“Okay. Shut up, Abbott. Just shut up. Let’s go down.”
“One nice thing—you can only fall once in your whole life.”
“Jesus, Abbott. Shut up.”
He realized that a fine rain was falling just beyond the shaft window. It was falling on the slates of that roof, with less than twelve hours to go.
Around five, Brewer told Abbott to finish stowing the lines in the barrels. He wanted the barrels in the van and the van parked in the alley behind the Complex. “Meet me in the poolroom and we’ll eat.”
He walked across town to Madison Avenue. As he went he dwelt on the exultant time after the rescue. It was like a sun-filled land; he promised himself a good time on the town, Kotlikoff being safely tucked in bed and himself back in the ranks. Maybe he’d make that bastard Geller buy him that steak dinner after all, with five-dollar cigars and good hootch. Then maybe an assignment in Greece—anywhere in the Mediterranean, in fact. Thinking about that time after made the wall seem easier.
But the rain mocked him as he walked.
Dr. Simmonds seemed skeptical. “These questions are more than academic, Mr. McMurry. Have you found Mr. Kotlikoff?”
“Now, come on, Dr. Simmonds. I can’t discuss this case with you. If we find him and pull him out and he’s in bad shape, you have to tell me what to do.”
“Are you telling me you know where he is?”
“That’s twice you asked me. No, I’m not telling you I know where he is. I’m not telling you anything. In fact, you know too much already. Isn’t it obvious to you I have to be ready for any contingency? This guy is a diabetic, and that’s just one of a thousand factors I have to be ready for. So lay it out for me.”
“Well, it can be highly dangerous. Extreme emotion can upset a diabetic’s chemistry, and only a doctor can decide what to do. It depends on a lot of factors. Why couldn’t you notify me or take me with—”
“Doctor. Doctor. Please. You’re wasting time. Whether you and I like it or not, you have to give me a short course on handling a diabetic.”
Dr. Simmonds opened his desk drawer and withdrew a small oblong box. “Okay. Let me tell it to you in simple terms. A diabetic who takes care of himself can live a perfectly normal life, do anything he wants to. If he doesn’t, one of two things generally happens. A diabetic coma from not enough insulin. Or insulin shock from too much. They’re at opposite ends of the blood sugar extremes. Now, if they’ve taken care of Kotlikoff with proper diet and insulin, you should have nothing to worry about. His health is good, and he should handle excitement very well. But if he’s going to have a reaction, it most probably will be insulin shock. Why? Because under extreme stress, even a diabetic’s body can make insulin, and for Kotlikoff it could be too much insulin on top of the insulin he takes every morning, and that would throw him into insulin shock. Okay, so far?”
“How can I tell?”
“Insulin shock? You can’t miss. Shivering, incoherence, he might even seem drunk.”
“Like he was the other day?”
“In the station? No. That was more like a catatonic shock. I think they gave him something. No, no—insulin shock shows a circumoral pallor—an unhealthy-looking bluish circle around the mouth. If the patient doesn’t get some offsetting sugar into his system, he’ll pass out and later even die. And the fastest way to bring him out of the insulin shock is with this—” Dr. Simmonds opened the box on his desk. “Every diabetic has some of these. Every doctor’s office, every hospital, every drugstore carries it. This is a preloaded syringe of glycogen. Sugar. You feed it intravenously.”
“You need a rubber hose to tie the arm?”
“No. If you’re in a hurry, all you do is take the shirt sleeve and twist it on the upper arm until the vein shows and then put the needle in the vein and press the plunger. He’ll come around in a few minutes. Whatever you do, be sure to get him to the nearest medical facility.” He closed the box and handed it to Brewer.
“Minutes could count.”
At six, Brewer was back on the street, walking toward the Complex. It was still drizzling, the fine needles of rain swarming at him no matter which way he turned his head, getting down his raincoat collar and up his sleeves, as unavoidable as despair.
His life was hemmed in by imperatives: he had to get the job done in a few hours or all his courage, which was now sifting away like sand from a sack, would be spent; he had to keep Abbott off the sauce; and the weather had to be clear and dry on that slate roof by three A.M. Nine hours to go with no upset, no Tiger Rose and no rain. Or else.
Abbott surprised him. The van wasn’t parked where it should have been—in the alley behind the Complex. Irritated, expecting an argument, he went to get Abbott in the poolroom.
But Abbott wasn’t in the poolroom. Just John was. So was Willie Walker, who sat talking to John and looking at his own right hand. Arty the rack man was there, dozing in his chair behind the counter. But no one else; the rest of the poolroom was in darkness. No van; no Abbott.
Brewer stomped up the stairs to Abbott’s room and rapped irritably on the door. No one answered. He put his head against the door and listened. Then he banged on the flimsy panel with the ham of his fist. “Abbott. Abbott!” There was something disconcertingly final and distant in the silence of that room; it conveyed the emptiness of an apartment unoccupied during a long vacation. The first tremors of alarm touched Brewer’s gut, for Abbott seemed, of a sudden, infinitely distant.
Brewer descended to the poolroom, hesitating. I don’t need this, he thought; if he’s somewhere sucking up, I’d better get to him before the Tiger Rose does.
Brewer hurried south to the old factory loft. Headlights moving along the distant expressway seemed smug, comfortable, mocking him for getting into this desperate strait. As he approached, the loft had that same feeling of emptiness as Abbott’s apartment. He stepped carefully, in the near-darkness, down the driveway, his feet scattering broken concrete and debris. The van was not parked at the back. Brewer stuck his head through the doorway and listened. The odor of char was heavy, moist, almost like breath, and the sound of falling water was sharp, augmented now by rain dribbles that fell from the roof puddles into the dark interior through the gaping holes. Brewer could see the silvery mist falling into the center of the building, backlit by the car lights far beyond the windows.
“Abbott! Abbott!”
An overwhelming and childish fear gripped him as he thought of that elevator shaft in pitch darkness. The ogre who lurked there, shadow-thin and stories-high, would come shambling out soon and carry him up to the top floor and, there, pitch him down. He turned, disgusted with his fears, and hurried back to the city lights.
Things were slow at the Lido Tuscany Restaurant. The garden tables were stacked against the wall under a slowly dripping tarpaulin, and inside, there were few patrons. Fatty the Fence sat amidst the ruins of his nightly sacking, stirring a spoon in his espresso, burping softly, agreeably somnolent, anticipating his late-night ice-cream treat with brandied fruit and cherry-topped whipped cream. His expression was vapid—beautific, content, narcissistic, his eyes fixed on an inward vision of food. He didn’t notice Brewer.
Brewer stepped back: no Abbott. He felt as though he were living in a music-box carousel where the same acts are to be repeated with idiot iteration, with never a variation, forever to no purpose: Fatty chewing his way through the centuries; Abbott gargling the decades.
The coffee shop was also slow. Three men sat on stools talking as the waitress slid mugs of coffee along the counter to them while she tossed some hamburgers on a grill. In the back booth the owner-cook, with his swollen, puffy gut, sat in his stained whites, going over a sheet of paper with two wise guys. When Brewer approached, the cook folded the paper over and pulled it into his lap below the table. “Yeah,” he said to Brewer. “No. Nah. No. I ain’t seen him.”
Brewer gave a curt nod of thanks and turned away. Their low voices resumed. Brewer wondered: was it the diagram for an apartm
ent? (“Now, here’s the living room and here’s the bedroom …”) Or was it a factory? (“This here’s the manager’s office; it’s just a tin cashbox in the bottom drawer and it’s usually loaded.”) Maybe they’re gazing fondly at a stuffed drug store or a radio store filled with transistorized components or an unarmed messenger carrying a bag paunchy with securities. Everyone’s in the business, robbing each other. Someday, thought Brewer, they’re going to find a giant tombstone higher than the World Trade building that says, “Here lies America. Robbed to death.”
Brewer’s emotions were a strange—and, to him, new—combination of relief and fear and despair. He was half-hoping he wouldn’t find Abbott. He desperately wanted to quit and desperately wanted to succeed. All he had to say was “I quit” and he’d be free of that chair and that wall. He had no heart to go wandering around on a wet night. He thought gratefully of the poker games he’d sat through on wet nights, with cigars and whiskey and somewhere later a woman. He felt now like one of the homeless of the city, nosing around looking for something—a warm bed, a meal, or maybe just a kind word. Somehow, he managed to put the next foot forward, to take the next step. Where would a drunk with a van go? The choices were limitless. He went to Cahill’s.
Flo was dealing them off the arm: Blue Plate Special platters of Paddy’s Stew with salad, rolls, butter and coffee plus home-style cherry pie.
“No, love, I ain’t seen him. If he comes in, I’ll tell him.”
Someone in the barroom was telling a story to three men who stood jiggling ice in their glasses and laughing, eagerly listening, braced to fire off another shout of laughter on cue. In the fireplace, old man Cahill had built a small fire that glowed behind them. Next to it one of the neighborhood regulars was fast asleep, with his shiny bald head in repose on the table, reflecting the flickering red of the fire. Brewer stepped out into the rain.
He ambled now over to the endless string of saloons on Third Avenue and walked north, head turned downward from the relentless drizzle. It occurred to him that the fate of nations could be decided by wandering drunks. The Kotlikoff affair could affect international relations for years to come—even decades. And here the key to it all was a wandering merrytotter of a drunk named Abbott.
The winking, gleeful neon signs lied rhythmically to the pedestrians about the pleasures within: the Grand Slam, Mother Murphy’s Cottage, the Three Shamrocks, the Blue Bucket. He would open the door and wince at the pounding jukeboxes and then step in to see spread before him in the semilight a slow rainy Friday night in Manhattan. In caves, in permanent dusk, shadowed figures drooped, the blasted eyes of drunkenness gazing indifferently at him, out of focus like the stares of imbecilic children, safely beyond the reach of reality. Cockeyed, insane eyes. Groping figures in booths. Drunken kisses. At the table sprawled the sleeping overdosed, drooling saliva, wetting their pants. Incompetent, spastic lovemaking in alleys. Hurryupgoddammit. Where’syourmoney. All sales final.
He went block after block, opening doors and looking in at each saloon. But no Abbott.
By chance he saw the van, a square of white, parked in an alley. He walked down to it. A drunk lay sprawled face up in a doorway, looking like a corpse fallen from an upright coffin, a living tomb with a scattering of arms and legs slowly soaking in the misty rain. His pockets had been turned out and his shirttails pulled out of his trousers. The alley reeked of urine. Brewer stepped around him and looked at the van. It was coated with fine beads of rainwater. He looked inside. In the faint light it was quite obvious. “Oh bleeding piles of Saint Patrick!” Empty; the goddamned thing was empty. No rope, no chairs, no barrels, no pulleys. Empty. Brewer drew back his fist and punched the side panel of the van. The metal sheet gave, then sprang back, flinging a shower of rainwater into his face.
The son of a bitch had pawned the rigging equipment. Pawned it in a hockshop. I’ll kill him, thought Brewer. Kill him. I’ll find him if it takes all night, and drunk or sober, awake or stoned unconscious, he’ll have his goddamned guts cut out. I’ll find him if it takes forever. Brewer stepped around the drunk again and strode furiously back to the street. He glanced up and down and walked to the nearest saloon.
Along the bar he strode, then down the lane between the booths. The place was practically empty. The bubbles rose in the neon bar signs, the music boomed and the patrons sat in slow shock. Brewer leaned over the bar to the bartender. “I’m looking for a guy named Abbott.”
“Yeah.”
“You know him?”
“I don’t know. What’s he look like?”
“Thin. Ski nose. Pale blue eyes. Looks about sixty.”
The bartender nodded. “What do you want him for?”
“I’m supposed to have dinner with him.”
“You ain’t going to have dinner with him tonight. He was in here with two winos and they had a good time.”
“Who was buying?”
“Hard to say. It’s like Social Security day … they cash their checks and pool them, then they fight and drink all night. Who knows?”
“Where did they go?”
“Out. Right out that door.”
“Where?”
“It’s a big world.”
Brewer went back out on the sidewalk. Which way? he wondered. He decided to go back south. Somehow, he felt they had gone south into one of the saloons he’d just passed. If they had gone north, it was all over. They might stroll all the way to Canada. Brewer pictured their wandering, rollicking footsteps leading him south to them, following the well-worn path from boozing shed to boozing shed. Shot n’ a beer. Happy days. The whole world seemed to be sliding overboard while three drunks stumbled from joint to joint.
He walked quickly now, urgently. A few blocks south, he approached a pawnshop, its windows filled with the captured possessions of prodigals in their multitudes. Watches and rings and jewelry and banjos and knives and pistols and radios and television sets and silverware—an endless cornucopia of alcoholic debris.
Open until nine.
Brewer stopped in shock. Nine o’clock? But it was already eight-thirty. He had a half hour to find Abbott, get the pawn ticket and recover the rigging equipment.
The bartender in the Emerald Oasis remembered them. “Yeah, they were in here, hugging each other. Abbott was holding these other two up, more or less. At least he could walk farther without falling down. They was moving beautiful—like palm trees in a hurricane. You might as well wait until tomorrow to see Abbott. I’d say they’re tucked in behind some trash cans for the night.”
Patty’s Palace had a large old wall clock that had swung its pendulum through good times and bad for more than forty years, calling cadence on eternity. When Brewer entered, he saw at a glance that Abbott wasn’t there, just as the clock chimed nine times.
The game was over; the chase ended; somewhere a pawnshop proprietor had just bolted his door, with the barrels of rope and pulleys locked away for the night. The rescue of the century, the great bring-back by Brewer the Bold, had gone glimmering—a failed dream.
He saw in a booth two men sleeping on their arms, spent survivors of a great battle.
“Was there a third man with them?”
“Yeah,” said the bartender. “Abbott. He was with them. You want him?”
“No. I don’t want him. Not anymore.” Brewer sat down on a cushioned stool, placing a five-dollar bill on the bar like a document of surrender. If it hadn’t been Abbott, it would have been the rain, or the pulleys, or the guards, or Kotlikoff, or something. It was an ill-fated voyage.
Brewer rested his arms on the bar and let all the air out. He sighed. He was free, finished, released. He wasn’t going down a sixteen-story wall, after all, screaming with inward terror, dangling on a thin thread over eternity. He felt the great release that failure bestows, the loser’s award: the cessation of hostilities. He settled, as though it were a bath of warm water, into that release, allowing himself to glow with the blandishments and allures of Failure: all about him were the st
ricken devotees at her shrine, draining their votive offerings to her great and passive name. Failure, the handmaid of Death, asking nothing except cessation of efforts. Just stop. Don’t struggle. Surrender. Give up. Peace, calmness, tranquillity, half death.
Abbott was somewhere asleep in a pile of trash, thrown away with the rest of the city’s debris, with the pawn ticket in a pocket, bar-soggy and smeared.
He groped in his pocket for a cigar and drew out the box with the glycogen syringe. He’d been beaten by a drunk.
Brewer took a double and drank it neat. He knew that, were Abbott to step through the door, stone sober, with the barrels in the truck, the chase had taken too much out of him anyway. He couldn’t get himself up—couldn’t now go through with it. This is how it ends—with a sag, like a tire gone flat. No shout. No loud shot or snap of a trapdoor on a gallows, but quiet and lifeless and used-up as gym socks. Quietly having a drink at a bar to announce to oneself that it’s over. You get the consolation prize: no more responsibility. When you lose everything, you lose with it the need to do anything. When you lose, you gain freedom.
Brewer ordered another double. He looked back on the weaving, stumbling trail of his life that led him back to Yonkers and the very pregnant wife he hadn’t seen in two years of overseas Army duty, and farther back to his childhood, and it was all the time scripted to end in a saloon: and he lived ever after as (fill in the blank). Janitor. Car parker. What? It all ended here in Patty’s Palace on a wet Friday night with a fine drizzle falling.
Beaten by a drunk.
Brewer dumped the double into his mouth and swallowed hard. Through the door, he turned and walked in the rain toward the Complex, the drink like a ball of bile in his gut. His anger was gone. Despair filled him.
Well, screw it anyway. At least he didn’t have to go down that terrifying wall.
At Cahill’s, Flo stepped out into the drizzle and fog, peering up and down the wet street. She saw Brewer and waggled a bent arm at him. “He’s here,” she called.
Catch Me: Kill Me Page 23