Each of us lives two lives: our real life and our secret life.
In our real life, we are what we appear to be. We love our husbands or our wives. We care for our children. Each morning we pick up a bag or a briefcase and we do what we must to oil the wheels of our existence. We sell bonds, we clean hotel rooms, we serve beer to the kind of men with whom we would not share our air if we had a choice in the matter. We eat our lunch in a diner, or on a bench in a park where people walk their dogs and children play in the sunlight. We feel a sentimental urge to smile at the animals because of the joy they take in the simplicity of a stroll through green grass, or at the children paddling in pools and racing through sprinklers; but still we return to our desks or our mops or our bars feeling less happy than we formerly were, unable to shake off the creeping sense that we are missing something, that there is supposed to be more than this to our lives.
Our real life—anchored by those twin weights (and here they come again, our careworn friends) duty and responsibility, their edges considerately curved, the better to fit upon our shoulders—permits us our small pleasures, for which we are inordinately grateful. Come, take a walk in the countryside, the earth spongy and warm beneath your feet, but be aware always of the ticking clock, summoning you back to the cares of the city. Look, your husband has made dinner for you, lighting the candle that his mother gave you for a Christmas gift, the one that now makes the dining room smell of mull and spices although it is already mid-July. See, your wife has been reading Cosmo again, and in an effort to add a little spice to your waning sex life has for once gone farther than JCPenney for her lingerie, and has learned a new trick from the pages of her magazine. She had to read it twice just to understand some of the terminology, and had to rely on ancient memory to summon up a picture of the sad, semitumescent organ that she now proposes to service in this manner, so long has it been since any such matters passed between the two of you without the cover of blankets and smothered lights, the easier to fantasize about J. Lo or Brad, perhaps the girl who takes your order at the sandwich bar, or Liza’s kid from two doors down, the one who is just back from college and is now transformed from a geeky little kid with railroad braces into a veritable Adonis with white, even teeth and tanned, muscular legs.
And in the darkness, one upon the other, the real life blurs at its margins, and the secret life intrudes with a rush and a moan and the flicking tongue of desire.
For in our secret life, we are truly ourselves. We look at the pretty woman in marketing, the new arrival, the one with the dress that falls open when she crosses her legs, revealing a pristine expanse of pale thigh, and in our secret life we do not see the veins about to break beneath her skin, or the birthmark shaped like an old bruise that muddies the beauty of her whiteness. She is flawless, unlike the one we have left behind that morning, thoughts of her new bedroom trick already forgotten for it will be put away as surely as will be the Christmas candle, and neither trick nor light will see use for many months to come. And so we take instead the hand of the new fantasy, unsullied by reality, and we lead her away, and she sees us as we truly are as she takes us inside her and, for an instant, we live and die within her, for she needs no magazine to teach her arcane things.
In our secret life, we are brave and strong, and know no loneliness, for others take the place of once-loved (and once-desired) partners. In our secret life, we take the other path, the one that was offered to us once but from which we shied away. We live the existence we were meant to lead, the one denied us by husbands and wives, by the demands of children, by the requirements of petty office tyrants. We become all that we were meant to be.
In our secret life, we dream of striking back. We point a gun and we pull the trigger, and it costs us nothing. There is no regret at the wound inflicted, the body slumping backward, already crumpling as the spirit leaves it. (And perhaps there is another waiting at that moment, the one who tempted us, the one who promised us that this is as it was meant to be, that this is our destiny, and he asks only this one small indulgence: that he may place his lips against those of the dying man, the fading woman, and taste the sweetness of what passes from them so that it flutters briefly like a butterfly in his mouth before he swallows, trapping it deep inside him. This is all that he asks, and who are we to deny him?)
In our secret life our fists pummel, and the face that blurs with blood beneath them is the face of everyone who has ever crossed us, every individual who has prevented us from becoming all that we might have been. And he is beside us as we punish the flesh, his ugliness forgiven in return for the great gift that he has given us, the freedom that he has offered. He is so convincing, this blighted man with his distended neck, his great, sagging stomach, his too-short legs and his too-long arms, his delicate features almost lost in his pale, puckered skin, that to gaze on him from afar is like looking at a full, clear moon as a child and believing that one can almost see the face of the man who dwells within it.
He is Brightwell, and with sugared words he has fed us the story of our past, of how he has wandered for so long, searching for those who were lost. We did not believe him at first, but he has a way of convincing us, oh yes. Those words dissolve inside us, their essence coursing through our system, their constituent elements in turn becoming part of us. We begin to remember. We look deep into those green eyes, and the truth is at last revealed.
In our secret life, we once were angels. We adored, and we were adored. And when we fell, the last great punishment was to mark us forever with all that we had lost, and to torment us with the memory of all that once was ours. For we are not like the others. All has been revealed to us, and in that revelation lies freedom.
Now we live our secret life.
∗ ∗ ∗
I awoke to find myself alone in our bed. Sam’s cradle was empty and silent, and the mattress was cold to the touch, as though no child had ever been laid upon it. I walked to the door and heard noises coming from the kitchen below. I pulled on a pair of sweatpants and went downstairs.
There were shadows moving in the kitchen, visible through the half-ajar door, and I could hear closets being opened and closed. A woman’s voice spoke. Rachel, I thought: she has taken Sam downstairs to feed her, and she is talking to her as she always talks to her, sharing her thoughts and hopes with her as she does whatever she must do. I saw my hand stretch out and push the door, and the kitchen was revealed to me.
A little girl sat at the end of the kitchen table, her head slightly bowed and her long blond hair brushing the wood and the empty plate that sat before her, its blue pattern now slightly chipped. She was not moving. Something dripped from her face and fell to the plate, expanding redly upon it.
Who are you looking for?
The voice did not emerge from the girl. It seemed to be coming to me both from some distant, shadowy place and also from close by, whispering coldly in my ear.
They are back. I want them to go. I want them to let me be.
Answer me.
Not you. I loved you, and I will always love you, but you are gone.
No. We are here. Wherever you are, so will we be too.
Please, I need to put you to rest at last. Everything is coming to pieces. You are tearing me apart.
She will not stay. She will leave you.
I love her. I love her as I once loved you.
No! Don’t say that. Soon she will be gone, and when she leaves we will still be here. We will stay with you, and we will lie by you in the darkness.
A crack appeared in the wall to my right, and a fissure opened in the floor. The window shattered and fragments of glass exploded inward, each shard reflecting trees and stars and moonlight, as though the whole world were disintegrating around me.
I heard my daughter upstairs, and I ran, taking the stairs two at a time. I opened the bedroom door and Rachel was standing by the crib, Sam in her arms.
“Where were you?” I asked. “I woke up, and you weren’t there.”
She looked at me. She was tired, and there were stains on her nightshirt.
“I had to change her. I took her into the bathroom so she wouldn’t wake you.”
Rachel laid Sam in her cot. Once she was happy that our daughter was comfortable and settled, she prepared to return to bed. I stood over Sam, then leaned down and kissed her lightly on the forehead.
A small drop of blood fell upon her face. I dabbed it away with my thumb, then walked to the mirror in the corner. There was a small cut below my left eye. When I touched it, it stung me sharply. I stretched the abrasion with my fingers, and explored it until I had removed the tiny fragment of glass from within. A single tear of blood wept down my cheek.
“Are you okay?” asked Rachel.
“I cut myself.”
“Is it bad?”
I wiped my arm across my face, smearing the blood.
“No,” I lied. “No, it’s not bad at all.”
∗ ∗ ∗
I left for New York early the next morning. Rachel was sitting at the kitchen table, in the seat where the night before a young girl had sat, blood slowly pooling on the plate before her. Sam had been awake for two hours, and was now crying furiously. Usually, once she was awake and fed, she was content simply to watch the world go by. Walter was a source of particular fascination for her, his presence causing Sam’s face to light up whenever he appeared. In his turn, the dog always remained close to the child. I knew that dogs sometimes became disconcerted by the arrival of a new child in a house, confused by how this might affect the pecking order. Some became actively hostile as a result, but not Walter. Although he was a young dog, he seemed to recognize some duty of protection toward the little being that had entered his territory. Even the day before, during the fuss following the christening, it had taken him time to separate himself from Sam. It was only when he was assured of the presence of Rachel’s mother close by that he appeared to relax and attached himself instead to Angel and Louis.
Rachel’s mother was not yet awake. While Frank had returned to work that morning, managing to avoid me entirely before leaving, Joan had offered to stay with Rachel while I was gone. Rachel had accepted the offer without question, and I was grateful to her for that. The house was well protected: prompted by events in the recent past, we had installed a system of motion sensors that alerted us to the presence of anything larger than a fox on our property, and cameras kept vigil both on the main gate and the yard, and on the marshland behind, feeding images to twin monitors in my office. The investment was considerable, but it was worth it for peace of mind.
I kissed Rachel good-bye.
“It’s just for a couple of days,” I said.
“I know. I understand.”
“I’ll call you.”
“Okay.”
She was holding Sam against her shoulder, trying to comfort her, but she would not be comforted. I kissed Sam too, and I felt Rachel’s warmth, her breast pressed against my arm. I recalled that we had not made love since Sam was born, and the distance between us seemed even greater as a result.
Then I left them and drove away in silence.
∗ ∗ ∗
The pimp named G-Mack sat in the darkened apartment on Coney Island Avenue that he shared with some of his women. He had a place in the Bronx, closer to the Point, but he had been using it less and less frequently of late, ever since the men came looking for his two whores. The arrival of the old black woman had spooked him even more, and so he had retreated to his private crib, venturing out to the Point only at night and keeping a distance from the main streets whenever possible.
G-Mack wasn’t too sure about the wisdom of living on Coney Island Avenue. It was once a dangerous stretch of road, even back in the nineteenth century, when gang members preyed on the tourists returning from the beaches. In the 1980s, hookers and pushers colonized the area around Foster Avenue, their presence made clearer by the bright lights of the nearby gas station. Now there were still whores and dealers, but they were a little less obvious, and they fought for sidewalk space alongside Jews and Pakistanis and Russians and people from countries of which G-Mack had never even heard. The Pakistanis had been having a hard time of it in the aftermath of 9/11, and G-Mack had heard that a lot of them were arrested by the Feds, while others had left for Canada or gone back home entirely. Some of them had even changed their names, so it sometimes seemed like there had been a sudden influx of Pakistanis named Eddie and Steve into G-Mack’s world, like the plumber he’d been forced to call a week or two back after one of the bitches managed to clog up the bowl by flushing something down there about which G-Mack didn’t even want to know. The plumber used to be called Amir. That was what it said on his old card, the one G-Mack had pinned to the refrigerator door with a Sinbad magnet, but on his new card he was now Frank. Frank Shah, like that was going to fool anyone. Even the three numerals, the 786 that Amir once told him stood for “In the name of Allah,” were now gone from beside his address. G-Mack didn’t much care either way. Amir was a good plumber, as far as he could tell, and he wasn’t about to hold a grudge against a man who could do his job, especially since he might need his services again sometime. But G-Mack didn’t like the smell of the Pakistani stores, or the food that they sold in their restaurants, or the way that they dressed, either too neat or too casual. He distrusted their ambition, and their manic insistence that their kids better themselves. G-Mack suspected that good old Frank-Who-Was-Really-Amir bored the ass off his kids with his sermons on the American dream, maybe pointing to black people like G-Mack as a negative example, even if G-Mack was a better businessman than Amir would ever be and even if G-Mack’s people weren’t the ones who steered two jets into New York’s tallest buildings. G-Mack had no personal beef with the Pakistanis who lived around him, food and clothing aside, but shit like 9/11 was everybody’s business, and Frankie-Amir and his people needed to make it clear just whose side they were on.
G-Mack’s place was on the top floor of a three-story brownstone with brightly painted cornices, between Avenues R and S, close to the Thayba Islamic Center. The Thayba was separated from the Keshet Jewish day-care center by a kids’ play group, which some people might have called progress but which bothered the hell out of G-Mack, these two opposing sides being so close to each other, although maybe not as much as the fucking Hasidim farther down the avenue in their threadbare black coats, their kids all pale with their fag curls. It didn’t surprise G-Mack that they always hung around in groups, because there wasn’t one of them strange Jews could handle himself if it came to a fight.
He listened to two of his whores babbling in the bathroom. There were nine in his stable now, and three of them slept here in cots that he rented to them as part of their “arrangement.” A couple of the others still lived with their mommas, because they had children and needed someone to take care of the kids while they were on the streets, and he had rented floor space to the rest in the place over by the Point.
G-Mack rolled a joint and watched as the youngest of the three women, the little white bitch who called herself Ellen, strolled through the kitchen in her bare feet, eating toast with peanut butter smeared untidily across it. Said she was nineteen, but he didn’t believe that. Didn’t care none, either. There were a lot of men liked them younger, and she was taking top dollar on the streets. G-Mack had even considered setting her up somewhere private, maybe placing an ad in the Voice or the Press and charging four or five hundred an hour for her. He’d been about to do it, too, when all the shit had broken around him, and he’d been forced to watch his back. Still, he liked to take a little of her honey for himself sometimes, so it was good to have her near.
G-Mack was twenty-three, younger than most of his own women. He had started out selling weed to schoolkids, but he was ambitious and saw himself expanding his business to take in stockbrokers and lawyers and the hungry young white guys who frequented the bars and clubs on weekends, looking for something to give them a kick for the long nights to come. G-Mack saw himself in slick threads, driving a hooked-up car. For a long time he dreamed of owning a ’71 Cutlass Supreme, with cream leather interior and chrome spokes, although the Cutlass carried bullshit eighteen-inch wheels as standard and G-Mack knew that a ride was nothing unless it was sitting on twenty-twos at the least, Lexani alloys, maybe even Jordans if he wanted to rub the other brothers’ noses in it. But a man who was planning on driving a ’71 Cutlass Supreme with twenty-two-inch wheels was going to have to do more than push weed on pimple-faced fifteen-year-olds. So G-Mack invested in some E, along with a little coke, and slowly the dough started coming in swift and sweet.
The problem for G-Mack was that he didn’t have the backbone to enter the big time. G-Mack didn’t want to go back to jail. He had served six months in Otisville on an assault beef when he was barely nineteen, and he still woke up at night screaming at the memory. G-Mack was a good-looking young brother, and they’d had a time with him those first days until he tied himself up with the Nation of Islam, who had some big sonsofbitches on their side and who didn’t take kindly to those who would try to punk out one of their potential converts. G-Mack spent the rest of his six clinging to the Nation like it was driftwood after a shipwreck, but when he left he dropped that shit like it was damaged goods. They came looking for him, asking him questions and shit, but G-Mack was all done with them. Sure, there were threats, but G-Mack was braver on the outside, and eventually the Nation cut him loose as a bad deal. He still occasionally paid lip service to the Nation if the need arose, when he was around folks who didn’t know no better, but mostly he just liked the fact that Minister Farrakhan didn’t take shit from whites and that the presence of his followers in their sharp suits and shades scared the hell out of all those middle-class doughboys.
But if G-Mack was to raise the money to finance the lifestyle he wanted so badly, then it meant trying to score big, and he didn’t like the idea of holding that much supply. If he was caught in possession, he was looking at a class A felony, and that was fifteen to life right there. Even if he got lucky, and the prosecutor wasn’t having troubles at home or suffering from prostate problems, and allowed him to plead down to a class B, then G-Mack would spend the rest of his twenties behind bars, and fuck anyone who said that you were still a young man when you got out, because six months inside had aged G-Mack more than he liked to think about, and he didn’t believe that he could survive five to ten years inside, didn’t matter whether it was no class B, class C, or even class fucking Z.
What finally confirmed him in the belief that the pusher’s life was not for him was a raid on his crib by a couple of real bad-ass narcs. Seemed like they’d turned someone who was even more scared of prison than G-Mack, and G-Mack’s name had come up in the course of the conversation. The cops hadn’t found nothing, though. G-Mack always took the same shortcut onto the streets, slipping through the burned-out shell of another three-story behind his own that in turn backed onto a vacant lot. There was an old fireplace in there, and G-Mack hid his stash inside it, behind a loose brick. The cops took him in, even though they’d got fresh air in return for their warrant. G-Mack knew they didn’t have nothing on him, so he kept quiet and waited for them to let him walk. It took him three days to work up the courage to go back to his stash, and he off-loaded it five minutes later for half of what it was worth on the street. Since then, he’d kept his distance from drugs and instead found another potential source of income, because if G-Mack didn’t know shit about the drug trade, he did know about pussy. He’d had his share, and he’d never paid for it, at least not up front and in cash, but he knew there were men out there who would. Hell, he even knew a couple of bitches who were selling it already, but they didn’t have nobody to look out for them, and women like that were in a vulnerable position. They needed a man to take care of them, and it didn’t take long for G-Mack to convince them that he was just the man to do it. He only had to hit one every so often, and even then he didn’t have to hit her hard, and the others just fell in line behind her. Then that old pimp Free Billy had died, and some of his women had come G-Mack’s way, expanding his stable still further.
Looking back, he couldn’t remember why he’d taken on the junkie whore, Alice. Most of Free Billy’s other girls just used grass, maybe a little coke if a john offered it or they struck lucky and managed to hold something back from G-Mack, not that he didn’t search them regularly to keep that kind of theft to a minimum. Junkies were unpredictable, and just the look of them could put the johns off. But this one, she had something, ain’t nobody could deny that. She was just on the verge. The drugs had taken some of the fat off her, leaving her with a body that was just about perfect and a face that gave her the look of one of those Ethiopian bitches, the ones that the modeling agencies liked on account of their features didn’t look so Negro, what with their slim noses and their coffee complexions. Plus she was close to Sereta, the Mexican with the touch of black to her, and that was one fine-looking woman there. Sereta and Alice were Free Billy’s girls, and they made it clear to him that they came as a pair, so G-Mack had been content to live with the arrangement.
At least Alice, or LaShan as she called herself on the streets, was smart enough to realize that johns didn’t like track marks. She kept a stash of liquid vitamin E capsules among her possessions, and squeezed the contents onto her arm after she shot up to hide the evidence. He guessed she shot up in other parts of her body too, secret parts, but that was her business. All G-Mack cared about was that the marks didn’t show and that she kept herself together while she was hooking. That was one good thing about heroin users: they got the nod for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes once the drug kicked in, but thirty minutes later they were ready to go. They could almost pass for normal then, until the drug started wearing off, and they got sick again, all itchy and antsy. Mostly, Alice seemed to have her habit under that kind of control, but G-Mack still figured when he took her on that the junkie didn’t have more than a couple of months in her. He could see it in her eyes, the way the hunger was biting more deeply now, the way her hair was slowly turning white, but with her looks he could still get good money on her for a time.
And that was how it was, for a couple of weeks, but then she started holding back on him, and her looks began fading more rapidly than even he had expected as her addiction deepened. People sometimes forgot that the shit sold in New York was stronger than just about anywhere else: even heroin was about 10 percent pure, as against three to five in places like Chicago, and G-Mack had heard of at least one junkie who arrived in the city from the sticks, scored within an hour of getting there, and was dead of an OD one hour after that again. Alice still had that great bone structure, but it had become just a little too obvious without a decent cushion of flesh over it, and her skin was growing increasingly sallow in complexion as the junk took its toll. She was willing to do just about anything for her supply, so he sent her out with the worst kinds, and she went to them smiling, didn’t even ask most of them if they’d put a rubber on before she went down. She ran out of vitamin E, as it cost her money that she needed for junk, so she started injecting between her toes and fingers. Soon, G-Mack realized, he would have to cut her loose, and she’d end up living on the streets, toothless and killing herself for ten-dollar Baggies down by the Hunts Point market.
Then the old guy had come cruising in his car, his big-ass driver calling the women over as he slowed. He’d spotted Sereta, she’d offered him Alice as well, and the two whores had climbed in the back with the withered old freak and headed off, once G-Mack had taken note of his plate. Didn’t make no sense to be taking chances. He’d talked to the driver too, just so that they were all clear on how much this was going to cost, and so the whores couldn’t lie to him about the take. The driver brought them back three hours later, and G-Mack got his money. He searched the girls’ bags and found another hundred in each. He let them keep fifty of it, told them he’d look after the rest. Seemed like the old guy liked what they’d shown him, too, because he came back again a week later: same girls, same arrangement. Sereta and Alice enjoyed it because it got them off the streets and the old man treated them nice. He fed them booze and chocolates in his place in Queens, let them fool around in his big old tub, gave them a little extra (which G-Mack very occasionally let slide; after all, he wasn’t no monster . . . ).
It was all nice and easy, until the girls disappeared. They didn’t return from the old man’s like they were supposed to. G-Mack didn’t worry about them until he got back to his place, then an hour or two later he took a call from Sereta. She was crying, and he had trouble calming her down enough to understand what had happened, but gradually she managed to tell him that some men had come to the house and started arguing with the old guy. The girls were in the upstairs bathroom, fixing their hair and reapplying their makeup before heading back to the Point. The new arrivals started shouting, asking him about a silver box. They told him they weren’t leaving without it, then Luke, the old man’s driver, came in, and there was more shouting, followed by what sounded like a bag bursting, except Alice and Sereta had spent enough time on the streets to know a gunshot when they heard one.
After that, the men downstairs went to work on the old man, and in the course of their efforts he died. They started tearing the house apart, downstairs first. The women heard drawers being opened, pottery breaking, glass shattering. Soon they would make their way upstairs; and then there would be no hope, but suddenly they heard the sound of a car pulling up outside. Sereta risked a glance out of the window and saw lights flashing.
“Private security,” she whispered to Alice. “They must have set off an alarm somehow.”
It was one man, alone. He shined a flashlight on the front of the house, then tried the doorbell. He returned to his vehicle and spoke into the radio. Somewhere in the house, a telephone rang. It was the only sound in the house. The men downstairs were now silent. After a couple of seconds, Alice and Sereta heard the noise of the back door in the kitchen opening as the men left. When they were certain that all was okay, the women followed, but not before they had erased all traces of themselves from the upper rooms, wiping wood and faucets, even retrieving the rubbers and tissues from the trash. Alice ripped her stockings climbing a wall, and Sereta cut her side, but they got away.
Now they were scared, afraid that someone might come after them, but G-Mack told them to be cool. Neither of them had ever been printed by the cops, so even if any prints were found, there was no way to link them to anything unless they got into big trouble with the law. They just needed to stay calm. He told them to come back to him, but Sereta refused. G-Mack started shouting, and the bitch hung up on him. That was the last he heard of her, but he figured she’d head south, back to her own people, if she was scared. She was always threatening to do that anyhow, once she had enough money saved, even if G-Mack figured it was just the empty posturing and pipe-dreaming that most of these whores went in for at some time or another.
The death of the old man—his name was Winston—and his driver made the news, big-time. He wasn’t real wealthy, not like Trump or one of those guys, but he was a pretty well-known collector and dealer in antiques. The cops figured it for a robbery gone wrong until they found some cosmetics in the bathroom, left by the women in their panic to flee the house, and they announced that they were looking for one, maybe two women, to help them with their inquiries. The cops came trawling the Point, after it emerged that old man Winston liked to take a ride around its streets looking for women. They asked G-Mack what he knew, once they tracked him down, but G-Mack told them he knew nothing about it. When the cops said that someone had seen G-Mack talking to Winston’s driver, and maybe it was his women who were with him that night, G-Mack told them that he talked to a lot of people, and sometimes their drivers, but that didn’t mean he made no deals with them. He didn’t even bother denying that he was a playa. Better to give them a little truth to hide the taste of the lie. He had already warned the other whores to keep quiet about what they knew, and they did as they were told, both out of fear of him and out of concern for their friends, because G-Mack had made it clear to them that Alice and Sereta were safe only as long as the men who did the killings didn’t know a thing about them.
But this wasn’t any botched robbery, and the men involved tracked down G-Mack just as the police had done before them, except they weren’t about to be fooled by any show of innocence. G-Mack didn’t like to think about them, the fat man with the swollen neck and the smell of freshly turned earth from him, and his quiet, bored friend in blue. He didn’t like to remember how they had forced him against a wall, how the fat man had placed his fingers in G-Mack’s mouth, gripping his tongue when he uttered the first of the lies. G-Mack had almost puked then on the taste of him, but there was worse to come: the voices that G-Mack heard in his head, the nausea that came with them, the sense that the longer he allowed this man to touch him, the more corrupted and polluted he would become, until his insides began to rot from the contact. He admitted that they were his girls, but he hadn’t heard from them since that night. They were gone, he said, but they’d seen nothing. They had been upstairs the whole time. They didn’t know anything that could help the cops.
Then it had come out, and G-Mack cursed the moment he had agreed to take Sereta and her junkie bitch friend into his stable. The fat man told him that it wasn’t what they knew that concerned him.
It was what they had taken.
∗ ∗ ∗
Winston had shown Sereta the box on the second night, happy and sated from his hours of mild pleasure, while Alice was cleaning herself up. He liked displaying his collection to the lovely dark-haired girl, smarter and more alert than her friend as she was, explaining the origins of some of the objects and pointing out little details about them. Sereta guessed that apart from the sex, he just wanted someone to talk to. She didn’t mind. He was a nice old man, generous and harmless. Maybe it wasn’t very smart of him to be trusting a pair of women he barely knew with the secrets of his treasures, but Sereta at least could be relied upon, and she was careful to watch Alice just in case her friend might be tempted to take something in the hope of fencing it later.
The box he was holding was less interesting to her than some of the other items in his possession: the jewelry, the paintings, the tiny ivory statuettes. It was a dull silver, and very plain in appearance. Winston told her that it was very old, and very valuable to those who understood what it represented. He opened it carefully. Inside, she saw a folded piece of what looked like paper.
“Not paper,” Winston corrected. “Vellum.”
Taking a clean handkerchief, he removed it and unfolded it for her. She saw words, symbols, letters, the shapes of buildings, and right in the center, the edge of what looked like a wing.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s a map,” he said, “or part of one.”
“Where’s the rest of it?”
Winston shrugged. “Who knows? Lost, perhaps. This is one of a number of pieces. The rest have been scattered for a very long time. I once hoped that I might find them all, but now I doubt that I ever will. I have lately begun to consider selling it. I have already made some inquiries. We shall see. . . .”
He replaced the fragment, then closed the box and restored it to its place on a small shelf by his dressing table.
“Shouldn’t it be in a vault or something?” she asked.
“Why?” said Winston. “If you were a thief, would you steal it?”
Sereta looked at the shelf. The box was lost amid the curios and little ornaments that seemed to fill every corner of Winston’s house.
“I was a thief, I wouldn’t even be able to find it,” she said.
Winston nodded happily, then shrugged off his robe.
“Time for one more, I think,” he said.
Viagra, thought Sereta. Sometimes that damn blue pill was a curse.
∗ ∗ ∗
When the men offered him money for any information that might lead to the whereabouts of the whores, it didn’t take G-Mack more than a couple of moments to think about it and accept. He figured he didn’t have much choice, since the fat man had made it clear that if he tried to screw them over, he would suffer for it, and someone else would be running his whores as a result. He put out some feelers, but nobody had heard from either Sereta or Alice. Sereta was the smart one, he knew. If Alice stayed close by her and did as she was told, maybe cut down on her habit and tried to get straight, they might be able to stay hidden for a long time.
And then Alice had come back. She rang the doorbell on the Coney Island crib and asked to come up. It was late at night, and only Letitia was there, because she’d come down with some kind of puking bug. Letitia was Puerto Rican, and new, but she had been warned about what to do if either Sereta or Alice made an appearance. She allowed Alice to come up, told her to lie down on one of the cots, then called G-Mack on his cell. G-Mack told her to keep Alice there, not to let her go. But when Letitia went back to the bedroom, Alice was gone, and so was Letitia’s bag, with two hundred dollars in cash. When she ran down to the street, there was no sign of the thin black girl.
G-Mack went ape-shit when he got back. He hit Letitia, called her every damn name he could think of, then got in his car and trawled the streets of Brooklyn, hoping to catch sight of Alice. He guessed that she’d try to score using Letitia’s money, so he cruised the dealers, some of them known to him by name. He was almost at Kings Highway when at last he saw her. Her hands were cuffed, and she was being placed in the back of a cop car.
He followed the car to the precinct house. He could bail her out himself, but if anyone connected her to what had happened to Winston, then G-Mack would be in a world of trouble, and he didn’t want that. Instead, he called the number that the fat man had given him, and told the man who answered where Alice was. The man said they’d take care of it. A day later, Boy Blue came back and paid G-Mack some money: not as much as he’d been promised but, combined with the implicit threat of harm if he complained, enough to keep him from objecting and more than sufficient to make a considerable down payment on a ride. They told him to keep his mouth shut, and he did. He assured them that she had nobody, that no one would come asking after her. He said that he knew this for sure, swore upon it, told them he knew her from way back, that her momma was dead from the virus and her poppa was a hound who got himself killed in an argument over another woman a couple of years after his daughter was born, a daughter he’d never cared to see; one of many, if the truth be told. He’d made it all up—accidentally touching on the truth about her father along the way—but it didn’t matter. He put what they gave him for her toward the Cutlass Supreme, and it now sat on chrome Jordans, Number 23, in a secure garage. G-Mack was in the life now, and he had to look the part if he was going to build up his stable, although he had driven the Cutlass only on a handful of occasions, preferring to keep it carefully garaged and visiting it occasionally like he would a favorite woman. True, the cops might come asking about Alice again once they found out that she’d skipped bail, but then again they had other things to occupy them in this big, bad city without worrying about some junkie hooker who took a skip to get away from the life.
Then the black woman had come around asking questions, and G-Mack hadn’t liked the look on her face one little bit. He had grown up around women like that, and if you didn’t show them you meant business right from the start, then they’d be on you like dogs. So G-Mack had hit her, because that was how he always dealt with women who got out of line with him.
Maybe she’d go away, he thought. Maybe she’d just forget about it.
He hoped so, because if she started asking questions, and convinced some other people to ask questions too, then the men who paid him might hear about it, and G-Mack didn’t doubt for one minute that to safeguard themselves they would bind him, shoot him, and bury him in the trunk of his car, all twenty-three inches off the ground.
∗ ∗ ∗
It was a strange situation in which Louis and I found ourselves. I wasn’t working for him, but I was working with him. For once, I wasn’t the one calling the shots, and this time what was occurring was personal to him, not to me. To salve his conscience a little—assuming, as Angel remarked, that he had a conscience to begin with—Louis was picking up the tab for whatever expenses arose. He was putting me up in the Parker Meridien, which was a lot nicer than the places in which I usually stayed. The elevators played vintage cartoons on little screens, and the TV in my room was bigger than some New York hotel beds I’d known. The room was a little minimalist, but I didn’t mention that to Louis. I didn’t want to seem to be carping. The hotel had a great gym, and a good Thai restaurant a couple of doors up from it. There was also a rooftop pool, with a dizzying view over Central Park.
I met Walter Cole at a coffee shop down on Second Avenue. Police cadets passed back and forth by our window, hauling black knapsacks and looking more like soldiers than cops. I tried to remember when I was like them and found that I couldn’t. It was as though some parts of my past had been closed off to me while others continued to leach into the present, like toxic runoff poisoning what might once have been fertile soil. The city had changed so much since the attacks, and the cadets, with their military appearance, now seemed more suited to its streets than I did. New Yorkers had been reminded of their own mortality, their susceptibility to harm from outside agencies, with the consequence that they, and the streets that they loved, had been altered irrevocably. I was reminded of women I had seen in the course of my work, women whose husbands had lashed out at them once and would lash out at them again. They seemed always to be braced for another blow, even as they hoped that it would not come, that something might have altered in the demeanor of the one who had hurt them before.
My father once hit my mother. I was young, no more than seven or eight, and she had started a small fire in the kitchen while she was frying some pork chops for his dinner. There was a phone call for her, and she left the kitchen to take it. A friend’s son had won a scholarship to some big university, a particular cause for celebration as her husband had died suddenly some years before, and she had struggled to bring up their three children in the years that followed. My mother stayed on the phone just a little too long. The oil in the pan began to hiss and smoke, and the flames from the gas ring rose higher. A dish towel began to smolder, and suddenly there was smoke pouring from the kitchen. My father got there just in time to stop the curtains from igniting, and used a damp cloth to smother the oil in the pan, burning his hand slightly in the process. By that point my mother had abandoned her call, and I followed her into the kitchen, where my father was running cold water over his hand.
“Oh no,” she said. “I was just—”
And my father hit her. He was frightened and angry. He didn’t hit her hard. It was an open-handed slap, and he tried to pull the blow as he realized what he was doing, but it was too late. He struck her on the cheek, and she staggered slightly, then touched her hand gently to her skin, as though to confirm to herself that she had been hit. I looked at my father, and the blood was already leaving his face. I thought he was about to fall over, for he seemed to teeter on his feet.
“Lord, I’m sorry,” he said.
He tried to go to her, but she pushed him away. She couldn’t look at him. In all their years together, he had never once laid a hand upon her in anger. He rarely even raised his voice to her. Now the man she knew as her husband was suddenly gone, and a stranger revealed in his place. At that moment, the world was no longer the place that she had once thought it to be. It was alien, and dangerous, and her vulnerability was exposed to her.
Looking back, I don’t know if she ever truly forgave him. I don’t believe that she did, for I don’t think that any woman can ever really forgive a man who raises his hand to her, especially not one whom she loves and trusts. The love suffers a little, but the trust suffers more, and somewhere, deep inside herself, she will always be wary of another strike. The next time, she tells herself, I will leave him. I will never let myself be hit again. Mostly, though, they stay. In my father’s case, there would never be a next time, but my mother was not to know that, and nothing he could ever do in the years that followed would ever convince her otherwise.
And as strangers passed by, dwarfed by the immensity of the buildings around them, I thought: What have they done to this city?
Walter tapped the tabletop with his finger.
“You still with us?” he asked.
“I was just reminiscing.”
“Only for our order. By the time it arrives, inflation will have kicked in.”
Somewhere in the distance I could see our waitress idly spinning a mint on the counter.
“We should have made her commit to a price before she left,” said Walter. “Heads up, they’re here.”
Two men weaved through the tables, making their way toward us. Both wore casual jackets, one with a tie, one without. The taller of the two men was probably nudging six-two, while the smaller was about my height. Short of having blue lights strapped to their heads and Crown Vic-shaped shoes, they couldn’t have screamed “Cops!” any louder. Not that it mattered in this place: a few years back, two guys fresh off the boat from Puerto Rico—literally, as they hadn’t been in the city more than a day or two—tried to take down the diner, home to cops since time immemorial, at around midnight, armed with a hammer and a carving knife. They got as far as “This is a—” before they were looking down the barrels of about thirty assorted weapons. A framed front page from the Post now hung on the wall behind the register. It showed a photograph of the two geniuses, below the block headline DUMB AND DUMBER.
Walter rose to shake hands with the two detectives, and I did the same as he introduced me. The tall one was named Mackey, the short one was Dunne. Anybody hoping to use them as proof that the Irish still dominated the NYPD was likely to be confused by the fact that Dunne was black and Mackey looked Asian, although they pretty much made the case that the Celts could charm the pants off just about any race.
“How you doin?” Dunne said to me as he sat down. I could see that he was sizing me up. I hadn’t met him before, but like most of his kind who had been around for longer than a few years he knew my history. He’d probably heard the stories as well. I didn’t care if he believed them or not, as long as it didn’t get in the way of what we were trying to do.
Mackey seemed more interested in the waitress than he was in me. I wished him luck. If she treated her suitors like she treated her customers, then Mackey would be a very old and very frustrated man by the time he got anywhere with this woman.
“Nice pins,” he said admiringly. “What’s she like from the front?”
“Can’t remember,” said Walter. “It’s been so long since we’ve seen her face.”
Mackey and Dunne were part of the NYPD’s Vice Division, and had been for the past five years. The city spent $23 million each year on prostitution control, but “control” was the operative term. Prostitution wasn’t going to disappear, no matter how much money the city threw at the problem, and so it was a matter of prioritizing. Mackey and Dunne worked with the Sexual Exploitation of Children Squad, which worked all five boroughs, tackling child porn, prostitution, and child sex rings. They had their work cut out: 325,000 children were subjected to sexual exploitation every year, of whom over half were runaways or kids who had been thrown out of their homes by their parents or guardians. New York acted like a magnet for them. There were over five thousand children working as prostitutes in the city at any time, and no shortage of men willing to pay for them. The squad used young-looking female cops, some, incredibly, capable of passing for thirteen or fourteen, to lure “chickenhawks,” as pedophile johns liked to term themselves. Most, if caught patronizing, would avoid jail time if they had no previous history, but at least they would be mandated to register as sex offenders and could then be monitored for the rest of their lives.
The pimps were harder to catch, and their methods were becoming more sophisticated. Some of the pimps had gang affiliations, which made them even more dangerous to both the girls and the cops. Then there were those who were actively engaged in trafficking young girls across state lines. In January 2000, a sixteen-year-old Vermont girl named Christal Jones was found smothered in an apartment on Zerega Avenue in Hunts Point, one of a number of Vermont girls lured to New York in an apparently well-organized Burlington-to-the-Bronx sex ring. With deaths like Christal’s, suddenly $23 million didn’t seem like nearly enough.
Mackey and Dunne were over on the East Side to talk to the cadets about their work, but it appeared to have done little for their confidence in the future of the force.
“All these kids want to do is catch terrorists,” said Dunne. “They had their way, this city would be bought and sold ten times over while they were interrogating Muslims about their diet.”
Our waitress returned from far-off places, bearing coffee and bagels.
“Sorry, boys,” she said. “I got distracted.”
Mackey saw an opening and rushed to take advantage of it.
“What happened, gorgeous, you catch sight of yourself in a mirror?”
The waitress, whose name was Mylene, whatever kind of name that was, favored him with the same look she might have given a mosquito that had the temerity to land on her during the height of the West Nile virus scare.
“Nope, caught sight of you and had to wait for my beating heart to be still,” she said. “Thought I was gonna die, you’re so good-looking. Menus are on the table. I’ll be back with coffee.”
“Don’t count on it,” said Walter, as she vanished.
“Think you got some sarcasm on you there,” Dunne remarked to his partner.
“Yeah, it burns. Still, that lady looks like a million dollars.”
Walter and I exchanged glances. If that waitress looked like a million dollars, then it was all in used bills.
The pleasantries over, Walter brought us down to business.
“You got anything for us?” he asked.
“G-Mack: real name Tyrone Baylee,” said Dunne. He pretty much expectorated the name. “This guy was made to be a pimp, you catch my drift.”
I knew what he meant. Men who pimp women tend to be smarter than the average criminal. Their social skills are relatively good, which enables them to handle the prostitutes in their charge. They try to shy away from extreme violence, although most consider it their duty and their right to keep their women in place with a well-placed slap when circumstances require it. In short, they’re cowards, but cowards gifted with a degree of cunning, a capacity for emotional and psychological manipulation, and sometimes a self-deluding belief that theirs is a victimless crime since they are merely providing a service to both the whores and the men who patronize them.
“He’s got a prior for assault. He only served six months, but he did them in Otisville, and it wasn’t a happy time for him. His name came up during a narcotics investigation a year or two back, but he was pretty low down on the food chain, and a search of his place turned up nothing. Seems that experience encouraged him to find an alternative outlet for his talents. He got himself a small stable of women, but he’s been trying to build it up over the last couple of months. A pimp called Free Billy died awhile back—they called him Free Billy on account of the fact that he claimed his rates were so low he was practically giving his whores away for nothing—and his girls were divided up by the rest of the sharks out on the Point. G-Mack had to wait his turn, and by all accounts there wasn’t much left for him once the others had taken their pick.”
“The girl you’re asking after—Alice Temple, street name LaShan—she was one of Free Billy’s,” said Mackey, taking up the baton. “According to the cops who work the Point she was a good-looking woman once, but she was using, and using hard. She didn’t look like she was going to last much longer, even on the Point. G-Mack’s been telling people that he let her go cause she wasn’t worth anything to him. Said nobody was going to pay good money for a woman looked like she might be dying of the virus. Seems she was friendly with a whore named Sereta. Black Mexican. They came as a twofer. Looks like she dropped off the map about the same time as your girl, but unlike her friend, she didn’t appear again.”
I leaned forward.
“What do you mean by that?”
“This Alice was picked up close by Kings Highway about a week or so ago. Possession of a controlled substance. Looked like she’d just come out to score. Beat cops found her with the needle in her arm. She didn’t even have time to inject.”
“She was arrested?”
“It was a quiet night, so her bail was set before the sun came up. She made it within the hour.”
“Bail bondsman named Eddie Tager. Her court date was set for the nineteenth, so she still has a couple of days left.”
“Is Eddie Tager G-Mack’s bondsman?”
Dunne shrugged. “He’s pretty low-end, so it’s possible, but most pimps tend to pay bail for their whores themselves. It’s mostly set low, and it allows them to get their hooks deeper into the girl. In Manhattan, first-timers usually just get compulsory health and safe-sex education, maybe community service if the judge is having a bad day, but the other boroughs don’t have court-based programs to meet the needs of prostitutes, so it goes harder on them over there. The cops who spoke to G-Mack say he denied just about everything except his birth.”
“Why were they talking to him?”
“He was questioned in connection with the murder of an antiques dealer named Winston Allen, along with most of the pimps over there. Allen had a taste for whores from the Point, and there was a rumor that maybe two of G-Mack’s girls might have been among them. G-Mack claimed that they had it all wrong, but the date would tie in with the disappearance of Alice and her friend from the streets. We didn’t know that when she was picked up, though, and her prints didn’t match the partials we got from Allen’s house when she was processed. Everything since has been a dead end.”
“Anyone talk with Tager?”
“He’s proving hard to find, and nobody has the time it takes to go looking under rocks for him. Let’s be straight here: if you and Walter hadn’t come along asking questions, Alice Temple would be struggling for attention, even with the death of Winston Allen. Women disappear from the Point. It happens.”
Something passed between Dunne and Mackey. Neither was about to put it into words, though, not without some pushing.
“Lately more than usual?” I asked.
It was a blind throw, but it hit home.
“Maybe. It’s just rumors, and talk from programs like GEMS and ECPAT, but there’s no pattern, which presents a problem, and the ones who are going missing are mostly homeless, or don’t have anyone to report them, and it’s not just women either. Basically, what we got is a spike in the Bronx figures over the past six months. It might be meaningless, or it might not, but unless we start turning up bodies, it’s going to stay a blip.”
It didn’t help us much, but it was good to know.
“So back to business,” said Mackey. “We figure that maybe if we feed you this information, you’ll help us by taking some of the pressure off and maybe find out something we can use on G-Mack along the way.”
“Such as?”
“He’s got a young girl working for him. He keeps her pretty close, but her name is Ellen. We’ve tried talking to her, but we’ve got nothing on her to justify pulling her in, and G-Mack has his women schooled halfway to Christmas on entrapment. Juvenile Crime hasn’t had any luck with her either. If you find out anything about her, maybe you’ll tell us.”
“We hear G-Mack called your girl a skank, a junkie skank,” said Mackey. “Thought you might like to know that, just in case you were planning on talking with him.”
“I’ll remember that,” I said. “What’s his territory?”
“His girls tend to work the lower end of Lafayette. He likes to keep an eye on them, so he usually parks on the street close by. I hear he’s driving a Cutlass Supreme on big-ass tires now, ’71, ’72, maybe, like he’s some kind of millionaire rapper.”
“How long has he been driving the Cutlass?”
“Not long.”
“Must be doing okay if he can afford a car like that.”
“I guess. We didn’t see no tax return, so I can’t say for sure, but he seems to have come into money recently.”
Mackey kept his eyes fixed on me as I spoke. I nodded once, letting him know that I understood what he was intimating: someone had paid him to keep quiet about the women.
“Does he have a place?”
“He lives over on Quimby. Couple of his women live with him. Seems he has a crib over in Brooklyn as well, down on Coney Island Avenue. He moves between them.”
“None of these guys are dumb enough to carry. The more established ones, they maybe keep one or two knuckle grazers that they can call on in case of trouble, but G-Mack ain’t in that league yet.”
The waitress returned. She looked a whole lot less happy to be coming back than she did when she came over the first time, and she hadn’t exactly been ecstatic then.
Dunne and Mackey ordered a tuna on rye and a turkey club. Dunne asked for a “side of sunshine” with his tuna. You had to admire his perseverance.
“Salad or fries,” said the waitress. “Sunshine is extra, and you’ll have to eat it outside.”
“How about fries and a smile?” said Dunne.
“How about you have an accident, then I’ll smile?”
She left. The world breathed easier.
“You got a death wish, man,” said Mackey.
“I could die in her arms,” said Dunne.
“You dying on your sorry ass right now, and you ain’t even near her arms.”
He sighed, and poured so much sugar into his coffee his spoon pretty much stood up straight in it.
“So, you think G-Mack knows where this woman is at?” asked Mackey.
I shrugged. “We’re going to ask him that.”
“You think he’s going to tell you?”
I thought of Louis, and what he would do to G-Mack for hitting Martha.