On the Nickel

by John Shannon

  He pursed his lips and seemed to think about it for a few moments and then disappeared into the darkness. A minute later it was the little psycho sauntering in, snapping open his switchblade with a happy flourish and slicing open the back pocket of her jeans like gutting a fish to retrieve her cheap wallet. It wasn’t her normal wallet. She’d taken a cue from her dad and assembled a ‘city wallet’ for expeditions that maximized the possibility of losing it to a pickpocket. This plastic one contained a photograph of George Clooney, one working credit card among several dead ones, a little cash, and a doorkey known only to god – but one of the stuffings had unfortunately had to be her real driver’s license that she knew listed her mom’s address. She wasn’t sure what her mom would make of these jerks, but she wished the address had been Gloria’s, who could certainly defend herself with more elan.

  ‘Don’t bullshit me on this,’ Gloria said. ‘I’ll bet your name’s not Mike neither.’ She’d clapped her badge against the thick plexiglass window, and now she had her finger on the photo of Maeve, holding it in the metal slide-under tray that was the only physical access to the market’s inner cage.

  ‘I see girl,’ the Vietnamese man told her, nodding obligingly. ‘She here look for boy. Polite all mothahfuck. Is your girl?’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘I say I see boy. I very helpful. I say he come for ATM. Then he go that way.’ He pointed left, which was the truth.

  Gloria held up the photo to the black security guard, who was keeping a respectful distance from her.

  ‘Mr Minh no speak with forked tongue, ma’am.’

  She bristled and almost went for him. ‘Is that supposed to be hilarious?’

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry. Not at all. I love everyone.’

  She realized the guard had no way of knowing she was a Paiute Indian, so the comment was relatively innocent. ‘Do you know anything else?’

  ‘The Fortnum Hotel two doors down,’ he said. ‘It’s an SRO. And remember me in your prayers.’

  ‘You’re better off if I don’t. The Great Spirit and I don’t see eye-to-eye much. Here, split this with Mike.’ She handed him a twenty. She’d never get it back from the sweetener slush fund in her own division, because she was off duty, but she was feeling generous.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am. I wanted to be a police officer myself. Very very much once.’ Gloria stood beside the waist-high freestanding steel ATM a few moments, noting there was no camera attached and no overhead camera focused upon it, and she debated her feelings, and then she turned back and tucked her business card into the rent-a-cop’s shirt pocket. ‘Call me if you still want in.’ He was young enough if he was motivated, and clean. He just had to be free of serious felonies.

  ‘Bless you, ma’am.’

  She nodded and stepped out into the rancid shit-smelling aroma that emanated off the trashy pools of water at the curb. The Nickel – everybody’s idea of a great evening stroll.

  At heart I am profoundly melancholy, Gloria thought, and that may never be something that the Great Spirit will forgive. But maybe Jack will. Oh, I need him whole again.

  She looked left. The Fortnum’s sign up the block had seen better days, to say the least. One long squiggle of cursive neon tube, which would say NUM HOT if it could light up, had swung down to dangle vertically from the metal sign. She couldn’t believe the gentrifiers were snapping these places up. But it was all location, location, location, as somebody had said. Or was it just cheap, cheap, cheap?

  ‘So, the nudnik is back.’ Samuel Greengelb had unwisely opened his door, holding on to his aluminum baseball bat, but he had a sense the golden-haired man could just reach out and take it away from him like an infant’s lollipop if he wanted to. ‘We want our heat back on.’

  ‘Shutup, kike. Learn something.’

  ‘Don’t be a nudzh.’

  ‘I said shut up! Your benefactor, the generous owner of this building, has just sweetened his offer to all of you. It’s now twenty thousand dollars. For each of you fighting kikes. But only if you’re out of here in three days. This fantastic offer will not be repeated.’

  ‘Puh.’ It was an exhalation through Greengelb’s clenched lips, like steam from a pot lid. ‘We should trust a putz like Vartabedian? We who know about real Brownshirts? Ira was three months in Mauthausen-Gusen. You go look that up. He’s so upset he won’t come out of his room.’

  ‘Ancient history, Grandad. We got that pretty boy from room 205 that I know you like and we’re holding him till you get out. You know my partner is a little crazy about playing games with his knife.’ He showed the old man the high school photo of Conor that he’d taken away from the girl. ‘If you want this dippy kid as a big stack of bone-in sirloins, just let me know. My pal can wrap and deliver.’

  ‘Who is this boy? You leave children alone.’

  ‘Play it your own way, gramps. But I have a lot of trouble restraining my friend. He used to be a butcher way over there in N’awlins before that Katrina, you know, and he’s dying to try out his skills on a fresh bag o’ meat. Twenty thousand clams for each of you.’

  ‘I have to talk to my friends.’

  ‘Sure. You’ll find your benefactor is a true gentleman. You got twenty-four hours for your answer. Give or take half a second. It’s not like you deadbeat fucks got to go off to work tomorrow. Find time to talk it over quick.’ The big thug looked at his watch. ‘I’ll be right back here at eight at night. My advice is not to think of yourselves as anything special. You don’t get to be no Jew heroes. You’re just old men who won the lottery.’

  ‘I’m not the boss of anything, but we’ll talk.’

  ‘Do that, Granddad. I’d hate to have to throw all you Christ-killers out a window.’

  ‘Can we at least have the heat back tonight?’

  ‘Wear a couple coats. You start asking for favors and benefactors aren’t so nice.’

  * * *

  ‘Maeve, are you over there?’ Conor hadn’t spoken for a while, though the thugs seemed to have left the area some time ago. The night was going to be cold, and the cement floor was already damned uncomfortable on her hip, as well as her breath wicking dust up into her nose at every stirring.

  ‘Where would I go?’ Maeve called. Her hands were well and truly manacled around the pipe. ‘Disneyland?’

  There was a long silence, while the building groaned and popped in the dying of the day. ‘Wasn’t there some sports thing about saying Disneyland on TV?’

  She decided to keep it light. He seemed given to panics. ‘I heard winners got a free trip if they said they were going to D.’

  ‘People sell themselves awfully cheap,’ he said.

  For a lot less than that sometimes, Maeve thought, but it wasn’t something she particularly wanted to talk about. ‘How are you tied up? Is there any way to get loose?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘My arms are handcuffed around a big cast-iron sewer pipe that goes up from the floor about ten feet. It looks like it’s been here for a hundred years.’ She heard a rattle. ‘It’s pretty strong.’

  ‘Don’t knock yourself out. Did they take your wallet?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She began to worry about her folks back home. Her mom in particular, but she remembered that she also had a university notice in the wallet, just an acknowledgement that they’d received her application, and she thought it had Gloria’s address on it, so she thought of her helpless dad opening the door to the psychos and cringed. Why hadn’t she purged the damn city wallet?

  ‘Maeve?’

  ‘Yes, Conor.’

  ‘I think I want to sing something for you if you don’t mind. Singing it aloud helps me remember. I’ve been writing new songs. I don’t know what it’ll be like a capella.’

  ‘Did you think I’d say no?’

  ‘Well, I’m still tentative enough to think it’s an imposition to make somebody listen to me.’

  ‘Go for it. I was supposed to save you, you know, and I seem to have
failed miserably, so the least I can do is listen to you.’

  She heard him laugh once, then he tried to beat out a slow rhythm on the floor.

  ‘It’s blues,’ he called. ‘I got the tune in my head.’

  ‘Go on, dude. I’m here.’

  ‘I just come up here from Fallbrook way,

  Ridin’ the bus past the sea and the sailor bars

  Yes, I’m new here from Fallbrook town,

  From where the cars all shine like a million stars

  And the mothers lock the doors both up and down.’

  There were six verses like that. Wow, she thought, that was real white-boy blues, rich-boy blues. ‘That was good,’ she said.

  ‘Come on, Maeve. You can be critical.’

  ‘Well … I think I need to hear the music to get the feel of it.’

  ‘Yeah, but there’s something you don’t like in the song, isn’t there?’

  ‘It starts to get pretty bitter, doesn’t it? I don’t know if blues is like that. It’s usually more sad and resigned. You got some pretty strong up-front anger going.’

  There was a moment that dragged on a while, in which he wasn’t responding, and Maeve worried she’d offended him.

  ‘You know, I wonder why I get so angry,’ he said. ‘My parents are wonderful, progressive people. I went to a good school. I didn’t lack a thing I needed. What is it? I was angry. Is it adolescence? Is it all just make-believe?’

  Maeve could feel a stir of cold air and the floor was starting to get chillier, as if a number of windows were open or broken to the winter air outside. ‘There’s plenty of real things in the world to be angry about. Stupid wars and homeless people right here, and women getting beat up.’

  ‘Thanks for that, Maeve. But there’s some kind of feverish personal anger I’m working out, isn’t there? I think I’m so unused to anger – I have trouble dealing with it. I’ve listened to blues all my life. Real blues are redemptive – I read that somewhere – and I have this feeling my blues are just plain howling at the sky.’

  ‘Don’t be so dismissive of yourself, Conor. Maybe you’ll find a positive energy in your anger. Your folks were always dreaming of a better world, weren’t they? To do that you’ve got to have another source of energy. You don’t seem to me cynical at all.’

  ‘Wow, I could fall in love with you.’

  ‘Not right now, please. We need to get out of here.’

  ‘Practical to the end. You’re the best, Maeve.’

  ‘And don’t give up hope. I know a damn good cop who’s definitely looking for us right this minute,’ she said.

  She tried two other flophouses, probably only for hoodoo reasons, before she went into the most likely one all the way up at the corner, the Fortnum, where Gloria finally managed to galvanize a startling-looking albino behind a wire screen into acknowledging the boy’s photo, though he didn’t react to Maeve’s picture, and he gave her a room number and thumbed up a dank stairway.

  No one answered at the number, and the next two room doors were standing open strangely, like rat cages with the rats having fled some terrible fate. She glanced into the barren rooms with unsheeted beds, a three-legged chair. The place definitely wasn’t the Biltmore.

  A tiny dapper old man with a tonsure of grey hair opened a nearby door at her footstep. ‘Good evening. Before you speak, madam, I must perform a minute adjustment to my hearing aid.’

  ‘Go for it.’

  He extracted a tiny device from his ear and fussed with what looked like a miniature hatpin for a moment before re-inserting it.

  ‘Forgive me, I was napping,’ he said. ‘A greater and greater necessity, I find. I have so little juice of energy left. And, to be honest, the memory is not so good.’

  Gloria showed him her badge and the faxed photo of Conor and then the one of Maeve.

  He smiled at the boy’s photo. ‘Yes, I think this is the boy. He and his guitar reside in that room there. He’s a good boy and very healthy. Good health has become so important. Are you healthy, Detective?’

  ‘I can’t complain.’

  ‘You know, there is something I’m supposed to remember about this boy. I took a nap and that interferes. My memory is so terrible. He is gone away for a time, I think. I was supposed to call a meeting.’

  She showed him Maeve’s picture again.

  He tried hard to recognize her. ‘I may have seen them together somewhere, I’m not sure. I haven’t been polite. Please come inside, Officer …?’ His rising intonation appealed for her name.

  ‘Ramirez. Thank you. Sergeant Ramirez.’ She was in no hurry, and it was such a treat to interview someone who was polite, and mildly helpful at that. What was this sweet sane man doing on Skid Row? She could see what seemed to be a real oil painting of some romanticized cottage on the wall over his shoulder and a small bookcase jammed with foreign-looking hardback books. ‘I will make some tea, madam, and you may join me or not, as you wish.’

  ‘They said in the academy I shouldn’t. A suspect could slip me a knockout drug and escape, you see.’

  ‘Woe is me. So many rules. Nu, so I’m a suspect?’

  ‘A manner of speaking, sir. No, you’re not.’

  ‘My name is Samuel Greengelb. For forty years I was a diamond-cutter for the commercial jewelers who come and go like shooting stars in the Jewelry District over on Hill Street. You’d think with all that wealth passing through my fingers, some of it would have stuck, but no. A wife and three children I raised, first in Boyle Heights, then in MacArthur Park.’ He sighed. ‘Almost all have become nogoodniks and want nothing to do with a useless old man. It’s beyond sorrow. Many years ago I decided to leave Ruthie the house and stay here until I found a good place. Hah. You know, about this boy. Something is bothering me.’

  He fussed with the teapot and a box of loose tea leaves. In his fussing, he knocked a note off the shelf, which fell to the floor. Probably just an old shopping list. He kept many of them. Greengelb set the kettle on an electric ring and ground the kettle hard against the device for some reason. ‘Detective, now is the time in your life to plan for the future and save your money. Poverty is not a puzzle, I assure you. And it’s not an accident. It’s a simple consequence of bad decisions.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll revisit my retirement plans. But the police have pretty good benefits.’

  ‘Good, good. My children tell me I could always go to live on Mars if I want, but I hear the space program doesn’t take too many old Jews.’

  She laughed.

  Just as the kettle began to whistle, there was an angry pounding at the door. Greengelb looked like he might know who it was, and he picked up an aluminum baseball bat, but then he glanced at her and took on a secret air of mischief. ‘Let me work on the tea,’ he said, ‘and you can see to the putz who’s banging on my door.’

  ‘I’m here to make you happy tonight, Yid!’ a voice called through the door.

  She yanked it open to see a short furious man wearing a gray hoodie. His eyes went wide when he saw her, and he backed a half step. ‘Whoa, this is fucked up!’

  ‘You want to make somebody happy?’ she snapped. ‘That would be a real fucking challenge, little man.’

  ‘Not you. I’m a messenger. My boss says the offer is fifty grand now. Take or leave tonight. All the Jew gentlemen get the same deal. You create your own luck, the man says, and that’s real straight, cupcakes – it’s great good luck that their own stubbornness has created. Gravity to you.’ He swept back the hood and doffed a nonexistent cap at Gloria. ‘Good evening, miss.’

  ‘Hold it right there. I mean hold it, dickhead.’ She badged him – some days it gave her such great pleasure to use the power of her badge thrusting out of its own well-worn black leather wallet. Then she offered him Conor’s photo. ‘Have you seen this boy? Be very careful.’

  He barely looked. ‘Nah. I’m not very observant.’

  ‘You’re not very observant. Then do it because you’re scared, little man. What’s your name?’r />
  ‘Friedrich Nietzsche.’

  ‘Let’s see some I.D., Nietzsche. Now.’

  Instantly the strange little man pounded away along the hallway, a miraculously fast take-off like a dash-runner, and then he almost reflected himself down the stairwell. What a quick little fucker, she thought. Her choices right then had been to shoot him, for no particular reason, or be badly outrun and humiliated, or let him go.

  ‘I bet you know who that was,’ Gloria said, still staring at the space at the top of the stairwell that the man had just vacated.

  ‘I’m not sure of the name. It’s something French or Cajun. Thoreau, maybe, but I know who he works for, and that’s a lot more important.’ He poured out tea for both of them and told her about the plans for turning the old single-room-occupancy hotel into pricey lofts, and the three old-time residents who had tenure there and were trying to stay put, the bitter-enders of a much bigger crew who had had leases from the previous owner.

  ‘You’re the leader of this group,’ she said.

  ‘We all are.’

  He studied the depth of color in the teapot and then poured their tea. ‘The boy, I’m sure there’s something.’

  He gave a half-smile, but there was no humor in it. ‘I do my best to keep things light these days and be a good neighbor to all. Like your friend, that boy. A place is only blessed if it has good neighbors. Conor is the boy’s name, I remember. But there’s more …’

  In 2006, L.A. Police Chief William Bratton together with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, announced their ‘safer cities initiative,’ with significant input from right-wing think tanks back east. For some bizarre reason, they added fifty cops to The Nickel and decided to deal with the homeless by arresting and jailing them for every minor infraction, from littering, to public urination, to sleeping on the sidewalks. The estimated cost of the fifty new ‘Safer Cities’ police officers was about $6 million per year.

  EIGHT

  A Benefactor of the City

  Maeve was beginning to feel seriously uncomfortable on the concrete floor, an ache so widespread and deep in her hip that she knew it was in the boy’s, too. She could imagine him twisting this way and that, as well, to the limits of his handcuffs hunting for marginally more bearable positions. And the cubicles were getting colder and darker. In a few minutes she would no longer be able to read the Seek Ye The Lord that someone had spray-painted on the wall with a big-mouth enraged devil beneath. To admit the truth to herself, the devil frightened her a little, suggesting a mind she never wanted to confront. She wondered if the small man had painted it. ‘Ow!’ she cried out involuntarily, twisting one time two many.