Zero Hour

intense confusion so evident on its features. That person, if not quite a stranger to this scene, seemed at least of questionable identity, bound to draw attention from Jeffreys, and provoke uncertain, even resentful, looks from members of the crowd gathering by the elevator door. Where was he from? Who did he intend to see? Was he trustworthy? Reliable? Beyond all else, did he belong?

Now Avram tore his eyes from the mirror, aware he’d been captured by its brightly gleaming surface again. That he’d lost a few seconds, stopped midway down the hall amid the procession heading toward the elevator. It had happened again, and the jarring realization made his chest feel a little clenched. Could the pressures he was under be taking a greater subconscious toll than he’d suspected? He supposed it was possible. Look at what had been going on with him, his change of fortune. Everything had accelerated, gathering a pace and momentum of its own. And there were new risks involved, measured as they might be.

Avram pulled a deep breath through his mouth. Whatever the cause of his episodes, he thought, he’d be okay. Mentally and physically. All things considered, Avram took reasonable care of his health, and at forty-seven years old assumed he’d enjoy many more decades of good living. Anxiety attacks should be the worst of his problems, he’d be back to normal in a minute. Fully Avram the Flesh-and-Blood. And he would go on with his customary routine.

A second inhalation, another, and Avram moved on toward the end of the hallway. He gave old Jeffreys a nod, was wished a good morning in return, approached the elevator. Then he abruptly swung back around to the security platform. He’d almost forgotten to tell the guard about a visitor who’d be coming to see him, and appointments didn’t often escape his memory.

Avram supposed he wasn’t quite himself again. Not yet. Absentmindedness wasn’t one of his usual shortcomings.

“What can I do for you today, Mr. Hoffman?” Jeffreys asked pleasantly from his stool.

A light-skinned black man in his sixties who knew most of the regulars waiting outside the elevator by name, and the rest by sight, he’d been at his post more than thirty years, a fixture within a fixture. Avram had been a teenager when they were first introduced, Jeffreys younger in those days than he himself was now.

“I’m expecting an important guest in about an hour. Ten-fifteen, ten-thirty,” he said. “Mr. Katari has trouble with the language, and might need help finding his way upstairs to the Club. He’s Ethiopian… well, an Ethiopian- Israeli… ”

Jeffreys offered him a wry wink, a smile, and then pinched the pecan-colored skin of his left wrist with his right hand.

“A little piece’a yours, a little piece’a mine, huh?” he said.

It took Avram a second to catch the guard’s meaning. His brief lapse, or fugue, or whatever his breathless spell at the mirror might be called, really had left him out of sorts.

“Right,” he said at last, and returned the smile. “That’s exactly right.”

Jeffreys slipped a pen from the breast pocket of his gray uniform shirt.

“This fella… he spell his name K-A-T-A-R-I?”

Avram nodded.

“I’ll leave a note right here, see he gets to you ’case I step out for a minute,” Jeffreys said, scribbling a reminder in the visitors’ book.

Avram thanked him, heard the elevator arrive, and hurried to join the dozen or so men crowding inside. Again, he exchanged familiar hellos.

Then he pressed the tenth-floor button and the car started upward with a bump, creaking on pulleys and hoist cables that had seen better days, but nonetheless continued doing the work for which they were built as if age, wear, and rust weren’t actually problems at all.

* * *

His eyes on the floor numbers above the ascending elevator, Jeffreys reached for his phone on the wooden podium that passed for a guard station in the hallway’s close quarters. The smile he’d shown Avram Hoffman was gone, but like a strip of tape peeled from his mouth it had left a lingering hurt on him.

He hoped his expression didn’t show how much pain he felt inside right now.

Jeffreys had known Avram since he was in school. He remembered his late father, Jacob, bragging about his yeshiva grades, and his scholarship to that big college uptown, Columbia University. He remembered Jacob looking so proud of him all the time, coming in with that stack of photos from his year as an exchange student in Israel. The people in this building, and the ones who belonged to the Club in particular… it was fair to say pride was the rack they hung their hats on. What they valued more than anything. Some of them were almost like family to Jeffreys. Sure, there were plenty of characters — the slick, fast-talking millionaires at one end, the crapped-out losers who were always asking favors, riding the backs of their successful friends and relatives at the other. If you got wind of their stories, it could be funny. There was competition, feuds that went on for years. One guy saying another guy’s only doing good because he’s a rotten conniver, the second guy calling the first guy a jealous nitwit, both of them getting on a third guy’s case for whatever reason. He’s this, he’s that, and did you hear what he did to so-and-so? A real kick, listening to them go at it sometimes. But there were the serious stories, too, the ones that’d gotten Jeffreys to truly respect these folks. Stories about what they’d accomplished, how they built something out of nothing. How they’d come to this country as refugees after they were chased from more countries than you could begin to count. Russia, maybe a hundred years ago. Near all of Europe in the Second World War. Generations of them coming to America with just the clothes on their backs, driven from their lands, their homes left behind, everything they’d owned burned, wrecked, or stolen. So many losing their loved ones to the gas chambers and ovens in those Nazi death camps.

Jeffreys respected these people for what they’d made of themselves. Respected how they could keep their own house clean, keep it right, and not have to look outside for police, lawyers, and courtroom judges to settle their affairs. If it was going to last, honor and trust had to mean something here. Had to hold on strong here. Those values started to break down, Jeffreys figured the end was in sight. They could take a wrecking ball to the building, fill the dusty hole it left on the street with some modern skyscraper a hundred stories tall, where there’d be room for a proper guard station near the entrance instead of his tight spot atop a riser near the elevator. Because the heart and soul would be taken out of the place, lost, and it’d be nothing but a sad reminder of what it used to be. Part of a story that started with the words once upon a time.

Jeffreys liked Avram, knew all his relatives, his wife and kids. He didn’t want to cause him any grief. Smile to his face, put the screws into him from behind. But his job wasn’t always about sitting on the wooden stool that’d given him so much trouble with bleeding piles and backaches over the years. He shook its tougher responsibilities, Jeffreys figured he might as well apply for retirement benefits. While none of the men who wrote his paychecks had come right out and told him what Avram was up to, or what they thought he might be up to, it was clear they had suspicions he’d got his hands into some bad shit.

Jeffreys sighed and made his call, cradling the telephone receiver between his neck and shoulder.

The Belgian snoop answered on his first ring. Jeffreys tipped the guy off like he’d arranged and hung up, the call taking maybe half a minute, but leaving behind a crummy feeling that would stay with him for a long time afterward.

Bad shit, this was, he thought. Serious bad. And he was afraid there would be a whole pile more in the offing… enough to throw its stink around the world and back again before everything was said and done.

* * *

Avram wasn’t surprised to find himself getting off on the tenth floor alone. In years gone by, the elevator would have emptied out here. But change came to everything, like it or not. No man, no institution, was impervious.

Passing the guard booth with a wave to the two uniformed men behind its bullet-resistant window, Avram turned left, swiped his identification card through the turnstile reader, stepped into a bare entry foyer, and then inserted the card into a second reader to unlock a door bracketed by overhead closed-circuit surveillance cameras.

Once past the door he moved into the main hall, an expansive space with floor-to-ceiling windows facing north and south, and rows of plain cafeteria-style tables extending lengthwise from the walls. Although the loudspeaker was presently silent, and the queue of telephones to either side of the central aisle idle, a handful of men were already scattered about the room, pushing glassine packets at each other across bare tabletops. Others