Ed McBain - Downtown (29 page)

youngsters walked out--the girl dressed as

441 a somewhat precocious Dorothy in a pleated skirt that showed white panties and half her ass, the boy wearing a gray suit and a funnel on his head. Both were wearing grins that indicated they'd been allowed to meet the Wizard and all their wishes had been granted. On the line, all faces turned expectantly toward Curly, who was now parading the sidewalk like a judge at a dog show. He chose two people at random, pressed a button that snapped the doors open again, and, with a surly nod, admitted the couple. The girl was dressed as a Munchkin with a frizzed blonde hairdo. The boy was wearing blue jeans and a long cavalry officer's overcoat. Apparently, then, admission to the club was not premised on fidelity to the film. The doors swung shut again. The sound of music was replaced by the keening of the wind blowing in fiercely off the Hudson. Nobody on the line complained, not even the kids standing at the head of it. This was simply the way it was. Curly decided who would go in, Curly decided who would stand out here in the cold. Nor was there any way of knowing upon which criteria he premised his choice. Either you waited for his approving nod or you went home with your dreams. That was it, and this was Oz, take it or leave it. Michael walked over to where Curly was disdainfully glaring out over the crowd. "Mama's expecting me," he said. Curly looked him over. "Expecting _who?" he said. "Silvio," Michael said. "Silvio who?" "Just say Silvio." "Mama ain't here yet." "I'll wait. Inside." Curly hesitated. "Push your button," Michael said.

Curly shrugged. But he pushed the button. The panels sprang open. Connie and Michael stepped together into the interior of the jewel, and were immediately inundated by a mortar explosion of battering sound and emerald-green light. The place was thronged with Tin Men, Cowardly Lions, Flying Monkeys, Dorothys, Wicked Witches, Munchkins, Wizards, Glindas, Scarecrows, and even ordinary folk. Green smoke swirled on the air. Bodies

twisted on the small dance floor. On

443 the bandstand, five blond men wearing black leather trousers, pink tank-top shirts, and long gold chains played guitar and electric-keyboard backup to a young black woman standing at the microphone and belting out a song that seemed to consist only of the words "Do me, baby, do me good" repeated over and over again. She had a big, brassy gospel singer's voice. She was wearing brown high-heeled boots and what appeared to be draped animal skins. The thudding of the bass guitars sounded like enemy troops shelling the perimeter. The room reverberated with noise, skidded with dazzling light. Out of the deafening din of the music and the refracted green glare of the lights and the dense hanging fog of smoke, a young man in a red jacket materialized.

"Sir?" he asked. "Did John admit you?"

He looked extremely puzzled. Had the system somehow broken down?

"Mama's expecting me," Michael said. "Who's Mama?" the young man asked. Michael winked. "John knows," he said. "It's just that I haven't got a table," the young man said. He seemed on the edge of tears.

"We'll wait at the bar," Michael said. "But how will I _know her?" he asked.

"Don't worry about it," Michael said, and winked again. He took Connie's elbow and led her toward a bar hung with rotating green floodlights that restlessly swept the room like the eyes of Martians, striking the tables around the dance floor, exploding upon them like summer watermelons and then moving on swiftly as if there'd been a prison break, Michael's motion-picture associations recklessly mixing similes and metaphors, the probing green searchlights in a London air raid, the sky-washing green klieg lights outside Graumann's Chinese, green tracer shells on a disputed green killing field--but in reality the shells had been yellow and red and the world of Oz was green and loud and somewhat frightening in its insistence on colorization. They sat on high-backed stools alongside a young man dressed as a Cowardly Lion whose mane, awash in the overhead

light, looked as green as wilted

445 asparagus.

He turned to Michael and said, "You're in the wrong movie."

Ever since Christmas Eve, Michael had been thinking exactly the same thing. "What are you, _Twelve _O'Clock _High?" the lion asked.

"__A Guy Named _Joe," Michael said.

"She's __The World of Suzie _Wong, am I right?" "_Shanghai _Gesture," Connie said. "What'll it be?" the bartender asked. "_Lost _Weekend," the lion said, and nudged Michael with his elbow.

Michael figured that in this splendidly green place a person should order either creme de menthe or chartreuse.

"Do you know how to make a hot rum toddy?" Connie asked. "Come on, lady," the bartender said.

"A Beefeater martini then," she said, "on the rocks, two olives. Green." "Tonic with a lime," Michael said. "Green."

"Hard or soft, the minimum's the same," the bartender said. "That's okay," Michael said.

"And besides, the tonic costs three bucks." "Fine," Michael said.

"Hello, darling," a voice behind him said. "You're out of costume." He turned. Glinda the Good Witch of the North was standing there in a diaphanous blue gown, wings on her shoulders, waving a wand. Wings on _his shoulders, actually, since Glinda was in reality Phyllis from the Green Garter, with whom Michael had danced earlier tonight, oh what a small world Oz was turning out to be, not to mention the city of New York itself. Phyllis was with a Scarecrow who under all that straw turned out to be Gregory who had rescued Michael from the bad guys and then admired his buns, curiouser and curiouser it was getting to be.

"A Pink Lady, please," Glinda, or Phyllis, or both, said to the bartender.

"And a Whisper, please," Gregory said.

The room was stultifyingly hot. Michael took off the bomber jacket and draped it over the

high back of the bar stool. The music was

447 still deafening, but the beat was slower now, designed for dirty dancing, the bass guitar chords jangling insistently into the room like the bone-jarring sound of bedsprings in a cheap hotel, the black girl's gospel-singer voice soaring to the roof where the air was thin and clear, high above the poisonous green smoke, setting the rafters atremble the way it had back home in Mississippi, where Michael imagined she used to sing with the Sunday choir. "Dance with me," Connie said.

There was--for him in the next several moments, and perhaps for Connie as well--the certain knowledge that they were the two most beautiful people in the joint, perhaps in the entire city, glowing with an inner light that shattered the emerald-green myth and illuminated them as sharply as if a follow-spot were leading them out to the dance floor. In the movies, this would have been Ginger and Fred, he in elegant tails rather than Levi's and a sweater, she in a long pale gown rather than jeans and leg warmers and a long-sleeved blouse. And in the movies, they would glide out onto a crowded dance floor--just as the dance floor here was crowded with people pressed against each other, sweating against each other, pumping against each other, dry-humping to the thud of the guitars and the angelic voice--and the crowd would part as Fred stepped out and Ginger followed, those first graceful steps indicating to the mere dancers on the floor that here were italicized _dancers, here were goddamn capitalized DANCERS to be reckoned with! And the floor would clear at once, and they would be alone at last, a heavenly mist rising from beneath their feet, and they would dance divinely on clouds, oh so easy, oh so beautifully airy and light and incredibly easy, the way Michael and Connie were dancing now. The black singer from Mississippi was caressing the dirty lyrics of the song as if the devil had entered her little church and corrupted not only the minister but the entire congregation. The song's double meaning was as subtle as a rubber body bag, designed to be understood by the dullest adolescent. With a forked tongue, the song spoke of "breaking and entry" and "shaking and trembling" and "taking so gently," the rhymes so slanted they were bent, the stumbling lyrics pounded home in a tune as simple as the village idiot. But transformed by Ginger and Fred, this crudest of

melodies with its thinly disguised

449 pornographic patter became a Cole Porter accompaniment to a dance of unimaginable sensitivity and skill.

Oh how they floated on that sea-green dance floor, oh how they drifted airborne on wafted winds of invention, oh how they wove intricate terpsichorial patterns around and among the stunned bystanders who watched them in envy and awe, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, here a black teenager wearing a modified Afro and a Scarecrow's stuffed suit, here a stunning brunette in a green micro-mini and braids and red stiletto-heeled shoes, here a lanky, loose-limbed fellow who strongly resembled a young Ray Bolger, and here a beautiful, long-legged woman with short blonde hair and wide brown eyes that opened even wider as he and Connie glided--holy Jesus! It was Jessica Wales. Dressed as the Wicked Witch, wearing a skintight black gown, and sparkly red high-heeled shoes, and pale white makeup and blood-red lipstick, and dancing with-- Arthur Crandall.

Who looked portly and pompous and pleased as punch, which was probably the way most fat men looked when they had slender gorgeous blondes in their arms. "Long time no see," Michael said.

The self-satisfied smile vanished. Perhaps Crandall had expected Michael to be in handcuffs by now, in a holding cell at one or another of the city's lovely police stations. Or perhaps he'd expected him to be in a garbage can behind one of the city's many beautiful little McDonald's locations, which was where Alice might have left him, given her wont. But wherever he'd expected him to be, it was certainly not here in a smoke-filled disco called Oz at twenty minutes past three on Boxing Day. He went immediately pale.

But not because he thought Michael was a murderer. Oh, no.

That would have been good enough reason to have gone pale, oh yes, a wanton killer here inside this nice noisy club, a cold-blooded murderer here inside this jewel of a joint, good enough cause for Crandall's eyes to have grown round with fear. But whereas Michael had bought Crandall's little act in

the St. Luke's Place apartment on

451 Christmas morning--"__Careful! He's a _killer!"--he now knew far too much to accept it all over again. Green lights blinking on his round, sweaty face, Crandall was realizing that somehow Michael had tracked Mama here. Which meant that he had also tracked Mama to Crandall himself. "May I cut in, please?" a voice said, and suddenly Michael was in the arms of a short, thin, mean-looking man with a thick black mustache, wearing a shiny silk gray suit that was supposed to make him look like the Tin Man.

"This is a knife," he said, and Michael suddenly detected the faint Spanish accent, and realized at once that this was the man Mama had sent to meet Crandall on Christmas Eve. The knife was in the man's left hand. The point of the knife was against Michael's ribs. The man's right arm was around Michael's back, pulling him in tight against the knife. The man danced them away from Connie, who stood looking puzzled as a swirl of Dorothys and Cowardly Lions and Wicked Witches flowed everywhere around her in the dense green fog. Michael suddenly remembered that his bomber jacket was draped over the back of the bar stool. All the way over there, the pistols were of no use to him. The man smiled under his mustache.

"I'm Mario Mateo Rodriguez," he said. "You dance divinely," Michael said. "Thank you." "But I wonder if ..." "Mama for short," the man said. Michael looked at him. "Mama," the man said. "For Mario Mateo." "You're a _man?" Michael said. "Nobody's perfect," Mama said. Michael winced. Not because Mama had just quoted the best closing line of any movie Michael had ever seen in his life, but only because he accompanied the line with a quick little jab of the knife. Michael was suddenly covered with sweat. He did not know whether Mama planned to kill him right here on the dance floor under all these swirling green lights or whether he planned to dance him out of here at knife point, onto the yellow brick road, and over to the Hudson River, where once

stabbed he could be disposed of quite easily,

453 but either way was a losing proposition. Crandall and his Wicked Bimbo of the East had vanished into the green fog. So had Connie. There was only Michael now, and Mama, and the knife, and the pounding music and the swirling green lights and the enveloping smoke, and all of it added up to being in death's embrace for no damn reason, no damn cause. "May I?" the voice asked.

The voice belonged to Phyllis in his blue Glinda gown and his diaphanous wings. He held his magic wand in his left hand, and his right hand was gently urging Mama back and away from Michael. He was attempting to cut in, the dear boy, which Michael considered infinitely preferable to getting cut up. There was a sweaty, uncertain, awkward moment.

Mama naturally resisting any intrusion at such an intense juncture. Phyllis naturally intent on dancing the light fantastic. Michael naturally wishing to stay alive. The scream shattered the hesitant moment. High and shrill and strident, it cut through the din as sharply as the word that defined it. "_Knife!" Someone had seen the knife. "He has a knife!" Mama froze.

Suddenly the center of attention, unprepared for such concentrated focus, he smiled in what seemed abject apology, made a courtly Old World bow, his arm sweeping across his waist, and then immediately straightened up and turned to run. Phyllis was directly in his path. Mama hit him with his shoulder, knocking him over backward, his wings crushing as he hit the floor, his head banging against the waxed parquet, his legs flying up to reveal gartered blue stockings under his Glinda skirt. Mama pushed his way through a gaggle of chittering midgets dressed as Tin Men instead of Munchkins, all of them squealing indignantly as he shoved them aside. More people had seen the knife now. Someone shouted at Mama as he pushed his way off the dance floor, knocking over chairs and tables on his way to the exit doors, cursing in Spanish when he banged his knee against a busboy's cart, angrily slashing at the air with his knife. Michael was right behind

him.

455 He wondered why he was doing this. Chasing death this way. He knew only that to find his way again, he had to follow Mama, follow him out of the green smoke and through the green exit doors that swung out onto the sidewalk, follow him into the cold night air past Curly and the waiting hopefuls, onto the yellow brick sidewalk on Greenwich Street, follow that to where it ended as abruptly as a shattered dream, pound along after Mama on a plain gray sidewalk now, past Rector and a girl in her underwear standing under a red-and-green neon sign that read GEORGE's LUNCH, and then Carlisle where an armless man stood under an elegant white canopy lettered in black with the words HARRY's AT THE AMERICAN EXCHANGE, and then Albany on the left, the street, not the city, and Thames on the right, the street, not the river, and another canopy stretching to the sidewalk, tan and brown this time, PAPOO's ITALIAN CUISINE and BAR, and then O'HARA's PUB on the corner of Cedar and Greenwich, the place names blurring with the street names until at last Greenwich dead-ended at Liberty and the World Trade Center loomed high into the night on the left. Michael was breathing hard, sweating in what was no longer fear but what had become certainty instead: he would follow Mama to his death. That was what this was all about. Michael dying. There. Up ahead there. A black Cadillac limousine. A China Doll car, he thought. Connie, he thought.