Going, Going, Gone Read online

  ‘My name’s Arnold,’ said Nosey. ‘Detective Arnold. This is Detective Benz.’

  ‘Officers.’

  ‘Construction worker’s gonna live, but he’ll need a hook,’ said Benz. ‘You get used to it, I hear.’

  ‘Think his wife will?’ said Arnold. ‘Kids?’

  ‘What’d your friends have against him? Just busting chops?’

  ‘They weren’t my friends,’ I said. ‘I’d just met them at the corner. Told me they were tourists. Kinda told me. No speaka the lingua real good.’

  ‘Tourists.’

  ‘Said they were looking for the Statue of Liberty.’

  ‘They find it?’ Arnold opened his jacket, so my view of his sap and his brass knuckledusters in the inside pockets wouldn’t be blocked. ‘Tourists. Where from?’

  ‘Didn’t ask.’

  ‘Too busy looking to ask.’

  ‘Witnesses said they were lookers,’ said Arnold. ‘You must have been looking.’

  ‘Never saw anyone like them. Officers, speaking as a witness I –’

  Benz shook his head like he was waking up. Not a hair came loose. ‘A hook. How’s he gonna pitch a few to the boy?’

  ‘Lopped off like he stuck it in a meat slicer.’

  ‘Like ham. Thin sliced ham. What’d she use? Machete?’

  ‘I didn’t know what happened till it happened,’ I said, figuring it would do no harm to tell the truth. ‘Guys were bugging ’em, I told them to ignore the assholes and keep walking.’

  ‘Thought they didn’t speaka the English.’

  ‘Not well,’ I said. ‘Officers –’

  ‘Boy probably won’t make the team,’ said Benz. ‘Not without practice.’

  Arnold walked over to the sole working locker, which he unlocked. He banged around inside for thirty seconds or so before he took out a radio aerial snapped off a car – sharpened, I thought, although that seemed unnecessary – a length of black rubber hose that dribbled its sand filling, and a Louisville Slugger with five long rusty spikes driven through the thick end. ‘Then they just took off after that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Seriously, officers, you ought to look me up in the files.’

  ‘We gonna find something?’ asked Benz.

  ‘All in good time,’ Arnold casually cuffed my right wrist to the chair’s arm.

  ‘Why am I being handcuffed?’ I asked, starting to feel unnerved. ‘I’m a witness, aren’t I?’

  ‘Tell us what you really saw, what you really know, you’re a witness,’ Arnold said.

  ‘I’m telling you what I saw. What I know.’

  ‘Let’s take a look at what we got so far.’ Benz extracting a small black notebook from a side pocket and flipping it open. ‘Resisting arrest,’ he said. ‘Still resisting arrest. Two charges.’

  ‘Possession of marijuana,’ said Arnold, pulling on rubber gloves. I gave silent thanks to Sophia on high that I’d only been carrying brand X, and left my P-bomb muggles safe and sound back at the old homestead. ‘Three.’

  ‘Loitering with intent. Vagrancy. Four, five.’

  ‘Accessory after the fact.’

  ‘Add everything up,’ said Benz, ‘seventy years.’

  ‘For what?’ I asked.

  Arnold looked over his collection before finally settling on the hose. As he picked it up he was careful not to let any of the sand slip out. Whipping it over his head, he brought it down on my legs just above the knees. Felt like a piano fell into my lap. ‘That’s for the boy.’

  ‘What else you remember about those women?’

  ‘Call Captain Thomason,’ I said, not as loudly as I might have. ‘He’s night shift. He’ll tell you.’ Benz shrugged. Arnold tapped the non-pointy part of the spiked bat against the sole of his shoe.

  ‘Tell you what?’ Benz said. ‘We haven’t even charged you yet.’

  ‘We’d like to avoid doing that,’ Arnold said, winding up as if ready to send me out high over left field. ‘If possible.’ Before he could play the Babe, thankfully, the room’s door opened. The desk jockey stuck in his head and gave us all the evil eye. ‘Dammit, Dennis, put that goddamn thing down,’ he shouted. ‘Let him go. He’s connected.’

  ‘How?’ Arnold whined, not letting go of the bat. ‘Tammany?’

  ‘Department of the Interior. Better luck next time, boys.’

  The way Arnold slunk back to the locker made it clear his whole day was ruined. ‘Thanks for coming in,’ Benz said, unclasping my bracelet. ‘You gonna be able to walk?’

  ‘No thanks to you,’ I said, making it to my feet. Glad they hadn’t broken anything but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Arnold glared at me as I walked out, but I was having none of it. When I reached the reception room I saw Martin sitting on one of the benches, looking more than a little peeved.

  ‘Didn’t need bail at least,’ I offered, but he kept mum. ‘Muchas thankas.’

  ‘How long have you worked for me? How long? Shouldn’t you know how to avoid these kind of situations?’

  Martin was still Agency when he visited the University of Washington campus the one year I was there, looking for likely recruits. Soon as I looked him over I was able to peg his grandparents’ line; his eye was just as trained and he did the same for me. In our unavoidable circumstances you always do what you can to help out your fellow passers, and he made me an offer. I hadn’t found higher levels of academia any improvement over the lower, but I wasn’t willing to commit, not yet. Called him not long after hitting New York, some time after I’d discovered my true metier. He was working the Department of Interior, which had its own operations going. Next thing I knew I was on the Sea Beach Express, barrelling toward Luna Park and Dreamland, casually spritzing testers to gauge how effectively an aerosol mood-alterant diffused within a closed subway environment.

  ‘Martin, look,’ I said as we reached Second Avenue. ‘Wrong place, wrong time. Nothing to add.’

  ‘Shouldn’t I know who these women are? They were the same ones you were with last month, weren’t they?’

  ‘Did you see us?’

  ‘I was on my way out. Think I wanted to hang around with that crowd any longer than I had to?’ He sneered; I could only imagine the kind of small talk Hammy and his little Germ made when I wasn’t around. ‘They cut off a construction worker’s hand?’ I nodded. ‘Walter, who are they working for?’

  ‘They fed me some line about the Society for Psychical Research.’

  ‘Don’t feed me shit and say it’s candy.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said, but he clammed. We kept walking west; it was hard to say who followed and who led. When we reached Fifth Avenue we turned south. Shackmans toy store was at the corner of 16th; it was older than Hamilton, it had been there since Hector was a pup. Glancing behind us first, Martin peeled off to the left and went inside. I trailed, shoving through the revolving door and feeling worn wooden planks creak beneath my feet. There wasn’t a toy in there made later than 1946. Reminded me of the old five and ten cent stores back in Seattle downtown, the bins on the oak tables full of tiny lead cars and soldiers, sets of jacks and hopfrogs, aggies and shooters and cats-eyes, airplane glue and balsa strips.

  ‘Psychical research,’ he said. ‘You’re fucking with me, Walter.’

  ‘No I’m not. Why would I? Look, I don’t know who they are any more than you do. But they’re definitely not ours or anybody else’s, near as I can tell. They’re –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hard to say. Look, I know they’re not Agency. At first I thought Bennett might be in on it –’

  ‘Not a chance,’ he said, whispering. ‘They’d have cut off his head first time he tried pinching their ass.’ We flipped through a rack of paper dolls, marvelling at how many outfits you could get for Shirley Temple. On the wall to our right was a shelf lined with a row of mechanical banks, reproductions of early twentieth-century toys. Cast-iron Teddy Roosevelts fired pennies into trees, making cast-iron bears pop out the top; Uncle Sam dropped coins into his satch
el and waggled his chin whiskers. There were others – ‘Always Did ‘spise A Mule,’ where the latter threw a hapless pickaninny and the penny he held onto the ground; ‘Darktown Battery,’ where a pitcher was ready to lob a cent at a gangly, thick-lipped batter. These weren’t entirely accurate reproductions; the once-black figures were all painted white. In the centre of the shelf was a bank I remembered seeing in stores when I was young; a bust of a man with one arm and a giant grinning head. The cast iron hair was curled tight, the nose broad and flat, the lips full, the ears protuberant. You put the coin in the hand and pressed the button; the arm raised to the mouth and the coin fell inside. The ears wiggled. On this model, the hair was blonde, the eyes blue, the face pale as Bennett’s; but along the bottom of the bust the legend still read JOLLY NIGGER. It was the cheapest of the lot, at fourteen ninety-five.

  ‘What’s the kraut add to this gumbo, anyway?’

  ‘I’m not absolutely sure,’ Martin said. ‘He’s an associate of Hamilton’s. Since he’s at Justice I have no say-so in the matter.’

  ‘And if he starts asking the wrong kind of questions about the wrong people?’

  Martin gritted his teeth, and ran his hand over his bald head. He shaved it every morning, so not a trace of a kink might show. Told everyone he’d lost his hair when he had typhoid, as a child. ‘No. That won’t happen.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  The clerk gave us a truant-officer stare, probably beginning to suspect we were waiting to lure away toddlers with candy. ‘Sirs,’ she said, ‘we’ll be closing momentarily.’

  I nudged Martin and we headed out. ‘It’s not going to help matters if you keep being seen with those girls,’ he said. ‘The big one is a girl, isn’t she?’

  ‘And a mile wide,’ I said. ‘They haven’t asked me if they can come around. It’s hard to fight ’em off.’

  ‘That’s clear,’ he said. ‘What did she cut his hand off for? What did she cut it off with?’ He shoved his mitts in his pockets after buttoning his coat. DC boys always cracked under the strain of New York weather. ‘Look, I’ve got to get to the station.’

  ‘Stag or drag?’

  ‘They left on the four-thirty. Good thing for you I had to get a second fitting for a suit up at Brooks Brothers. When the police finally did look at your file they called my number, and luckily my assistant knew where I’d be.’

  ‘Give her a raise,’ I said.

  ‘I can make the seven-twenty. When are you going record shopping?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘What should I know about this that they’re not telling?’

  ‘I’m not telling,’ Martin said. We grinned, feeling fairly jolly ourselves for the moment.

  The West Side Record Store was next to the Wong Kee laundromat on the 82nd Street side of the Endicott Hotel. Homicide Arms we called it, six people killed there every year on average: autoerotic fatalities, homosexual love stabbings, old drunks poking out each others’ eyes with pocket knifes, horse deals gone ruinously bad. Places like this attract good record stores; something in the air, I suppose. The jingle bells rang when I popped open the door. ‘Hey there,’ the owner called out, seeing me. ‘Where you been, stranger?’ Now that I knew who he actually was, it was impossible to miss. Tucked below that lush alky hair, beneath those chipmunk cheeks and the bags under his eyes, those Kennedy genes were there in plentitude.

  ‘I’ve lacked liquidity, my brother. Led a pauper’s existence. But down’s up again and I’ve come to celebrate.’

  ‘Here?’ he asked, laughing. I was the only customer in the store; there were two lights in the ceiling and forty-seven thousand 78s in bins, files and cases. Hard to have gotten higher, no matter what I dropped.

  ‘You got a couple of beauties I’ve been wanting to pick up for a long time,’ I told him. ‘Let me get their phone numbers.’

  ‘Which ones?’ he asked, not yet standing. While he wasn’t morbidly obese, he was huskier – let’s be honest, and say a real porker – than his brothers, all of whom were thin as motel blankets. Those mesomorphs couldn’t be happier being seen pounding tennis balls, rigging sails, lifting cars, diving into volcanoes. Even Father Ted showed good form hoisting that loving cup every Sunday. Jim Kennedy must have always been the standout in the bunch.

  ‘Skip James, “Devil Got My Woman Blues”, Blind Tommy Walker, “Mean Old Blue”, and Robert Johnson, “Malted Milk Blues”.’

  Oh, happy day when you make a store owner as happy as you when you buy something. ‘You sure you want them?’ he asked, smiling. I fluffed the green with a satisfying ruffle. He squeezed between the bins to reach the locked case, opened it and pulled out the prizes, laying them on a shammy he’d draped over his desk. ‘Labels unfaded. Near mint, each one. They’ll transfer to tape beautifully.’

  ‘Numbers match up with Godrich?’

  ‘Every one. And you know you don’t usually find these in packages like this.’ While Johnson was in a modern sleeve, and Skip’s original was still plain kraft, the one for Blind Tommy was a full-tilt Paramount Sambo special, bearing the logo THE POPULAR RACE RECORD, and a black-on-brown drawing of a big-lipped house slave whanging on his diddlybo. ‘Walter, right?’ he asked.

  ‘Right, Jim.’ Those Kennedy teeth gleamed like the moon. ‘Wrap ’em up.’

  As he padded my buys with cotton batting and newspaper I snaked over to take a look at what else was in the case. Several Enrico Carusos; but on a Brazilian label, not Italian or standard Red Victor. A couple of cylinders labelled, by hand, T. Roosevelt Dec 1907; the Emancipation speech maybe. ‘Old Jimmie Sutton’, by Grayson and Whitter, a sad sight; far as I had known until that moment, mine was the only existing copy. Bud Averill Plays Songs by Stephen Foster, a theremin recording on the Tech-Art label. A flat disc marked Last Surviving 1812 War Veteran; then several that I already owned, Geeshie prominent among them. And –

  ‘Jim,’ I said, ‘how much for this one?’

  ‘Twenty,’ he said. ‘I’ll make it seventy-five total if you want that one, too.’

  ‘Sold.’

  ‘Dallas String Band. “Dallas Rag”,’ he said, reading the label. ‘14292 D. Coley Jones, right?’

  ‘He’s on there,’ I said. ‘Guy I knew had a tape. Magnificent stuff.’

  ‘Let me tape it before you walk off with it. That all right?’ I nodded. Jim stuck a new reel on his player, fed in the leader and tested the wires. ‘Got it hooked into the speakers I use for the Victrola,’ he explained. ‘Picks it up directly.’ He dusted the grooves, fixed the baby blanket on the spinner and then eased the disc down. He used a bamboo needle instead of a steel so even before the first note plucked I knew the condition was near perfect. You’ve probably never heard it, but if you have, ‘Dallas Rag,’ a two-mandolin beauty that drives like a Tennessee moonshiner is about as perfect as there is. Impossible to find, but I always had a working theory that most of the stock was in Warehouse 6, and went up during the 1930 Columbia fire.

  ‘That’s something,’ Jim muttered, his eyes closed as he listened. Nobody listens to old records these days unless they’ve got the heart to hear them.

  ‘Where’d you turn it up?’ I asked.

  ‘New England,’ he said. ‘Boston. Elderly abolitionist owned this and about two hundred others. Don’t think he listened to a one of them but bought them to show solidarity. Boston used to be a good place to look for race records, but it’s all cleaned up now.’ I nodded; I knew. ‘I’m hoping next year to take a trip down South.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Think of all the records that must still be down there,’ he said, ‘in drawers and closets. Basements. Barrels out back. You don’t think so?’

  ‘Broom swept clean, down in those parts,’ I said. ‘The records were dumped along with everything else. Never known a racer to show up south of the Ohio River.’

  He nodded. ‘Closing time,’ he said. ‘Glad you came in. This pays half the rent.’

  ‘Jim,’ I said, ‘you ever want to go out for drink? So
mething?’

  His face brightened, then dimmed slightly. Even so it was plain as the nose on his face that he’d have jumped over five fences to go out with anybody. ‘I don’t drink,’ he said. ‘Not anymore.’

  ‘Never touch the stuff myself,’ I said. ‘Soda pop, then. And talking records. Let’s say Saturday?’

  ‘Sounds good.’ But somehow he looked as if it sounded bad.

  Maybe it was just events catching up with me, but I went all Blakey on the way back home. Sometimes when it’s late enough, and I’m bored enough, or stoned enough, I hit the bricks and turn on my own personal Wayback Machine. Try it sometime: make sure it’s after two in the morning, go to the right neighbourhood and then let your eyes unfocus – you’ll see what I mean. It’s one of the best things about New York, being able to live in past and present at the same time. Walk anywhere in the Thirties west of Eighth, and it’s still 1941. Head down Ludlow or Orchard if you want 1894. Stroll along Fifth, in the Fifties, and you’ll be right back in 1936. Keep your eyes above the cars, of course.

  That evening I had a different kind of vision. It wasn’t late, and I wasn’t on anything; one second I was bouncing down Broadway with my new old discs, and then the next everyone and everything looked different. The usual Balkan gang assimilated; their clothes and hairdos got fancier, their faces took on the look of strangers. Pint-size cars and gigantic pickup trucks with cabins on the back rolled bumper to bumper down both sides of the boulevard. The bars were gone, the cafeterias, the dress stores, the Commie French cheese shop; I couldn’t even guess what half the stores I saw sold … I nearly spun out, my brothers; but when I closed my eyes and then reopened, all was again as it should have been.