Chapter 1: Cash, First and Last
The boiler dies at 1:47 a.m. on the coldest night of February. You know the exact minute because you're awake at the kitchen table doing the quarterly taxes, and the radiator under the window stops ticking halfway through a clank, like it heard something it doesn't want to repeat.
You give it a minute. The Calloway is a ninety-year-old walk-up on the wrong end of Gilmore Street, four floors and eight units and one ground-floor bookshop, and its radiators have moods. Sometimes they come back on their own.
This one doesn't.
"No," you tell it. "Not tonight. I have receipts in three different shoeboxes."
You pull your grandmother's old wool coat on over your pajamas, dig the flashlight out of the drawer with the takeout menus and the spare keys, and go down. Past 3A, where Mr. Okafor's television is still murmuring a baking competition. Past 2B and the Delgados' bikes chained to the banister. Past the ground floor, where your shop sits dark behind its security grille, the gold letters on the window reading HOLLIS BOOKS backwards from inside.
The basement door is already open.
There's a light on down there. There's the clank of a wrench, and somebody swearing at a pressure valve, quietly and with a level of creativity you have to respect.
You stop on the third step.
Your tenant from 4B is lying half under the boiler on a flattened cardboard box, which is the box your last shipment of Agatha Christie paperbacks came in. He's wearing a headlamp. His brown leather jacket is folded neatly on top of the water heater, like he's at a dinner party and that's the coat rack.
"It's the low-water cutoff," he says, without sliding out. "Somebody's been letting sediment build up in it for about a decade. It trips, the burner shuts off. Give me twenty minutes."
"Hi," you say. "It's two in the morning."
"Yeah. That's why the boiler picked it. They're spiteful like that."
He pushes himself out from under the tank and sits up, and the headlamp blinds you for one full second before he clicks it off. Then it's just him, in the light of the single bulb that hangs over the laundry sink. It still takes a moment to recalibrate how much space he takes up. He's broad through the shoulders in a way that makes the basement look like it was built for a smaller species. Black hair, cut short at the sides, with a streak of white at the front that he definitely doesn't bleach because nobody who bleaches their hair lets the roots go like that. A thin pale scar along the jaw. Eyes that are blue in some lights and a strange, shallow green in others, like pond water with the sun behind it.
Right now, they're green, and they're looking at your pajama pants.
"Nice lighthouses," he says.
"They were a gift."
"From who?"
"Me. I'm very thoughtful."
The corner of his mouth goes up. It's not quite a smile. You've never seen a full one on him. He takes your flashlight, hands you his headlamp in a trade you don't understand, and lies back down under your boiler.
"Point that at the gauge," he says. "The round thing. No, the other round thing."
You point it at the other round thing.
Here is what you know about Jason Todd, tenant, 4B.
He answered your listing in November. He showed up for the viewing in that same leather jacket and walked through the apartment like he was checking it for exits, which, in this neighborhood, fair. He asked one question about the unit, which was whether the window in the bedroom opened all the way. Then he asked whether the shop downstairs sold used Vonnegut.
You said yes. He went downstairs and bought four.
He paid first month, last month and security deposit in cash. Twenties, rubber-banded, smelling faintly of motor oil and rain. On the application, under Previous Landlord, he wrote: Dead. Under Employer, he wrote: Self. Under Emergency Contact, he wrote nothing at all, and when you pointed at the blank space he looked at it for a long moment and then wrote, in small blocky capitals, ALFRED, and a phone number you have never once called.
You rented to him anyway. You're not proud of the reasoning. It came down to the Vonnegut, and to the fact that when the old pine shelf by the shop door finally gave up and started to tip, he caught it one-handed without looking and set it upright again and said, "You need a bracket on that," and the next Saturday there was a bracket on it.
Since then, he has paid on the first of every month, in cash, in an envelope slid under your door with 4B written on it. He fixed the sticking window in Mrs. Ocampo's kitchen before she even complained to you about it. He carried Mr. Okafor's air conditioner up three flights in September without being asked. He reads in the poetry corner of your shop on Sunday afternoons, standing up, always standing, with his back to the bookcase and a clear view of the door.
And twice a week, give or take, he comes home bleeding.
You know because you're the one who mops the stairs.
It started small. A few dark drops on the landing between three and four. A smear on the banister. A thumbprint on the light switch by the front door, brown-red and perfectly whorled, like the building had been fingerprinted. Then a trail all the way up from the back door. You bought a second mop, and you made a decision.
You have rules, as a landlord. Your grandmother Ilse kept this building through three recessions, the Falcone years, two gang wars and a man who tried to pay his rent in stolen fur coats, and she had rules, and she wrote them on an index card that is still taped inside the cabinet over your sink. Rent on the first. No grills on the fire escape. Don't lend money to anyone who calls you sweetheart.
And the one at the bottom, underlined twice: In Gotham, don't ask about the neighbors. You'll get answers.
So you don't ask. You mop. You leave a box of large bandages on the shelf by the mailboxes, unlabeled, and every couple of weeks it's empty and you replace it, and neither of you has ever said a word.
Under the boiler, something clanks hard and Jason says a word that would make Mrs. Ocampo cross herself.
"Is that the good kind of clank?"
"There's no good kind of clank." Another one. Then a long, mechanical sigh from deep in the tank, and a whoomp you feel in your shins as the burner catches. Orange light flares in the little window. Above you, all the way up the building, the pipes start to knock, one radiator after another waking up and complaining about it.
"Okay," he says. "That's the good kind."
He slides out and sits up and wipes his hands on a rag, and that's when you see his forearm.
He's pushed his sleeves up to work. There's a long gash running from just below his left elbow almost to his wrist, shallow but ugly, and it's been closed with what looks like black electrical tape wound around and around. The tape has slipped while he worked. Something dark and fresh is seeping out from under the edge of it and running in a slow line toward his palm.
He sees you see it.
The basement goes very quiet, apart from the boiler, which is now humming along like it never did anything wrong in its life.
You could ask. It's right there. The question is practically sitting on the laundry sink, waiting. He's watching you the way he watched the apartment the first day, like he's counting exits, except you get the strange feeling he's not looking for a way out. He's waiting to see which way you go.
"You're dripping on my Agatha Christie box," you say.
He glances down. There's a dark coin of blood on the cardboard, right on top of the words FRAGILE: BOOKS.
"Sorry," he says.
"There's a first aid kit at the top of the basement stairs. In the gray cabinet. It has butterfly closures, which are a lot better than whatever you've got going on there." You hand him back his headlamp. "I'm going to go upstairs now and not have seen anything, because it's two in the morning and I'm a very deep sleeper."
He looks at you for a long moment. Then the not-quite-smile comes back, and this time it gets most of the way there.
"You were doing your taxes," he says.
You stop with your foot on the bottom step. "How do you know that?"
"Your kitchen light's on." He shrugs, one shoulder, and folds the bloody rag over on itself. "It's always on late around the fifteenth. You sigh a lot. The vent in my bathroom connects to yours."
You think about all the things you have said out loud in your bathroom, alone, over three months. Your whole face goes hot in the cold basement.
"Goodnight, Mr. Todd."
"Jason," he says. "You call Okafor Emmanuel."
"Mr. Okafor brings me jollof rice."
"I fixed your boiler."
"You fixed my boiler at two in the morning while bleeding into a box of murder mysteries. That's not the same as rice."
He laughs, and it's short and surprised and a little rough, like he doesn't use it much. You go up the stairs before your face can do anything else.
The next morning there's no blood on the stairs. The gray cabinet is open, and the box of butterfly closures is gone, and in its place, propped on the shelf, is a twenty-dollar bill folded into a neat little square.
You leave it there out of principle. By lunch it has been tucked under the shop's door with the word RENT? on it in blocky capitals, and you laugh out loud at the register.
That afternoon, a different man comes in.
He's wearing a camel coat that cost more than your monthly mortgage and shoes that have never touched a puddle. He doesn't look at the books. He looks at the ceiling, the moldings, the old tin tiles your grandfather put up in 1962, the way people look at a house they've already bought in their head.
"Beautiful bones," he says. "You're the owner? Of the building, I mean."
"I'm the owner of everything you can see and the boiler you can't."
He smiles and slides a card across your counter. It's heavy stock, matte black, with silver lettering: GILMORE REVITALIZATION PARTNERS. A phone number. No name.
"We're consolidating the block," he says. "Long-term vision. We'd be prepared to offer well above market, and I mean well above. Cash, fast close, we handle the tenants." He says handle the tenants like it's a little paperwork thing. "Think about it."
"I've thought about it. No."
The smile doesn't move. "You might want to think a little longer. Gilmore Street is going to have a difficult spring, from what I hear. A lot less safe. A person might want to be somewhere nicer by then."
He taps the card once and leaves.
You're still staring at the card when the bell goes again, an hour later, and Jason comes in with a coffee in each hand. He's never brought you coffee. He sets one down on the counter, a little too carefully, like it might go off.
"Dark roast," he says. "You looked like a dark roast person."
"What does a dark roast person look like?"
"Tired and mean." He's already looking past you, at the counter, at the black card lying next to the register. Something happens to his face. It doesn't change, exactly. It just goes completely still, the way the boiler went still last night, all the warmth cut off at once.
He picks the card up between two fingers.
"Who gave you this?"
"A man in a very nice coat who thinks my building is a value-add opportunity." You watch him turn the card over. There's nothing on the back. He looks at it anyway, for a long time. "He said Gilmore Street was going to have a difficult spring."
"Did he." It isn't a question.
"Jason. What's wrong?"
He tucks the card into the inside pocket of his jacket. When he looks back at you, the warmth comes back on, slowly, like he's turning it up by hand.
"Don't call that number," he says. "If he comes back, don't let him upstairs. Okay?"
You think about your grandmother's index card. Don't ask about the neighbors.
"Okay," you say.
That night, for the first time in three months, Jason doesn't come home bleeding.
He doesn't come home at all.
You know because you're up until four, not doing taxes, listening for his tread on the stairs. At 4:12, Channel 6 cuts into the overnight infomercials to report a fire at a warehouse on the Gotham River, owned by a company nobody's heard of, which is owned by another company nobody's heard of. No injuries. A dockworker tells the reporter he saw a man in a red helmet walking away from the building while it burned, hands in his jacket pockets, not running.
"Like he was out for a stroll," the dockworker says. "Like he had somewhere to be in the morning."
At 6:30, the boiler clanks on for the day. And on the stairs outside your door, going up, slow and easy, somebody is whistling.