Blood Count

CHAPTER 7

After Radcliff left, I went across the hall and rang Lily’s bell. Nobody answered.

A couple, tall, thin people-from their height and their looks, I figured them for Ethiopian or Somali-hurried along down the hall toward the elevator. They looked at me briefly and moved on. From the apartment next to Simonova’s a dog barked, then the door opened a crack. The face of a very old woman-dark skin, little yellow silk cap fitted down tight on her head-looked out. She stared at me for a second or two, then shut the door. In another apartment music played, but I couldn’t make out what the song was, and then I looked at my watch. It was ten past eight.

I got out my cell and called Lily and she said she was in the shower, she was changing her clothes, said for me to wait in Simonova’s apartment. She seemed obsessed with the idea somebody had to be with the body.

“I called Dr. Bernard, OK? I called like you wanted me to,” Lily said. In the background I could hear water running and I tried not to think about how she looked in the shower. She hung up and I went back to Simonova’s apartment.

I felt it again when I looked at the body, something visceral, one of those flickers of intuition that’s mostly physical, that runs up your neck and makes you shiver, pressing your brain into action. In the apartment there was something I couldn’t see right, something I didn’t understand.

Virgil Radcliff was gone, but the idea I might call the ME had worried him plenty. He didn’t want this made official in any way.

Did he know something he wasn’t telling me? Did he sense Lily was somehow involved and was trying to protect her?

I took the shawl off Simonova’s face. It seemed grotesque that the cannula was still hooked in her nose, the oxygen tank still breathing for a dead woman. I removed it carefully. She had hairy nostrils, which reminded me of Stalin, of what my father told me he had felt when he saw Stalin lying in state in the Hall of Columns in Moscow. Hairy nostrils.

Years after we left Russia, my father told me how terrible he had felt back then when, looking at the great man, he saw only the huge hairy nostrils.

After I covered Simonova up again, I pushed the oxygen tank into a closet and noticed a small pile of Christmas presents under a scrawny tree hung with red tinsel draped on the branches. I looked at the tags, saw there was a present from Lily, another from somebody named Carver. I stopped what I was doing then, because for the second time that morning, I heard water dripping. It wasn’t in the living room.

I looked around the rest of the apartment. In one of the bedrooms, there was water running in from the roof onto the heavy plastic sheeting that shrouded everything-bed, dresser, chairs, clothes racks.

The room was a mess. Water had stained the yellow paint, and in places, slabs of plaster had come loose and dripped down the wall like candle wax. In one corner, there was mold that had grown down the wall in long fingers. More mold was on pictures that lay on the floor. It had somehow encroached on the images behind glass, making strange frames for them. One was a photo of a group of Russians near a dacha, five people in shabby clothes. In the 1950s, I guessed. The other was of Lenin.

I fixed the plastic sheets as best I could, shut a window that had been left open a couple of inches, and tried to call Lily on my cell. She didn’t answer.

I needed air. In the living room, I got my jacket and went out onto the terrace. I had only been in the building for a few hours, but I already felt trapped in it.

Snow was falling harder, big flakes, blown by a hard wind across the city. It fell onto the terrace where I was standing now. From my pocket I got out a wool hat and jammed it on my head.

I gulped some cold air, then I leaned out and looked at the street below.

From the terrace, which wrapped around the end of the building, I could see in almost every direction. The Armstrong was the tallest building in the area, fourteen floors of yellow brick at the northern end of Harlem. Up here I had a spectacular view of the city, even though it was blurred by the curtains of snow.

At the back of the building was a parking area enclosed by wire fencing. There was a row of garbage cans chained together. In front was Edgecombe Avenue and Jackie Robinson Park, trees bare, and the Harlem River. Beyond it was the tangle of highways, the Bronx, Yankee Stadium. It would be gone soon. Torn down to make way for some new stadium without any history.

I had loved the days and nights I’d spent at the Stadium ever since I got to New York; loved the games, the crowds, the noise, the singing, the players, the beer and dogs. Loved the camaraderie, the way you met other fans over and over, got to know them and their kids. I loved the playing of “New York, New York” when we won, the whole corny ball of wax. My New York.

North and west were the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge, shadows through the snow. To the south, all of Harlem, stretching to 110th Street and Central Park and down to the sky line-the Empire State, the Chrysler Building, but these, too, were only phantoms today. Here up on Sugar Hill, the rest of the city felt far away.

I once got to know a musician at Bradley’s downtown-it’s long gone now-who had lived his whole life in Harlem. One night, he’d said: “Black America, Artie? It’s another country. And Harlem is black America.” He’s been dead a while now, and I can’t remember his name.

If you live downtown like I do, Harlem feels like a different planet, low-lying, wide, spacious boulevards, trees. Harlem had barely mattered economically for so long that no one bothered to tear most of it down. It’s remained, for better and worse, suspended in its own past.

A decade ago, maybe, as city real estate prices soared, fear of losing out on a piece of the pie made Harlem a tasty prospect. A lot of it was broken down, some of the buildings condemned. But there were the great apartment houses like the Armstrong, there were the fabulous brownstones on Strivers’ Row; you saw ads in the Times for Harlem alongside those for Central Park West, Soho, the Village.

Houses went on the market for a million bucks. Developers talked about Harlem as if it were the Promised Land. All that housing stock, they’d say, practically licking their lips. And people moved. The New Harlem, they called it. A few bistros opened for business. Somebody set up a supper club and charged big bucks for a membership. A guy in real estate I sometimes play a little ball with used to tell me about all this, salivating. I told him I love where I live. Anyhow, I’m always broke.

Earlier, I’d noticed the date on the Armstrong: BUILT 1919. It must have been named later. In 1919, Louis Armstrong was only eighteen.

As soon as I’d arrived, I’d seen the building notices stuck to the beveled glass in the heavy front door. In the lobby there were ladders, cans of paint, part of the floor covered with a drop cloth. I wondered whether the crunch of the last months would stop the New Harlem dead, how much would sink in the financial shit storm.

From Simonova’s terrace, I could see the whole of Manhattan. Long and narrow, only partly visible in the snow, it looked like a great transatlantic ship that had hit an iceberg and was starting to slip down into the dark, cold water.

Suddenly, I heard the sound of water and a voice cursing.

“Goddamn this son-of-a-bitch raggedy-ass geranium plant! Damn it.”

I looked over the low wall that separated Simonova’s terrace from the one next door.

The man on the other side, tea kettle in hand, unlit cigarette in his mouth, was pouring steaming water into flower pots. He put the kettle down on a little table next to a coffee mug and turned to me.

“Hello there, sorry to bother you with my carry-on over here.” He had a deep, polished voice. “But it’s these damn plants just froze up on me. You don’t have a light, do you?”

I got the matches out of my pocket, gave them to him, he lit up, took a deep drag with a look of relief and deep satisfaction.

“Thanks.”

He was at least eighty, I guessed, but tall and lean with a full head of white hair. A purple birthmark stained his left cheek. His skin was medium brown, like milk chocolate, he had a thin mustache like old-time musicians often sported-he reminded me of Billy Eckstine-and he wore a good tweed jacket, a blue shirt, red sweater, gray flannels. On his feet were embroidered velvet slippers. He was a dapper guy.

“My wife doesn’t let me smoke in the house,” he confided. “She takes away all the matches, says I can’t even smoke out here, it gets in her drapes when the terrace door is open, but I sneak one now and again,” he said. “She says it will kill me. I tell her it’s my one remaining pleasure. I don’t mind about dying, only about pain. I usually go up on the roof to smoke, but it was iced over bad this morning.” He let out a long curl of smoke with a satisfied sigh. “How do you do? I’m Lionel Hutchison. Are you a friend of Marianna’s?”

I introduced myself. I said I was a friend of Lily’s, that I was visiting and she had asked me to look at a leak in Simonova’s ceiling. The lies came easy; they almost always do.

“Oh, dear, yes, well, it’s an old building, leaks like a bastard in bad weather. It’s even older than I am, but it’s sound, you know. There’s just a lot of foolishness about fancifying it. They rip stuff up, they run out of money, nothing gets finished, you know? You get used to it, though, or maybe I’ve just been here too long. I was only ten years old when we came here.”

He was clearly enjoying both his smoke and his own words. Glad for company, too, I thought. Not surprised to see me or hear I was a friend of Lily’s.

“When we came here, I was just five years old. My mother wanted to live there.” He pointed to the roof of the building next door. It was maybe ten feet below us. “Number 409 Edgecombe. Everybody lived there: Mr. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois, the Duke-lived in a seven-room apartment done up all in white. When it came to building the Armstrong-they didn’t call it that until later-ours had to be just a little taller, a little grander. Built by the same brothers back in the day, built for white folk, and those two brothers, architects both of them, they went at it, raising the ante, each of them, one putting on more fancy touches than the other.” He took another puff, holding the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger like old guys sometimes do. He chuckled. “Still, we never did have anyone throw a prostitute out our building, you know, not like over there-it did happen, yes, from the roof, I believe, or out the window, over at 409. We don’t let them forget about it. You cold?” He picked up his coffee and sipped at it.

“It’s pretty cold,” I said.

“I love the winter, the snow, the cold. Always seems to me to clean up everything in the city.”

“You’re a friend of Mrs. Simonova?”

“Good friends,” he said, but he didn’t ask how she was and I got the feeling he already knew. Cigarette in hand, Hutchison leaned his elbows on the wall between us, and settled in for some more talk.

“You interested in history? I like to think I’m a kind of local historian. This building, see, we had the nine-room apartments right from the beginning, with electric refrigeration, lovely wooden floors, high ceilings, terraces. You know about this part of town we call Sugar Hill? Everything that was sweet and expensive, so they said, and it ran right up here from 145th Street. See that building?” He pointed at Edgecombe Avenue. “Billie Holiday lived over there. We had musicians and athletes. The Polo Grounds, you heard of the Giants? Greatest baseball club of all time. They let us play there as kids. I was a boy, I played stickball with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte in the street, I was here when Joe Louis beat Max Schmeling and when Ray Robinson took the crown. All of Harlem just walked down to 125th Street to celebrate. You have to picture it, thousands of people, all dressed up in the best they had walking together. I used to hang out at Ray Robinson’s club, later on.” He looked at me. “Sorry, I got to catch myself when I start rambling,” he said. “It’s the curse of the old, and in this building, we’re almost all of us old now. We feed off our memories, you see.” He smoked his cigarette, the end of it glowing hot and red, then tossed the butt into an empty pail. He seemed oblivious to the cold and snow. “One young man comes along, wants to buy my apartment. He says to me, ‘Dr. Hutchison, the myth lingers on here in Sugar Hill, like smoke, or sweet perfume; I want to be part of it,’ he says, a nice young Negro fellow, excuse me, African American, lawyer, very polite, and I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing because this young man, with all his expensive clothes, is about as sweet as a cheap cigar.”

I laughed.

“Right? It’s just so much, how shall I put it delicately, horseshit,” said Dr. Hutchison. “Did you know this here, this little hilly area, this is Coogan’s Bluff? Same as the film by that name with Mr. Clint Eastwood?”

“What about Armstrong?” I said. “Did he ever live in the building?”

“You a fan of jazz music?”

“Yes.”

“For a short time, yes, I believe he did, just for a few months, but it was before we moved in. I knew his Lucille. I knew her well enough they invited us to the house in Corona over in Queens for Thanksgiving once.”

I was hanging on Dr. Hutchison’s story. Armstrong is one of my heroes.

“Louis used to hand out Swiss Kris laxative to everyone, he had a deal to represent it. He was a kind man, and he was a genius, but he was sometimes sad. Sometimes you’d catch him looking out a window, a cigarette in his hand, and a faraway look on his face. You could hear it when he played sometimes. Most of the time, he just wanted everybody happy,” Hutchison said.

I thought about the house in Queens where Armstrong finally settled. It’s a little museum now where everything-the dishes, the furniture, Louis’s horn-remains just as it was when he shared it with Lucille.

For some reason, seeing it, the modest house in Corona where he had been happy, made me want to cry. All the musicians I love are long gone. I still have the music, though.

Hutchison looked over at me. “Marianna’s doing all right? Do you want to tell her I’ll come by a little later?”

“Sure,” I said.

“It’s the pain that’s the problem, of course. So unnecessary, so inhuman. Suffering, they say it’s good for you, tests your character. Such foolishness, but it’s as if some kind of fake stoicism has become our religion. Brave, they call it, when somebody’s terminal, but what choice do they have? Being brave is about choice. Pain leaves you no choice,” Dr. Hutchison said angrily.

“Do you still practice?”

“Only when I’m needed. I keep up my license, always have. I graduated Harvard Medical School, class of fifty-four. Thought I could change the world,” he said, and then, under his breath, he added, “Sure done faked myself out on that one.”

“You look after Mrs. Simonova?”

“Just help out. She has her own doctor. Matter of fact, I sent her to Lucille Bernard. She’s a lung specialist. One of the best, yes, indeed.”

“So you see Mrs. Simonova most days?”

“Some,” he said warily.

“Recently?”

An insistent voice interrupted us, calling out to Hutchison from the doorway to his terrace.

“Lionel?” It was the little woman in the yellow cap I’d seen earlier. “What’s going on out there? You talking to that damn woman? For heaven’s sake, you’ll catch your death. Now tell her to go back into her own apartment and you come home, stop your rambling on about the damn past and killing yourself with those cigarettes.” She paused briefly. “She calls you, you just jump, don’t you, boy.” Sticking her head farther out of the door, the woman saw me and said, “Who are you?”

“My wife, Celestina,” said Hutchison. He picked up the kettle, tossed the remains over one of the plants, where it hissed and steamed, and retreated into his apartment.

I had the feeling Lionel Hutchison had seen Marianna Simonova recently. I had the feeling he already knew she was dead. He had engaged me in a lot of talk to see what I knew. It had been a fishing expedition.