NEW YORK CITY WAS KNOWN by the nation’s Drys as “Satan’s Seat,” and, at last, the devil Zebulon Finch was there to sit. Highways did not exist in 1925 and it took me a week to reach the outskirts. By then, the punishments I’d brought down on Lizzie had taken their toll. She whimpered during our nighttime crossing of the Hudson River, distracting me from a spectacular cityscape, and passed away as I coasted along West Street. I steered my dearly departed into a narrow L-shaped alley behind a factory. It was a dark and disused space; I concealed her with scrap metal and said good-bye. I’d loved her more than most humans. Make of that what you will.
A few blocks south was a sidewalk-spoked riverside garden called Battery Park. I secured a bench and spent the night staring up at columns of yellow lights reaching twenty, thirty, forty stories into the sky, a man-made Appalachia of steel and glass. Even during the moon’s reign, New York hammered and hollered and honked. This was most assuredly not rural Georgia or rural France, nor, for that matter was it Chicago or Boston. What was I to do with no way to transport the crates? With limited cash and no assistance? I hugged my arms and felt quite lonesome indeed.
Morning dawdled, for it was a beastly, drizzling day, and I, lacking a better strategy, slouched northward along a street called Broadway, so bluffed by tall buildings that it felt like a canyon. It buzzed with quacking trucks and ringdinging trolleys and intersected with byways that I’d read about in papers, like Wall Street and Park Place. Were I not a waterlogged corpse without a friend in the world, I might have experienced wonderment.
I halted my futile march in Times Square. The place was throttled with cars and fungal with umbrellas. Here I claimed a random corner and peered through the rain at awesome signs shouting about everything from Squibb’s Dental Cream to the Ziegfeld Follies. When a taxi blew by, everyone on my curb stepped back in a single motion: the shy stenographer in the checked wool skirt, the tussled university student holding a textbook over his head, the laborer in a grease-stained jumpsuit, the dead teenager. I realized that this metropolis might as well be a necropolis, as its residents were as faceless as stones in a graveyard and just as private regarding their states of decay.
The unexpected relief of anonymity pounded me harder than the rain. In this city I could exist completely unnoticed. Was that not the ideal situation for a being such as myself? I was eager to put this opportune revelation to the test, but first there was the matter of the giant cache of liquor stashed near Battery Park. I cheeked some rain and spit it out in a happy fountain. Well, I had a plan for that as well!
Four blocks east I stomped until I came upon Grand Central Terminal. There, inside the vast, echoing rotunda, I found a pay phone and, with nervous fingers, inserted the required silver. The hello-girl had a clipped, businesslike tone; no doubt she hoped for each call to be a simple A-B connection rather than an exhausting investigation. She had rolled snake eyes that day, for I was in need of assistance, possibly a lot of it, in locating the only person on Earth I knew who had, at one point, been right here in New York City. Call it a hunch, but I did not believe that he’d repaired to the hushed plains of the Midwest.
“Ahoy-hoy,” greeted I. “I need to find a man by the name of Burt Churchwell.”