Manhattan Nocturne

by Colin Harrison

  “Hobbs.”

  “Yes. But I didn’t know that yet. All I could see was that he was huge, tall, too, and that his suit must have cost something like ten thousand dollars. He was wearing this great bowler hat. He didn’t even look at the hotel desk or anybody, he just walked straight toward the elevator. Then he disappeared. His people checked in at the desk, and then they went up on another elevator. Everything calmed down. The whole thing lasted maybe a minute. He couldn’t walk very fast but he wasn’t in the lobby more than fifteen seconds. So I asked one of the bellhops who it was. He said it was Hobbs, the Australian who owns newspapers all over the world. A billionaire, he said. I remember that. I said, billionaire? And he looked at me like I was an idiot. He stays here when he’s in the city, he said. So then I said, I want to know something. And the bellhop just says, no lady, no way, can’t do it. Shakes his head. You don’t even know the room number? I say. Oh, I know it, lady, but I can’t give it out. I tell him I’ll pay him to know. Come on, he says, I could lose my job. Five hundred bucks, I say. He sort of says, oh shit, lady. Then I say, a thousand. He says, you don’t have a thousand. But I did. I mean, Simon’s making so much money that we’re just carrying around a ton of it, for no real reason. So I show him the money. He was dark, sort of skinny, maybe Pakistani or something. He tells me the number. That’s the main suite, he says, which bedroom it is I don’t know. I ask him how I’ll know if he’s telling the truth, and he says, because if I’m not, then you’ll come down here and tell the manager and I’ll lose my job. This seemed pretty good, so I gave him the money. Then I figured I should get up there before Hobbs went to sleep. If he’s coming from England or someplace, then he’s going to be really tired, and if he’s coming from the West Coast, then he’ll stay up a little while more. I’m thinking like this and also wondering what the hell Simon is doing. So I go up there and knock on the door. It opens and there’s a guy on the telephone. I smile and say, I’m here for Mr. Hobbs. The guy looks at me and just waves me in. It’s a big, big suite, maybe six rooms. The guy motions me into the next room and there is Hobbs, sitting, reading a paper, and then he says, well, what do we have here, something like that, you know, and you can pretty much imagine the rest of it yourself, or some of it at least. He was different, and sweet, too.”

  “You taped it.”

  “It was easy. I put the purse on a dresser and started the camera. It was a silent drive, with a fish-eye. It took in the whole room.”

  I said nothing, only nodded.

  “I came back to the apartment the next morning and Simon was quick to tear into my purse. He took the tape away and never let me see it. It turns out he never did his part of the bargain, either.” She sighed in bitterness. “I hated him for what had become of me, how I was willing to do something like that. I took a shower that must have lasted three hours—I told myself never again. We had a big fight about the tape, but he wouldn’t give it back, and then after he saw it we really had a big fight. What did he expect? Then later, after Simon died, I figured that the tape would be in his collection, but it wasn’t.”

  “Why me?” I said, trying not to feel angry.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Caroline exhaled, her voice tired and confessional. “I thought maybe you might be able to help me. Maybe just give me advice or something. I’ve hired private investigators or whatever they call themselves, and they can’t help me. I don’t know where the tape is. I don’t know what’s on it that’s so bad, really.”

  I stared at her. “This whole thing with us is about getting me to help you find the tape?”

  “Well—”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Yes.”

  I found myself looking toward the window.

  “Do you forgive me?” she asked.

  “No. Or myself.”

  “I like you, Porter, I like being with you. But I was hoping that I could get you to help … I mean, if I don’t find that cape … I thought I could ignore it, just not think about Hobbs. I get these—”

  And here she flicked on a table light and fumbled nervously through a drawer, pulling out a sheaf of letters on heavy bond. The law firm was London-based, with a sizable office in New York.

  “I got this last week,” she said. “And this one was before t, and—”

  Dear Mrs. Crowley,

  Pursuant to our last communication with you, dated January 12, we still seek to impress upon you the serious nature of this matter. Your purposeful reluctance to call this office or to respond to Mr. Hobbs’s direct inquiries is most troubling. We continue to maintain that you are in possession—

  And so on. “Why don’t you hire a lawyer to deal with this?” I asked. “Certainly Simon had an attorney who handled the disposition of the estate?”

  “Yes.”

  “So there was a complete accounting of the estate, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why not ask that lawyer to respond to Hobbs? Write him a letter saying that no such tape was in Simon’s possession at the time of death, something like that. I mean, this is pretty simple stuff.”

  “I haven’t wanted to deal with the lawyers. The estate was so complicated …” She looked at me with hope in her eyes and took my hand. “Please help me, Porter.”

  But I felt only a smoldering fury, and I got up, saying nothing, and went into the bathroom; there I washed my face and looked in the mirror. I’d heard a lie in Caroline’s voice somewhere, maybe more than one, and I wanted to think carefully about what she’d told me. But I was tired and my head swam with the drink. And now home seemed a better place to be.

  Napoleon was off-duty and, without his impressive buttons and collar, was only some guy in a T-shirt, sleeping in a cheap apartment, dreaming the gray dreams of depression. In his place in the apartment house’s lobby was an old man whose lower eyelids sagged so far down that the lips of them hung outward from the curved surface of his eyeballs, as if he had not slept in twenty or thirty years. One of those New York night characters who seems to have stepped out of an Edward Hopper painting. He watched me walk down the hallway, past the lilies again, a few pink petals of which had now fallen to the table, time passing wretchedly as always, and then he croaked, “Cab there, fella?”

  I nodded, and while his eyes seemed too tired to move from my face, his hand crept over the worn mahogany desk to a round brass switch, which he flicked back and forth with irritating energy, like a man urgently signaling the end of the world. By the time I was outside, a cab was sitting there, roof light haloed by the swirling snow, the driver sipping coffee.

  “Cold night, pal,” he said when I got inside. “I mean cold.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Starting to get some real accumulation here.”

  I moved my head in the affirmative. He had a little jazz coming out of the radio, soft, lulling even, and I pulled my coat tight and slumped sleepily back in my seat. I was exhausted and vaguely anxious. It was nearly. five A.M. The cabbie nosed the car into the light traffic, then glanced back in his mirror.

  “You all right back there?”

  “Aaah, yes and no.”

  “Yes and no? Ain’t going to crap out on me here or something? I had a guy with a heart attack once. Not a bowl of cherries, I’ll say that.”

  The cab flew down the avenue past the snow-flickering lights, past the few shades hunching along the white sidewalks, the city a fantasy of dreams, in which the morning world would never come. I watched the driver change lanes without signaling. The interior of the cab was suffused with bluish light, some kind of saxophone coming faintly from the radio. The entire night seemed impossible to me, impossible and true. We sailed past a white, double-length limo. The boys in it—sailors or high-school football players—had taken off their shirts and were hanging out of the windows and sitting on the roof. “Look at those fuckers,” the cabbie muttered.

  We pulled up next to my brick wall. The street was quiet. I paid the driver and walked heavily toward the gate. Ten feet away, I looked u
p to see a car jerk to a stop. Two men jumped out. They wore good wool coats, and one was hatless, I remember that. I didn’t like their interest in me, and I got out my key.

  “Wren.”

  I had the gate unlocked when they reached me. The bigger man put his foot inside the gate. They looked like businessmen. They weren’t cops. No one could see me inside the tunnel.

  “What can I do for you guys on this lovely evening?”

  “Give us the tape.”

  The snow was making me blink. “I don’t have it yet.”

  “You have a tape in your coat.”

  I was astounded. “That’s not the right one.”

  “Give us the tape now and there’s no problem.”

  The closer man pulled something from his coat and swung at me. I jumped back but was off balance. The other man kicked me between the legs like the guy who knocks them into the end zone for the Giants, and I defecated instantly, a shocked shit right there in my pants. Then I was down, down hard. A gloved hand was at the back of my neck, pressing my right cheek against the cold brick walk while my coat was searched. They took the tape.

  A voice close to my ear: “Hey, Wren, you’re an asshole, you know that?”

  I heard the sound of aerosol, and then my left eye and nose and throat ignited in pain, my mouth became a great hyperventilating orifice, and as I writhed I heard myself howling, as if from a far distance. And they kicked me a few more times, once in the head and twice in the stomach and once more in the balls, and, rolled tightly inside myself, clenched and blind and brain aflame, I yelled for mercy, the sound loud in the tunnel. No answer came, and I tightened, waiting to be hit again, covering my head, drawing my legs up. And then I realized that nothing was happening. My right eye, the one pressed to the cold brick, had taken only an incidental shot of the Mace, and I opened it to a watery blinking slit and began dragging myself toward the open gate. It was maybe six feet away. I wanted to cry. I crawled some more but made no progress. There were many parts of my body I needed to think about. I collapsed to my belly. Finally I was able to cup my balls tenderly, determine that they were still more or less there. I rolled over onto my back, feeling the shit move in my pants. The burning in my nose eased. I forced that same right eye open again to look with watery clearness beyond the open gate into the January sky, where one late star winked against the fading darkness, cold and beautiful. It was that moment when night gives way to day. Snow was still falling. I could see it drifting into the tunnel doorway, landing on my coat sleeve. I could feel it against my cheek, on my lashes. I remembered that I had told Caroline about finding the dead man in the snow. It was snowing, but I was not a dead man. I would be fine. In general I was drinking too much and fucking around and getting beaten up, but I was fine. Yes, I would be fine in a few minutes. But minutes are a strange thing. You do nothing and they pass. You do nothing but lie on a brick path with the gate still open, reasonably warm in your wool coat, your face cold, waiting for something, an answer, perhaps. I hoped that my balls would still work. I saw now that I was no longer in control. Events were running past and over me. I was in a kind of trouble that suggested that all that was bad would soon be worse.

  Then a car stopped outside the gate. I could hear the motor running. A door opened, footsteps on snow, footsteps closer, the sounds clear in the still, cold air. The gate remained open. Were the men coming back? I tried to push myself up. Nothing. Arms were dead. The steps were coming closer. Get up, you drunk fucker, save your own life. Be a hero. Steps. One person. I staggered to my knees.

  “Please,” I cried.

  No answer came. Something flew in through the open gate, hitting me in the chest. Flopping to the ground.

  The newspaper. Page one. PORTER WREN: DIARY OF A MADMAN.

  Good morning! You have a furious wife, you have blood in your piss, you have a great story in the paper. But—after Lisa had given me a cold look on her way out the door with Sally—I couldn’t think about these things. No, what really needed to happen was that Hobbs had to call off his two businessmen. I could only assume that once they saw that they had the wrong videotape they would practice some other beautiful tricks. Did they know that I was alone in the house right now, Lisa gone and Josephine out with Tommy? And how had they learned that I was carrying a videotape? Except for being hidden while at home, the tape had stayed in my coat pocket from the moment I’d left the Malaysian bank. I had never taken it out in public, never showed it to anyone. It occurred to me that Caroline had been lying about Hobbs and almost everything else and had called Hobbs or Campbell or the two executives and told them I was going down in the elevator with a videotape. She was, after all, the only one who knew that I had it in my pocket. But following our long conversation the previous night I wasn’t ready to believe this about her; it made no sense. Maybe Hobbs had her apartment bugged. That was a little far-fetched, though not impossible. You could bribe the building’s management, get inside. Obviously the doormen were already paid off and kept track of the comings and goings of people—obviously this had not been obvious to me. Then I remembered that I had taken the tape out of my pocket on the way up in the elevator to check that it wasn’t one of Sally’s. In a premier building like Caroline’s, the elevator would have a closed-circuit video camera hidden in it, available for review if necessary. They had seen me go up, perhaps observed on a monitor as I had smiled stupidly at the old woman, watched her get off on the second floor, and then reached in my coat pocket for the tape. Then it was just a matter of a phone call. Had they waited for me to go home, thinking they would grab it when I got out of the cab? That didn’t make sense—I could easily have left the tape with Caroline.