So Mr Big Hero took another bite of his potato knish and stared out at the badlands and goodlands of sleepy-time Staten Island, where 328,000 Americans were waking to a bright, sunny, all-American Sunday morning, to the New York Sunday Times crossword, and waffles, syrup and bacon, and a gentle screw, and toothpaste, and coffee, and no clatter of the garbage trucks today.
‘It’s cold,’ she said, and she was right; it was cold, damn cold and it felt good, for in the warm a soft slunky feeling would have crept straight up my body and put me in the land of nod, and there wasn’t going to be any nod for a long time yet, because when we got back to Manhattan I was going to have to go into the police station at West 54th and spend most of this beautiful day inside its dismal grey walls, answering questions and filling out forms and watching the dregs and misfits and victims of humanity be dragged interminably in and out, for speeding, murder, pickpocketing, mugging, knifing, raping, and reporting lost tabby cats and black widow spiders.
There was no shortage of forms, and carbon copies to go under the forms, and columns to be filled in on the forms. I could have done it all myself in about ten minutes flat, with the aid of a couple of IBM computers and three dozen secretaries; unfortunately the only equipment that the city of New York could offer me was a battered, old, manual Olivetti, with a lower-case ‘t’ that had broken off, and a pair of index fingers attached to 18 stone of fatted flesh in a uniform grubby enough to give anorexia to a clothes moth. His dexterity at extricating his breakfast from his teeth with one finger, picking his nose with another, his ear with a third and typing at the same time was remarkable; but it was the typing that suffered the most.
Relays of coffee arrived in receptacles that made British Rail’s plastic beakers seem like Crown Derby. There were no knishes and doughnuts weren’t available on this block on a Sunday; none others were worth eating, the resident doughnut expert informed me, but there was a Puerto Rican topless go-go dancer who did blow jobs in the men’s room of a coke den up in Harlem Sunday lunchtime, if I was interested in taking a ride. But it didn’t particularly appeal.
The keys clacked intermittently, punctuated by the odd curse as he filled in the lower-case ‘t’s by hand, and I began, gratefully, to drift into a few minutes of sleep. When I woke, Supertypist had an added burden to his bogeys and his breakfast and his Olivetti: some idiot had given him a carton of honey-barbecued spare ribs.
Several hours later the last rib hit the waste bin and the last sheet of the forms was wrenched out of the machine. I read through it and put my signature on it, and he read through it and put his ‘X’ on it and smudged it. My hand was shaken and my back patted. I had been a good boy. I had grappled fearlessly with an intruder, seized his weapon, shot him, and then had the good sense to call the police and fill out their forms for them, and there would be no need for me to attend the inquest, and if I would care to step outside it would be nothing short of a pleasure for the City of New York to provide me with a freebie ride home in a patrol car.
I was tired — dog, dog tired — and wanted out of that police station and into bed. I went outside and breathed the chill air, and watched the steam pouring out of a subway vent in the road, and listened to the distant hum of cars and far-off sirens. Peace. It was growing dark; some street-lamps were on, the rest were flickering to get on. Sumpy would be at her apartment by now, back from lunch with her brother and sister-in-law and their three kids in their house by the sea down in Mamaroneck; just the normal routine of a normal life.
The car pulled up for me, four great burly cops inside. They all looked reasonably alert — it’s strange how you can tell something like that just from shadows or silhouettes, but you can. One in the back stepped out to hold the door for me and then climbed in after me; I sat in the middle of the back seat, snugly wedged between two uniformed hulks. They were big, comfortingly big. I lounged back into the greasy vinyl and inhaled the smell of plastic and stale cigarettes that most American cars smell of, and listened to the tramp, tramp noise of the tyres that all American cars make. I felt relaxed and was about to start up some friendly chatter when I felt a hard thin object slide in between my thighs and come firmly to rest against my right ball.
‘Don troi nuttin.’
I don’t know what the hell they expected me to try. Even if they were all unconscious the only way I could have got out of that car would have been to have drilled a hole in the roof. All of a sudden I felt very awake again. I felt very awake, but I knew I was tired, overtired, dangerously overtired, and that’s not good.
3
One half of me was sorely tempted not to bother to find out who they were, or where they were taking me, or what they planned to do, but just to crash out, let them take me wherever they planned and let the chips fall where they might.
The other half of me that had kept me out of the long wooden box for over three decades wasn’t going to have any of it. Secretly I was glad about that.
‘Know thine enemy,’ says the Good Book. On my 18 months’ intensive training in the Highlands six years back I’d been told much the same. I studied them, listening to their chatter: not a great deal to listen to — scrambled eggs for brains in their dialogue department; the highlight of their conversation was whether it would be better to take the first, second or third left to get to the Henry Hudson Parkway. They could count to three.
They were goons, four big rented goons, and I had an ominous feeling that they hadn’t got the wrong man; I could almost hear a cement-mixer grinding away in the trunk, making the quick-drying concrete for a pair of snug-fitting size 9½ boots.
I stared through the hairs in the goon on my right’s nostrils at the far-away lights of the Bronx as we cruised up the west bank of the Hudson, along the scenic Palisades Parkway past the neatly mown grass and the neatly trimmed hedges and the neatly painted signs to the neatly laid-out beauty spots — all carefully done to show how wealthy and prosperous the State of New Jersey was compared to its shabby neighbour on the other side of that deep, deep river. And tonight it looked deeper than ever.
There was an acute pain in my backside. What had felt like a small lump at the beginning of the ride was hurting more and more at each bump we went over. It was something I was sitting on. The pain, combined with the jabs from the shooter in my private parts every time we jolted, was beginning to make me feel irritable.
The two-way radio suddenly crackled into life. ‘Bravo Delta, are you on time for the wedding?’
One of the goons in the front replied, ‘Bravo Delta picked up the groom.’
There was a pause while the usual squawks and screeches came through the speaker, then, ‘Roger, Bravo Delta, we’re on our way to collect the bride. See you at the church.’
‘You got it,’ said the goon.
It didn’t tax my brain a great deal to work out who the bride might be, but just to help me out the goon in the front passenger seat, whose teeth looked like they had suffered a bad attack from termites, and whose breath smelt like he’d been drinking from a rain-tub full of dead bats, turned the ghastly assembly of scars, dents, spots and boils, perched above his neck and below his hat, that passed as his head. ‘Means your broad, sweetheart.’