Lush Life (52 page)

"I think you should go home, rest up for-"

"Right now?" Billy s voice started to rise. "All I need to do is look at my bed and I start having nightmares from across the room."

Matty hesitated. "All right. Yeah, sure. Relax here, then."

After a few moments of head-down paperwork at the desk, Billy sitting there lost in thought, Matty caught Mullins's eye and hand
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signaled, Call me. "You want something, Billy? A soda? Coffee?"

"I'm good," he said, then, leaning forward, "I had this dream last night?"

Matty's cell rang. "Clark."

"What do you want?" Mullins asked.

"Are you serious?" Matty shot to his feet and began scribbling down some bogus address. "I'll be right there." Then, to Billy, "Something just came up."

"On this?"

"On something else. We could be gone for a few hours. Let me get you a ride home."

Once his slice was gone, he had no idea what to do with his hands, where to rest his eyes.

At ten in the evening, the foot traffic between that four-shop mini
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plaza and the Lemlich Houses directly across Madison Street was never-ending, but the group of tent-wearing young men more or less stayed clustered up near the stores.

The more they seemed to be ignoring him, the more powerfully he felt watched.

There was no way he'd approach them; or was he supposed to . . .

After a few excruciating minutes, one of the T-shirts walked away, ambling back across Madison into the Lemlichs, Eric thinking maybe he should take off too; back to Berkmann's, no way would this end well.

Then one of the other kids, without ever looking at him, began to slowly waddle-walk in his direction, his oversize T and mannered side
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to-side gait making him look like a hard-core penguin.

"What you need, Officer," the kid said, still looking off.

A gold medallion, one of three around his neck, announced his name: David.

"I look like a cop?" Eric asking for real.

"Not supposed to."

"I'm no cop." "OK."

Eric started to walk away.

"Hey, Officer?" the kid called out, and when Eric turned around, the whole crew finally came to life, laughing and low-fiving each other.

"He ain't police." Big Dap waved off his brother from his perch on the ramp rail in front of 32 St. James.

"I don't know about that," Little Dap said. He had crossed over from the miniplaza because he didn't know if that guy from the shooting had come back here to look for him.

"I know you don't know," Dap smirked, then nodded to Hammerhead, one of the older guys always hanging with him: Step to it.

As Hammerhead broke into a lazy jog back across Madison, Little Dap started to take off too, heading upstairs until this thing was over, but. . .

"Oh, yo. Get back here, little man. Gotta be in it to win it."

"Naw, see . . But his brother just waved him quiet.

"I'm in it," Tristan said, but as usual, nobody heard him.

Humiliated but thinking, Better a live asshole, Eric continued down Madison towards Montgomery, then froze as he heard feet coming up fast behind him. "Whoa, whoa," felt a hand on his elbow.

The guy pulling his coat was older than the others: mid-twenties, with a soul patch under his lip and so bulge-eyed that his gaze appeared wraparound.

"Them hoppers don't know shit.'What you need."

"Nothing."

"How much nothing."

"An ounce." Didn't mean to say it . . .

"A what?" his gibbous eyes glistening with surprise. A half block behind them that younger crew waddled in place as they watched the exchange from their two squares of pavement. Eric thinking, Just go, started to walk away again.

"Ho ho ho, hold it, hold it," the guy half-laughing, taking Eric's wrist. "That's just a lot of product on a spur-of-the-minute walk-up. But that's OK, can be done. Y'all just come with me," lightly tugging him towards the Lemlichs.

"No offense"-Eric went into a slight water-ski crouch to stand his ground-"but I'm not going over there."

"Hey. Let me tell you something about me because I realize no way you can know." He was still holding Eric's hand, Eric too embarrassed to ask for it back. "I am a fully endowed undergraduate student at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, something like six classes shy of accredidation, so . . ."

"What's your major?"

"My what?" Then, "Science."

"I'm not going over there." Eric finally getting his hand back.

"All right, fine, strip out here then."

"Strip for what, a wire?"

"Yes sir."

"Look, I don't even have any money on me." Turning out his pockets.

"That's OK. I don't have no product. We're just conversing here, maybe go to the next level if the shit's copacetic."

They compromised on the bathroom of the pizzeria, the two of them walking through the dining area, then past the Bangladeshis kneading dough at the back-room prep table.

The bathroom was bigger than it had to be but tearingly pungent from the scented urinal cakes.

The guy squatted on his hams as he carelessly patted Eric down, then took two steps back.

"Awright, boss, drop them skivvies."

"The fuck," Eric just saying it to say it, then dropping his jeans and looking off, holding down his boxers.

"Awright, awright." The guy backed up farther. "I don't need to see any more than I do."

Not that Eric had that much experience in this, but there was something disturbingly insincere about the whole routine.

"Say again what you want?"

"1 said already."

"What." The guy grinned, his wraparound eyes pulsing. "Y'all want to check me for a wire?" Standing with his arms wide.

"I said to you already."

"You did. You did." Then, "Ounce a G."

"No."

"Then we're done."

"OK." Relieved, Eric reached for the bathroom doorknob.

"Ho ho ho." The guy pinched the back of Eric's shirt. "What did you think it would be?"

"I was told seven."

"Seven?" Laughing. "Who the fuck down here, in this neighborhood, n s said seven.

"OK, I heard wrong." Reaching for the door again.

"I'll go nine."

"I'm sorry," Eric said, "what's your name?"

"You hear me ask yours?"

"OK, whatever. It's like, I'm going to say seven fifty, you're gonna say eight fifty, I'm gonna say eight, you're gonna say eight twenty-five, so OK, eight twenty-five."

"Eight fifty." "Bye."

"Awright, awright, eight twenty-five. Damn."

"OK, then." Eric feeling trapped by his win. "How soon can you get it?"

"How soon can you?"

"Me? The money?"

"Yuh-huh."

"Half an hour?" Just wanting to get it over with, whatever this would turn out to be.

"Hang on." The guy raising his eyes to the ceiling, doing the time math. "Make it forty-five."

"OK, forty-five."

"All right, I'll see you back here then."

"Not here." Eric thinking, thinking. "HI meet you somewheres inland."

"In what? What the fuck is inland."

"Somewheres near Orchard, Ludlow, Rivington."

"Oh. You mean white land." Laughing. "Just say that. Where at?"

"Where at?" Eric stalling. "There's a taco place on Stanton and Suffolk, you know it?"

"I know Stanton and Suffolk."

"There's a taco place."

"Does it say taco on the sign?"

"I assume so."

"Then we're good."

"Forty-five minutes?"

"Forty-five."

Eric faltered, then reached for the bathroom door again.

"Ey, yo." The guy turning him around at the last moment. "I can tell y'all nervous and shit?" Pulling a five-pointed badge out of his pocket and grabbing Eric's wrist. 'Tall had every right to be."

Eric stood rooted, half-smiling in shock.

"Bawwwwthe guy howling as he reared back and clapped his hands. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." Showing the badge again, a thin tin saying super secret agent. "I'm sorry, bad joke, bad joke."

"Yeah." Eric's forehead creamed with sweat.

The worst part of his being arrested those many years ago up in Bing
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hamton was the day-after-day waiting for it; so when that fucking idiot in the pizzeria flashed the badge in his face, Eric had been flooded with relief. Now, as he walked home from the Lemlichs, he tried to recapture that sensation, as if whatever was to happen had happened already, the piper paid in full.

This would not end well; he was pretty sure of that, but he felt powerless to stop it.

Over the last two weeks it had felt to him as if he'd slowly been devolving into one of his own Lower East Side ghosts; and ghosts, he believed, were nothing more than mindless reenactors, in possession of only the faintest sense of deja vu.

And so he floated into the vestibule of his walk-up, floated up the five flights of cockeyed stairs and into his denuded apartment like he had only the dimmest memory of ever being under this roof before.

But when he pulled his accumulated tip-pool skimmings out of a hiking boot in the closet and began to count out $900, $75 going into a separate pocket as an emergency reserve for the inevitable last-minute hustle, something in him shifted; it was as if the blunt value of the bills flicking between his hands lent more substance to him too; substance and confidence, and for the first time all evening he had a glimmer of himself not as some witless shade following a preordained script but as an individual who was in the process of taking control, of turning things around for himself.

With his jeans front-loaded with cash, he poured himself a vodka bracer, then just stared at it. Dumped it down the drain.

Not tonight, my man.

Feeling lighter and sharper than he had for days, he locked the apartment behind him, tripped down the stairs, got as far as the mailboxes; he could see Stanton Street through the glass of the lobby door, then felt the wind go out of him in a whoof.

At first he thought he'd stepped into the path of something moving at warp speed, maybe a bullet, maybe the bullet; getting shot, he heard, sometimes felt like that, a massive hammerblow; but when he looked up from the grimy tiled floor into the Lemlich faces, he knew it was nothing more than a punch to his unbraced gut.

One of them, wearing a bandanna up to his eyes, immediately stooped over and started going through his pockets, looking for the buy money, the kids billowing T covering Erics head and giving him an intimate view of a taut gut and flat chest.

Then one of the others hissed, "Hold it, hold it," and he felt himself being dragged by the ankles along the tiles around to the wedge of space beneath and behind the stairs, out of sight from the street, another punch to close his eyes, his brain a tuning fork, then a scrabbling through his pockets, one of them saying, "Seventy-five? He say eight hundred something," then another punch, Eric hearing more than feeling something crack beneath his eye, then, "Ho ho ho, here it is right here," the rest of his roll liberated, then another face close to his, no mask, chewing-gum breath, "We know where you live" then a final punch, his right eye ballooning in its socket, then the door opening to the street, letting in a slice of oblivious female laughter from up the block, then silence as the door closed again, Eric thinking, This'll do.

After fretting all day about sucking Billy Marcus into something for which the guy was completely unprepared, as night came down, Matty also found himself thinking about Minette Davidson again, and so almost as an act of penance he wound up heading over to the No Name to subject himself to his mixologist, practicing saying her name all the way, Dora, Dora, Dora, feeling slightly less of a hound for remembering it this time.

But when he made it through the heavy black curtains into the room, she wasn't there.

Her replacement behind the bar was just as compellingly moody and distant, though, long and lean with plum-colored eyes and slick black bangs; and she served up his pilsner with a tight smile that made him want to chat.

"I was looking for Dora."

"My English . . ." Squinting at him.

He waved it off, just conversating here; but she turned to the male mixologist, speaking to him in what Matty thought was Russian.

"She's sorry," the young guy said, "her English . . ."

"Forget it." Matty shrugged.

"You said you are looking for your daughter?"

Tristan sat on the roof of his building looking out on the East River, its muscular flow gleaming beneath the light-strung bridges going across to mostly dark Brooklyn. What did that cop say the night him and Little Dap ran up here? A billion-dollar view on top of ten-cent people. Something like that. He scanned the top-floor windows of the nearest Lemlich high-rise, maybe fifty yards away, saw the lives in there like little mouse plays, mostly everybody watching TV or talking on the phone.