Читать книгу The Sea Beach Line - Ben Nadler - Страница 12

4

AS SOON AS I turned the corner from Broadway onto West Fourth Street, I saw the booksellers. They were a feral element in the landscape, contrasting with the purple New York University flags and the attendant crowds of clean students. The booksellers were a black mold growing through the new paint. I admired the defiant role they played in the cityscape. Unlike all the people rushing off to offices—Becca and Andrew, for instance—these street vendors interacted with the metropolis on their own terms.

At the first table, a man wearing an old military jacket and a black beret was taking science-fiction paperbacks out of a Poland Spring box and arranging them on the edge of an already crowded card table. He lined the books up evenly with each other, letting as much of each one hang off the edge as he could without it falling onto the sidewalk.

“Excuse me,” I said. He looked up and shook his head. “No,” I said, “I just wanted to—” The man shook his head again, and pointed to another man, who had long black dreadlocks with pieces of seashell and wire tied into them, and wore a long coat that seemed too heavy for the tail end of a warm winter. He leaned against a large cement planter in which nothing grew, bent over in a halfhearted attempt to hide the wad of cash he was counting. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, but he neither drew nor ashed, and I waited to see if his bouncing dreadlocks would catch on fire. As I watched, a gust of wind dispersed the quarter inch of gray ash into the air.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Yeah? Could I help you? Could I?” His pupils—bits of charcoal floating in a glass of dirty water—darted up toward me for a moment before he resumed counting his money. It wasn’t a huge sum of money, but he kept getting confused and starting over.

“I was just wondering if you knew if there was a bookseller around here named Mendy?” The man stopped counting and looked up.

“Mendy? Mendy, Mendy. Mendy? There might be.” He turned and shouted at the man with the beret. “He wants to know is there a Mendy around here?” The man with the beret smiled warily, and clutched his box of books tighter. “Yeah, there’s a Mendy around here. What do you want with that asshole?”

“Nothing, it’s just that somebody told me I should talk to him.”

“Okay, okay.” He put his money in his pocket so he could gesture with his hands. “But look: if you got some textbooks to sell, you might as well go ahead and bring them to me first. Because I, frankly, will give you a better deal than that bastard.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think . . .”

“What do you mean, ‘no’? You can ask anybody out here on this street. It’s the truth. I can give you a better deal on your books. Don’t get me wrong, I can’t make you rich. Used books are worth very little. But compared to that stinker down there, well, let’s just say that he will not treat you so good as I will treat you.”

“No. I mean, I’ll keep that in mind.” I held out my empty hands, to show I didn’t have anything to sell. “It’s not about books, though, it’s about something personal.”

“Aw, hell. I don’t care about nothing like that. Mendy’s down that way.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. This man was a hustler, and if I wasn’t buying or selling, he had no use for me.

“Where?” I asked.

“Down there at the corner where the park starts. Old guy with a beard. That is to say, older than me, with a bigger beard than mine.” Our interview concluded, he went back to peering at his bills through his thick glasses.

I passed two more tables before I came to Mendy’s. His setup was by far the most expansive on the block, stretching along the sidewalk for a good twenty feet. Sheets of plywood spanned several card tables, and on top of them the books were packed tight in long, snaky rows, held at the end by the T-shaped metal bookends librarians use. Between the rows, other books stood upright, some encased in plastic slipcovers.

Debris was strewn underneath and behind the tables. Empty water boxes. The red-and-white woven plastic bags sold in Chinatown, weighted down with two-by-fours. A box of tissues. A shiny handcart. Stacks of books. Always, more books.

The whole setup gave me the impression of a kid’s clubhouse. I peeked, half expecting to find a twelve-year-old sneaking a smoke under the table. Someone was indeed hiding there, but he was a grown man well into his sixties. Though he was hunched down, busily cleaning book covers with rubbing alcohol and tissues, I had a clear profile view. There was something Hasidic in his lean face and long cloudy beard, but his soiled wifebeater and sinewy arms—surprisingly muscled for so old a man—betrayed more than a passing familiarity with the material world. He caught me staring and rose to an upright position. His eyes stayed locked on mine, as if he’d just discovered me inside his house, and couldn’t decide if I was a harmless sleepwalker or a burglar.

“Were you looking for something particular? Something I could maybe help you with?” Each word was a testing jab.

“No, I’m not looking for . . . I’m just looking.”

I picked up a thin book called The ABC of Anarchism and made myself read a few pages. The author was trying to convince somebody about something.

“The guy who wrote that”—he gestured at the book in my hand with the one he held in his—“Berkman. He’s the one who shot Frick.” I didn’t know who Frick was, but the old graybeard sounded like he was happy Frick got shot. “During the Carnegie Steel strike. He was Emma Goldman’s lover.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re familiar?”

“Not really.” My ex-girlfriend, Mariam, had sewn an Emma Goldman patch on her messenger bag, but that was the extent of my knowledge. “Is your name Mendy?”

“Yeah. It is. So?”

“My name is Izzy. Izzy Edel. I’m Alojzy Edel’s son.”

“Oh, I see. Jesus.” He took off his glasses, and rubbed his palm over his eyes and face and beard. “Ally, Ally, Ally. I didn’t even know he had a son. A daughter he’d mentioned, a few times . . .”

“Yeah, that’s my sister. Becca.”

“Sure. Right. Hey. Listen.” He put his glasses back on and stuck out his hand. “It’s nice to meet you . . . Izzy, was it?” We shook hands. His grip was very strong.

“I heard that he died. I’m very sorry. For whatever that’s worth.”

“Thank you for your concern, but . . . I’m not sure if he’s dead or not. It’s not been confirmed yet.”

“Oh. I see. I’m not optimistic, but of course I hope you’re right. We could sit and talk a minute, if you’d like?” He led me across the wide sidewalk to a short stone ledge extended off the NYU library.

“Had you been in touch?” he asked me once we’d sat down. “With your father?”

“No. Not in a long time. Years.”

“I can’t say that surprises me. He never struck me as a family man. So how did you find your way here, then, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“We only found out about my father’s . . . disappearance because we got a note from a man named Goldov. I met him yesterday. He mentioned your name.”

“Goldov? Sure. Sure. Excuse me.” Mendy turned to shout to a potential customer holding up a volume of Greek myths. “The price is on the front page. No, that’s the cover. I said the front page. That’s right. There. What it says. Three dollars.” The customer came over with a ten-dollar bill, and Mendy made change from the fanny pack around his waist.

“When my own father died,” he said to me, “I felt him around. I kept thinking he was just in the next room. Which was sort of funny, because it was not like I was used to him being around, ever actually being in the next room. I mean, there were years, as an adult, where I hardly saw my parents at all. It was mostly like that, more years that were like that than not. I always would think of him, but in a distanced way. Then he died, and all of a sudden, and for months, I kept thinking of him, in a much closer way. Like death made him more present.” It was true that Alojzy felt more present to me recently, but I didn’t think that was because he was dead. I thought it was because he had reached out to me. If I sensed him in the world, it was because he was in the world. Mendy saw the skepticism on my face.

“That’s neither here nor there. You said you think Al is only missing, not dead?”

“Well, Goldov said Alojzy was missing and believed dead. And you said you heard he was. But I don’t know anything for sure. Do you know any details?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t. He’d been away from the street for a week or so, which wasn’t so strange, but then I heard about his death. Maybe it was from Goldov, actually, that I heard it first? I think it was, though I wouldn’t swear to it.” This brought me back to the idea that the story of Alojzy’s death had been purposefully crafted, by either Goldov or Alojzy. “Then everyone was talking about it. But that was all anyone seemed to know, that he was dead.

“Let me be clear,” Mendy said. “I’m only telling you what I know. I can’t tell you for sure he’s dead. I can only tell you that he disappeared from the street. But my opinion is, to be perfectly honest with you, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for him to come back. I’m sorry to say.”

“Excuse me!” A man in a jacket and tie jabbed a stack of books at us.

“No,” said Mendy. “Excuse me, I’m having a conversation here.”

“Sure, I just wanted to make a purchase, if you can imagine that.”

“Listen, I don’t care what you want to do. I told you I’m having a conversation.”

“Are you serious? Is this the way to run a business?”

“No, I don’t think this is any way to run a business. You’re right about that, pal.” The man started to say something else, but couldn’t think what and shook his head instead. He tossed the books onto the table and stomped off.

“My father,” I said. “What can you tell me for sure? You worked on this street together? What do you know about his life?”

“Your father. He sold down here, off and on, for years. Everybody down here knew him. He was, I don’t know, he brought something out in people. Women especially. There were always women looking for him.” Mendy smiled. I imagined my father and this man exchanging little jokes about women’s bodies, in a streetwise male language I’d never quite learned. “But he could talk to anyone. He would just as soon stay quiet, he wasn’t one to run his mouth for no reason, but he was capable of talking to anyone. The gift of gab, I guess they call it. He spoke like six languages.”

“Six? English and Polish and Hebrew . . .”

“Some Arabic. Some Russian.”

“That’s right.”

“A little Yiddish too, I found out. He had a girlfriend who was teaching him Spanish, for a while.” Mendy looked at his fingers. “Now we’re up to seven. He had all that up on me. I got English, scraps of high school German, and some house Yiddish. That’s about it, for me. It all adds up to just English, really. My parents never let me learn Yiddish proper, because they didn’t want I should have an accent. Better I should speak like an American. They came from Poland too. But before the war. When there were Jews in Poland, still. Lots of them. I talked to Al about that, sometimes.”

“About . . .?” I had lost the thread of what Mendy was saying.

“About Poland, and the Jews who lived there. The history of it.”

“Oh. Okay. Is there anything else you can tell me about him, though? I mean, him personally?” I needed clues.

“Personally? He is—was—a rough person. But kind. He had ziskeit. You know the word? There’s no other word for it. I know he did some things. I know he hurt Goldov. I know he hurt some girlfriends. I imagine he hurt others. Maybe he hurt you . . . if I might be so bold, as to interpret the look on your face. He was involved in I don’t know all what. But I always thought of him as kind.

“I remember—I had a van for a while—I told Al he could borrow it one time, when he needed to move some books. He was shocked. He said, ‘Mendy, you’re really trusting me with your van?’ I said, ‘Al, is there a reason I shouldn’t trust you?’”

“I see.” I remembered a van of his own that Al had owned when I was in high school. It was a white Astro van, and was always dirty and packed full of boxes. “Do you know . . . do you know where he’d been living?”

“I don’t know if you could say he lived at any fixed place, exactly. But his, you could say, base of operations, where he kept his books, was a storage space down past SoHo. Where I do believe he slept sometimes, though he was very private about things like that. Very guarded.

“His space is in the same facility as mine, just down the hall. It’s the only facility downtown with twenty-four-hour access. I guess that’s another reason I think he died. It wouldn’t be like him to just abandon his stuff, to not try to sell it off or something before he left.”

“So his stuff is still there? You don’t think it’s been cleaned out?”

“No. No one’s been by to clean it out. I keep my eyes open.”

“They don’t throw stuff out, when a person dies? Or disappears?”

“They throw stuff out—or sell it, if they can—when someone stops paying the bill. Not that it’s my business, but I believe a man named Timur, who your father knew, took care of those details. He’s a rich guy . . . kind of a benefactor. I guess it’s paid up, because they haven’t cut the lock yet.

“Matter of fact, I got the spare key to that lock in my own space there. Al had me hold on to a copy in a neighborly sort of way, in case of emergencies. If you come back with me in the evening, I can let you in.”

I spent the rest of the day with Mendy. He said I could meet him down on Varick Street in the evening, but I wanted to see how Alojzy spent many of his days. Maybe I would meet someone who knew something about his disappearance. I wanted to know how it felt to work out on the street all day long, and see what the street looked like from this side of the table. The Yeshiva Bocher was in my pocket, but I was more interested in the street life than in a book.

The book table was both part of and an oasis from the crowded sidewalk. Foot traffic passed by indifferently for the most part, but sometimes people detached themselves from the herd to come look at the books. Sometimes they browsed. Other times they looked for a specific title. Often, though, they seemed to be hungrily searching for something specific, but they didn’t know what it was. I watched their faces as they picked books up and responded to them with curiosity, confusion, disappointment, and excitement.

I helped Mendy clean old price tags off newly acquired books. If they were left on, people would try to get the price on the tag, not the price Mendy had penciled in on the first page. He showed me how to clean the tags. First, you dissolved the glue by putting a drop of lighter fluid onto the tag, then you scraped the tag off with a razor blade. When that was done, you wiped off the tag residue, and any other grime, with a tissue and bit of rubbing alcohol. You had to be careful you didn’t use too much alcohol, or you’d end up wiping off the ink from the cover picture. I did this a couple times with old paperbacks, but Mendy didn’t seem to care too much.

“This,” he said, “is why I am not in the antique business.”

When Asher, the dreadlocked bookseller I’d spoken to earlier, saw me sticking around, he came by and introduced himself properly. I was also introduced to Hafid, a skinny Moroccan guy who set up next to Mendy and spent his day quietly reading Sufi books underneath a sun umbrella, and Robertson, a rare-book man who did his selling on the Internet, but hung around the block to talk shop and see if any interesting volumes surfaced. They nodded with respect when they heard who my father was. I didn’t press them all with questions, but I made sure they knew I was curious about Alojzy’s life, whereabouts, and fate.

Around one o’clock, customers descended like a wave. The socializing stopped, and everyone went back to his own table to focus on making money.

“The lunchtime rush,” Mendy explained. I helped out by packing peoples’ purchases into old Gristedes grocery bags while Mendy tallied the prices. He ran up and down the length of the table, connecting with each and every customer who was interested in making a purchase. After a customer left, I straightened out the books they’d disturbed. The people who didn’t buy anything seemed to leave the biggest messes. I referred most questions to Mendy, but after a while I was able to point a few people in the right direction on my own.

After business slowed down, I bought a quart of macaroni salad and a Diet Coke from the deli and ate it in the park. When I returned, Mendy asked if I would cover the table while he used the restroom and got some food. He handed me a bankroll from his fanny pack of cash to make change with. It seemed strange that he trusted me with his cash, but then I remembered the story about my father and the van. If he could trust Alojzy, he could trust me.

I sold a couple books and wrote down the names so I could tell Mendy what they were. An NYU coed with sweet brown dates for eyes thumbed through an anthology of d.a. levy’s work. She was looking at the collages, and asked me if I knew him and was he a good poet. I said he was, and told her about the love poem he wrote to the fifteen-year-old girl who turned him into the “subversive squad” of the Cleveland Police Department. The woman went away without buying the book.

Another wave came down on us at five o’clock, dropping off just at the end of dusk. It got colder as the sun went down, and Mendy put on a big green sweater he pulled from one of his many bags. The sky was hardening, closing in. Between the sky, the pavement, and the brick buildings along the square, I had the strange feeling that this wasn’t the outside, just a giant room.

Mendy sat down beside me on the curb. “This is the dinnertime lull. There’ll be one more chance to make some good money, starting around eight o’clock or so, then we’ll pack it in.”

The whole world felt calmer than it had half an hour before. The people had gone off the street into homes and restaurants, or else down into the subway. The air was thicker and lazier. The cabs that had rushed by earlier were now on some other block. Mendy, for his part, was no longer running up and down the length of the table, and had taken out a yogurt container and a metal spoon.

“So what do you do with yourself, Izzy?” he asked between slurps. “You in college or something?”

“No. I was there for a while. It didn’t really work out.”

“Sure. College wasn’t for me either. I felt—this was in the ’60s, early ’60s, maybe things are different now—they didn’t have anything I wanted. I always think of that scene in Casablanca. The guy says, What brings you to Casablanca? And the other guy, the Humphrey Bogart character, Rick, I think, says, I came for the waters. But, Rick, the guy says, there’s no waters. Oh, he says, I was misinformed. That’s how I felt about the university.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“I was misinformed.”

“Ah. Yeah. I get you. Before the semester, they give you a little magazine, informing you about the classes, and they were straight with me. I chose the classes I wanted, and I read a lot of books, even if I didn’t write all the papers. I maybe read too many books. But yeah, it wasn’t where I was supposed to be.” I kicked an empty coffee cup away from my foot. “I had to leave, because they threw me out. But it was time for me to go anyway. I’d gotten all I could from a place like that. When they told me to leave, I said, ‘fine.’” Thinking back on it now, I should have left as soon as I read the Pardes story. That was all they had to give me.

“Was it brawling?” Mendy asked. “You get into some fistfights?”

“No, nothing like that. It was drugs, actually. I hooked some kids up with some acid and when one of them got in trouble he turned me in.” I was a little surprised to find myself being so open about all this, but Mendy had been honest with me about Al, and I felt I should be honest with him in return.

“Life’s rough like that,” Mendy said. “You try to be a nice guy, and help another guy out. And then that’s what you get in return.”

“That’s what you get, all right.”

“Still, you’re lucky you’re a free man. A friend of mine got in some trouble like that once . . . they gave him ten years for two sheets of blotter acid. This was back in the ’70s. It was the ’80s by the time they let him out.” Mendy was quiet for a minute. “He was real different then.”

“Well, this wasn’t that much. Just a few tabs. I was just trying to help some guys out, you know? I wasn’t a drug dealer or anything. But I was tripping daily, so I kept a good supply, and people knew I was always sure to have something on hand. Or at least could always get something.”

I hadn’t been on any one thing in particular. I wasn’t a dope fiend or an addict, just a seeker. Most of the things I was into aren’t even addictive. But I always had to have something to put me in the dream world: acid, mushrooms, morning-glory-seed oil, whatever. At least some Adderall or Benzedrine to elevate things. Some good bud to help me ease away from the physical world’s illusions. It was better to buy in bulk than to run dry, and the only way I could afford to do that was by selling off half of every bulk purchase. People started coming to me, and the bulk purchases got bigger and bigger.

“Still, just for hooking the guy up, I was scared there was going to be some serious police problems. My stepfather got involved and smoothed things over as best he could. I agreed to withdraw from the school voluntarily, to save everyone the headache.”

The story was slightly more complicated than that, but that was the gist. There had been a couple minor incidents, then the one serious situation where the kid took some stuff he couldn’t handle and freaked out. He had to go to a mental asylum for a couple weeks, where they pumped him full of Risperdal. His father and his father’s lawyers got involved, and made the kid out to be a victim. He gave me up as the “campus source,” even though I was only buying from another guy on campus, who had connections up in Cleveland.

Campus security searched my dorm room and threatened me, but I wasn’t going to drag anyone else down with me. Besides, all they found were a few pills and residue-covered bags. I was lucky that they didn’t come earlier or later. When I broke the kid off, I had had a whole sheet of blotter acid, but in the interim it had all been sold off or consumed. I’d been making arrangements to buy a vial of liquid LSD the week after the search. One hundred doses for four hundred bucks was a good deal. If the school had found that, they would have called the police. Possession of more than fifty doses is considered a third-degree felony in Ohio; I would not have come away with anything less than nine months of jail time, and I would have done my time rather than snitch on my source.

The circumstantial evidence wasn’t really enough to get the police involved. It was just the other kid’s story against mine. But the school interviewed a bunch of other students, and then it was all of their stories against mine. I had thought some of them were my friends. Apparently not. I was failing out anyway, and it was clear to everyone that I was out of my mind on drugs. When they interrogated me, my answers didn’t make any sense. They didn’t even pertain to the issue at hand. The school just wanted me to go away, and Bernie and my mother came to a quiet agreement with them. My mother was still pretty mad about the whole situation.

“When I left school,” I told Mendy, “I went and stayed with my parents in New Mexico, where they live now, to get my head straight.”

“Your parents?” Mendy was confused; the only parent of mine he knew was Alojzy.

“My mother and my stepfather. They sort of retired down there, I guess.” Bernie was a few years older than my mother. “The climate’s good for my stepfather’s asthma. I mean, he still works, but from there. There wasn’t really any reason for me to be there. I’m staying with my sister here in the city now.”

“I see.”

“It’s where I’m from originally. I guess I feel more at home here.”

“Me too. I’m the same way.” I took a look at Mendy. I really couldn’t see him existing anywhere else except a New York City street.

“Hey, why did you guess it was fighting they kicked me out for?”

“I thought maybe you had that part of your father in you.” It made me happy that he thought that.

“He got in a lot of fights out here?”

“Well, look: he was always a nice guy to me, and everyone else who treated him nice, but if someone crossed him, oh boy, it was on.” Mendy finished his last bite of yogurt, and put the empty container down on the curb. “His face, the shape of his face, could physically change. It was terrifying. He had a thing about respect. If you were respectful to him, fine. But if he felt disrespected . . .

“This one time, he forgot his heavy jacket out on the street by mistake, his own mistake, after he’d packed up for the night. He comes back the next day, and asks Eye—a guy, a street guy, who hangs out around here—if he’s seen the jacket. Eye says yeah, right after Al left, this guy who passes by here walking a little white dog every morning and every evening, he came by and picked up the jacket.

“So Al, he waits until the guy comes by on his morning walk and approaches him. He says, ‘Excuse me, did you pick up a jacket from here yesterday night?’ The guy says, ‘No. I didn’t.’ And Al says, ‘Oh really, that surprises me, because you know, my long-term acquaintance Eye, who’s never steered me wrong on any factual matters, says you picked up my jacket that I forgot.’ The guy says, ‘Fine, so what if I did, what I find is mine. It’s none of your business what I pick up off the street.’ Al, I could tell he’s on the verge, he says, ‘Maybe you didn’t realize it was my jacket. But it is, and I’d like it back.’ The guy says, ‘No, fuck you, it’s my jacket now.’

“Al looks at him calmly. So calmly the guy thought maybe he’d won, but the thing is, your father at his calmest was your father at his most frightening. So he looks at the guy and says—his tone just as friendly as could be—he says, ‘That’s fine. I just want you to understand, though, that after I finish beating the shit out of you, I’m going to beat the shit out of your dog.’

“The guy went right on home and got the jacket and brought it back.

“Later, I said to him, ‘Damn, Al, that was something.’ He says, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Al, I mean, you were really going to beat up a little doggy?’ He says, ‘Look, Mendy, I knew by the fact he’s every day taking this little dog for walks in the fresh air, that he really loves that animal. If people cross you, then you have to hurt what they love.’” I liked hearing this story. Alojzy was strong, unyielding. People showed him respect.

“But at the same time,” Mendy said, “Al wasn’t petty. I’m not saying that your father was going to hurt the little dog because he was petty about the fucking jacket. You asked him for a fucking jacket, he’d give it to you. Matter of fact, this sweater I’m wearing right now . . .” Mendy tugged on the green fabric hanging loosely from his frame . . . “he gave it to me.”

As the last rush was dying off, we started packing up. The sun was long gone, the moon barely a sliver, but there were enough electric lights for us to see. Mendy had a whole system worked out. The books came off the table in order, row by row, and went into specific, numbered boxes. His handcart folded out into a long four-wheeled cart, and each of the boxes, folded tables, pieces of wood, and plastic bags had their own set places. We were tying the whole rig up with rope when a man built like a scarecrow sidled up to us.

“Mendy. Mendy, my man.”

“Oh, how you doing, Eye.” Eye was tall and lanky, though his oversized sweatshirt obscured the exact shape of his frame. The most noticeable thing about him was his thin, black, horseshoe mustache. His dark brown skin seemed like it had been weathered by centuries, but I guessed he was about Alojzy’s age.

“You need some help with the cart tonight?” he asked Mendy.

“Nah. Thanks, but I already got this guy here. He’s been helping me all day; I think I’ll just let him see it through.”

“This squirt here? Who the hell is he?” Something was off about Eye’s gaze; it seemed like he was eyeballing me, but only one eyeball was actually fixed on me. Then I understood what it was: his left eye was glass.

“Oh, sorry. This is Izzy. Izzy, that’s Eye.” I nodded at Eye. He blinked his good eye back at me.

“He’s Al’s son,” explained Mendy.

“Al? Al Edel? That Russian fuck?”

“Polish,” I said, as if there was some pride in the word for me.

“What the fuck I care what kind of Russian your daddy is, boy?”

“I’ll talk to you later, Eye,” Mendy told him.

I pushed the cart from behind, while Mendy pulled from the front, steering with a little length of rope. Mendy had an established route that he followed. We walked down the middle of the street, out of necessity. I knew that the city streets sloped down on the sides for drainage, but I had never realized how extreme of an arch it was until I had to keep a moving cart from tipping over. We pissed off more than one cab driver, and hearing the honks and shouts right behind me made me nervous. Mendy didn’t seem to notice them at all. He calmly snapped down the mirrors of parked cars threatening to clip us, and maneuvered us around potholes with hardly a glance at the ground. The cart was heavy on the uphill blocks. I wasn’t used to this kind of work.

At the very end of the route we had to cross Varick Street. It was well past what I thought of as rush hour, but the street was still fully inhabited by the caravan of commuters trying to find their way back to suburban New Jersey through the Holland Tunnel. The idling cars spilled through the intersection. Mendy forced a way across for us, staring drivers down or banging on their hoods until they backed up enough to let us through.

We cut through a parking lot. Cars were parked four stories high on metal girders, and I couldn’t make sense of the system that raised them up there. Mendy nodded at the parking attendant, who nodded back from his little booth, and we came to the back door of the New York Mini Storage, where two women were arguing in Russian. The only word I could make out was “dengi.” Money. The woman doing most of the shouting was older, about fifty, and had bleached blonde hair. The other woman was about my age, and had black hair. She started to argue back against the older woman, waving her finger in her face, and the older woman slapped her twice, knocking the girl to her knees with the second blow. The older woman took a drag on her cigarette, making the ember at the end glow red, then flicked the cigarette at the girl’s face.

I stopped pushing the cart, but Mendy shook his head.

“Not our business,” he said. “Besides, you don’t want to mess with Zoya. Let’s get inside.” He swiped a magnetic key fob against a panel to unlock the door, and guided the cart through.

It took us a few tries to get the cart into Mendy’s storage space. There was just enough space between the boxes to fit it in, and we kept getting in at a bad angle, and having to pull back out and try again. When we finally got in, I let myself sink down to the ground. I sat there and sweated. I still hadn’t caught my breath from the walk over.

Mendy counted out some money from his fanny pack and held it out to me.

“Here you go,” he said.

“What’s this?”

“Sixty-four dollars. It’s what I figure is fair, considering how long you worked, and what I made, and what I can pay.”

“I wasn’t doing it to get paid . . .”

“Well, you earned it. If you weren’t helping me, I would have had to get Eye to help me push the cart. He would have been doing it to get paid. I’m giving you the same rate I give him. It was most of your day. It made my day easier. Take it, or I won’t feel right. I don’t need one more thing to keep me up at night.” I took the money and put it in my pocket. It felt good to hold a wad of cash that I’d earned through an honest day’s work.

“Now.” He snapped his fingers. “That other thing.” He extracted a shoebox from his cluttered storage space, and rummaged through it until he pulled out a key ring. He lifted his glasses and pulled the keys close to his eye. Satisfied he had the right ring, he tossed it to me.

“That’s the key to your father’s space. It makes more sense for you to have it than me. The number written on the keychain should be Timur’s . . . I was supposed to call it if your father got jammed up or something. I guess maybe he did. You can sort things out with Timur yourself. That little fob on the ring gets you into the building.

“Well, there it is,” he said, pointing to another unit down the same aisle. “Your family legacy. I’ll say good night now, and leave you to it.”