A Drop of the Hard Stuff: A Matthew Scudder Novel

by Lawrence Block

  There were trees across the way, their leaves mostly gone now. Bare ruined choirs, a poet had written, but I couldn’t remember his name or anything else from the poem.

  He said, “This is a Xerox copy.”

  “That’s right.”

  “There an original?”

  “In a safe place. And there’s another photocopy.”

  “In another safe place, I’ll bet.”

  Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet bird sang. That was the whole line, but what came before or after it, and who was it who’d written it?

  I noticed that he’d put his glasses back on. For a moment I thought he was going to return Jack’s account, but instead he folded the papers and put them in his pocket, then got a fresh cigarette going.

  Bare ruined choirs. Was it bird or birds? It made sense either way. And was sweet right?

  “You have to wonder,” he said, “how much of it is true.”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Hard? Try impossible. The writing’s good, though. I’d have to say that. The choice of words, I mean. The phrasing. The narrative flow. I’m not talking about the penmanship.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  “Because outside of the nuns, who gives a rat’s ass about penmanship? It has a flow to it. It’s easy to follow. But you have to ask yourself, where does memory leave off and imagination take over?”

  “That’s always hard to know.”

  Birds, I decided. It had to be. If a single swallow didn’t make a summer, then it certainly took more than one bird for a choir.

  “This fellow he calls S. Does he even exist? He could be a figment of the writer’s imagination.”

  “Could be.”

  “Suppose S stands for self? It’s his own self that decides the woman has to die, because she’s a witness. The whole thing with S. wrapping his hands around the writer’s hands, that’s a perfect example of a psychotic break. The guy becomes two people at once, and the bad part makes the good part do something he’s ashamed of.”

  Bare ruined choirs. Was it Keats? I’d have to look it up in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Two minutes with Bartlett’s and I’d know the poet and the poem, and then I’d spend another two hours skipping around, reading no end of other fragments that I’d half remember on other occasions.

  Jan had a copy of Bartlett’s, and sometimes I’d turn to it when she was busy in the kitchen, or fitting in a little work on the current sculpture-in-progress.

  Maybe I’d go to the Strand and pick up a copy of my own. That was probably simpler than searching for another girlfriend who already had the book on her shelf.

  “But if there is an S.,” he said, “he doesn’t strike me as a guy with a whole lot to worry about. It might be different if the writer was around to back up what he wrote, but the document all by itself, well, I don’t see it as enough to put a man in jail, do you?”

  “No,” I said. “But that’s if the document’s all by itself, and it isn’t.”

  “Oh?”

  “There’s what you might call an interpretation. A few pages identifying Mr. S. and telling us what else he’s been up to since those days.”

  “Written by somebody else.”

  I nodded.

  “Handwritten? Copies made?”

  “The penmanship’s not as nice as in the specimen you saw,” I said. “But as you said, who cares about penmanship?”

  “Only the nuns.”

  “Right.”

  “And damn few of them. Still, you say the penmanship’s not so hot, and the content has to be mostly conjecture. If the writer could prove it, he wouldn’t have to go through all this crap.”

  “And S. would be in a cell in the Tombs.”

  “Assuming there’s an S.”

  “Right.”

  He lit another cigarette, smoked for a few minutes, blew the smoke at the trees across the way. Maybe he had the same line rattling around in his head. Bare ruined choirs. Maybe he knew the rest of the poem, and the name of the poet. Who knows what’s going on in somebody else’s head?

  “What do you want, Matt?”

  “To go on living.”

  “So? Who’s gonna stop you?”

  “S. might try.”

  “And if he did, those two documents, similar in theme but differing in penmanship, would find their way to parties who might take an official interest. Does that sound about right?”

  “It does.”

  “But if nothing happens to you—”

  “Then nothing happens with the documents, and S. gets to go on living his life.”

  “It’s not a bad life.”

  “Neither is mine.”

  “That’s all fine,” he said, “but nobody lives forever.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “I’m not wishing it on you, God knows, but you could die of natural causes.”

  “I hope to, eventually.”

  “And if that should happen—”

  “It’d be exactly the same as if somebody shot me in the mouth and the forehead,” I said. “The two documents would get delivered. But the odds are you’d have nothing to worry about by then.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Well, you’re three years older than I am. You’re carrying more weight, and how much do you smoke? Three packs a day?”

  He’d just taken a cigarette from his pack, and he put it back. “I’ve been thinking about cutting down.”

  “Ever try cutting down in the past?”

  “Maybe a couple of times.”

  “Have much luck with it?”

  He returned the pack to his pocket. “You never know,” he said. “What’s your point exactly?”

  “You’re overweight and you smoke. You drink, too.”

  “Not that much.”

  “A lot more than I do. What’s my point? My point is you’ll probably die before I do, in which case you’ve got nothing to worry about. And if you wind up outliving me, well, that’ll be time enough to worry about some charges that nobody could make stand up in court anyway.”

  “Jesus,” he said, and frowned. “What happens if you start drinking again?”

  “It would be better for both of us,” I said, “if I don’t. So the next time you get the urge to pick up a bottle or two of Maker’s Mark, make sure you drink it yourself.”

  “I knew that fucking bourbon was a bad idea. I got carried away with the beauty of it all. You know, you walk in, there’s the glass, there’s the bottle. I figured it would have an impact.”

  “Well, you were right about that.”

  “What effect did it have? Were you tempted?”

  “You have any fear of heights?”

  “Heights? What the hell has that got to do with anything?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “I don’t mind airplanes. I’m closed in, I’ve got nothing to worry about. But, like, being out on a ledge, or near a cliff—”

  “That’s different?”

  “Very.”

  “I’m the same way. You know what the fear is? That I’ll want to jump. I don’t want to jump, but I’m afraid I’ll suddenly get the urge.”

  He took this in, nodded.

  “I didn’t want to drink. But it was there, and I was afraid that I would want to. That I’d be struck by an impulse I couldn’t resist.”

  “But you weren’t.”

  “No.”

  “As I said, the minute I got out of there and thought about it I knew it was a bad idea. But we’re both here, aren’t we? We both survived. You know, the Mexicans have a word for it.”

  “Oh?”

  “For our situation. But I don’t know how you say it in English. The fucking Mexicans would call it un standoff.”

  He took out his pack of cigarettes, shook one loose, put it between his lips. “Fuck cutting down,” he said. “Why would I want to do that?”

  When I told Jim about it he took it all in and thought it over and said, “Then it’s over.
”

  “It looks that way.”

  “You don’t have to worry about this fellow anymore? You’ve left him with no reason to kill you?”

  “And every reason not to.”

  “So it all works out.”

  “I suppose it does,” I said, “if you overlook the fact that the son of a bitch killed five of his fellow citizens and gets away with it.”

  “If anybody ever gets away with anything.”

  “I don’t think his conscience will be troubling him. I don’t think he has one. But I suppose there’s always karma.”

  “So they say.” He reached for the teapot, refilled both our cups. “Jasmine,” he said. “The first sip’s a nice surprise, and by the third cup you wish they’d just give you the usual green tea. Matt, whatever keeps this guy at a distance looks good to me. I just hope you’re satisfied with how it turned out.”

  “Satisfied,” I said. “I’d like it better if he went away for it. Or if he made a move and got killed trying. But I guess I’m satisfied. And that reminds me.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” I said, “and I think the Buddha’s full of crap. It is our dissatisfaction with what is that separates us from the beasts of the field.”

  “And when did this revelation come to you?”

  “While I was shaving.”

  “You nicked yourself and—”

  “No, that’s just it. I didn’t nick myself. Because the razor’s this new twin-blade number that shaves you closer and smoother. It’s like some sort of tag team, one blade holds the whisker down while the other cuts it.”

  “You sound like a commercial.”

  “And I have to say it was better than the last razor I had, and that was better than the one before. And I thought about watching my father shave. He used a safety razor, though it must have been a fairly primitive one. But his father would have used a straight razor. And why do you suppose the razors keep getting better every couple of years? And the cars, and all the other little conveniences of modern life?”

  “I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

  “Dissatisfaction,” I said. “Every once in a while somebody throws his razor down in the middle of a shave and says there’s got to be a better way. And he looks for it and finds it.”

  “So dissatisfaction turns out to be the mother of invention. And here I always thought it was necessity.”

  I shook my head. “Nobody needs a double-bladed razor. Nobody needs to go sixty miles an hour in a car, or fly through the air in a plane.”

  “There’s probably something wrong with your reasoning,” he said, “but I’m not dissatisfied enough to figure out what it is. But the next time I run into the Buddha, I’ll set him straight.”

  “Well, if you’re looking for him,” I said, “you’ll generally find him at the midnight meeting at the Moravian church.”

  Early One Morning…

  “A Mexican standoff,” Mick Ballou said. “I’ve often wondered why they call it that. Have you any idea?”

  “No.”

  “If Kristin were here,” he said, “she’d take out her iPhone and consult her Google and provide a full explanation in the wink of an eye. The world is a strange place and growing stranger by the day. There was no Google twenty-five years ago, and no iPhones either. But men have always told stories, and that was a good one. Did he ever make trouble again?”

  “Steffens? As far as I know, he stayed on his side of the river. There was a state or federal task force that took on the courthouse gang in Hudson County, and a batch of Jersey City politicians went to jail, but I didn’t see his name in the papers. Then sometime after that, it must have been a dozen years ago, I got an unsigned card one Christmas. Santa Claus looking down at a plate of milk and cookies and taking a belt from a hip flask. It had a Jersey postmark, and I had the feeling it might have been from him.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  I shook my head. “He’s been gone, oh, getting on for ten years now. A one-car accident on the Garden State. Three o’clock in the morning, and he hit a bridge abutment head-on at something like seventy miles an hour. No skid marks, so he never tried to stop. And he went through the windshield, so he couldn’t have been wearing a seat belt.”

  “Suicide, do you suppose?”

  “Be hard to rule it out. He’d had emphysema for a couple of years, and had recently been diagnosed with lung cancer. He would have had a gun around the house, and he certainly knew how to use it, but maybe he just went for a ride and made his move on the spur of the moment. Put the gas pedal down, take a hard left, and let the cops clean up after you.”

  Somewhere along the way he’d returned his bottle to the back bar and came back with a liter of Evian water. And there we sat, two old men up past our bedtime, talking and drinking water.

  “You think ’twill come out even,” he said. “With the ends trimmed, and tied in a bow. The murderer found out, and dealt with in a satisfying manner.”

  “Like a television program.”

  “Even there,” he said, “they’ll surprise you now and again. The villain goes free. But your man was found out, wasn’t he? Do you suppose he had occasion to kill anyone else? In Jersey City?”

  “No way to know.”

  “And who’s to say we’re not better off in our ignorance? What dark things did he do in the years after he killed the man and woman in the Village? He moved across the river and found a new life in politics, but did he have a use for the gun in that new life?”

  “We’ll never know,” I said, “but when the time came to pick it up he remembered how to use it.”

  He drank some water. “All those years,” he said. “Where do they go?”

  “Might as well ask where they come from.”

  “But we never question that, do we? Tomorrow’s always there, just over the horizon. Until the tomorrows run out. The people you spoke about, some of them are gone.”

  “Yes.”

  “Jim Faber. Shot dead, wasn’t he?”

  “By a man who mistook him for me.”

  “Oh, that was a bad time. There were a lot killed in this very room around that time.”

  “There were.”

  “Did you blame yourself for his death?”

  “Probably. What helped was his voice in my head, telling me to cut the crap.”

  “Ah. The woman, the one who cut her auburn hair. Did the two of you ever get together again?”

  “Twice, maybe three times. After Jan and I were finally done with each other, and before I reconnected with Elaine. Donna and I would get to talking, and there’d be a current in the air, and we’d wind up in her canopy bed for an hour or two. Then she got married and moved away, and I think I heard that she got divorced.”

  “And Jan is gone.”

  “Yes.”

  “I remember she wanted you to get her a gun. Did she ever use it?”

  “No,” I said. “She let the cancer run its course. But she found it a comfort to have the gun, in case she decided to take that way out.”

  “You were the one she turned to. But you’d long since broken things off.”

  “She brought me my clothes,” I said, “and I gave her back my set of keys, but it turned out we weren’t quite done with each other. That took a while longer. We really cared for each other, so we kept trying to make it work, until it was just too obvious that it wouldn’t.”

  “Ah.”

  “Who else? I got together with Dennis Redmond now and then, for a meal or a cup of coffee. I called him a couple of times when I had a case I thought he might be able to help me with. But then we lost track of each other. I figure he must be retired by now.”

  “Like the other one.”

  “Joe Durkin. We became close over the years, but he was on the job and I wasn’t, and that puts a limit on just how close you can get. He’s working security for a Wall Street firm now, and between that and his city pension he’s doing okay.”

  “But you don’t
see much of him.”

  “Not too much, no. That bar Redmond liked, the Minstrel Boy? Last time I looked it was gone.”

  “Places come and go.”

  “They do, and the leaves fall from the trees. Bare ruined choirs—that was Shakespeare’s line, from one of the sonnets.”

  “Ah.”

  “I don’t know where I got the idea it was Keats. Jimmy Armstrong’s dead. He lost his lease and moved a block west, and then he died, and somebody else took over and changed the name. The new place had a dish I liked, an Irish break fast they served at all hours, but then they changed the menu, so that’s gone too. Theresa’s is gone, in case you were hoping for a piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie. Same with Dukacs and Son. There’s a chain drugstore filling the space where both of them used to be, Duane Reade or CVC, I forget which. I don’t know what became of Frankie Dukacs, whether he died or just lost his lease.”

  “He moved to Nova Scotia,” he suggested, “and became a vegetarian.”

  “I suppose it could happen. After Billie Keegan quit tending bar for Jimmy, he moved to California and started making candles. And Motorcycle Mark married a Gujarati girl from Jackson Heights and moved somewhere upstate. Putnam County, I think it was, and the two of them are running a day-care center. He stayed sober, he shows up at St. Paul’s every couple of months. He’s still got the Harley, but these days his regular ride is an SUV.”

  “And the other one with the bike?”

  “The other—oh, Scooter Williams? Last I heard, he was still living on Ludlow Street and enjoying the sixties. It’s become a very desirable neighborhood now, believe it or not. Piper MacLeish got out of prison a couple of years ago. They let him out early, sent him home to die. No idea if Crosby Hart is alive or dead, but Google could probably find him, after it tells us why they call it a Mexican standoff. What else? Tiffany’s has been gone for years. The coffee shop on Sheridan Square, not the jewelry store. That’ll be doing just fine as long as there are Japanese tourists to shop there.”

  “And the Museum of Natural History? Where you met with himself? It’s still in business, is it not?”