The 25th Hour (13 page)

He was kicked off the team and, without basketball, began to lose interest in school life. Classwork, which had come easily for him in his old schools, required intense study now, and Monty was only capable of bursts of intensity. In the spring of his sophomore year, eating pizza with seniors during lunch break, he listened to them discuss their plans to buy a bag of marijuana. One of the boys said they would need eighty dollars, and Monty, barely paying attention, said, ‘You’re getting ripped off.’

‘Yeah? How much do you pay?’

Monty shrugged, as if he were used to haggling for the merchandise, though at that point he had never bought or sold drugs in his life, or even considered such a possibility. ‘I could get it to you for half that,’ he said. And so the seniors gave him forty dollars, and Monty, knowing his reputation as a street-smart kid was on the line, talked to some friends in Bensonhurst and delivered on time. He ended up spending an extra twenty dollars of his own money, but soon all of the seniors were coming to him, and Monty quickly began turning a profit.

Near the end of his junior year, the coaches at Campbell-Sawyer learned about Monty’s business from a few of the younger athletes. The administration was informed and one afternoon, after lunch, Monty’s locker was opened and a brown paper bag discovered, filled with prescription painkillers and ecstasy tablets. The next day he was officially ‘separated’ from the school, barred permanently from the grounds. A letter was sent to all parents, discreetly urging them to prevent their children from associating with Montgomery Brogan. Because the computer files had not yet been updated, one copy of the letter was accidentally sent to Mr Brogan, who drove into Manhattan and threatened the headmaster with a lawsuit or a beating or both, never believing his son might actually be a criminal.

Campbell-Sawyer had not seen so much excitement in years, not since the head of the History Department was caught fellating the editor of the yearbook in a bathroom stall, but if Monty was distraught he did not show it. He never tried to find out who had betrayed him – what would be the point? He cleared out his locker, said his goodbyes, and left.

By the time his friends were proceeding past the podium in their mortarboards and black gowns, Monty had rented his own Yorkville apartment, leased a Corvette, and saved enough money to throw the most lavish graduation party of the year, summoning all his ex-classmates to a grand club forty stories above the street. Waiters circulated bearing trays of champagne flutes. Belly dancers brushed by the tuxedoed boys. Monty sauntered from room to room, escorted by the most beautiful sixteen-year-old girl from all of Bensonhurst, a blue-eyed brunette; her father and brothers were police officers who believed that Monty was a freshman at Columbia.

Among the teenagers gathered there that night, preparing for a summer of beach parties and bong sessions before heading off to college, Montgomery was already a legend, an outlaw hipster. Everyone knew the stories: the time he ran across the subway tracks to kiss a girl on the opposite platform; the time he slugged an opponent on the basketball court (in the later versions, Monty broke the other boy’s jaw with a single punch); the time he seduced the French teacher, Mlle Cendrars, and left her sprawled naked and purring in the audiovisual room (a myth invented by Jakob Elinsky, who spent much of his senior year in the library bathroom masturbating to Mlle Cendrars but could not, even in his fantasies, conceive of
himself
and the Frenchwoman getting it on).

The party became legend. Whenever Monty runs into an alumnus from Campbell-Sawyer, the man will always mention that night, and the belly dancers . . . ‘and who was that girl you were with, the brunette? Jesus, whatever happened to her?’ What happened to her was her brothers checked Columbia’s student directory, found no listing for Montgomery Brogan, surmised Monty’s true profession, and told their sister she would no longer be seeing the Black Irish kid. She locked herself in her room and went on a hunger strike for three days, but Monty let it go, deciding it was best to dissociate himself from a family of angry cops.

Donatella Bruno. Where is she now? Monty wonders. He stops in his tracks and brushes snow from his collar. He pats the small of his back, feeling for the hard ridge of metal below the camel’s-hair, the holstered pistol strapped to his belt. Monty loves his .40; he thrills to its weight, the purity of its lines, its simplicity of purpose. Walking with a gun is walking with power. He taught himself to shoot at a Brooklyn firing range, blasting at targets alongside his father, who keeps an ancient Browning 9-millimeter under his bar. Monty’s black leather holster was hand-tooled by a gnomish Calabrian in Bensonhurst: a large
B
for Brogan, patterned after the old Brooklyn Dodgers insignia.

Monty stares through another plate-glass window, through letters spelled in gold script, into a restaurant of white-clothed tables in buttery light, the people inside warm and comfortable and well fed, bottles of red wine by their breadbaskets. The hostess is on the telephone, laughing, twirling a pen around her fingertips.

Where am I going? Monty asks himself. To meet my friends at a bar? What will we do, sit around drinking, telling old stories? What the hell are we going to do? And what could be more pathetic than the awkward silences, the pledges of solidarity, the earnest and pitiful companionship?

He opens the restaurant door and presents himself to the hostess, his watch cap in his hands. She murmurs
bon soir
into the telephone receiver and hangs up.

‘Good evening,’ she says.

She isn’t beautiful, thinks Monty, but she has presence: tall, elegant, gray-eyed, and European. The words
bon soir
linger like an exotic fragrance.

‘Good evening,’ says Monty, staring at her. He has forgotten the words. This is his game and he has forgotten how to play. He stares at her and she smiles, casts her eyes down, and pencils a name onto the reservations chart.

This is it, Monty tells himself. He reviews the old tactics and settles on a classic.

‘I’ve got a theory,’ he tells the woman.
First you hook them. Not aggressive, not pushy. Get them curious
. ‘My theory – tell me if I’m wrong – I’ve got this theory that it doesn’t really matter what a guy says to a woman: the first line, I mean. It doesn’t matter, he could recite the Lord’s Prayer, whatever, she’s already made up her mind.’

The hostess cocks one eyebrow. ‘The Lord’s Prayer?’

‘She’s already decided. By the time he’s opened his mouth, she’s already decided, yes or no, thumbs up or down. Tell me if I’m wrong.’

She shakes her head slowly. ‘She’s already decided if he has a chance. But she’s waiting to be convinced.’

‘Right, fair enough. Within reason. So if I said I wanted to see you again, if I said I wanted to take you out one night, what would you think?’

‘What would I think? Or what would I say?’

‘What would you say?’

‘I’d say I have a boyfriend.’

‘Oh.’

‘Are you here for dinner?’ she asks, smiling.

Monty kneads the cap in his hands, the clumps of snow melting on the wool. ‘I already ate.’ Now he feels stupid, a failed Romeo dripping on the carpet. ‘Could I use your bathroom for a minute?’

The hostess wasn’t expecting that question. ‘You came in here to use the bathroom?’

‘No. I came in here to ask you out. But now I have to pee.’

‘In the back,’ she says, pointing, and she watches him weave through the tables, touching a waiter’s shoulder when he needs to pass by.

Monty locks the door of the small bathroom and sits on the closed toilet seat. Someone has written
Fuck you
in silver marker above the roll of toilet paper. Sure, he thinks. And fuck you too. Fuck everyone. The French hostess, the diners drinking wine, the waiters taking orders. Fuck this city and everyone in it. The panhandlers, grinning on the street corners, begging for change. The turbaned Sikhs and unwashed Pakistanis racing their yellow cabs down the avenues. The Chelsea faggots with their waxed chests and pumped-up biceps. Fuck them all. The Korean grocers with their pyramids of overpriced fruit, their plastic-wrapped tulips and roses. The white-robed Nigerians selling counterfeit Gucci on Fifth Avenue. The Russians in Brighton Beach, drinking their tea from glasses, sugar cubes clenched between their teeth. Fuck them. The black-hatted Hasidim in their dirty gabardine suits, selling diamonds on 47th Street, counting their money while they wait for Meshiach. The sidewalk gimps, bodies crooked and spastic. The Wall Street brokers, smug and cologned, reading their folded papers in subway cars. Fuck them all. The skateboard punks in Washington Square Park, wallet chains rattling as they leap the curb. The Puerto Ricans, flags flying and radios howling from the open windows of their cars. The Bensonhurst Italians pomading their hair, with their nylon warm-up suits and St Anthony medallions. The Upper East Side wives, with their pinched mouths and lifted faces, with their scarves from Hermès and their artichokes from Balducci’s. Fuck the uptown brothers, they never pass the ball, they don’t play defense, they take four steps on every drive to the hoop. Fuck the prep school junkies, smoking tar in Daddy’s kitchen while the old man jets to Tokyo. Fuck the police, the bullyboys in blue with their thick-necked swagger, zooming through red lights on their way to Krispy Kreme. Fuck the Knicks – Patrick Ewing and his blown finger roll against Indiana, Charles Smith and his failed layups against Chicago, John Starks and his thousand missed shots against Houston – fuck them, they’ll never beat Jordan, they will never beat Jordan. Fuck Jakob Elinsky, that whining runt. Fuck Frank Slattery, always staring at my girlfriend’s ass. Fuck Naturelle Rosario, set free tomorrow when I’m gone. Fuck Kostya Novotny; I trusted him and he dimed me out. Fuck my father, alone in his darkroom, hanging wet prints from a line. Fuck my mother, rotting below the snow. Fuck Jesus Christ, he got off easy, an afternoon on the cross, a weekend in hell, and then the hallelujahs of all the legioned angels. Fuck this city and everyone in it – from the row houses of Astoria to the duplexes of Park Avenue, from the projects in Brownsville to the lofts in Soho, from Bellevue Hospital to the tenements in Alphabet City to the brownstones in Park Slope – let the Arabs bomb it all to rubble; let the waters rise and submerge the whole rat-crazed place; let an earthquake tumble the tall buildings; let the fires reign uncontested; let it burn, let it burn, let it burn. And fuck you, Montgomery Brogan, you blew it.

Someone is banging on the bathroom door and Monty stands, walks over to the sink, and washes his hands. He stares at his face in the mirror. For all the good it did you, he thinks. Green eyes, high cheekbones, straight nose, perfect white teeth. Pretty white boy. Eyes, bones, nose, teeth. More banging on the door. And Monty knows what he has to do. ‘Fuck it,’ he whispers, and waves goodbye to the face in the mirror.

Thirteen

Uncle Blue carves open the middle of his steak with his wood-handled knife and examines the meat. The sirloin is overcooked, the center pink instead of red, and Uncle Blue beckons for his waiter with one finger. The waiter rushes over.

‘This is not rare. Please bring me another.’

‘Right away, I’m sorry about that. I wrote down rare.’

‘Fine. And another glass of wine.’

Uncle Blue’s companion is a deeply tanned man wearing a handsome blue suit, his white cuffs projecting an exact inch beyond his jacket’s sleeves, his fingernails buffed and neatly trimmed. A plate of grilled octopus sits before him.

‘Please,’ says Uncle Blue, ‘eat.’

‘You’d think when you own a place, they’d cook your steak right.’ The tanned man squeezes lemon over his octopus. ‘This looks good, though.’

‘I hope so, Mr Gedny. I taught the chef how to make it.’

‘Mm. Very nice. They give you a lot, too. Lots of octopuses. Octopi?’

Uncle Blue smiles. ‘Either way. The servings are not usually so large; we wouldn’t make a profit.’

‘But I’m eating with the boss.’ Gedny wipes his mouth clean with his napkin and looks out the window. ‘Look at that stuff come down. My car’s going to get buried.’

They sit in the private balcony of the restaurant. Whitewashed walls, clay tile floors, bright posters of the Parthenon at sunset and Santorini at dawn. The tables in the main room below – glass tops supported by miniature Doric columns – are empty and unclothed; diners stayed home tonight, not willing to drive or walk through a blizzard.

‘You met with Brogan this morning?’ asks Uncle Blue.

‘I did, yeah.’

‘How did he seem?’

Gedny reaches for his wine. ‘He’s not loving life right now, obviously, but I don’t know. He’s hard to read.’

‘I know he is. I don’t like that.’

‘Listen, one hundred percent certain, the kid didn’t flip. They would not be sending him to Otisville if he flipped.’

‘We’re talking about human behavior, Mr Gedny. Nothing is one hundred percent certain. Don’t assume they’re idiots. Don’t assume they wouldn’t try to trick us.’

‘That’s just it,’ says Gedny. ‘They’re not idiots. No way in hell the kid’s still walking around out here if he flipped. Second he goes he’s
gone
, right? Disappeared. He would not be walking into my office. You flip federal, you don’t end up in Otisville. No, he’s kept his mouth shut.’

‘So far.’

Gedny nods, his mouth full of octopus. ‘So far. I’m not too worried about him. He’s a good kid. He’s smart.’

‘What are they doing with his girlfriend?’

‘They made a lot of noise about charging her as an accessory, but nothing ever happened. She told them she didn’t know anything, and they didn’t believe her, and they didn’t care. She’s free of it.’

Uncle Blue watches the waiter climb the spiral staircase, several plates balanced on his arm.

‘Here’s your steak. The chef sends his apologies. He wanted you to try these tonight, the shrimp. He wants your opinion on the sauce.’

‘Fine, thank you.’

‘Anything else I can bring you gentlemen?’

‘Not right now. Thank you, Jeremy. Tell Victor I’ll speak with him later.’ The waiter nods and departs. Uncle Blue cuts open the steak and inspects the color.