As I retreated down the alleyway, I tried to put a name on what I had felt as I stared at the window. The sense of being watched was strong from the moment that we confronted G-Mack, but I was unable to detect any obvious signs of surveillance. We were surrounded by brownstones and warehouses, and any one of them could have concealed a watcher, maybe just a curious neighbor or even a whore and her john on their way to a slightly pricier assignation in a rundown apartment, pausing briefly to take in the men in the alleyway before proceeding on their way, conscious always that time was money and the demands of the flesh were pressing.
It was only when Angel and Louis began moving G-Mack, and I had a moment to scan the windows one last time, that the prickling began at the base of my neck. I was conscious of a disturbance in the night, as though a silent explosion had occurred somewhere in the distance and the shock waves were approaching the place in which I stood. A great force seemed to rush toward me, and I half expected to see a shimmering in the air as the circle widened, churning garbage and scattering discarded newspapers as it came. My attention focused on one particular window on the fourth floor of an old brownstone, a fire door close by leading to a rusted fire escape. The window was dark, but I thought for a moment that I saw a shifting against the glass, black momentarily giving way to gray at the center. Buried memories, both alien to me yet almost familiar, tried to emerge from my unconscious. I sensed them there, moving like worms beneath frozen earth or like parasites under the skin, desperately seeking to break through and expose themselves to the light. I heard a terrible howling, and it was as if voices were raised in rage and despair, descending from some great height, twisting and tumbling through the air, their cries distorting and fading as they fell. I was among them, jostled by the flailing of my brothers, hands striking me, nails tearing in a desperate attempt to arrest the descent. There was fear in me, and regret, but more than anything else I was filled with a dreadful sense of loss. Something indescribably precious had been taken from me, and I would never see it again.
And we were burning. We were all burning.
Then this half-remembered, half-created past, this phantasm from my mind, found itself bound up with real loss, for the pain brought back the deaths of my wife and my daughter and the emptiness that their passing had left inside. And yet the torment that I had endured on the night that they were taken from me, and the awful, debilitating pain that followed, seemed somehow less than what I now felt in the alleyway, the footsteps of my friends slowly growing distant, the protestations of the doomed man between them fading away. There was only the howling, and the emptiness, and the figure lost behind yellowed glass, reaching out to me. Something cold touched my cheek, like the unwanted caress of a lover once cherished and now rejected. I drew back from it, and thought that my response had somehow generated a reaction in the hidden figure at the window. I sensed its surprise at my presence mutate into manifest hostility, and I thought that I had never before been in proximity to such rage. Any impulse I had to ascend to the upper floor of the building immediately disappeared. I wanted to flee, to run and hide and reinvent myself somewhere far away, to cloak myself in a new identity and lie low in the hope that they would not track me down.
They.
He.
It.
And as I moved slowly away, following Angel and Louis to the busy streets beyond, a voice that was once like mine spoke words that I did not understand. It said:
You are discovered.
We have found you again.
∗ ∗ ∗
Louis was sitting in the driver’s seat of his Lexus when I reached them. Angel was in the back beside G-Mack, who sat sullen and hunched, sniffing gently through his ruined nose. Before I got in beside Louis, I took a pair of cuffs from my jacket pocket and told G-Mack to attach one cuff to his right wrist and the other to the armrest of the door. When he had done so, and his right arm was crossed awkwardly over his body, I got in the car and we drove toward Brooklyn. Louis stole a glance at me.
“Everything okay back there?”
I looked over my shoulder at G-Mack, but he appeared lost in his own misery and hurt.
“I felt like we were being watched,” I said quietly. “There was someone in one of the upper stories.”
“If that’s true, then there was someone on the ground as well. You think they were coming for this piece of shit in the back?”
“Maybe, but we got to him first.”
“They know about us now.”
“I think they knew about us already. Otherwise, why start tidying up the loose ends?”
Louis checked the rearview mirror, but the nature of the night traffic made it hard to tell if we were being followed. It didn’t matter. We would have to assume that we were and wait to see what developed.
“I think you have more to tell us,” I said to G-Mack.
“My man in blue came to me, paid me, then told me not to ask no questions. That’s all I know about him.”
“How were they going to get to her?”
“He said it wasn’t none of my business.”
“You use a bail bondsman named Eddie Tager for your girls?”
“Hell, no. Most of the time, they just get pink-slipped anyways. They get themselves in some serious shit, I’m gonna have me a talk with them, see if we can work something out. I ain’t no charity, givin it away to no bondsman.”
“I bet you’re real understanding about how they pay it back too.”
“This is a business. Nobody gets nothing for free.”
“So when Alice was arrested, what did you do?”
He didn’t reply. I slapped him once, hard, on his wounded face.
“Answer me.”
“I called the number they gave me.”
“Cell phone?”
“Yeah.”
“You still have the number?”
“I remember it, bitch.”
Blood had dripped onto his lips. He spit it onto the floor of the car, then recited the number by heart. I took out my cell and entered the number, then, just to be safe, wrote it in my notebook. I guessed that it wouldn’t lead to much. If they were smart, they’d have disposed of the phone as soon as they had the girl.
“Where did Alice keep her personal things?” I said.
“I let her leave some stuff at my place, makeup and shit, but she stayed with Sereta most of the time. Sereta had her a room up on Westchester. I wasn’t gonna have no junkie whore in my crib.” When he said the word “whore” he looked at Louis. We had learned all that we would from G-Mack. As for Louis, he did not respond to the pimp’s goads. Instead, he pulled over to drop me at my car, and I followed them to Brooklyn.
∗ ∗ ∗
Williamsburg, like the Point, was once home to some of the wealthiest men in the country. There were mansions here, and beer gardens, and private clubs. The Whitneys rubbed shoulders with the Vanderbilts, and lavish buildings were erected, all close enough to the sugar refineries and distilleries, the shipyards and the foundries, for the smell to reach the rich if the wind was blowing the right way.
Williamsburg’s status as the playground of the wealthy changed at the beginning of the last century, with the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge. European immigrants—Poles, Russians, Lithuanians, Italians—fled the crowded slums of the Lower East Side, taking up occupancy of the tenements and the brownstones. They were followed by the Jews, in the thirties and forties, who settled mainly in Southside, among them Satmar Hasidim from Hungary and Romania, who still congregated in the section northeast of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Northside was a little different. It was now trendy and bohemian, and the fact that Bedford Avenue was the first stop made by the L train from Manhattan meant that it was an easy commute, so property prices were going up. Nevertheless, the area had some way to go before it achieved true desirability for those with money in their pockets, and it was not about to abandon its old identity without a fight. The Northside Pharmacy on Bedford still took care to call itself additionally a farmacia and an apteka; Edwin’s Fruit and Veg store sold Zywiec beer from Poland, advertised with a small neon sign in the window; and the meat market remained the Polska-Masarna. There were delis and beauty salons, and Mike’s Northstar Hardware continued in business, but there was also a little coffee shop called Reads that sold used books and alternative magazines, and the lampposts were dotted with flyers hawking loft spaces for artists’ studios.
I hung a right on Tenth at Raymund’s Diner, with its wooden Bierkeller sign illustrated by a beer and a joint of meat. One block down, at Berry, stood a warehouse building that still bore the faint traces of its previous existence as a brewery, for this area was once the heart of New York’s brewing industry. The warehouse was five stories tall and badly scarred by graffiti. A fire escape ran down the center of its eastern façade, and a banner had been strung across the top floor. It read: IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW!” Someone had crossed out the word “Home” and spray painted the word “Polish” in its place. Underneath was a telephone number. No lights burned in any of the windows. I watched Louis drive around the block once, then park on Eleventh. I pulled up behind him and walked to his car. He was leaning back in his seat, talking to G-Mack.
“You sure this is the place?” Louis asked him.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“If you’re lying, I’ll hurt you again.”
G-Mack tried to hold Louis’s gaze, but failed.
“I know that.”
Louis turned his attention to Angel and me.
“Get out, keep an eye on the place. I’m gonna dump my boy here.”
There was nothing that I could say. G-Mack looked worried. He had every reason to.
“Hey, I done told you everythin I know,” he protested. His voice broke slightly.
Louis ignored him.
“I’m not gonna kill him,” he said to me.
I nodded.
Angel got out of the car, and we faded into the shadows as Louis drove G-Mack away.
∗ ∗ ∗
The present is very fragile, and the ground beneath our feet is thin and treacherous. Beneath it lies the maze of the past, a honeycomb network created by the strata of days and years where memories lie buried, waiting for the moment when the thin crust above cracks and what was and what is can become one again. There is life down there in the honeycomb world, and Brightwell was now alerting it to his discovery. Everything had changed for him, and new plans would have to be made. He called the most private of numbers, and saw, as the sleepy voice answered, that white mote flickering in the darkness.
“They were too quick for us,” he said. “They have him, and they’re moving. But something interesting has emerged. . . .”
∗ ∗ ∗
Louis parked the car in the delivery bay of a Chinese food store, close by the Woodhull Medical Center, on Broadway. He tossed G-Mack the key to the cuffs, watched silently as he freed his hand, then stood back to let him step from the car.
“Lie down on your belly.”
“Please, man—”
“Lie down.”
G-Mack sank to his knees, then stretched flat on the ground.
“Spread your arms and your legs.”
“I’m sorry,” said G-Mack. His face was contorted with fear. “You got to believe me.”
His head was turned to one side so that he could see Louis. He began to cry as the suppressor was mounted on the muzzle of the little .22 that Louis always carried as backup.
“I do believe you’re sorry now. I can hear it in your voice.”
“Please,” said G-Mack. Blood and snot mixed on his lips. “Please.”
“This is your last chance. Have you told us everything?”
“Yeah! I got nothing else. I swear to you, man.”
“You right-handed?”
“What?”
“I said, are you right-handed?”
“Yeah.”
“So I figure you hit the woman with that hand?”
“I don’t—”
Louis took one look around to make sure nobody was near, then fired a single shot into the back of G-Mack’s right hand. G-Mack screamed. Louis took two steps back and fired a second shot into the pimp’s right ankle.
G-Mack gritted his teeth and pressed his forehead against the ground, but the pain was too much. He raised his damaged right hand and used his left to push himself up and look at his wounded foot.
“Now you can’t go far if I need to find you again,” said Louis. He raised the gun and leveled it at G-Mack’s face. “You’re a lucky man. Don’t forget that. But you better pray that I find Alice alive.”
He lowered the gun and walked back to the car.
“Hospital’s across the street,” he said, then drove away.
Apart from the fire escape, there appeared to be only one way into or out of the building, and that was a single steel door on Berry. There were no bells or buzzers, and no names of residents.
“You think he was lying?” asked Angel.
Louis had rejoined us. I didn’t ask him about G-Mack.
“No,” said Louis. “He wasn’t lying. Open it.”
Louis and I took up positions at opposite corners of the building, watching the streets while Angel worked on the lock. It took him five minutes, which was a long time for him. “Old locks are good locks,” he said, by way of explanation.
We slipped inside and pulled the door closed behind us. The first floor was an entirely open space that had once been used to house the vats, with storage space for barrels and sliding doors to admit trucks. The doors were long gone, and the entrances bricked up. To the right, beside what had once been a small office, a flight of stairs led up to the next floor. There was no elevator. The next three floors were similar to the first: largely open-plan, with no signs of habitation.
The top story was different. Someone had commenced a halfhearted division of the space into apartments, although it looked like the work had been done sometime before, then abandoned. Walls had been erected, but most had no doors added, so that it was possible to see the empty areas within. There appeared to be five or six apartments planned in total, but only one seemed to be finished. The green entrance door was unmarked and closed. I took the left side, while Angel and Louis moved to the right. I knocked twice, then drew back quickly. There was no reply. I tried again, but with the same result. We now had a couple of options, neither of which appealed to me. Either we could try to break down the door, or Angel could pick the two locks and risk getting his head blown off if someone was inside and listening.
Angel made the choice. He got down on one knee, spread his little set of tools on the floor, then handed one to Louis. Simultaneously, they worked the locks, both of them trying to shield themselves as best they could by keeping as much of their bodies as possible against the wall. It seemed to take a long time, but was probably less than a minute. Eventually, both locks turned, and they pushed the door open.
To the left was a galley-style kitchen, with the remains of some fast food on the counter. There was cream in the refrigerator, with three days remaining before it expired, and a paper bag filled with pita bread, also apparently fresh. Apart from some cans of beans and franks and a couple of containers of macaroni and cheese, this was the sum total of food in the apartment. The entrance hall then led into a lounge area, consisting only of a couch, an easy chair, and a TV and VCR. Again to the left was the smaller of the apartment’s two bedrooms, the single bed casually made, and with a pair of boots and one or two items of clothing visible on a chair by the window. With Angel covering me, I checked the closet, but it contained only cheap trousers and shirts.
We heard a low whistle, and followed it to where Louis stood in the doorway of a second bedroom to the right, his body blocking our view. He stepped to one side, and we saw what lay within.
It was a shrine, and its inspiration lay in a place far distant from this one, and in a past far stranger than any we could imagine.