Teetering as it does on the edge of the continent, San Francisco seemed fragile to Reggie. And when he read in the book before him about the 1906 earthquake, he realized his own airy insignificance. He looked out the window onto Columbus Avenue. You could die in an instant even here at City Lights. So quiet, the customers so respectful of where they are, the soft chaos of the John Coltrane tune playing throughout, the books like well-informed secrets…. Reggie had made this bookstore his go-to destination whenever he himself could not figure out what to do.
He was suffering from what he called “chef’s depression,” a condition that often throttled him. He couldn’t get the chocolate coffee cake he had been thinking about to the point where the mix of ingredients would simply take command and the denouement would at last appear on the horizon. Reggie had so far come up with many solutions intended to usher him to that coffee cake moment, and none had succeeded.
He hated the phrase that had been running through his head: This isn’t it, Reggie! So, here in the bookstore, he thumbed through one book after another, replaced each on its shelf between its neighbors, and looked for yet one more. All you need is a line…an encouragement, he thought. Individual books had aided him before when his inventiveness wasn’t working. But now…now…. These open pages, filled with runes, held not a clue. Not in this book. Not in any of them. The searched-for line needn’t even mention chocolate or any other ingredient. What Reggie was looking for was the startling phrase that would dazzle him and let him know that he had better get back to the kitchen and get on with it.
For an example, the line “His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.” Reggie was the only baker he knew who had even heard of Dubliners. The swirl of spirits in that line, the tempestuous accounting of death’s enormity, had led him to more than one specific successful creation in his kitchen. The language sparked Reggie’s own significant creativity.
“The vast hosts….” “The dead….” Rhymes with bread, he thought.
He left City Lights, knowing that he had to get home. He needed sleep, and was due at work the following morning at three. The chief baker at Crusts of Bread & Such on Taylor Street in The Tenderloin, he and his assistant Josephine were working on a new possibility, a kind of chocolate-imbued pastry that was rolled and shaped into a loaf, so that the customer could cut it into thick slices, warm it, and baptize it with fine butter. Reggie knew that, when they got to the point of being able to sell it, it would be beyond delectable.
But they weren’t there yet.
Getting off the 90 all-night Van Ness bus the next morning, he walked up the alley that would bring him to the bakery’s side door. Even though it was so early, the alley was alive with conversation. There were bedraggled, stained tents on both sidewalks, and a number of residents jiving back and forth with each other, with considerable laughter here and there, and just as noisy complaint that was shouted out and shouted once more and then again by some crazy person.
Reggie knew several of these residents and was hailed by a few as he passed by. Some had flashlights. There were even lanterns in a few of the tents. He felt no danger, although he hurried up the alley, intent on the bakery. He felt he and Josephine were in the final stages of the new coffee cake, but before that, he had to get the crew going on all the other breads, pastries, and cookies. Josephine had suggested a different mixture of chocolate the morning before, with less sweetness, and as Reggie had thought about it at the bookstore, the idea became a revelation. He understood Josephine’s description of how a slightly altered chocolate—a touch of raw Mexican and some distinguished French—could be enriched by Irish butter—not American— maybe with a bit more sea salt, to such a degree that the customer would wish to buy a whole coffee cake after having just a bite from one slice.
When he got to the bakery, he looked back up the alley and saw a narrow, semi-destroyed village, mess scattered everywhere. Perhaps, he thought, like the rest of the world will be after global warming.
He entered Crusts of Bread & Such.
By nine a.m., Josephine’s suggestion had worked. They had put a loaf together as she had described it, tested and baked it. With a cup of coffee before each of them in the café itself, seated at the large main window in front, they sampled a slice without butter, and then one with. Both were superb, and each enhanced the coffee. As they shook hands across the table, Reggie congratulated Josephine. She had come into the café as a mere front-counter attendant some months ago and had voiced a wish to be trained as a baker. Reggie had promoted her after several requests and much insistence, and now realized what a mistake it would have been not to do so.
A few hours later, needing a breath of air, he stepped out into the alley. He leaned against the freshly dark-blue-painted wall of the building and grumbled as he noticed a message that had been scrawled upon it, apparently during the night before, which invited any passerby to fuck himself. Reggie would get one of the café guys out here to paint it over. But for the moment, he wished to enjoy one more slice of the loaf, which he brought from the pocket of his apron. No butter. Delicious. The sun had come up and, the disrepute of the alley and its citizens aside, he enjoyed the light.
Looking to his left, he saw Amy. A meter maid, she had been a regular on the alley for some months, having been acknowledged by several of the residents during her daily route through The Tenderloin. She had told Reggie that there was no sense in treating these people badly. “They’ve just been unfortunate, so many of them,” she had said. “You know, the drugs and all that.” About forty, she was very thin, with a grey complexion that bespoke some sort of sickness and sadness in her own life. When Reggie engaged her in conversation, she seemed reticent to speak with him. She never precisely mentioned it, but he suspected a difficulty in her life, maybe even some kind of rough disaster that had disabled for her the possibility of plain enjoyment.
Reggie always served her coffee and a pastry, for free whenever she came into the bakery. She would be in uniform: the dark blue somberness of the police presence, but without all the weaponry. So…no handgun. No handcuffs. A badge, yes. Sitting at the café counter, she would finger the pastry, occasionally picking it up as though she did not know what it was and was wary of it. She paid more attention to the mug of coffee, but even this was given little credit for improving her morning. Amy thanked Reggie every time, but could not get beyond the mono-syllabic responses that, for him, always distinguished her speech. Her cheeks sagged. She looked ill. Often, the pastry would be left behind, half-eaten, itself even more silent.
Until recently, when, Reggie noticed, she had begun wrapping the uneaten portion in a neat napkin and taking it with her.
Just now she was giving Abwan Jones a talk. Abwan was a ladder-tall black man, very friendly, who frequently backed up the singer whose recordings he was playing on his cellphone. (It still amazed Reggie that homeless people could afford cellphones…but so it was.)
Just this morning it was Marvin Gaye, his I heard it through the grapevine… ”’Oo-ooh, I bet you wondered how I knew….’” Abwan’s voice soared, interfering with Marvin’s. Amy stood before him, facing him, her arms to her sides. The ticket book was in her left hand, and she was smiling. Abwan’s eyes widened. “’’Bout your plans to make me blue.’”
He seemed actually to be flirting with Amy, and so, was doubly enjoying the lyrics. He wore a long, dark brown overcoat, a pair of jeans raggedy around the cuffs, a San Francisco Giants T-shirt, and a scuffed, black fedora. He had told Reggie he was forty; but in terms of the lines in his face, he looked fifty or more, and his face also sagged with downturned unhappiness except for when he was listening to his music. The most distinguishing detail of Abwan’s appearance was his cleanliness. Somewhere, he got a shower. Maybe every day.
“I’m a musician myself, man,” he had once told Reggie. “I had a career of my own goin’ for a while.” When they had first met, early one morning at sun-up a few months earlier, Abwan had asked Reggie what he was doing on the alley.
“I work at the bakery.”
“You the cook?”
“The baker, yes.”
Abwan offered a conciliatory nod. “You know Amy, don’t you? She gave me half of one of your cookies a while ago. Oatmeal.”
“Did you like it?”
“Man, it was…what you call…paradise?”
Abwan was not being intentionally rude to Amy just now. Reggie had noticed how they frequently spoke with one another. Abwan had a sense of humor, and he would kid Amy about her tickets. “Waste of time, Officer,” he would say. “Nobody here payin’ attention.” He would turn and laugh, joined by some of the others sitting on the sidewalk nearby. Amy seemed to understand Abwan’s gleefulness. She ventured another smile. She then advised a pair of tent dwellers that they couldn’t set up in the metered parking place in which the tent just now lay flat and unfolded. If the tent were indeed still there in an hour, and especially if it were set up, she would write them a ticket.
“Why?” the homeless woman asked as she gestured toward the other tents.
“Quality of life issue,” Amy said. Those tents were on the sidewalks, not in parking spaces. “And traffic safety.” She folded the ticket book shut and placed it in a back pocket. “It’s got to happen, Miss. We don’t want anybody to get run over.” Reggie knew that most of the tickets did get thrown away, and suspected that Amy knew that as well. But he also knew how the tent indeed would be moved. Most probably, he thought, because the officer had suggested personally that it be so, and with kindness. The intimacy of that kind of order face to face had more weight than did a mere government-issue form.
Reggie took another bite from the coffee cake and leaned back against the wall. He glanced up the alley. Abwan and Amy were both looking the other way, their backs to Reggie. He noticed the exchange of a green something from the meter maid to Abwan, which he secreted into a pocket. Money. She turned from him toward the bakery, and Reggie was able to look away an instant before he would come into the meter maid’s line of vision.
Later, Reggie was working the machine that made the super-thin croissant dough, and wondered how bakers had performed this task, those who had worked prior to the day on which this marvelous machine came to be. Josephine was working at a counter behind Reggie, her back to him, and as the machine wound up and down, back and forth spreading and flattening the dough thinner and thinner, he turned to address her.
“Amy was outside this morning,” he said.
“I saw her.” Josephine wore a white baker’s smock that now was smudged with dough and other ingredients. This one was missing a button in front and loosened at the collar.
Josephine had grown up in Bakersfield and was a big fan of Bakersfield’s own, Merle Haggard. She had mentioned the singer during her job interview, and Reggie had asked her about him.
Josephine said, “Listen, when you hear a lyric like ‘’Cause I’m always here at home ‘til closin’ time,’ you know you’ve got somethin’.” The day after he promoted her to assistant baker, Josephine brought her newlywed wife Lou Anne to the café. Unlike Josephine, whose hair was always a tight crewcut, Lou Anne’s flowed from her in dark cobalt tresses. She also wore make- up, applied with care and taste, while Josephine made only an occasional uncaring nod to fashion and her own considerable looks. The two women clearly cared for each other, although Lou Anne had once admitted to Reggie that she didn’t really listen much to country music. “I mean….” She glanced toward Josephine, taking her hand. “You know….”
“Who do you like?” Reggie said.
“Mozart!”
Both women laughed, embracing one another.
Reggie had described to Josephine how quickly Abwan had folded the bills from Amy and shoved them into his coat pocket.
“Amy buys drugs,” Josephine said.
“Drugs!” Reggie lifted a hand to the side of his head. “She’s a cop!” Chagrined, he rustled his hair.
“Yeah.” Josephine grinned. “And Abwan is a nice man!” She shook her head with slow thoughtfulness. “So what?” Wiping her hands with a wet towel, she leaned back against the counter. “I mean, even I buy from him.”
“You!”
Chagrined by her indiscretion, Josephine surrounded her hands in the towel once more, looking away. “Yeah…uh…a little apache now and then.” She tightened her lips. “It never hurt anybody.” She appeared to have taken fright, though, as though caught. “Does that bother you?”
“Uh….”
“You aren’t going to fire me, are you, Reggie?”
Reggie frowned. “Of course not. You’re responsible for that chocolate coffee cake.” He saw how worried Josephine had quickly become. ”Fire you!”
She lowered her head, staring at the floor. Her hands still wrung themselves within the towel.
“As long as, you know, you don’t do it here,” Reggie said. “And it doesn’t affect what you do when you are here.”
“I’m always on time, right?” Josephine grumbled.
“Yes, always.”
“Always alert?”
“Every minute of the day!”
She turned back to her own counter. “That’s the way I operate, Reggie. And that’s a deal. I guarantee it.”
Reggie demurred. He had told himself not to mind the drug sales in the alley. But in fact, he did mind. He didn’t know what personally had caused all these people to be cast out onto the streets. But he suspected that the fentanyl so released them from their opinions of themselves that getting back indoors became more and more a foolishness for them. Warmth! Comfort! Hey, man, we’re high!
He knew Josephine’s guarantee was real, though, and he accepted it.
A few days later, Abwan’s overcoat lay crumpled in an alley gutter, and the last anyone had seen of him was the evening before, when he had been accusing people of stealing his cell phone. One of the residents—Mel, who was white and bearded shaggy, an alcoholic Navy veteran who was more noted for the twice-daily bottle of Gallo red than for the filth of his USS Ronald Reagan baseball cap, who slept on the sidewalk outside the motorcycle repair garage up the alley—told of how Abwan had approached him and threatened him.
“You know, the guy wouldn’t listen!” Mel explained. “I mean, I like Abwan. But, man, he was bad yesterday!” Abwan had terrorized several others, and the conversation on the alley had to do with how that apache can make a monster out of you, man, even out of someone like Abwan Jones! His overcoat was all that was left of him the following morning.
Who seemed most affected by his disappearance was Amy. When she arrived later, her Go-For meter maid car parked at the head of the alley, she did not know of Abwan’s disappearance. But once she heard of it from several residents, she came into the bakery.
“Have you seen him?”
Reggie and Josephine had brought her a plate with some of the new chocolate coffee cake, heated, a thick smudge of fresh butter, and a brimming mug of extra-hot coffee, just the way Amy liked it.
“No,” Josephine said. “We were hoping you’d seen him.”
“Nowhere.” Amy chewed a moment on her lower lip, staring into the coffee. Her right hand on the counter was gathered into a gnarled-seeming fist. The feathery opening and shutting of the fingers indicated to Reggie the concern Amy had for Abwan. She played with the coffee cake and then, chagrined, turned away from it. Looking over her left shoulder, she appeared to be wishing that Reggie and Josephine weren’t there staring at her. She was crestfallen. “I don’t know where he is.”
After a bit more clumsy back-and-forth, Reggie and Josephine excused themselves. “Got to get back to work,” Reggie said. “If you see him….”
“Oh, I’ll let you know,” Amy said. She took a pen from the chest pocket of her uniform, asked Reggie for a piece of paper, and wrote on it. “This is my phone. A private number, so don’t give it to anybody, please.” She handed the note to Reggie. “And if you see him, call me.”
As she left the counter, Amy gestured toward Josephine. She wished to speak with her alone, outside, and Josephine whispered to Reggie that she’d be right back. “Something’s up,” she whispered. She headed for the door into the alley. Coming back fifteen minutes later, her demeanor had changed.
“What’s going on?” Reggie said.
“Can’t talk.”
“Come on, Josephine. What did Amy say?”
“No.”
The initial resentment of Abwan’s behavior among the alley dwellers changed to worry as, while the next days passed, he remained disappeared. Quiet—not the usual state of things on the alley—prevailed. Had Abwan been arrested? Was he dead? Reggie spoke a few more times with Amy, and with each conversation, her mood worsened. It was clear to Reggie that she feared the worst for Abwan, and Reggie supposed this was due to her knowledge that he was in the drug trade. Worker protection does not exist there, and Reggie feared that one day, Abwan’s twisted, broken body would wash up on some sidewalk, so that his singing would be just as gone as his cell phone.
And then one day, he did show up. But this was not the Abwan that everyone knew. For one, he clearly had not had a recent shower, so that his appearance more closely resembled that of the other residents. A cloth jacket had replaced his overcoat, and the fedora was gone. A cloth bag hung from his right shoulder. All was soiled, especially the run-down Nike running shoes that were the norm for Abwan. He had been able to keep them washed, reminding everyone that if shoes like this were good enough for all those Nigerian distance runners, “they fast enough for Abwan Jones.” The resultant laughter from the others ensured Abwan’s self-confidence. But now the shoes were stained with mud and detritus, as were the socks. He seemed not to care.
Reggie heard about his return to the alley from Mel. Early one morning, there was a disturbance outside the bakery. The alley suffered from frequent moments of turmoil, and they usually were settled within a few minutes, with occasional woundings, but more frequently slowly diminishing outrage muddled with profanities. This confrontation, though, seemed to be going on for longer than usual, until finally Mel opened the side door and leaned into the kitchen.
“Reggie! Can you help us?”
Reggie tossed aside the shaped clod of ancient grains dough, one of dozens of loaves he and the crew were preparing for baking. When he arrived outside, he could see the levels of concern on the faces of many of the residents, those especially who were looking up toward the far end of the alley. Amy was leaning back against her meter maid car, and Abwan was standing directly before her, berating her. His right arm was extended, the hand closed into a fist except for its index finger, which was pointed directly at the meter maid’s face.
“When you gonna leave me alone?”
“When you stop selling that apache…and especially when you stop doing the apache, Abwan.”
“I do what I want.”
“I know that. You’re killing yourself.”
“I am not. You’re thinking too much, Amy. You don’t know. How would you know?”
“Because I have eyes, Abwan. I can see.”
Abwan turned away from her and hurried his hands into his pants pockets. He took a few paces away from Amy, turned and took a few back toward her, and turned again.
“Go ahead! Be the actor, Abwan.” Amy was frightened, but it was clear that she would not be held back. “Academy Award!” She looked away a moment, and then turned toward him. “I quit, didn’t I?”
Abwan shrugged, his back still turned to Amy. “Yeah, yeah….”
“Why can’t you?”
“You shut up!”
“I did, Abwan!”
A confusion ran through the onlooking crowd. She quit? “I did! So, what are you gonna do?”
Abwan turned away, finally silenced. He spotted Reggie, who was standing with the crowd of witnesses. Abwan spit onto the alley road surface, and fled past Amy and the meter maid car, toward Van Ness Avenue.
Reggie was joined by Josephine, and they approached Amy who, although shaken, even terrified, was able to retain her composure. She leaned against the car, her head held low.
Josephine put her arms around Amy’s shoulders. “Come on, we’ve got coffee for you.”
“Leave me alone!”
“No, Amy. Forget the macho cop stuff. Just come in for a cup of coffee. We’ll take care of you.”
They passed back through the small crowd, and Amy actually got offerings of commiseration from a few of the homeless.
Abwan disappeared again, just as quickly, gone for five more days.
The coffee cake was as big a hit with the customers as Reggie had predicted. Whenever he received congratulations for it, he pointed out Josephine to the admirer. “It’s all hers. Just following her directions, that’s all I was doing.” He knew how much the accolades pleased her, and they had begun work on a new project, a kind of super-dark chocolate cookie in a combination much like that of the coffee cake, although improved upon by, well, Josephine.
One morning, the new counter-guy came into the kitchen…Jim, who had joined the bakery a few days before and was already being noted for his kind handling of customers. He was just twenty years old, yet reminded Reggie of old photos he had seen of 1960s hippies. His very long dusty hair surged from beneath a Leon Russell-style cowboy hat, the combination brightened by a pair of rimless, round John Lennon sunglasses.
“There’s an Indian guy out front. An old guy.” Jim wore a blue cotton work shirt and a tie-dyed sleeveless vest. “He wants to talk to you, Reggie.” He had attached a button to the vest that advised whoever was looking at it not to worry and to be happy.
Reggie glanced toward Josephine, who nodded. He wiped his hands clean. Coming out front, he saw the usual line at the cash register. A very dark man, clearly from the sub-continent—Indian, Pakistani or some such—sat at a table. He wore a white long sleeve shirt and dark slacks. About seventy-five, his still flourishing hair was straight and grey-black. He had not shaved in a few days, so that his whiskers looked like narrow snowflakes. His arms were crossed, and he appeared despondent, staring at his shoes. He wore thick glasses that sat at an angle upon his nose. Jim pointed him out.
“My name is Brajesh, Mr. Reggie.” He offered his hand as Reggie sat down. “I am from the Hotel William down Geary Street there.” He was a tall man with long arms. “One of our guests, he….” Brajesh tightened his lips and looked away. “A black man. He asked us to tell you…to tell you he is worried.”
“Abwan?”
“Yes. Abwan.” Brajesh folded his arms. “How did you know?” He looked down at the floor. “A Muslim name, no?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Yes, it is. I went to school with a boy named Abwan, before they moved to Pakistan.” Brajesh shook his head. “We were friends. But our fathers were not.”
“I see.”
“A sadness.”
“I imagine so.”
“But this Abwan lives in The William, and I am worried about him.” Brajesh reached into a shirt pocket and brought out a card. “I am the manager.”
Reggie examined the card. “Is he alright?” Receiving no reply, he noticed how Brajesh’s mouth resembled a worried-shut coin purse.
Brajesh searched for a reply. “No, he’s not well.”
“What’s wrong?”
“He will not come out of his room.”
“Does he say why?”
“No. And the first of the month came a few days ago.”
“Yes?”
“And…no rent.”
Reggie nodded. “I see.”
“Abwan always pays his rent…the first of the month. Every month, right as….” With sudden intensity, Brajesh smiled. “What do the English say? Right as— “
“Right as rain.”
“Yes.” Brajesh sighed and looked to the floor. “But this month? No. I went to ask him about it this morning, and he would not come out.”
“You talked with him?”
“Through the closed door, yes.”
“What did he say?”
Brajesh’s lips remained stiff. “I could not understand it.” He glanced out the café window onto Taylor Street and shrugged. “It was…nuts.”
“Nuts.”
“Yes. No sense.”
“He was raving?”
Brajesh’s shoulders sunk even more. “What is that? That word. I’ve forgotten it. ‘Raving?’”
“Shouting. Crazy.”
“Yes. Very crazy.”
Reggie excused himself and went to the kitchen, where he told Josephine what he knew. “I’ll be back in a couple minutes. Half an hour, maybe.” He put on his jacket.
“Should I call Amy?”
“No, not yet. Let me see what I can find out.”
He followed Brajesh up the stairs from the hotel lobby. The lobby was itself just an extension of the hallway leading from the front door. That door was locked and protected by an iron gate outside. The lobby had a linoleum floor, a card table and two wooden chairs. Brajesh went behind the counter and brought out a key ring. The keys rattled and tingled as he searched for one particular one.
“Come along, then.” He gestured toward a wooden stairway.
The hallway on the third floor was as lacking in decor as was the lobby. It was clean (as noted by Brajesh. “We have standards here, you know.”) but featureless. As they approached the door to room 311, Brajesh held an index finger to his lips.
Reggie heard rough footsteps against a bare linoleum floor. Silence. An outcry.
“You hear?” Brajesh whispered. “It has been this way for two days. He won’t come out.”
“And before that, what was it like when he did come out.”
“Confusion, Mr. Reggie! Anger.”
“Did he attack anyone?”
“Abwan? No.” Brajesh fingered the key. “But…sorrow.” He shook his head with slow commiseration. “Sadness.”
Reggie nodded and approached the door. “Abwan?” He knocked twice. But after a moment of silence, during which Abwan clearly was listening for more, the pacing returned. “Abwan, can we talk?” More pacing, and now a kind of loud muttering.
Reggie turned to Brajesh. “I see.”
“What shall I do?” Worry remained on Brajesh’s face. “Mr. Reggie?”
“Nothing, for the moment. But I know someone who knows Abwan. I’ll ask her.”
“Oh, thank you.” Brajesh shook his head, a despondent-seeming scowl on his lips. “He is a nice bloke, this Abwan. I have told him about my school chum.”
Reggie described for Josephine what he had witnessed. He needed advice. “Do we call Amy?”
There was no pause or hesitant worry. “Of course!”
“But she’s a cop!”
“So?”
“We don’t know what Abwan may have in his room.”
Josephine nodded. She understood. She didn’t care. “So what?”
“But, Josephine, she’s got the power of arrest.”
“And she’s a woman, Reggie.”
Reggie’s teeth ground together. He grumbled.
“I’ve watched her with Abwan,” Josephine said. “We talked about him.” Her eyes widened with commiserative assurance. “Let me talk to her. She and I speak…you know, the…the same—”
“Same language.”
“Yeah!” Josephine removed her baker’s jacket. Underneath, she was wearing a T-shirt that showed the faces of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and the rest of The Squad. “And I see that you have the capacity to, uh…” Looking down, she grinned. “…understand!” Reggie sensed that, although he may be getting it right in this particular instance, he would not get much else straight were he to sit in on intimate conversation about Abwan between Josephine and Amy. Reggie succumbed to Josephine’s smile.
A few hours later, Josephine placed her phone in a rear pants pocket. “She says she wants to see him.”
Reggie grimaced. “You don’t mean she goes up to his room in uniform. Her badge big as can be? ‘Let’s roll, guys!’?”
“I don’t know. But I think we better take her over there.”
The next evening, Reggie and Josephine sat with Brajesh at the lobby table. Josephine had brought a box of pastries…a carton that held two croissants, two oatmeal cookies, a couple of slices of lemon bread, and two blueberry muffins. The bakery also carried a few lines of jams, and Reggie had suggested the dark blue multi-berry jam that came from a Marin County vendor, his personal favorite of all the confections they offered. The box itself was a visual smile: white cardboard printed with multiple shapes and doodads in black, with the name “Crusts of Bread & Such” spilling diagonally, as though hand-written with a black crayon, across the closed top.
Amy was late. “A lot of tickets today, I guess,” Reggie worried.
“She’ll be here,” Josephine said.
“You talked to her?”
“This afternoon. Don’t worry.”
Brajesh, nervous, had been chewing on his thumb. “Our tenants do not like the police to be here.”
“It’s happened before?”
“Yes. Last year two of my guests…roommates…were arrested for heroin.” He looked away, toward the running board across the bottom of his office window. “Well, only one was arrested.” He sighed. “We don’t get much heroin here.” He ran his tongue over his lips.
“How did those guys get in?”
“They seemed nice. They were dressed. Young. They paid up front.” Brajesh sighed. “Gay boys.”
“But heroin?”
“Yes. An overdose.” Reggie let out a breath. “It was terrible, Mr. Reggie. So, the residents, they become nervous if a police chap shows up here.”
“She’s not a chap,” Josephine said.
“Yes, Miss. I know. But still….”
“Don’t worry. She told me about her plan. You’ll see.”
A few minutes later, the doorbell rang. The three looked toward Geary Street outside, and Brajesh stood and went to the office, to push the button that would allow the iron gate to open.
Amy surged into the lobby. Not in uniform. Reggie’s eyes widened. He felt they might make a noise doing so. “Amy!”
She was dressed in black, a silk dress, the top half embroidered with light grey sensuous roses. The dress’s skirt was expanded about the lower quarter with extra flourishes of silk embroidery. Her shoes, which resembled dance pumps, revealed lovely toes, their nails colored perhaps that very day, unlike what you would expect were you to see her only in her police officer boots. She had a small grey leather bag with a silver chain, and light, finessed eye makeup.
“How do I look, Josephine?”
Josephine sighed. She was flustered with surprise. “Just…well, fine!”
“You’re sure.”
“Believe me, I…I….”
“Where is he?”
They made their way up to Room 311. Josephine had handed Amy the box of pastries and described what was inside. As they approached the door, they heard Abwan’s ravings. They were louder now than they had been with Reggie’s visit the day before and less icily crazy. More spectral.
Amy looked to Josephine and Reggie for assurance, and cradled the box of pastries with her left arm. She took in a breath as she tried gathering herself. Josephine patted her on the shoulder and motioned to the others to step away from the door…indeed to retreat down the hallway toward the stairs. Once she was alone, Amy knocked on the door.
“Abwan?”
The raving ceased.
“It’s me, Amy. Will you let me in?”
Silence changed the atmosphere in the hallway, as did, after a moment, the voice behind the door.
“Amy?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Who sent you?”
“Nobody. I just came over to see you.”
More silence.
“Please, Abwan?”
The door opened. All Reggie could see was a hand and a bare forearm reaching out into the hallway. Amy took the hand into hers and entered the room.
There was no noise the entire night. Brajesh kept an eye on things until midnight, and was replaced by Reggie, who told Josephine when she arrived at three o’clock that he would be at the bakery. “Call me if anything happens.”
Reggie, working with the bakery crew, received no phone call from Josephine. No sense of alarm. Nothing, except for an email that said there was no raving from Abwan. Finally, she came into the kitchen at 7:30.
“Brajesh is there. He’ll call us if anything comes up. But mostly I’m concerned for Amy. There hasn’t been any noise at all from Abwan’s room. It just stopped, the moment she went in. He hasn’t…. You know, hasn’t….”
The side door to the kitchen opened, and Brajesh walked in. He was nervous.
“You had better come,” he said. Distracted, he turned back to the door, and was followed with hurried anxiety by Reggie and Josephine.
Josephine approached the door. The hallway was quiet , except for their careful footsteps. When they gathered outside Room 311, the only thing to be heard was breathing from each other. Josephine glanced toward the others, and then turned to the door and knocked.
For a moment, there was no sound. Then some footsteps, quiet, unhurried.
“Who is it?”
“Amy, it’s me. Josephine.”
“Oh!”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
They heard a few more steps back and forth, and some whisperings. Then the door latch being loosened and the turning of the doorknob. Amy, dressed as she had been the evening before, refreshed and smiling, came out, closing the door quietly behind her.
Reggie had not known what to expect. Her appearance the night before had shocked him, so that he now realized she had a far more complicated life than being just a cop. Her manner had been clarified. She had confidence in what she knew, and in what to do. Abwan’s retreat into quiet had come in the same moment he had opened the door of his room to her.
“He just needed some quiet, Josephine,” Amy said. The two women embraced.
Josephine took Amy’s hands into hers and examined them. “No. He needed you.” Her voice softened the moment so successfully that Reggie’s breathing itself eased.
Amy adjusted her hair. “Just leave him alone for now. He needs asleep.”
They descended the stairway and gathered in the lobby. The sidewalk outside was deserted. Sunlight emblazoned the street.
“Will he come out again?” Reggie said.
Amy looked away, out the front window of the hotel. Mel was walking past. Bent over slightly, he held his customary backpack, blotched with stain like so many of the tents on the alley, with his right hand, securing it to his back as he stumbled. Righting himself, he let out a angry vulgarity and proceeded on.
“No.”
Reggie looked to Josephine, who was also awaiting more explanation.
“Well…yes,” Amy said. She took Josephine’s hand. “He’s….” With her free hand, Amy fiddled with the latch of her purse. “He’s….”
Reggie and Josephine remained quiet. Brajesh as well.
“He’s coming with me.”
“You mean…” Reggie’s jaw tightened. “To jail?”
Amy inhaled and took Josephine’s hand more firmly. “No, Reggie.” She looked over her shoulder, up the stairs. “No.”
Copyright 2022. All rights reserved.
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This story was published originally in the Spring 2022 issue of Catamaran. It is one from my story collection San Francisco, available on order everywhere.
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