a dime.
I had enjoyed spending the day working with Mendy, and wouldn’t mind spending more days on the street. As I spent more time on Alojzy’s turf, around people he knew, I would find out more about him. Maybe someone even knew where he was, or could get a message to him. Maybe that wouldn’t end up being necessary. Assuming Alojzy was hiding out somewhere, he was bound to return when things blew over. When he did, he would find me here, working. I would save the money I made from his stock for him, and I would be able to show him that I was capable of taking care of business.
I WOKE UP TO the sounds of street vendors beginning their days. Unoiled wheels creaked as heavy carts rolled over the concrete floors. Carts banged against metal doors. Someone was tossing boxes from a ladder to the ground, and each landed with a heavy thump. People argued in different shades of English and French. Occasionally I heard a burst of Russian, and the same language I hadn’t been able to identify at night. It sounded South Asian. Maybe Urdu or Bengali? It hadn’t occurred to me that a storage facility would be filled with so much activity. While the upper stories housed regular long-term personal storage, the majority of the ground-floor units were occupied by street vendors.
I took a drink from the plastic water jug, hid the gun under the air mattress, and stumbled over Alojzy’s boxes to the door. In the corridor, three Russian girls were arguing over a stack of T-shirts. I recognized one of them as the black-haired girl I’d seen get smacked the night before. If her face had been bruised, her makeup concealed it. A shirt fell to the ground as I passed by, and I picked it up. The shirt had an image of a woman with her finger to her lips. “Nee Boltaee,” she said—no gossiping. Handing it to the girl closest to me, I pictured my father flirting with these girls and wondered if his Polish schoolboy innuendos translated smoothly into Russian, if the girls giggled and blushed. A dreadlocked woman pushing a cart piled high with African wood carvings came up behind me and yelled at me for blocking the aisle.
I used the men’s room and bought a Diet Coke from the vending machine in the lobby, then went over to the pay phone to call the number Mendy had given me.
“Allo?” demanded a Russian voice. I could hear that the word had been shaped in a square jaw.
“Yes, hello. Is this Timur?”
“No. Is not. Do not call again.” The line went dead. Had I made a mistake? The man didn’t say I had a wrong number, he just said he wasn’t Timur. The number was all I had so I tried again, afraid the man would just let it ring, but he picked up again.
“Didn’t I tell you not to call again? Who the hell are you?”
“Wait!” I said. “Listen. My name is Izzy Edel. I’ve been looking for my father. I was given this number . . .” The man on the other end of the line was quiet for a moment, but he didn’t hang up. Cars pulled in and out of the parking lot.
“You are the son of Alojzy Edel?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get this number?”
“First, I talked to a man named Semyon Goldov, and then I got the number from a man named Mendy. I don’t know his last name.”
“I know who they are. Why are you calling?”
“I don’t know if you know, but my father’s missing . . .” I was hoping this would get some response, but it didn’t, so I kept going. “I was told that Mr. Timur had paid the rental bill—but you’re not Timur?”
“No. I am not. That person does not speak on the telephone.”
“Oh. So how do I speak to him?”
“You don’t. You speak to me. But do not waste my time.”
“Fine. I’ll be quick. First of all, I just wanted to touch base about the status of the storage-center bill, to make sure my father’s stuff doesn’t need to be moved out immediately, or anything like that. But more importantly, I’m trying to locate my father, and I’m trying to talk to anyone who might know where he is or what happened to him.”
“All right. I will call you back on this number in five minutes.”
While I stood waiting next to the phone, a man approached and asked if I was done. I told him no. He picked up the receiver anyway and proceeded to argue in a mixture of French and some West African language for the next six minutes. My father would have made him get off the phone, but I didn’t know how to do that. Finally, the guy hung up. I waited another five minutes, but the phone didn’t ring. Maybe Timur’s man had called back and got a busy signal. But it was also possible that he wasn’t ready yet, and would just be annoyed if I called back. He didn’t sound like a man I wanted to annoy. After debating for three minutes, I decided to go for it.
“Allo?”
“Yeah, this is Izzy—”
“Yes. Edel. I told you I would call you back.”
“I know, but I hadn’t heard from you and—”
“That is because you didn’t tell me you were calling from a pay phone. Where the hell did you even find a pay phone? No, I can make guess: it’s the pay phone at that rotten storage space. Don’t you know a pay phone cannot accept incoming calls?”
“No. I didn’t know that.” A straggling street vendor rolled out of the door with her cart, and I flattened myself against the wall so she could pass.
“Well, now you are knowing,” the man said. “It’s because of the gangbangers and their pagers.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. It was very clever, to make an innovation of technology used only by doctors, so as to facilitate untraceable communication for drug deals.”
“Sure.”
“Still, I do not have time to be calling a phone which will not ring.”
“I’m sorry.” Who was this guy? He was angry that I wasted his time, and yet he had time to give me a history lesson about crack dealers? Or was this a roundabout way of making sure that I knew he was a gangster and should be treated with fear and respect? Well, I didn’t think Alojzy’s storage space was paid for by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
“Forget it,” the man said. “Now, Timur and I would very much like to speak with you in person about your father. Do you drive a car?”
“No.”
“Fine. Take the Q or B train to Brighton Beach. I will meet you on the southwest corner of Brighton Beach Avenue and Brighton Sixth Street. Six p.m.”
“Okay. Sounds good.”
“Hasta la vista, baby.”
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