttercup in which nestled a teddy bear and a beanbag eagle; and a home-crafted tubular-steel mobile whose desultory clanging on this nearly windless night truly sounded like mourning.
Matty was here on his own time, on the off chance someone known to the squad would show up to admire or fret over the results of his handiwork; or maybe he’d overhear something, a street tag, a rumor; all serious long shots, but he could already sense that this would become a nightly ritual until the shrine dissolved maybe a week from now.
Most people passing by couldn’t help but stop, although usually for only a few seconds, their comments equally divided into sad and sarcastic; the local male teens the worst, as if this whole display was a throw-down challenge for them to be instantly hard-ass funny in front of their friends. Some people truly lingered, their faces pinched with sadness, but no one of interest to him; middle-aged Latinas, a few of the twentyish newcomers.
“What this was?” A short, muscle-humped Puerto Rican holding a mason jar of tobacco-colored liquid was standing next to him now. “A Bloods initiation. Those motherfuckers who did him was Bloods, and I know because my daughter is with a Blood right now carrying his baby, which is also an initiation rite, and I’m the one locked up for child abuse?” Punching himself in the chest.
“Oh yeah?”
“Twenty-five hundred dollars bail on me with no record, no proof, but you know what that’s about?” The guy looking right through Matty now. “It’s because they’re scared of me, the police, of what I know about that precinct, about what’s really going on. I would never lay a hand on my daughter, you ask anyone in that building, the walls are like paper. There was no abuse, they just needed to shut me up. Twenty-five hundred dollars first-time bail for something I never did? Please . . .”
The bulked-up PR turned to walk away, couldn’t, wheeled back to Matty, and started in again. “But this right here?” Waggling his finger at the shrine. “It’s up to you, the whites, you got to wipe out the gangs so this shit don’t happen again. The gangs, the projects, this whole area, all of it.” Marching away again, his back to Matty. “All of it!” Bellowing to the rooftops, then disappearing into the shadows in two strides, highlighting the one thing that had become painfully obvious this evening—how easily two rollers could attempt to snatch a wallet, throw a shot, then just vanish into the darkness in the span of a heartbeat.
Berkmann’s was emptying earlier than usual this evening, not even 1:00 a.m. and the waiters were starting to look like loiterers. Eric could follow the conversations at the bar as clearly as if he were right up there with them.
Boulware was on his seventh or eighth complimentary Grey Goose and tonic; nearly off his stool now, his mouth a curtain of saliva as he held court with two, count ’em, two girls at once, one of whose thumb was a loving metronome on the back of his hand.
Cleveland was dying to cut him off, but Eric wouldn’t allow it.
“The, the irony is, if Ike . . .” Boulware faltered, blanched, briefly palmed his eyes, maybe his conscience starting to slap the shit out of him, Eric hoped. “If Ike could walk through that door? Could put his two cents in? He’d be the first to stand up for those guys. Not, not for what they did, but that, that, no one is born with a gun in his hand . . . That, that there’s this, this culture of violence, of inequity, of unfeelingness . . .”
Unable to bear another word, Eric caught Clevela
nd’s eye and finally ran his hand across his throat.
Just as the street seemed to be settling in for the night, three young black women came walking past the shrine and, caught up by the display, stopped to absorb the narrative, two of them automatically raising a hand to their face in a gesture of awed distress. The third one, who had a sleeping toddler draped over her shoulder, slowly shook her head.
“My God, he was just a child.” Her voice high, on the edge of breaking.
“What are you talking about?” one of the others said.
“Look at him.” She pointed at the old photo of Willie Bosket.
“That ain’t him,” her friend said, then pointed to Ike Marcus. “That’s the dead boy. Don’t you watch the news?”
The third woman grunted, shrugged the sleeping kid to her other shoulder. “Him?” she drawled. “Now all this shit here makes a lot more sense.”
As Boulware stood hunched over, barking up cocktails in front of the riot gate of a Dominican jewelry store on Clinton Street, Eric came up from behind and hooked him in the ribs. Because he had never swung on anyone in his adult life, the punch probably hurt him as much as it did the other guy; nonetheless it felt so good, so right, that he didn’t, couldn’t stop swinging until his knuckles were the size of gumballs and Boulware was snuggled up atop his own spatter.
Squatting on his hams, Eric addressed the one eye that was somewhat still open. “Do you know me?” The smell was making him tear up. “Do you remember me? I should’ve done that the minute you walked in tonight, but you’re twice my size and I don’t give a fuck about ‘fair’ anymore.”
Boulware’s good eye started to settle like a sunset.
“So. What do you want to do, press charges? Maybe you should press charges, what do you think?”
Boulware had passed out.
“Seriously . . .”
As the rising sun began to tint the upper floors of the towers that edged the East River, Quality of Life walked into the Sana’a for their end-of-tour breakfasts, Nazir giving them a half salute, then sidling the six feet from his phone-card-trimmed register to the griddle.
Lush Life Page 19
