What I’d found out was that the Armstrong had fallen on bad times in the fifties and sixties. The landlord let it go, didn’t pay taxes or fix the plumbing, so the city took it over. Bad times-heroin, cocaine, Harlem in the toilet. Then in the eighties, the tenants go it together to take it back, formed their own co-operative, kept the maintenance prices same as their rentals had been. Low.
So people stayed on. Some had been here sixty years. A few new people bought in when there were apartments on the market-usually when somebody died. I figured what Carver wanted was to turn it around, make it into the usual kind of New York City co-op-fix it up, raise the maintenance from five hundred to five thousand. Sell off the apartments that were empty. He’d been buying them up, warehousing them. Telling people he’d buy them out.
He got himself on the co-op board, became its president, the rest of the members are his people. I’d heard one old man say at the party the night before, “Lennox says it’s to restore the Armstrong to its former grandeur, the glory days, but if it happens, the residents will just get moved on. Lennox? That fellow just waiting for us to die.”
I went to the other side of the roof. When I leaned out, I was right over the back lot where I’d found Hutchison’s body. There were still a few cops, but the ambulance had gone. I leaned out as far as I could, lost my footing, and gasped for breath.
For a split second I felt myself dangle in the cold space, the wind pushing at me; for a second I wondered if someone had pushed me from behind, or if it was an accident.
A voice from behind startled me, and I crashed back onto the roof, my foot twisted under me. Pain rattled my brain.
“Jesus, man, you OK?” A hand reached down to help me. It was Carver Lennox.
I stumbled to my feet. He asked if I wanted a doctor. I said I was OK and hobbled a couple of feet back from the edge of the roof.
“You almost killed yourself-you sure you’re OK? I could call somebody.”
I said I was fine. I asked if he’d talked to Mrs. Hutchison, and he said he’d called her over at her sister’s, but the sister said she wasn’t there, and was trying to find her. The sister thought she might be at church but wasn’t sure if she was attending her usual Catholic mass or was over at the Abyssinian Baptist, where she sometimes went with a friend.
“I want to tell her about Lionel myself,” he said. “I want to be with her. She’s going to take this hard, you know; I mean, fifty, sixty years or something like that, they were married. You have anything at all on this? I talked to Captain Wagner, but he didn’t have any idea. He said you and Radcliff are working it.” Lennox looked at me. “How the fuck did Lionel fall? Celestina used to tell me she locked him in because he walked in his sleep.”
“She has quite a few stories.”
“Yes, and I never got the impression Lionel Hutchison listened to anything she said; he just humored her.”
I headed for the door and he followed, not touching me, but holding an arm out as if to catch me in case I fell. My ankle was throbbing like somebody had stuck it with nails. Lennox opened the door to the stairs and held it for me.
“You were close to them, weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So you wanted them to stay here.”
“Of course,” he said. “Even though Celestina never stopped telling me she wanted to sell-even last night at the party. She wanted to go somewhere warm.”
“I thought you were anxious to get hold of the apartments.”
“You think I’d just buy them out and not help them? I’ve offered to re-house all of them, anywhere they like-brand-new apartments in midtown so they can go hear music or go to the theater, or in lovely assisted-living facilities up in Westchester, or Queens, just a stone’s throw from here, lovely gardens. Many have already told me they’d like to move somewhere warm-Hawaii, the islands. I can enable that. Did you think I would just kick them out into the street?” he said. “Well, how would that look to prospective buyers? As for the Hutchisons, I told Celestina I’d be real sad if they were to go. They’re part of the history. I see this building as a fusion of past and future.”
“I see,” I said, walking painfully down the stairs from the roof.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“What about Simonova? Was she was part of your glorious plan?”
Lennox didn’t answer, not until we got to the fourteenth floor. In the light of the hallway I saw his face, saw a change in his expression.
“You were saying. About Simonova?” I looked at him.
“I wasn’t saying anything.” He removed his thick tweed coat and looked at it. “Where did I get this old thing? I can’t remember.”
“You didn’t like Simonova, did you?”
“I didn’t have a view about Marianna Simonova,” he said, and I knew he was lying. “She was a little crazy, but she was part of the Armstrong family, so attention was paid. I’ll go to Celestina now.”
“What the hell were you doing on the roof, by the way?” I said.
“Saving your ass, it looks like,” said Lennox, and hurried into his apartment.
Carver Lennox was fucked up over Hutchison’s death, but it felt like grief he might have borrowed from some TV talk show, public grief, standard cliches. What really worried him, was that the death would give the building a bad rep.
Or maybe I was wrong. There were things about Lennox I didn’t get. I had met guys like him, bankers, lawyers, hedge-fund guys on the make, had met them in restaurants, at parties. But Lennox was black. There weren’t a lot of black guys like him on Wall Street, and I wasn’t sure I’d read him right.
There was plenty I didn’t understand about the building, too, about what I’d seen and heard: the decent old doctor, as limber and healthy as somebody twenty years younger, who believed in euthanasia, was sharp as hell, talked about status and light skin and dark, laughed about New Harlem, had loved Marianna Simonova; the African woman who thought the place was haunted by evil spirits in the shape of black dogs; Celestina Hutchison’s bitterness; the stiff-necked Dr. Bernard; Virgil Radcliff, the young detective who didn’t play by the book, whose father looked like a white man.
It was more than that. I was a white cop in a black neighborhood-I had felt the tensions between Jimmy Wagner and his black detectives. I was an outsider. For all my love of black music, I didn’t belong. I should have been used to it. I’d been an outsider as a kid at school in Moscow, a nonbeliever, with a mother who became a refusenik and a father who was kicked out of the KGB; I’d been an outsider in Israel, where I spent most of my time hanging with peaceniks or Arab kids or lolling on the beach with sexy Sabra drop-outs, girls who liked smoking dope better than fighting wars.
New York, too, those first years, when I still had an accent, and got lost in the subway, and later at the academy, where I tried to be a tough cop.
Finally, I had found a place I could belong. When I lost my accent, ditched my past, became a real New Yorker, it seemed right. For a long time now, I’d been at home here, along with all the millions of foreigners and outsiders.
But now, I felt it again, that disconnect, the sense of being on the outside that made me wonder if I understood anything.
Am I getting anything right? I kept thinking. Is it just I’m so focused on Lily, or did the beating I got in the storage room fuck me up in some way I couldn’t determine? Was I tone deaf in a different country? A code I couldn’t quite catch, or hear, or translate? I thought of the bebop guys back when they invented music so fast, so complex, almost nobody got it at first, and how, in a sense, they did it to outfox whitey.
In the Soviet Union, we had done the same thing, though without the genius. Ways of dealing with the system. You left home, you stepped out the door, you took on a different role-at school, at work, any place where you pretended to listen, pretended to follow the party line, at least until you got home where you could take off your mask, sit at the kitchen table, curse the bosses.