Downtown

13

The three of them sat in a booth.

Connie was irritated because Gregory had taken Michael to the Green Garter instead of the Green Garden, which was a health food place on Orchard Street, and a hell of a lot closer to Gouverneur Hospital than Greenwich Avenue was.

“It all gets down to a matter of precincts,” she said. “The Sixth Precinct is not the Seventh Precinct. If I’d wanted the Green Garter in the Sixth Precinct, I wouldn’t have picked the Green Garden in the Seventh Precinct.”

“I’m contrite,” Gregory said.

He wasn’t being sarcastic, he really did sound enormously sorry for his error. Moreover, as Michael now reminded Connie, he was the one who’d charged to the rescue when— “Well, not exactly charged,” Gregory said modestly.

“But Michael’s right,” Connie said. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

“It’s the stink of the morgue,” Gregory said.

“Have you ever been inside a morgue?” he asked Michael.

“Never.”

“About two years ago,” Gregory said, “a friend of mine OD’D on heroin, and I had to go to the morgue to identify him. It truly does stink in there. It can give you a headache in there. It can also make you very anxious. All those dead people stacked up on drawers that slide out.”

“Don’t remind me,” Connie said.

Michael was thinking that at times the stench in Vietnam had been unbearable. He could not imagine any morgue in the world stinking more than a jungle clearing littered with three-day-old bodies.

“He didn’t even look like Crandall,” Connie said.

“You saw him?” Michael asked.

“Yes. A tall, thin man. Pockmarked face. Tattoo on his arm.”

“White?”

“Yes. But that’s the only resemblance.”

“How old was he?”

“My friend at the morgue guessed maybe forty, forty-five.”

“What’s his name?”

“Max Feinstein. I know him from when he was driving an ambulance for …”

“No, I mean the corpse.”

“Oh. Julian Rainey. They finally identified him from his fingerprints. He has a record that goes back forever.”

“Yes, he’s a dealer,” Gregory said, nodding.

“Was a dealer,” Connie corrected. “You mean you know him?”

“Oh, yes, he works this entire downtown area.”

“Used to work,” Connie corrected.

A drug plot, Michael thought. I knew it.

“A red heart, am I right?” Gregory said.

“The tattoo?”

“Yes,” Connie said.

“On his left arm.”

“The left arm, yes.”

“And in the heart it says Ju Ju, am I right?”

“I don’t know what it said in the heart.”

“Ju Ju. That’s his nickname.”

“Was his nickname,” Connie corrected.

Michael was looking at both of them.

“I think we have to go back to that warehouse,” he said.

“Without me,” Gregory said.

It was close to midnight when they got there. Christmas was almost gone.

Not a light showed in the entire building.

“That’s because nobody lives here,” Connie explained. “This is a real warehouse, it’s not like the buildings they’re renting for lofts all over town. People actually store things here.”

“What do you suppose Ju Ju was storing here?” Michael asked.

“Take a wild guess,” Connie said.

Michael looked up at the front of the building. It was seven stories high, with five evenly spaced windows on each floor. From the fifth floor down, huge white letters below the windows announced the building’s original intent, stating its past like a huge poster that faced the East River:

WAREHOUSE

Wholesale-Retail

OFFICE FURNITURE

Broad Street Showrooms

NEW YORK—MIAMI—

LOS ANGELES

The entire area smelled of fish.

“We’re just a few blocks from the market,” Connie said.

The metal entrance door was locked.

“It was open earlier tonight,” she said. “It’s on the fifth floor. I watched the needle.”

They were both getting very good at using fire escapes. Michael figured that if ever they were trapped in a burning building together, they’d know how to get out of it in a minute. He supposed it was good to know such things. On the fifth floor, they found the window Gregory had earlier jimmied open. It was closed now. Michael guessed the three pizza-eaters had closed it after they’d come into the room and found only Ju Ju’s bed with no one in it. He hoped the pizza-eaters were not still here. He did not think they were; not a light was burning anywhere inside. But you never could tell; in Vietnam, Charlie could see in the dark.

He eased the window open.

Listened.

Not a sound.

He climbed in over the sill, and then helped Connie into the room.

They waited, eyes adjusting to the darkness, moonlight slowly giving shapes to objects …

First the bed with its white wrought-iron headboard and footboard …

Then the bundle of clothes in the corner …

And then the Indian sitting his spotted pony. Nothing else.

“I think somebody peed in this room,” Connie whispered.

It was not truly a room, Michael now realized, but merely a space defined by a partition. The door to the other side of the partition was slightly ajar. No light beyond it. He went to the door and listened. He heard nothing. He nodded to Connie and opened the door wider. Together they moved into the space beyond the partition. And waited again while their eyes adjusted to what seemed a deeper blackness but only because of its vastness. When Michael felt certain they were alone, he groped along the wall for a switch, found one, and turned on the lights.

If he’d expected a cocaine factory, he was disappointed.

From the evidence here on this side of the partition, you would never have guessed that Ju Ju Rainey was a drug dealer. For here was a department store of the first order, stocked with television sets and cameras, record players and home computers, typewriters and silverware, fur coats and jewelry, cellular telephones—

“A fence,” Connie said. “Lots of dealers accept goods in exchange for dope.”

A drug plot after all, Michael thought.

There were windows on the wall facing the street. Distant traffic lights below tinted the glass alternately red and green. It was still Christmas, but just barely. The wall opposite the windows was lined with clocks. They ticked in concert like a conglomerate time bomb about to explode. Grandfather clocks ticking and tocking and swinging their pendulums, smaller clocks on shelves whispering their ticks into the vast silent room.

On a table near the metal entrance door on the right-angled wall, there was a tomato-stained and empty pizza carton and three empty Coke bottles. A green metal file cabinet was on the wall near an open door that led to the toilet. On the other side of the door, there was a huge black safe with the word MOSLER stamped on its front.

Michael went to the file cabinet and pulled open the top drawer. A glance at one of the folders told him that this was where Ju Ju Rainey kept his inventory records. A methodical receiver of stolen goods. The bottom drawer was locked.

“Do you know how to do something like that?” Connie asked.

“Like what?”

“Like pick a lock?”

“No,” Michael said.

“Let’s see if anybody brought in a set of tools,” Connie said.

They began rummaging through the stolen goods as if they were at a tag sale. It was sort of nice.

Shopping this way, you could forget that dead bodies were involved. Like that day in the jungle. With the baby. Not a thought of danger, Charlie was miles and miles away. Just strolling in the jungle. Birds twittering in the treetops. Andrew smoking a cigarette, the baby suddenly— He turned off all thoughts of the baby.

Click.

Snapped them off.

Connie had stopped at a pipe rack from which hung at least a hundred fur coats.

The baby crying.

Click.

“This is gorgeous,” Connie said.

She was looking at a long red fox coat.

Michael moved away from her, deeper into what looked like a smaller version of the Citizen Kane storehouse. There was a makeshift counter —sawhorses and planks—covered entirely with Walkman radios. There had to be at least a thousand Walkman radios on that counter. All sizes and all colors. Michael wondered if all those radios had come from a single industrious thief. Or had a thousand less ambitious thieves each stolen one radio?

Another counter was covered entirely with books. It looked like a counter in a bookshop. Very big and important books like Warday and Women’s Work and Whirlwind were piled high on the counter. Michael could easily understand why someone would want to steal these precious books and why Ju Ju had been willing to take them in trade for dope. He’d probably planned to resell them later to a bookseller who had a blanket on the sidewalk outside Saks Fifth Avenue.

Connie was lingering at the fur-coat rack. In fact, she was now trying on one of the coats, which he hoped she didn’t plan to steal. The temptation to steal something from a thief was, in fact, overwhelming. The goods, after all, were not the thief’s. The thief, therefore, could not rightfully or even righteously claim that anything of his had been stolen, since the stolen goods had already been stolen from someone else. Moreover, the transaction by which the thief had come into possession of the property was in itself an illegal one, the barter of stolen goods for controlled substances, and the thief could expect no mercy on that count. Especially if he was dead, which Ju Ju Rainey happened to be. On the other hand, if it was okay to steal stolen goods from a dead thief, then maybe it was also okay to have caused that thief’s death, and to have put another man’s identification on his corpse, and to have laid the blame on a third person entirely, which third person happened to be Michael himself. It was all a matter of morality, he guessed.

The coat Connie was trying on happened to be a very dark and luxuriant ankle-length sable.

The coat was screaming, “Steal Me, Steal Me!”

He hoped she wouldn’t.

The baby screaming.

Click.

“I would love a coat like this,” Connie said.

Michael was at a counter covered with musical instruments now. There were violins and violas and cellos and bass fiddles and even lyres. There were piccolos and oboes and saxophones and clarinets and English horns and bassoons and flutes. There was an organ. There were acoustic guitars and electric guitars and banjos and mandolins and a pedal steel guitar and a synthesizer and a sitar and an Appalachian dulcimer. There was a set of drums. And three bagpipes. And fourteen harmonicas and a book called How to Play Jazz Harp, which had wandered over from the book display across the room. There were trumpets and Sousaphones and tubas and French horns and cornets and bugles and seventy-six trombones. Michael guessed it was profitable to steal musical instruments.

The next counter was covered with tools. More tools than he had ever seen in one place in his entire lifetime. He guessed it was profitable to steal tools, too. On the other hand, maybe it was profitable to steal anything. There were hammers and hatchets and mallets and mauls. There were pliers and wrenches and handsaws and drills. There were planes and rasps and chisels and files. There were circular saws and scroll saws and electric sanders and electric chain saws. Michael picked up one of the electric hand drills and a small plastic case with bits in it, and carried them to where Connie was now standing at a table covered with weapons.

“Look at all these guns,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

There were revolvers and automatic pistols of every size and caliber and make. Smith and Wesson, Colt, Browning, Walther, Ruger, Harrington and Richardson, Hi-Standard, Iver Johnson, you name it, you had it. There were rifles and shotguns, too—Remington, and Winchester, and Mossberg, and Marlin, and Savage, Stevens and Fox. And there were several military weapons as well, guns Michael recognized as AK-47 assault rifles and AR-15 semiautomatics. Rambo would have felt right at home at this counter. Rambo could have picked up an entire attack arsenal at this counter.

“I think we can drill out the lock with this,” Michael said.

“Is it a crime to steal stolen goods?” Connie asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Is what I thought,” she said.

He walked past her to where the filing cabinet stood against the wall. He opened the little plastic case, and was searching for a bit he hoped would tear through the metal lock on the cabinet, when Connie joined him, her hands in the pockets of the short black car coat. Michael chose his bit, fitted it into the chuck collar, tightened the collar with a chuck key, found a wall outlet near the cabinet, knelt to plug in the drill, tested it to see if he had power, and then went back to the cabinet. Connie was still standing there with her hands in her pockets. He studied the lock for a moment, and got to work.

The bit snarled into the metal.

There was a high whining sound.

Baby over there, Andrew was saying.

Where?

Over there. Crying.

Curls of metal spun out from behind the bit.

The lock disintegrated.

Michael yanked open the drawer.

They were looking in at an open shoe box containing two little plastic vials of crack.

“Must’ve used all his dope to pay for the merchandise in here,” Michael said.

“Either that, or there’s more dope someplace else.”

“Like where?”

“Like where would you keep a whole bunch of crack?”

Michael looked at the safe.

“Do you know how to do something like that?” Connie asked.

“No,” Michael said.

“I didn’t think so.”

“But I have a question.”

“Yes?”

“Would you lock a file drawer that had nothing but two vials of crack in it?”

Connie looked at him.

“Neither would I,” he said.

He knelt beside the file cabinet, lifted the shoe box, turned it upside down, and looked at it. Nothing. He ran his hands along the bottom and back of the drawer, and then moved them forward along each side of the drawer to the front of it, and then felt along the back of the front panel and—

“Here it is,” he said.

He bent over the drawer and looked into it. Scotch-taped to the back of the panel was a slip of paper. It was fastened upside down, so that the writing on it could be read easily from above.

It read:

4 L 28

3 R 73

2 L 35

Slow R Open

“You’re so smart,” Connie said. “Do you know it’s almost midnight?”

“Is it?”

“Only a minute left.”

He looked at his watch.

“Yes,” he said.

“And then Christmas will be gone. Forty seconds, actually.”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember what we did last night at this time?”

“I remember.”

“I think we should do it again, don’t you?” she said, and put her arms around his neck. “Make it a tradition.”

Their lips met.

And even as bells had sounded when they’d kissed last night in Crandall’s office, and even as bells had sounded when Michael left the Mazeltov All-Nite Deli, so did bells sound now. This time, however, the bells were not on a ringing telephone, and they weren’t attached to a trip mechanism on an emergency door, they were instead the bells and gongs and chimes on the multitude of stolen clocks that lined the wall opposite the windows. This was a symphony of bells. This was bells pealing out into the vastness of the warehouse, floating out over the rows and rows of stolen items, reverberating on the dust-laden air, enveloping Connie and Michael in layers and layers of shimmering sound where they stood in embrace alongside a stolen Apple II-E computer, their lips locked, bong bong went the bells, tinkle tinkle went the chimes, bing bang bong went every clock in the place, announcing the end of Christmas Day, heralding the twenty-sixth day of December, a bright new Thursday morning in a world of abundant riches, witness all the shiny new merchandise here in the late Ju Ju Rainey’s storeroom. And suddenly the bells stopped. Not all at once since the clocks weren’t in absolute synchronization, but trailing off instead, a bong clanking heavily, a chime chinging tinnily, a dissonant bing here, a reluctant tink there, and then stillness.

“It’s Boxing Day, you know,” she said.

“I didn’t know,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “The day after Christmas. It’s called Boxing Day.”

“I see.”

“I know because it’s celebrated in Hong Kong, which is still a British colony.”

“Why is it called Boxing Day?”

“Because they have prizefights on that day. Throughout the entire British Empire.”

“I see,” he said.

They were still standing very close to each other. He wondered if anyone had ever made love to Connie on a counter bearing stolen Cuisinarts.

“Listen,” she said.

He remembered that she had terrific ears.

“The elevator,” she said. “Someone’s using the elevator.”

He listened.

He could hear the elevator whining up the shaft.

The baby sitting just off the trail.

Crying.

The elevator stopped.

He heard its doors opening.

Footsteps in the corridor now.

Voices just outside the metal entrance door to Ju Ju’s bargain bazaar.

When you were outnumbered, you headed for the high ground. The highest ground here was the rack holding all those expensive fur coats. He took Connie’s hand, and led her silently and swiftly across the room, moving past a table bearing a sextant, an outboard engine, an anchor, a compass, and a paddle, and then past another table upon which there were …

A key turning in the door lock.

… seven baseball bats, three gloves, a catcher’s mitt and mask, a Lacrosse stick, and a pair of running shoes …

Tumblers falling with a small, oiled click.

… and reached the end of the rack where a seal coat with a raccoon collar was hanging.

The door opened.

“Who left these lights on?” a woman said.

Michael knew that voice.

He could not see her from where he was hunched over behind what looked like a lynx jacket, but this was Alice the Pizza Maven, who was also the lady who owned the Mannlicher-Schoenauer carbine with its Kahle scope, which she’d fired from the rooftop at them earlier today—or yesterday, as it now was officially—which gun was now snug in its case in Connie’s bedroom closet, which was where Michael now wished he was. Because the next voice he heard belonged to Silvio, who had earlier thought it would be hilarious to kill Michael and leave him either in Ju Ju’s piss-stinking bed or else in a garbage can behind McDonald’s. And the voice after that was Larry’s, both men now vigorously denying that either of them had left the lights on.

“In which case,” Alice wanted to know, “how come the lights are on?”

There was a dead silence.

Michael wondered if he and Connie should have gone to hide in the bathroom.

“Check out the toilet,” Alice said. He guessed it was good they hadn’t gone to hide in the bathroom.

Silence.

The sound of metal rings scraping along a shower rod as the curtain was thrown back.

More silence.

“So?” Alice asked.

“Nobody in there.”

“Check out the whole floor,” Alice said.

And suddenly there were more voices. A man said, “All this stuff has to go, huh?”

“All of it,” Alice said.

“The piano, too?” a second man said.

“‘Cause we ain’t piano movers, you know.”

“That’s good,” Silvio said, “‘cause it ain’t a piano.”

“Then what is it, it ain’t a piano?”

“It’s an organ.”

“Take this organ,” the man said.

“If you don’t mind,” Larry said, “there’s a lady present here.”

“So?”

“So stop grabbing your balls and telling us what’s an organ.”

“I’m telling you we ain’t piano movers.”

“And I’m telling you it’s an organ.”

“And I’m telling you take this organ.”

“Just shoot him in the balls,” Alice said calmly.

“Some lady,” the man said, but presumably he let go of his balls.

A third man said, “Okay, where’s all this stuff has to go?”

A fourth man said, “Look at this joint, willya? What’s this, a discount store?”

A fifth man said, “You want this stuff boxed?”

“What’s breakable,” Alice said. “And wrapped, too.”

“What’s that?” the third man asked. “A piano?”

“I already told them,” the second man said.

“‘Cause we don’t move pianos,” the third man said.

“It’s an organ,” Silvio said, “and don’t reach for your balls.”

“My father used to play drums,” the fifth man said.

The first man said, “Why don’t Mama move in the daytime, like a normal human being?”

Larry said, “Whyn’t you go take that up with Mama, okay?”

“No, thank you,” the man said.

“Then get to work,” Larry said.

“Where’s that combo?” Alice asked somebody.

“I got it,” Silvio said.

“If he was gonna give you the combo, anyway,” Larry said, “why you suppose he wet the bed?”

They all began laughing.

Even the moving men.

“‘Cause if you wet the bed,” Silvio said, laughing, “then a person won’t shoot you.”

“It’s a magic charm,” Alice said, laughing. “You wet the bed, the bad guys’ll go away.”

“First time I ever had a man wet the bed before I shot him,” Silvio said, still laughing.

“Give me the combo,” Alice said.

“I tell you,” one of the moving men said, “this wasn’t Mama, I wouldn’t go near that piano.”

“You could get a hernia from that piano,” another one of the men said.

“It’s an organ,” Silvio said, but his voice was muffled and Michael guessed he was standing at the safe with his back turned. From where Michael crouched behind the furs with Connie, he felt like Cary Grant in Gunga Din, the scene where the three of them are hiding in the temple and all the lunatics are yelling “Kali!”

“Read it to me,” Alice said.

“Four left to twenty-eight,” Silvio said.

“Look at this, willya?” one of the moving men said. “Roller skates, ice skates, dart boards, a pool table …”

“I ain’t lifting that pool table, I can tell you that.”

“That’s heavier than the piano.”

“It’s an organ,” Silvio said over his shoulder. “Three right to seventy-three.”

“What’s this thing?”

“A toboggan.”

“What do you do with it?”

“Two left to thirty-five,” Silvio said.

“I never seen so much stuff in my life.”

“And this is what’s left after Christmas, don’t forget.”

“Slowly to the right till it opens,” Silvio said.

Silence.

Then:

“Holy shit!”

This from Larry.

More silence.

“That’s got to be at least a million dollars’ worth of dope,” Alice said. Yep, Michael thought. A dope plot.

“I thought Mama said Ju Ju was only small-time,” Silvio said.

“Mama was wrong,” Larry said.

“Or lying,” Alice said, and there was another silence.

A longer one this time. A contemplative one.

A pregnant one. The silence of thieves considering whether another thief had screwed them. It was an interesting silence, laden with possibilities. Michael waited. Connie squeezed his hand. She had understood the silence, too.

“Maybe Mama didn’t know there’d be so much stuff in the box,” Larry said.

“Maybe,” Alice said.

She did not sound convinced.

Silence again.

All three of them were trying to figure it out.

“Listen, we ain’t touching that pool table,” one of the moving men said. “There’s slate in that table, it weighs a ton.”

“Fine,” Alice said.

“Damn straight,” the moving man said.

Silence except for the sound of newspapers being crumpled, cartons being snapped open, work shoes moving across the floor, men grunting as they lifted heavy objects.

“We got paid,” Larry said.

A shrug in his voice.

“But did we get paid enough?”

This from Alice.

“The deal was to deliver Ju Ju,” Larry said. “That’s what we done.”

Trying to make peace.

But he was standing with the rest of them at that safe, and he was looking in at what Alice had described as at least a million dollars’ worth of dope.

“That was the original deal,” Larry said.

“The deal changed yesterday,” Alice said.

“The deal changed to doing Barnes, too.”

“And cleaning out Ju Ju’s store.”

“Was what the deal changed to.”

“But did Mama know there’d be all this stuff in Ju Ju’s box?”

They were all silent again.

“The answer is no,” Alice said.

Silence.

“Because I’ll tell you why.”

Michael was extremely interested in hearing why.

“Because if you were Mama,” Alice said, “would you trust the three of us with a million dollars’ worth of dope?”

They all began laughing.

Michael nodded in agreement.

“Sure, laugh,” one of the moving men said. “It ain’t you three gonna get the hernia.”

“What I think,” Alice said, “I think the trucks can deliver all this fine merchandise to Mama …”

“As agreed,” Silvio said.

“But us three will take what’s in the box here, how does that sound to you?”

“It sounds only fair to me,” Silvio said.

“More than,” Larry said.

“But who left on the lights?” Alice asked.