Page 47 of Rooke
“Urgh. Gross. Your cousin?”
“Hey, when you’re twelve years old, stuff like that doesn’t matter. Not even for a minute. You know, Brenda turned into a grade-A bitch. I’d probably still fuck her now if the opportunity presented itself, though.”
******
I’m pretty fucking high by the time I leave Mike’s. The Ritz is actually a small jeweler’s shop below a bed and breakfast in Harlem; both the jeweler’s and the bed and breakfast are run by the same guy—a short, overweight Armenian guy named Arnold. Every time I say his name, I think of thatHey, Arnold!Cartoon character with the football-shaped head. In reality, Arnold from the Ritz looks nothing like the fictional character, but I can’t seem to shake the association.
A couple of blocks away from the shop, I check the antique Rolex on my wrist, a gift given to me by the daughter of one of our clients who died last year. The previous owner of the watch had been coming to the antiques store for years—years longer than I’ve been working there—and he bequeathed it to Duke in his will. Duke took one look at the cracked tan leather strap and the dull shine to the face and handed it over to me without a second thought. The piece must be worth about fifteen thousand dollars, but Duke’s tastes run a little more expensive and shiny.
It’s eleven fifteen. Technically Arnold should be closed by now, but when I round the corner onto 125thI’m hardly surprised to see light still blaring out into the darkness, escaping between the cracks in his shutters. I don’t knock on the door. I make sure to ring the bell—one short, sharp blast to make sure he knows it’s one of his regulars.
Inside a rabble of dogs start barking; they slam their bodies into the reinforced door with the steel bars, snarling like savages. After a few moments, Arnold’s very round, non-football-shaped head appears on the other side of the glass. “You know, where I come from, it’s considered very bad luck when a crow appears in front of your house,” he says. I hear him perfectly, even over the racket the dogs are making.
“Good thing I’m a rook and not a crow, then.”
Arnold waves off this comment, unlocking a series of deadbolts on the other side of the door. “Rook. Crow. They are one and the same to me. What are you doing here so late?” He kicks at one of the dogs, shooing it back so he can open the door. For all their ferocious barking and snapping, they run at me, jumping up at me as soon as they can wriggle through the gap, licking at my hands and panting.
“I’m looking for someone.”
“I don’t deal in people. I deal inthings. Things are easier to control. Tea?”
“No, thank you.” I slip into the shop and Arnold begins the laborious task of closing all the deadbolts again. The inside of the shop smells like cinnamon and cloves, like the little black cigarillos Arnold smokes. The counters are cluttered with contraband probably not seen during regular opening hours: guns; knives; a set of knuckle dusters. A solid brick of gold rests on top of a stack of invoices like it’s a common paperweight.
“Are you sure you won’t take some Lapsang Suchong?” Arnold mumbles, hobbling around the counter.
I wrinkle my nose in answer.
“All right. If you change your mind, you keep it to yourself. It’ll be too late by then.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Arnold measures loose tea leaves into a silver strainer with shaky gnarled hands. “Who is this person you’re looking for?” he asks bluntly, still going about his task.
“A deadbeat. The guy who broke into the museum the other day. You know who I’m talking about?”
“I know someone broke into the museum the other day. I don’t know anything else, I’m afraid.”
I don’t know if I believe him. He’s looking down, focused on not spilling tea leaves everywhere, and I can’t get a gauge on him without looking him directly in the eye. I stoop down, leaning heavily against the counter. “He hurt someone. A friend of mine. What would you do if someone hurt one of your friends, Arnold?”
“I would kill them of course,” he says mildly. “I understand your need to find this person, Rooke. That doesn’t change the fact that I can’t help you. I wish that I could. If I could tell you a name or an address, then you would be happy, and I like to make you happy. Especially when it’s so late at night and I’d like to finish my inventory and go to bed. But since I haven’t any clue who this person is, I regret that you’re going to have to leave my shop an unhappy man. That pains me, it really does.”
Hurting Arnold isn’t really an option. Not if I don’t want to get myself kneecapped and dumped in the Hudson. Besides, the guy is ancient. It would feel wrong hitting him. At least Mike could have fought back if he’d had the fucking stones to.
I don’t owe Arnold anything, and you’d think that would put me in his good graces. However, if you owe Arnold something, you’re in his debt in more than one way. You don’t just owe him money. You owe him your fealty, you’re at his beck and call. You owe him a favor, and boy does he call in those favors. If youdon’towe him any favors, there’s a power imbalance in the relationship as far as Arnold is concerned. For some reason, he’s less likely to help you out if he feels like you’re his equal, which means I am shit out of luck on that front.
The only way I’m gonna get a guy like Arnold to help me out is if I have something to pawn with him, or outright sell to him at a discounted rate. I immediately think of my watch but then change my mind. I’m sentimental over the thing. I have no idea why, but giving it up, even when I got it as a gift, feels wrong somehow. I have nothing else of value on me, so where does that leave me?
Arnold finishes the ritual of his tea making and lifts the comically small tea dish to his mouth, blowing on the pale liquid inside. “Your mother came here yesterday,” he says softy. “She was looking for you.”
“Mymother?”
Arnold tips his head to one side, indicating that he was just as surprised as I am now. Most people come to know Arnold through dodgy dealings and underhanded mischief. That’s how I came to know him for the second time in my life. Thefirsttime I came to know him, he was my father’s antiques dealer and a family friend. I spent summers here, cataloguing the estate sales that came in and dusting high shelves that had never been dusted before. Then came high school and all of the chaos that followed with puberty, and Arnold just kind of faded from the backdrop of our family life. He was a friendly uncle who simply…disappeared.
The second time I came to know him, I was beaten black and blue, and a cracked-out junkie was trying to split my head open with a tire iron over a bag of money I was transporting for Jericho. Car money. Mob money. That is to say,Arnold’smoney. Every blood-stained, tainted dollar bill that passes hands in the New York underground eventually makes its way back to him. It’s beyond weird that my mother would come here looking for me. I haven’t mentioned Arnold to her in years. She has no idea that I’m still connected with him now.
“She brought me this tea,” Arnold says. “She was wondering if I knew how you were supporting yourself these days. I told her I hadn’t seen you in a very long time, of course. She was…dubious, shall we say.”
“Does she know what you do here?”
