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she wasn’t next. To see her. I was a jerk to drive.
    Halfway down a deserted street on the eastern fringe of Chinatown, my car skidded on the black ice that had formed under the fluffy deceptive snow and went out of control. I had to go with it or end up hamburger. For what seemed a lifetime, the car swerved in sickening, irrational spins, like a punch-drunk boxer, and then, finally, took a nose dive into a snow bank, pitched forward a few more inches and stopped dead.
    Wind blew past the blank faces of the warehouses that lined the street, loading docks empty, metal shutters down. It snapped snow against my face like iced gunshot. The streetlights seemed to shiver, seemed alive as the snow and wind and mist whirled around them. There were no cabs, no traffic at all, only the eerie sound of the weather, like a white-noise machine, as New York slipped back a century, when the cast-iron buildings went up, the streets were piled with horseshit and gas light flickered. I looked for a cab.
    Chinatown gave me the heebie jeebies, as my Aunt Birdie used to say. From nowhere, the thing came at me with the force of an ox.
    At first, I thought I had slipped on something greasy under the snow. Then my legs turned into jello and folded up like a cardboard box. Jello. Boxes. My head hurt like a bruise as I crashed to the sidewalk. Fog draped over the buildings and mixed with snow. I was blinded. I licked my lips and tasted wet snow. Did I pass out? Was it my own head I heard bump down the sidewalk? Thump thump thump, I seemed to be listening to the sonic boom of my own heart like when your ears are stuffed, or maybe it was my skull, bumping on cement. Somewhere, I heard someone giggle. I heard the cackle of derision. I was their joke, their prey. I was dead meat.
    When I opened my eyes, I was in a freight elevator in one of the warehouses. In the dark, I made out that there were two of them, but they had on ski masks. Cold creepy fingers clutched at my neck and pressed on nerves I didn’t know I had. Sweat dripped down my side like snakes. I heard the elevator doors snap shut, I heard the gears grind.
    The elevator lurched and rose. Then it stopped. Panic drenched me. I was trapped and I couldn’t get up. The floors were slimy from decayed vegetables. The gassy green smell made me want to puke.
    One of them grabbed my arms from behind; the other one got me in a choke. He had muscles like an ox, like a bull. But there was no pain. I lost oxygen; he let up. I came to. He knew where to press. He came at me with moves that knocked the stuffing out, and I lay on the crates in the dark like a rag doll.
    Somewhere a flashlight flickered. Light shone on a metal blade. It was a meat cleaver, the kind of blade gangs use to sever muscles in your arm, your back, so you can’t work or feed yourself. You end up still alive and a complete cripple. He must have pulled off the mask because I got the impression of a face. A Chinese face, I thought, but the elevator creaked and then plummeted two floors. I was falling. Couldn’t breathe.
    Something whizzed so close to my head I could feel the molecules move. I was sucking air.
    I’m in Moscow, twelve years old, stuck in the elevator of the Intourist Hotel on Gorky Street, it was then. It’s winter. We had gone in to sample the exotic pleasures of the forbidden—foreign tourists, espresso coffee. A kid I know has an uncle who sells busts of Lenin to the tourists. The other kids dare me. Who can get to the top floor? Who dares?
    I love a dare. It is the only thing that makes life OK, that and my mother who laughs at the system, and the scratchy copies of black market rock and roll records you can sometimes buy on the street outside GUM, the department store.
    No one else is in that Moscow elevator. No one comes. I press the button. The elevator moves up. Then it sticks. I don’t know what to do. If I press the alarm bell, I will be discovered and punished in ways that I