In the Shadow of St. Anthony

           

Prologue

Around here the old Italians used to tell you not to go west of Sixth Avenue after the sun went down. The printing district, wedged between Varick Street and the West Side Highway, from Houston to Canal, was a no man's land at the end of the workday. After five p.m. the place would clear out faster than roaches running for cover in a basement at the flip of a light switch. It was just one block west of Sixth Avenue.

One night in the summer of 1982, two vagrants, Jenny the Lush and Greasy Fred, sat on the courtyard loading dock in the rear of 50 Van Dam Street taking swigs from a bottle of cheap liquor. Police sirens rose and fell like crashing waves in the background. Their legs dangled over the side as their feet swayed a little more than a foot and a half above the asphalt. Steam practically rose off the cement and the air was so thick and muggy it was like wearing wool. Still, it was never busy in that part of the city at night. No residents and, more importantly, no cops to hassle them.

Greasy Fred wriggled and then slid off his seat on the loading dock.

"Where are you going?" Jenny asked with slurred words and a jerky pointing gesture. It came off as an accusation.

"To take a piss," he said with a scowl as he wandered away in a sloppy swagger into a darker spot of the courtyard. He reached a patch of dead grass by a warped and weathered chain-link fence on the other side and unzipped his pants.

The area was a haven for people like them in the summer, but that night it seemed particularly dead. Jenny wondered if the regular gang had acted on her idea of spending a few hours out of the heat in an air-conditioned movie theater. The Ziegfeld up on 54th Street was playing a revival of The Muppet Movie, and she always got a kick out of hearing the goofs in the back row of the balcony shout, "Bring out the bear, bring out the bear!"

In the distance, car horns blared and brakes screeched while bloated gray clouds covered the island of Manhattan like a down comforter.

A darkened blotch, camouflaged by the night, glided over the blacktop. If any person had seen it, they would have watched it slide along the ground, temporarily paint itself on the curb made of cobblestone, and then become a moving blemish on the face of the asphalt.

A fat cockroach, the size of a mouse, sensed the approaching shadow and scampered nervously away where it slipped between the bars of a metal sewer grate. A cluster of rats nearby were even poised to dart in the opposite direction as it moved past them. It reached the path's edge and, like water, assumed the shape of the curb then disappeared again into the blacktop.

She caught a vague reflection of her face in a small puddle by her side. Vague as her reflection was, it told the truth. She looked at least seven years older than her real age of twenty-nine. If the same rule applied to Greasy Fred, then the mileage on his face said he was over fifty.

Jenny needed a distraction, so she looked over her shoulder at the building, an abandoned redbrick structure, and fixed her eyes on its rear door. It was an old, heavy, and brooding rectangular slab of metal that had an air of being definite and final. She adjusted her position and rose to her feet. She flicked her cigarette off into the darkness and raised the bottle to her lips. She stood directly in front of the door and wondered then, as she often had, what was behind it.

The 1 train rumbled beneath Varick Street as it headed south to Canal Street.

She looked back again but couldn't see Greasy Fred in the dark patch he had stepped into and it made her nervous. Despite the numbing effects of the alcohol, she wasn't comfortable there by herself.