New York City Noir

by Tim McLoughlin

  Manhattan’s rents are such that few of its neighborhoods are available these days to most immigrants (though it remains the first choice of those fortunate enough to arrive with abundant funds). But it too is a city of newcomers, not so much from other countries as from other parts of the United States, and even from the city’s own suburbs and the outer boroughs as well. For a century or more, this is where those young people most supplied with brains and talent and energy and ambition have come to find their place in the world. Manhattan holds out the promise of opportunity—to succeed, certainly, and, at least as important, to be oneself.

  I was born upstate, in Buffalo. In December of 1948, when I was ten-and-a-half years old, my father and I spent a weekend here. We got off the train at Grand Central and checked in next door at the Hotel Commodore, and in the next three or four days we went everywhere—to Liberty Island (Bedloes Island then) to see the statue, to the top of the Empire State Building, to a Broadway show (Where’s Charlie?), a live telecast (The Toast of the Town), and just about everywhere the subway and elevated railway could take us. I remember riding downtown on the Third Avenue El on Sunday morning, and even as my father was pointing out the skid row saloons on the Bowery, a man tore out of one of them, let out a bloodcurdling scream, turned around, and raced back inside again.

  I think I became a New Yorker that weekend. As soon as I could, I moved here.

  “Why would I want to go anywhere?” my friend Dave Van Ronk used to say. “I’m already here.”

  * * *

  Manhattan Noir.

  While I might argue Manhattan’s primacy (assuming I could find someone to take the other side), I wouldn’t dream of holding that everything worthwhile originates here. Even as so many Manhattanites hail from somewhere else, so do many of our best ideas. And the idea for this book originated on the other side of the world’s most beautiful bridge, with a splendid story collection called Brooklyn Noir.

  It was that book’s considerable success, both critical and commercial, that led Akashic’s Johnny Temple to seek to extend the Noir franchise, and it was Tim McLoughlin’s outstanding example as its editor that moved me to take the reins for the Manhattan volume.

  I sat down and wrote out a wish list of writers I’d love to have for the book, then e-mailed invitations to participate. The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today’s literary world; there’s precious little economic incentive to write one, and the one I was in a position to offer was meager indeed. Even so, almost everyone I invited was quick to accept. That gladdened my heart, and they gladdened it again by delivering on time … and delivering what I think you’ll agree is material of a rare quality.

  My initial request wasn’t all that specific. I asked for dark stories with a Manhattan setting, and that’s what I got. Readers of Brooklyn Noir will recall that its contents were labeled by neighborhood—Bay Ridge, Canarsie, Greenpoint, etc. We have chosen the same principle here, and the book’s contents do a good job of covering the island, from C.J. Sullivan’s Inwood and John Lutz’s Upper West Side, to Justin Scott’s Chelsea and Carol Lea Benjamin’s Greenwich Village. The range in mood and literary style is at least as great; noir can be funny, it can stretch to include magic realism, it can be ample or stark, told in the past or present tense, and in the first or third person. I wouldn’t presume to define noir—if we could define it, we wouldn’t need to use a French word for it—but it seems to me that it’s more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.

  Noir doesn’t necessarily embody crime and violence, though that’s what we tend to think of when we hear the word. Most but not all of these stories are crime stories, even as most but not all are the work of writers of crime fiction, but the exceptions take place in a world where crime and violence are always hanging around, if not on center stage.

  Noir is very contemporary, but there’s nothing necessarily new about it. In cinema, when we hear the word we think of the Warner Brothers B-movies of the ’30s and ’40s, but the noir sensibility goes back much further than that. When I was sending out invitations, one of the first went to Annette and Martin Meyers, who (as Maan Meyers) write a series of period novels set in old New York. Could Maan perhaps contribute a dark story from the city’s past? They accepted, and in due course the same day’s mail brought Maan’s “The Organ Grinder” and a present-day story from Marty.

  Every anthologist should have such problems. Both stories are here, both show the dark side of the same city, and both are far too fine to miss.

  Most of our contributors live in New York, though not necessarily in Manhattan. (It’s hard to afford the place, and it gets harder every year. New York is about real estate, and Justin Scott’s “The Most Beautiful Apartment in New York” illustrates this fact brilliantly.) Jeffery Deaver lives in Virginia and John Lutz in St. Louis, yet I thought of both early on; they both set work in Manhattan, and reveal in that work a deep knowledge of the city, and, perhaps more important, a New Yorker’s sensibility.

  * * *

  It seems to me that I’ve nattered on too long already, so I’ll bring this to a close. You’re here for the stories, and I trust you’ll like them. I know I do.

  * * *

  Lawrence Block

  Greenwich Village

  January 2006

  THE GOOD SAMARITAN

  BY CHARLES ARDAI

  Midtown

  Rain battered the sidewalk and the storefronts. The wind played games with people’s umbrellas, teasing in under the ribs and then whipping them inside out and back again. One umbrella handle and shaft, discarded by its owner, skittered along the curb in an overflow from the gutter.

  * * *

  There were hardly any people on the street. Those there walked quickly, heads bent, shoulders hunched forward, buckling umbrellas held before them like shields. A few sought refuge under awnings and in doorways. One stood bravely in the street, a hand held high in a desperate attempt to hail a taxi.

  Harold Sladek sat where he always sat this time of night: in the shadow of the service entrance to Body Beautiful. The doorway offered little protection from the rain since it was less than a foot deep, but it was better than sitting out on the sidewalk itself. At least he wasn’t completely surrounded by the elements; at least Harold could feel concrete behind and beneath him. Solidity—that was something.

  It was also a matter of habit: He always slept in the doorway at Body Beautiful, even though it was no better than any of the other service entrances up and down the avenue. It was part of his routine, forged over the course of many years, many rainstorms. Solidity of a different sort, but no less important.

  Harold held a copy of Cosmopolitan, spread open at the center, over his head. He felt water trickle down between his fingers. After a few minutes, the glossy paper become waterlogged and slick, and eventually the magazine pulled apart in his hands. When this happened, Harold threw it into the street and pulled another issue out of the plastic bag next to him. He had found the stack of magazines tied with string next to a trash can on the corner of Lexington and 79th. His original thought had been to sell the magazines for a quarter apiece further uptown, on Broadway where all the booksellers were. But if the magazines could keep him dry, or even just a little bit drier, that was worth giving up a quarter or two.

  The second issue started dripping ink-stained water onto his forehead. Harold threw it away, wiped his hands on his drenched pants, and started on a third.

  He didn’t notice immediately when someone approached the doorway and stopped next to his bags. The magazine cut off much of his line of sight, and the rain, spraying him in the face with every fresh gust of wind, cut off the rest. But at one point, between gusts, he glanced beside him and saw a pair of legs in ash-gray trousers and, next to them, a dripping, folded umbrella.

  Harold put the magazine down behind him. It wasn’t quite soaked through yet, so it was too valuable to throw away. But he wasn’t going to sit with a magazine over his head while
another man stood next to him with an umbrella he wasn’t even using.

  He looked up, squinting against the rain. The other man was bending forward, sheltering his head under the overhang. The rest of him was exposed. The rain blew on the man’s suit and he just stood and took it, one hand in his pants pocket, the other on the handle of his umbrella.

  “Mister,” Harold said, “don’t you mind the rain?”

  The man shook his head. “Just water,” he said. “A little water never hurt anyone.”

  Harold had shouted; the other man had spoken at a normal level, or maybe even a little quieter. So even though Harold had leaned into it, he hadn’t caught the words. “What?” he said.

  The man bent at the knees. He stuck the umbrella straight out in front of them and pressed the release. It opened up enormously, suddenly cutting them off from the storm. “I said, a little water never hurt anyone.”

  He still spoke quietly but now the storm was muted behind the umbrella, and Harold heard him. “I don’t know,” Harold said. “But I’m not going to argue with a guy’s got an umbrella.”

  The man smiled. He took his hand out of his pocket and brought with it a slightly battered pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?” The man thumbed the pack open and extended it.

  It was suddenly dry and quiet—relatively dry and relatively quiet—and a man Harold had never seen before was offering him a cigarette. Why? Harold tried to read the answer in the man’s eyes. They didn’t reveal a lot. They were ordinary eyes in an ordinary face. They had wrinkles at the corners and were overhung by untrimmed gray eyebrows. They were not cruel, or cloudy, or cold, or anything else in particular. Just eyes. Just a face. Just a man doing his fellow man a good turn.

  Harold plucked a cigarette out of the pack and stuck it between his lips. Then he looked up again, to get another read on those eyes. Whatever he thought he might see, he didn’t.

  You’re on the street, you can’t be too careful, Harold told himself. Careful keeps you alive. But there are limits. When a guy comes by and offers you a cigarette, you take it and say thank you. It doesn’t happen every day.

  Harold reached back to take another, for later, or maybe two or even three as long as the guy was offering. But the pack of cigarettes was gone now, replaced with a brass lighter. At least it looked like brass—hard to tell in a dark doorway.

  Harold leaned into the flame. It took three tries for him to catch it on the tip of the cigarette. He dragged deep when it caught, let the warmth rush into his throat and lungs. First cigarette in … how long? Hard to say. You lost track of exact time living on the street. But it had to have been at least a month.

  “Thanks,” Harold said.

  “Don’t mention it.” The man straightened up, lifting the umbrella and stepping around so that he was standing in front of Harold. “Make the night a little easier to get through.”

  “You’re a mensch,” Harold said. “You know what that is, a mensch?”

  The man nodded. “What’s your name?”

  Harold coughed, a wet, rattling sound he brought up from deep in his chest. “Harry.”

  “You take care, Harry,” the man said.

  “Don’t you worry about me. I been through storms would make this look like pissing in a can. You take care—you got the nice suit.” Harold made himself smile up at the man. He thought, Maybe the guy will leave me the umbrella. Then he thought, What, and walk out in the rain without it? Next he thought, I could probably take it away from him. But finally he thought, The guy gave you a cigarette, talked to you, passed his time with you, kept you dry for a while, and you mug him for his umbrella? Schmuck.

  He thought all this in the time it took him to take two more drags on the cigarette.

  “I hate to ask,” Harold said, not quite able to get the umbrella fantasy out of his mind, “but would you mind standing there while I finish this? A little easier without the rain in my face …” He let his words trail off. The man was shaking his head.

  “Sorry. I have to be somewhere.”

  “Nah, that’s okay, I understand.” Harold raised the cigarette. “Thanks for the smoke.”

  “My pleasure,” the man said.

  * * *

  “Sladek, Harold R. R for Robert.” The detective flipped through the creased wallet he’d retrieved from Harold’s pocket. There was a long-expired driver’s license from New Jersey; a photograph of Harold, when his hair had been brown; another photograph of Harold and a woman standing next to a white-iced, pink-flowered cake; a stained dollar bill with one corner missing; and an ancient business card, smudged and bent, listing Harold Robert Sladek as Assistant Manager for J.C. Penney, New York.

  The detective nudged his partner with his elbow. “Check the bags.”

  The younger man bent to look through the plastic bags, still standing in a puddle of water.

  At the curb, a uniformed officer, the one who had found Sladek’s body, was coordinating getting the covered corpse into the EMS van. He had radioed for EMS instead of the morgue because he had thought Sladek was still alive.

  “… four, five, six magazines, a pullover, a comb, half a … a … I don’t know, I guess it’s a baguette,” the partner said. “A French bread. Whatever.” The detective took notes. “A couple napkins. Bag of Doritos. A WKXW-FM baseball cap.”

  “He must have got that at the Turtle Bay street fair,” the detective said. “They were giving them away on Saturday. I got one.”

  The partner looked up.

  “Never mind,” the detective said. “Go on.”

  “One sneaker, no laces. One copy of The Dark Half by Stephen King, paperback, no cover. One plastic cup. A roll of toilet paper. A disposable razor. Three, four, five soda cans, empty. One pocket Bible.” He stopped, glanced around. “That’s it.” The partner noticed the issue of Cosmopolitan that was lying in the corner. He picked it up, shook off a cigarette butt, and held it out to the detective. “One more magazine.”

  The detective added it to the list, then flipped his notebook closed and dropped the wet magazine back where it had been lying. He slipped the photos and the business card back into the wallet. “Poor bastard. Guy had a good job once. Had a place to live. Had a family.”

  “Once upon a time. What he had now was a baseball cap and six copies of Cosmopolitan magazine. Seven, excuse me.”

  “What the hell’s wrong with this city? An old man like this lying dead in a doorway, nobody even calls it in.”

  “It’s New York, what do you want?”

  “The man’s lying there, dead. An old man, dead on the street, and people just walk past him.”

  “This is news to you?”

  The detective walked back to the prowl car waiting at the curb. “You know, my father’s name was Harold.”

  “Lots of people’s name is Harold, man. Snap out of it. This guy’s not your father. It’s a homeless man was out in the rain too long. Sad story. Unhappy ending. Life goes on.”

  “Not for him,” the detective said.

  * * *

  Angela’s finger hovered over the cigarettes, lined up in three neat rows. Finally, her hand darted out and came back with one clamped between thumb and forefinger.

  The man closed the pack, returned it to his pocket, and took out his lighter. Angela cupped her hand around the flame and carefully lit the cigarette. “Thanks,” she said. “Man, what a night.”

  The rain had started again. But behind the huge umbrella they were both dry.

  “Hey,” she said, “you want to have a little fun … ?” She picked up the hem of her dress, pulled it above her knees. She had a purple mark on the inside of one thigh. For the first time, the man stopped smiling. Angela said, “It’s just a bruise.”

  “Thank you, no,” the man said.

  Angela shrugged. She drew on the cigarette. Pushed her dress down over her legs again.

  “It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Angela,” the man said, standing up. “Take care of yourself.”

  “Yeah.” She wat
ched him back away. “Thanks for the smoke. Come back if you change your mind.”

  The man nodded.

  “I don’t have any diseases. If that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “No,” the man said. “I’m not worried about your having diseases.”

  Something in his voice put her off. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean it in the best way. You’re a young woman, Angela. You look very healthy. I’m sure you have no diseases.”

  Angela smiled, a fixed, frozen smile that was part arrogance, part fear, and no part happiness. “That’s right. I’m so clean you could eat off me.”

  “I’m sure,” the man said. “Good night, Angela.”

  * * *

  The headline the story carried in the Daily News was only slightly inaccurate: “Runaway Poisoned Behind Penn Station.” Angela Nicholas had not run away. She had been thrown out of her home. Her mother emphasized that point, stabbing it into her husband’s shoulder with her index finger while the man looked down at his hands in his lap and mumbled apologies to her, to himself, to God.

  The detective took notes. There had been a fight. There had been many fights. A boy had been the subject of one of the fights. Other boys had been the subject of other fights, or maybe the same boy had. It wasn’t clear. What was clear was that the father had delivered an ultimatum: That boy doesn’t enter this house again or you don’t enter it again.

  Angela had brought the boy back. The next day, her clothes were on the sidewalk. She had beaten on the door, crying, and the mother had wanted to let her back in. But her husband had held her back. When they finally opened the door, Angela was gone. When they phoned around to all her friends—even, finally, to the boy, who hung up on them—they couldn’t find her.