LITMIR.BIZ

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focused on the kid with the box cutter.

      It was one thing to have those now-dead fools chase him and take potshots. It was another for his role in a deadly shoot-out washed clean off the books. That Latino cop would definitely remember his face. Would someone connect the incident at the fight club to this shoot-out?

      D sat back on his sofa and took stock of his life. He hadn’t lived in Brooklyn for decades and certainly never expected to again after he’d left like Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, Alfred Kazin in A Walker in the City, and thousands of other Brooklynites who’d crossed the East River to make their mark. Brooklyn was a place of your roots but not your future, unless you planned on being a cop, crook, civil servant, or candy store owner. Brooklyn had been a place to visit, Manhattan a place to thrive.

      But all that had been turned upside down. Post–9/11 Fort Greene, once a site of brownstone house parties, Spike Lee joints, and butter wavy bohemian girls, was now a leafy adjunct to Manhattan—and Clinton Hill was close behind. Do-or-die Bed-Stuy, while still having deep pockets of both black ownership and poverty, was full of white pioneers getting off the C and A trains after work.

      Even in the Ville, the never-ran-and-never-will land of D’s youth, there were signs of protogentrification amid the microgangs and stop-and-frisk-obsessed cops. It would be a long time before his beloved (and detested) Brownsville would see serious change, but a lot of locals saw stop-and-frisk as an urban pacification tactic, and D, who knew more about plots against black people than he’d like to, couldn’t totally dismiss the paranoia. Why else would that AKBK Realty office be situated on dark, deserted Livonia Avenue?

      D had looked for a place in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, but couldn’t find anything affordable. Through the manager of a rap group D got a line on a reasonable rental apartment in Prospect Heights, a relatively small patch of real estate surrounded by Bedford-Stuyvesant, Clinton Hill, Park Slope, and Crown Heights. His place was just off Washington Avenue, a few blocks down from Eastern Parkway and three of the borough’s cultural touchstones—the Brooklyn Museum, the Botanic Garden, and Prospect Park. On the northwest edge of Prospect Park, next to Flatbush, was a faux version of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe that D always thought was kinda weak after seeing the real thing a few years back.

      In the opposite direction, going east on Eastern Parkway, was Franklin Avenue, which used to be the gateway to Crown Heights but was now home to a mini-Williamsburg with hipster bars, artisanal restaurants, and gourmet grocery stores. These days, if you walked across Eastern Parkway going south you’d be in another world. Hunkered down on the north side of the parkway was a deeply entrenched Hassidic community, folks who hadn’t left when all the other white people in that section of Brooklyn had fled and were still here now when a new wave of white folks were arriving.

      The Hassidim had survived the blackout of ’77, the primal racial violence that followed the killing of the black child Gavin Cato by a Jewish man driving a station wagon in ’91, and various small-scale confrontations with police, hipsters, and real estate developers. Despite being perpetrators of racial profiling years before the term had been invented, D respected the Hassidim, viewing them as one of the city’s renegade posses, who looked upon everyone else in the city with a wary skepticism. Vigilantism in defense of your property was, in D’s eyes, not only logical but necessary. That’s what life in New York City had taught him. His D Security company, though now failing, was, in his mind, a secular extension of the way the Hassidim guarded their homesteads in Crown Heights, Williamsburg, and wherever else they wore their black hats.

      His new apartment had one bedroom, a bathroom with a big old deep tub, a good-size living room, and a dining area next to a narrow kitchen. A letter his mother had written to him long ago about survival and love was already hung up by the dining table. He was sitting on the blue sofa he’d brought over from his soon-to-be-closed Soho office. He’d also brought over a file cabinet and safe. From his Manhattan apartment on Seventh Avenue in the 20s, he’d moved his pots and pans, the dining room table, and sundry household items. So his new Brooklyn place was a mash-up of both his old office and home.

      This prewar building had lots of marble in its lobby and two rickety elevators to serve its seven floors. It was the first time since D had fled Brownsville’s Tilden projects that he was living in a building with elevators and a shared incinerator. He’d vowed back then that he would never again live in a high-rise, which this was not—but the idea of having to share an incinerator with his neighbors irked him, reminding him of countless days stuffing garbage bags down the shoot at 315 Livonia. Sometimes his neighbors wouldn’t shove their bags all the way down back then, so he’d have to push on their garbage as well his family’s mess, a distasteful chore that still made his teeth grind. Hopefully the folks in his new building, who were paying good money for the privilege, would be more conscientious. He knew it would take a minute to get really comfortable in his new home/office. Still, there was one looming decision to make: what to paint the walls?

      D got up from his sofa and walked over to the wall behind his flat-screen TV. He sat on the floor next to three cans of black paint, two brushes, and a large bottle of Poland Spring water. In his Manhattan apartment all surfaces had been black. Even the wall plugs and light switches had been painted black by the time he moved out. The sheets on his bed were a dark sepia. Over time he’d added a variety of charcoals. But the core of his self-created cave was “as black as the ace of spades,” as his mother once said dismissively.

      Was that what he needed in this return to Brooklyn? He’d only been back two days and shit was jumping off. Black probably wasn’t the move. At least not yet. He took a gulp of Poland Spring, clicked off the TV, took in the sun on this nice early-spring afternoon, and headed out into his new Brooklyn hood.

      Welcome home, D thought as he stood there on Washington Avenue. Welcome home.

      At that moment, two men in suits emerged from a car double parked on the street. One was big, burly, and white. The other was light brown with a porn-star mustache and an air of superiority that reeked worse than his cologne.

      The white one said, “Mr. D Hunter?”

      “Yes, officer,” D replied as he sized up them up.

      “I’m Detective Otis Mayfield and this is Detective William Robinson.” They did a quick badge flip for D.

      “Okay, officers,” D said, noting that they didn’t seem ready to arrest him.

      “We’d like to talk with you,” Mayfield explained. “Can we come inside?”

      “Officers, I was just going to get something to eat. You can join me if you’d like.”

      Mayfield and Robinson seemed cool about it. Didn’t come to play hardball, though D knew they would love to have been invited inside. D started walking and they flanked him, with Mayfield doing the talking.

      “Welcome back to Brooklyn, Mr. Hunter.”

      “Strange to be back,” D said. “Never thought I’d be living here again.”

      “Not the same place, is it?”

      “Yes and no. New people. High-rise condos. The Nets. But I feel like its core hasn’t changed,” D said. “At least not yet.”

      * * *

      D sat at a table at the Saint Catherine on Washington and sipped on a large chai latte. Facing him were the two detectives, with Mayfield again asking the questions.

      “Yes,” Mayfield said, “Brownsville is still Brownsville.”

      “I know.” D’s stomach got tight but he hoped his face hadn’t. Was this about the fight club or Livonia Avenue or both?

      “When was the last time you were in Brownsville, Mr. Hunter?”

      D decided to start with a lie. “A few days ago. I visited a young man who works for me sometimes. Raymond Robinson. Lives at 360 Livonia Avenue. Apartment 8G with his mother Janelle.”

      Mayfield smiled and looked at Robinson. “That’s very forthcoming, Mr. Hunter. When was your last time in Brownsville before that?”

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