Onion Street (15 page)

I followed Gloria up the stairs to the second floor and into a small, empty bedroom. She pointed at a short rope hanging down from the ceiling. “Can you grab that, Bobby?”

When I did, I was amazed at the little chute and narrow ladder that swung down. What did I know about attics? I lived in an apartment building my whole life. If we had one of these in our apartment, it would have led into the Spiegelmans’s apartment above us. For a heavy woman, Gloria managed to get up into the attic pretty easily.

“Watch your head,” she warned as I came up behind her.

You had to love this woman. Even the attic was neat, if a little dusty.

“Now where is it?” she asked herself, as she scanned the nooks and crannies. “There it is. See that suitcase, Bobby?” Gloria said, pointing to a pretty large, old-fashioned, leather-handled case under a stack of cardboard boxes. “That’s Sam’s. The first week she moved in, she asked me to keep it for her. I totally forgot about it until just now.”

I fought the urge to fling the boxes off the suitcase and forced myself to carefully move the boxes above it. The suitcase was pretty beat-up, tattered, and frayed. I moved it aside, and put the boxes back in place. Gloria and I stared at it, both of us a little queasy, I think.

“Take it,” she said. “Take it. I don’t wanna know what’s in it. I don’t think I could deal with it. I know it’s strange, but with Rocco in so much danger and everything, I don’t wanna be reminded of the dead.”

“I understand.”

When I went to pat Gloria’s shoulder, she hugged me with intense conviction. She was really hugging her son, but that was okay with me. We didn’t say goodbye. She handed me the case as I made my way down the attic ladder. When I was sure she was down safely, I took the last vestiges of Samantha Hope and let myself out.

I resisted the urge to open up the suitcase only partially due to self-control. The other part was that the suitcase might be locked, and I didn’t want to stand out on the street trying to pry it open. I put it in Aaron’s trunk and drove home. I got lucky for once and found a parking spot right out front of our building. I put the gift-wrapped bottle of Château Latour on the front seat for Aaron to find in the morning when he got into the car. That was a pretty expensive bottle of red grape juice, but I had kind of abused the privilege with his car. It was still a great shock to me that my brother had become so fascinated by wine. I suppose it appealed to his obsessive side. Although he wasn’t adventurous by nature, he did love studying and finding the subtleties in things. He confessed to me once that his dream was to get out of sales and to buy a wine shop. That was cool. The part that wasn’t cool was the part where I was supposed to be his partner. Yeah, sure.

I was beat; all the mileage I’d covered over the last two days was catching up to me in a single rush. I felt like once I got upstairs, I would fall into bed and sleep for a week. The thing is, I never made it upstairs. I didn’t make it five more feet.

I locked the Tempest’s door and took a weary step or two when I saw a car speeding right for me. I squeezed my eyes shut in anticipation of an impact that never happened. Instead, the car swerved past me, skidding, shrieking, screeching to a tire-smoking halt two hundred feet ahead. I was so preoccupied by not being dead that I failed to notice the man coming up behind me. Something hard and round jabbed me in the ribs.

“Don’t turn around, you honky mothafucka. Just get in the car.”

The car’s rear door was flung open and a strong hand hurried me along to it. I wanted to point out that getting pushed was just insult to injury, that I was already sufficiently motivated by the gun in my ribs. Before I got a chance to speak, I was shoved into the back seat of the waiting car, which took off even before the door shut. When I righted myself, I saw that I had plenty of company in the car with me. Besides Strong Hand on my right, there was another man next to me on my left. I assumed he was a man. He was built like one, but I couldn’t be sure because he was wearing an LBJ Halloween mask that covered his entire head and neck. The driver had on a Hubert Humphrey mask. Strong Hand was wearing a George Wallace mask — for purposes of irony, I suppose. The person next to Hubert Humphrey in the front passenger seat had on a Robert Kennedy mask. I was pretty sure the front seat passenger was female, her slight build giving her away. All of them were dressed in army surplus jackets and black turtlenecks below their rubber masks.

I should have been afraid, but I just wasn’t. In spite of the gun in my side, I couldn’t take this bunch seriously. The tough guys I knew meant business. They didn’t worry about irony and political statements. Even when I tried to muster up some fear, the best I could manage was bemusement. I felt more confused than anything else and it wasn’t profound confusion at that. Mostly, I think my lack of fear had to do with the fact that I recognized the girl in the front seat, her Kennedy mask notwithstanding.

“What does a guy have to do to get a mask around here?” I asked. “I’m feeling left out.”

Hubert Humphrey laughed, but George Wallace was not amused. He shoved the barrel into my ribs and said, “Mothafucka, I warned you to shut up.”

“What, I’m not a honky mothafucka anymore? And to be accurate, you warned me not to turn around. You didn’t warn me to shut up.”

Wallace pressed the barrel so hard into my ribs I thought it might go through my coat. “I’m warnin’ you now. Shut up.”

I turned to him and said, “Listen, man, I don’t think sticking the barrel of your gun through my ribs is what Stokely Carmichael meant by Black Power.”

Hubert Humphrey laughed again. Wallace was even less amused than before, but he didn’t take it out on me.

“Y’all keep on laughin’, just keep on laughin’ and we’ll see how you laughin’ with my foot in your damn mouth when I’m kickin’ your teeth down your throat.”

Robert Kennedy whipped around, angrily shaking her head at Wallace. I guess abducting someone off the street at gunpoint was considered fair play, but insulting your comrade was verboten. I caught a good glimpse of the girl’s eyes through her mask before she turned back around. After that, I was sure I knew who she was.

“So, Susan, what did you get on your final paper in Romantic Poetry?” I asked as if we were old friends who just happened into each other on the subway. “It’s Susan Kasten, right? I never forget a face.”

Nobody was laughing now.

LBJ blurted out, “Holy fucking shit!”

“Shut up!” yelled Hubert Humphrey.

“Man, ain’t nobody told you dumb crackers vaudeville is dead?”

Kennedy slapped her hand on the dashboard. That got everybody’s attention and it shut them all up. I was a little less intimidated by her.

“By the way, Susan, how’s Grandpa Hyman doing now that you blew his fix-it shop all to hell?”

With that, she finally spoke, but not to me. “Pull over.”

“But the Com — ” Humphrey stopped himself mid-word. “But didn’t they say to bring him straight to — ”

“Now! Pull over right now,” she screamed at the driver. When he didn’t respond quickly enough to suit her, she yanked the steering wheel hard to the right.

We slammed into the curb, the driver’s late braking doing little to slow the car down. When we came to rest, George Wallace said, “I told y’all we shoulda jus’ iced this mothafucka and been done with it.”

Suddenly, my lack of fear wasn’t quite so lacking.

“No!” Kennedy shouted. “We have to know what he knows. We’re not the pigs. We’re not fascists. We don’t just waste people on a whim or because they piss us off.”

“I guess Stalin, Mao, and Castro didn’t get that memo, huh?”

“Reactionary stooge,” scoffed LBJ.

“I was always partial to Curly myself,” I joked.

Wallace backhanded me across the side of my head. Some people have no sense of humor. “C’mon. Now let’s just ice his white ass.”

“We’re not cowboys. We must act as we’ve been instructed.”

“By the Committee, you mean?” I said.

Hubert didn’t like that. “He knows about the Committee.”

Susan was unconvinced. “No, he doesn’t. He’s fishing, throwing out a word he must’ve overheard to see our reaction. Well, now he’s got his reaction. But that’s not important. We have to find out what he
really
knows and how he knows it.”

George Wallace didn’t give up easily. “I bet he killed Abdul. That’s all I need to know.”

“I don’t even know who you’re talking about,” I lied. “Do I look like someone who knows people named Abdul?” Then I tried playing one of the few cards I had left to play. “Even if you find out what I know, you’ll have no way of knowing who else knows it.”

Susan laughed a jagged, joyless little laugh like a shard of glass. “Are you really so stupid, Moe, to suppose we won’t do what we have to do to find that out as well?” When I didn’t answer right away, she asked, “What, no snappy comeback?” She turned to Humphrey. “Come on, drive. We’re late.”

It now occurred to me that even if they weren’t going to kill me, they were probably willing to get as close as they had to. I was in no mood to find out just how close. As Hubert turned the wheel to pull back into traffic, I planted my elbow smack into George Wallace’s nose. It broke with a sickening, dull snap. He dropped the gun to the car floor and kicked it under the front seat as he writhed in pain. Blood gushed through the nostrils of the rubber mask. I hit him with my elbow again, this time in the throat. He slumped against the door, gasping for air. I twisted in my seat, pushed my back up against Wallace for leverage, and kicked LBJ with the flat of my sneaker square on the side of his head. The force of the kick sent his head into the window with a bang. I reached over Wallace, yanked the handle, and tumbled out the door.

I hit the pavement pretty hard and although the car wasn’t moving very fast, I rolled into the curb with a lung-emptying thump. I forced myself to get up, to run. My lungs didn’t seem to want to work, but self-preservation is a great motivator. I refused to look behind me as I ran. No use wasting time or energy or getting any more frightened than I already was. I recognized where we were, and knew I was not in the best of places if I was looking for someone to help me. Even in broad daylight, the area around Avenue Z and Shell Road was a pretty deserted part of Gravesend. Ahead of me, to my left, under the el and across the old trolley tracks, were the South Highway Little League baseball diamonds, and just beyond their outfield fences, the massive Coney Island rail yards. Further to my left was an area I thought of as Desolation Row: the murky, polluted waters of Coney Island Creek, the litter-strewn underbelly of the Belt Parkway, and the Brooklyn Union Gas Company. I doubted that Susan and her band of unmerry men knew their way around here half as well as I did. There was the additional benefit that most of it was inaccessible to cars.

If I had turned right and made it to Avenue X, I would have been safe. There would be plenty of traffic and people on the street even at that hour of the night. The problem was that there were four blocks separating me from the safety of Avenue X, four blocks where I would be totally out in the open, four blocks that were completely accessible to cars. It would have been easy for them to drive up to me and snatch me again. Somehow I sensed that if they got me a second time, I would have paid a big price for escaping. People with broken noses and bruised egos tend to lose their senses of humor. Still, the choice I made to head for Desolation Row was not without risks of its own. Between the buzzing of cars on the Belt Parkway and the din of subways passing on the el, it would be nearly impossible to hear someone coming up on me. Once caught, I could scream my head off and not a soul would hear me. And while that area wasn’t quite the Fountain Avenue dump, many a body had been left there to rot and gone undetected for weeks. It was too late to change my mind now. I was committed.

I made it across Shell Road and leapt onto the high fence that kept unwanted visitors off the Little League fields. I wasn’t a great fence climber, but fear improved my skills. When I came over the top of the fence, I finally looked behind me. It was a good thing I did. LBJ and Hubert Humphrey were close, heading across Shell Road, running not for office but for me. I climbed halfway down the fence, jumping down the rest of the way. I raced across the entire length of the field, from the third base line to the right field corner and hopped the low outfield fence. I got down on all fours. Dark as it was, I wasn’t trying to hide. You can’t hide behind a cyclone fence. What I was doing was looking for the hole in the fence that separated the ball field from the rail yard. It wasn’t a hole so much as a square of fencing that came loose when the Little League officials went to retrieve balls hit into the rail yard. Our parents thought we didn’t know about the hole. They thought that if we knew about it, we’d sneak into the rail yard. Of course we knew about it, and of course they were right: we used to sneak into the rail yard all the time. Well, until Pete Malone brought his dog with us once and it got fried like the Rosenbergs on one of the electrified rails. We stopped going after that.

I found the patch. It was held onto the yard fence with six of those little twisty ties your mom uses to close up plastic sandwich bags. I didn’t have the time to undo them. Instead I pulled on the patch as hard as I could and it came loose. I wriggled through the hole, replacing the patch as best I could. I hoped that my body had blocked Lyndon and Hubert from seeing exactly where the patch was. Anything that slowed them down, even a little bit, improved my chances. Rows and rows of subway cars lay silent at this end of the yard, but I knew better than to think that it was safe to move about as I pleased. The long lines of subway cars might well have seemed dormant. That didn’t mean the rails on which they rested couldn’t jump up and bite. Six or seven hundred volts of electricity were running through some of those rails, and guessing which ones were live and which ones weren’t would be playing Russian roulette. The rails weren’t the only danger, either. Trains were constantly pulling in and out of the yard, and there was the odd chance you might run into a security guard or a yard worker. The rumor was that if you got snagged in the yard, you were going to catch a bad beating.

Carefully navigating my way between trains and across many sets of tracks, I kept in the shadows of the darkened subway cars as much as possible. As I went, I looked for some sort of weapon: a stick, a crowbar, anything I could swing. The best I could do was rocks. I picked a couple of the biggest stones out of the gravel that covered the floor of the yard. My plan, such as it was, was to draw them deep into the yard while I doubled back behind them. Once I got to Coney Island Creek, they’d never find me. I stopped to listen for them, and heard their feet churning up the gravel. It was funny how when there were no passing trains on Shell Road and traffic was light on the Belt, it was quiet enough to hear their clumsy footsteps. I heard something else.

“We have to split up or we’ll never find him. You go right. I’ll go left.”

“I don’t like it. What if I find him, what do I do?”

“Hold him and scream for help.”

“Me? He’s bigger than me and you saw how tough he is. He broke Jimmy’s nose and nearly broke your jaw.”

“Here, then. You take this. If he runs, shoot him.”

“I never fired at a person before. Besides, the Committee didn’t authorize — ”

“You see anyone from the Committee out here with us?”

“No.”

“Then do what I say or I’ll shoot
you
. Now take this and get going.”

I didn’t like the sound of that, but I fought the urge to bolt. I listened to their steps go in opposite directions. Then a subway came rushing over Shell Road and put an end to my hearing anything but its rumblings. Losing track of them forced me to move, but instead of going right or left, straight ahead or back, I went up. I pulled myself onto the rear platform of the subway car closest to me, then climbed onto the roof of the car. I pressed myself flat against the filthy, ice-cold metal, and waited for the subway train on Shell Road to pull out of the station. It seemed to take forever. Eventually, the train’s air brakes
psssss
-ed and it slowly moved off toward Coney Island. When it had gone, I lifted my head to see if I could get an idea of where LBJ and Hubert had got to. No luck. Under cover of all that noise, they could have been about anywhere. For all I knew, one of them could be standing just below me.

First I peeked over one side of the car, then the other. No one. I was thankful for that, at least. Quietly as possible, I got onto my knees and scanned the yard. Again, nothing. I reached into my coat pocket, pulled out a stone, and hurled it into the night. I wasn’t trying to hit anything in particular. I was just trying to hit something. Mission accomplished. It clanged off metal and the clang echoed through the yard. That set off a chain reaction: the crunch and scrape of running feet on gravel, a short flash of fire, a small explosion, and screams.

“You stupid prick. You shot me! You fuckin’ shot me.”