Manhattan Noir 2

by Lawrence Block

  “It,” the heartless little radio jeers, “takes the worry out of being close.”

  Why is it taking them such a long time? What do they have to do, improvise as they go along? What for? They already knew what they had to do when they set out to come here.

  I’m sitting down again now, momentarily; knees too rocky for standing long. Those are the only two positions I have left; no more walking, no more running, no more anything else now. Only stand up and wait or sit down and wait. I need a cigarette terribly bad. It may be a funny time to need one, but I do. I dip my head down between my outspread legs and bring the lighter up from below, so its shine won’t glow through the blind-crevices. As I said, it doesn’t make sense, because they know I’m here. But I don’t want to do anything to quicken them. Even two minutes of grace is better than one. Even one minute is better than none.

  Then suddenly my head comes up again, alerted. I drop the cigarette, still unlit. First I think the little radio has suddenly jumped in tone, started to come on louder and more resonant, as if it were spooked. Until it almost sounds like a car radio out in the open. Then I turn my head toward the window. It is a car radio. It’s coming from outside into the room.

  And even before I get up and go over to take a look, I think there’s something familiar about it, I’ve heard it before, just like this, just the way it is now. This sounding-board effect, this walloping of the night like a drum, this ricochet of blast and din from side to side of the street, bouncing off the house fronts like a musical handball game.

  Then it cuts off short, the after-silence swells up like a balloon ready to pop, and as I squint out, it’s standing still down there, the little white car, and Johnny is already out of it and standing alongside.

  He’s come to take me to the party.

  He’s parked on the opposite side. He starts to cross over to the hotel. Someone posted in some doorway whistles to attract his attention. I hear it up at the window. Johnny stops, turns to look around, doesn’t see anyone.

  He’s frozen in the position in which the whistle caught him. Head and shoulders turned inquiringly half around, hips and legs still pointed forward. Then a man, some anonymous man, glides up beside him from the street.

  I told you he talks loud; on the phone, in a bar, on a street late at night. Every word he says I hear; not a word the other man says.

  First, “Who is? What kind of trouble?”

  Then, “You must mean somebody else.”

  Next, “Room 207. Yeah, that’s right, 207.”

  That’s my room number.

  “How’d you know I was coming here?”

  Finally, “You bugged the call I made to him before!”

  Then the anonymous man goes back into the shadows, leaving Johnny in mid-street, taking it for granted he’ll follow him as he was briefed to do, commanded to do.

  But Johnny stands out there, alone and undecided, feet still one way, head and shoulders still the other. And I watch him from the window crevice. And the stakeout watches him from his invisible doorway.

  Now a crisis arises. Not in my life, because that’s nearly over; but in my illusions.

  Will he go to his friend and try to stand by him, or will he let his friend go by?

  He can’t make it, sure I know that, he can never get in here past them; but he can make the try, there’s just enough slack for him to do that. There’s still half the width of the street ahead of him clear and untrammeled, for him to try to bolt across, before they spring after him and rough him up and fling him back. It’s the token of the thing that would count, not the completion.

  But it doesn’t happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life.

  My throat feels stiff, and I want to swallow but I can’t. Watching and waiting to see what my friend will do.

  He doesn’t move, doesn’t make up his mind, for half a minute, and that half a minute seems like an hour. He’s doped by what he’s been told, I guess. And I keep asking myself while the seconds are ticking off: What would I do? If there were me down there, and he were up here: What would I do? And I keep trying not to look the answer in the face, though it’s staring at me the whole time.

  You haven’t any right to expect your friends to be larger than yourself, larger than life. Just take them as they are, cut down to average size, and be glad you have them. To drink with, laugh with, borrow money from, lend money to, stay away from their special girls as you want them to stay away from yours, and above all, never break your word to, once it’s been given.

  And that is all the obligation you have, all you have the right to expect.

  The half-minute is up, and Johnny turns, slowly and reluctantly, but he turns, and he goes back to the opposite side of the street. The side opposite to me.

  And I knew all along that’s what he would do, because I knew all along that’s what I would have done too.

  I think I hear a voice say slurredly somewhere in the shadows, “That’s the smart thing to do,” but I’m not sure. Maybe I don’t, maybe it’s me I hear.

  He gets back in the car, shoulders sagging, and keys it on. And as he glides from sight the music seems to start up almost by itself; it’s such second nature for him to have it on by now. It fades around the corner building, and then a wisp of it comes back just once more, carried by some cross-current of the wind: Fools rush in, Where wise men never dare to go—and then it dies away for good.

  I bang my crushed-up fist against the center of my forehead, bring it away, then bang it again. Slow but hard. It hurts to lose a long-term friend, almost like losing an arm. But I never lost an arm, so I really wouldn’t know.

  Now I can swallow, but it doesn’t feel good anymore.

  I hear a marginal noise outside in the hall, and I swing around in instant alert. It’s easy enough to decipher it. A woman is being taken from her room nearby—in case the going gets too rough around here in my immediate vicinity, I suppose.

  I hear them tap, and then she comes out and accompanies them to safety. I hear the slap-slap of her bedroom slippers, like the soft little hands of children applauding in a kindergarten, as she goes hurrying by with someone. Several someones. You can’t hear them, only her, but I know they’re with her. I even hear the soft sch sch of her silk wrapper or kimono as it rustles past. A noticeable whiff of sachet drifts in through the door seam. She must have taken a bath and powdered herself liberally just moments ago.

  Probably a nice sort of woman, unused to violence or emergencies of this sort, unsure of what to bring along or how to comport herself.

  “I left my handbag in there,” I hear her remark plaintively as she goes by. “Do you think it’ll be all right to leave it there?”

  Somebody’s wife, come to meet him in the city and waiting for him to join her. Long ago I used to like that kind of woman. Objectively, of course, not close-up.

  After she’s gone, another brief lull sets in. This one is probably the last. But what good is a lull? It’s only a breathing spell in which to get more frightened. Because anticipatory fear is always twice as strong as present fear. Anticipatory fear has both fears in it at once—the anticipatory one and the one that comes simultaneously with the dread happening itself. Present fear only has the one, because by that time anticipation is over.

  I switch on the light for a moment, to see my way to a drink. The one I had is gone—just what used to be ice is sloshing colorlessly in the bottom of the glass. Then when I put the recharged glass down again, empty, it seems to pull me
after it, as if it weighed so much I couldn’t let go of it from an upright position. Don’t ask me why this is, I don’t know. Probably simple loss of equilibrium for a second, due to the massive infusion of alcohol.

  Then with no more warning, no more waiting, with no more of anything, it begins. It gets under way at last.

  There is a mild-mannered knuckle rapping at the door. They use my name. A voice, mild-mannered also, says in a conciliatory way, “Come out, please. We want to talk to you.” “Punctilious,” I guess, would be a better word for it. The etiquette of the forcible entry, of the break-in. They’re so considerate, so deferential, so attentive to all the niceties. Hold your head steady, please, we don’t want to nick your chin while we’re cutting your throat.

  I don’t answer.

  I don’t think they expected me to. If I had answered, it would have astonished them, thrown them off their timing for a moment.

  The mild-voiced man leaves the door and somebody else takes his place. I can sense the shifting over more by intuition than by actual hearing.

  A wooden toolbox or carryall of some sort settles down noisily on the floor outside the door. I can tell it’s wooden, not by its floor impact but by the “settling” sound that accompanies it, as if a considerable number of loose and rolling objects in it are chinking against its insides. Nails and bolts and awls and screwdrivers and the like. That tells me that it’s a kit commonly used by carpenters and locksmiths and their kind.

  They’re going to take the lock off bodily from the outside.

  A cold surge goes through me that I can’t describe. It isn’t blood. It’s too numbing and heavy and cold for that. And it breaks through the skin surface, which blood doesn’t ordinarily do without a wound, and emerges into innumerable sting pin pricks all over me. An ice-sweat.

  I can see him (not literally, but just as surely as if I could), down on one knee, and scared, probably as scared as I am myself, pressing as far back to the side out of the direct line of the door as he can, while the others, bunched together farther back, stand ready to cover him, to pile on me and bring me down if I should suddenly break out and rush him.

  And the radio tells me sarcastically to “Light up, you’ve got a good thing going.”

  I start backing away, with a sleepwalker’s fixity, staring at the door as I retreat, or staring at where I last saw it, for I can’t see it in the dark. What good would it do to stay close to it, for I can’t hold it back, I can’t stop it from opening. And as I go back step after step, my tongue keeps tracking the outside outline of my lips, as if I wondered what they were and what they were there for.

  A very small sound begins. I don’t know how to put it. Like someone twisting a small metal cap to open a small medicine bottle, but continuously, without ever getting it off. He’s started already. He’s started coming in.

  It’s terrible to hear that little thing move. As if it were animate, had a life of its own. Terrible to hear it move and to know that a hostile agency, a hostile presence, just a few feet away from me, is what is making it move. Such a little thing, there is almost nothing smaller, only the size of a pinhead perhaps, and yet to create such terror and to be capable of bringing about such a shattering end-result: entry, capture, final loss of reason, and the darkness that is worse than death. All from a little thing like that, turning slowly, secretively, but avidly, in the lockplate on the door, on the door into my room.

  I have to get out of here. Out. I have to push these walls apart, these foursquare tightly seamed walls, and make space wide enough to run in, and keep running through it, running and running through it, running and running through it, and never stopping. Until I drop. And then still running on and on, inside my head. Like a watch with its case smashed open and lying on the ground, but with the works still going inside it. Or like a cockroach when you knock it over on its back so that it can’t ambulate anymore, but its legs still go spiraling around in the air.

  The window. They’re at the door, but the window—that way out is still open. I remember when I checked in here the small hours of Wednesday, I didn’t ask to be given a room on the second floor, they just happened to give me one. Then when I saw it later that day in the light, I realized the drop to the ground from one of the little semicircular stone ledges outside the windows wouldn’t be dangerous, especially if you held a pillow in front of you, and remembered to keep your chin tilted upward as you went over. Just a sprawling shake-up fall maybe, that’s all.

  I pull at the blind cords with both hands, and it spasms upward with a sound like a lot of little twigs being stepped on and broken. I push up the window sash and assume a sitting position on the sill, then swing my legs across and I’m out in the clear, out in the open night.

  The little stone apron has this spiked iron rail guard around it, with no space left on the outer side of it to plant your feet before you go over. You have to straddle it, which makes for tricky going. Still, necessity can make you dexterous, terror can make you agile. I won’t go back inside for the pillow, there isn’t time. I’ll take the leap neat.

  The two cars that brought them here are below, and for a moment, only for a moment, they look empty, dark and still and empty, standing bumper to bumper against the curb. Someone gives a warning whistle—a lip whistle, I mean, not a metal one. I don’t know who, I don’t know where, somewhere around. Then an angry, ugly, smoldering, car-bound orange moon starts up, lightens to yellow, then brightens to the dazzling white of a laundry-detergent commercial. The operator guiding it slants it too high at first, and it lands over my head. Like a halo. Some halo and some time for a halo. Then he brings it down and it hits me as if someone had belted me full across the face with a talcum-powder puff. You can’t see through it, you can’t see around it.

  Shoe leather comes padding from around the corner—maybe the guy that warded off Johnny—and stops directly under me. I sense somehow he’s afraid, just as I am. That won’t keep him from doing what he has to do, because he’s got the backing on his side. But he doesn’t like this. I shield my eyes from the light on one side, and I can see his anxious face peering up at me. All guys are scared of each other, didn’t you know that? I’m not the only one. We’re all born afraid.

  I can’t shake the light off. It’s like ghostly flypaper. It’s like slapstick-thrown yoghurt. It clings to me whichever way I turn.

  I hear his voice talking to me from below. Very near and clear. As if we were off together by ourselves somewhere, just chatting, the two of us.

  “Go back into your room. We don’t want you to get hurt.” And then a second time: “Go back in. You’ll only get hurt if you stand out here like this.”

  I’m thinking, detached, as in a dream: I didn’t know they were this considerate. Are they always this considerate? When I was a kid back in the forties, I used to go to those tough-guy movies a lot. Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney. And when they had a guy penned in, they used to be tough about it, snarling: “Come on out of there, yuh rat, we’ve got yuh covered!” I wonder what has changed them? Maybe it’s just that time has moved on. This is the sixties now.

  What’s the good of jumping now? Where is there to run to now? And the light teases my eyes. I see all sorts of interlocked and colored soap bubbles that aren’t there.

  It’s more awkward getting back inside than it was getting out. And with the light on me, and them watching me, there’s a self-consciousness that was missing in my uninhibited outward surge. I have to straighten out one leg first and dip it into the room toes forward, the way you test the water in a pool before you jump in. Then the other leg, and then I’m in. The roundness of the light beam is broken into long thin tatters as the blind rolls down over it, but it still stays on out there.

  There are only two points of light in the whole room—I mean, in addition to the indirect reflection through the blind. Which gives off a sort of phosphorescent haziness—two points so small that if you didn’t know they were there and looked for them, you wouldn’t see them. And small
as both are, one is even smaller than the other. One is the tiny light in the radio, which, because the lens shielding the dial is convex, glows like a miniature orange scimitar. I go over to it to turn it off. It can’t keep the darkness away anymore; the darkness is here.

  “Here’s to the losers,” the radio is saying. “Here’s to them all—”

  The other point of light is over by the door. It’s in the door itself. I go over there close to it, peering with my head bowed, as if I were mourning inconsolably. And I am. One of the four tiny screwheads set into the corners of the oblong plate that holds the lock is gone, is out now, and if you squint at an acute angle you can see a speck of orange light shining through it from the hall. Then, while I’m standing there, something falls soundlessly, glances off the top of my shoe with no more weight than a grain of gravel, and there’s a second speck of orange light at the opposite upper corner of the plate. Two more to go now. Two and a half minutes of deft work left, maybe not even that much.

  What careful planning, what painstaking attention to detail, goes into extinguishing a man’s life! Far more than the hit-or-miss, haphazard circumstances of igniting it.

  I can’t get out the window, I can’t go out the door. But there is a way out, a third way. I can escape inward. If I can’t get away from them on the outside, I can get away from them on the inside.

  You’re not supposed to have those things. But when you have money you can get anything, in New York. They were on a prescription, but that was where the money came in—getting the prescription. I remember now. Some doctor gave it to me—sold it to me—long ago. I don’t remember why or when. Maybe when fear first came between the two of us and I couldn’t reach her anymore.

  I came across it in my wallet on Wednesday, after I first came in here, and I sent it out to have it filled, knowing that this night would come. I remember the bellboy bringing it to the door afterward in a small bright-green paper wrapping that some pharmacists use. But where is it now?