“Not Washington. Alexandria, Virginia. And usually not. But could you get it up with the daughter of the chief pig in the country?”
Elliot smiled. “It seems I did.”
“That doesn’t count. You didn’t have to put up with an FBI agent tailing you on dates.”
“Uh—I’ll take the point under consideration.”
“We’ve gotten way off the point,” said Lorimer. “You were telling me about your problem.”
“No, I finished. Tell me yours.”
“Nothing like yours. All I have to do is remain at large with my picture soon to be in every post office in the country.”
“That’s easy,” said Elliot. “Just put stamps on the posters and mail them. They’ll never be seen again.”
“Mmm. Well, neither of us is going to be in any shape to solve anything if we don’t get some sleep. We have to be up for breakfast in under five hours.” Lorimer reached over, crushed her cigarette into its ashtray, and shut off the light. They were ten minutes late to breakfast.
Mr. Ferrer met them at the door saying, “Come in, join us.”
“Awfully sorry we’re late,” Elliot said sheepishly.
“We overslept,” Lorimer lied.
Ferrer led them to the table. “Nonsense, you can’t oversleep.”
Elliot’s heart skipped a beat.
“If you slept longer, you needed it. Besides, we’re just sitting down.”
156
Alongside Night
Breakfast was unusually plentiful for a private table: oatmeal, bacon, eggs, orange juice, and coffee, the only exception to standard American cuisine being Mrs. Ferrer’s homemade Spanish churros—rolled flat fritters sprinkled with sugar—which she said she had learned to make from Mr. Ferrer’s mother. Elliot decided that if these were the imitations, the originals would have enslaved him for life. He consumed his fill, washing them down with plenty of dark-roast coffee.
Afterward, Carla left to meet a girl friend while her brother drew kitchen duty. The two senior Ferrers invited the
“Rabinowitzes” into their living room.
Mr. Ferrer walked over to the window, pulling aside the drapes, and looked out to the street. “Is it still so dreary out?”
Elliot asked him.
“It’s still raining,” Ferrer replied. He paused an instant, then added softly, “It washed the garbage off the street.”
“I didn’t see any garbage on the street,” said Lorimer. “Unless you mean the cans—”
“No, no,” he interrupted, letting go the curtain, “not anymore. This was, oh, six years ago. You must have seen the slums just a few blocks from here. Six years ago this block was also a slum.”
“What happened?” Lorimer asked. “Urban renewal?”
Elliot almost choked.
Ferrer said to him, “I see you understand.” He took a seat on the couch, taking a cigarette out of a silver box on the coffee table and lighting up. “No, not urban renewal as you mean it. That only traded flat slums for higher ones.”
“Why?”
“The way the housing projects were rented. The only people who got in were the unworthy poor. Welfare mothers with children they had only to get a bigger check. Drug addicts who had been cured—now they only took methadone. Friends of Alongside Night
157
the politicians.”
“Emmanuel, is no good to think about this after so long.”
“It will not hurt, Francesca, for me to tell it once more.”
Ferrer took another puff on his cigarette. “Mrs. Rabinowitz, six years ago I owned a small printing and copy store near New York University. I was not rich from it but it kept food on the table and paid the tuition for my children’s parochial school. Then one day in March, without any warning or reason, the Internal Revenue Service seized my business, my bank accounts, and everything in my apartment.”
“You don’t have to explain any further,” said Lorimer. “I know exactly how that works.”
“Very well. You know then that no matter how I tried, I could not find out why they did this, and that it would have taken years before I got a day in court. In the meantime, I had no job, no belongings, no money. I applied for unemployment insurance and was turned down. I applied for an apartment in a city housing project and was put on a two-year waiting list. I applied for welfare; it was denied.”
“What did you do?” Lorimer asked.
Ferrer snuffed out his cigarette. “I took a messenger job and moved my family into this building—the one we’re now in. It was abandoned. Every building on this street for three blocks was abandoned. Between inflation, taxes, and rent controls, the landlords—slumlords?—all had gone broke. When we moved in, this building was without electricity, running water, heat—”