It reminded me of the poem at the base of the statue in DeWitt Clinton Park. I didn’t know the author, but there was a title index and I found it that way. The author was John McCrae, and the lines on the monument were from the third and final stanza. Here’s the complete poem:
In Flanders fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved; and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe!
To you, from failing hands, we throw
The torch. Be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
I was all set to copy it down when I thought to look inside the front cover. For five dollars I could own it. I paid for it and my coffee and went home.
It was close to ten-thirty when I got to Paris Green. Elaine was at the bar drinking a Perrier. I apologized for being late and she said she’d made good use of the time, that she’d spent it flirting with Gary. Gary, Paris Green’s bartender, had announced at the beginning of the summer that he was through hiding from the world; he had accordingly shaved the great oriole’s nest of a beard he’d worn as long as I’d known him.
Now he was growing it back. “Time to hide,” he explained. “Lot to be said for hiding.”
We went to our table and ordered, the large garden salad for her, fish for me. She assured me I would have hated every minute of the lecture. “I hated it,” she said, “and I was interested in the subject.”
I had the book with me, and back at her place I found the poem again and read it to her.
“That’s why I was late,” I said.
“You were busy grabbing the torch?”
“I walked a few blocks out of my way,” I said. “To Clinton Park, where the last three lines are carved at the base of a war memorial. Except they got it wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“They misquoted it.” I got out my notebook. “Here’s how they’ve got it on the monument. ‘If ye break faith / With those who died / We shall not sleep / Though poppies grow / On Flanders fields.’ ”
“Isn’t that what you just read me?”
“Not quite. Somebody changed ‘us’ to ‘those’ and ‘die’ to ‘died.’ And ‘in’ to ‘on.’ They used eighteen words from the poem and got three of them wrong. And they left off the author’s name.”
“Maybe he insisted on it, like a disenchanted screenwriter taking his name off a movie.”
“I don’t think he was in a position to insist on anything. I think he finished the war beneath the poppies.”
“But his words live on. That’s what I keep forgetting to ask you. Something you said a few days ago about Lisa Holtzmann.”
“What about her?”
“Something about a cleaner, greener maiden, but that can’t be right.”
“ ‘I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land.’ ”
“That’s it, and it’s been driving me crazy. I know the line, but where do I know it from?”
“It’s Kipling,” I said. “ ‘The Road to Mandalay.’ ”
“Oh, of course. And that explains why I know it. You sing it in the shower.”
“What do you say we keep that to ourselves?”
“I had no idea who wrote it. I thought it must be the title song from a Bob HopeBing Crosby movie. Wasn’t there a movie called that, or am I nuts?”
“Or (C) Both of the above.”
“Nice. Kipling, huh? What do you think, are you in the mood for a little Kipling?”
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s kipple.”
AFTERWARD she said, “Wow. I’d have to say we haven’t lost our touch. You know something, you old bear? I love you.”
“I love you.”
“You didn’t talk with T J, did you? I hope Julia’s not teaching him how to dress for success.”
“He’ll be all right.”
“How did you know the inscription was off?”
“It just wasn’t the way I remembered it.”
“That’s some memory.”
“Not really. I just read it a couple of days ago. If I had a great memory I’d have known then and there that they’d got it wrong. After all, I read it in high school.”
Chapter 19
The next day was Friday, and I spent it downtown having another crack at government records before they locked them all away for the weekend. I didn’t learn much.
I quit in time to beat the rush hour and rode uptown on the subway. There was a message to call Eleanor Yount. It was almost five o’clock but I managed to catch her at her desk.
She was delighted to report that there had been no embezzlement. “My accountant was quite startled when I suggested the possibility,” she said, “and very much relieved when he was able to rule it out. I hate to think that Glenn might have been a thief, but it does make the thought less unsettling to know he didn’t steal anything from me.”
I hadn’t really figured him as an embezzler. Nor had I pictured an enraged Eleanor Yount keeping a rendezvous in Hell’s Kitchen and pumping four bullets into her in-house counsel.
She asked me if I’d learned anything.
Not much, I said. I knew a few things I hadn’t known before, but I couldn’t make them add up to anything.
“I wonder when it started,” she said.
I asked her what she meant.
“I always wonder,” she said. “Don’t you? Whether someone’s a born criminal, or is it the scar of some childhood experience, or is there some pivotal incident later on. Glenn seemed such a supremely ordinary young man. But he seems to have told so many lies, and lived a life so different from what it appeared. I suppose it will turn out that he was beaten by his father or molested by his uncle. And then one day a cartoon light bulb formed over his head and he said, ‘Aha! I’ll commit embezzlement!’ Or traffic in drugs, or blackmail someone. It would be convenient if one knew what exactly it was that he did.”
There was a message from T J as well. I beeped him and he called me back, but the things we had to talk about weren’t suited to an open line, so we didn’t say much. I gathered that he didn’t have the gun yet but he was working on it.
He didn’t volunteer anything about Julia, and I didn’t ask.
At St. Paul’s that night the speaker was from Co-op City in the Bronx. He worked construction, mostly as a window installer, and he told a good basic drinking story. My attention drifted some, but he brought me back when he said, very solemnly, “And every single night I would lock myself in my furnished room and drink myself to Bolivia.”
Jim Faber was there, and during the break he said, “Did you happen to catch that one? I thought you had to drop LSD if you wanted to take a trip, but this fellow got all the way to La Paz on Clan MacGregor. They could use that in their ads.”
“I guess he thinks that’s the expression, drinking yourself to Bolivia. I mean, it wasn’t a slip of the tongue.”
“No, he meant to say it. Well, many’s the time I tried drinking myself to Bolivia. And nine times out of ten I wound up in Cleveland.”
When the meeting ended we established that we were on for Sunday dinner. I asked him if he felt like a cup of coffee but he had to get home. I thought about calling Lisa, maybe dropping in on her. Instead I hooked up with a few others from the meeting and went over to the Flame. When I got out of there I still felt like calling Lisa, but I didn’t. I went home and called Elaine to confirm our Saturday night date.
Afterward I watched CNN for a little while, then turned off the set and looked through the book of poems until I found one that gave me something to think about. Sometime af
ter midnight I turned out the light and went to bed.
It was like not drinking, I thought, like staying away from a drink a day at a time. If I could stay away from bourbon that way, I ought to be able to resist Lisa Holtzmann.
SATURDAY afternoon I got a call from T J. He said, “You know the bagel shop in the bus station?”
“Like the back of my hand.”
“You ask me, they better at doughnuts than bagels. You want to meet me there?”
“What time?”
“You say. Won’t take me five minutes.”
I said it would take me a little longer than that, and it was closer to half an hour before I was seated next to him at the counter of Lite Bite Bagels on the ground floor of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He had a doughnut and a Coke. I ordered a cup of coffee.
“They got good doughnuts,” he said. “Sure you don’t want one?”
“Not right now.”
“The bagels is mushy. You eatin’ a bagel, you ‘spect it to fight back some. Doughnuts, you don’t mind if they’s mushy. Weird, huh?”
“The world’s a mysterious place.”
“And that’s the truth, Ruth. Almost called you last night, woulda been real late. Dude had a Uzi he lookin’ to sell.”
“That’s not what I was looking for.”
“Yeah, I know. It was pretty slick, though. Had an extra clip, had this case to carry it in, all fitted an’ all. Cheap, too, ’cause all he wanted was to get high.”
I pictured Jan trying to kill herself firing at full automatic. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“Oh, must be he sold it by now. Else he used it to hold somebody up. Anyway, I got what you want.”
“Where?”
He patted the blue canvas Kangaroo pouch he was wearing around his waist. “Right in here,” he said softly. “Thirty-eight revolver, three bullets for it. Holds five, but he didn’t have but three. Maybe he went an’ shot two people. Three bullets be enough?”
I nodded. One was enough.
“Know the men’s room around to the right? I’ll catch you there in a minute or two.”
He slipped off his stool and left the bagel shop. I finished my coffee and paid for both of us. I found him in the men’s room, leaning over a sink, checking his hair in the mirror. I moved to the sink beside him and washed my hands while the fellow at the urinal finished up and left. When he was out the door T J unclasped the pouch from around his waist and handed it to me. “Check it out,” he said.
I went into one of the stalls. The gun was a Dienstag five-shot revolver with checkered grips and a two-inch barrel. It smelled as though it hadn’t been cleaned since it was last fired. The front sight had been filed down. The cylinder was empty. The pouch held three bullets, each individually wrapped in tissue paper. I unwrapped one and made sure it fit the cylinder, then took it out and wrapped it back in the tissue paper. I put the three bullets in my pocket and tucked the gun under my belt in the small of my back. My jacket concealed it well enough, as long as it didn’t slip.
I left the stall and handed the blue pouch to T J. He started to ask what was wrong, then felt the weight of the pouch and realized that it was empty. He said, “Man, don’t you want the Kangaroo? To carry it.”
“I thought it was yours.”
“It came with the goods. Here.”
I returned to the stall and put the gun and the bullets into the pouch and adjusted the strap so that it would fit around my waist. The gun felt a lot more secure there than wedged under my belt. Outside, T J explained that the pouches had become the holster of choice on both sides of the law.
“I believe it was cops started it,” he said. “You know how they got to carry a gun when they off duty? Only they don’t want no gun weighin’ down their pocket or spoilin’ the lines of their suit. Then a lot of the players, they was usin’ these shoulder bags, but that’s a little too much like a purse, you know? ‘Sides, anything you carry like that, there be times you put it down an’ forget to pick it back up again. The Kangaroos, they sell ’em everywhere, you don’t even know you wearin’ one. Leave the zipper open, you ready to quick-draw. An’ they cheap. Ten, twelve dollars. ’Course you can buy one in leather an’ spend more. I seen a dope dealer has one in eelskin. That be a fish or a snake?”
“A fish.”
“Didn’t know you could make leather out of no fish. Charge a lot for it, too. I guess you could get a Kangaroo made out of alligator if you was fool enough to want it.”
“I guess.”
I asked about Julia. “She a strange one,” he said. “How old you think she is?”
“How old?”
“Take a guess, Les. How old you think?”
“I don’t know. Nineteen or twenty.”
“Twenty-two.”
I shrugged. “Well, I was close.”
“She seem younger,” he said. “An’ she seem older. One minute she this little girl an’ you want to keep her safe. Next minute she your teacher, gone keep you after school. She know a whole lot of things, you know?”
“I’ll bet she does.”
“Not just what you thinkin’. She knows all kind of shit. She made those pajamas she was wearin’. You believe that? Designed ’em herself, too. Lotta ways she could make money. She don’t have to be gettin’ in cars on Eleventh Avenue. ’Course, right now she need the money.”
“What about you?”
His eyes turned wary. “What about me?”
“I just wondered how we stand as far as money is concerned. Did you make out all right on the gun?”
“Yeah, we cool. Got a good deal on the gun. Only real expenses I had was all the dope I had to buy.”
“What dope?”
“Well, hangin’ out by the Captain an’ all. You want to start askin’ a bunch of questions, people got to know you all right. Best way is buy some drugs. They makin’ money off you, they got a reason to like you.”
“Did you have to spend very much? Because it’s only right for me to reimburse you.”
“No need, Reed. I made out fine.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mean I took what I bought and sold it right here on the Deuce. Lost money on one deal but made some on another one. All said an’ done, I come out a few dollars ahead.”
“You sold drugs.”
“Well, shit, man, what else was I gonna do? I don’t use none of that shit. I wasn’t gonna throw the shit away. That’s bread, Ed. I ain’t in the business, not any more’n I’m in the gun business. Only business I want to be in is the detectin’ business, but if I has to buy the shit I might as well get my money back. There be anything wrong with that?”
“I guess not,” I said. “Not when you explain it like that.”
IN my room I took the gun apart and cleaned it. I didn’t have the right tools, but Q-tips and Three-in-One oil were better than nothing. When I was done I put the gun in the drawer with the five thousand dollars. I’d been meaning to put the cash in my safe-deposit box, but I had missed my chance. I’d have to wait until Monday.
I turned the TV on and off, then picked up the phone and called Jan. “I think I’m going to be able to get that item we discussed,” I told her. “Before I follow through, I just wanted to make sure you were still in the market.” She assured me that she was. “Well, I should have something by the end of next week,” I said.
I hung up and checked the dresser drawer, as if the gun might have magically dematerialized while I was on the phone. No such luck.
* * *
THAT night I reprised most of my conversation with T J for Elaine, of course leaving out the part about the gun. I told her how he’d bought and sold dope on my behalf, and how he seemed to be getting involved with a pre-op transsexual.
“Entranced by a transsexual,” she said. “Or transfixed. Just how fascinated is he, do you know? What do we do if he shows up with tits?”
“That’s a stretch. He’s just experimenting.”
“That’s all they were doin
g at the Manhattan Project, and look what happened to Hiroshima. What’s the story? Are they an item?”
“I think she probably took him to bed and showed him a good time. I think the novelty of it impressed him and shook him up a little. That doesn’t mean he’ll be running down to the nearest clinic for electrolysis and hormone shots. Or that the two of them are going to be picking out drapes together.”
“I guess. Have you ever tried that?”
“Picking out drapes?”
“You know. Have you?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Not that you know of? How could you do it and not know it?”
“Well, strange things happen when you drink yourself to Bolivia. I did lots of things I don’t remember, so how can I say for certain who I did them with? And if the girl was post-op, and if the surgeon did good work, how could you tell?”
“But you never did it that you know of. Would you?”
“I’ve already got a girlfriend.”
“Well, this is hypothetical. I wasn’t propositioning you on behalf of Julia. How did you feel about her? Did you want to do her?”
“It never entered my mind.”
“Because you’ve got a cleaner greener maiden in a neater sweeter land, except I just got it backward, didn’t I? A neater sweeter maiden. Will I ever get to meet Ms. Julia? Or do I have to take a walk on Eleventh Avenue?”
“No need,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll invite us to the wedding.”
I spent Saturday night at Elaine’s. Sunday morning I went back to my hotel right after breakfast and turned off Call Forwarding. I checked the drawer, confirmed the continuing existence of the gun and the money, and called Jan.
I said, “Will you be home for the next hour or so? I’d like to stop by.”
“I’ll be here,” she said.
Half an hour later I was standing on the sidewalk on Lispenard Street, waiting for her to toss down the key. I was wearing the blue Kangaroo pouch. The zipper was closed. I wasn’t looking to make any quick draws.
The Devil Knows You’re Dead Page 21