Jonathan Raban - Surveillance - A Novel

“What?”

“ Kw-eye…dzuh. Chopsticks.”

“Are you from China?”

“Family come from over there.” He said fambly. “Once. Long time ago.” He picked up his water glass, held it beneath his nose, sniffed long and deep, then took a sip, which he swilled around in his mouth exactly as Alida had occasionally seen Tad doing with wine in a restaurant. This strange performance had both Tad and her mom gazing at Mr. Lee and swapping undercover glances. After many seconds of noisy tooth- and cheek-rinsing, the landlord swallowed, and said, “Old pipes.”

Tad said, “It’s an old building.”

“Them Winslow folks, they ever do any maintenance?”

“Schuyler Winslow always fixed what needed fixing.”

“Wah!” It was not quite a laugh and not quite a sneer. “You better believe it, I’m going to show you a thing or two ’bout what need fixing.” Ting for thing. “I tell you, I got plans you gonna like. Gonna take this neighborhood upscale, clean out all them bums. This ought to be class part of town, but ain’t nothing won’t happen here without you get them toerags off of the street.”

“And what are you planning to use, Mr. Lee? Rat poison? Gas?”

Mr. Lee stared at Tad for a full five seconds, then turned to Alida’s mom. “Funny guy,” he said. “Why they let this neighborhood go? Downtown so close, it don’t make sense. Where’s the business? This block, all you got’s that old TV store and the antics — and nobody go in there, don’t nobody want to buy that crap.”

That wasn’t fair. When Alida and her mom needed something like a homework desk or a chest for camp, they always went across the street to Mr. Kawasuki’s Almost Antiques. Alida had spent hours alone in there, browsing the bookshelves at the back, petting Mr. Kawasuki’s two cats, and digging for treasures in the 50¢ and $1.00 boxes. Her jewelry box came from Almost Antiques, and so did most of the jewelry inside it.

“What I see long term?” Mr. Lee was speaking softly, facing her mom but almost talking to himself. “I see you go out the door and you got the restaurant, nice restaurant, right there. You got the grocery store. You got the dry cleaners. And Starbucks. You got to have the Starbucks.”

On Adams Street ?

“You go out a night, and it’s real safe, lotta people there, good people. You got the condo blocks, just like in Belltown.”

Alida was confused. Adams Street wouldn’t be Adams Street, wouldn’t be home. For a moment she saw Mr. Kawasuki’s store boarded over, wrecking balls swinging through the sky, the street filled with the threatening fog of construction dust. Yet she couldn’t help but warm to some of his ideas; she had a particular weakness for iced mocha.

“Like I say, long term. Short term, you got to think security. Way you are now, you come back some afternoon and it ain’t gonna be your apartment no more, you know that? You gonna have the riffraff living here, cooking up your food, music on your stereo, shooting up right in your bathroom. Big party, lot of scumbag fun. You show up, they say ‘You go!’—and you gonna be looking at thirty-eight automatic pistol. Junkie with the gun, he got the shakes, he don’t know what his finger do.”

Tad said, “I think—”

“I know, ” the landlord said. “I know them low-life assholes, and what they want is what you got. See here!” He was out of his seat and by the door in a single movement that reminded Alida of a hummingbird’s mysterious ability to transfer itself invisibly from one space to another. “Okay, you got real lock in here with deadbolt. Now what, huh? What you need? Surveillance. Up here, bell ring — you got visitors. Who down there? You don’t know. Oh, sure, you got intercom, but intercom ain’t no security. Maybe friend says, ‘Is me,’ but maybe you got lowlife down there waiting to get in door with friend. Maybe friend don’t see lowlife, maybe lowlife hold a gun to friend. How you know what going on down there? Easy, ’cause right here”—he shaped a rectangle with his hands at shoulder height beside the door—“you got TV that show you the street, show everybody who there, fish-eye view!”

“Cool!” Alida said, the word escaping her involuntarily.

“Cool,” the landlord echoed. “See? Now you got security. Now you sleep good, not listen all the night for scumbag on stairs.” Grinning, he replanted himself in his chair. To Alida, he said, “Hey, maybe I get you a doorman. How you like that, huh?”

Alida tried and failed to imagine a doorman — fitted out in a blue uniform with silver braid — guarding the entrance to the Acropolis. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Mr. Lee, uh, do you have other apartment buildings in the city?”

Alida heard the incredulity in Tad’s voice, and watched the landlord as he inspected the question from every conceivable angle before he supplied an answer.

“Apartment block? No, first time.” He was speaking to her mom again, not Tad. “I got a bunch of parking lots, though. Get one, then two, you know how it goes. Right now I got seven. Downtown, Capitol Hill, Lower Queen Anne, all over. Nearest to you, I got one on Yesler and Second. Excellent Parking — ever go there?”

“Oh, that one,” her mom said. “The rates just went way up.”

The landlord shuffled his shoulders inside his too-big jacket. “What market will stand, hey?” He laughed, as if this was a kind of joke between him and her mom. “Go to New York City, know what you pay there? Fifteen bucks one hour, what somebody from New York tell me. Like in Seattle, I give you half-price, see?” That laugh again. Never in Alida’s hearing had anyone come quite so close to actually going tee-hee-hee.

He swung around in his chair to face her. “I’m like you,” he said. “Got to go back to school, study up to be land lord. Parking lots I know, apartments whole new ball game, got to learn a lot. You give me feedback, I see what I can do. Lesson One: got to keep tenant happy, right? So you help me and I help you.”

“Okay.” That seemed a fair deal to Alida, who was still thinking of how cool it would be to see every visitor on a TV monitor, caught by the camera unawares.

“Hey, I gotta question. Mr. MagiGro!” Arms folded on the tabletop, he leaned forward, grinning at Tad. “I been thinking about the lobby.”

“Lobby? The hallway?” Tad sounded distant, disdainful, and Alida wished that the landlord would stop annoying him with the Mr. MagiGro thing.

“Need new paint down there. Whole building need new paint. But what I think is to make nice with green, like what I see is palm tree in bucket. Would grow okay in lobby?”

“A palm tree, in a bucket.” Tad took off his glasses, wiped the lenses against his shirtfront, and put them back, perching them on the tip of his nose and peering over their tops, exactly as he did in the MagiGro commercials. All traces of irritation were gone from his voice when he looked earnestly at Mr. Lee and said, “You’d be looking at a pygmy Laotian date palm, tolerant of shade.”

Alida had no idea that Tad actually knew something about this gardening stuff. She and her mom had two big window boxes of flowers; he had none. True, he often brought cut flowers home, like the lilies, but he’d never shown interest in growing anything at all.

“Loamy soil,” he said. “You might want to add a little lime to raise its pH.”

Amazing.

“I’d use quite a bit of peat moss. And charcoal. Charcoal’s very good for palms.”

The landlord was nodding slowly, nodding and blinking, like he understood what Tad was talking about, which Alida was sure he didn’t.

“You’d need to keep an eye out for leaf blotch, down there in the…lobby. Then you’ve got to think about winter mulching.”