Marisha Pessl - Night Film

No one, she’d said.

It reminded me of the profile in the Amherst newsletter. It’s wonderful to get lost in a piece of music, she’d said. To forget your name for a while.

Our taxi eased down the deserted street. In front of us, the Manhattan Bridge extended at a diagonal like a massive fallen tree no one had bothered to remove. Dingy walk-ups had sprouted up around it.

“There,” Hopper said, indicating a building on our right.

The awning out front read 83 HENRY STREET in white letters, followed by a few Chinese characters. Metal grates had been pulled down on either side of the front entrance — a green door with a small rectangular window.

I paid the driver, and we climbed out.

It was oddly silent and still, the only sound the faint moans of unseen cars racing across the bridge. I stepped up to the door, looking through the window.

Inside, a derelict hallway spray-painted with graffiti extended beyond a row of mailboxes.

“Look,” Nora whispered, pointing at the label beside the buzzer for #16. It read K. GLASS.

“ Don’t press it,” I said. I stepped back to the curb, staring up at the building: five stories, crumbling red brick, a rusted fire escape. All of the windows were dark except two on the second floor, another on the fifth with frilly pink curtains.

“Someone’s coming,” Hopper whispered, moving away from the door, darting around the corner, where there was a parking lot. Nora lurched backward, hurrying down the sidewalk. I stepped around the trash bags piled on the curb, heading across the street.

Seconds later, I heard the door open behind me, rapid footsteps.

An Asian man wearing a blue jacket had exited, walking toward Pike Street. He didn’t appear to have seen us — not even Hopper, who’d slipped past him and managed to catch the door before it closed.

“ Nice, ” Nora whispered excitedly, rushing inside after him. “Number sixteen must be the top floor.”

“Hold on a minute,” I said, stepping after them.

But Hopper was already racing down the hall and out of sight, Nora right behind him. I held back, inspecting the mailboxes. Apart from Glass at #16, there was only Dawkins in #1 and Vine in #13.

I slipped down the hall, a TV babbling somewhere close by. Hopper and Nora could already be heard clanging upstairs. Because of a bright light somewhere beyond the corridor, their dark, elongated shadows were suddenly tossed against the wall in front of me — two long black tongues sliding down it, licking the cracked brown tiles and vanishing.

I headed after them, the steps strewn with trash and ads for Asian escorts, mostly in Chinese. One flier, wedged into a filthy windowpane, read ASIAN GIRL-MASSAGE and featured a naked Korean wearing rubber chaps shyly peering over her shoulder. MEET YUMI, it read.

Hopper and Nora had disappeared somewhere along the top floor. As I started up the next flight, kicking aside a Tsingtao beer can, there was a sudden bang somewhere below me.

I stared over the metal railing.

No one was visible. Yet I swore I could hear breathing.

“Hello?” I called out, my voice echoing through the stairwell.

There was no answer.

I moved up the remaining flights, pulling open the door marked 5 , spotting Hopper and Nora at the end of a long dim hallway outside #16. As I caught up, they both turned, startled, at something behind me.

A woman had just appeared at the opposite end.

The single neon bulb on the ceiling drenched her wide nose and forehead in sickly yellow light. She was quite fat, wearing a long green skirt and black T-shirt, straggly brown hair covering her shoulders.

“What d’you think you’re doing?” she asked in a croaky masculine voice.

“Checking in on a friend,” I said.

She scurried toward us, hunched shoulders, flip-flops rapidly slapping her bare feet.

“ What friend?”

“Ashley.”

“Who?”

“Kay,” Nora interjected. “He means Kay. ”

The name made the woman stop short, unwilling to approach further. She had to be in her fifties, with mottled skin, also missing some teeth, giving her face the countenance of a crumbling statue.

“Where the hell is Kay?” she demanded. “You tell her she owes me three weeks’ rent. I’m not running a free shelter here.”

Hopper reached into his coat pocket, unfolding a piece of paper.

“Is this her?” he asked. It was a black-and-white photograph of Ashley. He must have printed it off the Internet, because I’d never seen it before — unless it was from his own collection, a snapshot taken at Six Silver Lakes. The woman didn’t move to look at it, only jutted out her chin.

“You’re cops?”

“No,” I said. “We’re friends of Kay’s.”

“When was the last time you saw her?” blurted Nora.

The woman glared at us. “I don’t talk to cops.”

“We’re not cops,” said Hopper, removing his wallet from his back pocket. The instant he flipped it open, the woman’s small black eyes swarmed it like flies over a turd. “Answer our questions, we’ll make it worth your while.” He held out three twenties, which she grabbed instantly, counting them, then sticking them down the front of her T-shirt.

“Is this Kay?” asked Hopper again, holding out the picture.

“Sure looks like her.”

“When did you last see her?” I asked.

“ Weeks ago. That’s how come I came up. Heard all the creepin’ around, thought she came back to get her stuff and was trying to sneak past me. Any idea when Her Highness plans to show?”

“Not really.”

The news infuriated her. “I coulda rented this room five times over. Now I gotta get a locksmith up here. Clean out her shit.”

“Why a locksmith?” I asked.

She nodded at the door. “I don’ got the key to her room. She changed the locks on me.”

“Why?”

“Hell if I know.”

“What was she like?” asked Nora.

The woman grimaced. “Had duchess airs, if you ask me. Had a way of demanding things, like she thought she was a queen a’ England. Wanted me to fix the lights in the bathrooms ’cuz it was too dark for her, then the hot and cold tap. Musta mistaken this place for a fuckin’ Marriott.”

“Do you know what she was doing in the city?” asked Nora.

The woman squinted as if faintly insulted. “You pay me on time, what you do in the room is your business. She did do me a favor once. I had to run out, and she watched my nephew a coupla hours. That I did appreciate. But then she changes the locks, runs out, stiffs me on the rent. I’m runnin’ a business. Not a charity.” She stared resentfully at the door again. “Now I gotta pay for a locksmith.”

“How long has she been living here?” I asked.

“ ’Bout a month. But I haven’t seen her for weeks.”

“And how did she hear about it?”

“Answered my ad. I got fliers posted around Port Authority.”

“How much to break the door down?” Hopper asked, running his hands along it. “We’ll also cover whatever Kay owed you in rent.”

“Uh, that’d be — oh, one-fifty. Plus any damage to the door.”

“Here’s three hundred.” He shoved a wad of bills at the woman, which she hastily grabbed, then he strode to the end of the hall, where there was a door with a grimy pane of glass — some sort of communal bathroom — and a fire extinguisher. He pulled the extinguisher free and moved back, raising it over his head and slamming it hard against the deadbolt.

He did this five times, the wood splintering, and then — with a laid-back ease that hinted he’d done this before — he tossed aside the canister, took a few steps back, and side-kicked it. The door flew open, cracking against the wall, and then closed, stopping so it was ajar about an inch.