CONCOURSE (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin) (2 page)

T
HREE

I
t was still beautiful here. The sky was a perfect morning blue, the air chill and clear. In the park by the Bronx County Courthouse the trees were turning, to brown-red, scarlet, rust. Some were as thickly yellow as the sunlight that lay like a benediction on them and on the graffiti-trapped, decaying buildings along the Grand Concourse.

I drove the unmarked Moran Security car farther north than I needed to, drawn by the ghosts behind the boarded-up windows and the roll-down store shutters that hadn’t been rolled up in years. On the façades I made out names, “Kat” and “Lifer” and “PTA”, in the garish colors and fluid strokes of spray paint. Where the buildings were brick, the painted names had a textured look, something almost innocent, like an old woman’s needlework. On the side of one building, in a place where the painter must have hung from a rope to reach, “Snake” was written in huge silver letters outlined in gold. The paint glittered in the sun as I drove by.

I cruised past travel agents and layaway furniture stores, fast food takeouts and storefront clinics. The Concourse flowed through the Bronx like a river between high banks of stone and brick. Well-made and once-proud, the apartment buildings on either side stood together like elderly cousins lined up for the last family photograph. At Fordham Road I swung south again, toward the Bronx Home, to take the dead man’s place.

I parked on the street, lit a cigarette. In the tape deck I had Richard Goode playing a Schubert sonata, the B-flat Major. I was learning it, had worked on it last night after I’d burst from a four
A.M.
dream, heart pounding, face drenched in sweat. I know those
dreams. I can’t sleep after them, but usually I can play. Last night, though, I couldn’t do anything right.

The dream had been about Annie. She was nine, wearing the clothes I’d last seen her in, seven years ago: a chestnut jumper, a scarlet blouse. In the dreams I see every detail of her clothes, though if you’d asked me as I drove away from my ex-wife’s house that day how my daughter had been dressed, I don’t think I’d have been sure. When Annie was with me, I mostly only saw her smile.

In the dream she was searching for me through a shadowy house being built or demolished—I couldn’t tell which—and though I tried to call to her, I had no voice and she didn’t hear. I was desperate to see her, talk to her, even though I knew, the way you know in those dreams, that it would be the last time, that after this she would be gone forever. But she didn’t hear me, never found me. I watched her leave the house, knew she was skipping down a flight of steps I couldn’t see, and the panic that rocks those dreams woke me before the squeal of brakes, the screech of metal on metal, the irrevocable crash of broken glass could reach me from the accident I had not been there for, had not even known about until it was far too late.

Now, in the Bronx, in the bright early sunlight, fear, fury, acceptance, and desperation alternated in the music, washed over me like water. I closed my eyes, felt the notes in my fingers. For a moment I let myself wish I were home, at the piano, with a strong cup of coffee and the phone turned off. Then I left the car, threw away the cigarette, creaked open the gate in the wisteria-draped wall.

I stood for a moment, taking in a sight I wasn’t prepared for, although I’d been told. Across the sunken garden, resplendent in the morning sun, The Bronx Home for the Aged spread its three-story limestone wings to meet the garden walls. The sun sparkled in the tall windows of the central pavilion, gleamed off the tiled roof. A broad stone porch curved over the garden. The garden itself, seven steps below street level, took up fully half the block. From the street the crowns of the tall trees, sweetgum and oak, had been visible, moving in the gusting wind. Now I saw the others: evergreens, dogwoods,
cherries. There were splashes of gold and white chysanthemums in round beds, and a few pink roses still clung to bushes bordering the walk.

That’s where Mike Downey had been found, beaten to death beside that walk, his blood splattering the pink roses.

As I walked down into the garden Mike’s cocky laugh echoed in my head. The earth smelled damp and rich, but the garden, close up, had the melancholy look of gardens in autumn. Even the chrysanthemums were past their prime; the wind was tugging at the roses. Fallen leaves whispered underfoot. The lawn and path were dotted with sweetgum burrs, round and brittle. I started up the porch steps, thinking I was alone.

A loud whisper startled me: “Wait, you’ll scare them!” I stopped still, looked around. In a corner of the porch a tiny woman knelt, her hand out to me like a traffic cop’s. In front of her, a black cat crouched on the stone railing. A black-and-white splotched kitten and a tiger one prowled the floor near a plastic bowl full of glop.

With difficulty and determination, the woman rose and backed stiffly away, watching the cats. I waited; finally she waved me on. As I joined her she dropped an empty can into a paper bag, folded the top twice. Her hands were small and spotted; her hair was a short halo of white silk threads.

“You’re the new man.” Her voice held an edge, as if she wasn’t sure that the new man was a good thing for me to be. She read the nameplate on my jacket. “ ‘W. Smith’.” Her chin thrust upward. “What’s the W for?”

“William,” I told her. “Bill.” I held out my hand.

We shook. “Ida Goldstein,” she said. I’d once had a sparrow perch on my finger. Her touch reminded me of that. “We’re not supposed to feed them,” she said.

“Why not?”

We watched as the cat and kittens tore hungrily through the glop.

“Because they’re dirty. Because they’re wild and have diseases. Of course they do! Nobody takes care of them. Do you like cats?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. Did you know the other boy? The one who’s dead?”

The question threw me. “Mike Downey? Yes, I did.”

“He liked them. He smuggled me the cat food. It got him in trouble with the Boss Lady, because when she caught him with it, he wouldn’t tell her who it was for.”

She looked back at the cat and the kittens. The tiger was perfectly still; then, suddenly, it pounced on a leaf rolling across the stone.

“They’re right,” Ida Goldstein said, as suddenly. “I shouldn’t feed them. What’s the point? Something bigger will only kill them. Or they’ll grow into big, savage things themselves and kill something else.” She gave me a narrowed stare. “I don’t think I want to get to know you.”

She turned abruptly, took stiff steps toward the iron-and-glass front door. She poked her finger onto a button on the jamb. The door swung open. Ida Goldstein, leaning on the button, looked back at me. “You be careful,” she said, and hobbled in.

F
OUR

I
stood on the porch at the Bronx Home in the sharp early sunlight. I watched Ida Goldstein disappear; then I went in also.

The iron-and-glass door gave into a wide short hallway with a framed landscape on either wall. At the hallway’s other end was an intersecting corridor. From somewhere came the clink of dishes, and a breakfast smell of coffee and toast.

In the intersection, a man in a uniform like mine sat at a desk. His nameplate read “A. Dayton, Supervisor.” Another man in uniform lounged in another chair, filling out forms on a clipboard.

I gave A. Dayton my name, offered my hand. He shook it solemnly. He was a dark-skinned black man, younger than Bobby, older than I. His close-cut hair was graying, his mustache gray already.

“Mr. Moran called me about you.” Dayton had a deep voice
and a slow way of speaking, the air of a man using exactly the words he wanted to use. He nodded toward the other man. “This is Henry Howe. He’s supervisor on the graveyard shift.” I shook hands with Howe, a redheaded, potbellied fellow whose eyes were sharp and alert behind deceptively heavy lids.

“Mr. Moran says you’re experienced,” Dayton said. The eyes with which he looked me over were deep and unreadable.

“I’ve been on my own for a while,” I said. “But I started in Bobby Moran’s shop, close to twenty years ago.”

“Well, I’m glad to have you. Did Mr. Moran explain how things work here?”

“Three shifts,” I answered. “Three men on each shift. One man at each door, one on the grounds. That’s me, right?”

“Correct. You don’t patrol the building, just to go through from the front to the back. Inside isn’t where the trouble is. And normally we don’t have the third man but at night. Now …” Dayton shrugged.

An old man, mouth half opened, emerged in a wheelchair from a door down the hall. He worked the chair across to another door not with his hands but by digging his heels into the carpet, hauling himself along. Dayton turned his eyes to the man and chair; when they’d disappeared, he turned back to me. “If you’re ready to start, you can clock in. There are lockers in the basement, next the boiler room, if you need to put anything away.”

“Why ain’t he on my shift?” Howe spoke suddenly, words addressed to Dayton but his eyes on me.

“You get one of the day men. Turner.” Dayton gave Howe a sharp glance.

“Permanent? He replaces Downey permanent?”

“Yes.” Dayton nodded, a slow, considered movement. “Mr. Moran didn’t like to start a new man on the graveyard shift. Especially now.”

That was only half the answer. I had wanted to start out with days. Talking to people would be the best way to learn things, if there was anything to learn. Later, if there was any point to it, I could work Mike’s shift.

“Downey wasn’t new. Fat lot of good it done him,” Howe snorted. He looked at his watch, swung his bulk up out of the chair. “I’m done. See you tomorrow, Alvin. Smith, you enjoy yourself. It’s a beautiful day.” He clattered the clipboard onto the desk, punched
the time clock, wandered out whistling “Zipadee-doo-da.”

Dayton looked after him silently. Then he turned his eyes to me again.

“Mr. Moran sets great store by you.”

“He told you that?”

“He told me he was sending me the best.”

All morning the sun was strong and the wind blew wildly. Heavy clouds flew across the bright sky, pulling brief, dark shadows behind them. The dappling light splashed through leaves in constant motion, giving the garden an unreal, underwater quality.

I covered the garden, checked the wall, the single gate, getting to know the place. I had a smoke outside the gate, looking over the Concourse, letting the street see me. It had been a long time since I’d worked a straight security gig, but some things I remembered.

I went back in through the building, exchanged nods with Dayton, went down the stairs. The block sloped so sharply west from the Concourse that the back entrance was a floor below the front one. On my first pass through I introduced myself to the back-door guard.

“Hey, man,” he said, shaking my hand. “So you the shotgun, gonna save us from all the wild Indians?”

“Is that the problem?” I asked. “Indians?”

He shook his head and grinned. His name was Fuentes; he was a small, quick man with a thin black mustache and a thick Puerto Rican accent. “No, man. The problem here is slime. You know what I mean? They hatch under rocks thinkin’ the world owes them a livin’, you know? Then they crawl out to collect.”

The parking lot, the side doors, back through the building to the garden. The garden, the ground-level windows on that side, back through the building to the lot. The morning went like that. I did my job, patrolled, looked big and reassuring. I smiled at residents if their stares weren’t vacant, if they looked up from their private dreams or away from the television in the dayroom, but I didn’t stop to talk with anyone. Dayroom; that’s what they called it in prison. Maybe here it was called something else.

I did the back door on Fuentes’s break, the front door on Dayton’s.
On my own break I went out to get the car, bring it into the lot. I took a spin around the block. The area was mostly brick apartment buildings, mostly occupied, poverty displayed in humble ways: bedsheet curtains; glaring fluorescent-lit lobbies; bent and dented frames on glass-and-aluminum doors. Some buildings were abandoned, windows vacant or thick with concrete block. I saw some construction, and that seemed hopeful, though each project wore a blue-and-orange sign marking it as sponsored by one agency or another of the City of New York.

On Chester Avenue, behind the Home, a retaining wall rose like a concrete cliff, compensating for the relentless slope of the land away from the ridge of the Concourse. Nothing of the Home was visible from down here but the tops of the birch trees in the parking lot. Surrounded by a wall, sitting on a plinth, the Bronx Home for the Aged floated in this sinking neighborhood like wood in a whirlpool.

I noticed a set of doors, big wooden ones like old-fashioned stable doors, in the center of the retaining wall. They were peeling and grimy and shut. I wondered about them, about whether in its early days the Home had kept horses and carriages back here, and what back here had been like then.

Then something else grabbed my attention.

Across the street at the end of the block a knot of people strained toward each other. Tension pulsed from them like radio signals. I could hear voices raised, though I couldn’t make out words. Heavy gold jewelry flashed in the sun.

I drove nearer. Five men—some of them young, boys really—in sweats, Nike Airs, elaborate fade haircuts, made a jeering semicircle around a man in blue coveralls. The coveralled man, ignoring them, spat words at a skinny guy who towered above the rest. Six-seven, I judged, or six-eight, wearing a leather jacket patterned in red, black, and green, with black-and-white eight balls on the elbows and back.

“I ain’t saying this again,” the coveralled man shouted. “You don’t come near her, Snake. Ain’t no more discussion, that how it be.”

The tall guy smiled slowly. “Let’s show the brother,” he said to the group around them, “the way it be.”

The fight that had been simmering boiled over. The skinny
guy grabbed the coveralled man, slammed him against the wall. The man started to come back, but a fat kid tripped him. Suddenly there were four guys on top of him. Only the skinny guy stood aside, watching.

None of your business, Smith, don’t be an idiot.

That thought came and went as I stomped on the gas, screeched the car onto the sidewalk, threw my door open. It caught two of them; I exploded out and caught a third myself, the fat one. I hauled him off the guy in blue and pounded my fist into his soft gut. While he was thinking about that I hooked my foot around his ankle, swept it forward, shoved his shoulders back. He hit the pavement hard.

A moment later so did I. Someone had blindsided me, knocked me on my back. He was on top of me now. My head rang, breath was hard to get; I threw a fist out wildly. It connected with something. I forced my eyes to focus, found the face of the tall, skinny guy. His dark eyes glinted with excitement, and something else.

I twisted, trying to dislodge him. His fist slammed my face. Through the exploding colors I grabbed for his throat, but his arms were so long he was a mile away up there. I heard gold chains jingle on his chest; I couldn’t get near him.

His groin was closer. I jabbed at that, stiff-fingered, then clamped on his balls and yanked. He yelped, lifted half into the air. I twisted again, shoved him off, started to stand; but someone else grabbed my left arm from behind, pulled me off balance as the skinny guy rolled to his feet. Skinny kicked me in the chest.

That was enough of this shit. Before the next kick I fumbled into my jacket, swept out my .38.

“Freeze!”

His eyes met mine for the briefest second; I went cold when I saw what was in them. Then he grinned and whispered, “Oh, later for you, my man.” He stepped back, yelled, “Yo! Yo, Cobras! Chill!”

Suddenly no one was holding me. I lurched forward from the release. There was the percussion of feet on pavement, then silence.

In the silence someone was breathing heavily, besides me. I looked around. The guy in the blue coveralls groaned, stirred, pulled himself into a half-sit.

I slipped the gun back in my shoulder rig as he fixed dark eyes on me. “You crazy,” he pointed out in a rasp.

I breathed a little, until breathing seemed like a natural thing anybody could do. “Uh-huh,” I said. I added, “Bill Smith.”

He shook his head, rose to his feet carefully, helped me to mine. He said, “Martin Carter.” He eyed my uniform. “You work at the Home?”

“Yeah. Started today.”

“I work there too,” Carter said. “Maintenance.” I saw, then, the red stitching on his coveralls that said “Bronx Home for the Aged.”

“What was this about?” I asked, wiping sweat from my face.

Carter shrugged. “Business.”

“Sounded to me,” I pushed, “like two guys fighting over a girl.”

“Well,” Carter said deliberately, “then that what it sound like to you.”

We looked at each other for a few moments, sizing each other up, filing things away. He was young, dark-skinned, a few inches shorter than I, handsome.

I was aging, beat-up, and unmistakably white.

“But thanks,” he suddenly said. “You save my ass, no question. You okay?”

“Yeah, I think so. You?”

He rubbed his jaw and nodded. “Will be.” He cocked his head at me. “But you gonna have a shiner. Coming up already.”

“I can feel it. And you’re not going to tell me why?”

Carter looked at me, looked away, shrugged again.

“All right. I’ve got to get back to work. Nice meeting you.” I walked the few steps to the car, which was angled on the sidewalk, driver’s door wide open. I got in, slammed the door, lit a cigarette, turned the key. To hell with him.

There was a pounding on the other door. It was Carter, grinning. I leaned over, let him in.

“Can I get a lift?” he asked, the grin growing as he settled himself on the seat.

I said nothing, backed the car off the sidewalk, headed it along the street. From here we’d have to circle the block to get back to the lot gate.

“You do this often?” Carter asked. “Bust up fights, guys you don’t even know?”

“If I feel like it.”

“You been a cop?”

“No, never. What made you ask that?”

“Cop might do that. Plus, it look like a cop gun, that piece you waving around.”

“It was,” I said. “My uncle left it to me.”

“Left it?”

I said nothing.

“Oh,” Carter said. “Hey, sorry, man. None of my business.” He was silent for a minute. Then he said, “This wasn’t nothing. Just a fool talking to a ignorant man.”

“Which are you?”

He laughed ruefully. “Both, most likely.”

“And that tall guy? He’s both too?”

“Snake?” He just shook his head.

“He’s good with his hands. Fast,” I said, feeling my eye, remembering.

“Yeah, well, that the book on him. He the one made that chill with the Cobras.”

“Made what chill? And who are the Cobras?”

“Man, you come round here, you don’t know shit?”

“Enlighten me.”

“Those guys was Cobras. They run these blocks. And they got your number now.”

“I’ll change my number. Made what chill?”

He made a wordless, impatient sound. “Most of the crews round here, they pack all different shit. Cobras strapped too, but don’t use nothing but hands and feet unless they have to. It a thing with them, show they tough.” He gave me a strange look, said, “You want to be looking out for them, now.”

I shrugged. Except for Snake and the fat one, I wouldn’t recognize any of them anyway.

Carter was reading my mind. “Snake, he run the crew. Skeletor coming up. And don’t go thinking he soft cause he fat. Nothing soft about that mother.” He looked over at me. “Each Cobra wear a tattoo. Here, dig?” I glanced over. He traced a line on the sleeve covering the inside of his right forearm. “They put a snake there. Cobra, see?”

“Even the ones as dark as you?”

“Black ink,” he said shortly.

We’d reached the entrance to the Home parking lot.

“You got the key, I get the gate for you,” Carter offered. I dug the Moran keys out of my pocket. When I’d driven inside he leaned in the window, gave me back the keys. “Say your name Smith?”

“Uh-huh.”

He grinned. “I got cousins name Smith. You suppose we related?”

“You better hope not. All my relatives are as ugly as I am.”

“No shit,” Carter said. He appeared to be thinking deeply. “Well,” he finally announced, “sad as that be, I’m declaring you my relation. What you need, if I got it, you got it.” He stuck his hand in the window.

We shook. I said, “Thanks, cousin.” He grinned again, straightened up, wandered back into the Home. I parked the car and did the same.