“You look like you been workin’,” he said.
“Got paid sixty bucks.”
“Every penny counts.”
“Why are we meeting here, Mel?”
“I didn’t think you’d be too happy with me sitting in the office with your daughter.”
He was right about that.
“Can I get you something?” a young woman asked.
My nostrils flared when I saw the young Asian woman clad in a coral-colored minidress. For ten years I’d held down the passion in me. But that was over. The dog was out.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“I’ll have another Barolo,” Mel told her.
“Yes, sir.”
“So?” I asked when the waitress was gone.
“I’ll finish my drink and then we’ll take a ride down to the Verrazano Bridge. We’re going to Staten Island.”
He might as well have added, “Across the river Styx.”
Day turned to night in the time it took us to get Mel’s vintage Ford Galaxie 500 and drive to Pleasant Plains, Staten Island. We didn’t talk much; didn’t turn on the radio or play CDs. Wherever we were going it was serious business.
On the south side of the small town, there stood an abandoned church. I say abandoned, but what I mean is deconsecrated. It was surrounded by an eighteen-foot stone wall. The only entrée was through a remote-control iron gate. The rectangular brick structure loomed at a height of at least two and a half stories. Twelve slender stained-glass windows ran from the ground to the eaves of the steeply slanted, dark-green-tiled roof. On one end was a silo-like cylindrical steeple, also made of brick; it rose ten feet above the rest of the structure. There was a satellite dish at the very center of the extreme-angled lower roof.
Mel drove us to the middle of the circular driveway in front of the once holy refuge.
“This is where you live?” I asked as he unlocked the double-door entrance.
When we crossed the threshold, lights snapped on in quick succession. It wasn’t a huge building as far as churches go, but the high ceiling, empty space where there were once pews, and then the raised altar made me feel rather small.
“I stay here sometimes,” Mel said, answering the question that I had forgotten with the light.
“Where do you sleep?”
“In the station house.”
“The what?”
“This way.”
Behind the altar was a small door that led to a cramped spiral stairway going down.
As in the church, the moment we entered the stairs, a series of lights came on. Thirty-seven steps led to a door barely wider than a coffin’s lid. Through this door we entered a desolate room swathed in dim light abutted by a wall-size window behind which sat a bloodied man wearing only a T-shirt and boxers. His wrists were chained to a stone wall and his ankles to the floor.
The man was both pitiful and forlorn, but that’s not what caught my attention. I knew the guy. He was the one Mel called Porker. One of the men Stuart Braun sent to ambush me at the West Village coffee house.
“Can he see us?” I asked.
“No.”
“You been interrogating him?”
“Softened him a little bit. I was waiting for you to come up with better questions.”
Mel went into a small alcove next to the left side of the window-wall. From there he pulled out a pair of folding chairs. He set these up in front of the interrogation cell window as if it were a really big-screen plasma TV.
The room we were in was dark and dusty, but Porker’s room was all light stone and bright light.
“Yep,” Mel said as we looked at his private production. “This is a station house of the Underground Railroad.”
“Say what?”
“There were people on Staten Island who wanted to free as many slaves as they could. Over in Elliotville and under this building they did just that.”
For maybe ten seconds I was distracted from the prisoner.
“I bought this building for a refuge and maybe some other business,” Mel continued. “But then I discovered what had been going on back before the Civil War. I kinda like it. People should break the law if it doesn’t suit them.”
“Can he hear us?” I asked, motioning at Porker.
“Soundproof.”
“What’s his real name?”
“Simon Creighton. He was born in Jersey City. Breaks legs. Beats his girlfriends, but they love him anyway.”
“What have you gotten out of him?”
“I just been beatin’ him. You know…setting up the lexicon for when you got here.”
“You just beat him?” I said, looking at the leg breaker’s bruised, battered, and bloodied face through the slightly green-tinted glass wall.
“Anything one man does that another man understands can be defined as language,” Melquarth quoted. “I read that once in an article on philology. I was looking up poisons but found that instead.”
Mel went back to the little alcove from which he retrieved the chairs and came out with a very long black trench coat, a pair of thick black gloves, and a pure white mask that was reminiscent of Greek marble statuary of the gods. The white face was beautiful and manly, dispassionate and beyond pedestrian human expression.
“I put on this shit,” he told me, “and it scares poor Simon almost to death.”
“You got one for me?”
“Don’t need it.”
“Why?”
“There’s earphones in the mask and an omnidirectional mike too. You just listen to what Porker got to say and tell me if I should be asking something else.”
Mel first donned the trench coat, which came down over his shoes. After that he put on the mask and then the gloves. He turned that motionless and beautiful white face to me, nodded, and then went to a door on the right side of the window. That door led to another. Mel closed the first and then I saw him enter the white stone cage.
He stood motionless for at least three minutes staring at Simon Creighton.
At first the obese prisoner stared back. He was afraid, definitely, but also trying to put up a brave front. Thirty seconds into the stare down he began to tremble.
“What the fuck do you want, man?!”
Mel remained stock-still.
“Just tell me what you want…please.”
There came a snort in the room that didn’t seem to originate with either man.
“What the fuck do you need?” Simon pleaded. “Do I know you? Did I do somethin’ to you?”
Mel moved his head ever so slightly, and Simon tried his best to skitter away. His chains actually rattled.
I was getting scared myself.
Another minute went by. Then Mel took a step. When he moved you couldn’t see the foot motion, so in a way he seemed to be floating.
“Please don’t!” Creighton started screaming, and even though we were way under a stone building, and soundproofed to boot, I was half-certain that somebody would hear.
Mel descended on the chained man, punching, gouging, and kicking Simon with vitriol.
The beating went on for maybe ninety seconds before I said, “Mel.”
He continued and so I said, “Mel, stop it, man. I want him conscious and able to talk. I want him alive.”
Three more blows and Mel stood up from the bleeding, blubbering man. He turned to what must have been a mirrored interior, and I could see three spots of blood on the otherwise immaculate mask.
“Ask him why he was at the Liberté Café the other night.”
“What were you doing at the Liberté Café?” It was Mel’s voice but somewhat altered, and it didn’t come from him but rather speakers in the walls of both cell and anteroom.
Simon started shivering. “Me and Fido and Vince was there to catch a man with a red flower in his buttonhole, but he never came.”
“Who sent you?”
“A guy named Marmot, William James Marmot.”
“What were you going to do with the man when you got him?”
“I don’t know.”
Mel kicked Simon in his left cheekbone, slamming his head against the white stone wall behind. The impact left a pocked red imprint on the granite surface.
Simon actually shrieked.