Bronx Noir Read online

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2007 Akashic Books

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  Bronx map by Sohrab Habibion

  ePub ISBN-13: 978-1-936-07022-0

  ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-25-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2006936535

  All rights reserved

  First printing

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughliny

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  Dublin Noir, edited by Ken Bruen

  London Noir, edited by Cathi Unsworth

  Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman

  FORTHCOMING:

  Brooklyn Noir 3, edited by Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock

  D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, edited by George Pelecanos

  Delhi Noir (India), edited by Hirsh Sawhney

  Detroit Noir, edited by E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking

  Havana Noir (Cuba), edited by Achy Obejas

  Istanbul Noir (Turkey), edited by Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler

  Lagos Noir (Nigeria), edited by Chris Abani

  Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene & Todd James Pierce

  Paris Noir (France), edited by Aurélien Masson

  Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly

  Rome Noir (Italy), edited by Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski

  Toronto Noir (Canada), edited by Janine Armin & Nathaniel G. Moore

  With great admiration, the editor dedicates this book to

  Grace Paley, whose childhood in the Bronx was happy.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I: BRING IT ON HOME

  JEROME CHARYN Claremont/Concourse

  White Trash

  TERRENCE CHENG Lehman College

  Gold Mountain

  JOANNE DOBSON Sedgwick Avenue

  Hey, Girlie

  RITA LAKIN Elder Avenue

  The Woman Who Hated the Bronx

  PART II: IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT

  LAWRENCE BLOCK Riverdale

  Rude Awakening

  SUZANNE CHAZIN Jerome Avenue

  Burnout

  KEVIN BAKER Yankee Stadium

  The Cheers Like Waves

  ABRAHAM RODRIGUEZ, JR. South Bronx

  Jaguar

  PART III: ANOTHER SATURDAY NIGHT

  STEVEN TORRES Hunts Point

  Early Fall

  S.J. ROZAN Botanical Garden

  Hothouse

  THOMAS BENTIL Rikers Island

  Lost and Found

  MARLON JAMES Williamsbridge

  Look What Love Is Doing to Me

  PART IV: THE WANDERER

  SANDRA KITT City Island

  Home Sweet Home

  ROBERT J. HUGHES Fordham Road

  A Visit to St. Nick’s

  MILES MARSHALL LEWIS Baychester

  Numbers Up

  JOSEPH WALLACE Bronx Zoo

  The Big Five

  PART V: ALL SHOOK UP

  ED DEE Van Cortlandt Park

  Ernie K.’s Gelding

  PATRICK W. PICCIARELLI Arthur Avenue

  The Prince of Arthur Avenue

  THOMAS ADCOCK Courthouse

  You Want I Should Whack Monkey Boy?

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  WELCOME TO DA BRONX

  The Bronx is a wonderful place.

  “Wonderful” in the literal sense: full of wonders. Wonders everyone’s heard of, like the Bronx Zoo and Yankee Stadium; wonders that make presidents cry, as Jimmy Carter famously did in 1977, standing in the rubble of the South Bronx; and wonders only we Bronxites seem to know about, like Wave Hill, City Island, and Arthur Avenue.

  People are always discovering the Bronx. Native Americans, of course, discovered it first, fishing and hunting in its woods and streams long before Europe discovered the New World. The first European to settle north of the Harlem River was one Jonas Bronck, in 1639. Jonas and his family worked part of his huge swath of land and leased the rest to other farmers. Everyone in the area gave their address as “the Broncks’ farm,” giving rise to the “the” and eventually the “x.” (There—we’re giving you not only great stories, but a party trick fact.) And development and industrialization, sparked by the railroad in the early 1840s, probably took care of the “farm.”

  In 1895, New York City discovered the Bronx, and Westchester discovered it didn’t own the place anymore. In 1914, New York State discovered it needed a sixty-second county, and Bronx County was born.

  Immigrants discovered the Bronx in waves. Germans, Italians, and Irish came early, and then European Jews. The Grand Concourse, modeled on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, was built to draw them northward. In the 1960s, as the second and third generations of those immigrants moved to the suburbs, Puerto Ricans and blacks took their places. Now they’re being joined by Latinos from all over Central and South America, Caribbean islanders, Eastern Europeans, Africans, Asians, and, of course, yuppies. Sooner or later, everyone discovers the Bronx.

  Parts of the Bronx suffered badly from the governmental anti-urbanism and heavy-handed “city planning” of the ’50s and ’60s, and to a lot of people “the Bronx” became another term for “urban decay.” ’Twas never true. Though the worst America has to offer its poorer citizens can be found in some areas of the Bronx—this is what brought Jimmy Carter to tears—great stretches are what they’ve always been: neighborhoods of working-class people, native-born and immigrants, looking for a break. And there were two-family row houses along Sedgwick Avenue, mansions in Riverdale, and fishing boats sailing out from City Island before, during, and after the filming of Fort Apache, The Bronx. (A personal note: In my previous life as an architect, my firm did the new building for the 41st Precinct, which had been Fort Apache until the city clear-cut the blocks around it and the NYPD started calling it Little House on the Prairie.)

  If you want to discover the Bronx yourself, you might go up to Van Cortlandt Park to watch white-uniformed West Indians playing cricket on the emerald grass. They’re there most summer Sundays, just north of the swimming pool, south of a rowdy soccer game, west of the riding stable, and east of the elevated subway that runs along Broadway. That subway line—the Number 1, by the way, and need I say more?—ends there, at 242nd Street, but the Bronx goes on for another mile. Or you might try the Botanical Garden, the Zoo, the House That Ruth Built—Yankee Stadium, for you tinhorns—or the new Antiques Row just over the Third Avenue Bridge. These are all terrific destinations, but the real discovery will be the size of the place and the diversity of the lives you’ll glimpse as you pass through.

  And in this wondrous Bronx, the exceptional writers in this collection have found noir corners, dark moments, and rich places of asto
nishing variety. You can’t pack so much yearning, so many people, such a range of everything—income, ethnicity, occupation, land use—into a single borough, even one as big as the Bronx, and not force the kind of friction that slices and sparks. The Bronx has been home to big-time gangsters—from the Jewish organized crime of Murder Inc. and the Italian Cosa Nostra to the equally organized drug-dealing gangstas of today. The Third Avenue El was a Hopperesque symbol of urban hopelessness; it’s been demolished, but trains on other lines still rumble through the roofscapes of the borough. Prosperity is increasing and drug use is decreasing, but the public housing projects in the Bronx are some of the nation’s largest and remain some of its toughest. Many places in the Bronx seem hidden in shadows, just as the Bronx itself is in Manhattan’s shadow. And dark stories develop best in shadows.

  From Abraham Rodriguez, Jr.’s South Bronx to Robert Hughes’s Fordham Road, from Joseph Wallace’s Bronx Zoo to Terrence Cheng’s Lehman College, from Joanne Dobson’s post—WWII Sedgwick Avenue to Lawrence Block’s new wave—yuppie Riverdale, it’s all here. In this book, we offer a hint of the cultural, social, economic, and geographic range of the only New York City borough on the mainland of North America. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Da Bronx.

  S.J. Rozan

  The Bronx

  June 2007

  PART I

  BRING IT ON HOME

  WHITE TRASH

  BY JEROME CHARYN

  Claremont/Concourse

  Prudence had escaped from the women’s farm in Milledgeville and gone on a crime spree. She murdered six men and a woman, robbed nine McDonald’s and seven Home Depots in different states. She wore a neckerchief gathered under her eyes and carried a silver Colt that was more like an heirloom than a good, reliable gun. The Colt had exploded in her face during one of the robberies at McDonald’s, but she still managed to collect the cash, and her own willfulness wouldn’t allow her to get a new gun.

  She wasn’t willful about one thing: she never used a partner, male or female. Women were more reliable than men; they wouldn’t steal your money and expect you to perform sexual feats with their friends. But women thieves could be just as annoying. She’d had her fill of them at the farm, where they read her diary and borrowed her books. Pru didn’t appreciate big fat fingers touching her personal library. Readers were like pilgrims who had to go on their own pilgrimage. Pru was a pilgrim, or at least that’s what she imagined. She read from morning to night whenever she wasn’t out foraging for hard cash. One of her foster mothers had been a relentless reader, and Prudence had gone right through her shelves, book after book: biographies, Bibles, novels, a book on building terrariums, a history of photography, a history of dance, and Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, which she liked the best, because she could read the little encapsulated portraits of films without having to bother about the films themselves. But she lost her library when she broke out of jail, and it bothered her to live without books.

  The cops had caught on to her tactics, and her picture was nailed to the wall inside post offices, supermarkets, and convenience stores; she might have been trapped in a Home Depot outside Savannah if she hadn’t noticed a state trooper fidgeting with his hat while he stared at her face on the wall.

  Pru had to disappear or she wouldn’t survive her next excursion to Home Depot or McDonald’s. And no book could help her now. Travel guides couldn’t map out some no-man’s-land where she might be safe. But Emma Mae, her cellmate at Milledgeville, had told her about the Bronx, a place where the cops never patrolled McDonald’s. Besides, she hadn’t murdered a single soul within five hundred miles of Manhattan or the Bronx. Pru wasn’t a mad dog, as the bulletins labeled her. She had to shoot the night manager at McDonald’s, because that would paralyze the customers and discourage anyone from coming after her.

  She got on a Greyhound wearing eyeglasses and a man’s lumber jacket after cutting her hair in the mirror of a public toilet. She’d been on the run for two months. Crime wasn’t much of a business. Murdering people, and she still had to live from hand to mouth.

  She couldn’t remember how she landed in the Bronx. She walked up the stairs of a subway station, saw a synagogue that had been transformed into a Pentecostal church, then a building with mural on its back wall picturing a paradise with crocodiles, palm trees, and a little girl. The Bronx was filled with Latinas and burly black men, Emma Mae had told her; the only whites who lived there were “trash”—outcasts and country people who had to relocate. Pru could hide among them, practically invisible in a casbah that no one cared about.

  Emma Mae had given her an address, a street called Marcy Place, where the cousin of a cousin lived, a preacher who played the tambourine and bilked white trash, like Prudence and Emma. He was right at the door when Pru arrived, an anemic-looking man dressed in black, with a skunk’s white streak in his hair, though he didn’t have a skunk’s eyes; his were clear as pale green crystals and burned right into Pru. She was hypnotized without his having to say a single syllable. He laughed at her disguise, and that laughter seemed to break the spell.

  “Prudence Miller,” he said, “are you a man or a girl?”

  His voice was reedy, much less potent than his eyes.

  Emma Mae must have told him about her pilgrimage to the Bronx. But Pru still didn’t understand what it meant to be the cousin of a cousin. His name was Omar Kaplan. It must have been the alias of an alias, since Omar couldn’t be a Christian name. She’d heard all about Omar Khayyam, the Persian philosopher and poet who was responsible for the Rubaiyat, the longest love poem in history, though she hadn’t read a line. And this Omar must have been a philosopher as well as a fraud—his apartment, which faced a brick wall, was lined with books. He had all the old Modern Library classics, like Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, books that Pru had discovered in secondhand shops in towns that had a college campus.

  “You’ll stay away from McDonald’s,” he said in that reedy voice of his, “and you’d better not have a gun.”

  “Then how will I earn my keep, Mr. Omar Kaplan? I’m down to my last dollar.”

  “Consider this a religious retreat, or a rest cure, but no guns. I’ll stake you to whatever you need.”

  Pru laughed bitterly, but kept that laugh locked inside her throat. Omar Kaplan intended to turn her into a slave, to write his own Rubaiyat on the softest parts of her flesh. She waited for him to pounce. He didn’t touch her or steal her gun. She slept with the silver Colt under her pillow, on a cot near the kitchen, while Omar had the bedroom all to himself. It was dark as a cave. He’d emerge from the bedroom, dressed in black, like some Satan with piercing green eyes, prepared to soft-soap whatever white trash had wandered into the Bronx. He’d leave the apartment at 7 in the morning and wouldn’t return before 9 at night. But there was always food in the fridge, fancier food than she’d ever had: salmon cutlets, Belgian beer, artichokes, strawberries from Israel, a small wheel of Swiss cheese with blue numbers stamped on the rind.

  He was much more talkative after he returned from one of his pilferings. He’d switch off all the lamps and light a candle, and they’d have salmon cutlets together, drink Belgian beer. He’d rattle his tambourine from time to time, sing Christian songs. It could have been the dark beer that greased his tongue.

  “Prudence, did you ever feel any remorse after killing those night managers?”

  “None that I know of,” she said.

  “Their faces don’t come back to haunt you in your dreams?”

  “I never dream,” she said.

  “Do you ever consider all the orphans and widows you made?”

  “I’m an orphan,” she said, “and maybe I just widened the franchise.”

  “Pru the orphan-maker.”

  “Something like that,” she said.

  “Would you light a candle with me for their lost souls?”

  She didn’t care. She lit the candle, while Satan crinkled his eyes and mumbled something. Then he marched into his bedroom and c
losed the door. It galled her. She’d have felt more comfortable if he’d tried to undress her. She might have slept with Satan, left marks on his neck.

  She would take long walks in the Bronx, with her silver gun. She sought replicas of herself, wanderers with pink skin. But she found Latinas with baby carriages, old black women outside a beauty parlor, black and Latino men on a basketball court. She wasn’t going to wear a neckerchief mask and rob men and boys playing ball.

  The corner she liked best was at Sheridan Avenue and East 169th, because it was a valley with hills on three sides, with bodegas and other crumbling little stores, a barbershop without a barber, apartment houses with broken courtyards and rotting steel gates. The Bronx was a casbah, like Emma Mae had said, and Pru could explore the hills that rose up around her, that seemed to give her some sort of protective shield. She could forget about Satan and silver guns.

  She returned to Marcy Place. It was long after 9, and Omar Kaplan hadn’t come home. She decided to set the table, prepare a meal of strawberries, Swiss cheese, and Belgian beer. She lit a candle, waiting for Omar. She grew restless, decided to read a book. She swiped Sister Carrie off the shelves—a folded slip of paper fell out, some kind of impromptu bookmark. But this bookmark had her face on it, and a list of her crimes. It had a black banner on top. WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE. Like the title of a macabre song. There were words scribbled near the bottom. Dangerous and demented. Then scribbles in another hand. A real prize package. McDonald’s ought to give us a thousand free Egg McMuffins for this fucking lady. Then a signature that could have been a camel’s hump. The letters on that hump spelled O-M-A-R.

  She shouldn’t have stayed another minute. But she had to tease out the logic of it all. Emma Mae had given her a Judas kiss, sold her to some supercop. Why hadn’t Satan arrested her the second she’d opened the door? He was toying with her like an animal trainer who would point her toward McDonald’s, where other supercops were waiting with closed-circuit television cameras. They meant to film her at the scene of the crime, so she could act out some unholy procession that would reappear on the 6-o’clock news.