The Hollow Girl by Reed Farrel Coleman Read Free Book Online Page B

YOU-ston—Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It wasn’t ugly, nor was it much to look at. It got its nickname because of the whimsical art installment on its roof that featured twenty-foot-tall statues of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev holding hands and doing a circle dance. It was visible from surrounding streets. Behind the dancing comrades was a four-sided metal structure shaped like rows of dark green, red-starred ballistic missiles. The array of fake missiles covered up the building’s water tower. So, no, I wasn’t surprised at all by Siobhan’s choice of address. Like mother, like daughter—things weren’t what they seemed.
    Across Houston Street from the Kremlin was Katz’s, the world’s most famous Jewish deli. Opened in the 1880s, Katz’s was well known to all New Yorkers. But it became nationally famous during WWII when it adopted—some would say stole—the motto “Send a salami to your boy in the army” from a competing deli and made it its own. Stolen motto or not, Katz’s served the best pastrami and corned beef in the world. Besides being sent into a state of bliss by the aroma of cured meats, grilling hot dogs, sweet chicken soup, and the vinegary tang of sour pickles, stepping into Katz’s was another journey back in time. They did things the old-fashioned way here. There wasn’t a mechanical slicing machine in sight. The meats were all hand carved and piled in small mountains atop soft, fragrant rye bread.
    It was also a kind of sacred shrine, the place Israel Roth and I had always visited when he was up from Florida. It was corned beef for him, pastrami for me. Russian dressing for him, mustard for me. Dr. Brown’s cream soda for him, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray for me. A round kasha knish for him, a square potato for me. We both preferred sour pickles to half sour. That last time, he hardly touched his food. He was very old then, and dying. He knew it. I knew it. He refused to discuss it, and I was happy to let him refuse. We’d sat mostly in silence … well, as much silence as was possible in Katz’s. The place was always busy and noisy with clattering dishes, clanging silverware, shouted orders, hundreds of half-spoken sentences in thirty different languages. But whatever tiny bits of food Mr. Roth ate that night—one bite of his corned beef, a forkful of knish, a few sips of his soda, half a pickle—he seemed to savor. He knew these flavors would have to last him an eternity.
    As I walked across Houston, I saw the doorman at the Kremlin unloading groceries from a cab for one of the tenants. I was a bit disappointed not to be able to speak with him. A cooperative doorman is a great resource. No one, except maybe the superintendent, knows the inside skinny like the doorman. It wasn’t a total loss, though. It wasn’t like the doorman wouldn’t be there when I came out. I didn’t even have to use the key to get into the lobby. A young Japanese couple with wildly spiked hair, dressed in matching lime green leather jumpsuits and white marshmallowy boots, came bursting through the lobby door without giving me a second thought.
Ya gotta love the Lower East Side.
    Siobhan’s apartment was on the fifth floor. When I got out of the elevator, I followed the sign on the wall and turned left. It had been many, many years since I’d lived in a large apartment building, but I’d grown up in one. There was a kind of familiar comfort in the competing odors that filled the hallway. Whether it was a building of luxury flats in Manhattan or a tenement in Coney Island was beside the point. As I made my way to 5E along the zebra-patterned carpeting, my nose told me that someone in 5B was frying onions, garlic, and ginger. That the person in 5C was getting stoned; the earthy, burning-grass aroma of high-grade marijuana was intense. Think Allman Brothers,
At F
illmore East
, circa 1970. And then, as I passed 5D, I got gut punched by the scourge of apartment building life, the