Hell's Kitchen Read online

  He glanced at his potential fare. “Hey, man, I’m going off duty-”

  Pellam silenced him with another bill.

  The family piled in. From the back seat Ismail, eyes cautious now, stared at Pellam. Then the cab was gone. He hefted the Betacam, which now weighed a half ton, and lifted it to his shoulder once again.

  What’s this? A cowboy?

  Boots, blue jeans, black shirt.

  All he needs is a string tie and a horse.

  Yee-haw, Sonny thought. Everybody’s tawking at me…

  He’d watched as the cowboy had stuffed the shriveled-up nigger lady and her little nigger kids into a cab and had returned to the charred remains of the tenement.

  As he’d been doing for the past several hours Sonny studied the destroyed building with pleasure and a modicum of itchy lust. At the moment he was thinking about the noise of fire. The floors had fallen, he knew, with a crash but nobody would have heard. Fire is much louder than people think. Fire roars with the sound of blood in your ears when the flames reach your, say, knees.

  And he was thinking of the smell. He inhaled the unique perfume of scorched wood and carbonized plastic and oxidized metal. Then, reluctantly, he surfaced from his reverie and studied the cowboy carefully. He was taping the fire marshal as he directed an exhausted fireman to hoe through some refuse with his Halligan tool, combination axe and crowbar. Invented by Huey Halligan. An all-time, world-class firefighter, pride of the NYFD. Sonny respected his enemies.

  He knew a lot about them too. For instance, he knew that there were 250 fire marshals in the City of New York. Some were good and some were bad but this one, Lomax, was excellent. Sonny watched him taking pictures of the alligatoring on a piece of charred wood. The marshal had spotted that right away, God bless him. The black squares on the surface were large and shiny, which meant the fire was fast and it was hot. Useful in the investigation. And the trial – as if they’d ever catch him.

  The marshal picked up a six-foot hook and broke through a ground-floor window, shone his flashlight inside.

  A few years ago the city created the Red Hat patrol in the fire marshal’s department. They’d give marshals red baseball caps and sent them cruising through high-risk arson areas. Those were the days when Sonny was just learning his trade and it had been very helpful to flag the marshals so obviously. Now they dressed like regular plainclothes schmucks but Sonny had enough experience that he didn’t need red hats to spot the enemy. Now Sonny could look in a man’s eyes and know that he made fires his living.

  Either starting them or putting them out.

  Sonny, no longer quite so happy, feeling shakier and sweatier, glanced at the big camera in the cowboy’s hand. A cable ran to a battery pack in a canvas bag. It wasn’t one of those cheap videocams. This was the real thing.

  Who exactly are you, Joe Buck? What exactly are you doing here?

  Sonny began to sweat harder (which didn’t bother him though he’d been sweating an awful lot lately) and his hands began to shake (which did bother him because that was a very bad thing in someone who assembled incendiary devices for a living).

  Watching tall, thin Joe Buck take some more footage of the burnt-out tenement. Sonny decided he hated the cowboy more for his height than because he was shooting so fucking much tape of a building he’d just burned down.

  Still, in some part of his heart, he hoped the tapes were good; he was proud of this little fire.

  After he’d started the blaze and slipped back out through the basement door, he’d hidden in the construction site across the street and turned on his Radio Shack scanner. He heard the dispatcher put out a second-alarm assignment. It had been a 10-45, code 2 call. He was pleased about the alarm – which meant a serious fire – but disappointed about the code, which meant that there’d been only injuries, not fatalities. Code 1 meant death.

  The cowboy continued to shoot for a few minutes. Then he shut the big camera off and slipped it back into his bag.

  Sonny glanced again at the fire marshal and his cronies – my gosh, that’s one huge faggot assistant. Lomax told the big boy to order a backhoe and start the vertical excavation as soon as possible. Silently Sonny told them that this was the correct procedure for investigating a fire like this.

  But Sonny was getting more and more worried. Pretty soon he was all worry, the way a corridor fills with smoke; one minute it’s clear, the next it’s dense as cotton.

  The reason, however, wasn’t Lomax or his huge assistant. It was the cowboy.

  I hate that man. Hate him, hate him, hate him hatehimhatehim.

  Sonny tossed his long blond ponytail off his shoulder, wiped a sweating forehead with shaking hands and eased through the crowd, closer to Joe Buck. His breathing was labored and his heart slammed in his chest. He sucked smoke-laden air into his lungs and exhaled very slowly, enjoying the taste, the smell. Beneath his hands the yellow tape trembled. Stop that stop that stop that stopthatstopthat!

  He glanced up at Pellam.

  Not quite a foot taller. Maybe a lot less than that. Ten inches, if Sonny stood up straight. Or nine.

  Suddenly a new spectator eased between them and Sonny was jostled aside. The intruder was a young woman in a rich, deep-green double-breasted suit. A businesswoman. She said, “Terrible. Just awful.”

  “Did you see it happen?” the cowboy asked.

  She nodded. “I was coming home from work. I was on an audit. You a reporter?”

  “I’m doing a film about some of the tenants in the building.”

  “A film. Cool. A documentary? I’m Alice.”

  “Pellam.”

  Pellam, Sonny thought. Pellam. Pell-am. He pictured the name and spoke it over and over and over in his mind until, like the top of a column of smoke, it was there but was no longer visible.

  “At first,” she continued, looking at the cowboy’s, at Pellam’s lean face, “it was like there was nothing wrong, then all of a sudden there were flames everywhere. I mean, totally everywhere.” She carried a heavy briefcase stamped Ernst & Young in gold and with her free hand twined her short red hair nervously about her index finger. Sonny glanced at her laminated business card, hanging from the handle.

  Pellam asked, “Where exactly did it start?”

  She nodded. “Well, I saw the flames break through the window there.” Pointed to the basement.

  She didn’t seem at all like an Alice to him. She looked like that somber little thing on The X-Files, whom Sonny, in a private joke, called “Agent Scullery.”

  Like Pellam, Scullery was taller than Sonny. He disliked tall men but he venomously hated women taller than he was and when she happened to glance down at him the way she’d glance at a squirrel his hatred turned from anger to something very calm and very hot.

  “I was the one that called the fire department. From that box on the corner. Those boxes, you know, you see but you never think about.”

  He also hated short hair because it didn’t take very long to burn away. He wiped his hands on his white slacks and listened carefully. Agent Scullery rambled on about fire trucks and ambulances and burn victims and smoke victims and jump victims.

  And mud.

  “There was mud all over the place. You don’t think about mud at fires.”

  Some of us do, Sonny thought. Go on.

  Agent Scullery told Joe Buck the faggot cowboy about glowing-red bolts and melting glass and a man she’d seen pulling burnt pieces of chicken from the embers and eating them while people screamed for help. “It was…” she paused, thinking of a concise word, “excruciating.” Sonny had worked for a number of business people and he knew how they lived to summarize.

  “Did you see anyone near the building when it started?”

  “In the back I did. There were some people there. In the alley.”

  “Who?”

  “I didn’t pay much attention.”

  “You have any idea?” the cowboy persisted.

  Sonny listened intently but Agent Scullery coul
dn’t recall very much. “A man. A couple of men. That’s all I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Young. Teenagers?”

  “Not so young. I don’t know. Sorry.”

  Pellam thanked her. She lingered, maybe waiting to see if he’d ask her out. But he just smiled a noncommittal smile, stepped into the street, flagged down a cab. Sonny hurried after him but the cowboy was already inside and the yellow Chevy was speeding away before Sonny even got to the curbside. He didn’t hear the destination.

  He was momentarily enraged that Pellam the tall Midnight Cowboy had gotten away from him so easily. But then he reflected that that was all right – this wasn’t really about eliminating witnesses or punishing intruders. It was about something much, much bigger.

  He held up his hands and noticed that they’d stopped shaking. A tatter of smoke, dissolving ghost, wafted before Sonny’s face and, helpless, he could only close his eyes and inhale the sweet perfume.

  Remaining this way for a long moment, motionless and blind, he came back to earth slowly and dug into his shoulder bag. He found out that he only had a pint or so of juice left.

  But that was plenty, he decided. More than enough. Sometimes you only needed a spoonful. Depending on how much time you had. And how clever you were. At the moment Sonny had all the time in the world. And, as always, he knew he was clever as a fox.

  FOUR

  Windy this morning.

  An August storm was approaching and the first thing Pellam noticed when he woke, hearing the wind, was that he wasn’t swaying.

  It’d been over three months since he’d parked the Winnebego Chieftain at Westchester Auto Storage in White Plains and temporarily forsaken his nomadic lifestyle. Three months – but he still sometimes had trouble sleeping in a bed that wasn’t atop steel springs badly in need of replacement. With this much wind today he ought to be swaying like a passenger in a gale.

  He also hadn’t gotten used to paying fifteen hundred a month for a one-bedroom East Village shotgun flat, whose main attraction was a bathtub in the kitchen. (“It’s called a bitchen,” the real estate woman told him, taking his check for the broker’s fee and first month’s rent as if he’d owed her the money for months. “People’re totally dying for them nowadays.”) Fourth-floor walk-up, the linoleum floor a dirty beige and walls green as Ettie Washington’s hospital room. And what, he’d been wondering, was that smell?

  In his years doing location work Pellam had scouted in Manhattan only a few times. The local companies largely had the business locked up and, besides, because of the high cost of shooting here the Manhattan you saw in most movies was usually Toronto, Cleveland or a set. The films actually shot in the city had little appeal to him – weird little Jim Jarmusch student-quality independents and dull mainstreams. EXT. PLAZA HOTEL – DAY, EXT. WALL STREET – NIGHT. The scouting assignments had less to do with being the director’s third eye than filling out the proper forms in the Mayor’s Film Office and making sure cash went where it was supposed to go, both above and below the table.

  But scouting was behind him for the immediate future. He was a month away from finishing the rough cut of his first film in years and the first documentary he’d ever made. West of Eighth was the title.

  He showered and brushed his unruly black hair into place, thinking about the project. The schedule allowed him only another week of taping then three weeks of editing and post-pro. September 27 was the deadline for mixing and delivery to WGBH in Boston, where he’d work with the producer on the final cut. PBS airing was planned for early next spring. Simultaneously he’d have the tape transferred to film, re-edited and shipped for limited release in art theaters in the U.S. and on Channel 4 in England next summer. Then submissions to festivals in Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Berlin and to the Oscars.

  Of course that had been the plan. But now?

  The motif of West of Eighth had been the tenement at 458 West Thirty-sixth Street and the residents who lived there. But Ettie Washington was the centerpiece. With her arrest he wondered if he was now the proud owner of two hundred hours of fascinating interviews that would never find their way to TV or silver screen.

  Outside he bought a newspaper then flagged down a cab.

  The clattering vehicle wove right and left through traffic, as if the cabbie were avoiding hot pursuit, and Pellam tightly gripped the handhold as he tried to read about the fire. The story was dwindling in news value and today’s paper reported only that Ettie’d been arrested and confirmed what he’d known – that the only serious injury was Juan Torres. Pellam remembered the boy clearly. He’d interviewed his mother and recalled the energetic twelve-year-old, standing in his apartment, by the window, left-hooking a package of Huggies like a punching bag and saying to Pellam insistently, “My daddy, he know Jose Canseco. No, no, no. Really. He does!”

  The boy’s condition was still critical.

  A picture of Ettie, being led by a woman cop out of Manhattan Hospital, accompanied the article. Her hair was a mess. Light flares sparked off the chrome cuffs on her wrists, just below the cast that Pellam had signed.

  Etta Washington, formerly Doyle, neé Wilkes, was seventy-two years old. Born in Hell’s Kitchen she’d never lived anywhere else. The 458 W. Thirty-sixth Street building had been her home for the past five years. She’d resided for the prior forty in a similar tenement up the street, now demolished. All her other residences had been in the Kitchen, within five square blocks of one another.

  Ettie had ventured out of New York state only three times for brief trips, two of them funerals of kin in North Carolina. Ettie had been a star student in her first two years of high school but dropped out to work and try to become a cabaret singer. She’s performed for some years, always opening for better-known talent. Mostly in Harlem or the Bronx, though occasionally she’d land a job on Swing Street – Fifty-Second. Pellam had heard some old wire recordings transcribed onto tape and was impressed with her low voice. For years she’d worked odd jobs, supporting herself and sometimes lovers, while resisting the inevitable proposals of marriage that a beautiful woman living alone in Hell’s Kitchen was flooded with. She finally married, late and incongruously: her husband was an Irishman named Billy Doyle.

  A handsome, restless man, Doyle left her years ago, after only three years of marriage.

  “He was just doing what a man does, my Billy. They got that runaway spirit. May be their nature but it’s hard to forgive ’em for it. Wonder if you’ve got it too, John.”

  Sitting beside the camera as he’d recorded this, Pellam had nodded encouragingly and reminded himself to edit out her last sentence and her accompanying chuckle.

  Her second husband was Harold Washington, who drowned, drunk, in the Hudson River.

  “No love lost there. But he was dependable with the money and never cheated and never raised his voice to me. Sometimes I miss him. If I remember to think about him.”

  Ettie’s youngest son, Frank, had been caught in a cross fire and killed by a man wearing a purple top hat in a drunken shoot-out in Times Square. Her daughter, Elizabeth, of whom Ettie was immensely proud, was a real estate saleswoman in Miami. In a year or two, Ettie would be moving to Florida to live near her. Her oldest son, James – a handsome mulatto – was the only child she had by Doyle. He too caught the wanderlust flu and disappeared out west – California, Ettie assumed. She hadn’t heard from him in twelve years.

  The elderly woman had been, in her youth, sultry and beautiful if somewhat imperious (as evidenced by a hundred photos, all presently burned to gray ash) and was now handsome woman with youthful, dark skin. She debated often about dying her salt-and-pepper hair back to its original black. Ettie talked like a quick, mid-Atlantic Southerner, drank bad wine and cooked delicious tripe with bacon and onions. And she could unreel stories about her own past and about her mother and grandmother like a natural actress, as if God gave her that gift to make up for others denied.

  And what would happen to her now?

  With a jolt the cab bur
st across Eighth Avenue, the Maginot Line bordering Hell’s Kitchen.

  Pellam glanced out the window as they passed storefront, in whose window the word Bakery was painted over, replaced by: Youth Outreach Center – Clinton Branch.

  Clinton.

  This was a raw spot with longtime residents. The neighborhood to them was “Hell’s Kitchen” and would never be anything but. “Clinton” was what the city officials and public relations and real estate people called the ’hood. As if a name change could convince the public this part of town wasn’t a morass of tenements and gangs and smokey bodegas and hookers and pebbles of crack vials littering sidewalks but was the New Frontier for corporate headquarters and yuppie lofts.

  Remembering Ettie’s voice: “You hear the story how this place got its name? The one they tell is a policeman down here, a long time ago, he says to another cop, ‘This place is hell.’ And the other one goes, ‘Hell’s mild compared to here. This’s hell’s kitchen.’ That’s the story, but that’s not how it happened. No sir. Where the name came from was it’s called after this place in London. What else in New York? Even the name of the neighborhood’s stolen from someplace else.”

  “Look I am saying,” the cabbie broke into Pellam’s thoughts. “Same fucking thing fucking yesterday. And for weeks.”

  He was gesturing furiously at a traffic jam ahead of them. It seemed to be caused by the construction work going on across from the site of the fire – that high-rise nearing completion. Cement trucks pulled in and out through a chain-link gate, holding up traffic.

  “That building. I am wanting them to go fuck themselves. It has ruins fucking neighborhood. All of it.” He slapped the dashboard hard, nearly knocking over his royal orb air freshener.

  Pellam paid and climbed out of the cab, leaving the driver to his muttered curses. He walked toward the Hudson River.

  He passed dark, woody storefronts – Vinnie’s Fruits and Vegetables, Managro’s Deli, Cuzin’s Meats and Provisions, whose front window was filled with whole dressed animals. Booths of clothing and wooden stands filled with piles of spices and herbs packed the side-walks. A store selling African goods advertised a sale on ukpor and ogbono. “Buy now!” it urged.