A Diet of Treacle (17 page)

Joe stood up. His body uncoiled slowly and he stood up, his eyes on Shank. “No,” he said.

“Joe—” Shank started.

“No,” he repeated. “Think of some other way, Shank. Some cleaner way.”

“It’s the only way.”

“You better find another. She’s my woman. She’s not a hustler. Not now and not ever. So find another way.” Shank looked first at Joe, then at Anita, then at Joe again. He began to laugh. “Your chick? That’s funny, man. Too funny. You don’t know how funny it is.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I made it with her, baby. Back in New York. Right on your own little bed, man. So don’t play possessive papa with me, baby. She’s nobody’s chick at all. And she can hustle and get us to Mexico like I said.”

Joe went white. “Is it true, Anita?” he said in a beaten voice. Her voice was soft.

“He made me, Joe. He made me do it. I didn’t want to.”

“Go on.” Joe’s eyes were on Shank, cold. He listened to what she had to say.

“He made me, Joe. He…beat me up. He hurt me. And he was going to cut me with his knife. I was afraid. He…he raped me.”

“You never told me.”

“I was afraid.” Something happened to Joe. Something inside. He turned on Shank and his eyes were on fire.

“You son of a bitch!”

“Easy, baby.”

“You rotten—”

“Cool! It don’t change a thing, Joe. It’s the same scene all across the board. Now she can hustle, you dig? Now she can earn some bread and—”

“No.” Shank sensed something. He knew that Joe was not kidding now. He shoved the girl and she skidded across the room.

“Back off, Joe.” But Joe moved forward. Shank’s hand dropped to his pocket. The knife came out in a single fluid motion. He held it in his right hand, his finger poised on the button.

“Back off.”

“Drop it.”

“I don’t want to cut you, Joe. I don’t want to hurt you. You better let it alone, man. It happened a long time ago. It’s ancient history. We got to swing together or we both lose.”

“You’ll have to kill me.”

“Don’t make it tough, Joe.”

“It’s going to be tough. Very tough.” Shank nodded. His finger pressed on the button. The knife blade shot forward, six inches of glistening steel. Shank rubbed his thumb back and forth across the face of the blade. His eyes were on Joe. Joe kept coming. Shank moved the knife back and forth like the head of a cobra about to strike, He moved around in a little dance. His eyes were on Joe’s face. Joe backed away and Shank moved in, the knife moving back and forth, ready. Joe moved to the side of the bed. His hand dropped, gripped a pillow. Shank lunged with the knife and Joe swung with the pillow. The timing was perfect. The knife slashed into the pillow and feathers filled the room, fluttering to the floor. Joe yanked on the pillow, dropped it and crashed a fist to the side of Shank’s jaw. Shank staggered. His head dropped and Joe caught it on the way down with both hands. He cupped the head, pushed it down, raised a knee to meet it. Teeth gave way. Shank sank to the floor. He started to raise himself on his knees. Then Joe kicked him in the face and he fell down again. The feathers settled over him. Some of the feathers were red from the blood from his mouth. This time he stayed down.

Shank regained consciousness some ten minutes later. Joe was standing over him, knife in hand. Joe’s other arm was around Anita.

“You won,” Shank said slowly. “But it doesn’t change a thing.”

“You think not?”

“We’re in the same spot,” Shank said. “We’re running. We still need six hundred dollars. So you beat me. Solid. But we’re married, baby. You can’t cut me out.”

“Anita,” Joe said. “Go pick up the phone.”

“You calling somebody? I don’t get it, baby. Who are you calling?” Shank did not understand. But Joe did, finally. Everything was very clear now. It all fit in place. And Joe knew everything was going to be all right. He had found some portion of himself, a portion that had been lost for a long, long time. Not too long, though. The portion was still there—and functioning. Joe looked at Anita and loved her. He knew it was going to be all right with them now. From here on in everything was going to be all right.

“Pick up the phone,” he repeated. “Dial the operator. Dial 0.”

“Joe—” Shank began. He told Shank to shut up.

“Tell the operator you want the police, Anita,” he went on. “Tell them to come over here right away. Tell them you’ve got a murderer trapped.”

“They’ll fry us all, Joe. They’ll cool the three of us,” Shank promised.

“Just you,” Joe said. “Just you.”

“You’ll go to jail.”

“Maybe. But we’ll get out. You’ll fry but we’ll get out. And we’ll be alive then. We won’t have to run anymore.”

“You’re crazy!” Shank said in a high-pitched voice. Joe flicked a glance at Shank. Anita was talking to the police on the telephone, her voice very calm.

“You’re the one who’s crazy,” he told Shank. “I’m sane. I’m sane again. It’s been a long time, but I’m sane again.” Anita finished the call. She walked to Joe’s side, and the three waited for the police to come.

   In the summer of 1956, after a freshman year at Antioch College, I came to New York to spend three months in the mail room at Pines Publications. I’d be rooming with Paul Grillo, who’d arrived a few days before me and found us a place to live, at 147 West 14th Street. We were there for two weeks and then found a less expensive place to stay at 108 West 12th. By then we’d acquired another roommate, Fred Anliot, and the three of us were sharing a squalid little cell that a solitary midget would have found confining. Two weeks of that and we moved again, to a first-floor apartment at 54 Barrow Street, where we remained until our three months was up and it was time to return to campus.

The job was supposed to provide valuable vocational experience, and I’m sure it did. The guy who ran the promotion and publicity department took me aside one day and said his assistant was leaving and would I like to replace him? I was all set to go for it, and said maybe I’d drop out of school—and that led him to rescind the offer. If I was a student, he said, I should stay in school. That would be more valuable to me than the job he was offering.

I’m not sure he was right about that. The real education was being on my own and living in the Village and meeting all sorts of fascinating folk. I still know some of the people I met on Sunday afternoons around the fountain in Washington Square. A few of them are gone, and I miss them, even as I miss those days and nights.

A few years later I wrote a book set in that time and place. I called it
A Diet of Treacle,
with an epigraph quote from
Alice in Wonderland
. It wound up at Beacon Books, where they published it with the title
Pads Are for Passion
. I used a pen name on the book—Sheldon Lord, a name I’d used before and would use again.

Years passed, as they’re apt to do. Hard Case Crime, which had reprinted several of my early crime novels, was casting about for something else of mine, and I remembered the book. Founder Charles Ardai not only liked the book, he even liked its original title.

And, wonder of wonders,
Publishers Weekly
had these nice things to say about this early effort:

Block’s New York is a noir wonderland, populated with junkies and beatsters (the dark predecessor to the modern hipster) spouting angular tough-guy dialogue… Block effortlessly immerses himself in… their world of drugs, sex, and disaffection with a matter-of-factness that hits hard, all the more convincing because Block never makes an overt effort to convince. A potboiler morality play at its finest. (“Fiction Reviews,”
Publishers Weekly
, October 2007)

Well, that’s generous of them, innit? Possibly more generous than this very early work deserves, but that’s OK. I’ll take it, and I’m glad to see it go on to a further existence as an ebook. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

And as for its author, I’ve moved around a bit since that first sojourn in the Village. I’ve lived at various times in upstate New York, in New Jersey, in Wisconsin, in California and Florida; within New York City I’ve had apartments on the Upper West Side, in Washington Heights, and in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint. But I’ve spent most of my time where I started, in Greenwich Village, and for the past twenty years I’ve lived within a half mile of that first place on West Fourteenth Street. Sometimes it seems as though I’ve come a long way. Other times I don’t seem to have gone very far at all.

—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village

Lawrence Block ([email protected]) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.

   Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.

Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in
Manhunt
, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he would publish over the years in publications including
American Heritage
,
Redbook
,
Playboy
,
Cosmopolitan
,
GQ
, and the
New York Times
. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleven collections including
Enough Rope
(2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.

In 1966, Block introduced the insomniac protagonist Evan Tanner in the novel
The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep
. Block’s diverse heroes also include the urbane and witty bookseller—and thief-on-the-side—Bernie Rhodenbarr; the gritty recovering alcoholic and private investigator Matthew Scudder; and Chip Harrison, the comical assistant to a private investigator with a Nero Wolfe fixation who appears in
No Score
,
Chip Harrison Scores Again
,
Make Out with Murder
, and
The Topless Tulip Caper
. Block has also written several short stories and novels featuring Keller, a professional hit man. Block’s work is praised for his richly imagined and varied characters and frequent use of humor.

A father of three daughters, Block lives in New York City with his second wife, Lynne. When he isn’t touring or attending mystery conventions, he and Lynne are frequent travelers, as members of the Travelers’ Century Club for nearly a decade now, and have visited about 150 countries.