While I was gaping at him, trying to encompass this incredible idea, he pointed down the street behind me and said, “Here they come again.”
“What? Who?”
“Comere,” he said urgently, grabbed my sleeve, and the two of us ducked into a cellar entranceway. “Keep cool,” the boy advised me. “They didn’t see us come in here.”
I tried to see what was happening out in the street, but it was difficult while at the same time trying to keep from being seen. Also, the street was lined with parked cars. Nevertheless, I did see the black car go slowly by, as ominous as the silence in the middle of a storm. I couldn’t see who was driving or how many people were in the car, but it seemed to me the aura of menace around it was inescapable.
After they’d gone the boy said, “You want me to go get a cop?”
“No, that’s all right,” I said. “I live just a few doors from here.” I got out my wallet, fished a bill from it without exactly knowing its denomination—I only knew it had to be either a single or a five—and in some embarrassment pressed it into the boy’s hand, saying, “A small token of my esteem.”
He took it casually and said, “Sure. They tryna keep you from testifying?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m not sure what they’re doing.”
“They’re shooting at you,” he said reasonably. “Yes. Well, goodbye.”
“See you around,” he said.
I took the remaining half-block to my building at a dead run, went up the stairs to the third floor at the same breakneck speed, and stopped short at my door with the sudden thought: What if they’re in there?
I stood indecisively in the hallway a minute or two, trying to think of some way to test for the presence of assassins in my apartment, but ultimately decided there was no way to test other than actually entering the apartment and seeing what happened. What finally emboldened me to do so was the thought that if they—whoever they were—had access to my apartment it was unlikely they would be driving around the city taking potshots at me from moving cars.
My supposition was correct; the apartment was as empty as I’d left it. After a quick search of all the rooms and all the closets I got on the phone and called Reilly at home, but he wasn’t there. So I tried him at Headquarters and he wasn’t there either.
Now what? I wanted to report this to the police, of course, but on the other hand I felt a little foolish just calling up some strange policeman and saying, “Someone is shooting at me from a car.” It would require so much explanation, and in fact, most of the explanation I wouldn’t even be able to offer.
I thought of phoning Steve and Ralph, the Homicide detectives—it seemed to me very likely that the people shooting at me were the same ones who had killed my Uncle Matt—but there was just something so oppressive about that vaudeville team that I doubt I would have phoned them if there’d been an assassin in every closet in the place.
No, what I wanted was my friend Reilly. Let him tell the other police. I called him again at home, hoping against hope, but there was still no answer, so I returned disconsolately to my reading chair, sat down in it, and failed to read the Times.
Every five minutes between then and eight-thirty I tried Reilly again, and never did find him home. Then, at eight-thirty, I remembered the girl who had approached me in Madison Square Park, the one who had warned me I was in danger and claimed to be on my side. I hadn’t believed her on either count at the time, but now it seemed that at least the first half of her statement was true. If people were shooting at me, it seemed fair to say that I was in danger.
Could the second half also be true? Was it possible she was on my side? Was it possible she could tell me who was shooting at me and why?
Nine o’clock, she’d said, that was when I was supposed to meet her at her place tonight—160 West 78th, I’d remembered the address without wanting to.
Should I go? It would mean leaving here now, because to get there later than nine o’clock might be useless. But I hated to go up there alone, without Reilly, without at least talking it over with Reilly, telling him what had happened and asking him what he thought we should do about it.
I’ll give him one last chance, I thought. I’ll call him at home, and if he’s there I’ll tell him the whole story. But if he isn’t there I’ll go up to 78 th Street myself and find out what’s going on. Anything is better than just sitting here, twiddling my thumbs.
Naturally enough, he wasn’t home.
Fine. Having made my decision, I was left with one other small problem; namely, how to leave this building and this neighborhood without being shot at any more. After all, they couldn’t reasonably be expected to go on missing forever.
Disguise myself? No. There were a total of three tenants in this building, and any watcher would readily guess who I had to be no matter what disguise I chose for myself.
Just bolt out the door and down the street, pell-mell? No again. A car can outrun a man every time. And if I were to betray the fact that I was now aware of them, they would throw aside subterfuge and attack much more openly.
The back way? There was a small garden behind the building, Mr. Grant’s domain, enclosed by high fencing on three sides. I wasn’t entirely sure, but it seemed to me that if one could get over that fence at the rear, it should be possible to get through the building behind this one and thus out onto the street one block away.
At any rate, it was worth a try. I changed to my black suit, put a dark sweater on under the jacket, and went downstairs to knock on Mr. Grant’s door.
Didn’t he ever do anything but eat? This time he had a chicken leg in his hand, as well as the inevitable napkin tucked into his collar. I said, “I’m sorry to interrupt you again, but I wonder if I could go out your back door.”
He was so bewildered I felt sorry for him. He said, “My back door?” He turned around, as though looking for it.
“It would take too long to explain,” I said. “It really would. But if you’d just let me go through your apartment and out the back door …”
“You mean, into my garden?”
“Well, through your garden. I want to go over the fence and into the building across the way.”
“Across the way?”
“I promise to explain the first chance I get,” I said.
I think he only stepped to one side, allowing me to enter, because it was easier than trying to understand me. He shut the door, then preceded me through his neat apartment to the rear door, unlocked and opened it, and stood aside again to let me out. As I stepped through he said, “You won’t be coming back?”
“Not this way,” I said. Which shows how little we know our own futures.
9
THERE WAS more than enough light, spilling from windows on all sides. I traversed the winding slate walk to the board fence at the far end of the garden, climbed up on a steel lawn chair there, hoisted myself the rest of the way up, and slid down the other side into a million rusting metal coils. Springs of some sort they were, attaching themselves to my feet or bounding off with mighty sprongs or merely clustering under me as I tried to regain my balance. There was nothing for it but that I should fall over, and so I did, with a crash and a clatter and a bi-di-ding.
I lay there unmoving, waiting for silence, which eventually arrived, to be immediately followed by the sound of a window being hurled open. A hoarse male voice shouted, “Shoo! Damn it, you cats shoo the hell out of there!”
I didn’t move.
We both waited and listened for half a minute or so, and then he gave vent to a couple more half-hearted shoos and shut his window again.
It was impossible to move without sound effects. Boing under my left knee, greeek under my chest, chinkle in the vicinity of my right arm. With many a plink and tunkle I crawled away from the fence and the ubiquitous springs, until I was at last clear of all of them except those which had attached themselves to my belt and cuffs. These I removed, with muffled brangs, and got rather shakily to my feet.
I was in a much darker yard than Mr. Grant’s, and one not nearly so well kept. Directly in front of me was the building I was headed for, with a barred window and a shut door at ground-level. Though lights were on in the upper windows, the ground floor was in total darkness.
It hadn’t occurred to me before that I would probably have to go through an apartment in this building, that the physical setup would more than likely be similar to my own building, with the rear entrance only to a ground-floor apartment. But I was apparently in luck; from the absence of light, and the time only a little past eight-thirty, it seemed this apartment must be empty.
I had never burgled a door before, and wasn’t entirely sure how to go about it. I began with this one by rattling the knob and proving to my own satisfaction that it was, like every other door in New York City, locked.
But then I noticed that one of the panes of glass in the door was broken, replaced—temporarily, I suppose—by a piece of cardboard. How securely could a piece of cardboard be fastened? I pushed on it experimentally, and it gave, being attached on the inside only by masking tape. I pushed it farther open, reached in, opened the door from the inside, and stepped cautiously into pitch blackness.
My only guide was the faint gray rectangle of the window. If I kept that always behind me, and if I moved with extreme care, it seemed to me I must sooner or later navigate the entire apartment and emerge at the front of the building. Slowly, therefore, I began to shuffle forward.
I had shuffled about six shuffles when I heard a creak. I stopped. I listened.
A light went on. Bedside lamp, directly ahead of me ten feet or so. Hand still touching the lamp switch, long bare arm leading my eye to the right, where a naked woman was sitting up in a double bed, staring at me with the blank stunned gaze of someone awakened by the incomprehensible. Beside her, farther from the lamp, the mound of a second person, still asleep.
But not for long. Neither taking her hand from the lamp nor her eyes from me, the woman began to pummel the mound with her other fist, crying, “George! George, wake up! A prowler, George!”
I was frozen. I was incapable of movement or speech, and so could neither escape nor explain. I just stood there, like Lot’s wife.
The mound abruptly sat up, proving to be a man with a remarkably heavy jaw and a remarkably hairy chest. He didn’t look at me at all. Instead, he looked at the woman and said, slowly and dangerously, “Who’s this George?”
She looked at him. She blinked. She put her hands to her face. She said, “Oh, my God, it’s Frank!”
I didn’t wait for any more, since I’d suddenly found my feet capable once again of motion. To the right of the bed was a doorway. I ran to it and full tilt into a closet full of female clothing.
I backed out again, sputtering and beating off dresses, and found Frank gradually becoming aware of my presence, if not my identity. He looked at me, staggering past with a white blouse wrapped around my neck, and said, “George? This is George?”
My only chance was out the door I’d come in. Flinging the blouse at Frank, I spun out the door, across the yard in the direction of the fence and home, and back again into the Sargasso Sea of rusty springs. I flailed through these, and back there somewhere that window was flung up again and the hoarse male voice bellowed, “All right, cats, you asked for it!”
I attained the fence, but could do no more. I sagged against it, waiting for whatever was going to happen next. Behind me, in the doorway of the apartment I’d just left, Frank was standing buck-naked and shouting, “Come back here, George! Come back and fight like a man!” Meanwhile, the woman was tugging at him from behind and crying, “Frank, it’s all a mistake, let me explain, Frank, please!”
Now another female voice suddenly cried, “Harry, you’ll get the cops on us!”
The hoarse male voice roared, “Outa the way, Mabel, this time they’re gonna get it!”
“Harry, don’t!”
“Frank, please!”
“George, you bastard!”
From somewhere back there, something made a small sound. It sounded like pah. Near me a piece of metal went ting.
It happened again. First pah behind me, and then ting close by. And a third time. And a fourth time. Pah-ting. Pah-ting.
I didn’t get it until there was a pah, and instead of a ting there was a sudden burning sensation in my right leg, just above the knee, as though I’d been stung by a wasp. Then I realized what was happening.
Harry was shooting at me with a BB gun.
Pah-ting.
I suddenly found new reserves of strength. Up and over the fence I went, clawing my way, and collapsed in a heap across the lawn chair on the other side.
After a minute or two I had my wind back sufficiently to get to my feet, remove the springs that had attached themselves to my clothing, toss them back over the fence—which set off a new paroxysm of fury back there—and limp on down the path to Mr. Grant’s back door.
I knocked, and soon he opened the door an inch, looked at me with some astonishment, and said, “Are you coming back?”
“Change of plans,” I panted.
He looked past me, in the direction of all the noise. Over there beyond his fence it sounded as though a war were going on: shouts and shrieks and clamoring. Mr. Grant said, mildly, “What on earth is all that?”
“Some sort of wild party,” I said. “Nothing to do with us.” I slipped past him into the apartment. “Thank you very much,” I said. “I’ll be going now.”
When I left him, he was a very baffled man.
10
THERE WAS a black car double-parked across the street, its motor throbbing. I stood in the vestibule, in darkness, and watched it for a while without seeing it do anything but sit there and throb. A liveried chauffeur sat in semi-darkness behind the wheel, and black side curtains were drawn to hide the rear seat.
It was them, there was no question of it. They didn’t know I’d finally become aware of them shooting at me before—or, that is, I’d finally been warned by a passing child—so they were waiting as bold as brass right in front of my door, expecting me sooner or later to come blithely out and down the steps and directly into a hail of gunfire.
Not a bit of it. I had to get out of here, and I was resigned to going out the front way, but something had to be done about that hail of gunfire.
I had one advantage. They didn’t know that I knew that they were trying to kill me. With a little luck, plus the element of surprise, I might be able to get past them after all. Zip out the door, leap down the steps, race away along the sidewalk, be gone before they knew what was happening.
It sounded good, all right, but somehow I just wasn’t doing it. Seconds ticked away forever, and I continued to lurk in the vestibule.
Until, looking far down the street to the right, I saw a police car coming, meandering along slowly the way they do, and I knew I was saved. They wouldn’t dare shoot at me with a police car right next to them.
I tensed, I crouched, I closed my hand on the doorknob, I waited while the police car inched its way down the street and every nerve in my body slowly tied itself into a half-hitch. Until, until …
The police car approached the double-parked black automobile, started past it, came even with it …
And out the door I went, zip, according to plan. Down the steps, leap, and away along the sidewalk, race, and not a single shot was fired.
Also, it was a one-way street. They couldn’t merely U-turn and come swooping after me, they would have to completely circle the block. With any luck, I could be in a cab and racing uptown long before they made it.
Of course, there’s no such thing as a taxicab in New York City when you want one. That is, there are cabs, thousands and thousands of cabs, but they’re all off-duty. They streamed by me in schools, in coveys, in congeries, every bloody one of them off-duty, while I waved my arms around like the signal-giver on an aircraft carrier.
At last there showed up a cab whose driver had apparent
ly decided to work a second hour today. Into it I leaped, shouting, “Uptown! Hurry!” So up he dawdled to the next corner, where the light was red, and stopped there.
“These lights are set at twenty-two miles an hour, my friend,” he said. “So that’s the speed I’ll hurry at, if it’s okay with you.”
“Whatever you say,” I said, while simultaneously trying to hide myself from the world and look all around for the black car. I failed to see it, and I hoped it was failing to see me, and several weeks later the light changed and we began to crawl uptown at twenty-two miles an hour.
I was encouraged to see, when we turned onto 78th Street, that the only car that made the turn after us was a little gray Peugeot, driven by a woman in a huge floppy hat. As the Peugeot went on by us I paid the driver, left his cab, and hurried across the sidewalk and into the building.
Locked glass doors were in front of me, with a panel on the wall to their right containing nameplates and doorbells. But what was the name the girl had given me? I couldn’t for the life of me remember.
Maybe if I looked at all the names, the right one would ring a bell. I ran my finger down the rows, looking at all the names …
Smith?
Could it possibly have been Smith? Surely no one would use the name Smith in a situation like this. And yet that was the only one that caught my attention at all. And it did seem as though I remembered her having used that name, giving me this address and then the name Smith.
Well. Obviously there was nothing to do but try. It was already ten minutes past nine, and getting later every second.
I pressed the button beside “Smith 3-B,” and after a minute a metallic and vaguely female voice said through the grill above the nameplates, “Who is it?”
“Fitch,” I told the grill. “Fred Fitch.”
The door buzzed. I pushed it open and went into a long thirtyish lobby with the elevator at the far end.
The elevator was also on the ninth floor. I pushed the button and watched the numbers over the doors light slowly one after the other in reverse order. A while after the number I went on, the doors slid open and there was the elevator.
God Save the Mark Page 6