"Beige," I said.
He said, "How come you're bothering my lady?"
"Ah, it is you, Robert Rambeaux."
"What do you want, bothering her?"
"I was hoping she could get me tickets to your next recital," I said.
Rambeaux sighed and shook his head. "Everybody's a wiseass," he said.
"Now don't generalize, Bob," I said. "All that has been established here is that I am a wiseass."
"Robert," he said. The correction was automatic. "I asked you a question, whitebread, and I want an answer."
"White bread, Bobby? Racial taunts? You're about as black as Grace Kelly."
"I ought to kick your ass for you right here."
"Little question of that, Bobb-o," I said. "But you can't. And if you try, you're just going to get your outfit all wrinkled and sweaty."
Robert stepped about a step away and looked at me thoughtfully.
"You're a cocky motherfucker, aren't you," he said.
I shrugged. "It's just hard for me to get serious about a guy whose outfit took three hours to assemble."
"I'm tired of bullshitting around," Robert said. "I don't want you comin' near April again. You understand?"
"You really go to Juilliard?" I said.
"You understand?"
"I bet you don't," I said. "I bet you're a pimp instead."
Robert went inside the coat of his beige outfit and came out with a straight razor. He held it like he knew how.
"You better listen what I'm telling you, whitey."
"Heavenly days," I said, "talk about ethnic stereotyping."
"You go on back to Boston, fishbelly, and stay there and don't you come near my lady again."
I was still sitting. I put my left foot behind his right ankle, put my right foot against his right knee, pulled with the left, pushed with the right, and Robert went over backward. I stood up and stomped the razor out of his hand. I got a little of the hand in the process and Robert yelped.
"There goes your violin career," I said.
He came up swinging and he was better than he looked, with a lot of fluid speed in his punches. He was almost fast enough to hit me. I caught a punch on my right shoulder and rolled my chin away from another one and hit him in the solar plexus and he doubled over and backed away, holding his stomach, gasping.
"See why I'm cocky," I said.
His eyes scanned for the razor. It was ten feet away on the ground. It might as well have been in Paramus. Still bent over, he looked at me as the semiparalysis began to ease.
"What the fuck you want, man?" he said.
"Mostly I want to know that April Kyle is all right, and is going to stay all right."
Robert had straightened up. His shoulders were still a little forward and he was massaging his stomach with his right hand. But he could breathe.
"She's a fucking chippy, man. How all right do chippies get? How long they stay all right, you know?"
Two black kids on skateboards zipped between us and on down the walk.
"I didn't turn her out, man. She was a chippy 'fore I knew her."
I nodded. "Everything's relative," I said. "I don't want her worse off than she was."
"Hey, she's better off. She's making better bread than she ever made with Utley."
"And keeping it?" I said.
"Sure, man, whatta you think, I'm no pimp."
"Yeah, sure," I said, "you're a music student. You probably carry that razor to trim clarinet reeds."
"No shit, man. I'm taking courses at Juilliard."
"Robert," I said, "what's the point? If I can talk her out of you, I will. If you can stop me, you will."
"You can't talk her out of me, man."
"Probably not," I said. "But I'll try. And if you try to cut me again, I'll break both your arms."
"Maybe next time I won't be alone, man."
I turned back toward Fifth Avenue. "I think we can count on that, Rob," I said.
4
I strolled across the park toward Lincoln Center. To my left the row of high-rise hotels on 59th Street gleamed in benign elegance over the burgeoning green swales of Olmsted's grand design. Roller skaters and Walkmen and joggers and Frisbees and dogs and kerchiefs. Lunch in brown bags and park rangers on horseback and outcroppings of dark rock on which people sat and got the early yellow splash of spring sun in their faces. Birds sang. Maybe ten years ago a group of young men raped a young woman in the park and left her naked, gagged, and bound hand and foot. Another group of young men came along and found her and raped her too.
Ah wilderness.
Lincoln Center looked like an expensive complex of Turkish bathhouses, a compendium of neo-Arabic-Spanish and silly. It did for the West Side what the Trump Tower did for the East, offering the chance for a giggle on even the drabbest day.
A large-eyed woman wearing a full skirt and silver New Balance running shoes opened a file folder and told me that in fact Robert Rambeaux was registered at Juilliard. He was taking a course in composition with a practicum in woodwinds.
"What's his address?" I said. "He still living on First Street?"
"I'm sorry, sir, it's against our policy to give out that sort of information."
"Quite right," I said. "People drive you crazy if they know where you live. A person has a right to privacy."
She smiled at me and nodded. Her hair was pulled back behind her ears and fell to her shoulders. She didn't look very old, but there were gray streaks in her hair. Premature. Probably from worrying about the rights of privacy.
She had a cup of coffee in a white mug with Beethoven's picture on it. As I stood I brushed it with my elbow and spilled it across her desk and onto her lap.
She jumped up, trying to keep the coffee from soaking through, brushing her skirt with both hands.
"Oh, my God," I said. "I am sorry."
While I said that I shuffled the stuff on top of her desk frantically out of the way, and in doing so I copped the top sheet out of Rambeaux's folder and folded it inside my jacket.
"It's all right," she said, her graying head still bent over, smoothing at her skirt. "Really, it's all right. The skirt is washable."
I closed Rambeaux's folder and put it and two other folders and a long pad of yellow paper in a pile on the corner of the desk. She left her skirt and turned her attention to the calculator on her desk, wiping it off with Kleenex she took from a drawer.
"Really," she said, "it's my fault. I shouldn't have left the coffee there. It'll be fine. I'll just get a wet paper towel from the ladies' room and wipe off the desk."
"Well," I said, "thanks for being so decent about it."
"No, really," she said.
I smiled my earnest smile at her and thanked her again and she put her file folders away in the file and locked it and went to the ladies' room to get a paper towel. I left.
Walking through Columbus Circle, I read Rambeaux's transcript. He'd done well in his courses. And he lived on East 77th Street. I put the transcript in a trash bin attached to a lamppost. Incriminating evidence. Probably could have looked Rambeaux up in the phone book. How many Robert Rambeauxs could there be? But it's good to keep in practice. And the risk factor at Juilliard was low.
I walked back across the park and crossed Fifth Avenue and turned uptown. There was a plate glass window on the Hotel Pierre and I checked my reflection as I went by. I was wearing a leather jacket and a blue-toned Allen Solly tattersall shirt and jeans, and Nike running shoes with a charcoal swoosh. I paused and turned the collar up on my leather jacket. Perfect. Did the traffic slow on Fifth Avenue to look at me? Maybe.
It was nearly four in the afternoon and getting less sprf nglike when I turned east on 77th Street. I crossed Madison Avenue, the Hotel Carlyle on the southeast corner. Rambeaux's building was five and a half blocks east. Between Second and First avenues, a five-story gray brick building with black iron fire escapes zigzagging the front. The bell directory listed Rambeaux in SD. I settled into the entryway of a brownstone church across the street and waited.
Rambeaux knew me, so it would be harder following him. But not so hard it couldn't be done. I zipped my jacket up. It pulled a little tight over my shoulder holster, and it lost the nice contrast with my Allen Solly shirt. But the alternative was coldness. It's almost never perfect. After five, people began coming home. Students with school bags and musical instruments in cases, young women in tailored suits with blouses and bows at the neck, young men in tailored suits and white shirts and ties at the neck. A lot of briefcases. Nothing happened across the street. It was a quarter to six, it was chilly, I was missing the cocktail hour. Soon I would be missing the supper hour.