Abbie hurried to me and whispered, “What’s going on?”
“Summit meeting,” I said. I took a deep breath and sat up and wiped my brow. “Napoli and Droble are talking things over in the kitchen.”
“Napoli and Droble? Both of them?”
I nodded. “You don’t know how it felt to be in there with them,” I said.
“I can imagine,” she said.
I wasn’t sure she could. I said, “You know, years ago somebody put an ad in a couple of papers in New York for a guaranteed bug killer, to be delivered with complete instructions. It cost a dollar or two, I don’t know how much. So a lot of people sent in their money, and they got a package back, and in the package there were two ordinary bricks, one lettered A and the other one lettered B. And a sheet of paper with instructions: ‘Place bug on brick A. Hit with brick B.’ In that kitchen just now, I finally understood what the bug felt like.”
Abbie, hunkered down in front of me, elbows on my knees, took my hand in hers and squeezed. “I know,” she said. “It must have been terrible.”
“I only hope,” I said, “that when it’s over they don’t decide we’re a couple of loose ends that ought to be tied off. Like Captain Kidd taking care of the diggers after burying treasure. I wish we still had that gun of yours.”
“We’re better off without it,” she said. “It was just about useless anyway. It shot way off to the left all the time, you had to aim there if you wanted to hit over there, and it was so light even if you did hit somebody you wouldn’t do him much damage. And if we did have it and you showed it to that bunch in the hall, they’d fill you up with so much lead we’d have to paint you yellow and use you for a pencil.”
“You don’t have to paint me yellow,” I said.
She smiled and shook her head. “You’re braver than you pretend,” she said.
“Not me. You’ve got it wrong which is the pretense.”
Somebody shouted, angrily.
We looked at one another. We looked at the hallway.
Somebody else shouted, also angrily. Two voices shouted angrily at the same time.
I said, “The foolish thing is, I let them all in. I can’t remember why.”
Abbie said, “Do you think we’re in any danger?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “We’re in a cage full of irritated crocodiles. There’s nothing for us to worry about.”
“Maybe we ought to get out of here,” she whispered.
“Have you seen lately what’s between us and the door?”
She leaned closer to me. “Fire escape.”
“What?”
She gestured with her head at the window beside which Mrs. McKay was sitting. She’d continued to sit there since I’d come into the room, ignoring the two of us, ignoring the shouts which had subsided now, ignoring everything. Her arms were folded, her back was straight and her jaw was set. She glared into the middle distance as though seeing an apparition there of which she disapproved.
I put my head next to Abbie’s and whispered in her ear, “There’s a fire escape there?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Where does it go?” I whispered.
“Away from the apartment,” she whispered.
“That’s a good place,” I whispered. “Come on.”
I got to my feet and hoisted Abbie up, and the two of us tippy-toed across the room. The only person in sight was Louise McKay, who continued to ignore us until we were almost on top of her, at which point she focused on me with a glare intended to rout me in case I had it in mind to start a conversation.
I didn’t. “Excuse me,” I said, and edged around between the chair she was in and the floor lamp next to it. I raised the window shade.
Mrs. McKay said, “What are you doing?”
I didn’t answer her, I was too busy unlocking the window, but Abbie said, low-voiced, “We’re getting out of here. Do you want to come along?”
“I live here!” she said, very loudly.
I raised the window, and an icy blast rushed in. I’d completely forgotten it was winter outside and here I was in shirt sleeves. Not to mention Abbie in a miniskirt.
Mrs. McKay shouted, “Close that window! What do you think you’re doing?”
“Oh, you’re a pain,” I said, exasperated beyond endurance, and threw a leg over the windowsill. “Come on, Abbie, before this nut rouses the crocodiles.”
Abbie tried, low-voiced, to talk sweet reason to Mrs. McKay, who interrupted with another shouted question or demand or order or something. In the meantime I slid through the open window and out onto the fire escape. I turned around and stuck my head back in and whispered shrilly, “Abbie, come on!”
Mrs. McKay was really yelling now. For some damn reason she was tipping off the heavies. Abbie finally gave up her missionary work on the idiot woman, came hurrying around the chair to my frantically waving hands, and as I helped her over the windowsill I saw past her shoulder the other end of the living room filling up with mean-looking guys with guns in their hands.
“Stop!” somebody shouted.
Was he out of his mind?
26
Five P.M. of a freezing windy Sunday in late January, the sky a solid mass of gray clouds seven miles thick, the thin vague daylight already fading toward twilight, the temperature somewhere in the teens, and where am I? Standing on a fire escape four stories up in my shirt sleeves with gunmen shouting Stop at me. Not to mention the crease in the side of my head where I’ve already been laid low by one bullet.
The thing is, we’d been more or less safe up till now because nobody had really known what was going on, everybody had been confused and had wanted to find out which end was up before doing anything irreversible like bumping off witnesses. But now Napoli and Droble were working it all out in the kitchen, and whether they succeeded in reaching an entente or not was unimportant, because either way Abbie and I were about to become extraneous. We knew too much to be let go and too little to be kept around, and that left only one choice. Ergo, the fire escape.
This was the rear of the building, and looking down it seemed to me there was nothing down there but a cul de sac, concrete all the way around, high walls on three sides and this building on the fourth with what you know and I know was a well-locked door. I looked up, looked down again, looked up again, looked through the window at all those big-shouldered gun-toting gorillas pounding across the living room toward me, and when Abbie started to go down the fire escape I grabbed her arm and shouted, “No! Up!”
“Come on!” she cried, either not hearing me or not understanding me. She kept wanting to go down.
There was no time to explain things. I just clamped a hand around her wrist and took off.
She fought me for a while, yelling my name and other things, but a certain feeling of urgency gave me strength, and as I lunged up the metal stairs Abbie came bouncing and ricocheting and complaining along behind me. That is, she complained until the sound of the first shot.
That was a very strange sound, actually. It went BANG-dingdingdingding, the first part being the sound of the gun being fired and the rest being the sounds of the bullet ricocheting around the fire escape. So far as I know, it came nowhere near us, but it sure stopped Abbie from hanging back.
The building was six stories high. We went tramping and clanging up the steps, the railings ice-cold to our touch, the wind blowing all around us, and a half a dozen or so shots were fired, none of them doing any good at all. The fire escape served as a kind of screen, through which bullets couldn’t seem to find their way.
Then we were on the roof. I looked back down and saw two of them climbing out the window down there, in a hurry and in each other’s way. As I watched I saw them squabbling and pushing at each other, neither able to get out the window with the other one in the way. One from each gang, no doubt.
Well, they wouldn’t be able to hold each other up forever. I turned back to Abbie, who was standing there rubbing her wrist and glaring at me. Shouting to b
e heard above the wind, she yelled, “What did you come up here for? Now we’re trapped!”
“Cul de sac!” I shouted, pointing down. “No way out down there!”
“Well, there’s certainly no way out up here!”
“Come!”
I grabbed her other wrist this time, and started running. She might have wanted to argue, but you can’t argue and run at the same time, so there wasn’t any more discussion for a while.
We were in the middle of the block, on one of a row of similar buildings with identical roof heights. Knee-high brick walls separated the roof areas of each building, and on each roof there was a brick structure containing the staircase and elevator housing, a chimney, a few narrow air shafts surmounted by shielded fans and a number of teetering television aerials. We ran around all the structures and jumped over all the walls, and when we’d gone three buildings I paused to try a staircase door. Locked. I grabbed Abbie’s wrist again and ran on.
The fourth building’s door was locked. The fifth building’s door was locked. Somebody took a shot at us, and a television antenna near us said ping. I looked back, and here came half a dozen of them, all piling out onto the roof back there where we’d started.
“Oh, God damn it,” I said, and went on running. There were more bangs from behind us, more pings all around us. I initiated a dodging sort of run, back and forth, angling this way and that.
The sixth building’s door was locked.
“Hell!” I said. “If only we had that blasted gun of yours! It would get us through a door anyway.”
“Don’t talk,” Abbie advised me, gasping. “Run.”
I ran. Without my holding her wrist, Abbie ran alongside me. I don’t know about her, but I didn’t feel the cold at all.
Seventh building. I slammed into the door, it fell open, I fell downstairs.
27
Abbie was shaking my shoulder and saying, “Chet?”
“Boy,” I said. I struggled to sit up. “Wow,” I said.
“Are you all right?”
“I think my chassis’s out of alignment.” With the help of Abbie and a handy wall I dragged myself to my feet.
“You ought to be more careful,” she said. “You scared me half to death.”
“Thoughtless of me,” I said. I moved all my limbs and turned my head back and forth. Everything seemed to work all right.
“Can you run?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said, and staggered up the stairs.
“Not that way!” she shouted. “That’s the way we came from!”
“I know it. Buzz for the elevator.”
I tottered to the top of the stairs and slammed the door. There was a bolt, which I threw home, and then I blundered back down again, this time managing to stay on my feet.
The elevator wasn’t there yet. “It was on one,” Abbie said. She squinted at the little dial by the call button. “Just passing four.”
Somebody thudded on the door up there.
“I wonder if they’ll shoot the lock off,” I said, looking up, and a gun went bang and the door went ngngngngngn but didn’t open.
The elevator oozed into view. We jumped in, I pushed the first-floor button, and the roof door took another bullet. We began to drift leisurely down the elevator shaft.
I said, “Where’s your car?”
“In a lot on 48th Street. But I don’t have the ticket. I don’t have my purse. I don’t have anything.”
I patted my behind. Yes, I had my wallet. I was wearing my own clothes, the only problem being that I wasn’t wearing enough of them. I said, “We’ll just have to hope they remember you.”
“It was a huge lot,” she said, “with a hundred guys working there. They won’t remember me, and I don’t have any identification.”
The elevator inched past three. I said, “We have to have a car. We can’t run around the streets. If they don’t get us, the cold will.”
“I know,” she said. “Do you suppose they all ran out? Maybe we could sneak back into the apartment and get our things.”
“Abbie,” I said, “you aren’t thinking.”
“I guess that was kind of fantasizing, wasn’t it?” she said.
The second floor went by, lingeringly.
I stared at the elevator door. “We’ve got to have a car,” I said. I knew it was up to me. Time to start being the resourceful hero.
The elevator door opened. First floor, everybody out.
Abbie said, “What are we going to do, Chet?”
She was counting on me. I looked at her and said, “We’re going to run. Think later.”
“Listen!”
I heard it. Feet pounding down the stairwell. I grabbed Abbie’s hand and we ran.
Standing in the elevator we’d had a chance to cool off a bit, and when we hit the outside air with our clothing damp from perspiration we both staggered at the impact of the cold. “Oh, boy!” I shouted.
“H-h-h-h-h,” Abbie said.
I looked down to the right, just as three guys on the sidewalk in front of Tommy’s building saw us and started frantically pointing us out to each other. Any minute now they were going to stop pointing and start running. I turned and ran the other way, Abbie’s hand still clutched in mine, Abbie herself trailing along somewhere in my wake like a water skier.
I got to Ninth Avenue, and took a second to look back. The three on the sidewalk were just passing the building we’d come out of, and the rest of them were boiling out that building now. Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.
I turned left, for two carefully-thought-out reasons. First, it didn’t involve crossing any streets. Second, it got me out of their sight faster. Which is to say I was running blind.
People in New York never pay any attention to anything. The middle of January, two coatless, hatless people go running pellmell up Ninth Avenue at five o’clock in the afternoon, the sidewalk full of kids walking around and fat women talking to each other and guys in cloth hats waiting for buses, and I doubt any one of them gave us more than a passing glance. Maybe some kid, more impressionable than most, said to some other kid, “Hey, look at them nuts,” but that would have been about the extent of the excitement we caused.
I was running in a straight line now, so when I got to the corner of 47th Street, I ignored my carefully-thought-out reasons from before and just went straight ahead across the street. I also ignored whether the traffic light was red or green, and was therefore nearly run down by an off-duty cab. He slammed on his brakes, I slammed on his hood, and Abbie piled on me from behind.
The cabby rolled his window down and stuck his head out and said, “Whatsa matter witchoo? Wyncha watch where you’re goin?”
I’d been in the wrong, of course, but I knew better than to admit it. I was about to go into my automatic offensive response when I looked again and realized I recognized the cab. Not the driver, the cab. It was one I’d driven, it belonged to the V. S. Goth Service Corporation.
Of course! A cab!
I said, “Take us to—”
“Don’tcha see the sign, dummy?” He leaned out farther to stick an arm up and point at it.
“You’re going to Eleventh Avenue and 65th Street, dummy,” I told him, “and so are we.” I ran around his head and pulled open the rear door. Half a dozen slightly overweight hoods were puffing away at full steam in the middle of the block, a sight that even some New Yorkers couldn’t resist looking at.
Abbie jumped into the cab and I jumped in after her. The cabby said, “Them guys friends of yours?”
“We’re eloping,” I said. “Those are her brothers. Let’s go.”
He looked at the track team again, made a how-about-that? face, and we finally got moving.
It took him half a block to start talking, and then he said, “Don’t do it.”
I looked at the back of his head. “Don’t do what?”
“Don’t get married,” he said. “I got married, and what did it get me?”
“You got to be careful w
ho you marry,” I said.
He glared at me in the rear-view mirror.
“You making cracks about my wife?”
That’s the kind of conversation you can’t win. I said, “No,” and looked out the window.
We were stopped by the light at Tenth Avenue, of course. It has been my experience in my six years as a cabdriver that I would say I have spent four and a half of those years sitting in front of red lights. I looked out the back window, and here they came, just turning the corner way back at the other end of the block, running full tilt, arms pumping, ties whipping out behind them, jackets open. Most of them were just in suits, only two wearing overcoats, and if they ever slowed down they were going to be mighty cold.
The light turned green and we crossed Tenth Avenue and went to Eleventh Avenue, where the light was red. “You folks left without your coats,” the cabby pointed out. He’d apparently decided to forgive my slur against his wife.
“We were in a hurry,” I said.
“You must be elopin’ to Miami.”
“That’s right,” Abbie said, and grinned at me, and reached over to squeeze my hand.
“Don’t I wish I was there right now,” the cabby said, and the light turned green. We made our right and went one block to 48th Street, where the light was red. “You folks flyin?”
“You bet we are,” Abbie said.
“That’s the only way to go,” he said. “Right? Right?”
“Right,” Abbie said.
The light turned green. We made eight blocks, and at 56th Street got stopped by another light. All in all it took us three greens to get to 65th Street, and it turned out we had us a talkative driver. By the time we got where we were going he’d told us about his two airplane rides, about Miami, and about his brother-in-law’s car-wash operation in Long Island City which he could have had a half interest in only it had been during New York’s water crisis and he’d figured it was too dangerous to invest in something that used water and now he could kick himself.
I could have kicked him, too. My own feeling when driving a cab is that the customer should decide if he wants to hold a conversation or not. If somebody says something to me, I respond. But I don’t push conversations on people who don’t want conversations.
Somebody Owes Me Money Page 16