Marathon Man

by Goldman, William

  The exit was, in point of fact, at 72nd Street, but by the time they had passed 66th Janeway had realized what Babe must have done. Realizing it and acting on the realization were not quite the same thing. There was nothing for Janeway to do but mutter “Shit!” so frequently as to make it sound like a Druid incantation while he waited in wild frustration for 72nd Street to put in its appearance. When it did, he wheeled off the Highway going uptown, made several sharp turns, got back on the Highway heading downtown. He raced along it until he came to the 56th Street exit, which he assumed Babe must have taken. And so did he.

  But by that time Babe was heading safely, at least for the moment, away. He was sweating and his teeth hurt and his ankle was throbbing, but he had, at least for the moment, and at their own game, beaten them.

  He wasn’t his brother’s brother for nothing.

  25

  On the seventh ring, she answered. “Yes?”

  “Elsa—”

  “Who?—”

  “Listen—”

  “Tom?—”

  “Yes, but you gotta listen, there’s no time—”

  “You’re all right?—at least tell me that—”

  “Yes, fine, and I know it isn’t even five and I woke you, but you gotta do something for me, Elsa, I need you, you’re the only shot I’have.”

  “Of course.”

  “Get a car.”

  “A motorcar, you mean? To go someplace?”

  “Elsa, please wake up—yes, a motorcar, yes, to go someplace, I don’t know where, but I have to buy some time, I have to think, bad, I’m in trouble and I want to get where it’s quiet.”

  “I’ll get one. Somehow. Where should I meet you?” Babe looked across the large living room, then, as Biesenthal, in his Liberty robe, entered carrying a tray with two steaming cups of instant coffee. “There’s an all-night pharmacy, Kaufman’s—Forty-ninth and Lex, I think, in that area—it’ll still be dark, so keep your doors locked, I don’t want anyone trying anything on you. Six o’clock. That’s about an hour. Got it all?”

  “Kaufman’s. Forty-ninth and Lex. Six o’clock. Do you care for me?”

  “What?” Biesenthal was watching him closely. “When I came to see you before, you said you didn’t but you would again. Do you again? If you do, say it, or I don’t get the car.”

  “I care for you, I care for you, g’bye.” He hung up. “Sorry if it got a little mushy toward the end there,” Babe said, crossing toward Biesenthal and the coffee tray.

  Biesenthal sat on the sofa, holding his cup in his lap. “A man in my position doesn’t get exposed to a great deal of mush. I don’t find it unpalatable, in small doses, just be sure that—”

  “Father?”

  Babe turned. A stunning Jewish Princess stood in the doorway, robed and lovely, large-eyed, the proper olive skin, the long, dark hair.

  “Is everything all right?”

  Biesenthal looked at her. “Do you mean am I in dire physical peril? I don’t think Tom’s out to hurt me.” He stood, made the quick introduction. “My daughter Melissa, Tom Levy.”

  “Father’s spoken of you,” she said. Then, turning, “Excuse me.” Then she was gone.

  “Bright child, senior at Barnard, she’ll be Phi Bete barring a complete collapse. She wants to be an archaeologist, but then, she also wanted to go to Bryn Mawr. I stopped that, I’ll stop this—she should be more than contented looking after my bones in my dotage, don’t you think that’s fair? I tell you, the poets are always declaiming on the power of love, but for sheer brute strength, it’s incest all the way.”

  Levy wasn’t listening. Everything was changing too fast. Once he would have stammered a greeting to that girl; now he didn’t even bother with a nod. Once he would have savored the fact that Biesenthal had actually mentioned him to his family; now he only reached for his coffee and took a sip, but the steaming liquid attacked the holes in his teeth, hit his nerves, and he cried out, managed to get the cup back to the tray without spilling too much of it. He put his tongue over his wounds, helping the soothing process along. “Sorry,” he muttered finally.

  “And you still won’t let me be of help, you won’t speak to me of your trouble?”

  “I never said there was trouble. I never told you I was in any.”

  Biesenthal put down his cup and began to stalk the large room. “Oh, come now, sir, we are neither of us chowderheads, there is a distinct shortage of horses’ asses in the immediate area, so I should like to think you would at least give me the credit of knowing distress when it brushes me before five o’clock in the morning. Consider: I am awakened by my wife, who has been awakened by the night doorman, who has, I’m sure, been awakened by your pounding on the locked door of the building. Message? A young creature clad solely in pajamas cannot pay his taxi, would I mind taking care of that? I inquire after the pajamaed loony’s name, find him to be a student of mine as well as the son of a dear, dear friend; now, when faced with that decision, who needs a few hours’ sleep or a few dollars? Down I go, pay the driver, up we come, I inquire, ‘What is all this, what’s wrong?’ and you reply, ‘Nothing, nothing, can I please use your phone?’ Note, Levy, that I always give credit where it’s due: You did say please.”

  “I’m sorry, and I did come here for a reason, but telling you my situation sure wasn’t it. And neither was the money, but I did have to go someplace where I could get the guy paid—he was sort of cruising half asleep on Twelfth Avenue by the docks and I ran in front of his car or he never would have stopped—I don’t think he knew the word ‘apparition,’ but he figured that’s what I was so he said, ‘Yes sir, yes sir,’ when I gave your address, and did we make time. I came here because there were other circumstances involved, but you’ve been terrific, putting up with me like you have, and I really thank you.”

  “There’s nothing else I can do?”

  “I’d love some money—ten dollars for taxis and stuff, twenty if you have it.”

  “My wallet’s still in my robe.” He took it out and handed over twenty. Levy nodded thank you. “Is that the end?”

  “No, I’d sure love an old raincoat or something, Professor Biesenthal, I feel like such a jerk moving around town in these pajamas.”

  “There’s a raincoat in the foyer closet, yours when needed. Is that the end?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “All right then; why did you really come here?”

  “Why did I come here?” Levy said softly; then he shook his head, stopped dead silent.

  “Pretend it’s for your orals,” Biesenthal said after a time, “make believe you have to answer something.”

  “Yes sir,” Levy said, and he got up, moved to the window, looked out over Riverside Park. “I bet you can get a great view from here,” he said.

  “Particularly when the sun is up,” Biesenthal replied. Levy whirled on him: “I’m really smart, Professor Biesenthal; you may never get the chance to find if that’s true, and I know I sound like an idiot, but I promise you, you never had anybody better when it comes to hitting the books, and what I’m about to say doesn’t make sense, and when you’re as supposedly strong in the brain department as I am, it bugs you when you can’t sort things out straight, but here’s the thing, before my Dad died, I was the family dunce—I was only ten, but every teacher I had, I knew they felt I wasn’t near what Doc was—”

  “Doc?”

  “Henry David—my brother—his first three years at Yale he led his class, no one had marks as good as Doc’s in a decade, he was that smart, and he was getting better, he was going to be this genius lawyer, this defender of the downtrodden, demolishing tyrants whenever they had the guts to face him, and he was twenty when Dad died, and his senior year, well, naturally things slipped for him, it’s shitty when your father kills himself, and somehow, without meaning to, I became the defender of the faith and he became the money grubber—I think, goddammit I know, we were both reacting to the same event, the shooting, and this guy who knew Doc, he said to me earl
ier tonight, ‘Your father was guilty, wasn’t he?’ and I blasted him pretty good, lemme tell you, I set him straight, but now I know he must have gotten that from Doc, it’s what Doc must have thought too, he went one way because of what he thought and I went the other, and I have to know something you can tell me, and that’s, was he innocent, my old man?”

  Biesenthal closed his eyes. “The guilt still lingers after all these years.” He shook his head. “You know, the ecologists warn us that plastic takes hundreds of years before it disappears, decomposes. I think that’s nothing, compared to guilt. Down it comes through the generations like an uncounted gene.” He opened his eyes, looked at Babe. “But this isn’t answering your question, is it, sir? You want to know was your father, the noted H. V. Levy, a commie-pinko-fellow-traveling-radical-red-filthy-bolshevik-bomb-thrower?” Biesenthal almost smiled, but sadly. “He was the perfect patsy, that’s all he ever was: brighter than anyone had any right to be, and he seemed arrogant, and he was impatient, he never learned to suffer fools, and he tended to appear patronizing if you didn’t realize that was just his insecurity being blanketed away, and he was the head of the History Department at a capital letters Eastern Establishment Ivy League University, and he had been invited to Washington by the Opposition Party, and he had a funny name, and he was Jewish. My God, half a dozen H. V. Levys and Joe McCarthy might have made President.” Again the bright eyes closed. “How did Keats put it in the poem about Chapman’s Homer? Cortez was Keats’s image, when he first sees the Pacific. Your father was as innocent of charges as Cortez was of the Pacific’s existence the moment before he found out it existed.” The eyes opened, watched. “Sufficient?”

  Babe nodded, went toward the foyer for the raincoat. It was too small, but not so much that you’d stop traffic with it.

  Biesenthal followed. “Please let me help.”

  “You already have, you must know that.”

  “At least call the police. Or if you won’t, let me do it for you.”

  “Police?” Babe blinked. “Police? Why would I call them, what good would that do?” He buttoned the raincoat. “I don’t want justice, are you kidding, screw justice, we’re way past justice, it’s blood now...

  He took a cab outside Biesenthal’s building, took it to 96th and Amsterdam, got out, paid, hurried to the deepest shadows, and moved through them down to 95th. All of 95th was dark, the whole of it from Amsterdam to Columbus; with the delinquents that lived on this block, what chance did a light bulb have? Still, he stayed close to the building line as he crept toward his brownstone. Every so often, when he’d forget to keep his teeth covered, the night air would attack the nerves so he felt like crying out, but he kept control, simply sliding his tongue up over the injuries or covering his whole mouth with his hand, moving silently on. He had to get back into his apartment, if only for a minute; he needed to get there, everything hinged on that, but there was a good chance it was the single most monumentally stupid thing he could do, because New York was the Apple, a lot of places to hide, and the only place Janeway knew about was his apartment, so if Janeway was going to try to head him off, it would be there, at his place, in case he was dumb enough to try getting back, but there were risks you had to take, stupid or not, and dammitall—

  —a car was double-parked several houses down from his building. It was too far yet to see if it was empty or not, and maybe it was just some drunken Spaniard who couldn’t find a hydrant to sleep it off in front of, so he just passed out when he’d gone as far as he could.

  Please be a drunken Spaniard, Babe thought as he took another few quiet steps. He never realized he could be so silent under pressure, and that was about to give him the kind of bucking-up-fear-banishing pride he needed a few bottles of right about then, until he realized it was pretty hard to be noisy when you were barefooted, and that’s what he still was, a shoeless weirdo creeping down 95th Street in the night toward...

  ... toward what? Babe stood by a building, trying to tell as precisely as he could about the doubleparked car. It was still too far and it was still too dark to be very specific, but this much was sure: There was a man inside. And he wasn’t passed out, he was sitting there. A big man, probably. Maybe even as big as Karl.

  And if it was Karl, he wouldn’t be alone, Janeway would never have allowed something important to be Karl’s job alone, so that meant Erhard too. Somewhere. In his mind now, through remembered pain, Babe vaguely heard Szell screaming at the three of them, ‘Do once something right without me!’ so Janeway had to be around too, all of them in different darknesses, waiting.

  Babe crept forward. A little more. A little more.

  He stopped when he was as close as he dared, waiting for his eyes to get as accustomed as they could to their surroundings, and New York had millions of big guys, monsters like Karl, lumbering around, snorting hello to each other as they shouldered past the common folk into the subways each morning.

  So this wasn’t Karl. The odds were just too strong.

  Babe stared. He froze his body and concentrated as much attention as he had left on the vehicle.

  It was Karl all right.

  Waiting.

  Without a pause, Babe moved to the next brown-stone, slipped silently up the steps and into the foyer, and began pushing the Melendez button as hard as he could. First there was nothing, no reply, so he kept at it, working the button with his thumb, jabbing at it, holding it down for a while, then jabbing again, stab, stab, stab, then hold, then stab, stab—

  —suddenly this Spanish woman were screaming at him over the intercom.

  “Listen...” Babe whispered, “... I can’t talk loud, but if this is Mrs. Melendez I’m really sorry to bother you, but...”

  Her scream built in insistence.

  “... I need your boy, your son...” His knowledge of Spanish was next to nil; beyond “Sangria” he was in deep trouble, but he had never had cause to regret his ignorance till now. “... Child,” Babe said, “the young man, the... the...” what the hell else should he try, “bairn”? “urchin”? “scion”?

  It didn’t matter. With a final vituperative burst, she hung up.

  Babe pushed again. He just jammed his thumb against the Melendez buzzer and kept it there.

  This time when she came back she was really in full voice, screaming steadily, and all his “Please you’ve got to understands” and “I’m terribly sorry but this is importants” couldn’t wedge their way through, so before she had a chance to hang up on him again he pushed the buzzer really hard, until suddenly another Spanish voice was forcing its way through the mother’s, and then the stoop kid was saying into the intercom, “You wanna lose your finger, keep buzzing.”

  “It’s me,” Babe whispered, taking his finger quickly away. “Me, you know—”

  “—just one more buzz and it’s coming off—”

  “Melendez,” Babe said, louder than he wanted to, “don’t you recognize me, listen, listen for Chrissakes, it’s me. Me.” Hating himself, Babe said it: “The creep.”

  There was a pause. Then: “Creepy? That you?”

  “Sure.”

  “What you want?”

  “Talk.”

  “Okay.”

  “Private,” Babe said, and when Melendez pushed the button from upstairs, the foyer door opened. They met a moment later on the first landing, by Melendez’s place.

  “What?” from Melendez.

  Babe took a deep breath. “I want you to rob my apartment,” he said.

  Melendez just looked at him funny.

  “Right now; you have to do it. If you won’t do it now, it’s no deal. You can’t do it alone, you’ll need as many of the others from the stoop as you can get, and if any of you have weapons, you better tell them to bring them along.”

  “You kidding? Who don’t have a weapon?” Then, “Why?”

  “That’s a little hard to explain without getting detailed, but there are some people who are kind of after me and if I go myself they’d have me and I don�
�t much want that and I don’t think they’ll be as anxious to try anything with you.”

  Melendez couldn’t help smiling. “That’s some swell-looking raincoat, Creepy, but isn’t it a little big for you?” and then he said, “Hey, are those pajamas?” and started to laugh.

  “Just tell me yes or no, I don’t need your shit,” Babe said.

  That stopped the laughter for a while. “What’s in it for me?”

  “Well, I got a radio and a black-and-white TV that’s not too bad and a ton of books you’re welcome to sell, probably you’d do best at the bookstores around Columbia, they do a real business on used stuff, and of course any of my clothes you want, and hell, I don’t care, whatever you can carry you can have, and if you’re caught I’ll tell the cops I told you you could have it all so they won’t be a factor.”

  “I’m all relieved,” Melendez said, “I’m sure glad the cops won’t be no factor.” Then: “What’s in it for you?”

  “Well, I’d like my Adidas shoes, they’re probably in the middle of the floor someplace—”

  Melendez started laughing again.

  Babe told him what else he wanted.

  Melendez cut the laughter.

  “The door’s probably locked,” Babe said, “I was going to try and find the super but—”

  “Doors aren’t no problem,” Melendez said. Then, “What’s the catch?”

  “The catch is it’s dangerous.”

  “That’s not the catch,” Melendez said. “That’s the fun.” Smiling.

  Karl smiled rarely. Many times people thought that was because he didn’t have a sense of humor, but he knew that was wrong; the truth was things just didn’t strike him funny very often. What he felt inside most often was restlessness. He looked ponderous, with his great muscled arms, but what he needed to keep him in any kind of decent spirits at all was activity. He liked little jobs, lots of them, one piled on the next. That was pleasure.