by Alan Furst
It’s deserted in the streets, and I’ve given myself too much time. New York is still heaving and groaning like it does, but even the night people seem to have given up and gone wherever they go. I wonder, as I drive, where all this began. Because in college, dealing a lid here and there, it always seemed like a basically okay thing to do. Against the law was against their law and they, what with Viet Nam and black folks and a million other fuck-ups, they never seemed to be right about anything at all. The best they had was that kampus kop I slugged— a few maggots crawling around looking for a little spiritual protein to see them through the long night. I had got, over the last years, pretty good at stripping away beards and hair and seeing the complete face underneath. I had to do that, for survival, ’cause hair’ll grow on anything. And I could take those faces and see two kinds of people: distinct winners and distinct losers, never much the middle mass. Some people got good at sports and got good at school and got good at, well, say “revolution.” Though there has to be a better word, spiritual or political, it all came down to the willingness to say no. I always knew there was a niche around for me if I wanted it. I could of worked for my father, maybe been a lawyer or a straight business type—a little grass in the evening and maybe a mescaline party once a year with old friends. But I suppose I had to say no a little louder than that. Also, the higher I got, the sillier they seemed; the sillier they seemed, the more they yelled and shrieked and carried on and busted people; the more they did that, the more people said “Well, I’m not physical, y’know, but scare me enough, push me hard enough, and you’ll eventually turn me pig-side-up.” Funny, but the losers were the same, kids ugly in high school found that with freaks, you could be a freak, period, and if you were just the least bit righteous and the least bit generous and you didn’t get high off of bringing people’s heads down, well then welcome brother.
And then there weren’t winners or losers any more, which seemed to make both sides real, real happy. The media got into it and all that changed. Of course, with Nixon and his pals, the media’s karma came right back around pretty quick. Once it got mediafied, though, it wasn’t the Emperor’s New Clothes any more (we used to get stoned and yell, “fuck man, that king is naked, naked”) it became a style. The papers and TV never said much about the feeling, ’cause I don’t think a media can feel anything; it only puts out, it don’t take in.
I envy people like Professor Plum and his crew, and even Villegas, ’cause they feel a whole lot. They wouldn’t feel it so much without me, of course, since I’m the man that brings the disculturating goodies around.
Accardo used to say that once it got out what was going on, once all those cogs and gears and wheels that run the big machine found out what the engineer was doing at night when he went home, they were gonna scream blue murder. ’Cause they didn’t feel like they could ever have that shit, they’d been educated out of heavy wanting and into heavy survival a lotta years before. No, they were gonna scream “put those people away officer, if I ain’t got it well by God they can’t have it” and the cops did what they were told. You want to find a group of people who really don’t believe life is all that straight, just get with a bunch of cops for a while—they know what those cogs’ll do when they get crazy with coggin’. So here I was, going to do something I could hardly believe, but having to do it. Bein’ a little bit ready to join the survivors who do what they have to do, and also to join those folks who say “get your fuckin’ hands off my life, I ain’t ever hurt you at all.” Funny thing, a dealer, he’s got to survive, and he’s got to stay righteous, and those two don’t mix so goddamn well.
I get to Genelle’s street about four-fifty and start tryin’ to get followed. I don’t see the creep anywhere and I’m not real anxious to get out of the car and walk around, that’s a little too exposed for my purposes. Then I see him, he’s down at the end of the block. Just before he sees me looking at him, I manage to get out of the driver’s seat and start adjusting the mirror. Here he comes on the trot, but I get into the car real fast and he reverses his field—al! of which I can see in the mirror. I take my time about starting the car and spend one move more than necessary getting out of the parking space. I pull out just as the VW comes coughing around the comer. I get it moving pretty fast, ’cause I don’t want anything to happen until I’m ready, so I zip crosstown, once almost losing him, and get on Eighth Avenue uptown just above the Village. All the way to 49th I manage to keen a car or newspaper delivery track between us. When I take my cross street he manages to get up on my bumper for a moment, but I out-accelerate him and lose him at Tenth Avenue. Since turning I’ve been disregarding lights, after a quick check for cops, and I charge right across Eleventh Avenue in front of a tractor-trailer I don’t wear a watch but my guesses are real good about time and I think it’s around five-thirty, probably a few minutes after. Once on the piers, he just hangs about ten feet back off my bumper. The docks are deserted, almost, there are a few trucks and one or two groups of longshoremen shaping up, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. But there’s a whole lot of space down here, and the pillars of the elevated West Side Highway overhead keep everything in shadow from the street lights. In the paper I’d seen that Pier 48 had a freighter leaving a day ago and the Michaelangelo pulling in in two days. That meant to me that it would be clear. It is, and for a moment I panic ’cause my little reception committee isn’t around. But then I see them. They’re huddled in a little knot under a street light. There’s a few tracks around, but I’m not worried about them ’cause the drivers are either asleep inside or tied up from being highjacked, that not being an unlikelihood in this little part of the world.
The creep hasn’t noticed my receiving line ’cause that VW suddenly fills my mirror and there he is, one hand reaching inside his coat. He must figure I’ve played right into his hands. He is about to try pulling up with me on my right side, when I stamp the pedal and veer right toward my group. He sees them the instant I turn that way ’cause he hits his brakes and swings over to my other side and backs off.
Very quickly I hit the brakes and stop about five feet away from my employees. I’m out of the car in a flash, and from the corner of my eye I can see the prank worked, he’s out in the middle of a wide space with me and four guys. So he just stops and sits with his car idling about ten feet the other side of my car. I approach my unloading crew. I’ve got three older guys, pretty hefty, but with busted nose veins and puffy eyes, making a stay on the Bowery at some point a probability. The last guy is Puerto Rican, about twenty, and all muscles, probably a body-builder. I say in my best imitation Brooklyn-Italian accent “You guys did good,” and I hand each of them twenty ten-dollar bills. They are blinking at it and scratching their heads and looking at each other and maybe just thinking about starting to smile at their incredible luck when I turn around and reach in the back of the Nova and take out my gift-wrapped box. Through the rear window I can see the creep is watching all this, trying to figure out what’s going on, ’cause, depending on who he works for, seeing all this could mean some kind of points. I move around the back of the car, gift box cradled and slip my finger in the little square hole. This is getting nuttier every second to the creep, I figure. First I drive like crazy to the docks, then I make a meet with a bunch of guys and then I’m walking right at him with a Christmas present. His left hand is loosely on the wheel, he’s facing me three quarters and his right hand is down below the level of the window. If he knew who those guys were and what their reaction would be, he’d blow me away right now. But I’m smiling at him and at about two feet from his car I can hear his radio playing “Ah woman, when I loved you be-fore.”
I say “Hi there, have you been following me, you little prick?” I see his right shoulder move, maybe to bring the gun up, angle my gift package the rest of the way and pull the trigger. It jumps in my hands and the top of his body flies up and back and something hits the ceiling of the car. I hear the shotgun sound coming back at me off the concrete, a muffled boom
, and a huge swarm of pigeons takes off from up in the highway pillars and there is the pitty-pat of feet running across pavement. My crew must have figured it out. Quickly, box still held crossways though one end has disappeared and the air is full of little cardboard shreds, I go around to the driver’s side of the VW. One arm and what’s left of his face are hanging backwards out the side window which he shattered as he went through. There’s glass all over the ground and blood running down the side of the VW and making droplet noises as it hits the ground. I go back around the other side and suddenly a drumming noise makes me jump halfway out of my skin. But looking down, I see it’s his heel banging rhythmically on the metal floor. I start getting frantic and my fingers go after that ribbon in order to pump my shotgun and get another shell in the chamber when the foot stops. His other foot is up on the front seat and it’s wearing only a sock. The shoe is down on the floor and that’s what must have hit the car ceiling after I fired. It’s a black loafer with a tassle. Next to it, there’s a revolver of some sort, not unlike the one Roosevelt gave me. I put my box down and lean in the front. It smells awful in there, but I don’t figure out what I’m smelling until I put my hand in his back pocket. I almost pull it out, but don’t and reach into the other pocket and come up with a wallet and keys. I unfold the wallet and see he’s got everything I want in neat plastic envelopes that flip like a little book. I pick up my box and get back into my car, which is still running. I make myself take four or five breaths, slam the door, and take off.
I drive south on the docks for about ten blocks until I find a completely deserted pier and throw the box into the water. Its blown-open end, edged with blackened paper, dips down, bubbles, and vanishes. Then I climb back in the car and head east until I’m on Seventh Avenue. There’s nobody around but early morning garbage trucks and pigeons. It’s just gotten to be grayish dawn so I can see pretty good.
His old tan wallet has a change purse which closes with a little snap button and those flip’em envelopes. I find the license right away. My Sicilian hit-man is named Norman Gulich. And he lives at 318 West 103rd Street. I figure the cops’ll identify the guy pretty fast, but I’m betting against bureaucracy that I’ve got a couple hours’ start. Nobody on those docks is in any hurry to call the cops about anything, and it’ll be a while before a patrol car finds him. It doesn’t matter what anybody saw down there, ’cause that’s keep-your-mouth-shut country—if you don’t do it, somebody else will. My actors in the conspiracy scene are by now spending that $200 and forgetting what they saw, ’cause if it was what they thought they saw, a syndicate rub-out, they aren’t going to be in any hurry to act like citizens.
I move pretty fast up to 103rd St. I park the car and head upstairs. I knock several times. No answer. Apartment 5B is in a tenement that someone has carved up into small efficiency apartments—efficiency in 1949, anyhow. He’s got several locks and it takes me a minute to figure out which keys open which locks. The door opens and someone has sprayed some awful pine-perfumed room deodorant in there.
It’s small and dirty. About ten flies are having a witches’ sabbath around the ceiling light bulb. There’s a bare-boob calendar on one wall and a big stack of Playboy and Penthouse in one corner, and some Times Square porno books and magazines: Danish Nude, Going Down for Treasure, Ball Five, The Bottom Line and Abreast of the Times. On a night table is a picture of the creep in a tight bathing suit at the beach with his arm around a fat blonde girl who’s at least two inches taller than he is. Across their legs is “From Flossie to Norman with All My Love.” Also there is a comb with a few tight little curls in the teeth and a magazine called Sunbather’s Weekly. I open one of the kitchen cabinets and there’s about twenty packages of Oreo cookies and a half-bottle of reds. The other one is empty. The bathroom cabinet has two electric razors, a regular razor, a can of shaving lather and two or three bottles of cologne—terrible sweet stuff ’cause I smell it—called “Scottish Heather” and “Brawne,” Preparation H, two bottles of nose-drops, orange-flavored Tums (I’m not surprised, with all the crap this guy ate), a styptic pencil and a box of pink-colored Band-Aids. On the sink is dandruff shampoo, all-day all-night forever and ever deodorant (probably take the pits right off you), clove mouthwash (I wonder how a pickle tastes, heading through the mists of this clove mouthwash and chased with an orange-flavored Turn), a toothbrush, and toothpaste—the kind girls will want to kiss from across the room. A double bed takes up one wall of the living room. I throw back the blanket and the sheet looks like a fifteen-year-old’s the morning after a high school dance. The bureau has white T-shirts and Jockey underpants and black stretch socks, the kind made of phony silk, some purple and white and pink shirts and a ten-dollar bill in the comer. I put the ten in my pocket. There’s striped pajamas in the other drawer and that’s all. The suits in the closet are from the early sixties or late fifties; there are four of them, gray and brown, all with little black threads wandering through the material. Fourteenth Street stuff. Black loafers, a knee-length carcoat, and several thin leather belts. Poor Norman somehow never made it into the sixties. He got a foot stuck back there in the fifties and couldn’t get out. I probably oughta call the Smithsonian Institution and tell them I’ve got an exhibit for them: The Vanishing American Fifties Slob, an endangered species.
It’s about seven now and I can hear the neighbors stirring and coughing and trying to get themselves out to work another day. Let’s see, where would this guy stash? It takes me a half-hour to find it ’cause he’s been pretty clever. It’s in the top sill of the window; the wood has been dug out to make a little pocket, and in that pocket are a bunch of papers that mean nothing to me, scribbled numbers and letters, which could be initials, and one page with phone numbers. This I take. Also a bankbook from the Dime Savings Bank in Brooklyn. There’s an initial deposit of $100 made back in ’62.1 check his age on the license and that makes the hundred a high-school graduation gift. Nothing happens until ’67 and then there are three deposits of $20.00, a week apart. He must have been saving money from some job or other, but the fourth week he must have lost it ’cause there’s deposits of $300, and $400, and $375, and $330 with two withdrawals of $50 in about a four-month period. Then nothing until last week. Three days after I tossed a body on the wrong lawn, which would make it two days after it came out in the Arlington papers, somebody gave old Norman $1,000 and he banked it. He probably would’ve gotten another thou on the other end. A stinking little $2,000 minor-league hit by what looks like an amateur to me. I tuck the bankbook and paper in my pocket and walk out the door. There’s nobody in the hall and I get out fast and into the car and drive away.
Now where?
As Martin Lee, occupation salesman, I check into a motel on Rte. 4, just across the George Washington Bridge in Ft. Lee, New Jersey.
“What goes around, conies around.”
Street Saying
I am getting tired of motel rooms. I wake up with an air-conditioned head, dried-out sinuses, and the feeling that I may never be able to walk even as far as the bathroom. I sort of feel around, psychically, for mind injuries, but so far, no reaction to last night. Not much feeling about anything, really. I’m half-amazed that it went off like I planned it, but since somebody tried to blow me away from the top of the garbage cans, I’ve been running in a single-gear. I manage to get myself into my clothes, which stink. I usually run around with three sets of whatever and stop at a laundromat about every other week. But since the Yacht got busted I’ve grabbed what I could and lived in it. Am I getting tired of it all?
Breakfast at the grease pit next door goes quite a way to convincing me that I might just be. How could anyone do such a thing to a harmless egg? Back in the room I get out the list of numbers, written in thin black ballpoint and carefully blocked out figures, and have a good hard stare at it. Nothing I recognize. There are eight numbers, including four which by the exchange I can tell are New York. A chat with the operator confirms this. The next four are puzzles. My little old lady i
n Dayton does not appear and neither, thank fate, does any number I know about for Lieberman. So I try it in reverse and get off the first time. Information for Arlington Va. lists Edward Roosevelt as a new listing on Jamestown Rd. and there is his number, big as life. I call Lieberman, ’cause now I got to have help again. “Hello.”
“Well, where you been keepin’ yourself?”
“Out and around. Two things I need, one is a guy who can make fancy electric thingies and the other is Villegas.”
“Villegas I can give you, but let me get him to call you. I promised him I wouldn’t tell anybody where he was.”
“That’s fair. I’m at 599-0773, the Bridge-Vue Motel in Ft. Lee, New Jersey. He can take a bus across the GW Bridge if he wants and come right here. I’m in unit nine. You get all that?”
“I got it. You want the telegram from California?” “Hold that. Is there a phone number?”
“It looks like an order for shoes. But the digits would work for a phone. The area code is somewhere up north I think, around Eureka.”
“Okay. Call that number and ask for Jim and tell him everything is okay, he can go back home.”
“You sure of that?”
“Sure enough. I’m just fillin’ in the details now.”
“For the other thing, the only guy that comes to mind is Grover Dill.”
“Who? You must be kidding.”
“Nope. Grover is an electronic genius. He’s the one built my stereo and he sweeps my phone and does other goodies when I need him. He’s expensive, but good. Oh yeah, he’s also fifteen years old so don’t get surprised. He lives on East Broadway. 902. Top Floor. Doesn’t have a phone, you got to go see him.”
“Okay. I’ll be back to you pretty soon. You working on Genelle’s alias?”
“Yeah. But this guy is out mountain climbing ’till the day after tomorrow. I called his wife.”