Down the River unto the Sea

19

His left foot crossed the threshold, and mine did too. He felt my presence, but before he could respond I hit him in the back of the head with my .45. He went down on one knee and I hit him again — hard.

While he floundered on the green-and-black linoleum I did a cursory body search, coming up with a small-caliber pistol. Then I pulled the ceiling-to-floor curtains across the picture window and flipped the wall switch for the overhead fluorescent lighting.

Chester was holding the back of his head with one hand while trying to push himself up with the other. He was moving his lower jaw around as though he’d been hit there.

“Stay down,” I told him.

He stopped moving, and looked up to see me straddling one of the metal folding chairs. The .45 was in my hand, pointed at his forehead.

He was up on one elbow and confused, but when he shrugged, maybe a preparation to rise, I pulled back the hammer on the gun.

The fear factor of a cocking hammer is the real advantage of a six-shooter.

He stopped moving, but his eyes were hard at work.

He was long, strong, and considering his chances of turning the tables from a prone position.

“You do and I’ll shoot you in the knee,” I said, “still ask my questions, then walk out the back door, leaving you a cripple for life.”

“What you want, man?”

“You ran a woman named Nathali Malcolm some years back.”

His face twisted, trying to show without telltale words that he didn’t know what I was talking about.

“Oh?” I mocked. “Did I say that I will shoot the other knee if I’m not happy with your answers?”

“What you mean, ran?”

“If you tryin’ to wait until somebody comes to the door,” I said, “I will shoot you in the face and take my chances with the rest.”

“That was a long time ago,” he complained.

“I’m askin’ right now. I’m not gonna do it again.”

“I haven’t seen Tatty since she got busted years ago.”

“You were both arrested, but they let you off,” I said. “You had twenty pounds of cocaine in the trunk’a your car and they didn’t even book you.”

“Who are you?” Chester Murray asked.

“Who was the last cop you talked to after they arrested you?”

“That was over ten years ago, brother. How you expect me to remember the last cop or the first?”

I stood up, my lips twisting in the anticipation of pain.

I was way out of balance in that curtained room. I should have taken the fishmonger’s offer and spent another day watching Chester and his men. I should have planned out the interrogation, but I was playing it fast and loose because sooner or later, I knew, the men who had framed me would catch on to my ad hoc investigation.

Chester pulled his head back, sensing my desperation.

“Cortez,” he ejaculated. “Detective Cortez. I didn’t get no first name.”

“What he look like?”

“I don’t know, man. That was a long time past, and back then I was high day and night. I think he was Puerto Rican. Short, you know? I don’t know.”

Something in my eyes was scaring the gangster. It scared me too.

“What was the deal he gave you?” I asked slowly.

“He didn’t want — he didn’t want me to make any noise about Tatty. He said that she had information he needed and he didn’t want no lawyers or nuthin’ askin’ about her.

“Is she your woman? Because you know that cop didn’t give me no choice. If I’d’a gone up against him he would’a put me down. It was her or me and — and — and he said he just wanted information. I figured me bein’ quiet would help us both.”

I was silent for quite a while then. Chester and I were looking at each other, but I was sure that we were both seeing things outside that storefront.

“What’s in the boxes your men drove off with?”

“You don’t know?”

“Don’t make me ask again, fool.”

“G-g-guns. It’s guns.”

Walking the six blocks to the parking garage, and then driving back to my place on Montague, I was going over and over recent events. From the college girl to A Free Man. From the old man across the street to Chester.

I was standing right at the edge of a line that had to be crossed sooner or later.

So far Chester was still alive. I was too.

“Hi, Daddy,” A.D. said when I walked through the office door.

“Honey. How you doin’?”

“Fine. You like my dress?” she asked in a bratty tone.

Standing up, she did a half turn. The dress was a dull orange color and the hem was down to her calf. It complimented her figure without broadcasting it. I knew that it cost $87.99 off the rack.

“Your mother let you wear that?”

“You remember this?” Surprise took over the spoiled look on her face.

“I was with her when she bought it. I’m surprised she still has it.”

“Mama don’t throw out nuthin’. I took it outta her back row in the closet.”

In some ways I’d be married to Monica for the rest of my life. At least we did this one thing right.

“Any calls?”

“A man came and said that he would be waitin’ for you at the wine bar.”

“What man?”

“White guy with funny eyes,” Aja said. “He said his name was Mel.”

Before going down the street to Laniard’s Wine Bar I went into my office and put away three shots of whiskey. I wanted a cigarette and lamented giving the pack away.

Wearing a dark cranberry jacket and walnut-brown trousers, he was sitting at a high stool at the window, looking out onto Montague. When he saw me he waved and maybe gave a wisp of a smile; mirth on the face of a demon. I was glad I’d had the whiskey.

I passed the maître d’, a tall man in a black suit and tie. He gestured for me to wait, but I pointed at Melquarth, who, in turn, put up a welcoming hand.

I climbed up on the stool next to him.

“You look like you been workin’,” he said.

“Got paid sixty bucks.”

“Every penny counts.”

“Why are we meeting here, Mel?”

“I didn’t think you’d be too happy with me sitting in the office with your daughter.”

He was right about that.

“Can I get you something?” a young woman asked.

My nostrils flared when I saw the young Asian woman clad in a coral-colored minidress. For ten years I’d held down the passion in me. But that was over. The dog was out.

“No, thank you,” I said.

“I’ll have another Barolo,” Mel told her.

“Yes, sir.”

“So?” I asked when the waitress was gone.

“I’ll finish my drink and then we’ll take a ride down to the Verrazano Bridge. We’re going to Staten Island.”

He might as well have added, “Across the river Styx.”

Day turned to night in the time it took us to get Mel’s vintage Ford Galaxie 500 and drive to Pleasant Plains, Staten Island. We didn’t talk much; didn’t turn on the radio or play CDs. Wherever we were going it was serious business.

On the south side of the small town, there stood an abandoned church. I say abandoned, but what I mean is deconsecrated. It was surrounded by an eighteen-foot stone wall. The only entrée was through a remote-control iron gate. The rectangular brick structure loomed at a height of at least two and a half stories. Twelve slender stained-glass windows ran from the ground to the eaves of the steeply slanted, dark-green-tiled roof. On one end was a silo-like cylindrical steeple, also made of brick; it rose ten feet above the rest of the structure. There was a satellite dish at the very center of the extreme-angled lower roof.

Mel drove us to the middle of the circular driveway in front of the once holy refuge.

“This is where you live?” I asked as he unlocked the double-door entrance.

When we crossed the threshold, lights snapped on in quick succession. It wasn’t a huge building as far as churches go, but the high ceiling, empty space where there were once pews, and then the raised altar made me feel rather small.

“I stay here sometimes,” Mel said, answering the question that I had forgotten with the light.

“Where do you sleep?”

“In the station house.”

“The what?”

“This way.”

Behind the altar was a small door that led to a cramped spiral stairway going down.

As in the church, the moment we entered the stairs, a series of lights came on. Thirty-seven steps led to a door barely wider than a coffin’s lid. Through this door we entered a desolate room swathed in dim light abutted by a wall-size window behind which sat a bloodied man wearing only a T-shirt and boxers. His wrists were chained to a stone wall and his ankles to the floor.

The man was both pitiful and forlorn, but that’s not what caught my attention. I knew the guy. He was the one Mel called Porker. One of the men Stuart Braun sent to ambush me at the West Village coffee house.

“Can he see us?” I asked.

“No.”

“You been interrogating him?”

“Softened him a little bit. I was waiting for you to come up with better questions.”

Mel went into a small alcove next to the left side of the window-wall. From there he pulled out a pair of folding chairs. He set these up in front of the interrogation cell window as if it were a really big-screen plasma TV.

The room we were in was dark and dusty, but Porker’s room was all light stone and bright light.

“Yep,” Mel said as we looked at his private production. “This is a station house of the Underground Railroad.”

“Say what?”

“There were people on Staten Island who wanted to free as many slaves as they could. Over in Elliotville and under this building they did just that.”

For maybe ten seconds I was distracted from the prisoner.

“I bought this building for a refuge and maybe some other business,” Mel continued. “But then I discovered what had been going on back before the Civil War. I kinda like it. People should break the law if it doesn’t suit them.”

“Can he hear us?” I asked, motioning at Porker.

“Soundproof.”

“What’s his real name?”

“Simon Creighton. He was born in Jersey City. Breaks legs. Beats his girlfriends, but they love him anyway.”

“What have you gotten out of him?”

“I just been beatin’ him. You know... setting up the lexicon for when you got here.”

“You just beat him?” I said, looking at the leg breaker’s bruised, battered, and bloodied face through the slightly green-tinted glass wall.

“Anything one man does that another man understands can be defined as language,” Melquarth quoted. “I read that once in an article on philology. I was looking up poisons but found that instead.”

Mel went back to the little alcove from which he retrieved the chairs and came out with a very long black trench coat, a pair of thick black gloves, and a pure white mask that was reminiscent of Greek marble statuary of the gods. The white face was beautiful and manly, dispassionate and beyond pedestrian human expression.

“I put on this shit,” he told me, “and it scares poor Simon almost to death.”

“You got one for me?”

“Don’t need it.”

“Why?”

“There’s earphones in the mask and an omnidirectional mike too. You just listen to what Porker got to say and tell me if I should be asking something else.”

Mel first donned the trench coat, which came down over his shoes. After that he put on the mask and then the gloves. He turned that motionless and beautiful white face to me, nodded, and then went to a door on the right side of the window. That door led to another. Mel closed the first and then I saw him enter the white stone cage.

He stood motionless for at least three minutes staring at Simon Creighton.

At first the obese prisoner stared back. He was afraid, definitely, but also trying to put up a brave front. Thirty seconds into the stare down he began to tremble.

“What the fuck do you want, man?!”

Mel remained stock-still.

“Just tell me what you want... please.”

There came a snort in the room that didn’t seem to originate with either man.

“What the fuck do you need?” Simon pleaded. “Do I know you? Did I do somethin’ to you?”

Mel moved his head ever so slightly, and Simon tried his best to skitter away. His chains actually rattled.

I was getting scared myself.

Another minute went by. Then Mel took a step. When he moved you couldn’t see the foot motion, so in a way he seemed to be floating.

“Please don’t!” Creighton started screaming, and even though we were way under a stone building, and soundproofed to boot, I was half-certain that somebody would hear.

Mel descended on the chained man, punching, gouging, and kicking Simon with vitriol.

The beating went on for maybe ninety seconds before I said, “Mel.”

He continued and so I said, “Mel, stop it, man. I want him conscious and able to talk. I want him alive.”

Three more blows and Mel stood up from the bleeding, blubbering man. He turned to what must have been a mirrored interior, and I could see three spots of blood on the otherwise immaculate mask.

“Ask him why he was at the Liberté Café the other night.”

“What were you doing at the Liberté Café?” It was Mel’s voice but somewhat altered, and it didn’t come from him but rather speakers in the walls of both cell and anteroom.

Simon started shivering. “Me and Fido and Vince was there to catch a man with a red flower in his buttonhole, but he never came.”

“Who sent you?”

“A guy named Marmot, William James Marmot.”

“What were you going to do with the man when you got him?”

“I don’t know.”

Mel kicked Simon in his left cheekbone, slamming his head against the white stone wall behind. The impact left a pocked red imprint on the granite surface.

Simon actually shrieked.

“We was supposed to grab him and question him about who he was workin’ for,” he said. And because he didn’t want to get kicked again, he added, “Marmot’s a private security analyst who works with this guy named Antrobus, Augustine Antrobus. Marmot didn’t know, but Vince knew that him and Antrobus was a team.”

“What does this Antrobus do?”

“He has a security business too, but he’s a loner, like. He does work through private contractors. Just a couple’a women in his office. Vince once did a gig for him.”

“What were you supposed to do after you got your answers?” Mel asked.

“Do what?” Simon said with feigned innocence.

“Yeah,” Mel agreed. “Do what to the dude with the red flower in his buttonhole.”

Simon started crying, not so much like a man or a woman but more like a child bereft at both his misdemeanor and its punishment.

“That’s all I need, Mel,” I said. “Come on back out here.”

Simon Creighton sobbed while Mel and I sat in the folding chairs. He removed the mask and placed it on his lap. It sat there tilting back, looking up at me as if in judgment.

“You know the people he said?” Mel asked.

“No. But I should be able to find out easy enough.”

“I could just kill this one,” Mel remarked after a few beats of silence.

The madman created by Rikers was still there in my head. The greatest crime I’d committed so far was in the four seconds it took to consider Mel’s offer.

“Did he see you when you grabbed him?” I asked as a kind of charade.

“Nah. I put knockout gas in his car. When he opened the door it was released,” the watchmaker bragged. “He was out before he could get the key in the ignition.”

“Then he doesn’t know anything about us.”

“He knows what we asked him. He could tell somebody that.”

“Probably won’t,” I said with faux sagacity. “But even if he does, they don’t know who I am. Maybe if they know someone has identified them they’ll get rash and make some mistake.”

“Might be right,” Mel agreed. “You know, this is the second time I was primed to kill this motherfucker. I don’t like the tease.”

Taking a deep breath, he went to his all-purpose alcove and came out with a slender white leather briefcase. He got down on his knees, set the case on the chair, and opened it. He took out a hypodermic needle and syringe that had already been prepped.

Looking up at me with a smile he said, “Always be prepared.”

Again in his mask Mel approached Simon. The prisoner cried and begged, twisted and turned, kicked and even tried to bite Mel, in order to avoid that injection.

I drove one of Mel’s cars — a 1973 dark-brown GTO. He took the wheel of Simon’s car — a Cadillac from the nineties. Simon was unconscious in the back seat of the Brougham.

We crossed over into New Jersey.

I followed them across the Korean War Veterans Parkway, past New Brunswick, and down U.S. 1. Three miles toward Trenton there was a turnoff.

It was a rest stop designed for car problems and tired truckers. The rest stop was empty. By the time I got there Mel was standing next to the Caddy.

“He’ll wake up in the morning fucked outta his mind,” Mel assured me on the ride back to Brooklyn. “He’ll be thankful to be alive and wondering where the fuck he was. He’ll be so scared that it might even be worth it not killin’ him.”

“You’re crazy, aren’t you, Mel?”

“Yeah. I guess I am. I don’t wanna be. It’s not like I can get to it, you know what I mean? I love life. I’m good at shit. It’s just... I don’t know.”