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  “Don’t,” the child says. “Tighter. Hold me tighter. Please don’t let me go.”

  Chapter 17

  The woman who called herself Bree, and sometimes Tracy, and sometimes Submissive Sara had a real name, of course, and that was Jeanette Tomczak. She was born thirty-one years ago in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the third daughter of a ruddy-faced postal worker named Kathy who thought something was wrong with you if you weren’t grinning from ear to ear, and a livestock auctioneer named Henry who could say 315 words a minute when it came to raising the price of a calf or a set of tractor tires but who barely uttered a sound once he was home and parked in his chair. Jeanette will never make it out of Dennis Keswick’s apartment, and certain details of her life are noted here out of respect. She loved music. She had a collection of eight-track tapes, cassettes, and CDs. She held on to them all, as best she could within her disordered life. Even when a kind of media became obsolete, she kept it because she could not bear to throw away something upon which music was recorded. (She had no way of playing her eight-track tapes, but how in the world could she consign the Pointer Sisters to the garbage can?) She loved Chinese food, especially sweet-and-sour chicken. She was afraid of dogs. She wrote down her dreams in a large spiral notebook and often at the end of a working day would go over them, years’ worth, and discern patterns in them, patterns that edged up to the very cusp of revelation and then slowly backed away into obscurity. She was tough. She didn’t save her money—it’s tricky to hold on to dough when it’s all in cash. She didn’t take particularly good care of herself. She gained weight. Her face became ruddy, like her mother’s. Still, she had a long run, compared to others, but by the time she went out to Dennis’s apartment, she was on the downward slope, professionally speaking. The escort service kept her on for old times’ sake and sent her out if a client called and wanted someone right away and no one else was available or if some low-roller in one of the outer boroughs needed to get off. The thousand-dollar gigs at the Plaza Hotel were not for her; she was doing the thirty-minute mercy calls in Sunnyside, Queens. She didn’t sweat it. She knew she was on her way out, and it was just as well. Since she couldn’t quit the Life, the Life would quit her. She had an optimistic nature. She never stopped believing that one day she would move back to Pennsylvania, marry, and have children.

  Jeanette had under three hundred dollars in the bank and, aside from clothing, very few possessions. But she did have the gift of friendship, and of her many friends, none was more loyal than Portia Ramirez, who also went by the names Taco Belle, Karmen, Chiquita, and, on busy weekends, Submissive Sara—there were actually four Submissive Saras at Nite Movz, the escort service for which Jeanette and Portia worked. In the pecking order of Nite Movz, Portia was roughly halfway between the high-priced girls who were quite young, many of them just starting off their lives as prostitutes, and the older women like Jeanette.

  On the night Jeanette disappeared, she and Portia were to meet at three in the morning at a diner on the corner of 107th and Broadway. Portia’s cousin Seny had suddenly left New York, taking with her only a few precious things and leaving behind two closets filled with clothes. Seny was always on a diet and had in the past five years weighed anywhere from 120 to 200 pounds. What this meant for someone going through her hundreds of pieces of abandoned clothing was this: There was sure to be something in the right size.

  Portia was on time for their rendezvous. She took a booth with a view of Broadway, looked at what was left of humanity at this hour, and slowly nursed an iced tea and an order of fries. Twenty minutes passed, and no Jeanette. (She was still technically alive; Dennis was crouched over her, naked and tumescent, trying to get his mind to work in a rational way while he figured out what to do next.) Portia broke her French fries in half to make them last longer—a trick learned in poverty and maintained as a way of keeping in reasonable shape. Thirty minutes, forty. It was not unusual for people in the Life to run late. You’d never want to try to go to the movies with any of them, or catch a train. The shelter and security of an everyday, straight-edge, nine-to-five-house-in-the-suburbs-picket-fence-401(k) life was not available to any of them, so why pay the price that all the good little boys and girls willingly forked over for a life of no worries? Why make a big deal about being punctual if life was not going to keep its side of the bargain? Talk about being played; talk about sucker punches. And so when a full hour passed and Jeanette did not show, and when Portia called Jeanette’s cell and it went straight to voice mail, Portia was not particularly concerned. And she was not in the least bit angry. Maybe, Portia thought, she got another booking. Maybe she was tired and went straight home and went to sleep. Jeanette was an epic sleeper; once she was out, it took a bomb to awaken her.

  The next day was a busy one for Portia and she more or less forgot about Jeanette. The day after was busy too, but not as bad, and Portia remembered to call Jeanette’s cell, and once again it went straight to voice mail. She texted her, waited. She was in a taxi on her way downtown to see a regular customer on Tenth Street, and she rode with the phone in her hand, resting on her knees, staring down at it, willing Jeanette to answer. Of course there was no answer. Portia finished up with Tenth Street—rushed service, to say the least—and as soon as she could called Carol, who managed Nite Movz from four to four, working the phones and matching the johns to the girls and, as they say, vice versa. Carol had been working at Movz for five years. Salary, commissions, and bonuses appeared in cash in an envelope every Friday morning. She didn’t know who owned the operation. No one did. When she had a problem or a question, she dealt with a Korean named David Kwan, but he wasn’t in charge of things any more than she was. He was just a spoke at a different part of the wheel.

  Now, two days after that, Portia and three other Nite Movz employees, Doris (Dee, Dee-lite, Deirdre), Sue (Samantha, Sindy, Submissive Sara), and Luis, are deep in Brooklyn’s back pocket, standing in front of a pitiful apartment house on Ocean Parkway, home to Carl Ravenswood. Portia had to break her ass to get this address. Carol had gone from “I don’t know where Jeanette is,” to “We had to let Jeanette go,” to “I’m furious with her, she can’t treat people this way,” to “Okay, here was her last appointment,” to “You want to talk to him, then talk to him, but be nice and don’t make trouble because he’s sort of a regular.”

  Hundreds of people live in that apartment building, its bricks the color of thoroughly chewed gum. Portia and the others stand in the lobby. Smells of disinfectant, someone’s last-minute cig. Buzzer system, countless nipple-y buttons like the left side of the world’s largest accordion. Portia runs her finger up and down, looking for the name. Ravenswood, Ravenswood. People coming and going, mostly old, sneaky-looking, even the guys in yarmulkes skulking around like illegal immigrants. After a while, a good-looking young lesbian with a dachshund comes out, wearing cargo pants, tank top, earbuds, and carrying a shit bag—she takes one look at Portia and her friends and makes them, no questions asked, none needed. Drugs, robbery, or prostitution. Whatever. Isn’t that what they say? Whatever? Whatevs?

  “Here he is,” Portia says, finally locating Ravenswood, way up there on the ninth floor.

  “Let’s do this thing,” says Luis.

  Portia buzzes, waits. Nothing. Buzzes again. More nothing, but even more nothing-y the second time around. She pretends to know Morse code and gives his intercom nine floors up a lengthy series of short and long buzzes, buzzes that say, she imagines, Open up and meet your Maker!

  A middle-aged woman, chunky and tan, shameless in shorts and a skimpy shirt, comes into the lobby eating from a big bag of Golden Spring organic potato chips. She lets herself in with a key, and before the glass-and-metal door can close behind her, Sue (who is quick, with reflexes like a mousetrap) slips in behind her and holds the door open for the rest of them.

  They ride up with the potato-chip lady, who seems nervous in their company. Each time she takes a handful of chips, she rolls the bag tightly closed, as if this
were it, her last potato-chip indulgence of the day. But as soon as she swallows one haul, she unrolls the bag and dips her hand in for the next. She gets out on the seventh floor, and Portia and her friends have a good laugh at her expense. Portia knows it’s low to laugh at fat people, or at anyone, really, but it always strikes her as funny that you can be any kind of freak, greasy and fat and a fright to the eyes, and still you’re more respectable than a well-toned, clean, nicely dressed person who makes her living giving people sex.

  The elevator door opens on the ninth floor. Ravenswood’s apartment is two doors away. Portia stops Luis from knocking. She puts her ear to the door.

  Sure enough, the little maricón is in there. She can hear him singing along to some crazy song on the radio. “Ooo, e, ooh ah ah, ting tang, walla walla bing bang.”

  She gestures to the door, looking up quizzically at Luis. He frowns and strokes his chin like a doctor considering the symptoms of a hard-to-diagnose patient. He crouches, looks more intently at the door handle, gives it a gentle turn, another. He stands up, a look of mastery on his face.

  “Ridiculous,” he says, pulling an old Macy’s credit card out of his back pocket.

  “Wait,” says Doris. “We can’t just—”

  Portia lays a silencing finger across her lips, her eyes sternly narrowing.

  “I’m out of here,” whispers Sue. “This is nuts.”

  Portia waves them over to a spot farther from the door.

  “She’s in there,” Portia says. Her passion is such that even whispering, she seems to be shouting. “Tied up, maybe. Who the fuck knows? Something. What if it was you, Doris? Or you, Sue? Or any of us? Wouldn’t you want someone to do something? Or would you just want everyone sitting around with their thumbs up their asses?”

  “That costs extra,” Doris says, and they all laugh, breaking the tension.

  “Ready?” Luis says, twirling his Macy’s card on his fingertips, making it travel from thumb to pinkie, like a magician with the ace of hearts.

  “Arthur?” Cynthia says, grasping the phone, leaning forward, amazed that he has taken her call. “Look, I’m sorry about—”

  “It’s okay,” Arthur says. “What’s the situation?”

  “They’re back. They’re here.” She is sitting in the main parlor; she gestures vaguely up to the third floor, where the twins are resting. Or so she hopes.

  “Well, then,” Arthur says, his tone adding: Then let’s hear no more about it.

  “Don’t ask me where they were.”

  “I wasn’t planning to.”

  Cynthia knows she is being insulted, but she is not in a position to take offense. Best to breeze right past it.

  “I need to ask you a question.”

  “Go on.”

  “A legal question.”

  “So I would assume.”

  “I want to put the house on the market.”

  “The house? What house?”

  “This house.” She takes a breath. “My house.”

  There is a silence as he takes this in.

  “Well, of course you understand that that is complicated. Do you understand that, Cynthia?”

  Oh my God, you condescending prick. But she again feigns tone-deafness and speaks to him as if he were decent and well-meaning.

  “I believe I do. It’s complicated. And to be honest, I didn’t pay too much attention to the clauses and subclauses. I never for a moment dreamed I would want to leave this place, or live anywhere else, or take the children away.”

  “The house belongs to them, Cynthia.”

  “I realize that.”

  “Their mother’s will was quite explicit.”

  “I’m their mother, Arthur.”

  “Yes. Of course. Their previous mother. Their birth mother.”

  “So what are we talking about here, Arthur? The house has to have some liquidity.” Yes: take that! Liquidity. She slapped the word onto the table like a trump card. Did he think she knew nothing, that running an antiques business in San Francisco—with all that competition—for fourteen years had taught her zilch?

  “Of course it does, Cynthia.” She can hear it in his voice. Her saying liquidity has lanced the boil of sarcasm. “I’m just saying it’s complicated.”

  “Well, complicated doesn’t bother me, Arthur. Complicated is like a lovely massage and a box of strawberries compared to what’s been going on. I have to get them out of here. It’s something I must do, I simply must. I want to sell this place, find somewhere to live, and get these kids out of this city as soon as possible. It’s not safe here, Arthur.”

  “In New York? I’m surprised to hear you say that. Mayor Morris—”

  “Don’t get me started on Mayor Morris. I mean here, in this house.” She stops, listens. What is that sound?

  Breathing?

  A carpenter someplace or other, sawing away at a two-by-four?

  No. It’s the rats in the cellar. Maybe in the walls. Working. Working.

  She checks her watch. She has called the exterminators twice already. They keep promising to come. She’s afraid to call again, afraid of alienating them and having them dilly-dally even more blatantly as a way of putting her in her place.

  She taps her fingers on the phone. A feeling has taken hold of her—she is not alone. Stop being stupid, you’ve got enough problems. She sits straighter in her chair and peeks around its winged back.

  Alice.

  Standing there. Her eyes burning with indignation. She has visited the kitchen; she holds a roast beef sandwich in one hand, fantastically overstuffed, the edge of the meat bright red, as if the poor cow had just been butchered.

  Without knowing what she is doing, operating on a fusion of fear and instinct, Cynthia hangs up the phone.

  “Your frightened me,” she says to her daughter. “You can’t go sneaking up on people like that.”

  “We’re not moving,” Alice says. Her voice is foggy.

  “I’m glad you’re getting something to eat, honey. You need to eat.”

  “We’re not moving,” Alice repeats.

  “Just eat slowly. And…you know. Give yourself time to digest.”

  “This is our home,” Alice says. “You can’t make us leave.” And with that, she turns to leave. As she is making her way to the main staircase, she opens her hand and lets the sandwich fall to the floor.

  This is hopeless, thinks Cynthia, knowing that hopelessness is the greatest, the least forgivable, sin.

  Getting into Ravenswood’s apartment was the easy part. Now Portia, Luis, Doris, and Sue have to find a way of getting out. He was completely ready for them when they entered his apartment, greeted them with a handgun pointed directly at them, and, moving quickly, he stuck each of them with a big dose of see-ya juice. And then the little bastard just stood there with a cockeyed smile, scratching his chin with the barrel of his .44, his toe tapping, watching them like they were something on TV as first one and then the next and the next and the next buckled at the knees and hit the floor, like apples falling out of the bottom of a wet paper bag.

  Now they are coming to in roughly the order in which they were stuck. He didn’t use a syringe. He just slapped them on the back, touched them on the upper arms; Doris got hers in the ass. He was a blur of action. He was good at this. A needle the size of the business end of a thumbtack pricked their skin, and that was all she wrote; it was good night and good luck, it was welcome to the darkness, darling, it was Nite Movz to the nth degree.

  But the worst part was waking up. Not one of them has an idea of how long they’ve been out. Dennis has handcuffed them all together, wrist to ankle, turning them into a sixteen-limbed pile of We’re fucked. One can’t move without hurting another—those cuffs are steely and stern and seem to hate skin and bone with a passion—and one can’t be hurt without moving. It doesn’t take them long to learn they must be absolutely still, even though none of them are in position’s that are in any way comfortable—or even tolerable.

  “And to w
hat do I owe this pleasure?” Dennis asks, addressing them all. He is seated comfortably in his one good chair, which he has dragged into the center of the room in front of the human pile he has created. At his feet are two duffel bags, brightly colored, one orange, the other yellow, both stuffed to bursting.

  He waits for an answer, and when none is forthcoming, he points to Portia, randomly.

  “We’re looking for our friend,” Portia says. The only way she knows how to make her voice meek and cooperative is to speak very softly.

  “Your friend?” says Dennis as if the concept were somewhat new to him, full of delicious comic possibilities.

  “She came here,” says Portia.

  “Oh, did she?” He stands up, grabs the bags. His T-shirt rises, showing a bit of belly and the gun tucked into the waistband of his pants. “Well,” he says, “I can’t say I have any memory of that.”

  “Her name was Bree,” Portia says, her courage returning.

  Dennis laughs.

  “What is so funny?” Portia says. Her anger forces her to move, and there is a chorus of complaint from the people to whom she has been chained.

  “Oh, nothing, really,” Dennis says. “It’s just…I don’t know. Bree. It’s such a cheesy name.” His laugh is hearty now. Like a mad devil, he tilts his head and roars with merriment.

  He shifts his duffel bags and gazes around the apartment, bidding it a fond farewell. What a shitbox, he thinks. It’s good to be leaving it behind. The long commute. The cramped quarters. The idiotic neighbors. The kitchen in name only. The constant whine of traffic from Ocean Parkway. Ocean Parkway! Where was the goddamned ocean? He could not see it; he could not smell it; it gave absolutely no evidence of itself.

  His new place, once found, would have at least a river view. The mighty Hudson! Or maybe down there on the South Street Seaport. Or in one of those big shiny buildings on Third Avenue within eyeshot of the East River. In the meantime, he’ll be staying in a hotel. Let the landlord of this place, the classless place, so insanely beneath him, let the greedy old fuck beat the bushes in search of Mr. Ravenswood, who, ladies and gentlemen, is about to—before your very eyes!—disappear into thin air.