Manhattan Noir 2

by Lawrence Block

  The gassy water must have woken Isaac. “To the Bomber,” he said, “the greatest center-fielder in the world.”

  “To the Bomber.”

  “To the Bomber.”

  Harry “Bomber” Lieberman was a utility man the Giants had brought up in the second winter of the war, while their best men were overseas. But he didn’t play like a utility man. He was an antelope, crashing into fences and catching fly balls on a team that had already died.

  “To the Bomber,” Stoney said, smiling at Isaac. “Now kid, what the hell is it you want?”

  “You owe me money, Mr. Whitehall. I came to collect.”

  The warden turned to Mendel’s clientele, his nostrils flaring with pretended rage.

  “I made this boy. God is my witness. I gave him his start. I bring him through the door, and this is the thanks I get.”

  “I came to collect.”

  Mendel’s women were beginning to admire the brevity of Isaac’s style. They liked his bearish looks and the scratchy feel of his long johns. They shut their eyes and imagined Isaac riding them in one of Mendel’s back rooms.

  “Leave the boy alone,” said Diana Moon, the huskiest of these sisters. “Leave him alone.”

  “None ya business,” said Stoney, and he went to slap Isaac. But Diana Moon hooked her fingers into his belt. And the boy began to pound Stoney Whitehall in the middle of a long afternoon. Stoney fell under the bar, and Mendel’s forgot about him. He was only an air raid warden who’d delivered contraband ration booklets to Eric Fish, a renegade police captain and survivor of Murder, Inc. Fish had escaped the prosecutors because he wasn’t flamboyant or greedy. It was Fish who’d complained about Stoney’s fallen quota of stamps, Fish who’d promised to set the warden’s little house on fire if the quota didn’t rise. He was a Clinton Street boy who’d become a cop, made captain, and then resigned to run with Dasher Abbandando and Kid Twist. Dasher died in the electric chair. And Captain Fish? He had a dark, unsmiling face. He could walk into headquarters on Centre Street and drink coffee with his old chiefs.

  He didn’t sell any of the contraband books. He had the names on the covers removed with eradicating ink. His own forgers wrote in the names of particular police commanders, and the captain offered these dun-colored books as gifts. That’s how he’d built his own immunity during the war. He loansharked a little, always careful to waltz around his former comrades at 240 Centre Street. He got rich, but he never smiled. He must have been a student of Euripides, like Florsheim, the assistant principal.

  Fish had his own table at the far side of the bar. He was always there. He sat in his old captain’s tunic, the sleeves gone gray, the ribbons on his chest leaking a strange liquid. He called to Isaac across the smoke and gloom of Mendel’s, beer mugs hanging upside down from the wall. “I want the child that beat up my air raid warden.”

  Isaac approached the captain’s table, shivering with a curious joy. He imagined himself among the retinue of Eric Fish, the captain’s own little specialist in ration stamps. He looked upon the darkest face he’d ever seen. All Isaac could catch were eyes and the wings of a nose.

  “Who are you, then?”

  “Isaac Sidel.”

  “Son of Joel, the fur-collar prince?”

  “The same,” Isaac said, refusing to falter in front of that black mask.

  “Did you know that your father hires scabs?”

  “I’m not surprised,” Isaac said.

  “I threatened to kill him a couple years ago.” Isaac said nothing. “Tom Dewey got between me and your dad … Did you know I can never leave Manhattan? The D.A.’s men got together with the Treasury boys. They decided it might not look good on their scorecard to prosecute an ex-captain who had enough medals and ribbons to paper a district attorney’s ass. So I made a deal. I promised never to leave this fucking island. Otherwise you think I’d be sitting here, smelling piss? I’m a prisoner, Mr. Isaac.”

  Like the Man in the Iron Mask, Isaac thought, because the captain himself had become a mask in the darkness of Mendel’s.

  “Twist,” Isaac said.

  “What? Are you talking about Abe Reles? Go on. Ask me anything.”

  “What happened to the Kid?”

  “Loved him like a brother. But I couldn’t protect no songbird. They hid him on Coney at the Neptune Hotel. But I got to the cops that were minding Reles. It was simple business. Because Abe would have ratted on everybody.”

  “I figured you were the Coney Island connection,” Isaac said.

  “You figured right. But I’m still short one air raid warden. Stoney’s my butcher. He supplies me with stamps.”

  “But I did all the work.”

  “You? Your father’s a fucking millionaire.”

  “But he’s forgotten about the Sidels.”

  “I could break his head … as long as I don’t have to leave Manhattan island. How old are you, Mr. Isaac?”

  “Fourteen,” Isaac muttered, adding a year to his personal calendar.

  “One of Florsheim’s brats?”

  “Yes. But I’ve decided to leave school, Captain. I have a talent for stealing stamps.”

  “What do you think of Florsheim?”

  “He has egg on his tie. He’ll always be what he is. A smalltime philosopher.”

  “Ah, you’re not particularly fond of him.”

  “I am. He taught me Euripides. But Euripides can’t put food on the table.”

  “And I suppose you’d like to become my new air raid warden.”

  “You won’t regret it, Captain,” Isaac said, looking into that bloodless mask. “I could diversify. I don’t have to stick to stamps.”

  “And you’d break heads for me, keep whoever I wanted in line.”

  “Anything,” Isaac said.

  The captain leaped from his chair and pummeled Isaac into the ground. Ribbons fell off his chest. Medals flew everywhere. And Isaac felt the captain’s fists. Knobs of stone. Mendel’s women began to shriek. Diana Moon begged Eric Fish to stop this terrible vocation of slaughtering Isaac Sidel.

  The captain breathed on Isaac. “Go to school. If I catch you in Mendel’s, I’ll kill you to death.”

  Diana Moon washed his swollen face with a wet rag, and Isaac crawled out of Mendel’s. He returned to school, convinced that Florsheim was the captain’s favorite cousin. The world belonged to Euripides. And Isaac was left with the grief of having to become a student again. He envied the clarity of other people’s lives. The button men had their malt and cream soda. Sophie Sidel had her rags. Joel had the Salmagundi Club. Leo Sidel had the piss in his pants. Isaac looked in the mirror. There were lines of bitterness. The boy was beginning to grow some kind of mask.

  He went to Euripides. The assistant principal had been avoiding Isaac in the halls of P.S. 88. But Isaac sneaked into Euripides’s office. “How did you do it?”

  Euripides wouldn’t look at Isaac’s wounds. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “How did you do it?”

  “I went to school with Eric Fish. I coached him in geometry. He wouldn’t have graduated. He does me favors from time to time. We talk on the phone. I told him about the stamps. But I never dreamed he would hurt you, Isaac. I thought …”

  “I could have had a brilliant career. Now I’m Euripides…like you.”

  Isaac walked out of P.S. 88. He passed the copper dome of police headquarters, with its four clocks, its stone figures representing the five boroughs, its porches, its balustrades, its two lions out front with their big teeth, and he wondered about his fall from grace. The policemen had their own palace. But it wasn’t Mendel’s.

  He took the subway up to the Polo Grounds, crawled under a gate, sat in the bleachers while the wind howled in that empty shell. He wasn’t lying to conjure up Harry Lieberman. It felt safe among the empty seats, the green railing, the dead grass. He wasn’t a soldier or a center-fielder. He was a retired thief.

  A groundsman saw him in the bleachers. “Hey, you, you son of a bitch.”
<
br />   Isaac didn’t run. He sat in his green chair. The groundsman arrived with a hoe. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for the Bomber.”

  “Jesus, you from out of town? Harry don’t play in winter. The Giants are asleep … You figuring to sit until April or May?”

  “If I have to,” Isaac said.

  The groundsman laughed. He tried not to stare at Isaac’s face.

  “Sit, but don’t pee on the benches.”

  He abandoned Isaac, shoved across the stadium, and started to dig along some imaginary line between second base and the Bomber’s own big country of center field.

  LOVE IN THE LEAN YEARS

  BY DONALD E. WESTLAKE

  Wall Street

  (Originally published in 1992)

  Charles Dickens knew his stuff, you know. Listen to this: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

  Right on. You adjust the numbers for inflation and what you’ve got right there is the history of Wall Street. At least, so much of the history of Wall Street as includes me: seven years. We had the good times and we lived high on that extra jolly sixpence, and now we live day by day the long decline of shortfall. Result misery.

  Where did they all go, the sixpences of yesteryear? Oh, pshaw, we know where they went. You in Gstaad, him in Aruba, her in Paris and me in the men’s room with a sanitary straw in my nose. We know where it went, all right.

  My name’s Kimball, by the way, here’s my card. Bruce Kimball, with Rendall/LeBeau. Account exec. May I say I’m still making money for my clients? There’s a lot of good stuff undervalued out there, my friend. You can still make money on the Street. Of course you can. I admit it’s harder now, it’s much harder when I have only thruppence and it’s sixpence I need to keep my nose filled, build up that confidence, face the world with that winner’s smile. Man, I’m only hitting on one nostril, you know? I’m hurtin’.

  Nearly three years a widow; time to remarry. I need a true heart to share my penthouse apartment (unfurnished terrace, unfortunately) with its grand view of the city, my cottage (fourteen rooms) in Amagansett, the income of my portfolio of stocks.

  An income—ah, me—which is less than it once was. One or two iffy margin calls, a few dividends undistributed, bad news can mount up, somehow. Or dismount and move right in. Income could become a worry.

  But first, romance. Where is there a husband for my middle years? I am Stephanie Morwell, forty-two, the end product of good breeding, good nutrition, a fine workout program and amazingly skilled cosmetic surgeons. Since my parents died as my graduation present from Bryn Mawr, I’ve more or less taken care of myself, though of course, at times, one does need a man around the house. To insert lightbulbs and such-like. The point is, except for a slight flabbiness in my stock portfolio, I am a fine catch for just the right fellow.

  I don’t blame my broker, please let me make that clear. Bruce Kimball is his name and he’s unfailingly optimistic and cheerful. A bit of a blade, I suspect. (One can’t say gay blade anymore, not without the risk of being misunderstood.) In any event, Bruce did very well for me when everybody’s stock was going up, and now that there’s a—oh, what are the pornographic euphemisms of finance? A shakeout, a mid-term correction, a market adjustment, all of that—now that times are tougher, Bruce has lost me less than most and has even found a victory or two amid the wreckage. No, I can’t fault Bruce for a general worsening of the climate of money.

  In fact, Bruce … hmmm. He flirts with me at times, but only in a professional way, as his employers would expect him to flirt with a moneyed woman. He’s handsome enough, if a bit thin. (Thinner this year than last, in fact.) Still, those wiry fellows….

  Three or four years younger than I? Would Bruce Kimball be the answer to my prayers? I do already know him and I’d rather not spend too much time on the project.

  Stephanie Kimball. Like a schoolgirl, I write the name on the note pad beside the telephone on the Louis XIV writing table next to my view of the East River. The rest of that page is filled with hastily jotted numbers: income, outgo, estimated expenses, overdue bills. Stephanie Kimball. I gaze upon my view and whisper the name. It’s a blustery, changeable, threatening day. Stephanie Kimball. I like the sound.

  “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” Agatha Christie said that. Oh, but she was quoting, wasn’t she? Shakespeare! Got it.

  There was certainly a flood tide in my affair with Stephanie Morwell. Five years ago, she was merely one more rich wife among my clients, if one who took more of an interest than most in the day-to-day handling of the portfolio. In fact, I never did meet her husband before his death. Three years ago, that was; some ash blondes really come into their own in black, have you noticed?

  I respected Mrs. Morwell’s widowhood for a month or two, then began a little harmless flirtation. I mean, why not? She was a widow, after all. With a few of my other female clients, an occasional expression of male interest had eventually led to extremely pleasant afternoon financial seminars in midtown hotels. And now, Mrs. Morwell; to peel the layers of black from that lithe and supple body….

  Well. For three years, all that was merely a pale fantasy. Not even a consummation devoutly to be wished—now, who said that? No matter—it was more of a daydream while the computer’s down.

  From black to autumnal colors to a more normal range. A good-looking woman, friendly, rich, but never at the forefront of my mind unless she was actually in my presence, across the desk. And now it has all changed.

  Mrs. Morwell was in my office once more, hearing mostly bad news, I’m afraid, and in an effort to distract her from the grimness of the occasion, I made some light remark, “There are better things we could do than sit here with all these depressing numbers.” Something like that; and she said, in a kind of swollen voice I’d never heard before, “There certainly are.”

  I looked at her, surprised, and she was arching her back, stretching like a cat. I said, “Mrs. Morwell, you’re giving me ideas.”

  She smiled. “Which ideas are those?” she asked, and forty minutes later we were in her bed in her apartment on Sutton Place.

  Aaah. Extended widowhood had certainly sharpened her palate. What an afternoon. Between times, she put together a cold snack of salmon and champagne while I roved naked through the sunny golden rooms, delicately furnished with antiques. What a view she had, out over the East River. To live such a life….

  Well. Not until this little glitch in the economy corrects itself.

  “Champagne?”

  I turned and her body was as beautiful as the bubbly. Smiling, she handed me a glass and said, “I’ve never had such a wonderful afternoon in my entire life.”

  We drank to that.

  We were married, my golden stockbroker and I, seven weeks after I first took him to bed. Not quite a whirlwind romance, but close. Of course, I had to meet his parents, just the once, a chore we all handled reasonably well.

  We honeymooned in Caneel Bay and had such a lovely time we stayed an extra week. Bruce was so attentive, so charming, so—how shall I put it?—ever ready. And he got along amazingly well with the natives; they were eating out of his hand. In no time at all, he was joking on a first-name basis with half a dozen fellows I would have thought of as nothing more than dangerous layabouts, but Bruce could find a way to put almost anyone at ease. (Once or twice, one of these fellows even came to chat with Bruce at the cottage. I know he lent one of them money—it was changing hands as I glanced out the louvered window—and I’m sure he never even anticipated repayment.)

  I found myself, in those first weeks, growing actually fond of Bruce. What an unexpected bonus! And my warm feeling toward this new husband only increased when, on our return to New York, he insisted on continuing with his job at Rendall/LeBeau. “I won’t sponge on you,” he said, so
firm and manly that I dropped to my knees that instant. Such a contrast with my previous marital experience!

  Still, romance isn’t everything. One must live as well; or, that is, some must live. And so, in the second week after our return, I taxied downtown for a discussion with Oliver Swerdluff, my new insurance agent. (New since Robert’s demise, I mean.) “Congratulations on your new marriage, Mrs. Kimball,” he said, this red-faced, portly man who was so transparently delighted with himself for having remembered my new name.

  “Thank you, Mr. Swerdluff.” I took my seat across the desk from him. “The new situation, of course,” I pointed out, “will require some changes in my insurance package.”

  “Certainly, certainly.”

  “Bruce is now co-owner of the apartment in the city and the house on Long Island.”

  He looked impressed. “Very generous of you, Mrs., uh, Kimball.”

  “Yes, isn’t it? Bruce is so important to me now, I can’t imagine how I got along all those years without him. Oh, but this brings up a depressing subject. I suppose I must really insure Bruce’s life, mustn’t I?”

  “The more important your husband is to you,” he said, with his salesman’s instant comprehension, “the more you must consider every eventuality.”

  “But he’s priceless to me,” I said. “How could I choose any amount of insurance? How could I put a dollar value on Bruce?”

  “Let me help you with that decision,” Mr. Swerdluff said, leaning that moist red face toward me over the desk.

  We settled on an even million. Double indemnity.

  “Strike while the widow is hot.” Unattributed, I guess.

  It did all seem to go very smoothly. At first, I was merely enjoying Stephanie for her own sake, expecting no more than our frequent encounters, and them somehow the idea arose that we might get married. I couldn’t see a thing wrong with the proposition. Stephanie was terrific in bed, she was rich, she was beautiful and she obviously loved me. Surely, I could find some fondness in myself for a package like that.