God Save the Mark Page 18

  “I know where I’m going,” said Gertie. “First thing in the morning I’m headed for kak.”

  “That’s what you said on the phone,” I said. “But why go to them? What can they do?”

  “They can maybe give me some protection,” she said. “Besides, they’re one outfit you can trust.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “From what Matt told me,” she said. “Matt was no sucker, he knew when an outfit was legit or not.” Karen said, “What are you two talking about?”

  “Kak,” I explained.

  When Karen continued to look confused, Gertie took over the explanation, telling her what CAC was and about Uncle Matt having been a consultant to them. Karen listened, and then said, “But can they really do anything? What kind of power do they have?”

  “Some senator runs it,” Gertie said.

  “Senator Earl Dunbar,” I said, remembering the letters I’d gotten from them.

  “Right,” said Gertie, “that’s the guy. Senator Dunbar. The way I figure, with a senator running things they got to have something going. Besides, where else do we turn?

  We go to the cops, we’re right back in the laps of the Coppo boys again.”

  Karen said, “But what can they do if the police are corrupt? There must be some honest policemen, why not go to them?”

  “Honey,” said Gertie, “the tricky part is separate the sheep from the wolves, you know what I mean? The cop on the take don’t have a sign on his back.”

  Karen turned to me, saying, “Fred, do you really think Jack could be involved in something like that?”

  “I don’t know any more,” I told her. “I don’t like to think of him that way, but I just can’t be sure of him any more.”

  “Kak’s our best bet,” said Gertie. “Fred, how come you didn’t go there yourself?”

  “It never occurred to me,” I admitted. “They sent me a couple of fund-raising letters, so I guess I just naturally lumped them in with everybody else, out to take me for a dollar.”

  She shook her head. “You’re a nutty guy, Fred,” she said.

  “Maybe so.”

  “Come to kak with me in the morning,” she said. “You tell them the part you know, I’ll tell them the part I know.”

  I hesitated, saying, “I just don’t know …”

  “What else are you going to do, Fred?”

  “You’re right,” I said. I turned to Karen, saying, “What do you think?”

  “I suppose it’s best,” she said doubtfully.

  “Good,” said Gertie decisively. “Then that’s settled. Now the only question is, how slow a worker are you, Fred?”

  “What say?”

  “I want to know who sleeps where,” she explained.

  It took me a few seconds for the question to sink in, during which Gertie kept watching my face. Then I got it.

  She nodded. “That’s what I figured,” she said, and got to her feet. “Come on, Karen,” she said. “Let’s leave Don Juan to his beauty sleep.”

  I think Karen could at least have had the charity not to laugh.

  37

  AFTER BREAKFAST, Karen announced that she was coming with us.

  “No,” I said firmly.

  “I’ll just call the office and say I’m sick today,” she said.

  Gertie said, “Fred’s right, honey. Neither of us is liable to be very healthy to be near right now.”

  “That’s all right,” said Karen. “I’ll help watch for them.”

  I said, “If this outfit’s as good as Gertie thinks it is, maybe the mob has their headquarters watched or something. Anything could happen, and I don’t want you mixed up in it.”

  “Fred,” Karen said, “I think you’re dramatizing this a little bit.”

  “Dramatizing? I’ve been shot at and followed and hounded, Gertie was kidnapped, for Pete’s sake, my uncle was murdered, Gus Ricovic was murdered! If I’m dramatizing, what the heck are the Coppos doing?”

  Gertie said, “Gus? What happened to Gus?”

  “I’ll just phone the office,” Karen said, and went into the living room.

  Gertie said, “What’s this about Gus?”

  So I told her about Gus, which seemed to shake her up quite a bit. “I can’t understand it,” she said. “What would Gus know? Why bump off Gus?”

  “Somebody found a reason,” I said.

  Karen came back, saying, “Ready to go.”

  Gertie frowned at her and said to me, “Can’t you talk her out of it, Fred?”

  I just looked at her.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said fatalistically. “I forgot.”

  So we were an army of three as we marched out to the sunlight to strike our blow for decent society.

  38

  WE’D WALKED less than a block when Gertie said, “I guess I must of been followed last night.”

  I stopped where I was, and without turning my head to left or right, said, “Why do you say a thing like that, Gertie?” The sun was shining, the morning air was crisp and clear and clean, and I couldn’t have felt more like an exposed target if I’d stood on a sand dune in the Sahara.

  “Because of the car half a block behind us,” she said. “It looks like the same one they took me away in. Don’t look around at it.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” I assured her.

  Karen was standing on my other side, and now she leaned in front of me to say under her breath to Gertie, “Are you sure it’s the same car?”

  “Looks like it.”

  I said, faintly, “What sort of car is it?”

  “Black Caddy.”

  “Uh huh,” I said. “We’re doomed.”

  “They won’t do nothing out in the open like this,” Gertie said.

  Karen said, “We can get a cab down at the corner.”

  “No!” I said. “That’s what they want. We get into a cab, and the driver’s one of them.”

  Karen looked at me as though she might make a comment about dramatization again, but then she changed her mind and said, “Then what can we do?”

  “Split up,” Gertie suggested.

  Karen said, “But wouldn’t we be better off sticking together?”

  “We’re just a bigger target this way,” Gertie told her. “If we split up, at least one of us’ll get through to kak.”

  “Maybe,” said Karen doubtfully.

  “Gertie’s right,” I said, as though I knew what I was talking about. But at least if we split up there was less likelihood of anything happening to Karen. I had no illusions about which of the three of us the black Cadillac would follow.

  Gertie said, “Start walking again. Casual, like we don’t know nothing’s going on.”

  We started walking again, stiffly, as though we knew exactly what was going on.

  Out of the corner of her mouth, Gertie said, “When we get to the corner, we go three different ways. Remember, kak’s office is at Rockefeller Center.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  As we approached the corner, I said, “Should we synchronize watches?”

  I felt Karen give me a long and very slow look. “Guess not,” I said.

  39

  THE CADILLAC was following me.

  We had split up at the corner of 78th Street and Broadway, executing a maneuver like toy soldiers on parade, Karen turning left, Gertie going straight ahead, and me turning right.

  The Cadillac also turned right.

  At 79th Street I turned right again, and so did the Cadillac. It was keeping well behind me, but it was the same car, no doubt of it. I was sure the side curtains were drawn, too, the same as always.

  Never had the sun seemed so bright. Never had the store-fronts along 79th Street seemed set back so far from the curb, leaving such a wide expanse of sidewalk. Never had any block in New York looked quite so deserted at ten o’clock on a May morning.

  We crossed Amsterdam Avenue, like an unobservant matador being followed by the bull.

  At Columbus Avenue, 79th
Street is blocked by the planetarium and the Museum of Natural History. There were bicycles parked out in front of both buildings. Driven by a wild surmise, I hurried across the street, but all the bikes had locks on them. Naturally. Everything in New York has a lock on it, much good it does anybody.

  Across the street, the Cadillac was stopped by a red light. If I only had a vehicle of some sort, now was the time to get clean away from them.

  A flock of boys on bikes suddenly swarmed around me, dismounting with the bicycles still in motion, kicking down the kick-stands, reaching with practiced knowledge for their locks. I looked around me and knew my chance had come.

  The boy nearest me was very short, and stout, and wore glasses. I said to him, “Excuse mc,” and took his bicycle.

  He looked at me without comprehension.

  I got on his bicycle and rode away.

  Behind me, there was a sudden flurry of shouts. Looking back, I saw the rest of the boys leaping onto their own cycles and setting off after me. And the Cadillac, finally having a green light to deal with, was nosing around the corner.

  I faced front, bent grimly over the handlebars, and pedaled furiously around the museum and down 78th Street.

  It had been years since I’d ridden a bike. While it may be true that a skill once learned is never forgotten, it is also true that if you haven’t ridden a bicycle for years you’re going to be dreadful at it. Particularly when you’re driving down a sidewalk alive with garbage cans, young trees, fire hydrants and old ladies walking Pekinese.

  How I threaded through all that I’ll never know, but one way and another I did survive it, with a pack of howling bike-riding children in my wake, and with the black Cadillac snorting in muffled impatience at a red light back on Columbus Avenue.

  At the far end of the block was Central Park, and I made for it like a bicycling bear headed for his cave. Ahh, but between me and the potential sanctuary of the park lay Central Park West, a broad avenue blazing with traffic. Buses, cabs, MG’s, Rolls Royces, doctors in Lincolns, college boys in Ferraris, kept women in Mustangs, tourists in Edsels, interior decorators in Dafs, all tearing back and forth, all knowing they have sixty seconds of green light before the red light will return, all knowing that the unofficial world record is seventeen blocks on one green light and all trying to beat that record, and absolutely none of them prepared to deal with a nut on a bicycle abruptly crossing their bows.

  But what was I to do? I was going far too fast—and was far too shaky—to attempt a left or right turn. With all those screaming children behind me—not to mention the Cadillac, which must surely have a green light of its own again by now—I dared not stop. There was only one thing to do, and I did it.

  I closed my eyes.

  Oh, the shrieking of brakes. Oh, the tinkling of smashed headlights against smashed taillights. Oh, the screams of disbelief and rage. Oh, the panic.

  I opened my eyes and saw curb dead ahead. Some reflex left over from childhood made me yank up on the handlebars, so that the bicycle climbed the curb rather than stopping abruptly at it and leaving me to go airborne over the low stone wall and into the park. A similar reflex enabled me to turn right without capsizing. Down the sidewalk I raced, amid the strollers in the sun, leaving chaos, outrage, and crushed straw hats in my wake. So many fists were raised and shaking back there it looked like a mob of Romans come to hear Mussolini.

  There was a break in the stone wall, and a path, blacktop, going into the park and sloping away downhill to the right. I turned in there, gasping for breath, still pumping furiously, and let the incline take me.

  Beautiful. I could sit at last, and stop pumping, and feel the wind rush past my sweating brow. Down the slope I sailed, and even the yelping of the children still dogging my trail sounded suddenly remote and unimportant. I almost smiled, and then looked down at the bottom of the slope and stopped almost smiling.

  A pond lay dead ahead. Possibly the most polluted body of water in the United States, it sported a necklace of beer cans, milk cartons, bits of wax paper, latex products, abandoned toy dump trucks, dill pickles, broken switchblade knives, half-pint muscatel bottles, cardboard coffee containers, copies of Playboy, brown shoes, and crib springs.

  No. Please no.

  I applied the brakes. That is, I applied what were the brakes on a bike when I was a kid, which is to say that I began to pedal backward. When I was a kid, if you were on a bike and you wanted to slow down you pushed the pedals backward against pressure and the bike slowed down.

  Plus ça change, plus c’est change. Bicycles aren’t bicycles any more. I began to pedal backward, encountered no pressure at all, and kept on trying. Meanwhile, the bike was picking up speed. I was pedaling backward, the bike was going faster and faster forward, and that murky pond lay sprawled down there in front of me like an extra circle of Hell.

  I couldn’t think what was wrong. Was the rotten cycle broken? Why on earth wasn’t I stopping? Furiously I pedaled backward, and more furiously I streaked forward.

  The pond was scant feet away when at last I saw the little levers attached to the handlebars quite near my knuckles. Slender cables of some sort meandered away from these levers and disappeared into the bike’s plumbing.

  Could these be the brakes? I had no time to think, to ponder, to do anything but close my fingers about both those levers at once and squeeze. Hard.

  The bike stopped on a dime, and gave four cents’ change.

  It’s too bad there weren’t any levers on me. The bike stopped but I did not. I sailed through the air with the greatest of case, out over the olive-drab water, and seemed to hang there in midair while a peculiar yellow stench lovingly embraced me. Then I shut my mouth and my eyes, folded my body up in the foetal position, plummeted downward, smashed into the water, and sank like a safe.

  40

  WHEN I EMERGED, soaking and sputtering and spitting out candy bar wrappers, on the far side of the pond, I looked about me and saw the pack of boys splitting into two groups and circling the pond on both sides, still intent on my capture even though I no longer had anybody’s bicycle. Is it good for little children to bear grudges like that?

  At the top of the slope I’d lately left I saw a cop, just making up his mind to trot down and ask me one or two questions. I didn’t have time for all that now, nor to be set upon by a thousand enraged children, so I faced the other way and saw ahead of me a jagged escarpment of bare rock. Perfect. Up this it was possible for me to scramble, but no one would be able to pursue me on a bike.

  I had never in my life before been quite this wet, nor had I ever run across water quite this slippery and greasy. My hands and shoes and elbows kept sliding on the rocks as I climbed, leaving green smears behind. But I did at last attain the top, looked to my left, and saw across a bit of greensward the south-bound lanes of the road that makes a long oval inside the park. A traffic light was there—red, because all traffic lights are red—and among the vehicles hunched at the white line there was a taxicab with its vacancy light aglow.

  Saved! I squished in a sodden dogtrot across the greensward, pulled open the cab door, collapsed on the seat, and gasped, “Rockefeller Center.”

  The cabby turned around in some surprise, looked at me, and did a double-take. He then leaned way over to look out his right side window toward the direction from which I’d come, saying, “It’s raining?”

  “The light’s green,” I said.

  He immediately straightened, tromped the accelerator, and we joined the race to the next red light. On the way, he said, in a reasonable tone, “It ain’t raining here.”

  “This isn’t rain,” I said, very near the end of my rope. “I had some trouble.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  He was quiet for two more red lights, but while we were stopped at the third he turned around with a peculiar expression on his face and said, “I hope you don’t mind me pointing this out, mister, but you smell something awful.”

  “I know,” I said.

 
; “I would go so far as to say you stink,” he told me.

  “The light’s green,” I said.

  He faced front, gunned, and off we went again. I sat in the rear of the cab and spoiled.

  “You get some nuts,” the driver decided. Since he didn’t appear to have been talking to me, I made no reply.

  41

  THE ELEVATOR OPERATOR at Rockefeller Center didn’t like my aroma much either. The CAC headquarters were on a very high floor, so that we spent a lot of time together, comparatively speaking; when I left, he was looking around his elevator for a window to open.

  The door I wanted had no name on it, only a number. I entered and found myself in a small and scruffy reception room, with a receptionist at a desk and with Gertie and Karen reading respectively Holiday and Time on a bench to my right.

  They both leaped to their feet at my entrance. Karen came running toward me, arms outstretched, saying, “Darling! I was so—” And recoiled.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Gertie looked at me, wide-eyed. “Wha’d you do?” she asked me. “Hide out in the sewer?”

  “I had a little trouble,” I said.

  The receptionist said, “Sir, is that—is that you? The smell. Is it you?”

  “I couldn’t go back to the apartment,” I said. “I’d just managed to get away.”

  The receptionist went over and opened the window all the way.

  I said, “Excuse me.” I walked over to the window—the receptionist circled around me like a dog avoiding a horse—took off my jacket and tie, and flung them out into the world. Then, facing the room, I told the three women, “I’ll stay here by the window.”

  The receptionist said to Gertie, “Is this the man you were waiting for?” She sounded as though she couldn’t believe the answer would be yes.

  But it was. “That’s him,” Gertie admitted. “But he ain’t always quite that bad.”

  “Maybe I can get you something else to wear,” the receptionist told me, and hurried from the room.

  Karen, keeping her distance, said, “I was so worried about you, Fred. You didn’t get here, and you didn’t get here.”