“And how long you think it’s gonna stay this way once my mother gets home?” Neal demanded.
“You keep it this way. Another thing, you eat like shit.”
“I eat okay.”
“Candy bars, Sugar Pops-”
“I like candy bars and Sugar Pops.”
“There’s another bag in the hall. Get it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Neal returned with the bag and asked, “What is all this stuff?”
Graham removed the contents. “A frying pan, a pot, a pot holder, two plates, two forks, two spoons, two knives, one can opener-”
“I got a can opener.”
“A spatula, eggs, bread, butter, Dinty Moore beef stew, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of grape jelly, some spaghetti… these things are called vegetables, you will learn to like them-”
“No way.”
“Or I will break your face. I will bring more next week. Every Thursday, we are going to have a cooking lesson.”
“You’re talking ‘we,’ you better bring a friend.”
“Or you’re fired. You think you’re the only underage, undersized sneak thief in New York?”
“Not the only, just the best.”
“Then you had better get yourself some pride, kid. Because you live like an animal. Your mother doesn’t take care of you, so you’d better learn to take care of yourself. Or you can’t work for me.”
He worked. And learned. Easy stuff at first, like tailing someone from a distance; how to keep an eye on the guy without looking as if he was looking.
“First thing you look at are the shoes, Neal, the shoes,” Graham told him during one of the many sidewalk lectures. “Two reasons. One, you can always spot him in a crowd. Two, the guy turns around and spots you, you’re looking down, not right into his baby blues.”
They practiced that for a week, Neal following Graham down Broadway, on the subway, on the bus, down crowded streets, down nearly empty ones. One day tailing Graham east on Fifty-seventh, Neal was concentrating so hard on Graham’s shoes, he bumped right into his back.
“Now, why did that happen?” Graham asked him.
“I dunno.”
“Good answer. Exactly. You don’t know. The pace, Neal, you have to watch the pace. Everybody has a different stride-long, short, slow, fast… I shortened my steps. I kept walking just as fast, but I shortened my stride. I took smaller steps. I made you bump into me. The first block or so you’re tailing, measure the guy’s step against the cracks in the sidewalk. What is it? Step, step and a half to each crack? Count it off. Is it slow or fast? It’s like music, so sing to yourself if you have to. Keep time.
“Another good reason to match his step is he can’t hear you so easy. A guy who knows how to shake a tail is going to listen as well as look. He’ll hear the difference in walking sounds, and if he hears one sound too long, he’ll know he’s pulling a caboose. So it’s like you imagine he’s got paint on his shoes, and you walk in his footprints.”
So they spent a week with Neal following Graham and matching his pace and his stride. Graham would take the kid along crowded streets and then suddenly down empty ones, where the boy’s every footfall would echo in his own ears.
“You’re tailing an amateur, it doesn’t matter, Neal. Save your energy and just stay out of sight. But a pro, it’s like it’s a habit with him, to mix up his walk slow and fast and slow again… He’s going to play Simon Says: Take one giant step, one baby step.” They went at it again. A solid month of tailing. After the first week, Graham knew that Neal was the most talented prospect he had ever seen-fast, canny, and the lucky owner of a set of looks that was quite literally unremarkable. Graham worked him hard, leading him on chases down the shopper’s paradise of Fifth Avenue, where every store window offered a reflection, onto subway trains, into coffee shops, movie theaters, and men’s rooms, through the parks and the alleys. At first, the kid was always easy to detect or to shake, but after a short time, Graham found himself working hard to lose the little bastard, and then hard even to see him.
“Find the blind spot,” Graham told the kid, “and stay in it for as long as you can.”
“What’s the blind spot?”
“The blind spot… the alley… the slipstream; a spot behind the guy where he just doesn’t see you. Usually, it’s behind him, slightly to his left side, about fifteen feet back. But it depends, you know, on his height and build. That’s why it’s good you’re a little shit, because it gives you a bigger blind spot to stay in.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Like when you’re following somebody, and you get into the rhythm, and then you feel like you’re invisible, like the guy can’t see you.”
So they practiced finding that spot, picking a stranger at random out of a crowd and following him. Neal got good at it, real good, and Graham marveled at the kid’s ability to fade back into a crowd, to disappear momentarily, and then reappear instantly back on the track. And a shadow made more noise than Neal Carey.
“Use the crowd,” Graham lectured. “Horizontal, too, not just vertical, because you can get beside your guy if you use the crowd right. Like try to find a woman with real big ones, and get beside her. Then when your guy turns around, he’s not even going to see you, he’s too busy checking out her Daisy Maes.”
Soon neal graduated to trickier stuff.
“Today,” Graham announced one time, “you’re going to follow me from the front.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“That’s why it’s so beautiful. No one is going to be looking for a tail in front of him.” Graham showed him, crossing the street and then crossing back in front of a guy they picked at random. Graham used store windows and the mirrors of parked cars to follow his man, not missing a beat when the man turned into a bookstore off Fifty-seventh.
Neal tried and failed miserably, losing his mark after five minutes.
“Because you didn’t listen, Neal. Remember what I told you: Every step is different. Do the soles of his shoes slap the sidewalk? Do they click? If it’s a woman wearing high heels, that’s a different sound. Maybe the mark’s wearing sneakers.”
Back at it. Until “Front Following” became automatic. Then they moved on to “The East Side-West Side,” where the tail stays on the opposite side of the street. (“Why does the chicken cross the road?” Graham asked. “So the chicken he’s following doesn’t make him.”)
Then they went to the two-man stuff: relays, pass-offs, front and back doors, peekaboos (“Peekaboo. I see you. You see me. But you don’t see him.”), and the ever-tricky “Fake Burn,” in which you let the mark give you his best move and “lose” you, while your unseen partner stays on the mark’s relaxed ass.
Neal loved the “Fake Burn,” loved it with an intensity that inspired him to create his own variation: “The Solo Fake Burn,” known in the Carey household as “Neal’s Very Own Special Fake Burn.”
“You can’t have a one-man Fake Burn,’ ” Graham replied with disgust when Neal announced his invention. “The whole point is that you have two men.”
“Not necessarily,” replied Neal with a degree of preadolescent self-satisfaction that might have aggravated a man more sensitive than Graham.
“Okay,” Graham said, “I’m going to walk out this door and be back in two hours, and I want you to tell me where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing.”
Graham polished off his beer and headed out into the street. He made Neal about twelve seconds later, because the dumb little bastard was wearing red socks that could have given Ray Charles a headache. Graham made a mental note to correct the kid on that, and settled into the not unpleasant task of teaching him a lesson. He crossed Broadway against the light but stopped in the island, noticing with pride that Neal hadn’t jumped after him. Then he crossed the rest of the street and ducked down the IRT entrance on the uptown side of Seventy-ninth, bought a token, and walked back up the downtown side. Sure enough, Ol’ Red Socks was still with him. So he stopped at a newsstand, looked at a paper, reached into his pocket for a coin, changed his mind, and headed straight back at Neal, forcing him to front follow for a good fifteen minutes.