Ed McBain - Downtown (14 page)

Michael walked to where Crandall was standing with the gun in his hand.

"Fuck off, okay?" he said, and took the gun from him and went to the door. He now had two guns. Like a Wild West cowboy. One in each pocket of his coat.

He was happy that the two uniformed cops who came up the steps as he was going down did not stop and frisk him. "Are you looking for the guy beating his wife?" he

asked.

201

"No, we're looking for Wales," one of the cops said.

"That's near England, I think," Michael said, and continued on down. Connie was waiting outside in the limo, the engine running.

"I think it's time we went home," she said. She drove the limo to the garage China Doll used on Canal Street, and they began walking from there to her apartment on Pell. As promised, the temperature was already starting to drop. Michael guessed it was now somewhere in the low twenties or high teens. They walked very rapidly despite the packed snow underfoot and the occasional patches of ice on sidewalks that had been shoveled, their heads ducked against the wind, Connie's arm looped through his. Under the other arm, she carried the green satin high-heeled shoes she'd retrieved from the limo's trunk. The streets were deserted. This was four o'clock on Christmas morning, and everyone was home in bed waiting for Santa Claus. But Michael was brimming with ideas. "What we have to do is find out where Charlie Nichols lives," he said.

"Okay, but not now," Connie said. "Aren't you cold?" "Yes." "I mean, aren't you _freezing?"

"Yes, I am. But this is important."

"It's also important not to die in the street of frostbite." "You can't die of frostbite." "For your information, frostbite is freezing to death." "No, it's not." "Can you die of freezing to death?" "Yes." "All right then," she said.

"Connie, the point is we've got to talk to Nichols. Because if he's the Charlie in Crandall's calendar ..." "Please hurry."

"Then maybe he can tell us who Mama is, or why Crandall drew nine thousand dollars from the bank, _if he did, or what he did with that money, or what his connection is with the two people who took all that stuff from my wallet and the one who stole my car."

The words came out of his mouth in small

203 white bursts of vapor. He looked as if he were sending smoke signals. The clasps on Connie's galoshes clattered and rattled as she led him through yet another labyrinth, this goddamn downtown section of the city was impossible to understand. None of the streets down here were laid out in any sensible sort of grid pattern, they just crisscrossed and zigzagged and wound around each other and back again, and they didn't have any numbers, they only had names, and you couldn't get anywhere without a native guide, which he supposed Connie was. A very fast one, too. She walked at a breakneck pace, Michael puffing hard to keep up, both of them sending smoke signals with their mouths. He hoped there weren't any hostile Sioux on ponies in the immediate neighborhood. He would not have been surprised, though. Nothing that happened in this city could ever surprise him again.

They came at last to a Chinese restaurant named Shi Kai, just off the corner of Mott and Pell. The restaurant was closed, but a sign in the front window advised:

OPEN FOR BREAKFAST

AS USUAL

CHRISTMAS DAY Connie took a key from her handbag, unlocked a door to the left of the restaurant, closed and locked it behind her, opened another door that led to a flight of stairs, and began climbing. There were Chinese cooking smells in the hallway. There were dim, naked light bulbs on each landing. She kept climbing. Behind her, he watched her legs. Her galoshes rattled away. He hoped they wouldn't wake up anyone in the building. On the third floor, she stopped outside a door marked 33, searched in the dim light for another key on her ring, inserted it into the latch, unlocked the door, threw it open, snapped on a light from a switch just inside it, and said what sounded like "Wahn yee" or "Wong ying," Michael couldn't tell which. "That means, `Welcome` in Chinese," she said, and smiled.

"Thank you," he said, and followed her into the apartment.

He supposed he'd expected something

205 out of _The _Last _Emperor. Sandalwood screens. Red silk cloth. Gold gilt trappings. Incense burning. A small jade Buddha on an ivory pedestal. Instead, against a wall painted a pale lavender, there was a long low sofa done in a white nubby fabric and heaped with pillows the same color as the wall, and there was an easy chair and a footstool upholstered in black leather and there was a coffee table with a glass top, and a bar unit hanging on the right-angle wall, and several large framed abstract prints on the wall opposite the sofa.

Connie sat, took off her galoshes, and then padded in her stockinged feet to the bar unit. "This has been _some night," she said, and rolled her eyes, and lowered the drop-leaf front of the bar. "I had a man vomit all over the backseat, did you notice?" "No, I didn't." "I mean that the limo I picked you up in outside the deli wasn't the same one I'd dropped you off in when you went to see Crandall's wife?" "No, I couldn't tell any difference." "Charlie was very upset. Charlie Wong. _My Charlie Wong. About the stink in the car." "I can imagine."

"Do you know how to make martinis?" she asked. "Yes, I do," he said.

"Why don't you mix us some very nice, very dry martinis while I go take my shower, and then you can take your shower, and then we can sip our martinis in bed, would you like to do that?" "Yes," he said. His voice caught a little. Because he was thinking about what she'd just said.

Not about mixing the martinis or taking the showers. But about sipping the martinis. In bed. That part. "A twist, please," she said. You came through the bedroom doorway and the first thing you saw was the bed facing the door, its headboard against the far wall, a window on each side of it, a night table under each window. It was neither a king nor a queen, just a normal double bed. With a paisley-patterned quilt on it. There was a

dresser on the wall to the right of the bed, and

207 bookcases on the wall to the left, and a door to the closet on that same wall, and on the entrance-door wall, which he didn't really see until they got into bed together, there was an easy chair with a lamp behind it to the left of the door, and a full-length mirror to the right of it.

They left the quilt on the bed because it was so damn cold. Every few minutes, they poked out from under the quilt to take a quick sip of their drinks, and then they hurriedly put the glasses back on the night tables on either side of the bed. They did this until the glasses were empty. Then they pulled the quilt up over their shoulders and settled in close together.

"He turns the heat off at eleven o'clock every night," Connie said. "There's nobody cheaper in the world than a Chinaman."

Under the quilt, the whole world was cozy and warm and safe. Under the quilt, with Connie in his arms, he felt the way he'd felt long long ago in Boston, when his father was still alive and there to take care of him, and when the house was full of the smells of his mother's good French cooking and when at night she wrapped him in a big white fluffly towel after his bath, and patted him dry, and then tucked him into bed and pulled the covers to his chin, and told him Good Night, Sleep Tight, Don't Let The Bedbugs Bite, and kissed him on the cheek. In the darkness, he would smile. And fall asleep almost instantly.

After Boston, he hadn't slept too well for a long time. That was because the Cong's main job was keeping the Americans awake all night, never mind killing them. If the Cong could keep the Americans awake, why then they'd have to go home eventually in order to get a good night's sleep. He was sure that had been the strategy. It worked, too. Even when you knew they couldn't possibly be out there, even when intelligence reports told you they were fifty miles away, a hundred miles away, _retreating even, you still imagined them out there creeping up on you while you slept. So you never really slept. Never completely. You closed your eyes, yes, and occasionally you caught ten minutes here, ten minutes there, even a half hour's deep sleep sometimes until your own snoring startled you into frightened wakefulness, and you

jumped up in a cold sweat, your

209 rifle fanning the jungle even before your eyes were fully open. When he'd got back home ... Boston. Home.

Jenny told him he'd filled out a lot. She had learned how to soul-kiss.

From _Cosmopolitan magazine, she told him. His mother had given away all his clothes. And his father was sick and dying. He'd come back to where it was safe--the Boston he remembered, the Boston he'd longed for all those months, the Boston that was the reality as opposed to the jungle nightmare--but his father was sick and dying and his mother, who was only forty-two, looked suddenly old, and the nightmare was here, too, here in Boston where it was supposed to be safe.

They buried his father on a cold November morning. It was raining.

He remembered thinking he would never be safe again. He told his mother one night that his dream was to marry Jenny and take her someplace where it was warm all year round. He almost said warm and _safe all year round. His mother had looked at him with that sad, grieving expression she wore all the time now, and then she'd merely nodded. He wondered what she was thinking. Was she thinking it did not pay to dream because eventually all dreams die? His father's dream had been to own a chain of hardware stores all across New England. But cancer had cut him down when he was forty-four, and all he'd left behind him was the big old house and the one store. Good Night, Sleep Tight, Don't Let The Bedbugs Bite, and don't let the Cong creep up on you in your sleep, either. How can you dream if they won't let you sleep? It took his mother two years to get over his father's being dead. At the end of that time, she told Michael she'd had a good offer for the store and was going to sell it. Said she could lend him the money for his dream. At prevailing interest rates. Told him to go find his Someplace Warm, take his Jenny there with him. He'd never known whether she was trying to get rid of him or trying to help him. He'd had the feeling that maybe ...

Well, he'd discussed this with the shrink.

211 That somehow his mother blamed _him for his father's death. That because she'd prayed so hard for Michael to come home safe and sound, the gods had somehow taken payment for his survival. Had spared his life and taken his father's instead. That she hated him for this.

The shrink wondered out loud if she'd given away Michael's clothes the day she'd learned his father had cancer. Michael said he didn't know.

In Vietnam, Sergeant Mendelsohnn had told him to shoot first and think it over later. Michael took the money, asked Jenny to marry him, and moved down to Florida with her. Where he'd felt safe for a while. Until Jenny started up with James Owington at the bank.

And after that, you know, a man began to think there wasn't much sense to _anything anymore. You go fight a dumb fucking war where nobody will let you sleep and everybody including the people on your own side are trying to kill you, and you get through it by the skin of your teeth and you come home to find your father dying and your mother blaming you for it and your girlfriend soul-kissing her way through Boston and its suburbs, you begin to think, Hey, _sheeee-it, as Andrew would have put it. And when even the sweet Florida dream turns sour, when the enemy creeping up on your sleep now is a fat fucking branch manager who's getting in your wife's pants, hey, man, what was the sense of _anything? Part of his dream ...

Well, he'd wanted to start a family down there. Little girl, little boy. Two kids, that would've been nice. Name the girl Lise, after his mother. Well, maybe not. But _shit, Mom, it really wasn't my fault he died. Name the boy Andrew for sure. But if you can't sleep you can't dream, and anyway all the dreams died forever--or so he'd thought--nine months and six days ago, _seven days ago now, but who was counting? All the dreams had drowned in the Gulf of Mexico on that blustery March day, drowned together with his sorrows. But tonight ...

He could see snow beginning to fall again

213 outside the window on his side of the bed. Fat fluffy flakes drifting down in the light of the lamppost. He held Connie in his arms. She felt so small and delicate.

He held her close and watched the snow coming down. And almost instantly, he fell deeply asleep. And for the first time in years, he dreamed again.

9 It was Christmas Day. Cooking smells from the restaurant downstairs drifted up the stairwell and seeped under the door and wafted across the apartment into the bedroom where he lay with Connie Kee in his arms. It was still snowing. He guessed there had to be eight feet of snow out there by now. Maybe ten feet. It had to be Minnesota out there by now. He had fallen asleep instantly, but now he was wide awake and a bit leery of waking up Connie, who might discover there was a stranger here in bed with her and go running out into the snow naked. The last time he'd been to bed with anyone was with a woman named Zara with a Z Kaufman in Miami, where he'd gone to an orange-growers' convention. That was in September, it was still hurricane season down there in Florida, there were in fact hurricane warnings posted for southeast Florida and the Keys. He had not been to bed with anyone since the divorce in March, but there he was with the palms rattling outside his motel window and the wind blowing at forty miles an hour and a fifty-year-old woman who grew oranges in Winter Haven teaching him a few tricks he hadn't learned in Saigon. Zara with a Z Kaufman. A very lovely person. He had never seen her again after that night. So here he was now with a Chinese girl dead asleep in his arms, afraid to wake her up because whereas last night there had been only two of them here in this bed, this morning there were three of them if you counted his hard-on, which Connie suddenly seized in her right hand, leading him to believe she hadn't been asleep after all. They kissed.

It was like their kiss last night under the

215 stars in that snowbound backyard where telephone poles grew from an endless field of white and snow-capped fences ran forever. Except better. Because although last night there had been the attendant if remote possibility that their lips might in fact freeze together--she always seemed to be worried about freezing, he now realized--the bed today was quite warm under the quilt, thank you, and there was in fact steam banging in the radiators, and no one was about to freeze, not today when Christmas was upon the world. And whereas last night someone up there in a fourth-floor window had asked them what the hell they were doing and had threatened to call the police, which he or she had in fact later done, the bastard, there was now no one here in this radiator-clanging, steam-hissing room to hurl a challenge or to dial 911 to report a dire emergency. There was no dire emergency in this room. Unless the urgency of their mutual need could be considered an emergency of sorts, and a dire one at that. He could not recall ever wanting a woman as much as he wanted this one. Nor could he recall any woman ever wanting him as much as Connie seemed to want him. They could not stop touching each other. They could not stop kissing. Her murmuring little sounds hummed under his lips. His hands were wet with her. When at last he entered her-- "Oh, Jesus," they whispered together. It was Christmas Day.