It was all hogwash. Everybody kept talking about how the world had been Schoeninger’s home, when, really, he had never been at home anywhere. Everybody said what great times they’d had with him, but the truth was, the times you had with him weren’t always so great, not when I knew him. He wouldn’t let you. One of his greatest pleasures in life was making people jump.
I could have given quite a sermon. I could have given those bored reporters a hell of a lot to write about and I was half tempted to do it, but then I spied my landlady, looking as elegant as ever, on the far side of the room. I’m not saying I’m a coward, but the thought of facing her after racking up that humongous phone bill was more than I was up to.
I slipped quietly away, spun through the revolving doors, and headed toward Fifth Avenue. I crossed over into Central Park and strode toward the lake. Somehow it had turned into one of those perfect spring days. Japanese tourists were getting their caricatures done by alcoholic sketch artists, and the benches were full of businessmen playing hooky, ties loosened, faces tilted to the sun. Jamaican nannies chatted while their young charges wrestled over plastic shovels in the grass.
It had been a terrible mistake, coming up here, walking into that fucking building. What was I doing, turning into some kind of sap? Let them say whatever they wanted about Rex Schoeninger. As far as I was concerned it was over. And all that V. S. Mohle stuff? It was hasta la vista, baby. My name was Frankie Abandonato, I was back on the streets of New York, and I had a job to do.
I caught a cab at Columbus Circle and took it to the sports club on Ninth Avenue. A blind beggar rattled his cup out front, his seeing-eye dog sleeping beside him. I walked past the window a couple of times to scope the place out. There wasn’t anybody at the front desk, which seemed almost too good to be true. It wasn’t until I got my nerve up to poke my head in that I saw the note taped to the phone: please ring for service.
I wasn’t going to get a better opportunity than this. I took a deep breath, crossed the lobby, and headed down the rickety stairs. The handball courts were empty, but I could hear some sort of commotion beyond the hallway. I approached the weight room warily and peered in. At the far end, the desk clerk and the security guard were absorbed trying to get a sparrow down from the rafters.
The desk clerk took huge wobbly swings at the bird with a long-handled strainer, the kind you’d use to clean your swimming pool. The strainer may have been long, but it wasn’t long enough. All the desk clerk had managed to accomplish was to keep the sparrow flying back and forth, perching for a moment on a pull-up bar or a stationary bike, and then taking off again for the safety of a ledge near the ceiling.
The security guard tiptoed around, whistling, a blue blanket stretched between his arms—what he hoped to do with it, I had no idea. I stood watching as the two men crept through the rowing machines, pointing and arguing strategy, while the bird tilted its head from side to side, keeping a beady eye on them.
The good news was that no one had noticed me. I moved quickly to the locker room, pushed through the door, and made sure it didn’t make a sound as it closed behind me. The place was deserted. I made my way down the center aisle, stepping over a couple of wet towels. Kneeling in front of Locker 324, I retrieved the key from my pocket. When I slipped it into the lock, there was a satisfying click. The door squeaked when I opened it. Stuffed inside was a brown leather briefcase. It took me a couple of hard yanks to pull it free.
“There you go! You got ’em! Don’t let him get away!” The shouts from the weight room grew louder and then faded away.
The briefcase weighed a ton and was stuffed tighter than a Thanksgiving turkey. My guess was, it wasn’t filled with manuscripts. I picked it up and stuck it under my arm like a halfback toting a football. I went to the door, opened it five or six inches, and peered out. At the far end of the weight room, the desk clerk lay on his stomach, the long-handled strainer stuck out in front of him. Head raised, he had both hands clenched tight on the near end of it, like a man about to fire a high-caliber gun. At the other end, the sparrow thrashed in the green mesh, chirping. The security guard hovered above the bird with his blanket. The desk clerk cursed him as a fool and a coward, and finally the security guard dropped to his knees, smothering the sparrow in a cloud of blue cotton.
I stood there waiting as the two men disentangled the bird, first from the blanket and then from the netting. They huddled together, rubbing the sparrow’s head with a finger, trying to calm it.
I made my move, striding swiftly across the floor, trying not to rush it, trying to look as if I belonged. I nearly made it.
I was ten feet from the hallway when a corner of the briefcase banged against the handle of an exercise bike. “Hey! Hey, you!” It was the desk clerk. I kept going as if I hadn’t heard. “What are you doing?”
I took a glance over my shoulder. The security guard stood clueless, cradling the bird to his chest, but the desk clerk was on his way, marching briskly across the room.
I sprinted down the hallway, past the handball courts, and charged up the stairs. I jostled past a couple of guys with gym bags.
“Hey, buddy boy, watch it!”
I took the stairs three at a time, never looking back. I could hear the desk clerk shouting somewhere below me. All I had to do was drop the briefcase and I could have outrun him easily, but there was no way I was going to give it up, not now. The case was made of that cheap vinylized phony leather stuff, slick and awkward to hold.
I sucked air, using the handrail. I reeled across the lobby and out the front door. I had no idea what tripped me. All I know is that I went flying. I put my hands out to break my fall. I hit the sidewalk hard, with open palms, whacking my chin on the sidewalk.
It took several seconds for my head to clear, but when it did, I became aware that there was some sort of hubbub going on around me. I squinted to my right. The briefcase lay seven or eight feet away, limp as a deflated balloon. Packets of fifty- and hundred-dollar bills were scattered everywhere on the sidewalk.
Ninth Avenue is a busy street, night or day. There were lots of people out, and lots of them just kept walking, nothing was going to faze them. This was New York, after all. But a lot of them were fazed, seriously fazed, staring down at the money at their feet like the Three Magi staring down at the Christ child. One or two were looking around, trying to spot the hidden camera.
My chin was wet. When I reached up to touch it, I realized there was blood. A dog barked furiously at close range. I glanced over my shoulder. The blind beggar sat cross-legged on his mat, tugging at the leash of his seeing-eye dog. You don’t see that many self-satisfied beggars, but this guy was grinning ear to ear, Mr. Crime-Stopper. His cane lay across his knees.
The desk clerk stood in the shadow of the sports club doorway, winded, pissed, and temporarily stymied. The security guard peered over his shoulder, cradling the sparrow.
The spell was broken by a clatter at the curb. A tattooed bike messenger darted through the crowd, slid to his knees, and went right to work, scooping up packets of money and jamming them in his backpack.
“Hey, you!” I shouted. “What the hell you doin’? That’s mine!”
He paid me no mind, and that encouraged the others. A Con Ed worker abandoned his jackhammer and started pitching packets back to his buddy. A Mexican dishwasher shoveled money into his apron. A big-faced woman who looked like Julia Child made polite little dips, snatching stacks of hundreds and dropping them into her Macy’s bag. A shoving match broke out between two high school kids. This was it, philanthropy for the masses.
“Goddamn it!” I shouted. I grabbed two or three packets, scrambled to my feet, and retrieved my sorry-looking briefcase. I could taste blood in my mouth. “You!” I pointed at a pencil pusher in a cheap suit stuffing money inside his jacket. “Give me that!” He did as he was told.
Horns sounded. The crowd had grown, spilling out into the street and backing up traffic. The blind beggar, his sight miraculously restored, crawled un
der people’s legs, gathering in stacks of cash like a winner at poker gathering in chips.
I needed to hightail it. I pushed my way through the crowd and was nearly free of it when I spied Julia Child delicately rescuing a packet out of the gutter. I grabbed her wrist before she could drop it in the Macy’s bag. For a woman who’d spent her life whipping up soufflés, she was one tough cookie. She wouldn’t let go and I wouldn’t either. We tugged back and forth. She finally tripped over the curb and fell into me. I fell too, landing hard on the sidewalk with her on top of me. Elbow to my eye, she screamed.
I pushed her off me and lurched to my feet. I grabbed my briefcase and her Macy’s bag and was about to make a dash for it when I saw three human-growth-hormone specimens in cop uniforms headed right toward me.
I pivoted, thinking I would somehow escape back into the crowd, but the crowd had retreated, leaving me stranded on my own little island. If I was a real writer, I could probably break your heart right now, letting you know how alone it felt, what was going on in my mind and everybody else’s mind, and all the little details of it too, Julia Child weeping and pointing and a sparrow flying low, just over people’s heads, before winging its way to freedom. But I’m not a writer. Not much of one, anyway, and all I can tell you is, it really sucked.
Chapter Twenty-one
Ican’t tell you how happy I am to be finally writing the last chapter of this book. I thought I’d be able to finish it in a year and here I am, halfway through an eight-year sentence. The writers’ group here at the prison is almost all new faces. The former Secretary of the Treasury’s been out for eighteen months, making big bucks on the evangelical lecture circuit, and the mutual-fund manager is living happily in the Bahamas with his twenty-five-year-old bride. Even Dr. Pajerski’s split. Last June she quit to take over as the director of the Walter Van Tilburg Clark Writers’ Colony in Reno, Nevada. I find it amazing that she never did ask me to send her the manuscript when I was done.
Not that I’m complaining. The guards don’t carry guns and the food’s not half bad—the coq au vin is as good as anything you’ll find in those midtown bistros. We sleep six to a cell, in bunk beds, but there is no concertina wire and no high walls, just boundary signs posted all over the grounds. I try to think of this as my own Stegner Fellowship.
Though it was rough in the beginning, I’ll admit. I got several furious letters from my former students. They were all difficult to read, but one from Dominique was a killer.
Did it give you a lot of pleasure, playing us for fools? I’m sure a lot of it must have been a real laugh-riot, given how young and naïve and starry-eyed we were. Oh, but we worshipped you! We wrote down everything you said. We spent hours trying to puzzle out all the arrows and loops you scrawled across our manuscripts.
It stung. It stung a lot. All the same, we’ll get over it. None of us ever want to see your face again, but we’ll be fine. But the way you took advantage of Mr. Schoeninger was unforgivable. He was old and you used him. He was a great man and you mocked him. He believed in us, invested everything he had in us, and what did you believe in? Your own cleverness? And where has that gotten you? About where you deserve. May you rot in hell.
Dora came to see me a few weeks after I was incarcerated, supposedly to discuss our son, but I suspect her real reason was to let me know just how well she was doing. She’s remarried, to an assistant principal at a junior high school, and, honest to God, he sounds like Ned Flanders, Homer Simpson’s wimpy next-door neighbor. Dora says he’s a great listener, whatever the hell that means. As far as my son goes, I talk to him on the phone every couple of weeks. Our conversations are what you would call guarded, but they’re progressing. He’s turned into this fanatical baseball fan. It makes me wonder if maybe way back in his mind he does remember me pitching Wiffle balls to him in the park.
I only had one other visitor that first fall. The guard came to get me midafternoon one Sunday, visiting day, to say that there was a man named Victor Miller there to see me. I said I’d never heard of the guy.
“So what does he look like?” I said.
“He looks a little like you,” he said. “Not exactly a stud.”
So when I go down to the reception area, there’s old V. S. Mohle sitting on a bench next to a bunch of wives and girlfriends. Before I had a chance to beat a retreat, he was up on his feet with a big shit-eating grin on his face.
What could I do? I stood there scratching my neck as he crossed the floor. He’d put on some weight since I’d seen him last and he looked happier. In his down vest and stone-washed jeans you would have thought he was heading off on some ski vacation.
We shook hands. “It’s been a while,” he said.
“A while.”
“You doing okay?”
“Well enough.”
Some of the women were giving us the double-take and one of them, a blonde in leopard-skin pants, leaned over to whisper something in her friend’s ear.
“So what brings you by?” I said. “Just driving through?”
“No, I came to see you,” he said.
“Ahh,” I said. “Well, maybe I should give you a little tour.”
I took him through the exhibition of my fellow inmates’ artwork and then we strolled through the grounds. It was awkward at first (for all I knew, the man was going to pull a gun and shoot me), but it eased up when we started swapping stories about our boyhoods on the Upper West Side, jumping turnstiles, smoking dope at Grant’s Tomb, stealing apples from the fruit stands.
It was a beautiful day. The Henry Moore sculpture glistened like a glazed doughnut in the afternoon sun. An embezzler from Houston was giving his wife a bear hug, his face buried in her hair. She stood on tiptoes, making little whimpering sounds.
“I just want to apologize,” Mohle said.
“Apologize? For what?”
“For the last time we met. I said some things I’m not very proud of.”
“Well, I did too,” I said. “But we were both a little stressed, you know what I mean?”
One of the small-time dope dealers looked up from feeding the swans in the duck pond and stared at us, crossing himself as if he’d just seen a pair of ghosts.
“You know he’d been sending me letters,” he said.
“For how long?”
“For years. Never out-and-out apologizing. Just putting out feelers.”
“And what did you do with them?”
“Tore them up and threw them in the trash.” At the front gate, a guard listened to the Patriots game on the radio.
“Then why did you ever agree to go down there?” I asked.
“It was the money, really. Seventy-five grand for three months? Who could say no? I guess it mattered a lot to him, not to go out feeling like he’d made a fool of himself.”
“And then you ended up bailing anyway.”
“It just seemed too weird to me. I didn’t see any point.”
“He thought he’d destroyed you. He wanted to make it right.”
“So did you make it right?”
“Not really,” I said. I could hear the shouts coming from the volleyball court. It sounded like everyone was having a good time. “Tell you what,” I said. “There’s a pretty spot up here. Let me show you.”
I took him up to the Nob, the giant hill that’s the highest point on the prison grounds. You can see everything from up there, from the rows of dormitories and the guard station to the distant farmers’ fields and the roadside stands selling pumpkins and apple cider.
It was a serious climb. By the time we got to the top, I was so winded I had to sit down on one of the rotting benches to recover. Mohle, the picture of cardiovascular fitness, wasn’t even breathing hard.
“I need to tell you something,” Mohle said.
“Sure,” I said. “Go ahead. Shoot.”
“Last February, just before Rex died, this crazy Yugoslavian woman came to my door.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Exactly.” A chipmunk po
ked its head out from between boulders, sniffing for food. “She said she’d come to work for me.”
“So what did you do?” The sun had begun to set behind the hills.
“What could I do? The woman was terrifying. And she didn’t have a penny on her. Apparently she’d been looking for me for a couple of months.”
I bent down, picked up a small rock, and juggled it in my palm. If I’d been fourteen, I would have thought it was the perfect rock for throwing at cop cars. “So?” I said.
“So she’s been working for me. She’s a wonderful cook. She makes this lamb stew that’s remarkable.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“And her stories . . . my God . . . Sometimes it’s nice to have a little company in the evening.”
I gave him a sharp look. Had Mohle really come all this way to tell me that he and Dranka were getting it on? Try to get that image out of your head.
“There’s just one thing. She’s got this envelope of old letters.”
“Ahh,” I said. “I’ve read them.”
“Sometimes she swears she’s going to do something about them.”
“Like what?”
“Go to somebody. Create a ruckus.”
“And that’s why you came to see me?”
“That’s why I came to see you. So was he really the bastard she says he was?”
“No,” I said. I rose from the bench and hurled the stone as far as I could, heard it ricochet through the trees. “I’d say he was pretty much like the rest of us.”
I wiped my hands on my trousers. Below us, I could see some of the inmates saying goodbye to their wives and girlfriends. There was a lot of hugging and kissing going on. A mother tried to pull a wailing child from his father’s neck.
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