Jen looked back at me, showing a bit of hesitation for the first time.
She opened her mouth to speak, but at that moment the alarm from the next building stopped, the silence hitting us like a hammer.
Through the ringing echoes in my ears I thought I heard an annoyed voice on the roof behind us.
"Go on," I whispered.
We went down into the darkness.
Walking around New York, looking up, I often wonder what goes on behind all those windows. Especially the empty ones.
I've been to parties in squats, old buildings taken over by enterprising homesteaders who do their own repairs. And everyone knows that crack-heads and homeless people occupy abandoned buildings, inhabiting an invisible reality behind the blank windows and cinder blocks. There's this rumor that Chinatown has its own secret government, an ancient system of laws and obligations brought over from the old country, which I'd always imagined being run from inside a derelict building like this, complete with town meetings and trials and punishments meted out. Basically anything could be going on behind those blank and faceless windows.
But I never thought I'd actually be finding out for myself.
The air was difficult to breathe, baked hard by the summer sun. As Jen descended, she left dust coiling behind her in the few shafts of light. Her runners left footprints on the stairs, which made me feel better. Maybe no one ever came here. Maybe some buildings were just… empty.
Every floor down it got darker.
Jen stopped after three flights, waiting for our eyes to adjust, listening carefully to the silence. My ears were still ringing with the alarm screech, but as far as I could tell, no one had followed us from the building next door.
Who would do anything that crazy?
"Do you have any matches?" Jen said softly.
"No, but this works." I switched my phone to camera mode, careful to turn the bright screen away so I didn't blind myself. It shone like a little flashlight in the pitch blackness. It was a useful trick for fiddling with keys on late nights.
"Gee, is there anything that phone doesn't do?"
"It's no use against crackheads," I said. "Or officials of the Chinatown secret government."
"The what?"
"I'll tell you later."
We descended the last three flights, the phone scattering a weird blue light that gave our dancing shadows a ghostly pallor.
I darkened my phone when we reached the ground floor. Now that our eyes had adjusted, the sun streaming through gaps in the plywood shone like a row of spotlights. The ceiling was high, the whole floor stretching out unobstructed except for a few thick, square columns. What had once been store windows were now gaping rectangular holes in the wall, only plywood separating us from the street. Not even broken glass remained.
"Someone's using this floor," Jen said.
"What do you mean?"
She scuffed one shoe across the concrete next to a patch of light.
"No dust."
She was right. The sunlight revealed no coiling cloud around her shoe. The floor had recently been swept clean.
I ran my thumb to the familiar shape of the send button. A moment later the little multi-platinum tune played from a distant corner.
As we crossed, taking careful steps, I saw that the wall nearest to the flashing phone was lined with stacks of small boxes. Someone was in fact using the building for storage.
Jen knelt and picked up the phone, checking the floor around it.
"Nothing else here of Mandy's. Does she carry a purse?"
"Just a clipboard. If she got mugged, would they keep that?"
"Maybe they just tossed the phone in so she couldn't call for help."
"Maybe…" My voice trailed off.
Of its own accord, my hand went to the stacked boxes, pulled by magnets of familiarity and desire. I ran my fingers down the lids spaced every four inches. The boxes were a common size and shape, so familiar that I almost hadn't realized what they were at first.
Shoe boxes.
I reached up and pulled one from the top of the stack. Opened it and breathed the new-car smell of unused plastic, heard the crinkle of paper, felt plastic and rubber and string. I lifted out the pair and set them on the ground in a shaft of sunlight.
Jen gasped, and I stepped back, blinking at the sudden radiance of panels, laces, tongue, and tread. Neither of us said a word, but we both knew instantly.
They were the coolest shoes we'd ever seen.
Chapter 6
ANTOINE HAD TOLD ME THE HISTORY OF SHOES MANY TIMES:
In the beginning, the late 1980s, the client was king. A certain basketball player (whose name basically became a brand) made them king. An industry was transformed, and shoes grew air pumps and Velcro straps, gel chambers and light-emitting diodes. New models came out seasonally, then monthly, and Antoine started buying two pairs, one for wearing and one for saving, like comic-book collectors with their plastic bags.
And of course that bubble burst. People wanted shoes, not spaceships. Innovators began to search suburban malls for the humble sneakers of their childhood. Trendsetters demanded whole new categories of shoes: for skating, snowboarding, surfing, walking, running, and every other sport (parachutists probably have their own shoes), and to save all those secretaries time, hybrids appeared, dressy on top and rubber in the sole.
The client—with its flashy, gimmicky, jump-shooting shoes—faded. The world it had dominated disappeared, broken down into a patchwork of tribes and cliques and niches, like some neighborhood controlled by a different gang on every block.
But the pair in front of us recalled the oldies in Antoine's lovingly stacked boxes in the Bronx, those ancient, golden, simple days. Not spaceships—just shoes with insane confidence, vitality, and flair.
Sheer cool.
"Wow," Jen said.
"I know." Acting on instinct, I pointed my phone and took a picture.
"Wow," she repeated.
I reached out, and my hand glowed in the shaft of sunlight, as if the shoes were infecting me with their magic. The texture of the panels was something I'd never felt before, as rough and pliable as canvas | but with the silvery shine of metal. The laces flowed through my fingers as softly as ropes made out of silk. The eyelets seemed to have tiny spokes that turned when I flexed the shoe, using the same effect as those 3-D postcards that change when you look at them from different directions.
But the individual flourishes weren't what made the shoes incredible. It was the way they called to me to put them on, the way I was sure I could fly if I was wearing a pair. The way I needed to buy them now.
A way I hadn't felt since I was ten.
"So this is what Mandy wanted us to see."
"No kidding," I said. "The client must be keeping this a total secret."
"The client? Look again, Hunter."
She was pointing at a circle of plastic set into the tongue, where the client's logo stood out bright white and proud. With my brain gradually recovering from its dazzlement, I saw what Jen had spotted right away. The logo—one of the world's best-known symbols, up there with the white flag of surrender and the golden arches—had been cut through with a diagonal line in bright red.
Like a no-smoking sign. Like a no-whatever sign. The bar sinister, a symbol of prohibition also recognized around the world., ^
It was an anti-logo.
"Bootlegs," I murmured. That was another thing that went on in the I shadows of Chinatown. In rows of small, discreet shops on Canal Street you could buy watches and jeans, handbags and shirts, wallets and belts, all with the labels of famous designers sewn onto them by hand. All cheap and fake. Some were laughably crude, some pretty much passable, and a few required an eye as expert as Hillary Hyphen's to spot the telltale wrong stitch.