Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

"Wait, I got something else," Dan said, reaching into his briefcase again.

"What?"

"This. I had the guy do it in one day." He handed me a box of business cards. They had my name and new number on them, the address of the firm, everything.

I fanned the cards. Their stiff newness was satisfying. "You know I love this."

"Figured," said Dan. "Makes it feel official." He watched a boat of ice cream float down in front of his place. "Bill, one more thing."

"Sure."

"Just reassure me that- that you're coming to me with no problems."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean with no situations, no bad clients. No problems."

"Everybody has problems."

"Sure, sure," he said. "I mean real problems. Like funny clients you might be working with, whatever…"

"Not to worry," I said, starting to worry.

Sixty minutes later I stood in the doorway of the batting cages building in Brooklyn and spotted Helmo. He saw me right away and gave me that chin-up recognition guys use when they don't want to call out. I followed him across the street under the shadows of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. He smelled like Chinese food, but I didn't bring it up.

"So I was thinking," he said.

"About what?"

"I was thinking about your teeth."

"My teeth?"

"Yeah. They're good."

"So?"

"So I think three hundred is too low."

"Why?"

"Your teeth're too good. So're your clothes. Guy that's got good teeth, he can pay more."

I shook my head. Everyone was a chiseler, working the extra percentage, biting off the last dime. Including me.

"You want it or not?"

"How much?" I grumbled.

"Five hundred."

I dug it out of my wallet. Helmo handed me a slip of paper with Jay's address written in block letters. "You gotta go in the back. It's over the garage, up the side. I watched him go in there myself."

"How do you know it's not a friend's house or something?" I thought of Allison's anxiety about another woman. "Maybe a girlfriend?"

Helmo nodded slyly. "You check that place out, you'll see nobody else lives there."

"Which means-?"

"Just check it out. Trust in your common man, dude."

I stared at the address in my hand, it was near Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. "It's only about ten blocks away."

"Deal's a deal, bro."

I was eager to get going.

"What you looking for him for, anyway?" Helmo asked. "He do something bad?"

If Jay came back to the cages, Helmo could tell him of my inquiry, maybe get a round-trip payday.

"No, no, it's not like that," I said. "I'm trying to help the guy."

"Trying-a save his ass, like?"

"Something like that."

I set off then, on foot. Along Third Avenue under the BQE, then up the hill on Seventeenth Street. Once an Italian, maybe Irish neighborhood, now drifting Latino and urban mix. That's what everything is now, urban mix. If you're a white guy wearing a great suit in these places, you might as well have a blue-and-white NYPD chopper hovering over your head, announcing your appearance. I bought a Giants cap and a quart of milk at the corner deli, and yanked up my coat collar, hiding my jacket and tie. Cap low, carrying the plastic bag, shuffling along, trying to blend into the neighborhood. You could be somebody else. You aren't necessarily this thing or that. Just some guy. You don't look at people, because you're not interested, and if you're not interested, then it's no problem, we got no problem here.

I reached Seventeenth Street and found the address. Behind the house stood a garage with what looked like an illegal, owner-built addition on top, its shingles crooked, windows off-plumb, the roofing job patched and repatched. Here was the home of a man buying a three-million-dollar commercial building in downtown Manhattan? The idea was absurd. Behind the garage rose a twenty-foot-high chain-link fence grown over with ivy and ribboned with trash. A burglar could climb over it, but it wouldn't be much fun, and if you fell down on the garage side, you landed on a disassembled powerboat and a pile of cement blocks. Thus the apartment over the garage was well protected; the only way in was the exterior wooden staircase up the side. I looked behind me- no one watched. I pushed through the gate. Someone had abandoned a repainting job on the side of the house: Ladder, bucket, and brushes all fallen to the ground. In the weeds lay a rotting pile of freebie newspapers, phone books, shopping fliers, a leaking car battery, and whatever else someone didn't have the time for. I climbed the stairs and peered inside the one small window. The shade was down, nothing. I tried the door- locked. I knocked softly. Nothing. Maybe it was the wrong place; maybe Helmo had ripped me off. Nothing I'd seen proved Jay lived here. Going down the stairs I noticed that the treads were battered and worn. Even the risers were scraped, vertically. And there was a streaked pattern to the wear, suggesting repetition, something heavy going up or down on a regular basis.

Next I tried the garage door; it went up. I ducked beneath and closed it behind me. In the dusty half-light I recognized Jay's truck, a little slush stain on the sidewalls from the trip three nights prior. The truck's doors were locked. I peered into the windows; nothing. But the walls of the garage, I saw, were lined with large tanks, perhaps two dozen. I turned my attention to some boxes set in the back of the garage. They held car stuff, mostly, plus knitting materials and books on collecting dollhouses. Probably not Jay's. What else?

I slipped back under the garage door, picked up one of the paint cans in the weeds, and climbed the stairs. The apartment door was old, with nine panels of glass. I looked around, checked the street. This isn't much of a crime, I told myself, considering what he's already put me through. I swung the paint can against one of the bottom panels, and it cracked the glass enough for me to break out a few pieces. I checked the street again; nobody saw me drop the paint can into the weeds. I reached inside and flipped the dead-bolt lock. The door didn't open. I felt around and found a slide bolt below the doorknob.

Three minutes, I told myself- in and then get the hell out. Here I was breaking into someone's apartment hours after someone had broken into mine. Nice. I turned the knob and shut the door behind me. Jay would discover that someone had broken in, but he wouldn't know who.

The room was a monk's cell ten feet by twelve. You entered directly into the bedroom. A simple camp bed, neatly made. Next to it, an answering machine, red message-light blinking. To one side sat an enormous stainless steel box with a small window in its top, not unlike a space-age sarcophagus. It was the biggest thing in the room and a quick inspection of its dials and switches revealed it to be a hyperbolic oxygen chamber.

Oxygen. The man needed oxygen?

Three oxygen tanks identical to the ones in the garage stood next to the chamber. Bottled oxygen is a controlled substance, I remembered, considered a medicine. You need a doctor's prescription to get it. The tanks are heavy when full. They had to be delivered, and were probably carried with some kind of dolly up and down the outside stairs, hence the wear on the treads.

At the foot of the bed stood an oxygen compressor that huffed rhythmically, its sound not unlike that of waves breaking on a beach.

I saw two trunks under the bed and slid them out. Look inside? I'd come this far, so yes. The first trunk contained work tools: hammers, screwdrivers, socket wrenches. The second had socks, jeans, underwear, T-shirts, all neatly folded. Such neatness is depressing, as if one is preparing for death. I closed the trunks and slid them back. In Jay's closet hung ten suits arranged by color, each with matching shirt and tie, including the one he'd worn the night I'd met him in the Havana Room. These were expensive, good-looking clothes, but in the context of the tiny room, they seemed costumes for a theatrical production. Here was a man who lived militarily, who could move out in the amount of time it took to carry his belongings down the stairs. Perhaps four trips, not including the hyperbolic chamber. In the back of the closet, under a raincoat, sat the seltzer-water box Allison had given him the night of the deal. I tipped it toward myself to look inside: the cash was gone, all of it. Two hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars. Where had he stashed it?