brunette remained alone. She’d been stood up. It was a crime.
A nearby churchbell rang in the noon hour.
The woman signaled the waiter to bring her check.
My squirrel stopped his swaying and stood still and flexed his hands. Gentlemen, start your engines.
The check came and she dug into a suede shoulder bag as she went inside to pay. She came out again, left her tip, and we were on our way.
She looked west to First Avenue, waiting just that little bit longer before she started walking east in the direction of Avenue A. Long legs in black pants like sheer silk pajama bottoms.
My squirrel started right off. He took the job of shadow literally, matching her step-for-step on the opposite side of the street. I sized him up, wondering what he was capable of. Hundred twenty pounds tops, but plenty of bunched-up nervous energy.
I waited. Thirty feet. In my too-loud outside voice I said my location one last time, then goodbye, call you later, and pocketed my imaginary phone. Forty feet. I turned and looked in the shop window of the artist De La Vega’s store. Some wild stuff on display as well as handmade books of his artwork and collections of his writing. I’d have to come by again when he was open. Fifty feet. I started after them.
At Avenue A, she stopped for the light to change, so I caught them up a little. He matched her on the opposite corner, but at least he didn’t stare right at her. She crossed the street and entered Tompkins Square Park. He followed at a slackened pace.
She led us through the park, passed stone chess tables occupied by men playing cards, snaking by the sprawling green lawns where people lay bathing in the sun, many of them drably dressed street kids sleeping off the previous night’s debauch. We went by where the bandshell used to be before the 1998 riots and the destruction of the shantytown. Now there were jungle gyms. We threaded our way southeast along the narrow leafy paths, finally exiting at Avenue B and East Seventh Street.
Our parade continued south along Avenue B, through an Alphabet City unrecognizable to anyone who hadn’t arrived in the last fifteen minutes. Most of the older businesses—dive bars and dodgy bodegas—had been consumed, replaced by upscale boutiques, curtained lounges, French crepe shoppes; new money remaking the neighborhood in its own image. There stood a hair & nail salon where once had slouched a beer-drenched saloon.
But down these gentrified streets a man must go…
Was a time, I wouldn’t’ve walked in this neighborhood except under extreme duress or a high cash retainer (often one and the same), but times had changed.
Or so we’d been told. Statistically, crime was down to a record low in the city. But statistics only measure what they’re designed to: crimes reported and arrests made. When crime goes underground, out of sight, and the crooks become more sophisticated in avoiding detection, then the stats are useless to judge by and it’s time for a new means of measuring.
The numbers people saw reported supported the hyped image of a new New York City, crime-free and user- friendly. “Come one, come all, you’ll be safe as houses. Bring the kids. This isn’t your grandpa’s NYC.” Only when they get here, they discover it’s a lot less like
The truth is the city isn’t an animal you can domesticate. Those who imagine it is make the same mistake as people who try keeping grizzly bear cubs as pets: sooner or later, they get their faces clawed off.
We passed by a grade school and the Sixth Street Community Garden. At East Fourth Street, the woman crossed the avenue and continued east, halfway down this darker, less-tenanted, tree-lined street, coming to a stop at a waist-high black wrought-iron gate in front of a trim three-story townhouse. This building hadn’t even existed the last time I’d been here. The stark newness was offset by its neighbor, a six-story pre-war brownstone, painted white, with the black trails of rusted porticos running down its facade like tear-streaked mascara.
The young man was directly across the street as she went in.
I tightened up on him, closing within twenty feet. Too close really, but I wasn’t sure what he was liable to do.
The front gate swung shut behind her as she mounted the white cement steps to the door. She stirred the contents of her suede bag until she brought up keys, then opened the door and went in.
He watched. I watched. We watched. After she’d gone, he crossed the street to the gate and looked up at the door. A brass plate was mounted to its right. I supposed he read it. Too far for me to make it out.
The first floor windows had inside shutters of light-colored wood and they were closed. The second floor windows had dark, gypsy-shawl patterned curtains which were drawn shut.
The top-floor windows had the same curtains. One of them twitched as my eyes rested upon it.
My squirrel, “Jeff,” had his hand on the front gate, but he didn’t take it further. He turned left and walked away. I followed with my eyes, not losing sight of him as I crossed the street to the gate. I noted the address and the name engraved on the townhouse’s brass plate.
Rauth Reality.
I read it again. Rauth Realty.
My squirrel was thirty feet away. Enough of a head start. I followed.
He led me to the next corner where he turned right on Avenue C/Avenida Loisaida and headed south into the barrio. The cover of trees thinned out to stark empty sidewalks crumbling in spots. Fewer people around and more CLOSED signs on businesses yet to be revitalized. Fantasy-art murals on the side street brick walls.
I kept him on a long leash, but the precaution was unnecessary: leading me down C, past East Second and a half-block further to a five-story apartment house, he never once looked behind him.
I thought it funny, a guy follows someone but never looks behind himself to see if
Yeh, hilarious. Same was true of me.
A familiar grinding sound turned my head, but I saw no one behind me. And then didn’t hear the sound again.
The building was #27 Avenue C, a dilapidated tenement, one of the older buildings still remaining on the block, decades of touch-up paint, olive and gray, peeling from the bricks like scabby flesh.
Its entrance was between a TV repair shop with a CLOSED sign in its dusty window and a scaffolded four- story building covered in wind-torn blue tarp. No construction workers on the scene. A project that had begun with great fervor but stalled in the economic slump. The wave of gentrification stuttering, falling behind.
As my squirrel inserted his key in the street door, I broke into a jog, spanning the short distance between us. I was a few feet away when the door shut.
It was a battered metal door covered with wild tagger scrawls, which looked like the miscellaneous symbols that appear above a cartoon character’s head when conked.
The clouded view into the vestibule was a small square window of chicken wire-reinforced glass, grimy- yellow and etched by battery-acid graffitists.
I strolled up and peered in, hoping just to catch a glimpse of him maybe going up the stairs. But when I looked, he was still in the entryway, removing a key from the door of one of the mailboxes, top row, third from the left. No mail though, his hands were empty.
A car sped up the avenue, music on mondo, a thudding Latin beat and sugary rhythm that sustained in the air long after it passed, like the echo of a discharged cannon.
I hung back from the door, casually studying my watch. 12:18. Inside, the squirrel opened a second door and entered the building’s hallway. He went toward the stairs but passed by them, on to a rear left ground-floor apartment. Bit of luck.
He stopped with the key in his hand and knocked on the door twice. He said something, then opened the door himself and went in.
The squirrel was in his nest.
I turned my gaze back to the mailboxes. A name on the one he’d opened. I tried to read it, shifting my head around, standing on my toes, looking for a less clouded section of glass. First initial: L. Last name: A-N-D—was that an R?
“What you want?”
He was a thick-featured Latin about 60 years old, dressed in pine-green overalls and a pine-green visored
