Kiss Me Once

by Thomas Gifford

  They were finally leaving a little after one o’clock. The new closing-hours law was supposed to put the city on a more wartime footing should war come. No one seemed to know just exactly how, but then no one much cared either. The clubs along West 52nd fudged it, stayed open later. Terry was tipping the checkroom girl and she was giggling, helping him into the heavy camel’s-hair coat. A big guy saw Cassidy, recognized him, and came bellowing over. He raised the subject of two fumbles Cassidy had made against the Bears.

  “Fuckin’ queer,” he shouted. “Vaseline fingers.”

  Terry was laughing.

  The big loudmouth followed Cassidy outside. It was raining and foggy. The guy wanted to fight, he was feeling good, he wouldn’t remember a damn thing if he lived through the night.

  Cassidy told him to get lost, turned his back on him, a mistake, and he clipped Cassidy on the base of his skull with a fistful of car keys.

  Cassidy slipped and fell forward and smashed his lip on the curbstone, tasted blood and shredded pulp, and wished he were elsewhere under a different name.

  He was fumbling around trying to stand up and the next thing he saw was a flash of pale blond hair and dark brown mink. Terry had gone off down the street in the rain whistling for a cab. Cassidy looked up, swallowing blood, just in time to see Cindy Squires come at the guy from his left, smash a mink-draped forearm across his face. His nose broke, spraying blood across the mink and the rain-lashed sidewalk. She hooked her right leg behind his ankle and pushed him over backward. He went down like he’d been shot, with a bad, solid, wet sound. His head bounced off an iron grating.

  Cassidy was back on his feet holding a split lip together between thumb and forefinger. “What the hell—”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full, Mr. Cassidy.”

  “But how? What you did to—”

  “I told you I had that other bloke right where I wanted him.” She nodded over her shoulder. “Him, as well. I’m English, you see—”

  “Ah, of course. That explains it.”

  “At my school they prepared us in self-defense. For a German invasion, don’t you see? Then Mommy and Daddy sent me over here—”

  “To work for Max Bauman?”

  “Of course not. Don’t be fatuous. I managed that more or less on my own.” She shrugged. She looked down at the man she’d felled. “I don’t suppose this could be a Nazi? No, too much to hope for …”

  Max and Bennie came out onto the street, stood staring at them. “What exactly is going on here?”

  “Miss Squires just returned the favor,” Cassidy said. “Rescued me. Don’t look at me, Max. It’s a crazy old world.” He laughed and his lip tore open again. “Shit.”

  “Cindy?” Max said.

  “I couldn’t let this numbskull finish off your star player—”

  “You two,” Max said, starting to rumble with laughter, “have got to stop meeting this way.” He punched an elbow into Bennie’s midriff. Bennie offered a tolerant, pained smile, bow tie bobbing. “Howsa lip, Lew?”

  “Fine. Only hurts when I laugh.”

  “That’s good, Lewis. Only hurts when you laugh …” Max’s shoulders shook with laughter. He put his arm around Cindy. “Nice work, baby.”

  Terry came back down the street from the direction of Fifth Avenue. Without a cab. He shrugged. “I saw it all, Max. She took the guy off like she was born to it.”

  Cassidy sat down on the wet curb realizing just how loaded he was. The whole crazy evening was landing on him like the Bears. When he stopped contemplating his undone equilibrium and looked around, he and Terry were alone with Cindy’s victim. He’d missed everybody else’s departure. He closed his eyes and saw Cindy watching him from behind the strands of bone-colored hair. I don’t suppose this could be a Nazi … He smiled to himself. His lip came apart again. This girl, she was a new one on him. The hell with his lip. He laughed out loud.

  The guy on the sidewalk wasn’t moving. Once his feet in pointed black shoes twitched convulsively. “Terry, he looks dead or something.”

  “Do him good,” Terry said. He prodded the limp bulk with his toe and the bulk groaned and said “Shit.”

  Terry pulled his foot back, kicked the middle of the bulk, and it jerked into a crescent shape. It sounded like it might be crying.

  Terry got Cassidy home in a cab, drunk but peaceful. He laid him out on the bed like a stiff and Cassidy had a terrible dream about lying in the street all wet with a bunch of gangsters in a black Packard coming at him hell-bent and running over his hand. He woke up soaked with sweat, half convinced it had been a dream.

  Jesus. What a night.

  He was sober by then and the sky over Washington Square was getting gray, wet and sad like an old winter coat you’d come to hate. Before he got back to sleep he thought some more about Karin and how it had been when the going was good. But when he closed his eyes, it wasn’t Karin he saw. For the first time it wasn’t Karin …

  When the ball starts coming down, everything speeds up, like somebody pushed a button somewhere and you’re in an old movie, running for your life with the Keystone Kops on your ass.

  Cassidy kept his eye on it and for a moment the pressure of the hangover multiplied it, and there were two balls coming at him a couple of feet apart. If he muffed it, there was no Art Hannaford to cover it. Which one was the real ball?

  He picked the one on the left.

  It hit him like a cement breadbox, first in the hands, then slammed against his chest. It was 1:30 and the ’Dogs were being served to the New York Giants. Cassidy had the feeling they were going to put him on a roll and cover him with mustard. Fordham had never really prepared him for this. On the other hand, he wasn’t in the army yet and it was a living.

  It seemed like the harder he ran the slower he went. He was out of breath from the hangover and from the ball hitting him in the gut and he damn near dropped it at the fifteen. But even with a hangover he was Cassidy and that year Cassidy was the best there was …

  Bodies were beginning to hurtle past and guys were screaming when he noticed at the corner of his vision something approaching a miracle. Danny Maidstone had just made his first block of the season. He lay on the grass with a moronic smile of surprise on his innocent mug. He’d opened a little corridor along the sidelines and that was all Cassidy needed. He cut to the right, sprinting for it, figured what the hell, so I’ll have a heart attack and die on the field, so what? He took off like a supercharged Buick. Fuck it, they could bury him under the goalpost.

  He got past the thirty in one piece. He wondered if he was secretly hoping somebody would catch him. A ninety-five-yard kickoff return wasn’t on the itinerary for the day. He’d need an oxygen tent by the time he passed midfield.

  Their kicker was waiting for him at the fifty. Cassidy couldn’t help himself. He was beginning to think touchdown. An opening kickoff touchdown—Jesus! He felt like laughing at the craziness of it—against the Giants! He stiff-armed the kicker and set off down the white sideline stripe, like a projectile being sucked into the crowd’s roar.

  Then Coogan’s bluff collapsed on him.

  Somebody had been chasing him from behind. Cassidy wondered what the hell had taken the guy so long—it must have been like chasing a one-legged guy with a crutch!

  And suddenly King Kong was on his back. He was riding Cassidy across the sideline. Cassidy couldn’t seem to avoid the long wooden bench where the Giants were politely standing aside to make way for him.

  Then he was all twisted around on the ground spitting teeth and blood and that was the least of his problems.

  His leg was pointing in the wrong goddamn direction.

  Very wrong.

  Chapter Two

  THERE WAS A FUZZY HALO of light over his head and every time he squinted it got brighter and hurt his eyes so he stopped squinting and shut his eyes altogether. He tried to check some of his other senses. He was sick to his stomach. That had to be from the ether. Weakly, he made a fist. So far so go
od. He tried to decipher the low murmur of voices but that was way beyond him.

  When he woke up again, the light was still there, bright and fuzzy. Maybe it was God. He’d always sort of thought God was an old man with a long white beard and merry, forgiving eyes who was glad to see you at last now that you were done making a mess of your life. Like Santa Claus without the red suit and the reindeer. But maybe that was all wrong. He was no theologian. Maybe God was this bright light. Then, on the other hand, maybe it wasn’t God at all. Maybe it was just a bright light. All the heavy thinking wore him out, so he went back to sleep.

  Later on, a dark shape blotted out the light and someone was repeating his name. He thought he was answering but must not have been because his name kept swooping around above him.

  “Jocko … hey, Jocko … you awake, Lew?”

  “Shut up, I hear you, I hear you—”

  Laughter. “He’s coming around now.”

  “Feel like I’m gonna puke.” Somebody pushed a cold metal basin up beside his face. He turned his head and threw up the ether and felt a little better. “It’s all right,” he said. “The white wine came up with the fish.” He sank back, suddenly drenched in cold sweat. Then he faded out again.

  When he woke up next, the shape was back, blotting out the light. He licked his lips. They were dry and cracked and his tongue felt like it needed scraping with a tire iron. He felt a hand on his arm. “You’ll never tap-dance again, Fred.”

  “Frankly, Ginger, I don’t give a damn.”

  It was Terry. Cassidy told him he was an old bastard and Terry tapped the cast on his leg and shook his head. Cassidy tried to look down at the cast but the effort started making him sick again so he stopped. Old Terry. Always there when needed. If it couldn’t be Karin, then he wanted Terry. Terry could always take care of things. He was thinking about what a swell guy Terry was when he went back to sleep.

  Later on (he had no idea what day it was), he heard two voices talking in his sleep.

  Was it a dream? A kind of anesthetic-induced hallucination? They were talking about Terry, that was what he thought, talking about Terry and him, and the voices were vaguely familiar. The tones were low, muffled. Some of it was about Terry, some about him. He wanted to hear but it was hard and he couldn’t seem to will his eyes open.

  “Now they’ve done two operations on the leg, two in six hours—”

  “Knee, it was his knee—”

  “Was is right.” Laughing.

  “He’s gonna be out for a while, damn it.”

  “So whassa big deal?”

  “Hadda wait till Leary was on duty, he’s been hangin’ around here all the off-duty time—”

  “I get it.”

  “Couldn’t have Terry hangin’ around, could I?”

  “You think he’ll go along with it?”

  “He’s gotta, if he knows what’s good for him. They’re pals …”

  “Cassidy’s pretty hot shit these days—”

  “Not after this he ain’t. We don’t like the way he acts, we do his other knee. He’ll come around. Nobody’s hot enough shit for this. All these guys, Leary, Cassidy, they—”

  “I know. They all think they’re hot shit.” More sour laughter.

  “Gotta talk to Cassidy ’fore Leary gets to him, ’fore old Terry gets it figured out—”

  “You think he knows?”

  “Smart sumbitch, who the hell knows?”

  It had to be some kind of dream. He tried to force it to make sense and he found himself back at Keen’s Chop House. Listen, pal, I may be needing your help one day soon … Terry was at the top of somebody’s list. But whose list? And who were the two guys talking in his sleep? He hoped it was a dream.

  Two operations? Was his knee?

  What the hell was going on?

  Most of the times he woke up, Terry was there.

  Sometimes the radio was on, very softly, and he remembered hearing a snatch of Nat Cole singing “If I Didn’t Care” and some band music, Tommy Dorsey from the Terrace Room at the Hotel New Yorker. He’d hear Helen O’Connell or Marion Hutton singing and he’d figure he had a broken leg, like Hannaford, and he’d be done for the season but the season was just about over anyway and he’d be okay. So he’d close his eyes and his mind would wander but for some reason it always came back to Terry.

  So Terry was on somebody’s shit list, right at the top. Somebody was after him. Who? But, then, hell, somebody had always been after Terry. Like that time with Tony Morante …

  While Cassidy had been running up and down the gridiron at Fordham, Terry was the student manager of the team. There was another kid who ran the milk bottles full of water out to the guys during time-outs. Terry sure as hell wasn’t going to do that kind of shitwork. He was more the executive manager, kept the statistics, did jobs for the coaches, made sure the uniforms got laundered and the balls were all put back in the big canvas bags after practice. Opposites attracted: Cassidy was serious, took the game seriously, hated to lose for dear old Fordham, while Terry figured that in the light of eternity it really didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference one way or the other. Funny thing was, they hit it off right away. Terry was such an easy guy to get along with, had that gift for tuning in to your personality as if it were a station on the radio he knew mighty well. He never seemed to make hard work of anything. It came easy for Terry.

  Terry was invariably happy-go-lucky, taking risks for the sweet, simple hell of it. He got a kick out of dancing at the edge of the abyss. It wasn’t that he was unafraid. That would have made his whole style meaningless. Terry just figured he could beat it while Cassidy, the athlete, always knew there was the danger of the bad bounce, the missed tackle, the mistake that would wind up costing you the game. Terry had that spooky kind of innocence that scared Cassidy, yet drew him into its orbit. Terry figured he could beat it all, beat the fear, beat the game, beat the odds.

  Cassidy played great football, was All-East his last two seasons, was eighth in the class of ’34, but he learned how to raise hell from Terry Leary. Paul Cassidy had given him an Auburn roadster in celebration of some movie deal that had paid off and the car seemed to spur them on to new exploits, further afield.

  Like the time they dated the two Italian sisters from the convent school in Providence. The four of them were making out on the living room davenport at home when a brother got home pretty well gone on bathtub hooch. He didn’t like it much when he got a gander at two guys he’d never seen before enjoying four of the Morante family’s cute little tits.

  A frantic scramble ensued. Terry’s pants were at half-mast, and at first glance he didn’t seem exactly ready for a fight. Lots of shrieks and buttons flying off and the two of them hopping around pulling trousers up and the girls clutching blouses and wriggling skirts down. Tony Morante had not returned alone. Four inebriated Italians undertook at once to defend the girls’ honor. Cassidy was trying to crawl to the door, having had a lamp bent over his head, when he got a kick in the nuts. Things looked black. Cassidy was mourning his chances of ever fathering any children when Terry figured out a way to beat the odds.

  He set the place on fire.

  Lighter fluid on the davenport, a flick of the Ronson, and everybody stopped kicking Cassidy and began coughing and choking and beating on the flaring cushions.

  Cassidy got up and, as a grace note, clipped Tony Morante on the jaw with a straight, pistonlike right which dropped Tony where he stood and scraped most of the skin from Cassidy’s knuckles.

  “Time to go,” Terry said, leading an orderly retreat down the narrow staircase.

  From the street they saw the orange flames flickering at the window.

  “I think it’s under control, don’t you?” Terry saw a café a block away. It was snowing. The wind was cold and damp and driving off the ocean, the way it’s supposed to be in Providence in January. They leaned into it and went to the café. The windows were steamed over.

  “Terry?”

  “Yes, my
son?”

  “Your fly’s open.”

  They went inside and Terry ordered coffee and pie for both of them. Cassidy called the fire department.

  When they were headed back down the street in the Auburn, the fire truck had already clanged to the scene. The flames were out. The smoldering davenport seemed to be lodged halfway out the window.

  When Terry decided to become a cop—this was after he’d quite possibly gotten a Broadway chorus girl pregnant and had to come up with five hundred bucks to fix it, all the time avoiding her producer boyfriend who had let it be known there was a grand in it for the guy who brought him “the balls of the son of a bitch who took advantage of Rita’s warm and loving nature”—Cassidy just didn’t get it. Terry the Cop seemed like a crazy idea until he sat Cassidy down and told him how the cops and the guys they chased were just alike. Well, almost.

  But the odds were with the cops. The thing was, a lot of guys could go either way, be good cops or good crooks, and he knew how crooks thought. Which would make him a damn fine cop if only he could make a living out of it. The odds said that was the stickler, that you couldn’t make it pay, but Terry figured those were just odds. No problem.

  His uncle Paddy—the priest, not the Jersey City hooch runner—told him that being an Irish cop in New York could be a good life. Whatever that meant. Terry said he figured Paddy meant it had all the advantages of the Church but you could fuck around all you wanted to.

  In those days the New York Police Department was very Irish, very Catholic, and it seemed like most of the gents at the top of the heap had initials like F. X. One Francis Xavier after another. The occasional clicking of beads was heard in the corridors of power as well as in the cells and the sweaty interrogation rooms. Father Paddy did some helpful lobbying and Terry was off the beat and into a detective’s plainclothes in record time.