Body & Soul (6 page)

"I was up there last winter to fix a radiator. There's a door here"—he pointed at his rough map—"right next to the icebox. That's it. That's the cupboard."

"What if—" Claude began.

"I done told you. They gone for a week. I heard the doormen talking. Anyway, you listen like I told you. If you hear anything, don't go in. That's simple, ain't it?"

Claude stared at the paper.

"Be a lot of stuff in there—a lot of stuff. Don't mess with anything big. Don't mess with anything comes in a set, you hear? You looking for ashtrays, like if there's a whole lot of different little silver ashtrays like I think there is, then you take one or two. Take two if there's a lot of them, otherwise one, and if it ain't small enough to fit in your pocket, leave it. You hear?"

"Yes."

"Good. Here's the screwdriver."

They got up and went over to the dumbwaiter. Al brushed it out with his hand and then held the ropes.

Claude bent down and climbed into the small enclosure, pulling his knees to his chest and covering his nose and mouth with his hand against the smell. His head bumped the top of the wooden box.

"You ready?"

Claude nodded.

Al pulled gently on the ropes and the boy ascended, looking down at Al's hands and arms until the wall of the shaft and darkness intervened. He could hear the faint creaking of wood and the whisper of the ropes sliding along the outside of the box. In the darkness he was very aware of his body, hearing his own breathing and the dull thump of his heart. The ascent was slow, almost silent, and magically smooth. He touched the rough plaster wall with his fingertip, feeling it slide by. Hairlines of light outlined the door of the first floor as it passed. At the second floor he could hear the murmur of voices. Although he knew his speed was constant, it seemed to take longer and longer to get from one floor to the next. Thin light again at four, creeping up to five, and an eternity until he stopped at last at six.

He held his breath, put his ear against the crack, and listened. Nothing. Breathing softly through his mouth, he listened for a long time before carefully inserting the tip of the screwdriver into the simple latch. The door fell open a quarter of an inch and Claude remained motionless in the dim light, listening. Finally satisfied, he slowly and carefully pushed the door open and stared into the kitchen, the white, still room suddenly right there. After another moment he climbed out and stood on the tiled floor.

Silence. Now he could feel the faint touch of air on the back of his neck, flowing from the dumbwaiter shaft behind him. He knew immediately that the apartment was indeed empty. The kitchen was enormous—larger than the whole apartment in which he lived with his mother—and very clean. He went to the cupboard, opened the door, and turned on the light inside, arrested by the blazing crystal that seemed to float in a haze of prismatic colors, by the high glaze of china teapots and platters, by the hard brightness of silver. Goblets, bowls, bottles, tureens, trays, cocktail shakers, dishes, cups, candlesticks, gravy boats, ice buckets, salt cellars, butter dishes, ladles, spoons, and there, in a back corner, stacks of various-sized silver ashtrays. He moved into the brightness, took two ashtrays, stepped back, turned off the light, and closed the door. They fit in his pockets.

Crossing back to the dumbwaiter, he noticed a large jar, in the shape of a fat man, standing on a counter next to the stove. Raised letters on the bottom of the fat man's apron spelled cookies. Claude opened the jar and put in his hand. To his surprise, he felt paper. He pulled out a wad of money—dollar bills, a few fives, a ten. He stared at it for a moment, put it back, closed the jar, and turned away.

As he climbed into the dumbwaiter, he looked down through the two-inch crack between the sill and the box itself. Way down, far away, he could see the glow of light at the bottom of the shaft, an impossibly small patch in the dimensionless blackness. He folded himself into the box, pulled the door shut behind him, tested it, and reaching around the corner of the box with his slim hand, found the two ropes and gave them a sharp pull. Almost immediately he began his slow descent, Al working carefully down below.

Two things happened simultaneously. First, the bell—loud, piercing—startling him so that he banged his head. He knew what it was: the signal people used to summon the dumbwaiter in the event they had missed the morning pickup. Second, there was light below him. He could see his knees and his hands and the wall slipping past. The light grew brighter and suddenly he was descending faster, almost as if in a free fall.

For a split second, as he passed the open door of the third floor, he was bathed in light. He saw a kitchen, similar to the one above. The refrigerator was different, but it was in the same place. The door to the cupboard was there too, except it was green instead of white. A black woman stood at the stove reaching for a pot of coffee. Her face began
to turn toward Claude, and then all he could see was the blur of the shaft wall.

He landed with a bump. Gesturing rapidly with one hand and reaching in with the other, Al pulled him out.

"Al!" came a voice from above. "Is that you?"

Al tilted his head to call up the shaft. Claude sat down on the floor and rubbed the back of his head.

"Right here," Al yelled.

"She might have seen me," Claude said.

Al's eyes snapped down. "What?"

"She might—"

"Well did she or didn't she?" Al said. "Quick!"

"I don't know. It was too fast."

The woman called from above. "What's going on down there?"

Al stared upward and didn't say anything for a moment. Then he shouted, "What you mean, what's going on?"

"You hear me ring?"

Claude could see the relief on Al's face. "Sure I did."

"Well, didn't that thing just fly by here like a subway train?"

"It was the ropes. The ropes got messed up. Just hold on a minute, I'm coming." He began to pull, hand over hand. To Claude, he said softly, "That's Madge. She didn't see nothing."

"I don't want to do it anymore."

Al began to laugh. "We'll," he said, giving a little gasp, "I can see that."

He came home one day to find that a telephone had been installed. It stood next to the radio, and he felt both curiosity and excitement. The gleaming black instrument was provocatively modern in the dingy apartment, suggesting, in this dark room where everything for as long as he could remember had remained more or less the same, the possibility of change. A telephone! He examined it closely. The number printed on the round insert in the center of the dial was ATwater 9–6058. He picked up the receiver, listened to the dial tone, and replaced it in the cradle.

"Don't play with it," his mother said, coming in from her room. "Just leave it alone."

"But what's it for?" He noticed a thick telephone book on the floor. "I mean, who are you going to call?"

She paused, staring at him. He began to worry that he had inadvertently said something wrong, but then she turned away. "Just don't worry about it," she said.

For days it simply sat there. It never rang, and in the evenings she never used it. Browsing in the yellow pages, Claude stumbled upon the Music Store section, his eye caught by the illustrations of various instruments. It was thrilling to find a listing for Weisfeld's, and after a few false tries, he got through.

"Hello."

"This is Claude."

"Claude!" Mr. Weisfeld said. "What a pleasant surprise."

"We got a telephone." He looked down and touched the base with his fingers. "It's right here next to the radio."

"Good. I'm glad to hear it."

A long pause. "I like boogie-woogie."

"I thought you would. No more than half an hour at a time, though. It can be bad for your left hand."

"Okay." Claude listened to the hum of the line. He didn't know what to say, and it felt odd. "Goodbye."

"Goodbye, Claude. I'll see you tomorrow."

And then one night, in the middle of the night, it rang. He sat up on the cot and heard his mother come out of her room to answer it. She said a few words and put the phone down as Claude peeked through his door. She got pencil and paper and returned to the phone. "Okay, ready," he heard her say quietly, and then she wrote. When she hung up he ran back to the cot and pulled up the covers.

Suddenly the lights went on. She stood at his door, naked, her great white body startling him into full wakefulness.

"Get dressed," she said. "We're going out."

"Now?"

"Quick." She turned away. "And bring a blanket."

He obeyed, and found himself following her up the iron stairs into the dark and silent night. As they approached the parked cab he asked, "What's going on?"

She opened the rear door. "Just get in. You can go back to sleep. I can't drive around with the flag up at this hour of the night, that's all." He stepped up into the cab, and she went around and got behind the wheel.

As they pulled away from the curb and moved toward Third Avenue he stared out at the scene—familiar and yet transformed by the dark
stillness, oddly ominous. She drove downtown, and after a while he lost track of where they were. He dozed off, his head resting lightly on the back of the seat.

He woke up as she parked, on a crosstown street at the corner of an avenue. She turned off the headlights and the engine, but left the meter running.

"Where are we?"

"Downtown," she said. "I've got a couple of special pickups. We'll wait. We're early. When he comes I want you to get up front here with me." He could sense a subtle tension in her voice, a controlled excitement.

Every few minutes the meter would click as the cylinder rolled up, five cents at a time. A dollar ten. A dollar fifteen. His mind wandered. A dollar sixty-five. A dollar seventy. They sat in silence.

"Oh, shit," she said, and he sat up straight.

From the avenue, three people were approaching the cab. Two young men in tuxedos and open black topcoats, and a woman in a long dress and fur stole. The taller of the young men waved in an exaggerated manner, his coat flapping.

"Just sit tight and keep quiet," his mother said, rolling down her window. "The cab's taken," she said as the young man reached for the rear door.

"I don't see..." Claude saw the flushed face, the sandy hair falling over the forehead, as the man bent over to look inside. "Oh. Yes."

"Sorry," she said, and began to roll up the window.

"It's taken," the man said, turning back to his companions while at the same time putting his hand on the rising window, stopping it. "A woman driver! How extraordinary. Perhaps you could just take us along to Sixty-ninth Street. Plenty of room back there. Ten dollars?"

The woman in the stole was laughing at something with the shorter man, who stumbled against the front fender.

"Sorry," Claude's mother said, her right hand clenching and unclenching on the steering wheel. "The Hack Bureau. Rules."

The tall man still held the window. "I offered ten dollars," he said to his friends, his tone aggrieved.

The short man lurched forward, putting his face in the window. "Twenty! Twenty bucks and let's go." His wet lips shone in the dim streetlight. The tall man had removed his hand and now she rolled the window shut with a violent motion of her arm.

The tall man and the woman drifted back toward the avenue, but
the shorter man remained, standing now by the front fender, staring through the windshield. Claude's mother kept both hands on the wheel. The man took one step backward, opened his fly, and began to piss on the front tire.

Claude heard a kind of
oof
sound from somewhere deep in his mother's throat, as if she'd been punched. "Stop him," he said, "stop him."

"I can't get into anything," she whispered.

The man finished, shook his penis—all the while staring into the cab—and smiled as he zipped up and turned away.

There was a sharp snapping sound, like the crack of a whip.

"What? What was that?" Claude asked.

"Jesus," she said. "I broke the wheel." She bent over and examined it, running her fingers over the hairline fracture. "It's okay. I can still drive."

"Why did he do that?"

"Ah, Christ." She slumped back in her seat, the whole cab jolting slightly.

Fifteen minutes later the meter read two dollars and thirty cents. A small, stocky figure in a navy pea jacket came around the corner, and Claude felt his mother's sudden alertness. He came directly to the cab and she rolled down the window.

"The cab's taken," she said.

"May first?" he said. He wore odd-looking glasses, perfectly round with steel rims.

"Get in, please. Claude, come up front."

Claude took his blanket and got in the front seat. The man sat in back. She pulled away from the curb and turned uptown on the avenue. Claude noticed the man twisting his body to look out the back window.

"It's okay, sir," she said. "I'll know." She glanced at her side mirror and then the rearview. "I'll know."

"Of course," the man said.

Claude was surprised to hear her call him sir. He could not remember hearing her call anybody sir.

"It's ridiculous," the man said with a foreign accent. "Melodramatic. But we have to be careful."

"Yes."

"We are very grateful. We know you work hard and long hours."

"It's an honor, sir."

They drove through the dark city, the streets almost empty, going uptown two blocks, west one block, uptown two blocks, west one block, again and again in such a way as to catch all the lights.

"A good trick," the man said, and Claude recognized his accent as German, the kind he heard often in Yorkville. "I did not know this trick."

She pulled to the curb at the corner of Madison and Ninety-second. "We're on schedule," she said.

They waited in silence, the meter ticking near Claude's head. After some time a man in a light brown coat emerged from an apartment building and approached the cab.

"It's him," the German said, and opened his door for the newcomer, who slipped into the cab.

"Gerhardt."