The 25th Hour (2 page)

‘What’s up there, Monty? You’re out early today.’

The plane has disappeared. Monty nods but does not speak.

‘You want to tell the dog to relax? Hey there, pooch. Hey, good dog. I don’t think your dog likes me.’

‘Go away, Simon.’

The man nods, rubbing his hands together. ‘I’m hungry here, Monty. Woke up an hour ago, and I was hungry.’

‘Nothing I can do about that. Go up to a Hundred and Tenth.’

‘A Hundred and Tenth? Come on, I’m good.’ He reaches into his pocket and brings out a wad of five-dollar bills held together by a rubber band.

‘Put that away,’ snaps Monty, and Doyle snarls.

‘Okay, okay. I’m just saying I’m not looking for a mercy pop.’

Monty stares at the lighthouse across the river. ‘I’m over, man.’

Simon points to a trail of small scabs along his throat. ‘Look at this. Cut myself shaving this morning – four times! I can’t keep my hands steady. Come on, Monty. Help me out here. I can’t go to Harlem – look at me. Who do I know in Harlem? They’ll gut me up there. I’ll be like Jerry running from Tom. Need my cheese, Monty, need my cheese! I’m starving, man.’

There is a long silence and then Monty stands and walks toward the man, closer and closer until their faces are inches apart. ‘You need to leave me alone, friend. I told you, I’m out of business.’

Doyle sniffs at Simon’s boots, then raises his head, snout climbing the man’s leg. Simon dances a half step, trying to keep away from the dog without startling him. ‘What are you talking about? You worried about me narking you out? Look at me, man. You know who I am.’

‘You’re not listening to me. I got touched. Game over. So back off and go home to your lawyer mother or go to a Hundred and Tenth Street, whatever you want. Just leave me the fuck alone.’

Simon blinks and stumbles backward, tries to laugh, looks behind him, looks down at Doyle, rubs his nose with the back of his hand. ‘Five years I’ve been coming to you. All right, no problem. I’ll leave. There’s no need to be nasty.’

The dog is anxious to move; he tugs at his leash and Monty follows him past the concrete chessboards where the two of them have stood in the summer crowds, watching the duels. Little Vic used to play here; Little Vic who had been grand master at Riker’s Island until a Russian got busted on forgery charges and demolished him in four straight games. But no hustlers punch their chess clocks today; too early on a winter’s morning. The rubes are all home eating breakfast.

Monty and Doyle walk west, pausing behind a fence to watch a basketball game, the teenage players taking advantage of the warm air, one last game before school. Doyle sniffs posts that stink of yesterday’s piss. Monty assesses the ballers quickly, accurately, and disdainfully. The point can’t make an entry pass to save his life; the two guard has no left; the big man down low telegraphs his every shot. Monty remembers a Saturday when he and four friends owned this court, won game after game after game until the losers stumbled away in frustration, an August afternoon when every jump shot was automatic, when he could locate his teammates with his eyes closed and slip them the ball as easy as kissing the bride.

Man and dog walk down a cascading series of steps into the courtyard of Carl Schurz Park. A square of black bars encloses two rows of stunted gingko trees, their leaves shaped like Japanese fans. Old people, enjoying the weather, gather on the benches that line the gated plot, throwing crumbs to the birds, reading the back pages of the
Post
, chewing potato knishes. Black women push white babies in plastic strollers. Jagged boulders scrawled with paint serve as markers on the slopes surrounding the courtyard:
MIKO+LIZ
;84
BOYS; THE LOWLITE CRUZERS; SANE SMITH
. Sane Smith was here. Sane Smith was everywhere. Sane Smith is dead, having jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge. At least that was what Monty heard. The farthest-ranging of New York graffiti artists, Sane Smith wrote his name on billboards and highway overpasses and water tanks everywhere from Far Rockaway to Mosholu Parkway, Sheepshead Bay to Forest Hills, New Lots to Lenox. They’ll be scrubbing his name from walls for the next hundred years.

Doyle pauses to inspect the treasures held in an orange wire-mesh garbage can, but Monty pulls him forward. As they wait for the light to change on East End a fire truck rumbles past, the men on board big-boned and confident, slouched and ready in their high boots. A rear-mount aerial ladder, thinks Monty, and he watches the red truck disappear to the north. You could have been a wonderful fireman, he tells himself. Instead he is here, walking his dog in Yorkville, staring at everything, trying to absorb every detail, the way fresh asphalt spreads like black butter across the avenue, the way taillights at dawn flash and swerve, the way bright windows high above the street hide people he will never meet.

He passes a diner on Second Avenue. A beautiful girl seated in a booth smiles at him, her chin propped on a menu – but it’s too late, she can no longer help. In twenty-four hours he boards a bus for Otisville. Tomorrow at noon he surrenders his name for a number. The beautiful girl is a curse. Her face will haunt him for seven years.

Two

Nose pressed to the plate-glass window, Slattery wonders how close to the Hudson a good jump would get him. Standing on the thirty-second floor – assume each floor has a ten-foot ceiling, a two-foot interstice between that ceiling and the floor above, 320 plus 64 equals 384, a 384-foot fall. And how far from the building to the river? Call it 300 feet. A 384-foot vertical, 300-foot horizontal, for a hypotenuse of . . . Slattery frowns. Wait a second. A jump out this window will not be a slide down the hypotenuse. Gravity will suck him earthward as soon as he loses momentum. So, a leap of 300 feet.

First he would have to break through the glass with a chair. Position the starting line by the water cooler on the far wall; that gives him a twenty-yard sprint. Timing the jump is critical: a moment too early or too late and his foot fails to clear the window frame, leaving him toppling shame-faced over the edge, catcalls and laughter the last sounds he hears.

Not that it matters, thinks Slattery. He could run his fastest, jump at the perfect moment, catch a strong tail wind – the river is too far. He would never reach water, never come close. Instead his effort would end, colorfully, on gray concrete. The pedestrians below would remember the arc of his fall, the curious pumping motion of his legs, mimicking Olympic long jumpers. But it’s hopeless, leaping for the Hudson. Moments after impact, the traders, clustered around the broken window, would return to their desks, begin composing their jokes. Within minutes, all of Manhattan’s investment bankers would know the story, reduced to a blurb, compact and honed for a supper recounting among family and friends: Slattery splattery.

He bangs his head softly against the glass, then straightens up. All this morbid fantasizing might be premature. After all, he argues with himself, he owns the highest batting average on the floor. None of the other traders in his department has gathered so much loot for the firm. Discounting the misadventures of early July, that succession of horrid maneuvers (and what slugger does not suffer a seasonal slump?), discounting that fortnight and Slattery is the local star, a true-blue rainmaker, the Hank Aaron of the thirty-second floor. It doesn’t matter, he tells himself. One hour from now it will all be over.

A pale blue light arcs over the black river as the sun rises behind Slattery and reluctantly begins to illuminate the Jersey shore. Rising over Brooklyn, he thinks, rapping the glass with his knuckles. Screw this deal up and I’m going back to Brooklyn, say goodbye to the West Village apartment, hello again Mom, Dad, Eoin, and Aunt Orla from County fucking Wicklow, that witch, with her inside information on every situation planet-wide. Any disturbance between men that has ever occurred in the world’s turbulent history, Aunt Orla has her bitter opinions. Mention an agrarian dispute in ancient Sumeria, Orla chooses her side by the third word; she’ll be spitting maledictions at the enemy, the eejits, chanting benedictions for the aggrieved ally, the poor lambs, and claiming distant relations among that flock, the Akkadians or whatnot, and weren’t they the long-suffering Irish of Mesopotamia?

Every transaction, for Slattery, is a choice between two closed doors. Turn the wrong knob and the trap is sprung, fall back into Bay Ridge to bunk with a dim-witted little brother and breakfast with the endlessly irate Orla, the thirty-second floor a fast-fading mirage, and Dad clapping his hand to your back, telling you not to worry, a union card’s a cinch what with a crane operator for a cousin.

Slattery returns to his desk and sits with his hands behind his head, staring at the rows of numbers marching across the screens of his seven monitors. He taps a few keys and the numbers of one column freeze, today’s close in the Hong Kong market. Slattery rubs the bottom of his chin with a clenched fist and looks to the clocks fixed on the wall, the precise minute in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, London, New York: 7:57 here on the Eastern Seaboard. Half an hour till the number comes out. The trading floor hums, the low and nervous murmur of every month’s final Thursday. Big money to be made today, big money to be lost.

Slattery’s eyes are undercast with black crescents. He wakes each morning at five-thirty and rides ten imaginary miles on his stationary bike. An hour later he arrives at the office, seats himself before his array of electronics, and scans his seven screens for information, for clues he might have missed the previous afternoon.

The brown curls have begun their slow retreat from his forehead. An ex-wrestler, Slattery’s nose has been broken four times, his ears cauliflowered, his front teeth chipped from an accidental head butt sophomore year of college. His neck remains massive from grappling days, out of proportion to the rest of his body. He hasn’t been able to fasten the top button of his dress shirts since high school.

‘Coming out with us later on?’

Slattery looks up from his monitors and nods at his supervisor, the man who hired him four years ago: Ari Lichter, plump face flushed after walking three blocks from the subway station, cloaked in his winter overcoat though the morning is unseasonably warm.

‘You owe me ten bucks,’ says Slattery.

‘And good morning to you.’ Lichter thumbs through his wallet, finds a ten-dollar bill, hands it over. ‘I don’t want you to break my thumbs.’

‘Thank you, boss. Never bet on the Sixers, they’re uncoachable.’ Slattery snaps the bill taut between his fingers. ‘A little warm for that coat, isn’t it?’

‘Supposed to get some snow later on. If you want to start spending that big money, people are getting together at Sobie’s after work, watch the Knicks game.’

‘Sobie’s?’ Slattery eyes his boss skeptically. ‘You still trying for that bartender?’

‘I like the place. Good beer.’

‘Oh, yeah, they’ve got the best Budweiser in town. That girl can’t be twenty years old. She could be your daughter, boss.’

Lichter shakes his head. ‘Listen, my young friend, I’m a fat, happy suburban dad. And I follow the rules. But I’m allowed to look.’

‘Give me a report tomorrow,’ says Slattery. ‘I’m going out with some friends tonight.’

‘Big date?’

‘Nah, not even. Sort of a going-away party.’

Mentioning his plans for the night makes Slattery uneasy. So far this morning he has managed to keep thoughts of Monty buried beneath the numbers, the constant calculations and recalculations of his gamble. He wonders what his friend is planning to do with Doyle. The two have been inseparable since Monty found the dog four years ago; Monty has a hard time sleeping when the pit bull isn’t curled up outside the bedroom door. Bad enough to lock a man in a cell, to take him from his family, his friends, his city – couldn’t he at least keep his dog? If Monty had Doyle to lick his face in the morning, Doyle to bark in warning whenever a stranger approached, Doyle just sitting, quiet and content, head on the floor between his paws, brown-eyed and watching – maybe it would make seven years pass a little quicker.

‘The other thing,’ says Lichter. ‘You’re still holding on to all those contracts?’

‘Yeah. Why, you’re nervous?’

‘I don’t like it,’ says Lichter. ‘The claims numbers have dropped three weeks straight.’

‘And everybody’s thinking, therefore, if claims have dropped, employment must be up.’

‘They probably think that,’ says Lichter, ‘because it’s pretty much always true.’

Slattery wags his finger at his supervisor. ‘Pretty much always. But not this time. I’ve got a theory.’

‘Oh, good, you’ve got a theory. Everybody alive’s got a theory, Frank. How to beat the blackjack dealer, how to pick a horse, how to ace the stock market. I’ve got a theory too. You want to hear it? My theory is called Theories Are Bullshit. Do me a favor. Cut your stake in half, okay?’

‘You want me to sell five hundred contracts?’

‘Five hundred? You’ve got a thousand?’

Slattery nods slowly. ‘Right, boss. You’re quick with the numbers.’

‘At a hundred thousand a pop? Frank, come on, man, you’re in awfully deep.’

‘What? They authorized me to a hundred mil. You want to—;’

‘A week ago,’ says Lichter. ‘They raise your limit one week ago, and you’re already maxing out.’

‘So what’s the point of giving me a limit if they don’t want me to go there?’

‘Listen to me. Cut your stake in half. All right? You’ve been doing a great job, everyone knows that. They’re watching you. I’ll probably be fetching your coffee in a few months. But right now I’m still your supervisor and I’m telling you: sell those contracts.’ He grips Slattery’s shoulder, then walks toward his office, exchanging good mornings with the other traders on the floor.

Marcuse peeks his head over the partition facing Slattery. ‘Better hop to, sonny boy.’

Slattery says nothing, stabbing angrily at his keyboard, calling forth further tables and figures. But Marcuse remains, chin resting on the partition like a latter-day Kilroy. ‘I don’t see you picking up the phone,’ he says. ‘Didn’t Lichter just tell you to sell? Sounds like your allowance got cut off.’