CONCOURSE (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin) (29 page)

“Ain’t but one source of trouble in this house,” she said, glancing at her grandson. “You call me Mother Carter, now. And you come back to see us, you hear?”

“Yes, Mother Carter. I’d like to do that.”

Carter rode down with me in the rickety elevator. Outside the air was damp, cold with a north wind.

“I’m sorry about Snake,” I said.

He looked down the street, at nothing I could see. “Snake go off his own way, long time ago. By the time Skeletor smoke him, wasn’t nothing left nohow.”

“Sometimes that doesn’t matter.”

“No,” he said. “Sometime it don’t.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Do I got to answer?”

“No.”

“Then go ahead.”

“Vanessa is Snake’s, isn’t she?”

His eyes were hard. “I tell you already, she mine now.”

“But Snake was her father?”

Carter didn’t answer, and he didn’t take his eyes from mine.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s none of my business. I just want to know the whole story. Always.”

“You ever do?”

“No, probably not. But I want to.”

He blew air between his teeth. “Yeah, she Snake’s. Her mama Rashid’s mama.”

“Where is she?”

Carter shrugged, pushed something off the curb with his toe. “Charlene? She O.D.’d, man. Three month after she have Rashid.” He looked into the distance. “Been clean for years, too. After Vanessa born, Dr. Madsen get Charlene into a program over to Montefiore. Snake don’t want nothing to do with her no more, but Charlene and me, we get a place, start to fix it up …” He trailed off.

“Charlene,” I said. A scared fifteen-year-old, in labor on the living-room floor, in a ground-floor apartment down the hill from the Home.

My right arm twinged where the burn was healing. I didn’t expect any more, but Carter went on. “She try to get me straight, but I be busy, taking care of business. Then I go to the joint. She have Rashid, don’t have nobody with her, help with the kids, you know? Guess it got hard. Guess it just got hard.”

Carter leaned on the car, folded his arms. “Granny, she take both kids to live with her. One visiting day, she carry the two of them all the way up to the joint. ‘This your son,’ she tell me, ‘and this his sister. They got no momma. Her daddy ain’t worth spit. All they got is you, Martin.’ That what she tell me. ‘All they got is you.’ ”

“What about Snake?” I asked quietly.

“What about Snake? He boasting, bragging about he got a kid. ‘Take a life, make a life.’ He a big man behind that. But don’t care nothing about her. Try to give Granny money while I’m inside, still
trying when I’m out. But he don’t come see her, don’t hardly know her name.”

He gave me a strange look, almost smiled. “That first day we met? First time you save my ass? That what we fighting about. Snake be sending Nessie a bike. UPS man bring it. Man, he one nervous dude.” Carter shook his head at the memory. “I send it back. I tell Snake, next thing he send her, he gonna need Dr. Madsen pull it out his butt.”

The wind was cold, scouring the air. “Those kids are lucky,” I said.

I got behind the wheel of my car. Carter leaned in the window. “Look,” he said, “one thing you got to know.”

“What’s that?”

“Everybody think what I go up for, Snake done it. Snake so crazy, he believe it hisself. But it ain’t like that. Like I told you: I shot that A-rab. In the back. I done that.”

I tapped a cigarette against the steering wheel. “Okay.”

“Lot of shit I done, I can’t never pay it back.”

“It’s that way,” I said. “A lot of things can’t be erased. But you’re lucky. You have Vanessa and Rashid. They’re not part of those things. They’re what you have, now.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Word, cuz.”

“Be good.” I started the car. “Cuz.”

I pulled from the curb, drove around the block, headed back downtown, back to what I knew, out of the Bronx.

F
IFTY

T
he phone was ringing as I came in. I grabbed it up, told it who I was. It told me it was Arthur Chaiken.

“How are you?” he wanted to know.

“Healing,” I said. “How are you?”

“This hasn’t been a great week for me.” He sounded subdued,
ironic. “There’s going to be a full investigation of Helping Hands. And from what I can see, now that I’m looking, we deserve it.”

“Will the organization survive?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if we should.”

“What would you do if it didn’t?”

“I don’t know that, either. Listen, Smith. I’ve talked to Andy. What he was doing—his little development scheme—I knew about that.”

I lit a cigarette, drew deeply on it. Closing my eyes, I fought the urge to hang up, to walk away from this.

“You were in on it?” I said.

“No. My God, no. And he never thought I knew. But I saw the Bronx Renaissance funds get funneled again and again to areas right around us, and it wasn’t hard to figure out who was making money on it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Andy was vital to Helping Hands. And I didn’t see how what he was doing could possibly be related to what you were investigating.”

“Except that to hide what he was doing Hill was willing to pull strings to help hide what everyone else was doing.”

“Francine Wyckoff, you mean.”

“And she was hiding what Reynolds was doing, and Howe and Portelli. And what they were doing got Mike Downey killed.” And Mike’s death sparked Howe’s. And Howe’s death caused Reynolds’s. Leon Vega was still in a coma. Snake LeMoyne was dead.

“I thought … I thought the good we were doing outweighed the possible harm. I was wrong. Now I’ll have to live with that. I’m not sure how.”

Behind my eyes I saw squares of sunlight on a slate floor, and a man reluctant to stop feeding the birds so late in the season.

“Maybe you were right,” I told him.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no balance sheet. A number of men died because of corruption you hid. Maybe more lives were saved because of the reasons you hid it. There’s no way to know. But it may be easier to live with the question than with the answer you’ve come up with.”

Chaiken was quiet for a moment. “I’m surprised to hear that coming from you.”

“I am too.”

“In a way it’s why I called. I know about the deal you made with Andy. And I know that unless someone makes a point of exposing him, he’ll come out of the Helping Hands investigation untouched.”

“And you want to expose him?”

“I want to stop hiding things, Smith. I want to stop being the one making the decision about what’s more important than what.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, you could expose Hill. But you can’t stop making those decisions. This is one of them. If you break my promise to Hill, a guy with two little kids loses a chance at a new beginning. One guy. One chance. Maybe no big deal, except to him. But against what? Hill won’t go to jail. He’ll move and start again. And those Bronx Renaissance buildings might be doing as much good where he put them as they would have anywhere else. It might soothe your conscience to come clean now, but I don’t think it’ll help anybody as much as it would help you.”

In Chaiken’s silence I finished my cigarette.

“Another thing,” I said. “Even if Helping Hands doesn’t survive, you’re clean. You can find another organization, or set one up. There’s a lot of work left you have to do. If you connect yourself with Hill and what he did, you won’t be able to do it.”

“I thought you didn’t approve of our work. Of our Band-Aids.”

“I can be wrong.”

“And you’re not pleased that I’ve come around to your point of view?”

“My point of view sees pretty dark things. I keep hoping that from somewhere else, to someone else, maybe they look brighter.”

After Chaiken and I hung up I went to my desk, took out my checkbook. I wrote a check to a man I’d gone to see the day before, a man who’d run an ad in the paper about a piano for sale.

It was a good piano, the smallest of the Baldwin grands. I didn’t know how much room they had in the place Ida Goldstein was going to in New Jersey; I thought smaller was probably better than big.

The man’s daughter had just started college, and there were some costs he hadn’t counted on. His price on the piano was $4500.
It was a good price, and I didn’t bargain with him.

Buying the piano left me with $1400 from the money I’d taken from Henry Howe’s locker. I wrote another check, to the PAL.

Then I stretched out on the sofa, had a bourbon. Then I had another. I smoked another cigarette, closer to the filter than I usually get. The drinks didn’t help, and stretching out didn’t help. I was exhausted and I ached, but I was restless, on edge.

When the phone rang again, I was grateful.

“Hi.” Lydia’s voice smiled. “I’ve been calling; you’ve been out.”

“I’ve been cleaning up.”

“How are you doing? I sort of want to talk. I thought you might, too.”

“I—” I almost told her no, I’m all right, don’t worry, see you later. “You’re right. I would.”

“Shall I come over?”

“I’d like that.”

“About an hour?”

“That’s great,” I said. “Thanks.”

I hung up the phone, looked around the room. I had an hour. I couldn’t sleep, wasn’t hungry, had had a drink.

I knew what I was putting off.

I stood in front of the piano for a minute, just standing. Then I opened the top, fingered the keys. I sat, flexed my hands. They’d be weak, I told myself, weak and clumsy. Well, that had happened before. I played some scales, easy exercises, up and down the keyboard. It felt hard and familiar; it fit my hands well.

Finally, I started the Schubert. Most of the notes were there, at first; but then I started to miss. I took out the music, spread it on the stand, began again. Now I had the notes; but I had nothing else. The watchmaker’s joy was gone.

I kept at it; I don’t know why. Time passed, and it didn’t get better, but I kept working. The doorbell made me jump, broke the spell.

“It’s Lydia,” the intercom said. “Can I come up?”

“Yes,” I said to her. “Yes, of course.”

I buzzed her in, waited at the open door. Her face was serious as she came up the stairs, and beautiful.

“I was listening to you play,” she said. I closed the door behind
her. “Outside. Before I rang. I know you don’t like people to hear you. I didn’t want to pretend.”

I looked at the piano, at my hands. “I wasn’t very good.”

“You’re not strong yet. You will be.”

“I don’t know. I almost had it, that piece. Before. Now …”

We stood, silent for a moment, awkward with each other.

She turned away, walked to the window. I crossed to where she stood, wrapped my arms around her from behind.

“Bill …”

I said nothing, breathed in the scent of freesia.

“When you were in the hospital, that first night?” she said. “I was angry. Furious.”

“Why?”

Her reflection in the glass looked at mine. “That you might die. That you might leave me like that, no words, nothing. I was furious.”

I turned her around, felt her solid shoulders under my hands. “I didn’t,” I said.

I kissed her. I ached everywhere, but there was no pain where her arms held me.

In the end, as I knew it would be, it was she who pulled away.

“I don’t know,” she said softly. “I don’t know what I want.”

“That’s okay. You don’t have to know. I know.”

“Do you?” A question, many questions, shone in her eyes.

I kissed her forehead, held her for a moment. Then I stepped back, grinned. “You know what I want?”

Her brow furrowed slightly. “What?”

“Dinner. Pepper shrimp. Wintermelon soup. Bass in black-bean sauce. You like Chinese food? Come on, I’ll take you out.”

She laughed, and the tension between us broke like a wave on the shore. We locked up, headed down the stairs. She was faster than I; she waited for me at the bottom. I felt a little shaky, but that was all right. We didn’t have very far to go.

CONCOURSE
. Copyright © 1995 by S.J. Rozan. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Excerpt from “Epigrams and Epitaphs” in
Poems
by C. S. Lewis copyright © 1964 by the Executors of the Estate of C. S. Lewis Ptc. Ltd., reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.

For Deborah Norden
(1954–1994)

                    Here lies one kind of speech

                    That in the unerring hour when each

                    Idle syllable must be

                    Weighed upon the balance, she,

                    Though puzzled and ashamed, I think,

                    To watch the scales of thousands sink,

                    Will see with her old woodland air

                    (That startled, yet unflinching stare,

                    Half elf, half squirrel, all surprise)

                    Hers quiver and demurely rise.

                                 —C. S. Lewis,

                                     
Epigrams and Epitaphs
No. 13

To protect people who probably don’t deserve it I have played fast and loose with the geography of the Bronx. I know the area north of the courthouse is not in the 41st Precinct. There is no Chester Avenue. The timeless Ehring’s has been closed, sold, renamed, and reopened—substantially the same—since this book was written. As for the rest, if you can find the flaws, you’re a Bronx scholar. Don’t call me, call Dr. Tieck.

Thank you to:

My agent, Steve Axelrod

My editor, Keith Kahla

perfect gentlemen

Michelle Slung and Kate Stine

and they know why

David Dubal, for music

Terry Blackwell, for scams

Steve Landau, for expeditions

The group, for Tuesdays

Deb Peters, for years

Steve, Hillary, Julia, and Max (it’s alphabetical, guys)

toujours en famille

and

Nancy and Helen

the without whomest