sweatshirt obscured the exact shape of his frame. The most noticeable thing about him was his thin, black, horseshoe mustache. His dark brown skin seemed like it had been weathered by centuries, but I guessed he was about Alojzy’s age.
“You need some help with the cart tonight?” he asked Mendy.
“Nah. Thanks, but I already got this guy here. He’s been helping me all day; I think I’ll just let him see it through.”
“This squirt here? Who the hell is he?” Something was off about Eye’s gaze; it seemed like he was eyeballing me, but only one eyeball was actually fixed on me. Then I understood what it was: his left eye was glass.
“Oh, sorry. This is Izzy. Izzy, that’s Eye.” I nodded at Eye. He blinked his good eye back at me.
“He’s Al’s son,” explained Mendy.
“Al? Al Edel? That Russian fuck?”
“Polish,” I said, as if there was some pride in the word for me.
“What the fuck I care what kind of Russian your daddy is, boy?”
“I’ll talk to you later, Eye,” Mendy told him.
I pushed the cart from behind, while Mendy pulled from the front, steering with a little length of rope. Mendy had an established route that he followed. We walked down the middle of the street, out of necessity. I knew that the city streets sloped down on the sides for drainage, but I had never realized how extreme of an arch it was until I had to keep a moving cart from tipping over. We pissed off more than one cab driver, and hearing the honks and shouts right behind me made me nervous. Mendy didn’t seem to notice them at all. He calmly snapped down the mirrors of parked cars threatening to clip us, and maneuvered us around potholes with hardly a glance at the ground. The cart was heavy on the uphill blocks. I wasn’t used to this kind of work.
At the very end of the route we had to cross Varick Street. It was well past what I thought of as rush hour, but the street was still fully inhabited by the caravan of commuters trying to find their way back to suburban New Jersey through the Holland Tunnel. The idling cars spilled through the intersection. Mendy forced a way across for us, staring drivers down or banging on their hoods until they backed up enough to let us through.
We cut through a parking lot. Cars were parked four stories high on metal girders, and I couldn’t make sense of the system that raised them up there. Mendy nodded at the parking attendant, who nodded back from his little booth, and we came to the back door of the New York Mini Storage, where two women were arguing in Russian. The only word I could make out was “dengi.” Money. The woman doing most of the shouting was older, about fifty, and had bleached blonde hair. The other woman was about my age, and had black hair. She started to argue back against the older woman, waving her finger in her face, and the older woman slapped her twice, knocking the girl to her knees with the second blow. The older woman took a drag on her cigarette, making the ember at the end glow red, then flicked the cigarette at the girl’s face.
I stopped pushing the cart, but Mendy shook his head.
“Not our business,” he said. “Besides, you don’t want to mess with Zoya. Let’s get inside.” He swiped a magnetic key fob against a panel to unlock the door, and guided the cart through.
It took us a few tries to get the cart into Mendy’s storage space. There was just enough space between the boxes to fit it in, and we kept getting in at a bad angle, and having to pull back out and try again. When we finally got in, I let myself sink down to the ground. I sat there and sweated. I still hadn’t caught my breath from the walk over.
Mendy counted out some money from his fanny pack and held it out to me.
“Here you go,” he said.
“What’s this?”
“Sixty-four dollars. It’s what I figure is fair, considering how long you worked, and what I made, and what I can pay.”
“I wasn’t doing it to get paid . . .”
“Well, you earned it. If you weren’t helping me, I would have had to get Eye to help me push the cart. He would have been doing it to get paid. I’m giving you the same rate I give him. It was most of your day. It made my day easier. Take it, or I won’t feel right. I don’t need one more thing to keep me up at night.” I took the money and put it in my pocket. It felt good to hold a wad of cash that I’d earned through an honest day’s work.
“Now.” He snapped his fingers. “That other thing.” He extracted a shoebox from his cluttered storage space, and rummaged through it until he pulled out a key ring. He lifted his glasses and pulled the keys close to his eye. Satisfied he had the right ring, he tossed it to me.
“That’s the key to your father’s space. It makes more sense for you to have it than me. The number written on the keychain should be Timur’s . . . I was supposed to call it if your father got jammed up or something. I guess maybe he did. You can sort things out with Timur yourself. That little fob on the ring gets you into the building.
“Well, there it is,” he said, pointing to another unit down the same aisle. “Your family legacy. I’ll say good night now, and leave you to it.”
WHEN I OPENED THE metal door, I found a cart stacked high with water boxes. The rig was tied up with bungee cords, ready to hit the street. Alojzy had been planning on coming back here. Beyond the cart were stacks and stacks of water boxes, labeled in shaky Sharpie. “HC Mysteries.” “20th Cent. Art.” “Photog.” “Catchers in the Ryes.”
Based on the outer metal wall, the space extended quite a bit to the left, past the stacks of boxes. I climbed up over the cart and onto the stacks to see what was there. In the little light that filtered in from the fluorescent tubes on the corridor ceiling, I could make out a field of books, with a clearing in the middle. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that the clearing was an inflatable camping mattress. This was my father’s bedroom. I jumped down onto the mattress, the only place I could safely land. Luckily, it didn’t pop. Next to it, a camping lantern sat on an upturned milk crate. I switched the lantern on. It was bright enough to give me a fairly full view of the space.
I lay down on my father’s narrow mattress. With the sleeping bag and army blankets he had laid out on top of it, the mattress was comfortable enough to sleep on. I was a lot skinnier than him, though, and if he tossed and turned at night—as he always had, during his violent nightmares—he must have butted up against the collapsing stacks of books. When I laid my head back on the pillow, something hard knocked against my skull. I moved the pillow aside to reveal a gun of sorts. It had started life as a bolt action .22, not unlike the rifles we’d fired prone at the summer camp I attended in the Catskills when I was in junior high. The barrel of this one had been dramatically shortened and the stock sawed off altogether, so the gun could be held and fired more or less like a pistol. The magazine extended straight down, longer than the tape-wrapped grip.
I climbed back over the boxes and pulled the door shut. The storage-unit doors were made to only lock from the outside, but Alojzy had rigged up a chain and a deadbolt to hold the door closed from the inside. I fastened them both.
The gun did not surprise me. I had handled a gun of my father’s once before, about a year after he’d given up the apartment in Sheepshead Bay. He was gone for ten months after that, during which time I received four postcards
