It was Jim, and he’d appeared in front of me during the few moments I was seeing my name on the panel. I turned to see if likewise someone had spotted me from behind.
The light was now green sharing its light with the green word GO. The couple went forward still looking at each other. Jim stepped off the curb.
But from his left a black car with bird-lime on the hood launched itself veering out of the northbound avenue into the eastbound street they were moving to cross, and it must have brushed the couple and would have swiped Jim with the tail end but his hand came up onto the rear radio aerial and so he was able to stop himself, but when the car did not instantly brake, the aerial snapped in his hand, which it is not supposed to be able to do, and this was what seemed to stop the car.
The driver was out fast. He came back along the far side of the car as I slowed my approach. He was a big man in a white T-shirt with a brown decal on the chest. Someone said, Jersey plates.
A woman’s laugh was off to my right somewhere near a florist’s doorway flanked by pussywillows in a black can and soft dark and bright pansies in tiers of flats.
The driver came round the rear of his car, his hands in front of him at hip level.
Jim stuck the length of aerial straight out.
The man in the T-shirt rushed onto it.
It went into his shirt well below the brown decal, which I now saw was a target of numbered rings.
The two words “License revoked” suddenly survived above the engines whose din swirled like a virtually immeasurable air conditioner killing itself yet letting off staggered signal horns to mark its decaying sequences.
The victim’s mouth was open.
From the rise and fall of the woman’s laugh I couldn’t tell if she had seen the stabbing.
The driver had got his aerial back in one piece. The other man let go.
A few inches showed in front.
When the victim turned, as to avoid the aerial already in him, the rod could be seen to have gone clear through and pierced his back. But instead of puncturing his T-shirt again it tented it out as if he had a rolled tabloid in his back pocket sticking up under his shirt.
The stabber, Jim, stepped back onto the curb. He set out east finding his way into the clusters of early lunchtime strollers.
The driver, with the severed aerial through him, stood against his black fender not doing anything. The gathering mass of traffic pressed north. There was blood at the corner of the driver’s mouth. His eyelids were pinched shut.
I was at the curb now. There was more than enough of the broken silver rod to get hold of.
Jim walking east was already half a block away if that was his beige suit.
A voice like the laughing woman’s said, Call a cop.
The noise volume guarded by high buildings rose into a homogeneity like quiet; like a patient Om.
Back down the swarming block I saw Claire; it had to be Claire because she still looked much like my Jenny, who is only seventeen.
At once she turned back and went into a corner camera shop. Even if she simply didn’t want to meet me an hour before the time we’d agreed on as well as in a place other than her apartment, had she in any case seen the stricken man through the crowd?
At this point, then, the driver is several feet in front of me, Claire is in a shop a block south, Jim is now half a block east. The aerial is fixed in the driver’s front and gleaming so cleanly the T-shirt is like a new polishing rag.
He went to his knees and the aerial sticking out his back scraped a line on the fender.
The pressure then must have increased his pain inside, but his eyes were shut and he was apparently silent among the vehicle horns and the revvings of diesel trucks pushing dark fumes out of side-stacks.
The kneeling man dropped his large hands from his stomach to the street, and one mashed a length of ocher turd, the other a dark circle of spit. So he was on his hands and knees, and his T-shirt had ridden above the two inches of aerial that came straight up out of his back red-sleeved.
Two Puerto Ricans pushing coats and dresses along left their four-wheeled racks at the curb and looked into the black car.
One of the driver’s hands was missing part of the middle finger.
A siren that seemed in its low register as close as a speaking voicerose and swooped to rise again, a cop car in traffic a block and a half south.
There was clearly nothing to do for the man in the T-shirt till the ambulance came, certainly not disengage the aerial.
I felt I had been inserted into a situation.
I went back to the camera shop a block south but, being on the corner, it happened to have another door around on the cross-town street.
I entered and someone called behind me, I saw it.
I passed along the glass counter thinking to catch Claire in the cross-town street. The man said, What happened?
Jenny my daughter was in the market for a Leica IIIG box for a hundred dollars top, and if I could find one an Elmar f3.5 too.
I said over my shoulder, A man was stabbed.
Claire was out of sight.
Back through the door, the camera man said, Oi.
Could I get Jenny a reliable second-hand 200-millimeter automatic as cheap here in the camera capital as on the other side through Dagger?
It had been Claire, but she looked even more like my own seventeen-year-old Jenny now the difference in age was less.
My eyes stung as if blinking through chlorine. Eastward the way I thought Claire had gone, a Salvation Army hatband showed dull soft red moving toward me.
Did Jenny even want something from America this time? Why did I have the idea she was saying to me, Don’t bother, I’ll get it myself when the time comes.
In 1957 she was three and didn’t yet object to Ginny; I said I’ll bring you a present when I come back from America. She knew present but not America. A list of all I’ve brought her since would make a history.
If I told the camera man my problem too simply, he’d say, Look, all your camera prices are much higher in England, they got a very serious problem with their economy.
But when he got my point about the American PX or the continental duty-free shops Dagger had connections with, he’d turn right off; he’d say, Well we don’t compete with those foreign prices — maybe you need some film? you take slides, try this Fuji color.
During this absence from my house in London that has almost no mortgage left on the freehold, I could be holed up in another part of London for a fortnight and not even be in America. Bringing a present from the PX in Ruislip on the outskirts of London or the Navy place near the Embassy was like bringing a present from the States. But Jenny wanted something else.
I cut back through the camera shop, I would meet Claire as arranged. The man was outside the other door looking up the block, but behind the counter now was evidently the proprietor, a white-haired broad swarthy man in very dark glasses.
A man in a stained apron came in behind me and put a lidless shallow cardboard box on the counter. The clerk came back in the other door. The ambulance is stuck in traffic, he said.
What’s the ambulance? said the deli man.
On his forearm across a vein and barely visible in the hair were five blue numerals.
Claire’s disappearance wouldn’t have mattered if she hadn’t first appeared. You see Jim Wheeler you haven’t seen in years, or been aware of not seeing. You see him impale somebody without exactly meaning to and walk away down a lunch-hour street. You see behind you a young woman you’re going to talk to in half an hour. She cuts back through a camera shop and you lose her.