The Fall

But his leg. It was shattered. Irreparably.

The good doctor explained this to him with genial forthrightness, a man with whom Angel had shared a few afternoons of craps at the country club across from the film studios.

In the months and years that followed, Angel spent a great deal of his fortune trying to repair his broken limb-in hopes of mending his fractured career and recovering his technique-but his skin hardened from the multiple scars crisscrossing the knee, and his bones refused to heal properly.

In a final humiliation, a newspaper revealed his identity to the public, and, without the ambiguity and the mystery of the silver mask, Angel the common man became too pitied to be adored.

The rest happened quickly. As his investments faltered, he worked as a trainer, then bodyguard, then as a bouncer, but his pride remained, and soon he found himself a burly old guy who scared no one. Fifteen years ago, he followed a woman to New York City and overstayed his visa. Now-like most people who end up in tenements-he had no clear idea how he had gotten here, only that he was indeed here, a resident in a building quite similar to one of six he used to own outright.

But thinking of the past was dangerous and painful.

Evenings, he worked as the dishwasher at the Tandoori Palace downstairs, just next door. He was able to stand for hours on busy nights by wrapping lengths of duct tape around two broad splints on either side of his knee, beneath his trousers. And there were many busy nights. Now and then, he cleaned the toilets and swept the sidewalks, giving the Guptas enough reason to keep him around. He had fallen to the bottom of this caste system-so low that now his most valuable possession was anonymity. No one had to know who he once was. In a way, he was wearing a mask again.

For the past two evenings, the Tandoori Palace had remained closed-as had the grocery store next door, the other half of the neo-Bengali emporium the Guptas owned. No word from them, and no sign of their presence, no answer at their phone. Angel started to worry-no, not about them, truthfully, but about his income. The radio talked of quarantine, which was good for health but very bad for business. Had the Guptas fled the city? Perhaps they had gotten caught in some of the violence that had cropped up? In all this chaos, how would he know if they had been shot?

Three months before, they had sent him out to make duplicates of the keys to both places. He had made triplicates-he didn’t know what had possessed him, certainly no dark impulse on his part but only a lesson learned in life: to be prepared for anything.

Tonight, he decided, he would take a look. He needed to know. Just before dawn, Angel hauled himself down to the Guptas’ store. The street was quiet except for a dog, a black husky he had never seen in the neighborhood, barking at him from across the sidewalk-though something stopped the dog from crossing the street.

The Guptas’ store had once been called The Taj Mahal, but now, after generations of graffiti and pamphlet removal, the painted logo had worn away so that only the rosy illustration of the Indian Wonder of the World remained. Strangely, it exhibited too many minarets.

Now, someone had defaced the logo even further, spray-painting a cryptic design of lines and dots in fluorescent orange. The design, cryptic though it was, was fresh. The paint still glistened, a few threads of it slowly dripping at the corners.

Vandals. Here. Yet the locks were in place, the door undamaged.

Angel turned the key. When both bolts slid free, he limped inside.

Everything was silent. The power had been cut, and so the refrigerator was off, all the meats and fish inside gone to waste. Light from the last of the sunset filtered in through the steel shutters over the windows, like an orange-gold mist. Deeper inside, the store was dark. Angel had brought two busted cell phones with him. The call functions did not work, but the screens and batteries still did, and he found that-thanks to a picture of his white wall he snapped during daylight-the screens made excellent lights for hanging on his belt or even strapped to his head for close work.

The store was in absolute disarray. Rice and lentils covered the floor, spilled from several overturned containers. The Guptas would never have allowed this.

Something, Angel knew, was deeply wrong.

Above all else was the stench of ammonia. Not the eye-watering odor of the off-the-shelf cleaner kind he used to clean the toilets, but something more foul. Not pure like a chemical, but messy and organic. His phone illuminated several streaking trails of orange-tinged fluid along the floor, sticky and still wet. They led to the cellar door.

The basement beneath the store communicated with the restaurant and, ultimately, with the belowground floors of his tenement building.