He can’t say any of that. For Christ’s sake, she’s only seven.
“Don’t worry.” He pats Brittany’s shoulder awkwardly. “I’ve got a plan.”
Chapter One
September 1987, Friday
One week earlier
Simon wakes before his 2:30 a.m. alarm and lies under the covers, assessing his headache and listening to the night noises inside the building: the furtive scratchings of mice, the gurgle of pipes, the pad of feet as residents on the floors below make somnambulant visits to the bathroom or the kitchen. The tenement itself makes its own sounds; constructed in the nineteenth century, it shifts and creaks on its foundations like an old oak.
More noise comes from outside: the rumble of vehicles on the cobblestones, the chuckle of voices near Royale Veal. At distance, the thump of bass from one of the clubs. This is the Meatpacking District; it’s never really quiet. He doesn’t mind it. It reminds him of Guatemala, the village of Piedras Negras where he last lived, that sense of community, of everyone living in each other’s pockets.
His digital alarm clock beeps once, and he silences it. Onward.
Throwing back the blankets, he stalks naked to the bathroom, flicks on the light. The bathroom is the apartment’s weakest feature: Water-stained walls are high and glaring, and the bath, toilet, and upright sink are all crammed close together. Behind the mirrored door of the cabinet above the sink, a box of Vicodin; he washes one down with water from the faucet. This morning’s headache is low grade, so he wants to geton top of it before it escalates. Once the pain becomes unmanageable, there’s nothing he can do but bomb himself on medication and lie in a cool dark room, praying for the sweet release of death. And he can’t die today; he has work.
Simon boils espresso coffee in the apartment’s galley kitchen while he hunts for clothes, drinks it as he pulls them on. Checks himself in the mirror by the door. It’s good to remind himself of who he is in the day-to-day: a white man in his mid-twenties with a longish face, blue eyes, the structure of the bones under the skin sharply delineated. A fairly standard configuration for a face. He looks normal. Eyes and cheekbones are perhaps too striking, but he’s stuck with them. The groove in his skull, just above his left ear, is also nonstandard but is covered by his brown hair. He rubs two fingers over the ridged white scar where his neck meets his shoulder on the right: still there. He’s still him, whoever that is.
He pulls his collar over the scar, tugs down his sleeves at the wrist. Today’s outfit is boots, khaki trousers, and a gray hooded sweatshirt over a waffle weave long-sleeve Henley. No coat—he won’t need one inside the cutting room. The clothes look right. His first day at Gennaro’s Meats, he could tell his clothes were wrong, too neat, the lines and textures too formal. He had to rummage through a dozen thrift store bins to find what he needed, but he’s got it now. His doctor, Richard Flores, had told him that New York City—that America generally—would be about blending in, which has been correct. The clothes are important. His mismatched socks, both brown but of different lengths and patterns, complete the look.
Final check: His hair isn’t too tidy, and his pupils aren’t too pinned. Simon lights a cigarette and is out the door by ten to three.
On Gansevoort Street, his boots thud on the cracked concrete sidewalk, the sound joining the rest of the night music. Truck horns are honking, and two cab drivers are leaning on their car doors, listening to talk radio. It’s cold without a coat; Simon shoves the hand not holding his cigarette into his armpit, skirts a pile of crushed cardboard boxesnear the curb. Cheap workers’ cars are moored in random spots in and around the sagged chain-wire fencing of Edison ParkFast. As Simon crosses Washington Street near Centaur Packaging, he sees a young white transvestite bum a light from a Black hooker, both of them walking toward the johns waiting for them on the remains of the West Side Highway.
“It was always like this with the sexy ladies.” Sofia Rosa has been regaling him with stories of the district from the last twenty years, spilling the kind of insider details that only an outsider immigrant can observe. “The wharf is right there, yes? And oh, the blood! I would come out in the street each morning to buy vegetables—blood would be steaming in the drains. Cats and dogs would come to lap. Even cattle waiting for slaughter would lick it off the stones.”
Cannibal cows seem very plausible at 3:00 a.m., when streetlamps show clumps of men in their butcher uniforms, white coats glowing, spattered with gore. Simon’s in the thick of it now. Men everywhere—coughing, talking, smoking, walking back from their break. Carcasses hang in a row near the entrance to Gennaro’s, beneath the overhang. The air has the chilled, greasy smell of refrigerated fat.
He tosses his cigarette butt and slips inside the staff door with two other workers, grabs a white vinyl apron from the line of hooks on the right-hand wall.
“Noone?” Mike Nell, the shift supervisor, chews a toothpick as he marks off the roster sheet. “You’re on breakdown.”
“Really?” He’s only been on knives for two weeks. Before that he was on packing. But one of the men on the boning line somehow sliced through his abductor pollicis transversus, taking off most of his left thumb, and Simon was slotted into his spot. Since then, he’s experienced a rapid promotion.
“You up for it?” Nell squints. “Your prep lines seem okay, and you can drop a shoulder and cut a steak.”
“I’m up for it.”
“Wonderful. Then I don’t have to find another hire.” Nell’s eyebrows rise. He’s a glowering Scotsman with a bulldog’s barrel chest and a thick mustache; this is as overjoyed as he gets.
Simon grabs gloves, hairnet, white coat. More gear—boning knife, breaking knife, honing steel, all in the scabbard on the butcher’s belt. Something about putting on chain mail gloves is strangely sensual, the cold heaviness against his skin like the muscular coils of a snake.
“Tell me something, Noone.” Mike Nell catches his eye. “Most new fellas don’t last a week. The smells, the noise, the blood—and it’s heavy work. But you seem to be in your element. How’s that, eh?”
Simon fixes a baffled look onto his face, shrugs.
“I’m not complaining. Just to say, if you can avoid cutting your dick off, you’ll do all right here. Understand? Okay, off you go.”
A final stamp of his boots on the rubber mesh mats and Simon’s through the doors, onto the floor of the slaughterhouse, with a feeling of relief. For eight hours, the duration of his shift, he can lose himself in the scream of the electric saw, the way a razor-sharp blade slides over bone, yellow fat parting neatly, steel separating flesh.
He’s not sure what it means, that he loves this job so much. But it can’t be unusual. Other people love their jobs. It’s normal.
The 3:00 a.m. shift finishes at 11:00; it’s always a shock, emerging from the cold, dim cutting room into glaring midday sun. On his way back home, Simon smokes a cigarette. He buys milk and a pack of Pall Malls from the deli grocery near the corner of Washington. He’s already eaten his big meal of the day in the break room at work—a corned beef sandwich, slabs of warm pink meat with dollops of relish squashed between thick slices of white bread, washed down with a mug of bitter, overbrewed coffee—and he can get something for dinner later.
Streets are empty now the trucks have trundled off to deliver their loads: The district is like a ghost town by midday. At his tenement, Simon takes the front stairs and walks through the tall, narrow entrance, whistling. He always feels good after work. In the ground-floor hall,he knocks twice at the second door on the left. Sofia Rosa might be sleeping. No, the door is opening.
“Simón?” The old lady rubs her eye with a knuckle, fishes in her apron for a cigarette.
