Down the River unto the Sea

27

As I was leaving the actors’ co-op, my head was as light as a helium balloon, and my feet felt as if they were forged from lead. There was an abscess of evil out in the world and for some reason that was my responsibility if not my fault. A Free Man was on death row. No cop, judge, or average Joe was going to put up their hand and say, “I have a doubt.”

Before that afternoon I had often wondered how men and women became traitors. How could they one day wake up and say, “Everything I believed was wrong and now they have to pay.”

I never even considered for one moment that Miranda Goya was lying; me, a man who didn’t even trust his own clients, a man who had experienced betrayal on almost every level.

I walked down to Port Authority and stood on the corner of Forty-Second and Eighth trying to feel my way back to Montague Street and its mild indictments of big business and human nature. I wanted the worst problem to be my daughter’s choice of dresses or some traumatized white man thinking that I was abusing A.D.

“You okay, sir?” someone asked. The words were friendly, but the tone was not.

It was a beat cop who patrolled the sidewalks surrounding the giant bus station. I didn’t recognize him. I did wonder how he picked me out of all the junkies, pickpockets, prostitutes, and runaways.

“Yes, I am, Officer,” I said. “It’s just that I had to stop a minute and put my head together.”

“Can you walk?” the shorter, white cop asked.

I smiled, nodded, and then moved away from the big building that made humanity seem like the last dying colony of prehistoric ants.

I could have taken the subway, but instead I walked up to Eighth and Seventy-Third. Down Seventy-Third, about half a block, stood a seven-story brownstone apartment building that was very old.

I climbed the stoop, pulled open the outer door, and then searched the list of names for Thurman Hodge. I pressed the button for twenty-seven, Thurman’s designation, and waited.

“Who is it?” a gravelly voice asked over a staticky intercom connection.

“Smith,” I replied.

The address and the names Thurman and Smith were all sent by text to me by Melquarth. The fact that I was there meant that I had abandoned and very possibly betrayed the world I’d known.

“Be right down,” the rough voice told me.

The vestibule smelled of mold. Some people might have been put off by the odor, but for me it was a pleasant reminder of the apartment building where I lived with my mother, brother, and sister after our father was sentenced and before I was old enough to run away.

“Yeah?” a man said from the other side of the apartment building’s windowed door.

He was five eight in shoes, with coarse salt-and-pepper hair that he brushed equally to either side. Wearing a paint-stained, once-white artist’s smock, he looked like some villain from Dick Tracy in the old newspaper comic strips: Flattop, or maybe, because of his scowl, Gruesome.

“I’m here for the bargain basement,” I told the beady-eyed comic strip villain.

He squinted a little harder and then opened the door.

“Follow me,” he said.

We walked down a slender corridor to a flight of three steps, out a door that led to an especially small courtyard, and across the yard to another door.

While Hodge, if that was his name, searched a large key chain, he said, “You can tell Moran that this is the last time I can rent the place. The owners want to put some kinda IT center down here and ain’t nuthin’ I can do about that.”

I had no idea who Moran was, but Mr. Hodge didn’t need to know that.

He found the key and worked it on the lichen-crusted white-enamel-painted door.

He gestured for me to walk in and turned on the light after I realized that there was a series of stairs leading down. I stumbled only slightly but was reminded of the day before, when, on a similar set of stairs, I shot a man in the head.

Fifteen steps down, I found myself in another cellar. This one had been transformed into a studio apartment designed for men and women on the run. This reminded me of Mel’s connection to the Underground Railroad; made me think that I was fighting a war beyond the laws that once claimed my allegiance.

“No TV or radio reception down here,” the man who might have been named Hodge said. “The hot plate works, but there’s no good ventilation so don’t cook anything you don’t want to smell for the next few days. The space heater works. And here’s the keys for the apartment and the front door. There’s a bell for the super up front, but don’t call her. It’s me you deal with.”

I nodded and handed Mr. Hodge one of the hundred-dollar bills that Antrobus’s purple-garbed goon had given me. Hodge took the tip with an expression of surprise.

“Anything you need,” he said. “Just ring.”

“Do you get cell phone reception down here?” I asked before he could depart.

“Not unless Jesus Christ gave you the phone.”

Two blocks away I found a coffee shop that served glazed meat loaf and sour mash. I got the taste for the whiskey at Miranda’s apartment and wanted to follow it down a ways.

“Hello?” Andre Tourneau said.

“Hey, brother.”

“Joe. How are you?”

“Feel like I went to sleep on the ground and woke up in a coffin.”

“I get that way every time I go home to Port-au-Prince. What can I do for you, my friend?”

“Call Henri and tell him to call this number from a pay phone.”

“You’re not gonna get my boy in trouble, now, are you, Joe?”

“I remember why you bought that pistol, Mr. Tourneau, don’t you worry about that.”

The meat loaf tasted better with every sip of whiskey. I was feeling almost jocular when the cell phone sounded.

“Hello?”

“Joe,” Henri Tourneau said. “You still hiding?”

“I called Natches.”

“And what did he have to say?”

I told him as much as was necessary and added, “I think he might be able to figure out our connection so I wanted to ask you if you had some friend who could look up a street name for me.”

“Anything, Uncle.”

The familial endearment touched me. I don’t think it was just the whiskey. The days I followed down my expulsion from the police and the Man conviction I was also learning that I had a multifaceted life with many planes of beauty to it.

An hour later I received a text that said a junkie called Burns was a regular at the Bread and Bees Homeless Shelter on Avenue C in the East Village.

When I got that message I was already on Seventh Avenue at Christopher in the West Village. There I was waiting outside a nameless fortune-telling parlor.

Through the glass wall facade was a shallow room done all in reds. There were various crystals and two plush chairs, a calico cat, and the framed photograph of a large-nosed man with a receding hairline.

I walked in and was assailed by a sweet brand of incense that I recognized but could not name. The electronic announcement of my entrance was the sound of a solitary lark calling out for an old friend or a new love.

Through red curtains came a plump woman with pale skin dressed in a green wraparound that was festooned with tiny round mirrors.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Lackey,” I said.

The woman’s face didn’t have far to go for the glower she gave me.

“Tell him it’s Seamus from the Southside.”

She sneered but went back through the curtains.

I waited there wondering what kind of prison time I could expect after I’d finished with my investigations.

The woman opened the curtains without entering the spiritual consultation room, saying, “Come.”

We passed through a short dark hall into a bright kitchen where two women and three children were either cooking or eating. One dirty-faced little girl looked up from the dining table, smiled, and stuck her finger in her nose.

The frowning woman took me through another door into what I could only call a sitting room.

There were two stuffed chairs therein. One was yellow with big dark blue polka dots. It was of normal dimensions and looked quite comfortable. The other chair was twice the size of its little sister and might have been black. I couldn’t make out the full design or color because they were obstructed by the impossibly fat man who sat there.

Kierin Klasky weighed well north of four hundred pounds. He could have willed his face to be sewn into a basketball after he died; it was that large and round. The features of his physiognomy were mostly just fat, as were his bloated hands and ham-round thighs.

Kierin was a white man in a blue suit wearing a red tie. There was a black Stetson on the table next to his sofa-size chair. I wondered if he ever donned the hat and stood up.

“Joe!” he bellowed.

“Kierin.”

“I heard you got fired.”

“That was eleven years ago.”

“I’m still here,” he said. “What do you need?”

Back before my dismissal from the force I saved Kierin from a bust that would have put him away for years. He had information I needed about the heroin connection at the Brooklyn docks and I got a friend in records to taint his most recent arrest report.

“Can I sit?” I asked the fat man.

“Please do,” he said and gestured. “Maria!”

A woman blundered gracelessly into the room. She was young and wearing a peasant dress that might be found anywhere in Eastern Europe a century ago. It was made from strips of differing fabrics dyed in bold colors.

Her face was both beautiful and haunted.

“Yes, Papa?” she said.

“Bring our guest grappa.”

“Yes, Papa,” she said and then lurched away.

“She’s a beautiful thing,” Kierin said. “But her mind is always somewhere else.”

“Looks like she doesn’t need to pay attention,” I said.

“Why are you here, Joe?”

He was older than I, but in our business age hardly mattered. I was his inside asset for three months when he really needed it.

“Do you know a junkie named Burns?”

Maria came back carrying a delicate water glass three-quarters filled with clear hundred-and-ten-proof liquor.

She waited for me to take a sip. When I didn’t gag she smiled and left.

“First or last name?” Kierin asked.

“Nickname. They call him that because he has burn scars on his face and left arm.”

“Oh, him. Yes. A very troubled young man. Do you need to find him?”

“I can do that on my own. I just wanted to know anything you could tell me.”

“He’s a good customer when he’s got money. Must have found a new connection, though. I haven’t seen him in months. Maybe he’s dead.”

“What’s his habit?”

“Used to get two hits at a time. For a while there I was seeing him three times a day.”

“Two at a time?”

He nodded.

“Then that’s what I need you to sell me.”

Bread and Bees Homeless Shelter got its name from the beehives Arnold Fray kept on top of the building. He used the honey to feed his homeless, wino, and addict population.

“Honey,” Arnold would say, “is the food of God.”

When Arnold died, his daughter, Hester, took over management of the retreat. She was big like her father and tough like him too. She maintained the apiary and baked the bread.

I strolled up to the desk of the men’s shelter and said, “Hi, my name is Joe Oliver.”

“The cop?” Hester asked, standing up from her walnut office chair.

“Last time I saw you, you couldn’t have been more than sixteen,” I said. “And I don’t look anything like I did.”

“I got a long memory,” she said. “You need it in this calling.”

She wore a long black dress that completely hid any figure she might have had.

“What else you remember ’bout me?”

“All I need to know is that you’re a cop.”

“Not anymore. I was fired more than a decade ago.”

Her smile was unbidden.

“I came to see if I could find a guy called Burns,” I said.

“And you expect me to help you?”

Her eyes were gray and, I knew, mine were brown. We studied each other, looking for a reason to trust, but there was nothing there.

“I’ll promise you that I have no evil designs on Theodore and on top of that I’ll donate a thousand dollars to the shelter, in cash, right now. I’ll agree to meet him under your supervision too.”