Manhattan 62 (28 page)

“Are they coming for you or me,” said Max.

“We have to get out of here.”

I kept the gun on him and yanked at his arm. He picked up the dark green book bag and I pushed him in front of me.

“Now.”

“How do we go?”

I gestured to the street side door of the warehouse. He stumbled after me, grabbing my arm because he could barely see. We went down the four flights, the old boards creaking loud.

I had parked in front of the warehouse. I opened the passenger side door, kept the gun on Max, pushed him in, then went around to the other side, cursing the bucket seats in the sports car. Thank God I had left the top up.

“Close the goddamn door.”

With one hand, I reach for the key. I fumbled with the gun. I was twisted like a pretzel. I knew I was losing control. The sirens were screaming closer.

A pair of workers on their way to the docks, lunch pails in hand, stared at us. I could see them whispering, discussing if they should act. I had been yelling. They knew something was wrong. I fumbled with the handbrake.

Then I lost it. I still had his gun, but my grip was loose. When I looked sideways at Max in the seat next to me, he also held a weapon.

“You forget there were two guns,” said Max. “Yours and mine. You forgot that, Pat. I think it would be better if we go now.” He looked out the rear window.

I stepped on the gas hard.

“Why didn't you use it?”

He took the gun from my hand, where it dangled uselessly, and tossed both weapons in the back seat.

“The assassination.”

“I don't believe it. It's too crazy, man.”

“I believe it. Please, can you go faster? There's a car following us.”

In the rearview was the two-tone Impala I had seen before, and a second car, a large black Plymouth, shined up like glass, with a driver in a checkered cap. It was the man who had been following Ustinov in Penn Station.

“The Impala, I think it's our people, my tail.”

“The black car is ours.” Max slid further down in the seat, out of sight. “I think it's the agent who followed me in Chinatown.”

“You're scared of your own people? They are yours, aren't they?” I put my foot on the gas, not knowing where to go, not thinking about anything except losing the cars behind us.

“Where are the police? The sirens?”

“I'd bet they're searching the warehouse.”

“Somebody knew we were there?”

“Maybe a lot of people.

“Yes. I am scared of my people,” said Max. “Pat, do you think we can get to Harlem? Rica said he would leave something for me if there was trouble—he meant if he was dead, I think. I think he left a letter.”

“He knew he was finished.”

“I think, yes.”

“We'll go as soon as it gets dark. We have to lose these goons behind us. I'll try. I have to make a phone call. Where was he?”

“The Hotel Theresa. He knew of it because his delegation stayed there. Cubans love it because Fidel had stayed.”

“Jesus Christ.” I kept my eye on the rearview while I went through the tunnel. I couldn't go home. I couldn't go anywhere at least until I lost the cops and the Russkis, and maybe after dark, I could find a way to get us to Harlem, but not now.

“Are they still behind us?” said Max as we got close to the tunnel.

“Stay down,” I said, ran out of the car, and picked up the newspaper. By time we got to Jersey, and I had turned off the main road, I had lost them. Near a building site where the countryside was being dug up to make new roads, I found a ramshackle gas station attached to a crummy-looking motel. I handed over six bucks for a room, told Max to go clean himself up, locked him in the room—I knew he could get out if he wanted to but where the hell would he go?—filled up the car, went next door to a diner. I ordered sandwiches and coffee, and looked at the papers.

SOVIET CHALLENGES U.S. RIGHT TO BLOCKADE; INTERCEPTION OF 25 RUSSIAN SHIPS ORDERED; CUBA QUARANTINE BACKED BY UNITED O.A.S.

It would begin at 10 a.m. Surface-to-surface missiles, bombers, bombs, air-to-surface rockets, guided missiles, all these had been authorized by the Defense Secretary. JFK had pictures of Soviet ships heading for Cuba with Ilyushin-28 bombers in crates. It was coming.

On the counter was a small black and white TV. A few customers watched and ate breakfast. The line JFK had marked was five hundred miles off Cuba. American ships were to turn back any Soviet vessel suspected of carrying missiles to Cuba. Somebody leaked it to reporters that there was a Soviet submarine in the area.

We were dead. The politicians would screw up, or those gung-ho generals would take charge, or there would be an accident. A meeting had been called at the United Nations for the next day, but it would be a joke, a lot of diplomatic fussing, while the bombers were already in the air.

For a while I watched, staring at the screen where there were blurry photographs of the missile sites and maps depicting the position of the ships—ours, the Russians— out in the Atlantic. I drank some coffee.

A shot fired across the bow of one of their ships goes unanswered, maybe we board, maybe one of their sailors, a young kid, misreads all the signals or, encountering Americans, waves his pistol around. He doesn't speak English. Worse, he thinks he knows some words and gets it wrong. His hand shakes. He's shitting himself from fear. He fires too soon.

Or it would be us. How many naval guys spoke Russian? How many wanted to take a potshot at the Reds? There were a million possibilities, and I had seen it all in Korea where mistakes had meant a hundred dead boys lying in the mud. This time it would be everyone, all of us, dead.

Who said that it only took one sailor or a civilian translator, or a low-level spy, to start it, to push the trigger?

Finally, incredibly, we were on the brink of a nuclear war, the thing we had all dreaded for most of our lives, that drove everything in my life from the time I finished high school and the Cold War began. Everything. The way my ma and pa looked at the world, their hatred for the Reds, the certainty if you didn't live a decent family life, you were playing into the hands of the Communists, me going to Korea, my interest in the whole Commie thing.

Before the Cold War, nobody had ever threatened the American mainland, unless you counted some crazy old Brits in red coats once upon a time. This was what we had been taught by Mr Roth, the history teacher—and the only Jew—at the parochial school I had attended, and the single teacher who had ever taught anything true about current affairs. “Red coats, Reds,” he used to say. “Maybe we have to watch out for this color, boys, what do you think about that? Anyone here want to venture a thought on the meaning of this? Could it be that by now red has become the color of fear? Why would that be?”

Mr Roth brought us books to read, he tried to teach us; hardly anyone paid attention, except me, and another kid who became a Jesuit priest later, but in '48, the year I graduated high school, the Cold War was heating up, and by 1950, Joe McCarthy had begun the witch-hunts. I heard later that Mr Roth was accused of lefty tendencies, and possible subversion, and had been fired. I ran into him only once after that, at the Strand on Broadway where he sold me a couple of second-hand books,
The Naked and the Dead,
and
Animal Farm.
Mr Roth never gave up on trying to teach us.

Subversion my ass, I had thought even then, but in my narrow little world, teaching the truth to Catholic boys was seditious, or worse. My ma had believed only Joe McCarthy could save us. Her favorite book was
Is This Tomorrow? America Under Communism.
She kept it beside her bed; the cover showed flames consuming the flag and evil men—cartoon-like characters—attacking ordinary Americans.

“He will get rid of the Red devil,” she would say. “We will be safe.”

I remembered McCarthy. I remembered my ma calling me in to watch the TV. She's ironing my pop's shirts. In her green housedress, her feet stuck in some pink slippers, she stands at the ironing board, a cigarette burning in an ashtray, spitting on the iron to make sure it was hot.

“That senator, he's a good decent man, keeping us safe from them godless Communists.”

My mother's life—all of our lives—was driven by this terror of Communism, but also, even if we wanted to destroy them, nuclear war was the thing, no matter how much we were scared to death by it, we never really believed would happen. This was where we lived, in an atmosphere of dread, of tension between it happening and not happening. The bomb was always a big topic, even with little kids who had grown up crawling under their desks, or hugging the wall during air raid drills, eyes closed. Anxiety. Tension. I even knew a cop who got so screwed up worrying about it, he whispered to me about visiting a headshrinker. Still, and yet, life had seemed pretty good until now; for all those years, nuclear war had had the feel of a movie being made just over the horizon.

I went to the phone and called Jimmy Garrity, the young cop from the pier.

“They want you bad, Wynne. They got you down as more than a pain in the ass, they'd like to make you for something much bigger. They think you're in bed with the Reds, and right now, when we're about to go to war with the Russians, nailing somebody, anybody, for collusion, or subversion, or whatever the hell it is, you've got a target on your back.”

“I'm in Montauk. Fishing.”

“Nobody believes that; they been questioning me as to your whereabouts. Stay safe. I have to go. Don't call me anymore.”

Cowardly little shit, I thought. I was enraged by him, but I was scared too. “Fuck you,” I said, before he hung up on me.

In the motel, Max Ostalsky was asleep on one of the beds. In the bathroom I stripped off all my clothes and climbed into the shower. My foot, where the rat had bitten, was covered in sores and dried blood. The water was tepid but I stood there for a while, thinking if they indicted Farigno, in the chaos of the Cuban crisis, nobody would ask any questions. If I said anything, they'd pick me up. Garrity had said so. They wanted me out of the way. When I dried off and got dressed, I looked into the mirror and saw an older man, a version of myself I had not expected for years.

Max was already awake and sitting on the edge of the bed. I gave him a sandwich and he ate hungrily.

“Let's go back to this assassination fantasy,” I said to him once we were in the car. It was almost dark.

“We need the letter Rica Valdes left for me.”

“You believed him?”

“Yes.”

“You think it's somebody high up?”

“Yes, and Pat?”

“What is it?”

Peering out through his cracked glasses, Max looked out at the trees, leaves falling, the ramshackle roadhouses and small bungalows along the old country highway. I only took backroads. I drove them towards the city until I found my way to the George Washington Bridge.

The other side of the bridge, once we were in Manhattan, the big black Plymouth appeared. It was close on the rear of my car. They must have had Spotters, as the Feds sometimes called them, maybe even in goddamn Jersey. In the red Corvette, I was a sitting duck, and so was Ostalsky. I had to get rid of the car.

“Is it connected with the missile crisis, this assassination?”

“It's possible.”

“But who, goddamn it, who is it?” Even as I whispered, I felt my flesh prickle. “Not the President.”

“I don't think so.”

“Goddamn it, thinking isn't enough. Is it? Do you know? Are you keeping this from me, man, cause you better come clean.”

“No. It's to be in New York City.”

“You keep saying you don't know who, so how the hell can we stop it? If Valdes didn't know who or where, how did he expect to stop it? Him or that girl, Susana? You have an idea when it's planned?”

“Soon.”

“Listen to me, Max, if it's fucking soon, you must know something. Is this just stuff your pal Rica told you? Isn't he a loose canon?”