The Forty-Two

by Ed Kurtz

  Charley turned onto Thirteenth a little after one in the morning and felt as jittery as he always did out in the open that late and in that neighborhood. He strode quickly but with a false air of confidence about him; the nervous-looking ones always got popped first, and he was doing everything in his power to not look nervous.

  As he passed the alley, he could not help but sneak a little peak into the darkness there, wondering if that same guy was waiting for him tonight. Sure enough, there was someone hanging out in there, leaning against the crumbling brick wall and drawing on a cigarette, or maybe a jay. The intermittent red glow temporarily illuminated the bottom half of the lurker’s face in a pulsing rhythm like railroad crossing lights, and Charley could tell that the guy was watching him. He picked up the pace. He was almost home free. Getting popped twice in one night would just be too damned embarrassing to live down. If he lived at all.

  He jammed his key into the front door, and as he slipped into the foyer he snuck another look down the street. The lurker had stepped out into the dim glow of the streetlights now. It was not the same guy as the night before. Charley hadn’t really gotten a look at that guy, but he knew it wasn’t him. It was the gorilla who had beaten him down in the alley behind Forty-Second, the guy who threatened him with grievous bodily harm unless he left that stripper alone. The stripper who just so happened to look exactly like a girl who was murdered while Charley held her hand.

  He gawked at the massive bruiser as the guy took a final drag from his smoke and then flicked it into the street. He then gave Charley a half-assed wave and stalked back off into the darkness, disappearing around the corner in no time at all. Charley swallowed hard as he hurried inside and slammed the door shut. The gorilla knew where he lived, and he wanted to be sure that Charley knew that he knew.

  He was beginning to think that maybe Sol was right. Maybe it was time he gave the Deuce a wide berth for a while.

  Chapter 6

  Ursula’s eyes cracked into crusty slits and the eyeballs underneath peered through the gummy film at the glow-in-the-dark clock beside the bed. It was half past four in the morning, far too early to be waking up all on her own. But then again, she was not altogether sure when she’d fallen asleep. The room would have been pitch black had it not been for the city lights ruining the darkness with shafts the color of rotten fruit from the sides of the heavy window curtain. She yawned and tasted her mouth and grimaced with displeasure. It was all hot and sticky with liquor and cigarette smoke.

  Sudden movement behind Ursula startled her into full alertness. She turned over quickly, whipping the sheets off and exposing her naked body to the chilly air in the room. Under the covers beside her lay an obese man who was making unpleasant wet sounds with his tongue and throat. He was naked apart from the ropes of gold chains he hadn’t been willing to remove before crawling into bed. Not that anyone could tell at first glance—the man was so freakishly hairy Ursula might have sworn on a bible that he was wearing fur pajamas.

  That she had balled this guy not three hours ago did not bother her in the least. She had to eat, just like everybody else, and her market was small and specific enough that she had to take whatever business came her way. That was a given, and she damn well knew it going in. The problem was that the fat, hairy bastard was still there, sleeping and snoring and struggling to pass air through his own thick, flabby trunk of a neck, like he belonged there or something.

  She groaned and sat up on the edge of the bed. The side table and the dresser were littered with dead soldiers; empty bottles of bourbon and gin and probably a dozen spent cans of Schlitz. They had drunk a river, she and the john, but what really sent her over the edge were the damn pills. Bennies and speed, yellow jackets and phennies and soapers; the guy had a plastic bag full of them like Halloween candy and they’d washed them down with booze just like they were. Now the room was still titled at a permanent angle and Ursula’s head weighed a good hundred fifty pounds at least, and none of it would have been so bad had the dumb sonofabitch beat feet when the party was over like he was supposed to.

  The john snorted, prompting her to round the bed to his side and smack him on his fleshy jowls.

  “Wake up,” she rasped, her voice like a Brillo pad. “Hey. Wake up.”

  She gave him another smack and he snorted himself awake.

  “Whassit?”

  “We passed out,” Ursula said. “You gotta go.”

  “Aw, gimme a break, baby. Lemme sleep it off.”

  He had not bothered to open his eyes nor wipe the saliva from his bulbous chin.

  “No way. You gotta get outta here, man.”

  Now the john lifted himself up with his elbows and looked over at the clock.

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s almost five in the morning. Ain’t you got a job?”

  “Five? Fuck. My old lady’s gonna give to me.”

  Ursula gave a bitter chuckle and started rifling through the squalid mess on the dresser, looking for a fresh cigarette. If only the Carver had room service, she inwardly mused, she’d have coffee sent up. She found a lone Merit and fired it up, taking a long drag before exhaling at the ceiling.

  “You pay me already?”

  “Yeah, I fucking paid you,” the guy growled as he switched on the lamp. Both of them reflexively squeezed their eyes shut at the flash of light. “You put it in your purse.”

  “All right, don’t crap the bed. We got pretty messed up, didn’t we? I couldn’t remember.”

  “Try’na fleece me,” he mumbled. He was pulling his trousers on and surveying the small room in search of the rest of his clothes. “Always on the make, you goddamn whores.”

  Ursula blanched, her mascara-smeared eyes wide and indignant.

  “Who you calling a whore?”

  “You kidding me? Spade a spade. Don’t be stupid.”

  He found his shoes and shirt and somehow managed to fit his enormity into them before digging into his wallet and extracting another one-dollar bill, which he tossed on the bed.

  “Here,” he said, “a tip. You suck better ’n my wife’s vacuum.”

  “Spread the word,” she said bitterly.

  “See you around, baby.”

  The door slammed against the jamb and Ursula collapsed onto the bed. She let the cigarette burn down to the filter in the ashtray where she left it and buried her face in a pillow that smelled like Brut and warm beer. It helped to muffle the wracking sobs that erupted a few minutes later, so that no one in the hallway would hear how miserable she really was. It was not any of their goddamned business, anyway.

  By six in the morning she had managed to fall back to sleep, and she stayed that way until after one. It was a mostly fitful sleep, but during the brief spells of real, honest-to-god deep sleep she dreamed about the nice-looking kid she found in the alley between Forty-Second and Forty-First. He’d had such a gentle face, a boy’s face, like he could never conceive of calling her names like whore or bitch or faggot. When she woke up again, she had to run to the toilet to throw up. By then, she could not remember anything about the dream.

  Chapter 7

  Andy hunched over the ancient Moviola, feeding strips of Bloody Birthright into its waiting teeth and whispering curses to himself. When Charley staggered into the makeshift editing room he was beat from a sleepless night worrying about the gorilla in the alleyway. Watching Andy from the doorway, he reckoned he’d only shot about three quarters of the picture at best, but Andy looked rushed as though he had any sort of deadline. The washed-out image of Carla going through the motions on Andy’s so-called divan flickered on the little screen, and Andy shook his head dramatically.

  “Gonna have to do,” he muttered. “Gonna have to fucking do.”

  “You’ve still got your big finish,” Charley said. “That’ll knock them out of their seats.”

  “It’ll fucking chase them out of their goddamn seats. For Christ’s sake, Charley, do you know I already made this picture ten years ago? I was goin
g to make it better. Not with this dumb bitch, I’m not.”

  “Carla’s not so bad.”

  “I’m sure she’s a marvelous lay, darling, but she’s a lousy damn actress.”

  Charley shrugged, unable to dispute Andy’s point. Andy switched off the rickety old editing machine and sat up to face Charley, his face drawn and tired. He looked like he had been at it all night, trying to make a decent movie out of the garbage he’d been shooting these last couple of weeks. Neither of them believed for a second that was going to happen, but they weren’t going to admit that out loud, either. Andy fished in the deep pockets of his oversized sweater and came back with a crumpled pack of L&Ms. Charley declined when he was offered one and in a second the room was awash with bluish gray smoke.

  “Where are your fine performers, anyway?”

  “Who knows? I told them to fuck off for the rest of the week. I need to get my head together. Goddamn it, if this piece of shit goes straight to the Anco…”

  “I’m sure you can work something out.”

  “No, not me. That fat bastard Rosenthal has got it out for me by now. All he cares about is jack, he never once gave a thought to whether or not he was screening anything worth a goddamn.”

  “Well, he is a business man.”

  “Like hell. He’s a damn pornographer is what he is. Every time I go and see him he asks me about Fleshmonger. Twelve years ago, Charley, and all he cares about is the one skin flick I made back when you were a schoolboy, probably. ‘Where’s the tits?’ he’ll scream at me. Tits. Really, Charley.”

  “That’s the way it goes down there. You know that. You can still make art”—Charley nearly choked on the word—“but if you want it to play Forty-Two you’d better put some tits and gore in there, too.”

  “You know I saw that Star Trek picture at the Lyric the other night? Like that old TV show? That didn’t have the least bit of tits, ass or blood in any frame of it.”

  Charley smirked.

  “When you make a million dollar movie with far out special effects, you won’t have to deal with Rosenthal. But so long as you’ve got a no dollar movie with Carla and Jim, then I guess he makes the rules, doesn’t he?”

  “Oh, go to hell, Charley.”

  “Anything to get out of Tottenville.”

  Andy made a mock face expressing his shock and floated out into the kitchen. Charley followed and tried to turn down the scotch Andy was pouring him but it was nothing doing. They retired to the main room and sipped the cheap hooch.

  “So I was thinking,” Andy said offhandedly.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Maybe I can send you over to deal with Rosenthal this time around. You’re such a nice looking kid. Maybe he’ll feel bad condemning a pretty face like yours to the hellish nether regions of Times Square.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  “You just don’t want to face him.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  Charley groaned and took another long swallow of Andy’s lousy scotch. He made a face and his eyes watered.

  “You’ll blame me if he tosses it in the Anco or someplace worse. I don’t want that on my shoulders.”

  “No I won’t,” Andy purred. “Because you’re going to do great. We’ll play the Amsterdam this time, I know we will.”

  Charley rolled his eyes, half wondering if Andy really believed it. There was no chance.

  “Okay. I’ll give it a shot. But be gentle—it’s my first time.”

  Andy pursed his lips and winked.

  “There’s always a first, darling.”

  There was still more filming to be done, which Andy pledged to squeeze into the next two days if it killed him and everyone involved. Charley figured he was going to be dead on his feet for a while, but with any luck Andy would take a hiatus and let Charley get some rest for once. Before he left, he suggested that Andy catch a movie with him in Times Square sometime soon, but Andy explicitly informed him that he never went down to the Deuce to watch the pictures. Sure, he might buy a ticket, but he’d be in the men’s room before the opening credits were over and that was more than Charley really wanted to know about that.

  Charley had wanted to tell Andy all about the craziness that had plagued him ever since that awful night in the Harris—he really wanted to tell someone about it—but in the end he resolved to leave him out of it. It was enough that he had a frightening thug tailing him all the way home just to let him know the mean bastard had his number. He wasn’t about to drag Andy into that mess, too.

  It was getting dark by the time he got back into the city. Charley meant to ride the subway home but he found himself floating out of the Canal Street station in the Flatiron almost against his will. He was in a dream, levitating a few inches about the pavement toward a hash joint he hadn’t laid eyes on for months. It had one of those vertical Coca-Cola signs jutting out of the corner, on top of which Good Food was hand painted in fading orange letters. Charley wondered if the soda company provided them for free or if all the little diners across the map like this one had to pay for them. Funny, he thought. In all the times he’d come to this place when he was with Jackie that question had never crossed his mind. He glided past the long disused gas pump rusting in front of the place and went inside.

  There were a few downbeat patrons taking up space in the diner, most of them sitting alone and hovering gloomily over steaming cups of coffee. One guy was working the crossword in the paper, his lips moving as he struggled to solve the puzzle. A television with a grimy screen hung from the ceiling in one corner; a sportscaster was bemoaning the crummy season the Jets had suffered all year. After that it cut to some speech from a city councilman who pledged to “clean up” the Great White Way. Charley grimaced at the clean-cut jerk-off on the TV and wandered off to a booth by the windows. He slid across the plush vinyl seat and wiped the condensation off the Formica table with a napkin. Seconds later there came the greeting he’d fully expected the minute he saw the place looming on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Grand.

  “Charley! Charley McCormick!”

  Charley lifted his head, surprised at how heavy it felt, and turned to face the grinning waitress leaning over the counter.

  “Hey, Jackie,” Charley said.

  He said it as though it could not possibly have been a surprise, his just showing up in the joint after so long. Jackie double-stepped around the counter and over to his booth, her mouth turned up into a smile, but her eyes all wonder and confusion. She had feathered her long, blonde hair and she looked just like Farrah. That just about killed him.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I don’t hear a word from you in half a year and here you are. What’s the occasion?”

  “I was too hungry to make it all the way back to my neighborhood.”

  “Bullshit. There’s a thousand other places you could have stopped in at. And this one isn’t even on the way, unless you moved.”

  “I didn’t move,” Charley said. “Same crummy coldwater in the same crummy neighborhood.”

  “Same Franz, too, I’ll bet.”

  “Yeah. Same old Franz.”

  “I always thought he looked a bit like George Raft,” Jackie said. “Not goofy Spats Colombo, Some Like it Hot Raft, but young, mean Guino Rinaldo, Scarface Raft.”

  “I guess so,” Charley half-heartedly agreed, “but Franz isn’t mean at all. He’s a lazy bastard, but a sweet guy. Besides, he’s too tall to be George Raft.”

  “Everybody was shorter back then. Look at Cagney.”

  “Cary Grant is six-one.”

  Jackie smiled and cocked her head to the side. “How do you always know stuff like that?”

  “I’m an encyclopedia of useless knowledge. If it’s anything important, I don’t know anything about it.”

  Jackie slid into the firm, cold seat opposite him.

  “Depends on your priorities, I guess. If it’s really important to you, then it’s important.”

  “Su
re,” he said with no conviction.

  An awkward moment of silence passed, the lull in the small talk between ex-lovers who had nothing to say to one another. Then Jackie popped back up again and said, “I’ll get you some coffee.”

  Charley said, “Thanks.”

  He vigorously rubbed his temples with the balls of his thumbs while she was back behind the counter, trying not to groan out loud as he strained to come up with a convincing reason as to why he’d gone there in the first place. He was feeling pretty low, to be sure, and maybe a bit lonely, but Charley was fast turning into a wreck, and he severely didn’t want to unload that on poor Jackie. He’d done enough to her already.

  Nonetheless, he let the levees break almost the second Jackie came back with his muddy coffee.

  “So what’s new, Charley?”

  “I witnessed a murder night before last.”

  Jackie went white and she let out a nervous laugh.

  “What? A murder? Are you kidding?”

  “Nope. This chick got knifed sitting right next to me in a movie. Just like that.”

  “Holy shit, Charley! The Deuce, of course…”

  “Of course,” he agreed.

  “You need to stay away from that shit-hole, man. It used to be just a walk on the wild side, but now it’s getting really nasty.”

  “I guess it is. None of that stuff ever got to me. Not ’til this.”

  “Who was she? Who did it?”

  “Don’t know and can’t say. It’s a bona fide, honest to God mystery. I’ve been thinking about calling this detective at Midtown South. Maybe he can tell me something new.”

  “You got hassled by the fuzz over it?”

  “Not really. Just interviewed. I was there, you know.”

  “Jesus,” Jackie said in a low tone. “Six months I don’t see you and you come in here with a face like a basset hound and tell me about a murder. You’re really something else, Charley.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m a card.”

  Charley swallowed hard and tried sipping at the coffee but it was too hot. Jackie had forgotten how he liked it lukewarm, which was vaguely painful.