South by South Bronx (24 page)

“I was thinking,” he said. “We can't just let her walk out of here, Alex. With that blond hair on her, she'll get spotted in a minute. Cops notice stuff like blond women walking down a South Bronx street.”

“Especially white blond women,” Alex added.

“So, check these out. I picked them up in Europe. I met this girl in Amsterdam named Sasha. She used to change her hair color about three times a week. Keeps people guessing, she would say. She told me to use the stuff for painting, and I did—
The Sasha Series
. I guess you could call it my experimental stage.”

He uncapped one of the cans, shook it a little, and sprayed into his palm. A blob of black foam.

“Black mousse,” she said, grabbing a can from the bag.

“Yeah, it's hair color. I must have ten cans of this stuff. You foam it up, then splugga into your hair.”

Mink laughed again.

“Twenty minutes later, no blond. Just like that. All those nosy cops searching elsewhere.”

Ava looked from Alex to Mink and back again. Her eyes brimmed hopeful. Some weird thought about not being blond. Some weird thought about losing her identity, if Ava Reynolds was supposed to be blond—some deep philosophical issue about what makes a person.

Mink must have read her thoughts. “It comes off eventually.”

“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.” She rushed up to Mink and hugged him, planted a kiss on his cheek like a grateful little girl. Alex too. Got a long hug, though she lingered a bit more, pressed closer. His arms went around her waist and they were now face to face.

“I'll be right back,” she said.

“You won't go out the bathroom window?”

“No.”

“No cheap tricks, no lies, no stories?”

“No way,” she said.

Were they going to kiss? Mink thought so, and when she scooted down the corridor with her cans of paint, he was staring awful wary at Alex, who looked like he had been kissed. He leaned against the desk and took out his tobacco.

“What are you getting yourself into?” Mink said. “Are you sure about this?”

“Yeah, she has to go to Berlin. The least I can do is drive her there.”

Mink squinted. “Hello. Car?” He made motions, like he was behind the wheel. “Plane?” He shot a hand upwards like a 747. “You're taking her? See, I figured that. You don't know what this woman is carrying with her, Alex! You're not drunk now, you're in total command of your senses, right? What do you really know about her, that you should take so many chances?”

Alex thought a moment, holding his clump of tobacco. “But it's always like that. I'm only taking her to the airport.”

“I knew that. That's why she should at least not be a blonde. I don't want you catching whatever she's going to get. Though seeing you now, I figure you've already caught it.”

“Yeah, well. Are you going to show me what you painted?”

Mink's face tilted like he'd heard a musical note. “I'll show you both,” he said.

In a letter to a fellow poet, Anne Sexton wrote about how she had been having blackouts. In Dr. Kenneth Rangle's book,
Blackouts: The Memory of not Being There
, he cited twenty-nine case histories of people clinically treated for blackouts. People who lost whole chunks of life like loose change falling down a subway grating. People who learned to switch situations, react, make it up as they went along. It was a dance, an acting job. It was like modeling. To make it up as they went along from one slide to the next.

The pictures that came to her were fast speed. She saw it two ways: she, cringing, bullets, spatter. Like water splashing, hot grease. The other way was harder to make out through all the harsh lighting, those tilted camera effects and zooms. She would not fill in those blanks. Anne was there to fill spaces with words and pictures of her own. She might give you a handful of links. She would not, piece by piece, reassemble the chain. Dr. Kenneth Rangle pointed out that blackouts are sometimes self-inflicted. Created barriers, firewalls, a pop-up blocker.

She would have blacked it out if she could. Anne was her blackout. There were no blank spaces she did not fill. There was a semblance of circus music. Marilyn Monroe in fishnets atop an elephant. Seals clapping. Marlene Dietrich, the master of ceremonies. A pair of aerosol cans. She read instructions in English in Dutch in German in Spanish. What was it Alex said about the god of disguises?

This Mink. A real guardian all right. Could take over any chapter in any book, all lines were his. He was storm, he was calm. His hands never stopped moving.

She stared into the mirror at that blond face, she immersed in dark, in hot flaming water that dizzied her head, and barely twenty minutes later, no blond. Still curly, still those large eyes, now in a darker frame. She stared and stared.

When she came out, they stared and stared.

“Wow,” Alex said.

“You don't like it?”

Immediately after she felt so stupid to have said it, so stupid to have let such a thing slip, and now she stood looking at him, hopeless.

Alex stepped closer, to touch. “It's pretty,” he said.

“It's a different girl,” Mink added.
“Bella, bella.”

Her eyes had not left Alex's. “But you can still look at me?”

“Yes,” he said. “I can still look at you.”

“Now there's something I want
you
to look at,” Mink said. “But first, here.” He handed her the envelope he had brought out before. As she opened it, he passed her a sheet of paper. “Can you sign this?”

She glanced at it, glanced back. “What is it?”

“It's a release form saying it's okay I painted you. That goes together with the envelope.”

Ava opened it. Inside was cash, and a receipt.

“Three thousand dollars? What did I do for this?”

Mink smiled. “Let me show you.”

The studio was separated from the living room by a glass block wall made sturdier by bookcases. It shared the skylight and was raised in the center like a stage. Here were those big picture windows, from floor to ceiling. To see the street through them was to float above it. Canvases were stacked against the wall. A fish tank of colored rocks. Tin cans in rows, bristling with brushes brushes brushes.

The chairs, small end tables, stools, all looked like props. He shoved them offstage. Full center was the big picture. A smaller one on a second easel stood right off the stage, a little below, just crowned by light. It was a bare skeleton yet, with dabs and shadings of gray.

The painting of the blonde on the island looked done. He said it wasn't. He was still working on the right color, the final touches that he couldn't define yet. Alex was speechless when he saw it. Ava came close, almost to touch but not quite touch.

“That's me,” she said.

“Could be,” Mink said.

“It's not blocks and cubes,” Alex said.

“She's got an armband.” Ava sounded like she was in a trance. “It looks like a—”

“Yeah, this poor girl's got a past. A bad one. Maybe she ran away this time. Maybe she escaped.”

“Maybe she came back,” Alex said.

“It took me all this time to get here. Now I have these Romero brothers asking me to do blocks and cubes. Right when I've broken with them.”

“Maybe you should do it one more time,” Ava said. “A grand kiss-off. The way to send it away with a big bang. While this one,” she smiled, looking like the hostess in a gallery, “you can show your agent.”

“I like this girl,” Mink said. “She's going far with a brain like that.”

Alex stared at the painting with glassy eyes. “All the way to Berlin.”

Ava moved to the big table and signed the release form.

“It's beautiful, Mink.” She hugged him. “Thank you for everything.”

“Sure,” Mink replied. A hesitation hit everyone. “Will you be making a move?”

“Yeah,” Alex said, looking at Ava.

“You coming back?”

The question caught Alex off guard. He stared at Ava. Her dark hair shaped her face in a new way, it was almost like meeting a different girl. There were still those large green eyes though, already too familiar to belong to anyone else, blond or brunette.

“Yeah, he's coming back, he's only driving me to the airport,” she said.

The door buzzer sounded.

Ava looked at Alex. She slipped a hand into her purse.

Mink checked the video screen. “It's Monk,” he said, buzzing him in. They could hear him clomping up the stairs fast. The walk to the door was a little awkward. Alex seemed to have withdrawn and become his old, wordless self, grimace grinning like a Steve McQueen still.

Ava kept her hand in her purse as they waited for Monk, reminding Alex that she wasn't quick to trust. “But she trusts me.” He spoke the words under his breath as if the charm they carried mystified him.

“If there's anything about that boy,” Mink said as he opened the door and caught it on a stopper, “it's his timing. He never misses anything and he usually comes in at exactly the right moment.”

Monk looked thin in that worn PJ Harvey T-shirt, arms boyish bony. His eyes were fevered and luminous, glazed, yet with an intensity that seemed manic. Mink flicked a switch and turned on the light outside on the landing. Ava immediately saw that the universe of blocks and cubes on the door was only a fragment of the universe that Mink had painted on the surrounding walls and even part of the ceiling.

“Thanks for calling. I'm glad I caught you before you took off,” Monk said.

“Me too,” Alex said back, the two of them clasping hands.

“Ava, this is my good friend Monk.”

Monk kissed her hand.
“Enchanté.”
There was an energy to him that radiated kinetic, stubble-faced and no cap on this time to crush down that bush of curlies.

“I've heard a lot about you,” she said.

“Some of what you've heard could be true,” Monk replied, pulling a book out of his backpack. “Alex told me you two were leaving and I busted my nut trying to think of what to give you, you know, to take with you, and of course I thought
book
. My book and Mink's pictures—”

“A copy of
Shadowtown
,” Mink said. “I could've given her that!”

“It's mutually autographed,” Monk said, showing the page where they both signed a long, long time ago. “It's got him, it's got me, a quick way for you to take both of us along.”

He shoved the book into Alex's hands.

“But then I thought, man, that's so stupid. You guys on the run and everything and I'm giving you some dumb book to carry around. Not what you really need, so I kept beating my brain. I knew there was something I had of yours …”

“Of mine?” Alex asked.

“That's right.” Monk fished around in the backpack. “You remember that time we went to Spain with Mink?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“You crashed at my house for three days after we came back, remember? You left this. I've meant to give it to you for a while now, just kept forgetting.”

He handed Alex his passport.

“You might need it, you know. ID and stuff. Cops always ask for shit like that.”

There was a weird silence. Ava and Alex glanced at each other.

“No, no, not that you'll be running into any cops …”

“We have to get out of here,” Alex said.

“Yeah, we have to go,” Ava agreed.

“Sure, sure, here, take this.” Monk passed Alex the backpack.

Alex shoved the book in there, along with the passport. “Thanks for that.” He looked at Ava, then Monk. “I'll see you later.”

Alex gave Monk a hug. It was a tight, quick back-slapper. Ava hugged Mink and Alex smiled sheepishly at him.

As Ava and Alex started to descend the steel steps, Monk touched her arm, making her turn. “I just wanted to thank you,” he said.

“Thank
me?”

Ava saw the strangest look in his eyes. It was reverent, grateful, compassionate. It was the look of a satiated house guest.

“Thank me for what?”

“For a hundred and forty pages,” he said.

The words made her laugh, the same way a little boy saying “eleven-teen” or “eleventy-seven” would, some nonsense line when she expected grandiloquence. It was a relief to laugh, and Monk laughed too.

Outside, the late afternoon felt slow, the sun blinding. They moved quickly so as not to be seen coming out of Mink's. Alex pulled Ava along by the hand, toward Fox Street. They saw Mink and Monk standing in the big windows, but they could not wave.

26.

he wanted to ram me, I could just sense it. His need to hit out, to get results to force the issue. He wanted to say it all along, just scream it: “You knew! You knew all along she was pulling that cheap trick.” He couldn't get away with that, since I had urged him from the beginning not to follow. I had urged him on another path. The drink was rum, straight. No need for truth serum this time, more like bandages. There are plenty of shady spots and shadowy back tables. Places where the dudes at the bar never turn around to look. Cops can quietly go there and sulk.

“I told you she was good.” Hoarse whisper. Hot rum shot to make a man wince. Finding that phone jammed into an empty seat took a piece right out of him. I had never seen a face so thoroughly slapped in my life, the moment that agent dug into the train seat and pulled out that vibrating phone. Lieutenant Mitchell was a sturdy bull of a man who couldn't have been thrilled to get sent on this wild goose chase by some young goof with a letter from the DD/I. Nonetheless, there was no sarcasm when he asked, “Any chance she jumped this train?” Another example of the deep-hearted decency cops display to other cops and yes, even feds, when things go wrong.

The station manager was talking to the dispatcher, who was speaking into his portable radio. They seemed to be waiting for some word from Myers. Fan out, search the weeds, patrol the small towns trackside? The motorman shot down the notion of a jumper. The safety features on these trains would insure that the crew would know about any open door. Had anyone spoken to the passengers?

“That seat's been empty since Grand Central.”

It was Myers who put an end to the charade. “Lieutenant Mitchell, thank you for your trouble,” he said with a handshake. “She wasn't on the train. Please thank your people for me.”

An officer drove us back to the helipad at Pelham. There was hardly a word spoken. The chopper ride was the same, a solemn journey that felt like a bad tourist trip. The sun was high in the sky and filled the cab with heat. The world below slanted tilt like the view through a fish-eye.

“You didn't say I told you so,” he said. The churning blue East River bent below us.

“No, I didn't,” I said.

“It's only now that I'm hearing what you were saying.”

I couldn't read what was going through his mind. I doubted it would get me off the hook. I was “point man,” no matter what.

“She's forcing you to make a choice.” The sound of the chopper blades spinning made me feel I was talking in a vacuum, and talking louder only made it worse. “For all you know, she's still in the Bronx, or Manhattan.”

“How about for all
you
know?”

His stare was more than just a challenge. The case was falling apart. He'd need to bring home something, anything. A pound of flesh, some result that would convince whoever hired him it was worth the investment. He may have lost the girl, but finding the money would be one big payoff.

“I told you we should've hit Roman's.” I said it like that was all he was going to get. “I would have never gone on this chopper ride, man.”

“Pah. They told me you could find anybody.”

“Boston's not my turf,” I said. “Washington, neither.”

The Bronx skyline shimmered on the water like a glassy mosaic. The captain had no problem working with the FBI. He handed the files over to me. I waited two cigarettes long while Myers argued with the DD/I, then his two team members jumped into their car and sped off. I drove Myers back to his car. We were almost there, but when he said that shit about needing a drink, I detoured to a dark rum place. I wasn't looking for any hidden truths this time. I was stalling. I was just trying to put it off. Somehow I didn't want to let Myers out of my sight. The thought of him disappearing, taking everything with him. I was damn sure now I needed that sense of resolution I had been putting off. Had nothing to do with her. If I let him vanish now, I would never be sure that he wouldn't pop up again someday.

The slow game was over. No more stakeouts informers insiders to build pathways to the top, no slow steady progress to “the man.” The FBI raided the files. They claimed every name every location, sent rats scurrying with wide sweeps. Went with the big show. Caps and jackets. FBI, DEA, ATF, all like husky fans in football parkas. They stormed up stairs, they pounded down doors. The department decided not to be outdone and launched their own HIGH-PROFILE DRUG RAID NEWS AT TEN reporters mass arrests cameras ratings sweeps. They were the big noise I was the small noise. I was good cop bad cop, I was give-it-a-shot-for-one-more-day cop, lost in the rush of blue uniforms and flak jackets.

Where was Myers? His agents went one way, he went the other. There were two FBI agents posted at my office door. The yellout between the captain and I had nothing to do with any of it. It was something that was a long time coming. When words tapered off, we stared and saw past each other. Planting my shield on that desk would be a formality. The captain was staring at a dead man. “At least try to put on a good show,” he said.

Where was Anderson? Jackson Avenue, raiding Wiggie's. A bad hallucinatory film. The ranks of them storming through smoky storefront glass

what about when they're coming for me

flooding the street blue? Me running into an old theater like Lee Harvey Oswald, sitting there staring flickering images waiting for the moment when they turn off the film, waiting for the moment to spring. One fed two feds when have I ever seen so many feds in one place?

A loud crash. Spray of glass. A rolling cloud of dirt. Anderson came at me through a crowd of flak-jacketed G-men. He wore the wide smile of a winner, a man in charge. The political front runner, the one who makes things go. He shook my hand, he escorted me through chaos glass and dirt to a place of words.

“What an amazing job you've done on these files,” he said while I was cigarette cigarette, how had I forgotten all this time about having a smoke? I shuffled I shifted I searched my pockets. “Quite an interesting narrative. Interesting characters and situations. It's almost like reading Balzac, except this is all real.” A boom and a crash. Fifteen agents stormed into Wiggie's garage after tearing down the riot gate. When that one perfect white cigarette rolled free to tumble from some pocket somewhere, I went down after it. Picked it up off the sidewalk. Needing a smoke had nothing to do with dignity. A quick flick. Light. Draw. The deep exhale. Anderson was still talking and, I'm sorry, what was the question? I didn't know what was on his mind or how he was planning to approach me. I could only see this mass of police machinery flooding this petty storefront. All that work to get to know what was happening behind the scenes now useless—connections, talkers, watchers, all fled to hole up somewhere else.

“I didn't have time to warn them,” I said.

“You're a strange cop. Compiling your stories as if it's not this very ending they're supposed to have. This is the culmination of your years of police work. This is the final result, what it all leads to.”

Twisted. The very fibers. No nation no flag could ever explain away. The feeling between. Wiggie dragged and pulled arms pinned behind they were trying to duck his head down to force him into the van when he looked across he looked past his eyes locked directly with mine. He took a spit that got him bapped in the face, forced down, shoved into. A scramble of arms and legs. Thump and screaming.

Myers gone missing. Why am I holding the bag? What's in the bag? This started with a murder investigation, a double murder, can I make that point? What was the most important thing here? All this noise, all this empty show.

“There's nothing here,” I said, stepping up to bat. “You've got nothing on these people.”

“They'll all have their day in court.” Anderson frowned. “And you? Is it going to take a subpoena?”

Now came the dizzy slow, the hit the bang the almost blackout. I was suddenly lying in the tub. Hot foamy water, churning bubbles. A warm hum. She was lying with her arms behind her head, sheen of soap film making her breasts seem sprinkled with glitter. Her eyes: a calm dark radiance. She had packed her bags at the last minute and it was 4 a.m. and nobody cared. Started with the jangle jingle of that new ankle bracelet and newly lacquered toenails. Hibiscus oils and rose incense. There were flower petals on the bed.

“Are you sure we have to do it like this?”

The one time she asked. We weren't using condoms anymore. I could stay inside her all after. Straight through to the second time after these slow talking moments. These touching moments, these soft slow—“Yes,” I said.

“And what if something goes wrong?”

“Nothing will go wrong.” I could tell that just by looking in her eyes. “In a week I come and meet you for our vacation. Just like we planned.”

Sun. Sand. Beach. Spanish. Houses sold to foreigners on very favorable terms. We weren't using condoms anymore. I could stay inside her all after.

“We're trying to have a kid,” I said.

The clamor of agents and megaphones. The beep of a truck backing up. Another crash. I didn't want to look at the people being pulled out, I didn't want to see them. Watching Wiggie take a spit at me was enough. It was a cold strange feeling, a far deeper alone sense than any I'd ever had. Suddenly I wanted OUT, I wanted to tell Anderson everything because there had to be ONE PERSON one at least some place some fear, some big fear came and I think Anderson saw it on my face.

“If you can get a subpoena,” I said, because I couldn't tell him shit. I wouldn't trust him, I couldn't. I would talk to him “after,” not “before.” He might talk me out of it. He might insist there is a way for the system to deal with system-bred errors like Myers. It was a faith the bastard was pushing, a belief system. A fraud.

“When I first noticed Myers's interest in you, I figured it was just another in a long list of aberrations, the trademarks of his psychotic mind at work.”

The room was warm, the lights too bright. There was a pack of cigarettes on the table. There seemed to be no conditions attached to them, but I fought the urge to have one. I thought about Myers talking about scopolamine. They could put that shit in cigarettes.

Anderson sat across from me in the “after.” He ripped open three packs of sugar and poured them into his coffee. He had brought me a cup but I hadn't touched that either.

“It turns out, Myers hooked onto you for a reason.”

The cassette recorder was also sitting on the table. I could look right into it, see the tiny tape spools spinning slow and methodical.

“I'm not planning on making a statement,” I said.

“Humor me. I'm lousy at taking notes.”

“You told me you just wanted to talk.”

“That's all,” Anderson said. “And look. Whenever we want.” He shut off the machine with a click. “See that?” He switched it on again. “Whenever we want.”

I looked in his face and I saw Myers.
Good guys bad guys.
Nobody plays fair when everybody's looking to cut a deal. The wheel kept spinning. It lit up with colors as it turned, that glowing silver disc in the juke box. Anthony Santos: “CORAZóN CULPABLE.” Why this simple
bachata
song was dogging me I'll never know. From place to place I could hear its strains, its insistent chorus coming at me from open windows, from passing cars, up and down stairwells and even here in this nowhere bar:
“Yo sé lo que fué.”
I had brief manic Vonnegut dreams. “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” I was with Anderson, I was with Myers. Two different moments on the same page.

The drink was rum, straight. Not so much bandage now as liquid courage.

“I can get the APB, I can get the coverage. Train stations, airports, bus terminals. So what? With the FBI in the picture, we get screwed the moment they find her.”

“Myers. You're doing it again. She knows those tricks, man.”

“So what? Am I giving up now? Whose side are you on?”

“You think that matters so much now? You ran off to chase a blip this morning and didn't listen to me. I've been totally straight with you, but you didn't listen!”

Those Myers eyes. A dark shiny radiance, indecision mixed with regret. All those bad decisions. How one mistake follows another mistake follows another.

“It's true,” he said.

“You can chase after her. You may even catch her one day, but you won't get the money. Isn't that why you came to begin with? She's forcing you to make that choice.”

He was looking up at me from the bottom of a well.

“One or the other, Myers. You can't have both.”

He seemed to slowly grip himself. A dawning realization.

“You've got to make a choice,” I said. Hadn't I just lit that cigarette? I stamped out the fire, I crushed out the light. “I can't lead you to the girl.”

Myers tipped his head a moment, as if he had somehow discerned the high-pitched note of a transmitter. I was taking him back to Julio's, a hazy rum flashback. The rhythm of the congas slowed the heartbeat. I thought back to the moment I'd asked him about David and Anthony Rosario. His face had gone blank, no flicker of recognition. How shrunken small they had become. Collectible homies from a gumball machine.

“You made a deal with Myers?”

(Even Anderson skips past the Rosarios, no matter how much I try and bring them in.)

“I only told him I couldn't lead him to the girl,” I said. “The rest of the math he did himself.”

“And who gave him the idea you'd know where the money is?”

I thought of Ava Reynolds. I thought of the can of worms I would open if I mentioned her. Would Anderson know she was the one who led Myers to me? He sure was no poker face. He couldn't be playing the same hand as Myers.

“I gave him the idea,” I said.

The rum had its effect.