Manhattan Noir 2

by Lawrence Block

  But he figured out a way around it. Walking home Tuesday night, after that first weekend of movie-going, he’d stopped at three diners on Seventh Avenue, nursing a cup of coffee and chatting with the guy behind the counter. The third time was the charm; he walked out of there with a weekend job. Saturday and Sunday, same hours, same wages, same work. And they’d pay him off the books, which made his weekend work tax-free.

  Between what he was saving in taxes and what he wasn’t spending on movies, he’d be a millionaire.

  Well, maybe he’d never be a millionaire. Probably be dangerous to be a millionaire, a guy like him, with his ways, his habits. But he was earning an honest dollar, and he ate all he wanted on the job, seven days a week now, so it wasn’t hard to put a few bucks aside. The weeks added up and so did the dollars, and the time came when he had enough cash socked away to buy himself a little television set. The cashier at his weekend job set it up and her boyfriend brought it over, so he figured it fell off a truck or walked out of somebody’s apartment, but it got good reception and the price was right.

  It was a lot easier to pass the time once he had the TV. He’d get up at ten or eleven in the morning, grab a shower in the bathroom down the hall, then pick up doughnuts and coffee at the corner deli. Then he’d watch a little TV until it was time to go to work.

  After work he’d stop at the same deli for two bottles of cold beer and some cigarettes. He’d settle in with the TV, a beer bottle in one hand and a cigarette in the other and his eyes on the screen.

  He didn’t get cable, but he figured that was all for the good. He was better off staying away from some of the stuff they were allowed to show on cable TV. Just because you had cable didn’t mean you had to watch it, but he knew himself, and if he had it right there in the house how could he keep himself from looking at it?

  And that could get you started. Something as simple as late-night adult programming could put him on a train to the big house upstate. He’d been there. He didn’t want to go back.

  He would get through most of a pack of cigarettes by the time he turned off the light and went to bed. It was funny, during the day he hardly smoked at all, but back in his room at night he had a butt going just about all the time. If the smoking was heavy, well, the drinking was ultralight. He could make a bottle of Bud last an hour. More, even. The second bottle was always warm by the time he got to it, but he didn’t mind, nor did he drink it any faster than he’d drunk the first one. What was the rush?

  Two beers was enough. All it did was give him a little buzz, and when the second beer was gone he’d turn off the TV and sit at the window, smoking one cigarette after another, looking out at the city.

  Then he’d go to bed. Then he’d get up and do it all over again.

  The only problem was walking home.

  And even that was no problem at first. He’d leave his rooming house around three in the afternoon. The diner was ten minutes away, and that left him time to eat before his shift started. Then he’d leave sometime between midnight and twelve-thirty—the guy who relieved him, a manic Albanian, had a habit of showing up ten to fifteen minutes late. Paul would retrace his earlier route, walking the seven blocks down Eighth Avenue to 16th Street with a stop at the deli for cigarettes and beer.

  The Rose of Singapore was the problem.

  The first time he walked past the place, he didn’t even notice it. By day it was just another seedy bar, but at night the neon glowed and the jukebox music poured out the door, along with the smell of spilled drinks and stale beer and something more, something unnameable, something elusive.

  “If you don’t want to slip,” they’d told him, “stay out of slippery places.”

  He quickened his pace and walked on by.

  The next afternoon the Rose of Singapore didn’t carry the same feeling of danger. Not that he’d risk crossing the threshold, not at any hour of the day or night. He wasn’t stupid. But it didn’t lure him, and consequently it didn’t make him uncomfortable.

  Coming home was a different story.

  He was thinking about it during his last hour on the job, and by the time he reached it he was walking all the way over at the edge of the sidewalk, as far from the building’s entrance as he could get without stepping down into the street. He was like an acrophobe edging along a precipitous path, scared to look down, afraid of losing his balance and falling accidentally, afraid too of the impulse that might lead him to plunge purposefully into the void.

  He kept walking, eyes forward, heart racing. Once he was past it he felt himself calming down, and he bought his two bottles of beer and his pack of cigarettes and went on home.

  He’d get used to it, he told himself. It would get easier with time.

  But, surprisingly enough, it didn’t. Instead it got worse, but gradually, imperceptibly, and he learned to accommodate it. For one thing, he steered clear of the west side of Eighth Avenue, where the Rose of Singapore stood. Going to work and coming home, he kept to the opposite side of the street.

  Even so, he found himself hugging the inner edge of the sidewalk, as if every inch closer to the street would put him that much closer to crossing it and being drawn mothlike into the tavern’s neon flame. And, approaching the Rose of Singapore’s block, he’d slow down or speed up his pace so that the traffic signal would allow him to cross the street as soon as he reached the corner. As if otherwise, stranded there, he might cross in the other direction instead, across Eighth Avenue and on into the Rose.

  He knew it was ridiculous but he couldn’t change the way it felt. When it didn’t get better he found a way around it.

  He took Seventh Avenue instead.

  He did that on the weekends anyway because it was the shortest route. But during the week it added two long crosstown blocks to his pedestrian commute, four blocks a day, twenty blocks a week. That came to about three miles a week, maybe a hundred and fifty extra miles a year.

  On good days he told himself he was lucky to be getting the exercise, that the extra blocks would help him stay in shape. On bad days he felt like an idiot, crippled by fear.

  Then the Albanian got fired.

  He was never clear on what happened. One waitress said the Albanian had popped off at the manager one time too many, and maybe that was what happened. All he knew was that one night his relief man was not the usual wild-eyed fellow with the droopy mustache but a stocky dude with a calculating air about him. His name was Dooley, and Paul made him at a glance as a man who’d done time. You could tell, but of course he didn’t say anything, didn’t drop any hints. And neither did Dooley.

  But the night came when Dooley showed up, tied his apron, rolled up his sleeves, and said, “Give her my love, huh?” And, when Paul looked at him in puzzlement, he added, “Your girlfriend.”

  “Haven’t got one,” he said.

  “You live on Eighth Avenue, right? That’s what you told me. Eighth and 16th, right? Yet every time you leave here you head over toward Seventh. Every single time.”

  “I like the exercise,” he said.

  “Exercise,” Dooley said, and grinned. “Good word for it.”

  He let it go, but the next night Dooley made a similar comment. “I need to unwind when I come off work,” Paul told him. “Sometimes I’ll walk clear over to Sixth Avenue before I head downtown. Or even Fifth.”

  “That’s nice,” Dooley said. “Just do me a favor, will you? Ask her if she’s got a sister.”

  “It’s cold and it looks like rain,” Paul said. “I’ll be walking home on Eighth Avenue tonight, in case you’re keeping track.”

  And when he left he did walk down Eighth Avenue—for one block. Then he cut over to Seventh and took what had become his usual route.

  He began doing that all the time, and whenever he headed east on 22nd Street he found himself wondering why he’d let Dooley have such power over him. For that matter, how could he have let a seedy gin joint make him walk out of his way to the tune of a hundred and fifty miles a year?

&nb
sp; He was supposed to be keeping it simple. Was this keeping it simple? Making up elaborate lies to explain the way he walked home? And walking extra blocks every night for fear that the Devil would reach out and drag him into a neon-lit Hell?

  Then came a night when it rained, and he walked all the way home on Eighth Avenue.

  It was always a problem when it rained. Going to work he could catch a bus, although it wasn’t terribly convenient. But coming home he didn’t have the option, because traffic was one-way the wrong way.

  So he walked home on Eighth Avenue, and he didn’t turn left at 22nd Street, and didn’t fall apart when he drew even with the Rose of Singapore. He breezed on by, bought his beer and cigarettes at the deli, and went home to watch television. But he turned the set off again after a few minutes and spent the hours until bedtime at the window, looking out at the rain, nursing the beers, smoking the cigarettes, and thinking long thoughts.

  The next two nights were clear and mild, but he chose Eighth Avenue anyway. He wasn’t uneasy, not going to work, not coming home, either. Then came the weekend, and then on Monday he took Eighth again, and this time on the way home he found himself on the west side of the street, the same side as the bar.

  The door was open. Music, strident and bluesy, poured through it, along with all the sounds and smells you’d expect.

  He walked right on by.

  You’re over it, he thought. He went home and didn’t even turn on the TV, just sat and smoked and sipped his two long-neck bottles of Bud.

  Same story Tuesday, same story Wednesday.

  Thursday night, steps from the tavern’s open door, he thought, Why drag this out?

  He walked in, found a stool at the bar. “Double scotch,” he told the barmaid. “Straight up, beer chaser.”

  He’d tossed off the shot and was working on the beer when a woman slid onto the stool beside him. She put a cigarette between bright red lips, and he scratched a match and lit it for her.

  Their eyes met, and he felt something click.

  She lived over on Ninth and 17th, on the third floor of a brownstone across the street from the projects. She said her name was Tiffany, and maybe it was. Her apartment was three little rooms. They sat on the couch in the front room and he kissed her a few times and got a little dizzy from it. He excused himself and went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror over the sink.

  You could go home now, he told the mirror image. Tell her anything, like you got a headache, you got malaria, you’re really a Catholic priest or gay or both. Anything. Doesn’t matter what you say or if she believes you. You could go home.

  He looked into his own eyes in the mirror and knew it wasn’t true.

  Because he was stuck, he was committed, he was down for it. Had been from the moment he walked into the bar. No, longer than that. From the first rainy night when he walked home on Eighth Avenue. Or maybe before, maybe ever since Dooley’s insinuation had led him to change his route.

  And maybe it went back further than that. Maybe he was locked in from the jump, from the day they opened the gates and put him on the street. Hell, from the day he was born, even.

  “Paul?”

  “Just a minute,” he said.

  And he slipped into the kitchen. In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought, and he started opening drawers, looking for the one where she kept the knives.

  TWO OVER EASY

  BY SUSAN ISAACS

  Murray Hill

  (Originally published in 2008)

  On the morning of his forty-ninth birthday, Bob Geissendorfer sat in the recently remodeled Tuscan farmhouse kitchen in his apartment in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan and explained to himself that it was his own fault. If you hadn’t been such a decent guy, you’d have been a genuine media star, the most quoted reporter in the New York Times’ Business section. You could have owned Enron, talked tough with Chris Matthews, joked with Imus. You know you’ve got the stuff: an analytical mind, a clear writing style, and—let’s face it, this is a visual culture—the tight-cheeked, blue-eyed, square-jawed, graying-hair good looks of an actor who’d be cast as a CEO in a Super Bowl commercial. In real life (Bob had to laugh to himself) CEOs were mostly Dennis Kozlowski/Ken Lay types, men who looked made of mashed potatoes rather than muscle and bone.

  But irony of irony, in this era of diversity, his name had held him back. “Geissendorfer” reeked of lederhosen. At best. And at worst, a Nuremberg defendant—a name that should have “Oberstgruppenführer” in front of it. Yet at the last minute he hadn’t been able to hurt his father’s feelings by Anglicizing it.

  All during J school at Northwestern, though, he’d been picturing his byline as Robert Giles. There he’d be, at his first job at some small yet first-rate paper, muttering Bob Giles here into the phone with Woodwardian sang froid as he read over his copy. Bob Giles: two crisp syllables he wouldn’t have to spend half of every single goddamn day spelling. The cosmic joke of his decision? Honor your father and you get fucked.

  He sipped his orange juice. Whole Foods. Good. Well, like so much in life, everybody knows it’s the best. Except it wasn’t. Too pulpy. You’re interviewing the chairman of Delta and suddenly there’s a giant strand of orange fiber attached to a mini-blob of pulp that’s flossed its way between your teeth and feels Velcroed to your gums and you forget your follow-up question.

  When Bob got to the Times, lesser reporters, Williams and Wu and even Shapiro, developed ten sources to his one just because nobody could remember his last name. Who wanted to call the paper and say, Oh, operator, give me the guy in the Business section with, uh, the German name—Gibbelhoffer or Sauerkraut or some damn thing?

  “Almost ready!” Chrissie Geissendorfer chirped. Or maybe trilled. Some adjective to describe a cute voice. Cute, even though once any woman who happened to have a brain turned twenty-five, she’d know enough to turn her back on cute. She’d march, shoulders back, boobs front, directly into life.

  But not his wife. Here she was, back toward him, busy at the six-burner stove she’d had to have. Almost ready, he mimicked to himself. With that voice like one of the “Christmas Don’t Be Late” chipmunks. That was the problem with short women: They embraced Cute, or, to be fair, maybe had it foisted on them, and then, when other women were becoming interesting or sensual or elegant, they couldn’t let go of Cute. About ten years ago, when he asked her casually, “Hey, would you like me to call you Christina now?” she doubled over and pretended to throw up. Then she tweeted, or possibly twittered, “Christina? Couldn’t you just kill my parents? Way back when, like when I was nine or ten years old, I remember thinking my name sounded like I had grandma denture breath.”

  Steak and eggs, his ritual birthday breakfast. Early in their marriage, he must have made a positive reference to steak and eggs, although why he couldn’t imagine. But that’s what he got on his next birthday, along with her Alvin the Chipmunk rendition of the Happy Birthday song. Same thing the following year. Right then and there, he said to himself, Oh fuck, this is what I’m going to be facing 365 mornings from now and for the rest of my life. Unless I can get rid of her. Divorce. Or maybe she’ll die young: nothing painful, something quick.

  And here it was, before him, the egg whites thicker than liquid, yet runnier than mucous. The yolks—three of them, for God’s sake—were more orange than yellow and shadowed by ripples, as if they were lying above some egg-world fault line about to give way. Two over easy did not mean three under-fried eggs that probably came from some organic farm where chickens ran amok and pecked particles in cow shit. Another thing: Chrissie had cut the steak into an inch-high rectangle before broiling it, so it looked like a bad joke birthday gift—a greasy brown box rather than a piece of meat.

  She was singing, “Happy birthday to yoooou …” although with her accent, it was more like, “Hyappy beerthday …” He suppressed a groan—I’m getting too damn good at groan suppression, he mused—and offered her his I-dazzle-women smile. Naturally, Chrissie flashed
one in return, her show-every-tooth-while-you’re-at-it smile emphasized how the Crest Whitestrips hadn’t worked on her molars.

  Well, he couldn’t not act appreciative. She was trying so hard, and she loved him so much. Truth be told, Bob ached for her. Christina Johnston Geissendorfer was a genuinely decent human being. Yet he’d stopped loving her six months into their marriage.

  No reason: Maybe his feelings changed when he realized that what he’d first viewed as a warm personality and lively mind turned out to be no more than extravagant perkiness.

  He asked the question he posed himself frequently: How did I talk myself into believing she had a mind when she’d been in the marketing department of a costume jewelry company. Her Great Moment was renaming the six hundred “Big Apple” bracelets from an order cancelled by Macy’s “Original Sin” bracelets and selling them to Victoria’s Secret.

  He should have turned his attention back to his plate right then, but he caught sight of the crumbs embedded among the fibers of her terry cloth bathrobe, crumbs the unmistakable dark amber of Pepperidge Farm cookies. Over the years of their marriage, what had once been Chrissie’s hourglass figure had spread into the boxy solidity of a grandfather clock. Sex was largely a defensive act now, because if he gave in to feelings for her—namely, utter indifference—she’d start demanding to know if she was doing something to turn him off, and, Please, Bob, be straight with me; don’t worry about my feelings. Or she’d be suggesting to him—in what she thought was her gentle voice—Maybe you should go to see Dr. Gratz and ask for a testosterone count. You don’t have to feel self-conscious, it’s more common than you know with guys your age.

  She sat across from him, resting her elbows on the rough wood table that the decorator said came from an olive-grower’s house near Sienna. Another idiot extravagance, but then his Aunt Beryl had left him enough that they could live in a CFO-of-a-NASDAQ-listed-company manner rather than managing on his Times salary. Chrissie’s chin perched on the heels of her upturned hands. What the hell was she sitting there for? To watch him eat? He cut a large slice of the egg, figuring he had to do it now. If he waited, he’d probably gag on cold egg-white slime, and she’d spend his entire birthday leaving apologies on his voice mail about how truly sorry she was that breakfast had been a fiasco, then call back to say she hoped her messages hadn’t sounded passive-aggressive.