Outerbridge Reach Read Online Free PDF Page B

behind which burned the fires of Shia or drugs or plain madness.
    â€œSo what d . . do you think, Kiazim?” Strickland inquired. “You like New York?”
    Kiazim Shokru stared at him in the mirror, apparently with rage.
    â€œNo?” They had taken the Forty-eighth Street exit and were deep in gridlock. Strickland was already weary of his new conversation. “Where do you like, then?”
    The driver ignored him.
    Strickland’s premises were in Hell’s Kitchen, just west of Ninth Avenue. He got out on the corner, took his bag from the trunk and paid off Kiazim. On his way to the building, Strickland was approached by a lost soul who had been begging from passing cars with a Styrofoam cup. He sidled past the man but then thought better of it. Pausing, he filled the man’s cup with his Central American small change.
    He let himself in through the metal street door, leaned against the moldering green wall of the first landing and pressed the elevator button. The elevator arrived complete with Archimedeo, the Colombian super, who, seeing Strickland, stepped back in stylized surprise.
    â€œHey, where you been?”
    â€œAtlantic City,” Strickland told him.
    â€œYeah,” Archimedeo said, stepping out of his way. “I know where you been.”
    Strickland maintained half of the eighth floor of his building, which had been a musical-instrument factory long ago. His place consisted of two cutting rooms, a small office and a big loft space in which he had his living quarters.
    Approaching his shop, he heard a radio playing inside. When he pounded on the door someone came to listen by it.
    â€œYes please?” demanded a nasal, impertinent voice.
    â€œIt’s me, Hersey. Open the door.”
    The Medeco lock and the deadbolt were undone and Hersey stood before Strickland, bowing and rubbing his hands together. Hersey was an apprentice, an awkward youth of frail and scholarly appearance.
    â€œWelcome, master,” Hersey intoned. It pleased him to assume the demeanor of a freakish laboratory assistant in a horror movie, a role for which he was, in fact, well suited.
    â€œWhat’s happening?” Strickland asked him. “Everything arrive?”
    â€œI think so. A hundred and eighty rolls. Thirty hours.”
    â€œGot it sunk up?”
    â€œBut of course.”
    â€œGood,” said Strickland.
    He went back into his quarters, showered and changed. As he dressed, he listened to his message machine. After a while he shut it off. The messages were boring and he was not in the mood to talk on the phone.
    Back in the cutting room, he found Hersey at the Steenbeck, working to the creepy contemporary music the youth favored.
    â€œKnock off, Hersey. I want to see what I have.”
    â€œThe moment of truth,” Hersey said. He stood up and assumed the parody of a servile cringe.
    â€œTruth is right,” Strickland said.
    They sat and watched selected dailies from Strickland’s Central American documentary. There were scenes of political rallies sponsored by the party in power, of religious processions and of volunteers for the harvest. There were sensitive studies of the dead. There were views from the door of a moving helicopter that raced its shadow over the savanna in a ghostly reference to Vietnam, of flamingos rising in thousands from a mountain lake, and of pre-Columbian ruins, somber and murderous. And there were interviews of every sort.
    â€œChrist,” Hersey said, watching an American diplomat attempting to explain himself, “you really open them up.”
    â€œI get them to spread,” Strickland said. “That I do.”
    They watched the brother of a cabinet minister, sounding a little the worse for rum, attempt to explain what could not be explained to a camera.
    Hersey giggled asthmatically.
    â€œDoesn’t he know you’re shooting?”
    â€œSure he knows. And then again he doesn’t.”
    After about an