by Alan Furst
“Jesus Christ. You think I’m made of money?”
“I think you’re make of snips and snails and puppy dogs’ tails, and healthy respect for the flesh.”
“Goddamit Lieberman, I’m never sure if you’re getting me in trouble or getting me out of it.”
“That makes two of us buddy, bye-bye,” and he hangs up quick before I can say anything, before I can tell him why I can’t go.
So I go.
"Everybody talks about death, but nobody does anything about it.”
Grover Dill
At five-thirty I enter Genelle’s apartment. It’s hot, and somehow oily dirt has managed to ooze in under the locked (and barred, and gated, and chained) windows and spread itself around. It also makes me a little crazy being around all her stuff and Robbie’s, seeing presents I gave her, and smelling her perfume in the bathroom. I flash a picture of her up in the Adirondacks somewhere, a coach’s whistle bouncing against those nice firm tits across which is written on a T-shirt: Camp Ti-Ti-Ga-Wa. What felt like an over-complicated life sure looks tasty now, Genelle sitting in the front seat of the Yacht and making sandwiches and Robbie watching the tube in the back.
I peer through the window and don’t see anybody that looks like my expensive detective. There’s a crowd of fat ladies on the comer, which, depending on who they are slandering, looks either up, or down, the block. There’s lots of kids, all colors and ages, tearing an abandoned car apart. There’s one or two beautiful women walking through all that dogshit and garbage in the street, too goddamn good-looking to live in all this. Way down the block I can see a junky stealing an attache case from a new Buick Rivera and there’s a gang of folks playing conga drums and smoking dope on one of the stoops. Across the street a small guy with black hair and a gray summer suit is strolling along, eating what could be a pastrami sandwich. And there’s one old man in a canvas chair on the sidewalk, reading La Prensa and smoking a twisted cigar and ignoring the whole fucking circus. Him I admire.
I rummage around for something to eat, find a can of tuna fish in the cupboard and a frozen bagel in the refrigerator. This makes something like a sandwich, a Jewish-Catholic sandwich. Genelle’s folks are French Catholic, from Lafayette, Louisiana, originally. What is my head doing to me?
I finish eating and check the window again. The same action is going down, except the old man has gone inside, the ladies have moved about five feet just by shifting around in their conversation, the junky has disappeared, and the guy in the gray summer suit is now walking up the other side of the street at half-speed, eating an ice-cream cone.
EEK!
Right away I dial Lieberman, but he doesn’t answer. I find a kitchen knife that fits in my pocket and go downstairs into the lobby and hide behind a very pissed-on drape. Gray-suit swings by and ever so casually glances up, could well be at Genelle’s window, from my angle I can’t be sure. He!s about five feet six, real heavy beard shadow, tight black curly hair cut short, wearing a T-shirt underneath an orange silk sport shirt, with little black chest curls crawling over the top. He holds himself like an ugly guy at a dance in Brooklyn in the fifties—scared shitless but sticking his hands in his pockets to prove he ain’t. He’s in his late twenties somewhere, with hunchy shoulders from hanging out on street corners. I don’t know him personally but I know his type: the Neighborhood Creep, the guy whose profession is hanging around, preferably with people he idolizes, the guy the other guys tell their old ladies they’re with when they’re balling some chick. For this service they let him buy them a beer from time to time. I run back upstairs, telling myself that I’m bum-tripping myself.
I watch a little TV, mostly summer reruns of stuff I’ve seen, and twist the dial and smoke cigarettes a lot. Five minutes short of the hour I promised myself I’d wait, I’m back at the window. The only thing that’s changed is now he’s eating a knish in a piece of wax paper. I have two questions: 1. Where’s he getting it? and 2. Where’s he putting it? All I can think of is running down into the street, finding my goof-off private eye, and firing him on the spot.
At 2:00 a.m. I finally connect with Lieberman. “Life-Isn’t-A-Fountain Foundation” he answers the phone.
“Lieberman?”
“Some men call me that.”
“Oh Jesus, are you stoned?”
“Who me?”
“Look, this is me.”
“How nice to hear from you. This is me.”
“This is ME, ME.”
“The Maharishi believes you are holding too much ego. That’ll be fifty bucks please.”
“Will you stop rapping off me and listen? Did you hire an Irish detective, or a Sicilian hit man?”
“Oh, it’s you. Why did you say it’s me when it was you all the time?”
“Where is my fucking detective? I got a creep hanging around and I think he’s gonna put a fuckin’ icepick in me unless somebody does something.”
“Ah-HAH, the thot plickens.”
“Did you really hire that guy or is this another one of your tear-gas pencil pranks?”
“He’s there, don’t worry about that. He comes highly recommended, does McGrath. I suspect he’s following instructions, which are stay out of sight and put a tag on anybody who looks like a tag on you.”
“Why?”
“To find out who’s either at the top, the bottom, the middle, or any other place in this. Now cool it and lay back. This’ll happen just like nature, as the laxative people say.”
“Are you in tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow is a great television day. I will be home, in a state of highly altered consciousness, watching Laurel and Hardy with a young lady I know. That is the agenda for tomorrow. Now goodnight, Chet,” and he hangs up.
What I get isn’t sleep. It’s rolling left and right, and left, and getting up and looking out the window. Jesus, the things that go down on that block after dark! Sometimes the creep is around, sometimes he isn’t. But by nine the next morning, when I decide to quit rolling and get dressed, he’s sitting in a beat-up red VW right across the street and drinking coffee from a paper cup. He’s got a sharp Adam’s apple which is in the act of bobbing up and down, my guess would be to slam home the remains of a pizza.
I eat a few handfuls of Grape Nuts for breakfast and chase that with a cup of Oolong tea that Genelle keeps around—she’s a sucker for the tea rack in the market— and call Lieberman again.
“Hello,” I say, “this is me again.”
“Did I talk to you last night?”
“You sure did.”
“You don’t say? What did we talk about?”
“We talked about money paid out for a phantom private eye.”
“Oh, he’s around, you just aren’t helping him any.” “For $150 a day I’m supposed to help him?”
“C’mon man. Why don’t you take a walk or a ride and see what happens?”
“You are stoned. And worse, you are crazy. I’m gonna get under the bed. You should see this guy. I don’t even want to know what he thinks about.”
“Well, if you went out, hypothetically speaking, and lost him, we would know if he telephones somebody, goes somewhere, or heads back to Genelle’s, right? If he’s operating alone, we can pick him off somehow, get him busted, I’ll think of something bright. If he goes somewhere, we’re in the end zone.”
“Tom, I’ve been watching this goddamn street all night. And I haven’t seen anything resembling the guy you told me about. I don’t believe he’s here. I swear it. He’s goofing off somewhere, or on another case, or something, but he is not following the creep.”
“Okay, tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna come down there and find him and then I’m gonna call you from a payphone and tell you to take a little trip. Is that okay? I hope it is, ’cause I am gonna cancel a very nice afternoon to do this, and I hope you remember that when the bill comes in.”
“Good. That sounds good. What are you driving, just so I know?”
“An MGB, dark green, with the top d
own. I’ll be very visible.”
“Okay. I hope this detective has wheels, you better tell me that too, ’cause I’ll feel a lot safer in a cab.” “Good. Talk to you in an hour.”
Eighty minutes of thumb-twiddling later the phone rings.
“Jesus, you ever try to find a working payphone down here?”
“Well?”
“Okay, I saw McGrath. He’s up on a roof. He’s driving a telephone van. I’m gonna stick around and watch the action. So if something happens, I shouldn’t be too far behind that telephone van.”
“See you later.”
I put away the kitchen knife and find a beer can opener that fits a little better in my pocket. Genelle has a whetstone hanging on the wall and I hone down the edges of the church-key until it’s good and sharp. If someone hassles me I’m gonna tear him a new face ’cause I just hate to be scared.
I go downstairs and start walking east. In a plate glass window I see the VW edge out and come chugging along at less than walking speed. Just then a cab cruises by and I flag him down and get in. The driver is a huge black guy, with a big gray afro, and smoking an outrageous cigar. “Where to?” he says.
“I feel like seeing the sights. How about St. Pat’s Cathedral for beginners?”
“It’s your money,” he says and slaps down the meter and away we go.
At just under taxi hurtling speed, we zip crosstown to lower Madison Avenue, and I slide around in the back seat until I can get, by seeming to be tired and sort of slumping down, a good angle in the side-view mirror. This driver is enjoying himself, it’s mid-morning and the lights are set for twenty-six m.p.h., and he’s humming away to himself around that cigar, more a rhythm than a tune, “Ruh, ruh,—ruh, ruh,—ru-u-u-u-h, RUH,” and as we slide around busses and tourists with white knuckles clutching their steering wheels, he always moves out on a ‘ruh-ruh,’ sweeps by on ‘ru-u-u-u-u-u-h’ and cuts back in on ‘RUH.’
"In the mirror I can see a red VW clunking away through traffic, usually hanging half a block back and at forty-five degrees off our left rear bumper. Way back, I get a glimpse of the flat front of a white GMC telephone van, but that’s all I can make out. No sign of Lieberman. At 38th Street, the VW suddenly pulls up on our left and the creep looks over at me for a long second. I see he’s got one eyebrow running directly across his forehead, and his mouth is open: it’s the kind of face where the mouth is always stuck open. He drops back again to his quartering position and a shiver runs through me. My eyes meet the driver’s for an instant in his rear-view mirror and he says “Cost you 20 for me to shake that guy.”
“You got it,” I say, feeling vulnerable as hell all of a sudden.
“Oh, I had guys like you in the car, ain’t nuthin’ new to me. You fuckin’ somebody’s old lady or somebody fuckin’ your old lady and somebody goes on out and hires hisself some private fuzz. Or gets a guy and says ‘you beat the shit outa this guy and I’ll pay you 500— move over fool—and pretty soon everybody’s into it, yeah, they get right down into it. Where’s that 20?”
I float it into the front seat and he glances at it and lets it lay, like in a poker game.
He ‘ruh-ruh’s’ right on past the turn for St. Pat’s and we’re in the sixties by now. All the fairies are up and out with their silky Afghans and the early art gallery people are gathered here and there in knots tattling with each other.
“Yeah,” he says, “I got married a coupla times. I was just a kid. Jesus! What them women put me through. One day this old man tells me, ‘Son, sometime the screwin’ you givin’, ain’t worth the screwin’ you get-tin'. So I spent a few years in Detroit. Growed up some. I’ll tell you this, I ain’t done any marryin’ since then. Okay let’s us lose this fool.” He tromps on the gas pedal and lays the cab over into 69th Street. I get a flash of a blue-haired old lady jumping back onto the sidewalk and a second later, attached by a leash, a Schnauser sails upward and lands by her feet. Like ran-nin’ a movie backwards. I hear a powerful lot of squealing tires and some infuriated honking going on behind us, can stand it no longer, and stick my head out the window to watch the pursuit. The old lady is now back-pedaling from the curb and that Schnauser is right behind her heels, skittering away from her feet but trying to keep her between it and the action. And the action is furious. The VW corners okay, but here comes the telephone van right up behind it, its boxy body swaying with the turn; right up on its tail is Lieberman, wearing a cowboy hat and sliding the MGB around the comer like it was Watkins Glen or something. I’m just about to stick my head back inside when, holy-moly, I see behind the MGB that TV repair truck, rear end swinging as it takes the comer, and lo and behold there’s Ernie, the longhair Lieberman hired to tag his tag and discover its source, on a big hairy Norton Atlas coming along after. Great.
The driver has watched all this in his mirror and about the middle of the block that twenty comes sailing back over the seat and he says “This ain’t no divorce. What’d you get me into? Half the fuckin’ city wants to talk to you. Where’d you say you were gettin’ out?” I look in the mirror and the VW is tailing us hard now and I can make out that he’s driving left handed and his right hand is inside his jacket pocket. I grab up a wad of bills from my pocket and fling them over the seat, “That guy’s gonna shoot me, man. Do something!”
Now he’s muttering around that cigar, which is standing up at a high angle, like a tail on an excited cat. “You, mumble, mumble, muh-fuh, mumble mumble, som-bitch, mumble, how much on that seat right now?” I hang over the seat and there’s 3 twenties, a ten, and a pack of singles, “About a hundred bucks.”
“Hang on,” he says and the cigar rises another halfinch. He plows that cab into Fifth Avenue, scattering a bunch of ladies with white hats wearing carnations on their lapels. The rest of the gang follows right along, scree! scree! screeee-uhhh! (that’s Tom) scree, and the Norton gears down and takes the turn with peg brushing along the street. The cab turns again, into 64th Street and this time we go to Park Avenue and turn right, headed downtown. When I turn around, we’ve still got all our inventory. Park Avenue runs both ways, north and south, and in the middle of the street is an island, which has flowers in the spring, lighted Christmas trees in the winter, and bushes the rest of the year, courtesy of the Park Avenue Improvement Association. So we go down to 62nd, and after the whole procession stops for a traffic light, swing around into the uptown lane, so now I get to see all the other folks. Lieberman waves, the guys in the TV repair truck are both wearing Mets baseball hats and USAF sunglasses and looking pretty grim. Ernie, however, looks ripped, and he’s obviously enjoying the hell out of all this. We hook around again on 63rd and head downtown and I see what looks like a pistol in the creep’s right hand. I sink down in the seat and say “Dig on outa here man, that guy in the VW is gonna do a number.”
“Not now he ain’t” says the driver, and I inch up far enough to see that an NYPD cruiser has moved in front of us, and the cabbie is hanging right on his tail. Immediately, everybody drops back into orderly formation, like kids caught with a hand in the cookie jar, ‘who, me?’ But now I see the cop isn’t interested in us, he’s interested in Ernie’s motorcycle, which doesn’t happen to have a license plate on it. From the back, and the occasional profile, these cops are swingers, mustachioed, east-side, debutante-fucking cops—“There was a burglar there lady, but I chased him up on the roof and my partner got him. Hey lady, yer robe is open.” So now we’re locked in a circle, Ernie following the crowd following us and us following the cruiser following Ernie. “Dig it,” says the driver, “Sally go round the fuckin’ roses.” Twice more around the island and Ernie gets nervous and pulls out. The cops follow him, we follow the cops, everybody else follows us, all keeping their distance now. Pretty soon I realize they are gonna pull him over and bust him for no plates and lord knows what else, so I say “This is good for me man, I can make it down one of the wrong-way side streets and get lost.”
“I can’t say I ain’t glad to be rid of you. You
watch your ass now, son,” and he pulls abruptly up to Park and 46th and I skedaddle out of there, sort of bobbing and weaving into the side street. Nobody comes the wrong way into the street after me and I relax, keeping close to the buildings, and pretty soon I think “Whew, that was too high. I got to get the hell out of all this” and a steel-springed arm closes my neck between forearm and biceps and I am moved weightless into a hallway and I feel a knuckle forced into my neck just below the ear and that hallway gets fuzzier and fuzzier and disappears down a celestial hole into nothing.
I wake up thinking that there are bees around me. Then I realize it’s my ears buzzing. When I sit up, something is not right in my back and my left ear has a very tender knot grown up underneath it. I can’t focus for a second, then something clicks and I’m underneath a staircase in an unlighted hallway. If I’m dead and this is heaven, this must be God’s mop-room ’cause the door in front of me has stencilled on it “Janitor Only. Keep Out.” I start feeling around for other problems but I can’t find any. Neither can I find my money, my wallet, my cigarettes, my keys or my sunglasses. Well, I think, if that was them, they can’t want to kill me. Maybe they just want to smoke my cigarettes and wear my Foster Grants. I get up okay, though my ears get to singing again, and I think, “Shit, I’ve been mugged. Followed around by a Mafioso hit man, a private eye, my lawer, the FBI, a brother on a motorcycle and the NYPD and I get away from them and some asshole mugs me. Maybe I oughta move to Maine.” Then I figure out that he got the can opener too. And I don’t feel quite so goddamn virginal any more. Well, if this was a plain old NYC mugger, I know where to find the wallet.
I look both ways before I go out in the street but there’s nobody special around, and I walk over to the nearest garbage can and sure enough there’s the wallet. There’s no money in it, but Howie Fine’s ID is all there and that makes me feel a better. I haven’t got a cent on me, so how to get back to Genelle’s where I’ve stashed 500 bucks—the mugger got about 900. I walk about a block and here comes a great big guy in a flowered shirt and a beard .with a skinny chick hanging on his arm. He’s got a few hundred worth of camera around his neck and he’s talking and gesturing and the chick, long straight hair and dangly earrings, a city version of Joyce Quarterly I think, is soaking it all up. I approach them and say “ ’Scuse me folks. I just got mugged back there. Could I get fifty cents to make it back home with?” Beard looks at me for a second and then blows himself up like a dirigible and says “Get out of my way you spare-change cocksucker or I’ll kick your teeth up your face.”