14 years sober and a hypodermic still causes her toes to curl, remembering the visceral need, the anticipation. Holding breath before the puncturing of skin, the inhalation the moment before the rush that negated everything. An abandoned building might was well be as good as a penthouse, the back of an old jalopy a limousine. The state of things or places only mattered before and after, but never during.
So watching her daughter get a flu shot, she flattens her feet and lets those memories slip away, knowing that holding onto them or pushing them away only gives them their own inescapable gravity. Instead she smiles at her daughter and wonders if she’ll have to explain any of this to her some day as she politely refuses the doctor’s offer to vaccinate her as well.
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The one with the balaclava (or Max as I had just learned) blustered at me, got up from the couch to come to the pen’s entrance and stared at me with the same kind of hostility that he had when he was pinned under the chain in the cafe. I kept waiting for him to bluster out, but he went on long enough that I could feel a few of the Factory’s sentries break away from their posts, rotating in a slow orbit around the Corsicans’ cage, sensing trouble. I kept grinning, suddenly aware that if Max or the others got violent it wouldn’t be three against one, but it’d be free-for-all on the club floor, with me in the middle, the only one who wouldn’t care who he hit. Somewhere deep inside I heard Cheryl ask me if that was the reason I had come here, hoping for something like this, rather than my pretense of wanting to talk to the Corsican. With prison and then my duties at the casino I had been so bored for so long – maybe she was right. I had been dying for something to happen.
The thought of the chaos and damage I could cause widened the smile on my face as each image of violence passed through my mind. This only angered Balaclava more, his gesticulations and wrath increasing with each increased interval of my grin. His threats and insults were causing spittle to fly, some of it landing on me, but this only increased my amusement, which only angered him more.
I was pulled out of that feedback loop when I felt the Algerian retreat from us rather than step in to defend his friend like I expected. I kept my eyes on the screaming mess in front of me but raised my antenna, trying to sense what had changed. I was worried that someone might be trying to get behind me when this seemed to be confirmed by Balaclava going quiet, his eyes darting off me to something over my shoulder. He stepped back, deeper into the cage, the anger that had been so righteously his a moment ago draining away. For a moment, I thought he was going to drop to one knee. It was only then I decided it was safe to see what was behind me.
I noticed his heavies and the gossip of the crowds surrounding him before I saw Sartre himself. A full head and shoulders shorter than me, he was equally wide, taking up a space that was increased by the respect and fear emanating from those around him. Even the people who didn’t know who he was picked up on the vibe, whispered questions and answers buzzing out, layering the distant bombination of the Swede’s bass.
I hadn’t been this close to Sartre since he had visited the casino and longer before that. He was older than he looked from a distance, his thick, black hair and heavily muscled body hiding the ravages of time. However, this close you could see the deep lines on his face, particularly around his eyes and mouth, and that his bulk was at least partially attributable to the spare tire around his middle the years had put on. The dark well-tailored suits he favored helped hide that as well, draping over him right down to his practical, rather small, well-polished shoes.
Sartre stared at me with one of his grey eyes, closing the other one as if he were squinting at me down a sniper’s scope. Without opening his other eye, he stepped around me to look at the Idiots, who couldn’t seem to decide between making eye contact or staring at the floor. I could feel the Algerian gaping at Sartre, his eyes wide as if he couldn’t believe he was actually there. I could hear Fatty trying to fumble with a lighter, his attempt to appear cool through a casual smoke burning down.
In the moment that Sartre examined the four behind me, I quickly examined his entourage. Two flanked him like rooks, tall and thin men reduced to silhouettes by their imitation of their boss’ dark dress code. I counted at least four others similarly spaced out. It struck me as a lot of muscle to travel with, even for a crime boss.
In addition to those, the Factory’s bouncers aligned themselves around Sartre, facing the cage and all of us in it, making it clear how that was going to go down should something kick off. I hadn’t known the Factory belonged to Sartre, but it wasn’t surprising. As the rest of the crowd watched us, thick with anticipation, I heard a whispered, “Gouverneur nuit.”
The Night Governor. I had heard the nome de guerre mentioned before and I couldn’t imagine that it displeased Sartre. Its origins, I imagined, were prosaic, taken from his hand in the nightlife all over the city, but it certainly had the sinister ring that men in his position loved.
Stepping back to face me again, Sartre’s expression didn’t reveal anything about his opinion of the Corsican or his brethren. I was only given a hint of this by a roll of Sartre’s shoulders that continued down one arm until it became a wave of his hand, beckoning for me to follow him. “Why don’t you leave these children alone?”
Sartre oriented himself towards the exit and everyone else in the room seemed to follow his example; first his security apparatus, then the shadows behind those shadows. Without waiting to listen to any response I watched Sartre start off. I hesitated to follow, wringing the umbrella as I found my attempt to speak with the Corsican frustrated again. But then the ring of his bodyguards moved with him, forcing me to move along or bump into them. I choked up on the steel rod, giving a thought to maintaining my position with a quick straight arm, then heard Cheryl’s distant voice telling me not to be stupid.
“Who is Senator Hill?” He spoke the words confidently and without pause, certain that it was the answer for which the game show host was searching. Flashing lights, falling confetti, and a blaring horn announced that he was right.
He had been practicing for this moment in the spotlight since he could remember, convinced that if he continued to refine his skills at acting and singing, someone would inevitably recognize his specialness, his unique value, that he would be rewarded for simply being him. But it had never happened. Decades went by with dozens of anonymous jobs, hundreds of auditions, uncountable submissions, never quite spearing victory. All amounted to him making little more than a living while still remaining part of the background.
And now his great moment, his moment in the Sun, was because of random chance.
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The trio of thugs made their way away from the main stage until they became lit by an amber light emanating from a wide, rectangular opening flanked by what appeared to be prison bars. Through the open cell was a wider room painted a hellish red with tables and seats upholstered in an identical color. I watched the trio cross over that border and disappear to the left.
I stood at the border of the club’s main hall and the yellow light coming from its inner cells and felt a faint hesitation, brought on by the familiarity of being behind bars. The bars, I realized, weren’t a part of a prison, but were components of some industrial gate. Above it, stenciled into the concrete was the word, ‘Abattoir’. Strangely, this made me feel better. I stepped in.
While there was a faint modal remnant from the dance floor, it was quiet enough this far away to hear something besides the decapitated beat the Swede was spinning. The red space of the abattoir was divided into pens, four or five rotating off central hubs, separated by more barred walls that offered little privacy. That didn’t stop a number of the pens’ occupants from engaging in some very aggressive necking, but most everyone appeared to keep their clothes on. A few black turtlenecks unobtrusively stood around, quiet and still enough that they could have been silhouettes cut out of the red walls. Waitresses, cousins to Red Cross the bartender, floated by, wearing the same simple black, but carrying burnished silver plates and wearing short skirts.
I moved between the red islands, taking a bottle of water from a waitress and paying for it with an impressive tip that got her to point me in the right direction when I described the voyous. I headed that way. I didn’t travel far before the sounds of a young man drunkenly yelling could be heard over the lingering bass of the music. That’s a sound that would have normally primed me to eighty-six someone out of the casino, but in the abattoir of the Factory I suspected it was leading me to the right space.
With the black pea coat and black pants, I probably resembled one of the Factory security, so I was able to get close before anyone paid attention to me. In one of the pens Balaclava and Fatty were sitting on either side of the Corsican, who was more animated than the last time I saw him, trying to stand himself up off the couch his friends had dropped him on. Ever few seconds he’d try to stand only to be pulled down by the other two, which didn’t take much. He was obviously very drunk. Each attempt to get up was an inebriated rocking of his body, trying to hurl himself up and out of the booth’s red embrace, only to be caught by his arms and gently lowered back into it.
Through all this, the Corsican barely managed to keep his eyes off the floor, only lifting them to try to get a cigarette into his mouth or yell some slurred reply to the friends trying to calm him. It was mostly just a garbled mess (“je l’AIME!”), and I sighed thinking how impossible it was going to be to get anything out of him in this state. A young lady, her butt barely covered by an emerald green dress, was perched on the end of the couch, smoking a cigarette in a manner as disappointed as I felt.
I sighed like a bellows, which brought me to the attention of the Algerian, standing on the other side of the pen’s gate, staring in at his friends. I saw his figure rotate towards me out of my peripheral vision, and could feel his body go rigid as he recognized me. While he was still trying to figure out what to do I took my attention from his friends and gave it to him.
Even in the dim yellow light this was the best chance I had gotten to really see him without the adrenaline and threat of violence. He was taller than I remembered, a good inch above me, but half as wide – I expected him to pass between the bars in a retreat to his friends. There was a small diamond scar on his right cheek and one of his front teeth was chipped. Watching confusion and alarm blend on his face, mixing into an impulse to warn his friends, I felt a kind of sadistic joy that turned into a pointless but wide smile.
Whatever momentary shock the Algerian felt he pushed passed it quickly, anger and pride supplanting his surprise. I thought about giving him a quick knock-down but then thought better of it – he had at least two functional pals and they were probably still sore about what had happened at the cafe. No good reason to give them an excuse to make for a rematch. So I just smiled at him as he called to one of them by the name, “Max.”
Balaclava, kneeling in front of the Corsican and trying to get his wandering gaze to look him in the eye, rotated on his heels. His expression was one of irritation, bothered by the interruption, until he saw me, the shadow by the pen’s gate, standing tall and wide by the exit. Less hesitation in this one, he stood up and took two steps towards me, let loose a short string of curses and spitting on the floor. He motioned with his arm like it was some kind of goose neck, gesturing me away. I just stood there with the same leering smile and choked up on the metal rod of the umbrella in my hands.
As a student of architecture the young man had made an unfortunate comment about the competency of Pisano for his work on Pisa’s most famous tower. As punitive instruction his professor assigned him the duty of cataloguing all of the world’s leaning towers, particularly those that foundation had begun to fail during construction and what measures their creators had taken in order to counteract this. Extra credit would be given for any additional information on towers that had crumbled.
It was during his study of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri that the student noticed something was awry. Reality itself seemed askance, as if by studying the calamities of perfection he had pushed the world off its axis.
It came as a great surprise to his disciplinarian when he arrived at the hall, carrying the papers of his research, moving forward at a normal pace, but with a four degree tilt to the right.
