Hells Kitchen

thirsty, they went out for omelettes at the Empire Diner on Tenth Avenue and then he’d taken her back to her apartment, where they’d made love once more and lain in bed listening to the sounds of New York at night: sirens, shouts, pops of exhausts or guns, which seemed to grow more and more urgent as the night grew later.
    He never even thought of leaving without saying good-bye.
    It was Carol who broke the rules.
    When he awoke—to Homer Simpson’s loud Siamese wail—she was gone. A moment later the phone rang and through her tinny answering machine speaker he heard Carol’s voice ask if he was still there and explain that she’d had to be at work early. She’d call him later at his apartment. He found the phone and snagged it but she’d already hung up.
    Barefoot, in his jeans, Pellam wandered over the scabby hardwood floors, mindful of splinters, toward the bathroom. Thinking that she’d sounded pretty brusque on the phone. But who could guess what that was about? The aftermath of an evening like last night’s was wholly unpredictable. Maybe she’d already convinced herself that Pellam wasn’t going to call her again. Maybe she was seared with Catholic guilt. Or maybe she’d just been sitting across her desk from a hulking eighteen-year-old murderer when she’d called.
    Pellam tested the shower but the water was ice cold. Pass on that. He dressed and stepped out into a gassy, clear morning, scalding hot. Took a cab to his place on Twelfth Street. He climbed the steps of his apartment, watching two energetic youngsters, names razor-cut in their hair, streak past on skateboards.
    He decided he wanted a bath and a cup of very hot, black coffee. Just sit in the tub and forget arson, pyros, Latino thugs, Irish gangsters, and lovers with enigmatic attitudes.
    Climbing the dim stairs slowly. Thinking of the bath, thinking of soapy water. The mantra worked. He found he could forget it all—he could wipe all of Hell’s Kitchen out of his mind. Well, almost all. Everything except for Ettie Washington.
    He was thinking of all the flights of stairs Ettie had climbed over the years. She’d never lived in an elevator building, always walk-ups. She climbed stairs for seven decades. Carrying her baby sister Elizabeth. Helping Grandma Ledbetter up and down dim stairwells. Lugging food for her men until one left her and the other died drunk in the Hudson’s sooty waters, then forher babies and children until they were taken from her or fled the city, and then for herself.
    “. . . That’s a word for us here in the Kitchen. ‘Anonymous.’ Lord. ‘Ignored’ is more like it. Nobody pays attention to us anymore. You got that Al Sharpton fellow. Now he’ll go to Bensonhurst, he’ll go to Crown Heights and raise some hell and people hear ’bout it. But nobody ever comes to the Kitchen. Even with all the Irish here the St. Paddy’s Day Parade doesn’t even come over this way. That’s fine with me. I like it nice and private. Keep the world out. What’s the world ever done for me? Answer me that.”
    Ettie Washington had told the glossy eye of Pellam’s Betacam that she dreamed of other cities. She dreamed of owning stylish hats and gold necklaces and silk dresses. She dreamed of being a cabaret singer. The rich wife of Billy Doyle, a highfalutin landlord.
    But Ettie recognized these hopes as illusions only—to be examined from time to time with pleasure or sorrow or disdain then tucked away. She didn’t expect her life to change. She was content here in the Kitchen, where most people cut their dreams to fit their lives. And it seemed so unfair that the woman should have to lose even this minuscule corner she’d been backed into.
    Breathing deeply, he arrived at his own fourth-floor apartment.
    A bath. Yessir. When you live in a camper most of your life, baths take on a great importance. Bubble baths particularly, though that was a secret he kept to himself.
    A bath and coffee.
    Heaven.
    Pellam dug the keys out of his black jeans and walkedto the door. His eyes narrowed. He looked at the lock. It was twisted, sideways.
    He pushed against the door. It was open.
    Broken into. He thought fleetingly that he ought to turn tail and use the downstairs neighbor’s phone to call 911. But then his anger grabbed him. He kicked the door in. The empty rooms gaped. His hand went to the switch on the lamp closest to the door.
    Oh, shit, he thought, no, don’t! Not the light! But he clicked it on before he could