Manhattan Nocturne

by Colin Harrison

  “As soon as I get what I’m looking for.”

  “What?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “If we looking for it, too, then it’s part of our business.”

  I said nothing.

  “What happen if you don’t find it?”

  “You’ll get paid anyway.”

  “Why can’t you do this in the regular day? Police grab your ass?”

  “They don’t want it.”

  “They want everybody’s, way I look at the situation.”

  “Then you still got—” I didn’t like the smile on the man’s face, the sudden eagerness. “Wait, how many times you been in Rikers?”

  “Me? Never.”

  The other man started to laugh. “Yo, they fucking got the permanent reservation!”

  “Least I didn’t jump a cop.”

  “You jumped a cop?” I said.

  “I was messed up.”

  The other man cackled. “You was transmogrified, man.”

  They moved off, insulting each other.

  The old man looked at me.

  “They no good. But I can go. Name’s Richard.”

  “You got pretty sore feet, I think, Richard.”

  “I can do it.”

  I doubted that. “All right.”

  He climbed into the cab and I nosed the van into traffic. In the rearview I could see the men fighting. I had capital and technology but not enough labor. Where does one find grunt labor on a night late in January? It was past eleven-thirty.

  “You know anybody else?” I asked the man.

  “Man, I know all kinds of people, but you gotta understand not too many men in that place ready to go out and lift rocks. People be weak from drugs and shit.”

  I had an idea, checked the time, then headed toward Broadway and Eighty-sixth. Ralph, the philosophy professor, stationed Ernesto at midnight to get messages. I had a few minutes and pulled up the van. Richard played with the radio, could only get A.M. stations. At three minutes past midnight Ernesto appeared. Richard leaned forward, wiped the windshield. “That there is one big fellow.”

  I called across the street to Ernesto and he skulked warily over to my window. I reintroduced myself, then handed him a message to take to Ralph:

  I NEED TO EMPLOY ERNESTO FOR A PERIOD OF ABOUT SIX HOURS. CAN YOU SPARE HIM? I’LL FEED HIM AND GET HIM HAT, COAT, GLOVES, ETC. LABOR INVOLVES MOVING PIECES OF CONCRETE. NOT ILLEGAL. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS, HALF UP FRONT.

  “I hope he says yes,” Richard said.

  Fifteen minutes later, Ernesto reappeared holding a piece of notebook paper:

  1. ERNESTO IS NOT A SLAVE WHOSE LABOR CAN BE BOUGHT OR SOLD.

  2. HOWEVER, FOR $1000 I WILL FORGO THE ENTIRE MORAL INSTRUCTION OF MY LIFE AND TELL HIM TO WORK FOR YOU FOR NOT MORE THAN SIX HOURS.

  3. IF THESE TERMS ARE AGREEABLE, SEND $500 DOWN NOW.

  Ernesto nodded in comprehension when I gave him the money and then disappeared in the same direction a second time. This time he returned within ten minutes and climbed into the van. I could smell him now, and the odor was both original and familiar. I rolled down my window and headed south.

  I found Luis again and talked him into letting me run the power off a dedicated line in the basement of his building. Then I drove the van across the rubble of the lot, probably ruining the tires, and closed the gate behind me. We began to dig; it was slow going, but Richard and Ernesto warmed to the work. Using the tape measure and making trips into 535, I was able to estimate the location of the elevator shaft. Great slabs of brick wall were left from the demolition, and needed to be broken apart with a sledge-hammer before being moved aside. After nearly an hour, we had a pile of rubble but not much of a hole.

  We kept going. Richard got tired. Ernesto did not. He and I lifted some large chunks of concrete. He lifted some by himself—pieces very few men could have moved. Another hour. He worked in tight spaces, with Richard giving him directions. The long crowbar came in handy. I think Ernesto’s hands were bleeding but he said nothing. He was not working for me; he was working for Ralph, his labor an act of loyalty. Down five feet, six feet, more. We passed strata of brick, plaster, wood lathing, brick again. I was breathing in cement dust. Past pipes and trash and shards of porcelain fixtures and bathroom tile that poured like coins into the hole. Now we had the ladder in and were throwing the little pieces out of the hole and dragging the big ones up the ladder. Ernesto’s chest rose and fell as he evaluated which piece of rubble to lift next. I climbed out for a rest; he kept working. At twelve feet there was nothing, and I began to worry that I’d missed it.

  I had. Sideways. By three feet. Then I saw the elevator cable, a loop of it, lying in the rubble like a dead snake. We dug sideways, then down another foot. A piece of rubble shifted, fell on Ernesto’s boot. He said nothing, and I helped him move it. I pulled off my gloves and looked at my hands. They didn’t look good. I put the gloves back on. Then we found the roof of the elevator. It had been heavily damaged by the rubble that had fallen on top of it, but instead of being split open, it had merely crumpled like the top of a can attacked with a hammer.

  “I see it but I don’t believe it,” croaked Richard.

  I had used an acetylene torch once when I was a teenager. I hooked up the hose to the tank, and twisted the knob to start the gas. I lit a match and touched the edge of the nozzle. A flame leapt forth, almost two feet.

  “Holy cannoli.” Ernesto smiled.

  It took me a while and I made a lot of sparks and nearly burned off my toes, but eventually I etched a ragged square, off-center, in the top of the elevator between two thicker beams of steel. The squarish piece fell suddenly into the black hole. I motioned toward Ernesto to bring the rope over and we dropped it down. I lay on the top and shined the flashlight inside.

  Empty. The floor of the elevator was a black-and-white tile mosaic patched with linoleum and blown over by the roseate dust of pulverized brick. The bars of the elevator’s cage were gracefully curved in the style of the 1930s, exactly like 535’s, and in different circumstances I might have admired their artistry. But now I lowered myself into the cage past the jagged edge of the hole, so close that I could smell the burned steel, and dropped heavily the last few feet. I shined the light around—outside the four sides of the elevator, piled like lost history, was more brick and lathing and plaster. Then I noticed something in the corner, a fragment of green stone, and picked it up. It was a piece of carved jade, about an inch and a half long. The head of a horse with the ears broken off. I remembered, of course, that the detectives’ report had mentioned that Simon had a broken piece of jade in his breast pocket. Perhaps the two pieces were from the same statue or figurine. I slipped the fragment into my own pocket and looked around. I felt like a fool. There was nothing else in the elevator.

  Nothing except the panel. So why not open it, now that you’re here? A screwdriver was useless; the screws set into the brass cover plate were specially made so that idiots with common screwdrivers could not open the panel. You needed a custom tool. So I went at the panel with the sledgehammer, buckling it enough so that I could slip the crowbar in and tear out the cover plate with three quick jerks. Although I don’t know the first thing about a tangle of spliced electrical wiring, especially that of a seventy-year-old elevator, I am perfectly able to recognize the jury-rigging of a miniature video camera with an optic cable aimed to shoot through the missing button for the tenth floor and wired into the elevator’s power. My hands were so cold that I didn’t trust myself to disengage the tape cartridge from the magnetic recording head and the gearing that advanced the tape. I put my hands in my pants to warm them and noticed that the mechanism engaged the tape with a spring-loaded arm, and once I knew this, it was easy to jam the screwdriver in and depress the arm. The tape fell right out, into my gloved hand. I turned it over; the label had Simon Crowley’s neat block letters: TAPE 78 (REUSED).

  “Ernesto and Richard!” I hollered through the black hole above me into t
he night.

  “Yeah!”

  “Start throwing everything into the truck.”

  The newspaper never closes. Never. (It may die, if the owner goes bankrupt and there is no new buyer, but it never closes.) There might be some news. Armies moving in the night, earthquakes in Turkey, celebrity murders, anything. If the Brooklyn Bridge began to collapse at four in the morning, the paper would have a photographer there in ten minutes. After I dropped off Ernesto and the old man uptown, I parked my dented van in the paper’s garage, right in the spot reserved for the vice-president of finance—a fat little fellow who, it was known, decorated his house on Long Island with eight thousand Christmas lights. The garage attendant woke with a wide-eyed jerk, then sat warily in the booth wondering if it was killers. I waved.

  He edged out of the booth. “Kinda late tonight, Mr. Wren.”

  “It’s always kind of late.”

  “I’m with you on that one.”

  Upstairs in the newsroom, Bobby Dealy sat at the city desk in a haze of cigarette smoke, hunched over a model airplane with a doughnut in his mouth, gluing a tiny wheel onto the landing gear. Maybe some of the glue was going on the doughnut, too. A phone was cradled against his head, yet he seemed more interested in the crackling, overlapping voices on his police scanner. In front of him, AP summaries from around the world scrolled up one screen, and a soundless CNN report played on another. Next to the half-completed model airplane lay the doughnut box and a pile of tomorrow morning’s newspapers. He put down the phone when he saw me.

  “You have mud on you.”

  “I know.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “Can’t now.”

  “I got a good one. The cops have a guy who—”

  “Can’t.”

  “On a story?”

  I shrugged.

  “Need anything?”

  “Yeah, I need one of your doughnuts.”

  I closed the door to my office, pushed the mail off my chair, pushed the tape into my machine, and rewound it.

  Then I hit play.

  [Four men in business suits standing outside a huge warehouse under a cloudy sky. The season is summer. Three men are older and one is younger. He is animated; the others are mute, cautious.]

  Younger man: The building is still large enough for expansion. Fifty-eight thousand feet, well over one square acre. Let’s go inside. [He opens a door and the men step in one by one. When the camera adjusts to the change in light, a huge, brightly lit interior space becomes apparent, housing a series of immense water tanks. Pipes of all widths lead into and out of them. In the middle distance are two men in orange aprons, moving long poles in one of the tanks.] Please put your feet in that blue pan.

  Voice: Why?

  Young man: Disinfectant. Keeps the bacteria down. Two lines, guys. As I said before, the line of world fish consumption keeps going up and the line for available supply in the oceans keeps going down. Here’s the first tank. [Shot of a tank with thousands of darting black shapes.] The fingerlings come in at two months. It’s a hybrid of saltwater bass and freshwater white bass. We control their growth, incidentally. [Points at a digital temperature readout.] If we want to speed them up, we just bump the water temp up about nine degrees. We give them a current to swim against. The bigger they get, the stronger the current. We keep them moving through these tanks. That’s the quarantine tank, where we vaccinate them, then the nursery tank, then the grow-out tank, where they start to get some real size to them, then, way down there, the harvest tanks, where we sort them, and then we either sell them alive to restaurants or stun and process them here. We’ve got one point three million fish in here. That’s not as large as the outdoor fish farms. But this is state of the art. Our mortality rate is twelve point seven percent, and that’s a lot lower than the outdoor farms, and we reuse the water. [Pause while he watches their reaction.] A closed system. Most farms use maybe a thousand gallons of water per pound of fish. You’re going to run out of water using that much. We’re down to a hundred and twenty-eight gallons per pound here. And we get the feces back into the natural cycle. We sell it to local farmers at transportation cost. That plus the dead fish. Did I say we count the dead fish? We count the dead fish. We know how many fish are dead, so that way we don’t—

  I stopped the tape. I didn’t get it. It was impossible that the camera in the elevator had taken this, assuming the camera had worked. Maybe I had gotten it all wrong. I started up the tape again.

  —waste feed. A lot of farms just dump the stuff in. They use transient labor, teenagers, whatever. We use people skilled in the natural sciences. Lot of farms are going two, three pounds of feed per fish-pound. We’re way below that, down to one point five. That’s unheard of, way out on the curve. Here—[The men follow him past a sequence of tanks. The workers look up, then back to their tasks. The men stop at a huge tank.] Roy, get me one of the mature—fourteen inches, if you got any. [A worker climbs a ladder, pulls a small net out of a ring, looks in the tank like a bird, and in a second has a fish flopping in the net. He picks it out with a rubber-gloved hand, puts away the net, climbs down the ladder.]

  Worker [hands fish]: Here.

  Young man: Thanks, Roy. [Holds up fish. In the bright light it is lovely. It tries to swim in the air.] Aquaculture is five thousand years old, gentlemen. It’s not a new idea. [Flips fish gracefully up toward the tank and camera follows it high in the air. It arcs over the lip of the tank. A splash is audible.] But we are at a historic oppor—[Static. A new scene. Dark. The interior of the 537 elevator, from eye level. The left side of Caroline Crowley’s face appears.]

  Caroline:—don’t like it, Simon.

  Simon [out of frame]: It’s atmosphere. [Arm appears, slides door shut. The shaft wall is visible through the cage as the elevator rises, each floor number sinking past.]

  Simon: This building is due to be demolished soon.

  Caroline: That’s why there are no lights?

  Simon: Yessiree, Bob.

  Caroline: How does the elevator work?

  Simon: Old Simon has mucho trickeros up his sleevo.

  Caroline: Old Simon’s dad was an elevator repairman.

  Simon: That, too. Matter of fact, I consulted him earlier today on certain technical questions, like how to get another man’s tongue out of your wife’s cunt.

  Caroline: This again?

  Simon: Here we go. [Elevator stops at seventh floor. His arm pushes the door open. Simon and Caroline exit the elevator into what appears to have once been a small lobby area. She is as tall as he. She is dressed in a loose yellow dress. He is wearing a baseball cap, red T-shirt, and jeans.] People lived here once. [Directly in front of the elevator door is a bed, freshly made. The space is lit only by a strange apparatus next to the bed: a light connected to a car battery. A cardboard milk carton is on the floor. Behind the bed is gloom, the suggestion of paint flaking off rotten plaster.]

  Caroline: Very lovely.

  Simon: It’s our kind of place.

  Caroline: Why are you so hateful toward me? Why?

  Simon: You resist me.

  Caroline: I’m just tired, Simon. These little experiments don’t interest me anymore.

  Simon: You know all that you need to know?

  Caroline: I know you’re full of shit, Simon.

  Simon: I’m full of truth.

  Caroline [sitting on bed heavily]: Shit, truth, whatever. [Looks up.] What are you doing? [Simon has carried a small table over to the bed. There are several objects on it, but the camera angle is such that they cannot be identified.] What is this stuff? My horse? You took it from the apartment? [Picks up small figurine.]

  Simon: These are items of marital interest.

  Caroline [puts figurine down]: I’m getting out of here. [She rushes into the elevator. Face is toward camera, eyes anxious. She looks back at Simon, who has not moved. The control panel is below camera.]

  Simon: That won’t work. There’s a code. You have to push in a code, and th
en hit the down button. Otherwise nothing. [She rushes out of the elevator, past the bed, and out of the frame. Banging.] That’s not going to work. They’re all locked. [She rushes past him. Banging.] Caroline, I said all the fucking doors are locked!

  Caroline: What? What do you want?

  Simon: Come here.

  Caroline: Fuck you.

  Simon: Come here.

  Caroline: No.

  Simon: I’m your husband. You married me.

  Caroline: You—

  My office phone rang. It jolted me. I froze the tape; the image showed Caroline shaking her fist in anger, her face a bright smear.

  “Hello?” Silence. “Hello?”

  “Hi.”

  “Caroline?”

  “I’ve been missing you.”

  “You just saw me.”

  “I didn’t feel good about how we said good-bye.”

  “Maybe we’ll never say good-bye.”

  “Why aren’t you home?”

  “I’m on a story.”

  “Is it a good story?” she asked.

  “Very complicated.”

  “Is there a man and a woman in it?”

  “Don’t most stories have a man and a woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Usually one of them is bad.”

  “I don’t believe in stories like that,” said Caroline.

  “No?”

  “I think everyone is bad. Some are a little and some are very.”

  “That’s probably accurate.”

  She sighed. “So, in your story, which is the very bad one, the man or the woman?”

  “It’s unclear.”

  “Still?”

  “Still.”

  “Porter, I’m lonely. I know that’s silly, but I’m lonely.” She was quiet. I could hear music in the background of her apartment. “Will you come back?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “Could we have breakfast?”

  I looked at my watch. The sun would be up in about three hours. “I’d like that,” I said.