I picked up my phone to call Angie and apologize when the light on my extension lit up, indicating that I had an incoming call. I was going to let my voice mail answer, but then I decided to pick up, figuring it might be a last-minute contact calling me back about my article.
"David Miller."
"Hello?"
The woman's voice was meek and high-pitched; I had to strain to hear her.
"Yes?" I said.
"Are you David Miller?"
"Speaking."
There was silence for a couple of seconds, and then the woman said, "I have your wallet."
I straightened up in my chair and smiled. "Wow, that's great wow.
Where'd you find it?"
The line was silent again. I wondered if she'd hung up or the connection was lost.
"Hello?" I said.
"Yeah," she said.
"I said where'd you find my»
"The bus," she said. "The First Avenue bus."
"Really?" I said. "Jesus, I wonder how it wound up there. I was pick pocketed in this bar in midtown last night. How'd you get my work number?"
"It was on a business card."
"Wow," I said. "Thank you so much for calling this'll really save me a big headache. I thought I'd have to get a new Social Security card and go to the DMV, stand in one of those ridiculous lines»
"So do you want it back or not?"
Suddenly the woman sounded rushed.
"Of course," I said. "How can I get it from you?"
"I live downtown," she said, "on Avenue B and Sixth."
"Okay," I said, finding a pen and piece of paper to write on. "You want me to meet you someplace near your apartment, or»
"You can come to my place to get it," she said.
"Fine," I said. "No problem. What time?"
"How's right now?"
I glanced at the time on my PC 11:18. I could zip downtown and make it back up in plenty of time to finish my story before the two o'clock deadline.
"Sounds great," I said. "What's your address?"
She gave me the address and told me her name Sue.
"Okay," I said. "I'll be there in twenty minutes, a half hour. Thanks so much for calling."
I typed a quick couple of paragraphs, then grabbed my jacket and headed down the corridor toward the front of the office. On the way out, I leaned into Angie's cubicle. She was on the phone, so I whispered,
"Sorry." Without speaking she mouthed, It's okay, and smiled.
I took the subway downtown instead of taking a cab, figuring it would be faster at this time of day. After exiting the Eighth Street station on Broadway, I headed east along St. Marks. I hadn't been to the East Village in a long time, and I'd been to Alphabet City only once or twice, when I first moved to the city after college. I'd heard about all of the gentrification that had taken place east of First Avenue, but the changes weren't as dramatic as I expected. Internet cafes, trendy macrobiotic restaurants, and hip clothing stores had replaced many of the bode gas dive bars, and hole-in-the-wall record stores, but the streets were still crowded with plenty of self-important, pseudo-Bohemian wannabes and burnouts, and there were still lots of seedy-looking bars and stores selling what looked like garbage they had to be fronts for something.
Avenue A had definitely improved over the past decade, looking as yuppified as Amsterdam Avenue in my neighborhood, and Tompkins Square Park wasn't the drug-infested hellhole it used to be. There were actually kids in the playground and normal-looking people walking along the paths and sitting on benches. But the area hadn't been entirely cleaned up. Outside the park there were still plenty of drug-addict types huddled on street corners and milling around phone booths.
I headed down Sixth Street and found Sue's building, near Avenue B. It was a nice block, but the five-story tenement where Sue lived had definitely missed out on the neighborhood's renaissance. The facade was dilapidated, with crumbling concrete, and at least a couple of apartments were burned out, the windows boarded up with plywood. Along the front of the building there was a waist-high fence, with several overflowing garbage cans beyond it. The door to the building had a small window, about one foot by one foot, too high to see inside, as if it were designed to give push-in rapists privacy.
Two very thin, junkie-looking guys with dirty faces and filthy clothes were hanging out on the sidewalk in front of the fence They'd been having a hushed conversation, but they stopped talking and stared at me as I approached.
I had a bad feeling about going inside the building, and I considered forgetting about the wallet and returning to my office. I actually turned around and took a few steps back toward Avenue A, when I thought about the picture of Barbara tucked behind my driver's license. It was just an old Polaroid, trimmed down to wallet size, but I'd kept it in my wallet for years and it meant a lot to me.
I walked by the two junkies, who were still watching me, and entered the building. Garbage littered the floor of the vestibule some of it was sticking to my feet and there was a strong, nauseating smell of urine that reminded me of the way Manhattan streets smell in August. I held my breath as I pressed the buzzer to apartment fourteen. A few seconds later a stat icky barely audible voice said something I couldn't understand.
"Sue?" I said, but the loud static came back on as I spoke.
"It's me," I said. "David Miller… the wallet guy."
More static came on. The odor in the vestibule was so bad I had to hold my shirt up over my face to breathe. I was about to go outside when the buzzer sounded, opening the inside door. I thought it was weird that she'd buzz a total stranger up to her apartment, but she probably figured that a guy who worked at a financial magazine wouldn't chop her into pieces.
The interior of the building was as run-down as the exterior. There was an old, rickety looking staircase to the left and overflowing garbage some bagged, some not piled up next to it. As I headed up the four steep flights of stairs, my shirt still covering half my face, I heard a TV blasting The Price Is Right, and a guy screaming with an Indian accent I made out the words "piece of shit" and I saw several huge, fearless roaches on the walls. It got warmer on each floor until it became downright hot. Again, I considered turning back, but then I thought about the picture. I'd had it for about twenty years, and it would suck if I couldn't get it back, especially after coming this far to get it.
I heard a door open on the floor above me and I continued up the stairs.
SUE WAS WAITING for me on the fifth floor, peering out of the partially opened door of apartment fourteen. When I arrived on the landing, I could see only a sliver of her face and body. As I approached the apartment, the door opened wider and Sue poked her head into the hallway. She was even shorter than I'd expected about five feet tall and very thin. She had brown hair, cut in a boyish style around her ears, and pale skin.
"Come in," she said in her mousy voice, which sounded even higher and squeakier than it had on the phone. "Thanks," I said hesitantly.
I entered the small, cluttered apartment, or really a rectangular-shaped room. The place was maybe two hundred square feet, maybe, and had a rusty sink, a tiny stove, and an old refrigerator, probably from the sixties, at one end, and a wide-open window at the other. A small, beat-up drop leaf table and two large, antique-looking chairs, partially covered in peeling white paint, were near the brick wall. Near the other wall, a futon lay on the floor with a small, old Turkish rug in front of it. Amish-mash of paintings, photographs, and posters hung around the apartment, including old framed posters of Van Gogh's self portrait and that famous picture of the Flatiron Building, and what looked like an original oil painting of an overweight nude woman. While the apartment had obviously been decorated with things purchased at thrift shops, or maybe even found on the street, everything had been arranged with a well-thought-out, maybe shabby-chic sense of style.