Near Enemy (13 page)

After all, my father died. So did my mother, not long after.

So did my Stella.

So did New York.

Now here we are.

My mother told me, though, that I had this one teacher who’d championed me. English teacher. She was the one who’d put my name in the mix for the special class.

My champion.

Turns out this teacher thought I had an aptitude for language.

Aptitude. Not a word my father ever would have used. Didn’t like ten-dollar words. Not crazy about two-dollar words, for that matter.

That’s probably why the principal had been so easy to convince. I’d barely squeaked through in the first place.

Only had one champion.

Made me an easy veto.

Either way, a couple weeks after my father yanked me out of that program, that teacher, my champion, asked me to stay for a minute after class.

Class cleared out. Left her and me.

She looked up from marking papers.

I heard your father had you pulled from the special section.

Nod.

Do you know why?

Shrug.

Everything okay at home?

Nod.

You keeping up with your homework?

Shrug.

Then she pulled a thick paperback from her desk drawer. Had a whale and a boat on the front. She put the book aside and asked me if I wanted to meet her on Saturdays for special tutoring. We could meet at a coffee shop. I could tell my father whatever I liked. She had books and she thought I should read them. Thought I’d like them. We could read them and talk about them together.

You mean like detention?

No. Not detention. It’s not punishment.

Sounds like detention.

We can start with something fun.

Like what?

She held the thick paperback up.

Moby-Dick
.

I scoffed.

No, thanks.

Why not?

Don’t like animal books.

She laughed.

Have you read it?

Sounds boring.

How do you know it’s boring?

Shrugged. Muttered something.

I’m sorry, what did you say?

I said, does anyone get killed in it?

Yes. Lots of characters get killed in it.

Really? How?

Lots of ways. Whales, for one.

Scoffed again.

Sounds stupid.

Okay.

She put the book away.

Then let’s start with something a little more—exciting. Something pulpy. You read pulp?

Shrug.

How about
The Maltese Falcon
?

Like I said. I don’t like animal books.

She smiled.

You’ll like this one.

She pulled open the drawer again. Pulled out a different paperback. Battered cover. Weather-beaten. Held it out to me. Statue of a bird on the cover. Not promising. Author’s name sounded like a ballet dancer. Also not promising.

I shrugged.

She flipped open the front cover. Showed me some scribble. Showed me a year written under the scribble. From a long time back.

See that? That’s
my
high school English teacher. He gave this
book to me. Asked me to read it. Forced me, really. I was like you. Thought I didn’t like animal books.

She held the paperback out to me. I took it. Stuffed it in my back pocket. She winced.

Careful with that copy, please. That’s got a lot of sentimental value.

Sure.

You read that, then meet me on Saturday at noon at the coffee shop, and we’ll discuss it.

This Saturday?

Yes.

This whole book?

Yes.

By Saturday?

Yes.

This Saturday?

Trust me, you won’t want it to end.

Then she turned back to marking papers. Big stack of essays, all marked in red pen. A, C+, A-, B, B+, D, B, and so on. A whole alphabet, on an endless loop. I noticed she’d pulled my essay out of the pile, though. Set it aside. Circled a few words in red pen.

She kept marking. I didn’t budge. She looked up.

Yes?

And then I asked her the obvious question.

Why me?

Why you what?

Why me—?

Didn’t finish the question. Wasn’t even sure what I wanted to ask. She put down the red marker anyway.

Potential. I just hate to see it wasted.

Picked up the pen again.

See you Saturday.

Don’t know how that book turned out.

Never finished it.

Never started.

Dropped it down a sewer grate on the street outside the school.

Couldn’t be seen carrying around an animal book by a ballet dancer.

What would Terry Terrio think?

And I still remember to this day how the paperback fit so perfectly between the gaps in the grate before I let it drop, like I was delivering it through a mail slot, and the fluttering sound it made as it fell and then vanished, and how it landed in the sewer below with a splash, and how, once I’d let it go, I wished more than anything I could reach down into the darkness and pull it back.

Not sure what we would have talked about at the coffee shop on Saturday.

Never showed.

And next time in class, she didn’t mention it.

Never said a word about it to me, actually.

Just stuck my essay back in the middle of that endless pile.

Sometimes, many times, many years later, I’d think about that teacher.

Picture her, sitting in that coffee shop, waiting at a table for two, next to an empty chair. Waiting as the clock clicked toward noon.

Waiting for me to return with the treasured copy her own teacher gave her once, so we could discuss it, like they once did.

Waiting, as noon came and went.

Coffee cooling.

Until it became clear.

I looked her up, by the way, years later. That teacher. After my mother told me the whole story.

The story of my champion.

Hoped to pay her a visit. Say thank you. Say sorry.

Knock-knock.

Remember me?

In any case.

Didn’t matter.

Turned out she’s dead too.

Tracked her down to a tombstone in Jersey.

Peaceful cemetery. Well-kept plot. Withering bouquet.

Said sorry to a headstone instead.

And I bought that book eventually. The animal book by the ballet dancer. And I read it. And liked it. A lot.

She was right.

Told her that too, when I left my copy at her grave.

Speaking of.

Special kid.

Lesser.

Pervy hopper. Dirty fatso. Total weirdo.

But doesn’t deserve whatever’s happening to him.

Poor Lesser.

Deserves better.

Figure maybe he could use a champion.

Near Enemy.

What’s that?

You tell me.

Boonce laughs.

Look at you, Sherlock Garbageman. Congratulations. You figured one thing out.

Don’t fuck with me, Boonce. Just tell me.

He doesn’t tell me. Instead he leans on the railing of the rotten wooden deck overlooking the dirty Hudson River and chuckles.

In the background, quick-moving clouds of seagulls circle garbage barges on the river and shriek. Dive-bomb garbage. Drown us both out. Then Boonce announces, still watching the river, voice raised against the shrieking.

You know what’s the most dangerous thing in the world, Spademan?

What’s that?

Now he turns to me. Not chuckling anymore.

A man armed with a box-cutter and one fucking fact.

We’re standing on the upper deck of the South Street Seaport, down by the waterfront, at the tip of Manhattan’s south end. The deck’s railing is warped and the plankway is missing planks, victims of too many bad storms that hit too hard and too few city repair crews that still show up for their shifts.

Behind us, shifty merchants with makeshift wares sprawled
out on ratty blankets stand haggling with clients, most of them tappers aching for another hour in the limn. South Street Seaport used to be an actual seaport once, two hundred years ago or thereabouts, big magnet for commerce, bustling fish market, the whole shebang, until all that got shut down. After that, seaport turned into a shopping mall. Discount t-shirts sold from stalls that once housed fresh-caught sturgeon. Then the tourists left too, and the city went to hell, and now the seaport’s more of an all-purpose open-air bazaar, with an open-door policy when it comes to merchants. Which is to say, most of these merchants opened someone’s door, took whatever they could carry, laid it out here on a tattered blanket, and now they want to sell to you.

And just as pawn shops used to reliably pop up in neighborhoods where robberies happen, there are a half dozen by-the-hour flop-shops within stumbling distance of the seaport. People sell stolen shit here to raise enough cash to buy an hour in a bed. Some flops even offer ten-minute increments, though it’s hard to imagine what kind of off-body fantasy you can cram into ten minutes.

Actually, it’s not that hard to imagine.

Either way, the old seaport is an especially seedy corner of the city, even in a city full of seedy corners.

So, naturally, Boonce chose this place for our meeting.

I guess he only closes down Grand Central for you once.

I’d hoped for his office, tucked away in some police tower somewhere, but then, I keep forgetting.

He’s off the books.

Boonce leans his weight, arms locked, on the rotting railing and winces. I’m impatient, so I press.

I don’t like being lied to, Boonce.

No one likes being lied to, Spademan. And yet it happens every day.

He turns to me. Fidgets with that chunky watchband.

Speaking of which, how’s your nurse doing?

What nurse?

Boonce chuckles.

I like that. Play dumb. Look, I can see why she’s useful to your investigation, Spademan, given she’s the last person to see Langland alive. Oh, and thanks for keeping that piece of information from me, about Langland being dead and all. Good thing you’re not the only person on my payroll.

You never told me about Near Enemy, Boonce. Or that Lesser and Langland knew each other. Or that they both knew you.

Boonce sighs, like a husband caught cheating, but one who doesn’t really care if the marriage ends.

Look, Near Enemy was Bellarmine’s idea. But just the broad strokes. An initiative to protect the limn. You know, get some genius dorks to find all the holes in the limn and plug them.

Boonce gestures to the skyline.

Because that’s where the next one’s coming, you know. No one’s trying to blow up any of this shit out here anymore. The bad guys want to get in there. In the limn. Given what Lesser saw, maybe they already have.

And what about Lesser?

What about him? He was just some brilliant geek that Langland dug up and handed over to me. Some prodigy wasting away at a public high school, totally bored, parents completely useless, had no idea what they had on their hands, and Langland plucked him. Just like most of the kids at Langland Academy. It wasn’t a school so much as a salvage operation for brains. Lesser’s was the biggest, by the way.

Boonce thinks a moment.

Well, maybe second biggest.

Checks that watch again.

Tell me, Spademan, while you were off poking around in my
dirty laundry, did you ever happen to follow up on the one actual lead I gave you? That Egyptian kid, Salem Shaban?

No.

Well, he’s the one you have to worry about.

Why?

Because he’s the biggest brain of all.

Boonce rubs his forehead, like a guy with a migraine. Or a decision to make. He makes it, then says.

Here’s a little more backstory, since you’re so eager for the big picture. I told you Shaban moved here after the States took out his dad, right? In Egypt? When he was a teen? Do you want to know who brought him here?

I’m guessing it’s Langland.

Good guess. Shaban was another one of Langland’s reclamation projects. Notorious whiz kid. Langland plucked Shaban from Egypt and had him shipped stateside. State Department threw a hissy, of course, but Langland had pull to spare. Then Langland brought Shaban to me, to work on the Near Enemy project. Along with Lesser. The two of them. Top of the class.