On the day he had come home and found Rosie gone — that night, actually, after he discovered the ATM card was missing and could no longer put off facing what had to be faced — he had gone down to the Store 24 at the bottom of the hill and bought his first pack of cigarettes in eleven years. He had gone back to his old brand like a murderer returning to the scene of his crime. In hoc signo vinces was what it said on each blood-red pack, in this sign shalt you conquer, according to his old man, who had conquered Daniels’s mother in a lot of kitchen brawls but not much else, so far as Norman had ever seen.
The initial drag had made him feel dizzy, and by the time he’d finished the first cigarette, smoking it all the way down to a roach, he’d been sure he was going to puke, faint, or have a heart attack. Maybe all three at once. But now here he was, back up to two packs a day and hacking out that same old way-down -in-the-bottom-of-your-lungs cough when he rolled out of bed in the morning. It was like he’d never been away.
That was all right, though; he was going through a stressful life experience, as the psychology pukes liked to say, and when people went through stressful life experiences, they often went back to their old habits. Habits — especially bad ones like smoking and drinking
— were crutches, people said. So what? If you had a limp, what was wrong with using a crutch? Once he’d taken care of Rosie (made sure that if there was going to be an informal divorce, it would be on his terms, you might say), he would throw all his crutches away.
This time for good.
Norman turned his head and looked out the window. Not dark yet, but getting there. Close enough to get going, anyway. He didn’t want to be late for his appointment. He mashed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray on the nighttable beside the telephone, swung his feet off the bed, and began to dress.
There was no hurry, that was the nicest thing; he’d had all those accumulated off-days coming, and Captain Hardaway hadn’t been the slightest bit chintzy about giving them to him when he asked. There were two reasons for that, Norman reckoned. First, the newspapers and TV stations had made him the flavor of the month; second, Captain Hardaway didn’t like him, had twice sicced the IA shoofiies on him because of excessive-force allegations, and had undoubtedly been glad to get rid of him for awhile.
‘Tonight, bitch,’ Norman murmured as he rode down in the elevator, alone except for his reflection in the tired old mirror at the back of the car. ‘Tonight, if I get lucky. And I feel
lucky.’
There was a line of cabs drawn up at the curb, but Daniels bypassed them. Cab-drivers kept records, and sometimes they remembered faces. No, he would ride the bus again. A city bus, this time. He walked briskly toward the bus stop on the corner, wondering if he had been kidding himself about feeling lucky and deciding he had not been. He was close, he knew it.
He knew it because he had found his way back into her head.
The bus — one that ran the Green Line route — came around the comer and rolled up to where Norman was standing. He got on, paid his four bits, sat in back — he didn’t have to be Rose tonight, what a relief — and looked out the window as the streets rolled by. Bar signs.
Restaurant signs. DELI. BEER. PIZZA BY THE SLICE.SEXEE TOPLESS GIRLZ.
You don’t belong here, Rose, he thought as the bus went past the window of a restaurant named Pop’s Kitchen — ‘Strictly Kansas City Beef,’ said the blood-red neon sign in the window. You don’t belong here, but that’s all right, because I’m here now. I’ve come to take you home. To take you somewhere, anyway.
The tangles of neon and the darkening velvet sky made him think of the good old days when life hadn’t seemed so weird and somehow claustrophobic, like the walls of a room that keeps getting smaller, slowly closing in on you. When the neon came on the fun started —
that was how it had been, anyway, back then in the relatively uncomplicated years of his twenties. You found a place where the neon was bright and you slipped in. Those days were gone, but most cops — most good cops — remembered how to slip around after dark. How to slip around behind the neon, and how to ride the streetgrease. A cop who couldn’t do those things didn’t last very long.
He had been watching the signs march past and judged that he should be approaching Carolina Street now. He got to his feet, walked to the front of the bus, and stood there holding the pole. When the bus pulled up at the corner and the doors flapped open, he walked down the steps and slipped into the darkness without saying a word.
He’d bought a city street-map in the hotel newsstand, six dollars and fifty cents, outrageous, but the cost of asking directions could be even higher. People had a way of remembering the people who asked them directions; sometimes they remembered even five years later, amazing but true. So it was better not to ask. In case something happened.
Something bad. Probably nothing would, but TCB and CYA were always the best rules to live by.
According to his map, Carolina Street connected with Beaudry Place about four blocks west of the bus stop. A nice little walk on a warm evening. Beaudry Place was where the Travelers Aid jewboy lived.
Daniels walked slowly, really just sauntering, with his hands in his pockets. His expression was bemused and slightly dopey, giving no clue that all his senses were on yellow alert. He catalogued each passing car, each passing pedestrian, looking especially for anyone who appeared to be looking especially at him. To be seeing him. There was no one, and that was good.
When he reached Thumper’s house — and that’s what it was, a house, not an apartment, another break — he walked past it twice, observing the car in the driveway and the light in the lower front window. Living-room window. The drapes were open but the sheers were drawn. Through them he could see a soft colored blur that had to be the television. Thumper was up, Thumper was home, Thumper was watching a little tube and maybe munching a carrot or two before heading down to the bus station, where he would try to help more women too stupid to deserve help. Or too bad.
Thumper hadn’t been wearing a wedding ring and had the look of a closet queer to Norman anyway, but better safe than sorry. He drifted up the driveway and peeked into Thumper’s four- or five-year-old Ford, looking for anything that would suggest the man
didn’t live alone. He saw nothing that set off any warning bells.
Satisfied, he looked up and down the residential street again and saw no one.
You don’t have a mask, he thought. You don’t even have a nylon stocking you can pull over your face, Normie, do you?
No, he didn’t.
You forgot, didn’t you?
Well . . . actually, no. He hadn’t. He had an idea that when the sun came up tomorrow, there was going to be one less urban Jewboy in the world. Because sometimes bad stuff happened even in nice residential neighborhoods like this. Sometimes people broke in — jigs and junkies for the most part, of course — and there went the old ballgame. Tough but true.
Shit happens, as the tee-shirts and bumperstickers said. And sometimes, hard as it was to believe, shit happened to the right people instead of the wrong ones. Pravda-reading Jewboys who helped wives get away from husbands, for instance. You couldn’t just put up with stuff like that; it was no way to run a society. If everyone acted like that, there wouldn’t even be a society.
It was pretty much rampant behavior, though, because most of the bleeding hearts got away with it. Most of the bleeding hearts hadn’t made the mistake of helping his wife, however . . . and this man had. Norman knew that as well as he knew his own name. This man had helped her.
He mounted the steps, took one more quick look around, and rang the doorbell. He waited, then rang again. Now his ears, already attuned to catch the slightest noise, picked up the sound of approaching feet, not clack-clack-clack but hish-hish-hish, Thumper in his stocking feet, how cozy.
‘Coming, coming,’ Thumper called.
The door opened. Thumper looked out at him, big eyes swimming behind his hornrimmed glasses. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked. His outer shirt was unbuttoned and untucked, hanging over a strap-style tee-shirt, the same style of tee-shirt Norman himself wore, and suddenly it was too much, suddenly it was the last straw, the one that fractured the old dromedary’s spinal column, and he was insane with rage. That a man like this should wear an undershirt like his! A white man’s undershirt!