Midnight Club Read Free

him; who had stubbornly trailed him for two years.
    The apartment building in front of which St.-Germain finally parked seemed all wrong. It was faded red brick, rising maybe nineteen or twenty stories. It was the kind of place where mothers on the high floors throw change wrapped in tinfoil down to their kids for ice cream.
    The Grave Dancer followed a black woman inside the apartment building, some kind of nurse from the look of the white spongies and stockings showing below her cloth coat.
    The hallway of the floor where he got off the elevator was like all the others in the building. The night’s stale cooking smells. A clicking in the heating system. Pale blue walls; a worn blue and black hallway runner.
    Alexandre St.-Germain rang the bell for 9B. He rang the doorbell insistently, seven times.
    Finally, a woman’s voice came from inside, sounding very hollow and distant.
    “I’ll be right there. I’m coming. Who is it?”
    The dark blue door for 9B swung open. The look on Anna Stefanovitch’s face instantly revealed her lack of comprehension.
    “Something happened to Stef,” she said. A statement of fact, not a question.
    “Yes. And now something is happening to you.”
    There was no pain. Anna definitely heard the hollow, muffled shotgun blast from less than three feet away. She saw the bright streak of light illuminate the hallway, a little like a photographer’s flash camera going off. Anna Stefanovitch was dead before she hit the floor inside the foyer.
    Alexandre St.-Germain, the Grave Dancer, left the apartment building as confidently as he had arrived.

7
    Isiah Parker; 125th Street, June 1988
    THE ORANGE JULIUS stand tucked on the corner of 125th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard had at least one advantage over many of the other stores in the area—an open, lively view onto the street. A view of the changing, or rather, the decaying neighborhood: the sealed-off and abandoned buildings, like Blumstein’s, Harlem’s last department store, and the Loews Victoria, both shut down now. The Hotel Teresa, where Fidel Castro had once stayed while visiting New York, now an office building. The Apollo—where Basie, and Bessie Smith, Bill Eckstein and Ellington had played—closed, and now opened up again. Who knew for how long?
    Isiah Parker stood behind the brightly colored counter of the Orange Julius stand. He was dutifully wiping it down, while he watched the fascinating panorama of 125th Street stretch out before him. He had the thought that squalor and misery had never been so interesting; he had no idea why that was so.
    He heard his name being called by the juice-stand boss. “Hey, man, you deaf or what? Two fucking banana Julius, man.”
    Isiah Parker wasn’t deaf. As far as his hearing went, he was discovering lately that he had rabbit ears. He was like the professional athletes whose hearing seemed to magnify personal insults and jeers from the grandstands. Parker thought briefly about making an Orange Julius concoction out of the juice-stand boss’s face. He thought better of it, for the moment, anyway.
    “Yes sir, two Julies on the way,” he muttered in a low growl directed at the boss.
    “Two banana Julius.”
    “Yes sir, two banana Julies coming up.”
    All this time, he had kept his attention beaconed out onto the street. Specifically, he was watching the crumbling over-pass that supported the ancient New York Central Railroad tracks.
    He’d been waiting almost a week for this very moment… and now he wasn’t sure what to look for. So he watched real closely, while he fixed the Julies: crushed ice, fresh banana, special sugary powder from the parent company, godawful sweet-and-sour taste, in his opinion.
    Then suddenly, Isiah Parker was sure what he was watching. The two dealers got sloppy, and he saw the exchange. He saw the briefest flash of dollar green out on the street.
    “Hey you, Parker. Parker! ” he heard once again.
    “Hey you, man,” Parker talked back. “You