He unscrewed the top of the bottle. He picked it up.
Don’t need a glass, he thought. Just having a sip. That’s all.
He took a chug, then another. Then another.
The Seagram’s felt soothing going down. But then — feeling that the bottle had passed the halfway point — he was disappointed. Jimmie doesn’t like me going through so many bottles, he thought.
“Take it easy, Kiff,” Jimmie joked. “Leave some for the customers.”
But Jimmie liked Kiff. Liked the way he got the place all swept up in the morning.
It was a good job. Got this small apartment right above the bar — so damn convenient. And drinks on the house.
Shit, it was a great job.
He put the bottle down. Then he picked it up again and took another swig.
This was breakfast.
He never got drunk anymore. Couldn’t remember when he got drunk last. No matter how much he drank. And he drank a lot. Had to. Or he didn’t feel so good.
He bled, all right. From his asshole. Sometimes from his nose. Now, why the fuck did that happen? And he coughed all the time, even when he wasn’t smoking.
And sometimes his muscles, his legs, felt funny when he walked, as if they didn’t have any strength anymore, as if they were ready to pack it in. But he didn’t get drunk.
I can hold my liquor, he thought.
No problem.
He put the bottle down.
He saw the books on the battered bookcase . . . something he found on the sidewalk on trash day. Must be fifty books on the shelves, most of them ripped off from the library. They used to be in alphabetical order. But he kept digging them out all the time, checking stuff, reading things, so that they were all mixed up now.
The books told him what happened.
Told him about the bells.
Probably saved my life, Kiff thought.
He had some pages ripped out and taped to the wall. Things he wanted to remember. There was a prayer used by St. Etienne. Maybe it worked, Kiff thought. Maybe it didn’t.
And lots of pictures of crosses. Russian crosses, and Greek crosses, and Catholic crucifixes with Jesus in agony. And even some plain, boring Protestant crosses, silver and gold.
He had two real crucifix crosses. One hung right on the door. Another at the window. They were blessed. He got a priest to do that. With holy water — the priest convinced him that the water had definitely been blessed too.
They might work.
Or they might not.
Jimmie said he didn’t want any crosses in the bar.
The customers wouldn’t like it.
“This ain’t church that they come to.” He laughed, talking to Kiff. “They come here to get away from all that shit.”
Kiff nodded.
But he hid a small crucifix under the bar, off in a comer where Jimmie’s meaty hand would never discover it.
All this, thought Kiff.
All this, and I know I’m not safe.
Never have been.
That’s why I called Whalen. He can call the others. They can get some help, some real help.
He looked at his bedroom, more of a closet, all dark, with the window facing an alleyway, away from the morning sun.
The other pictures were in there.
The photos of the girls, the headlines. The articles describing the way it was done.
Just like in the books.
Kiff chewed his lip. He looked back at the hole in his floor.
I should get down there, he thought.
He walked back to the loose piece of linoleum. He knelt down. His bones creaked, and his muscles let him land hard on the floor. He knelt next to the linoleum.
It made him pat the pockets of his pants. He felt the rosaries. One in each pocket.
He reached out and took the cracked square of linoleum away.
Underneath, there was a hole. A ragged hole girded by splintery shafts of wood.
As if a giant rat had chewed right through the floor. It was the size of a softball.
But it hadn’t been a rat.
Jimmie said someone once fired a gun. Another time he told Kiff that this guy had killed himself in the apartment.
Heh-heh. Don’t go getting any ideas, Jimmie said.
Just never got it fixed.
Kiff pushed the linoleum to the side. And slowly, breathing hard, excited, thirsty — always thirsty — he leaned closer to the hole.
I have to do this, he told himself. Otherwise, how can I be sure?
He cautiously brought his face down to the hole so that he could look with his left eye.
He saw the bar.
Barely lit by the few neon signs that Jimmie left on all night long. The Silver Bullet. Miller Lite. The King of Beers.
He didn’t smell anything.
That was good.
Just the smell of the bar, the deep, sweet smell of beer and booze, filled his apartment. That smell was his life. There was no difference between the smell of the bar and his apartment.
But he didn’t smell anything else.
He knew from the books that was a good sign.
So he always sniffed before he looked.
Don’t want to get tricked . . .
He heard a creaking noise behind him. At the window.
He shot up.
It came from his bedroom.
He turned. Suddenly cold. He snorted at the air.
He heard it again. But Kiff could see the window, see it, and he knew that it was just the wind, pressing against the window.
He went back to the hole. To finish his survey. He checked behind the bar, studying each shadow, each dark corner that could hide something. He looked at the booths, the few tables. Then up to the rest rooms.
Someone could always be hiding in there, he thought. But he had an answer for that problem.
As soon as he got down, he locked the doors with sticks, old broom handles. He locked the cellar door too.
If someone was hiding, they would be locked up.
They’d have to make a hell of a racket to get out.
He laughed at his choice of words.
Hell of a racket.
He did one more survey, knowing that he couldn’t see every spot, every dark corner.
There was some unavoidable risk involved.
He knew that.
But then, satisfied — as satisfied as he could be — he pushed the square of linoleum back into place and stood up.
Kiff took another swig of Seagram’s, marveling once again at just how fast a full bottle turns into half a bottle.
And how half a bottle begins an inexorable march to empty.
Until it was time to start all over again.
“Okay,” he said to himself, screwing the cap back on.
It was time to go to work.
And he went to his door, the heavy wooden crucifix on the back. He opened it and went downstairs.
Kiff heard traffic outside. Cars gunning past the bar.
Soon Jimmie would come with a paper under his arm and a bag of rolls.
“Roll. Kiff?” he’d ask. And Kiff would smile and say no. Not hungry this morning, Jimmie.
He used the big broom to push together the piles of dirt and cigarette butts, catching stuff he missed last night. Then he’d wipe down the bar and the tables with soapy water. And if there was time — and he was sure that the basement was quiet — he’d bring up a new keg, though they got harder to lift. Maybe restock the bottom shelf, the Four Roses, the Seagram’s. The stuff that moved.
The radio was on, just noise, in the background.
He pushed the broom.
The phone rang.
Once. Kiff stopped.
The phone rang again. He stood still.
For a strange reason, Kiff thought it might actually be for him.
And when he went and picked it up, he discovered — thank God, thank sweet Jesus! — that he was right.
* * *
25
; Brooklyn has changed.
But I knew that, Will told himself. Brooklyn changed, the world changed. Everyone’s run away. To Long Island. To Westchester. To the wasteland of New Jersey.
He looked at the neon above the bar.
Jimmie’s Bar & Grill.
It was open. Through the smeary window, Will saw some men slumped over on stools, staring into their beers. The tube was on, glowing an iridescent blue and green.
The place was completely uninviting.
To get here, to free up this day, Will had to call in some favors to get his cases moved to another day on the docket. There was nothing major pending, a few DWls, a small possession rap. A guy who likes to take out his frustrations by beating his wife.
Nice citizens in trouble with the law.
It was cloudy. The warm glow of yesterday’s picnic, the flash of Indian Summer, had been replaced today with an almost icy chill. His leather jacket offered little protection from the nipping wind.
An old black woman walked behind him pulling a two-wheeled cart filled with groceries. He saw her steal a nervous glance at him, and then hurry on.
I look pretty strange out here, he realized. Standing outside the bar. Looking in.
So this is where you ended up, Jim Kiff …
And Will walked to the door and went in.
* * *
No one looked up when Will walked in.
This is the waiting room for hell. he thought. Pick a stool. sit down, and wait for the next express to Gehenna.
The bartender was leaning toward a customer, his foot rakishly resting on a shelf below the bar. His white apron, stretched by a full-sized gut, was speckled with the scars of too many weeks between washings.
Will walked up to the bar.
The bartender looked at him, raised his eyebrows, but still made no move to come over. Will waited politely, looking at him while he finished delivering whatever pearls of wisdom he was dropping in his customer’s ears.
Two men next to Will were carrying on a form of conversation, an inchoate, disorganized babble. Will listened while the bartender — slowly — disengaged from his high-level confab..
“Shit, wha’ ya gonna do? There’s not enough fuckin’ cops in the city.” The philosopher to his left took a slug of beer. “Too many fuckin’ murderers, not enough cops.”
His companion nodded, sipping at a shot glass. Then, with the authority of an imprimatur, he said, “Too fuckin’ right, Johnny.”
“And the judges! Real scum bags, I tell you.”
The bartender looked over again, his eyebrow arching even higher this time as if he had just noticed Will, just saw him — on time delay — wander in to violate the intimate social circle of his establishment.
He walked over to Will.
Put down a Bud Light coaster.
“What’ll it be?” he said.
Will had entered the joint with the idea that he’d just ask where Kiff was. Get his missionary work over. Pay his debt, offer some advice, and escape from Brooklyn. But the gloomy, suspicious air of the place made him feel that he should — at the least — order a beer.
“A beer,” Will said. “A light beer.”
The bartender nodded. He grabbed a glass that — unless Will was mistaken — still bore the soapy sheen of a cursory washing. The bartender put it under a spigot and pulled back, the glass expertly tilted, cutting the head to a neat one-quarter inch.
A professional at work.
Will put down a dollar. The bartender scooped it up and slapped back a quarter.
Will took the beer and sipped it, cool but not cold. He looked at the TV. ESPN was on with a motorcycle race held in some Martian-like desert terrain dotted with sagebrush and cactus. With the baseball play-offs in full swing, afternoon baseball was over . . . and there was no joy in this particular Mudville.
Will took another sip of the beer, a big one, and then he craned around, looking at the bar. There was a scattering of tables, idle, as if awaiting a flurry of guests. And some booths, bathed in a stygian darkness. Anything could be happening over there and no one would see.
Anything.
He saw two rest rooms — Ladies and Gents — lit by two naked bulbs. Will bet that if he inhaled deeply, another odor would join the pungent smell of beer and whiskey.
He turned back to the bar. .
The bartender was back with his customer, but he was also watching Will. His suspicious eyes met Will’s and then he stood up straight. He rubbed his hands against his apron.
Will responded by taking another slug of his beer. Then the man ambled over. “Get you another?” he said.
Will smiled. He shook his head. “No. I don’t think so.”
The man prepared to withdraw.
“Say,” Will said. “I’m looking for an old friend of mine.”
He waited, letting the bartender draw closer.
“Yeah . . .” the bartender said.
“He’s supposed to be working here, living near here.” The bartender squinted. “His name is Jim Kiff.”
The bartender rubbed his hands on his apron again. “You’re his friend?”
“Yeah,” Will said, smiling. “We went to school together.”
The bartender’s face turned grim, nasty, and Will guessed that Jimmie — if that’s who this was — probably had a pretty interesting history himself. “A friend,” the bartender said again. “You wouldn’t be jerking me around?”
Will imagined that they got their share of process servers and back-rent collectors haunting the denizens of Jimmie’s.
Will smiled. “Scout’s honor. I just — I want to see Jim Kiff.”
The bartender nodded. He walked to the end of the bar, and for a moment Will thought that the bartender was going to go over to one of those black stalls and kick something hiding in the darkness. Force it to come awake.
Instead the beefy man, with a bald spot not really covered by a thin veneer of carefully combed hair, walked to the back of his establishment, near the rest rooms. He opened a door. Will saw light, steps.
“Kiff!” the bartender said. Then louder, “Kiff, you got some company.”
The bartender backed away from the entrance.
And he smiled, as if a neatly placed trap were about to be sprung.
“You can go on up,” the bartender said, grinning, then arching his eyebrows. “He lives up there.”
The bartender waited.
And Will slowly slid off the stool and walked toward the door, the light, the stairs . . . to his reunion with Jim Kiff.
“Will, I can’t believe it.”
Kiff met him at the top of the narrow stairs, holding open a door to what unknown wonders Will could only guess. When he had spoken to Kiff on the phone, it had been brief. The phones aren’t safe, Kiff had said. Right, Will said, already regretting his call. He gave the address, the name of the bar off Church Avenue.
And now here was Kiff.
He looked skeletal.
Even before Will stood next to him, just the way Kiff looked scared him. His skin was tight against his face, molded to his jaw and cheekbones, collapsing in on itself. Will feared the way Kiff’s hand would feel when he reached out to shake hands.
Kiff still had red hair. It was thinner, standing up like lonely shafts of wheat blown apart by a twister.
Will got to the top of the stairs.
Kiff stuck out his hand. It shook in the air, almost blurring, wavering back and forth. Out of control.
Then Kiff’s hand closed on his. It was cold and bony. But it held on with incredible strength, not letting go. Desperate was the word that occurred to Will, and he squeezed back, hoping Kiff would release him.
“Hi, Jim,” Will said.
Kiff pulled him into his apartment, still holding on to him. The first thing that struck Will was the smell, the stench that filled the place. All the bar smells were here, but there was more. There was the odor of food gone real bad, and the ferric sting of urine, from a toilet that had been abandon
ed to a rainbow of discolorations.
Will felt the beer churning around in his stomach.
He tried to pull his hand back. .
“Oh, sorry. I — hey, Will, I’m real glad you came. Real glad. You look good, Will … real good.” Kiff’s face fell as if reminded that Will could no way in hell return the compliment. “Whalen told me that you’re a lawyer. That’s great . . . real great.” Kiff paused. Then, hurrying, breathlessly, “And you got a family.”
Will smiled. “A wife. Two girls.”
Kiff didn’t smile back.
“Yeah. Right. Hey, I told Whalen, I told him that I didn’t think there was a lot of time.” Kiff turned to the wall.
He’s crazy, Will thought. Whatever was left of Jim Kiff was probably still back in what was now called the Nam.
He’s a wreck.
Only one question, Will thought.
One crucial question . . .
Is he dangerous?
Will glanced at the bookshelves, the pictures taped to the walls. The drawings of crucifixes, and strange symbols, Egyptian squiggles, and fragments in Latin, in Greek.
“He tried to tell me to calm down,” Kiff went on talking, but he was looking over at his shelves. He turned to Will. “Oh, sit. Here . . .” Kiff gestured at a ratty chair near a table. The table was dotted with the explosive remnants of food.
Kiff stopped.
The social amenities momentarily forgotten.
“Oh, sorry. Would you like a drink? I mean, something to drink. I have —”
Kiff left his shelves.
“No, Jim. I don’t —”
But Kiff walked over to a sink. He picked up a bottle of Seagram’s.
A full bottle. Kiff picked up two glasses with his other hand. He put them on the table.
‘‘I’m a little jittery,” Kiff said. “This whole thing has got me —” Kiff unscrewed the bottle and poured two drinks, one into a Fred Flintstone jelly jar, the other into a Sau-Sea shrimp cocktail glass.
Kiff took the larger glass. Drank half of it in one shot.
He grinned at Will. His teeth were brown. Will imagined that he could smell Kiff, smell his breath wafting across the table consuming him.
“Yeah, er, Jim, Whalen said that you were upset about something. That it had to do with us . . . with Mike Narrio.” Will hesitated about bringing up the thing that had him really on edge. He laughed nervously. “And something about the murders in New York. . .” Will dared mention it. “That they have something to do with us . . .”
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