There were hardly any people on the street. Those there walked quickly, heads bent, shoulders hunched forward, buckling umbrellas held before them like shields. A few sought refuge under awnings and in doorways. One stood bravely in the street, a hand held high in a desperate attempt to hail a taxi.
Harold Sladek sat where he always sat this time of night: in the shadow of the service entrance to Body Beautiful. The doorway offered little protection from the rain since it was less than a foot deep, but it was better than sitting out on the sidewalk itself. At least he wasn’t completely surrounded by the elements; at least Harold could feel concrete behind and beneath him. Solidity-that was something.
It was also a matter of habit: He always slept in the doorway at Body Beautiful, even though it was no better than any of the other service entrances up and down the avenue. It was part of his routine, forged over the course of many years, many rainstorms. Solidity of a different sort, but no less important.
Harold held a copy of Cosmopolitan, spread open at the center, over his head. He felt water trickle down between his fingers. After a few minutes, the glossy paper become waterlogged and slick, and eventually the magazine pulled apart in his hands. When this happened, Harold threw it into the street and pulled another issue out of the plastic bag next to him. He had found the stack of magazines tied with string next to a trash can on the corner of Lexington and 79th. His original thought had been to sell the magazines for a quarter apiece further uptown, on Broadway where all the booksellers were. But if the magazines could keep him dry, or even just a little bit drier, that was worth giving up a quarter or two.
The second issue started dripping ink-stained water onto his forehead. Harold threw it away, wiped his hands on his drenched pants, and started on a third.
He didn’t notice immediately when someone approached the doorway and stopped next to his bags. The magazine cut off much of his line of sight, and the rain, spraying him in the face with every fresh gust of wind, cut off the rest. But at one point, between gusts, he glanced beside him and saw a pair of legs in ash-gray trousers and, next to them, a dripping, folded umbrella.
Harold put the magazine down behind him. It wasn’t quite soaked through yet, so it was too valuable to throw away. But he wasn’t going to sit with a magazine over his head while another man stood next to him with an umbrella he wasn’t even using.
He looked up, squinting against the rain. The other man was bending forward, sheltering his head under the overhang. The rest of him was exposed. The rain blew on the man’s suit and he just stood and took it, one hand in his pants pocket, the other on the handle of his umbrella.
“Mister,” Harold said, “don’t you mind the rain?”
The man shook his head. “Just water,” he said. “A little water never hurt anyone.”
Harold had shouted; the other man had spoken at a normal level, or maybe even a little quieter. So even though Harold had leaned into it, he hadn’t caught the words. “What?” he said.
The man bent at the knees. He stuck the umbrella straight out in front of them and pressed the release. It opened up enormously, suddenly cutting them off from the storm. “I said, a little water never hurt anyone.”
He still spoke quietly but now the storm was muted behind the umbrella, and Harold heard him. “I don’t know,” Harold said. “But I’m not going to argue with a guy’s got an umbrella.”
The man smiled. He took his hand out of his pocket and brought with it a slightly battered pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?” The man thumbed the pack open and extended it.
It was suddenly dry and quiet-relatively dry and relatively quiet-and a man Harold had never seen before was offering him a cigarette. Why? Harold tried to read the answer in the man’s eyes. They didn’t reveal a lot. They were ordinary eyes in an ordinary face. They had wrinkles at the corners and were overhung by untrimmed gray eyebrows. They were not cruel, or cloudy, or cold, or anything else in particular. Just eyes. Just a face. Just a man doing his fellow man a good turn.
Harold plucked a cigarette out of the pack and stuck it between his lips. Then he looked up again, to get another read on those eyes. Whatever he thought he might see, he didn’t.
You’re on the street, you can’t be too careful, Harold told himself. Careful keeps you alive. But there are limits. When a guy comes by and offers you a cigarette, you take it and say thank you. It doesn’t happen every day.
Harold reached back to take another, for later, or maybe two or even three as long as the guy was offering. But the pack of cigarettes was gone now, replaced with a brass lighter. At least it looked like brass-hard to tell in a dark doorway.
Harold leaned into the flame. It took three tries for him to catch it on the tip of the cigarette. He dragged deep when it caught, let the warmth rush into his throat and lungs. First cigarette in… how long? Hard to say. You lost track of exact time living on the street. But it had to have been at least a month.
“Thanks,” Harold said.
“Don’t mention it.” The man straightened up, lifting the umbrella and stepping around so that he was standing in front of Harold. “Make the night a little easier to get through.”
“You’re a mensch,” Harold said. “You know what that is, a mensch?”
The man nodded. “What’s your name?”
Harold coughed, a wet, rattling sound he brought up from deep in his chest. “Harry.”
“You take care, Harry,” the man said.
“Don’t you worry about me. I been through storms would make this look like pissing in a can. You take care-you got the nice suit.” Harold made himself smile up at the man. He thought, Maybe the guy will leave me the umbrella. Then he thought, What, and walk out in the rain without it? Next he thought, I could probably take it away from him. But finally he thought, The guy gave you a cigarette, talked to you, passed his time with you, kept you dry for a while, and you mug him for his umbrella? Schmuck.
He thought all this in the time it took him to take two more drags on the cigarette.
“I hate to ask,” Harold said, not quite able to get the umbrella fantasy out of his mind, “but would you mind standing there while I finish this? A little easier without the rain in my face…” He let his words trail off. The man was shaking his head.
“Sorry. I have to be somewhere.”
“Nah, that’s okay, I understand.” Harold raised the cigarette. “Thanks for the smoke.”
“My pleasure,” the man said.
“Sladek, Harold R. R for Robert.” The detective flipped through the creased wallet he’d retrieved from Harold’s pocket. There was a long-expired driver’s license from New Jersey; a photograph of Harold, when his hair had been brown; another photograph of Harold and a woman standing next to a white-iced, pink-flowered cake; a stained dollar bill with one corner missing; and an ancient business card, smudged and bent, listing Harold Robert Sladek as Assistant Manager for J.C. Penney, New York.
The detective nudged his partner with his elbow. “Check the bags.”
The younger man bent to look through the plastic bags, still standing in a puddle of water.
At the curb, a uniformed officer, the one who had found Sladek’s body, was coordinating getting the covered corpse into the EMS van. He had radioed for EMS instead of the morgue because he had thought Sladek was still alive.
“… four, five, six magazines, a pullover, a comb, half a… a… I don’t know, I guess it’s a baguette,” the partner said. “A French bread. Whatever.” The detective took notes. “A couple napkins. Bag of Doritos. A WKXW-FM baseball cap.”
“He must have got that at the Turtle Bay street fair,” the detective said. “They were giving them away on Saturday. I got one.”