Christmas Bliss (11 page)

The sedan’s radio was tuned to a sports talk station, and the discussion, mounted at top volume, seemed to be a heated debate about the prospects for the Rangers, which left my driver in a fury. He was screaming obscenities and pounding the steering wheel. “Fuck the Rangers. Nobody care about Rangers.” He jabbed at the radio’s push-button controls, changing stations, tuning now to an ear-splittingly loud rap music station with a thumping bass that made the whole backseat vibrate. My temples began to throb.

“Could you please turn that down a little?” I asked timidly. No response. Finally, emboldened by the driver’s bad manners, I tapped his shoulder.

“Hey! Turn it down, please. Okay?”

He glanced at me in the rearview mirror, and I could see his scowl, but he did finally turn the volume down.

The Buick’s thermostat was turned up to the blast-furnace setting, and I could feel perspiration beading up on my face and neck, and sweat trickling down my back. My driver was sweating too, but he seemed oblivious to the thick garlic-scented fumes wafting through the car’s interior. I tried rolling my window down for a breath of fresh air, but the crank window handle was broken. Out of desperation, I shed the heavy coat, laying it gingerly across my lap.

We paid some tolls, and eventually we merged onto an elevated highway that seemed to cut directly through a gritty gray morass of industrial buildings and tenement houses shoved right up against the highway’s edge. At one point, as we inched along, I looked over to the right and found myself staring directly into an apartment window, eyeball to eyeball with a fat man in a greasy undershirt who appeared to be standing at a stove cooking something. I looked away, embarrassed to intrude on his privacy, but when I looked back, he gave me a jaunty salute with his spatula. So far, it was the friendliest encounter I’d had since landing at LaGuardia two hours earlier. I smiled and waved back.

Suddenly, the driver floored the Buick’s accelerator, zipping in and out of lanes, alternately speeding and tailgating. I was desperately searching for my seat belt when the car hit a pothole so deep, it bounced me nearly off my seat.

“Hey!” I said sharply, but the driver didn’t even turn around. Anyway, the search for a seat belt was fruitless, so I simply hung on to the cracked plastic seat back and prayed we’d reach our destination before I got jounced out of all my dental work.

After we left the elevated highway we were on an ancient steel truss-work bridge which the signage declared to be the Williamsburg Bridge. This, I concluded, was definitely not the scenic route to Daniel’s apartment. Snowflakes swirled around in the air outside, and I longed for just a lungful of what I was sure was cold, clean air.

We drove through dense, urban streets. No signs of Christmas here. Just more stunted trees, soot-blackened buildings crowded up against streets, and sidewalks heaped with bags of trash, which were now receiving a picturesque frosting of snow. I saw street signs, but of course, they meant nothing to me. My driver hunched over the steering wheel, muttering in a low voice and an unfamiliar language.

“Excuse me,” I said brightly, thinking he was addressing me. It was then that I noticed he was wearing a headset, and actually talking into his phone.

We’d been driving for at least thirty minutes, and I was becoming more and more uneasy with each block. Shouldn’t we be in Manhattan by now?

“Excuse me,” I said loudly, but the driver had no reaction. I leaned forward and tapped him on the shoulder. “How much longer?” I said in a loud, distinct voice. Ridiculous! He was foreign, yes, but not deaf.

“Yes,” he said, nodding, his eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror. “Very soon. We arrive.”

“How soon?” I asked. “I looked up the address last night. On the Internet it says it’s only twenty minutes from LaGuardia.”

“Internet not know everything,” he said.

Ten minutes later, he pulled the car onto a street lined with what looked to me like rows of abandoned storefronts. The shop windows were covered with steel pull-down grates, and the brick and concrete walls were riddled with spray-painted graffiti. I saw what looked like a large bundle of rags dumped up against a vacant storefront, and was horrified to realize, on closer examination, that the bundle was actually a man, sleeping on a pallet of flattened cardboard beer crates.

The driver rolled slowly down the block, then pulled alongside the grimmest, most decrepit building I’d ever seen.

“Here,” he said triumphantly. He turned to me. “We are here.”

“Here?” I blinked. This looked nothing like the Greenwich Village I’d always pictured. I craned my neck to read the print on the nearest street sign, which read “Avenue C.”

“This isn’t Stuyvesant Street,” I protested.

“No. Is Avenue C. You say Avenue C. I take you here.”

“I never said Avenue C. I don’t know where this is. I asked you to take me to the East Village.”

“East Village?” He shrugged. “East Village is not here.”

“I realize that. You’ve brought me to the wrong place.”

“I take you where you say.” He picked up a pencil and a tiny spiral-bound notebook and began jotting figures. He frowned, erased, scribbled some more. Satisfied, he tore off the slip of paper and handed it to me.

In large numbers, he’d written $130.

“What’s this?”

“Is fare. You pay.”

“A hundred and thirty dollars? This can’t be right.”

“Is right. I pay tolls, gas. You pay one hundred thirty now.”

I was scared. But I was starting to get angry. Obviously this driver had deliberately targeted me. An out-of-town rube, a woman traveling alone, who would be ripe for a rip-off. Or possibly selling into white slavery.

“I am not going to pay you anything,” I said, clearly enunciating every word. “Until you take me to the right address on Stuyvesant Street in the East Village.”

His eyes narrowed. “You pay!” he screamed. “I call police if you no pay. Police put you in jail.”

“Call the police,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “I’ll tell them you took me to the wrong address and deliberately tried to overcharge me.” I glanced around at his dashboard, thinking I would write down his unit number, or however private cars were regulated, to report him, but for the first time realized there was nothing resembling a meter or anything like a permit to indicate my driver was actually licensed.

“You’ll be the one to go to jail,” I said. “You don’t even have a license to carry passengers, do you?”

“You pay,” he repeated. “You pay and get out my car.”

“I am not getting out of this car until you take me to Stuyvesant Street,” I repeated.

He gave it some thought. “You pay half now. Seventy bucks. Then I take you.” He’d started the car again, and we were slowly rolling forward again, but he was still turned halfway around in the seat, glaring daggers at me.

“Not even one dollar. Not until you take me to the right address.” I pulled my cell phone from my purse and held it up for him to see. “Or I’ll report you to the authorities.”

This, as it turns out, was not the winning strategy I’d hoped for.

He muttered something else under his breath. The car traveled another hundred yards, and suddenly he slammed on the brakes, sending me ricocheting off the back of his seat.

“Out!” he screamed, turning to me again. “Out, out, out! Out right now.”

I knew I’d lost, but I was determined to have the last word. “I’ll get out,” I said finally. “But I’m not paying you.”

I swung the door open and put my right foot down, but before I was completely out of the car, the driver sped off, sending me toppling facedown onto the sidewalk.

I managed to scramble to my feet. “Come back here!” I screeched, but the Buick was already halfway down the block. With my borrowed black camel’s hair coat stowed safely in its backseat.

“Psst.” The hoarse voice startled me so that I jumped. I looked down. A person who’d been sleeping on a nearby grate was now sitting up. It was a man. “You got any smokes?” he asked, giving me a toothless grin.

“Sorry,” I said, taking a step away. “I don’t smoke.”

“Maybe a sandwich?”

I shook my head no. It was bitterly cold. The nice, warm fleece-lined leather gloves BeBe had loaned me were in the pocket of her now-departed coat. I tucked my hands up beneath the edge of my sweater sleeves.

“Maybe some spare change?”

I reached into my purse and fished out a dollar bill and gave it to him. I looked up and down the street, but there was no other sign of life anywhere. “Look. That cabdriver was supposed to take me to the East Village, but instead he dumped me out here. Can you tell me where we are?”

He looked down at the dollar, and then back at me. “I could. If you had, say, five bucks.”

Chapter 12

Reluctantly I handed my new tour guide a five-dollar bill. He eyed it carefully, turning it over and over with hands encased in greasy yellow wool gloves with the fingers cut out. “You’re in Alphabet City. Avenue C. Between Fourth and Fifth,” he said finally. “But if I was you, I wouldn’t plan on sticking around. This ain’t exactly Park Avenue.”

“Thank you,” I said. I turned and started walking down the block, hoping he wouldn’t decide to follow. At the corner, I looked up and down the intersecting streets. Cars zoomed past, but I didn’t see many taxis, and anyway, I wasn’t really confident I actually knew how to hail a cab. I looked up at the sky, which was lead gray, with low, ominous-looking clouds. The snow was falling faster now, and my sweater was getting damp. My feet squished inside the loafers, and my toes were beginning to feel numb. My nose and cheeks burned from the cold.

If I stayed on this corner any longer, I feared I’d be frozen to the spot. Reluctantly I pulled out my cell phone and called Daniel.

His phone rang three, then four times. I felt my mouth go dry. What if he’d gone out? Or was asleep? He’d sounded so awful the night before, he was hoarse and had a dry, hacking cough. I’d urged him to take some cold medicine and try to get some sleep.

Finally, on the fifth ring, the phone picked up. “Hello?”

I was stunned. It was a woman’s voice.

“Hello?” she repeated. “Anybody there?”

“Sorry,” I managed, finally. “I must have a wrong number. I was trying to call Daniel Stipanek.”

“This is Daniel’s number,” she said smoothly. “Who’s calling, please?”

Again, I was stumped. I looked at my watch. It was 9:30 a.m. Why was a woman answering Daniel’s phone at this hour?

“This is his fiancée, Eloise Foley,” I said. “And who is this?”

“This is Carlotta,” she said. “I just came over to drop off some soup to Daniel. He looks like hell, so I made him go back to bed. Maybe you could call back later? After he’s had some rest? Say … after lunch?”

“Later?” I felt the blood rushing to my face. Who the hell did this woman think she was?

“I really need to talk to Daniel. Right now,” I said, making my voice steely. “It’s kind of an emergency.”

“Oh. Well, in that case…” Her voice trailed off, and I could hear footsteps on what sounded like a wooden floor, and then her voice, somewhat muffled.

“It’s your fiancée, Eloise. She says it’s an emergency. But I really don’t think…”

“Weezie?” Daniel’s voice was little more than a croak. “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

At the sound of his voice, my steely reserve melted like a Southern snowflake, and I was instantly reduced to a big, blubbering baby.

“I’m lost,” I wailed. “I wanted to surprise you, but this driver ambushed me at the airport. He deliberately took me to the wrong address, and when I wouldn’t pay him, he kicked me out of the car and took off. I’m freezing and I’m terrified…”

“Weezie, slow down, for God’s sake.” Daniel’s next words were lost in a spasm of coughing. “What are you saying? Exactly where are you? Airport? What airport?”

“LaGuardia,” I said, wiping at my nose, which was now running nonstop. “But I’m not there anymore. I’m someplace called…”

“LaGuardia? Here? You’re here in New York? Right now?”

“I took the first flight out of Savannah this morning. I was going to take a cab over to your apartment, but this driver … he accosted me. And the next thing I knew, I was in his car, and I know I told him I needed to go to the East Village. He drove off with my coat. BeBe’s coat.”

“Hold on a minute.” He coughed for what seemed like another three minutes. “Did you say you’re in Alphabet City?”

I could hear the woman’s voice in the background. “She’s in Alphabet City? Oh my God. What the hell is she doing in that neighborhood? Tell her to flag down a cab.”

Daniel was back. “Carlotta says…”

“I can’t flag down a cab,” I said. “They won’t stop. They just go speeding right past me.”

“Never mind,” Daniel said. “I’m coming to get you. Is there a store or something—like a bodega, where you can wait for me? At least get in out of the cold?”

I walked back to the middle of the block. Metal grates were pulled down over most of the storefronts. But across the street, there was a storefront. I could see a light through the window plastered with ads for cigarettes, lottery tickets, and malt liquor.

“There’s a store—but it’s pretty seedy-looking…”

“Never mind that. Just go over there and wait for me. Buy a newspaper or something. I’m getting dressed right now, and I’ll be there as soon as I can. Give me that address again?”

He wasn’t dressed? And Carlotta was there?

I was walking toward the store. I repeated the address. “Hurry, please,” I said. And then. “I’m sorry. I know you’re sick…”

“Just get inside and get warm,” Daniel said. “It’s gonna be all right, baby. I’ll be right there.”

*   *   *

A middle-aged woman was perched on a backless stool behind the counter, her dark hair pulled back from her face with a faded red scarf. She shot me a uninterested smile, then returned to the stack of papers spread out on the counter before her.

The store was tiny, with narrow aisles stocked with typical convenience store items. Tall coolers stocked with soda and beer ran across the back of the store, and on the counter adjacent to the cash register sat a coffee machine. I closed my eyes and inhaled the scent of the coffee. Near the coffee machine was a glass display case of pastries—muffins, croissants, bagels, and gooey-looking sugar-drizzled danishes.