Urban Flight

by Jonathan Kirshner

  “I don’t know Harry, I know you. You’re not as complicated as you think.” He sent the Nerf ball across the room and returned to sorting through his mail, wedging a few letters under his arm while tearing in half and tossing out most of the others unread.

  “I am too, complicated,” Jason insisted. It was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever said, even to Adam. “You’re right, I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m going to go up there and pull out.”

  “You know,” Adam said solemnly, tossing a few final letters in the trash, “one of her tits is bigger than the other.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean one of them is bigger. A lot bigger.”

  “Which one?”

  “Which one? What are you, blind? Whatever you do, don’t look at ’em. She’s very sensitive about it.” Adam tore open one of the four letters that had survived his purge, leaving Jason with his thoughts. “Holy shit, will you look at this?”

  He waved the letter back and forth, then read aloud, “Dear Mr. Shaker: Thank you for your inquiry. The information you requested can only be viewed at the Hall of Records. If we can be of any further assistance…blah blah blah.” Stuffing the letter back in its envelope, he tossed it towards the second shelf of a nearby bookcase and considered it filed. “You know what they told me at Records? That the stuff had been sent to be archived and could only be requested through the mail! Well fuck ’em. I got most of what I need. Come on, let’s go somewhere we can talk.”

  They left the building and weaved their way through the stopped traffic on Third Avenue. Navigating single file through the cramped spaces between cars, Adam was so caught up in what he was saying that he backed into a truck. He bounced off and kept talking.

  “That reminds me—you know the one positive piece of data I’ve come across? Pedestrian traffic fatalities. They’re down forty-two percent. Forty-two percent! Traffic can’t move fast enough to hurt anybody. If this city wasn’t in such bad shape, I’d be dead right now.”

  They turned down the corner, and headed east. The sun was out, but the shadows from the buildings formed a tunnel that narrowed all the way to the river.

  “Speaking of dead bodies in traffic,” Adam continued in a quieter voice. “You know why Sid Maynes was murdered?”

  “I didn’t know he was murdered,” Jason said innocently. He’d been down this road before.

  “No doubt about it.”

  “Last year you had no doubt about where Patty Hearst was hiding.”

  “You didn’t see her in a tan suit, did you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that you didn’t see Maynes that day. You saw one of the guys that killed him.”

  “You’re out of your mind. Who knows what I saw?”

  “You know how they say he killed himself? Slit his wrists.”

  “It’s a proven method—as long as you go vertical. Horizontal is a cry for help. At least that’s what my abnormal psychology professor said. I always wondered, what if you didn’t know?”

  “Are you getting any of this?” Adam asked impatiently.

  “Yeah, he slit his wrists. Which way did he do it—vertical or horizontal?”

  “That’s not the point!” Adam yelled at Jason without raising his voice much. Jason waited for the punch line.

  “The method doesn’t match the venue,” Adam continued. “What do you think, he goes for a car ride, gets out, takes a deep breath, gets back in, and slits his wrists? I don’t think so.”

  They arrived at the Coffee-Café, one of Adam’s favorite hangouts. It was nearby but out of the way, and nobody went there. They were greeted by a pretty young waitress, who smiled at Adam. Her light brown hair was pulled back from her face. She had delicate features, with innocent eyes for a waitress.

  “Two for the counter?” It wasn’t really a question.

  “Got anything in a booth?” Adam asked.

  “My boss has a rule about coffee drinkers in the booths,” she said sweetly.

  “My boss has a rule about giving away free concert tickets. It’s a pity, really. I hear Elton John is going to play the Garden for Thanksgiving.”

  Jason checked the place out, not sure how long Adam would be flirting with the waitress. He hadn’t been there in a long time. The food wasn’t great but it wasn’t bad, and the service was okay. There were a lot of regulars, mostly older folks who sometimes read while they ate. It was never more than half full, probably because it was too far from the subway to attract a commuter crowd. He couldn’t see how they stayed in business. Maybe they were supposed to lose money. “You want that booth in the back corner you love so much?” the waitress finally asked Adam.

  He was already walking past her. “I thought you’d never ask.” He barked out orders as went. “And two coffees! Ja-son! We’re back here!”

  Jason scrambled to catch up, and Adam was already sitting down when he got to the booth. An abandoned Daily News sat underneath a lipstick-stained glass on the next table. Adam leaned forward in his seat.

  “Look. Here’s what I’ve got,” he said in hushed tones. “I know it’s just bits and pieces. But it’s the tip of an iceberg. I’m not just saying that, I can see it in the spaces between what I know for sure.”

  He stopped to see if Jason was still on board. “This isn’t like the Patty Hearst thing,” he insisted.

  “Or the Jimmy Hoffa thing?” Jason added.

  “No. This is different. Those were guesses. These are facts. And the facts are this: bottom line, by any conceivable account, the City should already be bankrupt. But it isn’t. And that’s why Maynes was killed.”

  “Because the City isn’t bankrupt,” Jason offered, suggesting Adam’s logic was less than air tight.

  “No. Because it should be!”

  The waitress set down their coffees. “I brought a couple of menus just in case you see something you like.”

  “I’ll have what I had last week,” Adam said, without looking at the menu.

  “I think we may be out of that,” she responded.

  Jason hypothesized that she was not from the City, and still relatively new in town. He also suspected that Adam might be a while, and retrieved the Daily News from the other table. Its headline shouted GANG WAR, and beneath that it featured shots of the same four men from the morning news. Studying the pictures, Jason was increasingly certain that the one on the top left was the rapist who got right in his face the other day. One less person to worry about running into, he guessed. He flipped through the pages, as “complete coverage inside” was promised. Pages two and three were reserved for the BABY BORN IN RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC and CHANNEL 2 HONCHOS MULL BANKRUPTCY FILE. Not until page four did he get FOUR MEN SHOT DEAD ON WEST SIDE. Adam was still fooling around with the waitress.

  “Really? All out?” He said skeptically. “Are you sure there’s none in the back? It was quite good.”

  “Quite good?”

  “Excellent even. I was looking forward to having it again. Do you think any more will be coming in?”

  “Not for a couple of days. Maybe you should check back. You never know, someone else might snap it up.”

  “You can count on it.”

  She turned to Jason. “How about you?”

  Jason was reading the paper and lost in his own world. He learned a lot more from the paper than he had from watching TV, and none of it was good. First off, for those keeping score, between the four killed on the West Side and two unrelated murders in the Bronx, the City was on track to break last year’s record-setting homicide tally. But he’d kind of assumed that was the case. More surprising was the News’s reporting that it was in fact a gangland-style execution, complete not just with shots to the head, but hands tied behind the back as well. Apparently it was harder to change something in print than on TV. Either way, it was impossible for both versions of the story to be true, and Jason was betting on the one that had circulated before the cops corrected it. The puzzle remained as to why they
felt the need to.

  “Jason!” It was the third time Adam said his name.

  “Huh?”

  “Anything to eat?” the waitress asked. She tilted her head to the side slightly.

  “You getting anything?” he asked Adam.

  “Not me.”

  “Nothing, thanks,” Jason said softly. They both watched her walk away.

  “So listen.” Adam jumped right back into his exposition. “According to the figures at the library, this city’s income tax revenues have fallen by over twenty percent over the past five years.…”

  Jason always shut down whenever Adam started throwing numbers at him. His eyes drifted towards the young waitress, who was taking an order a few tables down. She had very smooth legs, which got longer when she shifted her weight to her toes to confirm the order of a low-talking customer.

  “How well do you know her?” he asked, mostly to himself, not putting a dent in Adam’s monologue.

  “…but according to the Hall of Records—and this is in the public domain, Jason—laws have to be passed and money actually spent, outlays have actually gone up by over six percent in the same period. These are facts, I can’t just be making this up.”

  That got Jason’s attention. Adam usually spent most of his tale-spinning explaining why he had to be right in spite of the obvious facts.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let me try to explain this visually,” he said slowly, “since you’ve never been a good aural learner.”

  Adam grabbed a small plastic container holding packets of sugar. “Essentially, here’s what’s happened. This box,” he said, holding it up, “is the city tax revenue. If this box isn’t full, then we can’t pay our policemen, our firemen, our teachers, or our garbage men. Now, over the last five years, one out of every five of these packs has left town.” He started to toss the sugar packets in various directions around the table. “Some to Jersey, a few out to the Island…even a couple over to Connecticut. But somehow.…” He opened two packets of sugar and dramatically spilled them into his coffee. “…the City still has enough sugar for the same amount of coffee—in fact, even a bit more than before.” He took a long sip of his coffee and smiled to illustrate that there was enough sugar to meet his needs.

  “You should save some of that sugar for the waitress. She must be nineteen years old.”

  Adam smiled broadly. “Ever see the way Muddy Waters smiles when he sings that song?” He started chanting, “She’s nineteeeen years old!”

  “I thought you were serious about that switchboard operator.”

  “I’m serious about all of ’em.” He said it like it was important to him, and that Jason should have understood that. “Look, I didn’t bring you here to talk about women. I’m telling you—these numbers just don’t add up. There’s some inescapable math here. Revenues are down twenty percent, outlays are up six.”

  Adam could tell he was doing well, so he pushed on, well aware that he was still paddling upstream against Jason’s inherent distaste for conspiracy theories. Just the phrase “second gunman” could drive him out of a room. Years ago Adam had done it on purpose when they were both hitting on this first-year law student at a party. She was good, too.

  “Except for tolls, meters, and parking taxes, the only thing that’s gone up is licensing fees. That’s a laugh, by the way, cause we’re paying for it. And I don’t mean the royal we—I mean you and me.”

  “How so?” Jason asked pointedly. He’d been looking for a chink in the armor. He didn’t have a car. Let them triple the tolls, for all he cared.

  “TV licensing,” Adam said to Jason’s surprise. “I don’t know what Morgan did to piss off the Mayor, but every station in this city has to pay triple what it used to just to keep their licenses to operate. You know part of that’s gotta be coming out of our salaries.” Adam felt like he was on a roll. A few cheap hits like that didn’t change the score much, but they kept the momentum going.

  “Morgan’s got plenty of money,” Jason said, dismissively. He wasn’t buying the licensing stuff.

  “Still, it’s a business,” Adam insisted. “I hear from my source at City Hall that two of the stations are up for sale—one of them network! Man, even the TV is leaving this town.”

  “Ah, somebody will buy ’em. Or they’ll just have to lower the fees again. TV is inevitable. Like a plague.”

  “Maybe. But that’s exactly the point. The City can’t raise taxes, because if they do, then even more people will leave. But they need more revenue, cause they don’t have enough money now to pay for what they need to do. I don’t know how they’re pulling it off—it’s like Cohen has levitated the City’s finances with the wave of his hand. It’s a magic trick.”

  “But what does that have to do with Maynes?” Jason had started to get caught up in Adam’s web and forgot that this whole thing started with the murder-suicide theory.

  “Magic only works when no one knows the secret,” Adam answered. “That money in Maynes’s car—this is about the money, for sure. City doesn’t have any, but he sure did.”

  “Even if everything you say is true, he still could have killed himself.” Jason wasn’t sure he believed that, but he wanted to get in one good shot. After all, technically, that’s the only point they were arguing about.

  “Maybe,” Adam slowly. “Conceivably. But I doubt it. Everything points to murder. And he was at the center of something, something big.” Adam could feel it in his bones. “I’m gonna go to the funeral today. You should come with me.”

  “You know I don’t even go to funerals of people I like.”

  “Okay, but you’re making a big mistake. We’re looking at a Major Funeral here. Outstanding theatre—it’s going to have it all. Staging, lighting, emotion, oratory, colorful characters—and all of the stars will be there.”

  “Sounds like a Bowie show. You should cover it for the Voice.”

  “I just might.”

  15

  Jason got back to the studio and reported to Lou, who walked him through how everything would go. There was a separate interview set, which Jason hadn’t expected, and when Lou showed it to him he felt even more nervous. He thought he’d be sitting behind the news desk, which would serve as a security blanket, and a buffer between him and the camera. The interview set looked more like an operating room theater—two black chairs facing each other, surrounded by a circle of lights and with a camera just off to the side of each chair. Carol was still in her dressing room, getting what someone called her “pre-makeup” put on, whatever that meant. Camera operators, electricians, and assistants were buzzing urgently about, making Jason dizzy.

  “Lou, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this,” he said, hoping he had turned such a convincing shade of green that Lou would pull the plug right there.

  “Relax—it’s just TV. It all goes by so fast.” He lowered his voice, letting Jason in on a secret. “Nobody really knows what you say, anyway, they just know the way you say it. So no matter what, just keep going. If you screw up, don’t go back and try and correct yourself. Sit up straight. Talk like you believe what you’re saying. Half the time we’ll cut to Carol smiling and nodding. It’s a walk in the park.”

  “Okay.” At another time, he would have enjoyed the irony that he wasn’t reassured by what Lou said, but just by the way that he spoke to him.

  “Oh, and another thing—don’t screw up.”

  Jason’s face fell.

  “Take it easy, fella, it’s an old joke.” Lou tugged at his headset and plugged a dangling line into the pack on his hip. “Now, we’re going to go mock live. You know what that means?”

  “No.” Jason felt like he was listening to his dentist as he was getting ready to drill.

  “Okay. It just means that even though we’re filming this for later, we pretend like it’s a live interview. So that’s what I want you to do, I want you to act like it’s going out live.”

  “Why?” Jason said suspiciously. It sounded l
ike a scam, and he wasn’t going to be a party to such dishonesty.

  “Trust me, if we didn’t do it this way, it would take forever. Also it helps us time it out. When we show it, they know it’s not live.”

  Okay, maybe it wasn’t a scam.

  As always, Lou walked as he talked, checking things out. “Now, we’re going to have to put a little makeup on—”

  “I’m not wearing makeup.”

  “Look, sweetheart, every guy in TV wears makeup. Doesn’t mean they’re wearing loafers behind the desk.”

  “That’s not it. I just want to be myself.”

  “Yourself,” Lou said with declining patience, “does not walk around with thousand watt bulbs stuck in his face. It’s just a little powder. Don’t put it on, you look like Nixon in the first Kennedy debate.”

  “Fine.” Jason said. He hated TV.

  “Also,” Lou continued, sticking his hand out to gauge the lighting, “you got another shirt? That one’s too dark.”

  Jason opened his mouth, but Lou spoke before he got a word in. “You gotta question everything I tell you to do? See that backdrop? Wear that shirt and you’ll look like a fucking floating head.”

  A few minutes later, Jason was sitting in his chair, wearing a borrowed white button-down shirt that was irritating the back of his neck. A makeup girl had powdered his face, and he felt like a clown. Where the hell was Carol? He couldn’t wait to get it over with. Harry walked over.

  “Lookin’ good, kid,” he said with a smile. He was full of shit, but Jason was glad to see him. “I’ll be in the booth the whole time.” He stopped and thought for a second. “But don’t look over.” He started and stopped again. “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” and left before he could do any more damage.

  Carol finally arrived, with her assistant and a more professional makeup woman in tow.

  “Hi, Jason,” she said warmly, and sat in her chair. As she did, the room seemed to close in—the lights, cameras, overhead mikes all drew in tighter and lower and you could feel the heat. Jason’s stomach chose this moment to tell him he might be claustrophobic. No one else seemed to notice. The A-list makeup woman studied the lights before putting the finishing touches on Carol’s face.