Safe House Page 5

  We didn’t get the hot-and-sour soup—that was only for family. But one of the waiters unfolded a fresh white linen tablecloth over the corroded Formica, then set the table with ultra-modern Danish stainless cutlery, gleaming like it just came out of the tissue paper.

  Mama checked the setup, nodded approval. The waiter brought a wild assortment of dim sum, plus some spring rolls so light the crackle of the skin was a surprise. Next there was beef in oyster sauce with disks of bok choy, some kind of lemon chicken with snow-pea pods, and fried rice with hefty chunks of crabmeat. All beautifully presented on ice-blue dishes. Mama even found a deep-purple orchid and placed it in a translucent white vase shaped like a genie’s bottle.

  “It’s wonderful!” Crystal Beth exclaimed after quickly nibbling at a half-dozen different dishes.

  Mama bowed, just the ghost of a smile around her mouth.

  “What’s in these?” Crystal Beth asked her, holding up a half-eaten piece of spring roll.

  “Big secret,” Mama said gravely. “Everything here big secret.”

  “I’d keep it a secret too,” Crystal Beth assured her.

  Mama bowed again, and went back to her register. The lights in the restaurant dimmed. A waiter came out and put what looked like a blue hurricane candle on the table, close to the wall. He lit the candle with a long red paper match, studying the flame until he was satisfied.

  Crystal Beth chewed her food slowly, eyes on my face all the while. She didn’t say anything. The candle flickered to her left, so the dark line along her jawbone was hard to see clearly. I tried not to stare at it.

  I guess that didn’t work. “It’s a tattoo,” she finally said. “You want to see it up close?”

  “Yes,” I told her, surprised at my own honesty.

  She turned her face all the way to her left. I moved the candle toward the center of the table and leaned over. The line came fairly straight down her jawbone, then formed a curlicue before it continued on around toward her square little chin. At the very tip it ended in what looked like a tiny crude arrowhead. I wanted to touch it, but I kept my hands flat on the tabletop.

  “It looks . . . tribal,” I said.

  “It is. It means I have a purpose.”

  “But they did it when you were a girl, right?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “I just . . . How could they know your purpose when you were a child?”

  “They didn’t. But . . . they knew I would have one.”

  “And that was true?”

  “Oh yes. Very true.”

  I returned the candle to its place near the wall. Her hands were small, the nails cut short and straight across, clear polish gleaming in the flickering light. Her face was fresh, free of makeup, deep-black pupils in her almond eyes. If she was uncomfortable not talking while she ate, she didn’t show it.

  A waiter cleared the plates, slowly and ceremoniously. I didn’t know any of Mama’s people could do either one. Then he brought us each an egg cup of lemon sorbet and a small silver spoon.

  “No fortune cookies?” she asked the waiter.

  He gave her a blank look. That’s one thing Mama’s people were real good at.

  “They don’t speak English,” I told her.

  “I’m surprised this place isn’t jammed,” she said. “The food is unbelievable.”

  “It’s . . . erratic,” I told her. “Cooks come and go pretty quick. This is more like a . . . school. If they get really good, they move on to one of the upscale places. Some nights, you could eat here and go right to the Emergency Room.”

  That was the truth, but it had nothing to do with the food. Every once in a while some outsider checks out the hole-in-the-wall location and decides Mama’s would be a good place for a robbery. I was there when it happened the last time. A kid came in the front door holding an Intratec Scorpion, the favorite of homicidal triggerboys throughout the city—the gun’s a piece of garbage, but they love the look. The kid had mastered the urban-punk killing machine’s pose—he had his wrist turned so he was sighting down the back of his hand, the side of the pistol parallel to the ground. Just like in the movies. A genius move with a semi-auto—it guarantees the spent cartridges are going to fly right up in your face. But the triggerboy never got the chance to find that out. His body went into a Chinatown Dumpster. I don’t know what happened to it after that.

  The waiter took the egg cups, put a large blue glass ashtray precisely between us. I took out my cigarettes, offered her one. “No thank you,” she said politely. “I have my own.”

  She took a pack of rolling papers from her purse, tapped out some dark rough-cut tobacco from a green-and-white tin and expertly assembled the cigarette. She ran the trailing edge of the paper over the tip of her tongue and sealed the package, then rapped it against a thumbnail to tamp it down. I held a wooden match for her. She inhaled deeply, blowing the smoke out her broad flat nose.

  “About my cousin,” she said.

  I waited a few beats. Saw she wasn’t going to say anything more. Some kind of dance rules I didn’t understand. I tried to pick up the slack.

  “Yeah. . . ?” I prompted her.

  “What do you know about them, Burke?”

  I liked that she said “Burke,” not “Mr. Burke” the way most people did. She never asked me whether it was my first or last name, just used what I gave her.

  “Who’s them?” I asked her.

  “Stalkers.”

  I shrugged. “There’s all kinds.”

  “That’s what I thought too. Once. But I don’t think so anymore. They’re all the same. They get to make the choices. All the choices. That’s the most important thing to them. It’s all about power.”

  What do you know about power, little girl? I thought to myself. What do you know about when the Beast gets loose? And loves the taste? Like in Rwanda. Or Bosnia. Or in some families. “Yeah,” I said aloud. “But—”

  “Do you think an ex-boyfriend is so different from an obsessed fan of a movie star?”

  “Sure. The ex-boyfriend, he’s got a history. Or what he thinks is a history, anyway. He had it, once. The fan never had it.”

  “That’s very rational,” she said, her voice just this side of frosty. “But rational doesn’t count. All that counts is pressure. The more obsessed they are, the more power they have. They can concentrate—focus their energy like no normal person ever could. They’re like heat-seeking missiles, homing in on the signal. And if you’re alive, you give off some signal. No matter how carefully you refuse to engage with them, no matter how much security you can buy. Strippers get them. So do college professors. Anyone who’s ever written a book or appeared on a talk show is a potential target. It’s like sexual harassment cranked up to the nth degree.”

  “Sexual?”

  “Of course it’s sexual. They call it a lot of things, but it all comes out the same. Stalkers are rapists. They try and take by force what they can’t have by consent. That’s all those anti-choice people are, every one.”

  “Anti-choice?”

  “That’s what they really are, those so-called pro-lifers. They get to make the choice; that’s what they want, not to save some fetus. If a woman is raped and they force her to carry that vicious animal’s child to term, what is that but more rape? Self-righteous rapists, that’s them. All of them.”

  “But if they—”

  “Maybe you think it’s funny, a man like you,” she said. Her nostrils were flared, almond eyes crackling with anger. A vein throbbed in her throat.

  “Funny? Why would I—?”

  “People do, don’t they? There’s whole sitcoms based on it now. And movies. Stalking as a hobby. Isn’t that hilarious? Of course, that’s women doing the stalking. When it’s—”

  “—your cousin . . .” I prompted, trying to bring her back.

  “My cousin?” She caught a breath, eyes focusing like they’d just caught her own reflection in a mirror. “Oh. Yes. He’s just . . . hounding her. He calls up and can
cels her credit cards. Steals her mail. He bribed somebody at the phone company to get her unlisted number and he calls . . . hundreds of times a day, but he never speaks. You know what he told her? She’s going to die. He’s going to kill her, and then himself. So he won’t even be punished. He couldn’t stand going to jail, because then he wouldn’t be in power anymore. He’s going to do it.”

  “She go to the cops?”

  “Sure,” she laughed, a dry, brittle sound in the empty restaurant. “You think life is like the movies? Some cop’s going to fall in love with her, devote all his off-duty time to watching her house?”

  “So she wants . . . what?”

  The woman who called herself Crystal Beth ground out her cigarette, not saying anything, eyes downcast.

  It was a long minute before she looked up at me. “Help,” she said.

  I sat there by myself for a long time after she left. If she had the motorcycle again, there wasn’t much point in trying to follow her. We didn’t have the personnel for a three-car box. Clarence was good, but the Prof couldn’t drive at all. Max piloted a car with all the finesse of a bull rhino. And compared to the Mole, he was a surgeon. But if we could score a license number . . .

  Clarence was the first one back. He greeted Mama, then came back to where I was sitting. I waited patiently for him to have the first cup of soup—Mama was watching.

  “The bike was parked two blocks over, mahn. I got the number.” He handed me a piece of paper torn from a small spiral notebook.

  “Good,” I told him. “It’ll probably dead-end, but it’s worth a look. Any problems?”

  “Could have been a problem, mahn. Maybe a big one. She had the bike chained up tight to a parking meter, so it took a long time to get it unhitched. Couple of young boys said something to her. She gave them something back. I think they were drunk. They came across the street like they were going to . . . I don’t know, make trouble, maybe. Then they saw Max, standing over to the side. So they turned around and split.”

  “Did she see him?”

  “No, mahn. Not a chance. I had her eyeballed the whole time.”

  “What color coat was she wearing?” I asked him.

  “Black, mahn. All black. With a hood.”

  When Max came in, Mama sat down with us. She stared at Max’s face for a long moment, then said to me: “That girl, she same as Max.”

  “Same as . . . ?”

  “Not Chinese,” Mama said.

  Then I got it. Max wasn’t Chinese either. He was a Mongol. From Tibet. I dimly remembered reading something about Eskimos when I was in prison. Weren’t the Inuits originally a Mongol tribe? I couldn’t pull it up on my screen. When I was locked down, I read everything I could get my hands on, telling myself you never knew what you could use on the streets. But that wasn’t the real reason I spent so much time reading. I was trying to get out. Any way I could. And, sometimes, for a few hours, it worked. Now part of my mind is like some crazy trivia game—I know all kinds of things, but I can’t always connect the dots.

  “I think you’re right,” I told her. Naturally, Mama took that as an insult.

  Nobody asked me what the woman had wanted until the Prof made the scene. Then I ran it down, simultaneously gesturing for Max. “It’s all here,” I said, tapping a sheaf of photocopy paper. “Got his name, address, phone numbers, photographs. Got everything on her too. The woman Crystal Beth says is her cousin.”

  “She wants the guy whacked?” the Prof asked, getting right to it.

  “No. Not a chance. She wants it to stop, doesn’t much care how it gets done. But I don’t think she was looking for a hit man when she met Porkpie that time.”

  “Maybe so,” the Prof said. “But no way the bitch has two relatives with this kinda problem.”

  “There’s that,” I acknowledged. “And she didn’t blink when I told her it’d be twenty large to make it stop. Guaranteed.”

  “She had that much cash with her, mahn?” Clarence asked.

  “I don’t know. She didn’t flash it. But she did have five. And she put it up.”

  Max pointed at me, made a face.

  I shook my head no. Five up front hadn’t been my idea. She’d negotiated it. Like she’d done it before. Which meant maybe she still owed Porkpie some money. And if the little weasel had lied about that . . .

  “What you gonna do, Schoolboy?” the Prof asked.

  I fanned the money out on the table. Circled my fingers around my eyes to make the sign for glasses, then gestured like I was pulling a satchel off the ground. I cut a thousand out of the pot and set it aside. Money for the Mole. The Prof took a thousand for himself. Then Clarence did the same. Then Max.

  All in.

  Mama watched silently. But she didn’t protest when we each pulled two hundred off our shares and handed it over to her.

  “First thing,” I told them, “I go and talk to this cousin of hers.”

  The apartment building was on the West Side, just off Amsterdam, a few blocks south of Ninety-sixth. Soot-gray stone, six stories, faded gilt numbers just above the smudged glass doors. I stepped into the lobby and almost broke my neck sliding on the throw rug of leaflets scattered all over the tile floor. Take-out restaurants, sex-phone services, stereo repair. Armies of off-the-books humans sweep through the city every day, carpet-bombing neighborhoods with their load of useless paper like it was propaganda for invaders. It makes every citizen mad, but petitioning that coalition of pathological slugs they call the City Council would be like trying to get a hooker to take an IOU.

  No doorman in this place. Probably one of those rent-controlled joints the landlord’s trying to empty out. Uptown, they’d let the rats and roaches run wild, not repair the plumbing, have a super with a felony record who kept in practice on the tenants. They wouldn’t have to get so intense in this neighborhood—probably most of the building had gone co-op during the boom a dozen years ago.

  I hit the button for 4-C. Waited for a count of ten. No response. Maybe the buzzer didn’t work. I tried it again, being careful to press the button with a short, respectful tap. Crystal Beth told me I’d be expected, but if the woman upstairs was listening, she’d still be scared. They all get that way after a while.

  I saw a dim shape on the other side of the glass. Couldn’t make out if it was a man or a woman. I moved closer to the glass, keeping my shoulders slumped and face bland. I was wearing a charcoal suit with a faint pinstripe over a white shirt and burnt-orange tie, all visible under the camel’s-hair overcoat I got for a song from a busted-out gambler a couple of years ago. My shoes were plain black lace-ups, polished but not gleaming. My hair was cut medium-length and neatly combed. But I couldn’t do anything about my face.

  The shape coalesced. A woman. Hard to tell her age. Dark hair, pale face. Wearing some kind of white housecoat. I stepped closer. So did she. But she didn’t move her hands, just stood there. Only the French doors between us—two wide panes of glass separated by two narrow panels of wood. Even an amateur could kick through it before she had a chance to run. I held out my hand so she could see the white business card I was holding. She still didn’t move. I slipped it between the flimsy doors the same way any fool could have used a credit card to loid the cheap snap-lock. She reached out and took it, stepped back to peer at it closely. I mimed for her to turn it over. On the back was a note from Crystal Beth in her own handwriting.

  The woman took a deep breath, then reached forward and opened the doors, eyes darting as though she wanted to see around me, make sure I was alone. I stood to the side, letting her have a better view.

  “You’re . . .”

  “From Crystal Beth,” I finished for her.

  She turned her back on me and started for the stairs. I stayed behind, not close enough to spook her. As she climbed, I could see the housecoat was really a lab gown of some kind. White low-cut shoes on her feet. A nurse, maybe?

  The stairs were dirty, but not outstandingly so for New York. No discarded condoms, no live verm
in, no graffiti. Still, she kept carefully away from the walls. “I never know what’s worse,” she said over her shoulder. “The stairs or the elevator. He could be . . . anywhere.”

  “Why don’t you let me walk up ahead of you?” I asked her gently.

  “I . . . okay,” she said, stepping aside for me to pass.

  We came up the rest of the way in silence. “This is it,” she said from behind me, stepping past me to open a door to the fourth floor.

  “I never know how to do this,” she said, moving down the hall over a carpet runner the exact color of slag. “When I go downstairs to get something. If I lock up behind me, he won’t be able to get in my apartment. But then, if he’s in the building, I won’t have time to unlock everything before he gets me. But if I don’t lock up, he can be inside. Waiting for me. That would be . . . worse, I think.”

  She pulled a ring of keys from the lab coat. One lock was above the doorknob, another was set higher, a big deadbolt with a heavy strike-plate around it. She opened them both, pushed the door aside to let me pass.

  The apartment opened into the living room. “Please sit down,” she said, gesturing toward a futon couch covered in plain white canvas. “Can I take your coat?”

  “That’s all right,” I told her, slipping it off, folding it over my forearm and dropping it next to me as I sat down.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “I . . . I’m not sure where to begin.” She walked in a little circle, then abruptly sat down on a straight chair made out of a single piece of white molded plastic. She tugged at the hem of her lab coat, pulling it down across her knees as she looked across at me. Her eyes were scars.

  “Pardon the cliché,” I said gently, “but at the beginning is always best.”

  Her dull mouth twisted in what might have been a smile. “I’m sure. I expected . . . I don’t know. Someone who . . .”

  “Some kind of thug?”

  “No! I mean, Crystal Beth said you would be . . . I guess I just don’t have any . . . image of this. It all seems so . . . insane anyway.”