19 Purchase Street

by Gerald A. Browne

  “Okay.”

  Then, after a silent while, she asked, “Where would you play today if you were going to?”

  “Up in the Bronx.”

  “Same place where I went with you to watch that time?”

  “Crotona Park.”

  “You ought to go play.”

  “Think so?”

  “Definitely.”

  “I wouldn’t feel right about it.”

  “You don’t feel right now.”

  “You’d be stranded out here.”

  “So, I’ll run you over to the Seventy-ninth Street Basin and pick you up there later in the afternoon. Say, five-thirty. Wouldn’t that give you time enough?” She seemed to be asking herself as much as him.

  “You wouldn’t mind being alone?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Sure?”

  “I’ll just read.”

  That he’d needlessly worried about the money the day and the night before helped convince Gainer that he ought to be at least a little less paranoid about it. Soccer was tempting.

  “You deserve it,” Leslie said.

  An hour later, shortly before noon, Gainer was in the Bronx, crossing over from One hundred and seventy-third Street into Crotona Park. The loose-fitting shorts he had on were old and unevenly faded, his T-shirt had holes in it and the sweatshirt tied by its sleeves around his neck was a gray five-dollar second from a street vendor. His soccer shoes, connected by their laces, were slung over his shoulder. He had better gear, a couple of expensive warm-up suits, but never wore them up here.

  As soon as grass was beneath his feet Gainer picked up his pace, from a stride to a lope to an easy jog. Across Crotona Parkway to the playing field. He hadn’t been there for several weeks and some of the guys let him know he was welcome by acknowledging that he hadn’t been around, asking if he’d been sick or away or in the can. Santiago and Tricky Rodriguez had arrived about half an hour earlier and were just completing their warmups. They came over to Gainer and did a few more while he did his.

  “We got shirts today,” Santiago told Gainer. “They dropped out of a window.”

  Tricky Rodriguez held one up, a green, long-sleeved mostly acrylic shirt with two white bars around the chest and two around the upper arms.

  “Sharp,” Gainer said.

  “I saved you one,” Santiago said, tossed it to Gainer, who tried it on. The shirt was extra, extra large.

  “Wrong one, that’s mine,” Santiago said, exchanging it. Not that he was large enough for that shirt; he preferred whatever he wore to be loose. He was a rangy two-hundred-pounder, had long legs and arms. His coloring was medium to very black, his teeth somewhat tobacco-stained. The red irritation in the corners of his eyes and around his lids was also from a kind of smoking. It was Gainer’s guess that Santiago was thirty. He was sure Santiago had served time because he often referred to one guy or another as someone he’d been “inside” with. Tricky Rodriguez was only about five-seven and a hundred forty. He was a freckled Puerto Rican with a slight speech impediment, a lisp that gave his Spanish a Castillian flavor. He could not have been more than twenty-three or -four. One reason he was called Tricky was he was good at magic, especially sleight of hand. Saturdays he dealt a three card Monte game on the bottom of a cardboard carton downtown on Fifth Avenue and around Rockefeller Center and along Fifty-seventh. He could handle the cards as well as anyone, but someone else had to do the spiel for him and that cut down on his take.

  “We’ ain’t playing just pick up today,” Tricky said.

  “The guys from Sound View Park are coming up,” Santiago explained.

  “Trying to tell me you already have a full side?”

  “We ain’t got but eleven shirts and I just gave you yours, didn’t I?”

  “You sure?”

  “Hell, yeah, we need you.” For emphasis, Santiago gave Gainer a playful but sharp shot to the stomach that Gainer toughened up for just in time.

  Gainer continued with his warmups. Did thirty toe-touchers and twenty side-stretches. Some backbends that made him feel the knots come undone along his spine. After that he did some deep breathing, taking air in slowly, holding it in for a long moment to get all the goodness from it before letting it out. He deep breathed for each part of himself: head, shoulders, thighs, calves, deep breathed as though all his skin were capable of inhaling, ventilating, nourishing. He got up, stood with feet apart, felt solidly related to the earth but at the same time light on it, balanced and capable of making swift shifts of movement. The state of mind and body soccer players call being “grounded.”

  Gainer would need to be very grounded, considering the condition of the field. It was a bare, overplayed place at its best. Now, from Monday’s rain, its dirt was mud and and the critical areas in front of each goal were puddled. The dimensions had been paced off, one hundred and thirty yards by seventy-five yards, and marked with flour, a twenty pound bag of Pillsbury someone somehow didn’t pay for.

  The match began at one-thirty only because that happened to be the time when the ball was put into play. It would last as long as anyone felt the need to score. There would be a half time or time out when the majority of both sides decided they wanted it.

  Green shirts and white shirts went at it. A swarming kind of game resembling the so-called Total Soccer that the Holland and West German teams had improvised in 1974, but lacking its strategy. All ten players on either side played both attack and defense as the opportunities and spirits dictated. There were no absolute territorial positions, no assigned zones of responsibility as in classical soccer. The result was often a melee with twenty players crowded into a section of the field trying for the ball. And, as a further result, there were many breakaways, some going almost the entire length of the field.

  The outstanding player for the Sound View team was a mestizo from Santa Marta, Colombia, by the name of Jeanaro Lopez. He had had two tryouts with the Tampa Bay Rowdies of the North American Soccer League. Ten minutes into play Jeanaro took a long, leading cross pass and had only Gainer to beat. Jeanaro came right at him, controlling the ball effortlessly in stride as though it were attached to his feet. He misled Gainer with his eyes and shoulders, skipped on one foot, did a couple of little stutter steps and was that quickly by and on his way to the goal. The goalkeeper had even less of a chance. Santiago’s shrug at Gainer said he himself couldn’t have done any better.

  Gainer recovered some face five minutes later when he worked a perfect give-and-go with Tricky Rodriguez just inside the penalty area, evaded a sliding tackle that caught his right ankle, dribbled left, changed pace by stopping the ball. The ball was his. No one could get it from him. He owned it. He suddenly feinted right and cut left for the shot. Whipped his foot and caught the ball with his instep.

  The ball hit the goal post.

  Ricocheted right back to Gainer.

  The goalkeeper was yards out of position.

  Gainer easily booted the ball through. He would have felt better about it had it gone in the first time.

  After about an hour of play the score was six to six. Gainer had scored twice and Jeanaro had five goals to his credit. It wasn’t unusual in matches of this sort for scores to end up fourteen to twelve, or eighteen to eighteen.

  Along the sidelines were thirty and sometimes as many as fifty spectators to give the players more of a sense of performance. They were hecklers and advisors, loyalist girlfriends and scampering children. People using the park for a shortcut paused to watch for a while. Older persons, envious of the energy they observed, enjoyed believing they would not waste it in such a way.

  Gainer was entirely caught up in the action. For the moment, there was no Number 19, no Darrow or Hine, or billions. He was in another world that centered on a twenty-eight-inch-around, sixteen ounce inflated black and white ball. He was, he felt, running well, able to reach into himself when needed for acceleration beyond his normal limit. The ground beneath his feet seemed to be his ally, helping to push him along.
No matter that he had a stitch in his side, that exhaustion was blurring his vision, that his right cheek was badly bruised from having taken an elbow from someone when he went up for a header and both his shins were kicked sore from instep to knee. He was being washed by the strain, his reservoir of anger opened, and being depleted by exertion and punishment given and received.

  A pass from Tricky down the right sideline sailed above Gainer’s head. The ball had spin on it, landed softly with hardly any bounce so that Gainer’s foot could come beneath it and carry it along in stride. Gainer saw, peripherally, no green-shirted teammates coming from mid-field for a centering pass. He took it himself, changed direction nicely and kept going full out to be in front of the goal.

  He heard screams, shouts. Cheers for him, he believed.

  He pivoted. Went easily around one of the Sound View defenders. Had only the goalkeeper to beat.

  The goalkeeper came out, apparently to challenge.

  Gainer was about to take the shot when the goalkeeper ran past him, leaving the goal empty.

  Gainer stopped so abruptly he slid in the mud, went down in the goop. He kneeled up, snapped his hands to rid them of the filthy-feeling stuff. Looked to the far end of the field and saw the gray Datsun.

  A five-year-old hatchback without license plates.

  The car had come up over the curb of Claremont Parkway and across the open area of the park, steering clear of baby carriages and wheelchairs, guys with bottles in paper bags and lovers oblivious in the grass. For a car to be where it should not be was far from the most flagrant thing ever seen around here. It was just another way of someone’s going against instead of with.

  Hardly any reaction to it.

  Until it reached the field where the soccer match was going on.

  It came onto the north end of the field at one of the corner kick quadrants. The driver had a black nylon stocking over his head to disguise his features and hide his hair. He stuck his arm out the car’s window and let go of something.

  Whatever it was flew up into separate pieces.

  Scattered in the wake of wind created by the speed of the car.

  It was a joke.

  They were counterfeit.

  Pieces of paper with a dead President’s picture on them.

  Hundreds.

  They looked real.

  The beneficent gray Datsun circled around elusively. Repeatedly, the arm of the driver emerged to make more money fly.

  Players and spectators alike gathered it up. Word traveled fast. Everyone in the vicinity ran to the soccer field for all they were worth. Even the elderly and feeble were able to get a share. Children shoved bill after bill inside their shirts and blouses. Girlfriends stuffed their panties. People were on their hands and knees in the mud.

  Real hundred dollar bills.

  A middle-aged woman out of breath in the thick of it paused only long enough to make the sign of the cross on herself while glancing gratefully heavenward.

  In ten minutes Santiago managed to grab up almost ninety-five thousand for himself.

  The gray Datsun departed as anonymously as it had arrived, sped across the open area between benches and trees and off the curb to Crotona Parkway, where it became just another car in the impatient traffic.

  Gainer had hardly moved, stood there in front of the goal with the ball under his arm.

  AT five-thirty, the appointed time, he was at the Seventy-ninth Street Basin. Leslie was ten minutes late. She brought the Riva in fast, bow up. Slowed but didn’t stop as she skimmed along the dock. Gainer had to jump for it. At once she demanded the boat’s top speed, executed a turn so tight it almost sent Gainer overboard.

  She headed the Riva downriver in the direction of Ellis. She was enjoying the speedboat now, its unique sort of maneuverability, the spaciousness of the surface that was offered her, so much more than a mere highway. If only the boat could do better than forty-five.

  She zigzagged sharply, playfully.

  Her nutmeg-colored hair whipped.

  She was in an up-mood, singing something Gainer could not make out because of the wind and the engine.

  He reached over and turned off the ignition key.

  The bow of the Riva settled down.

  “Why?” Gainer asked.

  “What why?” Leslie worked her eyelashes some.

  “No use, I know it was you.”

  “Did you make any goals today, lover?”

  “Where did you get the gray Datsun?”

  “You have a terrible bruise.”

  “Where?”

  “On your cheek.” She tried to get to it with a kiss but he pulled away.

  A tug came by, tooted.

  “Borrowed it,” she said, “from a cheap parking lot on Webster Avenue. They should be more conscientious about looking after the cars.”

  “Stole it?”

  “Only for twenty minutes. I put it back exactly where it was. Why are you so bothered about the car?”

  “It might be traced to you.”

  “Never. It wasn’t even missed.”

  “You were supposed to stay on Ellis with the money.”

  “I didn’t absolutely, positively promise that. Anyway, I just looked at it a moment ago. The money is all there.”

  “Except what you threw away.”

  She smiled her forgive me smile.

  “How much?” he asked.

  “Just one bagful.”

  Three to four million.

  “Why?”

  “Lady Caroline told me to.”

  Same old excuse, Gainer thought.

  “Lady Caroline had a dreadful time getting through to me. Almost didn’t … because of all those heavy spirits hanging around Ellis looking for someone to complain to. They kept scrambling her.”

  Head back, deep shoulder-heaving sigh from Gainer. “Why don’t you admit it … just this once, to me and yourself. It wasn’t some sort of instruction that came to you out of thin air. You had an irresistible fit of the monies, that’s all it was, the monies.”

  “You’re really pissed aren’t you?”

  “Damn right!”

  “All the way down to making your toenails red pissed?”

  Gainer felt like an actor being audienced by himself. He thought of Santiago and Tricky, imagined the times they would have with their windfalls. He started laughing inside.

  Then outside.

  He laughed all the way to the attic.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  IN the early morning of the Wednesday of that week. Darrow and Horridge were on the ninth fairway at the Jupiter Island Club.

  Both their drives had been off to the left and hadn’t carried well in the humid air, nor had they gotten much roll with the dew not yet burned from the grass. Horridge was a good if inconsistent golfer. He would double-bogey one hole and birdie the next. Darrow only appeared to be the better at it with his leanness and style. He was wearing light-gray English flannel slacks, deeply pleated, and a pale blue lisle shirt that matched his strapped-around sun visor.

  The day was so ideal, the place so exclusive that Darrow was almost able to put his predicament out of mind. Here was where he fitted, where he should have been all along, Darrow felt. Rubbing social shoulders where the blood was blue and the money old. Even the sun seemed to strike richer on everything here at Hobe Sound.

  Horridge had been straightforward with him about what to expect if the appeal was not decided in his favor. They had spoken briefly about it during the flight down on the Gulfstream. Darrow would be given two choices. He could, commencing next week, make frequent visits to a certain doctor at Sloan-Kettering in New York City—ostensibly for a series of vitamin B12 injections. The solution injected intravenously would indeed be vitamin B12, but it would also contain certain live cancer cells.

  That would be the prolonged way.

  Darrow’s other choice was swifter and required nothing of a change by him. Sometime soon in the normal course of his way of life, he would unknowing
ly ingest, in his food or drink, a concentrated amount of thromboxane, a potent clotting agent normally found in the body. Such a large dose of thromboxane would induce platelets to stick together and form clots in the bloodstream. An embolism, a stroke, a heart attack would be the result.

  Either way, Darrow’s demise would appear to be due to a natural cause.

  It was High Board policy, not to be questioned.

  It had proven to be more decorous and orderly than other ways, Horridge said.

  Darrow assumed by that that many others had gone before him, perhaps not all so voluntarily. Not just Gridley, but others who had died suddenly or been taken by cancer. To mind came certain politicians, criminals, journalists, even heads of countries. It had occurred previously to Darrow how strangely coincidental and convenient it was when a person who had become a crucial witness or a political embarrassment, a Wall Street troublemaker or whatever, solved and calmed things by dying. Darrow had never connected it up before.

  Anyway, it would not happen to him. He would succeed with his appeal. In fact, he would come out of it better off. He’d always felt he needed only exposure to the upper echelon to be realized. This, of course, was not the most desirable way of getting it, but he would turn it around.

  Did Horridge have any instructions for him about the appeal, perhaps a hint or two that might be to his advantage? What should he expect? Who would he be seeing?

  Horridge had answered by cleaning his glasses with a tissue and his breath, and by removing from his case a small leather-bound volume of Ralph Waldo’s poems.

  Now, Horridge lined up his second shot, smacked it toward the green. Darrow hit his ball into one of the bunkers to the right of the green.

  As they walked together Darrow told Horridge: “I’ll forfeit three strokes rather than play the bunker.”

  “What, and just toss your ball to the pin, I suppose.”

  “I’ll drop at the edge of the green. It’s just that I’m terrible in a trap. I might be in there all day hacking away.”

  Horridge agreed.

  Darrow’s real reason for avoiding the bunker was he didn’t want to risk messing his flannels.

  They arrived at the green, three-putted it and headed for the tee of the tenth hole.