Urban Flight

by Jonathan Kirshner

  After the Mayor was settled, a rabbi appeared at the podium. He was old but not frail, and carried himself with an assured, gentle confidence. Speaking with a hint of rabbinical vibrato, he brought some spirituality to an occasion that many in attendance were performing as a professional obligation.

  “And now the time has come for the beloved family and cherished friends of Sidney Maynes to return his body to the earth,” he concluded.

  There were no formal prayers as the casket was lowered mechanically into the ground. Everyone stood silently, watching it descend, and when it reached the bottom four workmen quickly and quietly removed the frame and more roughly pulled the red straps from the grave. Then one by one, in an order that had to have been determined in advance, officials from the dais joined family members and selected friends as they walked over to a large stack of dirt. Two more cameras were set up in the distance and they captured the procession of people as they ritually pulled a shovel from the pile, scooped up some dirt, and tossed it into the grave.

  Jason elbowed Adam to attention and pointed toward the line. “Who are those two guys?” He whispered, with a little urgency in his voice that didn’t register with Adam.

  “Which ones?”

  “In line behind Cohen. Not the old black guy right behind him, but the old man right after him, and that big, heavy-set guy two farther back.”

  Adam found the line, scanned it quickly and smirked. “Sometimes your ignorance blows me away.”

  “Just tell me who they are.”

  “Let me ask you something, Encyclopedia Brown, who’s the head of the CIA?”

  “George Bush,” Jason folded his arms and glared at Adam as he responded.

  “And what’s the capital of Laos?”

  “Vientiane. That’s two for two, okay, so why don’t you tell me who the fuck those guys are,” Jason snapped.

  “The tall guy at the end is George Gekin, Staten Island Borough President. As for the old man you’re so curious about, let me first alert you to the fact that he’s standing between Ben Frankel of the Bronx, and that person you described as “that old black guy” but who is known to millions as Arthur Harrison, the Manhattan BP. Anyway, his name is Abe Saperstein—he’s been your borough president since the Stone Age. Oh, and I should probably mention, the guy in the casket—that’s Sid Maynes. He was from Brooklyn.”

  Jason took a deep breath, and steadied himself by shifting his feet. “Huh. What do you know about Gekin?”

  “Nothing much,” Adam said dismissively. “Now Harrison, he’s an institution—did time in Congress years ago—probably the most respected black leader in the City. And Saperstein, he’s supposed to be a man of the people. Both of them are big figures in the City since the Depression, like Cohen. You know, up-from-the-tenements types. Gekin and Frankel are next-generation guys—post-war professionals. Career politicians like Maynes. Why do you care?”

  Jason felt a little light-headed and leaned into Adam. “ ’Cause Gekin is the guy who owns the car from Staten Island,” he whispered into Adams ear, then took a step back to gather himself.

  “What? The shooter?” Adam whispered so loudly that a woman nearby shot them a silencing glance. Jason stood motionless, staring at the funeral, and Adam had to grab him by the elbow to tug him back a few feet.

  “Are you kidding me?” Adam asked.

  “And Saperstein is the guy from Shea Stadium,” Jason added. “I never saw the other two.”

  Adam looked like he might explode. He pulled himself together and looked at Jason for confirmation. “You’re not kidding me.”

  “I’m dead serious.”

  Adam turned on his heel and briskly walked anyway from the crowd, heading deeper into the cemetery. He moved fast, weaving through rows of headstones as if he’d suddenly remembered where he’d buried treasure. He disappeared over a small hill, and when Jason caught up with him he was pacing between two rows of headstones.

  “Gekin?” he asked Jason. “Are you sure?”

  “Him and Saperstein I saw, for sure,” Jason said. He was feeling stronger from both the walk and the distance it created. “Saperstein was the one who seemed like a nice guy.”

  “Gekin shot Bill?” It was phrased as a question, but sounded more like a declaration.

  “I did not see who shot Bill,” Jason said emphatically. “Say it with me. I did not see who shot Bill.”

  “Okay, okay, it doesn’t matter.” Adam stopped pacing for a moment, eager to make some sort of declaration, but it wasn’t quite there.

  “Do you have any idea what this means?” he asked grandly, as if he was talking not only to Jason but to the vast silent audience of tombstones arrayed symmetrically around them.

  “No.” Jason was the only one who answered. “Do you?”

  “Yes,” Adam said slowly, even though he was still working it out as he spoke. “Morgan was…funneling money…to the borough presidents!”

  “Well, at least to Gekin and Saperstein.” Adam was back in business, so Jason had to return to his post, the sheepdog that kept Adam’s brain from wandering too far off.

  “And Maynes, too!” Adam said loudly, and then checked to see if anyone heard them, but it was just them and the tombstones. He lowered his voice again. “Remember that report about money found in Maynes’s car? It must have been one of those briefcases Bill was always carrying around.”

  “Could have been,” Jason corrected. “But why? I don’t get it.”

  “I told you Morgan and the Mayor were at war! I knew it the minute I saw those licensing fees go through the roof. That was no accident. Cohen was sticking it to him good.”

  “I still don’t see what Morgan could do with the borough presidents,” Jason protested. “And it doesn’t tell us anything about why Maynes was murdered.”

  “Oh, so he was murdered?” Adam said triumphantly. “One question at a time. Morgan must have been trying to get around the Mayor. But exactly how, we don’t know. Do you still have those papers from Bill?”

  Bill. For a moment Jason had almost forgotten. “Yeah.”

  “We’ve got to take a closer look at them. And the city charter—maybe this has to do with the way the City was incorporated. It happened in eighteen ninety-eight.” He was pulling ideas out of the air. “You should call Alison. She would know that.” He was pacing again.

  “She’s a medieval historian.”

  “Well, she would know where to look. Maybe it’s something else.” Adam was stoked, and when he was this excited he had a tendency to fire off questions like Adam West’s Batman bouncing ideas off Robin in the Batcave. “Question: how do you get around the Mayor? And not just any Mayor, but this Mayor. I don’t know. How much time do you have before you have to get back?”

  Jason looked at his watch. “About forty minutes.”

  “Give me half an hour,” Adam said, already on his way. “I’ll meet you back at the copter.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I want to look around. See who else is at the show.”

  Jason watched Adam disappear over the small hill and was left to his own thoughts, and he slowly turned his head, taking in a panoramic view. There sure were a lot of dead people. He decided to make his way back toward the helicopter, choosing a circuitous route that avoided the funeral. He would have made an effort to avoid it in any event, but now he was nervous about being recognized. Both Gekin and Saperstein had looked over at the copter.

  It was a long walk, and it gave him some time to settle down. Even the Six Million Dollar Man would have had trouble making out his face a hundred yards away through the glass of the helicopter, and those guys didn’t look like they had bionic eyes. And it really didn’t matter who shot Bill, he was still dead. Maybe at least he died for something. Jason’s mind drifted off the subject as he made his way among the headstones, and he started to play games with the dates. Which was the most ancient? Which was the most recent? Who had the longest life? Elsie Fienberg, 1842 to 1929—eighty-seven, no
t bad. Who had the shortest? Was it better to live a long, uneventful life or a short, purposeful one?

  Reaching the grassy field, he walked over to one of the stone benches and tested it with his hand—it was dry. He sat down, then lay on his back, looking up at the empty flagpole and the clouds beyond it. Letting his eyes close, his mind filled with a rush of images. Funerals remind you of other funerals, which is odd, because baseball games don’t make you think of other baseball games. But now he could see Martin Luther King’s funeral, plain as day, and he realized that he actually had seen Harrison before. When MLK came out against the war in ’sixty-seven at the Riverside Church in Harlem, the speech set off a firestorm of negative reaction. Harrison took him out to dinner.

  The sound of wheels driving across gravel brought Jason back to the present, and lifting his head he saw a limo slowing on the road on the other side of the field. The driver got out and started walking in Jason’s direction. He sat up and watched him. It was a long walk, and Jason stole glances here and there to see if there was anyone else around. There wasn’t. The driver got closer, and Jason fixed his gaze directly at him, as hard as he could. He got himself ready to move quickly if he needed to.

  “Something I can help you with?” Jason asked when he was still several feet away.

  “Would you come with me please.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Why should I do that?”

  “Man in the car would like a word with you.”

  “If he wants to talk to me, he can do it right here.”

  “He says you guys used to hang out on rooftops together.”

  Jason exhaled. He nodded and walked back to the limo with the driver, who opened the door and then closed it behind him. Morgan was alone, and motioned for Jason to sit across from him. Jason sat with his back to the front of the car—the partition was drawn and the front was not visible.

  “Nice day for a funeral,” Morgan finally offered. “I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to be buried on a sunny day. People would rather be elsewhere.”

  “I don’t think much about it.”

  “No, I imagine not at your age.”

  “I wouldn’t want to die in the rain, though.”

  “Agh.” Morgan waved his hand. “Doesn’t matter where you die, you do that on your own time.”

  “Sometimes there are other people around.”

  Morgan let that sit for a moment. Then he moved forward in his seat. “How you doing?” he asked. It seemed sincere. “You all right?”

  “More or less.”

  “The, uh, cops talk to you?”

  “Not yet,” Jason said, purposefully leaving some uncertainty to see what would happen.

  “I doubt they will. Come to you, I mean. They may not find a body, and they’d still have to place you at the scene. So I don’t think they’ll come to you.”

  “Are you saying you want me to go to them? Because that’s not—”

  “Heavens no!” Morgan’s voice jumped a bit, and it took Jason by surprise. “Just the opposite.”

  “You don’t care about what happened?” There was a hint of contempt in Jason’s voice.

  “Let me tell you something I’ve learned over the years,” Morgan responded, raising his finger and speaking in earnest. “Life is for the living, and vengeance is bad for business. Any personal feelings I have, they’re personal; I don’t need to put them on display for anyone.” He locked his eyes on Jason for a moment before getting back to his point. “And above all, I never lose sight of the right move.” He sat back. “And right now the right move is to let this go.”

  “If that’s how you want it.”

  “Just one thing,” Morgan said, too casually. “You talk to him?”

  “What do you mean? Ever?”

  “Before he died.”

  “No,” Jason said quietly, once again seeing the body from above. “There wasn’t any chance.”

  “Did he leave anything behind?

  “Huh?”

  “Did he leave anything behind? You know, lots of green stuff in those cases.”

  “You ought to know by now I don’t want what isn’t mine,” Jason said softly, looking out the windows. They were tinted, and you could see out but not in.

  “Of course, of course. I meant anything else, like papers? Or any sort of documents or envelopes?”

  “None that I noticed. I was kind of busy, getting shot at and all.”

  “You know, the business I’m in, that sort of thing can be quite sensitive.”

  “I guess.”

  “You know what it is I’m doing?” For a man who talked around things he said it point blank, and it caught Jason off guard.

  “You seem to do a lot of business with borough presidents. And you don’t seem to like the Mayor much.” Jason stopped himself before he said any more. Maybe he’d already said too much.

  “And how do you add all that up?”

  “I don’t. I’m just a pilot.”

  “Wise words, Mr. Sims. Words to live by.”

  22

  The music was low. Jason had thought for hours about what to play. He would have killed himself over the music in any event, but the pressure was really on since he only had two tasks for the evening, and only one, “get candles,” actually required any effort—the other chore being “pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.” Alison was taking care of everything else. She’d cooked dinner for them at her place and brought it over.

  He’d considered and rejected the Band’s Music From Big Pink (too dark), Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks (too ambitious, save for later), and an Etta Baker tape he’d made (played female blues last time), before settling on one of his newest bootlegs, Bruce Springsteen Live at the Bottom Line, August 8, 1975. Adam had been at the show last month and managed to score a copy of the soundboard tape. Jason didn’t play it for a couple of weeks, thinking that Adam was trying to deliver some message—the date was written in big letters on the front of the blank box, and Adam surely meant to call attention to the fact that it was one year to the day after Nixon resigned. But after the new album came out and he heard some of it on the radio Jason found the box and compared it with others that Adam had given him. It turned out the writing was pretty much the same from box to box.

  The evening was going very well—the food was great, and the conversation flowed easily. Alison started them off with a salad, which was a little too busy and had vegetables in it that Jason didn’t recognize, but he kept that to himself. The second course was a simple shrimp thing that was very good, and the beef that followed was outstanding. It went really well with the wine, which Jason rarely drank, because for some reason it went right to his head, and he never felt comfortable with a glass of wine in his hand, either. He thought about getting himself a beer but didn’t have the guts to find out how rude that would be. They had just about finished eating.

  “That was fantastic,” he said.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “Well, I am, a little, I mean, I thought—”

  “That I couldn’t cook?” There was a slight edge in her voice. Ugh. He was just trying to compliment her cooking.

  “No, no, I just thought that, uh, maybe you would have avoided it…you know, to make a point…?”

  “I don’t make points. I like to cook, so I cook.” She got up from the table, taking the bottle of wine with her. Jason grabbed his glass and followed her to the living room, where she plopped down on the floor near the couch and poured herself a little more wine. He sat down as well, not too close, and weighed an apology. It was the first missed note of the entire evening and he wanted to get back to where they’d been.

  “What are you doing Sunday?” she asked brightly.

  “Sunday?” A voice inside Jason’s head wondered if she was still mad, but it was drowned out by another voice that screamed “Shut up and move on, you idiot!”

  “I’m free all day,” he said with a smile.

  “My department is having a picnic in Central P
ark. I thought you might like to come and watch my back.”

  That had dental appointment written all over it. “The park is pretty safe during the day,” he offered. It seemed like a good cautious noncommittal maybe-not.

  “No, silly, I mean from my colleagues. There’ll be maybe three women there.”

  “What time?” he asked, still searching for an out.

  “It starts at eleven and goes till two. It’s a barbecue. They didn’t ask me to cook anything,” she said slyly.

  “Sounds great. I will be there,” he added awkwardly. “I’ll come by your place about ten-thirty?”

  “Make it eleven.”

  “Eleven it is.”

  Alison turned and watched the wheels of the tape rotate slowly. In the evening after a few drinks those turning wheels could be mesmerizing, and you could almost see the music rising from the tape. Jason gave her major points for listening at that particular moment. It was a quiet version of the song “Thunder Road,” the best track from the show. There was an aching in Springsteen’s voice when he sang “So you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore,” which wasn’t bad for a twenty-five-year-old.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “Bruce Springsteen. Hear it now, cause it’s never going to be the same again.”

  “Why not?”

  “He has this new album out, just out, and Adam says he’s going to be huge. At least it’s really good.”

  “At least?”

  “Yeah. It’s hard to be really good and really popular, so it’s nice that it’s a good album.”

  “Why?” She asked it sincerely, and Jason felt like he was about to tell her that there was no Santa Claus.

  “Because it’s hard not to be affected by fame and money. By not being able to walk down the street, or eat in a restaurant, or even know who your friends are. Or to be able to write without thinking about your reputation.”