The Sea Beach Line (37 page)

Rayna and I spent the whole day after our shopping trip lying in our bed in the storage space. We drank a bottle of champagne and fooled around. We still stopped short of actually having sex, but we grew more comfortable being unclothed around each other and touching each other's bodies.

“We haven't been outside all day,” I said in the late afternoon.

“It's fine,” Rayna said. “It's happy in here. We don't have to leave, just yet.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Let's stay here a while longer.” I wished that we would never have to leave that place. I think she wished that too. We could be married, and make a pledge to love and protect each other forever. We would finally consummate our union. We wouldn't need anyone else. We could spend our whole lives together.

Our first day back on the street after our little vacation, I noticed a black SUV with tinted windows parked on West Fourth, between
Thompson and LaGuardia, with the engine running. The vehicle was there when we got out in the morning, and took off about twenty minutes later. The windows were so dark I couldn't see who was inside. I didn't think anything of it, especially; I just took notice of it like I took notice of everything that happened on West Fourth Street.

“They look like cops,” Mendy said, when the SUV drove away. He had noticed them too. “Or even feds. Like they were waiting to snatch someone up. Someone they heard maybe hung out around here.”

“Guess they didn't see their guy,” I said.

“Guess not. I hope they never do, for his sake, the poor bastard. Hey, you heard about Eye, right?”

“No.” Come to think of it, I hadn't seen him around for a week or so. “He get arrested?”

“Yeah. I heard it from Sonya. He's at Rikers. Got caught selling subway swipes. Apparently he had a bench warrant out for something else, and he got jammed up for thirty days.”

Rayna came back from the store with orange juice and buttered bagels. After we ate, we had to finish getting the tables set up.

It wasn't until later, during the late-afternoon lull, that I started to feel nervous about Mendy's words. The presence of cops had always made me feel uneasy, long before I'd gotten into drugs, let alone become a bookseller. Maybe that was a trait I'd inherited from Al. He was not what you would call a fan of the police. Even as a kid, I'd come to school and start sweating when I saw the security guard. If he turned toward me, I would assume that I had done something wrong, and someone had turned me in for it.

My fear about the cops in the SUV was much less abstract. I had been happy to get paid for the warehouse job. Less because of the money itself—though Rayna and I enjoyed our paid vacation—than because of the feeling that I was becoming a true hustler, and was involved in something real. When I finally saw Al again—in this world or the next—I'd have a good story to tell him, one where I was a character, not just a narrator. I could show him I understood what his life was like. The flip side of this was that I was now culpable for
something real. West Fourth Street was where Goldov had given me the money; it was possible that some detectives were onto the warehouse theft, and tracked it back to me through Goldov.

I had been involved in framing Abdul-hak too, even though I had thought of myself as more or less a bystander in that situation. Maybe the arson squad was second-guessing their case against the news vendor. Maybe they had footage of me making the 911 call, and decided to watch me rather than question me. This was just paranoia; no one in the NYPD cared if an immigrant's newsstand burned down. But maybe it wasn't actually cops in the SUV; maybe the rival dealer Abdul-hak was involved with had decided to make a serious play for the park. And while Roman's words had made me fear that Al was dead, they were just the mutterings of a drunk man, and the most likely scenario was still that he'd had to flee some threat. Maybe the men in the SUV were that threat.

Rayna must have noticed that I was a bit distraught, because she came and sat down beside me on the curb. She took my one hand in both of hers, and put her head down on my shoulder. I put my arm around her. All the anxiety left my body, and I was no longer afraid of the police or gangsters or anything else. There was no real reason to think the SUV had anything to do with me. It could be ICE, looking to snatch up some noncitizen street vendors—most of the hot dog guys in the neighborhood were from Egypt, and several other food vendors were from South America—or it could be a security detail, making preparations for a foreign dignitary's speech at NYU. Maybe some NYU kids had gotten in over their heads with a drug dealer. Maybe some rich NYU student just thought it was cool to get the windows of his SUV tinted. There were plenty of police and criminals in the streets, but none of that was our concern. We had each other, and we'd be fine, as long as the world left us alone.

We had a good day of selling. Restless young feet were getting ready for their summer travels. I sold all my Kerouac novels, several Steinbecks, two
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
s, and one copy each of
The Powwow Highway
,
Burn Collector: Collected Stories from One through Nine
, and
Bound for Glory
. A woman preparing to study
abroad in Italy bought
The Stones of Venice
and a thick Italian–English dictionary. We filled shopping bags with beach reads. Classes were starting to end, and a few students came by to sell us their books from the semester. Rayna was still a little shy about interacting with customers, but when it came to buying books, she was a good haggler, and got us some deals. I didn't know how the seasons went on the street, but I hoped our good fortune would last through the summer.

That night, Rayna and I sat outside under the Artigas statue. We shared a bottle of blackberry brandy, and she read Yiddish poetry to me. I was starting to pick up some words from Rayna. “
Libe
.” “
Toyt
.” “
Khaloymos
.”

“That poem sounded nice,” I said. “What was it about?”

“There is a man, and he's speaking to a woman who is far away from him. He was traveling, on his way back to her, but he's caught in the snow, and he knows he's not going to make it. But as he freezes to death, he sees her approaching. She comes to him. To save him. It seems real, the way the poem says it. But then in the spring the villagers find the man's body. The woman was just a hallucination. He died alone in the snow.”

“That's sad,” I said. Rayna laughed.

“All these poems are sad.” She gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Don't let them make you sad.” It was getting late. We strolled back across the street, hand in hand.

An SUV left the parking lot as we came back to storage. It looked like the same one from earlier on the street. I had to admit, after a minute of intense paranoia, that it was dark out, and that furthermore, I didn't really know anything about SUVs or how to recognize them. On top of that, I was a bit drunk from the brandy.

“Is there something the matter?” Rayna asked. “You seem nervous.”

“No. Everything's okay. I'm just seeing things.” I didn't need to burden Rayna with my unfounded worries.

We went inside and went to bed. We still had a bit of the honeymoon feeling from our days off from the street, and we kissed and cuddled for a bit.

“
Zise khaloymos
,” Rayna said. Sweet dreams. We went to sleep happy. I don't know if I dreamed or not, but I slept contently, with my arm around Rayna.

Several hours later, Rayna shook me awake. Both of her hands gripped my one arm, and I thought that she was back in the world of nightmares again. But when I opened my eyes, Rayna's were already wide open.

“Do you hear them, Isaac?” I did. Our door was creaking, no, more than that, straining. Some invisible force was trying to muscle itself into our world. I wrapped my arms around Rayna and we huddled close in the far corner of our room.

The door snapped open and two men pushed in. The motion-activated hallway lights had clicked on, illuminating the invasion. Al's locks had stood strong, but the first man in the door—a bear in a black hooded sweatshirt—had popped the hinges with the crowbar he carried. The man behind him was much smaller but wore the same black pants, black sweatshirt with the hood up, and black beard. Instead of a crowbar he held a semiautomatic pistol. These men were clearly not police.

“He's not here,” I told them. “He hasn't been here for a long time.” These men had to be looking for Al. These were the people he had fled from.

They ignored me. The big guy came over and grabbed Rayna with his free hand. She didn't scream; she was strangely silent. I shouted “no,” and tried to pull her back, but the smaller guy leveled the big, black pistol at my face and I let go. I'd foolishly tucked Al's gun away in a box when Rayna moved in, so it wasn't at hand now. Rayna started to stay something, but the guy holding Rayna pressed the crowbar across her throat, and she shut her mouth. He tossed her over his shoulder and stepped out of the storage space. I heard two sets of footsteps slap down the hall, and realized that a third guy must have been standing watch outside.

The smaller guy backed out of the room slowly. He held the pistol with two hands for stability, and kept it trained on my face until he left.

I listened to the sounds of his sneakers hitting the thinly carpeted concrete as he ran down the hallway. Even after they had disappeared, I sat frozen for a moment, afraid of what I would encounter when I stepped out the door.

Snapping out of it, I dug Al's .22 out from the box. I started for the back door that the men had evidently exited through, but it occurred to me that they might be expecting that, and would ambush me when I stepped outside. I circled around to the front corridor, winding past the bathrooms and out onto the loading dock. I got outside just in time to see the black SUV peeling out of the parking lot. Without stopping to think, I fired a shot at the SUV's rear tire. The .22's pop was barely audible in the vast city night. The round slammed into the pavement. The SUV was gone. I ran out to the street, but I didn't even know if they'd gone straight on Hudson or turned down Spring. Rayna's nightmares were real. Demons had carried her away in the night.

I didn't know what to do. Back inside, I splashed cold water from the water fountain on my face. I took a long drink. I said
shehakol
, the blessing over water and other nonalcoholic beverages, as best I could remember it, because there is a Lubavitch teaching that if you are in grave danger you should pray
shehakol
. Nothing will happen until you are done, and by then, help may be on its way. I finished praying, but no help came.

I knew I needed to do something. I needed to act to find Rayna. The clock was ticking as I sat paralyzed, doing nothing but praying and moaning. Time was slipping away from me, the story was going forward, and I couldn't control the outcome. I wished for the power of
kefitzat haderech
—the juggling of time—that the Hasidic masters had possessed. The thought brought back a sudden memory—or flashback—of that first acid trip, when I could control the speed of things by turning a knob. I saw myself slowing everything down with the turn of a knob, so I'd have time to think. The image passed as quickly as it had come, and I was no longer on the train, but alone in the storage facility.

Real pursuers had come for Rayna. The men were gone with Rayna before I could react. The SUV zoomed off into the street. Wishing I could turn a knob and control time wasn't going to make it so. There was no knob to grasp. I wrapped my hands around the grip of Al's sawed-off rifle and shook back and forth. If anyone was watching, it might have looked like I was davening. But no one was watching and I wasn't praying anymore. I wanted to get high, higher than I'd ever been, and forget all about this situation. But I owed Rayna more than that. I couldn't retreat into fantasies, memories, dreams, or stories. I needed to find out what had really happened, who had taken Rayna, and why. I needed to know where they had taken her, and how I could get her away from there.

This was clearly not random. We didn't live in a farmhouse with lit windows facing the road. These men knew all about our secret living arrangement. They knew which of the hundreds of doors to open. They'd been stalking us in their SUV. They'd watched us working, and they'd watched us coming and going from our storage space.

I'd initially thought the men were looking for Al and, when they couldn't find him, decided to target Rayna and me. That didn't explain why they'd taken Rayna. Maybe they thought I could contact my father, and taking Rayna gave them leverage. But then why not say something to me, or even torture me, to see what I knew? My next thought was that this was my fault. Something I'd done for Roman and Timur had angered someone. Maybe Rayna was being held ransom until the Galuth painting of the rabbi was returned to its owner? Again, why had that not been expressed to me? So maybe nothing was wanted from me, and the threat had come from Rayna's world. It did seem like she was the target. The men had long beards; they could have been Hasidim.