Hells Kitchen

to grown-ups that way . . . He said he’ll be back.”
    Pellam didn’t doubt it.
    I be your friend.
    Well, I be yours, Ismail.
    That’s the marvelous thing about debts. Even after you repay them, they never go away.
    Ettie had also brought him a Post, the huge headline (“Towering Inferno”) next to an equally huge photo of the flames consuming McKennah Tower.
    There’d been no deaths. Fifty-eight people had been injured—mostly from smoke inhalation. The napalm in the theater had not ignited and the only injuries there were from crowds pushing their way out in panic. The most serious was a broken leg received when bodyguards shoved a woman aside to make sure their dignitary escaped before the commoners (the governor, as it turned out, costing Pellam a fiver, payable to Louis Bailey, the king of gears, both greased and clogged).
    The Tower was totaled. Burnt to the ground. It was insured, of course, but the policy covered only the cost of the structure itself, not lost profits. Without the rents from the advertising agency the developer would miss his fourth quarter interest payments on his worldwide loans. McKennah and his companies were already preparing papers for the bankruptcy filing.
    The sidebar in the paper read, “Welcome to the club, Rog.”
    Curiously, none of the pictures of the developer showed anything but a matter-of-fact businessman who seemed completely blasé about the prospect of losing several billion dollars. One shot showed him striding cheerfully into his lawyers’ office accompanied by an attractive young woman identified only as his personal assistant. His eyes were on her; hers, on the camera.
    The hospital room bristled around Pellam and grew dark for a moment. Pellam slipped a merciful Demerol into his mouth. He washed it down with wine.
    When he looked at Ettie he noticed her face was stern. But her expression had nothing to do with mixing alcohol with medicine. She said, “John, you did so much for me. You almost got yourself killed. You should’ve just took off. You didn’t owe me anything.”
    Should he say it or not? For the past several months Pellam had been debating. A dozen times he’d been on the verge. Finally, he said, “Oh, but I do, Ettie.”
    “You’re looking pretty funny, John. What’re you talking about?”
    “I owe you a lot.”
    “No, you don’t.”
    “Well, it’s not exactly my debt. It’s my father’s.”
    “Your father? I don’t even know your father.”
    “You did. You married him.”
    After a moment she whispered, “Billy Doyle?”
    “He was my natural father,” Pellam said.
    Ettie sat completely motionless. It was the only time in all the months that he’d known her that he couldn’t find a trace of any emotion in her face.
    “But . . . how?” she finally asked.
    Pellam told her what he’d told to Ramirez—about his mother’s confession—her husband being away all the time, her lover, Pellam’s suspect pedigree.
    Ettie nodded. “Billy told me he’d had a girlfriend upstate. That’d be your mother. . . . Oh, my. Oh, my.” She thought back, her sumptuous memory unreeling. “He told me that he loved her but she wouldn’t leave her husband. So he left her and came down here, to the Kitchen.”
    “She said she got one letter from him,” Pellam said. “There was no return address but the postmark was from the general post office—on Eighth Avenue. That’s why I came to the city—to find him. Or at least to find out about him. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to meet him or not. I did some digging in public records and found his wedding license application.”
    “To me?”
    “To you. And your marriage certificate. It gave the address of the old tenement on Thirty-Sixth.”
    “The one we lived in after we got married, sure. Got torn down a few years ago.”
    “I know. I asked around the neighborhood and found out that Billy was long gone and that you’d moved up the street. To the 458 building.”
    “And you came a-calling. With that camera of yours. Why didn’t you say anything to me, John?”
    “I was going to. But then I found out that he’d run out on you. I figured it was the last thing you’d want to do, spend any time talking to me.”
    She squinted and looked at his face. “That’s why you remind me of James.”
    When Ettie had told him about her son a month ago, Pellam realizedhe’d have to spend some time getting used to the idea that he was no longer an only child. He had a sibling, a