“No, there isn’t.”
“Hardly worth having a business card that doesn’t have a business on it. Must be hard to make a living.”
“You’d think, wouldn’t you?”
“What do you do, kill snakes?”
And the words were no sooner out of Willie’s mouth than he regretted them, his mind uttering a silent “Goddamn” as it realized that it had lost the race to catch up with his tongue.
“Kind of. I’m in pest control.”
“Pest control. Right.”
The man extended his hand once again in farewell. Almost in a daze, Willie shook it.
“Louis,” said Willie. “That’s it, just Louis?”
“Just Louis,” said the man. “Oh, and as of today, I’m your new landlord.”
And that was how it had begun.
Willie splashed water on his face. From outside, he heard laughter, and a voice that sounded like Arno’s giving his opinion on the Mets, an entirely negative view that seemed to involve only the word “Mets” and a seemingly infinite series of variations on a second word that Arno, who prided himself on his sophistication when he wasn’t on his fourth double vodka, liked to refer to as “the copulative.” Arno was funny like that. He might have looked like an aging rat, but he knew more words than Webster’s. Willie had been to Arno’s apartment only once, and nearly had his skull fractured when a pile of novels came toppling down on his head. Every available space seemed to be occupied by newspapers, books, and the occasional car part. On those rare occasions when Arno was late for work, Willie was tormented by images of him lying unconscious beneath an entire stack of encyclopedias from the 1950s, or smoking away like a piece of fish beneath layer upon layer of smoldering newsprint. Well, maybe “tormented” was putting it kind of strongly. “Mildly bothered” might have been closer to the mark.
Someone had written Jake is a male slut in lipstick at the bottom right-hand corner of the glass. Willie hoped that the culprit was a woman, although homosexuality didn’t bother him so much now. Love and let love, that was his motto. Anyway, that black gentleman who had saved his business (and, let’s face it, his life, because he’d always had a weakness for booze, and by the time the divorce was reaching its filthy nadir he was putting away a bottle of Four Roses a day, and say what you like about Four Roses but gentle it ain’t) had a partner named Angel, and while it wasn’t as if there were wedding bells in the offing, or an announcement in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, they were just about the closest-knit couple that Willie had ever encountered. “The couple that slays together stays together,” as Arno had once put it, and Willie had instinctively looked over his shoulder in the quiet of the garage, half expecting to see a black figure looming unhappily over him, a smaller one beside him looking equally discontented. It wasn’t that they scared him, or not much-that feeling had passed a long time ago, or so he liked to tell himself-but he hated to think that their feelings might be hurt. He had said as much to Arno, and Arno had apologized and had never issued a similar utterance since, but sometimes Willie wondered if Arno had been so far off the mark, all things considered.
The door of the men’s room opened. Arno’s head popped through the gap.
“The hell are you doing?” he asked.
“Washing my hands.”
“Well, hurry up. There’s a party waiting for you out here.” Arno paused as he saw the writing on the mirror. “Who’s Jake?” he asked. “Hey, did you write that?”
He ducked just in time to avoid being hit by a wadded paper towel, and then Willie Brew, sixty years old and sometime associate of two of the most lethal men in the city, went out to join his birthday party.
CHAPTER THREE
THE INTERIOR OF NATE’S was dimly lit. It was always that way. Even in summer, when streams of harsh sunlight struck the windows, the beams seemed to melt against the glass and then drizzle like honey through the panes, their energy dissipated as though they, like the patrons inside, had, in the transition from beyond to within, absorbed just a little too much alcohol to be truly useful for the rest of the day. Apart from an area two feet square beside the double doors, no part of Nate’s had seen unfiltered natural illumination for more than half a century.
And yet Nate’s was not a cheerless place. White fairy lights adorned the bar all year round, and each table was lit by a candle in a glass lamp seated on an iron bowl. The bowls were secured to the wood of the tables with inch-long screws (Nate was no fool) but the candles were scrupulously monitored, and as soon as they began to flicker they were replaced by a waitress or, on quiet evenings, by Nate himself, who was small, sixtyish, and jug-eared, and was said to have once bitten a man’s nose off in a bar fight down in Baja when he was in the Navy. No one had ever asked Nate if that was true because Nate would happily talk to anyone about ball scores, the idiots who ran the city of New York and the country whose space the city occupied, and the general well-being of friends and family, but as soon as someone tried to get more personal with him, Nate would wander off to clean glasses, or check the taps, or replenish the candles, and the unwise party who had inadvertently offended him would be left to wait on a refill and rue his brashness. Nate’s was not that kind of place, as Nate liked to point out, although nobody had ever managed to nail him down on just what kind of place Nate’s was, exactly. Nate liked it that way, and so did the people who frequented his bar.
Nate’s, like its owner, was a relic of another time, when this part of Queens was predominantly Irish, before the Indians and the Afghans and the Mexicans and the Colombians came along and began carving it up into their own little enclaves. Nate wasn’t Irish, and neither was his bar: even on St. Patrick’s Day, Nate wasn’t about to change his white fairy lights for green ones, or begin drawing shamrocks on the heads of his patrons’ beer. No, it was more to do with a certain state of mind, a particular attitude. Surrounded by foreign smells and strange accents, in a city that was constantly changing, Nate’s represented solidity. It was an old-world bar. You came here to drink, and to eat good, simple food that didn’t pander to dietary fads or concerns about cholesterol. You behaved yourself. If you used foul language, you kept your voice down, particularly if there were ladies present. You paid your tab at the end of the night, and you tipped appropriately. The chairs were comfortable, the restrooms, occasional graffiti apart, were clean, and Nate’s pouring hand was neither too heavy nor too light. He made good cocktails, but he didn’t do shooters. “You want shooters, go to Hooters,” as he once told some college kids who had made the mistake of asking for a tray of Dive Bombers. In fact, as Nate said later, once he had thrown their asses out, their first mistake was coming into his bar to begin with. Nate did not like college kids, which was not to say that he was not proud of the local boys who had made good by going on to further education. He knew their parents, and their grandparents. They were not “college kids.” They were his kids, and they would always be welcome in his bar, although he still wouldn’t serve them shooters, not even if a shooter was going to cure them of cancer. A man had to have standards.
The bar did not have a private room, but there were four tables at the back that were cut off from the rest of the premises by a wall of wood inset with three frosted-glass panes, and it was there that the party to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Willie Brew was taking place. In truth, the party had spread out a little as the evening drew on. There was a noisy core of six or seven seated around Arno, then a second table of four or five that was quieter, mellowed by Jameson and the general good nature of those gathered there. A third was occupied by assorted wives and girlfriends, of which Willie had initially not entirely approved. Willie had been under the impression that this was to be a men-only night, but he supposed that, under the circumstances, he could afford to be tolerant, as long as nonmales kept themselves to themselves, within reason. Actually, he supposed that, deep down, he was a little flattered that they had come along. Willie was gruff, and he was by no means a looker. Since his wife left him, the only females with whom he had enjoyed actual physical contact were metal and had headlights where their boobs should have been, and he had almost forgotten how good it felt to be hugged by a woman, and smothered in perfume and kisses. He had blushed down to his ankles as a series of what might generally be termed “women of a certain age” had, either singly or in pairs, reminded him of the charms of the fairer sex by pressing said charms firmly against Willie’s body. One of the reasons he had headed for the men’s room was to remove the lipstick traces from his cheeks and mouth so that he no longer looked, as Arno had put it, like an overweight Cupid advertising a poor man’s Valentine’s Day.