White Lead: A Novel of Suspense by Susan Daitch

Author:Susan Daitch [Daitch, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-11-14T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

Out on the street, I called Demetrius. I wasn’t sure he was still talking to me, but he sounded both anxious and relieved that I’d called and asked me to meet him straightaway in front of a warehouse under the Gowanus Expressway, just beyond Green-Wood Cemetery. He was going to get me something I very much needed before I spoke to anyone else.

Knox Barkley’s studio, if you could call it that, wasn’t under the Gowanus Expressway. Nothing much is except for strings of parked cars and vans. The address, just west of the overpass, was next to a halal butcher, and you could hear chickens and goats squawking and bleating their last. Inside, there were stacks of radios, blenders, toaster ovens, as if all the business conducted within was nothing more than the repair of small appliances, another obsolete profession.

Knox was a wiry little man with long, hippie-style gray hair, ink-stained hands, a green visor perched on his head, and a voice like Peter Lorre’s. Also, he wore sleeve protectors on his arms. Apart from Jimi Hendrix blasting, music that he said covered the sounds of the poor animals next door, Barkley could have stepped out of a 1940s movie about a newspaper office. Marnie, who loved screwball comedies, would have taken one look at him and broken into snappy dialogue full of Marx Brothers lines.

“I’m not supposed to be doing this line of work anymore, Demetrius.” Knox was clearly not happy to see Demetrius. He stood arm’s length from a counter that was a hinged affair made up of dirty wood and glittery cracked Formica.

“That’s true, but you are.”

“How’s your suspension going?”

So people in Demetrius’s circle, whatever that might be, knew. And, apart from the story about living next to a petting zoo in the Bronx, I didn’t know very much about him and needed to trust him.

“My friend here needs to disappear, to become someone else for a while.”

“Don’t we all.” Knox tried an existential argument.

“As long as it’s not money you’re manufacturing, I can pretend we were never here.” Demetrius could be very persuasive. I could tell that Barkley didn’t want to do the job but would give in. “And”—Demetrius wasn’t done—“you’re going to do this one gratis. You owe me.”

“Okay, okay. Easy-peasy.” Whatever it was that Demetrius reminded Knox Barkley about, he seemed more amenable to cooperation, but not before a look of panic gave way to the resignation of someone who has no choice and he knows it.

Barkley danced from the counter to the back in time with “Purple Haze,” then returned with a box-camera setup to take my picture. Knox was a forger of papers who was going to make me a new passport and driver’s license. He was also a vegetarian and a gun salesman who offered to sell Demetrius a Smith & Wesson from his car-trunk inventory. My new name was to be Star Hammersmith.

“That sounds like a stripper name,” I said.

“Star was an actual person; I don’t make people up. That’s for amateurs.

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