Manhattan Noir 2

by Lawrence Block

  Ahab said, “Kill, kill,” and turned to her with ferocious urgency.

  I grabbed his collar and slammed him back. It is a pinch-collar, misnomered by many as a spike-collar. When the short sliding length of chain is pulled, the linked circle tightens. This causes blunt prongs to meet, pinching the neck. It is an effective, and with Ahab, a necessary collar. There is no question, however, that he would disregard the pain of pinched flesh if he thought that killing were really appropriate.

  “Overprotective,” I said to the skinny not pretty girl who was the color of sour milk and had knees like flattened golf balls and who was shrieking and jabbing her finger at me. Shrieking, she did not hear me. “Fuck you,” I said. Jabbing her finger, she did not hear me. I don’t know if I said anything. If I did say overprotective and fuck you, then neither one of us heard anything and they were passionless sounds without significance, like fog, and they disappeared under the bright summer sun.

  “Heel,” I said to Ahab.

  He said nothing more. I believe he was thinking, with a growing sense of injustice or some such, of the seven fat pigeons and the way in which I had stopped him an instant before he lunged, an instant so close to the act that they shredded into one another. But I might very well be wrong.

  We went home.

  Ahab remained silent—that is, he did not say anything, in words, for more than a year. Most surely he carried on dialogues in the style assumed natural.

  We were again at the park late one pleasant fall night, some fifteen months after our initial conversation. We had just entered and were walking down the ramp and I had not yet unsnapped the leash from his collar.

  “Freedom now, freedom now,” he chanted.

  He had recently spent several afternoons playing with a bitch in the yard of a garden apartment down the street. Apartment and bitch were owned by a militant blueblack oboe player and his wife, both of whom wore their hair natural. “Freedom in a minute, there’s a squad car passing.”

  “Baby, I’m not gonna wait no longer. You don’t like it, that’s your lookout.”

  “What are you going to do if I keep the leash on?”

  “Like the man says, violence is as American as cherry pie. Take it from there.”

  “Shit on America, you’re violent by nature, that’s all.”

  “True. What are you by nature?”

  “You mean am I violent or not?”

  “Don’t jive me, baby. You dig the question.”

  “You know, if I do keep you on the leash, you won’t touch me. Matter of fact, if I clobbered the hell out of you, you wouldn’t touch me. That’s your nature too.”

  “True, very true. You have the knowledge, man, but unfortunately not the wisdom.”

  I unsnapped his leash. “Thanks,” he said, raced in wide circles, then went foraging into the darkness. He came back, fell in step with me and said, “Been thinkin’ on your nature?”

  “No.”

  “Well, wouldn’t help anyhow. You ain’t got none.”

  “Seems the only reason you say anything is to needle me.”

  “You people, man, you operate at three and three while the rest of it’s at fifty and fifty.”

  “Rest of what?”

  “Everything.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  “No.”

  “Well … listen, how come you talk? I thought about that a while back.”

  “I’m an atavism.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It seems the thing to say.”

  He swung in front of me and sat. He cocked his head to one side. “Hey, man. Hey.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  “I know. I love you.”

  “Does it help, loving?”

  “It helps. Sometimes, but it’s not nearly enough.”

  He nodded.

  We resumed walking. I said, “The thing is, there’s no significance. Nothing makes any difference. Nothing is more valuable than anything else. Which means there isn’t any such thing as value.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How do you endure it?”

  “I don’t.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “You won’t survive then.”

  “Is that really important?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  Without Ahab I would have gone mad, if there is such a state. That is, in a negative sense. Which I don’t believe. I was sinking. Interminably. From nowhere, to nowhere. I am still sinking, all of us are, interminably. But now there is a vital difference—I have the key, the raison d’être; better, the mode d’être. It is the answer, the only answer. Thank you, Ahab.

  Sometimes I called him Ahab Flying Death Defier. I would throw one of his rubber toys and he would leap high, with grace, and close his powerful jaws about it in midflight, then land erect with light resilience. Now and then I would say, “It’s a dynamite stick! Catch it, boy, or we’re done for!” And he would snatch it from the air. I laughed. He wriggled pleasurably and came to get his ears scratched, his chest rubbed. We loved each other. For whatever that was worth.

  I functioned well. The vicissitudes of my life went smoothly and successfully. Everything was, however, uniformly neutral. Everything still is, on that higher level. Or that lower level. Deterioration is not always symbolically manifest, nor even literally manifest. But that is what our dialogues had been about. Because deterioration is dominant, although deterioration is perhaps not the proper word: it implies values. And there is the crux of it all.

  “Self-determination and a positive outlook,” Ahab said. “We must pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, so to speak.”

  It was winter in the park. The sky was corrupt. The snow on the ground had been three days rotting. It was soot and sickly ice crystals. We had just come through a city election.

  “It requires will, strong will. Immediate investment. A sacrifice on all our parts, which, I point out, will not be easy. But I tell you that a sacrifice made easily and without effort is no sacrifice at all and is therefore without consequence. Invest now and in a little time you will reap benefits one hundred, nay even one thousand–fold.”

  “Where is this taking us?” I asked him.

  “To our logical, our inescapable conclusion, my fellow countryman.”

  Three boys in leather were approaching.

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier there was one?”

  “You weren’t desperate enough. Now is the time. The iron is hot.”

  “Is it cusp?”

  “It is cusp.”

  “I suspected that, dimly. But it doesn’t make any difference.”

  “True enough. That is why you must recognize its importance.” The boys in leather came scuffling closer. Ahab’s walk stiffened. “Discover your nature!”

  “You said I didn’t have any.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Nothing does!”

  “Nothing is!”

  “Then how can—”

  “Hey, Jack, you got any butts?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “Pull that mother back, or he’s dead!”

  “He’s dead anyway. Come on, your wallet, Jack.”

  They held thin steel in their hands, fine implements from the looks of them. I never knew much of cutlery. But they made good, solid metallic clacks when they sprang open. Discriminating buyers, I am told, look for that sound. I marked the absence of Ahab’s customary barks; this time there was only a low rumbling in his throat. He moved. The nearest one, the tallest, screamed. Ahab had opened his wrist. I could see a tendon. The knife fell. All three of them ran. Ahab loped after them, furrowed a calf, but broke off and returned when I called him.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “My pleasure.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Full. Brimming.” He raced ahead, spun, raced back, spun … “Overflowing,” he said.

  “Functioning a
s you’re meant to gives you such joy?”

  “Functioning, yes. As I’m meant to, that’s a non sequitur.”

  “Everything has an intended function.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “The function is to die.”

  “Puppycock.”

  “Mountains erode. Organisms wither, drop and decay. Physically, we are eating ourselves. Spiritually, we are disintegrating. Psychologically, we are being gnawed from within. Everything is collapsing.”

  Ahab chewed angrily at some irritation on his flank. “So?”

  “So a priori there is no question of ultimate survival, and temporary survival can be obtained only through self-neutralization.”

  “Temporary survival is total survival, triumph even, since in the grave nothing, including defeat, can be experienced. And survival is dependent on frameworks and structures.”

  “None exist.”

  “Right, so discover them.”

  “Create them?”

  “What can be created already exists; discover them. React. In a completely voluntary, and systematically arbitrary way. Reacting, you will act, which will cause reactions in the form of new actions. But it must be codified, all of it. And you must function within the system as if it were built upon categorical absolutes. Never question, never waver. You will have to do it, your species will have to do it. Perversely, you’ve forced yourselves to see the meaninglessness of your lives and values. So now you have no lives and values. You must rebuild.”

  “Why, why should we? What’s the point?”

  Ahab shrugged.

  “It’s stupid,” I said.

  “Someone suggested it wasn’t?”

  I thought a few moments. “If, I mean just if someone wanted to do that, how would he go about it?”

  “Plunge into it. Dramatically. Unequivocally. Your commitment has to be total.”

  “And it works?”

  “It works.”

  “What about you?”

  “I told you. I’m an atavism. Old primal race memories come to a head in me sometimes.”

  “Then it’s not perfect.”

  “Put it this way. Out of uncountable organisms over millions of years there have been only a few minor deviations. That’s not bad. Or not good, depending on your point of view.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “That’s what we’ve been talking about.”

  I sat up all that night looking out and down through my window at a street light and at the few people who passed hurriedly beneath it. In the morning I washed my face. I took Ahab to the park again. He made no mention of yesterday’s conversation. He made no mention of anything. He frolicked, rolled and burrowed in the rotten snow, delighted with this unexpected trip.

  While he concentrated on digging a stick from under the snow several yards away I unzippered my jacket and closed my hand around the Luger jammed in my waistband. The Luger is a 9 millimeter automatic handgun with a parabellum action. Mine was manufactured in 1918 by the Deutsche Waffenund Munitionsfabriken and is marked with their monogram, a flourished DWM. Its serial number is 4731 and all its parts are original, except for the clip which bears the number 6554. It is an excellent weapon—compact, powerful, accurate and extremely well balanced. Often you will hear that Lugers are unreliable, that they jam frequently. This is not true. When jamming does occur it is invariably due to poor quality ammunition. American shells are not to be depended upon. 9 millimeter is a sporting caliber in the United States, not military, and the powder charge is too weak to keep the weapon working at maximum efficiency. Foreign military loads are easily obtainable. Belgian, Canadian, British or Israeli cartridges are all quite acceptable.

  I laid my finger alongside the trigger guard. The metal was only a little chilly. The clip, which holds eight rounds, was already in place. I snapped the first shell into the chamber and flicked the safety off. I curled my finger lightly around the trigger and took aim.

  The first shot broke Ahab’s right foreleg at the middle joint. He collapsed heavily. The second shot missed. The third passed high through the rear of his body, but did not break the spine. With difficulty and in obvious pain he struggled to his feet and limped toward me on three legs. “Don’t,” he called. “Oh please don’t.” I fired again. He fell, but continued squirming forward. “Please,” he said, “I love you. Don’t.” His blood was trickling and spraying bright red onto the dirty gray snow. I kept firing. “Please, I love you. I love you, I love you.” The seventh round split his skull. He spasmed and lay still, his broken leg bent beneath him.

  I ejected the last round. It broke through the crust of rotten ice and disappeared, unspent. I went home.

  It is summer now. Voraciously, I am eating life.

  He intended this.

  This is what he intended.

  He did.

  THE INTERCEPTOR

  BY BARRY N. MALZBERG

  Upper West Side

  (Originally published in 1972)

  Death wore five faces that grim night. Could I pierce those grinning, evil masks and spot the real murderer?

  He has been in the hotel room for a long time. No pleasure that but he thinks he has the crime figured out at last. It must have been his wife.

  Everything, everything points to her. She must have killed Robinson in temper; then, when the placement of the securities next to the corpse would have tied the murder to her, turned the thing around and implicated him with that phone call which brought him to the scene just three minutes ahead of the police.

  “Come over,” she said. “Something really terrible has happened; I appeal to you” and linked to her in the end, unable to understand what was going on he had come and had nearly been apprehended.

  If he had not run immediately—but no sense in thinking about that now. He had gotten away from the police, just barely, and now at last he had solved the mystery. No time for speculation. No need for it either.

  The motives were clear. Robinson and his wife must have been having an affair, had carried it on under him for a long time, his business partner and wife, and Robinson, bored, had been looking for a way out. Wryly he thinks that he could have warned Robinson about entrapment if only the man had been frank with him. In fact, regardless of consequences, Robinson might well have broken off the relationship if only given a little more time. And she could not bear to see it end that way, being that kind of a woman.

  Yes, that must be it. He has nailed it to the ground. He lights another cigarette, looks around the room, paces to the window and looks at 72nd Street three floors below him, addicts milling in front of the hotel. He had been smart to have selected a location like this to be hidden although the circumstances were not of the best. If nothing else, living in this hotel for some weeks has made him socially conscious.

  Perhaps it was not merely a crime of passion, though. His wife must have known that sooner or later Robinson would let slip news of the affair and the divorce would have been shattering. At all costs the woman believed in appearances. She would not even have a bedroom fight unless she was made up for it.

  He sighs, walks away from the window. Relief overtakes him. It is good to know that he has the matter straightened out for himself at last and not a moment too soon. The police are closing in; even with the help of the inspector he could not remain in flight from the authorities forever. And to be apprehended in a hotel like this—

  He picks up the phone to call the inspector and give him the explanation that will, at last, set him free. As he inhales deeply to brace himself, a fragment of dust in the foul hotel room penetrates his lungs in the wrong way and he coughs. He coughs repeatedly, wheezing, feeling the first stab of an asthma attack. Enough. Enough of cigarettes. In his new life he will definitely give up the habit. He stubs out his forty-third cigarette of the day and dials the inspector’s home number.

  He thinks at last that he has got the thing clear in his mind. Not soon enough to have saved the agony of flight but not too late. Not by a damned
sight too late. He lights a cigarette to celebrate this. When everything is over he will give up the habit but now he will indulge himself. The murderer was Robinson. Robinson! It all ties together. His business partner and his wife must have been having an affair for many years until his wife had lost interest and had told the man that she had reached the end, that the worn-out affair was not worth the risk of a lost marriage.

  In a fit of jealous rage Robinson must have killed her in the offices, then planted the incriminating securities next to her and fled.

  The securities had led the police inevitably to him and with his wife dead and Robinson out of the country he did not have a chance. It had been clever of Robinson to arrange that illness of his father in Italy, diabolically so, and no details had ever been checked. Did Robinson even have a father?

  And so he had no choice but to become a fugitive while he tried to piece the crime together himself. He had to find the explanation that would free him of the authorities and restore him to the life that for so long he had taken for granted. But it had been difficult. Now the police had infiltrated into the hotel itself. The dope traffic in the halls and outside might distract them for a while; still it could be only a matter of time until they traced down his room number, poured into his door holding guns, and arrested him.

  Fortunately, he had at last worked out the true explanation of the crime. He would be saved. If he could only reach the inspector quickly enough to start the process in motion—He coughs. The air in this old and vicious hotel, once elegant, now destroyed, located in an undesirable area of the city he has always hated even in the good years when he and his young wife lived here, this air has become increasingly foul and in the bargain, due to the terrible impact of the murder and then the building pressures on him he has been smoking too much, even beyond his normal excess.

  He has always had a morbid fear of getting lung cancer and dying slowly, although his own doctor had assured him just two months ago, shortly before the nightmare began, that for a man of forty-seven he had been in perfect health. Slight elevation of the blood pressure; suspicious fullness around the area of the spleen, yes, but these were not serious problems and could be controlled. Lung cancer was contradicted under all circumstances.