Hell's Kitchen

EIGHT

From somewhere in his apartment building Pellam heard that song again, strident and loud. It must’ve been number one on the rap charts.

“… now don’t be blind… Open your eyes and whatta you find?”

A large stack of videocassettes sat at his feet, representing several months’ worth of taping. They weren’t edited yet or even organized beyond subject and date written in his sloppy handwriting on first-aid tape stuck to each cassette. He found one and slipped it into a cheap VCR that rested precariously on a cheaper TV.

Through the wall came the steady bass thud of the song.

“It’s a white man’s world. It’s a white man’s world.”

The screen of the cheap Motorola flickered reluctantly to life, showing this:

Ettie Wilkes Washington sat comfortably in front of the camera. She’d wanted to be filmed in her favorite rocker, an oak relic her husband Eddie Doyle had bought for her. But even the slight rocking motion had been a distraction and he’d moved her to a straight-backed chair. (As a young assistant Pellam had worked on Jaws and remembered Spielberg telling the director of photography to bolt the camera to the deck of Robert Shaw’s boat during the location shots. The seasoned DP wisely suggested that they better shoot handheld – or else risk sending sea-sick audiences racing for restrooms around the country.)

So Pellam had moved her to an overstuffed armchair. He’d wanted her in front of a window, with the construction work going on outside. You could also see, in the frame, another antique – an old rolltop desk, filled with papers and letters. On the wall behind it hung a dozen pictures of family.

“You asking ’bout Billy Doyle, my husband? I’ll tell you, he was a funny man. Nobody like him I ever met. I’ll tell you what he looked like first of all. He was handsome, yessir. Tall and, well, you know, very white. We’d walk down the street together. He always made me take his arm. Didn’t matter whether we were uptown near San Juan Hill, where the blacks were mostly, and they didn’t like mixed couples, or in Hell’s Kitchen, where it was white. The Irish and Italian boys there didn’t like mixed couples either. We got glares from everybody. But he always had me on his arm. Day or night.

“And he’d always go to clubs with me when I sang. He’d sit at a table with a whisky in front of him – the man loved his whisky – sit there, th’only white man in the whole place and he kept getting looks. But after a while nobody’d pay any attention to him. I’d look down from the stage and there he’d be, eating chitlins and talking with a couple, three men, smiling up at me, knocking them on the shoulders and saying I was his gal. Then I’d look down and see him arguing. I knew he was talking ’bout Billie Holliday and Bessie Smith.

“But the thing about him was he never found himself. And that was hard for a man. Hardest thing there is, a man who doesn’t come into his own. Sometimes he doesn’t really have to find it. Sometimes he just ends up someplace and digs his heels in and some years go by and that’s who he is and he’s all right with that. But Billy was always looking. What he wanted most was land. To own something. That’s the funny thing – it’s why we never really had a home, because he wasted all his time on these schemes to get a building, get some land. He wanted it bad and that was why he served that time in jail.”

Documentary filmmakers should never intrude. But off camera a surprised Pellam asked, “He did time?”

But just then Ettie shifted in her chair and looked up, turned her head. Pellam remembered that Florence Besserman, Ettie’s friend from the third floor, had come to the door unexpectedly. The tape went blank. She’d never finished the story about Billy Doyle’s criminal history and Pellam had agreed to come back – on the night of the fire, as it had turned out – to record the details. Pellam now rewound the tape to the beginning and found what he’d been looking for. Not Ettie but some footage of pretty, pudgy Anita Lopez, apartment 2A, who spoke in her machine-gun voice, her fireengine-red nails flying everywhere, despite Pellam’s reminders to keep her hands still.

“… Sí, sí, we got gangs. Just like what you see in the movies. They got guns, they get into trouble, they drink, they got cars. Boom-boom, these big speakers. Ai! So loud. Used to be the Westies. They gone now. What we got is we got the Cubano Lords, they is the big gang now. They got a apartment and they don’t mind if everybody know where. I tell you. On Thirty-ninth, between Ninth and Tenth. Oh, they scare me. Don’t say nothing to nobody I told you. Please.”

Pellam shut the VCR off. He dropped to his knees and inventoried the canvas bag, which contained everything an astute documentarian ought to have: the Betacam, the Ampex deck, the Nicad battery pack, two extra cassettes, a cardioid mike with sponge wind guard, steno notebook, pens. And a Colt Peacemaker single-action pistol. Five of the six chambers loaded with.45-caliber shells. The rosewood grip was battered and sweat-stained.

He was thinking of what his mother had told him just before he’d left the placid town of Simmons, N.Y., en route to Manhattan last May. “That’s a crazy city down there, New York is. You keep an eye out, Johnny. You just never know.”

Pellam had lived long enough to understand that, no, you never did.

He walked west along the sweltering concrete of Thirty-ninth Street. On doorstep sat a heavy woman, holding a long, dark cigarette and rocking a dilapidated baby carriage. She read el diario.

“Buenos días,” Pellam said.

“Buenas tardes.” The woman’s eyes swept over Pellam, examining the jeans, the black jacket and white T-shirt.

“I wonder if you could help me.”

She looked up, exhaled as if she were smoking.

“I’m making a movie about Hell’s Kitchen.” He held up the camera bag. “About the gangs here.”

“No gangs aquí.”

“Well, some of the young people. Teenagers. I didn’t mean to say ‘gang.’ ”

“Faltan gangs. No gangs.”

“Somebody told me about the Cubano Lords.”

“Es un club.”

“Club. They have a clubhouse here, right? Un apartmento? I heard it was on this street.”

“Buenos muchachos. No shit happen ’round here. They make sure of that.”

“I’d like to talk to them.”

“Nobody come here, nobody bother us. They good hombres.”

“That’s why I want to talk to them.”

“And look at las calles.” She waved her hand up and down the street. “They clean, or what?”

“Could you give me the name of who’s in charge? Of the club?”

“I don’t know none of them. You no hot in that jacket?”

“Yeah, I am. I heard they hang out around here.”

She laughed and returned to the paper.

Pellam left her and crisscrossed the neighborhood – over to the river and back again, skirting the squat, black Javits Convention Center. He didn’t find what he was looking for (which is what? he wondered. A half-dozen young men standing around like George Chakiris and the Sharks in West Side Story?).

A young Latino family walked toward him – the couple in tank tops and shorts, a teen girl in a short tight dress. They lugged a cooler and blankets and toys and lawn chairs. Dad’s day off, they were headed for Central Park, Pellam guessed. He was watching the family vanish toward the subway when he saw the man on top of the building.

He was about Pellam’s age, a few years younger maybe. Latino. He wore close-fitting jeans and a T-shirt, brilliantly white. He stood on the roof of a tenement, looking down, with dark eyes that even from this distance seemed to beam displeasure.

The man leapt from one building to another and was directly above him. Pellam could see only a silhouette. He was making his way east, along the roofs of the tenements.

Pellam turned and headed in the same direction. He paused at the corner, lost sight of the young man. Then, a sudden flash of white disappeared into a crowd of workers along Tenth Avenue. Crossing the street fast, Pellam tried to follow but the man had vanished. How the hell had he done that? He asked the workers if they’d seen anyone but they claimed that hadn’t seen anybody and the alley they stood in front of – the only place the man could have escaped – was blind. Barred windows. No doors. No exit.

Pellam gave up and returned to Thirty-sixth Street, wandering toward the charred remains of Ettie’s building.

It wasn’t the noise that warned him but its absence; some raucous hammering from the construction site across the street suddenly dulled, the sound absorbed by the young man’s body and clothing. Without even looking sideways at the running footsteps Pellam set the bag down and reached inside. He hadn’t yet found the Colt when a piece of metal – a pistol barrel, he guessed – touched the back of his neck.

“The alley,” the voice said in a melodic, Spanish accent. “Lessgo.”