The Angel of Montague Street

by Norman Green

  “There’s compassion for you. Reminds me of the New York version of mouth to mouth. You heard of it?”

  “No.” He gritted his teeth, angry with himself, and the door that had cracked open slammed shut again. He worked hard to keep the clamps on his emotions in the hope that his demons would stay buried. It didn’t always work, but it was all that he had. The other guy, oblivious, finished his joke.

  “That’s where you kick the guy in the ribs and yell, ‘Breathe, damn you!’”

  “Very good.” Silvano looked at the man’s olive drab fatigue jacket, irked that the jacket could be so popular when the institution was so disliked. “You Airborne?”

  The man looked down at the insignia sewn onto the jacket. “Me? Hell, no. Jacket was Airborne, I was in the brown water Navy.”

  “River rat, huh?”

  “Yes, suh.” He regarded Silvano with heightened interest. “Yourself?”

  Silvano twisted the truth, as was his wont. “I flew medevac.”

  “Oh, my,” he said. “Always glad to see one of you guys, even if you do be walking.”

  “You think this guy’s jumping?”

  “Yeah. He’s had enough. He been out there too long. He was gonna come down, he’d a given up by now. Got traffic fucked up from here to Kansas, got half the cops in New York waiting on his ass, he already got his money’s worth, he was gonna back out. No, this guy’s gonna jump.”

  “They’ll have to pull him outa the river.”

  “No way, baby. Too far to fall, and the current is a mother. Odds are, he’ll wash up on Staten Island in a few days, or over on the Jersey side.”

  “Sounds like you seen this before.”

  “Every so often. Brooklyn Bridge is a pretty popular spot for it.”

  Silvano watched and he wondered if this might not have been the way his brother Nunzio had gone, into the river, never seen again. It would explain why no one had heard from him in a year. The thought made his eyes water just a bit, and some part of his mind called out unbidden, Noonie, where are you, Noonie, for the umpteenth time.

  “Aw, shit, there he goes.” Silvano could hear real sorrow in the man’s voice as they both watched the figure cartwheel down through the night air into the river. Police divers went off the back of the boat as the helicopter swooped down to shine its spotlight on the surface of the water. “Son of a bitch.”

  Several of the other watchers turned and departed, and over the next few minutes the rest left one by one, leaving Silvano and the young black man standing alone at the railing.

  “He must have figured it was his time.”

  “You can’t think that way, man.” He glanced over at Silvano. “Especially guys like us, guys from Nam. I seen too many of us go like this. Too many suicides. It ain’t right, you can’t think that way.”

  “Why not?” Silvano was looking out at the black water. “You gotta go sooner or later anyhow. What the hell’s the difference.”

  “Well, that might be true, but I was raised Pentecostal, so I got a few attitudes left over from that, and one of ’em is, you can’t go early. You gotta wait until the man upstairs says it’s time for you to go. Otherwise, you show up ahead of schedule, you might piss the old boy off, wind up worse than if you’d just hung in there to begin with.”

  Silvano looked at him. “I guess we were better off than you guys, because we had Purgatory.”

  That got a laugh, which was choked off by a deep, hacking cough. “Aaa,” he said, finally, clearing his throat. “Why would Purgatory be a good thing?”

  Silvano shrugged. “I always knew I wasn’t gonna be a first-ballot Hall of Famer, you know what I mean? But with Purgatory, at least you got a shot, you know, because there’s a back door.”

  “You know, I never thought of it that way. So you figure the veteran’s committee is gonna vote you in?”

  “That would be assuming a lot. You from around here?”

  “Nope. Where I’m from, my old man was the first black dentist in the State of Maine. He had gone to dental school back in the forties, on the GI Bill, and after he graduated he moved from Philadelphia to Portland, Maine, and he went to work for a French Canadian dentist up there, wound up marrying the boss’s niece, and then I came along.”

  “That where you grew up? You ain’t got the accent.”

  “Been gone a long time. Yeah, I grew up in South Portland, there was a few brothers there at the time, but not many. Few more now. But I’ll tell you what, I didn’t hear too much shit about black and white, I got it worse for having a French Canadian mother than I did for a black father, because sometimes French Canadians talk funny, they would say something like, ‘Hey, t’row me down the stairs my hat.’ My mom said it didn’t matter, she said up in Quebec they’d tell Newfie jokes, you know, ranking on people from Newfoundland because they talk funny. I don’t know what kind of jokes they tell in Newfoundland.”

  “Probably tell the one about the white guy from New York City, jumped in the river.”

  “Poor bastard. How you know he was white?”

  Silvano looked out at the lights reflecting off the water. The guy’s probably sucking in a lungful of black water right now, he thought. Dying in the deep embrace of the East River while we stand watching. “In the joke, it don’t matter.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Listen, you live around here? You know a good place to eat?”

  “I live up to the St. Felix. Yeah, plenty of places, we got anything you want. My personal favorite, nice Greek place up on Montague, cheap, BYOB, they got sidewalk tables, you can sit and watch the world go by.”

  “St. Felix, no kidding. You know a guy named Nunzio, about so high, thin, not all there? People usually called him Noonie.”

  “Name don’t ring a bell. He owe you money?”

  “No, he was my brother. Went missing a while back.”

  “Ain’t that the way it goes? Go off for a one-year tour, when you get back, the whole world’s changed.”

  It didn’t feel like a year, it felt like half a lifetime. He pushed himself away from the railing. “I’m gonna go try out your restaurant. You hungry?”

  “No. I appreciate the invite, but I came down here to cop, not to watch some poor bastard take a header into the East River. I got business to transact, and the thing is, guy like you, down here at night, ain’t queer and ain’t walkin’ your dog, gotta be the po-lice. You too mean-looking to be Joe Citizen.”

  “Prejudice is such a mother, see, people think they know something about you . . .”

  That got another laugh. “Hey, listen, you staying here?”

  “Yeah, I’m at the Montague.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

  SILVANO WALKED AWAY from the northern end of the Promenade, out onto the local streets. The first building he passed was the Lady Margaret, a tall, narrow wood-frame hotel with a dirty white exterior and a smell to match. A stocky woman with white hair and a face like Tip O’Neill stood in front of the steps to the hotel and eyed him belligerently.

  “Thirty years of niggerism!” she bellowed at him hoarsely. “Thirty years of niggerism and a cellar full of garbage!”

  “Oh, nice,” Silvano told her. “And how are you tonight?”

  “Fine,” she said mildly.

  He passed the Castle Arms a block later and then he stopped at the liquor store in the St. Felix and bought a bottle of Chianti. The clerk slid the bottle into a paper bag and handed it smoothly to Silvano along with his change without ever once looking at him. Back out on the street, Silvano continued on with the bottle tucked under his arm. He paused on the sidewalk outside the arcade, the big opening in the hotel that gave pedestrians access to the elevator to the subway. To get into the arcade you had to go through two sets of swinging doors, an inner and an outer set, three pairs of them were set side by side in the grayish brick facade. As Silvano watched, an old woman with a cane came through the center set of doors, and in the vestibule space between the inner and outer do
ors she suddenly began swinging her cane wildly, wielding it like Errol Flynn in some old movie, and then exiting the outer set of doors she stopped to recover her breath and her composure. Then she set off down the sidewalk as if nothing in the world were more normal. Fear, Silvano thought, maybe she got mugged there once, and her fear makes her irrational and antisocial. Just like the rest of us.

  It was a ten-minute walk from the St. Felix to the Greek restaurant on Montague. The neighborhood was called Brooklyn Heights, and she was still undiscovered, a little nicked up and past her prime, but beautiful, with a sort of silver-haired grace. The brownstones and brick buildings spoke of time and endurance, the old slate sidewalks and the trees arching over the streets gave the place an air of solidity and permanence that Manhattan’s steel and glass towers could never duplicate. Silvano took his time, stopping here and there to look around.

  Finally he found the restaurant, sat down at a tiny table under an awning out on the sidewalk. A waiter came, pulled the cork from his bottle, took his order. He sat there alone, watching the people go streaming past, people on their way home, couples out for a stroll, a crowd of young men with unfashionably short hair, all of them seeming to shout at the others, trying to be heard, laughing uproariously. Silvano sat by himself, off to one side, like always. No crime in being alone, he told himself, but he’d had the inner debate about his solitary existence so often he was tired of it and he choked it off.

  When he was done eating he left money on the table, and catching the waiter’s eye, he jiggled the Chianti bottle to let him know there was still something in it. The waiter pinched the inside of his pantleg between a thumb and forefinger and shook it, giving Silvano his opinion of the wine. Silvano shrugged, left it there anyway. Communication without speech, he thought. That’s where I’m headed. He walked off down the sidewalk, but when he looked back, the waiter was pouring the rest of the Chianti into a water glass.

  Couldn’t have been that bad, Silvano thought. Bet he’s had worse.

  THERE WAS A BANK of pay phones on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, next to a large green box that opened out into a newspaper kiosk. Silvano had noticed the phones there before, on his way out. He’d expected the kiosk to be closed this late at night, but it was not. The dark-skinned man sitting inside on a stool was passed out, breathing noisily, cheek pressed against worn plywood. A row of skin magazines with unfamiliar names pinned to the top of the kiosk over his head fluttered in the breeze. As Silvano walked past, two neighborhood kids raced by him, grabbed handfuls of change from the counter of the kiosk, and took off again. The dark-skinned man woke with a start and looked around wildly. Indian, Silvano thought, or Pakistani. He could see the imprint of the wood grain in the side of the man’s face as he began to close up hastily. Silvano paused in front of the payphones, considering. Been six months, he thought. You really should call her.

  He walked over and stood in front of a phone, steeling himself. Why is this so difficult, he wondered, why is this so hard to do? He felt butterflies in his stomach as he reached for the phone, but it had no dial tone. Neither did the next one, but the phone on the end of the row worked. He dialed zero and the number. “Collect call,” he told the operator when she came on the line, “from Silvano.” She placed the call. He heard the phone ring twice, heard his brother-in-law Vinnie pick up the phone, heard the operator ask her question.

  “Yeah,” Vinnie said. “Yeah, I’ll pay for the call.”

  “Hey, Vinnie. What’s happening?”

  “Hey, Sil, how are ya? Got a good connection this time. Where you hidden away these days?”

  “Brooklyn.”

  Stunned silence, then: “No shit!” Silvano could hear him breathing into the phone. “Jesus,” he finally said. “Silvano, are you nuts? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  Silvano was mildly amused. “What would make you say that, Vinnie?”

  “Don’t jerk me off, Silvano. One place in the world the man wants you dead, and you gotta go visit. Little Dom finds out you’re in town, he’ll turn New York City upside down to get you. You know how bad he hates you, for chrissake.”

  “I don’t care whether he hates me or not.”

  “You don’t care about Little Dom?” Vinnie was incredulous. “You care about breathing? You care about being alive? The only reason he hasn’t put out a contract on you is because he wants to do you himself. If he catches you, he’ll cut your fingers off one at a time just to watch you scream, he’ll cut your liver out and make you watch him do it, he’ll . . .”

  “Vinnie.” Silvano cut him off. “Calm down.”

  “Calm down? Silvano, I been to enough funerals this year, I don’t wanna go to another one. Assuming Dom leaves enough of you to bury. You need money, just let me know, I’ll send it to you anyplace in the world but here, just go get on a plane and go somewhere else. If you’re willing to forget that carpenter bullshit, go back to doing what you’re good at, heh, I know a few people could really use you. I could make some calls, you could be working by the weekend, nice and safe out West, somewhere like L.A. or Vegas.”

  “Vinnie, be quiet and listen to me. I’m staying in an old flophouse in Brooklyn Heights, and I’m gonna be retired for a while. I’m gonna see if I run into anyone used to know Noonie. You can call Scalia yourself for all I care, tell him I’m here, I’ll give you his balls for cocktail onions.”

  That hung there in silence between them.

  “Vinnie?”

  “Yeah. Jesus, Sil, listen, why you gotta do this? Why you wanna get into all that? Noonie’s gone, Sil, you can’t bring him back. Whyncha just let him go? Let him rest. Go find a nice Catholic church, go on in, it won’t hurt ya, light a candle. Say a prayer. Your brother’s with God now.”

  “Yeah, you think so?”

  “Come on, Sil, don’t start with me. I don’t wanna hear any of that gook bullshit you’re into. Have some respect for the dead, for chrissake, go light a candle for your brother, and then just get the hell out of town.”

  Why do I talk to this guy, Silvano wondered. “You know, Vinnie, you may be right. Maybe I’ll do that. Ann around?”

  “Yeah, course. Look, Sil, why . . . I don’t understand you, you know that?”

  “I don’t either. Lemme talk to Ann.”

  “All right.” Silvano could almost see him shrugging his shoulders, throwing up his hands. “Just lemme say this one thing, okay? I know Domenic, okay, and he’s smarter and meaner than the old man ever thought of being. Even if you keep your head down, word’s gonna get out, it has to, and he has a long memory.”

  “So do I.”

  “All right, I just want to make sure you understand I did right by you, Sil, you can’t say I didn’t give you fair warning. I’ll go get your sister. Just watch your back, okay, Sil?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  A moment later she came on.

  “I gotta hand it to you, Silvie, nobody can make Vin talk about going to church except you. Are you still a Buddhist?”

  “Only part time. Every other Saturday.” He listened to her laughing at him. She was used to it, she knew he’d spent years looking for that one real thing he could pour over his life like milk on the cereal, something that would get everything to make sense, make it all work. Once it had been the Army, but that hadn’t worked in a long time. Another time it had been the Oregon woods and the marijuana maintenance program. Zen had been the last in the series, but it had come up suddenly short.

  “Vin says you’re back in Brooklyn, Silvie, is that right? You know you’re gonna open up some old wounds. You really wanna get everything all stirred up again?”

  He thought of the years that had passed since he left, the places he had lived as a stranger, always a gypsy passing through, another guy who didn’t belong. “I don’t care about the Scalias anymore, Ann. I’m not interested in ancient history. I’m gonna put my feet up here for a while, and while I’m here I’m gonna see if I can find out what happened to Noonie. I can’t j
ust let it go and pretend he died in his sleep. I owe it to him to at least ask a few questions.”

  Her voice got quiet. “You really think he’s dead, then.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to come out like that, but I guess I do.”

  She sighed. “I guess I’ve accepted it. It was so hard, waiting for him to call, the way he always did. For the longest time, whenever the phone would ring, I would think it was going to be him. But it’s like when someone pokes you in the same spot, over and over again, it hurts so bad, but then after a while you just don’t feel anything anymore. I guess I would really like to know what happened to him, you know, but I don’t know if I could deal with losing you, too, Silvie. Domenic’s not just a kid anymore, he’s for real now. This is not like he’s waiting for you at recess. I can let go of it, Silvie, I can handle not knowing about Noonie, if you would just go somewhere safe.”

  “Annette, I been through shit would make Domenic Scalia run screaming for his mommy. He may be a big man on Cross Bay Boulevard, to me he’s just another asshole in a shiny suit. Don’t worry, nothing will happen.”