The Angel of Montague Street

by Norman Green

  Dedication

  For Christine

  

  Acknowledgments

  THE AUTHOR WISHES to thank Richard Boes, Silvana Rivituso, Patrick Henderson, Charlie Boiselle, Brian DeFiore, and Marjorie Braman.

  

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  About the Author

  Also by Norman Green

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ONE

  THE MONTAGUE WAS an old whore of a hotel; she stood on the corner of Henry and Montague Streets in Brooklyn, New York. She was a couple of decades past her prime when Silvano Iurata landed there in the fall of ’73, but if you squinted your eyes hard enough to filter out the grime you could still see something of what she used to be when she was young and glorious, green marble columns in the lobby thirty feet high, floor-to-ceiling windows, ornate wainscoting, carved mahogany front desk, plaster lions molded into the ceiling, so far up you could barely make them out, up there snarling down at you in sooty malevolence. She was maybe eighteen stories high, the lower floors more desirable than the upper ones because only one of the three elevators worked. One of the other two was generally shut down for repairs and the third was broken and sealed off for good. In one corner of the lobby was a bar, a dimly lit room behind swinging doors that had the image of a piano frosted into the thick green glass.

  Silvano flopped on an ancient couch and waited for the night manager to locate his paperwork. He glanced in the bar’s direction but he had no real desire to go in; bars were not his thing, particularly when they were small, dank, and heavy with the smell of beer, urine, and unwashed bodies. He wasn’t that thirsty, couldn’t imagine being that thirsty. An old guy with a cracked leather face and a red potato nose watched him from the bar doorway, and after a while, his beverage in his hand, he made his way carefully over to where Silvano sat.

  “Excuse me,” he said, in that whispery voice guys get when their upper teeth are gone. “I know you from someplace. Someplace overseas.”

  Oh, I hope not, Silvano thought, keeping his expression blank. He looked at the old boy’s face, trying to picture what he might have looked like before time and bad habits had worked him over. “I don’t think so,” he said. “You don’t look familiar.”

  “You sure? I was a news service photographer during the fifties and sixties. I worked the Middle East and North Africa. I swear I ran into you over there someplace.”

  Silvano shook his head, relieved. “Not me,” he said, “late sixties, I was in Southeast Asia.”

  “Damn. I was so sure. Damn. Guy must’ve been your twin, then.” He chuckled and drained off what was left in his glass. “Maybe you’ll meet the guy some day. What did you do, in Southeast Asia.”

  “Worked for a messenger service.”

  “Ah,” he said, looking down into his glass. “One of those guys. You with the Company?”

  Silvano shook his head. “No. I was just an observer for the Defense Department.”

  “You don’t look like an observer. You look more like a participant.” He had a wry smile on his face. “Well, anyway,” he said, rattling his ice cubes, “I need a refill. Come on in and join me sometime. I’ll buy you a drink, we can talk about the bad old days.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Silvano shook his head as he watched the old boy make his way unsteadily back over where he’d come from. Funny, he thought, when you’re young and you’re spending it, you never think you’re gonna get old and have to struggle to make the payments. You see some old bugger just hanging on, just trying not to die today, he looks like some kind of an alien creature, but he’s you, brother, just as sure as that little shit who went to high school was you, and you’ll get there all too soon. He tried again to place the old man’s face, going back in his mind, remembering, until he caught himself at it and pulled back. Bad neighborhood, he told himself, you can’t afford to hang out there. You got to stay in the now.

  Easier said than done, though. He kept waiting for things to be different, but he kept winding up in the Hotel Montague or someplace like her, back in the arms of some old blowser who would give him shelter for a while. Someone had once said, he couldn’t remember who, that home is where you can go, and they have to let you in. Maybe that’s what kept him where he was, or maybe he was supposed to learn something, maybe he was supposed to have some sort of an incremental awakening before he could go on to the next level. But whatever the reason, he always felt more comfortable in the low-rent joints, where you didn’t need to worry if your shirt or your haircut or your politics were right, if you had the price of a round they’d be glad to see you no matter how you looked or how badly you’d treated them the last time out, and they’d say, welcome back, sonny, have a seat, tell us where you been this long time.

  There was still a lot of old fleabags like the Hotel Montague in that part of Brooklyn, from the Brooklyn Bridge stretching south and west along the waterfront past the Port Authority docks. The Hotel Montague was about the best of the bunch, at the time. Some of the others were pretty bad, like the Lady Margaret or the Stanford. With those two, it was only a question of whether they burned down before they fell down, or vice versa. The Castle Arms was another one, big square brick building with a parapet on each corner. It was not a bad place, relatively clean, still had some normal people in it. It had a big empty room on the first floor that had once been a restaurant, and a huge ballroom one floor down. No one had danced in the ballroom for a generation, it was dark and piled eight feet deep with chairs and old hotel furnishings that were covered with a thick coat of dust. There was a narrow pathway through it all to the back door. Upstairs, though, it looked nearly normal, like a regular hotel almost, all the elevators worked, all the doors had locks, all the toilets flushed, the whole bit.

  And then there was the St. Felix. The St. Felix took up an entire city block, from Clark to Pineapple and from Henry to Hicks. It hadn’t started out that way, originally it had just been a large white tower on one half of the block, but it sucked in all the other buildings like a tumor eating up healthy cells until the whole block was one big amorphous funky-smelling conglomeration with a few stores stuck to the outside, a deli and a liquor store and whatnot, and an arcade where you could catch the big elevator that went from street level through the basements and subbasements, all the way down to the subway.

  The original part of the hotel, the white tower, was mostly empty in those days, except for cats, pigeons, rats, and winos, but one of the elevators still worked, some of the rooms had electricity, and some had running water. The rest of the hotel was inhabited by crazy people; it was party central—neurosis, psychosis, self-medication, and the occasional homicide or suicide.

  What happened, sometime in ’72 someone decided that there were too many people in the puzzle factory who weren’t crazy enough, and it would be cheaper to put them on the street. Mainstreaming, they called it, and suddenly big welfare hotels and outpatient clinics became growth industries. A lot of the people who got mainstreamed had a bad time of it. Take a person with a tenuous grip on reality, lived most of his or her life on the inside, it’s a scary thing to be put out on your own. Got no family, no friends, everybody looks at you, well, like you’re crazy. A lot of them died from loneliness. They find you in the river, say that you drowned, but it was being alone killed you.

  THE NIGHT MANAGER found Silvano’s paperwork, finally, and gave him a room on the fifth floor. That
meant four flights of stairs up and four down every time he went out, that or wait for the elevator. Silvano did not like waiting. Even if the thing was sitting there with the door open you had to go in, push the button, and stand there while the D.C. circuitry in the elevator’s primitive brain decided to close the doors and slowly hoist you to your destination.

  Silvano banged through the stairwell door on the fifth floor into a long dark corridor. He could hear her before he saw her.

  “Claaark,” she said, in a mournful voice, “Claark, let me in.” She was sitting on the floor in front of a door, looking like a refugee from the Haight-Ashbury of half a dozen years ago, she had long straight blond hair, a velvet choker around her neck, a big yellow Indian-print shirt, bell-bottom jeans. Take one look at her face, though, and you could see how it had all gone to hell, she wore a troubled, confused expression and her blue eyes were clouded and unfocused. She was probably under thirty, but some of those years had to have been hard ones. She had a shopping bag on the floor next to her. Silvano looked at the number on the door where she was sitting, and then the number on his key.

  “Terrific,” he said.

  She ignored him. “Claaark,” she said again. “Please let me in, Clark.”

  Some of us, Silvano thought, paid a higher price for the sixties than others. “This is my room, sweetheart.”

  “No,” she said in that lost and confused voice, “this is Clark’s room. He’s inside, he’s waiting for me but sometimes he doesn’t hear.”

  Silvano checked the number again, shook his head. “If Clark’s in there, he’ll be right out. C’mon, move your ass.” He pushed her bag out of the way with his foot and she pivoted with it, crablike, still sitting down. He stuck his key in the lock and opened the door.

  It was a small room, twelve feet by twelve feet, walls and ceiling painted pale green. Asbestos tile floor, one double bed, one small metal desk, one metal chair, one lamp, one metal bureau, four drawers. One window, bathroom off to one side, out of sight.

  “See? No Clark. He musta split.”

  She peered over his shoulder into the empty room. “Clark?”

  Clark, Silvano thought, you must’ve been really fucked up. “He moved out. They gave me his room. Go on downstairs, maybe they’ll tell you where he went.”

  “But he was, he was . . .” She looked around uncertainly, and her voice got higher and more frantic. “But he was waiting for me!”

  “Yeah, well, he ain’t here now. Go on, get lost.” She inched reluctantly down the corridor a few feet. He closed the door, but he could still hear her voice.

  “Claark?”

  Oh, Jesus, he thought. Wonderful.

  He liked the room, liked the emptiness; he was comforted by the almost claustrophobic embrace of the place. You could see everything from anywhere in it, so there could be no surprises. Nothing hidden, no dark corners. He sat in the metal chair with his back to the wall next to the window and stared at the bathroom door. Nobody’s in there, you already checked, he told himself, but he could feel the worms chewing at his guts and he knew it would get worse and worse until he went over and looked. Was it the war, he asked himself, or are you just fucking crazy? He could feel his anxiety building. The hell with this, he thought, and he got up and went to look. No place to hide in there, either, there wasn’t even a window to climb through, nothing but the sink, the rusting metal shower stall, and the john. He turned and looked back into the room. Go on, he told himself, you’re going to give in to this shit, you might as well go all the way. He dropped to one knee and looked under the bed. Monsters in the closet, he told himself, except there’s no closet, so they hide up in your head. Jesus.

  It didn’t take him long to move in. He unzipped his bag and left it open on the floor, and that was about it. Not much in it anyway, just some clothes, toothbrush, and like that. The stuff he didn’t want stolen he’d already stashed in a locker in a bathhouse over in the St. Felix.

  Out of his window you could see the brick side of the next building, maybe six feet away, and a narrow slice of Montague Street, all lit up. The bed was starting to look good, but Silvano wanted to have a look around.

  She was not in the corridor, but when he got down to the lobby she was on the far side of the room. She spotted him coming out of the stairwell door and made a beeline for the elevator. Silvano stopped at the front desk.

  “What’s with Mrs. Clark?”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Claaark.”

  “Huh? Oh, her.” He chuckled. “Don’t worry about her, she’s harmless. You just caught her on a bad day.”

  Silvano stared at him.

  “No, really, man, most of the time she’s almost lucid. She gets to be a pain, let me know, we’ll move you.”

  “Is there a real Clark?”

  “Never seen one.”

  THINK OF A LONG row of bookshelves leaning drunkenly against a wall. The top shelf is the Promenade, a pedestrian walkway of octagonal paving stones, park benches, wrought-iron fences, small private gardens in the backyards of pricey brownstones. One shelf down and slightly out from the wall run the northbound lanes of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, another shelf down the southbound lanes of the same expressway. The bottom shelf is Furman Street, lined with trucks waiting to pick up or deliver to the freighters that were still coming to the Brooklyn waterfront, docking at the busy Port Authority piers. And the floor itself, stretching away from the wall, the floor is the East River, which is not a river at all, but which is, like the city that surrounds her, deep, fast-moving, dark, beautiful, also treacherous and unforgiving. On the far side the buildings of Lower Manhattan are stacked thick and close, so close you can see nothing of the land they stand on, nothing of the island itself, just the buildings, with another highway perched on stilts, running around the outside, just above the water. A row of piers stick their thick fingers out into the river, giving shelter to some wooden sailing ships from another century, ferries running to and from Staten Island and Governors Island, tennis courts under inflated cocoons, and a dock for seaplanes and helicopters. Behind the piers is the narrow slice of the South Street Seaport, a working fishmarket. No boats unload there anymore, the fish is all delivered in trucks, and men in dark suits set prices that hold firm as far north as New Bedford and Gloucester, as far south as Baltimore.

  Silvano walked the few blocks from his hotel straight down Montague Street to the end, where he stepped onto one end of the Promenade and turned right. Streetlights from the New York City Parks Department kept the night at bay, and people walked their dogs, pushed their baby carriages, and young gay men walked slowly, eyeing one another speculatively. For the most part they ignored Silvano because he was not young or pretty, did not look prosperous. Even the guys into rough trade gave him a wide berth, knowing somehow that he wasn’t one of them, that his troubles were uncomfortably real. He was medium height and he looked lupine, underfed for those fat years. He still walked with an athletic grace but his dark hair was beginning to show streaks of gray, and he had two days’ growth of beard on a lined face that looked older than it was. He could have passed for a street cop in plain clothes, or a hockey player, or maybe an aging middleweight who had stayed in the game a little too long. He had that kind of build, he had the scars, he had hooded, hollow eyes that told you the only real sin was not to see it coming.

  He leaned against the rail. The awareness of that vast open space behind him itched at him, but he ignored it and watched the crowd. There may be people behind you, he thought, but it’s not a stretch to trust that none of them are looking through a scope right now, lining you up. Didn’t make it easy, though. He stayed there with the people flowing slowly past him until he felt a little better. You’re just a voyeur, he told himself, you don’t understand them, so you stand and you watch, wondering what the hell they’re doing. You think you’ve gotta see every dog in the bushes, he told himself derisively. What a fucking wreck.

  He pushed himself away from the railing and wal
ked north on the Promenade. He stopped a little farther on, where an apartment building that had no rear garden butted up against the fence. He sat on a park bench with his back to the wall of the building and he watched again. It was an idiotic habit, he knew that, it only slowed him down, there were just the normal dangers on this nighttime walkway, nothing extraordinary, there were no trip wires on the Promenade, but something deep in his subconscious would not accept that. Some days he would fight against the paranoia, other days he found it easier just to go along, pick his spots to stop and scan the faces, look into the dark corners before he passed them by. A VA shrink once told him it was neurosis, but Silvano preferred to think it was just that he no longer believed in normalcy.

  He became conscious of the cacophony of automobile horns, louder and angrier than seemed reasonable even for Brooklyn, so he walked to the railing and looked down. Below him the southbound lanes of the expressway were empty, and the northbound lanes were stopped dead. A few people had gotten out of their vehicles to crane their necks and peer ahead, looking for the cause of the tie-up. He continued north, and soon the massive stone towers of the Brooklyn Bridge came into view, all lit up in the darkness.

  The helicopter that was hovering near the Manhattan tower was a police chopper, built by some company in France, that was why it hadn’t registered. It made a different noise than the Army choppers he was used to, whose whop whop whop sound had imbedded itself deep into the nether regions of his mind. It was shining a spotlight on the guy wires that ran from the big bridge cables down to the roadway. The roadway was ablaze with flashing lights from a crowd of police vehicles and ambulances, and there was a police boat in the river, bow pointed into the current, wake streaming out behind as it remained more or less stationary beneath the bridge. Below Silvano, the car horns crescendoed and died away, only to start up again farther on.

  In the space of maybe four city blocks he got to the other end of the walkway. There were about a dozen people there, leaning against the railing, watching. Silvano looked again, made out a human shape clinging to a guy wire about thirty feet above the roadway of the bridge. Ten feet below was another figure, one arm held up in supplication, had to be a cop saying, don’t do it, buddy, let us help you, come down, goddammit. Silvano stopped at the outer edge of the small group that stood watching. For one tiny fraction of a second his control slipped and he was out there on the bridge with the guy, whoever he was, holding on but leaning out, closing his eyes, and it wasn’t that you wanted to go but that you couldn’t stay because you didn’t have it anymore, couldn’t suck it up one more time, couldn’t go into battle again and couldn’t run away, just couldn’t get it up for one more fucking sunrise. The man next to him turned to make eye contact. “It’s just like the ones that jump in front of subway trains,” he hissed. “They always wait for rush hour. Gotta have an audience.” He rolled his eyes, turned away, and stalked off into the night. The next guy over, a young light-skinned black man with a cane, was laughing.