Catch and Release Paperback Page 12

  And she settles her hand on his arm, and beams while he tells his stories.

  * * *

  There was a silence, with an unasked question hovering. Elaine broke the one and asked the other. Did he regret the sale?

  “No,” he said, and shook his head. “Why should I? I could run it a thousand years and not take twenty million dollars out of it. And if it’s a neighborhood institution, and enough people felt they had to say so last night, well, it’s one the neighborhood’s well off without.”

  “There’s history here,” I said.

  “There is, and most of it misfortunate. Crimes planned, oaths sworn and broken. You were here on the worst night of all.”

  “I was remembering it just now.”

  “How could you not? Two men in the doorway, spraying bullets as if they were watering the flowers. One tosses a bomb, and I can see the arc of it now, and the flash before the sound of it, like lightning before thunder.”

  The room went still again, until Mick got to his feet. “We need music,” he announced. “They were supposed to come this afternoon for the Wurlitzer, the truck from St. Vincent de Paul. The creature’s not old enough to be valuable or new enough to be truly useful, but they said they’d find a home for it. If they get here tomorrow or Monday they’re welcome to it, assuming I’m here to let them in. On Tuesday the building changes hands, and what’s in it belongs to the new owner, and most likely goes into a landfill along with the bricks and floorboards. You haven’t any use for it, have you? Or a two-ton Mosler safe? I didn’t think so. What would you like to hear?”

  Elaine and I shrugged. Kristin said, “Something sad.”

  “Something sad, is it?”

  “Something mournful and Irish.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Sure, that’s easily arranged.”

  * * *

  I remembered an evening some years earlier. Elaine and I on our way out of the Met at Lincoln Center, the last strains of La Boheme still resounding. Elaine in a mood, restless. “She always fucking dies. I don’t want to go home. Can we hear more music? Something sad, it’s fine if it’s sad. It can break my fucking heart if it wants. Just so nobody dies.”

  We hit a couple of clubs, wound up downtown at Small’s, and by the time we got out of there the sun was up. And her mood had lifted.

  Irish songs on the ground floor of a Hell’s Kitchen tenement may be a far cry from jazz in a Village basement, but it served the same purpose, drawing us down into the mood as a means of easing us through it. I don’t remember exactly what Mick selected, but there were Clancy Boys and Dubliners cuts, and some ballads of the 1798 Rising, including a rendition of Boolavogue with a clear tenor voice backed by a piper’s keening.

  That was the last record to play, and it would have been a hard one to follow. I was put in mind of the Chesterton poem, and trying to remember just how it went when Elaine read my mind and quoted it:

  For the great Gaels of Ireland

  Are the men that God made mad,

  For all their wars are merry,

  And all their songs are sad.

  “I wonder,” Mick said. “Is it just the Irish? Or are we all of us like that, deep in our hearts?” He got to his feet, picked up his bottle and glass. “That’s enough whiskey. Is it iced tea you’re all drinking? I’ll fetch us another pitcher.” And to Kristin: “No, don’t get up. ’Tis my establishment still. I’ll provide the service.”

  * * *

  He said, “Will I miss it? The short answer is it’s a bar like any other, and I’ve lost my taste for them, even my own.”

  “And the long answer?”

  He gave it some thought. “I expect I will,” he said. “The years pile up, you know. The sheer weight of them has an effect. I wasn’t always on the premises, but the place was always here for me.” He filled his glass with iced tea, sipped it as if it were whiskey. “The room is full of ghosts tonight. Can you feel it?”

  We all nodded.

  “And not just the shades of those who died that one bad night. Others as well, whose deaths were somewhere else altogether. Just now I looked over at the bar and saw a little old man in a cloth cap, perched on a stool and nursing a beer. I pointed him out to you once, but you wouldn’t remember.”

  But I did. “Ex-IRA,” I said. “If it’s the fellow I’m thinking of.”

  “It is. One of Tom Barry’s lads in West Cork he was, and that lot shed enough blood to redden Bantry Bay. When his regular local closed he brought his custom here, and drank a beer or two seven nights a week. And then one night he wasn’t here, and then the word came that he was gone. No man lives forever, not even a wee cutthroat from Kenmare.”

  He pronounced it Ken-mahr. There’s a Kenmare Street a few blocks long in NoLita, which is the tag realtors have fastened on a few square blocks north of Little Italy. A Tammany hack called Big Tim Sullivan managed to name it for his mother’s home town in County Kerry, but he couldn’t make people pronounce it in the Irish fashion. Ken-mair’s what they say, if indeed they say the name at all; the residents nowadays are mostly Chinese.

  “Andy Buckley,” he said. “You remember Andy.”

  That didn’t require an answer. I could hardly have forgotten Andy Buckley.

  “He was here on that bad night. Got us into the car and away, the two of us.”

  “I remember.”

  “As good behind the wheel of a car as any man I’ve ever known. And as good with darts. He’d scarcely seem to be paying attention, and with a flick of his wrist he’d put the little feathered creature just where he wanted it.”

  “He made it look effortless.”

  “He did. You know, when I had them put this place back together again, I bought a new dartboard and had it installed in the usual place on the back wall. And I found I didn’t like seeing it there, and I took it down.” He took a deep breath, held it, let it out. “I had no choice,” he said.

  Andy Buckley had betrayed Mick, his employer and friend. Sold him out, set him up. And I’d been there on a lonely road upstate when Mick took Andy’s head in his own big hands and broke his neck.

  You remember Andy, he’d said.

  “No fucking choice,” he said, “and yet it never sat easy with me. Or why would I have had them replace the dartboard? And why would I have taken it down?”

  * * *

  “If they hadn’t come round with their offer,” he said, “I’d never have closed Grogan’s. It never would have occurred to me. But the time’s right, you know.”

  Kristin nodded, and I sensed they’d discussed this point before. Elaine asked what was so right about the timing.

  “My life’s changed,” he said. “In many ways, beyond the miracle that an angel came down from heaven to be my bride.”

  “How he does go on,” Kristin said.

  “My business interests,” he said, “are all legitimate. The few wide boys I had working for me have moved on, and if they’re still doing criminal deeds they’re doing them at someone else’s behest. I’m a silent partner in several enterprises, and I may have come by my interest by canceling a debt or doing someone an illegal favor, but the businesses themselves are lawful and so is my participation.”

  “And Grogan’s is an anomaly?” Elaine frowned. “I don’t see how, exactly. It’s evolved like the rest of your life, and it’s more a yuppie watering hole than a hangout for hoodlums.”

  He shook his head. “No, that’s not the point. In the bar business there’s no end of men looking to cheat you. Suppliers billing you for undelivered goods, bartenders making themselves your silent partners, hard men practicing extortion and calling it advertising or charity. But I always had a pass, you know, because they knew to be afraid of me. Who’d try to get over on a man with my reputation? Who’d dare to steal from me, or cheat me, or put pressure on me?”

  “Whoever did would be taking his life in his hands.”

  “Once,” he said. “Once that was true. Now the lion’s old and toothless and wants only to lie by th
e fire. And sooner or later some lad would make his move, and I’d have to do something about it, something I’d not care to do, something I’m past doing. No, I’m well out of the game.” He sighed. “Will I miss it? There’s parts of the old life I miss, and it’s no shame to admit it. I wouldn’t care to have it back, but there’s times when I miss it.” His eyes found mine. “And you? Is it not the same for you?”

  “I wouldn’t want it back.”

  “Not for anything. But do you miss it? The drink, and all that went with it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “There are times I do.”

  * * *

  It was late when we left. Mick turned off the one light, locked up, proclaiming the latter a waste of time. “If anyone wants to come in and take something, what does it matter? None of it’s mine anymore.”

  He had his car, the big silver Cadillac, and dropped us off. Nobody had much to say beyond a few pleasantries as we got out of the car, and the silence held while Elaine and I crossed the Parc Vendome’s lobby and ascended in the elevator. She had her key out and let us in, and we checked Voice Mail and email, and she found a coffee cup I’d left beside the computer and returned it to the kitchen.

  We tried the Conor Pass engraving in a few spots—in a hallway, in the front room—and decided to defer the decision of where to hang it. Elaine felt it wanted to be seen at close range, so we left it for now, propped against the base of a lamp on the drum-top table.

  The little tasks one does, all of them performed in a companionable silence.

  And then she said, “It wasn’t so bad.”

  “No. It was a good evening, actually.”

  “I love the two of them so much. Individually and together.”

  “I know.”

  “And he’s much better off without the place. He’ll be fine, don’t you think?”

  “I think so.”

  “But it really is, isn’t it? The end of an era.”

  “Like Seinfeld?”

  She shook her head. “Not quite,” she said. “There won’t be any reruns.”

  PART OF THE JOB

  “Walters has gone over,” Jondahl said. He was cleaning his glasses with a specially impregnated tissue. “His was a very sensitive position, you know. He had access to his department’s most important plan. Took a copy of it and ran with it.” He crumpled the tissue, studied the lenses, put the glasses on and looked across his desk at me. “Now he’ll peddle it to the highest bidder.”

  “It’s important?”

  “Vital. Walters thinks he’s clear. He’s not. Security’s had an eye on him for months, waiting for something like this. He’s been followed, went to ground in a cheap hotel. The hotel’s under surveillance.” Jondahl looked at me, his glance apologetic. “You have to get to him before the competition does. You see that, of course.”

  “We want the plan back, I suppose.”

  “More than that. Walters was in a sensitive spot, I told you that. The plan is on paper. It’s in his head as well. He could hurt us.”

  “So I have to hurt him first.”

  Jondahl grunted. He passed me an airline ticket folder. “Your flight’s in three hours. Don’t suppose you’ll want to pack much. You can return as soon as you’ve made contact.”

  “Good word for it.”

  “Well. You know the game, of course. Walters knew the rules too, you might keep that in mind. He knew the risks, evidently felt the rewards justify them. Money, glory, whatever he wants. Whatever such people think they want. Well. You’ll recover the plan, you’ll deal with Walters, you’ll return as soon as possible. It’s your job.”

  “Grand job.”

  He looked at me. “Somebody has to do it. I don’t say it’s fun, but it needs doing. Most people barely know we exist, but—”

  “They sleep better at night because we do our job.”

  “Well,” he said.

  I went back to my flat and packed a bag. I knew Walters, a nervous young man with brooding eyes and a high forehead. I had played chess with him several times, and once we had had lunch together. I wondered what made that sort of man decide to go over.

  A taxi took me to the airport. I carried my one bag onto the plane. The flight was smooth and generally uneventful. The stewardess declined my dinner invitation, then sent me wistful looks suggesting that she might change her mind if I asked her again. I didn’t.

  The plane touched down a half hour after sunset. I lugged my bag into the terminal building and dropped a dime in the telephone slot. I dialed and the phone was answered on the third ring. I said, “Marriage has many pains.”

  “Celibacy has no pleasures.”

  “Marvelous,” I said.

  “We’ve made a reservation for you at his hotel. His room is 412. He’s not in it at the moment. He’s at dinner. We have two men on him. He didn’t meet anyone for dinner.”

  “Good.”

  “We believe he has someone coming to see him tomorrow morning. Perhaps earlier.”

  I hung up and checked to see if they had returned my dime by mistake. They did once, years ago, and ever since I’ve looked for them to repeat this error. I took a taxi to Walters’ hotel. It was seedy. The lobby carpet was threadbare and all the furniture prewar. I signed in at the desk. The clerk punched a bell, and we waited in silence until a bellhop finally appeared. He escorted me to a room on the second floor. I had no change. I gave him a dollar and watched him gape at it. After he went away I put my clothes in the dresser, slipped the gun in one pocket and the ice pick in another. Then I walked past the elevator and climbed two flights of stairs and found 412. I knocked, and no one came.

  The lock was laughable. I slipped the bolt with a strip of celluloid, let myself in. I gave the room a toss. The plan didn’t turn up, and I gave up and parked myself in a chair. I might have looked more carefully but didn’t care to make a mess. Jondahl would want this one to look like natural causes. If it was just a question of recovering the plan I would have tossed the room thoroughly and been gone before Walters returned, but since a confrontation was inevitable I decided to save myself the work and worry and let Walters find it for me.

  Evidently he liked a leisurely dinner. I sat in the chair for half an hour before I heard his footsteps in the hall, then his key in the lock. I moved to the side of the door, and when he came through it I put the gun in the small of his back. He gasped, and I kicked the door shut and bolted it. I said, “Hello, Walters. The plan, if you don’t mind.”

  “My God.” He looked at me, his mouth trembling. “Please. I never thought—”

  “You never thought you’d be caught. No one ever does. I want the plan, then I’ll be going. That’s all.”

  “I could cut you in.”

  “The plan, Walters.”

  “I’d give you half. One hell of a lot of money, all of it cash, and no one would have to know you took it.”

  “I’m loyal. I don’t bite the hand that feeds me.”

  “Loyal!” He looked again at the gun, then at me again. “Loyal. My God, you’re not human.”

  “If that’s an insult, it’s the sort I can live with. The plan, and then I don’t care what you do.”

  He may not have believed me. But there wasn’t much else to believe. It turned out that the plan was still in his suitcase, tucked between the lining and the frame. I looked it over, and it was what I was after.

  “What’s that?”

  “Where?”

  I pointed, and he looked, and I hit him back of the ear, just hard enough to knock him out and not hard enough to leave a bruise that would make anybody wonder. He fell face downward. I rolled him over and stuck the ice pick into a nostril and on into the brain. A heart attack, or, if they checked more carefully, a brain hemorrhage.

  The body remained undiscovered when I checked out early the next morning. I had breakfast on the plane. When I tossed the report on Jondahl’s desk he glanced at it, smiled at me. “And the contact?”

  “Clean and neat.”

 
“Excellent. A good job.”

  “Oh?”

  My face bothered him. “You did well,” he said. “Take the rest of the week off.”

  “I intend to.”

  “Good. Get some sunshine, catch up on your sleep. This was just part of the job, you know that. You know what this—” he tapped the sheaf of papers “—would mean to our competitors.”

  “Yes.”

  “A detailed report of our fall merchandising program. Advertising, promotion, packaging, distribution, price structure. Everything.” He smiled at me. “I’m recommending a bonus for you. You’ve got a fine future. General Household Products is a grateful employer.”

  “And I’m a loyal employee,” I said. I went outside to get some fresh air.

  The Story About the Story...

  ...is arguably better than the story itself. Here’s an introduction I wrote to accompany “Part of the Job” when it appeared—finally!—in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine:

  In May of 2011 I was in Orange, California, signing copies of A Drop of the Hard Stuff at Book Carnival. Lynn Munroe, the dealer/collector with a vast knowledge of mid-century genre fiction and erotica, turned up with a couple of rarities for me to sign. And he showed me a copy of the December 1967 issue of a magazine called Dapper. “There’s a story of yours in here,” he said.

  Oh?

  I looked at the story, and it had my name on it. I didn’t recognize the title, and I knew I’d never had a story in Dapper. Far as I could remember, I’d never even laid eyes on a copy of the magazine.

  I gave “Part of the Job” a very quick scanning, and it didn’t ring any kind of a bell. At the same time, I didn’t spot any sentences that I could swear I hadn’t written. (Sometimes, you know, you can tell. Back in the early 1960s, I wrote pseudonymous erotic novels for publishers like Midwood and Nightstand under names like Sheldon Lord and Andrew Shaw, and I also licensed those pen names to ghostwriters. I’ve lately been reissuing some of those works as eBooks—for as surely as rock breaks scissors and paper covers rock, so does avarice trump almost everything. But I’ll only bring out those books I wrote myself, and I rarely have to look at more than a page or two to see my own hand at work, or be certain of its absence.)