“Hey, this is my neighborhood.”
Lena recognizes her favorite Chinese takeout restaurant, Family Garden, on the corner before noticing they’ve turned onto Metropolitan Avenue.
Bronko grunts as some sort of basic acknowledgment that a fact has been stated in his presence.
“Good Ecuadorian joint around here, I recall,” he mutters a moment later.
He double-parks the catering van in the middle of a block only five up from Lena and Darren’s apartment building. Bronko hits the hazard lights, ignoring a horn blast from a dry-cleaning van careening past his window.
“This’ll be a quick one,” he assures her. “There’s a cooler behind your seat. Grab it and follow me.”
He reaches behind his seat and with a grunt of exertion, hefts a large open box up onto his lap. Lena glances inside as Bronko reaches for the door handle. The box is filled with various sundries and dry foods. Lena realizes it must be for a home filled with women. She spots tampons, sanitary napkins, “lady” shaving razors, and several other hygiene products made specifically for women.
Before she can question him, Bronko has left the pilot seat of the van. Lena opens her door and climbs down from the passenger seat. She needs both hands to pop the handle and pull apart the side cargo door, and it strains her considerable forearm muscles in the process. The cooler behind her seat is of the large Styrofoam gas-station variety, although knowing Bronko, it’s filled with dry ice and who knows what kinds of product.
Lena fills both arms with the cumbersome object and lifts it out of the van. “What’s in the cooler this time, Chef?”
“Vacuum-sealed entrees and sides, mostly. Ya got some of my vegetarian tequila and lime risotto balls. Got some nice Jack-and-cherry-glazed tri-tip I stayed up all night doin’ at home. And, o’ course, Mama Luck’s own bacon-and-turnip soup. All ready to be sous-vide and served.”
“Is this for some kind of tapas bar for the homeless or something?”
“Not hardly. Think of ’em as Chef Luck’s Extra-Fancy Teeee-Veeee Dinners.”
For the last sentence, he puts on his hammiest performance voice, as if he’s back on his old cable cooking show.
Lena can’t help laughing.
“C’mon,” he bids her.
They’re standing in front of a small art supply store, but rather than lead Lena inside, Bronko walks over to the lowered ladder of the building’s fire escape beside the storefront.
“Chef—”
“No talkin’,” he hisses at her. “Just do what I do and follow me back to our ride.”
Bronko, with surprising speed and grace for a man of his bulk and advancing years, trots up the rungs of the ladder, assisted only by one hand as his opposite arm is occupied with the box. Bronko stops short of ascending onto the first fire-escape balcony. Instead, he hoists the box through the opening in the black steel grate and slides it directly beneath a closed and gray-curtained window on the second story.
Descending halfway back down the ladder, he reaches out to Lena silently for the cooler. She offers it up, expression curious even as she remains quiet, and Bronko takes it from her easily. He’s up the ladder, depositing the cooler beside the box, and back down again in less than ten seconds. As soon as his booted feet hit the pavement, he pushes the ladder back up into its cradle above the sidewalk.
“It’s kind of a safe house,” Bronko informs her as they climb back inside the van.
“Like, for battered women?”
“Witches.”
Lena blinks.
“Excuse me?”
“Witches,” Bronko repeats, staring past her, through the passenger window at the fire escape where he left their special delivery. “Real ones, I mean. None of that Internet Wiccan crap. The Sceadu and Allensworth’s people regulate the hell out of ’em. You can only practice as part of a licensed coven. Witches without covens are called ‘solitaires.’ They’re illegal, leastwise in America. They’re hunted down. And worse.”
Lena, horrified, looks out her window and up at the fire escape. A moment later, the curtains part, the window there opens, and slender, tattooed arms extend to pull the box and the cooler inside. They quickly slam the window shut and draw the curtains.
Lena frowns. “If Allensworth hunts them, why does he let you do this?”
Bronko shrugs, starting up the van. “I assume he knows and lets it slide. What does he care? He’s a big-picture kinda guy, after all. If it keeps the wheels greased and the machine runnin’, he’ll let us feed a few solitaires holed up in Williamsburg.”
Before they pull away, Lena’s eyes are drawn to another window, this one on the third floor. The curtains part and Lena can just make out a very small, white face, wild tendrils of stark white hair framing it. She sees the dot of a fingertip touch the glass and begin to spell something out in the thin sheen of dust there.
Then it’s all gone, left behind as the van pulls forward and rejoins the metallic blood flow of the city’s veins.
“You’re a helluvan extra-worldly philanthropist, Chef,” Lena says a few blocks later.
“Oh, that back there?” he asks. “That’s not me. That’s Ritter. He asked me as a favor to front it. Covers it all outta his pocket; just doesn’t want ’em to ever see his face.”
Lena feels a lump swelling in her throat.
“Why is Ritter sponsoring a shelter for runaway witches? And why anonymously?”
Bronko shrugs. “You’d have to ask him that. Not my business.”
By the time they return to Sin du Jour, it’s the end of the day and Lena feels drunk.
“You do this every week?” she asks Bronko as they roll through the waning industrial blocks of Long Island City.
He grunts. “If I didn’t, wouldn’t nobody else do it.”
Lena settles back into her seat, staring out through the windshield. The city looks like a painting hung on a bent nail, somewhere very far away.
“Why did you bring me along this week, Chef?” she finally asks.
Bronko parks the van next to its twin on the curb in front of the red brick fortress that is their company headquarters. As he reaches for the key in the ignition to kill the engine, he pauses and looks over at her.
“Couple reasons, I suppose. I want you to see . . . to know . . . that there’s more to what we do than what you’ve seen so far. We dance with the devil, sure, but we don’t go home with Him. Now, from talkin’ to Consoné, we know there’s a shit storm a’brewing. We don’t know when or how it’ll affect us, but I need y’all to know that if there’s a fight comin’, it’s not . . . it can’t just be about survivin’. Y’understand? I need you to believe that this place and what we do are worth fighting for.”
Lena finds she’s nodding slowly and involuntarily as he speaks. She stops.
“What’s the other reason?” she asks after clearing her throat.
Bronko draws a deep breath and holds it in for a long time before exhaling to answer her.
“I ain’t always going to be around, Tarr. Today, we just ran a few errands, y’know? This was all just the tip of a big-ass iceberg. Who’s gonna take those reins when I’m gone? Dorsky don’t give a shit about anything outside his own kitchen. Nikki, she got the heart, and Lord knows that girl is hard as stale French bread when she needs to be, but she don’t wanna lead. Never has. But you . . . you’re more like me, if you won’t take unkindly to the comparison.”
On the contrary, few words spoken to Lena throughout her life to this point have meant as much as those four.
“I don’t know what to say to any of that, Chef,” she says, determined to be as honest as possible with him, even if all she can offer is confusion and uncertainty. “None of this is . . . easy. It’s not one thing, with one side.”
“And it ain’t never gonna be,” he assures her, firmly but gently. “All you can decide is whether or not it’s worth doin’. That’s all. That’s what I did.”
She nods, accepting that.
“Anyway. It’s Saturday night and you’re still young enough that means something. Thank you for puttin’ in the overtime and riding shotgun with an old man.”
Bronko climbs down from the van. Before he shuts the door, he leans back inside, looking at her.
“Hopefully, we have some time yet,” he says. “Hopefully, we’ll just get to cook a while and be like a regular ol’ line in a regular ol’ kitchen.”
Lena’s grin is as bitter as baker’s chocolate.
“That’ll be the day, Chef,” she says.