Andy said, "You're in the same place, Tom? Perry Avenue?" and Tom nodded. We drove there through unfamiliar streets and Tom got out in front of a little box of a house clad in asphalt siding. Mick said he'd be in touch, and Tom nodded and trotted to the door and stuck his key in the lock, and Andy turned the car around.
At a red light he said, "Mick, are you sure I can't run you back to the city? You can keep this car and I'll get a subway home."
"Don't be silly."
"Or you can pick up the Caddy. Or I'll get the Caddy, whatever you say."
"Drive yourself home, Andy."
Andy lived on Bainbridge Avenue, on the other side of the Mosholu Parkway from Tom. He pulled up in front of his house and got out of the car. Mick leaned out the window and motioned him over, and Andy walked around the car and leaned against it with his hand on the roof. "My best to your mother," Mick said.
"She'll be sleeping now, Mick."
"By Jesus, I should hope so."
"But I'll tell her when she wakes up. She asks about you all the time."
"Ah, she's a good woman," Mick said. "You'll be all right now? You'll have no trouble getting your hands on a car?"
"My cousin Denny'll let me take his. Or somebody else will. Or I'll grab one off the street."
"Be careful, Andy."
"Always, Mick."
"They're hunting us down like rats in a sewer, the bastards. And who are they? Niggers and Chinamen."
"Looked more like Vietnamese, Mick. Or Thai, could be."
"They're all one to me," he said, "and what am I to them? What's their quarrel with me? Or poor Burke, for Jesus' sake, or any of the boys?"
"They just wanted to kill everybody."
"Everybody. Even the customers. Old men drinking their pints. Decent people from the neighborhood having a last jar before bed. Ah, 'twas a last jar for some of them, right enough."
Andy stepped back and Mick got out of the car himself and looked around, then shook himself like a dog shaking off water. He walked around the car and got behind the wheel, and I got out myself and got in front next to him. Andy stood on the sidewalk and watched us drive off.
Neither of us said anything on the way back, and I guess I must have faded out. By the time I checked in again we were back in Manhattan, somewhere down in Chelsea. I could tell because I recognized a Cuban-Chinese restaurant and got a sudden sense memory of their coffee, thick and dark and strong, and remembered the waiter who'd brought it to the table, a slow-moving old fellow who walked as though his feet had been bothering him for years.
Funny what you remember, funny what you don't.
On Twenty-fourth Street off Sixth Avenue, at the edge of the Flower District, Mick braked to a stop in front of a narrow brick building eight stories tall. There was a steel roll-up door like the kind at E-Z Storage, but narrower, only a little wider than a car, with a pair of windowless doors on either side of it. The door on the right had a column of buzzers at its side, suggesting that it led to the offices or apartments above. The door on the left showed two rows of stenciled lettering, black edged in silver on the red door. MCGINLEY & CALDECOTT, it proclaimed. ARCHITECTURAL SALVAGE.
Mick unlocked and rolled up the metal door, revealing a small street-level garage. Once he'd kicked a couple of cartons out of the way there was just enough room to park a full-size car or a small van. He motioned, and I slid behind the wheel and maneuvered the Chevy into the space.
I got out and joined him on the sidewalk, and he lowered the door and locked it, then unlocked the red door with the lettering on it. We stepped inside and he drew the door shut, leaving us in darkness until he found a light switch. We were at the head of a flight of stairs, and he led me down them to the basement.
We wound up in a huge room, with narrow aisles threaded among dense rows packed with bureaus and tables and chests of drawers and boxes stacked to shoulder height. It was, as promised, an architectural salvage firm, and the full basement constituted the showroom and stockroom all in one.
Ever since the Dutch bought the place, Manhattan's been a town where they throw buildings up only to knock them down again. Demolition is an industry in itself, construction's twin, and, if its main goal is an empty lot, I was looking at its by-products. Drawers and boxes spilled over with every sort of hardware you could strip from a structure before you took a wrecking ball to it. There were cartons full of nothing but doorknobs, brass ones and glass ones and nickel-plated ones. There were boxes of escutcheon plates and hinges and locks and things I recognized but didn't know the names of, and there were other things I couldn't identify at all.
Carved wooden columns stood here and there, looking for a ceiling to hold up. One section was crammed with ornamental stone and cement work from the outsides of buildings- gargoyles with their tongues protruding, real and imaginary animals, some sharply detailed, others as hard to make out as the inscriptions on old gravestones, weathered by time and acid rain.
A year or two ago Elaine and I spent a weekend in Washington, and in the course of it we dragged ourselves through the Holocaust Museum. It was wrenching, of course- it's supposed to be- but what hit us the hardest was a room full of shoes. Just shoes, an endless heap of shoes. Neither of us could quite explain the room's ghastly impact, but I gather our response was not atypical.
I can't say the plastic milk crates overflowing with doorknobs elicited a similar emotional reaction. My gut didn't churn at the thought of what had happened to all the doors to which those knobs had once been fitted, or the long-vanished rooms behind those doors. But somehow the endless array of hardware, sifted and sorted with Teutonic thoroughness, did call to mind that room full of shoes.