Hell's Kitchen

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Yo, look, man. Her, she the bitch work at that place fo’ kids.”

“Man, don’t be talking ’bout her that way. She okay. My brother, he all fucked up and he stay there a month. Was a cluckhead. Got hisself off rock, you know what I’m saying?”

“This nigger say she a bitch. All y’all think that be a okay place but all kinda shit go on there. Why you dissing me?”

“I ain’t dissing you. I just saying she ain’t no bitch. Got a minda her own. And look out for people is what I’m saying.”

Carol Wyandotte sat on the pungent creosote-soaked pilings overlooking the murky Hudson and listened to the young men lope past on their way south. Where were they headed? It was impossible to tell. To jobs as forklift operators? To direct an independent film like John Singleton or young Spike Lee. To pull on throwaways, take a box cutter and mug a tourist in Times Square.

When she heard the exchange she thought, as she’d said recently to John Pellam, Oh, he doesn’t mean “bitch” that way.

But apparently he did.

Anyway, who was she to say anything? Carol had been wrong before about the people whose lives she’d wedged her way into.

She sat on this pier under a torrid sun and looked at the ships cruising up and down the Hudson. Tugs, few pleasure boats, a yacht. A ubiquitous Circle Line cruise ship, painted in the colors of the Italian flag, moved slowly past. The tourists on board were still excited and eager for scenery; but then their voyage had just begun. How enthusiastic would they be, hot and hungry, in three hours?

One thing was different about Carol Wyandotte today. She had pulled up the sleeves of her sweatshirt, revealing rather pudgy arms. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d appeared bare-armed in public. Already a slight blush of sunburn covered her skin. She looked down and turned her right arm over, gazing at the terrible mass of scars. She rubbed her hand absently over this ruined part of her body then buried her eyes in the crook of her arm and let the tears soak the skin.

The car door slammed some distance away and by the time she counted, obsessively, to fifty she heard footsteps rustling through the grass. They hesitated then continued. When she reached seventy-eight in her count she heard the voice. It was, of course, John Pellam’s. “Mind if I join you?”

“The property was willed to a charity years ago,” Carol told him, hugging her knees to her chest.

“And then got transferred to the Outreach Center. I was working in the main office then and saw those three lots on the books of the charity – the ones at 454, 456 and 458 Thirty-sixth. Then I noticed McKennah’s surveying team working in the block where the Tower is now. I asked around and heard a rumor he was going to build. That neighborhood was a nightmare then. But I knew what was coming. I knew the value of those three lots’d skyrocket in a couple of years. Of course, none of the board of the charity would dare even set foot in the Kitchen; they had no clue what was going on. So I went to them and said we had to dump them fast because there’d been some reporters doing stories about teenage hookers and pushers and homeless squatting in the buildings.”

“And they believed you?”

“Oh, you bet. All I had to say was that if the media got hold of the fact that the YOC owned them, the publicity’d be devastating. They were horrified at the thought of bad press. They all are – rabbis, priests, philanthropists, CEOs, doesn’t matter. They’re all cowards. So the board dumped the lots at a sacrifice.” She laughed. “The broker called it a ‘fire sale’ price.”

“You bought them yourself?”

She nodded. “With drug money my ex and I’d stashed away. I set up the phoney St. Augustus Foundation. Learned how to do that when I was a legal secretary in Boston. I also knew I couldn’t tear down the building because it was landmarked. So I just held it. Then I met Sonny.”

“How?”

“He stayed at the YOC for a couple years after his time in Juvenile Detention for burning down his mother’s house and killing his mother’s boyfriend.”

“And,” Pellam continued, “you also knew Ettie.”

“Sure,” the woman confessed. “I was her landlord. I had copies of her rent checks and of her handwriting. I sent this black woman who looked sort of like her to get the insurance application. Paid her a few hundred dollars. I used my master key to get into Ettie’s apartment while she was out shopping. I found her passbook.”

Pellam looked over the flat, grassy land around them. “And you took the money out of her account?”

“The same woman who got the insurance application made the withdrawals. And the note they found on Sonny’s body? About Ettie? He was just supposed to plant it at one of the fires so the police would find it. I forged that too.”

“But why? You can’t take any money out of the foundation.”

She laughed. “Ah, Pellam. You’re so Hollywood. You think every crook has to steal ten million bucks worth of gold, or a hundred million in bonds. Like in a Bruce Willis movie. Life’s more modest than that. No, with the garage, the Foundation’d make a good profit and I’d hire myself as executive director. I could make seventy, eighty thousand a year without the Attorney General batting an eye. Add some petty cash, an expense account, and there’d still be enough money left to actually give some away to the poor folks in Hell’s Kitchen.”

She offered a grim smile. “Not contrite enough for you, m I?” The wolf eyes were like pale ice. “Pellam, you know the only times I’ve cried, I mean, really cried, in the past year? Five minutes ago, thinking about you. And the morning after we spent the night together. After I stole those tapes from your apartment I took the subway to work. I sat in the car and cried and cried. I was almost hysterical. I thought what kind of life I might’ve had with somebody like you. But it was too late then.”

A car drove past and they heard powerful bass beat from the radio’s speakers. That song again. It’s a white man’s world… Slowly the beat faded.

Pellam stared at the woman’s horribly scarred arms. He found himself saying, “But you didn’t cry for Ettie, did you?”

“Oh, that’s the point, Pellam,” Carol said bitterly. “Cry for Ettie Washington? All she could ever be is a victim. God gave her that role. Hell, half the people in this city are victims and the other half are perpetrators. That’s never going to change, Pellam. Never, never, never. Haven’t you caught on yet? It doesn’t matter what happens to Ettie. If she didn’t go to jail for this she’d go to jail for something else. Or she’d get evicted and move into the shelter. Or onto the street.”

She wiped her eyes. “That boy who’s following you around, Ismail? The one you think you can save? The one you think you have this connection with? The minute he realizes you’re no good to him alive, he’d knife you in the back, steal your wallet and have the money spent by the time you died… Oh, you look so placid, staring at the grass there. But you’re pretty horrified to hear me say things like that, aren’t you? Well, I’m not a monster. I’m realistic. I see what’s around me. Nothing’s going to change. I thought it might, once. But, no. The only answer’s to get out. Get as far away with money or with miles as you can.”

“The tapes you stole? Why’d you give them back to me?”

“I thought by confessing to the smaller crime you wouldn’t suspect me of the bigger one.” She moved her hand within a millimeter of Pellam’s. Didn’t touch him. “I didn’t want anybody to die. But it happened that way. It always happens that way, at least in places like Hell’s Kitchen it does. Can’t you just let it go?”

Pellam said nothing, moved his hand and touched the point of his Nokona, lifted off a dry, curled leaf.

“Please,” she said.

Pellam was silent.

She said, “I’ve never had a home. All I’ve had are the wrong men and the wrong women.” Her whisper was desperate. When she saw Pellam rise Carol too stood. “No, don’t go! Please!”

Then she glanced toward the highway, where the three police cars were parked. She smiled faintly, almost relieved, it seemed – as if she’d finally received bad news long anticipated.

“I had to,” Pellam said. He nodded at the cars.

Carol slowly turned back to him. “You know poetry? Yeats?”

“Some, I guess.”

“ ‘Easter 1916’?”

Pellam shook his head.

She said, “There’s a line in it. ‘Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.’ It’s my theme song.” Carol laughed hollowly.

The Circle-Line was long out of sight, hooking past Battery Park.

Carol suddenly tensed and swayed closer, as if about to embrace and kiss him.

For an instant compassion stirred in John Pellam and it occurred to him that perhaps the harms Carol had endured were just as deep and numerous as those she had inflicted. But then he saw Ettie Washington, betrayed by Billy Doyle, and by so many others just like Carol Wyandotte. He stepped coldly away.

A horn brayed over the water, resonating from the Moran tug that pushed a barge as long as a football field through the roiling current. Pellam glanced at the sunlight shattered on the waves. The horn blared again. The pilot was signaling to a fellow sailor steaming upriver.

Carol whispered something Pellam didn’t hear – a single word, it seemed – and her pale eyes turned to the skyline, remaining on this vista as she stepped backward so placidly that she tumbled into the gray-green water and was swept deep into the barge’s undertow before he could take a single step toward her.