Endless Things Read Online Free PDF Page B

flight's early.” None of this was true.
    "Naw,” said the Chief.
    "And in fact,” Pierce said, “I have to go back to Manhattan for a while tonight. This evening. Shortly."
    The Chief was still shaking his head. “You'll leave the bags here,” he said, his voice harsh from a lifetime of barking orders. “You'll come back tonight. Axel will be here, you'll have a drink with us, in the morning we'll take you out to Idlewild in the truck."
    "JFK,” said Pierce.
    "Listen,” said the Chief, advancing. “I'll tell you something. There is nothing you could want that can't be found right here. In Brooklyn. In the five boroughs at the most ."
    Somewhere in the building something heavy fell or was thrown down the stairs, while men laughed.
    "I guess that must be true,” Pierce said.
    "You're not shittn me,” said the Chief. Pierce now noticed that the man's right finger and thumb ticked rhythmically together. Effects of drink, or a palsy. “You know he needs somebody. If it's not you it's got to be somebody."
    Pierce said nothing.
    "The man's a genius,” the Chief said. “What he knows.” He tapped a temple with his forefinger. “Maybe you take after him."
    Nothing.
    "A good man too. He knows something about loyalty. Actually a lot."
    Pierce was uncertain how long he could stand up under these implied reproaches. He managed to nod, slightly and solemnly. On the floor above, the roughhouse (as Axel would surely call it) worsened. A fight, maybe a mock fight, punches thrown, thud of boots. Fawken A. Fawken assho.
    "So,” said Pierce. “Okay."
    From an ashtray on the mantelpiece the Chief took a business card. “You probably know the number here,” he said, and Pierce did, even the old letter exchange that had once named his neighborhood, its bounds mysterious. Only by means of the dial plates of phones could you discover what places were within it and what places were outside it; the candy store nearby was in, so was the branch library blocks away, but the movie theater on the avenue wasn't. “There's another number too. We got a warehouse space in Greenpoint."
    Pierce looked at the card, which bore their numbers, and a cartoon crown, chosen from a printer's catalog.
    Park Reclamation and Renovation
    Warehousing Fulfillment
    He thought: What if it's all all right, and they will be kind to him, and cherish him; keep him from harm, and not fall into fools’ errors, make bad decisions; will think of him and his unworldliness when they dream up their schemes? What is fulfillment, and how do they do it?
    "Okay,” he said again, and took the Chief's hand. Outside the naked windows (what had become of their lifelong brown drapes?) a short day was closing, the black skyline and the sky too familiar. “I gotta go."
    She lived up on the Upper East Side, almost under the shadow of the Queensborough Bridge, in a five-story building that was once also shadowed by the rattling El. It was ready now for the renovators and reclaimers, to turn its railroad apartments into expensive studios, but that hadn't happened so far.
    The front door was open, maybe stood open always—Pierce hadn't ever been here before, had only heard about it from her on the phone, those rare times she called. He went up. They didn't know, his neighbors up in the country, the feel of these banisters thick with a hundred coats of cheap enamel, these worn rubber treads. He had lived for years going up and down stairs like these, streets like these. And then he had left at last, impelled by her to take another way.
    He had used to call her Sphinx, softly in her ear in bed, and then later to himself when he thought of her. Not for her silence, she was a Chatty Cathy most of the time, but for her fine-boned cat's body and the gloss of her thick fur and the alien eyes in her human face. And for the riddle she posed maybe, for she was a Gypsy, or her mother was: gitana , race of Egypt once though no more. Her name had been Diamond Solitaire when she toured with a