Stephenson’s door smacked open. Shoulders hunched in the rain, the rag bellied up to Max. “What re you loiterin’ for, Jocko? Ain’t you diggin’ up some help?”
At first Max didn’t notice the bulldog-mugged boy nearby. The hulking barkeep pressed closer and showed his underbite.
“I know my business,” Max retorted, balling his fists.
Turning to the aproned boy, the bartender jabbed a thumb at a mucky mound of curbside refuse. “What’d I tell ya’? I’ll tan your hide before you can say Jack Robinson.”
Why was the man’s nose so raw, so shapeless?
A glancing weight struck Max’s shoulder, and he almost lost his balance. Racing through the puddles, the black man, his head bare, pounded past him down the sidewalk, then veered onto Thompson Street. The thought was only half-formed before Max started racing after him. The Negro might have seen the whole thing. A deaf and dummy could shake his head yes and no, he could tell the story with his hands. In the middle of the block, the fading figure in the tattered overalls darted into an alleyway.
His heart scuttling up his throat, Max rushed after him. As he groped down the dark walkway, the soft rain grew heavier, turning to a sudden downpour.
Emerging, he found himself in a rear courtyard just in time to spy his witness plunge into another alley. Soaking wash hung unattended on a line. He heard shouts, singing, coughing, babies crying. Inside a tunnel-like passageway he felt the sewage slop up to his ankles. The rain tasted of coal dust. Inadvertently, he tripped over a soft, indescribable mound. He didn’t look down. Behind a fence, geese yawped.
Then he came to a T in the alleys. He ran left for fifty yards, then turned and ran in the opposite direction. Hemmed in by sheer tenement walls, he had no idea which way to turn.
The African had disappeared. Max shrugged and picked his way toward Houston Street. Runny mud seeped up his suit pants, spattering his calves. He trudged on, praying for a lucky turn into civilization, but the lane ended at a brick wall. Now he had to retrace his steps, unsure but stubborn. Finally, he broke out onto West Third Street.
Drenched and shivering, he plodded south, crossed Houston, and headed downtown on Mercer Street. A shift of chattering garment workers, Eastern European Jews and Italians, poured from a loft building. With their shawls over their heads, in twos and threes, they moved in shapeless black clots towards the Grand Street train station.
He’d caught a chill. Waves of heat and cold swept through him. Hunching forward, he drove himself through the downpour. Small figures hung back but kept pace with him.
Stephenson’s boy had shed his apron, but not his pushed-in features. In a smashed plug hat, he was pedaling a bicycle with a deformed front wheel. Wobbling, the boy rose into the air and then fell at irregular intervals. Max squinted but couldn’t place the other little bastards. He searched for Famous, Cham-peen, even The Basher, but he couldn’t identify these street arabs. They occupied different turf, sidewalks patrolled by the full-grown Fashion Plates.
Were they stalking him on their own inspiration, or were they doing the rag’s bidding? It hardly mattered. One way or another, charity was not their stock in trade.
The bike rider’s confederates ducked into basements, hid behind piles of garbage, skittered under parked wagons. But they followed every twist and turn Max made, even when he whirled around and started to retrace his steps. The gang did look familiar, though. Yes, he’d seen the same stunted figures staggering pie-eyed around a Lafayette Street ashcan fire.
Had the barkeep dispatched his minions to stop Max from reaching police headquarters? But why? He hadn’t seen who had killed Mourtone. Still, he had stumbled on the aftermath. Cooing to each other, the arabs drew their noose tighter. A pale devil tossed a pebble that glanced off Max’s forehead. In the backs of their throats, the boys made a cawing sound. Then they let go a shower of stones. Max threw his arm up in front of his face. Setting his feet wide, he steeled himself for the onslaught.
Then he heard voices; he was reprieved. The Saint Bernard Hotel, an infamous roaring house, loomed in the mist. Nearby, a sign featuring large gilt teeth flapped in the wind. Dr. Minsky’s Painless Dentistry. A liquor shop legend announced “Sherry with a Big Egg in it, 5 cents.” Inside the doorway of a cast-iron building, a peddler, a stack of derbies on his head, stood still as a photograph. Max heard the racket of wagon wheels on cobblestones and the rhythmic clatter of hooves on paving. He took a breath, relaxing now. Then he heard the explosion.
Schwab’s boys? They were always babbling about a well-placed bomb, but so far New York had been spared the terrors of Barcelona, or even Chicago. Still, with Johann Most and Emma Goldman on the rampage, and all those tramps in the streets, his mind jumped to the obvious conclusion.
Running loose, a horse raced past in terror, its harness trailing. Max watched its slick haunches disappear around a corner. Capes of rain enveloped him. He moved toward the cursing voices. Teamsters? Some kind of ordinary fracas. If he could blend into the crowd, he’d be safe.
A tangle of vans, carts, broughams, and coaches choked the street. A deliveryman in a white smock stood on the roof of his vehicle trying to make out the cause of the impeding carnage.
Max saw the trouble. One delivery wagon was overturned, completely upset, its chestnut horse on its side, whinnying pathetically, trying to rise, slipping, falling again in a snarl of ruptured traces. Nearby, an empty carriage’s side was smashed in, exposing its elegant padded interior to the rain.
Two drivers went at each other’s throats. One of them, in boots and loud checked pants, was small and nimble. Ducking and dodging, he kept slipping his opponent’s bear hugs, raining blows down on the stolid man’s hairless skull. With a terrible scraping sound, the mad chestnut rose, snorting, dragging the cart on its side across the paving stones before falling again, spewing manure, pissing in terror. Racing toward the downed, gasping animal, the driver flailed with his whip, searing long fresh wounds into the helpless beast’s flesh. Then he paused to kick the animal in the side.
The wagon driver seemed to think that by kicking the horse and slashing it over and over with his hissing whip he could force it to its feet, but instead the chestnut’s eyes glazed over, poached eggs in its long face, and the life leaked out of him.
The racket of bumping, packed vehicles, the drivers’ screeching curses, the dull thwack of boot on horseflesh ached inside Max’s brain. These men couldn’t help him. He was alone.
In full sight of the accident the street arabs showed themselves. There were lalf a dozen, maybe more. With that off-kilter bump and bump, the bicyclist bored straight at Max with teeth bared in his bulldog mug. He barely made a sound when Max landed a punch high on his forehead. Invisible hands pulled at the newsman’s coat, worked inside his vest, tore at his pockets, hands like clicking crabs, unattached to the street arabs whose pocked faces blurred before his eyes. His body rigid, he fell backwards, his head cracking on stone. They fell on him in a pack. He fought hard, he used his fists, his knees, his elbows, but their pointy blows came from everywhere.
chapter seven
He woke up with bare, wet feet. His boots, even his socks were missing. Inside his cheek his tongue traced raw flesh. Though he felt an overwhelming urge to drift back to sleep, his freezing toes kept him from falling back into the alluring darkness. Instead, he found himself stretched out stiff in a doorway, boodess, sockless and, he realized suddenly, his coat had disappeared as well. In a panic, he groped to see if he was wearing pants. When he was satisfied that he wasn’t lying stark naked in the drizzle, a much deeper terror seized him. His own name kept eluding him. He dozed, faded in and out.
Then a man wearing a tall stack of derbies squatted next to him. “They cracked you good and hard, mister, something terrible. You still got a few teeth?”
Had this hat man saved him? Irregular waves of nausea swept through him. He could go to sleep again for a century, but the man wouldn’t leave him alone. “Open up. You shouldn’t swall
ow your tongue. I had a friend who ate his and choked.”
The idea of a man eating his own tongue struck him as funny, but he repressed his laughter because the derby man seemed so earnest. He tried to recall where he lived and discovered that he couldn’t. If he could only concentrate hard enough he knew he’d get it, but the lure of sinking was too sweet, sinking and fading away. He swam in a dream for a while. Only the pain brought him back to the surface, a shooting pain that darted up his jaw into the heart of his right ear. Parts of him felt broken. Like an old mechanical contraption.
Gaslight hissed in a dusty storeroom. A piece of time was missing, but his feet were dry. He looked down and was happy to see feet inside black woolen socks. He was the happiest man in the world. Warm feet: that was all it took. But who was he? Shelves of hats, stacks of hats, signs for hats, handwritten signs for hat sizes appeared, paled, then reappeared sharper still. He was lost in a universe of hats.
The derby man was feeding him.
Even a little thin soup was comforting if you didn’t know who you were. He forgot his fears as the warm liquid went down. Bits of gristle got stuck between his teeth.
“A little stove I got.”
He was picking at one recalcitrant shred of meat when it came to him. Max Greengrass. But there was something so comical about the sound of it, Greengrass, that he hesitated to commit himself. Maybe he had read about someone with this ridiculous name, and it had stuck in his mind. He didn’t want to make a mistake and claim to be the wrong person. But wasn’t that who he was? The wrong person? Sensing that this had always been true, he almost laughed out loud.
And what if he showed up at the wrong address? Well, it wouldn’t be his family, it would be someone else’s family. Now he lost confidence in the name Max Greengrass entirely. The nausea returned with newfound force. He looked at his fresh woolen socks and tried to hold back, but then an uncontrollable spasm seized him and undigested soup showered down on his feet.
“West 16th Street.” He was sure he would recognize the house, and the people inside would remind him of his name. He wouldn’t ask directly, he’d just wait for them to address him. Broken bits clattered inside his mind. Then he broke out laughing. He was the wrong man because he was dead. His own father had told him so. Read him right out of the tribe. But at West 16th Street they’d recognize the animated corpse. Him.
“Ten cents a pair,” his peculiar savior grumbled. “And now you ruin.”
“I’ll buy a dozen. Just take me to West 16th.” His mother worked a mop in a hallway. Where was it? In some unnamed tenement stinking of ammonia. The mop had strings like an old woman’s hair.
“A pair of felt slippers. You’ll walk on air.”
Groping, he discovered one trouser pocket slashed apart, but the other was intact, a few coins buried deep in the lining. “No purse,” he explained, offering the man a few coins. “No watch either. Time?”
“Three-thirty. Maybe four,” the hat man said, pocketing the change.
Max wondered whether he had paid far too much for the socks and the slippers but didn’t have the will to protest.
Greengrass was a made-up name, a prevarication that never fooled anyone. He was an invented man. His father was a lie, his birth an immaculate deception. There was a true story behind it, he could taste it, but it drifted away.
The hat man flagged a fly cab and pushed Max, felt slippers and all, into the coach. “West 16th, he’ll show you,” he shouted to the cabby, and the rickety horse-drawn vehicle clattered into the traffic, every uncushioned jolt ringing inside the bone bell of Max’s head. He started to remember.
Remembering came in fragments. The clawing fingers inside his pockets. Martin tilted as if he were going to fall. The black man’s shoulder spinning him around. Wet black alley walls. The choking atmosphere inside Stephenson’s. The slap of slung shot against the bartender’s palm. The rag’s pink, leaking nose.
“Wait, forget 16th Street! Take me to police headquarters! Mulberry Street!” he shouted up at the slouch-hatted driver. Madly, he groped around for Martin’s note, but it had disappeared along with his other possessions. His heart sank.
An intense headache still pulsed in his temples, but at least he knew who he was again. At Mulberry Street, he strode right up to the desk sergeant. “There’s been a murder over at Stephenson’s.”
“You sure you ain’t the guy on the other end?” the muttonchopped officer replied. A pair of lounging street cops hooted from a comfortable bench.
“Over at Stephenson’s.”
“That chapel?”
“Listen, I’m from the Herald—”
“And I’m the friggin’ Queen of England. You take a look at yourself?”
Aware that hatless and in spattered felt slippers he didn’t cut a compelling figure, he kept his temper. “Yeah, I know, I got rolled. You can call my editor, Stan Parnell. I’m Max Greengrass.”
A bow-legged barrel of a cop pushed through the door. Max recognized him instantly. Jack Sloan. Last September at Fitzgerald and Ives, Max had lost two bits to him on a bet involving the Orioles. “Jack.”
“Maxie, what gives? You get roughed up?”
“You know this clown?” the sergeant asked, his skepticism wavering.
“That’s Maxie Greengrass. He works for the World, don’t ya, Max?”
“The Herald now. Vouch for me, huh?”
“Sure, Maxie, he’s a white man. Who’s the gyp did this to ya?”
“Says he seen some hackum over at Stephenson’s,” the sergeant replied, mollified now. “We got an extra few coats back there, mister. I don’t know about no shoes. Who’s the stiff?”
“A friend … an acquaintance of mine. As far as I know, he’s still sitting there with a hole in his head.”
Sloan slid over and passed Max a flask. The raw whiskey singed his throat, but he took a good pull. One of the bench-sitters produced a topcoat. “I got some boots back there, lemme look at your feet.”
After making a sober assessment, he returned with a cracked pair of boots that actually fit. “They batted me around pretty good,” Max said, touching the moist, matted hair on the back of his head. “You got a detective on duty?”
“Stout, over here!”
In the police carriage the veteran, Detective Stout, a sunken-cheeked man with a hedgerow of dark eyebrows, kept up a steady patter. “Yeah, talk about your rat pit. Stephenson’s? Any way they can manufacture a shekel, huh? White girls ballin’ off niggers. Does than make sense? I mean from a business point of view. Your average nigger don’t have a pot to piss in, how much can he dig up to go around the world? This friend of yours, he ain’t… ?”
“No, I told you. His father’s in insurance.” This information settled the race question. At least Max hoped so. He sensed a mean streak in Stout, and had no doubt that the detective would soon be referring to him as that sheeny Greengrass.
“So you been at the Herald how long?” Stout probed him.
“A few months. I was at the World before that.” The cop didn’t have to know he’d been a space-rater at Pulitzer’s pressure cooker too.
“You can wipe your ass with either one, right? So you walk in, your pal’s got his brains removed, and the bartender is non compos mentis?
“That sums it up.”
“And we got a deaf-and-dumb nigger in overalls. Christ.”
“We don’t know that for certain. Consider the source.”
“Yeah, right. Can you imagine raising a kid in this cesspool? I moved my wife out to the suburbs, Kings Highway in Brooklyn. So where’d the nigger hotfoot it to? Minetta Lane?”
“No, he ran up Thompson and into the alleys. That’s where I lost him.”
“You can bet he took his razor with him to Minetta. So how long you been friends with Marty? You cruise these joints with him?”
Max stiffened. “He was just an acquaintance who read one of my stories. I had a drink with him once over at the Hoffman House.”
“Kinda an upt
own-downtown game?”
“No game. Just what I said.”
A colored man in an oily striped suit stood under Stephenson’s shredded awning. Max steeled himself for the dreadful sight of Mourtone one more time. He told himself that Martin Mourtone didn’t exist any more. The thing flung back in the chair was just that, a fleshy thing without sight, without thought, without sensation. A skinned sack of meat and bone you tossed into a simple hole in the ground. Unfortunately, this line of thinking only made him queasier.
“While you’re at it, ask Stephenson’s rag why he sicced his boys on me.”
“Yeah? How you figure that?”
“The arab that jumped me, he was working for the bartender.”
“You seen it?”
“Yeah. He was cleaning up some mess.”
The dive was filling up with warehousemen, local carters, janitors, and bootblacks with their kits. Max recognized a policy promoter from Frenchtown, near New York University. The whores over there did a pretty business with the students and the professorship. Not a single woman graced the crude bar. Following in Stout’s wake, Max could barely see the barkeep at first, so he made an end run around the detective to get a better look. Behind the bar a bent, hawk-nosed character hiked up his apron.
Where Martin’s body had tilted against the wall, an empty chair stood. Missing from the table were Mourtone’s hat and his dead cigar. Even the moist spots on the tin wainscoting had been wiped and dried.
Stout sidled back over to Max. “He went to see his mother. In Baltimore.”
“What?”
“This joy boy says he didn’t see nothin’ when he got on his shift. So it must’ve been your rag that took off to see moms in Maryland. Nice timing.
“That’s where Martin was sitting.” Max motioned toward the corner.
“I guess they shipped him over by Bellevue. C’mon. You’re his last friend in the world.”
The Midnight Band of Mercy Page 7