Chapter 13 - Ricky's Praise / The Rooftop

The message came at eight-forty-five, twenty minutes before the Friday rush began filling the room. Mateo. Cuando puedas. That was the whole text, and the whole text was the message. Teo read it in the corridor and put his phone back and told himself his face was doing what he needed his face to do.

A knock on the office door, a beat, the word from inside. He went in.

Ricky was behind the desk, suit jacket over the chair back, his shirtsleeves rolled to the forearm. He looked like a man doing paperwork rather than a man who had sent a woman to the floor with a split lip six days ago. The Punta Cana print was on the wall behind him, the beach and the palm trees in their frame, and the safe was behind the print and Teo kept his eyes off the print. The chair across the desk had been set at the precise distance: close enough to read, far enough to leave the door in his peripheral. He sat. Hands in his lap, weight settled back, the posture he had worked out for rooms like this.

"Mateo." Ricky set his pen down. The eye contact was the kind he used to measure, not to press. "Thank you for coming up."

"Of course," Teo said.

"Friday night. You've got the floor."

"Whatever you need."

Ricky folded his hands on the desk, a short motion that closed one piece of business and opened another. "I want to talk about your work, Mateo. Because I've been watching."

Teo kept his hands in his lap. "Okay."

"Tuesday last week. The situation on Willis Avenue, the building on the corner." Ricky read the address out of a document that existed only in his head. "You were there with Machete. Second floor, the man who came up short in August and was expected to resolve it."

The hallway came back: the smell of the second-floor landing, the angle Machete had taken at the door so Teo had to run the conversation. "Yeah."

"Machete tells me you handled it clean. Nobody else on that floor knew anything happened, Mateo." A measured beat. The voice was neither warm nor cold; it was building. "Then there was the Thursday the week before. The Hunts Point corner, shift change. Two Albanians."

Twelve days ago. From across the street Teo had clocked them, the posture and pace of men doing a survey rather than men in transit, and he had walked the opposite direction and called Machete from a block away. Clean. No incident. The relevant fact was that Ricky had not been within four blocks of that corner that night.

"You saw them early, Mateo. Machete said you were the one who called it."

"Got lucky with the timing."

"No." Ricky's voice went flat. "Luck is what people say when they want to give away credit they earned. I'm not interested in luck. I'm interested in judgment." A pause, the precise length of a sentence being checked for fit. "The third thing is the collections. October. The whole Mott Haven route. Every envelope, every count, no irregularities. Machete does his work right, but Machete has been doing that work for six years. You've been doing it for two months, Mateo."

The desk lamp put its light across the desk's surface and left Ricky's face at the edge of it. Outside the door, the dembow was starting to build in the room as the DJ ran the opening set. The bass came through the walls as a low vibration in the chair's legs and in the soles of Teo's shoes.

"I appreciate you saying so." The tone landed where Teo had aimed it, level.

"I'm not saying it to be kind. I say things because they're true or I don't say them." Ricky unfolded his hands and put them flat on the desk, a small repositioning. "Starting next Tuesday, you take point on the Mott Haven collections. No Machete riding along. You run the route, you bring me the accounting, you handle the irregularities yourself."

In Teo's chest a thing moved that was not yet a thought. The arithmetic was running in his direction for the first time in two months.

"That's Machete's territory." He kept the sentence careful. It was the question that did not push.

"Machete is taking on the Port Morris work. More responsibility there. The Mott Haven side needs somebody anchored who knows the route and the people on it. You're that person, Mateo. If you want to be."

"Yeah. I want to be."

"Good." Ricky picked his pen up again, the small motion that closed the formal part. "I know what I've got in you, Mateo. I want you to know I know it."

The pen turned once in his fingers. The weight of the sentence landed in Teo's body before his head caught up. I know what I've got in you. Two months of collection runs and floor shifts and reading the room and staying careful, and this was what it produced.

Teo stood and said thank you and went out.

---

The floor was filling up.

At his post near the bar he let the shift take over. Sight lines went where they went: door, corridor mouth, the corner of the room where the hierarchy stood visible. The praise sat in his head and he took it apart piece by piece while his eyes did the work.

Ricky had named three things: Willis Avenue, Hunts Point, October collections. The Willis Avenue job he had done with Machete, so the information came back through Machete's debrief, fine. Hunts Point had been twelve days ago and Machete had been in Port Morris that night. October collections were forty-some envelopes over four weeks, none of them counted in front of anybody but the man who paid and the man being paid.

Someone had been watching the route.

The thought arrived complete. His hands stayed at his sides. His weight stayed distributed. The face stayed what the room needed it to be. He was not going to run this to its conclusion at his post with the dembow filling the space between him and anywhere quiet enough to think in. He noted the shape of it and set it down where he could find it again.

The door was what he watched.

Cami's first set started at nine-fifteen.

The watching he did now was not the watching he had done two months ago, when she had been a problem he was trying to solve from across a room. He watched her now knowing the performance and the person were two operations running in the same body, knowing the eyes above the room were a specific alertness, the alertness of someone who had gotten very good at seeing without being seen to look. Three nights ago Machete's explanation had run its course on the drive back from Hunts Point and left him with the shape of something wrong he still did not have the language for. He had the language now.

She was watching for a door.

The set ended. She came off the stage and went down the corridor. The corridor's mouth held his eyes for a moment, then the bar, then the front door. Tuesday collections and the Hunts Point corner ran together in his head, the two facts looking for the third. His face held.

He stayed on the floor until close.

---

After her last set the sounds of the dressing room came through the corridor wall: lockers, the shuffle of women moving from performance to street, Yari's voice saying something he could not make out and someone laughing in the gap after. He waited by the wall. The door opened three minutes later. Cami came out with her bag on her shoulder and her hair pinned back up the practical way she wore it on the street, and she saw him standing there and did not startle.

"Hey," she said.

Teo tilted his head toward the back of the corridor. "Got a minute?"

In the look she gave him there was the question and the answer to a different question at the same time. The corridor was almost clear, one of the later-shift girls moving past with a phone to her ear, not paying attention. Cami adjusted the strap on her bag. "Where?"

"Roof. If you're not too cold."

She took a beat. "I have my coat."

The alley door at the back of the corridor opened onto the narrow strip between the club's building and the chain-link lot. October in the South Bronx at one-thirty in the morning meant a cold that knew the exact gap between collar and neck, coming in off the expressway, specific and immediate. Cami pulled her coat tighter without comment. Six flights of slatted metal up the adjacent building's fire escape, his shoes finding the familiar sequence of steps. Behind him her boots kept the same pace. She did not ask why he knew which fire door was unlocked.

The roof opened above them when he pushed through. Tar and gravel and the wide flat dark of it. The city ran in every direction at the level where it stopped being individual lights and became a color, brownish-orange low and dark above. Water towers stood north. A satellite dish leaned west on its rusted bracket. South, the Bruckner's headlight streams ran their two parallel currents.

The south parapet was twenty feet across the gravel. He walked to it and she came and stood beside him.

The parapet came to his sternum. Four feet of drop on the other side was nothing; six floors below that was something else. His hands went onto the concrete. The wind came through the jacket he had not thought to wear heavier. Four blocks south the neon of La Reina Roja held its red against the low cloud cover, the R and R in cursive, one a little dimmer than the other, the color washing up so the underside of the sky above the club ran a particular shade the rest of the sky did not have.

"It's cold." Cami said it like a fact she intended to sit with anyway.

"Yeah."

Her eyes were on the expressway. Her breath came out white when she spoke. That detail he had not noticed before tonight.

"How's the roof?"

"Good view."

"Is that why you come up here?"

Teo glanced over. Her eyes were still on the headlights moving south in the left lanes, the taillights moving north in the right. "Sometimes."

Her face turned then, one of the straight looks she did not manage. Teo held it.

"You okay?"

"Yeah." He meant it and did not mean it both. "Want to ask you something."

"So ask."

"You've been here almost a year. Before here. Where were you?"

Her face turned back to the expressway. In the brownish-orange light Teo watched the set of her jaw, the place at her temple where her hair was pinned. Whatever she was deciding to say, the decision was happening now. He kept quiet.

"Philadelphia. Kensington. You know Kensington."

"I know what it is."

"Then you know what it does." A pause. The expressway kept going. "Almost two years. I grew up in the Bronx but I went there because there was a situation here that needed me somewhere else for a while. And then the Philadelphia situation got to be its own situation."

"What kind."

"A man named Aurelio." The name came out without particular weight, which was its own kind of weight. "Older. He had a specific way of making the math work in his favor, and I didn't see the whole equation until I was in it, and by then the leaving was more complicated than the staying." A breath in, a breath out, the small white shape in the air between them. "Eight months too long. That's the part I don't like saying."

Teo's hands stayed on the parapet. In his peripheral he watched her profile. She kept her eyes on the expressway while she talked, as if the traffic could hold the thing for her. On the drive home from Hunts Point three days ago he had done the same with Machete.

"What happened the night you left." He said it quietly, not as a question.

Her stillness changed register. Nothing about her posture moved. The air between them for a half-second was different.

"I left. That's the part that matters."

The gap she had left for the next question sat between them. Teo had the question. He did not ask it. Capacity in his head was already full of things he did not know what to do with, and the rest of her Philadelphia was not what he had brought her up here for. The cost of not asking, he noted later than he should have, landed in the small downward motion at the corner of her mouth before she made it not be there.

She exhaled slowly. The exhale was a sound he felt rather than heard.

"Kensington to the Bronx, end of December last year." Her eyes were back on the headlights, her voice back at its level register. "My cousin had a couch. Yari's number was in my phone from before, from when we used to know each other in the neighborhood. She told me about the club." A beat. "I'm not proud of the decision. But I'm here, which means I made it, and I don't know what the version looks like where I made a different one and it worked out the same or better."

"That's not a thing you can know."

"No." Her shoulder moved against the parapet, a small shift of weight. "I think about Pittsburgh."

She had said the word. Teo looked at her. Her eyes stayed on the expressway, but her shoulders had straightened. This was the real thing, not the version she could hand over safely.

"What's in Pittsburgh."

"Not here." She said it simply. "My abuela has a cousin there. Marisol. My grandmother's never been but Marisol says it's different. That you can breathe in it. I don't know if that's true. The Megabus runs three times a day. A room near the community college is four hundred a month, classes are six. I've been looking at what it would take to be there by Christmas." She paused. "Or Chicago. Somewhere with a different architecture."

The wind came off the Bruckner and through both of them, finding his collar and the back of his neck. She was serious. The seriousness had been there a long time. Tonight was the night he had to know it.

"Not yet."

Her face came back to his with nothing managed in it. Teo held the look.

"Not yet." She turned the words once and held them.

"I'm working on something." He meant it. The shape of a plan was in his head; a plan was not. "Give me some time."

Three seconds her eyes stayed on his face. The watching she was doing was not the watching he did of rooms. Something quieter than that.

"How much time."

"I don't know yet." He held it. "Not long. I promise."

Two more seconds and her face turned back to the city. Teo watched the side of it. The thing in her silence was not the silence of agreement. It was the other kind. She had heard the sentence and was setting it down somewhere to look at later.

They stood there. The expressway ran its loops. The dembow from the club was audible in the gaps between the trucks, a low pulse attenuated by four blocks and six floors but present.

The sound arrived first.

Teo had heard the specific mechanical frequency of the elevated 6 train from enough distances to recognize it before the cars came into view, the tracks conducting the vibration out ahead of the train like a signal. Three blocks east, eye level with the roof, the tracks ran their elevated curve. The train came into view between the gaps in the buildings to the northeast, the windows lit and moving, each lit rectangle a brief flash before the angle of the building took it again. The empty rows between the occupied seats showed clear under the fluorescent of the car interior, the city dark behind it.

Cami watched it go.

Teo watched her watch it.

The sound receded to the south. The expressway filled back in. The dembow surfaced into the gap the train had left, the club four blocks south running its Friday pulse into the sky.

"Pittsburgh." The word came out of her mouth with weight.

"Cami."

Her eyes stayed on the expressway. The red of the La Reina Roja sign held south of them, four blocks, the light washing the underside of the clouds. The train was already somewhere else.

His hand went onto the parapet next to hers, close enough that the backs of their hands were almost touching. Her hand did not move. His hand did not close the distance. Christmas was eight weeks out.