Dark City Lights

by Lawrence Block

  The sergeant scans the screen, “The ex won’t be a problem. He’s doing time in Canada for smuggling marijuana. And word is he still owes the guys he got it from money.”

  “Look,” I explain. “Doesn’t matter how it seems. Love’s like a taxi with the light off. But you can’t afford forever.”

  “Dude’s a poet,” chuckles Morris.

  The sergeant reads more from the screen. “Here’s a message she sent to her sister on Facebook: You remember the man in my old building that I thought I was in love with a few years ago? Well—now I know I was, so wish me luck. I’m in love with Ben again.”

  Morris quips, “You in like Flynn!”

  I ask, “So am I free to go?” Their eyes meet up and grin. I stand.

  The sergeant says, “Ben. We’re only one of seven experimental subway crime prevention programs.”

  “What do the other six do?” I ask.

  The elevator door shakes open behind me. I take one last look at the bag. Morris says, “It’s a knockoff.”

  The sergeant waves, “Come back and see us.” As the door shuts.

  Just like life, it was over much too soon. And just like life, there weren’t any answers. But like that one-in-an-eight-million great New York moment, I didn’t need one.

  I couldn’t wait to tell Lateef that there were angels on the bottom. And there, rising to the skin from the bowels of the city, I never had so much direction in my life.

  THE SOLDIER, THE DANCER, AND ALL THAT GLITTERS

  BY TOM CALLAHAN

  THE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT IRISH STRIPPER with the long red hair jumped back and doubled over as if punched in the gut when the thick white fist drove south into her green satin G-string. The invasion was sudden and powerful like the Allies hitting the beach at Normandy, snapping her undies in two. The dollar bills attached to her hips fluttered to the rug of the small square stage like the first flakes of winter in the Bronx. Before the first Washington hit the deck, the tall man in an army jacket had the invading fist doubled behind the man’s back and his head in a chokehold.

  The masher, a man in his fifties with a gray crew cut and the prominent beer belly and heavy build of a construction worker had not noticed the man in the army jacket lurking nearby. He struggled to no avail to buck off the younger man.

  “Get off of me. Lemme go.”

  “Stop struggling or I’ll break your arm off.”

  “Motherfucker, I’ll kill you. Fight like a man.”

  They danced around a bit but slowly the masher stopped struggling and they were facing the floor-length dusty mirror right behind the stage. The ill-fitting mirror looked like it had come from an Irish dance studio that went broke and it did.

  “That was neither polite nor smart,” the man in the army jacket said into the masher’s ear. “Didn’t you see the sign? In big letters: NO TOUCHING DANCERS. PATRONS MUST KEEP FIVE FEET AWAY. That’s the law, mac. You can read, can’t ya?”

  Recognition suddenly dawned on the older man’s face as he looked at the reflection of the man with the shoulder-length brown hair. He was called Soldier in the neighborhood. Soldier, meanwhile, was looking behind him at the two guys, also middle aged, who were with the masher. He knew he was about to get jumped and then there would be real trouble. He glanced past the small back room they were in and saw Frankie moving fast behind the bar.

  “Hey, I know you!” the masher croaked.

  “That so?”

  “Yeah, you’re the neighborhood kid who went to Vietnam and came back a hippie communist peace freak. Faggot!”

  Soldier tightened his grip on both arm and throat. Masher grabbed the arm around his throat with his free hand.

  “Lemme tell you something, Soldier. I faced Nazi machine guns in France and won. You faced a bunch of gooks in black pajamas and got your ass beat. No wonder why the only way you can fight is to jump on a man’s back. And this is your idea of honor: jumping a real American in defense of some ugly, skinny Irish hoor in a ginmill.”

  The snap echoed through the now silent bar like a cannon shot.

  “Aaaaaiiiiiee! You busted my wrist.”

  Soldier shoved the man into the mirror and swung around and ducked just as the other two moved in on him. A loud click! echoed through the bar as Frankie the bartender elbowed Soldier aside and stood in front of the masher’s friends with a sawed-off shotgun raised.

  “Out now! Night’s over, boys!”

  They just stood there looking at the gun.

  “Move! Now!”

  They turned and shuffled toward the front door of the bar. The masher was leaning against the mirror, face etched in pain, holding his damaged hand.

  “Frankie, your thug busted my wrist. I am going to sue, man. I am going to sue your father and this bar for hiring this brain-damaged maniac.”

  “Alright, let’s go talk about it outside, huh? We don’t want to disturb these nice people anymore,” Frankie said, despite the fact there were no more than half-a-dozen people left in the joint. Frankie was as big as Soldier but fatter with dark hair that covered his ears—in style back then—and a big walrus mustache. “Here, hold this.” He handed the shotgun to Soldier, put his arm around the Masher’s shoulder in a friendly way and gently led him to the door.

  Soldier looked around for the first time and saw Norma several feet to the left of the elevated stage, leaning against the mirror, one arm covering her glittering tea-cup-sized breasts and the other holding what was left of her undies against her full red pubic bush in a failed attempt at modesty. Soldier saw the huge, wide green eyes, surrounded by little-girl freckles on the bridge of her sharp-featured nose. He realized he was looking at a terrified little girl. He’d seen them before in the villages. All he could do was go over to the stage, bend down and pick up the dollars lying there.

  He walked over, bills outstretched in his left hand, as if he was offering candy. She hesitated for a moment before taking them. As Soldier admired her body, as he did four nights a week, he saw where the terrified eyes were looking. He looked down and saw the shotgun in his right hand. He had completely forgotten it was there. Panic rose in his throat as he saw his finger on the trigger.

  His hands started shaking and he wanted to drop the gun but was terrified that if he did, he would accidently pull the trigger and put a huge hole in the beautiful creature before him. He’d seen that back in the villages as well.

  His whole body trembling now, he backed away from her, turned and ran to the bar.

  Breathing hard, he got ahold of himself long enough to disarm the gun and was putting it in the rack Frankie’s father had built for it right beneath the taps when Frankie moseyed in as if he did not have a care in the world.

  “Frankie, I’m really sorry, man. I lost it.”

  Frankie took a seat on the customer’s side of the bar across from Soldier. “Hey, no worries. You were doing your job protecting Norma. Is she okay?”

  “I . . . I think so. She did not look hurt.”

  “Are you okay? You are as white as a ghost.”

  “Fine. I’m fine.”

  “Look, that asshole could have cost us our liquor license if there was an inspector in here tonight. We ain’t running some Times Square stroke palace.”

  Norma appeared from the back and walked over. Fully dressed now in jeans, a dark red sweater and leather jacket, the long Irish straight red hair that spilled to the middle of her back tied in a bun at the back of her head. Over her shoulder was a large, fringed denim bag.

  “Hey, I was just asking about you. You okay?”

  “I am, thanks to my savior here.” She looked right in Soldier’s blue-gray eyes and he was speechless.

  “I’m sorry about that, Norma. He won’t be back in here to bother you.”

  “Ah, just another ejit showing the world how small his mickey is. I just wish he had a twenty instead of a one in his fist when he played drop-the-hand with me.” The ring of Kerry was thick in her voice.

  “Wanna drink? You deserve it.”r />
  “Thanks, Frankie, but I’m gonna run if it is all the same with ye. Night, gents. And thank you, Jimmy. My savior.” Everybody called him Soldier in the Kingsbridge neighborhood where he and Frankie had grown up. Only Frankie called him by his Christian name. And now Norma.

  Jimmy the Soldier silently watched her leave. Frankie watched him.

  “Savior, huh? At this rate you’ll want a raise. So what’s bugging you?”

  “This ain’t good, Frankie. You heard that guy. When he tells your father and files a lawsuit, your dad will go through the roof. He can barely cover the rent now.”

  “Not a problem, Jimmy. There won’t be a lawsuit.”

  “You heard him not twenty minutes ago . . .”

  “And you and I asked him to leave and he left, peacefully, if a little upset. Then the damnedest thing. Doncha know he walked outside, somehow got his feet tangled up and fell hard into the gutter. Think he landed on his wrist. Drunks do the stupidest shit.”

  “But . . .”

  “No, not his butt, his wrist. He should have been lucky enough to land on his ass. Hell, he should have stayed home and watched Carson or gone over to the Laconia Theater on White Plains Road and jerked off to the nonstop pornos, new feature every Wednesday. Last I saw, his friends were taking him over to Montefiore. Wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t break both wrists. Hard fall, well deserved.”

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, JIMMY the Soldier was sitting in his customary seat at the GreenLeaf Pub at the far end of the dark mahogany bar. From there he could see the door and TV on the wall beside it. Behind him, also in dark wood, half a wall divider stood cheaply. On the other side of that, a few feet away, was the small stage, surrounded by the legally mandated wooden rail on three sides with chairs in front of it; the fourth side was the mirrored wall. Dancers could lean against the mirror and watch themselves as they shook their asses. There was no dancer pole; this was not a big, high-class operation. Strictly neighborhood.

  Directly on the ceiling opposite the stage was a single large light that had in front of it a slowly rotating red, white, and blue disk. It was off now during the early afternoon. In the back sat the modest DJ booth, although there was no booth. Just an elevated table with a huge tape player and sound board for the bar’s audio system. This was where Soldier played Bob Seeger and the Eagles and whatever else the dancers brought him on tape. Now, in the afternoon, only the radio was on low tuned to the great NYC progressive rock station, WNEW-FM.

  On his stool, Soldier drank his Barry’s Irish Tea—cup after cup—and read his book. If it did not look like he was working, it was because technically he did not work for the bar or anywhere else, though Frankie or his father managed to slip him some cash every week in a brown envelope.

  Frankie and Jimmy were best friends their entire lives, but a bad leg from birth kept Frankie out of the draft, something that caused him no end of guilt. Jimmy went and everybody noticed the change when he came home and it was not just the wounds he would never talk about. He was, for one thing, radicalized, something unheard of in the neighborhood except among the old IRA guys.

  He had joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, went to DC and tossed his Purple Heart and medals over the White House fence and then drove a year later down to Miami to protest the GOP convention that re-nominated Nixon/Agnew, getting busted and tear gassed there. Then he and a lot of his buddies got indicted on some sort of RICO sedition rap in Gainesville. They beat it with the help of radical lawyers. He did no jail time and came back to hang around the old neighborhood all day and night.

  Several years went by, disco came and Nixon/Agnew went, but Jimmy kept on the army jacket.

  Most folks gave him wide berth—“There’s something off with him, ya know” was the common whisper—but he didn’t mind. He kept mostly to himself except for Frankie and his old man. They welcomed him into their bar and it was his second home. Tea and whatever he wanted was on the arm.

  And that is where he was sitting when Frankie came in, grabbed a bottle of Jack from the shelf behind the bar, moseyed over in that friendly way of his, and poured a generous shot into Jimmy’s tea.

  “Whoa, dude, it is kinda early in the day for me.”

  “It’s late somewhere, brother. Whatcha reading?”

  “It’s called A People’s History of the United States by Professor Howard Zinn. It’s a new book sent to me by one of my ’Nam brothers.”

  “Sounds like you are going to walk up the hill to Manhattan College and use your GI benefits to become a history major with that book.”

  “Doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for one thing, they are not teaching that book up there.”

  “Why not?”

  “It tells the truth.”

  Frankie reached over, got a glass, and poured himself a drink.

  “Listen, man, some business I gotta talk over with you. How’d you like to make five Gs?”

  “Who I have to kill?”

  “Nobody, nothing like that.”

  “Then like what?”

  “In about a month, I have to go to Atlantic City on some business.”

  “A shithole despite the new casinos. So?”

  “I was thinking of making it a holiday weekend. We will ask the girls to come and we can watch them frolic on the beach in their bikinis.”

  “We watch them frolic here four nights a week wearing a lot less.”

  “Better light at the beach.”

  “And that’s worth five grand?”

  “No, I got to see a man in room 1209 of the Claridge Hotel. I need you to stand with me.”

  “No fucking way, Frankie. Count me out. No.”

  “Relax, will ya, Jimmy? You are getting your panties in an uproar over nothing. You don’t have to do nothing or say anything. Ten, twenty minutes tops and it will be back to the beach and the frolicking girls.”

  “No fucking way am I carrying a piece, Frankie, much less using one.”

  “It’s not that at all, Jimmy. No rough stuff involved. I promise. It’s just I feel better when I am standing next to you and others feel . . . well . . . calmer with you around.”

  “Does your father know about this?”

  “No, and he is not going to hear it from you or anybody else.”

  “Frankie, have you lost your mind, continuing to deal with those Dominicans from Washington Heights? That is just insane. And it is just going to lead to disaster, man. Mark my words.”

  “Just think about it, okay? I need you. As a friend. Oh, added bonus . . .”

  “What would that be? Another RICO indictment?”

  “Norma says she is going to go and buy a new bathing suit for it. She has never seen Atlantic City or the Jersey shore. Imagine?”

  “I can imagine alright.”

  “JIMMY, CAN I SEE YOU for a sec?”

  The GreenLeaf Pub did not start out as a go-go bar. It was just one of a zillion New York Irish joints that popped up when New York was Irish. But times change and by the 1970s the demographics of New York and the Bronx had changed enough that Irish taverns were struggling.

  Ironically enough, some were saved by the sexual revolution that changed mores and loosened the ban on women dancing mostly naked in bars. Bet the Church never counted on that! And as long as they kept their bottoms on and did not interact with the customers or engage in acts of prostitution, “Stopless Dancing” was within the law. And that is what the sign said outside the GreenLeaf: STOPLESS—in big bold letters.

  So the dressing room, such as it was, for the three dancers the GreenLeaf employed besides Norma, was actually the liquor storage room, which Frankie’s father equipped with a lighted makeup table he got from God-knows-where and two battered dressers where the girls could hang up their clothes and a battered couch where they could sleep or read between sets. There had been a phone until the first month’s bill arrived.

  Jimmy cautiously entered when Norma called. It was still over an hour before the show and no ot
her girls were there yet. But Norma was already in her stage outfit: tonight a gold lame G-string and sheer gold see-through top. Her breasts were not huge, but Soldier had never in his life or travels seen nipples so long or erect or pointy, like pencil erasers for the sins of the world. They mesmerized him, although he was cursed with the knowledge that there was precious little he could do about them.

  On stage, she’d cover them with glitter so the colored lights made them sparkle when she moved. She had her leather jacket over them now as he entered, probably to ward off the constant chill in the bar, or some weird sense of modesty. She took a seat at the makeup table and crossed her slender thighs. Jimmy found a box of Jameson nearby to use as a chair.

  “You’re here early tonight.”

  “Yeah, I am going to do the first three sets and leave early. Frankie said it is okay.”

  “What’s up?”

  She fixed him again with those big green eyes. And again he thought he saw the fear in them and noticed her freckles.

  “Jimmy, I got to ask you a huge favor and I don’t know how to do it.”

  “Ask away.”

  “Do you know where Dobbs Ferry is?”

  “Sure, it’s a town up along the Hudson, about six or seven miles north of here.”

  “Could you give me a ride there this Saturday?”

  “Better yet, you can borrow my car, if you don’t mind driving a beat up ’72 Nova.”

  “No, Jimmy. I’d take the bus, but the bus only runs from 242nd to North Yonkers and there are no buses north from there.”

  She was starting to tear up. He could feel it coming, like a summer storm.

  “What is it, Norma? You can tell me.” The tears let go and she dropped her face into her hands.

  “Ah, Jaysus! My life is yockers. It’s just totally banjaxed. I ruined everything. Sorry for going on like this, Jimmy.” She took a deep breath before continuing, as if to screw up her courage. “There is a women’s medical center in Dobbs Ferry and I’ve got an appointment for Saturday morning.”

  “So take my car like I said.”