Only Child

Picks up some extra fronting meets—there’s a big room behind that desk. Trading post; you see where I’m going.”

“He trade anything else?”

“Gateman’s good people,” the Prof assured me. “Time-tested. Two rides; never lied to glide. I did a stretch with him, back in the day. He gets a G a month from us. That’s his lifeline; he can count on it. And, anyway, you ain’t no fugitive now. No price on your head. What’s he going to get from diming you?”

“Does he know who I am?”

“Maybe.” The Prof shrugged. “Gateman’s not the kind to show what he know. But he for damn sure knows who Max is, understand? Besides, he don’t even have to see you come and go, you don’t want him to, honeyboy. I told you the Mole was on the job. Want to see?”

“Sure.”

The Prof walked over to what looked like a floor-to-ceiling closet built out into the room, walled on three sides. When he opened it, I saw a flat platform and a pair of thick cables.

“Used to be one of those dumbwaiters,” the Prof said proudly. “My man Mole gets his hands on it—you know what you got now? A private elevator, bro! You got to crouch a little, but it works like a charm.”

“Where does it go?” I asked, taking a closer look.

“Basement. Nothing down there but the furnace and the boiler. Door opens in, not out, okay? When you open it, looks like you’re facing a blank wall, but it’s really the back of a big Dumpster. Lever to your right. You pull it down, it unlocks the wheels. You just shove it away, step out, push it back, and you’re in the alley. A phantom. Even if someone sees you, they don’t believe it.”

“What if there’s someone waiting in the—?”

“Got you backed, Jack. The Mole hooked up one of those submarine things. You know what I’m talking about, right? You look in it, you see what’s happening outside. Works at night, too. Everything looks kind of greenish, but you can still see boss, hoss.”

“I stay up here three nights once, while we are getting it ready, mahn,” Clarence said. “Quiet as a graveyard.”

“Rats don’t make a sound, huh?” I said.

Max pointed to a big box in a far corner. It looked like a stage speaker for an industrial-music concert. The Mongolian pointed at his ears, raised his eyebrows, and jerked his head around as if he just heard something. He made a mound of his hand to imitate the huge hindquarters and tiny head of the Universal Rat. Then he shook his head as if the sound was painful, and made the rat scurry away.

I nodded at him. Sure. The Mole wouldn’t waste his time with traps or poison. Cats can handle mice, but they’ve got too much sense to mess with City-mutated rats. For those, what you need is a little terrier...and my family knew I wasn’t ready even to think about another dog.

“Well, brother? This work for you?”

I scanned their faces, seeing what I’d crossed the country to see again.

“It’s the best place I ever had in my life,” I said.

I took my time settling in. Trying it on, adjusting the fit. Did a lot of dry runs through the basement: in and out, always at night. Slowly, I got familiar with the place, admiring the little touches they had added to protect me, like the acoustic tile on the walls. And the three cellular phones, all set to the same cloned number, each with a separate charging holster, so that one was always live. The electricity was bridged from Gateman’s own unit, and it powered the space heaters just fine when I tested them.

No A/C; wall units would have given away the game from the outside, and central air was impossible. But the venting was superb, so the fans were able to whisper the summer days down to comfortable.

I kept the anonymous pistol Mama had given me on a little shelf in the elevator shaft. One flick of my hand and it would drop to the basement, well out of reach of any search warrant.

Each room had a large plastic disk on one of the walls. Any weight on the stairs would make the disks glow flash-fire red, bright enough to wake you out of a deep sleep.

In a room off the entrance, I found they had hooked me up with a big-screen TV. And a piece of Gateman’s cable package. He was a high roller in that department—I even got HBO and Showtime.

That’s when it first hit me. My old office was too small to ever have friends over—say, to watch a fight on TV together. It was barely large enough for me and Pansy, and...and then I understood why my people had set up my new place the way they had.

“Calls come in,” Mama said. “All time, always.”

“Business?”

“Maybe sometimes,” she said, shrugging to emphasize the “maybe” part.

“What do you think?” I asked Michelle.

“I think maybe Mr. Burke could have an assistant,” she purred.

“You?”

“Me? Honey, I am no man’s ‘assistant.’ I was talking about you.”

“Sure, bro,” the Prof counseled. “Take the handoff and hit the line. You got to get back to work.”

I don’t know how the woman stumbled across my phone number...the one that rings in a Chinese laundry in Brooklyn and forwards to the pay phones behind my booth. That number’s been part of the graffiti in certain back alleys for so long that most of the people who call it can’t remember where they got it.

Michelle and I met her in a diner, somewhere around the Elmhurst–Rego Park border in Queens. She looked like a woman in her late thirties who’d kept herself pretty well...or like a teenager with most of her nerve endings deep-fried. If she had a problem with me and Michelle both being the “screeners” for the busy Mr. Burke, she didn’t say. Maybe because she was even busier amping out her story.

“Nola—that’s my genetic mother but I don’t call her ‘Mother’ because she’s not a mother because mothers don’t lie to their own children about critical things like she did, like she always did, from the very beginning—Nola, she told me that my father was a one-night stand, you know, like in a movie or something,” she said in one breath. The edges of her speech splintered with stress fractures. “Very romantic. He was a poet or something; I don’t remember. I don’t remember lies. That takes a lot of work. You try it yourself, if you don’t believe me. Forgetting something, that’s hard. Trying makes you remember. But I finally got it. I don’t remember what she said he was. My father. She said she never knew his name, but one day she saw his picture in the paper. He was killed in a car accident, or something. I think that’s what she said, anyway. I don’t remember. Because it was all a lie, so I don’t remember it.”

I felt Michelle’s long fingernail pressing into my knee, telling me to sit still. She was a lot more interested in the end of the story than I was.

“She isn’t as smart as she thinks, Nola,” the woman went on. “And I’m not as stupid as she thinks I am, either. I investigated her. She never thought of that. She thought I’d investigate him. But how could I do that, when I didn’t know anything about him? Except lies. And I can’t remember lies.

“I found my birth certificate. Her name, the Nola name, it was on it. But his wasn’t the same name she told me. It wasn’t the same name she said was my name, my last name, not Nola’s, the name from my father, the way you get your name from your father.

“After that, it was easy. So easy. I love the Internet. You can find out anything on the Internet. You can find the truth. The total truth. It’s always there. And nobody can erase it or lie about it or change it. Once it’s on the Internet, it’s forever. Like the runes. I searched. I used search engines. They have them, just for that. And I found her.”

I lit a cigarette. Took one drag, then placed it in the notch of a clear glass ashtray with a green logo in its base. The smoke drifted up between us. I let my eyes go into it, a patience trick.

“She was raped,” the woman said, a sneer in her voice. “That’s what she, Nola, what she told everyone, anyway. That’s where I came from. From a rape. She said. She, Nola, said it when I confronted her. It was a confrontation, like you see on television, like they tell you to do to the person who hurt you. I read that. I read that in a