Free A City Dreaming by Daniel Polansky Page A

“cozy”—but that was before the Fall, or was it the Crash?—and now he was living in a large but decrepit efficiency above an Italian restaurant in Nolita. He opened the door by saying that he was just “watching it while Bill is in Hong Kong.” M wondered if Bill was aware of this fact.
    Andre was not quite dressed, which was usually the case. He was as punctual as a very attractive woman. His apartment was full of things that were not furniture: crates of art and East Asian heirlooms, boxes of boutique vodka, a rack of fur coats, ermine and arctic fox and direwolf, the remnants and seeds of rooks, cons, and get-rich schemes. There was an IKEA sofa and a plasma-screen television. On a bar in the kitchen were three empty pizza boxes and an antique gold mirror with a few lines of coke laid out.
    â€œHave a bump if you like,” Andre said, “but do not look inside or you willsee the face of your heart’s true love.” Andre reappeared from the bedroom. “You do not want to see the face of your heart’s true love, do you?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œNo, of course not. Why ruin the surprise.”
    Andre had laid M’s suit out on the bed. Looking at himself in the mirror afterward (not the magic mirror, a regular mirror) he wasn’t certain that he was pulling it off, but Andre was complimentary and also rather rushed, and so there was little time for self-doubt, which, anyway, had disappeared with the rest of Andre’s cocaine.
    Andre paid for the taxi, which was only right, proper, and fair. M spent most of the way over talking about Gram Parsons in overheated fashion, the blow proving the ideal conduit between brain and mouth. Somehow Andre had never heard of the man, which was a situation that M felt begged to be rectified.
    When they got out they were high up on the West Side, and M was starting to think maybe this whole thing wouldn’t turn out to be a disaster after all. That was the worst thing about cocaine: It was not the aftertaste or the cost or its long-term health effects; it was that it made an optimist out of a thinking man.
    The building was steel and mirrored glass, and it extended up to the top of the world. Andre said a few words to the two men guarding the entrance, who were square-shouldered and square-jawed and velvet-glove polite, and then they were through the double doors and into the elevator, a vast, square, iron thing with a meter in the transom. It ran, M noticed after a moment with curiosity though not shock, from –1 to 300. Amid the slate of buttons Andre found, then pushed, the one that read PH . The box lurched upward. The seconds ticked by, and then the minutes with them. Andre was cheery and composed, checking his hair in the polished sheen of the doors.
    M was still talking about Gram Parsons: “. . . but then they didn’t do a decent job of building the fire, so he just kind of charred a little bit, until his friends realized it wasn’t going to happen, and then they left him there.”
    â€œThat is quite a story,” Andre said, settling back the single twist of hair that had come askew.
    â€œAin’t it though?”
    â€œBy the by, M, there is one aspect of tonight’s evening that occurs to me I have not yet had occasion to mention.”
    â€œIs it closed bar? Because I swear to God, Andre, if you made me put on this suit and come up here to pay twenty dollars for a gin and tonic—”
    â€œThe bar is open, of course—give me a little credit. No, the point I’ve thus far neglected is the possibility that there will be a man in attendance tonight who wants to see me dead.”
    â€œYou mean it’s possible that he’ll be here, or it’s possible that he wants to see you dead?”
    â€œIt is possible that he’ll be here. It is certain that he wants to see me dead.”
    The hand on the altimeter had gone as right as it could go.
    â€œWho is this