by Douglas Lain
Don’t want to.
Your wife is waiting.
By now she’ll be fast asleep.
You’ve had too much to drink again.
So? What else is new?
Go home.
A cab cruised past him going west. Northwest was the direction of his apartment. The cab’s sign was lit. He could have flagged it down. A simple wave of the hand. He didn’t. He needed something. He wanted to feel something.
Now what the hell does that mean?
59th was quiet. No breeze. Nobody on the street but him. There was traffic heading south on 9th half a block away but not here and even on 9th the traffic was light, he could barely hear it hissing by.
So here he was, alone. Staring up at a living room window and afraid to look away or even to blink for fear that if he did it would be exactly that moment she’d choose to appear and not any other moment and not again, afraid of the perversity of incident and chance, perhaps because it was precisely incident and chance that had got him here in the first place. She a new bartender, he a regular. Quickly becoming friends, far more slowly becoming lovers—two years before that happened—not until a casual date that left them alone in a crowded noisy new dance club they found not to their liking at all, waiting for two other friends to return from the bar so they could get the hell out of there, a single slightly boozy hug turning to a surprisingly lovely kiss and then more and more and before they knew it two more years had gone by and love had trapped them as surely incident and chance could trap anyone.
The window blurred over.
He wiped his eyes.
He was aware of sirens in the distance, somewhere around Times Square.
The window blurred again.
Were the sirens doing this? Some fucking ambulance making him cry? Somebody else’s distress? Some stranger’s? It was possible. These days anything was.
But that was too damn ridiculous even for him and no, he saw what it was now, literally saw it in that way that the mind imposes an image it chooses over the eyes so that what the eyes see in the natural world disappears for a moment, unable to compete, utterly sterile compared to the image the brain mandates. He saw it, vividly, sobbed once because he knew that in the natural world he might never see it again and certainly not the way he did now, directed so wholly at him—her open happy smile—and turned and started home.
FIVE
The composite on the nightly news was not great.
They’d got the nose right and the chin mostly but the forehead was way too high and the eyes were completely wrong because the eyes in the composite were bland, they held nothing, while his were full of . . .
. . . what?
Something. He didn’t bother trying to go there.
They were off on the numbers too. They had him down for around fifteen, twenty jobs this year. He had to laugh. The number was more like thirty, thirty-five. Roughly one every week and a half. He figured that by the end of his own personal fiscal year which began and ended on his birthday just before Christmas he’d take in fifty, maybe sixty grand. Not as much as if you were robbing banks but bars were a whole lot safer. Bars were vulnerable.
For one thing you didn’t work in daylight except to cruise for likely joints to hit. You didn’t have much in the way of surveillance cameras to worry about. And you didn’t have some retired cop with an attitude, some asshole armed guard willing and stupid enough to start blazing away at you.
It was a pretty rare bartender who was willing to die for the till and his tips.
That guy last week, though. That asshole actually chasing him.
He thought he’d put the fear of god in him. Especially that last hard whack on the head. He guessed there had to be a first time for everything.
Usually the getaway was simple. You headed for the nearest subway, didn’t matter where you went once you were on it. If there was a bus handy you caught that. You got off and had a beer or two at another bar far away and then you went on home.
They’d worried out loud on the news about his gun. Some police lieutenant mouthing off. Said that seeing as he had a gun, sooner or later he was going to use it. That was bullshit. His weapons were surprise and fear. The gun was only window dressing. Loaded window dressing but window dressing all the same.
Then they tried to link him up to a wider trend. All very ominous. Seems that shootings in the City were up twenty-four per cent over the same month last year—the figure spiked by the thinned ranks of the NYPD who were now on anthrax, security, and Ground Zero duty since World Trade Center instead of manning street crime.
Again, bullshit. He wasn’t part of any goddamn trend. He just did what he always did.
Plain old-fashioned armed robbery.
He sat on the sofa and sipped his beer. The composite didn’t worry him. Except for the eyes he was blessed with one of those more or less basic faces, a kind of no-frills face, one that set off no bells and whistles in anybody. Acceptable—that was how he liked to think about it. Acceptable enough so that guys had no reason either to fear him, be impressed or intimidated by him or even to remember him for that matter. Acceptable enough to women so that he got himself some pussy now and then. Not a hard face and not soft. No scars, no dimples, no cleft palates or cleft chins.
The composite didn’t work. His face was far too mutable.
The hair you could cut or color. For the line of forehead, a hat or a baseball cap. You could change the eyes with colored contact lenses or no-scrip glasses or just by trimming down your eyebrows a bit. Or darkening them with eyebrow pencil.
He thought eyebrows were seriously underrated.
You wanted to avoid a good tan. A good tan was memorable to New Yorkers, who were used to pallor. You made the mistake getting of a tan, you powdered it. Physique was changeable as the goddamn weather. You’re on the tall side like he was? five-eleven? So you’re stoop-shouldered now and then. You flex the knees. Build? Baggy sweaters or business clothes one time, jeans and tee-shirt the next.
Backpack on one job, shopping bag or briefcase on another.
He finished the beer and frowned at New York One. New York One was supposed to be about New York City, wasn’t it? But now they were going on and on about the fucking anthrax again. If it wasn’t the anthrax it was the fucking war in Afghanistan or else the fucking World Trade Center. Who cared if some senator’s assistant or postal clerk got anthrax—inhaled, cutaneous, or shot up the ass? Who cared if the towelheads took out skyscrapers?
He strictly worked ground-floor.
They ended with some puff piece about this guy who had to be the most politically correct asshole on the face of the earth—some Westchester dentist who was offering to buy up all the neighborhood kids’ Halloween candy so they didn’t rot their teeth. Fuck their teeth. He turned the damn thing off and got up and tossed the beer can into the sink.
Time to get.
In the bathroom shaving he glanced down at his various toiletry items and got a really great idea.
“You’re lucky,” the bartender said. “I was just about to tell my friend here last call. What’ll it be?”
“Miller, thanks.”
“Miller coming up.”
The barkeep’s friend probably didn’t know him from Adam. His friend looked to have been on a long night’s pub crawl and only one step up from blue-collar, if that, while this was clearly a kids’ bar, Barrow and Hudson, pool table and concert posters, “Sweet Home Alabama” on the jukebox and the bartender not much more than a kid himself. Wire-rim glasses, rosy cheeks, spiked hair, good strong build under the tee-shirt. Irish maybe.
“Gettin’ cold out there?”
The kid poured a half glass of Miller into the beer mug and set it down in front of him.
“Nah. Good breeze, though.”
The barkeep took his twenty to the register. The guy next to him downed his beer and mumbled thanks and slid off the barstool and tapped his dollar fifty with his forefinger. He was tipping the bartender one fifty. Big spender
. He put his hands in his pockets and headed for the door. Which meant that this was going very nicely indeed.
“G’night. Thank you, sir. You take care now.”
The barkeep put his change in front of him. Scooped up his tip and dropped it in the bucket.
He slipped on the surgical gloves.
“You take care,” he said.
“S’cuse me?”
They said that a lot. You take care. You said it back to them, it threw them off balance. Maybe even started to worry them right then and there.
But this kid was only puzzled.
He slid the .45 out from behind his sport jacket. Rested it flat on the bar pointed at the barkeep’s trim flat belly.
“I said you take care. Now, listen real carefully and you’ll get to go home tonight to your girlfriend. Let’s say I’m an old college buddy of yours and I’m closing up with you, so you do what you do every night, only I’m here. That’s how I want you to act. I’m just here having a drink. You lock the door and hit the lights outside and you dim the ones in here. Only difference is after that you go to the register and instead of counting it you empty it into this bag.”
He handed the Big Brown Bag from Bloomie’s across the counter.
“Open it and put it on the floor. That’s it. Very good. Now go about your business. And don’t even think about opening that door. I know you really want to but see, it takes too long to open it, throw it back and then go through. You’ll be dead by the time you hit the sidewalk, believe me. They’ve already got me down twice for Murder One”—it was a lie but it always worked—“so it doesn’t mean a thing to me one way or the other. I’m a very good shot, though. So it would mean a lot to you.”
For emphasis he clicked off the safety.
He could smell it then, that faint ammonia smell or something like ammonia. Bleach maybe. Fear-sweat coming off the guy. Fear cleansing the guy, pouring through the fat and skin all the way up from the organs, the organs unwilling to cease their function, unwilling to give up the pulse.
He put the gun between his legs and swiveled on the stool smiling as the guy moved on shaky legs out from behind the bar and fished his keys out of his pocket, locked the door, put them back in his pocket and reached behind a tall brown sad potted cactus and flicked off the outside lights.
“The dimmer’s over here, okay?”
The guy was pointing across the room to another half-dead fern or something.
“Why shouldn’t it be okay? I trust you. What’s your name?”
The guy hesitated. Like he didn’t want to say. Like it was getting personal.
“Robert . . . Bob.”
“Bob or Robert?”
“Bob.”
“Okay, Bob. Let’s dim the lights.”
He watched him cross the room, not even daring to glance out through the plate-glass window, afraid that even that much might get him shot. Good.
It was always amazing to him. Within minutes—seconds—you could get a guy performing for you like a trained seal. Half the time, like now, you didn’t even have to ask.
“You should water your fucking plants, Bob. Know that?”
He nodded, reached up and dimmed the lights.
“Okay, Bob, let’s get to the good stuff.”
He drank some of his beer. The barkeep moved back behind the bar and keyed open the register.
“Just the bills, now. No change.”
He watched him drop the bills into the Bloomies bag. Bob had had a pretty good night tonight. From where he sat it looked like well over a thousand. He’d read in the paper today that business was down in the City about $357 million since September 11th. Bars and restaurants particularly. You wouldn’t know it from where he was sitting.
“Tell you what, Bob. Let’s play a little game for your tip bucket. I’m sure you got a couple hundred in there. I’m sure you’d like to keep it. So, I lose, it’s yours. I win, it goes in the bag.”
“No, that’s okay, you can just . . .”
He started reaching for the bucket above the register.
“Hey! It’s not okay, Bob!”
He lurched to his feet and leaned over and shoved the barrel of the gun against the barkeep’s pale high forehead. He could feel the guy trembling right down though to the handle of the gun. Saw his glasses slip half an inch down his sweaty nose.
“Get this right, Robert. I say we play a little game, then we play a little game. Let me tell you something you don’t know about me, Bob. I don’t like people. In fact it’s fair to say that I fucking hate people. Not just you, Bob, you spikey-haired little Midwest shit-for-brains—though I do hate you, for sure. But see, I hate everybody. I’m a completely equal-opportunity hater—Jews, Arabs, Asians, blacks, WASPs, you name it. Some people think that’s a problem. You know how many people have tried to help me with this little problem, Bob? Have tried to reform me? Dozens! I’m not kidding you. But you know, it never takes. Never. You know why? Because my one real kick in life, the one thing that really gets me off, is to reform all those people who want to reform me. And it is my honestly held belief that the only way to reform people is to hurt ’em or kill ’em or both. Period.”
He sat back down again, rested the gun on the bar, his hand spread out on top of it.
Bob was visibly twitching now, mouth gulping air like a fish.
“Jesus, calm down, Robert, or this isn’t gonna work. Hand me the bag. And your keys. That’s good. Thanks very much. Now slide over that cutting board there and that little knife you use on the lemons.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Just do it. And dump the lemons.”
The kid glanced at his hand on the gun and then turned and did as he was told, set the knife and the board down in front of him.
“Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. You’re right-handed, right? Thought so. So you’re gonna put your right hand down, palm-side up—
that’s important, palm up—and spread your fingers. Then I’m gonna take this knife here, which I notice you keep nice and sharp—very good Robert—and jab around between your fingers. Slow at first, then maybe a little faster. Not too fast, don’t worry. Believe me, I’m good at this. I really am. But if I miss, even the slightest little cut, the slightest nick, you get to keep the bucket. I don’t miss, bucket goes with me. Fair enough? Sure it is. All you got to do is hold very still for me now.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“Stop with the oh Jesus, Robert. Try to be a fucking man for a change. Or you can just remember that I got the gun here, whichever works for you. Okay. Spread your fingers.”
The kid pushed his glasses up on his nose. They slid back down again. Then he took a deep breath and held it and put his hand down flat on the board.
He took the knife between his thumb on one side and forefinger and middle finger on the other and as promised, he started off slow. Thump, beat. Thump, beat. Thump. Then he picked up tempo and the thumps got louder because the force got greater and he really was good at this, damn he was good, thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump and the kid kept saying oh Jesus, oh Jesus, Bob a Christian through and through now and he knew that for poor Bob this was going on forever, this was an eternity and when he finally got tired out scaring the shit out of the kid pinned the web of his thumb to the cutting board so that the kid gasped and said aahhhh! and he said don’t you yell, Bob, whatever you do, don’t you dare fucking yell.
And Bob didn’t. Bob was toughing it out as expected.
He just stood there breathing hard, his left elbow propping him up on the bar against the pain and probably against a pair of pretty shaky legs and looked down at the spreading pool of blood between his fingers. He reached into his pocket and took out the envelope and opened it. Tore it down one side and blew a tablespoon of Johnson’s talcum powder directly into his face.
Bob looked startled. Blinking at him, confused.
“Anthrax, Bob,” he said. “It’s the real thing, I promise.”
He picked up the bag of money. Took fo
ur pair of rolled-up socks out of his jacket pockets and unrolled them and spread them out over the money.
Like he’d just done his laundry.
“You try not to breathe now for a while Bob, go wash your face. That shit’ll get right down into your lungs. And you know what happens then. Bucket’s yours. You won it fair and square. You take care now. And if you think I’ve treated you badly which I really hope you don’t, well hell, you should just see what I do to the ladies.”
Whether the kid believed him or not about the anthrax didn’t matter but he was betting he’d have a bad moment at least, the City being what it was nowadays.
He keyed the lock, looked right and left, threw the keys in the gutter and slipped off the gloves as he walked on out the door.
SIX
It had taken Claire a while to do this, to work up the will and the courage finally and Barbara had felt the same way. So they’d decided to do it together and that helped.
They stood in front of the Chambers Street subway exit on an unseasonably warm sunny day along with thirty or so other people scattered across the block staring south from behind the police barricades at the distant sliver of sky where only a month and a half ago the Twin Towers had been.
The smell was invasive, raw, born on a northerly breeze. It clawed at her throat. Superheated metal, melting plastic and something else. Something she didn’t like to think about.
She had never much liked the Trade Center. It had always seemed overbearing, soulless, a huge smug temple to money and power.
And now both she and Barbara were quietly crying.
All those people lost.
She was crying so much these days.
She knew nobody who had died here.
Somehow she seemed to know everybody who had died here.
She stared up into a bright blue sky tarnished with plumes of pale blonde smoke and after a while she turned around. She had never seen so many stricken faces.
Old people and young people and even little kids—kids so small she thought they shouldn’t even know about this let alone be standing here, they shouldn’t have to grow up in the wake of it either. It wasn’t right. A woman wearing jeans and an I LOVE NY—EVEN MORE tee-shirt was wiping back a steady stream of tears. A man with a briefcase didn’t bother.