Angie’s hand grabbed my wrist. “Garth, what’s going on?”
“It was her!” I handed over my hatcheck stub.
“No way!”
“Definitely.”
“Cola Woman?”
“What? No, no . . .” I grabbed my hat and guided Angie to the front door.
“Who?!” Angie implored.
“Marti. Marti Folsom. You know: the owner of Tiny Timeless Treasures.”
Chapter 12
I hid my face with my hat as we exited, as if I were checking my head size or something equally absurd. But the blind was unnecessary. They were halfway down the block and stepping out between parked cars. Bing’s hand shot in the air, and brake lights flared on the back of a passing cab.
“Marti?! I don’t get it, Garth. Are you sure?”
I gave her a cross look instead of an answer. “They’re getting a cab, dammit.”
Angie and I darted into the one-way street, searching the oncoming traffic. No white For Hire lights headed our way. “C’mon.”
With Angie holding my arm, I started hustling toward the intersection where Bing and Marti’s cab had come to a stop at the light.
“Hang on!” Angie yanked me to a stop, plucked off her shoes, and dashed ahead of me, her trailing velvet wrap flapping in my face. I had no idea how we could hope to follow them and, if so, what we would do when we caught up with them. My only thought was to grab the next available taxi and give the driver the line every cabbie yearns to hear: “FOLLOW THAT CAB!”
The light turned green, and the cab went straight across the intersection. We dashed across too, but Angie suddenly veered, hopping into the back of an available cab. Only this taxi wasn’t the prerequisite yellow, and it didn’t have a NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission medallion. What it had was a tall, sandy-haired man in Italian cyclist hat, spandex racing jumper, and Tevas poised over the engine. It was no ordinary cab; it wasn’t even a hansom cab. It was a bright green pedicab. You know, like a tricycle on steroids, the modern rickshaw and latest addition to New York’s traffic snarl.
“Get in!” Angie gestured frantically at me. I hesitated.
“Where’s the fire, guys?” The sandy-haired cyclist drawled.
“Follow that cab!” Angie pointed.
“Sure, toots. Mind telling me which one?”
Of course, like any midtown avenue and side street on a Friday night, the roads were chockablock with yellow cabs, all hired.
“Make a right, it’s halfway down.” I jumped in. There were about a dozen cars between our target and us. “Twenty dollars says you can’t keep up with it.”
Sandy gave me a scorching look, bit his lip, and said, “They’ll eat my dust, buster.”
His bell ringing madly, Sandy pumped the pedicab up the pedestrian ramp and onto the sidewalk, yelling, “Pregnant lady! Out of the way! Pregnant and in labor! One side!”
Angie—always the quick study—rolled her velvet wrap into a ball, tucked it under her dress, and fitted it onto her abdomen. She assumed the last-trimester slouch and gripped her belly, moaning loudly.
Chinese-food delivery boys on bikes wobbled from our path, herding scurrying pedestrians onto car hoods and into doorways. That’s not uncommon in and of itself, mind you, except that for once it was the result of someone else’s recklessness.
“I think you’re overdoing it a little, Sugar,” I yelled to Angie.
“Keep it up, girl! We’re gaining,” Sandy growled over his shoulder, his bell jangling like that of a Good Humor man during a grand mal. “Pregnant, one side! Move it, mister: baby on board!”
The next intersection loomed. Bing and Marti’s cab turned right, heading downtown. Sandy was closing.
“Hang on, Pregnant Lady!” Sandy leaned on an air horn; it was so loud I almost blacked out. Folks crowding the street corner froze, stagger-stepped, and ultimately dove from our path as the pedicab parted the pedestrians, jumped the curb, and careened right onto Broadway after our target. Another jounce and we came back down on all three wheels.
Sandy ran the light, zipping past Bing and Marti’s cab.
“You’re ahead of them!” I prodded.
“Cool it, Pinstripe. We’re on Broadway. The cabs only use Broadway up here when they mean to go downtown, way down. Gotta stretch it out here a bit, may need the extra furlongs in the home stretch.” Sandy glanced back at Angie. “Okay, sweetheart, cool it with the moaning. Give birth to your wrap like a nice girl, and I don’t want no velveteen placenta messing up my cab,” Sandy cackled.
Sure enough, we played leapfrog with Bing and Marti’s cab all the way downtown, me with my hat over my face like I was sleeping and Angie with a disinterested look. We went all the way to Houston Street, a busy crosstown boulevard, where they hung a left. We followed about a block behind, Sandy having worked up a considerable sweat despite Broadway’s gentle downgrade. Way east, past the usual club areas, pool halls, and a famous kosher deli, Bing and Marti’s taxi made a right into a commercial area that’s deserted at night. But they didn’t penetrate far before pulling over, which gave us the opportunity to hang back at Houston Street.
Sandy groaned, drawing an arm across his forehead. “Whew! So, Pinstripe, what’s that worth to you?”
Angie and I climbed out, and I gave the cabbie four ten-dollar bills. “Nothing but tens from the judges. You get the gold medal.”
Sandy pocketed the bills. “Just the gold, thanks.” We left him at the corner sucking on his water bottle as we turned down the side street in time to see the yellow cab zoom away. A beacon wedge of doorway light folded into black as Bing and Marti disappeared into a building. Angie put on her shoes and we assumed the pace of any normal retro couple on a late-night stroll through a desolate part of town.
“I don’t like this.” I scanned our perimeter: just a sparse archipelago of streetlight atolls in a sea of urban gloom. “We note the building they went into, we go home. Tomorrow, in the daylight, we maybe come back and explore.”
Angie nodded, and I hoped she meant it. I figured we could sprint back up to the bright lights of Houston Street in a trice should things get scary, though we’d probably be sacrificing Angie’s shoes in the process.
It was a canyon of grimy, defunct storefronts on the ground floors of old redbrick buildings. Goldfarb’s Millinery. East Side Remnants. Lenny’s: MATZOH, GEFILTE. Max’s Haberdashery—We Steam Felt. Moshe Trucking. Bederman’s Wholesale. To a height of four stories above the storefronts, windows were boarded, shuttered, or dark behind the black zigzag of fire escapes. Traffic, radios, shouts, and honks—New York’s equivalent of waves at the shore—faded as we walked, beckoning us back to the relative safety of urban bustle.
The building they’d entered was obvious by the seam of light under the door. Gunther’s Thread was spelled out in peeling gold on the store glass, specks of light visible where the black paint had flecked. The hubbub of voices, of a crowd, was audible within, but deep within. In fact, our ears directed us toward the metal sidewalk cellar door, where the crowd was louder.
“They’re in the basement.” Angie pointed, getting down on her knees to put an eye at the latch hole.
“C’mon, let’s get out of here.” I snapped my fingers.
“Wow. I can’t see much except a few elbows and some folding chairs. Sounds like quite a crowd.”
“Angie: time to go,” I whispered. “We can’t crash this shindig. Marti will definitely spot me.”
Angie stood, brushing off her knees. “So what if she does?” she whispered back.
“I dunno. What if she thinks I’m following her? I mean, it seems pretty obvious that somehow she’s mixed up in Pipsqueak’s kidnapping.”
“Theft. Assuming this isn’t just some kind of coincidence.”
“How about ‘squirrelnapping’? ‘Puppetnapping’?”
Angie rolled her eyes. “What’s she going to do about it? There’s a whole lot of people down there. I can’t see her pulling a gun. Besides, you’ve caught her
off guard. She’ll probably think it’s coincidence or something. But she’ll have to think about it awhile before she does anything.”
Light suddenly poured from the front entrance. Like possums in the headlights, Angie and I squinted at the forms of two men standing in the open door. A retro man in a wide-striped suit stepped past us, gave us the once-over, and moved on up the block. The big silhouette in the doorway boomed, “Well?”
Chapter 13
Hi!”Angie chirped.
“We were just—” I chortled.
“Password?”
“Nobody told us about any password,” Angie snitted.
“Nobody who?” Silhouette leaned defiantly on the door frame, the shadow of a toothpick waggling in his lips.
“You mean who told us to come? Garth, who’s that friend of yours? The one that told us . . .”
“Friend of a friend, really.” I shrugged. “Jeez, Angie, whatsisname . . .” I snapped my fingers.
“Hardy har-har,” Silhouette boomed, standing aside. “Get on in.”
Before I could grasp what he meant, Angie glided into the speakeasy. “Thanks!” Angie nodded to the silhouette.
I followed, tipping my hat and bestowing a nervous smile up at the doorman. Out of silhouette, he was still looming large in what must have been a size-58 jacket. His neck and head were shaved close over cauliflower ears, a nasty-looking scar on his forehead arcing up into a streak of white hair on his scalp. A shoo-in nominee for the Heavy of the Year Award. He didn’t give us a second look.
Directly inside was a dusty, vacant shop, walls lined with empty spool pegs. A cracked glass counter on our right was piled high with hats. Attending was ennui personified as a bobby-soxer. She said nothing as she took my hat and held out a ticket.
Angie and I bounced eyebrows at each other and continued toward the only obvious route at the back of the room, where we went through a set of curtains. I heard Mr. Heavy open the front door and growl, “Password?” Snapping fingers followed, and the next group entered. So that was the password. And to think but for dumb luck we’d have been safely on our way home to call Dudley and explain our disappearance.
Skirting a room of aging crates and scattered excelsior, Angie and I descended a narrow stairway to the left, a rush of cigarette smoke and convivial murmuring rolling up at us.
I put a hand on Angie’s shoulder. “Take it easy with the small talk down here, okay? Don’t say anything if you don’t have to, not our names . . .” And I reflected that Angie had said my name in front of Mr. Heavy. Angie patted my hand as if to calm my nerves. As if.
We emerged into a large industrial basement, complete with cast-iron pillars. Nobody had gone to too much trouble to doll the place up. Stray crates, pallets, and dangling bare-bulb lighting constituted the decor, along with about twenty rows of folding chairs in a variety of different materials and vintages. At the head of the rows was a podium, and behind that a makeshift bandstand with musicians. We were about the last to arrive; only standing room was left available. Much of the congregation was smoking. We were too, of course, by default.
A dude in an extralong pencil-thin mustache handed us each a program as we entered, and we drifted to the far back corner of the room. Busy scanning the room for Bing and Marti, I didn’t look closely at the program but saw that the cover had a cartoon of a wolf in a zoot suit twirling a chain.
“It’s like church,” Angie said under her breath.
“Not like the churches Mom and Dad took me to, I’ll tell you that. Check that out.” I pointed with my chin at the far side of the room, where Bing, standing, gestured in earnest to a fellow with white hair, white dinner jacket, and a white Panama hat in his hands. I didn’t see Marti.
“He’s just a kid,” Angie whispered. “Kind of a silly boy smoking that pipe, wearing a straw boater. Who’s he trying to look like? Bing Crosby?”
“That’s my guess. You’re right, he is young, too young to be hanging around with Marti. She’s fifty plus if she’s a day.”
“You’re sure it was her?”
“Positive. The hooked nose and voice are a giveaway. Hey, that’s Vito. In the band!”
“Oh, my gosh! You’re right.”
A fat, older man in a loud checked suit, goatee, and a classic example of male-pattern baldness stepped up to the podium and tapped the mic. The musicians stubbed out their fags and gathered their instruments. The lights dimmed and a smoky spotlight beam snapped onto the podium. All eyes turned forward and the crowd lowered the volume to a murmur.
“Gang,” Checkers began, “Scuppy is running a little late. I—oh, here he is!”
Scuppy made his entrance from somewhere at the back of the room, and I wondered where the other entrance to the building was. In an alley? A freight elevator? The audience jumped to their feet, applauding.
Scuppy swaggered up to the podium, waving apologetically, and Checkers retreated. “Sorry I’m late, but my taxi was cut off by a pedicab rushing to the hospital with a pregnant lady.” The crowd laughed. “No, really!” Scuppy laughed. “Anyway, listen up, people. Maestro?”
The audience sat, and the band laid down a sleazy, urban Peter Gunn rhythm, the drummer working a cymbal with a steel brush.
“I want to welcome you all back to the Church of Jive and to welcome any newcomers who’ve come to get the skinny, to open their eyes, to awake to the syncopation lost years ago but regained by you, me, and a growing number of others. How many people here remember black-and-white televisions?”
Some hands went up.
Scuppy nodded thoughtfully. “Well, you at least saw the last era of freedom. I never did. We had a Magnavox console TV, and I was placed in front of that thing as a baby. And I remember . . .” Scuppy picked up the microphone and stepped in front of the podium, the spotlight following him. “. . . I remember, one of my very first memories, I was very small and used to crawl up to the screen and put my eye right up to the screen.” Pantomime began to accompany the narrative.
“I liked the little colored dots, the waves of red, blue, and green that undulated across the phosphorous inner coating, and wondered who was inside the TV. But it didn’t take long before I stopped noticing all the little dots, and I stopped wondering who was inside the TV. I just sat there.” He made a goofy face of someone stultified, and the congregation laughed.
“In the back of your eye, in a part of the retina called the macula, there’s a tiny spot containing the receptors that give you color vision. There are as many as six million cones. Did you know that the signal induced from these sensors travels along the optic nerve—a bundle of one million nerve fibers—into the vision center of your brain’s cerebral cortex? This is the same place where your ability to hear and understand and sleep are located.” Scuppy whipped the mic cord authoritatively. “Now, do you think that way back in the 1960s—in the middle of the Cold War—it was a coincidence—”
“No way!” someone testified from the audience.
“I don’t think so,” someone else added.
“—that the scientists at the Broadcast Standards Institute—an organization, mind you, rife with German, ex-Nazi scientists, and funded at least in part by the CIA—decided to have the red, blue, and green electron guns fire sixty scans a second in a frequency that sent waves along the optic nerve to the cerebrum and induced a kind of seizure? Now, I’m not talking about spazzing out.” Scuppy acted like a spaz to get a chuckle, and got it.
“You know how flashing red lights can cause epileptics to have a seizure?” Folks in the first row were nodding. “They know what I’m talking about. And how about this?” Scuppy pulled out a news clipping and held it up. “There’s a copy of this in your program. In Japan, a cartoon show caused children all over that country to go into seizures, to vomit. From flashing colored lights. And what happened? Did they pull the show? Did anybody even try to find out what that cartoon did to their brains? Or did our government look into the possibility that terrorists might be able to use this on Americ
ans?”
Scuppy froze, a look of wonder on his face. The congregation hushed. Slowly, Scuppy pulled from his jacket a handful of clippings, holding them out for everyone to see. “Well, gee. Guess what, people?”
“What!”
“Speak!”
“Give us the word!”
“It has happened in America. It happens all the time in America, in fact.” He plucked an article from his hand like the petal from a daisy. “May 1994 issue of The Medical Journal of Sciences. Says here that kids all over the United States of America have been experiencing seizures from video games. Repetitive, high-intensity, multicolored flashes caused what they call complex partial and absence seizures. No spazzing, just”—he squinted at the article, as if reading—“impaired consciousness, intense memory recall, déjà vu, confusional episodes, and audible and visual hallucinations. Well . . .” Scuppy let that article fall to the floor, and pulled another. “July eleventh, 1995, Mid-Atlantic Bulletin of Medicine. A woman has blackouts and acts strangely when she sees a certain talk-show host.” He let that one drop. “September 1996, a study by the Hecklen Neurology Institute reports someone who smelled bacon every time she saw a local TV sign-off video of the Stars and Stripes waving in the wind.” That one dropped. “River City Times, 1999, residents black out after a local TV broadcast of Oklahoma!” He let the rest of the clippings fall to the stage. “And these are just the cases we know about. The government is all jazzed up over terrorism, over the prospect that someone is going to get us with poison gas or a thermonuclear weapon. Tell me: Why, then, haven’t they gotten to this? Could be some foreign government, some towelheads, perpetrating this, practicing on small segments of the population before they go for New York. Tell, me: Why?”
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