Somebody, some totally insane genius of a somebody, had carved the thing right out of a wall of rock that looked like it had to be part of a subway tunnel.
Who had done it? How long had it taken? Why would somebody so gifted carve something this startling and vibrant only to have it gather dust in the ass end of a building that would have to work its way up to qualify as a rat trap?
How had Jenny even found it?
I pondered those questions and all the others you’d expect as I hiked back to my shop.
I found a note there, in her handwriting, taped to the display window glass, right under the big gothic X so I couldn’t miss it. It contained just four words.
What did you think?
Maybe she expected me to sum up the experience in a couple of random quotes from obscure liner notes like we always had. If she did, she was dreaming.
Her leading me to that dragon, sharing it with me in that way, was like being given the keys to every secret treasure that had ever been lost and found.
There was no question that I had to see her face-to-face to give her a proper telling.
“That was the wildest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” I said. I think I startled her by stepping out from behind the community board. We hadn’t laid eyes on each other in person in weeks. “And I’ve seen a lot of wacky stuff.”
“Really?” was all she said after she recovered her composure. She was dressed for something formal and I could see her cello case lurking in the backseat of the cab behind her. I couldn’t read the expression on her face — something between puzzlement and amusement, I thought at the time — before she said, “Well. I’m glad I could share it with you,” and hopped back into her cab.
After that, it was back to the lists.
Three weeks after that, she was dead and I was digging.
Funny that particular encounter should pop up just at that time, with me leaving her mother’s place and hustling off downtown for my third interview.
There was nothing on her final playlist to point me back to that moment and yet, for some reason, I suddenly had a hard time shaking the image of her softly knit brow and over-large eyes from my mind.
“Who are you again?” said the intercom voice.
I was standing under the arch of a battleship-sized grey brick of a building on the southeast tip of the Shady Green, right where the residentials start mutating into the bowery. There was a big wooden sign nailed to one wall that read CODE: INDUSTRY in generic black and white.
“John Red,” I said for the third time. Rich people love their intercoms. Anything to keep the proles at arm’s length. In a few years all the occupants of Code: Industry would have shifted to one of the posh co-ops off Metro West, exchanging the intercoms for a burly doorman or two.
“And how do I know you?” said the voice.
“You don’t,” I said. “We both know Jenny Charles.”
“Wrong tense, Book Boy,” said the voice and I could hear the corners of her mouth curling.
Jesus. Even this close to her friend’s suicide, India couldn’t resist playing games.
Instead of one of those harsh buzzers to let us lowlies know the gates were being opened on our account, the occupants of Code: Industry had sprung for a very soothing bell.
“Take the back stairs,” she said as I heard the gate clang shut behind me.
There were only five stories, but they were bigger than average. This wasn’t an apartment building, it was a former factory that had evolved into something the classifieds called Live/Work lofts.
Maybe once upon a time people like Pollack and Basquiat had turned old sweatshops into kick-ass spaces where they could do their art and drugs. Maybe they’d even been cool.
Nowadays these joints were just excuses for the children of the top castes to comfortably slum while they worked out their issues with their folks’ money.
I’d never actually met India Pierce but, by the time I got to the top of those stairs, I’d already decided not to like her.
The second to last song on Jenny’s list was the remix of “Demonic” by Coil.
She don’t stroll, she struts
She don’t roll, she cuts
She don’t race, she ruts
Demonic.
Nobody liked Coil, not even the neo new-wave posers who bought their stuff in the nineties. They were a joke and I thought Jenny had only added them to the list to put a smile on my face.
Taking a look at India Pierce, curled on her imported Persian throw pillows like Hugh Hefner’s version of the Cheshire Cat, I was about as far from smiling as I had ever been in my life.
Her place was like a temple to India herself; everything about it advertised life above the glass ceiling and sex with consequences.
First-edition Fitzgeralds lay wrinkled and yellow over the latest copies of Look and It GiRL. The place smelled of rough cinnamon and was done all in deep reds and mahogany. There were tapestries on some of the walls and at least two Picasso pen-and-inks hung from thumbtacks on the others.
The one huge window, looking out on the city center and the mass of grey cubes in between, was the only remnant of the building’s original sweatshop life: a giant glass grid with cracks and spots you just knew had been allowed to remain for purely aesthetic reasons.
“Book Boy,” she said in that overly syrupy tone. “It’s about time I got a look at you.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” I said, letting the big steel door swing shut behind me. “Guess we just keep missing each other.”
“Guess we just,” she said. “Want a drink?”
I didn’t. She gestured toward a plate of something that looked like a small mountain made of bulgy triangle pastries. I could smell the meat and spices wafting off it, trying to pull me in, but I wasn’t there to eat either.
“You don’t stack up the way I thought,” she said. I rested a hip on the ottoman, placing the food between us.
I shrugged. “Seems like you were expecting me,” I said.
“I was.” She reached for another pastry. “From the way she made you out, I’m insulted you didn’t come to me first.”
“Jenny talked to you about me?”
“Surprised?” she said.
I was, a little, but I kept it off my face. People like India treated life like an ongoing hand of hold ’em. You blink or let your mouth twitch the wrong way and they own your ass.
She sashayed into a little speech about her and Jenny growing up together, bonding over boys and fashion and their mutual disdain for just about everybody else they knew.
They both chafed hard under the rules of conduct set down by their social caste but neither was willing to walk away from the cash. Jenny’s way of coping with that friction was to carve her life up into little boxes. It gave her control over who knew what about her and how much.
India preferred to make trouble.
She’d crushed dynasties between her perfect caramel thighs. A stray whisper from her in the right ear and reputations that had taken generations to build crumbled to dust.
“I figured you’d be the type to want to look into her death,” she said, winding down. “But anybody with any sense would definitely have come to me first.”
“I’m here now.”
“You are,” she said through her teeth.
“I just came to ask you some questions, is all,” I said.
“Okay.” She leaned back into her nest of pillows. “I’ll play.” The slight arch in her spine wasn’t exactly pornographic but it still took a second for the blood to flow back to my brain.