“I called Dr. Bernard, OK? I called like you wanted me to,” Lily said. In the background I could hear water running and I tried not to think about how she looked in the shower. She hung up and I went back to Simonova’s apartment.
I felt it again when I looked at the body, something visceral, one of those flickers of intuition that’s mostly physical, that runs up your neck and makes you shiver, pressing your brain into action. In the apartment there was something I couldn’t see right, something I didn’t understand.
Virgil Radcliff was gone, but the idea I might call the ME had worried him plenty. He didn’t want this made official in any way.
Did he know something he wasn’t telling me? Did he sense Lily was somehow involved and was trying to protect her?
I took the shawl off Simonova’s face. It seemed grotesque that the cannula was still hooked in her nose, the oxygen tank still breathing for a dead woman. I removed it carefully. She had hairy nostrils, which reminded me of Stalin, of what my father told me he had felt when he saw Stalin lying in state in the Hall of Columns in Moscow. Hairy nostrils.
Years after we left Russia, my father told me how terrible he had felt back then when, looking at the great man, he saw only the huge hairy nostrils.
After I covered Simonova up again, I pushed the oxygen tank into a closet and noticed a small pile of Christmas presents under a scrawny tree hung with red tinsel draped on the branches. I looked at the tags, saw there was a present from Lily, another from somebody named Carver. I stopped what I was doing then, because for the second time that morning, I heard water dripping. It wasn’t in the living room.
I looked around the rest of the apartment. In one of the bedrooms, there was water running in from the roof onto the heavy plastic sheeting that shrouded everything-bed, dresser, chairs, clothes racks.
The room was a mess. Water had stained the yellow paint, and in places, slabs of plaster had come loose and dripped down the wall like candle wax. In one corner, there was mold that had grown down the wall in long fingers. More mold was on pictures that lay on the floor. It had somehow encroached on the images behind glass, making strange frames for them. One was a photo of a group of Russians near a dacha, five people in shabby clothes. In the 1950s, I guessed. The other was of Lenin.
I fixed the plastic sheets as best I could, shut a window that had been left open a couple of inches, and tried to call Lily on my cell. She didn’t answer.
I needed air. In the living room, I got my jacket and went out onto the terrace. I had only been in the building for a few hours, but I already felt trapped in it.
Snow was falling harder, big flakes, blown by a hard wind across the city. It fell onto the terrace where I was standing now. From my pocket I got out a wool hat and jammed it on my head.
I gulped some cold air, then I leaned out and looked at the street below.
From the terrace, which wrapped around the end of the building, I could see in almost every direction. The Armstrong was the tallest building in the area, fourteen floors of yellow brick at the northern end of Harlem. Up here I had a spectacular view of the city, even though it was blurred by the curtains of snow.
At the back of the building was a parking area enclosed by wire fencing. There was a row of garbage cans chained together. In front was Edgecombe Avenue and Jackie Robinson Park, trees bare, and the Harlem River. Beyond it was the tangle of highways, the Bronx, Yankee Stadium. It would be gone soon. Torn down to make way for some new stadium without any history.
I had loved the days and nights I’d spent at the Stadium ever since I got to New York; loved the games, the crowds, the noise, the singing, the players, the beer and dogs. Loved the camaraderie, the way you met other fans over and over, got to know them and their kids. I loved the playing of “New York, New York” when we won, the whole corny ball of wax. My New York.
North and west were the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge, shadows through the snow. To the south, all of Harlem, stretching to 110th Street and Central Park and down to the sky line-the Empire State, the Chrysler Building, but these, too, were only phantoms today. Here up on Sugar Hill, the rest of the city felt far away.
I once got to know a musician at Bradley’s downtown-it’s long gone now-who had lived his whole life in Harlem. One night, he’d said: “Black America, Artie? It’s another country. And Harlem is black America.” He’s been dead a while now, and I can’t remember his name.
If you live downtown like I do, Harlem feels like a different planet, low-lying, wide, spacious boulevards, trees. Harlem had barely mattered economically for so long that no one bothered to tear most of it down. It’s remained, for better and worse, suspended in its own past.
A decade ago, maybe, as city real estate prices soared, fear of losing out on a piece of the pie made Harlem a tasty prospect. A lot of it was broken down, some of the buildings condemned. But there were the great apartment houses like the Armstrong, there were the fabulous brownstones on Strivers’ Row; you saw ads in the Times for Harlem alongside those for Central Park West, Soho, the Village.
Houses went on the market for a million bucks. Developers talked about Harlem as if it were the Promised Land. All that housing stock, they’d say, practically licking their lips. And people moved. The New Harlem, they called it. A few bistros opened for business. Somebody set up a supper club and charged big bucks for a membership. A guy in real estate I sometimes play a little ball with used to tell me about all this, salivating. I told him I love where I live. Anyhow, I’m always broke.
Earlier, I’d noticed the date on the Armstrong: BUILT 1919. It must have been named later. In 1919, Louis Armstrong was only eighteen.
As soon as I’d arrived, I’d seen the building notices stuck to the beveled glass in the heavy front door. In the lobby there were ladders, cans of paint, part of the floor covered with a drop cloth. I wondered whether the crunch of the last months would stop the New Harlem dead, how much would sink in the financial shit storm.
From Simonova’s terrace, I could see the whole of Manhattan. Long and narrow, only partly visible in the snow, it looked like a great transatlantic ship that had hit an iceberg and was starting to slip down into the dark, cold water.
Suddenly, I heard the sound of water and a voice cursing.
“Goddamn this son-of-a-bitch raggedy-ass geranium plant! Damn it.”
I looked over the low wall that separated Simonova’s terrace from the one next door.
The man on the other side, tea kettle in hand, unlit cigarette in his mouth, was pouring steaming water into flower pots. He put the kettle down on a little table next to a coffee mug and turned to me.
“Hello there, sorry to bother you with my carry-on over here.” He had a deep, polished voice. “But it’s these damn plants just froze up on me. You don’t have a light, do you?”
I got the matches out of my pocket, gave them to him, he lit up, took a deep drag with a look of relief and deep satisfaction.
“Thanks.”
He was at least eighty, I guessed, but tall and lean with a full head of white hair. A purple birthmark stained his left cheek. His skin was medium brown, like milk chocolate, he had a thin mustache like old-time musicians often sported-he reminded me of Billy Eckstine-and he wore a good tweed jacket, a blue shirt, red sweater, gray flannels. On his feet were embroidered velvet slippers. He was a dapper guy.
“My wife doesn’t let me smoke in the house,” he confided. “She takes away all the matches, says I can’t even smoke out here, it gets in her drapes when the terrace door is open, but I sneak one now and again,” he said. “She says it will kill me. I tell her it’s my one remaining pleasure. I don’t mind about dying, only about pain. I usually go up on the roof to smoke, but it was iced over bad this morning.” He let out a long curl of smoke with a satisfied sigh. “How do you do? I’m Lionel Hutchison. Are you a friend of Marianna’s?”