The Biology of Luck (6 page)

Larry walks backwards. He steers his burghers around Hardenbergh's Whitehall Building, points out the black smoke billowing from the Standard Oil headquarters, pays tribute to the Downtown Athletic Club and the ornate friezes of the custom house. He preps his pupils for Castle Clinton, waxes rich on its previous incarnations as an aquarium and concert venue. The Dutch nod
appreciatively at the names P. T. Barnum, Jenny Lind, Fiorello La Guardia. They have absolutely no idea what he is talking about. Larry has given up trying to impress the girl, and now he is free to talk over the crowd, through them, to address his wisdom to the whole expanse of lower Manhattan, to the stalagmitic towers of granite and glass, letting his words reverberate through the bowels of world capitalism and reach for the distant peaks of the Times Tower and the Empire State Building. His words are the mantra of a hollow culture, an incantation to form over substance. His lips must keep moving, his larynx quivering until it burns, but the content of his discourse is as trifling, as thoroughly irrelevant, as are the conversion figures in Van Huizen's book. Larry can say absolutely anything he desires. Anything at all.

They pass through the heavy wooden doors of Castle Clinton. The rounded walls of the fortress stand eight feet thick, solid stone, equipped with twenty-eight cannons, none ever fired except in target practice, and Larry shares all of this, striving to do his duty, relating in painstaking detail the firing of the first salute, Evacuation Day, November 25, 1811, but the Dutch prefer to stroll the gangways and battlements at their own leisurely pace and to poke their noses into the barrels of the guns. A handful of loyalists, including both Van Huizens and the parents of the teenage beauty, cling to Larry as he leads them through the fort and onto the exterior boardwalk. A pair of twin boys in matching shorts, not affiliated with Larry's tour, toss pieces of Styrofoam packaging from the fortress into the surf; these synthetic fragments float for a moment, and then the sea swallows them ferociously.

The girl scales the parapet and balances herself, arms outstretched, like an aspiring ballerina. Her pale skin stands out against the deep, opulent blue of the harbor. She is a fitting masthead for this island nation, for the undisputed capital of glamour. But she is too young, much too young. Larry turns his back on the girl and acknowledges several park rangers, crisp young men, more polish than spit, and he wonders if they share his unhealthy thoughts. No
matter. All will go home empty handed. It is enough to know that girls like this exist, to survive hand-to-mouth on the distant promise that such a beauty might someday be his, may fall into his lap, that he may share a stalled elevator with such a radiant creature or rescue her off a window ledge or win her heart with an epic novel, to keep Larry going, to keep his lips moving, to buttress him against the Willem van Huizens of the world.

“Is it true,” asks Van Huizen “that the channel used to freeze over frequently? It is my understanding that O'Callaghan and Hastings, who in my opinion are the two most trustworthy chroniclers of the city, differ on the subject. My own inclination is that Hastings has the better half of the argument, but I'd appreciate your thoughts….” Van Huizen tucks his hands into his pockets, his chest cocked forward, every joint of his soft body announcing that he doesn't give a damn for Larry's thoughts.

Even by the standards of men like Van Huizen, this strikes Larry as a particularly pompous question. Larry knows little of the long-dead Edmund Baily O'Callaghan and Hugh Hastings beyond their names and has no reason to believe them particularly gifted historians; he does know that the harbor has only frozen once in recorded times, during the winter of 1779–1780, and he begins to recount that frigid episode. Halfway through his answer, Larry hears the splash.

His first vision of the calamity is on the faces of the crowd. Eyes widen, mouths drop. All at once there is a frenzied charge toward the parapet, led by the girl's mother, accompanied by wild gesticulations and shouting in a foreign tongue. Shock rapidly diffuses into panic, even terror, before stabilizing itself on the bedrock of helplessness. The girl is flailing, sputtering, sinking. The water lashes against the concrete flood break, churning up clouds of spray. The crowd is hollering, pointing, pleading. The girl's mother pummels the father's chest, blaming him for the ultimate disaster, although it has not yet transpired, her mournful wail suggests that the girl's death is already a fait accompli. Larry's universe slows to freeze-frame. This is the opportunity he has been waiting for all of his adult life, one of those
rare instances of heroic potential. He takes in the drowning girl, also a pair of tugboats guiding a barge through the bay. The water churns cold and turbulent. Larry slowly, methodically, unbuttons his shirt; his actions are as precise and meticulous as those of a watch smith dismantling a mechanical timepiece. He vaults himself onto the parapet. He looks over his shoulder, capturing the ambivalence of the spectators, the hope, the apprehension, the mother's distorted features, Van Huizen's bemused grimace, the unadulterated befuddlement of a stout woman in a beige shawl. Larry steps forward, braces himself. And then, as the girl's head nears the point of submersion, her bare arms slackening, the tension easing from her face, in recognition, maybe in resignation, she resurfaces on the shoulders of a park ranger armed with a life ring. The ordeal is over.

Larry has no place in the bathos that follows. He is not a hero, not even a player, only a bare-chested tour guide standing on a parapet, holding a button-down shirt—a man self-conscious of his concave chest and sun-starved skin. The park ranger receives the applause, the grateful maternal hug, the generous-if-gauche gratuity from the armchair historian. They lay the girl out on a cushioned tarp, drawing her hair away from her slightly bloated face. She sputters water, smiles. Soon sirens announce the arrival of professionals, paramedics, strapping men equipped with a gurney and gauze. They do not offer Larry medical attention; they do not even inquire after his health. Their only concern is loading the teenager onto an ambulance, shepherding her parents in after her, transporting the VIP trio out of the war zone at a high rate of speed. The Dutch tourists disperse. They replay the incident in hushed voices, queuing for tickets to the Ellis Island ferry, still determined to make the most of their morning. No irreparable damage has been done. Nobody has died. If their numbers have been marginally reduced, it is their responsibility, their moral duty, like alpine hikers or characters in a murder mystery, to compensate for the loss. They are up for the occasion.

Larry is the only genuine victim of the episode. His moment of glory has degenerated into self-consciousness, his teenage beauty
lassoed from his clutches like a rodeo steer. His book will fail. His date will fail. It is all carved in stone. Men like Larry Bloom don't win the love of women like Starshine Hart. Men like Larry Bloom don't publish epic novels to literary acclaim. When you get right down to it—and Larry doesn't think he can go much lower at the moment—men like Larry Bloom don't do much of anything.

One by one, his fingers refasten the buttons of his shirt.

Word on the street: Bone, the one-armed super, can get you anything.

He sits in the forenoon sun, eyes closed but not sleeping, absorbing his beauty rays with a silver reflector, so that if his aluminum lawn chair weren't planted on the Fillmore Avenue sidewalk, if his Hawaiian shirt weren't clipped at the top with a bolo tie, if the shades resting in his tight-cropped hair didn't boast a bridge of custom-made gold leaf, in short, if he were not Bone, but just another olive-skinned cripple at the curbside, you might make the gross mistake of feeling sorry for him. He seems so harmless, so overtly innocuous. It is difficult to imagine, at first glance, that this emaciated creature is the kingpin, the Alpha and the Omega, the man who has connected the sorts of people who know each other. But it would take only one blink of a lizard's eye, one snap of Bone's calloused fingers, to supply you with anything, absolutely anything, contraband and coveted. Bone is the Wells Fargo wagon of the nascent millennium. He can get you high, he can get you screwed, he can get you shot. He can arm your band of mercenaries with Kalashnikovs and M-16 rifles, load them onto state-of-the-art personnel transports and deposit them within hours in the mudflats off the Guatemalan coast or Havana harbor. He can wipe clean your record as a pedophile, get you elected to the legislature, have your political opponents' families dismembered with machetes. If you have the money, if you have the need, if your personal welfare depends upon securing a year's supply of napalm or nude photographs
of the Queen of England or fucking identical twins simultaneously, if your fetish is panda fur or celebrities' tampons, if your talisman is World Series rings or severed human tongues, if you crave early Christian relics or your employer's wife or a particular print at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bone can make it happen. That, at least, is the word on the street.

To the tenants of number 72, the enigma of Bone offers a perennial motif for gossip and idle speculation. Rumor holds him to be the illegitimate son of the Lucchese family don, also a disinherited heir to the Walker cosmetics fortune, even the scion of a long line of distinguished Yemeni rabbis. He speaks English with a French accent; his French stops and starts with the glottal punctuation of a German. Nobody knows his origins, his history, the source of his thick roll of bills or the cause of his disfiguring wound, whether he really fought beside Che in Bolivia or against Che in the Sierra Madre or helped the CIA destabilize Iran in 1955. Nobody even knows if Bone is his first name or his surname or possibly a cognominal homage to his lack of flesh. All that is certain is that the one-armed super will move your automobile to the ebb and flow of alternate-side parking for a modest fee, and that your daily existence will prove much more pleasant if he likes you. Unless, of course, he likes you more than you like him, which is why Starshine takes pains to avoid his presence.

She chains her bike down the block and attempts to sneak past Bone at a brisk pace. The Dominican Jesus freak and his pregnant sister-in-law are lounging on the stoop, sharing segments of a diced mango, jabbering away in Spanish. The Jesus freak's name is actually Jesus. Jesus Echegaray. He works the Transit Authority night shift. She has given up saying hello to him. Sharshine's key is already in the lock when she can sense the super's gaze upon her, only one eye raised like a pirate, its intensity stronger than the shock of a taser.

“Three-J,” Bone calls out.

The turnover is too rapid for the super to learn his tenants' names, even if they catch the fancy of Mr. Little Bone, so he relies
upon apartment numbers. To Starshine, the bark of “3-J” is never good news. She stops dead in her tracks.

Bone levers himself out of his chair and approaches her slowly, measuring each step as though it were a precious spice. His gait heralds his power, his placidity. Bone has all of the time in the world.

“Bedsprings,” he says.

“Excuse me?”

“Bedsprings,” he repeats. “At night, you make this noise with the bedsprings. The neighbors complain.”

Bone raises and lowers his hand, palm down, in an effort to mime the compression of bedsprings. His lips form a thin, dark gash. It is impossible to decipher his intentions: Is this a come-on? A warning? Starshine is fairly confident that it is not a joke. The one-armed super is decidedly above humor.

“I'm sorry,” stammers Starshine. “I'll be more careful.”

“You'll be more careful,” agrees Bone. “The neighbors complain.”

Starshine is too uncomfortable with the subject, with the super, to pursue the matter further. But it makes her blood boil. Here these people are operating an illegal poultry farm outside her windows, papering the second floor landing with posters of their so-called savior and the Virgin Mary, discarding their cigarette butts and fast-food wrapping on the stoop, not to mention overpopulating the world with excess children, cramping them all together in a railroad flat with at least two pit bulls and God knows how many flea-infested cats and a deranged brother-in-law who proselytizes door-to-door, and they have the nerve to complain that she has an occasional houseguest. It really is too much to stomach.

“I'll take care of it,” Starshine promises. “I didn't realize they could hear us.”

“Good,” says Bone. “We go up and see.”

Arguing would serve no purpose. Bone has done this before, has invited himself into her apartment on one pretext or another, although none as compromising as this one, but the visits are short
in duration, more like inspections than social calls, so Starshine has learned to acquiesce to the course of least resistance. After the super's first visit, an examination of the bathroom grouting in response to a flood on the second floor, Starshine made the mistake of complaining to the management company. A midlevel agent humored her for twenty minutes. Her hot water supply vanished mysteriously for three consecutive days. Although she could substantiate nothing—afterward she couldn't even document the loss of hot water—Starshine learned her lesson. She is an at-will sojourner in the kingdom of Bone.

The super leads her into the dimly lit vestibule.

“You pick up your mail,” he says. “I wait.”

“What?”

“You did not pick up your mail yesterday. I wait while you pick it up.”

Bone folds his arm under the pit of his stump. Starshine, tears of frustration pooling behind her eyes, fumbles for her mailbox key. She feels violated, torn to shreds. It couldn't be any worse if Bone mounted her forcibly to test the decibel level of the bedsprings. How can the asshole possibly know whether or not she has collected yesterday's mail? But he does, damn it. She hastily retrieves her allotment of correspondence, mostly bills and late notices, and stuffs the assortment of official-looking envelopes into the waistband of her pants. She will not humiliate herself any further by examining them in his presence.