Safe House Read online

  “Yes! Everything except . . .”

  “The pictures?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re gone,” I told her. “I watched them go.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Sure.”

  “There was a letter. Should I . . . ?”

  “Read it to me,” I told her.

  “It just says: ‘You already got the rest. There is nothing more between us. Please leave me alone.’ Can you imagine? Like I was terrorizing him.”

  “Doesn’t matter, right?”

  “Yes, you’re right. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Let it sit for a while. Don’t do anything. If he ever shows up again, tell your friend, okay?”

  “Yes. Thank you! I—”

  I clicked off the cellular.

  Impossible to know which buttons would drop his elevator, so we’d pushed them all. Maybe it was the high-pitched sound blast ripping his ear when he picked up his home phone. Maybe it was the message on his computer screen when he fired it up, black-bordered like an obituary:

  Maybe knowing we had copies of everything he’d stored on his hard drive made him real nervous and he popped a Valium. Big mistake—the perfect-match lookalike pills we substituted would give him bad enough stomach cramps to make him think he’d been poisoned. And if he tried to drive himself to the Emergency Room, the air bag exploding into his face when he turned the ignition key in the BMW wouldn’t calm him down much.

  And after what we left in his bed, somebody was going to get a great condo at a bargain price. Kind of a pre-fire sale.

  “Harriet told me what happened,” Crystal Beth said to me. “Well, I guess, she didn’t actually know what happened. But he’s gone. Really gone, she thinks.”

  “If she doesn’t call him,” I said, nothing in my voice but the words.

  We were at a small table by ourselves, seated next to the palm-print-smeared window of a coffeehouse on the Lower East Side. Some residents call it the East Village, part of the neighborhood-renaming frenzy that hit the city during the co-op boom. They tried other names for it too—Alphabet City, Loisaida—anything that would make it sound sweeter than it is. Lots of new names came to Manhattan for different pieces. “SoHo.” “TriBeCa.” Even Hell’s Kitchen became “Clinton.” I’ve known that sorry game since I was a little kid. When they put me in a POW camp and called it a foster home.

  Crystal Beth had picked the place. With a day’s notice, I’d sent Clarence over to check it out. “Big nothing, mahn,” he said. “No action.”

  The street outside was covered in a thin film of the gray filth that passes for snowfall down here. She took a long hit off one of her hand-rolled cigarettes, letting the smoke bubble slowly from her broad nose, wafting up past her almond eyes. “I should be angry at that,” she said.

  “At what?”

  “At your . . . assumptions. That women ask for it.”

  “I never make assumptions,” I lied. All of us, all the Children of the Secret, we all make assumptions. We assume you’re going to hurt us. Use us. Betray our love and violate our trust. We all lie too. You taught us that.

  “So why would you say Harriet would ever call him?” she challenged.

  “I don’t know Harriet. I know the . . . dynamic.”

  “Yeah,” she said, sadly acknowledging. “I do too. I hope she never—”

  “Her choice,” I said. “At least she’s got one now.”

  “Choices aren’t cheap,” Crystal Beth replied. “Are they?”

  “I paid heavy for mine,” I told her. Thinking about when I was too small to know what it cost. Or to steal the price. But while I was learning, a lot of people paid. Mostly the wrong ones.

  I love it when citizens talk about hard choices. Where I live, you don’t get many. And the ones you do get are all hard.

  “Speaking of which—” She started to reach in her purse.

  “Not here,” I cut her off. “You don’t flash cash in a joint like this.”

  “I know better than that,” she came back, insulted.

  “Oh. You did this before?”

  Her face turned to her left, the tattoo clear in the feeble afternoon sunlight. “Why would you . . . ?”

  “Porkpie ever come back for his money?” I asked her, trying to catch those almond eyes.

  “Porkpie?”

  “It was five K, right?” Then I told her enough of what I knew to show her there was more.

  As soon as I was finished talking, she went into herself. Deep. I know what it looks like. What it feels like too. Her eyes were open but unfocused, her breathing was so shallow I couldn’t see her chest move. Her hands were gently folded on the table between us.

  I left her there, undisturbed. Sat waiting, not smoking or sipping my hot chocolate. Table sounds all around us, but she was safe in her capsule, untouched.

  I knew what she was doing. She wasn’t in shock, she was looking for answers. I could walk down the same path, but I couldn’t join her, so I stayed where I was.

  Time passed. Prison-slow.

  Her eyes refocused. “Want to take a walk with me?” she asked suddenly, her mouth straight and serious, the corners turned down slightly.

  “In this weather?”

  “It’s not far.”

  “Okay.”

  I left a ten-dollar bill on the table. Figured it was more than enough to cover my hot chocolate and Crystal Beth’s mint tea. But she tossed another bill on top as we were getting up—I couldn’t see what it was. She wasn’t doing some feminism number—the joint was a dive, but it was probably chic enough to charge uptown prices.

  On the street, she flicked the hood up over her shiny hair, tucked her hands into the pockets of her long red coat. I put on a pair of leather gloves, zipped my jacket to the neck, turned the collar up. The wind cut at us with ice-edged neutral hostility. Nothing personal—city winter hates everyone. Crystal Beth stuffed her hands into black mittens, inhaled a deep breath through her flat nose.

  “This way,” she said, bumping her hip against me to move us to the right.

  At the corner, she waited for the light to change even though traffic was so light we could have slipped across easily. We were heading east, the Bowery somewhere just behind us. The streets narrowed. We passed an open strip of vacant lot, its ground cover of broken glass sparkling in the lousy sunlight that followed the dirty sleet. Splattered across the dead-eyed wall of a semi-abandoned building in huge jagged letters was a troubadour’s message:

  As if anyone needed a reminder that the privileged princes and princesses of Generation X had rebelled against their elders by rejecting cocaine. And embracing heroin, snorting it in the deep delusion that only the needle could bring death.

  Poor little rich kids. Never learned how to act. The FDA doesn’t regulate street drugs. The same fifty bucks that bought you a mild buzz on Friday night will buy you a quiet ride down to the Zero the next weekend.

  Crystal Beth reached over and took my hand, held it like a trusting child. A trusting bossy child. She never looked at me, just tugged slightly when she wanted me to cross another street. We were walking down a long block, all by ourselves. Crystal Beth pulled her hand free, put it in her mouth and pulled the mitten off with her teeth. Then she wrapped her small hand around one of my fingers and gently tugged at the glove until it came off. She handed it to me without a word. I put it in my pocket. She took my hand again, swinging it slightly between us.

  Three men came out of a bar down the street. They turned in our direction and started moving toward us in a tight triangle. I tried to pull my left hand away from Crystal Beth. She held it tighter.

  “Drop it,” I told her, cold, eyes on the men.

  She did. I put the glove back on, unzipped my jacket so I could reach inside, stepped forward quickly, putting her a half-pace behind me. I followed the rules for dealing with a pack—take the alpha first. The lead man in the triangle was a Latino, shorter than me but thicker in the body. Our eyes touched, dropped
at the same time. The triangle moved past us. I reached over for Crystal Beth’s hand, but she yanked it away, making a snorting sound through her broad little nose.

  We turned left at the end of the block. “What was that all about?” she asked me.

  “I needed my hands free,” I told her.

  “For what?”

  “For whatever. If those guys got stupid, I’m holding your hand, I might as well have been wearing handcuffs.”

  “They didn’t do anything.”

  “I’m not a fucking fortune-teller,” I said.

  “Are you always this suspicious?”

  “Yeah. Are you always this not?”

  “I wasn’t raised to be paranoid,” she said, looking at me for the first time.

  “Where I was raised, it was the best way to be.”

  “Where . . . ?”

  “Inside,” I said. “Surrounded. You understand?”

  “I . . . don’t know.”

  “You want to give me your hand again?”

  “Why? Did you like it?”

  “Yeah. I did.”

  She was quiet a minute, walking next to me now, stride for stride. “Me too,” she finally said. And put her hand back in mine.

  She led me into an alley just barely wide enough for a garbage truck. Didn’t look like one had tried that for quite a while. She turned right, stopping before a chain-link fence secured by a rubber-covered padlock that spanned a narrow opening in the alley wall. A metal sign wired to the gate said: BEWARE OF THE . . . The rest of the sign was a jagged edge from where it had been ripped apart.

  Inside the chain-link, a back door was positioned between a pair of windows covered with thick wire mesh. The door itself was encased behind a security gate, a heavy lock anchoring it to a steel frame. She took her hand from mine, pulled a Medeco key from her coat pocket and turned the lock. The security door pulled out. Behind it was another, this one painted a light blue. Crystal Beth used the same key on another lock, and we were inside.

  “Come on,” she said, starting up a flight of metal stairs.

  The staircase was almost pitch-dark, the dim light flowing from somewhere above us too faint to do anything but cast murky shadows. Crystal Beth climbed as confidently as a Sherpa. I followed a couple of steps behind her, not questioning. Only myself for going along with this.

  At the landing, she turned and walked toward what had to be the front of the building. We passed a few doors—all closed. At the end of the corridor was a pair of blacked-out windows. The floor looked deserted. Crystal Beth walked past the windows without a glance and started up the next flight, still not saying a word. I went along, following.

  On the next floor a pair of long fluorescent tubes cast a yellowish light down from the ceiling. One door stood halfway open. Crystal Beth stepped through it. Over her shoulder I saw a whole wall of exposed brick and a tall woman with a clipboard in one hand. The woman looked past Crystal Beth to where I was standing, said, “Who the fuck is this?” in a voice as warm as a microchip.

  “He’s helping me with something,” Crystal Beth told her, not moving.

  “No outsiders,” the woman said, holding the clipboard like it was a cross and I was a vampire. A chocolate-colored cat stuck its narrow head around the corner of her room, regarding me with that “What’s-in-it-for-me?” stare they all have.

  “Stop making rules, Lorraine,” Crystal Beth told her. “We’re going to my place. I just wanted you to know we were in the building.”

  “I—”

  “Come on,” Crystal Beth told me again, turning on her heel and walking away. I followed her again, not looking back, feeling the tall woman’s glare on my back like a laser-dot from a sniper’s rifle.

  We walked quickly past the next floor. All closed doors, but I could hear music playing behind one of them.

  “This is mine,” Crystal Beth said when we finally reached what I guessed was the top floor. She opened a door and walked in.

  As soon as I saw the skylight overhead, I knew I’d been right about it being the top floor. The room was spartan—a mattress on the floor with neatly tucked blankets on top, an ancient leather easy chair patched with multi-colored scraps sitting under an old-fashioned floor lamp with a parchment shade; next to it, an empty orange crate held a large handmade clay ashtray and a box of kitchen matches. A wood desk was against the far wall, bracketed by some army-surplus filing cabinets. The only modern furnishings were a laptop computer with a row of wire-connected peripherals and a radio–CD–cassette–tape combo with bookend speakers sitting proudly on bookshelves made from long planks set on cinderblocks. I glimpsed what might be a kitchen to my left. Closed door to my right was probably a bathroom. The other door was a closet, maybe? Thick-cored gray radiators sat between the windows and against a side wall. The windows were heavy-coated with the same blackout paint they had downstairs.On the sill next to one of them was a green Micata cordless electric drill, a long narrow bit already fitted.

  “You into carpentry?” I asked her.

  “I’m into self-defense,” she said firmly, picking up the drill and pulling the trigger. The bit whirred. Up close, it would make a knife look friendly.

  Crystal Beth replaced the drill—crossed over to the easy chair, flicked on the floor lamp. It glowed faintly yellow through the parchment shade. “Give me your jacket,” she said. Hers was already off, folded over her arm.

  She opened one of the closed doors. Hung up our coats on a single hanger, mine over hers. Said “Have a seat,” pointing to the easy chair.

  Then she took a beige metal chair from where it had been lying folded against the wall, unsnapped it and put it next to the easy chair. She sat down.

  “I’m going on my instincts,” she said. “Letting go of my fear. Do you understand?”

  I nodded like I did, but the whole idea was insane to me. The best thing you can do with fear is use it, not lose it.

  “You know what this is?” she asked, making a sweeping gesture with one hand.

  “Squatter’s roost?”

  “No. It just looks abandoned. We did that on purpose. It’s mine. I own it. This is a safehouse.”

  “For . . . ?”

  “Victims,” she said quietly. “Victims who are tired of the role.”

  “Where do I . . . ?”

  She smiled and handed me my own pack of cigarettes. Must have taken them from my jacket when she hung it up, searching with her fingers. I lit one with a kitchen match from the box sitting on the orange crate, blew smoke at the ceiling to tell her I was still waiting for the answer.

  “Do you want to hear my story?” she asked. “Or just the bottom line?”

  Without taking my eyes off hers, I reached up and pulled the cord on the floor lamp so I wouldn’t feel like I was in an interrogation cell. The room darkened. “Tell me your story,” I said.

  “All communes get runaways,” Crystal Beth said. “Throwaways too. Good ones and bad ones. The communes, not the runaways. And they all make newcomers live by their rules if they want to join. For some of the communes, that means practicing their religion. For others, it means turning tricks. Or selling drugs. With us, it was they had to live in peace. Peace and love. Sounds stupid to you, maybe?”

  “No. Not stupid. Just . . . hard.”

  “Yes! Sometimes it was very hard. They didn’t all make it. Some were running away just for the adventure. Some because they were scared. Or lost themselves. There were outlaws too, looking for a place to hole up. And some, they thought they could . . . take over, I guess. Be in charge. We never had anyone in charge. We never did that. They—the elders—started the commune to be free of violence. They had all felt violence in their lives, and they all had moved away from it in their spirits. What they wanted was a place where anyone could do that.”

  She stopped talking then. Got up and walked around in a little circle. Came back and took her seat again.

  “Her name was Starr,” she said. “Good name for a little hippie, wasn’t it
? When she came to us she was maybe fourteen. . . . Nobody really knew. And we never asked.” She took a breath. Then she said, “Everything was fine until they came for her.”

  I knew better than to hold her eyes all through whatever story she wanted to tell, so I focused on the tattoo, not even sure if I was actually seeing it in the darkness, just knowing it was there, moving as she spoke.

  “Who came for her?” I asked.

  “Bikers. A whole pack of them. They said she was their property, and they wanted her back.”

  “Were they flying colors?”

  “What difference does it . . . ? Oh, I know what you mean. I’m not being fair. With the story, I’m not being fair. We knew a lot of bikers. They had their own communes, just like we did, only they lived in cities. They were nice, most of them. Friendly to the big people, sweet to the children. I remember one of them—Romance, his name was, I’ll never forget that. He had a great flaming red beard, like a Viking. I used to go for rides on the back of his motorcycle all the time. Not off the grounds—my mother wouldn’t let me do that—but we had plenty of land.”

  She was rambling. I threw out a line. “He was the one who taught you to ride?”

  “No, that was Roxanne. She had this old Indian, a big huge black thing with a white stripe on the tank. It had a foot clutch. She had to work it for me while I sat in front of her. She was . . . How do you know I ride?”

  “Just a guess,” I told her, straight-faced. “So these bikers—the ones who came for Starr—you didn’t know them?”

  “None of us knew them. They were from downstate somewhere. California, I think. But I don’t know. I don’t remember much about them except . . . my father wouldn’t let them take her. Starr. He was very gentle with them. He explained it. Nobody is property. No person can own another. That’s wrong. It’s against nature. Starr was scared. She said she would go with them, but my father said she didn’t have to go if she didn’t want to. I remember it like it was an hour ago. Three of the bikers, aimed like an arrowhead. Straddling the motorcycles, the leader in front. Telling my father that Starr was their property. She even had their brand on her. They told my father to make her strip, take a look for himself. . . .”