“She said she had two lines,” Rachel said, “but maybe it was a voice-over, and she wasn’t on camera at all.” It was hard to tell if she was taking him literally or matching his irony with her own.
I didn’t get around to turning on my cell phone until I was back home, and there was a voice mail message waiting for me. A voice I hadn’t heard before said, “Hey, thanks, man. Here’s the address.” I wrote it down: 755 Amsterdam #1217, New York NY 10025. “Don‘t forget the suite number,” he said, “or it won’t get here. That’s probably what happened the last time.”
In Manhattan, the numbered streets run east and west, and the numbers start at Fifth Avenue. If you know the house number, you can readily tell what avenues it lies between.
The avenues run north and south, and each one has a different numbering system, depending where it starts. But there’s a key, printed in street maps and pocket atlases, and to be found in most edi-tions of the White and Yellow Pages. There are slight variations for certain thoroughfares, but the basic idea is that you take the address, drop the last digit, divide the result by two, add the particular number listed for that particular avenue, and the result is the nearest cross street.
Some realtor had had the table printed on a wallet-sized plastic card, and it was a better giveaway than a calendar, because I’d had mine five years now and used it all the time. The realtor wouldn’t get much business from me, nothing was going to move us from the Parc Vendôme, but she had my thanks, whatever that was worth.
And I in turn had the knowledge that the address I had for David Thompson was a block or two north of Ninety-sixth Street. That was a 104
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little more than a half mile from the corner of West End and Eighty-eighth, and a whole lot farther from Kips Bay.
I got there on the subway, walked a block east from Broadway, and found 755 Amsterdam where Amalia Ferrante’s card said it should be, right in the middle of the block between Ninety-seventh and Ninety-eighth. The building was a five-story tenement, not yet noticeably affected by gentrification, but something was wrong, because even if they’d chopped it up into a rabbit warren over the years, there was no way there could be an apartment numbered 1217.
Maybe it was Thompson’s idea of a code; when an envelope came with #1217 on it, he’d know it was from the man who’d called him. But that didn’t make sense either.
I went into the vestibule and looked at the row of buzzers. There were sixteen, which worked out to four to a floor for floors two through five, with the ground floor given over to a store. Nine or ten of the sixteen had a name in the slot provided for that purpose. The rest were empty. I checked the names, and most were Hispanic. None was Thompson.
I went outside again and took a look at the store on the ground floor.
It wasn’t terribly inviting, with the merchandise on display faded by time or bleached by the sun, but it tried to make up for that by offering everything a marginal neighborhood could require—check cashing, passport photos, notary public, hardware and housewares, umbrellas, shoe polish, Pampers, and assorted snacks. Three neon beer signs, one for a brand they’d stopped making ten years ago, shared window space with a Café Bustelo poster. There was so much going on that it took me a while to notice the only relevant item in the window, a yellowing sheet of paper with the hand-lettered inscription private mailboxes available.
The inside of the store was about what you’d expect. I didn’t see any mailboxes, and wondered where all twelve hundred and seventeen of them could be hiding. A woman behind the counter, with a stocky build and hair like black Brillo, was keeping an eye on me. I don’t know what she thought I could possibly want to steal.
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I asked if she had mailboxes for rent and she nodded. I said I didn’t see them. Could she show me where they were?
“Is not a mail box,” she said, framing a box with her hands, the sides, the top and bottom. “Is a mail service.”
“How does it work?”
“You pay for the month, an’ you get a number, an’ you come in an’
tell me your number an’ I bring you your mail.”
“How much does the service cost?”
“Not so much. Fifty dollars. You pay three months in advance, you get the fourth month free.”
I flipped open my wallet and showed her a card Joe Durkin had given me. It was a Detectives Endowment Association courtesy card, and it wouldn’t keep a meter maid from tagging you for parking too close to a hydrant, but it looked official enough from a distance. “I’m interested in one of your customers,” I said. “His number is twelve-seventeen. That’s one two one seven.”
She looked at me.
“You know his name?”
She shook her head.
“You want to look it up for me?”
She thought about it, shrugged, went in the back room. When she returned her broad forehead was creased with a deep frown. I asked her what was the matter.
“No name,” she said.
I thought she couldn’t tell me, but that wasn’t it. She meant she didn’t have a name to go with the number, and I believed her. Her puzzlement over the situation was evident.
I said, “If there’s any mail for him—”
“That’s why I take so long. If there is mail for him, there is his name on it, yes? No mail for him. He come in one, two times a week. Sometimes mail, sometimes no mail.”
“And when he comes in he tells you his number.”
“Twelve-seventeen. An’ I give him his mail.”
“And when he gets a letter, is there a name on the envelope?” 106
Lawrence Block
“I don’t pay attention.”
“If you heard the name, would you recognize it?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Is the name David Thompson?”
“I don’t know. Is not José Jiménez. He’s Anglo, but that’s all I know.” She excused herself, waited on another customer. She came back and said, “You buy the service, you get a number, we write your name in the book. Next to the number.”
“And there’s no name in the book next to 1217.”
“No name. Maybe he come in the first time when somebody else is working, somebody who forgets to write down the name. Is not right, but . . .” She shrugged, shook her head. I think it bothered her more than it did me.
I’d brought along the photo Louise gave me, and I took it out and showed it to her. Her eyes lit up.
“Yes!”
“It’s him?”
“Is him. Twelve-seventeen.”
“But you don’t know his name.”
“No.”
I gave her a card. Next time he got a letter, I told her, she should call me and read me the name off the envelope. She said she’d do that, and held my card as if it were a pearl of great price. She craned her neck, took another look at the photograph.
She said, “He do something bad, this man?”
“Not that I know of,” I said. “I just need to know who he is.” I got home before Elaine did. She called ahead to say she was running a little late, could I put a pot of water on the stove? I did, and lit a fire under it, and it was boiling when she walked in the door. She tossed a salad and made pasta, and we left the dishes in the sink and walked down Ninth to a small off-Broadway house on Forty-second Street, where we had complimentary tickets for a staged reading of a play called Riga, about the destruction of the Latvian Jews. I knew the play-All the Flowers Are Dying
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wright from around the rooms, that’s why we were there, and after the curtain we congratulated him and told him how powerful it was.
“Too powerful,” he said. “Nobody wants to produce it.” On the way home Elaine said, “Gee, I can’t imagine why anybody would pass up a chance to produce that play. Why, it just makes a person feel good all over.”