A New York Dance

by Donald E. Westlake

  "I got all the time in the world," Jerry told him.

  The contact walked away across the concrete floor, sparsely populated with parked cars, and opened the rear door of a maroon Cadillac Eldorado. He bent down to speak to somebody inside there.

  Mel said, "What's happening, Jerry?"

  "I think they screwed up somehow."

  Mel said, "Are you sure they're the ones screwed up?"

  Jerry looked at his brother-in-law, ready to lay into him, and then he saw that in fact Mel was scared green. The whites were showing all around his eyes, and his nose was bulging. "Take it easy," Jerry advised. "I'm in the right, Mel."

  "I wish that made me feel better," Mel said, and looked over at the Cadillac. "What now?"

  Somebody was getting out of the front seat of the Cadillac on the passenger side. He was short and slender and dapper, in an electric-blue jacket of Edwardian cut, black sateen trousers, black patent-leather shoes, a white shirt with lace down the front and an electric-blue string tie. He and the contact walked back over to where Jerry and Mel were waiting, and they could see that this second man was Hispanic, olive-complexioned and brown-eyed, with black sideburns extending in scimitar-design halfway down his jawline and a pencil moustache that could have been used to slice rye bread. He also had a cocky and self-satisfied expression, and he looked Jerry and Mel up and down as though he was a king and they were ill-made beds.

  The contact said to Jerry, "This is the fella give you the message on the phone, and he says he told you right."

  "But of course," said the Hispanic.

  Jerry pointed a finger at him. "You told me A," he said.

  "But of course," said the Hispanic.

  "I don't have to take a lotta—" Jerry stopped and frowned at him. "What?"

  "But of course," said the Hispanic. Then he stepped forward, while Jerry and the contact both stared at him, and he looked at the writing on the box on the tailgate. "But thot ees wrong," he said, and waggled his finger over it.

  "Right," said the contact. He'd been at sea there for a second, but now he was on solid ground again. "It's the wrong box, like I said."

  "Thot ees not an A," said the Hispanic.

  Jerry looked at the contact and spread his hands, as though to say, You see?

  The contact now was looking at the Hispanic, and not only were his shoulders moving around inside his jacket but there were also muscles moving around under the skin of his forehead. Slowly, softly, dangerously, he said to the Hispanic. "That's not an A?"

  "But of course not," said the Hispanic. He seemed only politely interested, very slightly puzzled.

  The contact pointed at the A. "If that's not an A," he said, "what is it?"

  "Ah," said the Hispanic.

  Everybody waited, but the Hispanic had nothing else to say.

  The contact said, "Well?"

  The Hispanic smiled helpfully, ready to be of further assistance. "Yes?"

  The contact's finger was still pointing at the A, and now it trembled as the contact said, "What the hell is that goddam letter, you goddam pansy?"

  The Hispanic showed offense by coming taller and narrower. "As I have told you," he said, "it is the letter ah."

  "The letter ah?" The contact seemed ready to eat concrete. He said, "Then what the hell is the letter A?"

  "Quite simple," said the Hispanic. Withdrawing from his inner jacket pocket the kind of silver pen fancied by untrustworthy attorneys, he quickly sketched on the wooden box the letter:

  E

  Everybody stared at it. Then, in a voice hushed with awe, Mel said, "He's talking in the Spanish alphabet."

  A tiny furrow of doubt formed horizontally above the Hispanic's narrow eyebrows. "Beg pardon?" he said.

  Jerry said to him, "You should of been watching Sesame Street, you dummy."

  The contact said, "The Spanish alphabet? This fruitcake gave you instructions in the Spanish alphabet?"

  "Beg pardon?" said the Hispanic.

  The contact turned and struck the Hispanic with his fist, and the Hispanic lay down on the cement floor. To Jerry the contact said, "Wait there."

  "Sure," said Jerry.

  The contact walked away again to the Cadillac. The Hispanic lay quietly on his back, bleeding into both scimitars of his sideburns. Mel said, "Probably you didn't realize it, Jerry, but I was a little worried there for a second."

  "A cool guy like you? I would never of guessed."

  "In fact," Mel said, "I think I'll go sit in the car. Okay?"

  "Sure," said Jerry.

  Mel got into the station wagon and the contact came back over from the Cadillac to say, "Okay, no harm done. Tomorrow you pick up the box with the E on it, and we meet here tomorrow night, same channel, same time."

  "That's two pickups and two deliveries," Jerry said. "I expect two payments."

  The contact looked unhappy, but then he gave a quick nod and said, "Yeah, it wasn't your fault. Okay." Then he extended a small business card, saying, "You got any problems, call this number."

  There was nothing on the card but a phone number, handwritten in black ink. "Okay," Jerry said. He pocketed the card and pointed at the wrong box. "What about this thing?"

  "Keep it," the contact said.

  "Right." Jerry pushed the box into the storage area and shut the tailgate. Then he said, "You want to move your pal, so I can back up?"

  "Back over him," said the contact.

  The Next Morning…

  JERRY MANELLI CARRIED his laundry down the private outside staircase and went into his parents' part of the house through the kitchen door. "Whadaya say, Mom," he said, and dumped the laundry on top of the washing machine.

  Mrs. Manelli stood at the stove, left hand on her hip stirring the spaghetti sauce with a wooden spoon. It was her belief that somewhere there existed a perfect spaghetti sauce, somewhere within the reach of the human mind, and she was determined to find it. She experimented with ingredients, brand names, alternatives. She experimented with pots, with spoons, with higher and lower flame. She tried the same recipe on sunny days and on rainy days and on days with different barometric pressures. She was in the thirty-second year of research, and prepared to go on till the end of time, if necessary.

  "You're up early, that's what I say," she told her son, and stirred with the wooden spoon.

  "Gotta hustle," Jerry told her amiably, picked up the coffeepot from the back burner, and sniffed at the latest sauce. "Smells good."

  "I think it's congealing," she said. "I mean, you're early, considering how late you were out last night."

  Myrna and her rose had helped somewhat to ease his annoyance over the mixup with the box marked A. Jerry grinned and repeated, "Gotta hustle," with slightly different emphasis. He put sugar and milk in his coffee, and said, "Where's Pop?"

  "Flying a kite," said his mother.

  "You're kidding."

  "That's the latest. He's over by Alley Pond Park with a kite. He made it himself, it looks like a ravioli."

  Jerry's father had retired two years ago from his job in a department store's warehouse out on Long Island, and as soon as he became a senior citizen his name got onto more rotten mailing lists than you could shake your fist at. Everybody wants to hustle the old folks. A running theme in all this junk mail was that retired people ought to have a hobby, take up the slack from no longer having a job. The old man had never worked a day in his life — he'd spent most of his labouring days trying to figure a way to slip unnoticed out of the warehouse with a sofa — but he believed this hobby thing as though the Virgin herself had come down on a cloud to give him his instructions. "Man without a hobby shrivels up and dies," he'd say. "A hobby keeps your mind active, your blood circulating, keeps you young. They've done studies, they got statistics, it's a proven thing."

  Unfortunately, though, the old man had never had a hobby in his life, didn't really know what the hell a hobby was, and couldn't keep up his interest in any hobby he tried. He'd been through stamp-collecting, coi
n collecting, matchbook collecting. He'd paid good money for a ham radio but he never used it, because, "I don't have anything to say. I don't even know these people." He'd tried making a ship in a bottle, and within half an hour he'd busted the bottle on the radiator and stalked out of the house. He was going to build a St. Patrick's Cathedral out of toothpicks, and got as far as the first step. He figured he'd become an expert on baseball statistics, but the last time he'd looked at baseball there were sixteen teams in the two major leagues and now there were hundreds. He started clipping things out of the newspapers—disaster stories or funny headlines ("Action on Building Bribes Delayed by Lack of Funds," for instance from The New York Times) — and all he managed to do was cut the dining room tablecloth with the scissors, and glue his fingers together.

  The old man didn't know it, and nobody would tell him, but it turned out his hobby was looking for hobbies. It was certainly keeping his mind active and his blood circulating, and if he was actually out in the park now with a homemade kite then maybe it was also keeping him young. "Yeah," Jerry said. "Maybe I'll stop over there before lunch." He finished his coffee and put the cup in the sink.

  His mother looked at him. "No breakfast?"

  "I got a special pickup this morning." He kissed her on the cheek. "See you later."

  "If you see your father," she called after him, "tell him dinner at six. Not six-thirty, quarter to seven. Six."

  Later that Morning…

  "THEY LOOK LIKE they're taking a crap," Frank McCann said.

  "It's a fart contest," said his brother Floyd. "They're standing around trying to give out with the biggest fart."

  Frank and Floyd were in Frank's sunny kitchen, sitting at the white Formica table on which stood four gold-painted green-eyed Dancing Aztec Priests, hopping on their left legs amid a rural scattering of excelsior. The wooden box marked A was on the floor beside the table, with its top ripped off.

  Frank's wife Teresa, who was also Jerry's sister, looked over at the table from where she was chopping carrots on the drainboard and said, "Maybe they're dancing."

  "Yeah, they're dancing," Frank said. "The green apple two-step."

  Floyd said, "So what do we do? Throw them out?"

  "We'll put them in the closet," Frank said. There was a closet in the basement, behind the bar, where they kept things that might be valuable but for which they had not as yet found the right customer. Skis, for instance; there were a lot of skis down there.

  Floyd said, "Let's see what else we got today."

  So they put the four Dancing Aztec Priests and most of the excelsior back in the wooden box, and then turned to the mail sacks and packages and boxes that were Jerry's regular harvest from the airport. They slit open the canvas mailbags, punched open the cardboard cartons, crowbarred open the wooden boxes, and quickly separated the wheat from the chaff. All registered letters were opened, and cash was put in one pile, stocks and bonds in another. Small registered packages were likely to carry jewellery, which went onto a third pile. While Teresa went on preparing today's minestrone the loot heaped up on the kitchen table, with the discarded boxes and bags and envelopes and letters scattered around the floor.

  The reason Frank was home during the day was that he was a member of a backstage theatrical union. The union required so-and-so many members be hired for every Broadway and Off-Broadway production, whether that large a crew was needed for that particular show or not. Frank, a pale-skinned, pot-bellied man of thirty-four, with thinning red hair and a thickening red face, had been with the union twelve years and had pretty good seniority by now, so he generally got himself hired by shows where he was redundant and didn't have to put in an appearance hardly at all.

  Floyd McCann, a younger and somewhat thinner version of his brother, was in a construction union and so also had a lot of time off. If they weren't on strike — and they were usually on strike — then something else would happen, like the city running out of money or the contractor failing to get all the right permits. At the moment, blacks were sitting-in at the project where Floyd was supposed to be working, wanting some damn thing, so Floyd was at home again, on full pay, and he'd drifted over to Frank's house for today's opening.

  Frank was counting the day's cash and Floyd was separating the "pay to bearer" stocks and bonds from those with names on them, when the kitchen door opened and Jerry came in, wearing his on-duty white coveralls and blue baseball cap and looking annoyed.

  Something had to be wrong. Jerry was always at work this time of day, and he never wore his coveralls away from the job. Floyd said, "Hey, Jerry," and Frank said, "What's up?"

  "We got a problem," Jerry said. "With that goddam box."

  "What's wrong?"

  "I went to get the right box this morning," Jerry said, "and it was already delivered. Gone from the airport."

  Floyd said, "Then that's that."

  "No it isn't." Jerry took off his cap, wiped his forehead with it, and put it back on. "I called that number," he said. "The one the contact gave me last night. The answer was, they still want the box."

  "That's tough," Frank said. "Once it's out of the airport, it's their problem."

  "The way they talked," Jerry said, "I think maybe it's our problem."

  "But that isn't right, Jerry."

  Slowly, thoughtfully, Jerry said, "I don't think right and wrong is the question here, Frank."

  "Oh," said Frank.

  "The kind of people we deal with," Jerry said, "I don't think we want any unsatisfied customers."

  Frank said, "So what do we do?"

  "I'll have to take this other box to the city, to — what is it?" Picking up the box containing the four statues, Jerry read the stenciled address aloud: "Bud Beemiss Enterprises, 29 West 45th Street."

  "Sure," said Frank. "You'll make a switch."

  Jerry held the box in both arms. "Kicks the hell out of the day," he said.

  "Don't worry about it," Floyd told him. "We did terrific yesterday."

  "Oh, yeah? What was in that dental supply package?"

  "Teeth."

  "Oh, well, you win a few, you lose a few. Hold the door for me, will you Teresa?"

  But…

  THE GODDESS OF HEAVEN Chinese restaurant, on Broadway near 97th Street, serves Cantonese and Szechuan dishes, and has a menu large, long and intricate in its minute shadings of detail. In addition to normal facilities for lunch and dinner, and in further addition to its elaborate take-out service, the Goddess of Heaven also provides private rooms for groups from twelve to two hundred. Your wedding reception, office shower, bar mitzvah, or revolutionary call to arms will be given the world-famous Goddess of Heaven treatment of courtesy, graciousness, and fine food: "Your choice from Our Most Extensive Menu."

  Today at twelve-thirty a group of sixteen had taken advantage of this opportunity and was in possession of the Mandarin Room, up a flight of coral-coloured stairs from the regular dining rooms. The Mandarin Room, with one green wall, one orange wall, one purple wall, and one glass wall overlooking the traffic down on Broadway, was set up today with connected tables forming a U. The sixteen table settings — heavy plates richly decorated in blue and gold, plus massive silverplate spoons and forks, delicate long red plastic chopsticks, real cloth napkins cunningly folded into the shape of dunce caps, and name cards in the form of tiny parasols — were spaced around the exterior of the U, leaving the centre empty.

  It would be impossible for the casual observer to guess what common bond had brought these sixteen people together in this room. Young and old, male and female, black and white, straight and gay, they were as disparate as a Gallup Poll cross-section, seeming to share nothing but a general interest in lunch. And yet, throughout the meal they chatted together across lines of class, age, race, and sex with cheerful familiarity.

  At the end of the meal, with the ice cream balls and fortune cookies distributed, everybody was smiling and relaxed except for one young woman, Bobbi Harwood, who was pissed off. She was pissed off at her hus
band, Chuck "Professor Charles S." Harwood, who was sitting next to her on her right and blandly assuring her he didn't mind that she'd cuckolded him with yet another black man, by having slept with Oscar Russell Green. "I have not slept with Oscar," Bobbi said, through gritted teeth. "I'm telling you for the last time, Harwood." (She never called him by his last name unless they were fighting.)

  "But I don't mind, sweetheart," Chuck assured her. (He never used terms of endearment unless they were fighting.)

  "You stupid, egotistical son of a bitch, you have a mind like a drive-in theatre."

  "Now, darling," Chuck said. He had an absolutely maddening way of getting calmer and calmer and calmer the more hysterical the people around him became. It was this phlegmatism that had given him, in Bobbi's opinion, his totally inappropriate reputation for intelligence.

  Chuck Harwood, a tall angular stooped Lincolnesque figure of thirty-three, was an anthropologist, originally from Chicago and now an assistant professor at Columbia. He had lived all his life either in major cities with adequate mass transit or in utterly backward corners of the world — seven months in Guatemala, fifteen months in Chad — with no transportation at all, and so was one of the few adult white male Americans of the twentieth century who didn't know how to drive a car. Had no interest, in fact, in driving cars.

  Which infuriated Bobbi almost as much as his allegedly sophisticated attitude toward her alleged miscegenations. (Chuck never believed she was cuckolding him with white men.) The point wasn't even whether or not she was sleeping with all those black men, the point was whether or not Chuck's avowed nonpossessiveness was hypocritical. That was the point, the only point, and it drove Bobbi crimson with rage that he wouldn't admit it.

  As for Bobbi, who had begun life as Barbara Ann Callfield in Oak Crest, Maryland, and who was perfectly capable of supporting herself as an independent woman (she was first harpist with the New York City Symphony Orchestra), she had never been either northern enough to feel guilty towards blacks nor southern enough to feel hostile, neither big-city enough to fear them nor rural enough to be bewildered by them. The result was, her unweighted treatment of black men as normal human beings, occasionally created misunderstandings. "I like you as a friend, Jojo," she would say, one restraining hand on his rippling dark brown arm. While across the room Chuck would suck on his pipe and smile with false indulgence.