Philadelphia Noir

He shakes his head. “God knows where he sleeps every night.” He frees a hand and touches her cheek, her forehead.

“I can’t,” she says, and turns away. “Not like this. Not tonight. I should go.”

“You can’t go out there.”

“I don’t live far.” She’s already up. “Please don’t get the wrong idea-I am so grateful. You saved my life tonight.”

“I’ll walk you.” He follows her to the door, where she pauses.

“Please…” She touches his face, takes his hand. “Thank you.”

“You want to get high?”

“No,” she laughs. She must think he’s joking-one last crack for the road. “I’ll call you,” she grins, dabs bashfully at her forehead, “1-800-INJURED, right?” and slips from his fingers.

Her smile lingers in the room, the memory of it tangible, like molecules of goodness dissipating in the air, as dingy reality returns and he sinks into the couch. 1-800-INJURED. He contemplates the implications of a single phone call. God knows how Chris will work his magic once the sordid tale unfolds.

Nicky hits the lights, lies back on the couch, unloads the weighty goods from his pockets. He rolls a fat one, sparks the Zippo.

In a dream, it’s Nicky’s office. She’s in her anchorwoman skirt suit; he’s in Armani. They are just back from lunch, from a real restaurant, one with no theme. He closes the door. She pulls him by the tie toward the big desk. This is their routine.

A knocking wakes him. The light from his phone glows. Sirens ring out. Windows and walls flash. He sits up, stares at the door.

Phone in one hand, gun in the other.

“Open the door, Nicky!”

“They’re coming for me,” he mumbles.

“Everything’s gonna be fine.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

“Don’t be stupid, fuckhead. Listen to me. It’s your brother, who loves you.”

In his mind he can see him out there, pounding, head against the door, and then it’s as if he’s out there himself, feeling what it might be like to be left alone. “I love you too,” he blurts, and when he leaps for the door, to let his brother in, it’s as though he’s racing to save them both.

“CANNOT EASY NORMAL DIE” BY CARLIN ROMANO

University City

If every block in Philadelphia had only one resident, Isaac figured, lots of things would be different. Parking would be easier. Mail carriers would stop screwing up. Next-door neighbors too dumb to pack their garbage in plastic bags might disappear, because you wouldn’t have a next-door neighbor.

Isaac saw the downside too. Infrequent block parties. A pathetic neighborhood association. Ratcheting up of that lonely feeling Isaac used to get when he lived in Vermont and wondered how people in isolated houses survived the big snowstorms.

One-person blocks might even stir up aristocratic leanings, a sense of “to the manor born” that might lead people to consider getting their streets closed off, and their fiefdoms turned into separate municipalities.

Anyway, it was just empty, abstract theorizing, because so far as Isaac knew, he was the only person-at least in University City-with a block of his own. And even the neighborhood historian couldn’t tell him exactly how St. Irenaeus Square-not that it was a square-had turned out that way.

“There used to be a stable there, where your house is, in the late nineteenth century,” ventured Mildred, the old woman with semi-encyclopedic knowledge of Spruce Hill, at the last block event to which she’d limped her way. “I think that put some potential builders off.”

Another theory, ventured by Irina Butova, the realtor who’d first showed the structure to Isaac years ago, was that his unique, detached, slope-roofed oddity of a house had been built in defiance of neighborhood logic.

401 St. Irenaeus Square, after all, sat surrounded by backyards. To Isaac’s right, when he exited his house, lay the well-maintained yards of the celebrated Queen Anne homes on Spruce Street, the area’s architectural gems. To his left, beyond his own impressive yard with sixteen trees, loomed the leafy expanse formed by the backs of Pine Street’s solid row houses, the first two being the lovingly manicured creations of Derek Gombrowicz, the friendly architect who owned them.

In front of him, as he opened his door, sat the back of the mighty twin that ended the string of Queen Anne houses along Spruce Street as it headed west. Behind him, outside his bedroom window, lay the backyards of South 42nd Street, several of them regular venues for frat parties, on which Isaac sometimes eavesdropped during slow nights.

“Is quiet and full of peace like cemetery,” Irina had joked when she’d shown it to him three years before, right after it had been cleared of its student tenants. They’d messed up the house so badly, Irina explained, that it remained on the market for a year before Christy Greenfield, one of Isaac’s old lovers (he’d always liked realtors), referred Isaac to Irina as a match made in heaven. Irina had been in one of Christy’s courses at Temple’s Real Estate Institute, and then been a trainee at Plumer when Christy was still there. They’d kept in touch.

Christy knew both her client and colleague well. Isaac, a former foreign correspondent for the Inquirer in Russia, came with no wife, no kids, lots of boxes, papers, and books, and a complete indifference to interior design. His ideal look was used bookstore, circa 1950. He wanted a house with a porch or veranda so he could, like literary heroes from the past, sit on it in a chair made of natural materials and look literary. He preferred weeds and overgrowth to a regularly landscaped yard, thinking (incorrectly) that onlookers would mistake its choked anarchy for a lush Italian garden. He refused to do housework or gardening of any kind, remarking once to Christy that such impulses had died with his father’s generation.

Irina, for reasons Christy didn’t understand, had ended up with the 401 St. Irenaeus listing even though she mainly worked Russian neighborhoods in Northeast Philadelphia. It had something to do with the owner two back being Russian before it had been sold to the University of Pennsylvania. As listing arrangements went, it struck Christy as a bit of an odd match.

Most buyers in Spruce Hill fell into two categories. First came the mid-thirtyish academic couples new to junior teaching posts at Penn, eager to get into the catchment area so their not-yet or barely bred kids could go to Penn’s appealing new community school. For them 401 looked like a major fixerupper, the expense of which might be funded by converting 401’s unusual side garden-one of the largest in University City-into the site for another house.

The second category of buyers was the older Wharton or med-school types, often full professors or moneyed professionals who’d settle for nothing less than Architectural Digest perfection and were willing to pay for contractors to accomplish it. One couple of the sort had purchased the first Queen Anne west of 42nd Street a few years back for about $700,000, torn it up inside, created a huge atrium perfect for a glossy- magazine shoot, then put it back on the market for $950,000.

Both types seemed perfect for 401 St. Irenaeus. But Irina, to Christy’s surprise, couldn’t unload it that first year. According to Irina, Christy told Isaac, something had gone wrong every time it looked as if she had a buyer- financing that fell through, cold feet, fear of crime, whatever.

Christy, of course, knew it had to be more complicated than that-it always is when selling houses. One couple that had bid on 401, before Isaac came into the picture, told Christy that Irina grew belligerent when they asked about the legality of building a second house on the side yard, which was wider than 401 itself. “You buy sixteen fantastic trees to kill sixteen fantastic trees?” Irina had said to them. “Believe me, for you I can find house without trees! Not this house!”

That’s the story that first made Christy think of Isaac, who she knew was house-hunting. True, he’d been house-hunting for more than twenty years, since he’d come to Philly from New York. And Isaac had long since admitted to Christy that while he was, in principle, looking for a house, house-hunting was also one of his tried and