I knew her lover, Athwart “Pop” Miller, and more about her history than I was willing to say.
I had turned Pop into my CI when I found out about a regular marijuana delivery that he ran down at the docks. I didn’t interfere but instead made him identify and then report on Little Exeter Barret. Pop didn’t like Exeter because he dealt in heroin. I had a deep interest in the ferret-faced runt because he could lead me to the biggest bust in New York City history.
I only ever came to the bar after hours, so Cress was unlikely to know my face or anything about me.
“I don’t recognize you,” she said.
“Pop an’ me used to play Go after he closed,” I said. “He told me that his clientele wouldn’t like a man of my shade playing Chinese checkers at his bar.”
“Atty tried to teach me,” she remembered aloud, “but I just didn’t get it.”
“They say Go is harder than chess. Pop said he picked it up on a tour of Southeast Asia in the merchant marines.”
“And why you think I own the place now?” she asked. “He’s got three kids and two ex-wives.”
“But only one lusty wench,” I quoted, “that he wanted to be marooned with in the South Pacific.”
The tension went out of Cress then. I could see in the mirror behind her that her clients were losing interest in me. America was changing at a snail’s pace in a high wind, but until that gastropod mollusk reached its destination I had a .45 in my pocket and eyes on all four corners at once.
Cress served the sweet rum drink and I savored it.
I was reading an iPad version of the story of Joan of Arc, looking up now and then to see the denizens of an old way of life bring their world back for a night.
There was an old-fashioned jukebox that hadn’t had its contents swapped out for thirty years…Brandy was a fine girl and she’d have made a good wife but his woman was the sea.
Maybe two hours later a man said, “Hey, mister.” He’d installed himself on the barstool to the right before I looked up.
“Yeah?”
“Do I know you?” His skin was wizened and burned brown from oceangoing sunlight. The eyes might have had a color other than brown, but he squinted.
I smiled and turned Joan off.
“Why do you ask?” I replied.
“Never seen you here before, but you look familiar.”
“You’d remember if you knew me.”
“You that bad?”
“I’m just a sucker for real grog is all, my friend.”
“Now we’re friends?” he asked. Sitting up straight he was still a small man.
Two hours and all I knew was that Joan was a pivotal event in the culmination of the Hundred Years’ War. She had saved France and been betrayed by the king she’d crowned. They said she was a virgin, but I reserved judgment.
I’d already decided that Angles and Dangles was a bust when the runt sailor had drunk enough to try to pick a fight. Two hours wasted with sixty seconds of value tacked on to the end.
I raised my hand to get Cress’s attention, intending to pay my bill and leave. But then the door opened and Little Exeter walked in.
“Yes, Mr. Thor?” Cress asked while I watched the little rat wade through the crowd to a far table.
I looked at Pop’s barmaid lover and said, “Give my friend a triple of whatever he’s drinkin’.”
“Johnny, are you beggin’ drinks again?”
“Hell, no,” my newest best friend proclaimed. “Make that rye, Cressy.”
“We were talkin’ sea stories,” I lied. “He’s a good guy. You can bring me another grog too.”
It was almost two in the morning when three unsteady patrons staggered out of Angles and Dangles.
I’d left the bar just short of an hour earlier and set myself in the shadows of a doorway across the street.
Little Exeter was among the staggery crew. They parted company half a block away.
I followed my quarry for three blocks, sticking to the opposite side of the street, keeping my distance.
The streets were dark and lifeless except for rats running around the edges and a window light here and there. One heavily bearded homeless man pushed his overflowing shopping cart down the middle of the street proudly; one of the last humans in the world who had survived the holocaust of humanity.
Little Exeter was reeling, teetering, and stumbling, but now and then he’d stop and perform a near-perfect dance step that revealed a completely different man from the one I’d stalked a decade before.
I didn’t care.
When I was sure there was no one around I moved quickly, coming up and knocking him senseless with a fist bolstered by a roll of nickels.
Dragging him into a little alley, I let him fall on his back and then squatted down so he could see my face, illuminated by an automatic prowler light put there to scare potential burglars.
“Who you?” he said.
I took out my pistol and pointed it at the center of his forehead.
“I do sumpin’ to you?” he demanded.
“I need a name, Mr. Barret.”
“Huh?” He didn’t know whether to be drunk or afraid.
“Who in the police did you answer to fourteen years ago when you were running aitch outta the docks?”
His little eyes became big and he blinked like some kind of rain forest creature looking for a way out.
“Um, um, um…Cumberland,” he said. “Hugo Cumberland.”
That was the first time since Rikers that it came upon me in full force.
It was dark and dank, bug infested and rank from the odor of maggots in that alley. And I was, once again, a murderer-in-waiting, now with a gun in my hand and a man I yearned to kill prostrate before me.
It’s not that I wanted to pull the trigger; it was just that I was going to pull it and he was going to die. There was a powerful revelation in that burgeoning reality.
I think Little Exeter must have seen his death in my eyes and so the fear drained away, leaving only the seriousness of the last moments of a wasted life.
That look on Exeter’s face reminded me of Aja somehow. This brought to mind her asking for Coleman to be scuttled, for me to destroy him and her mother. If it hadn’t been for her, Exeter would have died in that filthy passageway.
I stood up quickly and ran.
When I got to my car, five blocks away, the pistol was still in my hand.
“Hello?” she said sleepily. “Is that you, King-baby?”
“Yeah,” I said after a short pause to catch my breath.
“What you doin’?”
“Sittin’ in a car down near the old navy yard.”
“What you doin’ there?”
“When I was in Rikers they broke me. Broke me like a china plate.”
Effy knew when to be quiet.
“They tore me down,” I confessed. “I thought I was tough, but everything I knew and believed in just slipped away.”
My face was going through all kinds of gymnastics to avoid crying.
“What you doin’ in that car, Joe?”
“I was looking for a name. There’s someone down here I thought might have it.”
“Did he tell you?”
“He did.”
“Did you kill him?”
There was something so intimate about the question that for a brief span of seconds I didn’t feel alone. And because of that epiphany I realized that I felt alone almost all the time—when talking to people, walking down crowded avenues, even when I was talking with Aja.
I was alone because no one else seemed to know what was in my heart. Only Mel to a certain degree and now Effy, whom I had had all kinds of kinky sex with. None of that mattered because in order to truly be with somebody you have to be in their mind.
“Did you, Joe?” she asked again.
“No,” I said, “I didn’t.”
“Did you do anything to him?”
“I knocked him down.”
“Did he deserve that?”
“About a hundred times over.”
“He’s still alive?” Effy asked.
“He is.”
“You a good man, King Joe,” she said. “In any country, language, religion, or wild place—you a good man. You knew me when I didn’t know myself.”
“Thanks,” I said, then I disconnected the call.
I put the pistol in the trunk and drove home at a snail’s pace; that same snail that was bringing humankind to a new understanding of the same old shit.
17.