Nomi yanks on Noone’s sleeve to bring him around, forcing him to walk fast enough to match her. “Stand down.Are you fucking nuts? The last thing we need is you getting arrested!”
“He can’t arrest me for spilling his coffee,” Noone says stiffly. “And it’s his own fault. He was being rude.”
“Jesus Christ, Simon, he’s acop—being rude is basically an employment requirement.” Nomi smothers her snort, pulls Noone forward. “Now come on, we got more than what we came for, and I want to get out of here before Gaffney decides to file some kind of report.”
Returning to Gansevoort Street in the back of another cab, Nomi takes a pen from her tote and writesClaude Amechein big letters at the top of Noone’s sketch. Then she examines the Big Mouth flyer.
She’s already getting ideas. “I’m thinking we go tomorrow night, see if Janice is there, find out what she knows, have a drink, get out.”
“What?” Noone seems somewhat distracted by the lingering satisfaction of dumping hot coffee all over a police detective.
“How would you feel about coming to a nightclub with me?”
“Now?”
“No—tomorrow. Pay attention.”
“You’re in the middle of an investigation and you want to go clubbing.”
“I want to dig upinformation, Noone. There’s a difference.”
“The difference being that this information is in a nightclub.”
She grins at him. “Come on, you know you want to come. Have you been to a club in NYC yet? I’ll even pay the cover charge.”
Chapter Thirteen
September 1987, Tuesday
So it looks as if he’s going to a nightclub tonight.
Simon turns this concept over in his mind as he walks across the dark cobblestones at 2:45 a.m., on his way to work, pulling on his wool cap and smoking a cigarette. Nomi was right; he hasn’t been to a nightclub in this city yet—hasn’t been to a nightclub before, ever, in fact. He’s been busy getting his life set up; he hasn’t felt the urge to socialize. Looks like that’s about to change, although he’s not sure how he feels about it.
He crosses under a streetlamp, where a guy in a fisherman’s sweater is manhandling metal barrels through an open cellar door; an older man in a porkpie hat watches the barrel wrangler, smoking a pipe and offering suggestions. Simon smells the pipe smoke, as well as car exhaust and raw meat. Trucks honk, goosing a pair of boys in corsets and high heels and long coats who scream with laughter as they scurry clear of the road.
As Simon comes through the door of Gennaro’s and finds his apron, Mike Nell gives him a nod. Nell is recentering a thin blade on a honing steel, and the whisking action sounds like powerline music.
“Nice cuts so far, Noone. Take a hook and a meat saw today—you’re on forequarters. Might get you doing some ribs.”
The magic of work is that it’s so soothing. Huge marbled slabs of beef hanging in rows, ass to ass and shoulder to shoulder, white fat gleaming—something pristine about it, almost holy: Here’s warm life transformed into cold carcass, the butcher ready to complete the process of carving, dismembering, feeding the hungry people of this hungry country. Everything that we are is meat—ask the boys at the Manhole near Hudson Street; ask the girls at the Vault; ask the hookers on the West Side Highway; they’ll tell you—and now Simon is doing his part, contributing to the great cycle, his knives working in rhythm with it all.
They’re down a worker on the production line, and Nell asks him to do an hour’s worth of overtime. Back at the tenement after his shift, Simon’s climbing the stairs when Nomi pokes her head out her open door.
“Do you have an outfit for the club tonight?”
“I have a suit,” he confirms.
“A suit.” She bites her lip. “Okay, we’ll work with that. Also, I bought a gift for Sofia Rosa, to thank her for Sunday.”
“If it’s chocolate or alcohol, she’ll love it.”
“It’s chocolate liqueur.”
“Perfect.”
“I have stuff to do this afternoon, but I’ll see you at nine, okay?”
In his rooms, he takes a shower and takes his rest. On waking at 2:30 p.m., he does a little light tidying to compensate for the neglect of the weekend. But something is niggling at him—an electric wire touching itself to the back of his neck, a tiny cattle prod. Returning from the laundromat, Simon figures out the problem when he steps into the midafternoon sunshine and sudden, shocking pain strikes him deep in the left temple and behind his left eye.
