Collected Stories Page 17

  Big Hooper had just bent to his will the front door of a Third Avenue tavern not yet open for business, intending to give himself a morning vodka–and–Chianti before carrying away the cash register, when he realized he wasn’t alone. The clinking and tinking from the back room suggested the owner was using this morning downtime to do inventory, having left his jacket and newspaper on the bar.

  Big went ahead and made his breakfast, then leafed through the paper while trying to decide whether to deal with the jangling offstage owner or come back another time, when he could have some privacy. He saw the Infiniti impaled on the bank, recognized the name Calhoun, finished his drink, and left. He took the paper.

  Stan Little was a driver. If you’ve got it, he’ll drive it. When he wasn’t working for various crews around town on their little errands, sometimes he drove for himself, picking up an example of your better–quality automotive cream puff and tooling it to Astoria in Queens, where he would have business dealings with Al Gonzo, an automotive importer–exporter, who would eventually find the merchandise a good home somewhere in the Third World. This morning, while discussing with Al the probable offshore value of a loaded Saab with less than three K on the odometer, Stan took the opportunity of Al’s strategic long silences to eyeball the Daily News.

  “All right, four,” Al said.

  “Well, look at that,” Stan said. “Morry Calhoun.”

  The reason Rumsey got off the F train early was because two transit cops went through his car and they both looked at him funny. Rumsey didn’t like cops to look at him at all, much less funny, so he quick got off at the next station, even though it wasn’t his but was in fact Queens Plaza, which is one of those giant bow ties in the bowels of the New York City subway system. There are 24 separate subway lines in New York, and four of them converge on Queens Plaza, distributing thousands and thousands of people this way and that every second. There’s the F, the 6th Avenue local that Rumsey had been on, which begins in nethermost Brooklyn, wanders northward to run under 6th Avenue in Manhattan, then heads on to outermost Queens; the R, the Broadway local, which is similar except its part of Manhattan is lower Broadway; the 8th Avenue E, which only has to deal with Manhattan and Queens; and the poor G, the Brooklyn Queens Crosstown, which never gets into Manhattan at all but just shuttles back and forth between Brooklyn and Queens, full of people wearing hats.

  Having got off the F, there was nothing for Rumsey to do but wait for another F, or some other letter, and so continue his journey in peace, but lo and behold, here were two more transit cops, and now they were looking at him funny. Maybe, he thought, he’d take the escalator upstairs to where the surface part of the bow tie was a lot of bus routes starting with “Q,” but as he turned away, with millions of people rushing all around him in this great echoing iron cavern, this paean to 19th–century engineering at its sternest, a voice cut through the din and the roar to say, “You. Yeah, you. Wait there.”

  Now the cops were talking to him; this was very bad. Feeling guilty, even though he hadn’t committed any crimes yet today, Rumsey turned about, hunched his shoulders in that automatic way that tells police officers everywhere that you are guilty, and said, “Me?”

  It is impossible for two human beings to completely surround one human being, and yet these two cops did it. They were big bulky guys with big dark bulky uniforms festooned with serious extras like a gun in a holster and a ticket book and handcuffs (Rumsey didn’t like to look at handcuffs) and a little black radio fastened up high on the black belt that angled down across their chests. Their very presence said authority, it said you’re in for it now, Jack; it said fugged aboud it.

  “See s’ ID,” one of the cops said.

  “Oh, sure,” Rumsey said, because, no matter what, you never disagree when authority is this close into your personal space. He remembered he’d packed somebody’s ID when he’d left the house, so he went to his hip pocket for his wallet, while the cops watched him very carefully, and as he handed over somebody’s credit card and the same somebody’s library card from the branch in Canarsie, he said, “Uh, what’s the problem, officers?”

  The cop who took the ID said, “How about your driver’s license?”

  “They took my license,” Rumsey explained. “Just temporary, you know.”

  The other cop chuckled. “You were a bad boy, huh?”

  That was cop humor. Rumsey acknowledged it with a sheepish grin, saying, “I guess so. But what’s wrong here?”

  The cop with the ID said, “We’re looking for a guy, Mr. Jefferson.”

  So he was Mr. Jefferson today. Trying to feel Jeffersonian, Rumsey said, “Well, why pick me? There’s a lotta guys here.” Millions, in fact — on escalators, in subway trains, on platforms …

  “The description we got,” the humorous cop said, “looks like you.”

  “A lotta guys look like me,” Rumsey said.

  “Not really,” the cop said, and all at once their two radios squawked, making Rumsey flinch like a rabbit hearing a condor.

  Police radios are the aural equivalent of doctor’s handwriting. All of a sudden, the little black metal box goes squawk–squawk–squawk, and the cops understand it! Like these two — they understood it when their little metal boxes went squawk–squawk–squawk, and this information they’d just received made them relax and even grin at each other. One of them pushed the button on his metal box and told his shoulder, “Ten–four,” while the other one handed Rumsey Mr. Jefferson’s ID and told him, “Thanks for your cooperation.”

  Rumsey said, “Huh? Listen, you don’t mind, would you tell me? Wha’d they just say there?”

  The cops looked surprised. One said, “You didn’t hear? They got the guy.”

  “The one we were looking for,” the other one addended. “Oh,” Rumsey said. “Was he me?”

  “Move along,” said the cop.

  Algy came up out of the subway and started walking along the boulevard in the cool October sunshine. Three blocks from the bank he was headed for was another bank, on another corner, this one open for business. As a matter of fact, as Algy walked by its front door, a big–boned guy in a black topcoat, carrying a full grocery store plastic bag, hurtled out of that bank and crashed straight into Algy; this is because the guy wasn’t looking where he was going, but leftward, off at traffic along the boulevard.

  Neither Algy nor his new dance partner went down, though it looked iffy for a second, and they had to grab at each other’s coats. “Easy, big guy,” Algy advised, while the guy, increasingly frantic, pulled himself free, waving that plastic bag around over his head, shouting, “Out of the way!”

  Algy might have said a cautionary word or two about panic and its discontents, but at that instant a black sedan pulled in by the fire hydrant between them and the curb. The driver, another dark–coated big guy, leaned way over to shove open the passenger door and yell, “Ralph! In!”

  Algy stepped back, gesturing for Ralph to go catch his ride, but all at once Ralph had a gun in his hand and a glower on his face and a cluster of Algy’s coat sleeve in his fist, as he snarled in Algy’s face, “Get in.”

  Algy couldn’t believe it. “Get in?”

  The driver couldn’t believe it, either. “Ralph? What the hell you doin’?”

  Over the approaching but still far–off screams of many sirens, under the surveillance of a pair of bank guards, goggle–eyed behind the bank’s glass revolving door, Ralph yelled at his partner, “He’s a hostage!”

  The driver also didn’t believe that. With one scornful look at Algy, he said, “He’s no hostage, Ralph. He looks like one of us.”

  “I do, you know,” Algy said.

  The driver squinted toward his rearview mirror, filling up with nearing patrol cars. “A hostage is a fourteen–year–old girl, Ralph,” he explained. “Get in the car.”

  At last Ralph released Algy’s sleeve and jumped into the black sedan, which lunged away into traffic, through the inevitable red light, and on around the co
rner, with all at once three gumdrops in hot pursuit, and more coming.

  One cop car slid to a wheel–locked stop by Algy and the fire hydrant as the two bank guards came running out, both of them pointing at Algy and shouting, “That’s one of them!”

  “Hey,” Algy said.

  The two cops got out on both sides of their car to hike up their tool belts and give Algy the fish–eye. “What’s your story?” the nearest one wanted to know. His partner was a woman, built low for stability.

  “I’m walking by,” Algy started.

  “They were talking to him,” a guard argued.

  The woman cop, being the smarter of the pair, pointed at Algy and said to the guards, “Was he in the bank?”

  “Well, no,” both guards said.

  The first cop went back to the first question. “So what is your story?”

  “I’m walking by,” Algy started again, “and the guy come out and run into me, and his car showed up, and he wanted me for a hostage, but the driver said no, a hostage is a fourteen–year–old girl, so they went off to find one.”

  Wide–eyed, the woman cop said, “They’re on their way to kidnap a fourteen–year–old girl?”

  Algy shrugged. “I dunno. That’s what they said.”

  The woman cop hopped back into her patrol car to report this development, while her partner abruptly became surrounded by victims from inside the bank, both customers and guards. Over their bobbing heads, the cop called to Algy, “Stick around. You can identify them.”

  “Sure thing,” Algy said, with his most honest smile. Holding the smile, he walked casually backward to the corner and around it, the way, as a kid, he used to sneak into movie houses by looking as though he was coming out. Once away from the sight lines of all that drama, he legged it on out of there.

  Big Hooper did not take subways. The cars cramped him, and let’s not even talk about the turnstiles. If he had to travel any distance (within the five boroughs, of course — where else is there?), he’d promote the cash he needed one way and another, then phone for a stretch limo, preferably black. The white ones were just a little flashy. He’d take the limo to somewhere near his destination, pay in cash, and if he needed a lift back, he’d call a different service.

  Today he’d decided to give the limo driver an address just a few blocks beyond the Sunnyside branch of Immigration Trust, so he could eyeball the place before de–limoing, just in case it might seem like a good idea not to drop in after all.

  So they were tooling along eastbound across Queens, maybe a mile, two miles, from their destination, with Big watching a soap opera on the TV in the back of today’s (white, what the hell) limo, when it gradually occurred to him that they weren’t moving, and they hadn’t been moving for quite some little while.

  When he looked up from the girl in the hospital bed trying to remember who she was, he saw a lot of stopped cars and the backs of a lot of gawking people. He could tell they were gawking because they kept going up on the balls of their feet, trying to see over the top of one another.

  Big offed the TV and said, “ ‘S it?”

  “Some kinda cop thing,” the driver said, looking at Big in his interior mirror. He was apparently from some remote, probably mountainous part of Asia that hadn’t started outbreeding until very recently. “They got the street closed,” he went on.

  “Well, take another way,” Big told him.

  “Can’t,” the driver said.

  “Whadaya mean, can’t?”

  “Nothing’s open.” The driver ticked items off on his fingers. “Hunner twenny–third torn up by Brooklyn Gas, shut till Thursday. Prospect closed to ve–hic–ular traffic till eleven p.m., block party. Jay blocked by construction until April. Wheeler closed down, a demonstration about charter schools.”

  Big said, “For or against?”

  “Who cares? Then there’s Hedlong, they —”

  “All right, just a minute,” Big said. “Lemme see about this.”

  He got out of the limo, the driver watching with the look of a man who’d been here in New York City from far–off remotest Asia long enough to know nothing ever helped around here. Regardless, Big walked forward, slicing a V through the gawkers like a bowling ball through lemmings, until he reached the center of attention, beyond a line of blue police sawhorses.

  The center of attention, in a cleared semicircle of sidewalk, turned out to be a loony with a knife. Maybe forty years old, in blue and white vertically striped pajamas, ratty maroon bathrobe, barefoot, hair all messed around like a shag rug after a party, unshaved, eyes full of goldfish. He stood with his back against the brick wall of a Neighborhood Clinic, whatever that is, and he kept waving this huge meat cleaver of a knife back and forth, holding off the half–dozen uniformed cops crouched in a crescent in front of him, all of them talking to him, gesturing, explaining, pointing out, none of them holding a gun.

  Big knew how that went. Things rode along easy for a while, and whenever the cops met a loony like this on the street — which happens now and again in New York City, though most of them were crazy before they got here — they would just cheerfully blow him away, then explain in the report how the knife or the hammer or the postage meter had seemed at the time to be a serious threat to the officer’s life, and that would be that. But then a few incidents would pile up, and the cops would decide to dial down for a while, so, when confronted with a prime prospect for the Off button like this one here, they’d do cajole instead, which never works, but which might possibly keep the loony contained until EMT could get here with the net.

  Which hadn’t happened yet, and who knew when it would. Big went sideways along this sawhorse to the end, stepped through the gap, and when a lot of cops reached out to restrain him, he said, “Yeah, yeah,” shrugged them away, and walked straight to the loony.

  The crescent of cops stared at him, not knowing what this was supposed to be. Big ignored them, kept walking toward the loony, stopped well within cleaver range, stuck out his left hand, and said, “Gimme the knife, bozo.”

  Now, we know this loony really was a loony because, when confronted by Big, he did not immediately say yes sir and hand over the cutlery. Instead of acting like a sane person, he went on acting like a loony, lunging forward with the cleaver slicing around in a broad sidearm swing, intending to bisect Big at the waist.

  The middle of Big’s body curved inward as his left hand lifted out of the way of the slashing cleaver, then closed, almost gently, on the hand behind it. Hand and cleaver stopped as though they’d hit a glass door. With the loony’s arm and body still thrusting forward, Big made a quarter turn to his right, like a partner in a very formal dance. His left hand flicked up–down. The crack of the loony’s wrist snapping caused a flinch and a queasy look on every cop in the neighborhood.

  The cleaver clattered to the ground; so did the loony.

  Turning away from his good works, Big nodded at the assembled cops. Before strolling away, “Next time,” he advised them, “try a little tenderizing.”

  Stan was a very law–abiding driver, since the cars he drove invariably belonged to somebody else. For that reason, he obeyed every traffic regulation everywhere, and if he’d had a license, it would have been clean as a whistle. So he was astonished, and not happy, when the county cop on the motorcycle up ahead on the Long Island Expressway suddenly pulled off onto the shoulder, stopped, hopped out of the saddle, and briskly waved Stan down.

  No choice — hit the right blinker and pull in behind the bike. He’d always known this moment might someday appear, despite his precautions, and he’d worked out a game plan to deal with it. He intended to claim amnesia and let everybody else sort it out.

  But there was something different about this traffic stop. In the first place, the cop, instead of taking that leisurely stroll around to the driver’s window that’s standard for such encounters, dashed for the passenger door, going klop–klop in his high leather boots, face strained with urgency. Yanking open that door, he flung him
self backward onto the seat, hurling his left arm out to point, so forcefully he banged his gloved fingertip into the windshield as he cried, “Follow that Taurus!”

  Stan looked at him. “What?”

  The cop had himself turned around and completely into the car now. As he slammed the door, he aimed a very red face in Stan’s direction. “Follow,” he said, and thumped his leather–gloved fist on the dashboard, “that” and did the fingertip–mash against the windshield again, “TAURUS!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Stan didn’t see any Taurus, but he figured, if he drove the direction the cop kept pointing, sooner or later a Taurus would present itself. It’s a popular make of car. So he tromped the accelerator, and the car, a very nice BMW recently in the longterm parking lot at LaGuardia, leaped forward so as to multiple–g the cop backward into his bucket seat.

  Taurus, Taurus. The cop peeled himself off the seat to say, “Good, that’s good. See him? The green Taurus.”

  Then Stan did: recent vintage, pallid green, middle lane, moderate speed. “Got him.”

  “Good. Don’t overtake him,” the cop warned, “just keep him in sight.”

  “Piece of cake.”

  The cop had a little radio high on the angled strap of his Sam Browne belt. Flipping the toggle, he said into it, low but still audible to Stan, “Cycle broke down, commandeered a civilian vehicle, suspects in sight, still eastbound within city limits.”

  But not for long. Stan watched his exit go by, but he and the Taurus kept heading for Long Island, while the cop’s radio made nasal guttural vomiting sounds the cop apparently interpreted as speech, because he said, “Ten–four,” which Stan knew cops say because they can never seem to remember “Uh–huh.”

  Stan had never been commandeered before. He wondered if it came with benefits, but somehow doubted it. He said, “You don’t mind my asking, wha’d the Taurus do?”

  “Held up a jewelry store in Astoria.”