“And that was it. The only thing missing was Alan Funt with Candid Camera. Standing on the street in my bare feet and no underwear, and being told she’d call me. It’s like I’m in some holding cell, waiting for the jury to come back.”
Adam took another big sip of beer. “Man, that’s the least of your problems. I can’t believe you lost that envelope.”
“I didn’t lose it,” Jason said impatiently. “Do you listen to anything I say?”
“You sure you looked everywhere?”
“I thought you looked for it.”
“Oh, that’s clever.”
“I told you. It was definitely on the table. When I got back, it was gone. Carol was gone. There’s some inescapable math here. She must have taken it.” Jason downed the rest of his beer.
“Jeez.” Adam turned to the bar. “Pat? Pat! Two more.”
“You were right about her all along,” Jason admitted.
“Now let’s not be too hard on her,” Adam said jovially. “After all, you’re a hero, a great interview, and she just loves the way you got beat up by cops in your youth.” He laughed before he got to the end, and slapped the table repeatedly with his hand.
Jason turned his head toward the stage so Adam wouldn’t see his smile. He saw the young singer who was there the first night he’d spoken to Alison, and the grin felt heavy on his face. Watching him tune his guitar a bit more elaborately than necessary to the adoring eyes of the assembled college girls, he felt the compression of time. He’d been in those shoes, and wished the kid better luck.
Pat brought over two more tall beers. “You guys keep this up, it might actually be worth having you around.”
“You’d think the bartender would toss in a free round every now and then,” Adam said without missing a beat.
Jason studied his beer. The bubbles were floating to the top in a distinct pattern. He wondered whether they always did that, and he’d just never noticed, or whether it was the beer, or the shape of the glass. He looked at Adam’s beer, and then at Adam. He was glad he was there. How many beers had they shared? Five thousand?
“You take all the times I’ve screwed up with women, every single one, and stack them one on top of the other, they don’t come close to this.”
“You talking about Carol, or Alison?”
“Alison, you asshole.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. You’ve fucked up pretty bad in the past.” Adam knew it was a funny line, but it was a clinical diagnosis.
“Maybe. But this is different.”
“I keep trying to tell you, they’re all different.”
“Well, this was different different.” He shot a quick glance toward Adam. He’d kept his Alison stories short, and he wasn’t sure Adam would get it. “Special different.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said quietly, and pressing his feet against the long brass rail that ran along the bottom of the bar, tipped his stool back and looked down at the floor. But within seconds he snapped his head back up. “Now if you really want to talk different, did I ever tell you about this gymnast I dated? She could put her head between her legs.…” He made a big counter-clockwise circle with his hand. “…by going backwards. Can you even begin to imagine the implications of that maneuver?” His voice rose with glee.
“You are so full of shit.”
Adam raised his hand. “My hand to God. True story.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t a true story.” Jason took another long drink, and smiled wistfully. “And I’m telling you, I could hear ‘Chimes of Freedom.’ Plain as day. I even thought maybe a neighbor was playing it, but it couldn’t have been.”
“So what are you saying, that your subconscious has decided you’re among the ‘confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse’?”
“I figured it meant I was a ‘gentle soul misplaced inside a jail.’ ”
“You see yourself as gentle?”
“Well, if I have to choose between gentle and strung out, I’ll take gentle. But that’s not the part of the line I was thinking of.”
“And just what do you think you were getting a last look at?” Adam asked devilishly, “Alison leaving or Carol’s tits?”
Jason didn’t answer, on purpose. He swiveled in his chair and played with the pretzels he’d lined up in front of him. He stood two of them up by balancing one against the other, noting their perfect symmetry and admiring his handiwork. “They’re the same size, by the way.”
“What?” Adam asked like he thought he missed something.
“Her tits. Left and right,” he said, poking the air in two spots with his index finger. “They’re the same size.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah. I’d say exactly.”
“Well, you’re one up on me,” Adam said wistfully. “I just thought it would help.”
“Yeah, it did.” Jason was sinking back into I-fucked-it-up-with-Alison-land, and he turned his eyes back to the stage again. Mr. Young-and-Impossibly-Cool-Without-Caring had started to play Richard Thompson’s “Meet on the Ledge”—Jason recognized it from the first few notes. The girls all looked up at him as he started to sing. Not an easy song to pull off, but the kid chose the right songs for his voice, which was something that most people only came around to later on.
We used to say/there’d come the day
We’d all be making songs
Or finding better words
These ideas never lasted long
It occurred to Jason that somebody up there had decided to punish him by having this guy narrate his life like a one-man Greek chorus. He contemplated this possibility while intently studying the performance, swiveling back to the bar when the song went into its first instrumental bridge. He had survived “Too many friends who tried/blown off this mountain with the wind,” but had no intention of enduring “Now I see I’m all alone/but that’s the only way to be.” Grabbing the last handful of pretzels from the bowl, he began work on a new project, making a circle with them on the bar.
“No playing with the food,” Pat said sternly. He was holding two more beers. “Two on the house,” he said, looking at Adam. “Gotta keep the big spenders happy.” He set the beers down, but gave them a hard look and dragged them back towards his side of the bar. “You guys aren’t driving, are you?”
“You know I don’t have a car,” Jason said, as if the very suggestion was offensive.
Pat pointed at Adam. “I meant him.”
“Yeah, I’m parked out front,” Adam said, straightening up.
Pat looked at him, and drew the glasses back another inch.
“But I can leave it there overnight, if you want, Mom,” Adam added.
Pat slid the beers back toward them, but didn’t let them go. “Hey, I don’t care if you crash it, it’s just that a bunch of uniforms from the 112th have been setting up checkpoints. A little old lady got hit on Queens Boulevard the other day. The guy wasn’t drunk or anything, but they have this new rule—you get busted, we could get fined.”
“Argh,” Adam didn’t want to hear another word about cops, or rules, for that matter. “Can’t drive anywhere, anyway, the whole city’s a fucking roadblock. They can get me for STWI—sitting in traffic while intoxicated.”
Jason and Adam found this terribly amusing. “Just walk the fuck home, okay?” Pat said, letting go of the beers and heading back down to the other side of the bar.
They sat with their thoughts for a moment, and Jason could hear the end of “Meet on the Ledge” in the background.
“Why do we even live in this city, anyway?” Adam asked, trying to reassess his life from scratch.
“Where you gonna live?”
“You mean there’s nowhere else in the country to live?”
“Where you gonna live,” Jason repeated flatly. “It’s not even a question. There’s no place else to live—it’s not a choice thing. Being on TV, that’s a choice.”
“Again with the TV?”
“You wanted to talk about chang
ing things, not me.”
“Well, something’s gotta give,” Adam said, his voice trailing off a bit as he looked at the big mirror behind the bar. Two potentially lovely women had taken up seats about six stools down from them, and he was trying to catch the right angle to check them out. “You know Cohen has them doing roadwork at night now? Those are union guys. Night work is double scale.”
“So?”
“The Sphinx, you asshole. The pyramids are gone, but the riddle remains.”
Adam tried to alert Jason with his eyes toward the reflection in the mirror, but Jason was diverted by his attention to two men who had just entered the bar, whom he viewed with enormous suspicion, although he realized that he might just be projecting the angry part of his current frustrations. In any event he didn’t like them. They looked out of place, like they had just stepped out of the 1940s and were trying to adjust to unfamiliar wardrobe. The shorter of the two had a round face and a serious gut that was squeezed into a thin leather jacket. He reminded Jason of William Conrad—and not the affable private-eye from the popular TV show “Cannon,” but the tough guy who iced Burt Lancaster thirty years ago in The Killers. The second man was big—Jack Palance big—and he was measuring the room with his eyes. Jason thought they stood out by trying to fit in, and he didn’t like the way their shirts were buttoned all the way to the neck. They were too well dressed to be narcs, but checked out the crowd the way cops would, and even though they approached the bar, they didn’t get quite close enough to order.
“There’s no way the City can afford all that construction,” Adam continued. He picked up the empty pretzel bowl and shook it at Jason. “You’re supposed to share these with everyone,” he said a little too loudly, and slipped off his stool. He took the bowl with him and walked down the bar. There was a full bowl of pretzels near the reflections that called for additional assessment. One of them, a redhead with what looked to be a cynical smile and attentive eyes had piqued his interest.
“Whaddya mean?” Jason called after him. “Highway money comes from the feds. The sphinx thing doesn’t apply here.”
Adam turned just shy of his destination. “What are you, taking accounting classes at night?” He forgot about the women momentarily and furrowed his brow, looking like a guy who expected to find his bagel ready but discovered someone had unplugged the toaster. Then he shrugged his shoulders and refocused on the pretzel bowl in his hand. “Whatever…there’s still way too much construction to make any kind of sense. And that still doesn’t explain.…” He stopped talking, trying to process why his voice had gotten so much louder. It hadn’t—the redhead was staring at him with penetrating green eyes. Actually, a small cluster of people had abandoned their conversations and were all looking right at him. And not in a good way. Wait—they weren’t looking at him—they were staring right through him.
“Nobody move. This is a holdup.” It was the Palance-like fellow, and with his size, not to mention his message, he commanded the room. Everybody stopped talking, and the contrast between the din of the bar noise and the silence that replaced it was more jarring than anything else. A collection of people in a bar, not drinking, made for an unnatural group—and they looked like they were caught in a game of musical chairs they didn’t know they were playing.
His heavy-set companion, living up to the image of the noir doppelganger that Jason had assigned him, had drawn a gun and was pointing it at Pat. But it was Palance who did the talking, and he looked to be calling the shots. He did not brandish a weapon, which somehow added to his menace, and to the impression that he was in charge.
“Everybody stay calm and no one’s going to get hurt,” he said, with a resolute but measured voice that suggested he had done this sort of thing before. “Heads down, eyes front. Down on the bar. Down on the tables.”
Nobody panicked and everybody did as they were told. Jason put his head down but kept his eyes on the gun.
“Get the money from the register,” he ordered Pat. He pulled out a sack and approached the bar, while his partner kept the gun on Pat. But as Pat turned toward the register, Jason saw the gunman shift and point his gun directly at Adam. Jason grabbed the empty barstool next to him and swung it wildly, hitting the guy hard and knocking him down. The gun discharged and fell out of his hand as he crumpled to the floor, dazed but still conscious. At the sound of the shot people started screaming and diving to the floor, but nobody was hit.
Jason jumped up and kicked the gun farther across the room. The gunman was gathering himself, rolling over his stomach to gain momentum, and Jason kicked him in the head and sent him tumbling further. It was the first time in his life he wished he wasn’t wearing sneakers. “Run!” he screamed at Adam, and they scrambled out the door.
The other man—with his well-groomed, jet-back hair he could have been Jack Palance—dropped the sack he was holding and started to reach into his jacket, but before the sack hit the floor Pat hit him hard with a stickball bat, right across the chest, catching both his arms with such force that he staggered backward and crashed into a table, knocking it over and sending its occupants fleeing. Glass shattered and the commotion elicited more screams near the front. The other side of the bar was much farther from the unfolding action, and in the increasing confusion a few guys made a dash for the back door, which set off an alarm when it opened. Whatever the plan was, it was unraveling fast.
Palance righted himself and managed to pull his gun from his jacket. He scanned the room quickly to make sure nobody was coming at him. Everything was still again, but when he looked up he saw that Pat had his own gun pointed at him. They stared at each other for a minute. The alarm was still ringing, and Pat had a look in his eye—some mixture of confidence, excitement, and curiosity—that suggested he wouldn’t mind rolling the dice.
“Let’s go,” the big man called to his partner, without taking his eyes off Pat. After retrieving the errant gun and casting a few menacing glares to deter any further free-lance heroics, the two men walked slowly to the door, putting their weapons back in their jackets as they exited.
Adam and Jason had stumbled out of the bar, and made it to Adam’s car—a large green convertible with the top down. They dove in without opening the doors. Adam fumbled for the keys and got it started just as they heard the sound of the alarm coming from the bar. Adam looked over.
“Move, move, move!” Jason shouted at him.
Adam started the car and pulled out wildly, swerving into the street. Jason looked back and saw the men from the bar run to their own car—a light blue two-door Lincoln. Adam’s car swerved again, causing Jason to fall forward into the dashboard.
“Are you okay to drive?”
“No!” Adam shouted back, but at least he had regained control of the car. He turned at every opportunity, and at one point went the wrong way down a side street.
“Just drive the fucking car!” Jason screamed, catching Adam dividing his attention between executing wild maneuvers and peeking in the rearview mirror. Jason sat on his knees and looked out the back. He couldn’t see the Lincoln, but it couldn’t have been too far away.
“What the hell happened?” Adam asked.
“He was going to shoot you!”
“Me?”
“You!”
“Shit!”
Adam took another sharp turn onto a bigger street, and Jason had to hug the headrest for balance. But they only made it about half a block before Adam had to slam on the brakes. The light was red and there were cars in front of them in both lanes. They stared impatiently at the light.
“You know what this means?” Adam asked.
“No.”
“I must be on to something.”
Jason looked back again and could now see their pursuers gaining ground. There were two cars between them, so it was possible they hadn’t seen them yet, and Jason ducked his head.
“Yeah,” he responded from his crouch. “Or vice versa!”
“Come on,” Adam said anxiously. “Let’s go
…let’s go…green, green, green.”
The light changed but nothing moved. Adam reached for the horn but stopped himself. “Do they see us?”
Jason looked back. One of the Lincoln’s big doors was swinging open. “They’re coming!”
Adam leaned on the horn.
“Forget it,” Jason shouted, “it’s gridlocked!”
Adam pulled the car out into the opposing lanes. No cars were coming at them, and Adam floored it as he headed for the intersection. But it wasn’t gridlock—the street had been closed off for construction—and he had to pound the brakes again, this time so hard the car skidded out sideways and they crashed through some wooden barriers. They plowed through orange cones, blinking yellow warning signs, and several huge mounds of dirt, one of which finally stopped the progress of the car—which was a good thing since it was either the dirt or the huge ditch next to it. The site was abandoned, with no workmen around.
“You okay?” Adam asked Jason, who had been thrown to the floor.
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
They climbed out of the car and ran through the construction zone. Jason fell once and scraped his leg, but got up and kept running. He followed Adam, who turned and ran down the block toward an elevated train station. Jason took a quick look back—Palance and Conrad were in pursuit, their distinct silhouettes visible in the darkness about one block behind. Adam bounded up the stairs and into the station, with Jason still a few steps behind him.
There was a train waiting on the tracks, brand new, one of the cars painted with red, white, and blue stripes for next year’s bicentennial. Adam hurdled the turnstile and Jason followed, while the token booth clerk watched passively. The two-note “ding-dong” sounded, meaning that the doors were about to close. Adam stumbled for a second, but caught himself with his right hand and pushed off the ground, diving between the closing doors. He crashed to the floor of the car and then bounced to his feet to catch the doors, but it was too late, they had already shut. They stared at each other through the glass as the train started to pull away. Adam tapped on the glass and mouthed the name “Mon-i-ca” in exaggerated fashion.
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