Night Life

by David C. Taylor

  “That’s a good choice,” Orso said, who would never go through its doors. “Just be careful.”

  “I don’t have to be careful. I’m twenty-three years old.” She recovered some of the politeness her parents had drummed into her. “But thank you both for helping me. I’m sure I would have been fine, but thank you anyway.” She nodded to them and went off down the street. Innocent. Full of possibilities. A magnet for guys like Flea. How long would the innocence last?

  “You can’t save them all,” Cassidy said.

  “Yeah. Fuck it.”

  “Come have a drink at Sardi’s.”

  “Nah. I’m going to stay out here and fight crime awhile longer. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He tapped Cassidy lightly on the shoulder with the paper-wrapped pipe and headed south toward Times Square.

  * * *

  Cassidy crossed 45th and went down Shubert Alley through the pack of theatergoers, women in fur coats, men in tweeds and wool, as they crowded the doors to the Shubert buzzing with anticipation of Cole Porter’s Can-Can. He dodged two slow-moving taxis on 44th Street and went into Sardi’s and surrendered his hat and coat to the hatcheck girl. Sardi’s had been the theater community’s clubhouse for more than thirty years. Cartoons by Alex Gard of actors, directors, producers, and other Broadway luminaries lined the walls. The Tony Awards had been invented at Sardi’s, and the yearly announcements of the nominees and winners from the Broadway shows took place there. The upstairs room was where Cassidy’s father hosted opening night parties for the plays he produced. The cast, crew, investors, and friends waited for the publicist to deliver the first editions of the newspapers with the evening’s reviews. If the reviews were good, the party went on till dawn. If they were bad, people left quickly as if fleeing contagion.

  Vincent Sardi Jr. stood by the bar, head bent to listen to a waiter’s complaint, smoothing his mustache with his thumb. He put a hand on the waiter’s arm to stop him for a moment and said, “They’re already here, Michael.”

  His brother and sister were in their usual booth along the wall near the middle of the dining room, their drinks half finished in front of them. Cassidy slid onto the banquette at the unoccupied place where a martini waited.

  “In this ever-changing world, the one thing we can count on is that Michael will be late,” Leah said. “One more minute and I was going to drink that myself to keep it from getting warm.”

  “Glad I could save you from that sacrifice.” He drank some of the martini, cold, clear, astringent, and felt things loosen inside him. “You look beautiful, as always. That too is immutable.” Two years younger, she had his black hair, but smooth and glossy like a raven’s wing, and his pale skin tight over the bones of her face, but with the angle and edge softened to give her a startling beauty that made men and women stare.

  “What about me?” Brian said over his raised glass of scotch. “I was voted the handsomest child two years in a row at the Presbyterian Church School.” Their older brother was a big man with a barrel chest, a big square head, and a broad, cheerful face.

  “You are without equal.”

  “I get that. I get that. Damned with faint praise. I know an actor, when he goes backstage to see a friend who just stunk up the joint, says, ‘Good is not the word.’ I get it. You, by the way, look like crap.”

  “Ah, family. You can always count on the kindness.”

  “Do you ever get any sleep?” The question of a man with an orderly life.

  “Not much.”

  Brian was clearly his father’s son. The Alex Gard caricature of Thomas Cassidy that hung on the wall above the booth could have been of Brian. It was as if the genetic material of the mother and father had been isolated and passed on intact, the father’s to Brian, the mother’s to Michael and Leah. The three of them clinked glasses and smiled at each other. They met here once a month, and while spouses and lovers were invited, they rarely came.

  “It’s a club, just the three of you, and no one else gets to join,” Gwen had said. “You finish each other’s sentences. You laugh at jokes no one else gets. You say things and suddenly the three of you are nodding and chuckling and saying, ‘Yes. Right. Has to be,’ or something like that, and nobody else at the table has a clue.” It was one of those nights when she was picking through his crimes in no particular order of severity.

  * * *

  “Tortured with pliers,” Brian said, and winced.

  The waiter slipped in to pour Leah more wine. They talked of other things while they ate, of the McCarthy subcommittee hearings going on then, the new plays on Broadway, and the prospects of the new musical their father was producing that was now in rehearsal, but finally they had come to this.

  “A fawn Chesterfield,” Leah said. “Where the hell did he get a fawn Chesterfield?”

  “Paul Stuart,” Cassidy said. He pushed his plate back and lit a cigarette.

  “You looked.”

  “I did,” Cassidy said. “I’m a detective. Clues are my business.” He waggled his eyebrows at her.

  “Defective detective.”

  “Not the point, is it?” Brian said. “The coat, I mean. It seems to me the point is the torture. Was the guy hiding something, or did someone just hate him?”

  “Of course the torture is the point,” Leah said.

  “What about the coat, though?” Cassidy asked.

  “I don’t get it. Come on, Sherlock. Give,” Brian said.

  “Was his coat wet?” Leah asked. “Were his shoes?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’d just come in.”

  “I think so.” Cassidy waited for her to go on.

  “What else? There’s something else. Have you told us everything?” She chewed her bottom lip and studied him for clues with dark eyes that mirrored his own. He loved her intensity even when it blew her up, or blew up the people around her, which it sometimes did.

  “Everything I noticed,” he said.

  “He bought a sirloin steak, two potatoes, and a box of peas, dinner for two.”

  “Right.”

  “So who was the guy with the pliers? The dinner guest?”

  “I think so.”

  “And he wanted something Chesterfield had, or knew.”

  “His name was Ingram. Alex Ingram.”

  “Do you think Ingram told him?”

  “I would have.”

  “And nobody heard anything?”

  “He had him gagged. I think he’d do something to him and only take the gag out if he thought Ingram was going to answer.”

  “Jesus, you two. Can we change the subject to something slightly less morbid?”

  * * *

  “Have you gone by rehearsal?” Brian asked while the hatcheck girl retrieved his coat and hat.

  “I haven’t had time.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Maybe a month ago.”

  “He’s your father.”

  “I see him.”

  “Not enough.” Brian saw his brother’s face and held up his hands. “All right, all right. Look, I’ve got to be down in Washington starting next week, and then I’ll be back and forth, so maybe you could pick up some of the slack.”

  “Washington?”

  “We’re going to televise the Army-McCarthy hearings. I’m going down to D.C. to set it up. The boss thinks people will want to see them, and we’ve got to do something different. CBS and NBC are killing us.” Brian produced a news show for ABC, the upstart television network.

  “Like watching paint dry.”

  “McCarthy’s the most dangerous man in America. He doesn’t believe in anything, no matter what he says. He’s like a nasty boy torturing a cat. There’s no purpose to it but the pleasure he gets by inflicting pain. From the very beginning this whole business of finding Communists in government has been crap. Do you know how many lives he’s ruined by accusing people of being Communists? Hundreds. Do you know how many Communists have been successfully prosecuted since he started? None. Zero.
Now he’s out to wreck the army, and all because that little shit Cohn couldn’t get an officer’s commission for his friend Schine.”

  “Roy Cohn?”

  “Yeah. Why? You know him?”

  “I ran into him once. He didn’t like the way I was doing my job.”

  “He’s been running around with this guy David Schine, a rich kid from California. Schine got called for the draft. Cohn tried to get him out of it, and when that didn’t work he tried to pressure the army into making Schine an officer. The army said no. Schine’s a private out at Fort Dix, and Cohn’s using McCarthy and the committee to get revenge by investigating the army.” Brian took his coat and hat from the girl. “Thanks, honey.” He put fifty cents in her bowl, shrugged into the coat, and turned to clasp Cassidy’s hand. “Anyway, I have to be back and forth to Washington, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d look in on Dad.”

  “Okay.” He would do it, because it would please Brian. “Love to Marcy,” Cassidy said.

  “Absolutely. And to Gwen.” He saw Cassidy’s face. “Uh-oh.”

  Cassidy shrugged.

  “When?”

  “Last week.”

  “You want to talk about it? I can stay.”

  “Nothing to talk about. She discovered she didn’t like me much anymore, and she left.” How do you explain the end of something you thought was going to last?

  “Ah, jesus.” He hugged Cassidy, as if to offer another ration of comfort. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Me too.” As if that covered it.

  A quick flash of her, turning to see him as he walked into the Oak Bar at the Plaza to meet her for drinks, blond hair cut short, a bright smile, happy to see him, eager. His heart would lift. A kiss, quickly broken by her, her Midwestern upbringing making her leery of public displays of affection. Early in the affair when it was full of light.

  He watched through the glass door as his brother went out, impatient to get home to his wife and two daughters. Brian hailed a taxi and got in without looking back.

  Cassidy stood up from the table when Leah returned from the powder room. “Brian left.”

  “Wife and kids. The happiest man I know. Did he talk to you about Dad?”

  “How’d you know?

  “He asked me if you’d seen him lately. I said I didn’t know. He got that serious look on his face, the one he gets when he’s going to do something he thinks will make us one big, happy family.”

  “We aren’t?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah, I guess we are. As happy as any other. Are you going to go to a rehearsal?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Good. That’ll make him happy.”

  “Brian?”

  “Dad, stupid.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “It will, because you, sweetie, are the favorite.”

  “You’re the favorite, if he has one. Or Brian. I’m tail-end Charlie.”

  “Uh-huh.” She smiled at her brother’s denseness.

  “Want to walk over to the Street, listen to some jazz? Tatum’s playing at Jimmy Ryan’s.” He was not ready to face an empty apartment.

  “Not tonight. Put me in a taxi, okay?”

  The night had cleared. The streets were still wet, and the neon signs were gashes of color the wet street threw back in broken reflections. Cassidy waved down a Checker and opened the door. Leah hugged him. As he started to let go, she held on. “I want to talk to you. I need some advice.” Her voice was muffled against his chest.

  “Sure.” Uh-oh. Where had she gone off the rails this time?

  “Maybe next week. I have to think. I have to make a decision.”

  “About what?” Maybe it was nothing. Maybe she couldn’t decide what to buy their father for his birthday. Sure.

  She pulled back to look up at him. “Uh-uh. You have to buy me lunch to get the dirt. Some dive where all you cops and hoods hang out.”

  “Where we stir our coffee with our guns. Everything okay with Mark?”

  “Mark is great, but Mark is in Delaware talking to DuPont. Mark is in love with polyvinyl chloride.”

  “I didn’t know that little Greek strumpet was still around.”

  “Strumpet. Ha ha. Plastics, dummy. Mark is bullish on plastics. He’s going to be even richer.” She put a hand against his cheek. “I love you, Michael. I wish you took better care of yourself.”

  “I love you too. Call me when you want to have lunch.”

  He watched the taxi drive away. His sister had always run with scissors, and he knew that one of the reasons he had left home was to miss the moment when she tripped.

  * * *

  He joined the army the day after his eighteenth birthday, with a young man’s illusions that war was an adventure to run toward. A year of combat across France and Germany taught him a harsher reality. There were days of cold and hunger and wet, hours of fear, moments of horror, endless seconds of real terror. He learned that in the hottest times something inside him stayed cool, that he could go forward when other men would not.

  In April of 1945, the war was winding down. Spring came as it did every year no matter what men did to each other, and spring brought hope the way it brought flowers out of the dead land, hope for survival, hope for an end to this. Cassidy and his squad came to Flossenbürg concentration camp in April. Human skeletons in striped rags clung to the wire and stared at them with huge uncomprehending eyes. The camp gate was open, and all the prisoners had to do was step forward, but no one came out. It was as if the freedom offered was too great a prize to test. One of them—A man? A woman? Impossible to tell—stretched a bony hand toward them, and then slowly collapsed to the spring mud and died. The man standing next to Cassidy, a big blond BAR gunner from Nebraska named Gordon, began to cry.

  He had dreamed of this moment months before while lying in a hospital bed recovering from shrapnel wounds. He had pushed the dream aside, dismissed it as the product of drugs, fear, and pain, but now they were here in front of him, human skeletons hanging on the wire, just as he had seen them in the dream, the one on the ground, Gordon crying. He had not had a dream like that since his mother’s death, and he had thought that he was through with them, that the agony of that day had burned them out of him. But they were back, occasional, elusive, unsettling.

  * * *

  Cassidy shipped stateside two months after VE-Day. Demobilized and back in New York, nothing fit, not the old clothes, the old attitudes, the old friends, the old haunts. The war lit anger in him that he could not extinguish. His father offered him a job at his theatrical production company, but Cassidy knew that was wrong, and when Tom Cassidy said he would give him a stake in any business he wanted, there was nothing that he did want. Brian, recently demobilized as a major from the Army Signal Corps in Washington, was at work at ABC and offered to find him a job there, and gave him a rueful smile and a pat on the shoulder when he said no, thank you.

  The first year home was a blur of bars and booze, of women whose names he could not remember when he woke up next to them, of early-morning escapes with his shoes in his hand from apartments he did not recognize out to the quiet, empty gray dawn streets and the surprise of where he was in the city. Days were passed in recovery and anticipation of darkness and bright lights, ice rattling in a glass, and boozy laughter. How could he tell it was morning if he didn’t have a hangover?

  Leah watched him without comment and then asked, “Are you ever going to be like you were?”

  He said, “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Well, that’s not all bad. You were kind of a pain in the ass sometimes.” Which made him laugh. “And you’re kind of a pain in the ass now. When are you going to snap out of it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do it soon, will you?”

  He enrolled at Columbia but dropped out after six months, unable to find traction.

  One day he walked by the police station-house on 67th Street, saw the recruiting poster, went in, and signed up.

  At di
nner that night, when he announced it, his brother said, “That’s wonderful, Mike. The city needs more people like you, people who are willing to take some responsibility.”

  Leah said, “Cool. Will you teach me to shoot?”

  His father, rigid with anger, said, “I did not raise my son to be a Cossack,” and left the table.

  His mother, of course, was dead.

  3

  The driver’s license and Social Security card in the man’s wallet said his name was Edmond Fraker. He had been Edmond Fraker for a couple of months now and was getting used to it. If they caught him, the name would trace back to a dead end, giving his employers deniability. Not that he would get caught. It had never happened, no reason to think it would that night. Still, get cocky, get hit. The war had taught him that. He took the knife from his pocket, flicked the blade open with the snap of his wrist, and slit the police tape on Ingram’s apartment door. The dead bolt was unlocked, so he slid the blade into the gap between the door and jamb, found the latch tongue, and eased it back. A moment later he stood inside with his back against the closed door. He listened for a while. No doors opened in the hall. No curious neighbors. No shouts of alarm. He turned on his penlight and shaded the narrow beam with his hand, and used it to avoid furniture as he crossed to the windows and pulled down the blinds. When he crossed back, he glanced through the open door to the bathroom, and his light picked up the dark blood on the tiles. He wedged a straight-backed chair under the front doorknob just in case. It would hold for a few seconds. Not that he expected anyone, but he thought of himself as a careful man. He pulled on thin medical gloves and started his search. Fraker savored assignments like this, a nighttime creep, clandestine, solo.

  During the war he discovered night was his territory. Where most feared the darkness, he welcomed it, no, loved it, felt more alive in it than he did in the day. He slipped the knife from his pocket again and flicked the blade open, five inches of Solingen steel, both sides edged and honed, the aluminum haft solid in his hand, the surface pebbled for grip. He had taken it off a Waffen SS sergeant an hour after the parachute jump that had put him behind enemy lines in France in the days before D-Day. Clouds wisping across the moon. The fading engines of the drop plane. The hum of wind through the shrouds and the flap and rustle of the canopy above him as he fell, heart racing, toward a darkness pricked by the flames of marker fires lit by French partisans in the field below. The wind took him away from there, and he watched the markers disappear. When he landed, no one answered the cricket click of the toy noisemaker he had been given for signaling. He was alone, and he liked it.