He woke up with bare, wet feet. His boots, even his socks were missing. Inside his cheek his tongue traced raw flesh. Though he felt an overwhelming urge to drift back to sleep, his freezing toes kept him from falling back into the alluring darkness. Instead, he found himself stretched out stiff in a doorway, boodess, sockless and, he realized suddenly, his coat had disappeared as well. In a panic, he groped to see if he was wearing pants. When he was satisfied that he wasn’t lying stark naked in the drizzle, a much deeper terror seized him. His own name kept eluding him. He dozed, faded in and out.
Then a man wearing a tall stack of derbies squatted next to him. “They cracked you good and hard, mister, something terrible. You still got a few teeth?”
Had this hat man saved him? Irregular waves of nausea swept through him. He could go to sleep again for a century, but the man wouldn’t leave him alone. “Open up. You shouldn’t swallow your tongue. I had a friend who ate his and choked.”
The idea of a man eating his own tongue struck him as funny, but he repressed his laughter because the derby man seemed so earnest. He tried to recall where he lived and discovered that he couldn’t. If he could only concentrate hard enough he knew he’d get it, but the lure of sinking was too sweet, sinking and fading away. He swam in a dream for a while. Only the pain brought him back to the surface, a shooting pain that darted up his jaw into the heart of his right ear. Parts of him felt broken. Like an old mechanical contraption.
Gaslight hissed in a dusty storeroom. A piece of time was missing, but his feet were dry. He looked down and was happy to see feet inside black woolen socks. He was the happiest man in the world. Warm feet: that was all it took. But who was he? Shelves of hats, stacks of hats, signs for hats, handwritten signs for hat sizes appeared, paled, then reappeared sharper still. He was lost in a universe of hats.
The derby man was feeding him.
Even a little thin soup was comforting if you didn’t know who you were. He forgot his fears as the warm liquid went down. Bits of gristle got stuck between his teeth.
“A little stove I got.”
He was picking at one recalcitrant shred of meat when it came to him. Max Greengrass. But there was something so comical about the sound of it, Greengrass, that he hesitated to commit himself. Maybe he had read about someone with this ridiculous name, and it had stuck in his mind. He didn’t want to make a mistake and claim to be the wrong person. But wasn’t that who he was? The wrong person? Sensing that this had always been true, he almost laughed out loud.
And what if he showed up at the wrong address? Well, it wouldn’t be his family, it would be someone else’s family. Now he lost confidence in the name Max Greengrass entirely. The nausea returned with newfound force. He looked at his fresh woolen socks and tried to hold back, but then an uncontrollable spasm seized him and undigested soup showered down on his feet.
“West 16th Street.” He was sure he would recognize the house, and the people inside would remind him of his name. He wouldn’t ask directly, he’d just wait for them to address him. Broken bits clattered inside his mind. Then he broke out laughing. He was the wrong man because he was dead. His own father had told him so. Read him right out of the tribe. But at West 16th Street they’d recognize the animated corpse. Him.
“Ten cents a pair,” his peculiar savior grumbled. “And now you ruin.”
“I’ll buy a dozen. Just take me to West 16th.” His mother worked a mop in a hallway. Where was it? In some unnamed tenement stinking of ammonia. The mop had strings like an old woman’s hair.
“A pair of felt slippers. You’ll walk on air.”
Groping, he discovered one trouser pocket slashed apart, but the other was intact, a few coins buried deep in the lining. “No purse,” he explained, offering the man a few coins. “No watch either. Time?”
“Three-thirty. Maybe four,” the hat man said, pocketing the change.
Max wondered whether he had paid far too much for the socks and the slippers but didn’t have the will to protest.
Greengrass was a made-up name, a prevarication that never fooled anyone. He was an invented man. His father was a lie, his birth an immaculate deception. There was a true story behind it, he could taste it, but it drifted away.
The hat man flagged a fly cab and pushed Max, felt slippers and all, into the coach. “West 16th, he’ll show you,” he shouted to the cabby, and the rickety horse-drawn vehicle clattered into the traffic, every uncushioned jolt ringing inside the bone bell of Max’s head. He started to remember.
Remembering came in fragments. The clawing fingers inside his pockets. Martin tilted as if he were going to fall. The black man’s shoulder spinning him around. Wet black alley walls. The choking atmosphere inside Stephenson’s. The slap of slung shot against the bartender’s palm. The rag’s pink, leaking nose.
“Wait, forget 16th Street! Take me to police headquarters! Mulberry Street!” he shouted up at the slouch-hatted driver. Madly, he groped around for Martin’s note, but it had disappeared along with his other possessions. His heart sank.
An intense headache still pulsed in his temples, but at least he knew who he was again. At Mulberry Street, he strode right up to the desk sergeant. “There’s been a murder over at Stephenson’s.”
“You sure you ain’t the guy on the other end?” the muttonchopped officer replied. A pair of lounging street cops hooted from a comfortable bench.
“Over at Stephenson’s.”
“That chapel?”
“Listen, I’m from the Herald—”
“And I’m the friggin’ Queen of England. You take a look at yourself?”
Aware that hatless and in spattered felt slippers he didn’t cut a compelling figure, he kept his temper. “Yeah, I know, I got rolled. You can call my editor, Stan Parnell. I’m Max Greengrass.”
A bow-legged barrel of a cop pushed through the door. Max recognized him instantly. Jack Sloan. Last September at Fitzgerald and Ives, Max had lost two bits to him on a bet involving the Orioles. “Jack.”
“Maxie, what gives? You get roughed up?”
“You know this clown?” the sergeant asked, his skepticism wavering.
“That’s Maxie Greengrass. He works for the World, don’t ya, Max?”
“The Herald now. Vouch for me, huh?”
“Sure, Maxie, he’s a white man. Who’s the gyp did this to ya?”
“Says he seen some hackum over at Stephenson’s,” the sergeant replied, mollified now. “We got an extra few coats back there, mister. I don’t know about no shoes. Who’s the stiff?”
“A friend … an acquaintance of mine. As far as I know, he’s still sitting there with a hole in his head.”
Sloan slid over and passed Max a flask. The raw whiskey singed his throat, but he took a good pull. One of the bench-sitters produced a topcoat. “I got some boots back there, lemme look at your feet.”
After making a sober assessment, he returned with a cracked pair of boots that actually fit. “They batted me around pretty good,” Max said, touching the moist, matted hair on the back of his head. “You got a detective on duty?”
“Stout, over here!”
In the police carriage the veteran, Detective Stout, a sunken-cheeked man with a hedgerow of dark eyebrows, kept up a steady patter. “Yeah, talk about your rat pit. Stephenson’s? Any way they can manufacture a shekel, huh? White girls ballin’ off niggers. Does than make sense? I mean from a business point of view. Your average nigger don’t have a pot to piss in, how much can he dig up to go around the world? This friend of yours, he ain’t… ?”
“No, I told you. His father’s in insurance.” This information settled the race question. At least Max hoped so. He sensed a mean streak in Stout, and had no doubt that the detective would soon be referring to him as that sheeny Greengrass.
“So you been at the Herald how long?” Stout probed him.
“A few months. I was at the World before that.” The cop didn’t have to know he’d been a space-rater at Pulitzer’s pressure cooker too.
“You can wipe your ass with either one, right? So you walk in, your pal’s got his brains removed, and the bartender is non compos mentis?
“That sums it up.”
“And we got a deaf-and-dumb nigger in overalls. Christ.”
“We don’t know that for certain. Consider the source.”
“Yeah, right. Can you imagine raising a kid in this cesspool? I moved my wife out to the suburbs, Kings Highway in Brooklyn. So where’d the nigger hotfoot it to? Minetta Lane?”
“No, he ran up Thompson and into the alleys. That’s where I lost him.”
“You can bet he took his razor with him to Minetta. So how long you been friends with Marty? You cruise these joints with him?”
Max stiffened. “He was just an acquaintance who read one of my stories. I had a drink with him once over at the Hoffman House.”
“Kinda an uptown-downtown game?”
“No game. Just what I said.”
A colored man in an oily striped suit stood under Stephenson’s shredded awning. Max steeled himself for the dreadful sight of Mourtone one more time. He told himself that Martin Mourtone didn’t exist any more. The thing flung back in the chair was just that, a fleshy thing without sight, without thought, without sensation. A skinned sack of meat and bone you tossed into a simple hole in the ground. Unfortunately, this line of thinking only made him queasier.
“While you’re at it, ask Stephenson’s rag why he sicced his boys on me.”
“Yeah? How you figure that?”
“The arab that jumped me, he was working for the bartender.”
“You seen it?”
“Yeah. He was cleaning up some mess.”
The dive was filling up with warehousemen, local carters, janitors, and bootblacks with their kits. Max recognized a policy promoter from Frenchtown, near New York University. The whores over there did a pretty business with the students and the professorship. Not a single woman graced the crude bar. Following in Stout’s wake, Max could barely see the barkeep at first, so he made an end run around the detective to get a better look. Behind the bar a bent, hawk-nosed character hiked up his apron.
Where Martin’s body had tilted against the wall, an empty chair stood. Missing from the table were Mourtone’s hat and his dead cigar. Even the moist spots on the tin wainscoting had been wiped and dried.
Stout sidled back over to Max. “He went to see his mother. In Baltimore.”
“What?”
“This joy boy says he didn’t see nothin’ when he got on his shift. So it must’ve been your rag that took off to see moms in Maryland. Nice timing.
“That’s where Martin was sitting.” Max motioned toward the corner.
“I guess they shipped him over by Bellevue. C’mon. You’re his last friend in the world.”
“Let me ask the barkeep something.”
“C’mon, don’t waste my time.”
But before Stout could restrain him, Max picked his way through the tables and pressed up to the bar. “Listen, you know the other bartender’s name? Where he lives?”
The new barkeep shrugged. “MacNamara. I’m fillin in.”
“What about his first name?”
“Joe. Joseph MacNamara. I come in, he’s gone. I ain’t seen zip. He goes on boats, they says. The whatchacallit…”
“Merchant marine?”
The scrawny man leaned down to tap a keg. “Yeah. They say he’s seen ‘em all. Dotheads. Hottentots. Maybe he shipped out to Japland.”
“Or the South Pole?”
“Sure. Maybe.”
The morgue squatted on grounds adjacent to the great municipal hospital. A caretaker in a brown denim suit led them to a ledger in which the deceased’s height, weight, hair and eye colors, type of clothes, and valuables were recorded. For some reason, few of the departed shuffled off to the netherworld with anything of value.
Three bodies had been delivered in the last two hours. One of the recent arrival’s descriptions matched Mourtone’s to some extent, so the attendant led them to the chest-high shelf drawers that ran along two facing walls.
“Damn rollers need grease,” the attendant complained, struggling and cursing over the heavy sliding compartment.
The chicken-necked man who slid out in the drawer bore no resemblance to Martin Mourtone whatsoever. Max caught a quick glance at a shattered eye socket and turned away. “Nah.”
“You sure?” Stout pressed him. “’Cause if you’re sure, you’ve got one witness who I can tell you right now is nowhere near the fucking city of Baltimore, and you got another one who’s dancin’ in Little Africa as we speak.”
“I’ll bet my life he’s not cake-walking, wherever he is.”
A leaky smile spread out on Stout’s face. “And as I’m sure you know, it’s against the law to perpetrate a hoax, especially if you’re planning to put it into your so-called newspaper.” The detective’s face tightened. “I remember you from the World. The Brian Gallagher case.”
Max’s stomach sank. In an unsigned article, he had raised questions as to why police Lieutenant Gallagher, after slitting the throat of a barber on Worth Street, had never been charged. He had suggested this with great care, indirectly, by posing certain questions to the deceased’s family, but he hadn’t fooled a soul, particularly the higher-up buttons.
He didn’t have a byline, so he thought he’d be safe, but some sonofabitch had ratted him out to the bigwigs in management, and a month later his space work mysteriously dried up.
“Yeah, so what?”
“You know so what. If some bleeding-heart judge listened to you, Gallagher would be wasting his life in the Tombs.”
“Whoever it was, it wasn’t me.” His ritual denial. Who could really nail the author of an unsigned piece? “Why would I want to kill all my sources? Ask Morris over at the 19th about me.”
“You make up shit, there’s laws against it.”
“Don’t go down that road. Bennett’s lawyers will be crawling all over you.” He had no idea if his publisher, who spent most of his time in Paris, would take the slightest interest in this dispute, but threats were all he had.
Suddenly, Stout smiled and punched him in the shoulder. “Hey, don’t get so itchy. It’s just a litde joke.”
Max didn’t think it was a joke, but maybe he’d been too quick to lose his temper. “What do you expect? Look at this lousy coat you boys gave me.”
“You mean that job ain’t yours?”
Suddenly, an immense weariness spread through him. His limbs felt heavy, swollen. “You mean Sloan didn’t tell you….”
He was going to explain how he’d been rolled, how he’d been left facedown on the sidewalk, how he’d been rescued by a man wearing a tower of hats, but it all seemed too difficult. “How about a ride home, Stout?”
Without witnesses, without a corpse, he had no story. There was no point in going back to the office.
As they rocked along in silence, he wondered whether to tell Gretta about Martin. Should he sit through dinner masticating stringy beef, making excruciating small talk, and then take her into the parlor? Should he knock on her door directly? Was there a decent way to announce such terrible news? Did words exist that would soften the blow? Or should he hide it from her for a few days and wait for Martin’s body to turn up? Wouldn’t she hold that against him? The more he planned, the more muddled his thoughts became.
He tossed the ragged topcoat into an ash can, but now he was down to his shirtsleeves. Climbing the simple stone steps to Mrs. DeVogt’s house, he hoped more than anything to slip into his room and wash up. He could envision his second clean shirt and his second suit hanging, newly pressed, in his closet. He yearned for fresh linen against his skin, the smell of laundry soap, he craved obliterating sleep. In his hand, the brass doorknob felt like soft skin. He turned it.