Shadow Dancers (11 page)

In the end, it saved her life. That cry, and the harsh, rude rattle of the bell clattering through the bird-twittering calm of a Sabbath morning, deflected the intruder.

At last she did faint. It came with a slow diminishment of light, like the iris of a camera closing. Just as the light went out entirely, she saw a dark figure fleeing like some large bird through the open glass sliders, and heard until she could hear no more the frantic, unrelenting racket of the doorbell dying in her head.

“Up to your old games again, eh, sonny? Radio’s full of your escapades.”

The old lady came padding around the big old nineteen-thirties electric range that sat like a derelict car wreck square in the middle of a space that might have been a kitchen, but could just as well have been anything else. There was about the room more the look of a shabby, somewhat disreputable curio shop than a place in which meals were prepared and served. A big square area crammed with junk and refuse, the room was pervaded with a sour haze of decomposing food and cat smells. Innumerable cat bowls with dry, hardened food littered the linoleum floors. Plates containing the remains of meals consumed weeks ago still littered the sinktop, already mantled over with a lacy green mold.

All about were windows, tall and stately, grimed with the dust of decades. Gazing out on the world through them gave the impression of peering through gauze. The shape of objects beyond the panes was a mottled, formless blur.

Short and stout, compact as a coal stove, with a face beet red, Suki Klink lumbered about the room, weaving her way through the intricate clutter with an agility that belied her sixty-some-odd years.

In truth, you couldn’t really tell her age. Her skin had a pink, scrubbed, infant quality, although she seldom washed it. On first glance she gave the impression of something put together out of large quantities of undifferentiated rubbish — jackets, sweaters, long, voluminous skirts layered one atop the other, from beneath which a pair of brand-new boxy, blue-white Nike sneakers showed below the numerous hems.

On her head she wore a toque hat set at a dizzy angle, a prize she’d plucked from a trash bin outside a theatrical costumer’s shop on the Upper West Side. Accessorizing the entire ensemble was a pair of Walkman headphones wired to her ears, from which she rarely disconnected herself even when she was sleeping. Yet she seemed oblivious to the incessant din of music blaring in her ears as she went about putting together some semblance of a meal, all the while keeping up a steady stream of reasonably coherent gab. When she spoke, it was through a choking haze of smoke wafting upward from the stubby little cigarillo inevitably screwed more or less dead-center into her mouth.

“I knowed it was you, all right. Minute they said that thing about the nasty pictures on the walls, I said that’s Warren, all right.” She giggled to herself. “Always did have a taste for nasty pictures, you did. Even when you was a tyke. Used to like to go off by yourself with a pencil and pad and draw naughty things.” She winked at him slyly, then burst into peals of shrieking laughter.

“Tell me, sonny, was it a profitable trip?”

Warren Mars frowned and turned away. “It was okay.” The reply was curt and sullen, intended to terminate the conversation quickly. The abruptness of the response stopped the old lady momentarily.

She’d been opening a can of soup and now she dumped its contents into a frying pan with a loud plopping sound. She pushed it around in there with a big wooden ladle. A sizable overflow spilled over the rim of the pan and sizzled on the burners. “You wouldn’t be keeping things from me, sonny, would you?” There was something of a taunt implied in the question. It came with a smile that opened on a mouth full of ruined, stumpy teeth.

“I told you it was okay.”

“Sure, sonny. Sure. Right you are. No need to bite old Suki’s head off.” Her eyes were full of playful mockery, but beneath that lay an edge of cool, shrewd assessment. “Whatcha so touchy for?”

“Well, for Chrissake. I’m gone four weeks. The minute I’m home, right away you’re at me — prying into business doesn’t concern you.”

She made a clucking sound with her tongue and pushed the soup around again. “Everything about my boy concerns me.”

“You’ll get your share, don’t worry.”

She giggled and stirred her soup. “Suki ain’t worried about her share, darlin’. She knows she’ll get her share.” She cocked an eyebrow in his direction. “Any nice little fancies you brung me home?”

Something leaped in his eyes. A frown crossed his dark, brutal good looks and all at once he turned away. “What if I didn’t?”

The row of stumpy, brownish teeth leered. “You’d never forget. Not your Suki. All she’s been to you.”

He whirled and flung his hands at the ceiling. “Okay, okay. Just let’s quit it.”

The soup bubbled and spattered in the frypan. It started to give off an unpleasant odor, like that of burning metal. She stared at the young man through the smoke of burning soup. He was standing there, half-turned away from her, hands plunged deep into his pockets.

She moved toward him with an air of caution. When she stopped, it was directly before him, tiny beside him and looking up. “If I ask about things, it’s only ‘cause I love to hear how things are gettin’ on with my boy. You’re still Suki’s boy, ain’t you, darlin’?”

She reached up tentatively and with a raw red paw cupped his chin in her palm. She patted it several times, each pat gaining momentum so that at the end they’d become short, hard slaps.

“Radio’s full o’ you, sonny. You best keep your head down for a while now. They’ll be out lookin’ for you full force.” She grasped him hard at both elbows and shook him slightly. “You understand?”

Annoyed, he looked away. She snatched his chin again and tugged his face around so that he looked down directly into her eyes. There was no longer any playfulness there. Only something rock hard and implacable. “You understand, do you?”

“Get off my ass.”

“Say it then. Say I understand.’”

The annoyance deepened, along with the flush in his face. “I understand. Okay? I understand.”

She giggled and pinched his cheek. “Good. Now what’d you bring home nice for poor old Suki?”

He looked at her, shaking his head, weariness and despair scoring his features. “Time’s coming, old lady.” She waved him off with a laugh.

“Soon. I’m telling you. You better believe it.”

“Sure, sure. What’d you bring nice for Suki?”

“Pretty soon. You’ll see. I’m going for good. I can’t say when, but it’ll be soon.”

Laughing, she turned back to her soup, which was now sending up noxious vapors. “You’ve had a busy time, is what you’ve had. Your nerves are frazzled, is all. Come have a bite now. Suki hardly gets to see her boy no more.”

She ladled out a scoop of the thick, gelatinous, lavalike substance from the frypan, splashed it into a cracked blue saucer, and thrust it at him. “There you go, little one. Eat up now.”

After he’d left, she continued moving about the kitchen, shuffling over the cracked and faded linoleum, slippers slapping the bare floor behind her as she went about shifting the kettle on the burner and stirring a foul, evil-smelling pot of gizzards for the cats.

Anyone using Grand Central on a daily basis would know Suki Klink at once. She was a fixture there. Especially in the winter. She was that old heap of rags you’d see plunked down in the middle of the treasury of junk she’d scavenged from trash bins. She’d lie there, propped up against the wall just outside the entrance to Track 28, directly opposite Zaro’s Bake Shop. Safely out of the drafts and cold. People from the offices in all the surrounding buildings would rush in and out of that bustling food emporium with bags of goodies, their fists crammed with change, and always slip her something. She was a canny old lady and chose her spots well.

The house on Bridge Street she owned free and clear. It had been bequeathed to her by her husband, whom she married when she was fifteen. At that time Mr. Klink was hovering up somewhere about the sixty range. He died approximately seven years later and Suki had owned the place ever since. It was a sore point for the Amalgamated Mercantile Bank of New York, who owned everything else on the block and coveted the property with an eye toward erecting yet another sky-blocking monument to corporate majesty. Doubtless, another bank. Their lawyers had offered Suki pots of money to sell, alternately wheedling and coaxing, then threatening to have the place condemned and seized if she didn’t comply.

If they thought they were dealing with a bewildered little old lady, she’d quickly disabused them of that notion. Suki was not greatly impressed with desk thumping and fulminations. She informed the bank through the good offices of her friend, a notary public and cigar-store owner, that she had no intention of selling the property at that time, least of all to them. The only way she’d be leaving number 14 Bridge Street was feet first in a coffin and she didn’t anticipate doing that for at least another twenty years. The notary public—Mr. Bloom was his name — then concluded by threatening a countersuit. For some reason plausible only to the arcane minds of bankers and lawyers, Amalgamated Mercantile backed off, at least for the time being, to regroup and rethink their strategy.

Now listening to the slamming of doors and banging of windows overhead, Suki laughed softly to herself. It was one of his tantrums, which he’d often had, even as a small boy, venting his spleen on a variety of inanimate objects. He’d kick and punch and fling them across spaces with such force they’d puncture plaster and burst out windows. Then, as now, she knew that such fiery displays were made as much for her benefit as his; largely for effect and intended to inform her that she’d displeased him. She rattled pots and kettles in noisy defiance, sang out loud mock arias at the ceiling, and laughed merrily to herself.

She’d heard it all before. How he was fed up and ready to clear out. How he hated the old place on Bridge Street. How it was a “goddamned pigpen,” smelling like a “shithouse,” with all those “fucking cats.” She listened to him stamp overhead and watched the shower of plaster dust drizzle slowly down through a fissure in the ceiling. From his eyrie high up in the cupola, he railed down at her against the old house, this fuming wreck that had been both sanctuary and prison cell to him since childhood.

“Door’s open, sonny,” Suki would shout back at him cackling gleefully to herself and showing those yellow stumps of teeth. “All you’ve got to do is walk out.”

The words were as much a taunt as they were an invitation. She could afford to be magnanimous. She knew he’d never go. Not now. Not anymore. But when he was a child of six or seven and she’d brought him home and fed him soup, like some wild shivering thing plucked from a forest, then she couldn’t be so sure.

In those days she made a point of never leaving him alone in the house. Then there was, indeed, the strong likelihood that if she had, he would bolt. So at night, after their late rounds at the terminal when they came home to Bridge Street and went to bed, she would lock him in the little room upstairs beneath the cupola. Weaning him, gradually, modifying his wild, wandering ways, she’d domesticated him from something untamed into a creature of home and hearth and conventional habits, until at last she felt she could leave him by himself in a house unlocked and trust that when she returned he’d still be there. When he got older he was free to come and go as he pleased. It was then she could begin to expect to see some return on her investment, for he was a talent, this one, her wicked little Sonny with the bright, sly smile. He could walk through the crowds in Grand Central and, with fingers light as air, lift wallets out of pockets and filch food and small change from countertops. She’d taught him all she knew of how to glean and gather the rich droppings of a wasteful, profligate society. She taught him the sort of skills that could make him free, a man of independent means who need never work for anyone in his life, to her mind the most contemptible state of existence imaginable.

Now grown lanky and strong, he was a valuable prize. And she had fashioned him. She’d bred the nomadic street ways out of him so he’d remain by her side, an asset and a defense against a hostile world for the rest of her days. There was no danger now that he would ever leave.

It was odd, she thought, that she understood this dependency, but that he didn’t, and doubtless never would. In his mind he was free. He’d lived wild as a child and he fully believed he could do so again.

But, just as oddly, she failed to recognize her own dependency on him. Not financial dependency, for in that regard she needed no one. But in another more subtle yet far more potent way, life for her had become unimaginable without Warren. They’d been together the better part of fifteen years. He was the closest thing to blood to her, the only thing that might be looked upon as family since Mr. Klink’s untimely demise. Moreover, he was her sole heir, though he didn’t know that and she had no intention of telling him until it became absolutely necessary. There was a paper in an old cardboard shoebox buried under the mound of quilts atop her bed. It was a paper drawn up by her notary-public friend, the proprietor of the small cigar store on Pine Street. Based loosely on a standard form found in a
Good Housekeeping
magazine, it had been composed in language simulating a kind of quasi-legalese, waxing more and more flowery as the notary gained confidence, peppering the document with a dazzling array of
wherefores
and
insofar ases
and
party of the first parts,
and so on. And while the end result was ludicrous, as most such documents generally are, it would certainly pass in most probate courts. The concluding line designated Warren Mars in clear, unequivocal terms as “heir to all of my worldly possessions here and now and for the full term of all his mortal days.”

That’s why the notion that he might actually go had to be taken seriously. Aside from the void it would leave — and that would be considerable — more disturbing even, there would be no one to whom she could leave her “collections” as well as the old house on Bridge Street. If that were actually to occur, then the bank and lawyer leeches, sensing her vulnerability, would come swarming about like jackals and hyenas at the scent of blood.