Staten Island Noir (29 page)

DUBLIN NOIR
(IRELAND), edited by KEN BRUEN

HAITI NOIR,
edited by EDWIDGE DANTICAT

HAVANA NOIR
(CUBA), edited by ACHY OBEJAS

INDIAN COUNTRY NOIR,
edited by SARAH CORTEZ & LIZ MARTÍNEZ

ISTANBUL NOIR
(TURKEY), edited by MUSTAFA ZIYALAN & AMY SPANGLER

KANSAS CITY NOIR
, edited by STEVE PAUL

KINGSTON NOIR
(JAMAICA), edited by COLIN CHANNER

LAS VEGAS NOIR,
edited by JARRET KEENE & TODD JAMES PIERCE

LONDON NOIR
(ENGLAND), edited by CATHI UNSWORTH

LONE STAR NOIR,
edited by BOBY BYRD & JOHNNY BYRD

LONG ISLAND NOIR,
edited by KAYLIE JONES

LOS ANGELES NOIR,
edited by DENISE HAMILTON

LOS ANGELES NOIR 2: THE CLASSICS,
edited by DENISE HAMILTON

MANHATTAN NOIR,
edited by LAWRENCE BLOCK

MANHATTAN NOIR 2: THE CLASSICS,
edited by LAWRENCE BLOCK

MEXICO CITY NOIR
(MEXICO), edited by PACO I. TAIBO II

MIAMI NOIR,
edited by LES STANDIFORD

MOSCOW NOIR
(RUSSIA), edited by NATALIA SMIRNOVA & JULIA GOUMEN

MUMBAI NOIR
(INDIA), edited by ALTAF TYREWALA

NEW JERSEY NOIR,
edited by JOYCE CAROL OATES

NEW ORLEANS NOIR,
edited by JULIE SMITH

ORANGE COUNTY NOIR,
edited by GARY PHILLIPS

PARIS NOIR
(FRANCE), edited by AURéLIEN MASSON

PHILADELPHIA NOIR,
edited by CARLIN ROMANO

PHOENIX NOIR,
edited by PATRICK MILLIKIN

PITTSBURGH NOIR,
edited by KATHLEEN GEORGE

PORTLAND NOIR,
edited by KEVIN SAMPSELL

QUEENS NOIR,
edited by ROBERT KNIGHTLY

RICHMOND NOIR,
edited by ANDREW BLOSSOM, BRIAN CASTLEBERRY & TOM DE HAVEN

ROME NOIR
(ITALY), edited by CHIARA STANGALINO & MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI

SAN DIEGO NOIR,
edited by MARYELIZABETH HART

SAN FRANCISCO NOIR,
edited by PETER MARAVELIS

SAN FRANCISCO NOIR 2: THE CLASSICS,
edited by PETER MARAVELIS

SEATTLE NOIR,
edited by CURT COLBERT

ST. PETERSBURG NOIR,
edited by NATALIA SMIRNOVA & JULIA GOUMEN

TORONTO NOIR
(CANADA), edited by JANINE ARMIN & NATHANIEL G. MORE

TRINIDAD NOIR
(TRINIDAD & TOBAGO)
,
edited by LISA ALEN-AGOSTINI & JEANNE MASON

TWIN CITIES NOIR
, edited by JULIE SCHAPER & STEVEN HORWITZ

VENICE NOIR
(ITALY), edited by MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI

WALL STREET NOIR,
edited by PETER SPIEGELMAN

 

 

FORTHCOMING

 

BEIRUT NOIR
(LEBANON), edited by IMAN HUMAYDAN

BOGOTÁ NOIR
(COLOMBIA), edited by ANDREA MONTEJO

BUFFALO NOIR,
edited by BRIGID HUGHES & ED PARK

DALLAS NOIR,
edited by DAVID HALE SMITH

HELSINKI NOIR,
(FINLAND) edited by JAMES THOMPSON

JERUSALEM NOIR,
edited by DROR MISHANI

LAGOS NOIR
(NIGERIA), edited by CHRIS ABANI

MANILA NOIR
(PHILIPPINES), edited by JESSICA HAGEDORN

PRISON NOIR,
edited by JOYCE CAROL OATES

SEOUL NOIR
(KOREA), edited by BS PUBLISHING CO.

SINGAPORE NOIR
, edited by CHERYL LU-LIEN TAN

TEL AVIV NOIR
(ISRAEL), edited by ETGAR KERET & ASSAF GAVRON

Bonus Materials

 

 

___________________

 

 

Staten Island Noir
completes the 5-borough set of Akashic Noir books set in New York City. To follow, please enjoy each editors' story from the previous four volumes (
Brooklyn Noir, Manhattan Noir, Bronx Noir,
and
Queens Noir
), presented here with the authors' permission. Each e-book is available independently, and in a single volume (NYC Noir: eisbn 9781617751837.) For more information on the Akashic Noir Series, please visit www.akashicbooks.com/noirseries.htm

Brooklyn Noir
Excerpt

The following is editor Tim McLoughlin's story in
Brooklyn Noir,
the 2004 volume that launched the Akashic Noir series.

 

 

___________________

 

 

WHEN ALL THIS WAS BAY RIDGE

BY
T
IM
M
C
L
OUGHLIN

Sunset Park

Standing in church at my father's funeral, I thought about being arrested on the night of my seventeenth birthday. It had occurred in the trainyard at Avenue X, in Coney Island. Me and Pancho and a kid named Freddie were working a three-car piece, the most ambitious I'd tried to that point, and more time-consuming than was judicious to spend trespassing on city property. Two Transit cops with German shepherds caught us in the middle of the second car. I dropped my aerosol can and took off, and was perhaps two hundred feet along the beginning of the trench that becomes the IRT line to the Bronx, when I saw the hand. It was human, adult, and severed neatly, seemingly surgically, at the wrist. My first thought was that it looked bare without a watch. Then I made a whooping sound, trying to take in air, and turned and ran back toward the cops and their dogs.

At the 60th Precinct, we three were ushered into a small cell. We sat for several hours, then the door opened and I was led out. My father was waiting in the main room, in front of the counter.

The desk sergeant, middle-aged, black, and noticeably bored, looked up briefly. "Him?"

"Him," my father echoed, sounding defeated.

"Goodnight," the sergeant said.

My father took my arm and led me out of the precinct. As we cleared the door and stepped into the humid night he turned to me and said, "This was it. Your one free ride. It doesn't happen again."

"What did it cost?" I asked. My father had retired from the Police Department years earlier, and I knew this had been expensive.

He shook his head. "This once, that's all."

I followed him to his car. "I have two friends in there."

"Fuck'em. Spics. That's half your problem."

"What's the other half?"

"You have no common sense," he said, his voice rising in scale as it did in volume. By the time he reached a scream he sounded like a boy going through puberty. "What do you think you're doing out here? Crawling 'round in the dark with the niggers and the spics. Writing on trains like a hoodlum. Is this all you'll do?"

"It's not writing. It's drawing. Pictures."

"Same shit, defacing property, behaving like a punk. Where do you suppose it will lead?"

"I don't know. I haven't thought about it. You had your aimless time, when you got out of the service. You told me so. You bummed around for two years."

"I always worked."

"Part-time. Beer money. You were a roofer."

"Beer money was all I needed."

"Maybe it's all I need."

He shook his head slowly, and squinted, as though peering through the dirty windshield for an answer. "It was different. That was a long time ago. Back when all this was Bay Ridge. You could live like that then."

When all this was Bay Ridge. He was masterful, my father. He didn't say
when it was white, or when it was Irish
, or even the relatively tame
when it was safer.
No. When all this was Bay Ridge. As though it were an issue of geography. As though, somehow, the tectonic plate beneath Sunset Park had shifted, moving it physically to some other place.

I told him about seeing the hand.

"Did you tell the officers?"

"No."

"The people you were with?"

"No."

"Then don't worry about it. There's body parts all over this town. Saw enough in my day to put together a baseball team." He drove in silence for a few minutes, then nodded his head a couple of times, as though agreeing with a point made by some voice I could not hear. "You're going to college, you know," he said.

 

* * *

 

That was what I remembered at the funeral. Returning from the altar rail after receiving communion, Pancho walked passed me. He'd lost a great deal of weight since I'd last seen him, and I couldn't tell if he was sick or if it was just the drugs. His black suit hung on him in a way that emphasized his gaunt frame. He winked at me as he came around the casket in front of my pew, and flashed the mischievous smile that—when we were sixteen—got all the girls in his bed and all the guys agreeing to the stupidest and most dangerous stunts.

In my shirt pocket was a photograph of my father with a woman who was not my mother. The date on the back was five years ago. Their arms were around each other's waists and they smiled for the photographer. When we arrived at the cemetery I took the picture out of my pocket, and looked at it for perhaps the fiftieth time since I'd first discovered it. There were no clues. The woman was young to be with my father, but not a girl. Forty, give or take a few years. I looked for any evidence in his expression that I was misreading their embrace, but even I couldn't summon the required naïveté. My father's countenance was not what would commonly be regarded as a poker face. He wasn't holding her as a friend, a friend's girl, or the prize at some retirement or bachelor party; he held her like a possession. Like he held his tools. Like he held my mother. The photo had been taken before my mother's death. I put it back.

I'd always found his plodding predictability and meticulous planning of insignificant events maddening. For the first time that I could recall, I was experiencing curiosity about some part of my father's life.

I walked from Greenwood Cemetery directly to Olsen's bar, my father's watering hole, feeling that I needed to talk to the men that nearly lived there, but not looking forward to it. Aside from my father's wake the previous night, I hadn't seen them in years. They were all Irish. The Irish among them were perhaps the most Irish, but the Norwegians and the Danes were Irish too, as were the older Puerto Ricans. They had developed, over time, the stereotypical hooded gaze, the squared jaws set in grim defiance of whatever waited in the sobering daylight. To a man they had that odd trait of the Gaelic heavy-hitter, that—as they attained middle age—their faces increasingly began to resemble a woman's nipple.

The door to the bar was propped open, and the cool damp odor of stale beer washed over me before I entered. That smell has always reminded me of the Boy Scouts. Meetings were Thursday nights in the basement of Bethany Lutheran Church. When they were over, I would have to pass Olsen's on my way home, and I usually stopped in to see my father. He would buy me a couple of glasses of beer—about all I could handle at thirteen—and leave with me after about an hour so we could walk home together.

From the inside looking out: Picture an embassy in a foreign country. A truly foreign country. Not a Western European ally, but a fundamentalist state perennially on the precipice of war. A fill-the-sandbags-and-wait-for-the-airstrike enclave. That was Olsen's, home to the last of the donkeys, the white dinosaurs of Sunset Park. A jukebox filled with Kristy McColl and the Clancy Brothers, and flyers tacked to the flaking walls advertising step-dancing classes, Gaelic lessons, and the memorial run to raise money for a scholarship in the name of a recently slain cop. Within three blocks of the front door you could attend a cockfight, buy crack, or pick up a streetwalker, but in Olsen's, it was always 1965.

Upon entering the bar for the first time in several years, I found its pinched dimensions and dim lighting more oppressive, and less mysterious, than I had remembered. The row of ascetic faces, and the way all conversation trailed off at my entrance, put me in mind of the legendary blue wall of silence in the police department. It is no coincidence that the force has historically been predominantly Irish. The men in Olsen's would be pained to reveal their zip code to a stranger, and I wasn't sure if even they knew why.

The bar surface itself was more warped than I'd recalled. The mirrors had oxidized and the white tile floor had been torn up in spots and replaced with odd-shaped pieces of green linoleum. It was a neighborhood bar in a neighborhood where such establishments are not yet celebrated. If it had been located in my part of the East Village, it would have long since achieved cultural-landmark status. I'd been living in Manhattan for five years and still had not adjusted to the large number of people who moved here from other parts of the country, and overlooked the spectacle of the city only to revere the mundane. One of my coworkers, herself a transplant, remarked that the coffee shop on my corner was
authentic
. In that they served coffee, I suppose she was correct.

I sat on an empty stool in the middle of the wavy bar and ordered a beer. I felt strangely nervous there without my father, like a child about to be caught doing something bad. Everyone knew me. Marty, the round-shouldered bartender, approached first, breaking the ice. He spoke around an enormous, soggy stub of a cigar, as he always did. And, as always, he seemed constantly annoyed by its presence in his mouth; as though he'd never smoked one before, and was surprised to discover himself chewing on it.

"Daniel. It's good to see you. I'm sorry for your loss."

He extended one hand, and when I did the same, he grasped mine in both of his and held it for a moment. It had to have been some sort of signal, because the rest of the relics in the place lurched toward me then, like some nursing-home theater guild performing
Night of the Living Dead.
They shook hands, engaged in awkward stiff hugs, and offered unintelligible condolences. Frank Sanchez, one of my father's closest friends, squeezed the back of my neck absently until I winced. I thanked them as best I could, and accepted the offers of free drinks.

Someone—I don't know who—thought it would be a good idea for me to have Jameson's Irish whiskey, that having been my father's drink. I'd never considered myself much of a drinker. I liked a couple of beers on a Friday night, and perhaps twice a year I would get drunk. I almost never drank hard liquor, but this crew was insistent, they were matching me shot for shot, and they were paying. It was the sort of thing my father would have been adamant about.