That was the extent of Prescott Holloway’s Spanish.
The extent of Esposito, C.’s English was “Hello.” She said it as soon as she saw Prescott in his uniform, and then she backed into her doorway and let out a yell. The yell brought a fat middle-aged man to the stair rail of the landing above them. He stood blocking out the stairwell light and looking Prescott over.
“What do you want?” he asked finally, in English not nearly as accented as it ought to be, considering how stereotypically immigrant he looked.
Prescott told him what he had told Señora Esposito on his way up.
“So how do we know it’s true?” the fat middle-aged man demanded at the end of it. “How do we know you’re not some kind of cat burglar?”
“In this neighborhood?” Prescott blinked.
“People have stereos in this neighborhood,” the fat middle-aged man said. “They have VCRs. They have televisions.”
“Sure,” another voice said—young, this time, teenage and hostile, “we’re all welfare queens in this building. We’re all getting rich off the city of New York.”
“Don’t all of us spend all our money on crack,” another teenage voice said.
Prescott shifted uneasily. This was what he didn’t need. Teenagers. Too many of the teenagers up here had nothing to lose.
“Look,” he said. “I’m a chauffeur. I’m a driver. You can see for yourself. My car’s parked right across the street.”
“How do we know which car is yours?” the fat middle-aged man demanded.
“Just take a look,” Prescott told him.
Downstairs, there was a snick of opened door and the soft slap of rubber-soled shoes on linoleum. A moment later, the door-snick sound happened again and somebody laughed.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” the someone said. “You should see it. Stretch caddy half as long as a football field. Only reason it hasn’t been ripped off is that everybody’s afraid it might be booby-trapped.”
“Maybe it is booby-trapped,” the fat middle-aged man said.
“Look,” Prescott Holloway told the company at large. “All I’m supposed to do is check Señorita Gonzalez’s apartment and make sure she hasn’t fallen ill on the kitchen floor. That’s it. Then I can go back to my boss and let her figure out what to do next.”
“You got keys to the apartment?” the fat middle-aged man asked.
“Of course I don’t have keys to the apartment,” Prescott said. “I’ve got a credit card. If the door isn’t bolted from the inside, I can get in. If it is, we know we’ve got trouble. All right?”
“She’s not lying in that apartment sick on the floor or anything,” said a young woman’s voice Prescott hadn’t heard before now. “She’s not in the apartment at all. She didn’t come home last night.”
The fat middle-aged man seemed to make up his mind. He moved away from the stair rail and began coming down to Prescott.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll let you in. But we’re going to be standing here watching you.”
“Fine,” Prescott said.
“We all know Maria,” the fat middle-aged man said.
“I know her, too. I work in the same place.”
“We’re not going to let you take anything away.”
“I don’t want to take anything away.”
The fat middle-aged man looked skeptical, but he motioned to Prescott to come forward, and the two of them started down the stairs to the floor below, where Maria’s apartment was. Prescott was glad now that he had not tried to go straight to it when he was buzzed in. There were buildings where nobody wanted to know anything about anyone else, and then there were the other kind.
The fat middle-aged man stopped in front of a door marked “2B Gonzalez, M.” and stepped back to let Prescott do his stuff. Prescott got his Citibank automatic teller card out of his wallet and slid it into the crack in the door. There were plenty of security doors now where the locks could not be opened with plastic no matter what, but this wasn’t one of them. Prescott didn’t think anything in this building had been replaced since 1959, except light bulbs.
The lock trembled, shuddered, jerked and sprung. Prescott pushed the door in and looked at the darkness.
“Shit,” he said.
“Don’t swear in front of the women,” the fat middle-aged man said.
Then the fat middle-aged man reached an arm over Prescott’s shoulder and a hand through the door, and Maria’s small apartment was full of light.
It was full of everything else imaginable, too. It was full of feathers and scraps of cloth. It was full of pastry crumbs and chipped stoneware plates. It was full of shredded bits of ancient carpet and peeling strips of plastic lampshades.