when one opened, I almost fell into the long narrow space onto something that looked, in the dim light, like a body before I realized it was only a dressmaker’s dummy.
I reeled back, stumbled to my feet, and laughed at myself. I was a cop with a gun and I was scared of a dummy. Heard the walls laugh back. As I backed out, voices came from the next room, voices arguing, but when I banged on the wall there was only silence.
Storage rooms, I thought. Servants quarters, maybe, once upon a time.
When I got back to the main corridor, there was only a faint oyster-colored light that came through those windows with the bars like a prison. There was no way out as far as I could see.
And then, suddenly, from the corner of my eye, I saw something scamper away down the corridor, something small and hunched and wearing red. It could have been an animal, but what was the red? Was it red? A rat in a coat? A cat in a hat? Was it Diaz? The Goof?
There was somebody down here who didn’t belong, somebody living in this basement, someone, or something, who ran like an animal, ran when I got near.
My cell phone didn’t work in the basement.
I was confused. I went into a room and realized somebody lived there-there was a cot, pile of clothes, jeans, dirty T-shirts, a jacket. Plastic sheets were hung under the ceiling. Water dripped. Something scampered on the floor again; this time it was a rat, a rat that ran over my shoe, brushed my ankle, and ran under the bed.
Was I hallucinating? On edge because of Lily, because she was somehow convinced she’d killed an old Russian on the fourteenth floor? Because of an old doctor who had been friends with the dead woman and who believed in assisted suicide? Call it assisted suicide. Call it killing people.
Lily seemed to know them all, seemed to have made a life in the building with them. In the snapshots on the dead woman’s mantel, there had been three that included Lily: Lily with the old doctor, Lily with Simonova, the dead Russian, Lily with the young cop-Radcliff-his arm around her.
I don’t like closed spaces. I couldn’t see a way out. Was I losing my mind in this basement in Harlem?
“Hello?” I started to jog down the long hallway. “Hello?”
There had been times the past year when I’d thought I was losing it. After Valentina was murdered; after I went to Moscow to find her father, my best friend, Tolya; after I made a deal with a bunch of creeps to get him free; after I got him home and thought he was going to die from a massive heart attack.
During the summer, I’d thought I was going crazy. I had found myself laughing at the wrong things, and more than once I just burst into tears. It was July, maybe August, when I’d started coming uptown, sitting drinking at the Sugar Hill Club, listening to the music and hoping Lily might show up. But she never had, not until election night.
Now, suddenly, there was a faint, long, low howl in the basement, or was it just a noise from the laundry room, one of the machines giving up the ghost?
I began to laugh again-nerves, fear-and then I started to run, chasing the thing, jogging toward it as it receded, running faster and faster until it was out of sight. I ran until I almost crashed into a young woman. She was picking up laundry she had spilled all over the concrete floor.
“Thank you,” she said when I helped her stuff the damp clothes into the yellow plastic basket she was holding. She thanked me, but she looked nervous. Her skin was very black, she wore a white shirt, a pink sweater, and jeans.
“I’ll take your stuff upstairs if you want.”
“It’s fine, thank you again,” she said. She had a French accent.
Somewhere a dog barked. She cringed.
“What is it?”
“There are djinn in this building and they take this form, of black dogs.”
“What?”
“Djinn,” she said again. “What you call evil spirits,” she explained, just as Virgil Radcliff appeared. He greeted the woman in French; she hurried away. “Marie Louise,” he said. “She’s from Mali.”
“She believes that stuff?”
“You think it’s stranger than believing, say, that Jesus was the result of virgin birth, then turned up again after he was dead? I mean, come on, Artie, religion, witchcraft, whatever. All the same.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I parked out back. Easier to get in through the basement. I left something upstairs.”
“At Lily’s?”
“Right.”
“The woman from Mali lives here?”
“Marie Louise cleans here for several of the inmates,” he said. “Did I say inmates? Residents, I mean, since you were asking. And you, Artie, you’re down here why, exactly?”
“You want to show me where you park?”
“Sure,” he said. “You got lost, right? Happened to me; it’s like an underground maze here. Even a cop can scare the shit out of himself, Artie, if he doesn’t know his way around.”
As we walked, Radcliff talked pretty much nonstop, telling me about the building as we passed spaces that had once housed shops, a cafeteria. One of the huge spaces had an empty swimming pool with blue-tiled walls.
He told me there’d been a hair salon where the owner ran a numbers racket. “You hear his ghost still hangs out down here,” said Radcliff.
“Squatters down here?”
“Probably. You can get in through the courtyard.” Suddenly Radcliff stopped. He looked up. So I did, too. Carver Lennox was coming toward us carrying a large rectangular box.
“Virgil, good to see you, my brother,” said Carver, stopping so he could put out his hand, which Radcliff shook briefly. He wore round horn-rim glasses. His mouth was full of expensive pearly veneers. He was an ugly young man, but he’d had himself polished and buffed, and he dressed with style. “Came down to get some wine out of my cellar. I keep a nice little wine fridge in my storage room,” he added. “Hello again,” he said to me. “You guys working on something here?”
“Just visiting,” said Virgil.
“Hey, listen, can I show you something? I think you’ll like this.”
Virgil shrugged.
From the box, Carver removed a heavy bronze plaque. He held it up with two hands. On it were the words: THE B ARACK O BAMA APARTMENTS.
“Nice, right?” said Lennox. “Good name change, don’t you think?”
“How do the residents feel?” said Virgil.
“A few of the older ones think we should keep the name as it is, that this is a landmarked building-it is, you know-and it’s wrong to change, but they’ll come around, you know? Most people think the president-elect is a little more important than a dead musician, don’t you agree?”
Virgil kept quiet.
“I know you do, Virgil. Of course you do,” he said, putting the plaque back in the box. “Yeah, and say hi to Lily,” he added. The low, polished voice had a tinge of, what was it? Menace? No, it was just a sense that Carver wanted his way and always got it. That he knew everything that went on in the building and that he was in charge. “Well, don’t forget the party tonight, Virgil.” Lennox’s voice was bland now, cool and smooth as pudding. “You, too, Artie. It will be a special occasion. Good food, plenty to drink.”
“You must be doing well,” said Radcliff.
“Surely, I’m a lucky man,” he said with a cocky smile. “Well, then, see you, my brother, I have to get along to a party at the Princeton Club first.”
“Goldman Sachs,” said Radcliff after the guy had gone. Said it like it was a curse.
“What kind of name’s Carver?”
“Named after George Washington Carver. Big African American hero. Revolutionized agriculture, cotton, back in the last century. He was like this Renaissance man, or so many people thought back in the day.”
“You don’t like it that he wants to change the building’s name?”
“It’s the high-handed way he just does what he wants. People here love Obama, of course they do, but
