The Fugitive Pigeon

by Donald E. Westlake

  Uncle Al brought an arm out into the corridor to go with his head. He pointed the arm right at me, and said, “Those stairs there.”

  They turned and looked in my direction, and looked at each other, and came forward.

  That was all. Down the stairs I went, two and three at a time. I had to sacrifice either speed or silence, and I opted for speed. So I guess they could hear me going just as plain as I could hear them coming.

  Doors, nothing but doors. I burst out the ground-floor door into the foyer, out the foyer door into the entranceway, out the entranceway door into the street. Their long black car was still double-parked out front, with nobody in it. I turned left, toward Central Park, and ran.

  Chapter 4

  When I was sure they’d given up and gone away, I crawled out from under the bush again and headed across the park toward the West Side.

  Now that the heat of the chase was gone, at least for a while, I was beginning to freeze. It was now about quarter to four, Wednesday morning, the twelfth of September. I don’t know exactly what the temperature was, but it was too low to be out walking around Central Park in just shirt sleeves. Walking briskly westward, I flapped my arms around like a drunk arguing with himself, while I pondered a future that now appeared to be as short as it was uncertain.

  Where could I go now, what could I do? I’d escaped the killers for the moment, but I knew enough about the organization from newspapers and television to know I wasn’t free of them for good. They wouldn’t give up, no matter how far or how fast I ran. I was a marked man; the tentacles of the organization would reach out to deal me swift vengeance wherever I might try to hide.

  My only goal had been Uncle Al. From him I had expected sanctuary, in him an ally, through him an explanation of why I’d been put on the spot. It still had to be a mistake, some sort of error; all I had to do was find the error and rectify it.

  But now what? I was safe for the moment, but that was all. I had no coat, not much money, and now that the excitement was temporarily over I could realize I was exhausted. I should have been asleep hours ago.

  Walking across the park, flapping my arms and jumping up and down and running in little circles to keep warm, I tried to figure out what to do next. More than anything, I needed some place to sleep, some place to get warm in, some place where I’d be safe.

  What about my mother’s apartment? There were even a couple of my old high school jackets there. I could sleep, get warm, eat something, and decide tomorrow what had to be done.

  But that wasn’t any good. Hadn’t those two killers come direct to Uncle Al’s? Didn’t that mean they knew about me, knew who I’d go to, where I’d run next? They were probably on watch at my mother’s place this very minute, waiting for me to show up.

  Somewhere else, then, somewhere else. Like where?

  I hadn’t thought of anywhere yet by the time I reached Central Park West. I came out of the park between 62nd and 63rd streets, stood on the sidewalk there a minute, and then crossed CPW and walked down 62nd street. Not that I had any destination in mind, it was just too cold to stand still.

  Somewhere, somewhere. Somebody, in fact. There had to be somebody I knew, somebody who would take me in for what was left of the night.

  Then I remembered Artie Dexter. I hadn’t seen Artie for seven or eight months, since the last time he’d dropied around the Rock Grill. Artie and I went to high school together, which is when he started playing conga drum in rhythm groups weekends. Later on he spread out to guitar and folk songs, and also sold marijuana and different kinds of pills sometimes, or at least that’s the impression he’d give. I don’t know how much was true and how much was just showing off. I know sometimes he’d seem to have a lot of money, and other times he’d be completely broke. Like the last time he came out to see me in Canarsie he borrowed ten bucks from me. That’s thirty-five he owes me. I know he’s good for it.

  My relationship with Artie is kind of an odd one. He was a colorful character back in high school, and colorful characters always have these hangers-on that cluster around them. I was one of the hangers-on, except for some reason Artie always liked me, so we were closer than your normal run of hero and hanger-on. After high school we still kept in touch, very occasionally, mostly with Artie showing up all of a sudden, inviting me to a party or stopping out at the bar or something like that. I suppose we could have been real good friends if I could have gotten over feeling like a hanger-on, but I never could.

  Of all the people I knew, which wasn’t very many when you got right down to it, the one I figured I could most likely barge in on at four o’clock on a Wednesday morning was Artie Dexter. Nodding, flapping my arms, clicking my heels together, I moved westward across 62nd Street with a sudden new surge of purpose.

  Artie lives in the Village, of course. I walked over to Broadway now, and turned left, and walked down to Columbus Circle, having taken the long way around to get there, and went down into the subway to take the first IND train that came along. The Sixth Avenue and Eighth Avenue trains separate just south of Columbus Circle, but they come back together again down at West Fourth Street and that was the stop I wanted.

  It was an A train came in first, the one Billy Strayhorn wants everybody to take to Harlem. I took it the other way. The car already had about ten people in it, sour-faced guys in work clothes and two youngish bums sleeping with their mouths open.

  I didn’t mind the stops (six of them) so much this time. I felt reasonably safe, for the time being.

  Authors who come to New York from Majorca once every ten years to buy a new bathing suit always put down in their books that the big city never sleeps, but that’s what they know. New York sleeps, all right, from about four-thirty in the morning till about quarter after five. That’s maybe only forty-five minutes, not very long to be asleep, but it can seem like forever if you’re one of the few people awake during it. And it’s most noticeable in places like Times Square, that are so fully awake the rest of the day. Sixth Avenue is like that, right around 8th Street, at Village Square. The movies and bars are closed, the luncheonettes are closed, everything is closed. There’s no traffic, no pedestrians, and the streets westward radiating away like a fan are all narrow and dark and empty.

  I hurried through this empty space, over the wide bumpy blacktop of Sixth Avenue and down a street to take me to Sheridan Square. Everything seemed so small, so narrow, it was like walking on an old movie set.

  Artie Dexter lives on Perry Street, which I reached via Sheridan Square and Grove Street and a couple other streets. I don’t know half the street names in the Village and I don’t believe anybody else does either. I do know the two really great intersections in the Village, because Artie told me about them. One of them is where West Tenth Street crosses West Fourth Street, which is enough right away to make a tourist turn around and go back uptown where he belongs, and the other, which I passed on my way to Sheridan Square, is the intersection of Waverly Place and Waverly Place. You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want, but it’s true.

  Anyway, hurrying through these empty artificial streets, with cold breezes ruffling my shirt sleeves, I wondered what Artie would think of me waking him up in the middle of the night like this.

  I needn’t have wondered. Half a block from his place I began to hear the noise, the singing and shouting and music. It was either a party or a presidential convention. I moved closer, jazz and hilarity wafting out onto the night air as though New York hadn’t gone to sleep after all but had called in all its forces into this one tiny corner of itself to keep the old pulse going till daylight. I looked up, and saw the brightly lighted windows, and it looked as though that was Artie’s apartment.

  It was. When I rang the bell downstairs, the buzzer sounded almost immediately. I pushed the door open and went upstairs to the second floor.

  Party noises filled the hallway, so loud it seemed as though the partygoers must be here, in the narrow hall, all around me, invisible. I walked to the end of it and k
nocked on the door, but that was ridiculous. No one could hear knocking, not in there. I pushed the door open and went in.

  Artie has two and a half rooms. The half is a wide closet in the living room, full of kitchen appliances. The bathroom, which doesn’t count in the “two and a half” description, is bigger than the kitchen, very, very long, with a bathtub on a raised tile platform, and with doors leading both into the bedroom and the living room.

  The living room is furnished mostly in shelving, rickety shelving sagging under the weight of LP records. There’s a fireplace, with shelving over it and on both sides of it. There are two windows overlooking Perry Street, with shelving between them and under them and beyond them, and with great big speaker cabinets on top of them. Shelving flanks the hall door, the bedroom door, the bathroom door, the kitchen-closet doors. Not all of this shelving bears LPs; there are a few books, and some knickknacks and whatnots, and hi-fi components, all mixed in here and there.

  With shelving on all the wall space, the furniture—a spavined sofa and a few miserable mismatched chairs and tables—is all clustered in the middle of the room, on and around an old green and yellow fiber porch carpet. The speaker systems scattered around the room all bisect amid this furniture.

  At the moment, fifteen or twenty people filled the doughnut-shaped area between the furniture and the shelves, all holding drinks and all holding forth. I didn’t see anybody listening. I didn’t see anybody sitting either.

  Artie himself suddenly popped up in front of me. He’s half a foot shorter than me, about five four, and since he had his teeth capped he smiles all the time, brilliantly. He never looks at any one spot for more than a tenth of a second, glances always darting here and there, so that sometimes he looks as though he’s doing a trick or maybe exercising the eye muscles. He bounces a lot, being musical, and keeps jabbing around with his hands.

  “Baby!” he said, looking quick at my right shoulder, my left ear, my widow’s peak, my right elbow, my left nostril, and the stain on my collar. He jabbed his hands around. “Glad you could make it!”

  “I need a place to sleep,” I shouted.

  “Anything, baby!” he shouted back. He looked at nine parts of me, said, “Make yourself at home!” and disappeared.

  Fine. It was almost four-thirty in the morning by now, I was too tired to stand up straight. I moved through the people, most of whom gave me half a sentence or so on the way by, and opened the bedroom door. It was dark in there, which seemed like a good idea. I closed the door, but didn’t turn the light on, and groped my way to the bed.

  But there were people in it, I’m not sure how many. A voice growled, “Watch it, you.”

  “Sorry,” I said. There was a rug on the floor. I lay down on it and closed my eyes. The party noises went away.

  Chapter 5

  The funny thing is, I knew I was dreaming, but I didn’t know what I was dreaming. That was the damnedest dream ever; to be dreaming, and know you’re dreaming, and know it’s a bad dream, a terrifying dream, and not to know what the hell the dream’s all about.

  I guess that was the most frightening part of it. Terror of the unknown and all. I wanted so hard to know what I was dreaming about that I popped myself out of sleep like a cork out of a champagne bottle.

  I was lying on a floor, in a swatch of sunlight.

  This was wrong. My bedroom windows face north; I get an acute angle of sunlight, a narrow beam, only at the very peak of summer. Besides, in my bedroom I sleep in bed, not on the floor. This was very wrong.

  The body wakes up first, and then the mind. I opened my eyes, and moved my arms, and remembered everything.

  I sat bolt upright. My back twinged as though someone had just yanked my spine out. I said, “Ngahh,” and lay down again. Sleeping on the floor isn’t a good idea at the best of times.

  I got up more slowly on the second try, and this time made it all the way to my feet. I stood there, bent forward a little bit, and surveyed the room.

  There was still someone in the bed, but now it was Artie and he was alone. On every flat surface in the room—dresser, night tables, straight chairs—there were half-empty glasses. The closet door was open, and clothing was lying in a heap on the floor in front of it.

  There was the smell of coffee in the air. I followed it from the bedroom, and at the kitchen-closet I found a sloe-eyed raven-tressed beauty in dungarees and black turtleneck sweater, scrambling eggs. She was barefoot, and very short, and she had that Chinese-French-Negro look that Jewish girls get when they go to the High School of Music and Art.

  She was the first to speak. “You were asleep on the floor,” she said. Matter-of-fact, the way you’d comment on the weather.

  “I guess I was,” I said. My back hurt, my hands were greasy-feeling, my mouth was furry, and I remembered perfectly why I wasn’t in my own safe apartment above the Rock Grill. I said, “Could I have some coffee?”

  She pointed at the pot with a fork that dripped scrambled egg. “Help yourself. You’re hung over, huh?”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t drink last night. What time is it?”

  “Little after two.”

  “In the afternoon?”

  She looked at me. “Sure in the afternoon,” she said. She went back to stirring the eggs. “Must have been some party,” she said.

  “You weren’t here?” I was opening cupboard doors, looking for a cup.

  “They’re all in the sink,” she said. “No, I’m the morning-after girl.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  It was close quarters there, her at the stove and me at the sink. I picked a cup out of the pile of dishes in the sink, washed it as best I could, and poured coffee in it.

  She said, “I never saw you around before.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, I don’t get up here very much.”

  “Up here from where?”

  “Canarsie,” I said.

  She made a face like I’d just told a very corny joke. “Come on,” she said.

  “No, it’s true.”

  She already had a plate for herself. She scraped the eggs into it and put the pan back on the stove. “You want eggs, you got to make them yourself,” she said. Not being nasty about it, just letting me know.

  “No, that’s all right,” I said. “Coffee’s enough for me.”

  She carried her eggs and coffee over to the cluster of furniture in the middle of the room and sat down. Artie had no kitchen table. I followed her and sat down facing her and sipped at my coffee, which was still too hot to drink. She didn’t pay any attention to me, but just shoveled scrambled egg in the way you might shovel coal into a furnace, just scoop, scoop, scoop. Like Patrolman Ziccatta and his nip, nip, nip. Steady, machinelike.

  I said, “When do you figure Artie’ll get up?”

  “When I’m done breakfast,” she said. “You don’t have to stick around.”

  “Oh, but I do,” I said. “I have to talk to Artie.”

  Now she did look at me. “What about?”

  “A problem,” I told her. “A jam I’m in.”

  “What’s Artie supposed to do about it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, which was the truth. There just wasn’t anyone else I could think of to talk to.

  “If it’s money,” she said, ‘he’s broke. Believe me.”

  “It isn’t money,” I told her. “I need his advice is all.”

  She looked at me over the vanishing eggs and went scoop, scoop, scoop. Then she paused a second and said, “What is it, you need an abortionist?”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Nothing like that.”

  She said, “If it isn’t money and it isn’t sex, then I don’t know. You aren’t a junky, are you?”

  “Me? No, not me.” The idea was surprising as the idea that two professional killers might have been sent out to practice their profession on me. Me a junky? Me a threat to the organization?

  “I didn’t think so,” she said. “You look too healthy.” It was a comment that could
almost have been an insult, delivered matter-of-fact between mouthfuls of scrambled egg.

  ‘It’s just some trouble I’ve got,” I said. I drank some of the coffee, and walked around the room a little. I’d slept in all my clothes, and I had that swollen puffy moist feeling you get when you’ve slept in all your clothes. I felt as though I’d just slept my way through a cross-country bus ride. “I’m sorry if I’m being mysterious,” I said. “But I don’t think I ought to talk about it too much.”

  She shrugged, finished the eggs, and got to her feet. “I don’t care,” she said.

  As she went over to dump the plate in the sink, I remembered something I could tell her. “My name’s Charlie,” I told her. “Charlie Poole.”

  “Hi,” she said, standing at the sink, her back to me. She didn’t offer me her name. “You want to wake Artie now?” she asked me.

  “Is it okay?”

  “If you don’t,” she said, “I do.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Don’t take too long,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  I went back into the bedroom, carrying the coffee cup, still half full. Artie was lying on his stomach, arms and legs spread out in a pale twisted swastika. He looked like he was sleeping five miles down.

  I said, “Artie? Hey, Artie.”

  Surprise. He opened his eyes right away, flipped over on his back, sat up, looked at me, and said, “Chloe?”

  “No,” I said. “Charlie. Charlie Poole.”

  He blinked, and then flashed a great big smile and said, “Charlie baby! Nice to see you, long time no see, baby!”

  “I came in last night,” I reminded him. I wasn’t entirely convinced he was awake.

  He kept smiling the big smile, looking at me with bright eyes. “Great party!” he said. “What a great party!” Then he blinked again, and the smile slipped, and he looked at the floor. “You slept on the floor,” he said, the way he might have said, “You walked on the water.” Incredulity, but muted by awe. He said it twice, the same way both times. “You slept on the floor. You slept on the floor.”