Bloody London (16 page)

Half a dozen dog walkers lounged on benches in the park with the bronze warthog. Their pups sniffed the earth and each other. A stream of people cruised the river front. Their chatter floated out on the night air, along with the cars that honked on the drive and the noise from a boombox and the yappy dogs. Leaves crackled underfoot and I could hear the water, and in Queens, across the river, lights twinkled. I leaned against the railing and waited.

Two flights of stairs up, along the terraced façade with its little park, was the Middlemarch. I could look up and see it through the stand of trees in the park, branches almost bare.

I leaned against the railing and waited and watched. I looked at the passing faces. Everyone smiling. Low crime, fat economy, this was fun, and even the Pascoe story added a buzz: rich people, fabulous apartments, tyrannical co-op boards, the Russians moving in, the Natashas flaunting it.

A group of teenagers drifted into the park and stood around a knotted dwarf tree. Some smoked, others stared at the water or made out in the shadows of the trees. An old Portishead number played on the boombox. The smell of pot was in the air, and the sound of beepers. Private-school kids wore beepers on their belts.

I watched them, the white kids sprawled across the park who ate French fries and Big Macs and sipped out of forty-ounce beers. They were pale, tall, long-boned kids, the best stuff the gene pool can produce.

“Hi.” Callie came up alongside me and leaned on the railing. She was in skinny black jeans and a white T-shirt.

“What happened to the bell bottoms?”

“Very last year.” She looked at the kids near the tree. “They call it the Feeling Tree. It's OK, Artie, you can laugh.”

Nights, if they didn't go to Central Park, kids from St Pete's came here to the river, Cal told me, then she looked over at the street.

“Oh God. The Guidos, omigod.”

Music blaring, a two-tone Buick Regal, bronze and tan, pulled up alongside the park. Two boys, Guidos from Astoria, she called them, tumbled out. They were followed by a couple of their girls. The boys wore tight silky shirts and pressed jeans, the girls had bell bottoms, platform shoes, earrings through their eyebrows. Cal said they came over the Triboro or the 59th Street Bridge, Guidos like them, and cruised the rich kids. The boys from St Pete's tried to get off with the Guidettes. Sometimes it happened.

They eyeballed each other, and snickered at each other's outfits. From where I stood, the mating rituals looked harmless. One of the Guidos smoothed his hair and postured for Callie's sake.

She giggled. “Don't tell Mom, OK? She thinks it's bad news, the Guidos, but they're OK. So, Artie?”

“What?”

“There's Jared Mishkin. By the bench.”

I said, “Introduce me. Say I'm your uncle, whatever.”

Callie said, “Don't be such a jerk, I'll say you're my friend.”

She introduced me to a couple of her girlfriends first. They wore tight Ts and showed cleavage and puffed on joints. The smell of pot was so thick now it clogged my nostrils. Then Callie said, “This is Jared Mishkin.”

Up close, the Mishkin kid was dazzling. He was sixteen, tall, well built, graceful; he had a handsome face, black hair fell over his forehead and he stroked it away from his eyes, which were very light, very blue.

Jared tossed a cigarette on the grass and rubbed it out carefully with his foot, then reached down, picked up the butt and pocketed it. He smiled. He had a heartbreaking thousand-watt smile. “The environment,” he said. “I'm hoping to go into politics on a green ticket some day.” At first I figured him for a smartass New York kid, but he was serious. Callie watched me watch him; she was crazy about the kid.

“Where's Harry?” Callie asked him.

He said, “Some poor bastard homeless guy got beat up, crawled out of a cash machine. Harry found a cop, took him to the shelter. Harry's still there.”

I said, “What shelter?”

“For the homeless. Mr Pascoe's place.”

“Thomas Pascoe?”

“Yeah. Under the bridge.”

“Cal, I'll drop you home. Nice meeting you, Jared.”

“What's the hurry, Artie?” She was irritated.

A picture was forming up in my head. I was making connections and it made me tense. I wanted Callie out of here. “Let's just go,” I said.

Jared said, “If Callie wants to stay, I could see she gets home on time.”

Callie's eyes narrowed; don't blow this, the look said; give me some space here. I didn't want to leave her but I left, looking over my shoulder. Jared was whispering to her, his mouth near her hair. She looked young and vulnerable.

As I left the park, I looked back again and saw the kids. Callie's pals were a lot tougher than the Guidos – a couple of the boys from Queens lingered on the
fringes – who only had crappy cars for turf. The St Pete's kids, Jared, his pals, who commandeered the park with a chilling sense of entitlement, owned the access routes to the bigtime. In a few years, they'd own the neighborhood.

On my way to the shelter, I called Sonny Lippert.

He snorted into the phone. “Yeah, Pascoe and the homeless. City shelters. International rescues for the homeless, too, it eats my liver, Art, you know.”

I held my tongue.

“The goyim, a certain type WASP, they get off on that kind of thing.”

“You know anything about St Peter's?”

“The school?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure, it's where they train the kids up to inherit the parish of the privileged. The ironies of the New York rich are endless, man.”

Under the bridge, near the river, a couple of homeless guys played cards on an empty crate where a flashlight was stuck upright in a coffee can. Hidden by the old tiled arches of the bridge, the makeshift camp had gone up. Cardboard boxes, tents made out of black plastic garbage bags on poles, supermarket carts. A few blocks north of the Middlemarch, but hidden in the shadows of the bridge.

Traffic roared overhead on the bridge, the boats buzzed the river, a few blocks away Callie and her pals flirted in the park, but the guys playing cards, the others who sat and smoked or snored on cardboard, were shut off from the rest of the city.

I picked my way through the cardboard and the garbage, and from out of nowhere, someone touched my arm. I jumped. He said, “Got a smoke?”

I gave him the pack. He took three and returned it, then started for the street. Under the streetlight I saw he was a middle-aged guy, round face, dull eyes.

I said, “You know anything about a shelter around here?”

“Come on.”

I followed him past the bridge where the arches had been restored, the turn-of-the-century tiles buffed up to a creamy glow, ready for the new market, the restaurants, food stores, shops, that would change the neighborhood. It would all change: the homeless would go; the old ladies who drank their pensions dry in bad Chinese dives on First Avenue would die off. At buildings like the Middlemarch, the co-op boards would give way; more new money would arrive. I thought about the new buildings towering over the rest of them. “Steals our air,” Frankie had said. Somewhere a dog barked.

Near the bridge, a derelict tennis bubble loomed up and the homeless guy headed for it. The light was dull and I squinted. Slowly, out of the dark, I saw a mass of bodies take shape in the night. It was a long line of figures that snaked its way from the camp near the river towards the converted tennis club.

I followed the moving figures up the street. In the streetlight it was a weird sight: the long line, passive, sullen, weary, shuffling, jostling on the way in, then coming out the other side of the temporary building. Now the line of people moved quickly, food clutched in their hands, people darting out of the light to eat.

The guy I gave the smokes to got in line. He said, “Soup kitchen.”

“What's the shelter like?”

“It ain't exactly home, but it's OK, one of the best. Good neighborhood, after all.” He laughed.

By the time we got up to the shelter door, I saw a couple of cops climb out of a blue and white, the lights on it flashing. I told one my name and he said, “Homeless guy got beat up. Crawled part way here, one of the kids that volunteers brought him in. You seen the goons they got patrolling the cash machines?”

I thought of the black guy in the bank lobby with the mayor's mask on. “Yeah, I did.”

“Someone tried a little outreach on him. We got a situation. The New Social Order, right? Clean 'em out of the bank lobbies and you got a city that's squeaky clean. You a detective?”

I nodded.

“He's been asking for someone, you mind speaking with him? He got hurt pretty bad. He's inside, I'll take you, OK?”

On the wall of the shelter was a picture of Thomas Pascoe in a frame. Underneath it was a vase with white carnations. Everywhere was the heavy smell of soup.

The shelter had been carved out of part of the tennis club and the dome-like roof made it cavernous. At the far end were long metal tables, and a steam table where a crew of servers produced soup and sandwiches.

The young cop led me to a section of the shelter that was partitioned off from the main room. It had six beds. A man sat on one of them. The cop said, “This is the guy that got beat up.”

He sat on the edge of the bed. Someone had patched up his face and I sat next to him. He was young, twenty-five, not more, squat, with the biceps of a body
builder but pale milky eyes that were a little vacant. His name was Dante Ramirez, he said. He held a newspaper in one hand. In the other was a cup of coffee that he set down on the floor by the bed.

“You an actual detective, man? You got some clout here?”

“I don't know.”

“Don't let them send me to the hospital, please. They make you wait all night.”

“Don't worry,” I said.

“It's been bad since the murder, you see. Then the demonstration by Gracie Mansion. Everything changed. It was OK before, then they start watching us.”

I said, “It's pretty tough.”

He said, “Yeah. You know how we feel, man, a lot of us that ain't insane or ripped on bad drugs? I mean, I'm a drunk, I like drinking, but I ain't crazy, you know? I finished high school. I had a job. I lost it, I lost my house, I got sent from Queens to Manhattan, this motel, that motel. I lost my baby. They took him. The city say I can't have housing 'cause I got a brother in Brooklyn, but my brother beat on the baby's head. They make you feel immoral. You're not in the game, you didn't play it right. You're a loser, man. The mayor said maybe the homeless will figure out it's easier to live in a good climate, I hear a rumor he's offering a oneway ticket south, I get this vision of us loaded on trains, south, you know what I'm saying. Trains. Camps.” He shrugged. “You seen the shanty town down under the bridge?”

“I saw it.”

“We call 'em Rudivilles, honor of our mayor,” he said. “We got some all over town. It's getting cold, out there, man,” he added. “I'm scared of the cold.” He held up the newspaper. There was a picture of Thomas Pascoe. “Pascoe.” He whispered it.

“Pascoe hurt you?”

Ramirez was shaking. “No. No.” He picked up the styrofoam coffee cup, but the brew sloshed over the rim and he set it down on the floor. His hands shook hard.

I said, “It's OK. Pascoe's dead. He can't hurt you.”

“Mr Pascoe, Tommy, he said we should call him Tommy, was the best human being I ever met in my fucking life.” Dante Ramirez got up and made his way to the main room, where he stopped under the portrait of Pascoe and looked up at it like an icon. He crossed himself.

“He raised the money for this shelter. He got us clothes and food and medicine. He tracked down families if people had any. He came here himself most nights. If you couldn't make it through the night any other way, he got you something to drink. He was always here.”

The words had become a eulogy, and I suddenly realized that, gradually, a group of men had clustered around us.

They began talking. Echoing Ramirez' words. Relating stories of Pascoe's good work. He was a saint, it seemed; now he was a martyr.

I looked across the room. She was there. Frankie Pascoe, a cigarette in her mouth, she was behind a cafeteria counter. She was passing out sandwiches.

Frankie stubbed out her cigarette, then lit a fresh one. Between passing the sandwiches to the growing line of homeless, she placed the smoke on the edge of the steel counter. She looked up suddenly. Saw me. Smiled.

I wanted to touch her. I walked towards her and shoved my hands in my pockets. She stripped off the latex gloves, tossed them on the table. “It was a condition of knowing my husband, the charity work,” she said. “I thought it was the right memorial, coming here as usual. Anyway, I can't go anyplace else, the TV people are always out there waiting. Thank God for Halloween, it will give them something else to cover.”

“Your husband was a popular man around here.”

She said, “Here, certainly. Our neighbors weren't happy at all, a shelter on their doorstep, but Tommy said it was the right thing. He was persuasive.”

“I bet. Unhappy enough to wish him dead? Enough to kill him?”

“The worst of them were, of course, the new people. They donate their Versaces to the shelter thrift shop, then they want a cut of the profit, that's their idea of helping.”

I kept quiet.

She said, “You like the irony, I'm sure, Tommy helping the homeless. We've got lots of irony for you around here.”

I thought of Sonny. “So they say.”

“It keeps you from feeling,” she said. “The irony. A very fine British habit.”

“Who else worked here?”

“All kinds. It's a day shelter for the most part.
Showers. Kitchens. We've got a few emergency beds.”

“Kids from St Peter's?”

Her eyes darted away from me for the first time, unable to hold on to me, looking for someone else.