Time's a Thief by B.G. Firmani

Author:B.G. Firmani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

14

“Stupid girl,” Clarice said to me when I told her that Jerry had come for his flute. “That was a sterling silver Muramatsu. It cost eight thousand dollars.”

All I could say was, “What?”

I didn’t know things could cost that much. I mean, my flute, back in the day, had been a student Gemeinhardt that seemed mad expensive at $200 used. When I gave it up because of my utter lack of skill, my mother was all long faces at me for weeks, as much as for my dearth of stick-to-itiveness as for the amount of money she had wasted on my fickle musical ambitions.

I was so hurt by Clarice’s words and felt such a wretch that all I could do was hang my head.

“But how would you know?” she said. “No one ever told you the boy wasn’t to be trusted.” She touched her hands to her cheeks as if to express a sudden idea. It struck me as rehearsed—an actress summoning up a housewife’s eureka moment.

“You’ll just have to go and get it back,” she said.

“I what?” I said.

“Just pay him a visit.”

“Do you even know where he is?”

“I’m sure Cornelia has the address,” she said.

“I feel very awkward about this,” I said.

“There’s no reason to,” she said with a sunny finality that made my heart sink.

And so a week after Jerry’s visit, despite my many protestations, despite the sense that I was on a fool’s errand—despite, stronger than these, my still being so furious with Jerry for thinking I was some double agent that I only wanted to slap his smug face—I found myself way east on Fifth Street, yelling up at a squat from the middle of the street.

The building was a battle-weary old tenement with mountains of rubble piled up against it. Instead of a door, a sort of reinforced wood pallet covered its entrance. Its first-floor windows were cinder-blocked up and all the other windows were dark above them, most of them broken and taped up with plastic. There was of course no frivolous nicety such as a doorbell.

I am no kind of outdoor yeller unless angry or surprised by a truck backing into me, but I tried a few weak little exclamations of Jerry! My words barely rose in the air before evaporating into the slumbering dusk. Still I stood gazing up at the dark windows. No one stuck a head out.

In fact I knew this block well, because the bar Sophie’s was at the far end, a few doors in from a bunkerlike Con Ed station, in front of which no end of lost souls could be found, in even the coldest weather, doing the heroin nod. Earlier that summer I’d been at Sophie’s with Trina when, because of the hot dry air, my rigid-as-a-Pringle contact lens suddenly popped out of my eye and flew behind the bar. Of course I had only one pair of contact lenses, which I took great poor-person’s care of, so when the bartender saw us freaking out

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