We passed by a grade school and the Sixth Street Community Garden. At East Fourth Street, the woman crossed the avenue and continued east, halfway down this darker, less-tenanted, tree-lined street, coming to a stop at a waist-high black wrought-iron gate in front of a trim three-story townhouse. This building hadn’t even existed the last time I’d been here. The stark newness was offset by its neighbor, a six-story pre-war brownstone, painted white, with the black trails of rusted porticos running down its facade like tear-streaked mascara.
The young man was directly across the street as she went in.
I tightened up on him, closing within twenty feet. Too close really, but I wasn’t sure what he was liable to do.
The front gate swung shut behind her as she mounted the white cement steps to the door. She stirred the contents of her suede bag until she brought up keys, then opened the door and went in.
He watched. I watched. We watched. After she’d gone, he crossed the street to the gate and looked up at the door. A brass plate was mounted to its right. I supposed he read it. Too far for me to make it out.
The first floor windows had inside shutters of light-colored wood and they were closed. The second floor windows had dark, gypsy-shawl patterned curtains which were drawn shut.
The top-floor windows had the same curtains. One of them twitched as my eyes rested upon it.
My squirrel, “Jeff,” had his hand on the front gate, but he didn’t take it further. He turned left and walked away. I followed with my eyes, not losing sight of him as I crossed the street to the gate. I noted the address and the name engraved on the townhouse’s brass plate.
Rauth Reality.
I read it again. Rauth Realty.
My squirrel was thirty feet away. Enough of a head start. I followed.
He led me to the next corner where he turned right on Avenue C/Avenida Loisaida and headed south into the barrio. The cover of trees thinned out to stark empty sidewalks crumbling in spots. Fewer people around and more CLOSED signs on businesses yet to be revitalized. Fantasy-art murals on the side street brick walls.
I kept him on a long leash, but the precaution was unnecessary: leading me down C, past East Second and a half-block further to a five-story apartment house, he never once looked behind him.
I thought it funny, a guy follows someone but never looks behind himself to see if he’s being followed.
Yeh, hilarious. Same was true of me.
A familiar grinding sound turned my head, but I saw no one behind me. And then didn’t hear the sound again.
The building was #27 Avenue C, a dilapidated tenement, one of the older buildings still remaining on the block, decades of touch-up paint, olive and gray, peeling from the bricks like scabby flesh.
Its entrance was between a TV repair shop with a CLOSED sign in its dusty window and a scaffolded four-story building covered in wind-torn blue tarp. No construction workers on the scene. A project that had begun with great fervor but stalled in the economic slump. The wave of gentrification stuttering, falling behind.
As my squirrel inserted his key in the street door, I broke into a jog, spanning the short distance between us. I was a few feet away when the door shut.
It was a battered metal door covered with wild tagger scrawls, which looked like the miscellaneous symbols that appear above a cartoon character’s head when conked.
The clouded view into the vestibule was a small square window of chicken wire-reinforced glass, grimy-yellow and etched by battery-acid graffitists.
I strolled up and peered in, hoping just to catch a glimpse of him maybe going up the stairs. But when I looked, he was still in the entryway, removing a key from the door of one of the mailboxes, top row, third from the left. No mail though, his hands were empty.
A car sped up the avenue, music on mondo, a thudding Latin beat and sugary rhythm that sustained in the air long after it passed, like the echo of a discharged cannon.
I hung back from the door, casually studying my watch. 12:18. Inside, the squirrel opened a second door and entered the building’s hallway. He went toward the stairs but passed by them, on to a rear left ground-floor apartment. Bit of luck.
He stopped with the key in his hand and knocked on the door twice. He said something, then opened the door himself and went in.
The squirrel was in his nest.
I turned my gaze back to the mailboxes. A name on the one he’d opened. I tried to read it, shifting my head around, standing on my toes, looking for a less clouded section of glass. First initiaclass="underline" L. Last name: A-N-D—was that an R?
“What you want?”
He was a thick-featured Latin about 60 years old, dressed in pine-green overalls and a pine-green visored cap, carrying a bucket full of black water and a mop the color of storm clouds. He had a keyring crammed with about 30 assorted keys clipped to his belt. The building’s super. From the corner of his mouth hung a small smoldering cigar like a soggy stuffed grapeleaf.
I smiled. “Afternoon. Was looking to see if a friend of mine still lives here.”
“Who’s your friend?”
I took a chance on the name.
“Andrews.”
His face softened, his mug looked like a flabby kneecap. He had bushy gray eyebrows below which his black eyes were bright but deep-set like two coins out of reach under a grate.
He asked cautiously, “You a friend of Mr. Andrew?”
“Yes. Is he still living here?”
He shook his head sadly. “Mr. Andrew went away. The people who stay in his place are no good. Very bad.”
A vapor of alcohol traveled on his words.
“Really? Well, that’s not right.”
“But I don’t know how to call Mr. Andrew,” he insisted, grieved nearly to tears. “I would tell him of how bad these people are.”
“Well, maybe I could get a message to him for you.”
“You call Mr. Andrew?” His dark eyes sparkled. “Yes? You talk to him, you tell him to call me, Luis, right away. He has my number, but I give to you.”
From his back pocket, he pulled a stubby pencil and a brown paper bag with a pint bottle still in it. He wrote something on a corner and tore it off and handed it to me.
“You tell him about this man and this woman? Specially the woman. She’s…” He searched for the word in English, but couldn’t find it and shrugged ashamedly.
“Bad?” I offered.
“Loco,” he said, and he said it darkly. “When I tell them not to leave garbage always in the hall outside their door, she punch a hole in the wall by my head. I call police, when they come she tell them I was drunk. She lies and says I punch the wall. They almost arrest me. I call the police and almost they arrest me. Ha! But other building people come out, come down to the sidewalk, and tell police who I am. Good building people, nothing like them.” He spat on the sidewalk.
I thought of the woman at the hotel who’d bashed me over the head. I asked him, “Red hair? Rojo? This woman?”
He shook his head. “No, blonde. Like an angel.” His lips contorted with the irony and made a wet-fart noise. “But she’s a diabla. You know? If devil were a woman. You know?”
I described Jeff to him and he nodded his head. “Yes, him. I see him at the garage, the one on Tenth, across from near the pool. He’s not so bad, but she is…she is…”
“Bad?” I tried again.
He nodded. “Bad. You tell Mr. Andrew, he come back, see what these people do. I know Mr. Andrew, he will not like what they do. But I don’t know how to call. You call?”
I nodded my head, assured him I’d make the call.
He smiled broadly. Several bottom front teeth were missing, the rest slanted into a craggy yellow W.
He landed a meaty, callused hand on my shoulder.