The Biology of Luck by Jacob M. Appel Page A

rifles, load them onto state-of-the-art personnel transports and deposit them within hours in the mudflats off the Guatemalan coast or Havana harbor. He can wipe clean your record as a pedophile, get you elected to the legislature, have your political opponents’ families dismembered with machetes. If you have the money, if you have the need, if your personal welfare depends upon securing a year’s supply of napalm or nude photographsof the Queen of England or fucking identical twins simultaneously, if your fetish is panda fur or celebrities’ tampons, if your talisman is World Series rings or severed human tongues, if you crave early Christian relics or your employer’s wife or a particular print at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bone can make it happen. That, at least, is the word on the street.
    To the tenants of number 72, the enigma of Bone offers a perennial motif for gossip and idle speculation. Rumor holds him to be the illegitimate son of the Lucchese family don, also a disinherited heir to the Walker cosmetics fortune, even the scion of a long line of distinguished Yemeni rabbis. He speaks English with a French accent; his French stops and starts with the glottal punctuation of a German. Nobody knows his origins, his history, the source of his thick roll of bills or the cause of his disfiguring wound, whether he really fought beside Che in Bolivia or against Che in the Sierra Madre or helped the CIA destabilize Iran in 1955. Nobody even knows if Bone is his first name or his surname or possibly a cognominal homage to his lack of flesh. All that is certain is that the one-armed super will move your automobile to the ebb and flow of alternate-side parking for a modest fee, and that your daily existence will prove much more pleasant if he likes you. Unless, of course, he likes you more than you like him, which is why Starshine takes pains to avoid his presence.
    She chains her bike down the block and attempts to sneak past Bone at a brisk pace. The Dominican Jesus freak and his pregnant sister-in-law are lounging on the stoop, sharing segments of a diced mango, jabbering away in Spanish. The Jesus freak’s name is actually Jesus. Jesus Echegaray. He works the Transit Authority night shift. She has given up saying hello to him. Sharshine’s key is already in the lock when she can sense the super’s gaze upon her, only one eye raised like a pirate, its intensity stronger than the shock of a taser.
    â€œThree-J,” Bone calls out.
    The turnover is too rapid for the super to learn his tenants’ names, even if they catch the fancy of Mr. Little Bone, so he reliesupon apartment numbers. To Starshine, the bark of “3-J” is never good news. She stops dead in her tracks.
    Bone levers himself out of his chair and approaches her slowly, measuring each step as though it were a precious spice. His gait heralds his power, his placidity. Bone has all of the time in the world.
    â€œBedsprings,” he says.
    â€œExcuse me?”
    â€œBedsprings,” he repeats. “At night, you make this noise with the bedsprings. The neighbors complain.”
    Bone raises and lowers his hand, palm down, in an effort to mime the compression of bedsprings. His lips form a thin, dark gash. It is impossible to decipher his intentions: Is this a come-on? A warning? Starshine is fairly confident that it is not a joke. The one-armed super is decidedly above humor.
    â€œI’m sorry,” stammers Starshine. “I’ll be more careful.”
    â€œYou’ll be more careful,” agrees Bone. “The neighbors complain.”
    Starshine is too uncomfortable with the subject, with the super, to pursue the matter further. But it makes her blood boil. Here these people are operating an illegal poultry farm outside her windows, papering the second floor landing with posters of their so-called savior and the Virgin Mary, discarding their cigarette butts and fast-food wrapping on the stoop,