Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  The nuns always respected his wishes and never attempted to penetrate his privacy. Still, try as he might, he could not eradicate the memory of Jeffrey Archer from his mind.

  After Archer he vowed it would never happen again. He had always thought of his rooftop escapades as being summary and final. He had never envisioned them as leading to permanent impairment. “No more,” he proclaimed that anguished haunted day of self-loathing after the last drop when he sent the plant to Archer at the hospital. Afterward, he went to a small nearby church, fell on his knees and prayed. “This is the end of it,” he had said over and over again to himself. “This is it. No more. I swear. This time it’s really finished.”

  For several months after there were the bouts of remorse, the near-biblical grieving, all of which served to buttress his resolve to quit. He thought of going to the police but the possibility of jail horrified him. He could not bear the thought of being locked away, his freedom taken from him. Then came the months of quiescence. Blessed respite from the ghosts. The fog lifting. Entering another phase. Brighter. More hopeful. Thinking he’d licked it. The awful thing would never come again. Then, only yesterday—a small, unpleasant, totally unrelated incident and suddenly it had all come rushing back.

  Up ahead the gaudy lights of the street twinkled in the mist-hung night and ran together like colored paints splashed by water.

  “I won’t,” he said. “This is it. This is the end of it. No more. No more.” He repeated the words in a kind of fierce litany. His face was wet, he thought, from rain. He didn’t know that he was crying.

  32

  “After the war … after having been the sole survivor of a helicopter accident during a secret mission behind enemy lines … after coming home, I worked as a safety engineer for Trans World Airlines …”

  “And how long was that?”

  “That was four years: 1970 through 1974. Then I became purser for Pan Am.”

  “Yes … And that lasted …?”

  “Two years. Then I worked as a free-lance writer.”

  “A writer?”

  “That’s right. For a salvage magazine. Sunken ships. Buried treasure. That sort of thing. And then I was an airplane mechanic, and then I was commissioned a commander in the Iranian navy. That was during the reign of the late shah, whom I knew quite well.”

  “I see.” The eyes of the interviewer arched above the frames of heavy horn-rimmed glasses. She was a short, dark, intense woman with a light furze of hair above the upper lip. “Were you a mechanic and commander in the Iranian navy all at one time?”

  The note of barely masked ridicule had not escaped Watford. “No. That was over a seven-year period.”

  “That puts us into 1983, Mr. Watford. This is still only 1981.”

  Watford shrugged and grinned wryly. “I guess I’m wrong, then.”

  If she thought his smile impertinent, she was no doubt right. He didn’t like her any more than she liked him. The situation surrounding the interview was intolerable and he knew she hadn’t believed a word he’d said. Since she had rejected him even before reading his resume, he resolved to conduct himself as atrociously as possible. It took the sting out of the rejection and made him feel better.

  This was the seventh agency he’d been to that day. He’d started eagerly at nine sharp that morning with reasonable hope, looking as he tried to explain to each interviewer, for a position with an airline. When it became apparent to him that most of the interviewers were not taking his application seriously, he became increasingly outrageous.

  They were sitting now in a little three-walled glass cubicle furnished with a desk and two chairs in a one-flight-up employment agency directly off Fifth Avenue.

  “I’ve been a magician, too,” he went on quite earnestly.

  “You don’t say?”

  “Yes, yes. You know, scarves, rope tricks, rabbits out of hats.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you?”

  “Only too well. Thank you very much, Mr. Watford.” She rose.

  “I speak seven foreign languages, too.”

  “I’m sorry. I have nothing for a linguist today.” She stood there stiffly, trying to leave, but not quite brazen enough to turn her back upon him and walk out. She was also a bit frightened.

  He knew he had talked too much but by now he was no longer able to stop himself. “German, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Croatian, Gaelic …”

  “Thank you. I’m afraid we have nothing.”

  “And Russian, of course. I can start tomorrow, if you’d like.”

  He rose, nearly tipping his chair, watching her back out of the cubicle, her eyes suddenly filled with panic. In the next moment she turned and fled.

  As he walked across the gray littered floor on his way out, he had a sudden ghastly prospect of aisles and rows of cubicles. They were all furnished in precisely the same rudimentary way as the one he’d just left. Even more disheartening was a glimpse he had of the occupants in each. Bathed blue under harsh fluorescent lights, applicant as well as interviewer, barely distinguishable, all uniformly shabby, mean and defeated; each hating the other; the barest pretense of civility between them.

  Halfway across the floor he started to laugh. It had begun with a small, barely audible snicker, then mounted into gales of howling, scornful laughter.

  People looked up. Several came out of the cubicles to see what was going on. But Watford kept right on walking, booming laughter into the stale, smoky air. For all of the hilarity, he was faintly sick. He had never before encountered so much rejection, and the thought that his money was fast running out, along with his Demerol and prescription pad, made his mouth dry and his throat constrict.

  “Try to recall, Mrs. Uliano. I know it’s tough.”

  “Aaah?”

  “I say, I know it’s tough.”

  “Aaah?”

  “Difficult, difficult.” Mooney was reduced to shouting into her ear, his problem compounded by t he fact that not only did the wizened little Italian lady have a hearing deficit, but her English was virtually nonexistent.

  “Rudy …”

  “Si, si.” Her eyes lit. “Rudy. Aaah?”

  “Rudy. Cab. One night. Last year.” He waved a linger in the air and gestured frantically as if he were playing charades. “Capeesh?”

  “Si. Si. Rudy. Cab. Tax, aah? Si, si.” She stood I here before him, a hag mantled in mourning black, leaning on a stick. He suspected that she was not as old as she appeared. That impression arose from her black funereal clothing which he guessed she had not changed since the death of her husband nearly a year before. Mooney lowered his voice and tried to affect sorrow. He was certain she thought he was a lunatic.

  “In Rudy’s cab one night. Blood. Molto blood. Hombre. Mucho hurt. Remember?”

  A stream of Italian spewed from her.

  He gestured wildly and retreated next to a kind of lingua franca of the eyes and body.

  “Ah,” she said, a glint of seeming comprehension in her gaze. “Blood. Blood. Si.”

  “Si. Blood. Si.” His head nodded frantically at her while hers nodded back in the identical rhythm. “Man hurt. Blood. Remember?”

  She cocked her head sideways, like a small sparrow, and stared up at him. “Aaah?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Aaah?”

  “Nothing. Sorry.”

  He thought wistfully of Fritzi at the track and icy-minted bourbons, fresh March breezes buffeting out of the west, the roar of crowds and the good smell of leather and horseflesh. Afterward, lobsters, or maybe soft-shelled crabs somewhere out on the Island.

  Mrs. Uliano’s little parlor room with the linoleum floors was steeped in the odors of provolone cheese and decades of marinara sauce.

  Just as he thought all of his linguistic ingenuity had been exhausted, he heard the click of a key in the outside door.

  It swung open and a young man in jeans and Wind-breaker stood there peering inward from the threshold.

  “Dominick.”
The old lady waved her cane at him and rattled something in Italian.

  Mooney watched the young man start falteringly forward. When he came within reach of the old lady, she snatched his sleeve and tugged him closer. “My boy. Dominick.”

  “Ah, your son.” Mooney felt relief surge through him. He turned to the young man whom he judged to be about thirty. From his rough dress and dusty leather brogues, Mooney assumed that he was in some kind of construction work.

  “You speak English, Dominick?”

  “Sure.”

  “Aaah.” Mrs. Uliano beamed satisfaction.

  “My name is Mooney. I’m a detective.” He flashed his badge and noted the frown that crossed the young man’s face. Dominick Uliano fired off something in Italian. At once the old lady turned and vanished noiselessly into the gloom of a darkened kitchen beyond. She did not reappear.

  “I don’t know nothin’ about that,” Dominick Uliano said after Mooney had explained to him the reason for his visit. “My father never talked much about his work. When would this have been?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “How do you know it was my father’s cab?”

  “I don’t. All I know is your father probably had a badly injured guy in the backseat of his cab somewhere around the night of April 30, 1979.” Mooney noted the look of distrust in the young man’s eyes. “Your father’s not accused of any wrongdoing, Dominick. It may just be that he holds the key to this whole series of so-called ‘accidental deaths’ around the theater district.”

  The young man continued to watch him warily. “You say this guy bled a lot in the backseat?”

  “Like a stuck pig. Your father probably took him to a hospital and left him there. Did your father ever mention anything like that to you?”

  Dominick Uliano’s eyes bristled with that innate distrust of the lower classes for the police. “If he had, I would’ve remembered,” he snapped.

  “He didn’t break no law, I want you to understand. Normally, cabdrivers are supposed to report any emergencies like that.”

  “You mean fill out a form?”

  “Right.” Mooney watched him uneasily. “But I want you to know, as far as we’re concerned, your old man is clean. He did nothin’ illegal.”

  “So?”

  “So, I’m tryin’ to find out where he might have taken that injured passenger.”

  “Oh.”

  Mooney could see the young man struggling to think quickly, but terrified of saying the wrong thing. “No. He never said nothin’ like that to me.”

  “You didn’t talk much with your old man?”

  “Nope. Not too much.”

  “You know anyone who did?”

  A faint flash glowed momentarily in the young man’s eye, then sputtered and went out. “Nope.”

  “Sure you do, Dominick.”

  “No. I’m tellin’ you, I don’t.”

  “Come off it, Dominick. Don’t be simpleminded. He must have had someone he spoke to.”

  “No. Now, I already told you. My old man spoke to no one. He was like … very private. See?”

  “Not a friend? Not a close buddy? Not even your mother? Listen, if you knew you could save a life by recalling the name of a pal of his. Someone he drove with.”

  The notion appeared to spark something in the young man’s imagination. “You sayin’ this guy in the back of my old man’s cab was some kind of killer?”

  Mooney shrugged. He knew he’d hooked him. “More than likely.”

  The silence that followed was portentous. Mooney watched his quarry weaken.

  “Well, there might’ve been some guy he drove with …”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nothin’ you’d call a close pal, see.”

  “Sure—I understand.”

  The young man stretched his neck and gave it a sharp half-turn as if the collar were too tight. He rattled off some more Italian in the direction of the kitchen where Mooney could hear the old lady stir and start to shuffle about.

  “There was a guy he used to drive with by the name of Harry Rothblatt.”

  “Rothblatt, Harry,” Mooney scribbled the name into his pad.

  “If there was a guy my father used to talk to a lot— real buddies sort of—it was him.”

  “I got you.”

  “Used to drive for Acme when my old man was there. Now I think he works with some outfit out in Queens.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know which one?”

  “No, but if you’re lookin’ for him, just go to the Belmore Cafeteria on Twenty-eighth and Park Avenue South. If he’s not there, they’ll know where you can find him.”

  Even as he drove down over the 138 Street Bridge, making his way west to Park Avenue South, he struggled to suppress a sense of gathering momentum. It was a bit like betting a horse who’d been out of the money his last six races, then suddenly makes an unexpectedly strong move coming out of the eighth pole.

  Mooney knew the Belmore by reputation only. Occasionally, a garment manufacturer off his track might stumble in, but the ninety-year-old caféteria was a landmark frequented by virtually every cabdriver in the city. Open seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, it was a lighthouse to all those tired, angry men crisscrossing the city every day in yellow cabs, driving through the long reaches of the night, drawn there by the temptation of strong coffee and sweet pastries, hot meals at any hour. And, of course, always the raw, bitter, funny conversation—gossip from all the comrades of the road. There was about it more the raucous flavor of a clubhouse than that of a caféteria located in the grimy, drably commercial section of Park Avenue South.

  “Where would I find Harry Rothblatt?” Mooney asked a blowsy, overweight cashier, spilling out of the cramped little area behind the register. She ignored him pointedly and went about her pencil computation. He waited, until at last she looked up regarding him through rhinestone-framed sunglasses. For reply she nodded in the direction of a tall, bald counterman with his shirt open to the third button, proclaiming a hairy chest upon which the Hebrew letters for LIFE glittered in gold plate.

  “Harry Rothblatt,” Mooney inquired a moment later, and watched the man flip potato pancakes into a huge skillet of sizzling fat. The rancid smell of fried food wafted up about his face.

  “Who wants him?”

  Mooney flashed his badge over the glass counter. The man gave it a quick impassive glance and poured more pancake batter into his skillet. “He’s not here right now.”

  “Does he come in regular?”

  “Every day.”

  “When do you expect him?”

  The counterman glanced at his watch. “Between six-fifteen and six-thirty. Just before he goes on. He drives at night.”

  Mooney glanced up at the caféteria clock which read 6:10.

  “Fifteen minutes or so,” the counterman said. “You had your supper yet?”

  Mooney gazed wistfully at the huge, pink corned beef and hams, the freshly made, still warm, brisket glistening with beads of brown burned fat. He had barely eaten all day. Now the warm, heady odors of roasts and frying food were merciless.

  “Not yet,” Mooney made a sheepish, pathetic face and started to back off.

  “What can I offer you, my friend?”

  He put his hands up as if he were warding off a blow. “Nothing, thanks. Not a thing …”

  The counterman watched the detective’s wistful gaze fall upon the crisp, lacy-fried potato pancakes. “What about a couple of these little beauties?”

  “I can’t, really. Thanks all the same.” Mooney was weakening and the counterman saw it. He heaped a half-dozen pancakes on a plate, along with a dollop of sour cream and one of apple sauce. “How about a nice slice of brisket? Fresh out of the oven. To go with the pancakes?”

  Mooney smiled queasily. The stern, disapproving gaze of Fritzi Baumholz flashed before his eyes. “I really shouldn’t.”

  “Who says?”

  “I’m supposed to be on a diet.”

  “Who
’s telling anyone? I didn’t see a thing.” The counterman winked and passed the plate along to Mooney, who took it with trembling hands. “Take a seat over there. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll let you know when Harry comes in. Coffee’s in the urn. Iced tea, if you prefer. Help yourself.”

  Mooney threaded his way across the floor, to an empty table beneath the caféteria clock. In a little under six minutes he had jettisoned every rule of calorie conservation and was more ravenously hungry than ever. More than anything now he craved strawberry shortcake or an eclair, oozing custard and dark chocolate. The fact that he was so intimidated by the mere thought of Fritzi made him even more recklessly defiant.

  Mooney was just about to rise and seek out sweets when he caught the eye of the counterman nodding at him, and then toward the door. As he turned he saw a gray, sixtyish, bearlike figure, with a dome of gauzy white hair shamble through the doors.

  He sat back down in his chair and watched the man lumber across the floor waving to people, pausing occasionally at tables to chat with other drivers.

  Once he reached the counter Mooney watched him lean quickly forward while the counterman whispered something in his ear and pointed to Mooney. The man turned and looked quickly at the detective, then turned back to the counterman who proceeded to serve him.

  With his tray full, the man turned once more, and without looking at Mooney, made his way directly toward him.

  “Hold on,” he said, placing his tray at the same table opposite the detective. “Be with you in a minute. Just wanna get some tea.”

  The man turned and lumbered back to the big aluminum urns. He walked as if his feet hurt him. Mooney’s jaded eye rambled over a tray full of salad, cottage cheese and stewed prunes.

  “Ulcers,” the big man remarked, returning to the table. He set his cup of tea down and took the seat opposite Mooney. He’d caught the look of repugnance on the detective’s face. “Not exactly the food of the gods. Harry Rothblatt,” he said. “I understand you’re lookin’ for me.”