Tours of the Black Clock (11 page)

“Go upstairs,” Doggie just says, somewhere between a whisper and a croak.

Some time later I’m upstairs in his office and he comes in. I’m looking out his windows at the city trying to see the things I once saw. “You’ve got to get out of here,” he says the moment he walks in. He says it calmly and insistently, without panic. I won’t be back, I tell him. He says, “I don’t mean the club, I mean you’ve got to get out of the city, you’ve got to get out of the country. You could go to Canada but those guys will follow you to Canada. Better South America.”

South America? What will I do in South America?

“I can’t see you again, kid,” he says. He pulls from his desk a wad of cash and peels me out five hundred dollars, just like that. I don’t want it, I tell him, but he shakes his head. “This is business,” he says, “this is five hundred dollars that says I don’t see you again.” He pauses. “Killing blood, you don’t shake that. Killing a stranger, killing your enemy, that you shake
maybe
. But not blood.”

My blood
was
strange, my blood
was
the enemy.

“Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t,” he says, “I’m not passing judgment. Maybe your father is one son of a bitch, I don’t say he isn’t. All the more reason you’re not going to shake it, not without putting lots of places between you and the more the better. So here’s some funds, and here’s one more ride. Billy?” Billy comes in the door. He doesn’t even look at me. “You’re going to give the kid a ride,” Hanks says to him, “no funny stuff. Anywhere in New York City he wants to go, train station, the docks.
No funny stuff
.” Billy doesn’t do or say anything for a moment until he understands the boss expects an answer, and then he nods. I turn from the window to look at Hanks; the office seems dark and distant. My ears pound with time and momentousness. I ask if I can make a phone call.

When Kronehelm answers I say it’s time to relocate the business to homesoil after all. When I put down the phone and look up, Doggie’s nowhere to be seen. It’s just Billy leaning in the door waiting. No funny stuff, Doggie said, but Billy’s laughing just the same, all the way to Gramercy Park in the middle of the night.

“T
HE NEXT FORTY-EIGHT
hours are spent with Herr Kronehelm plotting my escape from America. He’s been taken by surprise at the new change in plans, and is still two weeks away from getting his own affairs in order before he can leave. I’ve made it clear that I can’t and won’t wait two weeks. In my head I have a whole scenario in which Johnson and Blaine show up sooner or later. My clothes in my apartment, my typewriter, my books and the money I stashed there the past year, all that’s lost now since I don’t dare take a chance going back there or sending anyone else. The five hundred bucks I didn’t want to take from Doggie Hanks I’m very happy to have, on further reflection, though it also feels something like a disgrace. Of course I don’t mention it at all to Kronehelm, rather I hit him up for an advance.

During the day Kronehelm’s arranging things with various people. He gets me passage on a cargo ship that’s disembarking tomorrow morning at dawn. His connections in Europe will have a visa waiting for me in Cherbourg when the ship arrives in about five weeks. From there I’ll get a train to Paris; from Paris a train to Vienna probably by way of Munich. Kronehelm’s translator will be waiting for me there; not long after that Kronehelm himself will arrive. It sounds like he’s got everything figured out. I suppose he believes I’ll be under tight rein, there in a strange city in a strange country. It’ll be just like right now, the two of us—well, I guess the three of us with the translator—sitting in a cozy apartment in Vienna where all the curtains are closed, shuffling around in bathrobes and creating the literature of love, gangsters and America. In the meantime here in New York City I peer through the curtains to the street below; there’s a jeweler’s shop, a diner, a little flower shop up at the corner of Third Avenue. No Johnson and no Blaine. In these forty-eight hours, the winter that’s hung back for almost a month arrives suddenly. Like a cat with a bird it takes autumn in its teeth and squeals with it, thrashes it against the ground until nothing’s left of it but blood and feathers. One miserable wind disperses the rest. A few hours later the windows form ice.

I have another eighteen hours of lying low.

Finally the time comes. It’s five in the morning, still the dead of dark, and Kronehelm rises from his bed to phone a cab. He gives me the name of the cargo ship’s captain, and then some money, most of it in Austrian schillings. I wait by the window watching for the cab that turns off Third Avenue and slows to a stop. There’s nothing I have with me except the clothes I’m wearing and the money in my pocket; Kronehelm stands in the dim light of the tablelamp clutching his robe around him. He looks stricken by the possibility of betrayal. Part of me would like to leave that look on his face, but the other part says to him, “See you in Vienna.” He’s reassured because he wants to be. I shake my head a little and I’m gone from him.

I get down to the street and in the cab. I’m looking over my shoulder all the time, up and down the street but not taking a lot of time about it. I have my eyes peeled for the little man and the big man. In the cab I take a good look at the driver, I don’t know him. He looks back and says hello or something. If he hadn’t looked back, if he hadn’t said anything or said it funny, I’d have waited till he got to around Park Avenue and then I’d have jumped from the cab and gotten another one. As it is, I don’t tell him right away where we’re going, just the general direction downtown. I leave myself as much time as I can to get out if I have to, and get to the harbor without anyone but me and Kronehelm and the captain knowing where I’m ending up.

We cross the Brooklyn Bridge to the Brooklyn Pier. It’s five forty-five, with the ship scheduled to leave in fifteen minutes. The dock’s cold and hard and an old warehouse to my left has crusted with ice during the night, ice hangs from the doors and the roof. At the end of the dock is the ship, it weaves in the sea. On deck someone’s standing, the captain maybe but more probably one of the hands. I pay the cabbie and he pulls away and I pull my coat up around me, and I move to the plank at the end of this time I am in. I’m about ninety seconds from the plank when Johnson and Blaine come around the corner of the warehouse.

I guess I feel both furious and relieved to see them. I don’t think I would have believed my own life if I hadn’t seen them again, I would have always thought they were going to turn up no matter where I was. And at this moment as they emerge from the warehouse I don’t have the slightest impulse to run from them as before; I’m even thinking maybe I’ll take them, or give it a good try. But then, you know, they spoil it, I mean with the gun and everything. And though I know, or at least I think I know, and they know I know that my father wants me back alive, I also have to figure that under no circumstances can they allow me to leave the country, never to be seen or found again, that’s just not going to be acceptable. If that means crippling or killing me, they’ll do that, I guess. I guess they will. And now I want the havoc, I could use it; but it isn’t there. Now I’m just trying to calculate my way onto that ship sometime in the next five minutes, because I don’t think the captain or anyone else on it is going to risk so much as a patch of time or flesh waiting for me to resolve my difficulties with the little man and the big man. When the hand comes up with the gun, I lurch to my left for the warehouse, into the nearest door.

The warehouse is nothing but crates stacked to the ceiling and rows of space between them. In my head I’m trying to figure how to lose them among the crates and then get to the ship. I hear one of them behind me. They’d just be waiting at the plank to cut me off if they were willing to risk losing me somewhere in New York City again, so I guess they intend to take me here; time’s against me. I know I’m not going to make it, it’s obvious I’m not. But the funny thing is I can see myself running up that plank; I’m already five minutes into the future, running up the plank and diving onto the ship. And for a split second I’m almost serene with this, and now I just follow this moment to come, follow it through the crates of the dark warehouse like following a string. This split second ends when I hear the shot and feel it by my face.

I’ve never heard or felt a gunshot this close. Not in all the time I was working for one of the city’s biggest gangsters. But then maybe that’s the measure of a good gangster, the measure of control. The sound of the shot is cold like the snap of a whip, even sharper in the cold air. But the smell has heat and it’s that heat that turns everything inside me, as though I’m going to be sick and have a bowel movement at the same moment, everything in me is at flashpoint, about to explode out both ends of me. To call it fear is to trivialize it. If one smells the flesh burning when the bullet hasn’t even entered it, what’s the smell when it has? I’m crashing among the crates now and I don’t see that five-minute future anymore, I can’t get the image of it in my eyes no matter how hard I look. The cold warehouse fills with echoes. I can’t tell which are mine, I can’t even tell which way I want to be going. I can’t tell who or what’s before or behind me.

And then he’s there. He just puts his hand out and I run into it, and I’m sprawling across the ground. He stands over me, his dull dead expressionless face in my face, inches from it; I can smell the bourbon from his pores and count the broken veins of his nose.

Everything in my head ends. I look over for a moment and can see the boat and the plank, can see the hands getting ready to pull the plank on board. The sun’s coming up now, its light is blue in the cold but gold on the sea. It’s all only ten seconds or so from me, I almost made it. I’m at the other end of the warehouse, me and Blaine. The only thing I can think of now is everything I said to him two nights ago. He’s thinking the same thing, and maybe he remembers better than I do.

He has my head in his hands, as though to do to it what I did to Henry’s. He’s thinking about his own joke, the one that’s been on
him
his whole life I guess, like the one that was on me when I was a boy on a farm. In the distance I hear Johnson calling. I hear them beginning to pull the plank. I hear the whistle of the boat and guys yelling instructions to each other. I hear gulls on the water. I’m waiting to hear the big man with my head in his hands tell me he got the joke, and tell me here’s the monster everyone always said he was, here it is, and then there’ll be a slosh inside my head and that’s all. I’m thinking for a moment, still scheming for a moment, how far away Johnson is and how if I were to cry out now, maybe Johnson would get here and stop Blaine from killing me; but that seems like a long shot. I can’t imagine getting much sound out of my head before Blaine would cave in its walls.

Blaine takes his hands from me. He says, “Go on.”

For a moment, for several moments in fact, I don’t understand exactly what he’s telling me.

“Go …
on
,” he says, and looks at the boat, and back at me.

It’s a plan, is all I can think. He can’t explain killing me with his bare hands but they can explain shooting me to keep me from getting on board the boat.

Johnson’s still calling. Blaine looks over his shoulder in the direction of Johnson’s voice, and turns back to me and nothing in his expression, as ever, has changed.

I go.

I scramble to my feet and run. I wave to the hands on deck, the plank slides back to the ground. I wait to hear the shot. I wait to smell the heat that will send everything in me exploding out. But all I hear are the gulls and the whistle, and the crash of my feet up the wet icy plank. I dive onto the ship. I lay there some minutes, the deck freezing up into my back, foreigners standing around laughing down at me. When I pull myself up to peer over the railing, we’ve already started to move. The land’s sliding through my hands on the rail, and the new violated water’s hissing in my face.

Johnson’s on the dock already getting smaller. I can barely hear him over the sound of the water and the engines of the boat churning beneath me. He’s stamping his foot, any second he’s going to throw his hat on the ground and jump on it. Blaine stands behind him in the doorway of the warehouse; his hands are in his pockets and he’s not really looking anywhere at all. I stand there on the side of the ship wanting him to look my way once, wanting just to catch his eye before he’s out of sight and it’s too late.

But I won’t catch his eye, he won’t look my way. I won’t get that last chance to say something to him, he’s going to have the last word. It’s part of the price I pay that he will have the last word. He’s just a lug anyway, anyone can tell that. Not the brains of the operation.

We leave the harbor, the city lasts another hour of my life. The sea lasts a month and a half. In that time the year turns. My life to come will see it turn many times, before I see this city and this hour again.

T.O.T.B.C.—6

A
VISA WAITS FOR
me in Cherbourg as planned. As planned I take the train to Paris and there spend four freezing bewildered days. I don’t feel any rush to get to Vienna, at this point all these places sound the same to me: places for a tourist. “A hell of a time to be going
there
,” people say to me. I don’t know what they’re talking about. “Anyway,” advises a guy I meet in the American Express, “at least go by way of Zurich. Not Munich.” Is there a difference? I ask. “Yeah,” he answers, “one of them has Germans.”

The train to Vienna by way of Zurich has no heat. I’m in a car with three Spanish girls who live in Vienna and spend Christmas in Paris with one of the girl’s families; they’re exiles at least until the civil war ends. Their families have enough money that the three girls can afford to live and look like bohemians. They speak every language within a thousand miles except English. I can’t make up my mind if I prefer their company or not, it’s just less room to sprawl. But when the cold really settles in around one in the morning, no one’s sprawling anyway. I doze fitfully, waking on and off into the night to find, around an hour before dawn, two of them huddled against me in their sleep.