The 25th Hour

by David Benioff

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘It’s yours,’ says Uncle Blue. ‘You know how to use it?’

  Valghobek holds the pistol by the barrel, waiting, a small smile on his face, until Monty grabs it from him and stands.

  ‘I know how to use it.’

  ‘Good,’ says Uncle Blue. ‘This man does not deserve to live. He betrayed you, he betrayed me. He stole from you. He stole seven years from you. End him.’

  Everything seems stupid to Monty now, stupid men playing at stupid games, a confusion of menace, of treachery, all for such petty stakes. A fool’s drama played by dim thugs reciting the same lines endless generations of dim thugs recited before.

  The Zakharov twin holding the gun taps the muzzle against the back of Kostya’s head, where the skull meets the spine. He grins up at Monty. ‘Right here,’ he says. ‘Very quick.’ He straightens up and backs away. His brother continues to hold Kostya down; he nods at Monty and watches him.

  Monty crouches beside the Ukrainian and points his gun. Kostya struggles to turn his head. Blood leaks from his nose. ‘Monty—;’

  ‘Don’t talk.’

  ‘Listen, Monty, please listen. I had no choice. I—;’

  ‘You had a choice,’ says Monty. He looks into his old friend’s eyes and feels no pity, no pity for this man who drank vodka with him, played cards with him, who took him to Russian restaurants in Brighton Beach and taught him to curse in three languages.

  It seems to Monty that revenge is the simplest of all pleasures, the most understandable: someone hurts you, you hurt them back. And won’t it make things easier, seven years in a cage, knowing that the man who sent you there is not lying on the beach as the waves roll in, enjoying the summer sunshine; is not sitting in the raw bar at Grand Central Station slurping oysters from the shell; is not hollering at the hockey players to pass the puck; is not, period.

  ‘It doesn’t matter anymore,’ says Monty, flicking on the safety. ‘What’s the point? I could have told you about Kostya seven months ago. It was too late then and it’s too late now. You kill him, you bury him, I’m still going to Otisville. What’s the point?’ He tosses the automatic to Uncle Blue, who catches it and frowns.

  ‘Be careful,’ says Uncle Blue.

  ‘I’ll be careful. And you be careful too. You think I’m soft, don’t you? You think I’m soft?’

  ‘Monty,’ says Valghobek. ‘You want to watch what you’re saying.’

  ‘No, I don’t. It doesn’t matter to me. Not a goddamn thing matters to me, except this: if anything happens to my father, I’ll kill you both.’

  One of the Zakharov twins asks a question in Russian, but Uncle Blue holds up his hand.

  ‘Go ahead,’ says Monty. ‘You give him the order if that’s what you want. But if I walk out of this room, we’re done. You hear? I’m out, my father’s out.’

  ‘It won’t change anything,’ says Uncle Blue, gesturing at Kostya, who has begun to sob quietly on the floor. ‘You’re not saving anybody.’

  ‘You want to let me go or not?’

  Uncle Blue drums the desktop with his fingers. Valghobek lights a new cigarette, puts out the burning match with a flick of his wrist, and drops it on the floor. Everyone waits. The bass line is barely audible down here, but Monty can feel the vibrations in his bones. A glass of water sitting on the desk trembles slightly.

  ‘Remember what I told you,’ says Uncle Blue. ‘A man with no friends.’

  He nods at Valghobek, who walks over to the door and opens it. Valghobek blows a perfect ring of smoke and Monty watches it rise, trembling, toward the fluorescent lights.

  ‘Come on,’ says Valghobek. ‘You’re missing your party.’

  Twenty-one

  Three young men – silent and shivering in the underground station – sit with their backs against the corrugated steel shutters of a closed newspaper stand. Two teenage boys with shaved heads and sleepy faces stand at the far end of the platform, sipping from a carton of orange juice that they pass back and forth. One old man, wearing a black garbage bag with a hole cut out for his head, leans against a blue I-beam that helps support the station’s ceiling. He holds a small radio close to his ear and listens to an evangelist preaching in Spanish. Snow is melting in the old man’s hair; it drips down his neck, down the black plastic of the garbage bag, puddles at his feet.

  Slattery hears the two boys laughing; he sees them crouched at the platform’s edge, staring at the tracks. He leans forward but can’t make out what they’re laughing about. Monty and Jakob are paying no attention, but Slattery is curious, so he stands up, walks toward the boys, asks, ‘What’s down there?’ His breath rises in white vapors above their heads.

  The boys examine him for a moment, reckon him safe, point. Slattery peers into the darkness. ‘What?’ And then he sees the pink tail of a rat slip under a steel rail. His eyes begin to pick out movement in the shadows, and he counts six, seven, nine rats crawling in the tracks, nosing through balled-up paper bags, wax-paper cups, candy wrappers, orange peels.

  ‘These ones,’ says the taller of the boys, ‘they eat rat poison like chocolate. The MTA keeps putting more and more poison down there, and the rats get fatter and fatter. People talking about getting snakes, these pythons from Africa, getting a bunch of them and letting them loose in the tunnels. To eat the rats.’

  ‘They should just get cats,’ says Slattery. ‘It would be cheaper.’

  The boy scowls. ‘Cats would get hit by trains. That’s the thing, a snake could just slide under.’

  Slattery smiles, trying to imagine a New York politician importing African snakes for release in the subway tunnels.

  ‘My uncle works for the MTA,’ says the boy. ‘He told me, one time, these guys were down here working on the tracks, and one guy felt something crawling up his leg, under his pants – and he starts screaming. By the time his friends get to him, the rat’s chewing his balls off.’

  ‘Come on,’ says the short boy.

  ‘It’s true. That’s why you see guys, nowadays, working down here in the tunnels – next time you see them, check it out – they all tuck their pants into their boots. I’m telling you,’ he says, over his friend’s clucking.

  ‘Watch this,’ says Slattery. He digs around in his pants pocket for a handful of change, picks out a nickel, and hurls it at the closest rat. The nickel flashes by the rat’s head and clangs off the rail. The rat hustles into the dark alcove below the lip of the platform. A chorus of high-pitched squealing makes the boys laugh.

  ‘They’re saying, Look out!’ says the tall boy.

  ‘Here,’ says Slattery, offering a palmful of change. ‘Take a shot at it.’

  The boys look at each other for a moment and then each takes a coin. They stare up at Slattery. He nods at them.

  ‘Let’s see what you got.’

  The taller boy takes careful aim at a fat gray rat whose head and front paws are inside an empty bag of potato chips. He throws the coin too hard; it pings off the tile on the far side of the tunnel, below the red spray-painted tag: SANE SMITH.

  ‘Your release is too high,’ says Slattery. ‘Look.’ He mimics the boy’s motion. ‘See? You’re letting go way up here, so it’s floating on you. It’s like – you play football?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Baseball?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? What do you play?’

  ‘Soccer.’

  ‘Soccer? All right, forget it. Your turn, little man.’

  The small boy hands the orange juice carton to his friend, crouches with one hand on his knee and the other, coin-holding, hand resting on the back of his hip, like a pitcher on the mound, reading the catcher’s signals. The fat gray rat now sits back on its haunches, gripping a sliver of potato chip between its paws. It takes a nibble and looks around, black eyes small and wet like two drops of blood. The boy raises his left leg high, in the manner of the great Juan Marichal, rears back, and fires sidearm. The coin spins through the air and they’re all
watching it – even the rat is looking up now, solemnly nibbling its fried potato – and pthhwick! the nickel smacks it on the head. It drops the chip, quivers for a moment, and bolts into the shadows, its brother rats squealing and the humans cheering.

  ‘Thataboy!’ yells Slattery. He raises his hand and the boy slaps it, grinning happily.

  ‘You see that? You see that?’ shouts the tall one. ‘Rat got clocked! Charlie got mad velocity!’

  Charlie says nothing, just grins and hops around on one foot.

  ‘Every now and then, fellas,’ says Slattery, ‘you got to show the rats who’s boss.’

  Jakob watches the kids at the far end of the platform jumping up and down and wonders why they’re so excited. He checks his watch. Six o’clock. Three hours until the bus leaves Port Authority headed north to Otisville. Monty sits next to him but he’s not there; he’s a cold space, unspeaking, unblinking, hunkered down in his camel’s-hair coat, staring at a gray concrete floor freckled with tramped-down chewing gum.

  When Slattery found Jakob sprawled on a black velvet chaise lounge in a back corner of the club, he helped him to his feet and said, simply, ‘Monty wants to go home.’ None of them said a word on the long march to the train station. Jakob kept looking back at the six rows of footprints that trailed behind them, slowly filling with new snow.

  He knows he should say something to Monty now, do something, some gesture of solidarity, even an arm around the shoulders, anything, but he is stiff with fear, with exhaustion, with the sick memory of that kiss. He keeps seeing Mary D’Annunzio’s face flattened with shock, her bewildered eyes, the Yankees cap sitting crooked on her head. It’s not the sin of it that really bothers him, not the immorality of the situation, it’s the rejection. A kiss that had his toes curling left her disgusted, her tongue retreating to the back of her mouth, her hands hanging limply by her side. How much better to be a winning lecher, a seducer, to corrupt young women and get run out of town! But to fail with the seduction, to have the girl step back, revolted, wanting nothing but to escape . . . ?

  LoBianco is right about one thing, thinks Jakob. Mary won’t go running to the headmaster. But she will tell her friends, won’t she? Don’t girlfriends discuss everything, every wart on their lover’s anatomy? Imagining the conversations is horrifying for him. He pictures the girlfriends gathered about Mary in the coffee shop, twisting straws around their fingers, their mouths wide with the erotic thrill of good gossip. He kissed you? they would shout. Oh, my God! He kissed you? What was it like? Mary would shake her head. Ugh, she would say. Awful. He slobbered all over me. Like kissing a ferret. They would scream and laugh and ask, What are you going to do? You could sue the school. Maybe they’ll arrest him!

  If the kiss had been better, he thinks, if I had kissed her right, everything would be okay. Monty, if Monty had gone into that bathroom, wrapped his arms around her, laid on a Monty smooch, Jesus, the two of them would still be in there; there would be a line of ten thousand people with bursting bladders banging on the door.

  What is worst of all for Montgomery, thinks Jakob, the worst possible punishment, is to be deprived of women, to be exiled to a stone city of hard men, scarred losers with razors in their pockets and a lifetime of defeat to avenge. Monty has always been comforted by women; they have always adored him, protected him, covered his face with kisses, gazed at him on the sidewalks. What disturbs Jakob is the quick twinge of justice he feels when he considers the situation. He has waited years for his turn. He remembers the interschool dance in tenth grade, when a pretty young cleft-chinned girl had walked bravely up to him and, looking over at Monty, asked, Who’s your friend? Someday, he always told himself, the girls will look my way.

  For the next seven years, thinks Jakob, I will live in a city gone mad with beautiful women, everywhere, waiting at the corners for the light to change, sitting in Bryant Park watching the outdoor movies, hanging onto the straps of swaying subway cars, serving drinks in Chelsea bars, jogging around the reservoir, yelling at their boyfriends on Avenue A, whispering into pay phones, smoking outside Indian restaurants, dancing in the dens of apartments that have dens. And Monty will wait in Otisville, watching a television bolted to the ceiling, the glass protected by a wire-mesh screen. He will sleep in a cell with strangers he cannot trust, he will use a bathroom where the walls are smeared with shit, he will eat food prepared by convicts, knowing the rumors about broken glass in the chili, maggots in the rice.

  Jakob can imagine the prison, but he has no idea whether his picture matches the reality. The only prisons he knows are from television and movies: the fantasy penitentiaries where an innocent man fights to survive while at the same time proving his innocence; where an old lifer, sentenced decades ago, provides tactical advice on how to combat the gangs, the sadistic warden, the loneliness. Jakob sees the old lifer perfectly, the battered face still mournful for the wife he murdered in the fifties.

  How does Monty imagine it? Does he understand what is happening to him? Jakob stares at him now and can’t read a thing. Monty’s green eyes are dulled over, like the eyes of a fish you wouldn’t buy. Jakob wants to ask him what he sees right now, what he’s picturing, if it’s Otisville or Naturelle or how this all got started. But Jakob asks nothing; he rubs his hands together and shivers. A few more hours and I can lie down in my warm bed, between old flannel sheets. I can boil water for tea and sip it while watching the snow fall outside my window. They’ll have to cancel school today. I can sleep late, wake up in the early afternoon, watch the cartoons, root for the cat to finally catch the mouse.

  ‘Are we sure the train is running?’ Jakob finally asks. Monty does not answer. He’s not present. He’s in a hospital on Seventh Avenue in Bay Ridge in 1977, visiting his mother.

  She had begun to look like someone else, like something else, something monstrous pretending to be his beautiful mother. He didn’t like this new woman, he hated her; she was trying to trick him, to make him believe she was his real mother when it was so obvious she couldn’t be. She was an impostor. When she spoke it was nothing like his real mother; it was a rasp that almost never made it to the end of a sentence.

  At home he had drawn a picture of two women, one with curly hair, one bald, and his father had asked who they were. ‘That’s mommy,’ the boy had said, pointing to the curly-haired woman. He put a finger on the bald woman’s face. ‘That’s the robber mommy.’

  When his father told him they were going to the hospital, Monty cried and yelled until his father slapped him hard on the face. Monty stopped crying. He hated his father for thirty minutes but was holding his hand by the time they got to Seventh Avenue. Monty wore a plastic fireman’s helmet, candy-apple red, with a sticker on the front that read NEW YORK CITY FIRE DEPARTMENT. They rode the elevator, and an old woman in a bathrobe, leaning on a walker, smiled at Monty and asked his father for a light.

  When they got to the room Monty did not want to go in; he squeezed his eyes shut and covered his ears with his hands and shook his head violently. ‘Monty,’ his father said, uncovering his ears, ‘please. Help me out here.’ His father had never spoken to him like that before. Monty opened his eyes, took his father’s hand, and followed him into the room.

  The robber mommy looked at him and smiled; she reached out for his hand and drew him close. He was afraid but she drew him close. He didn’t know what was happening but he knew it was bad. She held his hand and said, ‘Don’t be scared.’

  ‘I’m not,’ he said.

  ‘You look very handsome in your helmet,’ she told him.

  ‘I’m going to be a fireman,’ he said, and she nodded.

  ‘I know you are.’ She closed her eyes and a shudder ran down the length of her long body. And then another and then another. Her hand dropped Monty’s and clawed at the bedsheets. Mr Brogan gripped his son by the shoulders and led him to the doorway. As he left the room Monty heard his mother speak, with great effort. ‘You’re going to be a wonderful fireman, Montgomery.’

  He
did not turn around. He left his father behind, walked down the hospital corridor, his basketball shoes squeaking on the shining floor, and stopped at the open door of another room. An old man lay in his bed, tubes running up his nose, into his arm. A radio on the nightstand played opera. The old man saw Monty standing at the door and beckoned for him with one curling finger.

  ‘Figlio mio,’ said the old man. ‘Dov’e` il fuoco?’

  Monty ran. He ran so fast the fireman’s helmet flew off his head, but he did not stop; he ran to the end of the corridor, down three flights of stairs, out the hospital doors, east to Seventeenth Avenue, north to 81st street. He did not stop running until he was on his own block. He crouched outside his building and panted.

  Half an hour later he watched his father park the blue Chevrolet across the street and then sit motionless in the driver’s seat for a minute. When Mr Brogan finally got out of the car he stared at Monty for a long time over the roof of the Chevrolet. He started to cross the street, turned back, unlocked the passenger door, and reached inside. He slammed the door and checked both ways for oncoming traffic, the red plastic fireman’s helmet in his hand.

  Twenty-two

  The parked cars lining the avenue look like scoops of vanilla ice cream, glistening below the streetlights. The awnings of the buildings, fringed with icicles, creak beneath the weight of the snow. The sidewalk plane trees, pin oaks, and Callery pears in their little squares of soil stand motionless in the still, clear air, the curves of each branch precisely traced by curves of snow. The avenue looks unreal to Jakob: too white, too silent, like an abandoned mansion, its furniture draped with white sheets. The snow has stopped falling.

  Doyle, off his leash, charges down the middle of the street, carving a trail through the foot-deep powder, a drop of ink rolling down a blank page. Monty follows behind, twirling circles with the leash, his ruined shoes squeaking with each step. Jakob and Slattery walk side by side, a few feet farther back. Jakob tries to step carefully into the hollows of Monty’s footprints, the tramped-down snow, but mimicking Monty’s longer stride is awkward, ruining Jakob’s rhythm. Slattery wades forward, his pant legs soaked from the knees down.