The feeling roared back, and he swung around to about-face and retrace a block, turned west at the corner, and stopped. There it was. “That’s it,” he told himself, “that’s the . . .” The what? It was a six-story red brick building, the sides blank and windowless except for an office at street level at the distant corner. But it looked right. Flat roof; he could see the conical top of the old-style wooden water tower up there. Yes. And along the building’s sides just below the roofline in a band of weathered paint, BEEKEY BROTHERS, MOVING AND STORAGE, 555-8811. Yes. In a painted panel, LOCAL AND LONG DISTANCE HAULING. STORAGE OUR SPECIALTY. AGENTS FOR ASSOCIATED VAN LINES. A green, gilt-lettered Beekey truck stood before a metal-slat truck door in the side of the building. This was it, whatever it was, and Rube Prien turned to walk beside the block-long building toward a door he could see in his mind.
It was there. At the end of the building. An ordinary, unmarked weathered gray door, the paint peeling here and there in narrow strips. He knocked, heard steps on a wooden floor, the door opened, and he saw what he knew he’d see: a young man in white coveralls, his name embroidered in red over a pocket. “Hi there; come on in.” The man turned away as Rube stepped in. Lettered in an arc on the back of his coveralls: Beekey Brothers, Movers.
Rube glanced around, pulling the door closed behind him. He knew this little room: the worn oak desk behind which—the name over his pocket was Dave—the young man sat down. Knew the wooden chair before it, at which Dave gestured, inviting Rube to take it. Knew the framed photographs on the walls: moving crews lined up beside their trucks; The Gang, some were labeled. Some of the trucks were old, with unroofed cabs, no windshields, steering wheels huge and perfectly upright. Dates lettered in white under the lined-up crews: 1935, 1938, 1912, 1919 . . .
“What can I do for you?”
Rube turned, gripping the back of the empty chair, and said, “Do you know me? You recognize me?”
“No, can’t say I do.” Voice polite.
“I’ve been here before, I know I have.” But Dave shook his head. “Well . . .” Rube’s mind supplied an answer. “I’m . . . winding up a small business. Got some stuff to store. If I could look around?”
“Sure.” Dave stood to walk to a gray-painted metal-sheathed door, pushed it open, and held it for Rube, who stepped through into a tiny, concrete-paved area lighted by a bare high-wattage ceiling bulb. Dave pushed a button beside closed elevator doors, they heard a starting clunk up in the shaft, then the steadily descending whir, and Rube held himself still and expressionless, everything here utterly familiar, to the very scratches on the green-enameled elevator doors. And yet—what was he about to see?
Up to the top floor; the doors slid apart, Rube stepped out, and stopped so abruptly Dave had to dance a sidestep around him. They stood at the head of an aisle wide as a narrow street and so long its sides contracted far ahead with distance. Caged ceiling bulbs lighted the area poorly, shadowing the wooden floor rutted by years of iron wheels. Both sides were lined—like houses on the two sides of a street—with side-by-side cubicles of wood-framed wire netting, their simple plank doors stencil-numbered and padlocked. Rube stepped forward, his shoulders bulled in angry frustration, head jerking from side to side, glancing into the nearest cubicles; at household furniture, chairs inverted on tabletops; at a space paved with shadeless lamps, another stacked chest-high with framed pictures; more furniture. Angrily he said, “What is this! God damn it, what is this!”
Dave took his time answering, staring levelly at Rube. “It’s a storage space, what do you think it is? This is a moving and storage company.”
“And . . . what about the rest? The other floors.”
“Three more just like this. And below that, temporary storage, stuff they’re assembling into truckloads for long-distance hauls. You say you’ve been here before?” But Rube was swinging away, back toward the elevator.
Out in the street, walking away fast, he found a cab at curbside on Sixth Avenue, opened the door, ready to say, “Library on Fifth,” but instead gave his home address. A moment or so later, sitting back, trying to think about what he had seen and what he had not seen, Rube murmured, “Oscar . . .” He did it again, deliberately, “Oscar,” waited for more, but there was no more, and he cursed silently, staring out at the street.
• • •
That evening, his gabardine suit hung in his bedroom closet to preserve its press, Rube sat facing the windows in the one upholstered chair of his furnished apartment. He was barefooted, wore a sleeveless underwear top and faded blue pajama pants. On his lap lay a clipboard, a pen clipped to the blank sheet. Not reading, not listening to or watching anything, eyes deliberately unfocused, and not consciously thinking, he sat in the faint wash of orange light reflected by the ceiling from the streetlamp below. He held a measured ounce of bourbon whiskey, with water, in a glass, occasionally sipping, staring out the window, waiting. His bare forearms and biceps looked powerful; first thing every morning he did push-ups, down on the floor only seconds after his alarm had rung.
Presently he said, “Dan . . .” and waited. “Dan . . . forth? Dan . . . bury?” He shook his head, said, “Don’t force,” and allowed eyes and mind to drift out of focus again.
He printed Oscar on his clipboard sheet. Then Dan—in elaborate doodle he strengthened the letters, added serifs and shading, then sat back again, staring at the rectangle of window. He sipped from his glass, set it back on the sill. “Dan . . . iel?” he said. “Dan . . . cer? Danboogleboogle? Danblahblahblah? Dandantheaccordionman? Okay, cut it out.”
Across the street, he noted, the sky above the roofline of the apartment building really was a sky, not a whitish nothingness but a blue-blackness behind a thin scatter of stars. A light came on in a window of the building, then off. He stood up to walk absently through the three rooms, something he often did, often singing softly, usually an incompletely remembered fragment of the old popular music he understood. “A new room,” he sang now, “a blue room for two room . . .” He knew he was a lonely man but didn’t mind. Oscar Rossoff.
Swiftly he walked into the living room to a small wooden table against one wall that he used as a desk, and from a ten-foot length of books on an unpainted pine shelf he’d attached to the wall over the desk, took down the Manhattan phone book. Rossoff, Michael S. . . . Nathan A. . . . Nicholas . . . O. V. . . . Olive M. . . . Omin . . . Oscar! He dialed the desk phone, and on the third ring a man’s voice said, “Hello?”
“Mr. Rossoff? Oscar Rossoff?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Prien, Mr. Rossoff. P-R-I-E-N, Ruben Prien. I am a major in the United States Army, and I’ve phoned because I once knew an Oscar Rossoff. In . . . New York. And I wonder if it’s you. Do you remember me? Rube Prien?”
“No-o,” the man said slowly, politely reluctant to say it. Then, “Actually I’m not sure. Prien. Ruben Prien. It does sound . . . not quite unfamiliar.” He laughed at his own cautious phrasing. “Maybe I do. Clue me in.”
But all Rube Prien could do was refer to a nearly formless mental picture. “Well, the Oscar Rossoff I knew was . . . in his thirties, I’d say? Early thirties, but this was . . . a few years ago, I think.” Suddenly he added, “Had dark hair and a trimmed mustache.”