'First I stole the money, then I lost it.' She said laughingly, 'Where?'
'In the market.'
'But where?' she said. 'Where does it go when you lose it?'
She licked his face and shinnied up his body and he could not remember where the money went. She ran her tongue over his eye and brow He lifted her rhapsodically higher and mashed his face in her breasts. He felt them jump and hum.
'What do poets know about money? Love the world and trace it in a line of verse. Nothing but this,' she said. 'And this.'
Here she put a hand to his head and took him, seized him by the hair, a thrilling fistful, drawing his head back and bending to kiss him, so prolonged and abandoned a kiss, with such heat of being, that he thought he knew her finally, his Elise, sighing, tonguing, biting his mouth, breathing muggy words and dying murmurs, whisperkissing, babytalking, her body fused to his, legs girdling, buttocks hot in his hands.
The instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms. Then she wedged herself through the narrow opening in the boards and he watched her cross the street. Nothing moved out there. She was the lone stroke of motion, crew and extras gone, equipment gone, and she was cool and silvery slim and walking headhigh, with technical precision, toward the last trailer in the service station, where she would find her clothes, dress quickly and disappear.
He dressed in the dark. He felt the street grit, minutely coarse, studding his back and legs. He poked around for his socks but couldn't find them and went barefoot out to the street, carrying his shoes.
The last trailer was gone, intersection empty. He didn't sit with the driver this time. He wanted to be in the rear cabin of his cork-lined limousine, in bronzy light, alone in the flow of space, noting the lines and grains, the sweet transitions, this shape or texture modulated to that. The long interior had a thrust, a fluid motion rearward, and he smelled the leather around him and the red cedar paneling up front, used in the partition. He felt the marble underfoot, bone cold. He looked at the ceiling mural, a dark ink wash, semi-abstract, that showed the arrangement of the planets at the time of his birth, calculated to the hour, minute and second.
They crossed Eleventh Avenue into the car barrens. Old junked-up garages and ratty storefronts. Car repair, car wash, used cars. A sign reading Collision Inc. Stripped cars ranked on the sidewalk, tail ends to the street. It was the last block before the river, nonresidential, nonpedestrian, car lots fenced with razor wire, an area suited to his limo in its current condition. He put on his shoes. The car stopped near the entrance to an underground garage, where it would sit overnight and probably forever, or until it was evicted, scavenged and scrapped.
The wind came up. He stood in the street, near a derelict tenement, windows boarded, a padlocked iron door where the entrance used to be. He thought he'd like to get a can of gasoline and set fire to the car. Create a riverside pyre of wood, leather, rubber and electronic devices. It would be a great thing to do and see. This is Hell's Kitchen. Burn the car to a blackened scrap of dead metal, right here in the street. But he could not subject Ibrahim to such a spectacle.
The wind blew hard off the river. He and his driver met at the side of the car.
'Early morning you can see, right here, teams of men in white coveralls, they are washing the limousines. A marketplace of limos. Rags flying.'
The two men embraced. Then Ibrahim got in the car and eased it down the ramp and into the garage. The steel grille came down. He would drive his own car out the exit on the next street and head on home.
The moon was mostly shadow, a waning crescent twenty-two days into its orbit, he estimated.
He stood in the street. There was nothing to do. He hadn't realized this could happen to him. The moment was empty of urgency and purpose. He hadn't planned on this. Where was the life he'd always led? There was nowhere he wanted to go, nothing to think about, no one waiting. How could he take a step in any direction if all directions were the same?
Then there was a shot. The sound flew in the wind. It was something, yes, an occurrence, but also nearly negligible, a hollow popping noise come and gone in a breath and carrying only the faintest intimation of danger. He didn't want to blow it out of proportion. Then another shot followed by a man's voice howling his name in a series of trochaic beats and at a cracked pitch that was more chilling than gunfire.
ERIC MICHAEL PACKER
So it was personal then. He remembered the gun in his belt. He took it in hand and prepared to sprint toward a couple of small dumpsters on the sidewalk behind him. There was shelter there, a blind from which to return fire. Instead he stood where he was, in the middle of the street, facing the padlocked building. Another shot sounded, barely, nearly lost in the ripping wind. It seemed to come from the third floor.
He looked at his gun. It was a snub-nosed revolver, small and blunt, with a wide trigger. He checked the cylinder, which held only five rounds. But he knew he would not be counting rounds.
He prepared to fire, eyes closed, visualizing his finger on the trigger, in tight detail, and also seeing the man in the street, himself, long-lensed, facing the dead tenement.
But there was something moving toward him, off his left shoulder. He opened his eyes. It was a man on a bike, a bike messenger, bare-chested, and he went swarming past, arms spread wide, and made a sweeping turn onto the West Side Highway, heading north along the terminals and piers.
Eric watched for a moment, semi-marveling at the sight. Then he turned and fired. He fired at the building itself, as a building. This was the target. It made every sense to him. It solved so many problems of who or whom. The man fired back.
Why do people interpret gunshots as firecrackers going off or as cars backfiring? Because they aren't being hunted by a killer.
He approached the building. The padlocked door looked formidable, an iron-plated bulkhead. He thought of firing a shot into the lock for the sheer cinematic stupidity of the gesture. He knew there was another way in and out because the padlock could not be opened by someone inside the building. There was a gate to his left, some steps, an alley that was narrow and dog-shat, leading to a junked-up yard behind the building.
He pushed against an old misshapen door. His strength coach was a woman, Latvian. It gave way and he entered the building. The back hallway was swampish. A man lay dead or sleeping in the vestibule, if this is still a word, and he walked around the body and climbed two flights of stairs in the dim swinging light of a couple of strung bulbs.
The wind was blowing through the upper floors. There was fallen plaster on the landings and every sort of drift and silt and street debris. On the third floor he stepped over a number of unfinished meals in styrofoam trays, with neatly snuffed cigarettes worked to the nub. All the doors but one were gone and the wind came blowing through an unboarded window space. He liked that, the sound of wind knocking through the rooms and halls. He liked the two rats he saw moving toward the food nearby. The rats were good. The rats were fine and right, thematically sound.
He stood outside the one apartment that had a door. He stood with his back to the wall, shoulder nudging the jamb. He held the gun alongside his face, muzzle up, and looked straight ahead, into the windy hallway, not seeing things at maximum clarity but thinking into the moment.
Then he turned his head and looked at the gun, inches from his face.
He said, 'I had a weapon I could talk to. Czech. But I threw it away. Or I'd be standing here trying to mimic Torval's voice so I could get the mechanism to respond. I happen to know the code. I can see myself standing here whispering Nancy Babich Nancy Babich in Torval's voice. I can say his name because he's dead. It was a weapons system, not a gun. You're a gun. I've seen a hundred situations like this. A man and a gun and a locked door. My mother used to take me to the movies. After my father died my mother took me to the movies. This is what we did as a parent and a child. And I saw two hundred situations where a man stands outside a locked room with a gun in his hand. My mother could tell you the actor's name in every case. He stands the way I'm standing, back to the wall. He is ramrod straight and he holds the gun the way I'm holding the gun, pointed up. Then he turns and kicks open the door. The door is always locked and he always kicks it open. These were old movies and new movies. Didn't matter. There was the door, there was the kick. She could tell you the actor's middle name, his marital history, the name of the rest home where his abandoned mother dozes in a chair. Always a single kick suffices. The door flies open at once. I left my sunglasses in the car or at the barbershop. I can see myself standing here whispering in vain. Nancy Babich, you fucking cunt. But then again, what? Once he said her name, maybe the firing
