The Dewey Decimal System (8 page)

“Mr. Yakiv Shapsko.”

“Uh-huh. And he wants to discuss …”

Armani lifts his shoulders and drops them. “Business. What else?”

I nod. “Okay, I’m open to that. Tomorrow morning would work best for me.”

The men exchange looks.

“Mr. Shapsko makes suggestion, meeting right away. We take you to him now. Okay?”

I absorb both of them. Honestly, I don’t want to be a snob, I certainly do similar errands on occasion, but there’s this subspecies that’s just so specific. These guys fall into that category.

From past experience I can guesstimate that I don’t exactly have a choice about how this plays out. I’m not up to further static. Say, “Look, boys. At least let me change my pants. As you can see, I’m not presentable and I don’t want to disturb you or your boss’s finely honed aesthetic sensibilities. If I may.”

Again the boys share a glance. It’s a hair tense. Armani is working his jaw. “Stepan, he is going with you.”

“Guys, I’m not a flight risk. Neither you two nor your boss does much in the way of scaring me. I’ll go wherever, I don’t have anything better to do.”

Armani, who I’m sure would love to have at me, is marshalling his cool. “Stepan, he is going with you,” says the big man again.

I shrug, put my gun in my waistband, and start up the stairs. It’s not easy. “Fine, Stepan, please do follow me.”

Armani, in Ukrainian, says to Stepan: “Hurry this up, help the nigger walk.”

“Yeah, Stepan,” I echo in their native tongue, “help this nigger walk.” Throw them off a little.

They don’t seem particularly impressed by my lingual skills.

Stepan offers his forearm, the koi warped by his ridiculous musculature. A lesser man would have gagged on his cologne, but I keep it together and take his arm like Scarlett O’Hara.

“You’re too kind,” I continue in Ukrainian. “Hey, I dig Hardy’s gear. It’s got that edge.” Stepan won’t look at me, so I keep talking. “Cousin, in general I just gotta say, I like what you’re working with. The big guns here. Since David Barton went under, I imagine you have a fantastically well-appointed home gym.”

These guys must be under strict orders and/or truly fear their master. Because their intense desire to beat me into carpaccio is thicker in the air than my man Stepan’s cologne.

Which is saying something.

S
uperflu descended like the motherfucking wrath of God, Old Testament style.

H1N1? That stepchild had been the viral equivalent of
Ishtar
. A big raspberry of a bomb, the failed punch line, all talk and no walk.

Put folks off guard.

But Big Bad Mother Nature learns from her mistakes, makes adjustments, and comes roaring back with an improved model. Those who knew said if you dug the Superflu virus under a microscope, you could watch the bastard mutate, right there before you eyes.

It was perfect, in every respect. And like a snowflake, each and every individual virus had its very own unique design and symmetry. Constantly shifting.

In North America, it’s thought that about two million people lost their lives to this pandemic. Even with all our modern medicine, inoculations, etc.

That slightly beats out the Spanish Flu of 1918, given the current world population. No joke.

Course, me, I’d had the secret shot. The one that never went into production. So as the bodies stacked higher and higher, all I had to contend with was a mild case of the sniffles.

G
liding now down Ninth Avenue.

This far west? You can smell the Hudson, even above the Stench. The tainted water level is high, about a meter below the edge of the road. And rising. It’s just a matter of time.

As we arrive, I gather the Maritime Hotel on Ninth Avenue and 16th Street is not what it once was, which is to say that it is apparently no longer a hotel. More like a private entertainment facility.

The first indicator my brain didn’t identify right away. I’m folded into the cramped backseat of a latemodel Ford Volt as the distinctive building comes into view, and I’m thinking something’s funky.

As we pull into the former bike lane and come to stop at the curb, it hits me: all the lights are on. They must have a serious generator, industrial kind of gear.

Dude in some sort of fancy burgundy Mao jacket opens the door for Armani (never got his name), who turns and flips down the seat.

“Mr. Decimal. Let’s go.”

I’m climbing out, obviously not fast enough what with the knee, because Armani grabs my upper arm and gives me a jerk … I almost do a face-plant, which would have been embarrassing because we have a potential audience; the mezzanine-level terrace, formerly a nightclub or a sushi place or some shit, is hopping.

Thick with white men drinking cocktails and uniformly slender white or Asian women doling them out. Rice paper lanterns adorn the balcony, and I hear the muted throb of that kind of crappy electronic music to be found only in settings such as these. I spy a waterfall.

The vibe is strictly late–twentieth century designer hotel, and my inner douche-o-meter is pinned hard right.

Mao jacket slides into the car and is off, taking the corner at 16th with a slight screech of the tires. Valet parking?

I have a few questions but Stepan grips the back of my neck, and together with Armani they’re hustling our party toward the entrance. This is the largest grouping of people I’ve seen in the city since the Occurrence(s), outside of a construction site. Clearly I’m out of the loop.

Back at the library, I had been allowed to change, then I was stripped of my gun, my Purell
^TM
. They studied my laminate for ages. They took issue with my key, I kept telling them it was just a goddamn key, and eventually they let me hang on to it. I slipped it into my new pants pocket, front right of course.

And it took a lot of talking to convince the men to allow me to retain my pills.

“It’s not a freaking cyanide capsule, guys. I have a real …”

In the end Stepan simply popped one. We all sat around for five minutes and after nothing happened, they tossed the vial back to me and we split. By that time they’d chilled out, such that they even let me do my thing with the pistachio shells without asking what the fuck I was up to.

The atrium of the Maritime is flanked by two Maojacketed robots who nod at my big buddies and don’t seem to notice me. I’m hustled up a set of stairs, which would be an impossible act of athleticism on my part without a little help from my friends.

Ridiculously, that ancient folk song pops unbidden into my head and lodges there.

I get by with a little help from my friends I get high with a little help from my friends

But that’s all I can remember of it, so it just loops.

Into the crowded lobby, and all at once I’m engulfed in the kind of crowd scene I had thought long gone. I feel dizzy and nauseous, I lose depth perception. The joint assaults me with color and sound. The wall of body heat is sickening, and thankfully I am propelled through and past it with dispatch by the twin heavies, who steer me into an alcove featuring a wall of elevators.

Surely these can’t be in operation … Armani inserts a keycard into a metal slot, above which are the words,
Penthouse Level, Private
.

“Guys …” Surely we can’t be … An elevator door which bears a plate proclaiming the same sentiment slides open, and I’m being forced in its direction. I dig in with my feet; my wingers slide on the marble and I am treated to a blast of pain up my bad leg. “Guys, I don’t do elevators. I’m serious. I have a medical condition.”

“Let’s go, Mr. Decimal,” Armani is saying.

“Listen, I’m not trying to be difficult, I just can’t do …”

Stepan puts me in a headlock, cutting off my windpipe, good Lord does this guy ever want to see me die, I shouldn’t have played it so snarky. He hauls me like a sack of sand into the mirrored closet that is the elevator.

This is the part where I press the button. Metal elevator. Hallway. Door.

These thought-bubbles drift by, out of context.

I’m trying to communicate my inability to breathe by poking gently at Stepan’s thorax. Armani slides the keycard into a panel on the wall and hits the single button. Oh protect me, Jesus, the doors whisper closed.

The grip on my blowhole slackens and I’m sucking oxygen again, the four-way mirror showing an infinite regress, multiple still lifes of me plus gorillas.

I look awful. My hat is askew and my nappy head is in need of grooming. In general I look like a pair of trashed leather slouch boots. Everything hangs off me, my sport jacket, my flesh.

The goons seem disengaged and stare at nothing. The cologne fog is almost visible, I suck at the compromised air through my mouth.

“I just … It’s not a phobia. I have negative associations …”

I’m breathing wrong. Feel my extremities tingling, my throat tightening. I start counting backward from ten. I touch the key for strength. I can’t believe I got coerced into a goddamn elevator ride. I fumble for a pill, tip one back.

But nothing’s happening. I sense no movement.

I’m getting ready to share my assessment of the situation with the Power Twins, but before I’m able the door slides open, revealing a gigantic, low-lit space into which I am pushed.

There’s a party going on here as well, though nothing like what’s happening downstairs.

High ceilings, track lights. Couples and small groupings of well-heeled-looking peeps converse quietly here and there. Modelesque girls and boys in kimonos orbit the room, bearing trays with hors d’oeuvres and drinks. The furniture, although dated, looks expensive and inviting. The art is an impressive mash-up of Japanese wall hangings, suits of armor, a Kandinsky, a couple Hoppers, some Dutch master stuff, and a smaller Rodin statue. And that’s just what I see immediately.

Multiple wall-mounted plasma-screen TVs play old soundless World Cup footage, probably from 2010. I hear Miles Davis,
Kind of Blue
if I’m not mistaken, piped in by unseen speakers. A few heads turn and take us in, then return to their conversations.

I’m led through the room and down a hallway, herringbone wood floors covered with Oriental runners.

On the walls are jazz/Harlem Renaissance memorabilia, a photo of Langston Hughes framed with what I imagine to be a poem in his handwriting, a playbill of Orson Welles’s all-black production of
Macbeth
, a photograph of Billie Holiday mounted with a lipstick-smeared cocktail napkin, Miles Davis and John Coltrane in conversation accompanied by scribbles of musical notation with the words
So What
at the top. And so on.

We arrive at another door, this one looks to be modified as there is no handle on the exterior, only another key card slot and a button.

“Hands on the wall,” says Armani, spinning me to face it.

I do as I’m told, careful to avoid the framed bric-abrac. As they frisk me for the second time I believe I’m looking at an eight-by-eleven poster advertising a show at the Savoy in March of 1934, featuring the Chick Webb Orchestra with vocalist Ella Fitzgerald.
Apollo champion and songbird of Harlem!

“Fellows, you know I’m not armed. Stepan here watched me get dressed, for Christ’s sake.”

Armani’s patting down my calves and doesn’t respond. I’m wearing my very last viable suit, a seersucker with blue stripes, complemented by a white shirt and blue tie, and my usual brown porkpie hat.

The suit is okay for the current season but I’m going to need to work out something else for the colder months.

Assuming I can keep myself alive.

Armani stands and nods to Stepan, who presses the button with his bratwurst of a thumb.

Presently, Yakiv Shapsko opens the door. Scans me. “Is he unarmed?” he asks the boys in Ukrainian, smiling, not taking his eyes off yours truly.

They respond in the affirmative.

Yakiv looks like he just came from work … He’s got on a pair of Dickies, with a cheap dress shirt and tie. He has a napkin from Popeyes tucked in his collar.

Popeyes. Jesus. Must be the one on 14th Street, the last low-class chicken hut standing. Grew up on the stuff. I shiver inside.