Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (20 page)

The delicatessen was packed with people, I could see now; it was narrow but long, and looking over the heads of the crowd to the rear it seemed endless. In the left corner there was a cashier’s cage and a cigar counter, using as little space as possible, and against the wall to the right, stretching halfway from the front window to the rear, was the serving counter. This was a cafeteria-style delicatessen, you got your plates from one of the stacks on the end of the counter (‘No, no plate, it’ll just be in the way,’ Mandon said.) and stepped in line and passed along the counter behind which eight men wearing aprons and chef’s bonnets of brown paper sacks, were slicing at the roast beef and corned beef and pastrami and tongues and sausages and dill pickles and loaves of rye bread, listening to the food orders and filling them more or less correctly (which nobody seemed to mind) and at last they handed you something and you moved out of line, past a squat curving bar where you also had to wait on yourself, and then you were ready to eat – if you could find a place to sit down; guys and cops were stacked two-deep around the tables, waiting, laughing and talking and hollering and slapping each other on the back. It was like a goddamn convention. Most of the men in here knew Mandon too, and called him ‘Shice’.

Mandon finally found a vacant spot against the wall, between two tables, and backed into it, I behind him, each of us with a sandwich in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other.

‘I see what you mean about the plate,’ I said.

‘Sure. A plate’s all right if you come early enough or late enough.’

‘Why come at all?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘I said why come at all. You don’t have to impress me with how many cops you know.’

He flicked his eyes at me. ‘If this makes you nervous, we’ll go. …’

‘It doesn’t. How’s your sandwich?’

‘Good. How’s yours?’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘If I can keep my eyes closed to these guys’ table manners I’ll probably be able to finish it…’

Something touched the back of my neck and I turned my head. Standing beside me was a white-haired man in shirt sleeves, his forearms covered with black sateen elbow-cuffs, winking at me and pantomiming for me to keep quiet. He was trying to reach Mandon with the arm behind my neck, still chewing the last morsels of his food, his mouth opening wide with each chew, and I could see his tongue kneading the swill into a sodden bolus. Make a note of this, I was thinking, make a note of this and mark it with an asterisk to insure remembrance, because one of these days I shall jockey this carrion, this whoreson, this chawbacon into a nice safe corner where a pistol shot will be heard by nobody else. … The badge pinned to his shirt was not silver, like all the other badges in the delicatessen, this badge was gold and I knew he was no ordinary cop. I eased forward a little to give his arm sufficient play, and he slapped Mandon on the pate and snatched his arm back, ducking behind me, out of sight. Mandon turned thinking it was I who had slapped him, but I winked and indicated that it was the guy behind me, and he tilted his head, squinting his eyes, and then recognition came into his face. He sniffed loudly, saying, ‘I smell a turnkey.’

The turnkey straightened up, coming out from behind me, laughing as if this was one of the funniest things he had ever heard. ‘Hi, Cherokee, where you been keeping yourself?’ he said, sticking out his hand. Mandon held his sandwich in his teeth to free one hand to shake with. ‘What’s happened to you lately?’ the turnkey said. ‘Don’t your boys like my hotel no more?’

Mandon got his hand back and took the sandwich out of his mouth. ‘How are you, Boo? Meet my helper, Paul Murphy. Boo Bedford, Head Jailer across the street’

‘Pleased to meet you, Mister Bedford,’ I said. Hail and farewell, I was thinking. …

‘What do you help him do?’

‘He’s gonna take up law,’ Mandon said.

‘I’m gonna take up law,’ I said.

‘His father was an old friend of mine,’ Mandon said. ‘He turned him over to me to get practical experience.’

‘Well, boy,’ Boo said, ‘you sure picked the right man.’ He put his arm around my shoulder. ‘Come to see me sometime and I’ll give you the lowdown on the old bastard.’ Learn to keep your mouth closed when you’re eating, you pig, I thought. ‘And as for you,’ he said to Mandon, ‘don’t make yourself so scarce. I won’t put you in High Five, much as you need it. …’

‘I’ll drop in when you least expect me, Boo,’ Mandon said.

‘Do that – and bring Paul. We’ll show him what the inside of a jail looks like. …’

He patted me on the shoulder and left. Mandon watched him

‘Contact, that’s why I came here,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s good business. That was the head jailer. Carries a lot of water, too. See the guy there at the middle table? In the linen coat. The one with the black horn-rimmed glasses …’

He was a slightly bald-headed man in shirt sleeves, sitting with three civilians. All of them looked a little superior to the others in the room – although not much superiority was needed for that. ‘I see him,’ I said.

‘Judge Birdsong. Very good friend of mine. Him I met in here. …’ he handed me the empty beer bottle, and sidled his way to the table. He leaned down and the judge saw him and smiled broadly and said something I could not hear. With all the noise that was being made I would have had to be right on top of them to hear. Mandon also knew two of the others and shook hands with them, but I could tell from the way he shook hands with the fourth man that he was meeting him for the first time. None of them got up and offered him a chair, none of them looked around for a waiter to ask for a chair. They just sat there, talking and chewing and drinking; everybody in the place was talking and chewing and drinking, and in my mind I saw in every mouth what I had seen in the turnkey’s mouth a loathsome bolus: these swine, these offals, and I could not eat the sandwich. I half-turned my face to the wall to shut out some of the scene, thinking how nice it would be to wire the walls and the floor of this place with t.n.t. and set it off some day at noon, what a great public benefaction that would be…

‘What’s the matter with your sandwich?’ Mandon asked at my elbow.

‘Oh!’ I said. I had not seen him come back. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. I’m just not hungry. …’

He looked at me quizzically. ‘Don’t be nervous. Go ahead and eat.’

‘Goddamn it, I told you. I’m not hungry.’

‘You wanna go?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come on then’

I placed the sandwich and the two bottles on a nearby table, right under the nose of some surprised cops who were sitting there, and followed him to the front, bumping hard against a couple of the bastards, apologizing, pretending they were accidental. Mandon paid the check and we stepped into the brightness of the street, walking towards the corner. The crowds of cops had thinned out, they were inside one of the assortment of joints feeding their faces. ‘Jesus –’  I said, glancing over my shoulder at the delicatessen we had just left. ‘I never saw anything like that before in my life. Not among human beings. Not in jail, not in a road gang, not even in prison. I haven’t seen anything like that since I was a kid. Not since I was a kid back in the mountains.’ ‘Well, they’re cops,’ he said. ‘They like to make a lot of noise and let off steam. This is the only time of the day they can.’ ‘The noise didn’t bother me,’ I said. ‘What did bother you?’ ‘We used to be in the ham business. We raised hogs. Did you ever see a thousand hogs feeding at the same time?’ He did not reply, so I glanced at him and saw that he was staring at me, frowning, his heavy eyebrows raised, high. ‘So that was it, so that was it,’ he said slowly, and now the stare softened and a suggestion of understanding came into his face. ‘I’m way ahead of you, Cherokee,’ I said. ‘Don’t try to psychoanalyse me. I can do a much better job of that than you can.…’

We stopped at the corner.

‘I apologize for subjecting you to an ordeal like that,’ he said. ‘But I had to find out…’

‘Find out? Find what out?’

‘I just wanted to see if you were a loud-talking punk, or a guy with the nerve to see this thing through.’

‘How could you tell from what happened back there?’ I asked.

‘An accumulation of very vivid reactions. You’ll do, Paul. …’

‘That’s fine. That only leaves one of us in doubt,’ I said coldly.

He smiled at me, unruffled. ‘As far as my courage and dependability are concerned, I’m afraid that you’ll just have to take those for granted.’

‘Will I?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ he said pleasantly.

He nodded to the City Hall across the street. ‘Shall we go over and try it on for size?’ he asked.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

Mandon stopped by the cigar stand at the corridor corner opposite the elevator. The clerk was at the far end of the counter giving a woman some change, but when he turned and saw Mandon he said in delight, ‘Cherokee!’ and came to him with his hand outstretched. He was a dark man and his right arm was off at the shoulder. ‘Cherokee!’ he said again, sticking his hand over the mints and cigarettes and magazines.

‘Hello, Augie,’ Mandon said warmly shaking hands.

‘I don’t see you around,’ Augie said with a slight accent. ‘You been gone?’

‘No, I’m just busy, Augie. How are you? How’s the family?’

‘I’m good. The family’s good. And –’ he grinned ‘– business’ good. You are good?’

‘I’m good,’ Mandon indicated me. ‘Meet my helper, Paul Murphy…’

Augie put his hand out to me and I took. ‘Hello, Augie,’ I said.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, nodding. ‘Business is very good when Cherokee needs a helper. Many, many years he do the whole thing by himself.’

‘No longer, Augie, no longer,’ Mandon said, moving his fingers lazily, pointing at something on the rear shelf.

‘I know…’ Augie said. He took down a round pasteboard carton, like the one I had seen in Mandon’s apartment, and removed the lid. Mandon reached in to take out some stogies and Augie said, ‘His favorite...’ and Mandon laughed, pleased, putting a handful of stogies into his inside pocket and handing Augie a one-dollar bill, waving for him to keep the change.

‘See you soon, Augie …’ Mandon said.

‘Very soon, I hope,’ Augie said. ‘Please to meet you,’ he said to me.

I nodded and followed Mandon away. ‘You think that’s wise to introduce me as your helper?’ I asked. ‘Nothing wrong with it,’ he said. ‘I can hire anybody I please. You’ve got to have some sort of connection. Gives us the right to be together whenever we want to. In here …’ he said, nodding.

He stepped over to a big frosted glass door marked: MEN, and took out a key ring and found the key and unlocked the door. This was a charming bit of irony: the City Hall was open to the public but the toilets weren’t. You had to have a key to get into one of them.

I went in behind him, through a bare hall, into the lavatory proper. It was shiny and clean with six stalls and six gleaming urinals, and a battery of wash basins all with foot-controls, like a hospital operating room, and a stack of linen towels. The doors of all the stalls were open, and there was a man in shirt-sleeves at the urinal, his back to us. Mandon moved in to one of the urinals and in a moment the other man shuddered his shoulders in a mild spasm and turned away, zippering his fly. He ignored the nice gleaming wash basins and the stack of linen towels and walked out.

Mandon turned quickly to me and said, ‘Give me that gun!’

‘Go away,’ I said,

‘I saw you switch it from your hip pocket to your coat pocket while you were standing at the cigar stand,’ he said. ‘You chump, give it to me, give it to me!’

I shrugged, taking the gun out of my coat pocket and handing it to him. He quickly moved to the stack of linen towels on the shelf above the wash basins and stuck the gun inside them, halfway down.

‘What the hell is this?’ I said, moving over to get back the gun. He grabbed my arm and there was anger in his face. I didn’t want to hit him, so I shoved him backwards, and before I could reach for the stack of towels, I heard the click of the corridor door as it opened. I jumped into one of the stalls and as I closed the door I had a flash of Mandon moving back to the urinals. I held the door shut with my hand, not locking it, peering through the crack near the hinges, and the guy came in, going to the urinal. I pushed the flusher, waiting for him to finish, hoping that he too would go straight out, ignoring the wash basins and the towels, because I didn’t want to run the risk of him finding the gun. But I knew that it would just be my luck for this guy to have very clean personal habits, and it was. He finally turned, moving to the wash basins, and I came out and took the one next to him. He was a stocky civilian. He inspected his face in the mirror, almost clinically, squeezing the skin, then he examined his eyes minutely, and when this was done he took a comb from his hip pocket and began to comb his hair. Hurry up, you son-of-a-bitch, I was thinking, but I confess that I felt some admiration for his poise. He seemed entirely unaware that another man was standing beside him. How any man can go into a lavatory and be unaware of other men, impervious to them, fully at ease, untortured, I do not understand, but this one was. I couldn’t stall any longer and I started washing my hands, and then he did too. I finished and took one of the towels, slowly drying my hands. He soaped his hands and rubbed them and cleaned the fingernails of each finger with the fingers of the opposite hand, and then soaped his hands again and washed them off. When he shook off the excess water, I reached for a towel for him, holding it out politely.

Thanks …’ he said.

I smiled at him.

He wiped his hands thoroughly and dumped the towel into a white metal container with a swinging top and went out.

I fished under the stack of towels and got the gun and Mandon stepped beside me. ‘Goddamn it!’ he said, popping out his hand for the gun. I gave it to him and he dropped it into his pocket, glaring at me. ‘Did you use this crashing off that prison farm?’ he asked tensely.

‘No.’

‘Have you killed anybody with it?’

‘No. …’

‘Don’t lie about this!’

‘What the hell is this?’ I said.

‘Have you?’

‘No!’