disadvantage, his first mistake.
Stupid, he berated himself, you can't be so stupid and expect to survive.
4
It was a good hiding place but she hadn't slept well. Every hour or so she woke as a siren flew by, or someone hollered murderously in the street below, and she found herself hotly disoriented all over again, not sure whether to hang her head out the window and look down or wait soundlessly where she lay. Who would know about the building? A few people. But who would know
she
knew about this building? No one. No one in the world should know, Jin Li told herself. So why am I so nervous?
The night was warm, and thus the five-story building, one of a series of former factories on West Nineteenth Street, had become aromatized by the humidified essences of mold, dust, dead flies, cardboard, and dry-rotting wood—seemingly the layered odor of time itself expiring without end. The structure and six just like it had been built in the early part of the twentieth century; successive waves of real estate speculation had passed through and around these buildings, converting most to loft apartments, offices, showrooms, fancy restaurants that invariably failed, and the like. But a few remained unrenovated, and the reasons usually had to do with structural damage to the building, either from fire or water or, more often, because the building itself was a neglected holding long entangled in a lawsuit, estate matter, or family dispute.
Alone among the seven factories was the building where Jin Li sat up now in the half dawn, thinking she'd heard something. This building was notable for the implausibility of its continued existence;the place should have collapsed long ago. Why? All five floors were crammed with heavy useless matter, the crème de la crème of junk. The top floor was filled with claw-footed iron bathtubs and pedestal sinks, many of them tagged with information explaining their origin: "Hotel Edison, 1967 renovation," and so on. The fourth floor contained engine parts not only from vintage American cars and trucks of the 1930s, '40s, '50s, and '60s but, even more obscurely, utterly impossible-to-find motorcycles from early German, French, Italian, and British companies long defunct. The weight of these parts alone should have compromised the floor joists decades earlier. On the third floor could be found close to two million pairs of women's nylon stockings, still boxed, ranging in size from "petite" to "queen." The freight elevator was forever frozen on this floor, its bearings finally burnt out. Just to empty the building, either for demolition or renovation, would have required the replacement of the elevator, a considerable and demoralizing expense. Moving downward, the second floor contained thousands of boxes marked "Property of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development/New York City Regional Offices." These lost records documented the marginally successful attempt by the federal government to house hundreds of thousands of low-income residents in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx during the economic downturn of the early 1970s. And finally, the ground floor was piled with spools of obsolete fiber-optic cable, bought when the city was rewiring itself in the speculative fever dream of the 1990s.
From time to time people asked about renting cheap office space in the building and these inquiries were fielded by the custodian, a Russian man with strange, faded Cyrillic tattoos on his knuckles who did little more than sweep up the sidewalk once a week and remove flyers advertising art-house movies and new rock bands. He handed the prospective renters copies of the keys to the steel door to the building, told them to use the stairwell, and to go in the middle of the day for the power was off and no lights worked. "And please you drop key in mailbox." But whether the key was returned was a matter of character—as was whether the Russian custodian noticed. He generally didn't, for he noticed very little
Stupid, he berated himself, you can't be so stupid and expect to survive.
4
It was a good hiding place but she hadn't slept well. Every hour or so she woke as a siren flew by, or someone hollered murderously in the street below, and she found herself hotly disoriented all over again, not sure whether to hang her head out the window and look down or wait soundlessly where she lay. Who would know about the building? A few people. But who would know
she
knew about this building? No one. No one in the world should know, Jin Li told herself. So why am I so nervous?
The night was warm, and thus the five-story building, one of a series of former factories on West Nineteenth Street, had become aromatized by the humidified essences of mold, dust, dead flies, cardboard, and dry-rotting wood—seemingly the layered odor of time itself expiring without end. The structure and six just like it had been built in the early part of the twentieth century; successive waves of real estate speculation had passed through and around these buildings, converting most to loft apartments, offices, showrooms, fancy restaurants that invariably failed, and the like. But a few remained unrenovated, and the reasons usually had to do with structural damage to the building, either from fire or water or, more often, because the building itself was a neglected holding long entangled in a lawsuit, estate matter, or family dispute.
Alone among the seven factories was the building where Jin Li sat up now in the half dawn, thinking she'd heard something. This building was notable for the implausibility of its continued existence;the place should have collapsed long ago. Why? All five floors were crammed with heavy useless matter, the crème de la crème of junk. The top floor was filled with claw-footed iron bathtubs and pedestal sinks, many of them tagged with information explaining their origin: "Hotel Edison, 1967 renovation," and so on. The fourth floor contained engine parts not only from vintage American cars and trucks of the 1930s, '40s, '50s, and '60s but, even more obscurely, utterly impossible-to-find motorcycles from early German, French, Italian, and British companies long defunct. The weight of these parts alone should have compromised the floor joists decades earlier. On the third floor could be found close to two million pairs of women's nylon stockings, still boxed, ranging in size from "petite" to "queen." The freight elevator was forever frozen on this floor, its bearings finally burnt out. Just to empty the building, either for demolition or renovation, would have required the replacement of the elevator, a considerable and demoralizing expense. Moving downward, the second floor contained thousands of boxes marked "Property of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development/New York City Regional Offices." These lost records documented the marginally successful attempt by the federal government to house hundreds of thousands of low-income residents in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx during the economic downturn of the early 1970s. And finally, the ground floor was piled with spools of obsolete fiber-optic cable, bought when the city was rewiring itself in the speculative fever dream of the 1990s.
From time to time people asked about renting cheap office space in the building and these inquiries were fielded by the custodian, a Russian man with strange, faded Cyrillic tattoos on his knuckles who did little more than sweep up the sidewalk once a week and remove flyers advertising art-house movies and new rock bands. He handed the prospective renters copies of the keys to the steel door to the building, told them to use the stairwell, and to go in the middle of the day for the power was off and no lights worked. "And please you drop key in mailbox." But whether the key was returned was a matter of character—as was whether the Russian custodian noticed. He generally didn't, for he noticed very little
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