The Shambling Guide to New York City (2 page)

After the grimy door shut behind her, Zoë decided she had earned a tall caloric caffeine bomb to soothe her ego. She wasn’t sure what she’d done to deserve this, but it didn’t take much to make her leap for the comfort treats these days—which reminded her, she needed to recycle some wine bottles.

Mannegishi’s Tricks is the oldest bookstore in the Theater District. Established 1834 by Akilina, nicknamed “The Drakon Lady,” after she immigrated from Russia, the store has a stock that is lovingly picked from collections all over the world. Currently managed by Akilina’s great-grandaughter, Anastasiya, the store continues to offer some of the best finds for any book collector. Anastasiya upholds the old dragon lady’s practice of knowing just which book should go to which customer, and refuses to sell a book to the “wrong” person. Don’t try to argue with her; the drakon’s teeth remain sharp.

Mannegishi’s Tricks is one of the few shops that deliberately maintain a squalid appearance—dingy, smelly, with a strong “leave now” aura—in order to repel unwanted customers. In nearly 180 years, Akilina and her descendants have sold only three books to humans. She refuses to say to whom.

O
ctober seemed completely unaware that she was having a shit day. The crisp weather and the blue sky couldn’t help but cheer Zoë a little bit. She had simply loved coming home. Full of people and secrets, cities were three-dimensional, rising high in the sky and creating labyrinthine tunnels underground. She’d come from the suburbs of the Research Triangle in North Carolina, a sterile, impotent metropolitan area of three million people stretched over several counties. That was not a city.

She’d moved with her parents when she was in grade school, but nowhere had ever felt like home the way the city did. She reflected she should have returned when she got out of school, but she got a job traveling for a magazine, and then got the job in Raleigh with Misconceptions and decided that was worth it.

After that ended, it seemed obvious that there was nowhere else to go except home. Ever since she was a child, she had felt cities, especially New York, were alive. Cities had a heartbeat. When she wasn’t in a city, she felt soulless, with an ever-present itch telling her something was missing.

New York was a
city
.

Zoë prided herself in her ability to seek out the perfect hidden gems in a city. She fancied herself an urban explorer of a sort, and desperately avoided chain restaurants and stores. She enjoyed getting to know cities as if they were friends; you visited
the Targets of your acquaintances, but the mom-and-pop stores of your friends.

Her fifteen or so years out of New York had seen the city change a lot, both from time and from 9/11. She loved wandering the streets, getting to know it again.

So what if she’d left Raleigh in shame and now counted on one hand the unemployed weeks she had left in her savings account before she had to give up and move out? She was where she’d always wanted to be.

When she spied the little café a few doors down from the bookstore, she knew where she wanted to be right then: Bakery Under Starlight. It was perfectly placed, facing south on Fifty-First Street so that the fading afternoon sun of early autumn cut through the trees and into the café. The café had orange-red walls with antique, mismatched chairs and tables. Behind the counter a cappuccino machine hissed. Racks of bread and pastries assaulted Zoë’s nose, and she took an appreciative whiff of freshly baked goodies.

“Suck it, Starbucks,” she muttered as she got in line.

The only people Zoë saw working the shop were a mountain of a man whose baker’s jacket said “Carl” and a petite woman who shouted obscenities at the customers when their coffees were ready.

Zoë stood in line behind a fat man with sallow skin and limp brown hair. He wore a very nicely tailored pinstripe suit, but it was ill-fitting, straining at the buttons and baggy in the shoulders. She felt a little sorry for the suit, thinking that if it had had any say in the matter, it would not have chosen this man to fill it.

Carl greeted the customer by name. “ ’Morning, John, you’re looking well.”

John smiled and winked at Carl. “I found a new club the other night. Things are looking up.”

“Oh really? I’d check it out, but, you know.” Carl gestured
widely, encompassing the café, and John nodded as if he understood.

The John person got his coffee and scone—“Latte for the son of a demon and a whore!” the small woman cried out in accented English—and nodded again to Carl before taking a table against the wall.

Zoë nodded to the barista as she approached the counter. “Doesn’t that drive away customers?” she asked Carl.

Carl shrugged. “Tenagne’s Ethiopian,” he said, as if that explained it.

“That’s a little stereotypical,” Zoë said.

Carl glanced at Tenagne, who steamed milk with her back to him. “Not for her family, which is pretty large. Don’t worry, she only yells obscenities at people she likes. You should be safe. Now what can we get you?” Zoë blushed and gave her order—plain coffee and a croissant—and then snagged the only free table by a window, which happened to be along the wall next to John’s.

On the wall above her hung another corkboard with missing-cat notices and job postings. She saw the Underground Publishing flyer, and snatched the whole thing off.

As she contemplated the job description again, she caught John staring at her. She tried to ignore him, reading the flyer a couple of times, looking for any clue that would lead her to what Underground Publishing wanted, but finding nothing.

When she looked up, the man was still staring at her. She sighed. “Do you have a problem?”

He did not flinch at the obvious irritation in her voice, but instead put down his coffee and wiped his mouth, a silver bracelet peeking from inside his cuff. Despite his lugubrious appearance, he sat up straight and met her eyes with no sense of shyness. He gestured toward the flyer. “I’m not sure if that’s a good idea for you to pursue.”

Zoë pursed her lips. “So I’ve heard. Is there a campaign against me? You don’t even know me. Neither does that Phillip guy.”

John raised an eyebrow at her. “You know Phil?”

She nodded. “I just met Phillip Rand at that nasty bookstore down the street, and he told me the same thing. So what is the problem? Why are you people following me to make sure I don’t apply? Why do you fucking care?”

The fat man considered her for a moment, smiling. “Paranoid, and quick to anger. That’s very attractive.” He didn’t sound sarcastic, and his tone made her squirm slightly inside. “To answer your question, Phil is my boss. Our office is nearby. We’re hanging flyers in area businesses. Your encountering both of us is nothing but a happy coincidence.” He ignored her snort of derision. “And about your qualifications, Phil is looking for someone with experience you may not have,” he said, seeming to choose his words carefully.

Zoë sighed. “Why not? I’ve got experience, I’m a native, I’m an excellent researcher, surely I’m worth an interview at least.”

He sipped at his coffee again, sizing her up over the mug’s rim. His muddy brown eyes weren’t undressing her, but she still had the uncomfortable feeling that she was a slab of beef and John was a butcher, deciding where to make the first cut. “You’re still probably not what they’re looking for.”

“So what do you do? What makes
you
so perfect for the job?”

He extended his hand. “John Dickens. Public relations, Underground Publishing.”

She shook it, his warm hand strangely dainty in her own.

“Zoë Norris.”

“Well, I’m not in editorial; it’s not my decision. Go ahead and apply. Who knows? Phil might change his mind and take a liking to you. You’re… appealing.”

Zoë didn’t like the way he said that. Did she want to work
with this asshole? “Thanks for the advice, I guess.” She sat at her table and pushed her chair pointedly to put her back to John. She got out her BlackBerry and pulled up the template for her standard job query. She made some pertinent changes, attached her résumé, double-checked for mistakes, and then sent it to Phil’s e-mail address as given on the sheet.

She sat back and relaxed. Despite the comments to the contrary, she felt good about this one. Of course, she’d felt good about all the jobs she’d applied for; she’d been convinced that every publishing house in the city had at least one open job whose description read so perfectly the ad might as well have said, “WANTED: Thirtysomething woman from Raleigh, NC, petite, heartbroken, fleeing a scandal at a publishing company. Names starting with ‘Z’ preferred.” But she had been overqualified for one, under-qualified for another, and too laid-back for a third—although she was pretty sure her lack of any structured religion was the real reason, even though by law they couldn’t say that. That was her worry about Underground Publishing: that it was focused toward Jews or Christians or bisexuals or people who had lived through the heartbreak of psoriasis or some other group that she didn’t belong to. But why were John and Phil so secretive?

Zoë fiddled with her phone, ignoring the other patrons, especially the man behind her. She went through news feeds, reading her favorite websites, checking in at the weirder science news sites just for fun, and then checked publishing blogs. She was
tsk
ing at another book deal for another celebrity who’d made a name for herself by doing drugs and sleeping with producers and now felt qualified to write, when she realized that an old Kool & the Gang song was playing very loudly.

No, Carl hadn’t cranked the volume. Instead, everyone in the café had stopped talking. Zoë looked up and saw a dirty,
wide-eyed woman standing in the middle of the café. She looked to be older, like seventy, and had white hair and Asian features. She wore a pink shawl, a grimy T-shirt that said “I 8 NY” over a silhouette of Godzilla, and dirty jeans. Out of place on her ragged form was a pair of very high-quality black combat boots. She pirouetted slowly and stared at the patrons in the café. The patrons stared back.

“Well, this should be interesting,” John whispered behind her.

Zoë frowned. The tension in the café was palpable; there was none of the usual discomfort or pointed ignoring reactions New Yorkers did when faced with something or someone they didn’t want to deal with. The people in the café seemed completely terrified of the old woman, even though her thick braided hair swinging at her hip was the strongest-looking thing about her. Zoë felt a sudden kinship with this woman, feeling outcast and friendless as she had been. She stood up and glanced around the coffee shop. Even Carl looked petrified.

No one moved to talk to the woman, to take her order, or to usher her out. Zoë couldn’t take the tension any more, so she turned on what she had learned of Southern charm. She heard a small gasp behind her as she approached the woman.

“Hi, honey, can I help you? Are you meeting a friend, or do you need a cup of coffee?”

The woman fixed her wide brown eyes on Zoë and seemed to think for a moment. “You want to buy Granny Good Mae a cup of coffee?” Her accent was flat and difficult to place, almost the generic American accent Hollywood actors had.

Zoë shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

“I always knew you were a good one,” she said, glaring at Carl, who blanched, his dark skin turning ashy. “I don’t do coffee. I drink tea.”

“Sure.” Zoë walked to the counter. She waved her hand in
front of Carl’s face. “It’s OK, she won’t bite. Just get her some hot tea. I’ll pay for it and get her out of here.”

“That’s Granny Good Mae,” Carl whispered, but he moved to fill a to-go cup with hot water. “She’s not welcome here.”

Zoë shook her head in amazement. “She’s not hurting anyone. What’s your problem?”

“You both batshit crazy,” Tenagne said to Zoë, tossing Carl a tea bag. “Her ’cause she talk to the air, and you ’cause you listen to her.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Zoë said. She paid Carl for the tea. The customers still watched Granny Good Mae, who looked them over as if she were a general surveying the enemy. Neither seemed willing to make the first strike.

Zoë walked up to the old woman and put her hand on her elbow. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m not really sure why they don’t want you here, but I think it might be best if you go. Here’s your tea.”

“I got what I came here for,” Granny Good Mae said, turning to leave.

“Does this café have especially good tea?” Zoë asked, opening the door for the woman.

Granny Good Mae looked at her, startled. “What? No, the tea here is garbage tea. Comes in bags. Like garbage. And goldfish crackers. I came here to see how you’ve grown up.” She tossed the full cup of tea into a garbage can on the street. “And you grew up real nice.”

Bemused, Zoë said, “Uh, OK. I’m Zoë. Nice to meet you.”

“Life! Life! This city needs life!” Granny Good Mae cackled as if she’d made a good joke, then her face fell. “Remember, Zoë-Life, watch your back. Some people in this city will eat you right up.”