The Mole grunted something.
“I don’t know where it is now,” I told him. I looked at Max, and made the gesture for steering a car.
Max tapped the ground with his foot, then pointed down. So the Subaru was buried someplace safe. It had good paper on it, and it was registered to a fine set of bogus ID I’d been using on the other coast. I could sign it over in blank, give the paper to a driver, let him clout the car down in Florida, maybe. We couldn’t know if anyone was onto the ID, but if they were, the sale would place me a long way from home. And I could use the money.
“Which car did you take?” the Mole asked Terry.
“The Accord.”
“You want that one?” the Mole asked me. “In the City, nobody sees it.”
“Sure...” I told him. “That’d be great.”
The Mole gave me a look, but he didn’t say anything.
We walked back to where the Honda was hiding. Without the Jeep, it took maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. Terry never stopped talking. The Mole said about as much as Max did.
But before we took off, he leaned down to where I had the window open. “Nothing is different,” he said again. Like he wanted to make sure I got the message.
We took the back way home, over the Willis Avenue Bridge. It was late afternoon, the deep shadows already dancing with impatience to take over the streets. As we came up on the Houston Street exit off the Drive, Max reached over and tapped my wristwatch. He wasn’t asking me what time it was; he was saying we had a meet.
“What?” I mimed.
Max didn’t respond. But when we got to Chrystie Street, he pointed through the windshield—keep going straight. We weren’t headed for Chinatown, then. I stayed on Houston to the bitter end, then turned south down Varick Street. Max kept pointing me through the narrow maze of blocks that circled the Holland Tunnel like broken capillaries around a bruise.
We found a parking spot under a sign that said not to. I got out and followed Max down a garbage-filled alley. As we turned the corner, I saw a pair of center-joined doors, their frosted glass worn away enough to show a metal grate behind. On the glass, someone had painted ROOMS in once-red freehand.
Max made a “let’s go” gesture and opened the doors, pushing the grate aside with one hand. To the right was a long plank with a hinged center section. Behind it stood a wall of pigeonholes. Large number-tagged keys poked out of a few of the slots. A long-handled bolt cutter stood against the wall.
Behind the plank, there was a fat man in a wheelchair, wearing a green eyeshade out of a Fifties movie, only twisted around, hip-hop style. His eyes were the color of old dimes. Between rapid blinks, they scanned, recorded...and erased the tape.
I followed Max up an uncarpeted flight of stairs that was a little cleaner than the alley. On the next landing, a single low-watt bulb protruding from the wall revealed only the vague shapes of doors, all closed.
Max went up another flight, checked the area briefly, then kept climbing. I recognized the top floor by its skylight. Signs were splattered randomly over the walls—EPA, Health Department, Office of Building Management —warning of everything from exposed wiring to lead paint to asbestos contamination. NO ADMITTANCE! DANGER!
In case anyone still felt brave, there was a triptych of rat posters, the kind the Transit Authority slaps up in your better subway stations. Drawings of malevolent rodents, with a POISON!! notice above. Nice places, subway tunnels. If the vermin didn’t get you, what the City tried to kill them with would.
I warily eyed the cables dangling from the ceiling as we walked to the end of the hall. We came to a decrepit-looking wooden door, sagging on its hinges. Max pushed it open, stepped aside to usher me in, a faint smile on his usually flat face.
The Prof and Clarence were seated at what had once been a professional poker table—a green felt octagon, with round slots for ashtrays and drinking glasses at each station. They gave me an indifferent glance, as if I were a stranger who had just walked into a bar.
Max tugged at my sleeve and pointed for me to look around. Instead of the coffin-sized rooms you’d expect in a flophouse, the place was spacious enough to hold a corporate meeting—someone had taken a sledgehammer to the connecting walls. The windows were small and grimy, but an overhead skylight bathed the whole space in soft light.
Max gave me the tour. There was no kitchen, but someone had put in a little blue microwave, a chrome toaster, and a white enamel hotplate with two burners. Three stubby brown mini-fridges were stacked one on top of another.
At the very end of the corridor was what had once been the shared bathroom for the whole floor. Its walls had been punched out to incorporate the room next to it, and it now featured a coiled aluminum line that added a shower option to the good-sized white fiberglass tub. There was a skylight above that room, too.
Retracing our steps, Max pointed out the new layer of rubber flooring, a tasteful shade of black. Fresh drywall had been used to form a sleeping room, furnished with an army cot, a wooden chest of drawers, and four stand-up steel lockers.
“What you think, Schoolboy?” the Prof asked, coming up behind where I was standing.
“It’s beautiful,” I told him, meaning it.
“Yeah, bro. The Mole tricked it out slick.”
“The
“See,” the little man chuckled to Clarence, “I told you Burke wouldn’t bust it.” He turned to me. “Don’t look like the Mole’s tracks, right?”
“Well...”
“That’s the point of the joint, son. Downstairs, it’s still an SRO. One step up from a chickenwire flophouse. A pound a night, cash in hand.
“Even after the World Trade Center?”
“This is The Apple, son,” the Prof said, with the bitter pride only people born and raised here ever really get right—or understand. “They’d have to do a lot more than knock down some buildings and kill a bunch of folk.”
He held out his hand, palm up. I slapped it soft, no argument.
“So, anyway,” the little man went on, “they don’t tumble buildings no more, they rehab them. This here one, that’s what it’s waiting on. ’Course, with all the palms that got to be greased, it’ll be years before it ever actually happens.”
“And in the meantime...”
“Yeah. You lay in the cut. Right up here on the top floor. Off the books, complete. Far as the City know, this floor’s unfit for human occupancy. Nobody goes past the third.”
“The guy at the desk...?”
“You don’t need to worry about him, bro. The only thing Gateman’s got an eye out for is his PO.”
“What’d he go for?”
“He’s a shooter.”
“You mean, he
“No, son. Gateman always worked right from that chair. Last time down, the jury hung on homicide. Gateman claimed the other guy was making his move. Self-defense. The other guy was strapped, but he never cleared leather. Gateman’s a cutie. Told the DA he had to sit anyway, might as well sit on The Rock until they tried him again. They have a staredown, and the DA blinked. Kept dropping the offer. When it got down to Man Two, Gateman took the lucky seven, did his half-plus.”
“He doesn’t work now?”
“Just behind that desk, son. But I pity the sucker who tries to stick up the place.”
If this was any city but New York, I might have raised an eyebrow at anyone holding up a flophouse. Here, I just nodded.
“Gateman, he’s on the hustle,” the Prof said. “He gets a free room and a little cash for managing the place.
