“I better be getting back,” Simms said, rising. “Thanks for not being mad at me anymore.”
Outside, as he waited to cross the street, he looked back and saw her watching him suspiciously. He smiled and waved. She still doesn’t trust me all that much, he thought. But for his purposes, that was okay. All he needed was a little trust.
For a week, Simms watched Lupe Mercado come and go. Her routine never varied. First thing in the morning she took Debbie to daycare, then she spent the rest of the morning job-hunting. At noon she was usually back at the hotel for the free meal served by Help for the Homeless. After lunch she’d sit in the lobby or go across to the coffee shop and read the classifieds again to see if there was anything she missed that morning. Sometimes Simms would see her using one of the pay phones in the lobby to call about jobs. Then, just before three, she’d leave to get her daughter from daycare.
Now and then Simms would speak to her in passing or wave to her across the lobby, but he didn’t intrude on what she was doing or in any way act as if he was presuming a friendship. All he wanted to do was keep her aware of him until he was ready.
He picked Thursday as the day. Thursday: late in the week when people were tired, not as alert, laboring toward the weekend. Simms had already selected the boiler-room door that led to the alley as the way by which he’d leave the hotel. He knew he’d have to move fast — Max Wallace would be after him very quickly.
At three-thirty, Simms was on the seventh floor when Lupe Mercado got off the elevator with Debbie and came down the corridor to 704. Simms pretended to be in a hurry.
“I was hoping I’d run into you,” he said in a rush of words. “I only got a second — there’s a bad leaky pipe in the basement I got to tend to.” Fumbling in his pocket, he pulled out a slip of paper. “This lady’s got a dress shop down in the Village. She wants somebody to work in her stockroom — says she’ll train somebody with no experience, says it’s good pay plus a discount on clothes. Give her a call as soon as you can, the job might still be open.” Pressing the slip of paper into her hand, he hurried down the corridor to the fire stairs. He made sure his footsteps sounded loudly as he ran down to six, and halfway down to five. Then he abruptly turned and crept quietly back up to seven. Standing just around the corner from the corridor, he heard Lupe speaking to her daughter.
“I’ll be at the phone in the lobby — just for a few minutes. You stay inside until I get back. Don’t play in the hall.”
Hearing a door close, Simms peered around the corner. Lupe Mercado was hurrying toward the elevator. He waited until she got on the elevator, then walked quickly to Room 704. When he knocked, Debbie opened the door on a chain.
“Debbie,” he said easily, “call your mother to the door — I gave her the wrong phone number.”
“She went downstairs.”
“Oh. Well, let me in and I’ll wait for her. I have to give her the right number.”
He took a pack of gum from his pocket and put a stick in his mouth. “It’s okay,” he assured her. “Your mother and I are friends. You know I’m helping her find a job.” Unwrapping another stick of gum, he held it through the opening.
Debbie hesitated. Then she took it. Simms unfolded several work orders he had stuck under his toolbelt. “While I’m waiting, I want to check something in your bathroom that needs fixing.” He added just a hint of firmness to his voice. “Open the door now, Debbie, so I can get to work.”
Debbie took the chain off and opened the door. When Simms got inside, he closed and locked the door behind him.
In the lobby, Lupe hung up the telephone and stared at the slip of paper in confusion. It was the number of a dress shop in the Village, all right, but the sales clerk Lupe had talked to knew nothing of any stockroom job that was open. The clerk had called the manager to the phone, but the manager knew nothing about it, either. And the owner of the store was out of town on a buying trip.
Puzzled, Lupe started back toward the elevators. Charlie Hosey was near the elevator bank, repairing a drinking fountain. Max Wallace had just walked up to him. “Where’s Simms?” she heard Wallace ask the maintenance man.
“He went up to seven to do something,” Hosey said. “He ain’t come down yet.”
Lupe stopped and stared at them. “Oh, my God!” she said.
“What’s the matter?” Wallace asked.
Without answering, Lupe ran toward the elevators.
“Simms,” Wallace said tightly. “I knew it!” He ran after Lupe.
Hosey ran after both of them.
In the bathroom of 704, Debbie was sitting on the edge of the tub, watching Simms in fascination. He had emptied the medicine cabinet of all its contents, piling them in the sink. Then, with a power screw-remover, he had unscrewed four three-inch wood screws that held the metal medicine cabinet into the wall studs on each side of it. With a small chisel, he’d pried loose the top, bottom, and both sides of the cabinet and taken it out of the wall. Then he had stuck his arm far down into the opening between the walls and pulled up a pillowcase with Algiers Hotel embroidered across the hem. “Thanks, kid,” he said, tucking the pillowcase under one arm. “Tell your mother to call Maintenance to have this put back in.”
He started for the door and Debbie followed him. At the door, he paused and gave her the rest of the pack of gum. “Your mother’s right, you know,” he told her. “You really shouldn’t talk to strangers or take gum or anything. Promise me you won’t do it again.”
Smiling shyly, Debbie said, “I promise, George.”
Simms opened the door and stepped into the corridor. Max Wallace, just hurrying up, put a gun in his face. “Move a muscle and you’re gone,” he said coldly.
Simms froze. Lupe Mercado rushed past him to gather Debbie into her arms. “My baby! What did he do to you?” she cried.
“I didn’t do anything to her—” Simms started to protest.
“Shut up!” Wallace ordered.
Peering past Wallace’s shoulder, Charlie Hosey’s face brightened. “Now I remember you! You’re the bank teller! I always thought you looked familiar—”
Wallace frowned. “That Chase Manhattan embezzler you told me about?”
“That’s the one,” said Hosey. “The one who hooked up with the Lana Turner lookalike.”
Wallace snatched the pillowcase from Simms and looked inside it. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he whispered.
“It must have been hidden in that room all these years,” Hosey said. “Eighty thousand dollars.”
Lupe stared at the bundles of currency in the pillowcase, then turned her eyes incredulously to Simms, her lips parted in stunned disbelief. Wallace put handcuffs on Simms and started leading him away.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Lupe asked, following them down the hall, indignation rising. “We could have shared it! We could have both got out of this sewer! Why didn’t you trust me enough to tell me?”
“Me trust you?” Simms said. “You didn’t even trust me enough to give your kid a stick of gum!”
In the middle of the corridor, Wallace pushed Simms onto the elevator. “You could have tried!” Lupe said. Then more softly she added, “I could have tried—”
“Well, it’s too late now,” Simms said flatly as the elevator door closed them off from each other for the last time.
Young Isaac
Jerome Charyn
Lower East Side
(Originally published in 1990)
It was West Broadway, a land of small factories that could have produced every button and zipper in the world. Isaac loved to spy on all these button and zipper men, who would leave their lofts in the middle of the afternoon and congregate in a candy store, where they drank a curious concoction of malt and cream soda. They’d arrived in the ’20s from London’s East End. The language they spoke was almost indecipherable, even though Isaac’s dad had come out of the same streets. But Joel Sidel didn’t struggle over zippers. He was the fur-collar prince, and he was gathering a nice little nest. He had an exclusive contract with the Navy to manufacture fur collars for foul-weather coats. It kept him out of the war. He was already a millionaire in 1943, but he wouldn’t give up the tiny house that was ensconced between two button factories. “I’m one of the downtown Sidels,” he liked to say. “Never was an uptown man.” He wore suspenders lined with jewels. He had mistresses of every persuasion. He neglected his wife and children and ran to the Salmagundi Club, where he mingled with artists, because Joel would rather have been a painter than a fur-collar prince. He wanted the Germans to get the hell out of Paris, so he could move in. “How can I go to Montmartre and meet Picasso when there’s storm troopers on every block?”