Hells Kitchen

stepped inside.
    He’d slash first at Artie—aiming for his eyes. Then try for the gun. He’d—
    Pellam stopped just over the threshold, frozen, gripping the letter opener.
    What is this?
    He glanced back at the developer and his thug. McKennah impatiently motioned him forward. And, following the tacit order, Pellam began to walk forward—but he did so very carefully; it was hard tomaneuver through the sea of babies. Across the room was a pale, obese woman in a stained blue tank top and tan shorts, who sat rocking the loudest of the screamers—the infant they’d heard from the hall. Trying to feed the baby a Frito, the woman stared at them in angry shock. “Who the fuck’re you?”
    McKennah nodded toward Pellam then said to his bodyguard. “Okay, give it to him.”
    The man handed Pellam his Betacam.
    “Do it,” McKennah urged. Pellam shook his head, not understanding.
    Half of the babies were in cardboard boxes and the rest wandered or crawled about, playing with broken toys or blocks. On the floor sat plastic bottles of orange diet soda and Coke, some had tipped over and spilled. Two of the children struggled to open one, like young animals trying to crack open a coconut. Ammonia from dirty diapers wafted through the room.
    “Who the fuck are you?” the woman repeated, shouting. “You want me to call the cops?”
    Roger McKennah said petulantly, “Sure, why don’t you?” To Pellam he said with irritation, “So go ahead. What’re you waiting for?”
    He asked, “Go ahead what?”
    “Well, what do you think? Play Charles Kuralt. Start filming!” The developer’s temper was starting to fray.
    “Fuck you!” the fat woman shouted. “You get out of here.”
    One of the babies crawled rapidly over the filthy floor and began playing with Pellam’s boot. He picked up the infant and dusted off his blackened hands and knees, set him on a blanket. “Why don’t you take better care of these kids?”
    “Fuck you too.”
    Okay. We’ll do it your way. Pellam lifted the Betacam. Started the deck running. “Say, ma’am, you mind repeating that?”
    “I’m calling the cops.” But the woman remained seated, ignoring the intruders, and lost herself in an episode of The Young and the Restless on the small TV.
    Pellam panned slowly around the room, having no idea what he would ever do with these shots; the squirming infants, the junk food and the raised middle finger of a fat woman hardly made the stuff of oral history.
    Looking through the eyepiece, he asked McKennah, “You want to tell me what we’re doing?”
    “This’s an unlicensed day care center. Most of the people in the Kitchen can’t afford a licensed one so they drop their kids off at pigsties like this. It’s a disgrace but there’s nothing parents can do if they want to work.”
    The woman tossed a handful of corn chips at the feet of one baby who had just started sobbing. Pellam shot the scene.
    With robust approval McKennah said, “Stone-cold Pulitzer! Go, go, go!”
    Twenty minutes later they were outside, deeply breathing fresher air. Pellam asked, “So, what the hell’s going on?”
    He pointed at the building. “I’m trying to wipe those out of New York, places like that. They’re a disgrace. . . . Excuse me, do I see some cynicism? Wondering why Roger McKennah wants to do a good deed? Oh, I’m no Mother Teresa. But that kind of crap doesn’t help anybody. It’s in my interest to have good, cheap day care centers in this neighborhood.”
    “Day care?”
    “And clean parks and pools. I want parents who can feel safe dropping their kids off and then coming to work in my office buildings. I want teenagers to play basketball on nice courts and swim in clean pools so they don’t mug my tenants at night. Self-interest? Sure. Say what you want, I don’t care. I read Ayn Rand in college and never got over her.”
    “Why did you bring me here?”
    “Because I checked you out. You’re doing a documentary on the neighborhood. And you were going to trash me like everybody else does.”
    “That’s what you think?”
    “I’m a tabloid-magnet and I’m fucking sick of it. I want to make sure you tell the whole story. Nobody has an inkling what I’m doing for the neighborhood.”
    “Which is what?”
    “How ’bout the public park I’m renovating at my personal fucking expense on Forty-fifth Street. And the pool repairs for the Department of Parks and Recreation that I guarantee’ll be finished by the time the