Peril

by Thomas H. Cook

  Abe came around the end of the bar and followed him out onto the street. It seemed the minimum he could do. Briefly, they stood together, watching the breeze riffle through the trees that lined the street.

  “Let me know if there’s anything you need,” Abe said finally.

  Mortimer snatched a pack of cigarettes from his jacket, thumped one out and lit it. “You got a safe, Abe?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mortimer lifted the match and stared at the small, guttering flame. “Maybe you could do something for me.”

  “Sure.”

  Mortimer drew an envelope from his pocket and handed it to Abe. “Fifteen thousand. It’s for Dottie. If something happens to me, make sure she gets it.”

  “That’s a lot of cash,” Abe said warily.

  “I do a cash business,” Mortimer replied. “And the thing is, if I keep it, it’ll ride off on some fucking nag at the track.” He dropped the cigarette and crushed it with the toe of his shoe. “You don’t see me around, look me up in the book. Mortimer Dodge. Eighty-sixth Street. That’s where Dottie is.”

  “Okay,” Abe said. He put the envelope in his pocket. “But, hey, maybe you’ll beat this thing.”

  Mortimer shook his head. “If it was a light switch, I’d flip it off right now.”

  “If what were a light switch?”

  “Life,” Mortimer said, turned, and trudged wearily down the street, head bowed, shoulders hunched, as if headed for that place where the firing squad stood waiting for him, talking idly and smoking cigarettes.

  CARUSO

  From behind the limited concealment of a tree, Caruso watched Mortimer trudge up the street. He’d seen him pass an envelope, but the guy he’d passed it to didn’t remotely resemble the sort of guy he’d have taken for Batman. But that didn’t matter, Caruso said to himself. If this fuck was Batman, and the Big Assignment came his way, then it didn’t matter if the guy looked the part or didn’t look the part. Either way, the guy was history.

  Now, as he fell in behind Mortimer, following him at a distance, he wondered just how many guys Mortimer would see during the night, how long the list he’d have to whittle down, eliminating one guy at a time, until he knew which one Batman really was.

  Mortimer reached Fifth Avenue, then headed uptown again. It was a clear, cool night, but as far as Caruso was concerned, the air’s crisp clarity did nothing to recommend a long nocturnal stroll up the blue spine of Manhattan. What if Mortimer were a drunk? Caruso asked himself. What if the poor hopeless bastard was one of those guys who spent his nights going from bar to bar but always managed to appear sober the next morning. Caruso considered this possibility, then instantly believed that Mortimer was precisely this kind of guy. From that unappetizing conclusion, he imagined himself tailing his black-hatted quarry from one gin mill to the next as the hours dropped dead one by one, and dawn at last broke over the bleary face of the city.

  But as Mortimer continued north, he seemed hardly to notice the taverns he passed. Instead, he appeared entirely lost to the world around him, hardly noticing the speeding traffic or his fellow pedestrians. When an old woman’s small white dog leaped at him, snarling and straining at the leash, he seemed barely aware of it. He didn’t flinch away or alter the pace of his forward momentum but only sailed onward, holding to his course like a battered old steamer churning its way home.

  At Nineteenth Street, Mortimer turned westward, his gait now so weary and unsteady he seemed perpetually jostled by a rude, invisible crowd. The signs from the bars did not beckon to him. He passed them like strangers, wobbling on through the nearly deserted street until he reached a building whose address Caruso could clearly read: 445 West 19 Street.

  It was a five-story brownstone that looked carefully maintained. Two black wrought-iron railings led up seven cement steps to a polished wooden door. Four windows faced the street, and there were terra-cotta flower boxes in each of them. Some kind of greenery rose from the boxes, but there were no flowers. There was a large brass knocker on the door, but Caruso noted that Mortimer pressed a small buzzer instead, then waited until the door opened.

  STARK

  Mortimer stood at the door, the same oddly morose look on his face that Stark had noticed at their last meeting. “I hope it’s enough,” he said as he drew the envelope from his jacket pocket.

  Stark looked at Mortimer pointedly, took in the drawn, desolate face, the sense of something frayed beyond mending. If something were wrong with the deal, he thought, and Mortimer knew it was wrong, then what desperation would have compelled him to go through with it? He thought of the years they’d worked together and decided, just this once, to offer an out.

  “Do I need to know anything else, Mortimer?” he asked. “Anything else before I go to work on this?”

  “You mean about the—”

  “About anything,” Stark interrupted.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Mortimer looked unnerved by the question but said only, “Yeah.”

  All right, Stark thought, what’s done is done. He took the envelope from his hand. “I’ll get back to you.”

  With that, Stark expected Mortimer to retreat down the corridor, but he remained in place, staring at the envelope.

  “What’s the matter?” Stark asked.

  “I thought I’d wait.”

  “For what?”

  “For you to see if you got enough to do the job.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  “No hurry,” Mortimer said quickly, nervously, like a guy covering his tracks. “It’s just that my friend, he’s anxious to get moving on this thing, so if you can’t do it, he needs to know.”

  “I can’t read it now,” Stark told him. “I have an appointment.”

  “Okay,” Mortimer said weakly. He stepped away from the door. “So, you’ll let me know when . . .”

  “I’ll be back here at midnight,” Stark said. “You can call me then.”

  “How about if I just come by,” Mortimer asked.

  “You’re not going home now?”

  “Dottie’s on the warpath. I’m giving her a little time to cool.”

  Stark looked at Mortimer doubtfully. “Why is she on the warpath, Mortimer?”

  Mortimer looked like a guy caught with his hand in the till. “This other broad,” he sputtered. “She thinks I got this other broad.”

  Of all the answers Mortimer could have given, Stark thought, this was the most ludicrous, and because of that, he knew that it had been yanked from a mind unaccustomed to deceit.

  “I see,” Stark said coolly.

  “She’s real hot about it,” Mortimer added with a sideward glance.

  “No doubt,” Stark said, though he knew that this, too, was ridiculous, since everything Mortimer had ever said about his wife suggested that she was a woman who asked little and demanded nothing, a dull, moonless planet that revolved around Mortimer in an orbit that never varied in its shape or speed.

  And so the question was why had Mortimer bothered to concoct such a shallow, pointless, and transparently absurd lie. The only possible answer was that he’d done so in order to conceal some deeper and more dreadful falsehood.

  Stark hated both the question and the answer. He looked at the envelope Mortimer had just given him and felt sure that something was seriously wrong in this whole matter of the missing wife.

  “The woman,” he said. “Did you know her?”

  Mortimer looked as if he’d just been hit with an electric shock. “The one who’s missing?” he asked. “No, I . . .”

  “But she’s your friend’s wife, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And yet you never met her?”

  “I met her,” Mortimer said. “But I didn’t really know her.”

  “So you’re not involved in it,” Stark said. “In her being missing.”

  “Me?” Mortimer’s face froze in shock. “How could I be involved?”

  “I don’t know, Mortimer,”
Stark told him. “Maybe you and the woman are . . . close.”

  “Close?” Mortimer yelped. “You mean like . . . close . . . like that?”

  “Maybe she’s the woman your wife is worried about.”

  “No!” Mortimer blurted out. “Nothing like that. I never really knew the woman. She don’t mean nothing to me.”

  Stark let Mortimer squirm for a moment, then said, “All right. Come back around midnight.”

  Mortimer looked like a schoolboy suddenly released from the clutches of a disapproving teacher. “Okay,” he said hastily, then turned away and trudged back down the stairs.

  Watching him, Stark recalled how emphatically Mortimer had denied any connection to the missing woman it was his job to find. If this were true, he thought with a renewed and steadily sharper sensation of disturbance, then Mortimer was in Lockridge’s position, hired to find a man who could find Marisol for another man, in this case, Mortimer’s “friend.” But who was this friend, Stark wondered, and was he like Henderson had been, a scorned man, bitter and enraged, the missing wife—if she were his wife—now the sole object of his boiling wrath.

  CARUSO

  As he followed Mortimer westward, Caruso thought of the man at the top of the stairs, and the more he thought of him, the more one thing seemed clear. This guy looked a lot more like Batman than the barkeep he’d seen talking to Mortimer minutes before. For one thing, he’d had a book in his right hand. A very old book, like the ones Caruso had seen in movies about rich people who had huge country estates and whole rooms filled floor-to-ceiling with books you never saw in bookstore windows because they’d probably been made for the people who read them and nobody else. He knew that such people were phonies, that they would shake his hand, then quickly wash. He would always be low and dirty and disreputable to such people.

  Okay, so forget about the barkeep, Caruso thought, it was this guy he’d love to waste, this smart and arrogant guy, with the fancy book in his fucking hand. He could put a bullet between his eyes and walk away smiling. He imagined doing just that, getting the word from Mr. Labriola, Whack Batman, then coming up behind this fuck and whacking him good. He thought of the shiny thirty-eight revolver he’d bought eight years before and which he kept, fully loaded, in the glove compartment of his car. When the moment came, he knew he’d be ready.

  The only problem was that even if Labriola gave him the Big Assignment, he couldn’t be sure if this guy was really Batman. Because if he were Batman, then wouldn’t he want to look like he wasn’t instead of like he was?

  Mortimer had made it to the Seventh Avenue subway by the time Caruso had run the various permutations through his mind. By that time he no longer felt certain which of the men Mortimer had visited was actually the man Labriola had hired to find his daughter-in-law, and this left Caruso utterly perplexed as he watched Mortimer descend the stairs to the station, then finally disappear.

  Nothing was easy, that was the bottom line, Caruso concluded. Everything required more than you thought it would. More investigation, he decided, he needed more investigation before he could tell Labriola who Batman was and be sure that he was right. But how could he check out two different guys at the same time? That was a real mind twister, and as he made his way down the stairs, still vaguely on Mortimer’s trail, he tried to figure out a way to do it. The obvious answer was that he could hire some punk to keep an eye on one of the guys while he kept an eye on the other, but the punk would want money, and Caruso didn’t have any money, and he knew Labriola wouldn’t spring for an extra dime.

  A problem, Caruso thought, as he watched Mortimer step onto the uptown number one, a real fucking problem.

  SARA

  She’d been lucky, and she knew it. She was lucky because she hadn’t brought the gun. If she had, the commanding voice would have been too loud and insistent for her to ignore. In her mind she saw the little bald man stagger backward as the plume of blood spread across his chest, a look of horrified amazement on his face. One more step, and what she now envisioned would have been real.

  And so she had to be careful. That was the lesson she had to learn. She had to check everything out. She had to be street smart. She couldn’t allow herself to be cornered again.

  Still, there was no choice but to go on. And so she took the paper from her bag and once again turned to the classified section. She scoured its pages, noting the varied skills she did not possess. She knew nothing of computers, nothing of bookkeeping, nothing of management, nothing of organization. She couldn’t set a broken leg or clean a tooth. She couldn’t fix anything or assemble anything or break anything down once it was assembled. She knew nothing about the theater, nothing about carpentry, nothing about recruitment. She had no experience in retail, had never sold a skirt, a greeting card, a record. The only thing she’d ever sold was herself, her voice, and that was probably long gone.

  She folded the paper and considered just how little she’d learned in her life that anyone else could use. She knew scores of old songs, could play a little piano. But so what? The world was full of people who could do these things. The point was to be able to do something that someone else wanted done and would pay you to do. Or maybe just something you had that someone else wanted. Maybe no more than your body.

  She froze, appalled by the idea that she could think so little of herself. And yet, what did she actually have to offer? What could she do that a thousand other people couldn’t do better?

  She knew that these were devastating questions, and that if she pursued them, she would fall and fall and at the end of her fall she would reach the bottom of her will and there lay prostrate and defeated, a woman fit only to be scooped up and tossed into the backseat of a car and driven back to Long Island.

  And so she decided that there were some realities that no one could afford to stare in the face, because if you did, you saw only the heartless truth of your situation, and if you did that, you’d give up on everything. The winners were the ones who ignored the facts, because the facts were like whirling swords, forever slashing at your hope, and against which you had only the armor of your refusal and avoidance and denial, whatever you needed to say, Not me.

  She rose and made her way back across town, pausing briefly in Washington Square Park to watch the street musicians who gathered there. Some were singing folk songs and strumming guitars. There were a couple of rappers, and near the fountain, a lone crooner of the old standards. He was in his sixties, Sara supposed, his voice a bit gravelly, and yet somehow perfect for the world-weary lyrics of “But Not for Me.”

  Listening to him, she realized how little she’d known about life when she’d sung the old romantic songbook. She was sure she could sing these songs more truthfully now, because of all that went wrong and faded and vanished, all that betrayed and disappointed you, the things that never added up and the things that never made sense, and because she knew that for her to sing them in any other way would be to sing a lie.

  CARUSO

  So, could Piano Man be Batman? Caruso wondered as he sipped his beer. The guy sure didn’t fit the image he’d had in his head. But facts were facts, and he’d watched from just across the street and seen Mortimer talking somberly to this same guy who sat, playing the piano, utterly ordinary, nondescript, and who for all the world didn’t look like he could find a black guy in Harlem, much less some crazy broad who ditched her husband and sure as hell didn’t want to be found.

  He grabbed his beer and strolled to the back of the bar.

  Piano Man had just come to the end of a song, so it seemed to Caruso that it was a perfect time to chat him up.

  “You worked here a long time?” he asked.

  “Seems like forever,” the man answered.

  Caruso took a quick sip of beer, then glanced about the nearly empty bar. “Slow night.”

  “It’s early,” the man said. “We get a better crowd at night.”

  “So, you got entertainment.” Caruso nodded toward the piano. “I seen the sign outside.
Abe Morgenstern at the piano.”

  Piano Man shrugged. “I just like to keep from getting too rusty. We used to have a singer.”

  “This all you do, piano?” Caruso lit a cigarette.

  “No, I own the place,” Piano Man answered.

  “Own the place, no shit,” Caruso said. He smiled. “My father had a small business,” he lied. “A bakery. Lived right over it. All night he could smell the work he’d done that day. Never got away from it. It eats you alive, a small business.”

  “It takes up a lot of time, that’s for sure,” Piano Man agreed.

  “So, you’re like my dad, you live upstairs?”

  “No,” Piano Man answered. “I got a place over on Grove Street.”

  Caruso smiled cheerfully. He couldn’t tell if Piano Man was lying, but he hoped he was. He loved being lied to because it confirmed a truth he needed for his work, the fact that people were scum, so whatever you did to them, they fucking deserved it.

  But that wasn’t the point at the moment, Caruso realized. The point was to nail the guy down, get something for Labriola to chew on. “So, I was wondering,” he began. “If I was looking to get a place in this part of town, would Grove Street be good?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Piano Man said.

  “What kind of rent would I be looking at?”

  “A bundle.”

  “Like how much?”

  “Depends on how big. You got a family?”

  The fact that he didn’t have a family stung Caruso briefly, like admitting to another guy that he couldn’t get it up. “No,” he answered quietly.

  “So a studio, that would be enough?”

  “A studio, yeah.”

  “I would guess a couple grand at least.”

  “A month?” Caruso gasped, momentarily taken in by his own ruse, the absurd notion that he was looking for a place in the city. He wasn’t, of course, and he told himself that immediately. Still, the fact that he couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan even if he wanted to made him feel like a guy who would always come up short, have a car, an apartment, a girl that was a couple notches down from the ones he really wanted. But this was a point uncomfortable to pursue, and so he returned to the issue at hand. “So the bar, it makes you a good living, I guess.”