Bronx Noir

Snow boiled off the arched glass roof. One foot, the other. He fell; he got up. One foot. The other. A glow stabbed through the blinding white, made his watering eyes look up. Lights. A vehicle. He was insane, the cold and wind had driven him mad. A vehicle? It came closer without vanishing. No mirage, then. Some caterpillar-tread ATV whining across the tundra. Didn’t see him or didn’t care. Lumbered to the conservatory, growled to a stop at the end of the wing. A figure, dark parka, dark boots, blond hair swirling like the snow itself, jumped down, pushed through the storm. To the door? She was going to open the door?

She did. He followed. When he got to the ATV it was there and real, so he eased around it, inching to where the storm-haired woman had disappeared. He stopped, startled, when through its thick quilt of snow the glass suddenly glowed, first close, then along the wing, then the high dome. She was turning the lights on. And moving toward the conservatory’s center, away from the door.

He wrapped numb fingers around the handle. He pulled, and the door came toward him. Slipping inside, he closed it after, shutting the violence out.

First was the silence: no howling storm, no ripping-cloth sound of pelting snow. Then the calm: no wind ramming him, the ground motionless. Slowly, with nothing to fight against, his muscles relaxed. He pulled off his soaked gloves, his crusted hat, felt pain as his ears and fingers came back to life. His eyes watered; he scrambled in his pocket for an aged napkin and blew his nose. Looking down, he watched a puddle spread as melting snow dripped from his clothes.

The smell hit him out of nowhere. Oh God, the smell. Sweet and spicy, damp and rich and full of life. Warm, wet earth. Complicated fragrance thrown into the air by sunsetcolored blossoms hoping to attract help to make more like them. I swear, I’d help if I could. There should be more, Kelly thought. They should be everywhere, covering everything, they should race north and smother this dead frigid pallor with color, with scent, with lavishness.

Amazed, gulping moist vanilla air, he stood amid long rows of orchids, gardenias, who knew what else. He was no gardener. Back home you didn’t need to be. Back home these plants didn’t need you. Here, they had to have pots, drips, lights, towering glass walls to save them from vindictive cold, from early dark, from wind that would turn their liquid hearts to solid, choking crystals. Here, soft generosity had to be guarded.

He started to walk, farther in. He wanted to walk to the tropical core of the place. He wanted to walk home.

Each step was warmer, lovelier, more dreamlike. But when he got to the giant central room, something was wrong.

Plants with man-sized, fan-shaped leaves roosted on swelling hillsides at the feet of colossal palms. They were colored infinite greens, as they should be, and moving gently, as they would be, under the humid breezes of home. But this was not that breeze. A waterfall of icy air rolled into the glasshouse, vagrant snow flying with it but melting, spotting the high fronds the same way rain would have, but not the same. Outraged, Kelly bent his neck, leaned back, trying to find the offense, the breach. Near the top of the dome, he saw greenery bowing under the cold blast. Trying to shrink away.

And some other kind of movement. The woman with the wild hair. High up, near the gaping hole, pacing a catwalk. He watched her stretch, then jump back as jagged glass she’d loosened tumbled past, crashed and shattered on the stone floor not far from him. The echo took time to die.

She hurried along the catwalk, climbed over something. Machinery whined and a mechanical hoist lowered. A squarecornered spaceship, it drifted straight down past curves, bends, wavering leaves. Kelly flattened into the shadows of a palm’s rough trunk.

The woman jumped from the basket. She swept her wild hair from her face, whipped off her gloves, pulled out a cell phone. She spoke into it like a two-way radio. “Leo?”

“I’m here,” it crackled. “How bad?”

“Two panes gone. Some others cracked, four at least. A branch from the oak.”

“All the way there? Jesus, that’s some wind.”

“This weren’t a blizzard, it’d be a hurricane.” She had a breathless way of speaking, as though caught in the storm herself.

“If it were a hurricane,” the distant voice came, “we wouldn’t have a problem.”

“Agreed. Leo, the cracked panes could go. Weight of the snow.”

“It’s not melting?”

“Too cold, falling too fast.”

“Shit. You have to get something up there. You called security?”

On icy air, snow tumbled in, unreasonable, antagonistic. The temperature had dropped already, Kelly felt it.

“Only one guy made it in,” the woman was saying. “Wilson.”

“Oh, mother of God, that Nazi?”

“On his way. But he won’t climb. He already said. Union contract, I can’t make him.”

An unintelligble, crackling curse.

“I called Susan,” the woman said. “She’s phoning around, in case any of the volunteers live close.”