A Cool Breeze on the Underground nc-1

by Don Winslow

  “Worse comes to worst,” Graham said, “and it will, you get down on your belly and swim downstairs.”

  “Swim?”

  “Try it. Don’t be afraid. Lie down, headfirst, and do the dog paddle.”

  “I can’t swim and I don’t have a dog.”

  Neal felt stupid as shit lying down dangling over the stairs.

  “You’ve seen Lassie, haven’t you?” asked Graham. “Do like Lassie does when she has to save that little bastard from drowning.”

  “Timmy.”

  “Right. Whatever. Quit stalling.”

  Graham put his foot on Neal’s ass and pushed.

  It wasn’t so bad when you got used to it, Neal thought, doing like Lassie does, etcetera. He made his way to the bottom of the stairs.

  He asked Graham, “How do you do this with one arm?”

  “You don’t. You hire some stupid kid to do it for you.”

  He walked over Neal’s back and out the door.

  A couple of months later, Neal tried to climb through a window and talk at the same time. He had something on his mind.

  “If I gave you the money, would you buy me something?”

  Graham stood on the fire escape. “What? Beer? Cigarettes? Rubbers?”

  “A book.”

  Neal was backing through the window, his feet already in the kitchen sink.

  “A book? You really want to go through a window like that? So you can’t see what’s in the room awaiting your arrival with a Louisville Slugger? What book, Neal? Swedish Sex Slaves? Ruby and the Firemen? Like that?”

  Neal climbed out. “Tom Jones.”

  He started back through the window, headfirst this time.

  “Tom Jones? Is it dirty?”

  “Dirty enough, they won’t let me buy it.”

  “Are you really this stupid, Neal, or are we just having an off day? Going into an apartment window head in the air like a hanging curveball? You go in like that, you come out on a stretcher, anyone’s home.”

  Neal eased his way out. “So will you?”

  “What’s so important about this book?”

  “David Copperfield read it when he was a kid. You know David Copperfield?”

  “Yes, I know David Copperfield. I saw it twice. Freddie Bartholomew and W. C. Fields.”

  “Really? W. C. Fields? Who’d he play?”

  “I don’t know. Guy who was always broke, owed money.”

  “Mr. Micawber.”

  “Yeah, okay. Now will Mr. Carey please show me the correct way to enter a domicile via a window, if this literary discussion is over? Or shall I pour tea?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “The correct way to enter a domicile via a window.”

  “Why didn’t you ask?”

  Feetfirst, facing the window, and swing through. Like you’re on the monkey bars. Then walk purposefully through the kitchen and down the hallway and into the bedroom, which will be on your right. Don’t tiptoe. Tiptoes are for ballerinas and guys who go to jail for B amp; E. Which you are neither. First thing, grab something that looks pawnable and put it in your pocket. If someone is there and you can’t get out, don’t fight. Let him grab you and call the cops. Levine will be right there to arrest you.

  So you’re in the bedroom and the guy is asleep. You put his watch in your pocket and place this nice little mike under the side table. Put the watch back. I said put the watch back. Now go out the way you came in.

  Easier than Maloney’s sister. Your old Dad taught you well. Home now for a Swanson’s TV dinner and a book.

  Thus, Neal Carey grew up and learned a useful trade.

  9

  “Today,” said joe graham with his brightest nasty smile, “we are going to play a game.”

  “Swell,” said sixteen-year-old Neal, who possessed that finely tuned sixteen-year-old sense of sarcasm.

  They were sitting in Graham’s apartment on Twenty-sixth Street between Second and Third. The place looked like an operating room, only smaller. The countertop of the efficiency kitchen glistened and the sink and tap handles shone as brightly as the soul of a seven-year-old Catholic girl leaving confession. Neal could not figure out how a one-armed man could make a bed with hospital corners you could cut yourself on. The bathroom contained a toilet that begged sunglasses, a similarly shimmering sink, and a shower-no bath. (“I don’t like lying around in dirty water.”) Graham had moved in ten years ago because it was an upwardly mobile Irish neighborhood. He had failed to discern that all the upwardly mobile Irish were moving to Queens. They came back to the neighborhood only on Saturday nights to sit in a local tavern and listen to songs about killing Englishmen, sanguinary concerts punctuated by maudlin renditions of the dreaded “Danny Boy.”

  On this particular Saturday, an unseasonably warm autumn afternoon, the neighborhood was noisy with the sounds of playing children, old couples returning from their weekly grocery shopping, and neighbors hanging out on the sidewalk enjoying the sun.

  Neal would rather have been enjoying the sun, especially in the company of one Carol Metzger, with whom he had planned a stroll in Riverside Park and maybe a movie. Instead, he was cooped up in Graham’s stuffy shrine to Brillo, about to play a game.

  “The game is called Hide-and-Go-Fuck-Yourself,” Graham announced, “and the rules are simple. I hide something and you go fuck yourself.”

  “You win. Can I go now?”

  “No. Now, let us say I have lost my earring-”

  “Your earring?”

  “Just play the game. I have lost my earring. It is somewhere in this apartment. Find it.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to have a beer.”

  “Can I have a beer?”

  “No. You can look for the earring.”

  Graham went to the fridge and got a cold one. Then he sat down on a stool by the kitchen counter and turned to the sports section of the Daily News.

  Neal began to search the apartment. If he could nail this stupid thing early, maybe Graham would let him out of here and he could still catch up with Carol Metzger. The way her brown hair fell on her shoulders made his stomach hurt.

  If I were an earring, where would I be? he thought. This seemed like the most logical way to go about this. He looked under the cushions of the small sofa in Graham’s “sitting area.”

  “Good idea,” Graham said.

  There was no earring in the sofa. There was no earring under the sofa. There wasn’t even any dust under the sofa; no pennies, rubber bands, paper clips, or toothpicks, either. Neal looked in the seam between the seat cushion and back of Graham’s Naugahyde easy chair. No earring.

  “The Giants are eight-point dogs tomorrow,” Graham noted. “At home against the Colts. You want in?”

  Neal didn’t bother to answer. He knew this bit. Graham was just trying to distract him, disrupt his concentration.

  Graham continued: “Eight points. Tempting. You can give a touch and still make. Of course, the stupid bastards would find a way to give up a safety in the last twelve seconds and bust your balls.”

  “Where’s the goddamn earring?”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Graham said pleasantly. There were far worse ways to kill a Saturday afternoon than torturing Neal: watching college football, for example.

  Au ugly suspicion hit Neal. “Is this earring on, as they say, your person?”

  “That would be, as they say, devious.”

  “Because if it’s in your underwear, I’m not looking for it.”

  Graham was tempted to say something about this Carol girl but thought better of it, sixteen-year-old love being a sensitive sort of thing. “So if I tell you to search my drawers, you wouldn’t take it the wrong way?”

  Neal rifled through Graham’s chest of drawers. This wasn’t too hard. The socks were neatly balled and organized by color. The underwear was folded. There were little plastic containers for formerly loose change. Neal got a quick
surge of hope when he found the little tray containing cuff links and tie tacks, but there was no earring. Nor was it under the laundered shirts, stiff in cardboard and tissue paper, nor under the sweaters.

  “You told me to search the drawers!”

  “So?”

  “So it’s not there.”

  “Gee.”

  Neal tried the closet next: coat pockets, shelves, the works. In a moment of inspiration, he searched the vacuum-cleaner bag. Nothing. While he was zipping it back up, Graham slid off his stool and came over.

  “You’re going about this all wrong, son.”

  “Figures.”

  “The key to finding an object is not to look for it.”

  “I can do that.”

  Graham ignored the remark. “Don’t search for the object; search the space. Don’t run around looking where you think the object might be; look at what is. Got it?”

  Neal shook his head.

  “Okay,” Graham said, “you got the room, right? That’s what is. In the room, there is supposed to be an earring, right? That’s what might be. What are you going to look at, what is or what might be?”

  “What is.”

  Graham was getting excited. “Right! So you search the room!”

  “That’s what I was doing!”

  “No, you were searching around the room.”

  Neal sat down in the easy chair. “I’m sorry, I don’t get it.”

  Graham went to the fridge and got out a beer and a Coke. He handed Neal the Coke. “Okay, you like to read, right?”

  Graham was thinking real hard. “So when you read, do you skip all over the page? Read a word here, a word there?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Wouldn’t make any sense.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “Well… you read paragraphs… and sentences.”

  “Okay! So break the room up into paragraphs! Read the room!”

  Now Neal was getting excited. He didn’t quite have it, but the connection was almost there. “Yeah, but how do you break a room up into paragraphs?”

  “Divide it up into cubes.”

  “Cubes?”

  “Sure. It would be squares, except squares are only two dimensions, and rooms are three dimensions. Then you search a square at a time. Search the whole square. Don’t look for the object; search the cube. If the object is there, you’ll find it. If not, move on to the next cube.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “How about that? Now find the earring while I finish my beer and look for investment opportunities,” Graham said. He returned to his stool and perused the point spreads.

  Neal found it in the fifth cube, beneath the radiator.

  He held the earring up in triumph.

  Graham nodded. “The cube system is good, of course, when you are looking for some specific object, but it’s even better when you are just searching for something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Graham sighed in mock exasperation. “Sometimes, Neal, you’re sent into an apartment, or an office, or a house just to see if there’s anything peculiar, out of the ordinary; with the cube system, you’re unlikely to miss anything, like maybe a twelve-inch mahogany dildo carved like Mount Rushmore or something.”

  “Because you’re just looking, not looking for something, and therefore you’re not narrowing your vision with preconceptions.”

  “If you say so, son. We’ll pick this up next week. Now get out so I can watch Ohio State massacre Wisconsin in peace.”

  “We’re done?” Neal asked, visions of Carol Metzger dancing in his head.

  “For today.”

  Neal scrambled for the door.

  “Neal!”

  Neal stopped in the doorway. He knew it was too good to be true. Graham was probably going to send him out to look for something, like a gum wrapper he had initialed and left in Times Square.

  “Yeah?”

  “You got money for the movie?”

  How did he know? “Yeah…”

  Graham extended a ten-dollar bill. “You’ll want to take her somewhere decent afterward, get a bite to eat.”

  Neal shook his head. “Thanks, Graham, but I don’t want-”

  “Take it. You’re a working man; you deserve a little walking-around money. Take her someplace they have napkins.”

  Neal took the money. “Thanks, Graham.”

  “Get out; I wanna see the pregame show.”

  Neal split. Graham went back to his paper, but his mind was more on Eileen O’Malley, who had been sixteen when he was sixteen, and who had blue eyes that could stop your heart.

  10

  “You give good search, Neal,” Joe Graham said one Saturday morning during one of their weekly training sessions.

  “Thanks.”

  “You read a room really very well.” This was true. Neal had just finished searching Graham’s apartment for an M amp;M, a brown one, the regular kind, not the peanut. He had found it in less than ten minutes, taped in the water tank of the toilet.

  “But,” Graham said as Neal winced, “Helen Keller could come in here, know the place was tossed.”

  “Isn’t she dead?”

  “Doesn’t matter. She could still tell.” This week, Neal actually had a Saturday-night date, a real date, with Carol Metzger, so he was in a particular hurry. Nevertheless, he was annoyed that Graham was never happy. What did he want?

  “Go search my top drawer.”

  That’s what he wanted.

  Neal went to the drawer and visually divided it into cubes. He lifted up the plastic tray full of change, saw nothing very interesting, and was about to set it down when Graham told him to freeze.

  “Look at the way you picked it up,” Graham said. He waited for an answer.

  Neal didn’t have one. He had just picked the damn thing up, that’s all. He shrugged.

  Graham continued, “You picked it up diagonally, at an angle.”

  “I should be shot.” What the hell difference did it make?

  “You have to lift this straight up. Straight. Why?”

  “Oh yeah, so you can set it down in exactly the same place.”

  “You’re not as stupid as you look. Of course, that would be impossible. Now practice.”

  “Practice?”

  “It’s not as easy as it seems, lifting things straight up, setting them down. I’m going to practice on a cold bottle of Knickerbocker.”

  So Neal spent an hour and a half lifting things up and setting them down, and it wasn’t as easy as it seemed. He found the best technique was to stand at a little less than arm’s reach, with his elbow slightly bent and wrist cocked downward.

  “What about fingerprints?” he asked Graham. Have you ever thought of that, wise guy?

  “Yeah, well, if you’re tossing an FBI agent, you might want to bring gloves along, but if you do it right, your average homeowner isn’t gonna know you’ve been there, never mind think about fingerprints.”

  The next thing they worked on were window treatments. “That’s what interior decorators call curtains and Venetian blinds and that stuff,” Graham said.

  “What do you know about interior decorators?”

  “There’s one lives in this building whose interior I’d like to decorate.”

  “God.”

  “So look behind the curtain there.”

  “I looked already.”

  “Yeah, you looked bad, now I want you to look good.”

  Neal reached for the curtain.

  “Stop.”

  “I haven’t even touched it!”

  “You were about to pull it back. Don’t pull it back, pull it out, and no smart remarks.”

  Neal pulled the curtain out.

  “Now let go of it.”

  Neal did.

  “And?” Graham asked.

  “And it fell back in the same place.”

  “Doesn’t matter so much if it’s a guy’s place, but women notice these things. W
oman comes home and there’s a corpse lying on the floor; she calls the cops and says, There’s a body lying in a pool of blood over by the curtain, which is out of place.’ Now raise the blinds.”

  “You’re going to stop me before I touch the cord, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. First lick your finger.”

  “Then do I spin around three times and say, There’s no place like home’?”

  Graham made a lewd gesture. “Spin on this,” he said. “But first lick your finger, then-”

  “Which-”

  “Any finger. Just do it. Now… using the spittle-”

  “Spittle?”

  “Mark the windowsill and match it up with the bottom edge of one of the thingies on the blinds.”

  Neal did, raised the blinds, and then lowered them to the exact spot.

  “And you thought your Uncle Joey was crazy.”

  “Same thing with windows up and down, right?”

  “Bright boy.”

  Neal went to the fridge and grabbed a Coke. “So probably the next thing you’re going to show me is how to do closet doors, medicine cabinets, that sort of thing?”

  “I’m looking at you with new respect, Neal. Now usually this is the stuff that only professionals, women, and advanced paranoids notice, but there’s no harm in being careful, right?”

  “I like careful.”

  So they went to work on the closet door in Graham’s bedroom. First came a lecture from Graham, which Neal didn’t mind, as it gave him a chance to sit down and finish his Coke. Graham told him that if the closet was shut, it was no issue. But sometimes suspicious people will leave a closet door ajar deliberately, and then you had to be careful to leave it exactly the same way. There were two good ways to accomplish this.

  “You can mark the opening along the side of your shoe, or you can do what the subject probably did, which is to line the edge of the door up with something else in the room, usually something on the wall, and usually something very obvious.

  “Hinged doors like this one are trickier than sliding doors. Why?”

  “Because you have to check both the inside and outside edges of the door against possible marks on the wall, and also because it’s harder to match the exact perspective that the subject used to make the mark.”