Dear Old Dead (5 page)

Robbie left metaphors and strategies and all the rest of it to people who understood those things, which he didn’t. As far as he was concerned, what he was engaged in was an act of self-defense.

The wind was picking up. Robbie zipped his jacket closed and hunched his shoulders against the growing cold, wondering what it was like in there, deep in there, in the places he’d never been. What would happen to him if he went inside? What would they do to him if he got Dr. Michael Pride into a corner and told him the truth about what this center was doing?

Then Robbie remembered. It wasn’t Michael Pride. It was the other one. Van Straadt. Was van Straadt in there? What would happen to the center if van Straadt was no longer around to give it money? What would convince van Straadt?

If Robbie hadn’t hated the center and everything it stood for, he could have used it. The center provided medical services to anyone who showed up at the door, no questions asked. Maybe he could just walk right inside and then walk right—

Where?

And then what?

He didn’t have the ghost of an answer to that. He only knew that the soles of his feet itched.

J
ULIE ENDERSON HAD BEEN
in the refuge program for three months now, and in all that time—the only time in her life she could remember not being high for more than a couple of hours at a stretch; the only time in her years she could remember not having a pimp—she had never broken the rules of the center or the program even once. Julie had no real idea why she was being so careful. She knew that no one on the staff here was overly strict or too much of a purist about rules and regulations. Friends of hers had been caught drinking beer in the boiler room and sneaking boys into the utility shed out back and even shoplifting a little. No one had thrown them back onto the street. Julie didn’t want to risk it. She had told everyone here that she was eighteen years old. Sister Augustine suspected she was fourteen. Julie was, in fact, sixteen. The subterfuge was necessary, because Julie had had a very strange and checkered life. She knew much more about some things than the nuns did. Julie’s mother had been a black prostitute. Her father had been a white john. When Julie was eleven years old, her mother’s live-in boyfriend had sold her to a pimp for the drug money he never had enough of. Her mother had noticed only enough to register the fact that there was now a little decent dope in the house. Three weeks later, Julie had found herself out on the street, feeling numb and crazy and weak. It was the middle of February and the wind was blowing up Tenth Avenue, making her legs cold. That was what she remembered forever afterward—what she remembered with perfect clarity once she came to the center and started to dry out—streetwalking made her legs cold. Maybe it was because she was always wearing hot pants or very short skirts.

At the center, Julie wore baggy jeans and T-shirts and big cotton sweaters, even in summer, as if the point of being here was to claim her body for herself. When the temperatures began to fall this night in May, even though they didn’t fall very far, she put on a turtleneck to cover up her throat. Then she got her friend Karida and headed for the bridge that led from the west building to the east one. That was how the center had been built—or, rather, renovated into existence. Dr. Pride hadn’t had the money to put up a big new building. Hospital corporations ran fund-raisers for years and took money for the government to do that. Dr. Pride had had only his own money and some seed money. He’d bought the two tenement buildings on this block when they were abandoned and condemned. Then he had gone to work to make them habitable and suitable for the center he envisioned. What construction work had been done here was minimal. There was the emergency-room complex and the OR. Those were state of the art because they had to be. There was the interlocking security system. That was better than the one the CIA had at Langley. There was this bridge. The bridge was made of steel and stone and lined with windows on either side. The windows were great glass squares tinted smoky gray. Standing here you could look out over the tops of half the buildings in Harlem. Standing here, you could see the world.

One of the absolute rules of the center was that no one from the refuge program was supposed to cross the bridge to the medical building without permission. Because going into the medical building almost always meant running into either your own old pimp or someone who knew him—the girls got hurt more often than the pimps but the pimps got hurt enough; Julie had been amazed to come out of her drug-induced distraction and discover how much time the people she knew spent bleeding—permission was almost never given except in a medical emergency. Julie rationalized what she was doing now by telling herself that this was a medical emergency. It just wasn’t
her
medical emergency. Then she asked herself why she still cared. All right, all hell was breaking loose out there. It happened every once in a while. All right, her mother had last been heard of serving as a kind of house mother to the Blood Brothers. That was the kind of thing her mother would do. Julie wasn’t sure her mother would remember she was actually a mother, of the biological kind. Why was it so important to go over to the emergency room and find out if she had been hurt?

Karida only wanted to get out of the west building and see some excitement. She had a look Julie recognized, the look of a girl who doesn’t last long in the refuge program or anywhere else. Karida had had a good scare a month and a half ago. A john had turned violent and broken her arm, and then, when she’d gotten out of the Lenox Hill Hospital emergency room, her pimp had beat her bloody for letting herself get put out of commission. Karida had ended up at the center. When she’d been offered the refuge program, she had taken it. It wasn’t going to last. In the last three months, Julie had seen two dozen girls disappear back onto the streets and only three go on to the next step on the way to regular lives. She was beginning to know the signs.

It was Karida who knew how to get the bridge door unlocked. She had worked it out the very first day she was on the refuge program dormitory corridor. Julie watched with amusement while Karida jiggled and rattled the door knob, muttering under her breath. It was as if Karida were performing a form of voodoo, and the hocus-pocus spell mattered as much as the physical manipulation.

“There we go,” Karida said. “I can’t believe you’ve never done this before.”

“It’s against the rules.”

“So what?”

“So I don’t want to be thrown out of here.”

“They’re not going to throw you out of here. And how long can you stay? Aren’t you getting nuts?”

“Not really.” Julie walked to the center of the bridge and looked first downtown and then up. Uptown she could see spurt-flashes in the dark, what she knew must be gunfire. Julie had been in a few gang wars in her life, but this was something special. “I’m going to take the test of the academy next month,” she said carefully. “Augie says I probably won’t pass it this time, but I can take it as many times as I want, so I might as well get started. Then after I see what I don’t do so—so well on, I can study those things and take the test again.”

“You’ve got to be crazy,” Karida said.

“Why?”

“Because it is crazy. What do you think you’re doing? I’ll bet they’ve never had a single black girl up at that academy.”

“They’ve got Hiram Corder’s daughter.”

“Who’s Hiram Corder?”

“He plays with the New York Giants.”

“I mean black girls like us.”

Julie turned away from the windows and started walking down toward the other end of the bridge. “Augie says the world is a hard place and it’s full of jerks but every once in a while there’s a window of opportunity, and when you find one of those, you should go through it. That’s what I’m trying to do. Go through it.”

“To what?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you think is going to happen to you?” Karida insisted. “You think you’re going to turn into some kind of actress or model or what?”

“No. No, nothing like that. That kind of thing would be too much like whoring, you know what I mean.”

“No. I don’t know what you mean.”

Julie sighed. She didn’t blame Karida, really. She didn’t know what she meant herself, not completely. It was a feeling she had. All those models and actresses, what did they do? They showed their bodies around for money. They had very valuable bodies, so nobody was allowed to touch, but what difference did that make? Didn’t they do exactly the same thing whores did, except in a classier way? Sister Augustine had a picture of herself on the desk in her office, dressed in the long veil and floor-sweeping habit her order had worn in the old days. When Julie dreamed herself into the place she called freedom, that was how she saw herself dressed. Completely covered up. Completely hidden from the world.

Julie tried the door at the east end of the corridor, expecting it to be locked. It wasn’t. She stood back and looked through into the corridor beyond. The corridor reminded her of the hallways in the old apartment buildings in the neighborhood. It was dark and painted green and ringed with nearly black wood doors. Julie wondered what went on up here. These couldn’t be apartments for the staff. The staff had rooms in the west building. Even Dr. Pride had his main residence in the west building, in spite of the fact that he spent half his nights sleeping in his office. At least, they had thought he had. Julie thought about all the newspaper stories and felt as if she wanted to cry. She didn’t care what Dr. Pride did for sex in his free time, as long as he didn’t patronize a prostitute. She did worry that he would get the kind of disease there wasn’t any cure for. She worried more that he would get knocked out of the center by Them. Julie didn’t have a coherent definition of Them. She couldn’t have described Them in concrete terms if her life depended on it. She just knew Them when she saw Them.

“This is where they have the day-care center in the mornings,” Karida said, coming onto the corridor past Julie at the door. “They open all the doors and stick a gate thing in the stairs and let the kids wander around. Sister Kenna set it up. It’s kinda neat. All the different rooms are different ideas. One of them’s a jungle room. One of them’s supposed to be a castle. Skeera Hoyt and I came over here one night and got all the doors unlocked and looked around.”

“You had to be crazy.”

“Not everybody thinks like you,” Karida said. “Not everybody just smiles and croons whenever some nun says she’s done a good day’s work. I don’t like those nuns. I think they’re weird. I mean, no sex, for God’s sake. It’s got to do something awful to your insides.”

“What?”

“I don’t know what. I just know it’s got to do something awful.”

There was nothing blocking the stairs now. Julie came onto the corridor and let the bridge door close behind her. She went to the stairs and started down. Beneath her in the stairwell, she could see the harsh lights of office overheads. They were just like the office overheads in the west building, probably because the center bought all its light bulbs in bulk. Julie stopped a little way down the stairs and listened. There was a man down there somewhere, talking. She couldn’t hear anyone talking back, so she supposed he must be on the phone. Whoever he was was pacing as well as talking. She could hear the scuffle of shoes on carpet.

“There’s someone down there. What’s on that floor?”

“Offices,” Karida said promptly. “All the really important offices. Father Donleavy’s. Dr. Pride’s.”

Julie listened again. “It’s not Dr. Pride. It’s not Father Donleavy, either. Who else is down there?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know everybody who works here.”

Julie went a little way farther down the stairs. What she really wanted was to turn right around and go back to her own dormitory room. She had a history book there she hadn’t finished reading. She had some work to do she had promised Sister Augustine to finish before morning. Her mother had never given ten seconds thought to what happened to her. Why should Julie give ten seconds thought to what happened to her mother?

Julie went down more stairs, almost all the way to the bottom. The corridor there was much better lit than the one on the floor above. Most of the doors that opened onto it were in fact open, with more light spilling out of them from desk lamps and auxiliary reading lights. Julie stepped off the bottom stair and edged her way toward the voice. It was coming from the door of the office she could now see was clearly marked as Dr. Michael Pride’s—there was a big sign on the wall next to the door jamb, ragged enough to make Julie think it had been hand stenciled by someone at the center—but the voice was most definitely not Dr. Pride’s. That’s an old man, Julie thought, and then wondered why the sound made her so uncomfortable. She was having a very hard time making herself not squirm.

“Hey,” Karida said in an exaggerated whisper. “What are you doing? You’re going to get caught.”

“I just want to see who it is.”

“Who cares who it is?”

This, of course, was perfectly sensible. Julie knew it. She couldn’t stop herself. She edged closer and closer to the door.

“I want you to have it ready for me to sign tomorrow morning,” the old man was saying. “I’ve pissed around with this long enough. I’ll be at your office at eight fifteen—”

Pause. Pace. Breathe.

“—Yes, I know—Yes, it’s early—I don’t really care about the trains coming in from Larchmont, Felix, they’re not my responsibility—Yes—”

I should do what Karida wants me to do and keep on going down the stairs, Julie thought. That’s what I should do.

Whoever that is in there doesn’t work at the center. If he did, I would know the voice. He won’t know that I’m not supposed to be here. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t walk right up there and look right in.

“Hey,” Karida said again. “Julie, we’ve really got to—”

That was when Julie realized that the old man had stopped talking. She hadn’t even heard him hang up the phone. He had stopped pacing, too. She wondered what he was doing. She wondered why he was in Dr. Pride’s office. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to be there. Maybe he was dangerous. There was a clock on the wall of the office just across the corridor. Julie could see through its open door to read the time. The time was 7:22.