Finally the VW started, crept across Lex, began slowly passing the back of Gimbels East. Rosenbaum rode the other car’s tail now, trying to get by, but the VW would not budge from the center of 87th Street. Then, without warning, the motor died again, and the car oozed to a stop, blocking Rosenbaum completely. He leaned out the window, honking and honking, really getting his throat limbered up now: “Move-move-move—what the hell’s with you, get off the road, you’re a goddamn menace, you stupid jerk, now move-your-car-or-I’ll-move-it-for-you!”
From the Volkswagen came one word: “Langsamer.”
Langsamer. Slow down. Take it easy. Translate it from the German how you will. Rosenbaum was starting to perspire heavily, from both the heat and aggravation. “Don’t you Langsamer me, you kraut meathead, mach snell!”
The relic in the VW leaned out the window, looked back, managed to shake an ancient fist at Rosenbaum. “Langsamer!” he said again.
The sight of the guy set Rosenbaum’s teeth on edge. So old, practically ready for stuffing, with blue eyes, just like all the Nazis, a Hun on the loose in midtown Manhattan, faded and senile; it was a disgrace anybody let him behind the wheel of a car.
For a moment after the second “Langsamer!” Rosenbaum just sat there and sweated. Then he drove his Chevy forward and nudged the Volkswagen. It felt so terrific, he backed up a few feet and then drove forward, nudging it again, harder. It had been years since he had felt so instinctively like getting in the ring with a stranger. Why? Well, he was (a) in Yorkville; (b) on 87th Street; (c) behind Gimbels East; (d) blocked; (e) by a Volkswagen; (f) driven by an antique limburger-lover; (g) who was making him even later for his Thursday card game; (h) which was particularly galling since his Chevy wasn’t air-conditioned, and even though it was mid-afternoon in mid-September, the temperature read 92 degrees; (i) Fahrenheit; (j) and rising.
Rosenbaum banged into the other car a third time, knocking it several feet forward before it stopped, but then it suddenly went forward again as the motor caught, heading toward Park, and Rosenbaum was surprised at first, but he gunned his Chevy, quickly caught up, and prepared to pass on the right, because he knew what his mission in life was now, and it all came down to this: pass the goddamn VW, get in front of it, block it, and then slow down to ... a ... c ... r ... a ... w ... 1.
But the other car was having none of it—as Rosenbaum went right, so did the Volkswagen, and when Rosenbaum went left, so did the Volkswagen, and suddenly, on 87th Street, war had been declared, and that was fine with Rosenbaum, because the day a Chevy couldn’t mop up a pint-sized import, we might all just as well hang it up.
They talk a lot in France about the Mistral and the insanity that possesses people when it starts blowing, and in California everybody treads softly when the Santa Ana begins to brain-bake. Well, there’s a wind like that in Manhattan too, nobody’s named it yet, but it’s there. When a hot day turns into a real steamer and the wind swirls up from the west, blowing all the mosquitoes from the Jersey swamp straight across the Hudson—and maybe that’s all this was, an aberration caused by climate, but God knows it was something, because up ahead now the lights on Park Avenue were just going into their red-to-green act, and the Chevy was pouring it on, but the VW man was keeping the lead, foot to the floor, as if nothing mattered but that the bumping madman in the car behind should never pass, never, never, no matter what, and they flew across the intersection of 87th and Park, and nurses grabbed their children and a dozen people looked helplessly around for a cop, and then they were going for Madison, with the VW starting to shake almost out of control at the effort, while the Chevy gunned and scraped, and there they were, these two guys, way over 150 years old total, fighting to the death because a stalled motor had happened in a rented Volks back by Lexington Avenue, and these things do happen all the time in cities, really, but they pass, flare-up follows quiet follows outburst, on and on, and probably this one would have passed too, except for Hunsicker.
Hunsicker was making his regular delivery, and he hated the 87th Street job because the street was narrow, but he liked the 87th Street job because around the corner toward 88th was the Lenox Hill Deli and behind the counter of that establishment Ilene worked, and every week for going on over a year Hunsicker had eaten coffee and a Danish there, because Ilene was stacked and the head was nice too, one hunk of a divorcee, only she’d never come across. She’d joke with him, sure, she’d even sometimes reach out and rumple Hunsicker’s hair, but she never wanted to meet him after work. Her first husband had been a teamster, she said, and once was more than enough, if you don’t mind. “But I’m different” was Hunsicker’s pitch, “I’m not some jerk who gets his jollies at the bowling league, I read best sellers, all the number ones, Love Story I read, The Godfather, you name a biggie, I got the paperback,” but Ilene would not relent. He was telling her that Jackie Susann’s latest, Once Is Not Enough, marked a definite improvement for her, an advance in both content and style, when the crash came.
Hunsicker guessed it was his vehicle immediately, so he took off out the door, running like a bastard, back to 87th, and even before he turned the corner, he felt the heat, the incredible heat, because when an oil truck goes, it can incinerate a brick, and there were screams now from all over, women and kids, and as he got to 87th the flames were scorching the side of the building he was delivering to, and Hunsicker ran as far into the inferno as he could, tried to make sense of it all, but there wasn’t much. It looked like two cars had creamed into each other and then spun into his truck, and from there, who knew, but my God, how many dead?
Scorched, Hunsicker staggered back to the Deli, put in one call to the firemen, a second to the cops. He sat dully at the counter while Ilene, unasked, poured coffee. He sipped at it. Something in him touched her somehow, and she came around the corner, sat alongside him, wiping his darkened face with a clean cloth. That night she went to the movies with him for the first time, and three dates after that, he scored. So it all worked out fine for Hunsicker.
It worked out fine for Bibby, too. He was a black kid, barely into his twenties, who wanted to be a photographer, and who happened to be on his way to the park when the crash took place. He was the only one clicking at the time, and he got some beauties. The Daily News bought a bunch and spread them across their front and center pages, and eventually offered Bibby a full-time job, so he had nothing close to a complaint, either.
And actually, call it luck, timing, proof of Divine Intervention, only the two drivers took it, and that wasn’t the greatest loss imaginable either. Rosenbaum was truly a scratchy man, seventy-eight and full of unpleasant quirks, increasingly cranky, and the VW driver was even older, eighty-two, a widower who had but one living relative, a son, whom he had not seen in close to half an ordinary lifetime, and even though their blood relationship was thick as standard, any emotional interchange had long since gone by the boards; theirs was an exercise in commerce, nothing more.
This widower was a refugee who had outlived all his friends and had never bothered accumulating many enemies. Everyone called him Kurt Hesse, though that was not his name. His driver’s license read Kurt Hesse, his passport read the same; doctors and mailmen called him Mr. Hesse, his barber “Mr. H”; children called him “thank you” when he scattered candy in the park playgrounds, something he enjoyed doing; and his sister, when she was alive and once she got used to it, always called him Kurt. Indeed, he had been Kurt Hesse for so long now that if you asked him his name without preparation, if you just ran up behind him and cried “Name!” he more than likely would have stammered “Hesse, Kurt Hesse” and not meant to be a liar.
His real name was Kaspar Szell, but twenty-eight years had passed since anyone had called him that, and sometimes, when he was in a dreamy state before sleep, he actually sometimes wondered if there ever really had been a Kaspar Szell and, if there had, what he would have been like had he been given a chance to live.
He died instantly in the crash. The crash killed him, not the
fire. The fire only delayed identification.
The entire incident, from Gimbels on, covered less than three minutes, and at the most, in the case of Rosenbaum, less than five seconds of primary pain. All in all, it would have been hard to have wished for a happier tragedy.
PART I
BABE
1
“HERE COMES DA CREEP,” one of the stoop kids said.
Levy did his best to ignore them, standing at the top of the brownstone steps, making sure his sneaker laces were properly tight. These were his best shoes, the cream of the Adidas line, and they fit his feet as if divinely sculpted, never, not even on the first day, giving a hint of blister. Levy felt passionate about few items of wearing apparel, but these running shoes he cared about.
“Hey creepy creepy creepy,” another of the stoop kids shouted, this one their leader, small, quick, with usually the brightest clothes. Now he made his voice very hoity-toity: “I just absolutely adore your chateau,” and he indicated Levy’s hat.
Without really meaning to, Levy adjusted his golf cap, and as he did the stoop kids, three brownstones down, hit him with the sound of their triumphant laughter. Levy was particularly sensitive about the whole cap business. He had been wearing his peakbill for years, and no one cared, but then, in the ’72 Olympics, Wottle won the 800 meters for the U.S.A. and he wore a golf cap, Wottle did, so everyone assumed that Levy was merely an imitator.
Levy felt genuinely confident about few things in this world, but one of them was—did it sound conceited? then it was conceited—his mind. He had, for someone not yet out of his middle twenties, a relatively original mind, and he would never have copied anyone, let alone a fellow runner. Now he took a breath, trying to ready himself for the taunts of the stoop kids as he began jogging storklike down the brown-stone steps. The stoop kids loved his awkwardness. They flapped their arms and made goose sounds.
Levy just hated it when they imitated him. Not because they were wrong, but because they were so aggravatingly accurate in their mimicking. He, T. B. Levy, did look like a goose, at least on occasion. He didn’t much like it, but there it was.
The stoop kids—usually six in number, Spanish in origin—seemed to live on the brownstone steps of the house three doors closer to Central Park than Levy’s own. At least, they had been perched there when he arrived in June, and here it was, September now, and they showed no signs of flying south. They were maybe fifteen or sixteen, small, thin, undoubtedly dangerous when provoked, and they ate on their stoop, played handball against the stoop steps or on the sidewalk in front, and often, late in the darkness, Levy would pass them necking and more with what he assumed were neighborhood girls. Morning till night, the stoop kids were there, sitting there, standing, playing, smoking, not caring to watch the world go by, because they were a world, tight-knit and constant, and sometimes, for that reason, Levy wondered if he didn’t envy them. Not that he ever wanted them to offer him a seat. Certainly, he would have rejected such an offer. But then again, who knew how he’d behave, it was all academic, they’d never asked him.
Levy turned on the sidewalk toward Central Park, jogging his way, and as he passed them the one who adored his chateau said, “Why aren’t you in school?” so suddenly that Levy had to laugh, because once, in June, when they had been particularly insulting to him, he had said that to them, “Why aren’t you in school?” and not only had he not shut them up, for a month they’d never let him come close to forgetting it. But this was the first time in many days they’d used the line back on him, and therefore his laughter. Humor was the unexpected juxtaposition of incongruities, who had said that? Levy rooted around in his mind a moment before he decided on Hazlitt. No. Meredith maybe? G. B. Shaw? Think, he commanded, but the right name would not come. Levy stormed at himself, because you had to know that kind of thing if you were going to be really first-rate, his father would have known just-like-that, known the author’s name and the work the quote resided in and the mental state of the creator at the moment of composition—were these good times for him, bad, what? Shamed, Levy jogged faster.
Levy lived on West 95th Street, between Amsterdam and Columbus, not an appetizing neighborhood, certainly, but when you were a scholarship student you took what was available, and in June what was available was a single room with bath on the top floor of the brownstone at 148 West 95th Street. It wasn’t all that bad, actually: a lovely jogging distance from Columbia, just across to Riverside Park and then up to 116th, a straight shoot along the river—you couldn’t ask for more than that if you were a runner.
Levy crossed Columbus, picked up his pace a bit more as he closed in on Central Park, turned left at 95th, ran one block upland into the green area itself, straight to the tennis courts, and after that it was just a little half turn and then he was there.
At the reservoir.
Whoever invented the reservoir, Levy had decided months ago, must have done it with him alone in mind. It was without flaw, a perfect lake set in this most unexpected of locations, bounded by the millionaires on Fifth and their distant relations on Central Park South and their distant relations along Central Park West.
Levy easily passed other joggers as he began his initial circling of the water. It was half-past five—he always ran then, it was ideal for him. Some people liked a morning jaunt, but Levy wasn’t one of them; his mind was at its best in the morning, so he always did his most complex reading before the noon hour; afternoons he took notes or read simple stuff. By five his brain was exhausted, but his body was desperate to move.
So at half-past five Levy ran. Clearly he was faster than anyone around, so if you were a casual observer it would have been logical to assume that this rather tallish, sort of slender fellow with the running style not unreminiscent of a goose covered ground really quite well.
But you had to consider his daydreams.
He was going to run the marathon. Like Nurmi. Like the already mythical Nurmi. Years from now, all across the world, track buffs would agonize over who was greatest, the mighty Finn or the fabled T. B. Levy. “Levy,” some of them would argue, “no one would ever run the final five miles the way Levy ran them,” and others would counter that by the time the last five miles came, Nurmi would be so far ahead, it wouldn’t matter how fast Levy ran them, and so the debate would rage, expert against expert, down the decades.
For Levy was not going to be a marathon man; anyone could be that if you just devoted your life to it. No, he was going to be the marathon man. That, plus an intellect of staggering accomplishment coupled with an unequaled breadth of knowledge, the entire mixture bounded by a sense of modesty as deep as it was sincere.
Right now he only had the B.Litt. he’d won at Oxford, and could race but fifteen miles without fatigue. But give him a few more years and he would be both Ph.D. and Champion. And the crowds would sing out “Lee-vee, Lee-vee,” sending him on to undreamed-of triumphs as now sports fans shouted “Dee-fense” as they urged on their heroes.
“Lee-vee, Lee-vee—”
And they wouldn’t care about how awkwardly he might run. It wouldn’t matter to them that he was over six feet tall and under a hundred and fifty pounds, no matter how many milkshakes he downed per day in an effort to move up from skinny to slender.
“Lee-vee! Lee-vee!—”
It wouldn’t bother them that he had a stupid cowlick and the face of an Indiana farmer, that even after spending three years in England he still had the expression of someone you just knew would buy the Brooklyn Bridge if you offered him the chance. He was beloved by few, known by none save, thank God for Doc, Doc. But that would change. Oh yes, oh yes.
“LEE-VEE ... LEEEEEEE-VEE.”
There he was now, up ahead and running with the firm knowledge that no one could ever conquer him, except possibly Mercury. Tireless, fabled, arrogant, unbeatable, the Flying Finn himself, Nurmi.
Levy picked up his pace.
The end of the race was still miles off, but now was the greatest test, the test of the he
art.
Levy picked up his pace again.
Levy was gaining.
The half-million people lining the course could not believe it. They screamed, they surged almost out of control. It could not be happening but there it was—Levy was gaining on Nurmi!
Levy, the handsome American, was closing in. It was true. Levy, so confident that he even dared a smile while running at the fastest pace in marathon history, was definitely destroying Nurmi’s lead. Nurmi was aware now—something terrible was going on behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, and the disbelief was plain for all to see. Nurmi tried to go faster, but he was already at maximum pace, and suddenly his stride began to betray him, the crucial rhythm getting erratic. Levy was coming. Levy was making his move. Levy was getting set to pass now. Levy was—
Thomas Babington Levy paused for a moment, leaning against the reservoir fence. It was hard to really concentrate on Nurmi today.
For he had a toothache, and as he ran, as his right foot hit the ground, it jarred the cavity on the right side of his upper jaw. For a moment Levy rubbed the offending tooth, wondering if he should see a dentist now or not. The thing had come on only lately, and maybe it would depart as it had come, because it hadn’t gotten worse, and proved a nuisance only when he ran. Dentists raped you anyway, they charged a ton for maybe two minutes’ work, and there were better things to spend your money on, like books, all the books ever printed; records, too. To hell with it, Levy decided.
In the end, it didn’t really matter. Once they found his weakness, they almost killed him ...
2
AS SCYLLA ENTERED THE airport bar, he spotted the toupeed man immediately, and for a moment he was undecided as to what to do, since at their previous meeting they had both tried very hard, if somewhat briefly, to kill each other.
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