Urban Flight

by Jonathan Kirshner

  “What about the poor?” Jason said, probing the breadth of Cohen’s confidence.

  “What about ’em?” Cohen said defiantly. “You have a plan in your hip pocket to win the war on poverty? Let me tell you something about the world: the poor will always be poor, and the rich will always be rich. And there’s nothing that any mayor—any mayor—can do about that. The mayor’s job—my job—is to make the City work for the millions of people whose lives I can make a difference in. That’s what I do. And I do it well.”

  “Even if that means working with the mob?” Jason said, testing a theory he hadn’t even shared with Adam.

  “Mobs, unions, cops, I got deals with every one of ’em. The racket boys are the easiest of the three. They’re predictable. And when you tell them to shut the fuck up, they usually do. Usually,” he repeated, with a slight edge in his voice, and shifting his eyes at Jason.

  “But they’re criminals, common criminals. And you look the other way. Even let them do jobs for the City.”

  Cohen wouldn’t back down an inch. Whatever he was up to, he believed in it; it wasn’t a series of random decisions that had caught up with him. “I govern,” he said, enunciating the word. “And that involves making choices and choosing priorities. Hooking and gambling are victimless crimes—it’s not my job to tell people what to do with their spare time.” He looked derisively at Jason. “You kids should appreciate that more than most. So if I spare the over-stretched cops and overcrowded courts a lot of nonsense by looking the other way, as you call it, well, maybe those criminals you’re so worked up about owe me something in return. Hell, they run protection rackets in those neighborhoods anyway, so why can’t they do a little free-lance law enforcement for us?”

  “Because that’s not justice,” Jason responded just as firmly. Cohen’s cynicism was so deep that it outflanked him, and unexpectedly left him as the idealist in the argument, which was old and now only vaguely familiar territory. “Those four guys—what did they do to draw a death sentence? What you’re doing isn’t right.” They were having an argument, and part of Jason was loving it. He had drawn a line, and he was going to defend it. What was right was right.

  Cohen took a deep breath. “I do, I will do…whatever is necessary.”

  “Including murder?”

  “It hasn’t ever come to that.”

  “A lot of bodies lying around,” Jason observed.

  “I know,” Cohen said more gently. He took a few steps back towards Jason, and his features came into view. “That’s why I’m here. Things got a little out of hand. I’ve put a stop to it. You and your buddy are safe, for now. But you boys are gonna have to leave town.”

  “Leave town?” Jason shot back. What was this, the Old West?

  Cohen didn’t respond, but made his way to the other side of the room and cast his eyes at a large reclining chair, as if addressing its invisible occupant. “It was all coming together so nicely,” he said wistfully. “All that highway money our boys in Congress delivered.…” He turned and looked at Jason with new life in his eyes. “You got any idea what the composition of the current Congress is?” he asked. It wasn’t a rhetorical question.

  “No idea,” Jason said flatly.

  “Two hundred and ninety-one Democrats—more than twice as many Democrats as Republicans! Watergate was the best thing that ever happened to this city. That putz Nixon—fuck him—I met him in ’forty-eight, the little red-baiting prick.” He turned back to his invisible confessor in the lounge chair. “Overspend like crazy on construction—those are good union jobs, especially nowadays with the economy. And the traffic jams, a little poetic justice to boot. On top of that, it gave the excuse to raise those tolls and parking fees. You know what I call that?”

  He looked over triumphantly, but Jason just stared blankly, waiting for him to finish the show.

  “Reclaiming our tax base,” he said, a phrase he was obviously pleased with. “And almost all of it in cash! General-purpose revenues.” He waved his arm with a magician’s flourish. “You helped us move it around.”

  “I always wanted to work for the City,” Jason said quietly. He felt used, but didn’t blame them for it. He had made choices, too, and could have asked more questions—or a question—and didn’t.

  Cohen shook his head. “After Maynes, though, things just fell apart. Gekin and Frankel, goddamn punks, they panicked, and the mob covers its tracks on instinct. Bad break. Bad, bad break.”

  “I don’t know,” Jason said, finding his own voice. “Bad breaks, they don’t come from nowhere.”

  “How you figure?”

  “You sleep with someone, they rub off on you a little.”

  Cohen didn’t snort, but he might as well have. “Bullshit beat poetry,” he said, answering with a little rhythm of his own. “Maynes just got greedy.”

  “Not like you,” Jason said deadpan. He wanted to find a way under Cohen’s skin and finally found one.

  “You college boys don’t understand much, do you?” Cohen said, angry for the first time. Coming closer to the bed, he stared at Jason so hard his left cheek gave a little flutter. “You listen good,” he growled through tight lips, underlining each clause with a jabbing index finger, “I’ve never taken one penny, not one, that the people of this city didn’t vote me.”

  “And your dear, dear friend Sid Maynes?” Jason asked, calling Cohen on his funeral speech.

  “Far as I’m concerned, he got what he deserved.”

  “You sound more like an accountant than a mayor.”

  “When were you born, ’forty-five, ’forty-six?” Cohen asked. He wasn’t angry anymore. “What do you know? Kids like you, spoiled rotten. You don’t understand just how thin the line is.”

  “The line?”

  “Between then and now. You take it for granted. People from my day, lot of times we didn’t know where the next meal was coming from—or who was going to serve it. You think just because it isn’t like that now, it can never be again. But people like me…people like your father…we were hungry. That’s not a figure of speech, kid. You know any history, or you just read about it?”

  “Maybe you can draw on that,” Jason conceded for the sake of the argument, “but it’s not a blank check.”

  “Times make the man, you know.” Cohen was speaking expansively again, as if there were others in the room. “During the war, that was a good time to be a hero. These are more…pragmatic times.”

  “Times for knowing the right move,” Jason offered, reciting a phrase he’d picked up from Morgan.

  “Exactly. And the right move now is for you kids to take off.”

  “No chance,” Jason responded coolly, and it was clear he meant it. “And even if I did, Shaker would never go.”

  Cohen sat back down and dragged his chair closer.

  “Look, you’ve got nothing. That body—I doubt it will ever be found. You’ve lost whatever thin scraps of paper you had. We own the tabloids. And the Times won’t touch a story without hard evidence. Real hard evidence. You boys are in serious trouble. Serious trouble. These people—how can I put this—they don’t care for loose ends. I’m offering you a chance. You don’t take this deal.…”

  Cohen got up again and walked slowly to the window, letting the silence do his talking.

  Jason let the silence linger. “You ever see Dave Edwards on the news?” he asked after a while.

  Cohen fiddled with the blinds and didn’t look back. “I don’t watch the news. I make it.”

  “He does the traffic. We shoot him live, from a camera in the copter. It’s mounted behind my seat—points right at him.”

  Cohen turned slightly, but still didn’t make eye contact. “I’m familiar with the concept.”

  “Well, a while back, I got to talking to an old friend, and it occurred to me that maybe I needed to watch my back. So I decided to keep the camera rolling, you know, whether I was flying with Dave, or…with anybody.”

  Cohen turned the rest of the way.


  “The bottom line is, I’ve got shots of the murder, the money, the shooter, and a nice picture of the license plate. Sure looked like Gekin’s car to me. You think the Times would be interested in that sort of hard evidence?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Cohen said, with genuine concern in his voice. “That film sees the light of day, they’ll kill you. The cops won’t help you, and I won’t be able to protect you.”

  “I don’t see why anybody has to see it. But suppose, just suppose, that me and my friend stick around. Anything happens to either of us, and I mean anything, the film would show up all over. It’s been copied, and the copies are safe.”

  “I’m glad to see you can talk like a pragmatist after all,” Cohen said, quickly adjusting to the new realities he was presented with. “It’s a language I appreciate.”

  “Then we have a deal?” Jason asked.

  “In my business, we call it an understanding.”

  28

  Jason was in the hospital for two more days, and when he was discharged they explained that it “wasn’t really” a collapsed lung, which didn’t seem like the most precise medical diagnosis, but it didn’t sound so bad, so he decided not to push it. They also gave him a cane for his leg, which “might help if it got tired,” another profound piece of doctoring. On the bright side, they seemed to think that he was in pretty good shape—nothing was broken, and when he inquired about the bill he was told that his “Uncle Al” had already taken care of it for him.

  He carried the cane most of the way home but found himself using it on the walk from the subway station back to his apartment. It was good to be back in the neighborhood and to have a relationship with every storefront he passed. Even the ones he’d never set foot in—the shoemaker that must have been there since the twenties, and a small clothing boutique—offered a comforting familiarity. He rarely came home in the morning, and it was interesting to see people from the other direction, when they were just starting out instead of getting ready to close up. It was a nice day, late summer, and the slow pace of his walk forced him to think about things. He wondered if Alison had tried to call him. She’d said “later in the week,” but didn’t seem to mention any business after Tuesday, and it was already Wednesday.

  He finally got back to his building; he’d been through a lot, but everything was exactly in its place. There wasn’t a scrap of mail waiting for him, not even a bill. Choosing the elevator, he poked the button with his cane, and watched the floor count slowly march towards five—number three didn’t light up, he couldn’t remember when it had ever worked—but now he thought it might be a cosmic message. He had two or possibly three calls to make—did the missing three mean he should make the call, or that he shouldn’t?

  He half expected the apartment to have been ransacked or something, but it wasn’t, not that an outsider would have noticed a huge difference. He rummaged around for his address book, which took a while because he hadn’t used it in ages. It turned out not to be anywhere near the phone, but was underneath a stack of take-out menus in the back of that kitchen drawer where he kept stuff.

  The first call was to Adam, who was probably still hiding out with Monica. He didn’t know her last name but didn’t need to; she was listed under “G,” for Adam’s girlfriends. 516 area code—out on the Island. Jason didn’t remember Monica, but Adam must have figured it was probably wise to get out of city limits, and most likely had doubled back and grabbed the Long Island Railroad at the Jamaica station. Adam hadn’t caught up with many of the fugitives he chased over the years, but he sure learned how to run, Jason thought as he dialed the number.

  “Hello?” answered a woman’s voice.

  “Monica?” he waited for her to correct him and she didn’t. “Is Adam there?”

  “Who? I’m sorry, you must have the wrong number. Good—”

  “Wait! Tell him it’s Jason.”

  “Look, mister, you have the wrong number. Don’t—”

  “Listen, before you hang up, if you have a houseguest, tell him that ‘Waterloo Sunset’ is an overrated song.”

  She hung up. A minute later the phone rang.

  “Obviously, you’ve never heard the Kinks do that live,” Adam said without as much as a hello.

  “I was standing next to you at the time, O senile one. Just trying to get your attention.”

  “Oh, yeah, jeez, what was that, ’sixty-seven? I forgot. Hey, you okay? What happened? They stopped doing the traffic. I didn’t want to call your house. I haven’t talked to anyone. Been at DEFCON 1, you know—total radio silence. Are you safe?”

  “Yeah, fine. Just a little banged up. I can’t seem to keep the damn helicopter in the air.”

  “Are you alone?” Adam asked suspiciously.

  It took Jason twice as long to convince Adam that he was alone than it did to bring him up to speed with everything that had happened. Then it took even longer to convince him that releasing the murder film wouldn’t “bring the City to its knees,” as Adam proclaimed, since nobody would recognize Bill, the location, or probably even the car, not to mention the shooter. Adam finally agreed that they were better off keeping the copies along with carefully annotated notes in a safe place as an insurance policy, and immediately switched over to scheming about how and where to secure them, and “how best to ensure that they would surface in our absence should the need arise.” He also said that he should probably stay out on the island for a couple of more days, but Jason figured that was for an unrelated reason.

  Jason got up and tidied the apartment a little. Alison’s picnic basket was still on the kitchen table where he’d left it last week. He wondered if there were any perishables in it; there was nothing he could smell from the doorway and he didn’t feel like checking it out either way, so he worked around it.

  The second call was to the station; Jason was handling them in increasing order of difficulty.

  “Harry Ross’s office,” answered a chipper voice. Jason didn’t even know Harry had a secretary, but it made sense that he would.

  “Is Harry in?”

  “No, he’s unavailable. May I take message?”

  “Just tell him that Jason Sims called, and he can reach me at—”

  “Could you hold a moment?” she interrupted.

  Jason held the phone for more than a minute, and decided to look out the window and come up with some decision rule about how long to wait before hanging up.

  “Jesus, kid, how are you?” Harry’s voice boomed over the line. Didn’t anybody say “hello” anymore?

  “I’m fine.”

  “The copter was a total loss,” Harry explained, filling in his side of the story. “A couple of cops came by the station, gave some half-assed story about a crash, and told us you were alive, nothing more. They wouldn’t tell us where you were taken—are you in some sort of trouble?”

  “Almost,” Jason smiled at the phone. “But no, I’m not in any trouble. It was all about Adam, and I kind of got caught in the cross…caught in the middle.”

  “Shaker? No shit. His music reviews are okay. But I never thought he’d dig up enough dirt for anyone to go after him.”

  “Yeah, me neither.”

  “Is he with you? We haven’t seen him, either, not that we’re not used to…is he…uh…”

  “Yeah, he’s fine too.”

  “Oh, that’s good.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Listen, Jason, why don’t you take the rest of the week—how does that sound?”

  “It’s not a problem. I could be in sooner if you want,” Jason said, hoping desperately Harry would give him the week.

  “Nah, don’t worry about it. We still don’t have a new helicopter, anyway. You should see Dave’s face; he does it all off camera now—it’s killing him. Anyway, come in on Monday, and we’ll see what’s what.”

  “Sounds good.”

  The third call, the maybe call, he wasn’t quite ready to make. Technically, she could call anytime between now and Friday afte
rnoon and still be operating within the designated window. On the other hand, she probably would want to know about all the things that had happened during the last few days. In fact, she could even be upset if he didn’t call to tell her about it. Or maybe that was a stretch.

  He decided to work on the living room for a while, and really get it organized. That turned out to be a much more ambitious project than anticipated. Gathering and putting away the accumulated clothes and stuff that was just left where they were dropped didn’t take all that long, nor did throwing out a year’s worth of read and unread magazines. Still manageable but requiring somewhat more effort was assessing and determining the fate for his stray instruments. But getting the records back in serious order, reassessing some of the genre and sub-genre classifications, attributing principal contributions, and certifying the differences between recording and release dates was taking hours. He was stuck, agonizing over whether Derek and the Dominos was blues or rock, and whether, in either case, it should be filed under “D” for Derek or “C” for Clapton, when there was a soft knock at the door. He stopped what he was doing and listened, since a knock made little sense given the doorbell, and the people who knew him would have expected to find the door unlocked anyway.

  On the second set of knocks he tiptoed to the door—not an easy maneuver with a bum leg—and actually looked out the peephole, something he’d always considered undignified. It was Alison. He took a deep breath, and then another, and opened the door.

  “Hi.” She said. It wasn’t a bad hi, but it was hard to read. He resisted the urge to hug her.

  “Hi,” he said back lamely. At least it was English.