Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  “… Apples and oranges.”

  “… Give Swale five lengths. He’d eat him up alive.”

  “You’re mad. Danzig’s already won the Peter Pan and the Belmont by a length and a quarter over John’s Treasure.”

  “He still don’t have Swale’s stuff. Swale was a prince on turf.”

  The talk was noisy and heated. Warren understood little of it, but he listened with the rapt attention of the spellbound. Though they all spoke at one time, it was the big man with the white hair who dominated the flow of chatter.

  Warren drank his beer and studied the detective across the way. The fact that this man who’d been searching high and low for him for more than a year and didn’t realize that the object of his search was now seated no more than twenty feet from him, sipping a beer, tickled him mightily. He wanted to laugh out loud. Several times he had to stifle an urge to shout across the bar, “It’s me. Hey, look. Over here. It’s me. Here I am. Come get me. I’m your guy. Forget about that faggoty wimp, Koops. I’m the real Dancer. This is me, Warren Mars. Here I am.”

  Like a child in possession of a wonderful secret, Warren felt little shocks of dangerous mirth quaking upward into his throat where he swallowed them, sitting there listening to the noisy blare of Mooney and his crowd, his own face a mask of stony impassivity.

  Curiously, Warren felt no dislike for this man, his hunter and, conceivably, executioner. Quite the contrary, and just as before, it was admiration, even a sort of affection that he felt. There was a part of him that actually wished Mooney well and wanted the detective to succeed. Still, another part, wholly more realistic, was more determined than ever that that would never happen.

  For Warren, the game of cat-and-mouse had become irresistible. Suddenly he was seized with a strange desire to make Mooney notice him. Possibly he might even speak to the detective. To Warren, that would have been sublime — sending up the world as very few had ever done. And the secret would have been his and his alone. He’d never share it with another soul.

  The more he toyed with the idea, the more the cautious, realistic side of him retreated into the background. Despite all the obvious reasons for fearing the detective, giving him as wide a berth as possible, the more he was impelled to thrust himself at him. He was unaware that a small, foolish grin had begun to dart across his features.

  For all of his efforts, he was having little luck attracting Mooney. The detective was too preoccupied just then to take note of the dark young stranger seated across the way, grinning at him. The talk was lively and heated. Another round of drinks was being served.

  Warren tried again to catch Mooney’s eye. By that time the grin on his face had shifted from amiability to something bordering on either insolence or dementia. He had no way of knowing that until, suddenly, the big man, encircled by friends, reached for a drink. He turned and their gazes met.

  Mooney had the sort of face that reveals everything at once, and Warren had a clear view of it the moment he turned — the startlement and then the frown as though the detective had confused the grin for ridicule. Was he being laughed at? Mooney scowled back at him. There was a question in his eye as if he were trying to recall whether or not he knew the person grinning at him across the bar or possibly whether this person was just . grinning at someone else nearby.

  Warren was about to rise and go over and introduce himself. He would tell the detective that he’d seen him several times on television and how much he admired him, and wished him the best of luck on that Dancer job. He was about to stand, but just then Mooney was distracted by a tall, attractive lady with red hair. Warren ; recognized her at once as the woman he’d spoken to that first night he’d come into the Balloon.

  She’d appeared now from the main dining room and greeted friends at the bar. She never noticed Warren, and even if she had, chances are she’d not have recognized him, so fleeting had their contact been.

  She was busy at the moment, saying goodnight to guests. Most of them she knew by name. They appeared to be regulars of the restaurant. She looked around, waving and nodding and smiling here and there.

  Warren waited for her to recognize him, but to no avail. Once her eyes even lighted on him. She smiled directly at him and for a moment he imagined she was about to come over and say hello. He half-rose to greet her in anticipation, only to suddenly realize she was smiling at someone else just behind him. She glided past him and beyond with not even a glimmer of recognition. It hurt and even angered him that she seemed not to recall him.

  People were clustered around the front doors. Outside, an endless succession of taxis kept rolling up beside the canopy. Warren turned slightly, only to have his field of vision suddenly darkened by a huge looming object bearing down on him. The speed with which it came made Warren lean back as if to step aside. It was Mooney. Several people trailed at his heels, all chatting animatedly at one time, still talking horses.

  At a certain point Mooney passed so close that Warren felt the heat of his body, radiating outward from his clothing. As he lumbered past, the sleeve of the detective’s jacket brushed Warren’s arm. The sensation was exquisite, too giddy and unreal to believe. It was imperative now that he talk to Mooney. Actually, his arm half-rose, as if to stop him before he bustled past. But something stayed him. In the next moment his arm dropped. He kept his place instead, lapping like a thirsty dog at the last of his warmish beer.

  Mooney was now standing beside the tall, handsome lady.

  “Hey, Fritz,” the detective boomed. “What d’ya say we go home?”

  “When we get all cleaned up here.”

  “I’m dead on my feet. I’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”

  “That’s what you get for marrying a saloon keeper,” someone chided.

  “Go on ahead,” the lady said. “I’ll be along in a half hour.”

  Mooney grumbled. Several of his friends laughed.

  So they’re married, Warren thought to himself. He rose quickly, oddly annoyed, and made for the door. So they’re married.

  Outside on the street he could barely contain himself. He breathed deeply, gulping at the cold, wet air as if he were snapping at it with his teeth.

  He started to walk. The annoyance he’d felt was now past. The laughter he’d managed to suppress inside the bar he now gave full rein to. Laughing to himself, his walk was nearly a sprint. To a passing couple he appeared demented, and they gave him a wide berth.

  He had no idea what he’d found so funny. Only moments before he was angry. Now all he knew was that something tickled him immensely. He touched the place on his arm where Mooney had grazed it. Feeling a surge of elation, he bustled down the street, his feet fairly flying over the pavements.

  He had no wish to go home to Bridge Street. After the Balloon, the gloomy house with the dirt and rank smells, the unventilated garret he slept in under the grimy, rain-spattered cupola, struck him as more of an offense than ever. Finding Koops, his Doppelgänger, picking him out of a city of millions, then finding Mooney, his pursuer, with whom he’d made actual physical contact that night, had left him feverish with excitement.

  He would take care of Koops. He would eliminate that problem in his own way. But for now, he was hungry. Ferociously hungry. He would eat. It occurred to him that he wanted meat more than anything. The savory smell of roasts and thick steaks broiled on the open charcoal pits of the Balloon still lingered in his nostrils.

  He could taste meat at the back of his throat. The roof of his mouth tingled for it.

  He wheeled sharply, heading suddenly north and farther west. His course took him up past the Nineties and on to 103rd Street and Madison, where Janine lived.

  Though he was famished, he wanted to go to Janine first. He longed to tell her about his encounter with Koops and then the detective. He had a need to be near her. It wasn’t necessary to see her; just to be within some reasonable proximity to her. To drink in the closeness of her. Even though her “friend” was there, sleeping by her side, no matter. He woul
d not be there much longer. Warren would see to that too.

  He had plans for Janine’s friend. He’d thought it all out. It wasn’t pleasant, but it had to be done, just as Koops had to be done. And, in the end, Janine would understand. Even be grateful. He would make it all up to her. He had the power to do so. It was purely a matter of will and concentration. Once he set his mind to something, there was nothing in the world that could deflect him.

  It was just past midnight when he reached the modest little walk-up where Janine and Michael Mancuso lived.

  He knew the location of their apartment from his many nocturnal visits to the area. Several times he’d seen Janine through the windows fronting the street.

  Those windows were dark now, as were most of the others in the building. Only a single set of apartment lights at the northeast corner of the building still glowed, suggesting insomnia or sickness behind them.

  The streets were deserted. He leaned against a street-lamp across the way, and, with a sigh of enormous contentment, he gazed up at her darkened windows.

  TWENTY

  “AND YOU’RE SURE THIS WAS A SIXTY-EIGHT Mercedes?”

  “In mint condition. Positive.”

  “How come he wanted to paint it?”

  “He had some rust going on around the headlights and fenders. So while I was taking care of that, he said I should also paint it.”

  They were in the cramped little space that served as Mr. Anthony Pagano’s office. A glass partition separated them from the big floodlit paint shop where just then an old Coupe de Ville was being sprayed.

  Mr. Pagano sat behind a desk stacked with little hills of invoices, paper coffee cups, and unemptied ashtrays reeking of dead cigar stumps.

  “And it was a two twenty,” Pickering went on. “Right. A two twenty.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Course I’m sure,” Mr. Pagano snapped. “Pretty sure, anyway.”

  “What color did you paint it?”

  Mr. Pagano’s eyes closed and his head tilted back slightly. “Lemme see. It was green when he brought it in.”

  “What shade of green?”

  Pickering tried to control his excitement. This was the ninth auto body shop he’d been to that morning. He’d visited nearly a hundred over the past several days, with no luck whatsoever.

  By that time he was tired, and there was a conviction deep in his bones, going back to boyhood, that overenthusiasm for anything leads inevitably to disappointment.

  “It was dark green.” Mr. Pagano snatched some color swatches down from the pegboard and pointed his paint-stained finger at one. “That’s a basic Mercedes color. What we call your basic forest green.” Beyond the glass wall, masked and suited figures drifted phantomlike through steamy clouds of vaporized paint hissing under great pressure.

  “And the color you painted it?”

  Pagano’s head rolled backward again. The eyes closed. “Now, you gotta remember this is like four, five weeks ago. I paint maybe a hundred cars a week.”

  Pickering’s brow started to lower.

  “But this one,” Mr. Pagano continued, “I got a distinct impression we sprayed gray.”

  “Yeah. How come?”

  “How come we sprayed it gray?”

  “No. How come you remember this one especially? What was so special about this one?”

  Pagano turned to watch the ghostlike figures of his painters drifting beyond the glass partition. ” ‘Cause of the guy,” he remarked distractedly. “It was the guy. Something about him.”

  “Strange?”

  “Not at all. Friendly. Pleasant. Chatty, you know. Spoke in a low voice. Kind of dignified. Knew a lot about cars.”

  “Did he say why he wanted it painted?”

  “There was this rust, I told you. And I guess he figured if he was gonna spring for that, he might as well go all the way with a paint job. Car’s nearly twenty years old, don’t forget.”

  “This was the first paint job it’s had in twenty years?”

  “I didn’t say that, did I?” Mr. Pagano was irritated by the question. “As a matter of fact, when we scraped it down, there must’ve been four, five layers of paint. All different colors. A regular fucking rainbow.” Pagano beamed amiably. “That’s how come I recall this car. You don’t see that too often. People spray a car, they generally spray it the same color.”

  Pickering had been sitting there spinning his thumbs. Over the past several minutes the speed of his rotations had steadily increased. “If your memory’s so great,” he taunted, “I bet you don’t recall this guy’s name.”

  Mr. Pagano’s caterpillar brows furrowed. For the first time during the course of questioning, he appeared distressed. “What d’ya want him for? What’d the guy do?”

  “Maybe something. Maybe nothing,” Pickering replied evasively. “Who knows? That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  “Look,” Mr. Pagano proclaimed, “I run a respectable place here. Everything on the up and up. Never had no trouble with the law. I’m a good neighbor. Ask anyone on the block.”

  “Who’s talkin’ about you?” Pickering shot back. “You’re clean. We know that. I’m just asking, do you know this guy’s name, is all.”

  Mr. Pagano seemed offended. “Sure I know his name. Not off the top of my head. But right here in my file.” Pickering waited, slowly tapping the arm of his chair, scarcely breathing as the boxy little Italian man rummaged through his file. It was no ordinary file, not the sort of thing one finds in a well-organized, well-run office. Items here were filed according to no discernible system — not alphabetical by name, not by category, or by date in time, but rather by some system, internal and mysterious, consisting wholly of a series of tiny abstruse symbols known only to Mr. Pagano himself.

  Even from where Pickering sat across the desk from the file, he could view the turmoil within those drawers. They bulged and spilled over with stacks of tatty, dogeared invoices, yellow and dusty with age.

  From beyond the plate glass, a figure like a fish in an aquarium tank floated up to the glass pane and peered out at them incuriously through goggles. Great gusts of hissing air whirled all about him. The haze of paint fumes hovering above the outer office made Pickering’s eyes burn and his head throb.

  “I got it right here somewhere.” Mr. Pagano ransacked his drawers, waxing more furious by the moment. He could sense the growing skepticism of the detective sitting, waiting there, before him.

  Several times he pulled out invoices, apparently forgetting what it was he’d been looking for, then proceeded to read them to himself. Then he would place them carefully off to the side as if he intended to return to them at some future date. Then he’d turn back to the chaos of his files. “Don’t worry. It’s here. It’s right here.” Pickering’s burning eyes rolled heavenward in silent, long-suffering despair.

  ‘Now where the hell is that invoice, anyway?” Mr. Pagano banged the file drawer shut and started to rummage through the wire out box on his littered desk. ‘Let’s see now. What do we got here? Mercedes. Mercedes. Everybody owns a fucking Mercedes …” He whistled breathily while papers flew through his hands. “Mercedes.” He plucked an invoice out of the pile. “Here’s one.” His eyes scanned quickly over the yellow sheet, the smile on his face fading as quickly as it had appeared. “Forget it. It’s a four fifty SL. A nineteen eighty—five. Foster. I remember that guy, all right. A stiff. Still ain’t got my money.”

  The harried, overworked man pressed on. “Jesus, I know I got it. It’s right here someplace.”

  “I can come back,” Pickering said, anxious by then to depart the place himself.

  “No, no. You stay right there. It’s right here, I tell you. Right under my nose. I can almost smell it. It’s right…” Suddenly his face lit up and he was flapping a yellow carbon sheet about over his head. “Briggs. Donald Briggs.”

  Pickering rose and moved quickly around the desk. “You got it?”

  “Sure I got it. I told you, didn’t I? N
othing in these files I don’t keep a record of right up here.” His thick, paint-spattered fingers tapped the side of his head for emphasis.

  “Briggs. Donald. I even got a copy of the registration, if you want.”

  Pickering gaped back at him. Can this be me? Rollo Pickering? he thought. Can I be so lucky? “You’ve actually got a copy of the registration?”

  “Course I do. I always make a copy of the registration. Specially with these fancy cars. Most of ‘em are hot, you know.”

  “Briggs, Donald.” Pickering’s eyes swarmed over the invoice. The pale Xerox letters wavered like objects under water beneath his burning eyes. The registration number was perfectly clear, but some of the computer generated letters and numbers of the address were either faded or had not reproduced at all. He held the sheet away from his eyes, squinting to decipher the address. “Hey, what’s this look like to you?”

  Mr. Pagano craned his neck and peered over the detective’s shoulder. “What’s that, a b?”

  “Yeah. But the next letter is missing. Then you got an i. Then the next two letters are missing.”

  “What’s that at the end? Looks like an e.”

  “Yeah. That’s an e, all right. Can you make out the number?”

  “Looks like a fourteen.”

  Pickering looked at him skeptically. “You could’ve fooled me.”

  “Zip’s pretty clear, though: one-oh-oh-one-four. That’s way downtown, ain’t it?”

  “From the Village on south,” Pickering said to himself. “It figures then he’d pick your place to have his car sprayed. Must live right around here somewhere.” Pickering had scribbled out onto his pad a diagram of the letters he had available to him with a series of short dashes in between to indicate those letters that were missing.

  B — I——E Street

  New York, N.Y. 10014

  Together the two men puzzled over the acrostic … to no avail. Nothing whatever came to mind. Mr. Pagano slapped his knees and sighed ruefully. “Listen, I gotta get back out there.” He indicated with his head the two priestlike figures floating behind the glass partition.