The Cutting Room (3 page)

“But I’m telling
you
.” She was obviously eager to spill her guts—or merely gossip—about this with
someone
. “This was not a man who entertained many visitors, let me tell you. But I don’t have to, right, you knew him.”

“Yeah. Alan was a, well, a difficult guy.”

“Unpleasant, very unpleasant. And fragrant. Not a bathing sort of man, if you know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“But still—kill him? I don’t know.”

There was a long pause. The woman—Mrs. Heater, I later found out, was her name—took out one of those long brown cigarettes. I didn’t think anybody smoked them anymore. But if she was going to smoke it, I was going to light it for her.

“Thanks.”

“Sure.”

I waited patiently, not wanting to push. “Were these people you’d seen before?”

“It’s hard to say. My cataracts make it hard.”

I couldn’t help but grunt a bit, in frustration. But she didn’t seem to hear.

“I know one was that muscleman. But her, I’d never seen before.”

I just nodded, feigning calmness. But heat was starting to fill my shirt. Gus had been there that night! Even though he said he had not!

“When you say
muscle
, you mean—”

“The short one, who sometimes carried the camera back and forth.”

“Right, right. And . . .”

A woman? Alan Gilbert anywhere near a woman? Suddenly, reality was taking a shape I didn’t recognize.

“The woman was on the run, I know that. Two steps at a time.”

I nodded, with a little “uh-huh.” Like her, I was just another neighborhood gossip, more interested in
knowing
than in doing anything.

“She came out first,” Mrs. Heater went on. “Then muscleman showed up. And then
he
left. I thought there was a party going on, attended by only one person at a time.”

Mrs. Heater laughed at this, a brown ash jiggling off her smoke. Then, sighing a little, she seemed to lose interest in the whole affair. She unrolled and took up her magazine again, as if I wasn’t even there.

So I started to leave. But before I did, I turned around, because I had to know one other thing.

“Tell me—”

Mrs. Heater looked up, as if I were a person she was meeting for the first time.

“Yes?”

“Were either of them carrying anything?”

“Who?”

It took her a second to remember. But when she did, she gave a snort of recognition and didn’t hesitate.

“Oh! The man had something in a bag. He was clutching it to him, like he was afraid he would drop it. And hanging out of the top of the bag was, like, a tail, or something.”

“A tail?”

“Not like a dog’s tail. Shinier than that.”

“Like a piece of film?”

“That’s right. Filmy.”

She stared at me a second. Then, recognition again slowly vanished. Mrs. Heater went back to reading, her hat dipping down over her flawed but still observant—to me, very beautiful—eyes.

Gus Ziegler lived in a hole of an apartment house uptown on the West Side, where Columbia University begins to mingle with Harlem. His flat was on the first floor, and his buzzer just said,
GUS
, as if that was all we needed to know.

I needed to know a lot more.

Standing on the sidewalk, I could see that his one lousy room, which faced the street, was dark. When I pushed his bell—insistently, several times—no one answered. So I thought I’d kill time next door in a magazine store, reading the movie reviews in every newsweekly, glancing out the window every few seconds, until I saw him come home.

I only had to wait a few minutes before I saw the big man lumber by.

To be honest, in his own fashion, Gus was moving quickly, as if he was being pursued by someone. His expression—panicked and fearful—confirmed this, when, as he opened his apartment house door, I tapped him on the shoulder. I said just, “Gus.”

He let out his own low, rumbling version of a scream. Then, turning immediately away, he frantically pushed his key into the lock until the front door fell open before him.

I would not go away. I had never been in a fight before—as opposed to being on the losing end of assaults, as I had been through most of my schooling—but being close enough to
The Magnificent Ambersons
that I could taste it made me bizarrely brave.

I attached both of my hands to Gus’s broad back and got a secure hold of his shoulders. As I pulled down his shirt, I saw a tattoo on his neck that said
HERMAN
.

I thought of Hitchcock’s
Torn Curtain
, the scene where Paul Newman has to kill an enemy agent. The director insisted that it be long and arduous—the victim kicking and screaming, his head in an oven, his fingers clawing, never giving up the fight—to show how hard it is to kill someone. But when
Torn Curtain
plays on TV, the scene is often cut to be less violent and, ironically, less cautionary for any kids watching.

Tonight, as I traveled with Gus inside, like a fly on an elephant’s neck, I hoped our struggle might be edited for TV.

That was not going to happen. The door closed ominously behind us in the shabby first-floor hall. Gus turned, quickly, and his hands reached behind to grab my hands as if he were flinging away a cloak. The gesture lifted me from the ground and sent me into the wall, legs first.

“Gus!” I screamed.

I ricocheted off the wall and landed in a far corner of the floor. I was now at some distance from Gus, who was moving like a small car to his apartment, steps away. My legs feeling a new kind of pain, I managed to half-rise and half-roll after him. I was right behind as, having opened it, he now tried to shut his door. It was as if we were both squeezing into a fleeing subway train.

“Gus . . .”

Try as he might to lock me out
and
get inside himself, it was impossible. Both Gus and I went shooting in, the old door snapping shut behind us.

Here Gus had a definite advantage. The sun had set, the place was dark, and Gus lived there, I didn’t. In other words, as I just groped around, idiotically, he was already scrambling efficiently for whatever he needed to defeat, maim, or kill me.

“Gus?”

I heard him reaching and hauling, zipping and lugging. I knew he was not accumulating any homemade weapons. He was instead grabbing whatever it was he wanted to either hide from me or, dragging past me, carry out. And, of course, I thought I knew just what that might be.

“Gus, let’s talk about this,” I said as my eyes adjusted slightly to the dark. All I could make out were piles of clothing, strewn on every surface, and I did not think I would be more enlightened if the lights were on. “Gus, it’s not yours to take.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, panting, as he scooped up something and stuffed it down into something else.

“You know exactly.” My problem in communicating was: I did not want to just blurt out the words, for what if I was wrong, what if he didn’t know? I could just imagine Gus stopping what he was doing, standing there and staring, saying, “You mean, Alan had
The Magnificent Ambersons
?” and then what would I do? So I had to be suggestive if not downright vague.

“You know exactly what, my friend. You know just what.”

Suddenly, there was silence. Though I could make out even more of Gus’s run-down studio swollen with clothes and remains of meals, I could not make him out any more. In Welles’s film
Touch of Evil
, there is a fight in the dark at the end of which, in a shocking closeup, Akim Tamiroff’s character is shown garrotted, his eyes bugged out. That film was also recut and reshot, in Welles’s absence.

I was hit in the stomach by what felt like a swiftly moving shovel. (I later learned it had been the one-volume edition of
The New York Times Encyclopedia of Film Reviews
, 1926–1970. My one copy was hard enough to pick up, let alone swing around.) The force of the blow bent me completely over. I grasped before me and clawed a terry cloth bathrobe off a chair before going down. Then I lay on the floor, near what looked like a small pile of egg and mushroom omelette that I’m sure Gus had meant to wipe up.

Carrying whatever he had been packing, Gus now started to step over me with his muscle-clogged legs. As he did, I managed to choke out, “Are you going to do to me what you did to Alan?”

I got him with that. Gus stopped, straddling me, his single piece of luggage held in one hand and swinging above my eyes.

“I didn’t do that!” he yelled.

That was all he said. He started to go again, the bag pulled away from my reaching hand now, like bait from a fish, as his sneaker grazed my left cheek with its dirty sole.

Switching my target from his bag to his foot, I succeeded in closing my right hand around his thick left ankle, though just barely. My right hand joining forces with my left, I got a firmer hold. I found I could not trip him up but only pull him around, absurdly, like a small child trying to land a giant kite. Gus tried to kick me off, his bloated leg jerking up again and again.

“Please let go,” he said reasonably.

Gus managed to kick me off. But his kicking motion had upset his balance. As if he were propelled from a banana peel, both of his feet went flying up before him, and he came crashing down next to me, his bag leaping away and smashing against the front door.

There was a pause. I thought this might instill a sense of comic camaraderie in Gus, but Abbott and Costello bloopers this was not to be.

“You little bastard,” he whispered, inches away.

Then he slapped my face like an angry lover.

My whole head rang with the blow from Gus’s beefy paw; my face turned, my chin nearly touched my shoulder. When I turned back, a million cries of pain coming from my neck, jaw, and chest, I saw only the wide back of Gus, escaping out the front door. He dragged the bag behind him, like one more piece of dirty laundry.

Gus, of course, could not get a cab.

It was rush hour, New York City’s great equalizer: even men pursued by others are left standing on sidewalks, waving their hands. Gus had been at it long enough to let me drag my aching body out the door and down the front hall, after him.

He turned to look behind him—as I’m sure he had done every second—and saw me. Running as fast as his biceps and deltoids would allow, Gus then flew from the sidewalk into the street, across the center island on Broadway, and reached the other side.

From there, he disappeared down into the subway, the top of his fuzzy head visible for a second before he was gone.

Dodging cars—including one available cab, poor Gus—I shot after him, into, across, and down, my sore legs screaming with every stamp on the stairs going toward the Number Nine.

I hadn’t had to hurry. Gus stood, swiping and swiping his MetroCard at the electronic eye at the turnstile, muttering, “Work, damn you, work!”

Mine went through once, clean. Gus now looked up and saw me at the turnstile to his right, bloodied but unbowed enough to smile cutely at him.

The screech of a train coming in got our attention. As Gus’s panic caused his MetroCard to finally work, he pulled his bag up from my hand, which was nearly grasping its nylon handle. Then we both pushed through the turnstiles and got onto the train, together.

My heart pounding, strangely exhilarated, I dared to sit right next to him. As we rode, Gus clutched his bag close to his heaving chest, shaking his head at my proximity and his bad luck.

Over the hiss and bang of the train, I bellowed in his ear, “Gus! It’s okay that you lied to me! But you’ll never get away with it!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he shouted back.

“If Alan hadn’t been killed, I would understand your stealing it! Maybe I would have done the same thing! But now it’s murder! Someone has to stop you!”

“I didn’t do that! I didn’t kill Alan!”

Of course, the train had stopped at this point, and Gus was screaming his innocence into a silent, crowded car. This being New York, no one even noticed.

Instead, people noticed me. I remembered that the fight had left me smudged with blood, black and blue, with my clothing torn. To all eyes, I seemed the least beloved of all New York residents: the crazy homeless man.

Gus realized this at the same moment I did. Standing up, indignantly, he hugged his bag tighter and said, like an offended old dowager, “Get away from me! Go bother someone else!”

People edged away, some frightened, others disgusted. Then the bell sounded for the closing doors. Through the scrambling mob, the station stop was visible. The doors tried to close, were forced open, tried to close, were forced open again.

Gus saw his chance. While the doors did their dance—opening, nearly closing, opening again, bell going off—he hustled toward escape. Fearing he might make it, I reached for him and grabbed. Unable to stop his strong body, I merely opened one side of his jacket, flung it flat against him, and sent an envelope out of its inside pocket onto the floor.

The bell now insistent, the doors finally closed. As the train spasmed onward, I scooped up the envelope through the feet of nervous, fleeing passengers. Frantically, I opened it as Gus reached down and tried to snatch it from my hand.

I saw airplane tickets to Los Angeles. Then Gus stopped me—and everyone else—with a cry of “Police!”

The tickets were snapped away by him. I looked up and saw, to my shock, coming forcibly through the rush hour crowd, a uniformed cop.

Everyone was staring at me, directing glances of hatred or fear. I started to push through them, saying politely, “Excuse me, excuse me.” With the cop doing the same thing, though less politely, I made it to the door between cars.

I thought, if the train kept moving, I might be able to keep avoiding the cop until the next stop, where I could exit and be lost. But first I had to push my way through the next packed car.

“Excuse me, excuse me.”

Glancing frantically behind me, I saw the cop finally come through the door, too. The station stop flickered outside; it was only a matter of time.

But I was stuck, crushed in a crowd either hostile or just unable to budge. The cop, however, was making headway. I could see the features of his face now.