A Diet of Treacle (6 page)

Then he took the stairs two at a time, wondering how long the tail would stay on the street before he decided to have a look inside. He got his answer while he was opening his own door, when he heard the downstairs door open.

He closed the door, sliding the bolt into place. Then he raced around the apartment, grabbing the half-empty brown envelope from the table, snatching up the packet of cigarette papers although there was nothing illegal about owning them, picking up also the sack of Bull Durham on the off chance some pot was mixed in with the tobacco. He hadn’t remembered spicing up that particular sack but there was no point taking chances.

The toilet worked on the first flush for the first time in a good three weeks. He flushed it again for the sheer hell of it and let himself relax completely for the first time since he had spotted the tail.

The relaxation did not last. Suppose Joe had left the stick some place around? Suppose there was a roach on the floor somewhere? Christ, all the cops needed was a grain of the stuff and they could stick you with possession if they wanted you badly enough. Suppose the son of a—

A knock sounded at the door.

He took a quick look around. He glanced under the bed, finding nothing.

“Open up there. Police.”

Police—well, that wasn’t much of a surprise, Shank chuckled to himself. He opened the door.

Close up, the tail seemed meek and unimpressive. He could have been sitting across from Shank in the subway all the way from 125th Street without Shank having been aware of him. But the man’s eyes indicated toughness and capability.

“Want to let me in?” the tail said. “Want to show me your credentials?”

The man was Detective First Grade Peter J. Samuelson, Narcotics Bureau. Which, come to think of it—Shank gave a mental shrug—wasn’t much of a surprise either.

“C’mon inside,” he said.

Detective Samuelson went through the motions then, but it was obvious he no longer expected to discover anything. The first look at Shank’s face had told him the place was clean. Samuelson bothered with a search only on the off chance he might strike uranium. He made Shank stand with his hands on the wall while he went through his pockets. All he found were two opened packs of cigarettes, a wallet with a few dollars and some uninteresting cards, and the knife.

“You expecting trouble?” the detective inquired.

Shank gave no reply.

“There’s a law against knives like this,” the detective pointed out softly. “Can’t buy ‘em, can’t sell ‘em, can’t own ‘em. I could haul you in on this and let you cool off in the Tombs.”

“That what they got you boys doing? Looking around for switchblades?”

And now the cop said nothing.

“You pick four kids off the street,” Shank delivered the brief lecture. “Pick up any four kids and three of them got knives like that one. Bigger, most of them.”

The cop laughed unpleasantly. He pressed the button and the blade of the knife shot out. The cop looked at the knife for several seconds, closed it and dropped it into Shank’s pocket.

“Here,” he said, “keep your toy.”

Shank fell silent.

The cop went ahead and checked the room. He knew all the right places—the toilet tank, the window sill, under the mattress, inside the shoes by the bed. Shank wore a pair of desert boots and the cop double-checked them because there was enough room in the toe to hold illegal merchandise.

The cop combed just about everything, and while he did he cursed softly to himself because he knew that the search would do no good. Somehow or other Shank had tumbled to him and ditched the stuff, and it was a cinch it was nowhere around the apartment. Well, it served Detective Samuelson right. He knew he should have collared the little bastard on the street instead of taking chances. Next time he would know better.

“Okay,” Samuelson said, finally. “I guess you’re clean.”

Shank smiled.

“When did you make me?” the detective asked casually.

Shank shrugged. His eyes said he could not possibly be familiar with what the cop was talking about but the cop knew better.

“When you turned around,” the cop said, reflecting aloud. “Sure. You already had cigarettes. I should have known—I saw you with one before you got on the subway. And you didn’t throw away an empty pack. I should have picked you up the minute you walked into the drugstore.”

Shank smiled again.

“I was working close,” the cop said, rubbing his nose ruefully. “I should have figured on you spotting me but I thought I was clear. How did you happen to notice me?”

“You were lousy,” Shank summed it up.

For a minute the cop looked as though he were ready to explode. Then his features relaxed.

“You won this round,” he said. “How many more do you think you’ll win?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The hell you don’t. You’ll know what I’m talking about when we get you, punk, and don’t think we’re not going to get you sooner or later. You were clean until today. We didn’t know you were alive. Now we know and we won’t forget until we nail the lid on.”

Shank kept silent.

“Sooner or later you’ll be holding and we’ll be on to you. Sooner or later you’ll slip and we’ll grab you. We’ll watch you so hard you won’t be able to hit the toilet without looking over your shoulder to see who’s there.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” the cop said.

“You try to watch every guy who’s selling and you’ll need more men than you got on the whole force. You got any idea how many guys are selling?”

“A fair idea.”

“Lots of them, aren’t there?”

“Too many.”

“Well, how are you gonna—”

“We won’t watch ‘em all,” the cop said. “Just the ones we know about. And we know about you.”

Shank said nothing for a moment. He was enjoying the conversation but at the same time he was annoyed the cops were on to him.

“What the hell,” Shank said. “I don’t know what you’re so burned about. I wasn’t holding anyway.”

The cop laughed again.

“I wasn’t,” Shank defended himself. “I—”

“You took a good three ounces off the Mau-Mau,” the cop said. “Probably more. And in case you’re wondering, we busted the Mau-Mau just after you left. It’s the third time for him, the third intent rap, and this means the Mau-Mau has a home for the rest of his life as a guest of the United States Government. You might want to think about that for a while.”

The cop left.

Two hours later Shank smashed Mrs. Herman Rodjinckszi’s mailbox with a hammer and reclaimed the envelope.

   The Hoi Polloi is a small Chinese restaurant one flight above the street on Eighth Street off Sixth Avenue. Anita Carbone had never been there before, but now she was eating pork with Chinese vegetables. Although the food was good, its taste was lost on her. Something very strange was happening to her and she was doing her best to keep up with it, to figure out what was going on.

Joe Milani sat opposite Anita and filled his mouth with chicken chow mein, washing it down with tea. Soon, she knew, the meal would be finished and the waiter would present her with the check. And she would pay it.

She had never bought dinner for a boy before. When she went out to dinner with a date, he paid for the meal. No young man had ever so much as asked her to pay her own way, let alone to swing the entire check.

But this was different, Anita felt. She had picked up Joe Milani all by herself. He had been sitting alone, and she had found him, and otherwise they would never have been sitting at the same table in the Hoi Polloi.

Of course, she argued with herself, she hadn’t exactly picked him up. She had gone to the Village again, admittedly, but not for the purpose of meeting Joe. He had been on her mind, of course. He had been rather interesting in The Palermo, naturally, and certainly not the type of fellow she had been used to—nothing run-of-the-mill about Joe Milani. But she hadn’t been consciously scouting him when she had wandered through Washington Square. Not really.

When she had seen him there, it had been only natural for her to stop and say hello. It would have been rude to walk right by him without a word.

So when you looked at it that way…Anita’s thoughts trailed off.

“Two cents,” Joe said.

She glanced up, startled.

“For your thoughts,” he explained. “You look real deep. Buried in thought. Wouldn’t be fair to offer you a penny for your thoughts, not when they’re so profound. So I’ll make it two cents.”

Anita smiled.

“What are you thinking about? Tell me.”

“Nothing,” she said. “I don’t know. Just thinking.”

He waited.

“Emptiness,” she said. “You know how somebody says his mind is a blank? Not like that exactly. Not that my mind is blank, but what I’m thinking about…well, everything. And everything I’m thinking about is blank.” Joe offered her a cigarette and she took it, put it between her lips and lit it. She thought that she could smoke in the restaurant, that it was all right, but that she should remember not to smoke outside on the street because her grandmother would be mad at her. She thought how funny her grandmother was about things like that and she wanted to laugh but didn’t. She remembered when Joe had offered her a cigarette in the park, and she had explained that it wasn’t right to smoke in the street if you were a girl.

Depends what you smoke, he had said. And she had laughed, a little uncertainly, and then later on he had mentioned pot and she had remembered the marijuana smokers in her own neighborhood, the marijuana smokers and the heroin users. Her disapproval had shown at the time and he had laughed at her, telling her that marijuana was not bad for you at all, that a New York Public Health Report had certified it as harmless, that it wouldn’t hurt you a bit. She had not been sure whether she should believe him or no.

“Emptiness,” he repeated, waking her up again. And she nodded slowly and focused on the tip of her cigarette. It was glowing dully.

“It’s all set up,” she said. “All patterned out. My whole life, practically. I live with my grandmother. She’s a nice old lady. And she keeps the place looking good, Joe. It’s supposed to be a slum—you know, East Harlem, a slum, it says so in the paper. But our apartment—I’ve seen worse, believe me.”

He nodded. She closed her eyes for a moment and pictured the apartment, her grandmother curled up in the cane-bottom rocker, rocking slowly, shriveled, small. Anita opened her eyes.

“I go to Hunter,” she said. “If you come from New York and you do well in high school you go to college for free. I did well in high school, Joe. They told me I was very bright. So I went to Hunter. You know what I’m majoring in?”

“You told me,” he said. “History, isn’t it?”

“Government—not very different, really. It’s sort of interesting some of the time. The courses.”

Joe nodded and thought about Smollett.

“And I go out on dates,” she went on. “I’m not a wallflower. I’ve even got a steady boyfriend. Isn’t that a stupid word? Boyfriend. He’s a friend and he’s a boy. His name is Ray. Ray Rico. He’s good-looking and he’s smart. Goes to Cooper Union, studying to be an engineer. You’ve got to be a whip to get into Cooper Union. He’ll walk out of that school and walk into a job with IBM or somebody at ten thousand dollars a year. You know how much that is? Two hundred dollars a week. That’s a lot of money. And the more he works for them the more money he makes. He told me he ought to be able to go as high as twenty-five thousand. You know what’s funny? When you don’t make much money it’s so much a week. A steno makes sixty-five a week, not three thousand and something a year. Nobody makes four hundred a week. You don’t think about it that way. It’s funny, I guess.”

Joe smiled. “I worked in a drugstore once,” he said. “I made seventy-five cents an hour. While I was in high school. Deliveries, dusting the stock, sweeping the floor. That type of scene. You ever hear anybody talk about making twenty bucks an hour?” But Anita’s eyes were staring into the far-away. What was she looking at, Joe wondered. Emptiness, perhaps. Space.

“All in a pattern,” she said. “When Ray graduated from high school he knew what kind of a job he would finally have. Now he knows he’ll marry me. We go out once, twice a week. A movie, a cup of coffee. At first he kissed me once at the door every night before I went inside. On the mouth. Now we sit on the roof once in a while and he touches my breasts. That sounds funny, doesn’t it? But that’s what he does. He touches my breasts. I guess pretty soon he’ll start putting his hand under my skirt. Then when there’s nothing else to do but go to bed—we’ll be married. And he’ll graduate and get his good job and we’ll buy a little house on the Island. A split-level. I’ve seen pictures of them. Small and ugly but very chic, very modern.”

She closed her eyes and saw the pictures of the split-levels. She remembered wondering why anybody would want to live in one of them.

“I’ll have an electric kitchen,” she said. “Electric range and electric refrigerator and electric dishwasher and electric frying pan and electric coffee maker and an electric sink. They’ll probably have electric sinks by then. They’ve got everything else. And we’ll have two-point-three children and one of them will have to be a boy and one a girl and God knows what the fraction will be. And we’ll have a big television set and we’ll sit in front of it every night. All of us. All four-point-three of us. We’ll stare at that screen and let it think for us nice and electrically. Real togetherness. We wouldn’t watch television alone. It wouldn’t be right. Do things in a group. The family that prays together stays together.”

“You make it sound pretty sad,” Joe ventured.

She looked hard at him. “That’s just it,” she said. “I make it sound terrible. And, you know, it is not that terrible. Not for most people. They would tell me I’m insane to make such a fuss. Look at me, I’ve got a nice guy, he’ll make money, we’ll have a good life. It’s nice. Isn’t that a great word? Nice. And it fits. It’s nice. For everybody else in the world it’s nice and I don’t want it.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know.”