THE ABSCONDER
Kenneth C. Crowe
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Kenneth C. Crowe
Books by Kenneth C. Crowe
AMERICA FOR SALE
COLLISION
THE JYNX
THE DREAM DANCER
THE HERO
THE ABSCONDER
This book is dedicated to
my wife, Rae Lord Crowe
and to
Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld
founders of the Innocence Project
CHAPTER ONE
OCTOBER 10, 1990
He went up the escalator rising past two flights of unrelieved crème-colored walls. After walking by the Quing Dynasty vases and bottles, he turned left through the hallway lined with prints then paused to look down on the sculpture gallery, a favorite place where he often sat on a bench to rest and watch the women. He savored the lovely ones. The East Side women, slender and well dressed, tasting culture before lunch. The French tourists. The ripe young college students with sketchbooks. The suburbanites in expensive cotton sweaters; the weather was still too warm for cashmere.
Just past the sign: Nineteenth Century European Painting and Sculpture, he turned right. He barely glanced at Rodin’s Pygmalion and Galatea, the perfect woman in marble. He went the length of the gallery crowded with quick scanners and serious art lovers to Salome. He walked around a woman working a pencil in a sketchbook; he had seen her here last Wednesday. Same woman, same spot. In her 50s, like him. A hard-faced woman, the corners of her mouth turned down, in a white turtle neck and denim casual shirt worn like a jacket over faded jeans. Her brown hair was pulled back, tied with a red ribbon, giving her an artificially high forehead. She walked with a limp. Her reappearance made him uncomfortable. He knew he was too insignificant a fish to rate an elaborate trap in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The cops would be more likely to try to pick him off the street or grab him in his bed in the middle of the night with as little fuss as possible. He scanned the gallery. No one suspicious. No fearful vibes passed through him.
He stepped to the woman’s left, positioning himself near the doorway just in case. He took out his small leather-bound notebook, a birthday gift last March from Phil, to record his impressions of the painting. Salome, her lips set somewhere between a near smile and a smirk, is seated on a folded oriental rug atop a green trunk inscribed with gold atop a leopard skin. She is draped in a golden diaphanous skirt and blouse, her left breast with a well-defined pink nipple and her heavy thighs showing through. These clothes, held in place by a golden clasp, could fall easily away leaving her dressed only in the snake bracelet on her upper right arm. Her right hand is on her hip. Her golden blouse is pink on the left side.
He wrote, “Why? A reflection of the setting sun or the blood from John the Baptist’s severed head?”
On her lap is a large golden bowl. Her left hand rests on an ivory-handled knife in an elaborately-decorated scabbard lying in the bowl. He was pleased with himself. The knife in the bowl hadn’t registered on him when he began studying the painting last week. He looked for more details. Her heels are raised high above her toes, which are lodged in slippers, black outside, red inside. Her cheeks are rosy.
“Rouged or flushed with the excitement of the dance and the deed?” He scribbled the question in his notebook.
The painting is signed HRegnault Rome 1870.
The woman with the sketchbook glanced at him catching the shift in his eyes from deep concentration to pleasure. A thrill passed through her. He had the most expressive eyes that she had ever seen. She had spotted him last week as she was leaving the museum and he was climbing the broad concrete steps, weaving through the tourists sitting and standing in conversational lumps. He wore a blondish handlebar mustache and long hair gone to gray, pulled back in a pony tail. On an impulse, she turned and followed him back into the museum, to a ticket booth, up the grand staircase to the second floor and to Regnault’s Salome. She studied him that day, wanting to approach him, but unable to step across the precipice of first contact with a stranger. She decided to let fate decide for her. Seven days later at approximately the same time, she had returned to the museum, and here he was. She turned on a smile, stepped towards him. With a noticeably deep breath, she offered him her gambit: “Has anyone ever told you that you have wonderfully interesting eyes?”
He looked at her, a quick examination. What did this dame want? Nothing of the cop about her, but he was poised to react.
“They just went from happy fascination to deep suspicion.”
“Yeah.”
She laughed extending her hand, “I’m Mary Hudson.”
“Chris.” He shook her hand.
“I saw you here last week and I said to myself, ‘Mary, this could be the right face. The mustache, the long hair, but most of all those expressive eyes.’ I came back again to be certain. I decided if you were here, we were destined to meet.”
“And here we are.” He nodded at her sketchbook. “You an aspiring artist?”
“No. I am an artist. Are you an art student?”
He chuckled holding up his notebook. “I’m a perennial student.” He snatched her sketchbook away from her. “Could I see your work?” A way of checking on her. He had his back against the wall. His eyes roamed across the throng of people. Some of them noticing him and the woman with a flicker of curiosity. No sign of danger. No tension anywhere but in Mary Hudson, who obviously didn’t enjoy having him grab her sketchbook.
Her words were laced with a controlled anger. “I would rather you saw the end product rather than the process.”
“You want to take me some place private to see your sketchings?” he said. There was amusement in his eyes now.
“In a way, this place is my place. I have a painting right here in the museum.”
“Yeah.” A word spoken with contemptuous disbelief. He paged through the pad. Several rough outlines of his face and eyes. He looked at her, anger in his eyes. “No one gave you permission to draw me.”
She tried to smile, suppressing the temptation to say, ‘Do you realize who I am?’ This clod would have no idea. “You’re interested in art. Let me show you my painting.”
“You really have a painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art?”
She smiled. She took her sketchbook back. “Come on.” She led him past the collections of European paintings to a crowded gallery in the American Wing. The poster advertised: New York Nudes of the Twentieth Century. They threaded through the crowd to the very end of the exhibit. They looked over the heads and shoulders of several people at a large painting, entitled Self Portrait, of a woman with a broad, soft body, a thicket of pubic hair, flabby breasts, and the remains of a waist. She holds a paintbrush in her left hand, a pallet smeared with a kaleidoscope of colors in her right hand. They waited until they could move close to the painting. She pointed to the signature on the painting. “Mary Hudson. Me.”
“You in the painting?”
“Me in the painting. Me the artist. One leg shorter than the other. Big nipples. On a high wooden table behind me within easy reach an open bottle of single malt Scotch, the cap lying beside it along with a low-ball glass containing a tiny pool of the golden liquid. American realism in action. Mary Hudson unveiled.”
Chris went through his process of examining the painting. First a fleeting look, then a search for details, considering the colors, the light, the expression on the artist’s face. He was about to say, You’re looking into a big mirror aren’t you, when he turned to see a grinning Martin Zelotovich coming towards him. He flinched. She had led him into a room that was a box. Trapped if Zelotovich had backups covering the one way in and the one way out of the room. The vein in his left temple throbbed. Sweat oozed from his palms.
“Mary Hudson,” Zelotovich said theatrically. He turned to the dozen people behind him, mostly middle-aged and elderly women. “Ladies and gentlemen, you’re lucky today. Right next to her own portrait is Mary Hudson, one of America’s greatest living artists.”
Chris stepped behind Mary and moved through the gathering of smiling faces out the door. Zelotovich obviously hadn’t recognized him. The 60’s hair style and the mustache gave him a different look, besides years had gone by. He weaved between clumps of museum visitors, husbands and wives, mothers and children, Japanese tourists with multilingual guides, into the lobby and out of the building.
Mary caught up to him as he was hurrying down the broad gray museum steps. “Chris,” she called, and he turned. She was breathing hard from the effort of chasing him. “You see, I’m not only an artist, I have a fan club.”
“Who was that guy?”
“A docent. Told him he had caught me at a bad moment. And I ran right after you. You’re a fast-moving man. I hope I didn’t embarrass him in front of his tour. But then, I hate wasting my time on people who know nothing about art and for the most part really care nothing about it.”
“Then who do you paint for?”
“The select few like you.” She put on a phony smile, an effort at appearing pleasant, a cover for the pain in her leg. “Let’s have lunch, shall we? I have a proposition for you.”
Mary said she had access to the Directors’ Dining Room, but neither of them would pass the dress code.
He wanted to get away from the museum and Zelotovich. “I know a place on Madison,” Chris said. They crossed Fifth Avenue under the warm October sun and passed into the shade of 81st Street.
“You live on the East Side?” she asked.
“No.”
“Where do you live?”
He stopped, considered her for a moment, and said: “Wherever I am.”
“Oh, a philosopher.” She continued walking with her mixed hobble and step.
He led her to into the Madison Bar & Grill set in the basement of a walkup. There was an old man, bald and skinny, reading the Daily Keys at a table in the back of the narrow wood-paneled room whose walls were lined with signed photos of baseball players and boxers from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Four men in suits were laughing and talking on barstools at the old wooden bar. While they were taking off their coats, they told the bartender that Mary wanted a scotch, straight up, with a hamburger, and Chris an Irish whiskey on the rocks, a hamburger and steak fries. “Coming right up folks. I’ll put the order right in.”
“Let me ask you something,” Chris said when they settled at a small table, waiting for their drinks and food.
“Oh,” she said widening her eyes. “I hope my answers are more forthcoming than yours.”
“What’s it all about? Art? You’re a woman who should know.”
“I could give you an easy answer and say art’s a three-letter word.”
“Some beatnik said that.”
“I’m very, very impressed. There’s more to you than your eyes.”
The bartender put their drinks in front of them. “Couple of minutes for the burgers.”
“Here’s to you,” Chris said, touching her glass with his.
“And to you.” She sipped her drink. “What is a work of art? It is something unique. For a painter, a vision transferred from her eyes through her brain through her brush onto a surface. Could be canvas or paper or wallboard. And that work changes you when you study it whether you know it or not. The impact I’m describing isn’t delivered to tourists walking through museums at ten miles an hour, then giving their focused attentions to the trinkets and reproductions in the gift shops.”
“I have the same notion. That’s why I decided to study Salome. I wanted to see what I could get out of a painting if I really put myself into it. Took notes. Thought about it.”
“Think of an onion when you look at a painting. The obvious meaning is the sweet, pretty lady, dressed in gold. Then start peeling away the layers and get into what the artist was thinking and what she did that was beyond her intent straight out of her subconscious. I’ll give you a layer of Salome to think about: Don’t judge a woman’s potential for danger by her looks.” She winked at Chris. “There is a passive innocence to her face; a pleasant set to her lips; her eyes are almost hidden by those waves of thick black hair you can almost feel. She makes me think of Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”
She had moved into Chris’ arena. He recited: “I met a lady in the meads, full beautiful. A fairy’s child. Her hair was long, her foot was light. And her eyes were wild.”
She reached across the small scarred oak table to place her hand on his. “You are marvelous. There are so many layers to you. I’ve just got to have you.” She paused. “As a model of course.” She laughed and the bartender, with a bottle of ketchup tucked under his arm, put their hamburgers on the table. “Do you have any mustard?” she asked.
“Coming right up.” He fetched a jar of mustard from a sideboard. “Enjoy,” he said to her.
“Give us another round,” Chris said. He waited until the bartender had departed. Was this a con? he wondered. No. He saw her self portrait in the museum. His immediate reaction of suspicion was replaced by the pleasure of the chosen.
“This will be an adventure for you. I’m going to take you to places you’ve never been.” She bit into her hamburger.
“You’re going to take me traveling?”
She laughed. “I meant psychologically. Spiritually. You’ll have fun doing it.” She took one of his steak fries, dipping it in his ketchup. Enjoying the Scotch, enjoying the hamburger slathered with mustard and ketchup. The narrow room was warm and friendly. The men at the bar were laughing. “I’m having a really good time,” she said, pausing then saying emphatically, “For the first time since Monday.”
“What happened Monday?”
“My fifty-fifth birthday. I realized that John Keats was 26 when he died, and Henri Regnault was 28. Each of them produced masterpieces in their short lives. I’ve lived longer than the two of them put together, and while I’ve done some pretty good work, I have yet to paint the best I can.”
“I’m 56. I’m a year older than you and I haven’t produced a goddamn thing.”
“Why you interest me Chris is because for the longest time I’ve wanted to do a pair of paintings, maybe the work should be called a duad or a dichotomy certainly too big for a diptych, centered on radically different facets of the same face. A work of art is a journey, Chris, and a masterpiece is an epic journey. When you begin you never know what your final destination will be. In a quagmire. Or on top of the mountain. This is Everest I’m talking about.”
“And all I have to do is stand there while you’re climbing the mountain to glory?”
“You want to understand art. Model for me and you’ll see the process from the inside. Besides, I’ll pay you. I’m not asking you to give me your time free.”
He looked into his glass. Only the remembrance of the whiskey on the ice and in the melted water. He was enjoying the life he lived, not wanting to change anything at the moment. “I have a motto. Carpe Occasionem. Seize the moment. When I’m ready for the moment that you’re offering me, I’ll give you a call.”
She fished into the big bag holding her sketchbook, coming up with a small silver case decorated with a butterfly. “Do you have a business card?” she asked.
He smiled at that. He shook his head, no.
She slipped two cards from the silver case. “One is for you. Write your name and phone number on the back of the other.” She gave him a pen.
He hesitated, then wrote his number at the Bog. He slid the card across the table. “Thanks for lunch.” He left her sitting in the booth, with the check.
CHAPTER TWO
Mrs. Baltic was sitting at her table under the discretely-lit oil portrait of Daniel O’Rorke, the founding father of Burty’s Bit o’ Green. Her two dogs, a Japanese Chin and a Shishatsu, were lying at her feet. She was passing time bent over the New York Post, her scalp showing through her thinning, wiry, red hair. Chris spotted her as he walked through the front door. She was early; usually the car service dropped her and the dogs around 8, a few minutes after he arrived for work. He went right behind the bar, snatched her favorite bourbon off the shelf, scooped ice into a shaker, poured in the Gentleman Jack, a little sweet vermouth and just a touch of bitters. Swirled the contents with a glass wand then dropped three maraschino cherries into one of Mrs. Baltic’s personal crystal glasses. He put the shaker and the glass on a small tray.
“Take off your jacket at least,” Burty the Third said to him. He was fuming, hating the presence of the dogs in the dining room, fear boiling in his gut that a city health department inspector would appear. That would cost him a $20 bill.
Chris said, “Don’t come down on me because you’re unhappy. Tell Mrs. Baltic to keep her dogs home.” He slipped off his bulky LL Bean parka then picked up the tray. He knew why Burty wouldn’t say anything to her. Mrs. Baltic had been coming to the Bog, as the regulars called Burty’s Bit o’ Green, twice a week for at least 50 years and when Burty the Third’s father, Burty the Second, ran into trouble with a loan shark sometime in the 1930s, the Baltics, Dr. and Mrs. Baltic, bailed him out with a no-interest loan. Those roots gave her privileges that couldn’t be denied, including her favorite table and the dogs. When Dr. Baltic was alive that was their table for a cocktail as a prelude to dinner at a nice restaurant or a Broadway show. Since he passed on in 1985, she came alone or with her dogs every Monday and Thursday for two hours, arriving around 8 and leaving around 10. She insisted that Chris prepare her two bourbon Manhattans, one when she arrived and the other halfway through her stay.
Burty’s lips tightened into a thin line. “Give your girlfriend her drink and get back here so I can go home.”
He smirked at Burty. His girlfriend! She was a lonely old lady with all of the afflictions of the old: slightly stooped from osteoporosis, hard of hearing, tending to drift into sleep--even in public--forgetful, a thickened body, wrinkles. They had become friends. She enjoyed his banter, and often told him that she wished her divorced daughter in Vermont could find a man like him. A real man.
Mrs. Baltic folded the newspaper as he approached. “Are you okay, hon?”
He smiled erasing the bleak expression of his leftover anger at Burty. He leaned close to Mrs. Baltic: “Love has gone and left me. And the days are all alike.”
“Her name is on the tip of my tongue. The candle burns at both ends poet.”
“Very good, Mrs. Baltic. Edna St. Vincent Millay.”
“She raised her Manhattan to him: ‘But, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends. It gives a lovely light.’ Dr. Baltic loved her. He used to recite that all the time.”
“Gotta get going,” Chris said.
She knew from the rough edge to his voice and his crude language that he had missed the polish of college despite his repertoire of poems and impressive skills in reciting them. He reminded her of a young Irish thug she met in Greenwich Village when she first came to New York from Vermont with her dream of being a Broadway musical star. She could close her eyes and see him laughing standing naked over her or fully clothed in a pin-striped suit and spats at the bar of the speakeasy where they ate and drank on almost every night of their month-long courtship that ended when he left and never came back. She sipped her Manhattan. “You’ve got a great presence, Chris. I could imagine you whispering romantic lines to a mature, beautiful woman in a play or a film. Why are you still a bartender?” A question that she repeated to him periodically forgetting that she had asked it until he responded with his usual answer.
“I’ve ended up where my life has carried me, Mrs. Baltic.”
She overcame the surge of embarrassment at her faulty memory to say, “I see so much potential in you and I know what I’m talking about Chris.” Mrs. Baltic was fizzy with good cheer. Chris was glad for that. He dreaded the occasions when she ruminated about her stage career, an early start and an early retirement. She was on the stage at 17 in the “Greenwich Village Follies of 1921” snared Dr. Baltic’s heart when he saw her in “Artists and Models” in 1925, and was married to him within a year. Retired from show business at age 22. The doctor arranged for private tutors to get her a high school diploma then sent her to NYU for a degree. She later got a masters. Her life was spiced with theatre-going, museums, lectures, reading, and good restaurants. When the children came, she had help to ease the burdens of motherhood and domesticity. Yet sometimes she spoke with regret over failing to take Ginger Rogers’ path from New York musicals to Hollywood.
“Gotta get going,” Chris said. “I’ll be back to talk to you later.”
He worked pouring drinks, mostly whiskey on the rocks or pints of beer with occasional martinis and Margaritas, for the waitress covering the small dining room and for the customers at the bar, a mix of men and women, half of them regulars, filling every stool, leaving some standing. At 9 o’clock, after making sure everyone at the bar had a drink, he brought Mrs. Baltic her second shaker of Gentleman Jack Manhattan with three maraschino cherries and a fresh glass to her table.
“Thank you, dear. This will help me sleep tonight,” she said. He sat for a while to tell her about his second trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art the day before. Mrs. Baltic had taken Chris to an off-off Broadway production in the East Village of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. The teenage Salome on the stage of the tiny theater, danced with her sweet young breasts, nipples erect, tantalizingly exposed and hidden by turns under whirling translucent purple veils. Temptation personified. Mrs. Baltic had been aroused by the dance of this wonderfully-talented nymphet, whose image replayed over and over in the air around her, on the street and in her bedroom. She would have been splendid in that role when she was a slender girl with a narrow waist and flawless skin. She regretted that Chris hadn’t seen her then. That thought prompted her to buy him a membership in the museum and to suggest that he use it to study Regnault’s Salome for insights into two very different artists dealing with the same subject.
Chris talked of his first impression of the painting, seeing a pretty innocent girl with a fulsome head of thick black hair, who looked like a gypsy in her loose, transparent skirt and blouse. Then he became aware of the knife and the bowl for transporting John the Baptist’s head and he understood the title, Salome. He told her that he had met an artist who had a painting in the museum, a nude of herself, and seemed as fascinated by Salome as he. Seeing a flicker of jealousy pass across Mrs. Baltic’s face, Chris said the artist was thick bodied and austere. No lipstick or makeup. A washerwoman hairdo. No great beauty. A fresh customer strolled into the bar giving Chris the excuse to break away from her.
At 10 o’clock Chris walked Mrs. Baltic to the waiting car, giving her a kiss on the cheek as she slipped him her usual $10 tip.
Back inside the Bog, one couple lingered at a table in the dining room and the bar was down to half a dozen men. The writers from the New York Daily Keys would begin filtering in about half an hour to bring the Bog back to life with laughter and stories about the stories they had written.
CHAPTER THREE
Chris woke from his doze, warm and comfortable in his bed, to the sound of rain beating on the window. He heard the door open and close, then Phil’s theatrically loud squeal of delight in finding the gifts. A bouquet of red roses on top of two packages, wrapped in lavender with white satin bows. He picked up the remote on the night table to turn on the stereo. A Phil Coulter tape. Minutes dragged by. He was tempted to get up, but wanted her to come to him.
Phil danced through the bedroom doorway, swirling the sheer golden silk scarf around her naked body, waving the flowers gracefully, high above her head. She was wearing the cultured pearl necklace. The scent of her perfume filled the room. And just as he had imagined, Phil was using his three gifts to bring him pleasure. The flowers and the necklace were suggestions from Trish Cavallo, the Daily Keys columnist. They were easy. He went to Macy’s for the pearls. They were on sale. He went out this morning to a florist on 31st Street under the el for the roses. He searched for the scarf through Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s and half a dozen small shops until he found the perfect golden cloth at a surprisingly low price in a store on Second Avenue selling imports from India. Salome had inspired that gift.
“Happy birthday,” he said, throwing back the covers.
“Oh, is that for me too?”
He laughed. She knew exactly what to say, what to do. He had a desire, Phil anticipated it and satisfied it. Trish had asked him whether the gifts were for a woman he was just screwing or a woman he was making love with. He hesitated, never before considering the difference. “I’m asking do you love her?”
“Yes I sure do,” he said after another long pause.
Trish laughed and knocked back her scotch. “Whether you love a woman or not, the answer would be the same. Pearls and flowers are always a sure bet. You’ll get an extra good bang out of your woman every time with flowers or pearls. But put them together and what do you get? Wow!”
Phil was skinny, with small, nice breasts, bony hip bones and a slight belly. She had bleached blonde hair, dark skin, and light brown pubic hair. Her backside was her best feature, in and out of clothes. Without make up, and she rarely wore any coming to his bed, there was a mannish toughness about her, a product of what she thought had been a hard life. Widowhood at 36, working as a waitress to support her two children in her father-in-law’s Greek restaurant on Steinway Street. This morning, her hair was done. She was in makeup, her eyes darkened, rouge over a base, lipstick. Her nipples painted red. She was beautiful.
After making love, just before drifting into sleep, Chris whispered to Phil, “I love you.”
“Another birthday gift,” she said, nuzzling against his neck, “and I love you and always will.”
She was 38 today. He was 56 last March. An age span of 18 years, which they never discussed and didn’t seem important in the context of their love making.
***
Chris fell almost immediately into a familiar dream: He is dancing down a cell-lined hall singing, “I’m off to see the Wizard.” Hughie Monaghan and Butch O’Brien, dressed in black, heads shaved, lips pressed tightly together, are walking side by side towards the room with the electric chair. Chris stops, turns. He yells after them. “They’re killing me too. A little at a time.” They ignore him. The executioner has stepped out of the little room, arms crossed, waiting. He can barely make out the man’s features. Is that Red Kearney? Chris continues down the hallway, no longer singing, no longer dancing, head bowed, sobbing.
***
He awoke, still sobbing.
“Are you alright, honey?”
“Yeah,” he said embarrassed by his display of weakness.
“I suppose you’re not going to tell me about the dream?”
“No.” He lit two cigarets.
“Maybe I could help you, you know, if you told me about it? Maybe you should see a shrink? They specialize in what haunts people.”
“I know what the dream’s all about. Regret for something that ate up a big piece of my life.” He thought about Hughie and Butch while he smoked. He had never forgotten the newspaper accounts of their last meals: pork chops, French fries, salad, apple pie a la mode and coffee for lunch. Their last suppers: Steak, baked potato, peas, chocolate cake, and tea. Could they sit in their cells and enjoy eating meals like that with death waiting down the hall? Maybe you don’t believe they’re really going to put you in the chair until they do. Butch said at the end, “God knows I’m innocent.” That bothered Chris. Why would he say that?
“My mystery man,” Phil said. “You know, we talk all the time, but you never told me where you got that.” She ran a finger along the ragged white scar on his left side. “Or this.” She stroked the tattoo in faded black lines of the Peregrine falcon talons on the attack with a stream of blobs representing blood and the pieces of a snake flying behind. She touched his left shoulder. Another tattoo: the I Ching hexagram for Strategic Withdrawal.
He swung his legs onto the floor, sitting with his back to her, not answering. The tattoo on his chest recounted a moment in his years locked in Auburn State Prison. He was the falcon. The snake was Les Owens, the black jocker, who made the fatal mistake of trying to turn Chris into a queen just to show how bad a dude he was. Chris and his mentor, Lew Tieh, were walking together when Owens moved into his attack. Tieh sensed the danger and turned with a defensive maneuver that deflected the thrust of the shiv. The homemade weapon gouged a piece of flesh out of Chris’ side. In a fury of combat, Chris grasped Owens by the throat in a grip that lasted only seconds, cutting off the flow of blood to his brain and life from his body.
The screws found Owens dead where he fell and Chris standing in his cell, soaked with his own blood. He said he didn’t see who stabbed him. The shiv Owens had used was gone, disappeared into the prison. They questioned Tieh, knowing that he and Chris were seldom apart. He didn’t see anything either. The prison doctor sewed up the wound and in the morning, Chris was transferred to Attica and Tieh to Dannemora. Had Owens been a white man the screws might have made an effort to pin the killing on Chris. He saw a balance. Sometimes they framed you, sometimes they let you go. Whatever was convenient. He was left with a lingering sense of the loss of Tieh and the shame of snuffing out another man’s life. The memory of killing Owens had clung to him, a ghostly elemental that whispered in his ear from time to time, asleep or awake, “murderer.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Rag’s all-night restaurant, breakfast 24 hours a day, had a lonely feeling at a quarter to five in the morning. The street outside, under the el, was dark, lit only by the restaurant’s neon and the pale yellow light of a tired streetlamp. Chris parked right outside the front door. That didn’t happen very often, but he was earlier than usual. He had found a parking place next to the Bog when he went to work that evening, and the traffic over the 59th Street Bridge coming back into Queens was sparse. The only customers in the restaurant were a pair of Daily Keys delivery drivers, who were regulars, sitting at the counter chatting.
Chris stopped at Rag’s two or three times a week on the way home from work. The coffee was good. He always ate breakfast at the restaurant on Tuesday and Friday mornings so the kitchen wouldn’t be a mess when Phil came upstairs. She liked a clean house, and could get nasty if the stove had grease spots or the kitchen floor was speckled with crumbs. He took a small table towards the back of the restaurant away from the door and the cold that other customers would bring with them.
“Coffee, hon?” the waitress asked. She was a puffy woman with bags under her eyes in a pale pink dress with a full white apron and a matching lacey cap. She carried a Pyrex pot of black coffee and a long, laminated menu. She had been taking his breakfast orders for months, but still went through the routine of asking if he wanted coffee and offering him a menu.
“I need coffee, but I don’t need a menu. Let me have the French toast and sausage links. With maple syrup. Please.” Sometimes he ordered eggs over light with home fries and sausage; once in a while a cheese and onion omelet.
She wrote the order on a green pad. “No orange juice this morning?”
“No thanks.” He never ordered the orange juice.
He enjoyed sitting alone at this old Formica table sipping the hot coffee that radiated through his body. He studied the signs over the counter: The Big Man/four eggs lottsa bacon/toast/all the coffee you can drink/$2.09. The pancake special with sausage and bacon/$2.09. New York Strip steak—best in Queens--with French fries and Greek salad/$14.75. A cop came in for a container of coffee and a Blueberry Danish to take out to his patrol car. A big grey garbage truck, headlights bouncing, rumbled by outside on 31st Street. Going too fast.
The waitress brought his order along with the coffee pot to refill his cup.
“Not much action,” Chris said.
“Wait till 6 o’clock. They come in droves. All at once.”
“That’s what you want.” Chris poured the faux maple syrup on his French toast, taking care to avoid the three sausage links placed in an arc at 12 o’clock on the heavy diner China plate. The food made the coffee taste even better.
A little after 6, Chris was in the heavy green easy chair in his living room reading B. Traven’s The Treasure of Sierra Madre for the third time. He had seen the movie when he was a kid, and read the book twice, in Auburn and in Attica. Still dark outside. The sky was clear. Traven was a mystery man on the run from something. He got beyond the reach of whatever was after him in Mexico. Chris doubted if anyone were chasing him, but his quandary was he could never get into trouble with the law or his mask would be stripped away. That’s how absconders like him got caught. They weren’t run to earth; they stumbled back into the maws of the law. He was never going back to prison again. That was the one certainty of his life.
He changed into his exercise clothes: sweatpants, a t-shirt, windbreaker, white socks and running shoes. The sun was shining, promising a beautiful October morning. He walked on the sidewalk to 20th Avenue, then stepped past a parked car to jog in the road, running in place twice as cars pulled out of side streets, he moved past the Con Ed power plant, waving to the rent-a-cops on the gate, to Shore Boulevard into Ralph DeMarco Park, a narrow strip of lawn, trees, a few decorative lampposts and curving concrete paths on the east shore of the East River. He ran into the park onto the path closest to the dark, fast-moving river. He looked towards the New York skyline, the Empire State Building, Citibank’s triangle and an irregular ridge of nondescript high rises, a view intersected by the arch of the Hell’s Gate railroad bridge and beyond by the long span of the Triboro Bridge. When he reached the end of the small park, he turned back, walking to his favorite spot, a small flat patch of lawn within an open triangle of trees. He stood, feet spread to shoulder width, hands at his side. He faced north, took five deep breaths and moved into the tai chi chuan forms, performing them slowly with a detached grace.
He walked back to the house on the sidewalk, past several blocks of shoulder to shoulder one-car garages with large brown doors set in cream-painted columns and yellow brick walls. He waved to the UPS man who plied the neighborhood in his boxy brown truck, to the letter delivery lady in her grey uniform, a young mother with two children in a stroller. He seemed to float in an ecstasy of happiness. Life had become very good. Phil. The Bog. The joy of sunny days, rainy days, occasional snow, biting winds, hot mornings, cold mornings in the park and on the street.
Phil was waiting in his bed when he got back to the house. He bent over her, kissing her left breast. “It must be Friday,” he said, shucking his sweats and underclothes.
“Take your shower.”
He showered and perfumed himself. He slipped under the covers to the warmth of her body.
Afterwards when they smoked their usual post-coital cigarets, she asked him, “Chris, what does a man want in a woman?”
“What you are is what I want.”
“I don’t mean you. I know what you want. A good lay.”
“That’s not true. You’re much more than that to me. I told you I love you.”
“And what do we do together, other than go to bed?”
“I want to do more. You’re the one who wants us to be a secret.” He wondered what this was about? Phil could shift so quickly from being wildly alive to glum. Usually because of some dumb remark of his.
“My father-in-law would kill you, kill me, if he ever found out about us. You don’t understand about how the Greeks feel about their women.”
“I know I’m a lot older.”
She cut him off. “I don’t want to be cruel Chris, but what have you got, another four or five good years left in you, you say so yourself, then you’re into your 60s and I’d be your nurse. You’re not going anywhere Chris. You’ve got no money. I’ve got years ahead of me. I’ve got two kids. I’ve got to think of them.” She was crying. “I really wanted to ask you, but I didn’t know how, whether you think a successful, educated man would want me? I’ve got two kids. I never graduated from college. Not many more years and I’ll be sagging.”
“Did you meet someone else? Is that what this is all about?”
“Two weeks ago, I went to that party at my sister’s house out in Plainview. There was this lawyer there. His sister lives next door to my sister. He’s a widower with a little kid. He’s a great dancer. He took me out on my birthday, Tuesday night.”
“We made love Tuesday.”
“That’s the trouble. I went to bed with him Tuesday night too. It wasn’t very good, not like with us.”
He felt a searing pain in his stomach. “Maybe he’ll get better with practice.”
She put her arms around him, kissing his lips and eyes, her tears wetting his cheek.
He started to take her arms away, then stopped. If he did that, she could be gone forever. “I don’t want to lose you,” he said hugging her, kissing her.
“I felt like I was cheating on you, Tuesday night.”
“Maybe that’s why you didn’t enjoy it.”
“Maybe,” she said.
She got dressed in silence. He lay there without speaking, lost in sadness.
CHAPTER FIVE
Trish Cavallo, the Daily Keys columnist, came in a little after 11 with Tom Manion, her boyfriend, a bearded, roundish, public relations man with wiry brown hair who organized the annual Media Versus The Moguls softball game in Central Park on the third Sunday of September. He used invitations to play to leverage his connections to clients and the city’s journalists. In addition, the very favored were invited to his place in the Hamptons for a weekend or given use of his house in the far reaches of Ireland’s Donegal. Manion slapped the bar: “Barkeep! Two double scotches with just a scent of water for two thirsties.”
“Got something for you,” Trish said holding up a brochure.
“Right.” Chris turned to the top shelf for the Dewar’s. He poured the whiskey into two crystal lowball glasses from a set of eight kept for Manion and his guests in a red velvet-lined box with the Manion coat of arms on its cover. He measured a teaspoon of spring water for each glass. He put them on the bar in front of Trish and Manion, then fetched two stirrers and a small bowl of ice. Manion was a regular held in high regard by Burty the Third. He brought celebrities for drinks and parties. Burty often said, “Manion’s a man who makes the cash register ring.” Chris didn’t like Manion, and was disappointed that Trish did.
“To the best woman a man ever met,” Manion said touching her glass with the slightest clink.
“To a connoisseur,” she said, and laughed. Trish sparkled when she laughed.
Chris stood behind the bar listening to their familiar exchange. Trish was slender in an athletic way, a brunette with no gray despite being in her early 50s; she had a youngish face with high cheekbones and olive skin. A Mediterranean cast like Phil’s. She was nearer his age, but out of his reach. He had tried. But he was on the wrong side of the bar, and without an expense account.
“You’re looking gloomy tonight,” Trish said to Chris. She felt uncomfortable with his hovering. Usually Chris moved down the bar giving Manion and her space and privacy.
“You said you brought me something.”
“Oh yes.” She held up the brochure with a photo of a long white yacht set against an azure sea, a sky with puffy white clouds, and a huge ghostly figure of an ancient bearded warrior in Greek armor shielding his eyes from the sun. In the wake of Aeneas was printed in large red letters across the lower part of the brochure. She unfolded it on the bar to display a long map with a dotted line connecting the site of ancient Troy on the coast of Turkey across the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas to Carthage near Tunis in North Africa. “I was doing a column on a travel agent who specializes in yacht vacations, and I got this for you.”
He glanced at the brochure, scanning the map finding Sicily, and recited: “They were all under sail in open water; With Sicily just out of sight astern, Lighthearted as they plowed the white-capped sea.”
She clapped. “Isn’t he just marvelous.”
“Amazing. I salute you,” Manion said raising his glass to Chris.
“Someday I’m going to write a column about this astounding bartender who comes up with just the right lines every time.”
“Please don’t.”
“What’s that from the Iliad or the Aeneid?”
“From the loser’s perspective, Virgil’s Aeneid, or I should say, Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Aeneid.”
“How could you possibly memorize all the poems you know?”
“Some men spend their time handicapping horses, I focus on poetry.” The convict in Jack London’s The Star Rover was his model. That poor lonely son of a bitch, wrapped in a straitjacket in the hole, escaped madness by projecting his soul across time into his previous lives. The Aeneid was Chris’ wormhole to another existence. He escaped madness and dullness by memorizing the entire epic, twelve books, in Latin. He started in the punishment box in Elmira Reformatory where he was stashed for fighting off a ferocious beast who wanted to turn him into a sissy. He fought him with an insane fury, smashing his nose with an elbow, poking out his right eye, and slamming his head against the floor cracking his skull. Chris came out of it with broken teeth that bothered him for years and a torn lip that healed with a small reminiscent lump. There wasn’t much light in the box. Just barely enough to see a line at a time. He rested his eyes as he memorized. In later trips to the hole, in Auburn and in Attica, he sang the lines aloud. He sounded like a mumbler to the guards on his journey to the stars. Spouting Virgil’s Latin was too pretentious so he fell back on favorite lines from Fitzgerald’s fluid translation to entertain the Bog’s customers.
Manion tapped the map with his left forefinger. “What a great adventure this would be. We could do a foursome. Trish and me and you and your wife or girlfriend or significant other. She tells me you’re always talking about retracing Aeneas’ steps.”
“One of my dreams.”
“Here it is buddy. Only $7,500 a head to live a dream.” He turned the brochure over. “They only need 14 passengers and off they go. Gourmet meals, wine, champagne. Swimming in the blue, blue sea. Sunbathing on secluded little beaches for consenting adults.” He winked at Chris, a sordid signal that promised Trish and other naked women on warm brown sands.
“I could go for a bit of that,” Trish said.
So could Chris. He had never seriously considered visiting Troy and Carthage, walking in the footsteps of Aeneas. He identified with the aspect of the Trojan hero forced to flee from defeat, to track across hostile and unfamiliar terrain. He had almost $6,000 stashed in cash to finance another strategic withdrawal if he ever had to go that route again. Phil would love a trip like that if he could afford to take her, which he couldn’t. And, there was the fear and loathing factor. She would be afraid of her father-in-law’s reaction, and embarrassed to be with so old a man. Chris broke away from Trish and Manion moving down the bar to refill a customer’s glass with beer from the tap. He kept busy mixing drinks, doing paperwork, talking to other regulars until they finished lingering over their scotches and waved good night.
Trish left the brochure on the bar, next to Manion’s $2 tip.
CHAPTER SIX
Chris unlocked his front door, and immediately knew someone was in the apartment. His heart fluttered. He took five deep breaths. Stood very still, listening. Someone was in the bedroom. He closed and latched the front door. That would slow down anyone behind him. His escape route was through the bedroom window onto the tin roof over the back porch and up onto the roof of the house, and a straight run across the roofs of the connected houses to 21st Avenue. Whoever was in the house was between him and that window. He was confident he could take down a burglar, especially a kid. If it were the cops, he was in trouble. They would be there in force. At least two in the bedroom, others coming out of hiding in the hallway on the other side of that locked door. He would confront the problem, and deal with it. He slipped into the bedroom, poised for combat.
In the yellow glow from the streetlight, he could see her outline, the blonde hair on the pillow, the covers wrapped around her shoulders. Phil. He looked down at her. This was the first time that he ever come home from work to find her in his bed. This would be what marriage was like, or at least living together. He quietly stripped off his clothes. He bent over her, kissing her gently on the mouth. She opened her eyes. She smiled. “That was nice. I must have fallen off. I wanted to surprise you.”
“You did.” He slipped under the covers, taking her in his arms, kissing her on the lips and neck, feeling the inviting warm of her body.
She shivered. “Oh, you are so cold.”
He slipped down between her legs redolent with the scent of her perfume. She moaned, whispering, “You’re driving me crazy. I can’t move too much, the kids are downstairs.” He continued, flickering his tongue then driving it deep inside of her. She sobbed with pleasure, staying rigidly still. Just as he was ready to move up to enter her, she said, “Make love to me. Please. Now! I can’t wait.” The bed squeaked under them and as she reached her peak, she jack hammered her hips lifting him up and down, too excited to be concerned about quiet. When she was finished, he rolled off her onto his back. He was panting from the effort, laughing with pleasure.
She turned to him. “I love you.”
He drew her to him; “I love you too,” he said.
“I had to tell you I loved you. I couldn’t eat supper, I couldn’t study, I couldn’t even watch TV. I was awake all night thinking about you, how much I hurt you, afraid I wouldn’t see you again.” She squeezed him in her arms. “I love you. Never doubt that. I thought I loved Al until I met you. Last night, just the thought of losing you made me realize what real love was all about.” She had married Al right after high school, both were 17 about to be 18, and she was pregnant. By the time he got himself killed by a tractor-trailer speeding through a red light on Ditmars Boulevard on the night of the drunken celebration of his 36th birthday, Al regularly seethed with an anger that lasted for days at a time over the entrapment of marriage; their sexual encounters had become perfunctory. He left her with two almost grown children, a son and a daughter, the house paid up because of the wisdom of mortgage insurance, in-laws who disliked her, and the prospect of a juicy settlement someday from the trucker’s insurance company. Within a year of the funeral, Phil, who continued to wait tables in Al’s family’s restaurant, was registered at Hunter College, where her daughter was matriculating, taking two classes a week towards a degree in Communications, and she was experiencing an unanticipated sexual adventure with Chris, the tenant from upstairs.
Chris fell into a deep sleep, not even stirring when Phil got dressed and left for the bakery to buy fresh rolls and a pecan raisin coffee cake for her children’s breakfast.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Chris looked across Federal Plaza in downtown New York, just north of City Hall and opposite the Manhattan and U.S. District Court Houses, searching for Lew Tieh in the large flat space on which more than 100 men and women, most Chinese, some Caucasians, moved through the graceful tai chi chuan forms in silence, each performing the ritual as though alone. Chris walked the perimeter of the plaza then across it at a 45-degree angle examining the devotees.
Almost two years ago, Chris had been strolling past Federal Plaza, en route for dim sum in Chinatown with a recent divorcee after an exhilarating night together when he glimpsed a little old man presiding over four students, three Chinese youths and an American woman. He left his companion on the edge of the plaza, hurrying forward. “Tieh,” he called.
The master and his students ignored him, continuing through the ancient patterns with Chris standing disappointed for a moment before returning to his puzzled companion. “What was that all about?” she asked.
“I thought I saw an old friend.”
She was irritated. “You just walked away from me like I didn’t matter. Don’t ever do that to me again.”
“Sorry. I was so surprised at seeing him, I just forgot everything else. He must be 90 now. I just never expected to see him again.” He knew instantaneously that he had offered the wrong answer. She was a self-centered woman, who in the thrall of sex had opened herself to him, weeping with joy, telling him her ex-husband and other lovers paled in comparison to his performance.
She had begun coming to the Bog on a nightly basis for the past month, joking with him, enjoying his poetry. Last night, she stayed until closing, and invited him to her place in Brooklyn Heights. He had napped for a few hours after they fucked, then showered, and accepted her suggestion of a romantic walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on a lonely Sunday morning to breakfast in Chinatown.
She wasn’t willing to put his innocent distraction behind her. She stood with her fists on her hips, confronting him, “I told you, I’ve had it up to here with men who use me. I thought you were different. Never again is my motto.”
He had enjoyed her so much, her screams of pleasure, that he anticipated a return to her bed after the dim sum and then sleep until he had to go back to work. He didn’t want to lose her this morning over a misunderstanding. “I’m sorry. Take me to your dim sum place and let’s enjoy the rest of the morning together.”
She stood with her head bowed, deciding. “Okay,” she said after a while.
They went, side by side without speaking or touching, to a walkup restaurant on Mulberry Street. They ate in silence. The magic gone. She fumed over his insult. Chris remained distracted, his mind on Tieh. He hadn’t seen him for 27 years since the day they transferred him to Attica and Tieh to Dannemora. Feb. 2, 1963, the day after he crushed Les Owens’ throat. Tieh was the master who put him on the path of tai chi chuan. That journey started the day Tieh sat down beside him in the mess hall in Auburn to whisper, “I have a Chinese antidote to fear and boredom and loneliness.” Chris listened because this was an old con with a reputation. This skinny little Chink, in for murder, seemed to have eyes in the back of his head. The story was that when a crazy went after him, he easily eluded every frantic slash of the shiv until the man dropped to the floor in exhaustion. When a gang encircled the Chink in the showers to punish him for some imagined slight, he pummeled and bloodied six muscular cons, fracturing one’s skull against a grey tiled wall, without losing his breath. Then he finished his interrupted weekly shower and went quietly to the hole for 90 days. Tieh taught him the 120 forms that brought inner peace, calm and elusiveness in response to attack, and patience.
She signaled the waiter for the tab. He watched as she produced a Gold American Express card. She stared into his eyes, deep breaths flaring her nose. The waiter returned with the charge form. She signed it. Held up the receipt. “You were worth it. No need to see me home.”
No encore, he thought. He took the subway to Brooklyn to fetch his car near her apartment.
The following Sunday, and many a Sunday morning since, skipping the rainy, snowy, bitter cold, or extraordinarily hot days that New York weather delivers, Chris returned to Federal Plaza executing what had become a ritual of encircling the space, walking across it, and then floating through the tai chi chuan forms with a dreamy grace, performing the dance as a tribute to his ancient master, hoping that Tieh would come forward to embrace him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mrs. Baltic and two women, one younger than the other, came into the Bog just before 11 into the midst of an impromptu going away party for a minor Daily Keys editor who was jumping to New York Newsday for more money and to escape the stress of the ugly atmosphere in the newsroom on 57th Street. Four dozen reporters, editors, and photographers from the Daily Keys, along with a few others from the New York Post, Newsday, and the New York Times and a half dozen off-duty cops, each with a beer or whiskey were crowded along the bar with some in a lump around Mrs. Baltic’s favorite table listening with guffaws and wisecracks to Tom Manion singing Danny Boy.
Chris shrugged his shoulders in apology. No way he could chase the partiers away from Mrs. Baltic’s special spot. Instead, he moved drinks and people around to open three bar stools for Mrs. Baltic and the others whom he recognized from the framed family pictures on the grand piano in her apartment. Photos of the women at various stages of their lives alone and with one another, with friends and family, some with Mrs. Baltic, some with the late Dr. Baltic