Bone in the Throat (11 page)

"Hold on," said the chef, cautiously.

"They gone. Five-O be gone," said the little man.

"I'm not sure," said the chef.

"It's four o'clock, four-thirty," said the man. "Shift change for the mothafuckas. They goin' back to the precinct, write it up, get some overtime."

The chef slid carefully out of the wall. He stood there picking splinters out of his palms and his shirt. The little man emerged, blinking. He crept up to the window and peered over the sill. "They gone," said the little man. "They ain't comin' back today." He reached into his sock and took out a dime bag. He rooted around in his underwear for a set of works, found them, and laid them out on the floor. He found a bottle cap on a mattress and picked up a cigarette butt and removed the cotton from the filter. "I gotta find some water," the little man said. He left the room for a minute, returning with a soda can. He emptied the bag of heroin into the bottle cap and began to prepare his shot.

The chef rolled up a crumpled single, and snorted one of his bags in one long draft.

"You shouldn't waste it like that, bro'," said the little man.

Upstairs, in the dark, the chef could hear the workers returning to their cage behind the barrier. From the roof came voices: "Open!" "Green light!" "Open!"

Twenty

I
T WAS FOUR
o'clock in the morning, and it was raining outside Tommy's Morton Street apartment. Tommy stood, naked except for his bowling shirt, looking out at the empty street. He was thinking about the van.

On the bed, Cheryl was asleep. It was hot, in spite of the rain, and she was naked, sleeping on top of the sheets, head tucked under a crushed pillow, snoring gently. Tommy's cat slept also, curled up close to Cheryl's stomach.

Tommy was wide awake. It was that goddamn van. He was worried about that. He turned away from the window and looked at Cheryl on the bed. One delicate ankle extended over the side, toenails painted red, her ribs moving rhythmically in and out with her breathing.

He thought he was being followed. He was almost sure of it. When he left the Dreadnaught at the end of his shift, Tommy had seen a graffiti-covered delivery van pull out from a space directly across from the restaurant. A man, only a shape with eyes, really, had appeared to look right at him for a second. It had startled him.

He had put it out of his mind. But then there it was again when he turned up Sixth Avenue toward Morton Street; he had seen the van again, rolling slowly up Sixth, a block behind him. Even then, he had not been too concerned. Shit like that happened all the time, he told himself. He saw the same trucks—the fish guy, the produce, the meat company, the dry-goods truck—he saw them all the time, all over town. He could recognize many of the drivers by now; he'd wave and they'd sometimes wave back.

But this van . . . this van was unfamiliar. Tommy had never noticed it before. The way it was covered with graffiti, unlike the others . . . And it didn't look like it was delivering anything, sitting outside the Dreadnaught at eleven at night. Tommy knew most of the trucks that delivered to the other restaurants on Spring Street. He knew who got their fish from Rozzo, their meat from New York Beef, West-Conn, their tortillas from La Barbone . . . It was the sort of thing you noticed after a while. You even talked about it, chuckling over the fact that the Villa Nova used a fish company you knew to have been indicted for substituting skate for scallops. Tommy had remarked on such things, sitting out front with the chef, watching the trucks pull up in front of other restaurants on the block.

You remembered what the trucks looked like, like you remembered the companies that short-weighted you, arrived late, didn't arrive at all. You took note if you saw your fish company making a delivery down the street when you hadn't got your order yet.

No, he didn't know this van . . . There was nothing written, no sign anyway, on the side. Only the graffiti, layer upon layer of it, spray-painted front, back, and sides as if the van had been parked in one place for a very long time, so the kids put their tags on it.

Even after he saw the van on Sixth, he had been all right. No reason to freak out, he thought. No big thing. Maybe it was some independent, a jobber . . . Some guy from Queens or one of the boroughs, owned a truck and ran around town, shopping for bargains for a small group of customers. There were a lot of guys like that in the produce market, working on almost no capital, trying to hustle up a living, working odd hours. No big thing. Coincidence.

Tommy had walked over to Chumley's for a few pints, ended up playing liars' poker with some cooks from Formerly Joe's. He had lost thirteen dollars and left the bar around one o'clock. He had gone out through the hidden entrance, through the courtyard, though a sign inside the door told you not to, and the van had been there again. A half block down, toward the river, in a space in front of a hydrant. He saw two dark shapes, sitting immobile behind the dash.

Suddenly he had become stone cold sober. And scared. He had walked from Chumley's down to Seventh, faked a right, and then bolted left, jogging up Seventh Avenue, his heart pounding in his ears. Seventh Avenue ran downtown; there was no way, he reasoned, that they could follow him in the van. Maybe they were coming after him on foot though . . .

He had run uptown to Woody's, where Montana Eve used to be. He had worked briefly at Montana Eve. He knew there was an emergency exit in the back dining room that didn't sound an alarm if you went through it. You could walk in from Seventh, go straight back, through the bar, across the dining room, and exit onto Charles Street. Not many people knew about the door on Charles, it was tucked under some stairs and there was no sign, no outward indication it opened into the restaurant.

Tommy had gone straight through, pushed past some bar customers, crossed the dining room, and slipped out the door. On Charles Street he had removed his shirt, wrapped it around his head like an Arab headdress, and strolled casually toward Bleecker, looking, as this was the West Village, no more peculiar than anybody else on the street at that hour.

At Bleecker, he'd hailed a cab and had the driver drop him at the corner of Morton and Hudson, around the corner from his apartment.

He had walked up the steps to his front door and was trying to get the key in the lock with shaking hands when he saw the van again. It was waiting for him, a few car-lengths down the street in a no parking zone. Frightened and confused, he had let himself in and then sat, crouched behind the front door in the alcove. Afraid to peek.

Now, much later, he looked out the open window of the apart ment, searching the street for the van. It was gone. Tommy wondered if he could sleep. He didn't think so. Too much to think about. Was somebody really following him?

He lit a new cigarette from the end of the one he was smoking and ground the butt into an overflowing ashtray on the floor. His foot stubbed up against an empty beer bottle and sent it rolling under the bed. Cheryl stirred in her sleep. The cat woke, got up, changed position, and curled up again, her head on Cheryl's arm. Now that, thought Tommy, is peace of mind. Not a lot to worry about in the cat universe. Should I sleep or should I eat? That's all a cat had to worry about. Tommy couldn't do either of those things lately. . . Freddy's bleeding head, the apron as it soaked through with blood, Freddy's mouth opening and closing the way you see goldfish do . . . the images followed Tommy around. He was afraid to dream.

And now there was the van. It had been following him. They were waiting for him outside his apartment. Who could it be? It wouldn't be anybody from Sally's crew, Tommy told himself. Even Skinny—who obviously had doubts about sharing knowledge of a murder with Tommy—even Skinny wouldn't follow him around in a fucking van! If they were mad at Tommy, if they had a problem with him, worried about him keeping his mouth shut, they wouldn't shadow him in a van . . . They'd just call him up on the phone, tell him his mother was sick; invite him to a ball game; or have Harvey call him in to work in the early morning. On the way someone would step up to him and shoot him in the head.

No. It couldn't be Sally. Tommy tried to reassure himself. Sally was his uncle, for Chrissakes! Sally fancied himself his older brother, his surrogate father, regardless of how Tommy felt about it. He had no need to follow Tommy around in a van. He knew where Tommy lived. He knew where he worked. He could come over any time, or send somebody. He could call him on the phone, arrange to meet Tommy somewhere, that would be all it took. "Hey, Tommy!" somebody would call out to him in the street, "How ya doin'? Ain't
seen, you
in ages . . . " Maybe somebody Tommy knew as a kid, somebody he'd played dodgebail with in second grade, an old friend. He'd smile and Tommy would reach for the extended hand, the warm greeting, the hug, and
ba-da-bing
—
ba-da-boom!
No more Tommy.

So, if it wasn't Sally, or any of Sally's people . . . Who the fuck could it be? Why would the cops be watching him? Well . . . he knew why they might want to watch him . . . But how could they know about Freddy? There had been nothing in the papers . . . Nobody had come around the restaurant looking for Freddy. No cops asking questions, looking for evidence. Sally and Skinny sure weren't going to say anything . . . Why would the cops be watching him? Except for the other night, Tommy had stayed away from all that for years and years . . . If something was going on with the cops, Sally would have warned him, right? Wouldn't he? Tommy considered this for a moment. He decided that Sally would have told him if there was some kind of investigation, if only for his own protection. Sally and Skinny wouldn't want him going down to an interrogation unprepared. They'd be ready with the lawyers, their lawyers . . .

Tommy looked out the window again. Still no van. He sat down in front of the TV The volume was down all the way. He tried to get interested in some footage of Stuka dive-bombers dropping high explosive on Warsaw. The Discovery Channel. Cheryl called it the War Channel. Panzer tanks rolled silently across the screen, scenes of bridges blowing, farmhouses burning, the Polish cavalry making a heroic, futile charge against the mechanized Nazi hordes . . .

He got up again and walked over to the window. He heard the distant warble of a car alarm from the direction of the river. There were no pedestrians, only a homeless guy, sorting through garbage bags across the street. In the spot where the van had been, Tommy noticed a Jeep Explorer, its windows tinted dark. Somebody could be in there, Tommy thought. Fie felt the hair on the back of his neck rising. Somebody could be in there, looking up at me right now, and I wouldn't know it. He stepped back from the window, moved forward again carefully. He tried to make out a shape or shapes behind the tinted glass, but he couldn't.

He considered going down to look, but that would be stupid. He didn't even know if he wanted to know for sure. Would that make it better? He didn't think so. It would only make it worse. If somebody really was following him . . . waiting for him at work, watching his apartment . . . If somebody was so interested in him they were following him around in a van, in a Jeep . . . Tommy didn't want to know. He wished he could forget about it. Put it out of his mind. He wanted to run away. He looked again at Cheryl on the bed, sleeping soundly with Tommy's cat. He wished he were someplace else with her. In the country maybe, a nice country inn. He'd cook, Cheryl would run the front desk. No Sally. No Skinny . . . no strange vans. Freddys killing a distant, faraway memory, growing fainter and fainter until he had no memory of it at all. . .

No reason for anybody to be worried about him keeping his mouth shut, he thought, thinking again of Sally and Skinny. They had to know he was a stand-up guy. Of course, his father had been a stand-up guy too. Look where it had gotten him. He still didn't know. They never found his father. Maybe if things had been different. If he'd met Diane sooner. Met Cheryl sooner . . . Maybe if Sally were dead and his father still alive . . . Maybe if his mother had been more like Diane's mother, not so willing to go along. If she hadn't let that endless procession of budding and veteran criminals traipse through her kitchen and into Tommy's life. Tommy was ashamed of himself. Trying to blame his mother! Who was he kidding?

He sat down on the bed next to Cheryl, brushed the hair off her forehead. He ran a bent finger gently down her spine. He leaned over and ran his lips across her naked hip. Fear was making him horny. He ran a hand up over Cheryl's stomach, letting it stop, coming to rest just below her breasts. Cheryl came out of her slumber for a second. "Forget it," she said sleepily.

Tommy pulled back. Cheryl squirmed into the sheets for a few seconds and was soon fast asleep again.

Tommy picked up the chef's worn copy of
Down and Out in London and Paris
from the night table and read a few pages. He was too drunk to concentrate on the words. He wanted to lose himself in the underground passageways of the gargantuan Hotel X . . . haul ice through the cellars with Orwell, scrape fat, barehanded, off dinner plates with the
plongeurs
in the book . . .

He wanted to be in Paris, drunk in Paris. He wanted to be in Paris with Cheryl, rolling around in clean hotel sheets. He wanted to drown himself in Cheryl, live on room service, climb the Eiffel Tower . . . Do they let you go all the way to the top? He didn't know . . . He wanted to eat oysters in a little French cafe. He wanted to watch Cheryl eat a Belon oyster, watch her tip back her head and slurp one down, a real one, too, not one of those sorry-ass fakes they raise up in Maine. He wanted to drink absinthe, whatever that was, and smoke stinky French cigarettes . . .

He wanted the chef to be there, too . . . He could show them around. Maybe the chef could get work at some fancy bistro, open all hours. He and Cheryl could drop by to see him. The chef would feed them late supper, a platter of those little birds, the ones you ate with the bones still in them, and truffles as big as your fist. . .

Far, far away from Sally. Far away from trash bags full of dead men.

He wanted to stand in front of a house with wood shutters and a red-tiled roof, squinting into the sun, waiting for Cheryl to take the picture.