before the subway went underground. When the train pulled in, D dashed to the front of the platform, hopped down the stairs next to the tracks, and climbed over a short fence, putting himself on the dingy side of Lincoln Terrace Park. He went over another fence, headed past some crumbling tennis courts, and found himself on Eastern Parkway, a long tree-lined boulevard that ran across the spine of Brooklyn, cutting tins through Brownsville, Crown Heights, and Prospect Heights.
D walked a few blocks west to Utica Avenue, a central location for north/south buses and an express subway. He stopped by a garbage can, was about to drop the backpack in, and then changed his mind. As long as he didn’t get caught with the guns, they just might be useful later. So D made a left and then a right, crossing Union Street, which would take him through the heart of Crown Heights’ Hassidic community. It was a place of peering eyes and suspicious Jewish security teams but it felt safer to him than Eastern Parkway’s wide boulevard.
As he crossed New York Avenue, D suddenly felt very tired. All his joints were throbbing—his knees, his ankles, his lower back. He was in good shape but a full-on sprint through Brownsville with contraband guns hadn’t been on his itinerary.
Twenty minutes later D walked wearily up Washington Avenue back to Eastern Parkway. He moved past the Brooklyn Museum’s awkward, ornate, classical/modern glass entranceway. A few cars sped by him on Eastern Parkway and D hoped he didn’t look too conspicuous (or memorable). When he reached the entrance to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden he paused, put his feet together, and then counted off ten long strides, stopping before the cast-iron fence that bordered the garden and the thick, dark bushes behind them.
He bent down and squeezed the backpack through the bars and deep under some bushes. Using his cell phone as a flashlight, D made sure the bag was fully covered. Satisfied, he stood up, looked around, and continued west. His new apartment was just a few blocks away. He needed to sleep. Only after that would he turn his attention to the only question that mattered: what the fuck had just happened?
. . . TIL THE COPS COME KNOCKIN’
The next day the NY1 Time Warner cable channel reported that a shoot-out between two New York City policemen and two gunmen ended in the deaths of the two criminals. The official story was that two off-duty officers were walking toward their cars at the end of their shift when they were fired upon by a man from a jeep and one on foot. The off-duty officers returned fire. The two shooters, Aaron Hall and Dalvin DeGrate, had long rap sheets for violent crimes and some association with a branch of an East New York drug gang. There was a recently opened real estate office on Livonia Avenue and police theorized that the gunmen mistook them for employees of that new company and were attempting a robbery. Apparently the owners had recently reported extortion attempts to the local precinct. There was no mention of anyone matching D’s description.
D chewed on his oatmeal laced with almond butter and mulled over the news report. It was going down as a botched robbery attempt in an area known for crime. Manhattan makes it, Brooklyn takes it was still a mantra in some parts of BK. While D’s absence from the report was a momentary relief, it created a host of new worries. That cop seemed to know something about the backpack. Unlikely, yet he had been real interested in the bag when he should have been focused on the kid with the box cutter.
It was one thing to have those now-dead fools chase him and take potshots. It was another for his role in a deadly shoot-out washed clean off the books. That Latino cop would definitely remember his face. Would someone connect the incident at the fight club to this shoot-out?
D sat back on his sofa and took stock of his life. He hadn’t lived in Brooklyn for decades and certainly never expected to again after he’d left like Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, Alfred Kazin in A Walker in the City, and thousands of other Brooklynites who’d crossed the East River to make their mark. Brooklyn was a place of your roots but not your future, unless you planned on being a cop, crook, civil servant, or candy store owner. Brooklyn had been a place to visit, Manhattan a place to thrive.
But all that had been turned upside down. Post–9/11 Fort Greene, once a site of brownstone house parties, Spike Lee joints, and butter wavy bohemian girls, was now a leafy adjunct to Manhattan—and Clinton Hill was close behind. Do-or-die Bed-Stuy, while still having deep pockets of both black ownership and poverty, was full of white pioneers getting off the C and A trains after work.
Even in the Ville, the never-ran-and-never-will land of D’s youth, there were signs of protogentrification amid the microgangs and stop-and-frisk-obsessed cops. It would be a long time before his beloved (and detested) Brownsville would see serious change, but a lot of locals saw stop-and-frisk as an urban pacification tactic, and D, who knew more about plots against black people than he’d like to, couldn’t totally dismiss the paranoia. Why else would that AKBK Realty office be situated on dark, deserted Livonia Avenue?
D had looked for a place in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, but couldn’t find anything affordable. Through the manager of a rap group D got a line on a reasonable rental apartment in Prospect Heights, a relatively small patch of real estate surrounded by Bedford-Stuyvesant, Clinton Hill, Park Slope, and Crown Heights. His place was just off Washington Avenue, a few blocks down from Eastern Parkway and three of the borough’s cultural touchstones—the Brooklyn Museum, the Botanic Garden, and Prospect Park. On the northwest edge of Prospect Park, next to Flatbush, was a faux version of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe that D always thought was kinda weak after seeing the real thing a few years back.
In the opposite direction, going east on Eastern Parkway, was Franklin Avenue, which used to be the gateway to Crown Heights but was now home to a mini-Williamsburg with hipster bars, artisanal restaurants, and gourmet grocery stores. These days, if you walked across Eastern Parkway going south you’d be in another world. Hunkered down on the north side of the parkway was a deeply entrenched Hassidic community, folks who hadn’t left when all the other white people in that section of Brooklyn had fled and were still here now when a new wave of white folks were arriving.
The Hassidim had survived the blackout of ’77, the primal racial violence that followed the killing of the black child Gavin Cato by a Jewish man driving a station wagon in ’91, and various small-scale confrontations with police, hipsters, and real estate developers. Despite being perpetrators of racial profiling years before the term had been invented, D respected the Hassidim, viewing them as one of the city’s renegade posses, who looked upon everyone else in the city with a wary skepticism. Vigilantism in defense of your property was, in D’s eyes, not only logical but necessary. That’s what life in New York City had taught him. His D Security company, though now failing, was, in his mind, a secular extension of the way the Hassidim guarded their homesteads in Crown Heights, Williamsburg, and wherever else they wore their black hats.
His new apartment had one bedroom, a bathroom with a big old deep tub, a good-size living room, and a dining area next to a narrow kitchen. A letter his mother had written to him long ago about survival and love was already hung up by the dining table. He was sitting on the blue sofa he’d brought over from his soon-to-be-closed Soho office. He’d also brought over a file cabinet and safe. From his Manhattan apartment on Seventh Avenue in the 20s, he’d moved his pots and pans, the dining room table, and sundry household items. So his new Brooklyn place was a mash-up of both his old office and home.
This prewar building had lots of marble in its lobby and two rickety elevators to serve its seven floors. It was the first time since D had fled Brownsville’s Tilden projects that he was living in a building with elevators and a shared incinerator. He’d vowed back then that he would never again live in a high-rise, which this was not—but the idea of having to share an incinerator with his neighbors irked him, reminding him of countless days stuffing garbage bags down the shoot at 315 Livonia. Sometimes his neighbors wouldn’t shove their bags all the way down back then, so he’d have to push on their garbage as well his family’s mess, a distasteful
