Blue City (7 page)

“Why should I struggle for a second million?” I asked him over my shoulder, and left him winking both eyes.

Charlie’s Billiard Emporium and Soft Drinks was a little tobacco shop with a big basement underneath. The shirt-sleeved man behind the counter gave me a sleepy look, snapped one of his purple arm bands like a signal to himself, and went back to his racing sheet. I went down the unswept stairs and stood at the foot for a moment, peering through the smoke-blue air. The smoke haze hung in the wide, low room like a cloudy liquid, through which men appeared like half-human creatures moving slowly over a sea floor in an undersea ritual. The click of billiard balls cracked the illusion, and I went on into the room.

The walls were partly lined with cue racks, some of which were padlocked. There must be players here who took the game seriously, to own their own cues. Between the racks were group portraits of old football teams, some with handlebar mustaches; signed photos of game little forgotten fighters, with huge fists and shoulders leaning gamely into the camera and tiny disappearing waists; an unknown wrestler, wearing a championship belt almost as wide as a corset, who signed himself: “All the Best to My Old Pal Charlie, Al”; pictures of naked women as bright
and empty as balloons; advertisements for rubber goods and specifics and quack doctors waiting for despair, when everything else had failed, to gravitate to them.

These Herculaneum murals depressed me, and I looked away into the room. There were six or eight tables, bright green under their double cones of light: a couple for snooker or English billards, one without pockets for three-cushion, the rest for ordinary pool. Most of the tables were being used by boys and young men who leaned over them in precise and prayerful attitudes or stood back in meditation chalking their cues. The cues shot forward quickly and certainly, like little goads of fate; the balls rearranged themselves according to the laws of physics, like well-trained molecules taken in infinitely slow motion, or infinitely miniature planets. Once a player miscued, and his ball jumped the table and rolled away on the floor among the filth of years.

A young man knocking the balls around at a table by himself scooped it up and tossed it back. He had white hair and a goose-flesh face as white as typewriter paper. The outer corners of his pale-pink eyes drooped towards the corners of his mouth, as if his face had been parted in the middle and combed backwards.

He went back to his game, shooting casually, and sank four balls in succession. I found a straight cue in one of the open racks, and asked him for a game.

“Plain pool, one-two-three?”

“Suits me,” I said.

“For two bits?”

“I can use two bits.”

He smiled sadly, set up the balls, won the flip, and broke them. I sank the one in a side pocket and nudged the two halfway down the cushion into the end. The three was behind a cluster of other balls, and I couldn’t quite see it. I tried a cushion shot and hit the three but missed the side pocket by an inch. He couldn’t see the three either, because the seven was in his way, but he put a lot of english on the right side of his ball and curved it around the seven. The three dropped in, and he’d left himself a setup for the four in the end pocket.

“Nice position,” I said. “Seen anything of Joey tonight?”

“He was sitting in the back room until about an hour ago.” He sank the four, drawing the cue ball into position for the five. Then he sank the five.

The six ball was an impossible shot, tight on the cushion at the other end of the table. He made it.

“Where is he now?”

His pale gaze stroked me mildly and returned to the table. He dropped the seven in the side pocket and left himself a setup for the eight. “You a friend of Sault’s?”

I thought the business approach would be safest. “I’d like to be. I’m interested in buying what he’s got to sell.”

He sank the eight ball. “He wouldn’t be doing any business tonight. He told me he’s running a party for some of the girls.”

“My business can’t wait,” I said. “Where is the party?”

The nine was in a tight spot, out of line with any of the pockets. He looked at it carefully, and the cue slid forward between his white fingers. The nine traveled the length of the table and rebounded into a side pocket.

“Where did you say the party was?”

“I didn’t say. It’s over at Garland’s, beside the park.”

He missed the ten. “Know where that is?”

“No. Do you?” I sank the ten and missed the eleven.

He took the eleven. “Opposite the main entrance of the park. On the top floor, up above the liquor store. If you do any business, tell him Whitey sent you.”

He missed the twelve. I sank the twelve and then the rest of the balls. He grunted audibly when the fifteen went in.

“That was game ball,” I said. “Tough luck.”

He looked at me sadly. “I can put the game on the slate, but I ain’t got your two bits. I got cleaned out in the back room. I didn’t think you’d win.”

“Forget it.” I went away and left him knocking the balls around by himself.

My taxi dropped me in front of the closed iron gates of a municipal park. The night air was beginning to turn chilly, and the dark lawns beyond the gates, shaded by unbudding trees, were as desolate as any cemetery. In the center of the paved triangle of which the gates formed the base, there was a statue I remembered, an early French explorer in bronze buckskins.

“Meeting somebody?” the driver asked as I paid him off.

“Got an appointment with this statue. We get together every now and then to talk over old times.”

He looked at me vacuously and I didn’t tip him. When he had gone away I turned and looked at the statue. The statue didn’t say anything. He stood calmly gazing with blind, metal eyes across a virgin country that no longer
existed. I remembered from school that he had left France with the intention of bringing Christianity to the heathen.

On the opposite corner there was a palsied neon sign: “Liquor Store.” Above it were three stories of flats. Five or six of the windows on the top floor were lighted, but all the blinds were drawn. They weren’t drawn tight enough to contain the shouts and laughter which I heard. It was high, wild laughter, definitely not merry, but I didn’t mind. Merry laughter would have conflicted with my mood.

I crossed the street and found the entrance to the flats beside the store front. The narrow stairs were lit, or unlit, by red twenty-watt bulbs, one to each flight. The bulb at the top of the fourth flight was white but grimy. It cast a bad light on a sky-blue door trimmed with red by an amateurish hand. The same hand had painted “F. Garland” on the door in tall, red letters which bled a little.

The sounds of the party came through the thin panels like water through a sieve. I had listened to a lot of parties, and I knew that mixed parties sound like a monkeyhouse, female parties like an aviary, and stag parties like a kennel. This party sounded like a kennel, though some of the voices were lap-dog voices, high and querulous.

I knocked on F. Garland’s door, wondering where the girls were. The yapping and whining and howling and barking went right on. A fire-siren laugh climbed little steps all the way up to a high, idiot cackle, and teetered shakily down. I knocked again.

A small man came to the door and opened it, still buttoning up his clothes. The smudge of lipstick on his narrow chin was the only spot of color in his face. It was a pathetic
little face, with hollow cheeks, high, thin temples, a young, sensitive mouth, whose upper lip overlapped the lower lip a trifle. His voice was soft and pleasant:

“I don’t think I know you, do I?”

“The loss is mine. Is Joe Sault here?”

“Joey is occupied at present.” He uttered a shameful, little, lilting laugh. His gray eyes were as amiable as ground glass.

“Will you tell him I’d like to see him for a minute? Out here will do.”

“Is it business?”

“Call it that.”

“He’s not doing business yet tonight. He’s waiting for more stock.”

“Not that kind of business. I have to talk to him.”

“What name shall I give him, fellow?”

“John Weather. You his secretary?”

An angry flush pumped a little color into his phthisical cheeks. He sneered at me with his expressive nostrils. “My name is Garland,” he said softly. “Maybe you’d better remember that.”

“Delighted, I’m sure. Convey my respects to Mr. Sault, and tell him I await his pleasure in the antechamber.”

“A gagman,” he chirped. He shut the door, but before it closed I saw the scrambled bodies inside the room. They were live bodies, but I had experienced stronger fellow feeling with corpses.

A minute later the handsome boy came to the door. He had sideburns, dimples, swimming black eyes. He had chocolate-brown high-rise trousers with three pleats on
each side, and scarlet silk suspenders to hold them up under his armpits. His shirt was made of beige silk. He had the rank masculinity of a tomcat, but his dark face was emotionally versatile. The cigarette between his slender brown fingers burned unevenly and did not smell like tobacco.

“Joe Sault?”

“You’ve got me.” He smiled engagingly. “Garland doesn’t like you.”

“I like Garland ever so much.”

“He’s screwy, but he’s got a good nose. When he don’t like ’em, I often don’t like ’em.”

“And here I was thinking my personality was irresistible. You’re destroying my dream.”

“You talk too much, like Garland says.” His expression shifted easily from boyish friendliness to blank hostility. “If you got something to say to me, say it.” His cigarette had burnt down to his fingers. He ground it out on the doorjamb and put the butt in his pocket.

I drew back on my right foot and shifted my weight to a position of equilibrium, ready to move in any direction. “I need a gun,” I said.

He slid past me on quiet feet and leaned over the shaky banister to peer down the stairs to the next landing. “Why come to me?” he asked me over his shoulder. “They got guns for sale in stores.”

“I’m hot. A couple of years ago—” I paused, waiting for his mind to add one and one.

He straightened up and faced me. He was almost as tall as I was, and his shoulders were very good. I readjusted my weight in relation to his new position.

He said in a tone of gentle reminiscence: “You were saying: ‘A couple of years ago.’ ”

“You helped out a friend of mine.”

“Who is this friend of yours?” He stood back and watched my face impassively, with both hands in his pockets.

“He wouldn’t want his name used. You know that.”

“How did I help this friend of yours a couple of years ago that wouldn’t want his name used?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“I helped a lot of people. I’m a very helpful guy.”

“You got him a Smith and Wesson revolver—”

The muscles moved in his right arm, all the way up to the shoulder and across to the pectoral. He said very quietly: “What did you say your name was?”

“Your memory is bad.” I was as tense as he was. “John Weather.”

The knife flew open as it came out of the pocket. My left hand was ready and caught his right wrist. My right arm put a lock on it. He twisted quickly and pulled hard, but not out of my grasp. He was hard to bend, but he bent slowly as I raised my hands locked over his wrist. Slowly his head went down. He sighed almost inaudibly and the knife fell free just before I tore his shoulder loose in its socket.

Suddenly I let go, stepped in close to him, and brought my right fist up from the knee. The point of his chin bruised my knuckles, his head went back and rapped on the wall. For a moment he stood there on weak knees, both hands outspread flat against the wall, his head sagging. A voice from the doorway stopped my left in the middle of the concluding punch:

“Don’t hit Joey again. It could spoil our party if you did.”

Garland stepped through the door and closed it behind him. His sensitive little mouth was quivering, but his right hand was in his coat pocket holding something solid and steady.

I took a step backwards so that I could watch both of them, and in the same movement I stooped and had the knife. “I’ll keep this. I make a collection of knives that try to cut me.” I pressed the catch and forced the four-inch blade back to its place in the handle, then dropped it in my pocket.

“You want me to call some of the fellows, Joey?” Garland said.

Sault was smoothing his hair, rubbing his jaw, massaging his dented personality. “We handle this hard boy ourselves. Tell him to give me back my knife.”

“Give him back his knife.”

“I wouldn’t want him to cut himself.”

He jerked his heavy pocket. “Give it back.”

“It’s for my collection,” I said. “My friend who sent me here wouldn’t like it if you shot me. And most wounds would give me time to throw you downstairs.”

“He thinks I couldn’t give him a head wound from the hip,” Garland said to Sault. He giggled like a mischievous little girl. “Tell him about me, Joey.”

“He’s fast,” Joey said sullenly. “And his name’s Weather, he says. We wouldn’t want to kill him here and spoil the party, like you said.”

“Sault doesn’t sound gay,” I said to Garland. I was getting tired of watching both of them, shifting my weight
with every heartbeat. “Maybe what he needs is for you to get him another reefer.”

“Say the word, Joey. It would be nice to shoot him.”

Sault’s face was working with thought. Finally he said: “Lay off him, Garland. Maybe we better take it to Kerch.”

“Who is Kerch?” I said.

“You don’t want to know,” Sault said. “You may think you do, but you don’t want to know.”

“Kerch is the man I work for,” Garland said. “I work for Kerch twenty-four hours a day.”

“You better take some of your overtime and buy yourself something to eat. You look hungry.”

“I look better than dead people look.”

“Take a look in your mirror. You’ll be surprised.”

“You go away from here,” Garland said in a thin menacing voice. “But quick.”

“Natch, Gloria. Natch.”

I went down the stairs, not too fast and not too slow, feeling five eyes on my back: Sault’s black eyes, Garland’s gray eyes, and the hidden eye of the gun.