“But I didn’t do anything wrong, I swear it.” I knew I sounded pathetic. “You didn’t have to make me get out of the car.”
“Don’t tell me my job, asshole.”
“I apologize. I didn’t mean to. You certainly know what you’re doing.” Maybe if I was abject he would leave me in peace. He couldn’t be looking for me. Had I committed a crime? Does leaving your family constitute a criminal act? Perhaps I was the subject of a missing persons search and had caused the police department considerable expense in time and manpower. They could just be annoyed with me. It wasn’t as if I was a serial killer. My offense was more along the lines of jaywalking.
The policeman put his hands on his hips. “Driver’s license and registration,” he said.
I felt faint. What if he spotted my driver’s license as a counterfeit? As I climbed back into the car and reached over to the glove compartment to get the registration I must have blacked out for a moment because, when I came to, I was lying on my stomach on the seat and the cop was shouting at me.
“Get the hell out of the car.”
But I couldn’t get up because his nightstick was pressing into the small of my back.
“Please…,” I tried to say.
He grabbed me by the belt and hauled me out of the limo, patting me down for a weapon at the same time. He must have been inexperienced, because his partner came up behind him and said, “What the hell are you doing?”
The young cop released me and took a step back. “Looking for a weapon, is all. Guy might be packing."
“Look at him, for chrissake. He can barely stand up. Lean him up against the car and frisk him.”
The young cop pushed me against the car and finished his search. “He’s clean,” he said to the older cop.
“Then get his license and registration. Stop wasting time. We gotta move.”
The young cop turned to me. “Show me your license and registration.”
I found the presence of mind to say, “Here’s my license. The registration is in the glove compartment.” I reached into my back pocket and took out my wallet and handed him my driver’s license.
The young cop glanced at it and turned to his partner. “Want me to get the registration?”
The older cop sneered at him. “Best idea you had all day.”
The young cop walked around the limo to the passenger’s side, opened the door and rummaged through the glove compartment. He emerged holding the registration aloft. “Got it,” he said to his partner.
“Give it to me,” the older cop said.
“What’s the problem?” I said.
“Shut up,” the young cop said. “When we want you to talk, we’ll ask you.”
The older policeman studied the two cards in his hand with a flashlight. A car driving past slowed down to witness this scene of a patrol car with its colored lights flashing on an innocent man who had left his family being interrogated by two frowning cops who had no knowledge of his offense against society. The cops appeared more interested in the limousine and its registration than in the unlikely occupant of the car.
Finally, the older cop turned to me. “Take a walk,” he said.
I didn’t understand. “But…” I said.
“You heard me. We’re impounding the car. Take a walk.”
I was stunned. For a minute I couldn’t speak. I just stood there. “But I don’t understand why…”
The older policeman condescended to explain. “This limo has thirty-one tickets against it. It’s not going nowhere. It’s going to the pound. Your boss can come down and pick it up. Tell him to bring lots of cash.”
That seemed to settle it for the cop. He turned on his heels and started to walk away from me.
But it wasn’t settled for me. This member of law enforcement was walking away with my very expensive phony driver’s license. My entrance ticket to everything I needed in the third-world life of grrreens. Did I have the nerve to ask him for it?
I swallowed hard. “My driver’s license,” I yelled after him. “I need it back.”
He didn’t even turn around. “Come to the precinct tomorrow. The desk sergeant will have it waiting for you.”
*
I wandered through the night with a deepening sense of dread. I hardly knew where I was going. I kept walking and walking. It was a long walk. From Fifty-ninth Street on the East side to West Fourth Street in the Village. It was like rambling in a dream. I couldn’t remember what I had seen or where I had been. And time seemed not to matter at all. I felt naked and unprotected. There was no driver’s license. There was no limousine. How would I explain to Max what had happened? Would he kill me? Would he literally rip the limbs from my body and toss my bleeding torso onto the junk heap of history?
Of course, I could simply not go back. But then Ethan would suffer the consequences because he had vouched for me. He had sworn I was honest and worthy of trust. So I had to go back.
I don’t know what time it was when I walked into Max’s garage. It seemed to me as if I had walked all night. The garage was as brightly lit as ever and as hot and noisy as hell. When he saw me, Max dropped his wrench and ran over to me and grabbed the front of my shirt. He must have known from the look on my face that something was wrong. He shoved his face into mine. The overpowering smell of garlic and onions on his hot breath woke me from my stupor.
I drew back.
“Where’s my car?” he screamed over the noise of the shop. “You sonbitch. I call you. I call you. But you don’t answer. Where’s my car?”
I just spread my hands in front of me. I didn’t know how to frame an answer.
That seemed to infuriate Max even more. “Where’s my car?” he shouted even louder. He pushed his face so close it was just an inch from mine. “I want my car, you sonbitch. Where’s my car?”
I inhaled his heated breath and surrendered to his will. “The cops took it,” I said.
He released me and took a step back. “What the hell,” he said. “How the cops take it?”
“They impounded it.”
He screwed up his face, misunderstanding. “They pounded it?”
“No, they impounded it,” I said. I was slowly coming back to my senses. It was obvious he didn’t understand the meaning of the word impound.
“What is impounded? What means it?” He stamped his foot. His Israeli impatience with the vagaries of the English language was never so obvious.
“It means they took it by law.”
This circular reasoning didn’t illuminate his understanding of the situation. Of course, the police had taken it. That much was apparent. The question was why. Did they simply want it for their own driving pleasure? Or just to drive him crazy? Maybe in his foreign experiences the police had acted in a capricious manner and he assumed the police acted in the same way in this country.
“Why they take my car?”
Perhaps they don’t like you, I wanted to say. “They said the limo had thirty-one tickets. They said…”
He didn’t let me finish. “This not fair. This against law,” he ranted. “Bastards take my car. What I do? What I do?”
I didn’t know if he meant what should I do or what did I do. I felt I had to defend the well-considered laws of Anglo-Saxon civilization, built upon centuries of common law experience. “They’re certainly within their rights to impound the car if it has thirty-one tickets on it,” I informed him.
That was a mistake. He didn’t want to hear my exegesis on the law. Somehow, in his mind, I was the one responsible for the confiscation of his car. If I hadn’t been parked where I was, they never would have impounded the car. It was all my fault.
“You sonbitch,” he shouted at me. “You make me lose my car. You the one. You gonna pay, you.”
I shook my head. “It’s not my fault. I didn’t get any of those tickets. I was very careful.” I was very careful for many reasons, but I didn’t tell him that. It was my nature to be careful. The only risk I ever took in my life was running away, an
d that was very carefully done. But one cannot ever protect oneself against the external risk. The risk you least expect.
He jammed his dirty finger into my chest. “You gonna pay for this. You owe me. You gonna pay, for sure.”
CHAPTER XXXIII
There was no reason why I should have felt guilty about Max’s losing his limousine. But I did. I wanted to make it up to him somehow. So I didn’t put up too strenuous an objection when he came to me a few nights later and said, “Tomorrow night we gonna make a run up to Bronx. You gonna drive. No questions. You gonna do this for me.”
Max had a tendency to drop his articles. The Bronx was called the Bronx. It was not called Bronx. One day, I would explain to Max that there were only two places in the world with the prefix THE: The Bronx and The Hague. But not now.
I had no idea what he had in mind but I didn’t like it. Knowing Max, this was not going to be an eleemosynary mission. He was not going up to the Bronx to deliver a fruit basket to the Sisters of Infinite Mercy. It was going to entail something of a questionable nature. No one went to the Bronx at night for a good cause. If at all possible, one tried to stay away from the Bronx at night.
So I tried to demur in a half-hearted manner. “I really can’t. I have a conflict tomorrow night,” I lied.
“You sonbitch. You gonna do it for me. You do it, or else.”
He didn’t specify what the “or else” was. I suspected it wasn’t pleasant.
“All right,” I said, against my better judgment. “I’ll drive you tomorrow night. Where are we going?”
“I tell you tomorrow,” he said.
*
It was raining heavily the next night. I had hoped the downpour would be enough to make Max cancel his planned outing to the Bronx, but he seemed more fixed than ever on the idea. When he saw me, he rubbed his hands together and said to the man next to him, “Good. Our driver here.”
I pointed to the entrance of the garage. “But what about the rain? It’s coming down pretty hard.”
“Good. Rain is good. Even better. No problem.”
Max had an unfortunate tendency to speak in short staccato phrases. Some people might have thought his phrasing was poetic, but I didn’t. In fact, it set my teeth on edge. Everything about Max was starting to get on my nerves.
“But I don’t think we should go in the rain,” I said.
Max turned to the man standing beside him. I’d never seen the man before. He looked like Max, with the same thick black moustache, but he was taller and thinner and had more hair. He was wearing a long formless black slicker. It was his eyes that troubled me. They were a rheumy gray, heavy lidded, with a cold stare.
“Sonbitch don’t like to go in rain,” Max said. He extended his index finger in my direction and added, “This sonbitch lost my car.”
The man nodded.
“We going anyway,” Max said. “Even better, the rain, you know.”
The man grunted in assent.
Max indicated an old dented black Chevy just inside the entrance. “We take that car,” he said. “We leave one o’clock. Don’t go nowhere till one. Stay here. Drink cup of coffee.”
I shook my head. “But I don’t have my driver’s license. The cops confiscated it. I don’t want to drive without it.” Needless to say, I’d decided over the course of the last few days that it was just too risky to march into the police station and blithely request that they return my counterfeit license with the Troy home address. Perhaps if I had brass balls I would have done it, but I had never been issued a set of brass balls.
“No problem,” Max said. “Tonight you don’t need license.” He gave me a sly look. “Tomorrow you can buy new license where you got old one.”
I’d run out of excuses. The downpour gave no sign of letting up. It was still a couple of hours until one o’clock, but I didn’t feel like going back home in the darkness so I did as Max said. I went into the cramped glass-walled office, shut the door to keep out the infernal racket and poured myself a cup of black coffee. I had The Confessions of Rousseau with me and I started to read it, but couldn’t concentrate. There were too many unbidden images that kept presenting themselves. Images of appropriated driver’s licenses and moving sexual violations and runaway husbands with an uneasy sense of dread.
The time passed slowly, but one o’clock finally arrived. A minute or two later Max rapped sharply on the office door, waking me as I was starting to nod off.
“Come on, sonbitch,” he shouted. “We go.”
I nodded. “OK, I’m ready.” But I wasn’t.
I got behind the wheel of the Chevy. Max slid in beside me and the other man got into the back seat. The man hadn’t said a single word.
“Which way?” I asked.
“Go up FDR,” Max said. “I tell you how we go.”
I put the car in gear and pulled out of the garage. The Chevy appeared old from the outside but the engine ran smoothly and the car felt like it had a lot of power. It was raining even heavier than before and I had to put the wipers on maximum. Even with the wipers on fast, it was tough to see. The streets were deserted because no fool would be out in this weather.
We took the FDR Drive, then the Willis Avenue Bridge and the Major Deegan Expressway to the Cross Bronx Expressway. We left the Cross Bronx at Arthur Avenue and drove east on Tremont Avenue until we reached Crotona Avenue where we made a right turn. It was so dark and the rain was coming down so hard it was difficult to make out the street signs. It didn’t look like a very good neighborhood.
We had gone one block south on Crotona Avenue when Max said, “Turn left here.” The street sign read Fairmont Place. I drove one block east until we got to Clinton Avenue.
“This is it,” Max said. “Go slow.” He pointed to an old warehouse across the street. The building was a sprawling three-story structure that appeared to be deserted. There was a chain-link fence around the building.
I slowed down. “Are you sure this is it?” I asked. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone around.”
“You sonbitch. What you know?”
I tried to look for a sign or some identification of the warehouse, but couldn’t make anything out. Across the street from the warehouse was an empty lot, and on the other two corners were two five-story apartment buildings. There were no lights on in any of the apartments. The only illumination came from a streetlight on the corner.
I came to a complete stop. “Where should I go?” I asked Max.
He pointed at a spot across the street in front of the warehouse. “Go there.”
I looked in both directions even though I hadn’t seen a car in minutes and crossed Clinton Avenue and turned right into the driveway in front of the main gate. The gate was closed and there was a chain and padlock on it.
“There’s nobody here,” I said and put the car in reverse. There was no sense in asking to become a victim. I was damned if I was going to sit around and wait for a gang of muggers to play hopscotch on my face.
“Wait, you sonbitch,” Max said. “Don’t back up.” He turned his head rapidly from side to side several times, surveying the area. He didn’t look like the most relaxed man in the world. “Blink two fast, one slow,” he said.
“What?”
“Your light. Blink two fast, one slow.”
I did as Max said. Nothing happened for several minutes. We just sat there staring at the rain drops on the windshield. Then a figure emerged from a side door of the building and ran, hunched over, to the gate. I couldn’t see his face, but he looked dark-skinned. His hand reached over and unlocked the padlock and swung open the gate.
“Turn off your light,” Max said.
I turned off the headlights.
“Drive in,” Max said.
I drove through the open gate and pulled up to the door the dark-skinned man had come from. The man ran beside us and went back in through the door. I could see a dimly-lit room and some men inside sitting around a table.
“You wait here,” Max said. “Keep car r
unning. Keep light off. You got it?”
I nodded. “Yes, I have it. I’ll keep the engine running and the lights off. Don’t be long.”
Max gave me what I took to be a dirty look. He got out of the car and the man in the back seat did the same. They crouched against the rain and trotted to the open door and entered. Somebody inside shut the door.
Everything was dark. I could barely make out the decrepit building and the yard around it. The razor ribbon on top of the chain-link fence glistened in the reflection of the streetlight. It was strangely quiet except for the rain hitting the roof of the car. I felt very alone.
Ordinarily I didn’t mind being alone. As a matter of fact, I welcomed it. There were few people who had ever engaged my interest. Most people were unforgivably dull and their conversation reflected that irreducible fact. I was frankly my own best company. I always kept a rich interior monologue running, a monologue which I much preferred to other people’s inanities. Other people’s utterances simply interrupted the flow of my inner voice.
I enjoyed being with Malkie, it’s true, but more for her presence beside me than for her words. Her words were the words of a child. An innocent in a nasty world. But her presence was comforting, pleasant rather than stimulating. I wished she were alongside me right at this moment. I didn’t want to be alone.
Five minutes passed. There was no sign of life inside the warehouse. If you didn’t know people were inside, you would have thought the place was empty. There was no light and no sound. It was as if you were in the middle of an uninhabited wasteland. I imagined vast stretches of the mid-section of the country felt as lonely as this.
Another ten minutes passed. Nothing happened. What if everyone had gone home and left me there? What if this had been a giant practical joke to punish me for allowing the limousine to be impounded? When would I wake up to the fact and realize that I was alone? Then I would drive back to Max’s garage and everyone would have a huge laugh at my expense.
My mind wandered over many uncharted pathways. Where would I finally end up, a runaway husband with an uncertain direction? A man without a pension, dental insurance or a funeral plot. I had fallen through the safety-net and was clinging on to a single strand of unraveling twine. Where most people had a predictable trajectory to their lives, I was treading down an indeterminate road. I imagined I saw shapes and forms that turned out to be shadows and fog and other aberrations of middle-aged sight on dark rain-swept nights. But there was nothing.
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