Another silence. “Yes, yes, Smythe-Jones, that’s right, but I think maybe you want one of his other students?”
Then silence again. I could hear Wiggsy’s watch ticking. Then I could hear Pop shuffling around for his pipe and his tobacco. The silence went on and on. My legs were asleep, and I knew they were going to hurt when I tried to walk on them again. There was silence and ticking and the sound of blood rushing through my body.
Finally Pop spoke. “Mr. Woodward, you may very well have a release sheet with my name on it, but I guarantee you I know nothing about the whole thing. Are you positive you have the right boy? Yes? Well, it must be right. It must be something Smythe-Jones arranged, but I can’t understand why he didn’t talk to me about it.”
He stopped talking. I started to shift one leg to ease the cramp in my back. Wiggsy snapped the muzzle of the gun at me, and I held still.
“I don’t get this whole thing,” Pop was saying. I could tell he was getting sore at Mr. Woodward. “You say some kid broke his arm riding his bike and George is supposed to take his place on the show tonight. Frankly...” There was a short pause. “Yes, but frankly I’m not sure I want George to have anything to do with it...Well, that’s your problem, Mr. Woodward. Heck no, I didn’t sign anything...All right, calm down. Yes, I’ll bring the boy up right away. I’m as anxious as you are to find out what’s going on. He must be on the way home from school now. In fact, he should be here now. I’ll run out and catch him, and bring him right up...Well I don’t know, Mr. Woodward. We’ll see. Good-bye.”
We heard the phone bang down and then some quick tramping around as Pop got his coat on, and then the sound of the door slamming, and Pop’s footsteps getting softer and softer as he went down the stairs.
Talking about losing. After all these weeks of auditions and rehearsals and lying and cheating I’d finally got my break; and there was a good chance I’d be dead just about the time the show started.
For a long minute neither of us moved. Then Wiggsy said, “On your feet, babe.” He slipped the gun into his shirt. I tried to stand up, but my legs were completely numb, and I started to fall.
“My legs are asleep, Wiggsy.”
He grabbed me by the front of my shirt, jerked me up, and spun me around to face the door. “Move, babe. And keep it cool.”
I went out of the apartment and down the stairs ahead of Wiggsy, stumbling and wobbling on my numb legs. Wiggsy kept right behind me, half carrying me by the back of my collar. For all that fat, it was amazing how fast he could move when he wanted to.
At the bottom of the stairs he eased forward and looked out. “Which way did your old man go?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. My legs were beginning to thaw out, and they prickled.
He banged me on the back of my head with his knuckles; not hard, but enough to make my eyes sting. “Up Sixth Avenue, probably.”
“Better be right.” He shoved me out, and we began going up West Fourth Street as fast as we could and still look natural. We got up a couple of blocks and then a cab came out of Jones Street. Wiggsy flagged it down, and we got in.
“Where’s this place at, babe?”
“You mean the laundry?”
“Yeah.”
“Eighty-ninth Street off Amsterdam,” I said.
He told the driver. We turned onto Sixth Avenue and headed uptown. “Wiggsy, he said he wouldn’t give it to me without an invoice from Mrs. Saddler.”
“Don’t worry, babe,” he said. “I’ll get it.”
He lit a cigarette, and after that we said nothing. I looked out of the window, trying to think of an escape. I really didn’t want to make myself think. I just wanted to sit there frozen and still and just do what Wiggsy told me.
Wiggsy wouldn’t want to kill me. He was mean and tough and cool, but he wasn’t the kind of guy who liked to kill kids. I guess he was probably a little crazy, the way most of the beatniks and weirdos around Greenwich Village are, but he wasn’t really crazy. I mean he wasn’t a lunatic or anything like that. He ran his store and taught guitar lessons and so forth; a maniac couldn’t do things like that.
So he wasn’t likely to kill me because he was nutty or because he got a blast out of killing kids. He would kill me only because I knew about the jewels.
The cab driver took us straight up Sixth Avenue, past the candy store where Pop got his newspapers, past the Howard Johnson’s, past P.S. 41, where I’d gone to school up to the sixth grade, past the lunch counter where I’d looked up the Needy Child’s Center only that morning. It hardly seemed that it could be the same day, or even the same week. We went straight up Sixth Avenue, and then through Central Park, and came out at Seventy-second Street. From there it took us only a few minutes to get up to Amsterdam and Eighty-ninth Street.
“Let us out at the corner,” Wiggsy said. He paid the cabbie, and we got out. Then he put his arm around my shoulders in what seemed like a friendly way and grabbed hold of the muscle on my upper arm.
“Okay, babe, open your mouth at the wrong time, and I’ll squeeze the muscle right off your arm,” he said. He flung his cigarette away. “Where’s the place?”
I pointed. We walked up the street and into the entranceway. Wiggsy sniffed. “It smells like a cleaning shop,” he said. “So far you’re okay.”
We climbed the stairs, opened the door, and Wiggsy pushed me into the gloom of the rug forest. He stood just behind me, his hand lying loose and casual on my upper arm. Wiggsy squinted around the dark, smelly room at the rugs and the shadowy men working in the aisles. Then he turned to the desk.
The old grandfather with the silvery hair was gone. In his place a young fellow sat with his feet up on the desk, tipped back in his chair reading the Daily News. On the page folded back toward us there was a small headline which read:
MUSEUM HEAD TO COPS: SOLVE SAPPHIRE HEIST OR CALL F.B.I.
I jerked my eyes away and looked at the man. The man seemed to have the measles, for he kept scratching himself. He looked around the edge of the paper. “What can I do for you fellows?” He gave his chest a quick scratch.
Wiggsy gave my arm muscle a little warning squeeze. “The boy was here looking for his teddy bear this morning. He says you were keeping it for him.”
The scratcher shook his head. “Don’t know anything about it.”
Wiggsy gave me a look.
“It was a different man, Wiggsy,” I said quickly. “An old man with white hair.”
“That right?” Wiggsy asked the man.
The scratcher crossed over an arm and went to work on his left side. “Yeah, that’s Carl. He was here before. Well, I don’t know anything about it. Why don’t you come back on Monday morning when Carl’s here?” He finished cultivating his side and went to work on his stomach.
Wiggsy let go of my arm and put his hand on my head. “I’ll tell you, fella,” he said, “the boy is pretty cut up about it. I’d like to do something about it tonight.”
“Teddy bears? Listen, we get hundreds of teddy bears.”
I said, “He put it in that bottom drawer. He said he’d keep it for me.” I cleared my throat. “I saw him put it in there.”
The scratcher quit harrowing himself, bent forward, and opened the drawer. Wiggsy and I leaned over the desk to see.
The drawer was empty. “Maybe he switched it to another drawer,” I said.
The scratcher sighed and closed his eyes as if he were exhausted. “Look, kid.” Then he opened all the drawers in the desk one by one. There was no teddy bear in any of them.
Wiggsy reached into his hip pocket and took out a roll of bills. He unwrapped a five-dollar bill from the roll and folded it up very small. “The boy is all broken up over it,” he said. He laid the folded five-dollar bill on the desk and put the old alarm clock on top of it.
The scratcher went to work on his chin. “It was in the stuff from the Needy Child’s Center, right, kid?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, well maybe Carl put it back wi
th the rest of the stuff. Let me check.”
He walked off into the jungle, scratching his back, and disappeared in the gloom. In five minutes he came back, carrying in each hand a bear. He held them up for us to see.
“This what you were looking for?”
Wiggsy snatched them out of the scratcher’s hands and began examining them quickly, but I knew right away neither of them was the right teddy.
“They’re not right,” I said.
Wiggsy grunted, and dropped them onto the desk.
The scratcher patted me on the shoulder. “Well, teddy bears are all pretty much the same,” he said. “You just take one, kid. On the house.”
Wiggsy shook his head. “You know how it is, the kid wants his own back.”
The scratcher shrugged. “Maybe Carl took it home with him.”
Wiggsy nodded, and his eyes narrowed. He was thinking that maybe Carl had discovered the jewels and taken them home. “What’s Carl’s phone number?”
“He hasn’t got a phone,” the scratcher said, slipping his hand under his shirt to get at his belly. “He lives in a rooming house down on Avenue B someplace.” He gave Wiggsy a look. “Okay, okay,” he said, “maybe it’s in his Social Security file.”
He walked back into the jungle again. When he returned he was holding a slip of paper, which he handed to Wiggsy.
“Thanks,” Wiggsy said. “Okay, babe, let’s split.”
Now Wiggsy’s hand was on my arm, squeezing, and we were hurrying again; hurrying down the street and around the corner; hurrying across Amsterdam, where we caught a cab going downtown. Wiggsy sat still, staring straight ahead, his arms wrapped around his huge belly as if he were holding it from flying off like a helium balloon. During the whole trip nobody said anything. I stared out the window on my side. My arm hurt where Wiggsy had been squeezing it and my stomach was sore from being scared so much. I couldn’t think anymore. I looked out the window and watched the scenery go by.
By the time we got down to the address the scratcher had given us it was toward the end of the afternoon. It was getting cool and dark. The kids were quitting their games and going in to watch television or do their homework and eat their suppers. I wished I were doing the same. I wished I were just an unimportant kid who never had anything interesting or exciting happen to him, just an ordinary kid who went to school and played stoopball in the afternoon and did his homework in the evenings. I wished I could erase from the past my ambitions to play the guitar; erase Wiggsy and Mr. Woodward, and Damon Damon and all the rest of them. But you can’t erase the past.
The neighborhood around Avenue B, where Carl lived, was old and sort of slummy. The buildings were dirty, and there was garbage spilling out of the garbage cans lined up along the curb. All up and down the block people were sitting on the front stoops, even though it was getting cold. A few kids were still playing ball or horsing around among the cars parked along the street.
We got out at Carl’s address. An old woman wrapped in a beat-up fur coat was sitting on the stoop. “Were looking for a fella named Carl,” Wiggsy said.
“Top floor. Five rear,” she said. “But he ain’t in. He goes out to eat now.”
“We’ll go up and wait for him,” Wiggsy said.
We went in. There were cigarette butts and candy wrappers and junk like that on the floors, and a thick smell of garbage everywhere. Kids had written their initials and some dirty words on the walls with crayons and marking pens. We started up the stairs. Wiggsy shoved me along ahead of him. He was breathing hard and grunting as he heaved that huge fat stomach up the stairs, but he was going fast and I had to rush to keep ahead of him.
The light in the fifth floor was out, and the hall was dark.
Wiggsy lit a match and examined the door to the rear apartment. The number was mostly worn off, but there was enough to read: 5R. The match burned down and went out.
Wiggsy knocked. We waited in silence. From five stories below came the faint sounds of kids shouting and the grinding of a bus pulling away from the curb. Nobody answered. Wiggsy heaved the door with his shoulder. It wobbled, but it didn’t give.
He lit another match and bent over to inspect the lock. After a moment the match burnt down to Wiggsy’ s fingers. He cursed and flung it away. Then he took something out of his pocket, and began poking it in the lock. He was bent over the lock, blocking my view’, and I couldn’t tell whether he was working with a file or a skeleton key or a wire or something else. He cursed softly to himself as he worked. Every minute or so he glanced back at me to make sure I wasn’t going to make a run for it.
There wasn’t much chance of that. He was standing only a couple of feet from the head of the stairs. If I tried to lunge past him he could grab me just by reaching out with his big arm.
In the other direction there was a flight of stairs going up to the roof. Because of the dark I couldn’t see up there very well, but I knew at the top there would be a metal fire door which opened onto the roof. In two big steps I could be on the stairs. It wouldn’t be much of a head start on Wiggsy, but it might be enough. Wiggsy could move pretty fast for a fat man, but on the roof it would be dark, and there would be television aerials, with their guy wires, and low walls and chimneys. I know. I’d been on New York roofs plenty of times. Dodging around all that stuff I could make better time than Wiggsy could. Some places in New York you can cover a whole block—sometimes go around the block—going over the rooftops. Once I got a couple of roofs away from him I could dash down the stairs of another building, or slip down a fire escape or even hide behind a chimney.
There was only one trouble with the whole idea. Those doors are supposed to be unlocked so people can get out in case of fire, but in these old buildings half the time somebody puts a padlock on them to keep out thieves or to keep kids off the roof. Suppose I made a run for it and the fire door was locked? I’d be trapped; and Wiggsy would just laugh and smack me around a couple of times.
I was thinking all of this when Wiggsy said, “Got it,” and pushed old grandfather Carl’s door open. The apartment was dark. Wiggsy leaned into the hall listening, in case Carl was asleep in there. It was quiet. Somewhere a big alarm clock ticked. We went in. Wiggsy closed the door behind us. Then he turned on the light.
We were in the kitchen. The place was clean and tidy, the way an old man will keep things. There were no dirty dishes around, and the food was all neatly stored behind the glass doors of the cupboards.
The teddy was sitting on the kitchen table, propped up against a ketchup bottle. We stopped dead and stared at it.
It seemed to be sitting there patiently waiting for us. I almost expected it to say something like, “What took you so long?” or “How did you manage to find me?”
Then Wiggsy grabbed it. He squeezed it with both hands, feeling for the jewels. “Good,” he said. “You’re lucky, babe. You were telling the truth.”
I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything for me to say. What was he going to do with me now?
He jammed the teddy bear under his shirt, lit a cigarette, and sat down in a chair by the kitchen table, thinking.
I stood, waiting. Then I heard from somewhere up above a soft thud, a dull thump. I knew right away what it was, for I’d heard it many times before. It was the sound of an unlocked fire door banging in the wind.
CHAPTER TEN
EVERYTHING WAS silent except the ticking of the alarm clock. Wiggsy went on smoking and thinking. Every once in a while he would turn and stare at me. I knew he was trying to decide whether or not to kill me. First he would look at the cigarette, and then he would look at me, and then back at the cigarette. He was cool. He was taking his time about it.
Finally he said, “Okay, babe, let’s go.” He motioned for me to go out the door ahead of him. I opened it and went out into the dark hall. Wiggsy turned back to snap the lock behind him. I ran.
In two strides I hit the stairs going up and charged for the top. It took Wiggsy a couple of seconds to realize wh
at had happened. By the time he turned around I was almost at the top.
“Come back, babe,” he snarled.
I slammed through the swinging fire door. Wiggsy swore and came after me, his feet crashing on the stairs, his heavy body creaking as he swayed from side to side.
I burst out onto the roof. It was dark, dark enough so that you couldn’t see the aerials and chimneys and so forth except near the tops where they got high enough to be silhouetted against the light rising up from the city below. Wiggsy could hear me run, but he couldn’t see me if I kept low.
The roofs were divided each from the other by low brick walls about two feet high. I couldn’t tell how far the roofs went on. I began to run, ducking and dodging around the chinr neys and the television aerials. I could tell where the aerials were by watching for the tops, which caught a bit of light, but the guy wires supporting them were invisible. They clawed at me, and sometimes they tripped me up and dumped me down on the rough tar, scraping my hands and bruising my kneecaps.
Behind me Wiggsy’s heavy feet thumped like bass drums on the roof. He swore. “I’ll get you, babe,” he roared.
I crossed one roof and then another and then a third. When I figured I had a little lead I dashed for a fire door. It was locked. I ran on. Wiggsy pounded after me, cursing. I slipped over the wall onto the next roof and tried another fire door. It was locked, too. I ran on. Behind me I heard Wiggsy trip over something. He swore and got up. My legs were aching, and my chest burning. I kept on running, looking for a way out.
The trouble was that even when people didn’t padlock the fire doors, they sometimes hooked them from the inside to keep them from blowing in the wind. It was easy enough to unhook them with a knife blade or a piece of wire; I had done it plenty of times before, fooling around on roofs with Stanky. But I had no wire and I had no knife and, besides, I didn’t have any time. I crossed another roof and ran on.
Suddenly the roof ended. I came up to the last low wall and looked over. Five stories down below there was a parking lot, empty and dark. I whirled around. I couldn’t see Wiggsy, but I could hear him stumbling along over the roofs, cursing and hollering and shouting my name. I whirled around again and, ducking low, ran along the wall toward the front of the building, looking for the fire escape. At the corner I hesitated. There was no wall along the front edge of the roof. I dropped flat, and peered over.
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