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The Angel of Montague Street Chapter One

The Montague was an old whore of a hotel; she stood on the corner of Henry and Montague Streets in Brooklyn, New York. She was a couple of decades past her prime when Silvano Iurata landed there in the fall of '73, but if you squinted your eyes hard enough to filter out the grime you could still see something of what she used to be when she was young and glorious, green marble columns in the lobby thirty feet high, floor-to-ceiling windows, ornate wainscoting, carved mahogany front desk, plaster lions molded into the ceiling, so far up you could barely make them out, up there snarling down at you in sooty malevolence. She was maybe eighteen stories high, the lower floors more desirable than the upper ones because only one of the three elevators worked. One of the other two was generally shut down for repairs and the third was broken and sealed off for good. In one corner of the lobby was a bar, a dimly lit room behind swinging doors that had the image of a piano frosted into the thick green glass.

Silvano flopped on an ancient couch and waited for the night manager to locate his paperwork. He glanced in the bar's direction but he had no real desire to go in; bars were not his thing, particularly when they were small, dank, and heavy with the smell of beer, urine, and unwashed bodies. He wasn't that thirsty, couldn't imagine being that thirsty. An old guy with a cracked leather face and a red potato nose watched him from the bar doorway, and after a while, his beverage in his hand, he made his way carefully over to where Silvano sat.

"Excuse me," he said, in that whispery voice guys get when their upper teethare gone. "I know you from someplace. Someplace overseas."

Oh, I hope not, Silvano thought, keeping his expression blank. He looked at the old boy's face, trying to picture what he might have looked like before time and bad habits had worked him over. "I don't think so," he said. "You don't look familiar."

"You sure? I was a news service photographer during the fifties and sixties. I worked the Middle East and North Africa. I swear I ran into you over there someplace."

Silvano shook his head, relieved. "Not me," he said, "late sixties, I was in Southeast Asia."

"Damn. I was so sure. Damn. Guy must've been your twin, then." He chuckled and drained off what was left in his glass. "Maybe you'll meet the guy some day. What did you do, in Southeast Asia."

"Worked for a messenger service."

"Ah," he said, looking down into his glass. "One of those guys. You with the Company?"

Silvano shook his head. "No. I was just an observer for the Defense Department."

"You don't look like an observer. You look more like a participant." He had a wry smile on his face. "Well, anyway," he said, rattling his ice cubes, "I need a refill. Come on in and join me sometime. I'll buy you a drink, we can talk about the bad old days."

"Yeah, sure."

Silvano shook his head as he watched the old boy make his way unsteadily back over where he'd come from. Funny, he thought, when you're young and you're spending it, you never think you're gonna get old and have to struggle to make the payments. You see some old bugger just hanging on, just trying not to die today, he looks like some kind of an alien creature, but he's you, brother, just as sure as thatlittle shit who went to high school was you, and you'll get there all too soon. He tried again to place the old man's face, going back in his mind, remembering, until he caught himself at it and pulled back. Bad neighborhood, he told himself, you can't afford to hang out there. You got to stay in the now.

Easier said than done, though. He kept waiting for things to be different, but he kept winding up in the Hotel Montague or someplace like her, back in the arms of some old blowser who would give him shelter for a while. Someone had once said, he couldn't remember who, that home is where you can go, and they have to let you in. Maybe that's what kept him where he was, or maybe he was supposed to learn something, maybe he was supposed to have some sort of an incremental awakening before he could go on to the next level. But whatever the reason, he always felt more comfortable in the low-rent joints, where you didn't need to worry if your shirt or your haircut or your politics were right, if you had the price of a round they'd be glad to see you no matter how you looked or how badly you'd treated them the last time out, and they'd say, welcome back, sonny, have a seat, tell us where you been this long time.

There was still a lot of old fleabags like the Hotel Montague in that part of Brooklyn, from the Brooklyn Bridge stretching south and west along the waterfront past the Port Authority docks. The Hotel Montague was about the best of the bunch, at the time. Some of the others were pretty bad, like the Lady Margaret or the Stanford. With those two, it was only a question of whether they burned down before they fell down, or vice versa. The Castle Arms was another one, big squarebrickbuilding with a parapet on each corner. It was not a bad place, relatively clean, still had some normal people in it. It had a big empty room on the first floor that had once been a restaurant, and a huge ballroom one floor down ...

The Angel of Montague Street. Copyright ? by Norman Green. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.