Chapter 7

Janine pulled the cage door shut and stood with her fingers through the wire.

"My prints are on one of those," she said. "I helped him carry it."

Artie Lombardi came down, looked, and said some things he learned in the Navy.

He put his own padlock on our cage and moved a cot into the boiler room.

I went to the marshals on Monday.

That's four days, and I want it written down.

There were four hundred people upstairs, and it took me four days, because I had seven years in and a slip with a lie on it, and I knew what was going to happen to me.

On the first of August I climbed the stairs off Webster Avenue and put it all on Ortega's desk: the Cool Whip tub, the black key, Bathgate, whose name was on the cage.

He listened with his pencil down.

"Why shouldn't I lock you up?" he said.

"Because somebody's going to call you about those cans," I said. "I wanted to get here first."

He picked up the phone, and before I got to the bottom of those stairs I was suspended without pay.

That night his men carried the gasoline out the service door, and Artie stood the same cans back in the same row, full of water, so nothing looked changed.

The call came Wednesday.

He drove up to 19-F that night and sat at my table with his tie off, across from Janine.

"Concerned citizen," he said. "There's a fire dispatcher in Riverdale with gasoline in his storage cage, and ask him how he knew about Bathgate. Nice voice. Loud. Friendly."

He turned the black key over on the table.

"A guy framing himself doesn't come tell me first. So fine, I believe you. That and fifty cents gets me on the subway. I've got a girlfriend with her handwriting in his book and her prints on a can, and a jealous boyfriend who lies on the radio. Any lawyer in the Bronx could buy a boat. He has to say it, in his own voice, where somebody can hear."

"You'd have to go in front of a grand jury," I said to Janine.

"I know what I'd have to say," she said.

Vic found me that Friday.

I was coming through the lobby in the middle of the day with a quart of milk, which is a hell of a thing to be doing after seven years.

He was on the bench by the mailboxes in a new shirt, and he looked honestly glad to see me.

"You don't come to the diner," he said. "I heard you got a vacation. Who've I got to talk to now? I mean it, nobody's as good as you."

He took out the Zippo, lit a cigarette, and let it burn a while before he snapped it shut.

He looked up at the ceiling, all twenty-four floors of it, and he smiled.

"Tell her I'm not sore," he said. "Tell her I'm coming by some night for my sweater."

I carried the milk up nineteen flights and put it in the refrigerator.

"He can't shut up," I said. "He's got to come and find me to tell me he can't shut up."

Janine was at the sink.

"Not in the dark he can't," she said.

I asked her what that meant.

"He sleeps with a light on. He says he reads. Four months, he never let me blow out a candle. He gets up in the night and lights that Zippo just to look at the room."

I stood there with my hand on the refrigerator door.

Every time I clicked off that flashlight, he talked faster.

I had thought it was the flask.

Five hours he went on in that car, and I had thought he was bragging, and he was whistling.

I could tape him at the diner all day, but with the lights on Fox Street was a nun and a little chair.

Only the dark had ever gotten it out of him.

"How long do you figure he could stand it?" I said. "In the dark, with nothing, with somebody who won't talk back?"

She shut off the water and dried her hands one finger at a time.

"Not as long as you," she said.

Ortega told us nobody could stop an elevator on his say-so, that a judge would have his badge, and that he hadn't heard me ask.

He also said he had to look at those cans again Wednesday the tenth, around nine-thirty, and a man might want to look at the hoistway too, from the seventeenth floor, if the super had a complaint.

"I got a complaint," Artie said.

Ortega left a pocket tape recorder on my table, about the size of a pack of Luckies, and he forgot it there.

New York lets a man tape his own conversation.

If I said Bathgate, he would holler up the shaft and Artie would have me on seventeen in ten seconds.

Wednesday around eight Janine met Vic in a bar on Broadway.

She told him I had gone to my mother's in Woodlawn and she was moving out, and to come up at nine-thirty for his sweater.

He bought her a drink, and he went to wash his hands and left the Zippo on the bar.

She has very good hands.

At nine that night she stood behind me in the kitchen with a roll of adhesive tape from Jacobi and told me to breathe out.

She taped the recorder to the small of my back, and her fingers were cold.

She smoothed the tape down with her thumb, and her hand stayed there a little longer than the tape needed.

That was the last time she touched me.

On the table, next to the thermos, she had left the flint from his lighter, about the size of a grain of rice.

It was four weeks to the night.

Car One had a sign on it, and Artie was up in the motor room with his hand on the switch.

I stood behind the mailboxes until Vic came in the service door, crossed the lobby, and got into Car Two.

I ran for it.

He held the door with his foot, and nineteen was already lit.

"Marty!" he said, just delighted. "Look at you. Visiting somebody?"

"A friend," I said.

I pressed nothing.

He laughed all the way to sixteen.

Between sixteen and seventeen the light went out, the fan quit, and the car stopped with a bump I felt in my teeth.

It was blacker than July, because this time there was no flashlight on the floor.

"Aw, come on," he said. "Con Ed? Again? What are the odds?"

I heard him go in his pocket.

Click.

Click, click.

"Hey," he said. "Pal. Where's your flashlight?"

I sat down on the floor with my back in the corner.

"I work nights," I said. "I know how to wait."