THE TIP OF HIS BLACKTHORN stick made a reassuring sound as he walked across Washington Square toward the massive arch so reminiscent of the Arc de Triomphe. The park was empty but for the occasional bum sleeping under a canopy of newspaper on a bench and the pigeons ignoring them. It was ten past six, a gray misty morning with the colored leaves littering the grass and the pathways, with the curtains still drawn in most of the windows facing the square. Cassidy stood by the arch, stamped his feet against the early morning chill. Fifty years earlier Henry James’s characters had peered at the park from behind heavy draperies, hearing the clip-clop of the horse-drawn milk wagons making their rounds. In the middle of World War II you could hear the clatter of the milk bottles being delivered and see the early risers out walking their dogs. William Powell and Myrna Loy and Asta were nowhere to be seen but, when he looked up empty Fifth Avenue, he saw the big man in the light topcoat coming toward him, past the hugely solid apartment buildings which gave the bottom of the avenue its status and weight. Harry Madrid fit right in, oddly enough, heavy and solid, one of the pillars on which the everyday order of the city rested. The last thing you’d have thought, watching him that morning, was that only one thing separated him from all the other homicidal maniacs in town. His badge.
He crossed the street and cast casual glances right and left, stopping beside Cassidy.
“Nice morning, Lew,” he said. He pulled a black pipe from his pocket, packed it as he spoke. “Does a man good to start the day at the start of the day. Where’s your place?”
Cassidy nodded toward the west side of the square.
“Nice, very nice. Feels good to be home, right?” He struck a match on the concrete arch, cupped his hands around the flame, and lit the tobacco.
“What do you want, Harry?”
“Why, I thought you liked to have me stay in touch. Say, Lew, I’m mighty sorry about your wife. Even if she was a Kraut.”
Cassidy stared at him.
Harry Madrid nodded, agreeing with himself. “So, you got anything for me, Lew? We figure you’ve had six months, better than that, but who’s counting? You haven’t come up with much, have you? So Tom Dewey asks me how we’re progressing on your friend Max, he wants to know what you’ve come up with … I hated like hell to disappoint him. Thing is he says Lucky’s pressing him for action. Thinkin’ about another winter or two in the big house makes Lucky sulk. Lucky wants Dewey to get moving, put Bauman away in a big show trial, and get old Tom on the road to Albany. You got any ideas what I could tell him?” He puffed reflectively on the cherry tobacco. “They’re breathin’ down my neck, pal.”
“I got bad news for you, Harry. I figure Terry’s not a cop anymore so you can stop hating him for being a bad cop. What Terry’s being a bad cop makes you I hate to think—”
“Watch it, Lew—”
“So you can leave Terry to heaven, okay? And I gotta tell you, I’ve had an attack of conscience. I don’t think Terry needs my help to save his ass from Luciano and you. I think he can take care of himself because, frankly, Harry old stick, you’re kind of a stumblebum. You killed Markie and you fumbled the ball, you didn’t get your proof Markie was paying him off for services rendered. I don’t think you’re going to do anything to Terry … so I quit—”
“You’re forgetting Lucky’s spot remover. Remember? You’re the spot—”
“Forget it. Do your own dirty work. Am I getting through to you at all, Harry?”
“You’re whistlin’ past the graveyard, Lew, and we both know it.” He laughed easily. The confidence was making Cassidy nervous. “But I’ll tell you how to fulfill your obligation, your promise, to Dewey and Luciano. Two guys it’d be bad to have pissed off at you, by the way. And I can keep you from getting yourself removed. You satisfy them and, what the hell, maybe everybody’ll forget about Terry.”
They were walking through the park, damp leaves clinging to their shoes. The squirrels were already up and gathering the winter’s stores. The city was just waking up and it was still quiet in the park. The blackthorn stick had lost the sound of reassurance. Now it sounded more like a blind man feeling his way across dangerous ground.
“Lucky’ll be inside for a while, Dewey’s gonna see to that. And I guess I don’t give a shit what happens to Terry … but, believe me, Lew, you don’t want to give us any trouble on this. We’re giving you an easy way out. Don’t blow it.”
“What’s this easy way out?” He didn’t want to listen but he remembered Luciano’s face, the sound of his voice telling him about the spot remover, Markie’s bloated body on the sand.
“We’re back to the gas rationing stamps. It’s a huge operation, Lew, bigger than we’d thought. They’re all over the eastern seaboard, the Midwest, California, the Deep South. Counterfeits. Tens of millions, hell, it’s like printing money. But”—he puffed contentedly, led the way to a bench where they sat down—“but we haven’t been able to tie Max to any of it.” The sun was starting to glow, turning the clouds to a faint hint of blue sky.
“Maybe he’s just plain not involved.”
“Don’t make a damn bit of difference. He prolly is but we don’t give a shit, not anymore. Get it? We’re gonna get him on the stamps whether he’s involved or not. We’re gonna get him good.” He smiled at Terry and dug a finger into his bristly ear. He took his finger out, regarded the tip, flicked the wax away. “Hoover’s behind it, all the bright boys at the Bureau—you know what those buggers did? I’ll tell ya, in thirty years I never seen anything so beautiful. Hoover had ’em print up his own goddamn counterfeit stamps, floated a bunch of them around the marketplace! No shit …” He was chuckling to himself, his hard little eyes disappearing in the folds of flesh. “Hoover! I don’t give a damn if he is a pansy, he knows how to play this fuckin’ game!” His girth was shaking under the topcoat. “We’re gonna plant our counterfeits on Max! We’re gonna salt the fuckin’ mine shaft! Max ain’t gonna know what the hell’s going on and we’re gonna put him away … Hoover, Dewey, Madrid and Lew Cassidy!”
“You don’t need me.”
“Oh, hell yes! You’re the guy’s gonna plant ’em on Max.”
“Oh, shit …”
“You’re doin’ the honors, Lew. Piece o’ cake.”
“What about all these other sources of yours? All these sources close to Max? What about the guy tipped you to the Jersey shore?”
“You’re my guy, Lew. You got the most to lose if you fuck it up.”
Harry Madrid began laughing again.
The summer was dying a peaceful death, a gentle good-bye full of tranquil beauty, shedding a slow, easy life for a more demanding, vigorous one. They were raking the leaves in Central Park.
Cassidy had gone uptown with the intention of telling Terry the whole story. Madrid, Dewey, Luciano, Max, the threats and the phony twenties and the counterfeit gas stamps. Particularly those damn stamps! They sat now in sealed cartons in Cassidy’s hall closet. Harry Madrid and a silent man, one of Hoover’s hard-asses, had brought them down one night. “Plant ’em, any damn way you want to,” Madrid had said, puffing his pipe. “Hell, use Terry if you want. Just plant the bastards and tell us where they are and we’ll take it from there.” So they sat in the closet like a ticking bomb. He’d have to do something soon.
But he’d gone uptown, had stood across the street from the familiar building on Park Avenue, and in the end he hadn’t been able to do it. Better to keep Terry out of it. Handle it yourself and Terry’s off easy and never had to know and … Max Bauman. He knew how to take care of himself. And he wasn’t exactly the Citizen of the Year. Cassidy had all sorts of reasons for turning around and walking away.
He walked down Fifth Avenue, listening to the solid clicking of the new stick’s ferrule on the cement. He stopped for a moment to lean on the brick wall and look across the park at the nannies wheeling children in baby carriages and strollers. Dogs ran around rolling in piles of leaves and barking at the squirrels. The sun was still high but it was riding down the southern sky and the shadows were lengthening.
It was late October and you could smell the burning leaves. It was the smell of burning memories for him, all the memories of all the things he’d lost. Burning leaves and football games and walking in Central Park with Karin and making love on the rug before the fireplace, warmed by the dying embers … Well, there wouldn’t be any more football, no more Karin in his arms, but there would always be the smell of leaves and the clouds of memory.
He was beginning to get used to the ache in his chest and the gaping wounds in his memory where Karin had gone to stay forever. He didn’t look at the photo albums anymore. He knew every picture by heart. Maybe he’d never look at them again. Never want to, never have to. There was no little Karin to show them to and say, look, honey, there she is, she was your mommy …
But he still had to play out the hand, live his life, risk the pot. He was going to have to make it work so that at the end when somebody up there said well, that’s it, pal, zip-zip, that was your life, hope you had a good time, mate, you pass this way but once …
He strolled on down Fifth Avenue, crossed Central Park South among the horse-drawn hacks, and went into the Plaza. The Oak Bar was sparsely populated and he sat at the long bar and ordered a weak bourbon and water. He was feeling like a Hemingway hero, a kind of Jake Barnes for World War II, lonely and tragic, only he knew he was a fake, of course. Hell, anybody eavesdropping inside his head would have thought he had a war wound. The gridiron war, a paltry tragedy. Order of the Purple Shoulder Pads.
People would see him with his cane, he’d see them watching and whispering among themselves, wondering if he’d been at Pearl or Bataan or Wake Island or Corregidor. Every so often some fat old guy in a bar somewhere would come up to him and shake his hand with tears in his eyes and tell him how he’d got it at the Battle of the Marne or the Somme and Cassidy didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d gotten his at the Polo Grounds.
But for the moment he wanted a drink or two while he thought about the future, where nothing much awaited and anything might be possible. He didn’t want to get drunk. He’d spent enough mornings through that summer holding his head as if it were the last known egg of the last known giant auk while he left the previous night’s ration of experience in the toilet bowl. He was finished with all that. He was getting straight and maybe he’d drop by and see if the team could use him as an assistant coach or as one of the old bums who sold programs outside the stadium for a dime …
First, however, he’d have a drink or two and then go home and take a good clear look at the future. Figure out what he was going to do with the gas stamps. So he sat at the bar, watching the barman polishing glasses.
He should have skipped the drink. He should have gone home then, before she found him …
She sat on the stool next to him. All those empty stools but that one had her name on it. He saw her face in the mirror behind the bar. Her perfume was so faint you almost couldn’t smell it. It pulled you toward her, like a whisper. There was just enough to make you want to smell a hell of a lot more of it.
She was short of breath, like she was nervous or had been hurrying. He felt her brush against him, wiggling her rear end on the stool. She took a deep breath. It was nerves. Her cigarette case clattered when she dropped it on the shiny surface of the bar. Then she spilled most of the Camels trying to pry one loose. Her hand was shaking. She wouldn’t catch his eye. Her voice was low and a little hoarse and there was a tremor in it.
“Light me, please?”
He struck a match and watched her lean forward to meet the flame. She was wearing cream-colored gloves and a casual suit the shade of tobacco. The jacket hung open. There was a cream silk blouse.
“Thank you,” she said. “Don’t you smoke?” She seemed becalmed now that she’d sucked the smoke down into her lungs and blown it across the bar at their reflection.
“No, I’m in training.”
“Oh, dear, how serious. In training for what?”
“For living as long as possible. Those things’ll kill you.”
“Well, what’s to worry, then? I won’t live long. So I might as well smoke. So many things can kill you these days. But, then, maybe I like living dangerously.”
“Then it’s your style.”
“I followed you for the last ten blocks. Wondering if I dare do this. Scared of the consequences. Then, of course, I’d remembered that I’m an adventuress. It’s a good thing, too. The world’s a pretty inhospitable place these days. Like the lady in the operetta, I laugh in the face of my own mortality, tra-la, tra-la.” She told the barman she wanted a perfect martini.
He nodded. “Coming right up, Miss Squires.”
She finally looked at Cassidy. “Billy makes a perfect martini. All gin. Sort of passes the vermouth over the glass. A ritual.”
“Sounds like you’re a regular here.”
“I’m a regular lots of places.”
He watched the bartender with his black leather bow tie and the lonely strands of dyed black hair carefully stretched across his shiny scalp. “He would.”
“Would what?”
“Make a perfect martini.”
Billy placed the glass in front of her, centered on a cork coaster. Her long-fingered hand flicked the pale curtain of hair back from her face. She sipped. “Dutch courage. I need it.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Well, I haven’t seen you for a long time. I didn’t like that. And … and I heard about your wife. I’m so terribly sorry. You must feel helpless. It’s all so bloody awful.”
“I’m getting used to the idea now. You know what they say.”
“No, I don’t think I do.”
“About war. It’s hell. But that’s not why you followed me.”
“True. I was going to see Terry and then I saw you. I knew you’d be better for me than Terry … you’re not one of them. Them.”
“Who?”
“Oh, all the ones I need to get away from. Max and Bennie and all of Max’s other happy elves. And Terry, too, for that matter. And all the people at the club. Heliotrope. Where, I notice, your face is ne’er seen anymore. I can’t move without their knowing everything I do.” She was twisting a sapphire and gold ring she wore on her right hand. “They’re smothering me … Max, all of them, I feel like a little adopted refugee who also happens to sleep with her new father—”
“That ought to appeal to your sense of danger.”
She sipped the last of her drink and waited for Billy to place another one before her. There was a long blond hair on her tobacco-colored lapel. She lit another Camel. Her lips left a dark red smudge on the paper. Cassidy was drowning in her.
“You know what I told you that time?”
“You’ve told me quite a lot.”
“You know perfectly well what I mean. Well, I really am … a whore. Through and through, it’s my nature.”
“It’s all part of living dangerously.”
“I think it’s something a woman’s born with, something that goes all wrong inside her—”
“Like being born with one brown eye, one blue.”
“Like being born crippled.” She stared at Billy and he moved off down the bar, polishing, polishing. “Apparently I can’t belong to any one man, can I? I feel like I’m going crazy—”
“If she finds the right one, then it all calms down. She’s a whore no more. She’s in love and it’s a well-known fact that love conquers all. It can even change people’s natures.”
“What a dope! What an innocent you are!”
“Just a romantic.”
“Nothing changes one’s nature. It’s a well-known fact, the leopard and his spots.”
“You’re a youthful skeptic.”
“No, Cassidy. I’ve told you what I am. And Max is driving me crazy. I’m Max’s girl. Max’s property. He gives me everything I want but he doesn’t want me, doesn’t understand about me … He’s my father but he also does it to me, that’s his fantasy. And I’m little Bo Peep. I want to get out … but I’m afraid. He doesn’t understand I have to be available.”
“What the hell are you punishing yourself for?”
“Don’t tell me you’re a disciple of Dr. Freud.”
“No, just a smart guy with a winning Ipana smile.”
“Oh, you poor guy.” She touched his hand. “Is it your winning smile that makes me unload all this baggage on you?”
He shrugged. “Soul mates. We did watch a bunch of guys get murdered together.”
She ignored him. “So I escaped this afternoon. Max was at a meeting with his lawyers and Bennie went off on an errand and no one was watching me. So I just left.” She shivered with the daring of it.
“So why were you afraid to follow me?”
“When you belong to Max you get to thinking there’s always somebody following you, watching you … it’s like one of Dali’s paintings, eyes watching you, clock faces melting, time running out. Or that movie, the razor slicing the eyeball. Sometimes I’d like to take a slice at all the eyes watching me. I’d like to hurt them … and all they’re being is kind, taking care of me, but always for Max—oh, well, why don’t you tell me your troubles?”
“Women always seem to have better troubles …”
“No, they just make a bigger deal of them.”
“Well, Cindy, I’m going home now. It’s been very nice psychoanalyzing you again.”
“Mind if I walk with you?”
They walked all the way down Fifth Avenue and his leg felt okay. Almost a year, and a good day with the leg was an event. She didn’t say any more about being a whore, thank God. It was getting to be an old story. As they walked, he noticed that he was beginning to feel like a human being. He wasn’t thinking about the war. He wasn’t thinking about Karin. He was listening to her talk about her childhood in England and her brother Tony’s letters from Deerfield and the music she liked and where she liked to shop and her love of Dickens. She admired his blackthorn stick and she read the inscription and he told her about the sword.
Standing in front of a church on the corner of Eleventh Street, she said, “Can I see your sword?”
“Just press the button below the knob.”
She grinned, felt for it. The knob rose solidly into the gloved palm. “Can I take it out?”
“It’s your funeral.”
Slowly she slid the blade out. Her eyes were shining.
“It’s beautiful,” she said slowly.
His living room seemed so bookish and unfamiliar, so humble, after all the months at Terry’s. Out past the trellis at Washington Square they were burning leaves, and the aroma of autumn was seeping into his apartment. The late afternoon was darkening. The clouds of leaf smoke hung over the square like the mists of Avalon.
Cindy said she didn’t really feel like another drink so they sat talking, watching the last of the sunlight wiped away by dusk. She excused herself and went to the bathroom. Cassidy closed his eyes, leaned back. Max Bauman’s girl was in his bathroom. He hoped to hell nobody actually had been following her.
When she came back from the bathroom, she’d taken off the gloves and the suit and the blouse and the brown and white pumps and the stockings and her garter belt and her panties which dangled from one finger. All she had on was the slip. It clung to her nipples as if it were soaking wet. She wriggled her toes, the nails red as precious stones arranged on the rug. She went around the room turning off the two table lamps so the light from the street left the room in gray shadows, enough light to see her by. She stood in front of him with her feet apart so the dim light haloed around her and between her legs. “Well,” she said, half swallowing the words, “you know what I told you.” She slid the straps of her slip down over her shoulders. Her eyes were cast down upon herself as if she were as interested in what would be exposed as he was. She pulled the slip down until the top caught on the points of her nipples. Right about then it occurred to him that her nipples were the only things in the world worth living, dying, or fighting for.
She tugged the slip down until it slid over them, making the tight erectile tissue twitch, and he saw the soft outline of her tiny girlish breasts with the distended dark tips. She eased the slip down over the swell of her broad hips and let it drop to the floor. Her belly was flat, actually a slightly concave dish pouring the dark flood of pubic hair from its rim. Her breath caught in her throat. “I’m going to feel awfully foolish,” she whispered, “if you don’t want to fuck me.”
She took his hand and led him past the bathroom into the bedroom. She lay down on the bed. The light from the bathroom lay like an icicle across the foot of the bed. He slipped out of his shirt and slacks and stood beside the bed watching her. She reached up with one hand and gently pulled his stiff penis out of his shorts. She moaned when her fingers closed around him. “Oh,” she murmured, “you’re slippery already, aren’t you …” She placed her other hand slowly and carefully between her legs and parted her thighs, bending her knees slightly. He watched transfixed by her deliberate movements while she probed in her pubic hair with her middle finger until she located the labia touching one another. Then she slowly parted the thick hair, spread the lips wide with her forefinger and ring finger. The darkness inside of her glistened.
“Come to me,” she whispered. “Hurry. I want to take you in my mouth before it’s too late.”
He lay down on the bed beside her, rested his face on the solid, smooth fleshiness of her inner thigh, smelled the richness of her sweat and the lubrication of her vagina which was quickly matting the hair. Her tongue was licking at him, he heard it and felt it, and he felt what came out of him thickening as her mouth slid over him, engulfed him, pulling at the center of him as if she would willingly do him injury if it would fill her mouth, satisfy her need, but she couldn’t hurt him, she could only try, and he licked at her fingers as she worked them in and out of herself, licked at the viscous saltiness as she removed them and smeared them across his mouth, and he pulled her open with both hands and leaned into the darkness and the flood of her and tasted her and plunged his tongue into her and worked his finger into the tightness, circling his finger within her anus, felt her hips arch off the wet sheet, heard her mouth sibilantly sucking his semen, gagging and choking and pulling him in again, felt her fingers tightening rhythmically around his testicles, milking him efficiently, familiarly, an expert at work, but when she felt his finger work its way to the hilt between her hips and felt his teeth nibbling at the tiny wet bud hidden behind the folds of her inner lips, the thrashing and the deep growling in her chest was more primitive than any performance, a cry of pain and release and vulnerability, and for just that moment she was the helpless little girl she sometimes parodied and for an instant at least he knew she was his, not someone born a whore doing her job or acting out a man’s fantasies, but a creature slipping off the high ledge into uncharted darkness and she pumped her belly and her thighs and her hips spasmodically, out of control, all the gears stripped, in fast forward for what seemed a very long time …
When he pulled her around so that her face was near his, she quickly clamped her legs around his thigh and continued the slow gentle lapping of her internal sea, soaking his leg with the endless flow. And before he kissed her he saw the saliva and the clots of semen in the corners of her mouth and drifting in streaks across her soft, downy cheek and she was crying.
An hour later she moved around on the damp, sticky bed, said, “I want it all again, Lew, all the same things. Don’t leave any of it out,” and she began. They clung together with all the same results and his mouth was rubbed raw by the thick hair between her legs and she lay gasping on her back, holding the back of one hand to her forehead, collecting semen on her fingertips from the corners of her mouth and absentmindedly massaging it into the bulging nipples while he looked up the length of her past the dark sodden mass of hair licked flat against her thighs and groin. There was nothing left anywhere, no desire, no strength, no need to be a whore. Not for a little while, anyway.
Another hour passed and this time it was Cassidy waking, wanting her again. She was breathing deeply, asleep, her head down by his knees. He had to touch her, explore her again. He pulled her nearly dead weight across him, her belly wet and sticky on his chest, her knees on either side of his shoulders, and she moaned, a mixture of exhaustion and desire coming alive. He looked up into the wet darkness again, opened her again and she sobbed. “It hurts,” she whispered sleepily, “I’m sore …” He stroked her with his tongue, tasting it all again. She sighed and giggled deep down. “I think we could be arrested for everything we’ve been doing … nothing but unnatural acts …”
He took his mouth away from her and picked a strand of hair from his lip. “I know, I know, ain’t a life of crime just grand …” And soon she was rocking back against his face and from beneath her he flicked his tongue across the fingers she’d worked back between her thighs and she wouldn’t stop until they’d both struggled over the top yet again. He was smiling in his own darkness. Not a natural act since they’d started. His kind of girl. They’d watched men die …
She was dressed, leaning over him where he’d collapsed. She smelled like powder and perfume again. It was a quarter to ten. In half an hour she’d be singing at Heliotrope.
She spoke insistently, battering at his weariness. “Listen to me, darling. I don’t know when I’ll see you again. Whatever you do, don’t call me. You’re going to want to talk to me and do all this again but you mustn’t call me. And don’t send me a note. Barely remember me if we meet.” She leaned down and kissed him. “I used your toothbrush. I needed it.” She sighed and touched his tiny, helpless, limp penis. “Take care of this brave little soldier.”
“He’s a private,” he said.
She pressed her fingers when he tried to say something else. “Hush. No questions, no little endearments. My only answer is, I don’t know. I’ve got to be careful. If he found out, he’d … he’d kill me. Now go to sleep.”
He heard her leave and sat on the edge of the bed. The sheets smelted of sex. He inhaled deeply.
Once she was gone, he felt as lonely as it was possible to feel. The fun was elsewhere. He couldn’t believe she wasn’t coming back to him. Later. After she was done singing.
He waited awhile, then went to take a shower. He was deep in the lather and steam, she’d been gone for half an hour, and somebody was banging on the door. He turned off the shower, wrapped himself in a thick terry-cloth robe, and hobbled to the door trying to shake soap and water out of his ear. He almost expected her to be standing in the doorway, like Claudette Colbert coming back to the guy she really loves in the movie, ready to tell him she’d fallen under his spell and she was a new woman and wanted him and what were they going to do about it?
As so often happens in life, however, he was mistaken.
Bennie the Brute was standing there staring at him and what he saw in the eyes floating behind the thick lenses was definitely not love.
It wasn’t even like.