The late afternoon sky was a gray veil, the Jersey City air gentle as cold iron. And Carl Moore was out making his run to Manna Liquors, three blocks the door-to-door. A cheery chime at the store’s entrance trailed him right to the cold case. He took a half-rack of cans up front and set it on the counter. “Ten High also, the fifth, thanks.” His lips curved into a smile.
The Vietnamese owner said, “Yeh,” amiable, and turned to the gleaming bottles behind her. She set the fifth next to the beer and Moore said, “And Winstons.”
The lady turned again. “Winston, yeh.” She set the pack on the counter. Moore put it in his shirt pocket, saying “This’ll be okay.”
She tapped on the register. “Foty-two.”
Moore pulled out his wallet. Light tremblers as he handed over cash. “There goes the farm,” he smiled.
She nodded, gave him a weak grin. He put his wallet away, saying, “When they openin’ the coffee place? The sign, been in the window forever . . .”
The lady shook her head. “Is a scam!”
“Yeah?” Moore laughed.
Her eyes went round as dimes. “Someone come give them applicasha, they put in for student loan.”
He went out weighted with a sagging carry bag. There was a cleaners one down, nobody coming either way. It was starting to snow. He hunched in his thin jacket and turned for home. Coming up to the corner he stopped at the OPEN SOON sign and peered through the dark window. Empty, looked like. The door jutted a fraction from its aluminum frame. He used two fingers to tug the handle. It pulled open, so he went in.
Winter light bled into the bare space. Shut into silence, he set his bag on the floor. He stepped over to the long service counter, went around it to the door in back. Locked. On the counter’s rear side were clean shelves and a set of drawers. He opened the drawers from the top down. Nothing. In a crouch, he glanced up at the counter’s underside. There was a legal envelope taped to the wood. He peeled it away.
He heard the front door open and stayed down.
The door shut. A voice came. “Who’s dare?”
Moore grunted.
“UP, YOU!” A cracked roar.
Moore raised his hands above the counter’s edge, then slowly rose till his eyes cleared the plane. There was a giant cop in a black leather jacket, with a contorted face under a dark blue cap and an automatic up in the two-fisted stance. “YOU GET—”
The door opened. The cop threw himself right, swinging the gun around. Just a man’s head poked through the opening, with a dark scarf crossed under the chin.
“Chippy,” the head said.
The gun came halfway down. “Nick? Fuck’s sake. What is dis?”
“I don’t know.” Nick pushed the door open and came in, looking around. He wore a camel topcoat, a beauty, and chocolatey gloves. His knife-point chin tilted toward Moore, now standing innocently in back of the counter. “Maybe he knows.”
Moore showed no expression. “It was empty,” he said. “Door’s open. I wanted a drink.”
“See? He wanted a drink,” Nick said.
The patrolman looked unhappy. “I’se about to take your head right off.” Then he giggled softly. “Just about did it, Nick.”
Nick spoke to Moore. “You want to watch yourself,” he said, contemplating the plastic carry bag on the floor beside him. He bent and flicked it open, then straightened up with the whiskey bottle in his gloved hand. Examining the label, he said, “Ain’t been cracked.”
Moore shrugged. “Interruptions.”
“Yeah. I know how that is.” The cop made a tentative noise and Nick looked over. “I don’t think he’s up to anything bad. You, Chippy?”
“Didn’t get ID off him,” Chippy said.
“Oh?” Nick replaced the bottle, absently saying, “So where you from, chief?”
“I’ve got a place. In the medical building on St. Mary.”
“Prove it.”
Moore took out his wallet, unfolded it and held it out. Chippy holstered his gun, glaring, and stepped over. He took the wallet and frowned at Moore’s license before saying, “Still there?”
Moore nodded.
Nick said, “My company owns over there. This is mine, too, where you came trespassing.”
Moore said nothing.
“So who are you, chief?”
No answer. They all stood for a long minute, each glancing back and forth at the others.
Nick spoke again. “Maybe he’s just some juicer. That right, chief?”
“You’re getting warm.”
Nick turned his head and sighed. His gloves suddenly flicked, a magician’s presto. “Out out out. I can’t even look at the POS.”
Chippy immediately bellowed, “MOOVE!”
Moore bowed his head and went around the front of the counter. He stepped past the two men and hoisted his carry bag, Chippy saying, “Sure. Goin’a have himself a party.” He left them in silence.
Outside ashy snow was drifting around. He went to the corner, turned and walked half a block before dropping into a doorway. He put his bag down, lifted the bottle out and unsealed it, shivering. Took a long pull, waited, then took another. He recapped the bottle and set it back in the bag, then dug the envelope out of his pocket. He tore an end open and pulled out newsprint. Crumpled and dropped the envelope. Unfolding the page, he saw it was a police item from the Jersey Journal. Again he hefted the plastic handles and walked into the snowfall.
At St. Mary he followed the traffic. This was his block, an old strip where Dominican tenants grouped on their front steps and sat in lawn chairs tipping back reddish Corona-and-Clamatos. But not in winter. Snow had whitened the stoops and sidewalk. Reggaeton beats ticked inside a parked car. Otherwise el bloque had taken it indoors.
At the corner he entered a building marked with a clinic’s name, went down the dim ground-floor hallway and unlocked his place. He went in, crossing between a standard aluminum sink and a tossed single bed. The one window was no use for light. He hoisted the bag onto his vinyl card table, then tore open the rack for a beer. He uncapped the whiskey, took a hard pull. Snapped the beer can and hooked it. Then he sat in a folding chair and lit a cigarette from an open pack on the table. Hooked more beer, smoked.
He took the news page out. One side advertised a years-back Macy’s Thanksgiving sale. On the other was a story headlined COPS CLUELESS. Ernesta Trevino, owner of the Hi Hat Tavern, faced grand jury charges stemming from reports she’d hired young women to “be sociable” with her male patrons. The men paid for the company on a rate scale, five bucks and up. The bar also hired off-duty cops to work security. Despite disturbance complaints from neighbors, none of the officers on the door had ever reported improper activity. Allegedly the girls were as young as 14 (this someone had underlined). Immigration had arrested Trevino in connection with human trafficking.
A few quick thuds came from out in the hall, then senseless yells. He sat a little longer looking at the page, then got up and opened the door. Chippy stood there in his minty black leather, high pink in the face. Abruptly he hollered, “You get dat item! You come NOW.”
Moore’s face stayed smooth as marble. “Why’s everyone getting nervous?”
Chippy stopped to process this. “I don’t get nervous,” he said, frowning past Moore’s shoulder. “And you are a juicer.”
“And what’m I supposed to have?”
Chippy’s eyebrows went up. “Maybe I should break you in half right now?”
“No, just testing you.”
“YOU DON’T GIVE TESTS! Juicer!” Suddenly they began to holler at the same time, leaning into each other, until Chippy slammed him on the upper arm: “Move!”
Moore crossed to the table and picked up the news page. “This is all it was,” he muttered. “Pinhead.”
They walked out into the wind, snowflakes now wheeling against the darkened sky. Chippy’s city cruiser stood blocking the bike lane. The sheet of snow on the road was cut with black tracks. Chippy opened the cruiser’s rear door and said, “In.” Moore bent past him. The seat was a slick plastic panel facing a diamond-hatched steel grid. The door slammed. Chippy got in the front and drove off, as if unaware of him. In silence they headed into a section of tired row houses. Red neon was announcing takeout everywhere in the heavy dusk. Chippy pulled into a small lot outside a bar, parked next to a pair of cars and got out. He opened the back for Moore and said, “Guys waitin’ on your ass.”
They walked up to the blank stone bunker. Chippy got the door, sneering, and pushed him inside. Even Moore noticed the sour bouquet. In pale light the lone customer was telling the bartender, “Plunkett! Two Supabowls!” The bartender shook his head, saying, “Uhr uhr, here’s my question – three teams . . .” as they went single-file past the jukebox into a narrow hall. From a back room came a voluble drawl: “Because yer mine, Ah walk the line. Beee-cause yer mahn . . .” Moore showed in the doorway with the cop looming at his shoulder. The singing stopped.
Three men sat at a round table littered with beer bottles and pizza remains. Two were smoking: heavies gone soft, a pair of fat squids in sweatshirts. The third, his vocals cut short, now gave a little chuckle. He was swollen and sweaty in short sleeves and an unknotted tie. A dark rash flowered across his nose and cheeks. Tack-head band aids were stuck in and around the macula. He stared through practical lenses and said, “Chippy. Always making the big entrance.”
Chippy responded warily, shutting the door. “This one came to return you something, Mr. Councilman.”
“An honorable man then.”
Chippy scowled. “He’s a juicer.”
“A high and honorable man, then.”
The squids tapped their cigarettes into the pizza box, smirking. Airily the Councilman raised a clear drink from the table and tipped it back. Then, a bit hoarse, he addressed Moore. “We won’t detain you. What did he have, Chippy?”
Chippy laid the news page at the Councilman’s place.
The Councilman looked down at it for a moment, then considered Moore. “You work somewhere, my friend?”
“Right now I’m taking time off to find myself.”
“Drunk,” Chippy blurted.
The Councilman spoke patiently. “You might consider the beam in your own eye, Chippy. Eh?”
Chippy smiled weakly. “Mr. Councilman, you’d know best on that.”
The Councilman turned back to Moore. “Feel unsteady, do you?”
Moore didn’t answer. The Councilman said, “Give me the rest of it and go. Get yourself an eye-opener. Usquebaugh, water of life.” Together the squids tapped their cigarettes.
Moore said, “There is no rest of it.”
“Come come. Nobody wants any fuss. Not over this.”
“I’m saying, I don’t have anything.”
One of the squids spoke up. “We don’t need anything’ll look bad with them in Newark there. Not right now.”
“Well then, our friend doesn’t walk away,” the Councilman said. “You want to go downstairs with Chippy? To the quiet room?”
Chippy’s face twisted, the lower jaw drawn sideways, showing tooth.
“No, I don’t guess you do. So . . .”
There was a sharp concussion and the room went black. Chairs scratched and shouts went up. Moore took a thump in the side as he stepped back, blind, into the hall. He turned and stumbled forward, crashed against the jukebox, then spun across the room and hit the bar. His hands found a barstool. He threw it aside and guided himself along the bar, shoving every stool he passed to the floor. Behind him came yelling and a huge crash of scattering wood. The bar’s front door opened, outlining a gray patch. Someone appeared in the frame just as Moore dashed for it. Moore hit him high, catching the windpipe with a hard forearm. They stumbled back and slammed to the concrete in the parking lot. Moore landed on top with a knee going in between the legs. He rolled off the guy, who was making noises like a gumball got stuck in his throat. In the street smoke spiraled from an open manhole. A car alarm shrilled. He jumped up and ran. Snow was blowing in a fury, the corner traffic light a red blob suspended in the swirl. Someone gave a three-note whistle and called, “Hey mista, here!”
At the curb half a block away a car’s door hung open. Moore ran up. The dash-signals’ glow showed the driver in half shadow: a teenage boy. Moore jumped in and slammed the door as the car started to move. “That work or what?” the boy whooped. “Out go the lights!”
Moore watched him as they gained distance from the bar. “You blew the power?”
The boy turned cool, taking a corner off the main road. “The underground wires, you can get to them.”
Another moment passed before Moore said, “But everything exploded. Smoke was coming out of the street.”
“Knock you down, okay, but you don’t die.”
Moore turned his head from the boy, watched the wipers scrape. “I have to thank you.”
The boy nodded. “It’s casual, bub.”
“You tell me who you are?”
“AJ.”
“AJ? Carl.”
They drove back downtown, snowflakes swimming in the headlights. AJ braked the car on a side street and reversed into a space. Moore stepped out beside a glittering drift. In a streetlight’s cone snow was gliding straight down, seeming to accelerate. AJ got out and joined him on the sidewalk. Behind a storefront’s plate glass a falafel maker stared at them from his counter. “Here’s the place,” said AJ. He led Moore through a street door and up a stairwell. On the first landing he unlocked an apartment.
Tiffany lamps reddened the suite’s front room, turning it dusty orange. Tapestries spun in some astral design cloaked the windows. The ceiling was hung with a thousand crystals. On a table draped with black velvet sat an enormous toad made of emerald glass. Behind the table sat a plump lady wearing a deep gold head scarf and violet-tinged glasses. She lifted a card from a deck in front of her, considered it and laid it on the table. She looked up at Moore, mildly surprised. “Your profession is . . . artist . . .” she said. “Or music . . . ?” She drew a new card. “But you have most trouble with the discipline? Yes. The discipline.” Another draw. She was silent.
Finally Moore asked, “Not good?”
“The Moon. Means bad surprises. But maybe we should finish later.” She studied him. “I am Celesta, a seventh daughter. Come sit. Ask what you need to know.”
“If there’s anything to drink,” he said, coming over. He drew a chair and carefully lowered himself.
“Anton.”
The boy stepped through a bead curtain into the next room. One of the shrouded windows gave a violent rattle and Moore flinched.
Celesta tilted her head back. “I’ll get you!” she cried. She stared at the ceiling, waiting, but the room was quiet. She shifted and muttered to Moore, “It’s a trace job, for a spirit. Big piece of work, to follow the presence. The body she’s at Union graveyard. The being is out here.” She waved a hand as if to clear an odor. “So she comes. Only to trouble me.” Celesta sighed. “No matter right now.”
AJ returned through the beads carrying a teacup and brought it to Moore. Moore took the cup by the rim and tipped it dry. The other two were watching. He handed the cup back.
“So,” Celesta said. “We lose too much time.”
Moore shrugged, smiling. “I don’t know why I’m here.”
“You took a thing Anton left for someone else.”
There was a pause. Moore said, “The newspaper story.”
A nod. “Do you have it?”
“They made me give it to them in the bar.”
“These people . . . .” Celesta started over. “You know Mr. Nick.”
“We’ve met. Talked some real estate.”
“So. This Nick, I sometimes work with him. I mean I pay him for a place where I can work. Nick called me today, told me the police took you. I told Anton go get you out.”
“Thank you.”
“But why should we do this?”
“I don’t know why. But they would’ve put me in the ground.”
“Let me tell you what has happened. Do you know a government person came to the store to get an envelope? Goes in and doesn’t find it. You got the envelope. Now you say they got it in the bar.”
“It was only an old page from the Jersey.”
“Not only. It was a swap. The government gets the story, I get some help. You see?”
“Sorry. Can’t see.”
“Like this. I have an idea for hokkani, it means a small game. I rent the store, young people come to find work, I get some information. Is risk.” She nodded. “Is always risk. I put in to get the federal loan. They look at my information. They find out too soon.”
AJ spoke up. “She’s talking about the agent they sent. They checked who’s running the store, tried to find us. I said I’d do something to maybe cool them, see? We don’t want any concernment with our family, so I tipped them about the envelope, said come get it.”
“Anton set it up and watched. The only way.”
“I stayed down the block, saw you go in, saw the cop go in, saw Mr. Nick. You leave, the agent gets there. Goes off on the cop right in the street. Then Mr. Nick calls me saying what’s this. I say I don’t know. He says they’re sending the cop to take you.”
“Nick cared about me?”
“He cared about himself. He doesn’t like people coming around he can’t buy. The FBI you just can’t buy,” AJ recited.
“Good boy,” said Celesta. She spoke to Moore. “All these politicals are scared now. They see their friends going away for long, long times. They don’t need it any more. So if trouble comes around all a sudden and you get in the way, they’re gonna want you.”
Moore processed this. Finally he said, “So what do I do?”
“You gave them everything, yes? The envelope?”
“Yes.”
“You see, it’s important. What’s in there.”
“It’s gone. I don’t have it.”
Celesta studied her emerald toad. The boy stood beside her holding Moore’s cup. At last she said, “Where do you live?”
“Here. Downtown.”
“You just go home.”
Moore didn’t move. “Can you tell me one thing?” he said. “Like what’s this envelope.”
“Again I explain. We, people we know are finders. Find things to sell or swap. It means sometimes a little business, sometimes a lot. My boy, he handles many things, yes?” AJ grinned, rows of small teeth splitting his face. “Anton, you leave the room.”
The boy’s eyes went wide. “Why can’t I listen?”
“I’m training you for lawyer, my child, sometimes you got to leave.”
AJ’s mouth gaped, but he only said “Yes, madame” and strode through the bead curtain.
Celesta’s voice was soft. “I don’t like him to hear this.” Moore was frowning. “You see in that newspaper about the club, police guarding this club. With the girls, you see what goes on. The girls there they know me, they come to me for dukkerin. That’s with the cards, yes? I give them advice what to do. All believe in fate. I tell them there is no fate.”
She stopped for a moment, then went on slowly, eyes fixed on the glass toad.
“So. The police don’t do nothing about nothing. And this club pays a political too, so they stay safe. Fine. One girl comes to me and tells me something. She is the bribe. For the man, this Herod who protects the club. Very young, the girl. Such a man needs to be put down.”
“There’s the chance it would get out,” Moore said slowly.
“They’ll chance for less than this, you know. The play is you got to give them something. There’s nothing too little to take, not ever, or too much. The club gets in trouble, isn’t supposed to happen, but they want to fix it, they have to pay. And this man, he said he wanted a new girl. Really new, you see? They said no one’s this new here. They all hate him. And the girl, she went to him then brought one of her hair to me. She said I could use it to harm the man. I said no, I said if I try it she gets hurt too. But I took it. Little black hair. They test it, it will prove what he did.”
“And that’s what you tried to pass to the, ah . . . agent?”
“Gone now, yes?”
“Sorry.”
Celesta showed anger. “Yes, sorry. The egg went smash! Now my nephew sleeps in Kearny jail.”
“Are we talking about one of them from the bar?”
“Other man. He’s senator now.”
Moore looked down, at nothing. “It’s no good to say it. But I didn’t know.”
“Just go. Just go home.”
***
Outside snow was shooting horizontally, the sidewalk buried in drifts. Thunder cracked. Moore began walking, his shoes slipping and icy grains biting his face. He crossed an empty plaza amid flurries that swirled from the ground like smoke. Half blinded he came to the block around from Manna Liquors where he’d been hours before. He found a night-blackened doorway where snow was swept up in a deep, soft curve. He crouched and shoved his arms in, feeling around. Then stood up holding a balled envelope. Two blocks away there was a bar. He’d just started out for it when a car door at the curb swung open and someone called, “Whadda ya got?”
Moore stopped. A cradle of light from the car’s interior broke through the darkness and the whipping storm. A black woman sitting on the passenger side held a silver badge in her lap, flipped it closed and said, “Justice.” He stood planted in snow to the shins until she said “Climb aboard” and slid across the seat. He kicked through a drift, ducked into the car and slammed the door. The woman sat there examining him. She had long, glossed hair. A silver necklace stood against her dark suit. She didn’t smile. “Never thought I’d say this, but tonight I’d rather be back in Newark.”
“You were, ah, waiting?”
“I was around the corner earlier then followed your footprints, just for the heck of it. I know all the tricks. Decided to stick around, maybe meet you.”
“Stick around. Right.”
“A woman sitting in a parked car’s pretty inconspicuous. Especially on the passenger side. Especially in a blizzard.”
Moore didn’t reply.
“But listen, there’s a reason I’m here. You know Nicolas Selvetti? You went in his place, took something out of there. In fact that was mine, and I need it.” She ogled him, making it extra sincere. “Can I have it now?”
Moore took the envelope out of his jacket, unwadded it and handed it to her. She opened the torn end with a finger and tapped something into her palm. Moore could see a mini Ziploc, the size that ordinarily holds green bud or crack. She gave a little sniff. “Nice.”
A black-and-white rolled by, its brights barely cutting through the blowing storm.
The agent was holding up the mini-zip, squinting. “It’ll ID someone, living, dead, whatever.”
A little shyly Moore said, “Won’t they say you fabricated it?”
She gave a reluctant laugh. “Aren’t you well-informed. No, I really don’t think so, they can’t this time. Just tell me something. I heard there was a blackout, you disappeared but didn’t go home. Where was ya?”
Moore shrugged. “At Psychic Celesta’s.”
“Oh the psychic, okay. It would be. She’s involved with the original fraud, and . . . that’s who tipped us I bet?”
“You know more than I do.”
“I’m backward chaining here. Computer hasn’t filled these fitty-dollar shoes yet.” She picked up a phone on the dash and tapped a number. While it rang she said, “You been in any trouble with us before?” She held up a hand. “Yeah hi, Burt. The envelope was from the gyp madam, we know her. Right.” She put the phone back.
Moore said, “The cops’ll be on my place.”
“Well, they’re not going to sit out here waiting on you. I wouldn’t myself except I already did.”
“They’re kind of batty. At that bar they were, ah, not going to let me leave.”
“Who’s they.”
“A council member, a cop. I’m saying I need a little help here.”
“Who am I, the patron saint of wackos? I can’t protect you.”
“I’ll cooperate.”
She only looked disgusted. “I just wasted my whole day on this. Why? Some lush needed an emergency refill, that’s why.”
Moore let a silence hang, then said, “I’ve got nothing out there.”
She put her hands on the wheel, gazed at the windshield. He saw that she’d gotten out and cleared it off. Or maybe she hadn’t really been there that long. “Well. I guess I can get you to a little better place. Short term.”
“Thanks.” She started the car.
They drove through the frozen whirlwind toward the Hudson waterfront. The car rolled through green lights at empty, snow-blown intersections. Soon they came to night-bound blocks of warehouses. The agent pulled onto a cobbled lane and parked by a loading dock. “This is home.” They got out and tramped over a snowbank and up concrete steps, entering an old factory through a metal door. There was a bare hallway half-lit by fluorescent tubes. The agent led, stamping wet boots, to another door. She opened it for Moore.
Inside, a poured-concrete floor ran the breath of the building, stretching past peeling block pillars to greyed-out factory windows. Dead darkness was broken at random by cage lights suspended from the ruined ceiling. Under one of these, two men sat at a steel table playing cards. The squids from the bar. They only glanced over when Moore and the agent walked in. And Celesta was there, slumped in an armchair with a hand raised to her temple. “Bad surprises,” she said, staring up at Moore.
He went nearer and said, “I’m with your contact, right?”
Celesta’s gaze slid to the agent’s face. “No. Anton said it was a gadjo.” She looked back at Moore. “Male.”
Deeper into the murk, light shined over an industrial table saw standing centered on a plastic tarp. Through a closed door just visible in the far darkness a toilet flushed. Out came a large man in a police uniform, with white strips visible across a face shrouded in shadow. He walked toward them as he fastened his belt.
“Chipmunk,” the agent said.
“Hey detective. How ya doon.”
“’Bout to froze my hump out there, Chipster.”
Chippy approached, leering at Moore. White tape was banded above and below his cloudy red eyes. “I’ll get you back, ’tec,” he said. “You let me finish what needs doon here. Then I’ll—”
And out went the lights.
Author Bio
Arthur Evans does freelance work in New York City. He spends his time off in New Jersey. He’s only been sentenced to community service, and still thinks the matter should have been dropped.
