Picture This

‘Black, young, tall… I cannot remember anything else. But you know what was really bad? I tipped him five dollars. If only I’d known! I am so sorry, Mr Baum.’

After Maria had left the room, Felix phoned the pizza company. They had no record of the delivery. He put the phone down and turned slowly in the entrance hall. Now he didn’t feel so safe. He pulled out his mobile and dialled another number: one that he’d made sure existed only in his memory. There was a long bleep before the ringtone set in, indicating that the person at the other end of the line was overseas. Finally a young male voice answered, sleepy, as if he’d just woken up.

‘You out of the country as we

arranged?’ Felix kept his voice low.

There was a reply – more a grunt than a clear confirmation, but the meaning was obvious.

‘Good. Stay there, until I say otherwise,’ Felix instructed, then clicked off.

Chapter Ten

Latisha got out at 33rd Street and started walking down towards Koreatown. The paper with the address burned a hole in her pocket, felt like it was trailing smoke as she lumbered her way through the bustling sidewalks, street peddlers touting their wares in a cacophony of noise, her crutch supporting her weight like the stick of a prophet. She was far taller than most of the Koreans and they fell back, intimidated by her size, the crowds parting before her as if she were royalty.

Maxine’s ghost had left her somewhere between the Rockefeller Center and West Fourth Street, extinguished by the stream of working humanity that flowed through the subway like dirty oil in a pipe. Latisha herself generally had little time for other people – except at church, and some family, like her nephew – but the artist had changed her, made her think there might be some goodness left under the folds of unhappiness and indifference she saw in the passing faces.

Like an ember you have to fan, evolution makes narcissists the most successful of us, but how do you measure success? Maxine once asked her from behind her modelling stand, caught in the flow of all those stories that had begun to fill the apartment like invisible fish hooks catching at Latisha’s hair and lips. The question remained unanswered and suspended between them. Latisha, numb from lying on that lumpy uncomfortable couch, was too embarrassed to admit she didn’t know what a narcissist was. It sounded like the name of a flower, but that couldn’t be right. So she stayed mute in feigned wisdom. Only now did the answer come to Latisha as she navigated the uneven pavement: If success meant staying alive, Maxine had failed, and if success meant not feeling things so much they drove you to crazy dangerous things, the artist had failed again. Yet Maxine had lived – more vividly and in far brighter colours than Latisha could possibly imagine – she concluded, as she turned west on 32nd Street, having only loved once herself, and that at a distance, so quietly that through fear of rejection, and worse humiliation, she’d let the man walk out of her life without him even knowing she wanted him.

The building was a red-brick block that looked as if it had been thrown up cheaply in the 1960s, with apartments that ran over a laundromat, a takeout shop and a tiny electronics store, with an array of neon signs in Korean plastered above them. The windows above were grimy and neglected, as if some of the rooms were still used for storage.

Latisha ambled up. An old poplar tree leaned wearily against the building, its leaves dusty, a stray dog shitting in the small patch of grass around it. She hauled herself up the stoop to the entrance and scanned the list of names. Apartment ten had a tiny caricature of the head of a young man: a handsome man not more than 20, with a haunting look about the eyes. She peered down at the slip of paper: Gabriel Bandini.

‘You Mr Bandini? ’Cause I need to talk to you,’ she asked the drawing, then pressed the buzzer.

A small Korean man opened the front door. He glared up at her, vibrating with an anger that put Latisha in mind of a ruffled cockerel.

‘What you want, lady? Number ten not home!’

‘Where is Mr Bandini?’

‘That guy? He gone!’ The small Korean tried to push the door shut, but Latisha got her metal crutch in the crack just in time.

‘Gone for good, or gone for a while?’

He glanced down at the crutch jammed in the door, then up at Latisha’s massive bulk, something in him obviously deciding she wasn’t a woman to be messed with.

‘How do I know? I’m only janitor. He pay rent though, up till September. Left his painting shit all over the place, landlord very, very upset. Wants him to pay for new carpet.’

‘If you’re the janitor, you have a spare key?’

‘What’s it to you?’

‘I’m his aunt.’

The Korean looked shocked, then uncertain. ‘He white!’

Latisha reached into the lining of her long knitted coat, fished around and then pulled out the 20-dollar bill she kept there for emergencies.

‘His rich aunt,’ she declared, holding out the bill.

Shrugging, the janitor opened the door and ushered her in.

*

Susie wound the window down and stared across the street; the old cookie factory on 125th Street, East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem, was only a block or so down from the famous Apollo Theatre. The building was red brick and looked 19th-century, with high windows, a couple on the top floor boarded up and broken. A car body repair shop was located at street level, the garage doors open to reveal several BMWs and a Ford in various stages of repair, and a number of African-American men in greasy overalls busy panel-beating and soldering to a frenzy of hip-hop blasting out of a hidden speaker.

The men were oblivious to Susie, sitting in the cab she’d taken uptown, gazing across at the building.