Shadow Dancers (51 page)

They were loud and raucous. They drank to the new year and to Mooney’s impending liberation. People standing nearby at the bar watched them and eavesdropped on their conversation. Mooney laughed out loud that evening several times, out of sheer joy. Out of relief. The old dread, the vague, gnawing, ceaseless discomfiture seemed past. Yet, the face of Ferris Koops remained, still present in his mind’s eye. It was not the bloated mask with the grotesque ringed eyes he’d seen that morning, but, rather, an image of the small outcast child, cowering alone all by himself in a tony institution for the unwanted offspring of the well-to-do, locked in the basement of a derelict tenement in Hell’s Kitchen, and then the grimy little nomad, foraging with other nomads through the trash baskets of Grand Central Terminal after some small scrap of survival.

That evening before he went to bed he lugged his old telescope and tripod up to the roof. With the 500 X power lens, he scanned the April night sky to make certain that the universe was still there, all intact. There was Cassiopeia up to the north and Draco trailing like a long snake directly overhead. Behind him, Bootes flew like a great kite with brilliant Arcturus glittering in its tail, and there the rainy Pleiades had risen behind him in the east. They had promised a shift in fortune, and they had delivered. Everything appeared to be in order. Everything was in its place, all of his coordinates and guide-posts, the old tried-and-true friends of his troubled youth. They were all still there, shining down, timeless, imperturbable, scarcely deigning to note all the ceaseless fret and turmoil of mortal man below.

That night he slept the untroubled dreamless sleep of infants.

EIGHT MONTHS LATER, MOONEY HAD OCCASION
to be passing through Grand Central. It was at the end of one of those dog-day August afternoons. The city had sweltered under a blazing sun that had hammered mercilessly down for nearly a week. Daily, New York had suffered from hundred-degree temperatures, water shortages, drought alerts, and brownouts from record power demands.

Along with thousands of other limp and dazed commuters, Mooney descended the escalator, conveyed downward into the churning inferno below. Before him, a blur of stagnant motion shivered equivocally like a mirage in the desert. His damp seersucker suit clung to his back and the calves of his legs. His wet inner thighs chafed as he walked. The air inside the terminal was sour and suffocating. It smelled like the meaty breath of a bear that had recently fed.

Mooney was not rushing for a train (he pitied the poor beggars who were), but merely taking a shortcut through the terminal out to Lexington Avenue. At the foot of the escalator, his eye was drawn to a noisy flurry of activity outside of Zaro’s, where people lined up to buy breads and rolls and fast foods to take home for supper. Somewhere toward the rear of that line, but clearly separate from it, he glimpsed what appeared to be a dark, spreading stain just to the right of Track 28.

Whatever it was, it caught his eye and held it until, from all of that welter of chaos, a form gradually emerged. It was a person of indeterminate sex, perched atop a mound of odd bundles and packages.

At that distance, Mooney couldn’t make out the features of the person seated there. Still, he was struck by a sense of unmistakable recognition. As uncomfortable as he was in damp clothes and with chafed inner thighs, curiosity drew him closer to the place. Sure enough, it was Suki Klink. She’d taken up her old hunting grounds again outside Track 28, where weary commuters lurched and staggered out to the platform for the 5:40 to Poughkeepsie.

Swaddled in layers of clothes in that suffocating heat, she appeared to be enormous. Far heavier than he’d recalled. The apple-red cheeks seemed to have inflated to the point where the eyes had sunk into barely perceptible creases just above them. Now, there were only the sparse eyelashes to indicate the place they’d once occupied.

She sat amid bundles and packages, shopping carts stacked with magazines, newspapers, deposit cans and soda bottles, all of the detritus of an “all-disposable” civilization. The impression she conveyed, however, was not one of squalor, but rather something regal, on a grand scale, rather like a pasha presiding over a vast desert kingdom. She was wearing dirty white anklets and her swollen ulcerous legs stuck out from beneath layer upon layer of voluminous skirts.

She scarcely deigned to look up when he greeted her. The second attempt he made, he leaned down and stared directly into her face. “How are you, Mrs. Klink?” he asked. This time she stirred. It was like waking a drowsing lizard. Her head rose, her eyes cracked open, and a red tongue darted out across her lower lip. The movement was immense and stately, like that of a slightly crapulous Buddha.

“Remember me? Lieutenant Mooney. I came to visit you over on Bridge Street.”

The eyes embedded deep within the doughy flesh were bemused and shrewdly wary. “You a cop?”

Mooney laughed. “Used to be. Retired now. How’ve you been?” He glanced around at the assorted bundles. “Looks like times are pretty good for you.”

“You the son of a bitch who got Warren?” Her voice was full of reproach.

“If it hadn’t been me, it would’ve been somebody else. He was a naughty boy.”

“I don’t say he wasn’t.” She hastened to cover the impression she’d conveyed. “I don’t blame you. Not one bit. I’m glad you got him. He was bad. Did bad things.” Her great girth stirred and the bundles shifted beneath her. “That’s not the way I taught him. I tried to teach him right.”

Mooney nodded sympathetically. “Sure you did.” She watched him intently, as if trying to gauge the sincerity of his reply. In the next moment, the florid skin above the cheeks stretched into a smile. Yellow stumps of teeth showed beneath the rubber blue lips. She grinned. “You hear about me?”

“No. should I have?”

“Sold my place on Bridge Street.”

“No kidding? To the bank? I know they were after it.”

“Well, they got it.”

“I’m sorry,” Mooney said, and he genuinely was. He hated to see banks win anything. The notion of that old ramshackle hovel plunked right down smack in the midst of the financial district, like a huge wen on the smooth marmoreal nose of American corporate grandeur, pleased him mightily. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be.” The yellow stumps grinned up at him. “They gimme eight million dollars for it and the land. Three acres, it was.”

She must have caught the incredulity in his face. She started to cackle, and in the next moment, her red, edematous hand, like a lobster claw, ducked into a large beaded reticule and plucked out a bank book from the mounds of debris stuffed inside. She flipped it open and Mooney suddenly had a glimpse of a bank balance with more zeros parading out behind it than he’d ever seen in a passbook before.

“Looks like the number of light-years between Jupiter and the earth,” he observed.

She gazed up at him blankly. “Eh?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just thinking out loud. What are they doing with the place, anyway?”

“Doing? They done it already. Ploughed it under. Bulldozed it. Putting up a new building there.”

Mooney smiled knowingly. “Well, what else would they do?”

“I got me a new place,” she beamed. “Loft building down on Varick Street.”

“You living there now?”

“In one of the lofts. Rest of it I let out. Lots of artists and crazy people. They pay their rent, though. Prompt and regular. They wrote an article about me in the paper couple months back. You see it?”

“Afraid not.”

The puffy red hand swept down into the bag again and rummaged about for a while. It reminded Mooney of one of those wax gypsies in the glass booths you see in the penny arcades on 42nd Street that tell your fortune with a little printed card. Then something like a magnetic claw pulls out a cheap plastic prize from a heap of trash at the bottom and pokes it at you.

At last she fished out what she wanted and poked it at him. “They call me The Landlord Baglady.” She made an unpleasant gurgling sound when she laughed. Sure enough, it was Suki — a full cover portrait on the cover of
American Business Week.
There she was, in full baglady regalia, standing out in front of her loft in TriBeCa. Printed just beneath the picture in large bold print were the words,
“THE LANDLORD BAGLADY — AN AMERICAN DREAM.”

“They tried to steal it from me. Take it for nothing.” She giggled with renewed zest. “But I got me my own lawyer. Made ‘em pay big. Who they think they’re kidding?” She howled gleefully and so did Mooney, suddenly aware she was no longer looking up at him but at a scruffy, diminutive figure that stood with a disquieting stillness before her.

“Well, looky here,” she trilled. “Here’s the little seeker now.” She reached up and clasped a small child to her. With a yielding that seemed more like resignation and distaste, the boy, attired in a bizarre combination of rags, allowed himself to slip lengthwise against her, drawn into the smothering heat and copious folds of her garments.

At the same moment, his head turned and he gazed up at Mooney. It was the eyes. Something about the eyes. It would not be sufficient to say they were old beyond their years. The word
troubling
came to mind.

The old woman fussed over the boy and kissed him wetly. To this, the child submitted with sullen apathy. It was as though he’d been sedated, but by things far more potent than drugs. Everything of life had been hammered out of him.

Suki looked up at the detective and read his thoughts. She put a hand up to the side of her mouth and averted her head toward Mooney. “Poor little thing,” she whispered up at him. “Poor little tyke. Got no home. Lives with me, he does. I’m teachin’ him to read and write. Ain’t that so, darlin’?” She cooed over the child and chucked him beneath the chin. “What have you brought nice for old Suki? Have you brought old Suki a little present, sonny?”

Mooney watched the grimy little fist, clenched tight as a knot, slowly open. He could almost see it struggling to overcome its own inertia. At last, the hand hung open, limp and indifferent, to reveal in its palm a dirty wad of coins and rumpled bills of small denomination. “Oh, my, see what the little entrepreneur has here. You done splendid, you little scamp.” Clucking happily, she scraped the money into an apron she had banded around her middle. She lifted the apron, revealing beneath it a change maker such as bus and trolley-car conductors used to wear. The coins vanished quickly into that. The bills went into a small purse she’d fished out of her reticule. Into the child’s hand, which still hung limp in midair in the timeless attitude of the mendicant, she pressed two one-dollar bills.

“Now that’s for supper, sonny. Go get yourself an orange juice and a red hot. And mind, if there’s any change, bring it back.”

Undoubtedly, the boy had come to the old lady via the same route taken by Ferris Koops years before, and just like Ferris, had been introduced into the unconventional domestic arrangements of the house on Bridge Street. How much, Mooney wondered, did the old lady really know of the part played by Ferris in the Dancer’s nocturnal forays? At the time of the inquiry she denied knowing anything. Possibly that was true, Mooney thought. But, on the other hand, it very likely wasn’t. Mooney had no way of knowing, and at his present juncture in life, he didn’t much care. The matter by then was academic. All he knew was that the old lady was alive and thriving, much to the regret of the district attorney and the board of directors of the Amalgamated Mercantile Bank. Clinging resolutely to her former style of life, which simulated most closely some species of vermin, she’d become a millionaire many times over. Surrounded by her bundles and packages, installed within those mounds of undifferentiated rags and fuming debris, she was happy as a clam. She came and went as she pleased. She owed nothing to anyone. She fed off her foragings and had nothing to do but collect her rents. She’d beaten the system at its own game.

And, then again, there was the child. All of his various needs had now devolved upon her. He would require protection and love. He would have to be taught the ways of the world. She’d suffered her losses with Warren, but she had a new prodigy now. He was her future and that made all the difference.