Kockroach (20 page)

“That’s the one,” I says.

“You sure you want to be doing this, Mick? No telling what kind of damage you could end up causing.”

“The only thing I ever been sure of, Champ, wheresever I go, disaster it follows sure as blood from a wound.”

We walked side by side together up the sidewalk, Champ and me, and then we turned into the stone path. This was something I knew I had to do, but even so my step slowed as I approached the house. My house. I had once felt the person inside to be the most important person in my life, someone I believed to be the fulcrum around which my life swayed and tottered. It’s not so easy running away from that and not so easy coming back to it again.

“We can turn around now,” says Champ. “Let’s say we turn around now, fill up the tank, hightail it out of this burg. What about Nogales?”

“You never been to Nogales.”

“I heard swell things. You ever have a taco?”

“No, I never had no taco.”

“It’s jimmy.”

“I’m going to ring the bell.”

“Do what you got to do, Mick, but I could go for a taco right about now.”

“Be on your best behavior,” I says as I punch the button. “And smile. We don’t wants to scare the kid.”

We waits a while, a while longer. I rings again and then the footsteps, the footsteps, and the door opens, and despite my best intentions my heart it takes a leap. It takes a leap, yes it does. It don’t matter what we are, the heart it’s a strange thing, inexplicable as life itself. It takes a leap and then it settles and I wait as comes first the gasp and then the face in front of me composes itself into a mask of stunned surprise.

“Mite?”

“Hello there, Celia,” I says. “It turned out to be Yonkers for you after all, now didn’t it?”

The night of Mite’s
reappearance after eight long years, Celia dreamed of the Empire State Building.

In the dream, she hovered over the art deco tower, jaunty and impossibly high, as it danced to the music of some riotous jazz band, twisting its upper-floor windows into a smile, whistling out its piercing crown, snapping to the music with cartoon fingers at the end of stick arms. The shimmying skyscraper, swelling and bopping to the rhythm of the trumpet’s Dixieland beat, filled her with joy and fierce longing, emotions so powerful they blistered her heart. And then the skin of granite and glass began to peel away from the top of the tower in one elastic piece, like a sheath being pulled back, and what she saw being revealed was monstrous and dark and she woke with a start.

Well now, thought Celia, catching her breath as she lay next to her husband, Gregory, who snored gently. Not so hard to figure that one out, is it? No need to call in Freud to make sense of that.

“How’d you end up here, in Yonkers?” asked Mite after she invited him and the huge Negro with the scarred face, named Champ, into her house, and spent an awkward time in small talk. Gregory was in a faculty meeting at the college,
Norman was in bed now, and so they were free to talk about old times, as if she and Mite were college chums, with nothing but good memories to bind them.

“We don’t own it, we rent it,” she said as she poured the bourbon into a glass for Champ. Mite had declined a drink, and maybe she shouldn’t have one either, she already felt disoriented from seeing Mite after all these years. But she needed one, she decided, definitely, and she half filled a second glass. “Gregory found the house and brought me here and instantly I loved it. There’s some financial arrangement Gregory worked out. Through the college, I think. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s a genius like that.”

“I’ll bet he is,” said Mite.

“And a small inheritance I received helps,” she said as she walked the drink over to Champ, who was sitting next to Mite on the coach.

“That was sure a lucky break,” said Mite.

“It was. I love it here,” she said, taking a sweet burning sip. “Norman is in third grade now. I walk him to school, just down the road. And there’s a small park just the other way, and the neighbors.”

“You ever hear from Blatta?”

“Jerry? No, of course not. Didn’t you know? You had to know. He died. In the thing. I thought for sure you knew. I was just so happy to hear from that grubby little policeman that you were okay. Mite, tell me what happened. How did you escape?”

“I wasn’t in that warehouse when it went down. I was tipped before, you see.”

“And Jerry?”

“He wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t what?”

“Tipped.”

“Mite? You didn’t tell him? Mite? You let him go in there, all the time knowing?” She felt something rise in her, a pain still so fresh it was as if it was only yesterday when the world exploded and a part of her was buried away forever. “Mite?”

“Call me Mickey,” he said.

She looked at him, took a swallow from the drink, tried to fight back the emotion, succeeded, because that was what she had become so accomplished at over the last eight years, drinking and fighting back her emotions.

“That was a long time ago,” she said finally.

“No it wasn’t,” said Mite. “I can still smell the smoke.”

“Are you sure you don’t want anything? Champ, are you hungry? I have cheese and crackers and some grapes. How does that sound?”

“That sounds jimmy, ma’am.”

“Good, just give me a minute.”

She was headed into the kitchen when Mite said, “He didn’t die, Celia.”

She stopped without turning. “Who?”

“You knows who. He didn’t die.”

She spun. “Of course he did.”

“It’s my house, this house. It’s my name on the deed, you can check it for yourself. You didn’t get it through no college. He pays the taxes and he made sure you got it for nothing. You had to suspect, ending up in this house, in Yonkers. This
was Cooney’s house. You remember Cooney, that night in ‘21’? The mope what gave me this?”

He held up his hand, pointed at the thick gold ring on his finger.

“It can’t be,” she said.

“And your inheritance. Who was it who died?”

“An old uncle.”

“Did you know him?”

“No, actually.”

“A lawyer named McGreevy, with his pale skin and stuttering tongue, broke the bad news, didn’t he?”

“Stop it.”

“You had to have figured he was somehow connected with you getting the inheritance, this house.”

“No, Gregory told me—”

“He didn’t die in that fire, Celia,” said Mite. “He’s still alive. He’s our Uncle Rufus. And I’ve found him.”

Which was why the dream, and why the next morning, after Celia walked Norman to the school, she found herself calling for a cab so she could catch the commuter line to Grand Central Station. Just to see, she told herself, only that, to see and to prove to herself it was over, all of it, and the life she was living, the family she was raising, was the life and family she was meant for all along.

And now there it was, the Empire State Building, not dancing to some hepcat beat, blessedly, but tall and solid. And yet even as she stood before it and stared upward like a tourist right off the bus, she couldn’t help but think of the dark monstrous thing covered by the thin skin of granite and
glass and steel. But the monstrosity in her dream wasn’t inside the building, she knew, no matter what Freud would have said about it. The dark thing she glimpsed beneath the skin of the building was herself, as she might have been had not everything in her old life gone to a fiery hell.

And yet, like a phoenix, from the ashes she had been reborn into what now she was. Everything her mother had always wanted for her, a husband who supported her, a child whom she adored, a beautiful house with a picket fence, all of it had come into her life. Respectable. That was what she had become, against all odds, and she owed it all to Gregory.

She had gone to him after all of it was over, had gone to him as if just to talk, but all the time hoping that he would save her, and he did, exactly that. Gregory. Without any questions or lectures. The arrogance had somehow been burned out of him in the years after she had sent him packing from the apartment. Gregory. Still the idealist, but more practical than ever she could have imagined. He knew what to do right away. The quick civil ceremony, the new place with room for a nursery, the introductions to the junior faculty at the college. And he did it all without making her feel that he was doing her the greatest favor of her life, even if he actually was. He did it all as if he were doing it out of love, imagine that. It would have been easier if he had turned out like so many of the other professors he worked with, if he drank too much and stomped around like the second coming of Hegel and slept with his young and pretty research assistants, it would have been a relief. Then they would have been even. But he didn’t. He was the perfect husband, the perfect father,
a more attentive lover than he had ever been before. Gregory. He had made for her a life and she couldn’t deny that the affection she held for him had grown deep and strong.

So why was she here, now, on Thirty-fourth Street?

“You ready, Celia?” said Mite, standing beside her, also looking up at the building, captured by his own dark thoughts.

“I don’t know,” she said, and she didn’t, truly, know why she was there. Just to be sure one way or the other, she told herself. Her son deserved that, at least, she told herself. She would only go as far as she needed to find out if it was true, she told herself.

“What if he’s not so happy to see us, Mick?” said Champ, who stood like a scarred ebony pillar on the other side of Mite.

“Oh, he’ll be happy,” said Mite. “He’ll be bursting his buttons, he will. It’s why he took care of us all these years. He was waiting for us to return.”

“You think?” said Celia.

“No doubtsky aboutsky,” said Mite.

The very scent of the lower offices of Brownside Enterprises, on the eighty-ninth floor of the Empire State Building, raised the thin black hairs on the back of her neck. The elevator had taken off so fast it was as if a part of her had been left behind in the rise and maybe that was the main cause of her vertigo. But there was also the faint scent of raw animal power that worked on her emotions like a memory. It floated here among the pretty girls with their perfect legs, busily typing at desks arrayed in neatly ordered rows and columns in the middle of
the floor. It floated among the executives in their suits, bustling in and out of glass-walled offices ringing the floor. And it seemed to flow down the broad staircase that reached grandly from this floor to the next, from this level of worker bees to something high up in the reaches of power.

The buttons of the elevator had gone straight from 89 to 91.

Before the stairs sat a woman in a dark suit, cold and perfect, as if carved from alabaster. There was no typewriter on her desk, just a single flower in a fluted vase and a single phone. Behind her stood a guard with a gun on his hip. The woman at the desk smiled stonily at the three of them as they stepped off the elevator.

“Can I help you?” said the woman at the desk.

“What’s upstairs?” said Mite.

“Executive offices.”

“That’s where we’re going.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No appointment,” said Mite.

“Then I’m sorry,” she said with a firm smile, “but no one is allowed up without an appointment.”

“How abouts you gets us an appointment?” said Mite.

“That is not possible. I am not authorized to make appointments.”

“Then why don’t you call up on that phone of yours and gets the authorization?” said Mite. “Tell them we’re here to see Blatta.”

The woman looked at the three of them for a moment and then opened her desk drawer, took out a small book, paged through it. “There is no Mr. Blatta listed, Mr….”

“Pimelia, but he’ll know me as Mite.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Pimelia, but no one is allowed upstairs without an appointment. You’ll have to leave. Oscar will show you the elevator.”

“Let’s go, guys,” said the guard, stepping out from around the desk. He was a big man, with the jaw of a moose, but still, after he took a quick glance at Champ, his hand slipped onto the grip of his gun.

Quick as a clap, Champ grabbed the guard’s arm with one hand and the holstered gun with the other and lifted the guard slightly into the air so it was impossible for the gun to be drawn.

The guard flailed about for a moment.

“Easy now, Pops,” said Champ in his low growl.

Mite stepped toward the desk, sat on its edge, raised the handset of the phone. “About that appointment,” he said.

Celia’s skin began to itch at the way the woman blanched.

A man came down to get them, a stocky man in a chauffeur’s uniform and chauffeur’s peaked cap. He walked with a limp, wore a black eye patch over his left eye.

“Well, well, well,” said Mite. “Look who it is. I see Uncle Rufus found you too, hey, Istvan?”

It was only then that Celia recognized the man with the eye patch as Jerry’s former driver, who eight years before had come with the message from his boss that had started everything.

“Good morning, Mr. Pimelia,” said Istvan. “You too, Miss Singer.”

“Hello, Istvan,” she said softly. “It’s Mrs. now.”

“Very good.”

“Looks like you survived the worst of it, huh, palsy?” said Mite.

“This way, please,” said Istvan in a dry voice, before turning toward the stairs and starting up again.

Champ eased the guard down, gently let go of his arm, brushed away the palm mark on his sleeve. Then Mite and Champ, with Celia behind, followed Istvan up the stairs.

The smell grew stronger as they rose, furry, more animal than human, of some great power waiting to be unleashed. The scent flushed through her as if injected straight into her veins. The itch in her skin increased, her heart started kicking beneath her breast.

He was here, she could sense it in every nerve. The presence of Istvan proved it even further. There was no reason to go on, she should turn away, now. And yet she didn’t.

They were in a dark imposing space, all wood paneling, with maroon leather chairs like in some fussy old men’s club. Istvan led them to a reception desk next to a set of large double doors. The woman behind the desk was pretty, with high blond hair and huge breasts. The nameplate on her desk read: C. Peppers. Behind her was a portrait of a greasy-looking man with an unshaved face and a bemused smile. The bronze plaque under the portrait read: irving brownside—founder.

“And how can we help you today?” said C. Peppers, her screech of a voice wildly out of place in the powerful hush of the office.

“We’s here to see Blatta,” said Mite.

“Whom can I tell them is here and what can I tell them is
the purpose of the visit?” She pronounced purpose like the sea mammal.

“We’re not here to see no them, just him. Blatta. The name’s Mite. This fellow over here is with me and his name is Champ. We’re a team, right? So he sees one, he sees us both. He’ll understand, he was once on the other side of that equation. And this here is an old friend of his, Celia, with a
C
.”

The woman stopped writing on her pad to eye Celia carefully, her gaze riding down from Celia’s face to her waist to the brace on her leg. She seemed relieved to see it and then looked back up with a breath of pity on her face.

So, thought Celia, that’s how he has been entertaining himself.

“We just came to wish him Happy New Year is all,” said Mite.

“It’s May,” said the woman with the high hair.

“So maybe we’s a little late, but like my momma always said, it’s the sentiment what matters.”

“My mother wasn’t much on sentiment,” said the woman. “She preferred diamonds. All right, wait here and I’ll see what I can do.”

Celia watched as the woman ripped a sheet off her pad, stood, smoothed out her skirt. The blond woman had high heels, and she walked so that she led with her breasts, like a battleship with two great prows. It had been years since Celia felt what she felt as she watched the woman walk to the double doors: envy, bitterness, the strange competitive desire to rip the woman’s face off and stuff it down her cleavage.