14 Sept 90—NEW YORK CITY
He had a single room in an SRO hotel called the Croydon on the West Side. It was home to people starting out and people giving up, to dregs, drunks and ex-drunks, welfare recipients, and people who were insane but who had been locked out of the insane asylum. He had one of the nicer rooms in the hotel because he paid and he looked like a man who would pay every week. His room had a private bathroom attached and a single Murphy bed. The sheets were changed once a week. There was a couch, an end table, a black-and-white television set, and, behind folding doors on one wall, a Pullman kitchenette. The hotel reeked with age and neglect and sadness. Nights were garish and loud on Tenth Avenue below the window; even when traffic finally died off, there were ambulances and fire engines in the neighborhood.
Devereaux explored this side of New York. It was full of five- and six-story tenements hunkered low in the morning shadows cast by the high-rises going east from Seventh Avenue in the 50s. At the street level were delis and narrow newsstands and laundries and pawn shops. The neighborhood was littered with hard Irish bars, some of which did not seem to have any name.
Devereaux walked the streets. He felt his way into Hell’s Kitchen the way he would have felt his way into the fabric of any foreign city. And he left a trail and wondered if anyone would notice it.
He thought of Pendleton most in the mornings, thought of a thousand ways to kill him. He thought of the sound of Pendleton’s voice and swore he could hear it in the silence of his sleeping room.
And he thought of Rita Macklin all the time, at odd and painful moments. Once, he saw a redhead on Sixth Avenue and followed her for two blocks in the mistaken hope that Rita Macklin was in New York after all and was looking for him. It wasn’t her.
He tried all the bars. The answer—or the beginning of one—was in these closed neighborhoods within the neighborhood. Dougherty’s was on Eleventh Avenue. The bar was dark, the floor laid with broken white tile. There never seemed to be more than a half dozen souls in it, no matter the time of day or night. He would sit at the end stool in Dougherty’s and drink beer from the single tap and watch television and not say a word to anyone.
It was the same in Grogan’s on Tenth Avenue and McKee’s—also on Tenth—and the Clare House on Ninth. Every place different and just the same. Every place lighted the same, day or night; every place containing silent, hard-faced men who sat at the bar and minded their own business, which was drinking.
But he kept going back to Dougherty’s on Eleventh and he spent more time there.
Now and then, a man would come in and look at the barman and the barman would either shake his head or nod in the general direction of the washroom. When Devereaux used the washroom, he saw a third door that led to a back room or office or storeroom and he decided this was where the men disappeared.
Sometimes a man would come into Dougherty’s carrying a large display case like an oversized suitcase. He would look at the barman and the barman would nod almost imperceptibly and the man with the case would lug it into the back room and shut the door. And then, just as slyly, one of the denizens on the barstools would slip off his perch and stroll toward the back as though going to use the washroom. Except he would go into the back room as well. Devereaux thought it was very elaborate because they were simple thieves and fences and then he realized this was done because of his presence in the bar. He might have been a cop. In any case, he didn’t appear to belong in the neighborhood; he didn’t have the look.
It was frustrating, the endless, aimless days of waiting for something that he could not foresee. He did all the right things, went to the right places… and he waited. Worst, he could not call Rita, not in the first few weeks. It was part of the setup.
Also part of the setup was looking for work. He took an examination in French with a firm that serviced the UN with translators and interpreters. It was his best language; his Vietnamese was patois, a blend of French and native dialects that could get you understood in the jungle and not accepted in the velvet jungle on the East River. The firm said they’d get back to him; language facility was a commodity, after all, and some languages were worth more than others. There were a lot of French speakers; now, if he had spoken any Arabic…
He also tried a name remembered from his brief career as a professor of Asian studies at Columbia University. He had been first recruited into R Section at Columbia. The name he had turned out to be dead.
He called Rita in the fourth week. He used a pay telephone in the dingy lobby of the Croydon Hotel. There was a telephone in his room but he wasn’t going to make it easy on them. Whoever they would turn out to be.
It was late and she sounded drunk. She didn’t drink very often at all and almost never to the point of slurring her words the way she did now.
“Are you all right?”
“Oh, shit,” she said. “I’m fine. What about you?”
“Still looking for a job,” he said. Waited.
“Looking for a job.”
He waited. It was a little dangerous, he thought; she had been drinking and she might forget. And they might be listening. He waited still and he thought he could hear her breathing.
“Are you there?” she said.
“I thought I’d give you a call.”
“I found some of your stuff. In the hall closet. When are you going to pick it up? Or you want me to dump it in the garbage?” Belligerent.
“I told you, I just wanted to leave it there—”
“Fuck you. You move out, you move out. Move out lock, stock, and barrel. I don’t need your old suit hanging in my goddamned closet. My. Closet. My. Apartment. You get your ass down here and get your clothes.”
He waited again.
“You there?” she said.
“Yes. I thought we could be friends.”
“Okay, okay. So we’re friends. Buddies. Bosom buddies. You liked my bosom, didn’t you, buddy? You miss it? Well, I don’t miss you. I want you to get your stuff out of my closet, buddy. Okay by you? Or I throw it out.”
Silence on the line. He didn’t know what to say.
“You gonna get your stuff?”
“I’ll get it.”
“When you gonna get it?”
“Soon.”
“Give me soon. Give me a day so I don’t have to be around.”
“I’ll come down Friday and get it,” he said.
“Good. I got a date Friday.”
“Rita,” he said.
Nothing.
“Rita.”
“See you, Dev,” she said, and broke the connection.
He held the receiver in his hand for a moment and then replaced it on the hook. Then he hit the pay phone very hard with his fist and there was blood on his knuckles. He hit it again. The desk clerk, a fat young man with an earring, looked over at him. “Hey, don’t take it out on the phone, buddy.”
Devereaux thought he would like to push his fist into the pile of dough on the fat boy’s face.
She had gutted him, just like that. His bowels were on the ground and more were falling out of his body and he couldn’t hold them in. Just like that.
He went to Dougherty’s that night but he wasn’t looking for anyone, he wasn’t dropping any names. He was staring at his own face in the mirror behind the bar exactly the way the other men stared at their faces, seeing the hopelessness in the eyes, letting the booze numb the aches that can’t be reached by other medicines.
He saw Rita Macklin in his eyes. What had happened to her? But it was him. It was this stupid secrecy again, it was being back in harness again because a man forced him with simple, crude blackmail, the kind of blackmail that is usually most effective.
Devereaux drank until the bar closed at two A.M. and he had trouble walking home. It wasn’t just the booze. It was the deep, dark hurt. Not only his but her hurt as well. The hurt in the voice on the phone, the angry kind of hurt that lacerates others but does most damage to the hurter.
He didn’t even see the two men following him from the place.
Or the large black limousine the two men got into when he finally staggered up the steps of the Croydon Hotel and crossed the lobby.
The two men sat in the back of the limousine for a moment staring at each other. Then the young one, who was built big and had large, wide hands, looked at the older man and shrugged. It was his habit to shrug before he ever asked a question, as though to dismiss the question before it left his tongue.
“What do you think, Mick?”
“Ah, what I think is that it’s a helluva performance if that’s what it is, a helluva performance. We might be dealin’ here with a real actor if that’s all it is.”
“If it is, we can know soon enough,” Kevin said.
“That’s the truth, lad. Soon enough. Mr. Devereaux’s call to the stage has been made. Now let’s see how deep the actin’ can go.”
“You think it’s all an act then?”
“I don’t know what I think.” Silence. “But I do know how to find out, which is just as good.”