Manhattan Mayhem (41 page)

I offered Mikey a ride home from the hospital, where the medics had rushed Jimmy and Mikey, just in case there was a miracle waiting
for the old man. There was not.

Mikey gave me a long, kind of foggy look. “Thanks, Ray.”

I parked my Caddy near the house on Grand. “You gotta see this, Mikey.”

“What’s that, Ray?”

“It’s not far.”

We walked down Grand, past Elizabeth and Mott and Mulberry. Like we’d done a million times as boys. It was still sunny out, but cold. Mikey shuffled along next to me, looking down.

“You said on TV that it got eaten up by a cancer,” I said. “But I say, fuck that, Mikey. It’s smaller, that’s all. It’s still a place for people like us.”

“What do you mean?”

“This. Little Italy. You say it’s dead, but it isn’t. It’s alive. Here. Look at this.”

I led the way down an alley behind the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas. There were puddles of rain from the night before. I hopped around them, got out ahead of Mikey, then turned and faced him.

The alley was long and we were halfway down it, protected by the tall buildings. Mikey stopped and looked at me, and I saw that he got it. He finally
got
something. A little surprised, I think.

“With Jimmy gone, I can speak for the family now,” I said. “This isn’t just business. It’s personal, too.”

He did it right. Didn’t even put his hands up. I shot him, and he went down hard. Twice more.

I walked back the way we’d come, around the puddles, back toward the house on Grand. I felt like some long misunderstanding was now understood. Like the thing he wanted to say was said.

I felt bad for Mikey, but this was always our thing, and finally he’d gotten that, too.

T. JEFFERSON PARKER
is the author of twenty crime novels, including
Silent Joe
and
California Girl,
both of which won the Edgar Award for best mystery. His last six books are a Border Sextet, featuring ATF task-force agent Charlie Hood as he tries to staunch the flow of illegal firearms being smuggled from the United States into Mexico. His most recent novel,
Full Measure,
is about a young man who returns from combat in Afghanistan to pursue his dreams in America. He lives in Southern California with his family and enjoys fishing, hiking, and cycling.

Stark ran west on Eighty-Fourth Street.

Starry-eyed gentrifiers had renamed the shabby old block Edgar Allan Poe Street. He crossed Riverside Drive against the light, gave a bus the finger and a cabbie a look that made the man reach for the tire iron he kept under the German shepherd on the front seat. It was the winter of 1981; life was already harsh in New York, and just when it seemed the city couldn’t get more dangerous, Stark was on the lam.

He cut into Riverside Park, turned off the tarmac path, frightened a child, and climbed an enormous rock. It stood high as the fourth floor of the apartment buildings across the drive. He sat beside an old steel door someone had stolen from someplace and glared at the
Hudson River.

On the lam came in two varieties. Holed up in a four-star Bahamas hotel with a suitcase full of dough was good lam. The job gone wrong, a woman gone south with your getaway stash, and witnesses reporting which way you’d gone was bad lam. Bad lam meant you had to pull another job, like right now. But spur-of-the-moment heists promised jail or the morgue. So did sitting on this rock until the cops caught up.

The old door slid aside, and a cadaverous long-haired man climbed out of the hole it had covered. He sat on the door, gazed at the river, sharpened a pencil with a penknife, and scribbled in an ancient leather-bound notebook.

“You going to be here long?” Stark asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said, when are you going to haul ass outta here and leave me in privacy?”

Dark, mournful eyes drifted over Stark’s tough and battered face. They took stock of his clothing, the small rip in one knee, the solid lightweight assault boots, and the bulge under his sweat-stained gabardine jacket, which suggested either a firearm or an alarming pectoral. “I would imagine I’ll be here another seven or eight hours. And you, sir?”

Stark said nothing. He glared at the Hudson, instead, and wondered if he was losing his touch.

“Poe.”

“What?”

The cadaverous fellow extended a bony hand and said again, “Poe. The name’s Poe. Edgar Allan Poe. And you, sir?”

Stark jabbed the top of the first page of the guy’s notebook. “If your name’s Poe, why’d you write, ‘Ravings,’ a Short Story by E. P. Allan?”

“Allan’s a nom de plume.”

“Huh?”

“A pen name. I had to change my name to sell my stories.”

Stark nodded. He, too, had changed his name. This morning. Owing to the mismanaged bank job on the East Side. The connection pleased him, and an unusual sense of human fellowship warmed him
like a restaurant exhaust fan blowing grease in a winter alley. He stuck his hand out. “Stark. Pleased to meet you.”

“Delighted,” said Poe, closing icy and surprisingly strong fingers around Stark’s.

“I’ve already admitted I’m a writer. May I ask how you make
your
living, Mr. Stark?”

“Banks and armored cars.”

“Do not expect me to be frightened by an armed robber. I’m accustomed to agents and publishers.”

“I could be a writer,” said Stark. “I could write a hell of a book about my work.”

“And what would you write for your second book?”

“I could write ten books. I’ve pulled jobs you couldn’t dream up. Some good, some bad. Human situations, mistakes, betrayals, revenge, scruples. All that stuff.”

Stark, who had put prison time to good use reading, was impressed to be meeting a writer. He began to tell Poe about jobs he’d pulled—leaving out names, dates, and venues. Poe listened, politely. Now and then he made a note in his book. Stark was wrapping up a redacted version of the morning’s disaster when Poe interjected, “Forgive me, sir, but I’ve got to finish this mystery before the Xerox place closes. They’ve got a special overnight rate, three copies for the price of two. One for my editor. One for me. And one for the girl who lives across the hall.”

Stark displayed some inside knowledge he had picked up somewhere. “What about your agent? Doesn’t he get a copy?”

Poe gave a small sad shrug, bent over his book, and resumed scribbling. Stark watched and when his pencil stopped moving figured it was okay to ask another question. “Why’d you have to change your name to sell your stories?”

Poe looked up, blinking. “What? What? Oh … I write different kinds of stuff. Poems. Novels. Short stories. I mean there’s no way I can write a love poem, a horror novel, and one of these
Mystery Magazine
pieces with the same name.”

“What does a name have to do with writing?”

Poe considered that a moment, and it seemed to make him uncomfortable. “Not writing.
Selling.
Marketing. You can’t confuse the readers.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The publishers say you can’t confuse the readers.”

Stark had spent enough time behind bars to understand the merciless logic of the power behind the rules. “I get it.”

Color rose to Poe’s cheeks. He closed his notebook on his pencil and said, “It’s more than that—here, I’ll show you.” He swung his legs over the edge of the hole in the rock and dropped into it. “Come on! I’ll show you.”

Stark peered over the edge. Poe was climbing down a rickety ladder.

“Come! I don’t have all day.”

The hole looked like the lowest form of on the lam where you huddled in the dark, curled in the fetal position. Still, you took your chances when you saw them; maybe it contained a tunnel that led under Riverside Drive into an apartment shared by Pan Am stewardesses.

Stark followed Poe down the ladder. The hole wasn’t as deep as it looked. He caught up at the bottom. Poe led him down a rock-sided alley and into a narrow street of low brick row houses. A carriage pulled by horses clattered past. The sunlight was dulled by coal smoke. “What is this?”

“Greenwich Village, last century—there! There we are.”

And there was Edgar Allan Poe, walking head down with a group of thin men who were listening to a plump, prosperous-looking business type with a thick gold watch chain draped across his belly.

The Poe standing at Stark’s elbow said, “The gaunt men are Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. The youngster is Melville. That’s our literary agent doing the talking. Listen to what he says.”

“How did we get here?” asked Stark.

“Listen—”

“Can we get back?”

“Of course.”

Stark looked up and down the street and back at the stone alley
and saw opportunity. His sharp cheekbones and granite jaw dissolved into a dreamy expression that had last crossed his face when his mother breast-fed him.

Poe smiled. “Would I be far off the mark?” he asked silkily, “to guess that you are speculating, what if you knocked that agent on the head and took his watch and chain back to Riverside Park in 1981?”

“I’m a heist man, not a mugger.”

“Forgive me. I meant no insult.”

“Any banks nearby?”

“Plenty downtown,” said Poe. “But when we return to 1981, good luck spending currency issued by the Savings Institute of Butchers’ and Drovers.”

Stark’s expression changed to that of a man grappling with the concept of attempting to pay a four-star hotel bill with a sack of gold coins.

Poe said, “Listen to the literary agent instruct the writers.”

“The publishing business is changing,” the agent was saying. He tugged his watch chain, checked the time, and shoved his thumbs in his vest pockets. “No more little books. No more medium-size books.”

Emerson and Thoreau and Hawthorne and Melville started snickering. They exchanged superior looks. Then all talked at once.

“Absurd!”

“A good book’s a good book.”

“Who cares if it’s big or little?”

“Long, short, you’re done when the story’s done.”

Stark nodded. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville seemed to have a point.

A gleaming lacquered coach drawn by a matched team of four black horses came down the street. The agent raised his arm in a languid wave, and the coach stopped. A liveried footman jumped down and held the door for him. “Change,” he called as he climbed inside. “Change or disappear.”

“We’ve heard enough,” said Poe. He led Stark back through the stone alley and up the ladder and out of the rock.

Stark squinted at the Hudson a while, digesting events. Tugboats
and barges and heating-oil tankers headed to Albany were all signs of here and now. “Your buddies were right,” he said. “A good book’s a good book.”

“No,” said Poe. “Our agent was right. Look at Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. Dead as doornails. Melville went sailing. Took him forty years to get
Moby-Dick
noticed. Nobody would touch
Billy Budd
with a barge pole until the poor man was a generation in his grave.”

Stark nodded. Put that way, Edgar Allan Poe had a point. “What about you?” he asked.