“Sorry,” I said. I motioned to the bartender and told him to bring us each a fresh drink.
“Spilled your goddamned drink all over me,” the Canadian said.
“An accident. They happen.”
“All over me. Soaked to the skin. I ought to punch you in the nose, you son of a bitch.”
I gave him a hard look. “I said it was an accident, baby. Don’t lean on your luck.”
“Dirty bastard.”
I told him to shut up.
The bartender came over and set fresh drinks in front of both of us. I mixed mine again and wondered where the Canadian would take it from here. It was his move. He could push it or leave it alone. I hoped he would push it.
He did. “Dirty son of a bitch,” he said again. And when I turned around to look at him he tried to slug me.
It was a mistake. He sent me a telegram first, then wound up and threw what was supposed to be his Sunday punch. It was Tuesday and he missed. I brushed the fist aside with my left hand and swatted him with the right. He gagged and stepped back. Then he lowered his head and came in again.
I hit him in the chest, over the heart, hard. I chopped a short right to the underside of his jaw and he straightened up. I kicked him in the pit of the stomach and he fell forward on his face.
He lay there and made little noises without moving. I walked over next to him, looked at him for a moment and gave him a very short and very hard kick in the side of the head. It was hard enough to knock him out but not hard enough to kill him. His eyes closed and he stopped making his little noises.
The jukebox was the only noise in the bar. It went on making bad music while everybody else clammed up and tried not to look at me. They didn’t manage it.
I picked up the bills, leaving the change for the barkeep. I motioned him over and he came to me, his eyes wary.
“I don’t want trouble, Mac.”
My eyes smiled gently. “No trouble,” I said. I peeled a single off the top of the roll of bills and handed it to him. “For him,” I said, pointing to the Canadian on the floor. “I spilled a drink on him. This is so he can get his suit cleaned.”
I turned and walked out of the bar.
I had been in a combat unit in Korea. It all happened years ago but parts of the experience had been sharp, raw, vital. Those parts were still clear now. Some of them came back to me now and then, sometimes in dreams, sometimes when I was lost in thought.
Now I remembered the first time I’d seen combat. Most of Korea was nothing much more than too much cold and too much mud and too many corpses. The first day of fighting was memorable.
Not the action itself. The action had something to do with a hill — we were trying to hold it, or to take it, or something. But what was really memorable were the feelings. There had been the anticipation. There had been the worry that I would crack up or run screaming or that some bastard of a Chinese would kill me. Then there had been the tension of the scene — the bullets overhead and men dying and the gun in my hand chattering like a woman on a telephone. And afterward, the gunfire dying down and stopping, there had been the calmness and a chance to relax. And there had been the sudden sure knowledge that I had been good, that I had held up, that I hadn’t gone to pieces and wouldn’t go to pieces. And that I was alive and had lived through the battle and would live through the war.
The same feelings were back again as I headed back toward the Malmsly. The night air was clean and cold in my lungs and I walked easily, confidently. I had set the first test up all by myself. I had staged a little incident for Crowley and I had brought it off properly. I felt sorry for the Canadian — he’d played a bit part in a private play without knowing what was coming off — but I wasn’t going to waste tears on him. He was a means to an end and nothing more.
Maybe I had accomplished something. Maybe someone had noticed me and would want to know who I was. Because the person who chopped down the Canadian and kicked him in the head and left a dollar to clean his suit wasn’t a slob with a chip on his shoulder. He was a heavyweight, a hotster, a definite mob type. He was Nat Crowley.
So maybe somebody noticed and would want to know more. If so, fine — that made everything that much easier. If not, also fine. Because the bit in the bar had still served a purpose. The incident had given me a crisis situation and let me play Crowley against it. I had learned new mannerisms and new manners. New pictures and new words.
I slowed down, stopped in a haberdashery doorway and got a fresh cigarette going. While I was lighting it, I managed to look around behind me. I learned something that way.
I had a tail.
He was around twenty-five years old. I had seen him before in the bar. Now he was following me.
It would have been easy enough to shake him but shaking him was the last thing I wanted to do. He was sizing me up, shadowing me to find out where I was staying and who I was. He would find these things out and tell somebody. Fine.
I shook out the match and dropped it to the pavement. I led my tail to the Malmsly. I got my key from the desk and took the elevator upstairs to my room. I washed up and went to bed, wondering how much the tail would have to bribe the desk clerk to find out who I was.
4
Wednesday and Thursday were waiting days, walking days, wandering days. Wednesday morning I took a rambling walk along the downtown east side. I watched the winos drink muscatel in broken-down bars. I passed through the fringe district, the borderland between Skid Row and Buffalo’s version of Harlem. I looked at fag joints and porno bookshops and dubious nightclubs, all of them sad and slightly soiled in the daylight.
I stopped at a pawnshop and bought a gold signet ring that fitted nicely on the fourth finger of my right hand. I stopped at a cigar store and bet five dollars on a horse.
When I got back to the hotel the morning was mostly gone. The maid was making up my room.
“I’ll come back later,” she said.
“Go ahead and finish,” I told her. “I’ll stay out of your way.”
I closed the door. She had already made the bed and was busying herself with a dustcloth, straightening up the dresser. I stretched out on the bed and watched her. She was a Negro girl, maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty. The contrast of her starched white uniform and her soft brown skin was dramatic. There’s something about girls in uniforms that has always turned me on, Barshter or Crowley. Airline stewardesses, nurses — they always get to me. Maybe it’s the lure of the forbidden or the idea that they’re around to be of service.
So I watched the lines of her body, the taut muscles in her calves when she bent over to pick up something from the floor, the way her breasts pushed out against the front of the neat uniform.
The rush of desire surprised me. It was more than the lazy wouldn’t-it-be-nice-to-get-into-that feeling that any man gets when he looks at a pretty girl. My feeling was hunger, raw and intense.
Don Barshter had never believed in the sanctity of the marriage vows. But Don Barshter had somehow never got around to cheating. He never started affairs because he was afraid they would be messy. And he didn’t go to prostitutes because he was afraid of making his pitch to the wrong girl. If a girl had come along with the word whore tattooed in blue upon her forehead, square old Barshter would have taken her up on it. But he could go to a bar and sit next to a painted lady and never have the nerve to approach her.
But I wasn’t Don Barshter anymore.
So I said, “You’re a real pretty girl, honey. You know that?”