Hell's Kitchen

Carol avoided Pellam’s eyes as she made meaningless conversation. She told him in a breezy voice that an elevator company was going to donate a new car to the YOC. It would have a big “compliments of ” plaque inside. As if the kids would run out and buy elevators of their own. “Crazy what people’ll do for publicity.” He gave no response and she fell silent.

The doors opened and Carol led them down a deserted corridor oppressive with dirty tiles and murky in the weak fluorescent light. “Here.” Carol pushed the door open and Pellam stepped in – before he realized that it wasn’t a lunch room or office, as he’d expected, but a dim storeroom.

Carol closed the door. She had purpose in her movements and her eyes had grown chill. In the back of the room she moved aside boxes. Bent down and rummaged for something.

“I’m so sorry, Pellam.”

She paused. Took a deep breath. He couldn’t see what she held in her hand.

His thoughts strayed to the Colt in his back waistband. Ridiculous to think that she’d hurt him. But this was the Kitchen.

You’re walking past a little garden at noon in front of a tenement, thinking, Hey, those’re pretty flowers, and the next thing you know you’re on the ground and there’s a bullet in your leg or an ice pick in your back.

And her eyes… her cold, pale eyes.

“Oh, what a fucking mess.” Carol’s mouth tightened. Then suddenly she turned, her hand rising, holding something dark. Pellam reached back for his gun. But in her pudgy fingers were only the two videocassettes she’d stolen from his apartment.

“For the past week, I’ve actually thought about ru

“Tell me.”

“That man who mentioned me. About saving his son?”

Pellam nodded. He remembered about the young man nearly dying inside a building about to be torn down, how she’d rescued him.

She said, “I was afraid you might have me on tape. I can’t afford any publicity.”

He remembered her distrust of reporters.

“Why?”

“I’m not who you think I am.”

A recurring motif in Hell’s Kitchen.

“And who are you?” Pellam snapped.

Carol hung her arm around the riser of a shelf and lowered her head onto her biceps. “A few years ago I was released from prison after serving time for dealing. In Massachusetts. I was also convicted…” Her voice faltered. “… convicted of endangering the welfare of a minor. I sold to some fifteen-year-olds. One of them overdosed and nearly died. What can I tell you, Pellam? What happened to me was so boring, so TV-movie… I dropped out of school, I met the wrong men. Street dealing, basing, smack, fucking for dollars… Oh, brother, I did it all.”

“What’s this got to do with the tapes?” he asked in a cold voice.

She compulsively ordered a stack of thin towels. “I knew you were making that movie about the Kitchen. And when I heard that man had mentioned me I thought you’d include me in the story. I thought somebody in Boston might hear about it and word would get back to the Outreach Center board. I couldn’t risk any publicity. Look, Pellam, I’ve ruined my life… I’m so messed up from abortions I can’t have kids… I’m a felon.”

Carol laughed bitterly. “You know what I heard the other day? This bank robber was released from Attica and was having trouble getting work. He was furious that somebody referred to him as an ex-con. He said he was ‘societally challenged.’ ”

Pellam wasn’t smiling.

“Well, that’s me. ‘Societally challenged.’ There’s no way I can get a job with a government social agency. No day care center in the world would give me the time of day. But the Youth Outreach Center board was so desperate for help they didn’t have much of a screening process. I showed them my social work license and a massaged resume. And they hired me. If they find out who I am they’ll fire me in a second.”

“For the good of the children… Why’d you lie to me?”

“I didn’t trust you. I didn’t know who you were. All I know about reporters is that they look for the dirt. That’s all they fucking care about.”

“Well, we’ll never know what I would’ve done, will we? You never gave me the chance.”

“Please don’t be angry, Pellam. What I do here is so important to me. It’s the only thing I have in my life. I can’t lose it. I lied when I met you, yes. I wanted you to go away but I also wanted you to stay.”

Pellam glanced down at the cassettes. “I’m not interested in today’s Kitchen. It’s an oral history of the old days. I wasn’t even going to mention the YOC. If you’d asked I would have told you.”

“No, don’t leave like this. Give me a chance…”

But Pellam pushed open the door. Slowly, undramatic. He walked down the stairs then continued through the lobby of the YOC and stepped outside into a midtown filled with a searing sun and the cacophony of engines and horns and shouting voices. He thought Carol’s might have been one of them but then decided he didn’t care.

Walking east, toward the Fashion District on the way to the subway.

Crazy name for a neighborhood, Pellam was thinking. The least fashionable of any neighborhood in the city. Trucks double- and triple-parked. Tall, grimy buildings, dirty windows. Feisty workers in kidney belts and sleeveless T-shirts, pushing racks of next spring’s clothing.

A woman stood at a phone kiosk, hanging up the receiver then tearing a slip of paper into a dozen shreds. Now there’s a story, Pellam thought. Then he forgot the incident immediately.

He paused at a construction site on Thirty-ninth Street to let a dump truck back out, its urgent beep-beep-beep reverse warning jarring his nerves.

“… Thirty-ninth Street – that was Battle Row, the headquarters of the Gophers. The worst place in the city. Grandpa Ledbetter said the police wouldn’t even come west of Eighth a lot of the time. They wouldn’t have any part of it over here. He had a boot with a streak across the toe where he got hit by a bullet from this shoot-out on Battle Row when he was a boy. That’s what he said to us children. I never quite believed him. But maybe it was true – he kept that old boot till he died.”

Two shrill whistles rose from the pit of the construction site. The sound brought more spectators to the viewing holes crudely cut in the plywood fence lining the sidewalk. He paused and looked through one. A huge explosion. The ground leapt under Pellam’s boots and the mesh dynamite blanket shifted as the explosive shattered another fifty tons of rock into gravel.

Ettie’s words wouldn’t leave his mind, they looped endlessly.

“There was always construction going on here. Papa had an interesting job for a while. He called himself a building undertaker. He was in one of the crews that’d take the old demolished tenements out to Doorknob Grounds in Brooklyn. They dumped hundreds of old buildings in the water. Build up a shoal with the junk, and the fish’d love it there. He always came back with bluefish or halibut to last for days. I can’t look at fish now for any money.”

Three loud whistles. Apparently the all clear from the demolition crew. Hard-hatted workers appeared and a bulldozer moved forward. Pellam started back up the sidewalk. Something caught his eye and he glanced at yet another developer’s billboard.

He stopped, feeling the shock thud within him like a replay of the explosion a moment before. He read the sign carefully, just to make sure. Then he started off at a slow walk but, despite the overwhelming August heat, by the time he was at the corner he was sprinting.