“Lauren? She’s a big girl now. Twenty-two.”
“Twenty-two.” The Mayor repeats the number wistfully, the march of all these years passing suddenly before his eyes. “Twenty-two, is it? I’m a grandfather three times over. What’s she doing with herself?”
“She’s an artist.”
“An artist?”
“They’re showing her paintings right now,” Konig says, swelling a bit with pride. “Some fancy gallery over on the East Side. Charging very fancy prices for them too. She’s coming home tomorrow,” he blurts out irrepressibly, not having intended to mention anything about Lolly. But the moment he says it, the moment the words are out, a great weight lifts from him, as if the saying of it actually makes it so. Suddenly he feels giddy and happy. “Yes, she’s coming home.”
“She been away?” the Mayor asks.
“Oh, just for a while,” Konig says, a kind of shy evasiveness in his eyes. “Little misunderstanding. But that’s all behind us now.”
“Good—very good, Paul.” The Mayor clasps his hand warmly. “All the better. Then the free time in the months ahead will be a good time for the both of you to get to know each other again.”
“Yes—I think so.” Konig’s face is glowing. “I think the first thing we’ll do is open up the place in Montauk. We can go out and stay for the whole summer. Lolly loves the ocean, you know.”
“Can’t say I blame her,” the Mayor booms. “Say hello to her for me. Tell her my Joanie is the mother of two now.”
Konig stands there by the door smiling rather idiotically, the Mayor still clasping him warmly by the hand but all the while jostling him gently out the door, a political liability now to be quietly, but swiftly, dispatched. “And, Paul,” he adds, lowering his voice a little conspiratorially, “don’t worry about all the trash you read in the papers. You’re still the best.”
A short time later Konig is back downtown at his desk trying to tunnel through more of the unfinished paperwork. The unanswered letters sit there, a quiet reproach, awaiting him.
It is Saturday morning and so the place is empty. He has it to himself and he relishes the quiet of it. His mind still harks back to his conference with the Mayor. The forced retirement had disheartened him, but he knew, of course, that it was coming. The fact that their conversation took place in the informality of the Mayor’s home rather than at City Hall, as well as the fact that Konig was permitted to pick the time, was the tip-off to what the purpose of the meeting was. So it came as no shock. That he was disheartened was quite true. But walking out of there this morning, he’d also felt a curious exhilaration, as if a great weight had been lifted from him. It had all to do, he knew, with Lolly. The fact that she was coming home now, and that thing the Mayor had said (quite inadvertently, because he knew nothing of Lauren Konig’s situation) about their having “time to get to know each other again.” It was that that had set him off, buoyed him so, had him whistling all the way down from 89th Street to the Medical Examiner’s Office on 30th. In slightly more than twenty-four hours now they’d be together again. After a separation of five months, they’d be a family once more.
Then, too, when he’d walked in that morning around 11:30, made his coffee on the Bunsen burner, watered his plants, lit his first cigar of the day, he’d seen a plain white envelope on his desk with his own name typed across the face of it. It was Carl Strang’s resignation. Curt, succinct, devoid of acrimony, it simply declared he was leaving. It asked for nothing in the way of favors or references. Konig was relieved. It even added to his exhilaration.
Then he turned to his correspondence.
DEAR DR. GRISWALD:
I have studied your reports and protocols with considerable interest and it occurs to me—
And so it went for several hours until he’d actually come within striking distance of the bottom of the pile. He’d typed his own replies, fully enjoying the afternoon’s work. The old communication with colleagues, the reaching out, so to speak, across the land, across the sea, to perfect strangers who’d reached out to him, sought his advice. The common bonds that joined them. That pleased him mightily. His concentration had been deep. His mind keen. He’d even felt a touch of the old vigor surging through him.
Glancing at his watch now, he is astonished to see that it is nearly 3 p.m. He rises instantly, anxious to get home. There are several errands to run before nightfall. Before his rendezvous at the bridge. There had to be food in the larder if Lolly was coming home. He had to stock up. The girl had probably been starved, or at least minimally fed, during the course of her ordeal. Then, ot course, there were the paintings. Her paintings. The ones he’d bought at the Fenimore Gallery. He would hang them on the walls as a kind of surprise for her homecoming. Gleefully, he imagines her reaction when first she’d see them there, hanging throughout the house. He can barely contain himself at the thought of it.
When he’d rinsed out the beaker of coffee, extinguished the Bunsen burner, stubbed out his smoldering cigar, then put out the lights, he was at last ready to go.
Striding out the door of his office, he suddenly catches sight of a small white calling card that had been slipped beneath the outer door. On one side it read “Francis Haggard. NYPD.” On the other, in a rather bold, untidy scrawl, it said merely: “Please don’t try to go it alone.”
»61«
“No—we got no Salvation Army customers, pal. The way my customers pay bills, I’m the only Salvation Army around-here.”
“Know what you mean. Thanks a lot.”
“My pleasure, pal.”
5:15 P.M. TENTH AVENUE AND 50TH STREET.
Sergeant Edward Flynn stands outside a small neighborhood grocery that happens to sell newspapers and magazines. “QUINONES Bodega” it says in faded yellow letters on the window. Then the word “Grocery” printed in smaller letters beneath it.
Flynn stands there in the bright April sunlight scanning a list of seventy names of which Mr. Quinones was the forty-third. Incredibly, at 9:30 this morning, Mr. Stanley Charles had furnished him with a list of names. In alphabetical order, it had been scaled down from the intial hundred-odd retailers who on March 31 might have sold issue number 3118 of the Clintonian to a man who may or may not have been a Salvation Army officer.
“Don’t thank me,” snarled Stanley Charles, much beleaguered and fuming, muttering intermittently _about the “lawyer leeches” and the “tax bastards.”
“Thank the little fourteen-year-old black kid who works for me on the trucks. He’s better than all the goddamned computers put together.”
“You mean he actually worked out a system with those serial numbers?” Flynn asks incredulously.
“Yeah, but don’t ask me to explain it. He tried to explain it to me but I’ll be damned if I can understand it. Something about the order he stacks them on the truck for delivery. Anyway, he narrowed down the list of 100 or so to the bare possibilities. That’s seventy names. They’re in alphabetical order. That’s all I can do. The rest is up to you.”
And so it was. Since ten o’clock that morning he’d seen forty-three people. He’d walked up and down Eighth and Ninth Avenues between 40th and 59th Streets. Then he’d trudged as far west as Eleventh Avenue, where he could see the river and smell the warm, bilgy odors of it. He’d been to newsstands, luncheonettes, drugstores, supermarkets, groceries, subway vendors—any place where newspapers were sold. Asking the same questions and getting the same unsatisfying answers. Certainly no one recognized the serial number, which was never listed on their invoices from the distributor. And so far no one had a customer who walked around in the uniform of a Salvation Army officer.
It is quite warm now, and from where Flynn stands he can see way down to the piers on the river and the big white smokestacks of a docked Italian liner, its gaily colored pennants flapping listlessly in the breeze, and gulls screeching overhead. It makes him think of travel; foreign lands; long, white sandy beaches; palm trees waving; beautiful, accessible women—many things he’
s never had.
The gentle breeze is soughing eastward off the river, bringing with it the smell of low tide. Flynn is hot and tired. His feet hurt and his underwear, sticking to his seat, has chafed a raw welt on his inner thigh.
There are twenty-seven names left on his list. He is physically incapable, he knows, of finishing the list today. But before quitting, he will see just a few more.
Next on the list is a newsstand vendor by the name of Resnikoff—Tenth and 49th. After that, Siegel’s candy store—Eleventh and 49th. After that, a grocer by the name of Salerno—Eleventh and 46th.
At that very moment, Francis Haggard is leaving the New York offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on East 69th Street. He’d spent the afternoon there going through mug shots, comparing prints and data with the Federal agents assigned to the Lauren Konig case.
Because of a number of remarkably similar incidents involving the bombing of public buildings in the greater Boston area, the Bureau has a theory that both Wally Meacham and Janos Klejewski are somewhere in that vicinity with a number of their cohorts, as well as with Lauren Konig. For that reason they have concentrated their search in the Boston area, going as far north as Concord, as far south as Walpole.
They had presented to Haggard that day a lot of solid evidence to substantiate their beliefs, the most impressive being a recent sighting of Janos Klejewski, positively identified on closed-circuit television during the course of a bank robbery in Boston nearly a week ago. The second link in that theory is substantiated by the Bureau’s contacts with paid informers who insist that Meacham and Klejewski, old friends from Danbury days, are back working together again.
Finally, the Bureau’s agents concluded on a somewhat more ominous note. The body of a young girl had been exhumed from a peat bog outside of Worcester three days ago. She’d been beaten, strangled, put in a sack, then submerged in the bog. She’d been part of Meacham’s coterie—in fact, his girl friend.
The force of the first two facts is impressive. The third is something the detective doesn’t even wish to contemplate. But Haggard is still dubious. He cannot refute videotape or privileged information bought at high cost from reliable sources. But all his instincts tell him that Meacham is right here in the city. It’s not merely yesterday’s fiasco in Forest Park that makes him feel that. That could have simply been a few of Meacham’s people doing business for him down in the city while he remains far north, up in New England, out of harm’s way. In fact, that would be the most sensible thing for Meacham to have done, Haggard reasons, with so much heat on for him in the city.
Still, the detective cannot let go of the idea that Wally Meacham is somewhere right around him. Under his nose, so to speak. Within spitting distance. Most important, however, and to his distinct disadvantage, he could not possibly know that both Meacham and Lolly had been at Konig’s house the night before. How could he? Konig hadn’t told him. Nor did he intend to. And had Haggard known that Konig was keeping such crucial information from him, he probably would not have blamed him. Not after the colossal blunder of the day before.
More perplexed than ever, and with a slow but relentlessly mounting sense of panic, of time slipping through his fingers, the detective starts for home.
In Riverdale, Paul Konig has just finished hanging the portrait of Ida. He’s hung it in a commanding position, directly above the marble mantel, having removed from that spot a fine old Hudson River painting. The effect of it has been to brighten the room immeasurably. The brilliant seaside light of Montauk seems to be shimmering off the canvas. It pierces the musty, tenebrous shadows of the room like a shaft of sunlight, and Ida’s smile, glowing there above him, has a salubrious effect So much so that for those brief moments he feels very close to her. Once again her spirit is back with him in the house.
He checks his watch now. He has been checking it all day. It is nearly 6 p.m. and the countdown to 3 a.m. is already well under way. Moving about the house now, his feet have almost a spring to them. He has stocked the refrigerator with food, the first of any substance that has been in there in months. On the walls of the stairway he has hung Lolly’s three small paintings. Going up the stairs he chuckles gleefully as he views them. And upstairs in his den his fishing rods and tackle box are out, bright, gaily colored plugs lie scattered all about, oil and rags all waiting there for him to apply to the reels that he’s brought down from the attic.
Once more he glances quickly at his watch.
»62«
“But how would I remember the number?”
“I didn’t expect you to.”
“The paper, yes. I certainly sold issues of the paper, but whether or not the particular one you’re holding in your hand—”
“Uh-huh?”
“—that I have no way of knowing.”
5:55 P.M. A SMALL CANDY STORE,
49TH STREET BETWEEN TENTH AND ELEVENTH AVENUES.
Flynn stuffs the dog-eared, much-thumbed sheet of the Clintonian back into his pocket. Sighing, he slides wearily onto one of the red Leatherette stools before the soda fountain. “How about a lemon and lime?” he says. “Plenty of ice.”
“Would be a pleasure, Sergeant.”
Mr. Saul Siegel is a big, powerfully built man of seventy some years. He is a splendid, barrel-chested specimen with flowing white hair and somewhat Biblical mien. On the back of his head he wears a black skullcap. Flynn watches him scoop crushed ice into one of those old Coca-Cola glasses held in a steel zarf. Then the old man punches the button of a big, glass syrup dispenser and proceeds to make cold green, bubbly soda.
The vision of the skullcap, the cold green soda effervescing in a zarfed glass, the smell of the old zinc bar, and suddenly Sergeant Edward Flynn is back again, forty years or so, a little boy in Kastle’s candy store on Hester Street, stealing penny candy, while old Mr. Kastle, sorely put upon by young hooligans, cordially looks away.
Yes, Mr. Siegel’s establishment touches a nostalgic chord in Edward Flynn. It is a kind of warm, shabby hole in the wall (no bigger actually than a couple of goodsized closets) with a sliding-window counter that faces out on to the street. Having never been in there before, nevertheless the detective knows it perfectly. There in the back of the store are the same two little phone booths that Mr. Kastle had. And on the back wall is the same floor-to-ceiling magazine rack. On another wall is a glass display case crammed full with cheap toys—kites, model planes, model clay, plastic dolls, toy soldiers, jacks, penknives, packets of foreign postage stamps, and little girls’ tea sets.
By far the biggest allotment of space is given over to the bright old zinc bar with the Breyer’s ice cream signs and the faded posters depicting hamburgers and Coca-Cola. Directly above it, hanging from a long, black string, are innumerable cards of key chains, nail clippers, pipe cleaners, Zippo lighters, pencil sharpeners, rubber bands.
But it is the zinc bar itself that really captures Flynn’s heart, the splendid old bar with its shiny soda spigots, the huge inverted apothecary jars full of vividly colored syrups—the bright-red cherry, the cool green lime, the sunny yellow pineapple, the gorgeous black root beer. And there, too, a big glass cake saver full of cheese and prune Danish. And, wonder of wonders, a counter full of penny candy at the far end—boxes of jawbreakers, jelly slices, red-hots, banana candies, coconut-covered marshmallows, halavah; they’re all there. Even a bubble-gum machine—a colored ball of gum and a tiny plastic toy, all for a penny.
For a man who’s been plodding about all day, badgering a lot of irascible people, it all has a very pleasant nostalgia about it And old Siegel there, with his skullcap and his flowing white hair, looks exactly like the old rebs on Hester Street, with their tall beaver hats, their long, black frock coats, the braided forelocks streaming out from beneath the wide-brimmed hats.
Edward Flynn, as a boy, had a strange awe, a fascination, for these old men, always reading, studying day and night in the synagogue.
Sipping his lemon-lime slowly, he studies Mr. Siegel, hu
nched over the zinc bar, bifocals perched on the tip of his nose, and reading.
“Know the neighborhood well?” he calls to him.
Mr. Siegel glances over the rim of his bifocals, a question on his face.
“I asked if you knew the neighborhood well.”
“Been here thirty years.”
“Then you should know it.”
“I do—but it’s changing.”
“So is everything.” Flynn smiles. “Trouble?”
“Sure. But at my age, who’s running? Besides, everyone’s got trouble. Right?” Mr. Siegel smiles, and out of that craggy, patriarchal face, something like peace shines.
“Right.” Flynn nods. “What are you readin’, may I ask?”
“The Bible. Sabbath night I read the Bible.”
“What book?”
“Book of Numbers. An ancient book. Old Hebrew laws.” Flynn ponders a moment, then says, “Will you read some to me?”
There is a look of gentle amusement on the old man’s face. “You want me to read you the Bible?”
“Sure—I could use some Bible tonight.”
Mr. Siegel considers that a moment. “Well, if you could use it, who am I to deny it. Any particular passage?”
“Just where you left off will be good enough.”
Mr. Siegel is still smiling. It is an inward smile, as if something had pleased him vastly. Then, propping the bifocals on his nose, he proceeds in a quiet but curiously powerful voice.
“‘And if he smite him with an instrument of iron—’”
“Not in English, please,” Flynn interrupts.
Mr. Siegel looks up again. This time the smile of amusement has turned to one of mild perplexity. “You understand Hebrew?”
“No—I just like the sound. Brings back memories.”
Mr. Siegel shrugs, nods his head, and in the next moment his soft but resonant bass rises and spreads like a shawl over the little store.
City of the Dead Page 37
