Manhattan Noir Read online

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2006 Akashic Books

  Manhattan map by Sohrab Habibion

  ePub ISBN 13: 978-1-936-07037-4

  ISBN-13: 978-1-888451-95-5

  ISBN-10: 1-888451-95-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2005934818

  All rights reserved

  First printing

  Printed in Canada

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman

  Dublin Noir, edited by Ken Bruen

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  FORTHCOMING:

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  London Noir, edited by Cathi Unsworth

  Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  Havana Noir, edited by Achy Obejas

  Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan

  Lone Star Noir, edited by Edward Nawotka

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  CHARLES ARDAI Midtown

  The Good Samaritan

  CAROL LEA BENJAMIN Greenwich Village

  The Last Supper

  LAWRENCE BLOCK Clinton

  If You Can’t Stand the Heat

  THOMAS H. COOK Battery Park

  Rain

  JEFFERY DEAVER Hell’s Kitchen

  A Nice Place to Visit

  JIM FUSILLI George Washington Bridge

  The Next Best Thing

  ROBERT KNIGHTLY Garment District

  Take the Man’s Pay

  JOHN LUTZ Upper West Side

  The Laundry Room

  LIZ MARTÍNEZ Washington Heights

  Freddie Prinze Is My Guardian Angel

  MAAN MEYERS Lower East Side

  The Organ Grinder

  MARTIN MEYERS Yorkville

  Why Do They Have to Hit?

  S.J. ROZAN Harlem

  Building

  JUSTIN SCOTT Chelsea

  The Most Beautiful Apartment in New York

  C.J. SULLIVAN Inwood

  The Last Round

  XU XI Times Square

  Crying with Audrey Hepburn

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  WELCOME TO A DARK CITY

  The City.

  See, that’s what we call it. The rest of the world calls it the Apple, or, more formally, the Big Apple, and we don’t object to the term. We just don’t use it very often. We call it the City and let it go at that.

  And, while the official city of New York is composed of five boroughs, the City means Manhattan. “I’m going into the City tonight,” says a resident of Brooklyn or the Bronx, Queens or Staten Island. Everybody knows what he means. Nobody asks him which city, or points out that he’s already in the city. Because he’s not. He’s in one of the Outer Boroughs. Manhattan is the City.

  A few years ago I was in San Francisco on a book tour. In conversation with a local I said that I lived in the City. “Oh, you call it that?” he said. “That’s what we call San Francisco. The City.”

  I reported the conversation later to my friend Donald Westlake, whose house is around the corner from mine. “That’s cute,” he said. “Of course they’re wrong, but it’s cute.”

  The City. It’s emblematic, I suppose, of a Manhattan arrogance, of which there’s a fair amount going around. Yet it’s a curious sort of arrogance, because for the most part it’s not the pride of the native. Most of us, you see, are originally from Somewhere Else.

  All of New York—all five boroughs—is very much a city of immigrants. Close to half its inhabitants were born in another country—and the percentage would be higher if you could count the illegals. The flood of new arrivals has always kept the city well supplied with energy and edge.

  Manhattan’s rents are such that few of its neighborhoods are available these days to most immigrants (though it remains the first choice of those fortunate enough to arrive with abundant funds). But it too is a city of newcomers, not so much from other countries as from other parts of the United States, and even from the city’s own suburbs and the outer boroughs as well. For a century or more, this is where those young people most supplied with brains and talent and energy and ambition have come to find their place in the world. Manhattan holds out the promise of opportunity—to succeed, certainly, and, at least as important, to be oneself.

  I was born upstate, in Buffalo. In December of 1948, when I was ten-and-a-half years old, my father and I spent a weekend here. We got off the train at Grand Central and checked in next door at the Hotel Commodore, and in the next three or four days we went everywhere—to Liberty Island (Bedloes Island then) to see the statue, to the top of the Empire State Building, to a Broadway show (Where’s Charlie?), a live telecast (The Toast of the Town), and just about everywhere the subway and elevated railway could take us. I remember riding downtown on the Third Avenue El on Sunday morning, and even as my father was pointing out the skid row saloons on the Bowery, a man tore out of one of them, let out a bloodcurdling scream, turned around, and raced back inside again.

  I think I became a New Yorker that weekend. As soon as I could, I moved here.

  “Why would I want to go anywhere?” my friend Dave Van Ronk used to say. “I’m already here.”

  Manhattan Noir.

  While I might argue Manhattan’s primacy (assuming I could find someone to take the other side), I wouldn’t dream of holding that everything worthwhile originates here. Even as so many Manhattanites hail from somewhere else, so do many of our best ideas. And the idea for this book originated on the other side of the world’s most beautiful bridge, with a splendid story collection called Brooklyn Noir.

  It was that book’s considerable success, both critical and commercial, that led Akashic’s Johnny Temple to seek to extend the Noir franchise, and it was Tim McLoughlin’s outstanding example as its editor that moved me to take the reins for the Manhattan volume.

  I sat down and wrote out a wish list of writers I’d love to have for the book, then e-mailed invitations to participate. The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today’s literary world; there’s precious little economic incentive to write one, and the one I was in a position to offer was meager indeed. Even so, almost everyone I invited was quick to accept. That gladdened my heart, and they gladdened it again by delivering on time … and delivering what I think you’ll agree is material of a rare quality.

  My initial request wasn’t all that specific. I asked for dark stories with a Manhattan setting, and that’s what I got. Readers of Brooklyn Noir will recall that its contents were labeled by neighborhood—Bay Ridge, Canarsie, Greenpoint, etc. We have chosen the same principle here, and the book’s contents do a good job of covering the island, from C.J. Sullivan’s Inwood and John Lutz’s Upper West Side, to Justin Scott’s Chelsea and Carol Lea Benjamin’s Greenwich Village. The range in mood and literary style
is at least as great; noir can be funny, it can stretch to include magic realism, it can be ample or stark, told in the past or present tense, and in the first or third person. I wouldn’t presume to define noir—if we could define it, we wouldn’t need to use a French word for it—but it seems to me that it’s more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.

  Noir doesn’t necessarily embody crime and violence, though that’s what we tend to think of when we hear the word. Most but not all of these stories are crime stories, even as most but not all are the work of writers of crime fiction, but the exceptions take place in a world where crime and violence are always hanging around, if not on center stage.

  Noir is very contemporary, but there’s nothing necessarily new about it. In cinema, when we hear the word we think of the Warner Brothers B-movies of the ’30s and ’40s, but the noir sensibility goes back much further than that. When I was sending out invitations, one of the first went to Annette and Martin Meyers, who (as Maan Meyers) write a series of period novels set in old New York. Could Maan perhaps contribute a dark story from the city’s past? They accepted, and in due course the same day’s mail brought Maan’s “The Organ Grinder” and a present-day story from Marty.

  Every anthologist should have such problems. Both stories are here, both show the dark side of the same city, and both are far too fine to miss.

  Most of our contributors live in New York, though not necessarily in Manhattan. (It’s hard to afford the place, and it gets harder every year. New York is about real estate, and Justin Scott’s “The Most Beautiful Apartment in New York” illustrates this fact brilliantly.) Jeffery Deaver lives in Virginia and John Lutz in St. Louis, yet I thought of both early on; they both set work in Manhattan, and reveal in that work a deep knowledge of the city, and, perhaps more important, a New Yorker’s sensibility.

  It seems to me that I’ve nattered on too long already, so I’ll bring this to a close. You’re here for the stories, and I trust you’ll like them. I know I do.

  Lawrence Block

  Greenwich Village

  January 2006

  THE GOOD SAMARITAN

  BY CHARLES ARDAI

  Midtown

  Rain battered the sidewalk and the storefronts. The wind played games with people’s umbrellas, teasing in under the ribs and then whipping them inside out and back again. One umbrella handle and shaft, discarded by its owner, skittered along the curb in an overflow from the gutter.

  There were hardly any people on the street. Those there walked quickly, heads bent, shoulders hunched forward, buckling umbrellas held before them like shields. A few sought refuge under awnings and in doorways. One stood bravely in the street, a hand held high in a desperate attempt to hail a taxi.

  Harold Sladek sat where he always sat this time of night: in the shadow of the service entrance to Body Beautiful. The doorway offered little protection from the rain since it was less than a foot deep, but it was better than sitting out on the sidewalk itself. At least he wasn’t completely surrounded by the elements; at least Harold could feel concrete behind and beneath him. Solidity—that was something.

  It was also a matter of habit: He always slept in the doorway at Body Beautiful, even though it was no better than any of the other service entrances up and down the avenue. It was part of his routine, forged over the course of many years, many rainstorms. Solidity of a different sort, but no less important.

  Harold held a copy of Cosmopolitan, spread open at the center, over his head. He felt water trickle down between his fingers. After a few minutes, the glossy paper become waterlogged and slick, and eventually the magazine pulled apart in his hands. When this happened, Harold threw it into the street and pulled another issue out of the plastic bag next to him. He had found the stack of magazines tied with string next to a trash can on the corner of Lexington and 79th. His original thought had been to sell the magazines for a quarter apiece further uptown, on Broadway where all the booksellers were. But if the magazines could keep him dry, or even just a little bit drier, that was worth giving up a quarter or two.

  The second issue started dripping ink-stained water onto his forehead. Harold threw it away, wiped his hands on his drenched pants, and started on a third.

  He didn’t notice immediately when someone approached the doorway and stopped next to his bags. The magazine cut off much of his line of sight, and the rain, spraying him in the face with every fresh gust of wind, cut off the rest. But at one point, between gusts, he glanced beside him and saw a pair of legs in ash-gray trousers and, next to them, a dripping, folded umbrella.

  Harold put the magazine down behind him. It wasn’t quite soaked through yet, so it was too valuable to throw away. But he wasn’t going to sit with a magazine over his head while another man stood next to him with an umbrella he wasn’t even using.

  He looked up, squinting against the rain. The other man was bending forward, sheltering his head under the overhang. The rest of him was exposed. The rain blew on the man’s suit and he just stood and took it, one hand in his pants pocket, the other on the handle of his umbrella.

  “Mister,” Harold said, “don’t you mind the rain?”

  The man shook his head. “Just water,” he said. “A little water never hurt anyone.”

  Harold had shouted; the other man had spoken at a normal level, or maybe even a little quieter. So even though Harold had leaned into it, he hadn’t caught the words. “What?” he said.

  The man bent at the knees. He stuck the umbrella straight out in front of them and pressed the release. It opened up enormously, suddenly cutting them off from the storm. “I said, a little water never hurt anyone.”

  He still spoke quietly but now the storm was muted behind the umbrella, and Harold heard him. “I don’t know,” Harold said. “But I’m not going to argue with a guy’s got an umbrella.”

  The man smiled. He took his hand out of his pocket and brought with it a slightly battered pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?” The man thumbed the pack open and extended it.

  It was suddenly dry and quiet—relatively dry and relatively quiet—and a man Harold had never seen before was offering him a cigarette. Why? Harold tried to read the answer in the man’s eyes. They didn’t reveal a lot. They were ordinary eyes in an ordinary face. They had wrinkles at the corners and were overhung by untrimmed gray eyebrows. They were not cruel, or cloudy, or cold, or anything else in particular. Just eyes. Just a face. Just a man doing his fellow man a good turn.

  Harold plucked a cigarette out of the pack and stuck it between his lips. Then he looked up again, to get another read on those eyes. Whatever he thought he might see, he didn’t.

  You’re on the street, you can’t be too careful, Harold told himself. Careful keeps you alive. But there are limits. When a guy comes by and offers you a cigarette, you take it and say thank you. It doesn’t happen every day.

  Harold reached back to take another, for later, or maybe two or even three as long as the guy was offering. But the pack of cigarettes was gone now, replaced with a brass lighter. At least it looked like brass—hard to tell in a dark doorway.

  Harold leaned into the flame. It took three tries for him to catch it on the tip of the cigarette. He dragged deep when it caught, let the warmth rush into his throat and lungs. First cigarette in … how long? Hard to say. You lost track of exact time living on the street. But it had to have been at least a month.

  “Thanks,” Harold said.

  “Don’t mention it.” The man straightened up, lifting the umbrella and stepping around so that he was standing in front of Harold. “Make the night a little easier to get through.”

  “You’re a mensch,” Harold said. “You know what that is, a mensch?”

  The man nodded. “What’s your name?”

  Harold coughed, a wet, rattling sound he brought up from deep in his chest. “Harry.”

  “You take care, Harry,” the man said.

  “Don’t you worry about me. I been through storms would make this look lik
e pissing in a can. You take care—you got the nice suit.” Harold made himself smile up at the man. He thought, Maybe the guy will leave me the umbrella. Then he thought, What, and walk out in the rain without it? Next he thought, I could probably take it away from him. But finally he thought, The guy gave you a cigarette, talked to you, passed his time with you, kept you dry for a while, and you mug him for his umbrella? Schmuck.

  He thought all this in the time it took him to take two more drags on the cigarette.

  “I hate to ask,” Harold said, not quite able to get the umbrella fantasy out of his mind, “but would you mind standing there while I finish this? A little easier without the rain in my face …” He let his words trail off. The man was shaking his head.

  “Sorry. I have to be somewhere.”

  “Nah, that’s okay, I understand.” Harold raised the cigarette. “Thanks for the smoke.”

  “My pleasure,” the man said.

  “Sladek, Harold R. R for Robert.” The detective flipped through the creased wallet he’d retrieved from Harold’s pocket. There was a long-expired driver’s license from New Jersey; a photograph of Harold, when his hair had been brown; another photograph of Harold and a woman standing next to a white-iced, pink-flowered cake; a stained dollar bill with one corner missing; and an ancient business card, smudged and bent, listing Harold Robert Sladek as Assistant Manager for J.C. Penney, New York.

  The detective nudged his partner with his elbow. “Check the bags.”

  The younger man bent to look through the plastic bags, still standing in a puddle of water.

  At the curb, a uniformed officer, the one who had found Sladek’s body, was coordinating getting the covered corpse into the EMS van. He had radioed for EMS instead of the morgue because he had thought Sladek was still alive.

  “… four, five, six magazines, a pullover, a comb, half a … a … I don’t know, I guess it’s a baguette,” the partner said. “A French bread. Whatever.” The detective took notes. “A couple napkins. Bag of Doritos. A WKXW-FM baseball cap.”