The Forty-Two

by Ed Kurtz

  Her heart pumped hard from the thrill of escape as she skirted the edges and corners that ultimately led her to the stairwell on the other end of the ward. From there she clopped down the stairs in her loud pumps and zipped across a crowded lobby where nobody took any notice of her at all. It did not occur to her until she made it to the street that she had no idea where Charley could possibly be. So she extracted her last cigarette from her purse, fired it up, and began looking for an available cab to drive her to Forty-Second Street.

  That was her magnet, and she was pretty sure it was Charley’s, too.

  Chapter 30

  Charley bolted for his room. Heavy footsteps tramped up the first flight of steps leading to the second floor as he shut and locked the door behind him.

  Someone shouted, “Third floor!”

  Charley’s heart sank at the realization that Sol had given him up so quickly. Friendships were ephemeral, he supposed. It never seemed to take much to dissolve one completely.

  He checked his pockets, both pants and jacket, to make sure he still had the switchblade and Weemer’s gun. He did. Next, he prayed that the window was not painted shut. It wasn’t.

  He heaved it open and got blasted with cold air from outside. Someone kicked a can in the alley below and a truck’s sonorous horn sounded nearby. The pounding footsteps were close now. Charley dove out onto the fire escape, slammed the window shut, and began padding down the rickety iron-grated steps. They echoed metallically with each step he took, undesired sonar to alert the cops above to his location. He tried moving both faster and quieter, but the quiet part did not work out at all so he settled for fast. As he neared the final landing flush with the second floor of the building, he noticed the flashing red and blue lights bouncing off the pavement and walls at the mouth of the alley. There was no escape that way, nor the opposite end of the alley, where near identical pulsing lights signaled more police presence. They had blocked him off.

  Charley grabbed hold of the grating and dropped down to the alley in lieu of kicking the noisy ladder down. There was a back door there, which he knew led to the hotel’s disused basement. He also knew that the door was broken and thus remained unlocked at all times, a malady Sol had no intention of remedying since there was no way out of the basement other than the door that led into it. If there were transients down there keeping themselves out of the deadly winter air outdoors, then Sol could sleep better at night in the knowledge that his god was watching. Charley wondered how Sol’s creator was apt to look upon betrayal, given the big man’s history with the issue, but dismissed the question as he kicked the door in.

  It was dark and cool and damp in the cavernous basement to the New Rose Hotel, the way Charley imagined the labyrinth of sewers beneath the city must be. Somewhere within, water slowly dripped into a puddle or two, each hollow plop echoing throughout the basement like some ancient subterranean chamber. The notion of descending into the basement was marginally terrifying to him, but with all other options thoroughly exhausted, he went in and quietly shut the door behind him, immersing himself in total darkness.

  He stepped forward and down, his foot searching for the next rotting wooden step. He found it eventually and repeated the process four more times before reaching the cracked cement floor at the bottom. There he stopped, completely unaware of what lay before him in the wet, black chill. His eyes useless to him, Charley pricked up his ears and listened to the ghostly void. The drops continued dripping, and in a distant corner he thought he could hear air whistling in through a crack in the wall. He took a cautious step forward, and when that yielded nothing disastrous, he tried another.

  That was when he heard the unmistakable sound of raspy human breathing. Charley was not alone—not that he necessarily expected to be, though he had hoped not be molested by some schizophrenic hobo in a place he might not be able to escape from. He sucked up his own breath and held it, trying to manifest some form of echolocation to determine the exact whereabouts of the schizo in question. It was near enough, just off to his right beyond any possible combination of clutter and refuse that had been accumulating down there since the building’s erection decades ago. In fact, if Charley’s imagination was not running away with him, he felt certain that he could determine two distinct breathing patterns. One to hold him down, the other to work him over in whatever horrifying way he saw fit. Charley froze up, paralyzed with fear. Back up on the street the police still hemmed him in with a bought man at the head of their crooked phalanx, a definite losing proposition. Down there in the basement, on the other hand, nothing was set in stone yet. Nonetheless, Charley could not will himself to move at all. Worse still, he could hear the blood pulsing through his ears.

  So he stood still for several minutes, listening to somebody breathing nearby, until one of them sauntered forth and bumped right into him. Charley screamed. So did the other man. What followed was a weak, half-assed scuffle that consisted in a tangling of arms and legs and the two men knocking their skulls together. Then the other presence, also male, gave a high-pitched shriek.

  “Hit him, Kevin! Hit him!”

  At that moment, Charley decided that he was the bogeyman in the basement, not them. He reached out in the darkness and pulled Kevin into a tight bear hug, restricting his movement despite Kevin’s violent flailing. It was only then that Charley recognized that the guy was completely naked.

  “Hey! Hey!” Charley whisper-shouted. “It’s cool, man. I didn’t know anybody was down here.”

  Kevin relented, relaxing his tense, sinewy frame enough for Charley to feel all right letting him go.

  “We don’t want no trouble,” Kevin said. He had a resonant Brooklyn accent, a tough guy sort of voice.

  Charley laughed meekly.

  “Me neither,” he said. “I’m just trying to lay low, all right?”

  “Fuck, man,” groused the other man as he drew nearer.

  Suddenly a small, orange light flared up, temporarily blinding Charley. The other man had ignited a Zippo, which illuminated both men’s states of undress. Kevin wore nothing but a pair of knee-high tube socks, whereas the other guy was more modest than his companion—he also wore a pair of baggy white briefs. Charley stared at them for a moment, amazed that neither of them was shivering at all from the cold dampness.

  “Look,” the man with the lighter said deferentially, “this isn’t what it looks like.”

  “I honestly don’t give a shit,” Charley said plainly. “I’m hiding from the police right now, so whatever you fellas are up to is not very high on my list of priorities at the moment.”

  Kevin and his companion glanced at each other and then back at Charley.

  Kevin said, “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  Kevin cocked his head questioningly at the other man, who frowned, rolled his eyes and then hesitantly nodded. Kevin smiled and said, “Follow me.”

  The second man lit the way with Kevin close behind and Charley in tow. They walked around an enormous wooden spool and a mountain of steel pipes and over a filthy, broken baby doll and probably fifteen years’ worth of cigarette butts and used prophylactics. At the end of their journey across the basement, Charley immediately took note of the large wood panel that lay square with the concrete wall. It was as damp as everything else down there and splotched with fuzzy black circles where rot and mildew had taken hold. Kevin knelt down beside it, the fact that his genitals were touching down on the cold cement floor eliciting no reaction from him. Anchoring his fingertips underneath the panel, he hoisted it up a few inches while his partner peered underneath. Then the other guy nodded to Kevin, who in turn lifted the panel up much higher, two feet or so.

  Charley squatted and looked through the gaping hole in the cement wall at what appeared to be a dimly lit men’s room. It was the bath house next door to the hotel, complete with a not-so-secret entrance to Sol’s disused basement.

  “What do you know,” Charley said vacantly.

  “Go on in,” Kevin’s lover
said with a devilish grin. “Just try to act like you belong there, if you can.”

  “Right.”

  Charley slipped through and the panel slid shut behind him. He had apparently interrupted the men’s amorous activities and they intended to finish what they began. Now that he found himself standing up in the toilet of a gay bath house, Charley was not entirely sure how to proceed. But if there was anything that could put a fire under a man’s ass, it was the fear of being shot to death by a crooked cop, so he concluded that he was going to do as the Romans did. Thus, when he observed a pair of sullen looking men walk past the men’s room’s open door in nothing but the towels around their waists, Charley stripped down.

  He was barely down to his boxers when a brown-skinned man with thick, black eyebrows happened by the door, completely naked, and stopped to look him over.

  “I’m in the room at the end of the hall, to the left,” he said at length. “I’ll leave the door open.”

  He continued on.

  Charley got dressed again in a hurry and hustled down the hall in the opposite direction. The local population was, naturally, entirely male, and the preponderance of these males wore no more than the ubiquitous white towels tied around their waists. Some of the less modest men wore nothing at all, whereas Charley passed a guy in a white three-piece suit and overcoat on his way through the hall to the main sitting area up front. He could have sworn it was Truman Capote.

  The strangest aspect of the bath house was its utter silence. Almost no one spoke, not even in the roomy area at the front where at least half a dozen guys lounged in soft chairs while smoking cigarettes and sipping liquor straight from the bottle. A few of them eyed Charley with bemused curiosity, but nothing more. He stepped up to the door and paused there, wondering just how close the cops were likely to be when he went out.

  “You all right there, pal?”

  He turned to see a dark-complexioned man with heavy, drooping eyelids looking up at him from one of the soft, cushiony chairs. The guy was intermittently dragging on an unfiltered cigarette, and a grin was playing at his lips. Charley narrowed his eyes and tried to smile back.

  “Not particularly, no,” Charley said. “But I’ll tell you what—if you walk two blocks with me I’ll give you fifty bucks.”

  “Two blocks to where?”

  “Just around the corner.”

  “And then?”

  “Then you go back to whatever you’re doing.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Charley yanked the wad from his pocket and displayed it to the incredulous stranger, who let the smile break out fully as he pushed himself up from his chair.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Two blocks east and around the south corner, Charley disentangled his arm from the stranger and paid him the fifty he promised. It was a hell of a risk, and his heart nearly burst out of his chest all the while he was still in view of the police behind his back, but those dumb Jakes did not want anything to do with the queer scum coming out of that den of iniquity. Charley had bet everything on that and came out to the good. For the time being, at least, he could breathe easy.

  The stranger arched an eyebrow at Charley and kissed him on the cheek. Charley was startled by the unexpected peck, but he understood it to be less than an out-and-out advance and flashed an awkward smile at the guy.

  “See you around, Mac,” the man said on his way back down East Ninth.

  Charley waved and made tracks in the other direction, heading for the Third Avenue IRT and then northwest to Times Square.

  The ancient black woman seated next to him on the subway smelled badly and muttered constantly and Charley was fairly certain she’d pissed herself. This was the big city, he considered, a brightly lit hell that swallowed souls up whole, and most of them leaped into its gaping jaws willingly like Odysseus sailing for the Sirens. How long before he would be spotted shuffling down Broadway in a filthy winter coat, his sweatpants full of shit, and a toothless grin to let the world know he could not care less? Probably never, he presumed. He did not really expect to live that long. Not in this place.

  He surreptitiously patted the outside of his jacket pocket and felt the vague shape of a small handgun there. He had already killed one man in his pursuit to redeem a dead stranger, but he nevertheless had serious qualms about doing it again. It was not entirely out of remorse, although that was there too, but also plain common sense. The punk he’d plugged in the Bowery was just some no-account hophead, a waste of life nobody was likely to miss. The man who awaited him in the Harris Balcony on the Deuce, however, was surely someone of far greater social visibility. All signs pointed to City Councilman Fred Haskett, and putting a bullet in his head was not going to go unnoticed. Yet, if Charley did not intend to kill the rotten son of a bitch, what was he going to do? Ask him nicely to stop doing all the nasty little things he was doing?

  He ground his molars together, creating sharp points of pain in his temples and jaw line. It was oddly refreshing, the pain, so he kept grinding. The more his temples throbbed, the more he focused on his memory-image of Elizabeth Hewlett, dead in the torn velvet seat beside him. And the more the veins protruded like twisted corduroy ridges in his neck and on his forehead, the more he resolved that somebody was going to have to pay, and tonight.

  The garbled voice on the intercom announced the subway’s arrival at the Forty-Ninth Street Station. Charley unclenched his jaws and got off the train.

  Chapter 31

  Nobody was in the box office at the Harris Theater, which was almost as eerie as the fact that no one was in its shotgun lobby, either. There had been a couple of tough looking characters loitering out front—hardly an unusual sight—but now Charley considered the possibility that they were aggressively suggesting to interested people that the theater was closed for the night.

  He started to feel hot all over, a shock to his system having just come in from the cold. He glared at the Ed Koch cartoon scratched into the paneling beside the stairs. It had been crossed out with permanent marker, with a new legend added above it: Koch is a faggot.

  Beneath that, someone had scrawled something considerably closer to Charley’s heart: Save the Deuce. That made him feel vaguely sad, largely because he was unconvinced that it could be done in the long run. If Haskett did not get his way, it would not be long before someone exactly like him came along and shut down every single theater, video shop, peep show, massage parlor and bath house anywhere near the Square and probably throughout the entire city. It had been done before, when they raided Minksy’s, and it would be done again. Someday, a generation or two down the line, there would be another Deuce, another scumatorium for sleazehounds like Charley and his ilk, and then that would be unceremoniously destroyed, as well. Perhaps, he considered for the first time, it was all for the best. Because maybe, if there had never been anything like the Deuce, Elizabeth Hewlett would still be alive somewhere and Charley would be watching some old Joan Blondell picture on television with Franz, blissfully unaware that the poor girl ever existed.

  He swallowed a mouthful of spit and slowly ascended the carpeted stairs, barely avoiding a fresh wad of pink gum pressed into the fibers. As he neared the soiled curtain that divided the upper landing from the balcony, he began to hear the whirring of the projector.

  He divided the curtains with his body and advanced into the darkness of the balcony. When his eyes adjusted to the drastic change in light and shadows, Charley squinted at the weird, fuzzy images projected on the Harris’ massive screen. As saturated and out of focus as the grainy eight-millimeter image was, he instantly recognized the creepy bedroom from that Skid Row apartment. The same one he and Ursula had been abducted from. The same one Elizabeth had been filmed in. And it was Liz who filled the screen now, larger than life and as naked as the day she was born. So were the three flabby men who were alternately fucking her and punching her in the face and stomach, oblivious to her tears and whimpering.

  Charley whimpered,
too.

  There was no soundtrack—no eight-millimeter stock came equipped with an optical audio track—so that the only noise in the entirely vacant theater was the incessant, rapid clicking of the projector in its booth. Charley’s eyes bulged as he watched the gruesome film grow more gruesome by each flickering second. The beating got worse as the punches rained down harder and faster and Elizabeth began to keen. The corpulent man on top of her thrust his jiggling midsection back and forth like a gelatinous piston, slowing his pace only to land the occasional open handed slap across the girl’s face. He grinned from ear to ear after every strike. Charley swallowed hard and his eyes welled up, blurring his vision. He did not bother to wipe the tears away. He just let them dribble out over his eyelids and down his hot cheeks when they were damn good and ready.

  The filmstrip flickered to a stark, blindingly white light for a few seconds before resuming with a different scene. Elizabeth again, curled up naked on the same bed in the same dingy room. She was hugging her knees and Charley thought she looked a little frightened. Then a wiry, nude man entered the frame, his arms and back all but covered with various tattoos, a bundle of frayed ropes in his hands. Charley involuntarily sneered at him. It was Chester Price.

  Price silently barked something at Elizabeth, who merely trembled at whatever command she was given. Price frowned, set the ropes down on the bed beside her, and then hauled off and punched her in the side of the head with a bony, closed fist. She bucked from the impact, her mouth hanging open and saliva dribbling out in long, gummy strands. Price yelled again and this time she hopped to, quickly arranging herself on the bed with each arm and leg pointed at a corner of the mattress. She was still shivering while Chester Price set to the business of binding her wrists and ankles to the legs of the bed frame with the ropes, effectively securing the girl for whatever depravity he had in mind. Charley shuddered at the anticipation of it, but that did not last long. Seconds later Price climbed on top of Elizabeth, spit on her face, and then commenced urinating all over her bruised and battered body.