Greg had avoided his Mini Cooper, knowing full well where he’d end up if he slid behind the wheel. Instead, he’d trudged up the steep hill from his apartment and ended up on the East Liberty part of Liberty Avenue, a three- or four-block stretch of gently sloping, rapidly gentrifying asphalt, lined with pioneering Gen-Z bars, locavore restaurants, and ‘woke’ bookshops. Among the garish forest of signs and hoardings screaming for attention, it would be easy to miss the small shingle of the Muscular Arms.
The bar was old-school, a relic of the age of steel, of a time when the small row houses that clung to the hillsides had been occupied by factory workers, the air laden with belched soot and the orange glow of smelters. Its customers were older for the most part. Back in the day, they’d have spilled brawling into the street on a Saturday night just for the fun of it. Now, they sat sedately beneath shocks of white hair, chatting quietly at the counter while the hurly burly of the twenty-first century hurried by on the sidewalk.
The Muscular Arms was not a place for sinning. Not anymore. It lacked the energy. A banged-up, muted TV was tuned to the local news on Channel Seven. The president of the sanitation workers’ local was mouthing silently to camera, followed by a shot of the mayor. Strike news, no doubt. No one paid it the slightest attention.
Greg sat by himself in a dimly lit booth, nursing his third or fourth vodka, wanting desperately to be somewhere else. The vodka had done nothing to silence the Devil’s tormenting song. It simply drained him of the energy to do anything about it. Once his liver had done its work, the vodka would be gone, but the Devil would still be there.
If only …
If only … what? If only he hadn’t climbed those narrow, English stairs?
But he had. They’d creaked beneath his feet, single-malt scotch trailing expensive vapors across his nostrils. He’d entered the apartment of his own free will, allowed his eyes to travel over a wall of hardbound, educated books and old leather furniture.
The Devil had won. And losing to the Devil had eventually brought him here, to the vertiginous streets of the Steel City and the safe, predictable life of a foreign language teacher.
A burst of laughter from the sidewalk attracted his attention. There was a group of twenty-somethings on the other side of the bar’s plate glass window, bundled up against the weather and headed for a night out. They looked like they hadn’t a care in the world. Even if that was almost certainly untrue, Greg was willing to bet that those cares did not encompass a dead body at their place of work.
He allowed himself a wry smile. If he’d had even a modicum of self-discipline, he wouldn’t give a rat’s arse about Lindsay Delcade either. It wasn’t the Devil who had lured him down to the custodian’s room instead of going straight home; or who had persuaded him to crouch low over the woman’s stained aftermath; or who had encouraged him to subject Vernon Szymanski to an underhanded interrogation. He’d done that all on his own.
Because he was bored.
He slugged back the vodka.
If he was going to be honest with himself – and vodka was made for honesty of the worst sort – there was more to it than that. He liked Andrea. She was sailing an ocean he knew well, one where her name and the color of her skin dragged like a half-raised anchor. Even so, until Monday night, with her books and her hopes, she looked like she might be getting somewhere.
But now the storm was blowing. And this was an ocean without lifeboats, where no one would come to her aid.
He, at least, had had his mother. Clever, highly educated, ferocious in his defense. When the system had threatened to grind him into paste, she’d made sure he’d at least had a chance.
But when the police had come for Andrea Velasquez and she’d turned to the one person in the world who could help, he’d told her to fuck off.
There, but for the grace of God, go I.
The waitress delivered another drink without him even asking.
He didn’t give much for Andrea Velasquez’s chances. She’d been smoking dope in the custodian’s room. Lindsay Delcade, doubtless looking for someone to shout at, had, for whatever reason, found her way down there and caught her in the act. It was only too easy to imagine what happened next: So this is what I pay my tuition for, is it? To let doped-up Hispanics deal drugs to my kids in the school basement? Don’t lie to me! Personal use, my ass! You think I was born yesterday? You only work here so you can sell this shit to the students. Like shooting fish in a barrel to someone like you, isn’t it? I’m not having my daughter exposed to a drug-dealing illegal. Stay right where you are. I’m calling Principal Ellis and then I’m calling the police – and ICE. You are done. And I’ll see to it that you never work in this country again …
He stared into the clear liquid, admiring the way the world warped and blurred when you looked through it. The world, Greg knew, could be easier that way. It was sometimes better not to see things too clearly: to not see Andrea, for instance, terrified for her future, panicking and grabbing the first thing that came to hand; to not see Lindsay Delcade, suddenly fearful, raising futile hands against a plunging metal shaft; to not see a dead body lying on the floor in a spreading pool of red; to not see Andrea Velasquez, appalled at what she’d just done, stumbling into the winter’s cold of the loading bay, a trail of bloody footprints in her wake.
Footprints.
Greg Abimbola, struck by a sudden thought, downed his drink, settled up his tab, and departed.
He left a bigger than usual tip.