“This old lady is all. She live upstairs, on the top floor.”
“Anybody else?”
“I dunno. People hanging. I dunno.”
Pellam looked at what was left of the back door. It was metal and had two large locks on it. Would’ve been a tough job to break through. He leaned down and peered through the window. He’d wondered if the pyro could have thrown the bomb through the bars. But they were too close together for anything but a beer bottle; the wine jug never would have fit. Somebody would have to’ve let him in.
“The back door was locked, right?”
“Yeah, they try an’ keep it locked. But, shit, there a lotta traffic, you know what I’m saying? In that back place there, see it, Pellam? This fag doing business, you know? Givin’ head and all. He a cluckhead too.”
A male prostitute . . . “So people’d come through the back door? His customers?”
“Yeah, we’d sit outside, some of us, what it is, and these guys’d come out the back door and we’d say, ‘Fag, fag . . .’ And they’d run away. Shit, that was fun!”
“You seen that guy around lately?”
“Naw, cuz. He gone.”
Pellam picked up the building directory, lying where he’d let it fall after Ramirez had tossed it to him the other day. “You know this Ramirez?”
“Shit, Hector Ramirez? His crew be the
Cubano
Lords. They bad motherfuckers too but they don’t give this nigger no shit. Not like Corcoran. He’s sprung, cuz, Corcoran is. Man be a hatter. But Ramirez, see, he’d wax you but only if he
had
to.”
Even this ten-year-old was better patched in to the Word on the street than Pellam. He glanced at the name
E. Washington
on the directory and tossed it to the ground.
A police car cruised slowly past the building and paused. The officer in the driver’s seat was looking his way. He gestured Pellam out of the police tape.
“Ismail—”
The boy was gone.
“Ismail?”
The squad car drove on.
He searched for several minutes but Ismail had vanished. A brittle sound of falling brick and hollow metal filled the night. A soft grunt followed.
“Ismail?” Pellam stepped into the alley behind the building and saw a boy, about eighteen, blond, in faded blue jeans and a dirty white shirt. He crouched beside a pile of trash. He was digging something out, occasionally dislodging a small avalanche, leaping back like a spooked raccoon then digging again. He had fine, baby hair, self-cut, ear length. The obligatory Generation X goatee was anemic and untrimmed.
He glanced at Pellam, squinted then returned to his task.
“Gotta get some
stuff,
man. Some stuff.”
“You lived here?”
The boy said gravely, “In the back.” He nodded toward where the rear basement apartment had been. “Me and Ray, he was like my manager.”
Me and Ray, he was like his pimp.
This was the one Ismail was talking about. The male prostitute. He seemed so young for a life on the street. Pellam asked, “Where’s Ray now?”
“Dunno.”
“Can I ask you some questions about the fire?”
With a grunt of exertion he pulled what he’d been looking for from beneath the pile and wiped at the cover of the book.
Kurt Cobain—the Final Year.
He gazed at it lovingly for a moment then he looked up. “That’s what I was going to talk to
you
about, man. The fire. You Pellam, right?” He flipped through the book.
Pellam blinked in surprise.
“So, here’s the deal. I can tell you who started the fire and who hired them. If you’re, like, interested.”
“How’d you know about me?”
“Just did.” The boy caressed the glossy cover of the book with a filthy hand.
“How?” Pellam persisted, as curious as he was suspicious.
“You know. Like, you hear things.”
“Tell me what you know. I’m not a cop.”
His laugh said he already knew this about him.
The Word. On the street.
The boy’s attention returned to his book, like a child’s Golden Book, just a photo laminated on a cardboard cover. The type was large and the words sparse. The photos were terrible.
Pellam prompted, “So who set the fire? Who hired him?”
In a very young face, the very old eyes narrowed. Then the boy broke out into a laugh.
Gear-greasing is expensive work.
Pellam mentally totaled his two savings accounts and an anemic IRA, penalty for early withdrawal, and some remaining advance money from WGBH. The figure
eighty-five hundred floated into his mind. There was a little equity left in the house on Beverly Glen. The battered Winnebago had to be worth something. But that was it. Pellam’s lifestyle was often liquid but his resources largely were not.
The boy wiped his nose. “A hundred thousand.”
He thought a grunge-stud like this would have more modest aspirations. Pellam didn’t even bother to negotiate. He asked, “How’d you find out about the fire?”
“The guy who did it, I sorta know him. He’s a hatter. Crazy dude, you know. He gets off burning things.”
The pyro Bailey had told him about—the one A.D.A. Lois Koepel, whom Pellam already detested, was so eager to track down.
“He told you who hired him?”
“Like, not exactly but you can figure it out. From what he told me.”
“What’s your name?”
“You, like, don’t need to know it.”
You, like, know mine.
“I could give you one,” the boy continued. “But so what? It wouldn’t be real.”
“Well, I don’t have a hundred thousand bucks. Nowhere near.”
“Bullshit. You’re, like, this famous director or something. You’re from Hollywood. Of
course
you got money.”
In front of them the police cruiser eased down the street again. Pellam thought about tackling the skinny kid and calling the cops over.
But all it took was one look into Pellam’s eyes.
“Oh, nice
try,
you asshole,” the boy shouted. Clutching the precious book under his arm, he burst down the alley.
Pellam waved futilely at the police car. The two cops inside didn’t see him. Or they ignored the gestures. Then he was racing through the alley, boots pounding grittily on the cobblestones, after the kid. They streaked through two vacant lots behind Ettie’s building and emerged onto Ninth Avenue. Pellam saw the boy turn right, north, and keep sprinting.
When the kid got to Thirty-ninth Street Pellam lost him. He paused, hands on hips, gasping. He examined the parking lots, the approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel, the rococo tenements, bodegas and a sawdust-strewn butcher shop. Pellam tried a deli but no one in there had seen him. When he stepped out into the street Pellam noticed, a half block away, a door swinging open. The boy sprinted out, lugging a knapsack, and vanished in a mass of people. Pellam didn’t even bother to pursue. In the crowded streets the boy simply turned invisible.
The doorway the kid had come out of was a storefront, windows painted over, black. He remembered seeing it earlier. The Youth Outreach Center. Inside he saw a dingy fluorescent-lit room sparsely furnished with mismatched desks and chairs. Two women stood talking in the center of the room, arms crossed, somber.
Pellam entered just as the thinner of the two women lifted her arms helplessly and pushed through a doorway that led to the back of the facility.
The other woman’s pale, round face was glossy with faint makeup, barely hiding a spray of freckles. She wore her red hair shoulder-length. He guessed she was in her mid-thirties. She wore an old sweatshirt and a pair of old jeans, which didn’t disguise her voluptuous figure. The long-sleeved top, maroon, bore the Harvard crest.
Veritas.
Pellam had a fast memory of the
Cubano
Lord.
Verdad,
he recalled.
Primero con la verdad.
She glanced up at him with some curiosity as he stepped inside. She glanced at his camera bag. He introduced himself and the woman said, “I’m Carol Wyandotte. The director here. Can I help you?” She adjusted a pair of thick tortoiseshell glasses, a break in the frame fixed with white adhesive tape—shoving the loose glasses back up her nose. Pellam thought she was pretty the way a peasant or farm girl would be. Absurdly, she wore a choker of pearls.
“A kid left here a minute ago. Blond, grungy.”
“Alex? We were just talking about him. He ran inside, grabbed his backpack and left. We were wondering what was going on.”
“I was talking to him down the street. He just ran off.”
“
Talking
to him?”
Pellam didn’t want to say that the boy knew about the arson. For the youngster’s sake. The Word on the Street traveled far too fast. He remembered the gun in Ramirez’s hand and how the whole world seemed terrified of Jimmy Corcoran.
“You can,” Carol said dryly, “tell me the truth.” Shoved her glasses onto her nose.
Pellam cocked an eyebrow.
“Happens all the time. One of our kids cops a wallet or something. Then somebody comes in, blushing, and says, ‘I think one of your boys “found” my wallet.’”
Pellam decided she was a smart, rich girl turned social worker. Which was probably a very tough category of person to deal with.
“Well, he might be a great thief but he didn’t steal anything from me. I’m making a film and—”
“A reporter?” Carol’s face went ice cold—much angrier than if he’d accused Alex of “finding” his wallet. He thought: her eyes are remarkable. Pale, pale blue. Almost blending into the surrounding white.
“Not exactly.” He explained that
West of Eighth
was an oral history.
“I don’t like reporters.” A bit of brogue slipped into Carol’s voice and he had a clue to the feistiness inside her—a grit that the director of a place like this undoubtedly needed. A temper too. “All those damn stories on preteen addicts and gang rapes and child prostitutes. Makes it hard as hell to get money when the boards of foundations turn on
Live at Five
and see that the little girl you’re trying to rehabilitate is an illiterate hooker with HIV. But, of course, it’s exactly kids like that who’re the ones you
need
to rehabilitate.”
“Hey, ma’am,” Pellam held up his hand. “I’m just a lowly oral historian here.”
The hardness in Carol’s round face melted. “Sorry, sorry. My friends say I can’t pass a soapbox without climbing on top. You were saying, about Alex? You were interviewing him?”
“I’ve been talking to people in the building that burned down. He lived there.”
“Off and on,” Carol corrected. “With his chicken hawk.”
Me and Ray.
She continued, “You know Juan Torres?”
Pellam nodded. “He’s in critical condition.”
The son of the man who met Jose Canseco.
Carol shook her head. “It just kills me to see something like that happen to the good ones. It’s such a damn waste.”
“You don’t have any idea where Alex took off to?”
“Ran in, ran out. Don’t have a clue.”
“Where’s home?”
“He claimed he was from Wisconsin somewhere. Probably is. . . . I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Pellam.”
“First?”
“John Pellam. Go by the last usually.”
“You don’t like John?”
“Let’s say I don’t lead a very Biblical life. Any chance he’ll come back?”
“Impossible to say. The working boys—you know what I mean by ‘working’—only stay here when they’re sick or between hawks. If he’s scared about something he’ll go to ground and it could be six months before we see him again. If ever. You live in the city?”
“I’m from the Coast. I’m renting in the East Village.”
“The Village? Shit, Hell’s Kitchen sleaze beats
their
sleaze hands down. So, give me your number. And if our wandering waif comes home I’ll let you know.”
Pellam wished he hadn’t thought of her as a peasant. He couldn’t dislodge the thought. Peasants were earthy, peasants were lusty. Especially red-haired peasants with freckles. He found himself calculating that the last time he’d slept with a woman they’d wakened in the middle of the night to the sound of winds pelting the side of his Winnebago with wet snow. Today the temperature had reached 99.
He pushed those thoughts aside though they didn’t go as far away as he wanted them to.
There was a dense pause. Pellam asked impulsively, “Listen, you want to get some coffee?”
She reached for her nose, to adjust the glasses, then
changed her mind and took them off. She gave an embarrassed laugh and readjusted the glasses again. Then she gave a tug at the hem of her sweatshirt. Pellam had seen the gesture before and sensed that a handful of insecurities—probably about her weight and clothes—was flooding into her thoughts.
Something in him warned against saying, “You look fine,” and he chose something more innocuous. “Gotta warn you, though. I don’t do espresso.”
She brushed her hair into place with thick fingers. Laughed.
He continued, “None of that Starbucks, Yuppie, French-roast crap. It’s American or nothing.”
“Isn’t it Colombian?”
“Well,
Latin
American.”
Carol joked, “You probably like it in unrecyclable Styrofoam too.”
“I’d spray it out of an aerosol can if they made it that way.”
“There’s a place up the street,” she said. “A little deli I go to.”
“Let’s do it.”
Carol called, “Be back in fifteen.”
A response in Spanish, which Pellam couldn’t make out, came from the back room.
He opened the door for her. She brushed against him on the way out. Had she done so on purpose?
Eight months, Pellam found himself thinking. Then told himself to stop.
* * *
They sat on the curb near Ettie’s building. At their feet were two blue coffee cartons depicting dancing Greeks.
Carol wiped her forehead with the souvenir Cambridge cotton and asked, “Who’s he?” Pellam turned and looked where Carol was pointing.
Ismail and his tricolor windbreaker had mysteriously returned. He now played in the cab of the bulldozer that had been leveling the lot beside Ettie’s building. “Yo, my man, careful up there,” Pellam called. He explained to Carol about Ismail, his mother and sister.