The Ghost of Christmas Present (14 page)

SOMETHING'S CHANGED

T
he place used to be called Hell's Kitchen. It was one hundred square blocks of sooty brick buildings where gangs of Irish, Italians, and Puerto Ricans had rumbled for decades in back alleys. It was only a two-­minute walk to the Actors' Studio and another minute past that to Broadway.

Back in the late 1990s, when Patrick and Linda were young actors, the rents had been low, so they'd moved into an apartment on the south side of 51st Street just west of Ninth Avenue. But now the neighborhood was called
Clinton
, and the sooty brick of the past had been power-washed and the windows underscored with flower boxes.

Patrick walked to his old stoop and looked up at the fire escape where he and Linda had spent so many evenings splitting a calzone and watching the street scene below. Shouting and boom boxes, hustlers and the odd grocer. Free entertainment.

But today it was all different. The abandoned building next door that had long been a nest for what you didn't want to know about was now a clothing boutique for kids. The local grocer was gone, and now that storefront was the face of a coffee chain. The corner of 51st and Tenth Avenue that Patrick passed had changed too. His blood was gone.

Nine Christmas Eves ago, Patrick was returning from a late rehearsal, and it was here on this corner that he had seen the first kid cross the street and then walk past him. But he hadn't seen the second, or the third. A minute later Patrick sat slumped against the cornerstone of a warehouse, wiping blood from his eyes.

Moments earlier, with the teenagers pounding away on him, he'd thought he was dead. The strange thing was that while the beating was happening, Patrick's mind had cleared a space apart from fear and pain and had the coherent thought that this was one heck of a lousy death scene. Only an actor would include in his final thoughts that he hadn't expected it to end quite like this, without even a deathbed speech. Patrick had to smile at the memory of his younger self.

There had only been this, his possible death coming at him from all angles for no discernible reason. And all he could think was
Death scene
. Then for no discernible reason life had its say as the kids abruptly ended the attack and moved on down the dark street, laughing at their handiwork with whoops and high-fives.

Patrick had risen to his feet and propped himself up against the building by putting both hands on the warehouse's side. He made his way back out onto the next avenue and tried in vain to hail a cab.

A half-hour later Linda had screamed as she looked up to see Patrick stumbling through the door, his face drenched in horror-movie red and reciting the words he had rehearsed his whole long way home: “It's not as bad as it looks. I promise. It really isn't.”

And it really wasn't. His nose was broken, four of his ribs were cracked, but his pride was only bent. They waited longer for the nurse to bring the discharge papers than they had for the X-rays. So they spent the early morning hours of Christmas in the emergency room waiting to leave and making a vow to each other that this would be the only bad Christmas Eve they would ever have.

“But life doesn't make bargains.” Patrick now stood on that same corner and looked at where his bloodstained handprints, which had actually soaked into the stone and stayed for several years, were now gone, power-washed away, no doubt. No trace left of that long-ago drama.

Now he had a new one, and just as much of a life-or-death one as that had been. He couldn't beg on the streets anymore, and the money he'd made in the last two weeks had only paid his bills and one month's rent. The bad Santa had robbed him of the chance to get ahead and show Rebecca and the court that he could take care of his own son. He could chance it and find another corner to work, another disguise, but any possibility of arrest and its appearing on his record for good was too great a risk. He could lose Braden forever.

So, walking through his completely new old neighborhood was the only choice left to him. Patrick checked the address on the card Red-Beard had given him last night and made his way up Ninth Avenue, tracking the numerically ascending addresses.

He wasn't even sure Red-Beard wasn't leading him into some kind of lion's pit. How well did he know this guy, really? He didn't. And in truth he didn't even know his or any of their real names. Patrick had been beaten up here once. You can change a neighborhood's name, but you can't change the world's danger. But still Patrick walked on. What choice did he have?

Boutique after boutique interrupted by the odd internet café led him up the avenue. He had told Braden he'd be pulling a double shift at the pizza place. Patrick had wanted to open the vanilla yogurts and have their spoon-clinking toast, but the boy shook his head.

“We'll do it tonight, Dad. After you take care of whatever it is you're so worried about.”

“I'm worried about
you
,” Patrick said before he could stop himself. He hadn't told Braden about Ted seeking custody. As far as the boy was concerned, Rebecca had been just a social worker checking up on Braden's welfare. Patrick and Rebecca had agreed beforehand that was all the boy needed to know.

“You've been worried about me since I was born, and especially these last two weeks. But now it's different, it's worse, and you're not hiding it very good.”

“Very
well
,” Patrick said.

“Correcting my words isn't going to make me think things are the same today as they were yesterday. Something's changed.”

“Something's changed” echoed through Patrick's brain as he passed another internet café and then found himself standing in front of an unexpected sight.

It was a storefront that actually belonged to the twentieth century. It might have even belonged to the century before that by the looks of it, for it wasn't really a store but a bar, and it didn't have a front so much as it had a door with a sign that unceremoniously demanded that all customers “
Use the back way or you
'
ll get kicked
 . . .
No ifs or ands, just butts
.”

“Lovely,” Patrick declared as his eyes passed over the faded place. Its two windows wore Erin's harps painted in peeling gold. The antique bar stood on the sidewalk between the internet café to its right and a pet-grooming salon to its left, looking like a piece of West Side history some development committee forgot to unpreserve.

To Patrick's eyes, it looked like a watering hole that must have been frequented back in the day by the Westies, the Irish mob who controlled Hell's Kitchen for decades until a series of arrests sent them to jail or scattered to the other boroughs.

But here this place still sat, now in Clinton, like an aging thug who refused to retire to Florida or take refuge in Paraguay. It had stood its ground and eyed with suspicion the shifting parade of yuppies, Generation-X'ers, urban bo-bo's, and post–9/11 metrosexuals. A gamey old grand-da perched on his porch year after year.

Spying the opening to a small alley on the bar's left side, Patrick squeezed through a thin, rusting gate and walked down the passageway through piles of beer crates and kegs. He finally reached what he took to be the back door, even though it stood on the building's left side, for there was no more of the alley beyond it, only a cinder-block wall with metal spikes rising from its stony ten-foot top.

Patrick grabbed the handle to the gray metal door and pulled it open.

Chapter 20

STRIFE, WIFE, OR LIFE

P
atrick entered a dimly lit stockroom stuffed with liquor cases stacked on top of a row of old pinball machines. He closed the door behind him and walked under the lone hanging bulb, which flickered as if it had been sent from central casting for a cameo in a splatter movie but then had stopped in here for a drink, never to leave.

Patrick worked his way to the far side of the room and entered an open hallway, better lit and filled with the sound of distant music. As he headed toward the light of the bar, the music grew louder—if you could call violins loud.

For that's what it was, classical music on high volume. As he drew nearer, Patrick recognized the piece. It wasn't “classical” in the technical sense of the word; it was Baroque. The last sound Patrick had expected to hear drifting down this hallway, lined with old photos of boxers and racehorses dead and gone, was the second movement of Arcangelo Corelli's
Christmas Concerto
.

Patrick entered the bar. In the left corner, on top of the sawdust-covered floorboards and under a host of old promotional beer mirrors, were two violins, a viola, and a wide cello. Patrick stood amazed and watched four young people, music students surely, work their strings into the movement's swelling finale.

Two dates flooded Patrick's mind: 1690, the year the piece was written, and 1999, the year the piece was performed at his and Linda's wedding by just such a string quartet as this. It was so unexpected, so incongruent in this rough-and-tumble tavern, that his heart rose with the music's crescendo, for it had to be a sign from Linda or God or someone that everything was going to be all right after all. The quartet brought the Baroque piece to its climactic forte and then finished with a final triumphant coda. Then silence.

Patrick burst into applause, clapping with unbound appreciation.

The musicians looked at him as if he were a lunatic.

Patrick kept applauding, and then he turned around to the rest of the room to see that not only was he the only one clapping, but every one of the ragtag rummies who sat spread out behind the tables and at the bar's counter were also all staring at him as if he'd lost his mind.

Patrick stopped clapping and took in the group of sneering red noses. “It's one of my favorite concertos.”

Silence.

“Of all the concertos Corelli wrote, or even Bach or Vivaldi, that has to be my favorite.”

Hard stares.

“That music was played when I married my wife, okay?” Patrick panned a defiant gaze across the room.

Nobody said a word or moved until one particularly large man rose from his bar stool and approached with an empty glass mug clutched in his hand. The empty mug was soon resting on Patrick's shoulder as the big rummy put his arm around his neck and leaned into his face, breathing, “That's a beautiful story. If you buy me a beer, I'll listen to it all over again.”

The bar broke out into a storm of laughter.

“That's all right. I don't think it went over very well the first time,” Patrick said as he moved away from him and toward the bar. Beyond it, tarps and paint cans lay on the floor before the blocked front door clearly under renovation.

“Come on!” cried the big rummy after the retreating Patrick. “You had me at Bach and Vivaldi.”

More laughter from the tables as Patrick approached the bartender standing behind a great, scrolled wooden counter large enough to look as if it had been carved out of the hull of a clipper ship. The bartender's wide frame matched the wood he stood behind, and he looked away from Patrick down to an unscrewed tap handle he was polishing.

Patrick couldn't help himself. “Why is a string quartet playing in a sawdust saloon?”

“It keeps out the riffraff,” the bartender said as he screwed the tap handle back.

Patrick looked at the patron sitting on a stool next to him, who grinned with all twelve of his teeth. “It does?” Patrick asked, looking back at the bartender, who finally raised his eyes.

“None of these fellas you see here carry heat.”

“Excuse me?”

The bartender finished screwing the tap handle and impatiently wiped the bar where Patrick had rested his hands. “I don't care for firearms in my establishment, and I've never known a villain who could come in here with his guns and his drugs and sit more than ten minutes while that noise is playing. By the time the second string song is starting up, they're out the door looking for some other place to peddle their poison. Works every time.”

“Well, I wouldn't call Corelli noise—”

“These fellas here can stand it. Sure, they start tipping a few come noontime, but they're good boys, all of them.” The bartender stopped wiping the wood and studied Patrick. “Are you planning on being a good boy in here?”

The question took Patrick aback as he saw the bartender grip something unseen under the bar, then nodded in agreement. “I plan on being a very good boy in here.”

The wide man smiled. “Happy to hear it.”

Patrick pulled out the calling card. “I'm told I can find this man in your establishment.”

The bartender took no more than a glance at the card before looking down to where he resumed wiping. “What would you want with him?”

“I understand he's a lawyer. I've got a problem.”

“Strife, wife, or life?”

“I don't understand,” Patrick said.

The bartender stopped wiping and clutched two bottles in the well below his waist. “If you're looking to sit with the counselor, you'll need to ante up,” he said, and nodded to the very far back corner. There sat a heavy, carved-oak booth where the back of an equally aged white-haired head appeared.