The top was down and the morning air was warm and promising of the heat and blue of a June day, and as the black convertible crossed the Queensborough Bridge a million windows flared with sun, and the sounds of the city came up as they descended into it. With the passing of each second, the gold and orange light of sunrise was refined to yellow and white.
Crossing the park was as splendid, because of the trees, as any part of the drive. They went up Central Park West, made a U-turn at 94th Street, and rolled to double-park in front of the Turin. The doorman didn’t come out. It was too early, or he was remiss. Harry pulled the brake and turned to Catherine. She had already moved toward him, but as they drew together a siren sounded from directly behind them. A police car they had forced to a halt was telling them, in the fashion of police cars that one forces to a halt, to move on.
So their kiss was a brush of lips that lasted no more than a quarter of a second, and when she drove off, the trees at the edge of the park swaying slightly in a stirring of the wind, he was left standing in the road as the police car slipped by and the traffic lights turned green and marched into the distance. He replayed her kiss as a wave of oncoming cars drove him from the middle of the street.
11. Overcoats
WHEN HARRY WALKED in at ten-thirty, Cornell said, “Hurry up. Let’s go for an early lunch.”
“It’s ten-thirty.”
“I want to get there before they run out.”
“Who runs out?”
“The counter at Woolworth’s.”
“Of what?”
“American cheese.”
“Cornell,” Harry said, his voice expressing disbelief, “when Woolworth’s runs out of American cheese it’ll only be because the universe has exploded. There’s no way I can eat lunch this early. I just won’t.”
When a few minutes later they sat at the counter at Woolworth’s, Cornell said nothing until the counterman took their orders: grilled cheese sandwiches, Coca-Colas, and chilled grapefruit salads, all of which Woolworth’s did surprisingly well, including the Coca-Cola, which could vary from fountain to fountain and was often either flat or too sweet.
“I wonder what the Negroes are doing today,” Cornell said, speculatively and as if he had just opened a newspaper, which he hadn’t.
“One, anyway, is obsessed with American cheese.”
“I just wonder how today dawned for us. Something’s going to happen, even if it’s little, somewhere, every day, because the world is not going to stand still. Do you remember when your father took you to Florida?”
“I was in high school. It wasn’t that long ago.”
“Before the Crash or after?”
“Before. High times.”
“And what happened at that hotel.”
“Which hotel?”
“Where you drove up. . . .”
“The one in Boca Raton? The sign?”
“Yeah.”
“I was driving. My father made me turn around.”
“Your father and I used to have debates about that sign. He said that because it said No Negroes, Dogs, or Jews, that Jews were at the bottom and therefore the least welcome.” Cornell slowly shook his head. “That’s not how it goes. I said that we were the least welcome, then dogs, then Jews. He said that that was impossible. They like dogs. Jews wouldn’t be more welcome than dogs. Then I told him,” Cornell said, rapping the counter, “if that’s so, why would we be more welcome than dogs? He said proximity. We were house slaves and servants. The dogs sometimes were allowed in, and sometimes not. Jews weren’t servants, so they aren’t used to them, and that’s why they were at the bottom—because they caused a kind of revulsion. Go to Darien or Scarsdale, he said, and you’ll see Colored people all over the place, working in the houses, taking care of the children. A Jew they think of as unclean, and they would be horrified to have one in the house, like a pig. It was hard to argue with your father, but well meaning ladies’ maids and cops never said ‘Here, boy,’ to him. I come from many generations of free men. Sometimes, the way people act, you’d never know it.
“If power corrupts, Harry, I’m going to exit this world totally uncorrupted. It will change. It has to change. But I don’t like change. I don’t want to be distracted by adjustments. I just want quiet in the time I have left. I’m too old to want to fight, although I will.”
“Cornell, it worries me when you talk like the Sphinx.”
“You want me to talk like the Sphinx?”
“No. I don’t want you to talk like the Sphinx.”
“I’ll talk like the Sphinx.” He folded his napkin, and ran his big hands over the smooth counter, which was waxed like a bar top. Then he looked at his watch. He was upset.
“What?”
“Overcoats.”
“Overcoats,” Harry repeated.
“Two came this morning just after we started work.”
“Two overcoats?”
“Two men in overcoats.”
“It’s June. Why would anyone wear an overcoat?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know.”
The food was put down before them. “Why would anyone wear an overcoat in the summer?”
Being in love, Harry was so happy that he couldn’t hold the weight of Cornell’s anxiety. “Because they’re cold.”
“When it’s eighty degrees?”
“Perhaps they just got over an illness, or had some sort of serious mental damage, or they live in Hawaii and by comparison it’s cold here. If an Eskimo came here in the winter he might wear a Hawaiian shirt.”
“That’s about the stupidest thing I ever heard you say.”
“Then you tell me.”
Cornell took a sip of Coca-Cola from a glass that said Coca-Cola on it. “To conceal weapons. Guns. Baseball bats. I don’t know.”
“Oh, them.”
“Yeah, them.”
“What did they want?”
“Did you ever wonder how we spend five hundred dollars a week in cash?”
“We pay for lots of things in cash.”
“Maybe a hundred a week, maximum.”
“Payoffs? What? Garbage? Police? Inspectors?”
“Only at Christmas, or when the inspectors shake us down. Mostly they’re too busy with new construction.”
“Protection? How long has that been?”
“Since about ’twenty-three or ’twenty-four.”
“My father paid?”
“He did.”
“What a waste.”
“Four hundred a week to Mickey Gottlieb.”
“I know the name. I thought he was my father’s friend.”
“Harry, with friends like that there’s no need for diphtheria.”
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
“He didn’t want you involved in that kind of thing.”
“And what other secrets?”
“How should I know?” Cornell said. “These are new people. I used to pay Gottlieb’s collectors and that was that. I knew them. I got used to them. Believe it or not, they were nice. The ones who came today are going to crack the whip.”
“What did they say?”
“They wouldn’t talk to me.”
“Why not?”
“Come on, Harry!”
“Did you tell them you’re an owner?”
“I did.”
“What’d they say?”
“They laughed. I could have shown them the documents and they still would have laughed. They’re going to come back, and they want to see a white man.”
“That’s no good.”
“Who knows what they want? The war’s over, there’s inflation, everyone expects more. Something’s got to change.”
“How did my father handle them?”
“Your father was tough.”
“He was.”
“The best negotiator I’ve ever seen.”
“What did he do?”
“He paid them what they asked.”
“They’re not
a force of nature, you know,” Harry said.
Cornell craned his neck to glance at the clock at the end of the counter. With his head at that angle, he looked somewhat like a turtle. “The problem is that they can take anything. They don’t care. And they’ve come at just the wrong time. Can you do this? Are you scared?”
“A little. And the strange thing is that just a week ago, ten days ago, I wouldn’t have been.”
“The girl?”
“Yes.”
The charms of a young woman are natural, without diligence, and unending. They arise effortlessly and in great abundance and can leap across an abyss of silence, or inhabit memory until it glows as in a dream. Because of Catherine, for most of the afternoon Harry was unable to think of the visitors he expected. Except as empty overcoats moving like puppets on sticks, their image remained unformed in his mind, and even had it been formed precisely and with perfect menace it could not have outdone his continual recollection of her as if she were there. He was in danger of losing his balance on ladders and his hands in machines. He walked as if lightly drugged or slightly drunk, preoccupied with his imagination of her, in which he could recall and project views, short clips of motion, sound, speech, and scent. He didn’t know how many minutes he spent at the top of a rolling ladder, boxes piled on the last step, remembering in a burst of microscopic detail the two kisses, every word she had said and how she had said it, every move she had made, her face, her clothes, her perfume, the bracelet at her wrist. It was a band of woven gold to which three tiny gold signets were attached. The body of one was carved into a vaguely leonine shape, the other into a bird of some sort, and the last a human figure, each holding at the base a flat stone—a ruby, a sapphire, and an emerald—for pressing the inlaid seal into wax. The work was so fine that, thinking that she probably wouldn’t know, he asked anyway to whom the signets had once belonged. “The red one to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld,” she said, “the green to Queen Anne, and the blue to one of the Medici, I’ve forgotten which one. Their provenance isn’t absolute. I’ve had them since I was little.” It was possible for her to have such things without amazement.
“Do you know,” he asked, “how they look on your wrist, near your hand, set off by the rest of you?”
She showed by her expression that she had never thought of it.
“It doesn’t matter to whom they belonged,” he said.
“I’m a little afraid of losing them,” she had told him, “but, with this top, I needed something strong for balance.”
As a gleam of adrenaline woke him up, he caught himself as he was about to fall off the ladder, but had he fallen he would surely have felt no pain. Even when Cornell appeared in the stockroom and said, “They’re here, in the office. They walked right past you. I sent Rose out to the stationery store,” Harry was lost in the memory of Catherine and thinking of nothing else.
But now he had to deal with an opposing force. Their faces were huge, and had a quality that made him think of the exfoliated tops of the stakes that anchor circus tents; and of a butcher shop with heavy cuts of meat hung from hooks, gravity coaxing their dense flesh into a downward bias and red bloom. These men looked as if they were starving for violence that the world in its cruelty refused to provide. They seemed almost as big as elephants, they moved like wolves, and their little eyes really could have fit into the head of a rat.
“Hello,” Harry said, offering his hand, which they didn’t take. They were offended that he hadn’t divined the spirit of their visit, although of course he had, and that his payments to them would not include compensation for the lesson he was about to receive free of charge. He sensed all this, but some unplanned instinct kept him fearlessly on a steady course. Cornell could see that he was hard at work at something, although Cornell didn’t know what, and doubted that Harry knew either. And the overcoats didn’t understand that Cornell’s worried look had less to do with them than with him.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Harry asked, pressing his luck, because they had signaled with their expressions that he should relinquish the initiative. “I can send the boy out for something to eat.” Facing away from them and toward Cornell, he signaled, though his voice did not, that this was part of an act. “A Danish, a cruller?” he asked, playing the fool, but also defiant. They could not know which.
“We came for the money.”
“The money?”
“You’re the owner, right?”
“I just took over from my father.”
“Talk to him.”
“I can’t. He’s dead.”
“Before he was dead, he was dealing with Gottlieb, but Mr. Gottlieb has transferred this account to us.”
“What account?”
“We provide security.”
“From what?”
“You never had a problem, right? You could.”
“What happened to Gottlieb?”
“Mickey Gottlieb is gone.”
“And now we pay you?”
They nodded, bored.
“I’m not being uncooperative, but how do we know that you’re not just two guys who walked in off the street?”
“Because if we were just two guys who walked in off the street and did this, we’d be dead before his birthday,” said one of them, pointing to the other.
“When’s his birthday?” Harry asked.
“Thursday.”
“Happy birthday,” Harry said. Cornell raised his eyebrows. “Cornell, can you get the money from petty cash?”
Cornell went to the safe and, shielding it with his body, quickly worked the combination.
“You let him know the combination to the safe?” one of the overcoats asked Harry.
“Ya.”
The overcoat wagged his finger. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. That’s crazy. They steal.”
Cornell thought this was painfully funny, but he didn’t dare laugh. He counted out four hundred dollars in twenties, put the remainder back, walked over to Harry, and handed him the money. Harry counted it again and offered it to them.
“How much is that?” asked the one whose birthday was coming.
“Four hundred.”
“It went up.”
“To what?”
“Two thousand.”
In the dead silence, Harry could feel his heart beating, even now a pleasant sensation. “Two thousand a month?” he asked, suspecting that a four-hundred-dollar increase might not be what they had in mind.
“A week.”
“How can that be? That’s five times what it was.”
“I don’t care how it can be, it is.”
“We don’t have two thousand.”
“You can give it to us Friday, a whole day after my birthday.”
“Two thousand a week and we’ll be out of business before the end of the year.”
“Things change,” said the other overcoat. “Everywhere. Prices go up.”
“I need to talk to your boss.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“Look, could you please tell him that I just took over this business, I’ve never had any experience with this kind of thing, and I need his advice? Okay? I need his advice.”
“We’ll tell him, but you better have the two thousand by Friday. Got it?”
“Can I deliver it to him personally so I can have a moment of his time?”
“No.”
“Two thousand dollars!” Cornell said, clenching a fist. “Two thousand dollars a week! We’ll be finished by October.”
“What are we doing these days?” Harry asked.
“About six thousand a week, but it’s going down. Expenses have been a little more than six thousand a week, and they’re going up.”
“Has the four hundred been included in expenses?”
“Yes, but that leaves sixteen hundred to break us, and break us quick.”
“With what I have, I can keep us going for a year.”
“Then you’d have nothing left, and then what
anyway?”
“My father would want me to keep the business going. It’s his money. I didn’t earn it.”
“But there’s no point.”
“There is a point, a very important point. When you’re in what seems like an impossible situation and it looks sure that you’re going to be overrun, you have to keep in mind that only half of what the enemy does is actually going to put him in a position to overrun you. The other half is to communicate this so you’ll do his work for him.”
“What good would it do, if he really can overrun you, to ignore the message?” Cornell asked. His had not been a war of maneuver.
“If you ignore the message, it changes the situation. He now has to consider the cost, change his focus and pace. He has to suspect that maybe you’re in a better position than he thought. Therefore, he becomes more cautious. The price goes up for him. The timeline changes. You, for your part, have resolved upon dying, and so because of this he hesitates, and you’re still alive. In that moment, which may be short or long, something can happen, and it usually does. If you can hold, and time passes, things change and you have a chance. They can change from without, in the enemy force or by some agency impinging upon it from elsewhere. They can change in the objective situation—the weather, an accident, action on the part of other echelons—or in you, in what you figure out and in what you resolve. Which is not to say that we’ll survive, but that the field of maneuver is just opening up. I’m not going to give in and do their work for them, not before I know the conditions.”
“Harry, they’ve been doing this for decades. The whole city pays off. They own the politicians and the police. Nothing’s going to change.”
“You yourself said that every day something changes. They don’t own every crack and cranny. They don’t do everything right. They’re not invincible.”
“You’re going to fight them? You can’t fight them.”
“I want to see what ground we’re on. I’ll see first if I can get them to lower the amount. They may have been mistaken. When I was talking to those guys, I felt a kind of mortal pressure. I felt defeat very strongly. I’ve felt that way before, not long ago. And look, I’m still here.”