Chapter 11 Chapter Eleven

The circular drive in Central Park is almost six miles around.We're on the fourth lap counterclockwise, and the Cadillac is moving along smoothly.It was mainly Chance who spoke.I took out my notebook and jotted down something from time to time. In the beginning he was talking about gold.Her parents were Finnish immigrants who settled on a farm in western Wisconsin.The nearest city there is Eau Claire.Kim, whose real name is Jira, grew up milking cows and weeding vegetable gardens.At the age of nine, his brother started sexually molesting her, going into her room every night and touching her.

"It's just that sometimes when she tells the story, the brother turns into an uncle, and another time into a daddy, so maybe it's all just made up. It's no longer real." In the third grade of middle school, she had a relationship with a middle-aged real estate agent.He told her he was leaving his wife and being with her.She packed her bags and went to Chicago with him, stayed at the Palmer Hotel for three days, and had all three meals delivered to the room by room service.The next day the real estate agent was drunk and in tears and kept telling her he was ruining her life.He was in good spirits on the third day, but when she woke up the next morning, he was gone.There was a note explaining that he had returned to his wife, had paid four extra days for the room, and said he would never forget Kim.Next to the note was a hotel envelope with six hundred dollars in it.

She lived for a full week, sightseeing in Chicago, and sleeping with a few men.Two of them offered her money, and she wanted the others to pay too, but she couldn't say it.She thought about going back to the farm.On her last night at the Palmer Hotel, however, she met a guest there who was a Nigerian delegate to a business meeting. "That cut her back," Chance said. "Sleeping with black people meant she couldn't go back to the farm. The next morning, she was on the bus to New York." It wasn't until he bought her from Duffy and put her in the apartment that her life turned around.Her appearance and demeanor are suitable for receiving customers indoors, because she has never been used to soliciting customers on the street.

"She's lazy." He thought for a while, then said, "Whores are lazy." There are six women working for him.Now, Kim is dead, and there are five more.He talked about them in general for a while, and then cut to the chase, giving me their names, addresses, phone numbers, and personal details. I took a lot of notes.On our fourth lap around the park, he turned right, out West Seventy-second Street, walked two blocks, and pulled over to the side of the road. "Be right back," he said. I stayed there while he went to the corner booth and made a call.The engine is still idling.I looked at the notes I had just made, trying to deduce a pattern from the scattered information recorded.

Chance got back in the car, looked in the rearview mirror, and made a quick but illegal turn of the head. "Call my telephone station," he said, "to keep in touch." "You should have a car phone." "It's too troublesome." ——Bammer School·E Book Group— He drove east downtown and stopped by a fire hydrant in front of a white-brick apartment building on Seventeenth Street, between Second and Third Avenues. "It's time to collect the money," he told me. He let the engine idle again, but this time it was fifteen minutes before he emerged, striding blithely past the livery porter and sitting nimbly behind the wheel.

"Donna lives here," he said. "I told you about Donna." "The poet." "She's so excited. A magazine in San Francisco is going to run two poems of hers. She's getting six free copies of the magazine that have her poems in it. That's what she's paid—just the magazine." When the light came on red, he hit the brakes, looked left and right, and sprinted across. "A few times," he said, "she's been paid by the magazines that published her poetry. Once she got twenty-five dollars, which was the most she'd ever been paid for a manuscript."

"It sounds like it's going to be hard to make a living out of it." "Poets don't make a lot of money. Whores are lazy, but this one writes poetry very hard. She sits for six or seven hours at a time, hammering out words, and always slips dozens of poems into envelopes. If you reject the manuscript, send it there. The postage for her poems is more than what she gets paid for the manuscript." After a moment of silence, he laughed softly. "Do you know how much I got from Donna? Eight hundred dollars, and it's only the first two days. Of course, she also has a time when the phone doesn't ring for days."

"But it's still a lot on average." "Much more money than writing poetry." He looked at me. "Want to go for a drive?" "Aren't we going around?" "We're going in circles," he said, "and I'm taking you to a completely different world now." We drove down Second Avenue, across the Lower East Side, over the Williamsburg Bridge, and into Brooklyn.Coming off the bridge, we took several turns, which made me dizzy, and reading the signs didn't help.Those street names were unfamiliar.But I saw the change from the Jewish Quarter to the Italian Quarter along the way, and from the Italian Quarter to the Polish Quarter, so I knew where we were.

We drove into a dark, silent street where two families lived in each house. Chance slowed in front of a three-story brick building with a garage in the middle.He used the remote to raise the garage door, drove in and then lowered the garage door.After following him up a few flights of stairs, we came to a spacious room with a high ceiling.He asked me if I knew where we were. I guess it's the green dot area. "Very well," he said, "I suppose you're no stranger to Brooklyn." "I'm not very familiar with the area. But the kielbasa ad at the meat market reminded me."

"I suppose so. Any idea whose house this is? Ever heard of Dr. Kazimir Lewandowski?" "No." "You wouldn't have heard of it. He's an old guy. Retired home, in a wheelchair. An oddball. No human contact. This place used to be a fire station." "I think it must be one of those kinds of places." "Two architects bought this place a few years ago and remodeled it. They knocked it all out and redecorated it. They must have got a lot of money because they don't save. Look at that floor. And look at that window frame." He pointed out details and commented.

"Then, they got bored of the place, or they got bored of each other, I don't know why, and they sold it to Dr. Lewandowski." "He lives here?" "He doesn't exist." He said.The way he speaks keeps shifting, from grassroots to intellectual and back again. "The neighbors never saw the old doctor. They only saw his loyal black servant, and saw him drive in and out. This is my house, Matthew. I'll show you around for a dime Guide fee?" This place is really nice.There is a gym on the top floor, complete with weights and fitness equipment, as well as a sauna and jacuzzi. His bedroom was also on this floor, with the bed covered in fur in the center of the room, facing the skylight above.The second-floor study has a wall full of books and an eight-foot pool table.There are African masks everywhere in the room, and groups of African sculptures are scattered here and there.Chance would occasionally point to one of them and tell me which tribe it was made of.I mentioned seeing African masks in Kim's apartment as well. "The mask of Boro society," he said, "is. I keep an African thing or two in all my girls' apartments. Not expensive, of course, but it's not rubbish either. I don't collect rubbish." He took a rather crude mask from the wall and handed it to me to take a good look at it.The eyeholes are square, and the facial contours are geometrically precise, with a strong primal feel. "Yes," he said, "take it. It is not enough to appreciate a sculpture with the eyes, but with the hands. Come, touch it." I took the sculpture from him.Much heavier than I expected.The wood used for carving must have a fine texture.He picked up the phone from its teak base and dialed a number. He said, "Hey honey, do you have a message?" He listened for a while, then put down the phone. "It's all right," he said. "Have some coffee?" "Drink if it doesn't bother you." He assured me it would be no trouble at all. While making coffee, he told me about Africa, how its craftsmen didn't see their work as art. "Everything they make has a specific purpose," he explained, "whether it protects the house, or wards off evil spirits, or is used in a specific tribal ritual. If the mask loses its power, they throw it away. , and make new ones. The old ones become rubbish, and they either throw them away or burn them because they are useless.” He laughs: "Then the Europeans came and discovered African art. Those French painters got their inspiration from tribal masks. As a result, there is now this phenomenon in Africa, where people spend their lives making masks and statues and exporting them to Europe and America. They Carved in a traditional style to suit the needs of customers, but that's ridiculous. Their work is useless, there is no emotion in it, it is not real. You look at it, hold it, and you feel the real thing, if you are a little With an artistic eye, you can tell the difference right away. Interesting, isn't it?" "It's interesting." "If I had this kind of crap I'd show you, but I don't. I bought some to start with. You only learn by mistake. But I got rid of that stuff and threw it over there Burnt in the fireplace." He laughs, "I still have the first real one I bought, it's hanging on the bedroom wall. It's from the Danes, from the Boro Society. I didn't know anything about African art then, But when I saw it in an antique shop, I was immediately attracted by the artistry of the mask." He paused, shaking his head. "That's not the case at all. Actually, when I saw that smooth black piece of wood, I thought I was seeing a mirror. I saw myself, I saw my father, I saw That distant age. Know what I'm talking about?" "It's hard to say." - Stick School · E Book Group - "Shit. Maybe I don't know either." He shook his head. "One of those old carvers made this, and you guess what he'd say? He'd say, 'Hell, this crazy nigger wants What are these ancient masks for? Why is he hanging them all on the goddamn wall? 'Coffee is ready, you'd better drink no sugar and no milk, right?" He said, "How the hell do detectives do cases? Where do you start?" "Go around first, talk to everyone. Unless Kim happens to be killed by a madman, her death must be caused by her life." I tapped on my notebook. "You know very little about her life." "I guess so." "I'll talk to people and see what they tell me. Maybe the pieces of information put together point to something. Maybe not." "My girl will talk to you all she wants." "That's helpful." "Not that they know anything for sure, but if they do—" "Sometimes we know things that we don't know we know." "Sometimes we say something and don't know we said it." "That's right." He stood up, hands on hips. "You know what," he said, "I didn't mean to bring you here. I didn't think it was necessary for you to know about the house. And you didn't ask to come, so I brought you." "This house is amazing." "thanks." "Kim appreciates it?" "She's never seen it. None of them. There's an old German lady who comes in once a week and cleans it up. She's the only woman who's ever been in the house. Because it's mine. Well, the architects who lived here before rarely needed women. Here's leftover coffee." The coffee tastes great.I've had a lot of it, but it's so good I can't help but want more.When I raved about it before, he told me it was a blend of Jamaican Blue Mountain and roasted Colombian beans.He said he would send me a pound, and I told him I was staying in a hotel room and couldn't cook it. While I was sipping coffee, he called his contact station again.After hanging up the phone, I said, "Do you want to give me the phone number here? Is this number confidential?" He laughed. "I don't come here often. It's easier to find me by calling the contact station." "Ok." "Besides, I don't quite remember the phone number here. I have to check my old bills to see if I remember the number. And even if you dial the number, it won't work." "why?" "Because the phone doesn't ring, the calls here can only be made out. When I bought the place, I had a phone installed, and an extension, so there was always a phone close at hand. But I never gave the number to anyone, even None of my phone contacts, no one." "and then?" "Then I was here one night, like I was playing pool, when the goddamn phone rang and I jumped up. Someone wanted to ask me if I wanted to subscribe to The New York Times. Two days later, I got another A call, the wrong number. I realized that all I could receive was either a wrong number or a sale, so I picked up a screwdriver and pried open all the phones, and I could see a small phone inside. Bells, when the current passes through a certain wire, it will ring. I removed all the small bells from the telephone. I dialed this number from other phones, and it sounded like I got through, but because of the absence of those small bells, the room The phone won't ring." "so smart." "No doorbell either. There's a button on the side of the door, but it doesn't connect to anything. Since I moved in, the door hasn't been opened at all, and I can't see anything from the window. I also have a lot of alarm bells installed. It’s not because there are a lot of robberies in Greenpoint, it’s a nice Polish neighborhood to live in, it’s because of Dr Lewandowski, he needs security, he needs privacy.” "I guess he needs to." "I don't come here often, Matthew. But when I drive in here, that door shuts out the whole world. I can't touch anything, nothing here." "I didn't expect you to bring me here." "I didn't expect that either." Finally, we come to the question of money.He asked how much I needed, and I said $2,500.He asked what I was using it for. "I don't know," I said, "I don't charge by the hour, and I don't keep track of expenses. If I end up spending too much, or if the case drags on too long, I might ask you for money. But I don't Will send you the bill, and if you don't give me the money, I won't sue you." "Very informal." "That's right." "I like it. Cash transactions, no receipts. I don't care about spending money. My women make a lot of money, but they spend a lot of money. Rent, business expenses, bribes. You put prostitutes in a building You have to pay the people in the building. You can't give the concierge twenty dollars at Christmas like you do the other guests. It's twenty dollars a month, a hundred dollars at Christmas, and the rest of the building staff. So much. It adds up." "It must be so." "But the net profit is not bad, and I will not waste money on drugs and gambling. How much do you say? Two thousand and five? The Dogon mask I asked you to pick up just now cost me twice the price. More than that. $6,820 plus sales tax." I said nothing. He said, "Hell, I don't know what I'm trying to prove. I guess I'm a rich nigga. Hang on here a minute." He came back with a wad of bills and counted twenty-five of them to me.Old banknotes, all without consecutive numbers.I wonder how much cash he put in the room, and how much he usually carries with him. A few years ago, I knew a loan shark who carried no less than 10,000 yuan in cash with him every time he went out.He kept it secret, and everyone who knew him knew that he carried a huge sum of money with him.However, no one ever tried to take his money. He drove me home.We took another route on our way back, entering Queens over the Polasky Bridge, and then through the tunnel back to Manhattan. Neither of us talked much.On the way, I fell asleep and he had to put his hand on my shoulder to wake me up.I blinked and sat up straight.It's at the curb in front of my hotel. "Door to door delivery service." He said.I got out of the car and stood on the side of the road.He waited for a few taxis to pass and began to make a U-turn.I eyed his Cadillac until it was out of sight.Thoughts raced through my head like an exhausted swimmer. I was too tired to think, so I went to bed.