Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

Despite the prickly heat the sky was clear, and crisp shadows stretched across the street before them. Two blocks away McKennah Tower caught the last of the light and glowed like oiled ebony. The sparks fell from the welders’ flames as if the sunlight was being sheared off by the slabs of black glass.

“Did you ever find Corcoran?” she asked.

“We had a chin-wag, like my mother used to say.”

“And you lived to tell about it.”

“He’s a sensitive person deep down. He’s just misunderstood.”

Carol laughed.

“I don’t think he did it,” Pellam said. “The arson.”

“You really think that old woman’s innocent?”

“I do.”

“Unfortunately, one thing I’ve learned is that innocence isn’t always a defense. Not in the Kitchen.”

“So I’m finding.”

They continued slowly along bustling Ninth Avenue, dodging the hoards of workers from the main post office and discount stores and fashion district warehouses and greasy-spoon restaurants. In L.A. the streets were impassable at rush hour; here, it was the sidewalks.

“He seemed smart, Ismail,” Carol said after a moment. “Had spirit. It’s a crying shame it’s too late for him.”

“Too late?” Pellam laughed. “He’s only ten.”

“Way, way, way too late.”

“Isn’t there a program or something you can get him into.”

Carol apparently thought he was kidding and burst out laughing. “A program? Nope, Pellam. No program, no nothin’.” They stopped in front of a store selling exotic gypsy dresses. Carol, in her fat-hiding clothes, looked wistfully at the outfits on the anorexic mannequins. They walked on. “His father’s dead or gone, right?”

“Dead.”

“His mother? He called her a cluckhead. That means she’s a crack addict. No other relatives. You showed some interest. That’s why he attached himself to you. But you can’t give him what he needs. Nobody can. Not now. Impossible. He’s making gang contacts now. He’ll be jumped in in three years. Five years from now he’ll be a street dealer. In ten he’ll be in Attica.”

Pellam was angered by her cynicism. “I don’t think it’s that bleak.”

“I know how you feel. You wanted to let him stay with you, right?”

He nodded.

“I used to be optimistic too. But you can’t take ’em all in. Don’t even try. It’ll only drive you crazy. Save the ones you can save – the three-, four-year-olds. Write off the rest. It’s sad but there’s nothing you can do about it. Forces beyond our control. Race’ll be the death of this city.”

“I don’t know,” Pellam said. “Making this film, I see a lot of anger. But not angry blacks or whites. Angry people . People who can’t pay their bills or get good jobs. That’s why they’re mad.”

Carol shook her head emphatically. “No, you’re wrong. The Irish, Italian, Poles, West Indians, Latinos… they were all despised minorities too at one time. But there’s one insurmountable difference – it may have been in steerage but their ancestors booked passage to the New World. They didn’t come on slave ships.”

Pellam wasn’t convinced. But he let it go. This was her world, not his.

I be his friend…

He was surprised at how bad he felt about the boy.

“I hear so much rhetoric,” Carol continued angrily. “ ‘Ghettocentric.’ ‘Fragmented family units.’ What incredible bullshit you hear. We don’t need buzzwords. We need somebody to get the fuck into these neighborhoods and be with the kids. And that means getting to them in the nursery. By the time they’re Ismail’s age, they’re set in concrete.”

She looked at him and her eyes, which had grown icy, softened. “Sorry, sorry… You poor guy. Another lecture. The thing is, you’re an outsider. You’re entitled to a certain amount of optimism.”

“Bet you’ve got a little left, though. To stay here, I mean. Do what you’re doing.”

“I really don’t think I’m doing very much.”

“Oh, that’s not what your neighbors say.”

“What?” Carol laughed.

Pellam tried to remember. The name came to him. “Jose Garcia-Alvarez?”

Carol shook her head.

“I taped him for my film. Just last week. He spends every afternoon in Clinton Park. Shares his Wonder bread with a thousand pigeons. He said something about you.”

“That I’m a fiesty bitch probably.”

“That he’s forever grateful. You saved his son.”

“Me?”

He told the story. Carol had found the sixteen-year-old boy, strung out and unconscious, in a tenement that was just about to be torn down to make way for McKennah Tower. If she hadn’t called the police and medics the teenager might’ve been crushed to death by the bulldozers.

“Oh, him? Sure, I remember that. I wouldn’t exactly call it heroic.” She seemed embarrassed. Yet part of her was pleased, he could see. She suddenly grabbed Pellam’s arm to stop at a shoe store. It was an upscale place, doing no business whatsoever. Joan and David Shoes, Kenneth Cole. A single pair probably cost a week’s paycheck for most of people walking past. The owner was praying for gentrification and couldn’t hold out much longer.

“In my next life,” Carol said, though whether she was talking about being able to afford the svelte rhinestone-studded black heels she looked at or fit into a dress that would go with them, Pellam couldn’t guess.

Halfway down the street Carol asked, “You married?”

“Divorced.”

“Kids?”

“Nope.”

“Going with anybody?” she asked.

“Haven’t been for a while.”

Eight months to be precise.

If you could call a lusty night in a snowbound Winnebago “going with.”

“You?” He didn’t know if he should ask. Didn’t know if he wanted to.

“Divorced too.”

They dodged around a hawker in front of a discount cosmetics store. “Yo, bee-utiful lady, we make you mo’ bee-utiful than you already be.”

Carol laughed, blushing, and continued quickly past him.

A block farther she nodded at a shabby tenement, similar to Pellam’s.

“Home sweet home,” she said.

Carol gave a quarter to a panhandler she greeted as Ernie. They stopped at the deli, exchanged a few words with the counterman and walked to the back of the store. She held up a can of coffee and a six pack of beer. “Which one,” she mouthed.

He pointed to the beer and he could see that that was her choice too.

Not too distant kindred souls…

Her apartment was next door, a decrepit walk-up with beige and brown paint slapped over dozens of generations of other layers. They walked up the stairs. He smelled old wood, hot wallpaper, grease and garlic. Another firetrap, Pellam thought in passing.

On the landing she abruptly halted, stopping him on the step below. A pause. She was debating. Then she turned. Their faces were at the same height. She kissed him hard. His hands slid down her shoulders into the small of her back and he felt the ignition inside him. Pulled her even closer.

“ Turiam pog ,” she whispered, kissing him hard.

He laughed and cocked an eyebrow.

“Gaelic. Guess what it means.”

“I better not.”

“ ‘Kiss me,’ ” she said.

“Okay.” And did. “Now, what does it mean?”

“No, no.” She laughed. “That is what it means.” She giggled like a girl and stepped to the door closest to the stairs. They kissed again. She dug for her keys.

Pellam found himself looking at her. And as she bent forward, glassesless, squinting her bad eyes to open the lock, he saw an image of a Carol Wyandotte very different from the stony, hustling Times Square social worker. He saw the sad pearls, the sweatshirts, an elastic-shot cotton bra, the fat at her throat that Fiber-Trim would never melt away. Whose nights were filled with the tube, in a room peppered with Atlantic Monthly s and Diet Pepsi empties, dresser filled with more cotton socks than black pantyhose. The Archway cookies packages she’d automatically tucked out of sight when guests walked into the kitchen, a fat person’s instinct.