In a minute they’d be coming up, via elevator. Would they stop at the third floor, or would they go on to seven? Did they know my Uncle Al lived here? They had to, there was no other reason for them to come here. They hadn’t followed me, I was sure of that. While I’d taken my route here by subway, they’d taken their route by car.
So they’d stop here, just to be sure, on the third floor.
Whirrr, they were coming up.
I’ve been coming to Uncle Al’s apartment since I was a kid, and kids always know geography better than adults. Kids know apartments better, buildings better, neighborhoods better. So I knew the door to the right of the elevator led to the staircase. I gave off kicking and knocking, and went through that door, and fixed a matchbook so the door didn’t close all the way. Through the narrow vertical slit, I could see Uncle Al’s door.
I’d been right; they got off the elevator at the third floor. Peeking one-eyed through the crack, I could see their backs, broad and black-coated. They didn’t just stand, they hulked.
They walked across the white carpet without any noise, and knocked on Uncle Al’s door. It was a special code-type knock, and anyone could tell that; one, and then three, and then one.
The door opened right away, and Uncle Al stuck his head out and said, “You got him?”
Uncle Al is a big hefty guy, about two-thirds bone and muscle, about one-third spaghetti. He has black hair so thick and shiny most people think he’s wearing a toupee, and his face is a normal collection of mouth, eyes, eyebrows, cheeks, chin and ears positioned around a nose the size and shape of the bald eagle’s beak on the tail of a twenty-five-cent piece. In the summer, when he pitches softball in his undershirt at clambakes, you can see he has black hair growing all over his chunky arms and chunky shoulders and chunky chest. I don’t know about his chunky stomach, but I suppose he has black hair growing all over that, too. When he sits in an overstuffed armchair and crosses his legs, another hairy region pops into view between the top of his black sock and the cuff of his black trousers.
Normally, Uncle Al has a voice to go with all this chunkiness and hair, a bass voice that makes him a natural for the barbershop quartets at the aforesaid clambakes, but right now, as he said, “You got him?” that voice had gone up maybe two octaves. It was the first time I’d ever seen or heard my Uncle Al scared.
One of the two guys said, “Not yet. Is he in there?”
Uncle Al said, “Are you kidding?”
The second one said, “You wouldn’t cover up for him, would you? Agricola wouldn’t like that.”
“I’m keepin’ out of it,” my Uncle Al said, “I want no part of it, no part of it.” All that showed of him in the hallway was his head, looking scared.
Standing there in the yellow stairwell, my feet on concrete and my forehead against the edge of the door and my eye blinking at the narrow vertical strip of corridor, I began at last to understand a couple of things. Way back in Canarsie, when those guys out there had first come after me, my immediate reaction had been to call Uncle Al, the only one I personally knew in the organization. I’d been too scared and excited myself to understand the meaning of his response on the phone; at the time, it had only meant to me that Uncle Al was being difficult to talk to. And the same again, when I’d been kicking futilely at the door. My relationship with Uncle Al has always involved a degree of difficulty in communication for both of us, so there was no reason this time should be any exception.
But now, seeing his face hanging disembodied in the hallway, hearing his voice, I understood I’d made this trip for nothing. Uncle Al wouldn’t help me because he couldn’t help me. He was too scared.
Out there in the corridor, while I was making my discouraging discoveries, they were still talking. The first one was saying, “He come up here.” Like it was an indictment of Uncle Al, an open-and-shut case.
“Would I cross Agricola?” my Uncle Al asked them. He pronounced it A-grić,-o-la. “Am I a dumbhead?” he asked them.
That was one of his favorite expressions. When he was young he used to drive a cab, and when he talks about it these days he says, “Drive a cab all my life? Am I a dumbhead?” The answer is supposed to be no.
The first one, meanwhile, was repeating, “He come up here. And he didn’t go back down.”
Uncle Al said, “What about the roof?”
They both shook their heads. “It don’t figure,” the first one said. “He come here looking for you.”
“Invite us in,” said the second one.
Uncle Al said, “Listen, I got trouble enough. The wife don’t know nothing about this, you follow me? The brat’s her sister’s kid, you know what I mean? How do I explain you two, this time of night?”
“We want the kid,” said the second one.
The first one, still working the same idea, said, “He come up here.”
Uncle Al said, “Maybe he went back down.”
“How?” said the second one. “We took the elevator ourselves. There it is.” He half-turned, and pointed at it.
Uncle Al said, “The stairs, maybe he took the stairs.”
“What stairs?” They both said it, while I was thinking to myself that I understood about how he couldn’t help me but it struck me he was going to far when he started helping them.
Uncle Al brought an arm out into the corridor to go with his head. He pointed the arm right at me, and said, “Those stairs there.”
They turned and looked in my direction, and looked at each other, and came forward.
That was all. Down the stairs I went, two and three at a time. I had to sacrifice either speed or silence, and I opted for speed. So I guess they could hear me going just as plain as I could hear them coming.
Doors, nothing but doors. I burst out the ground-floor door into the foyer, out the foyer door into the entranceway, out the entranceway door into the street. Their long black car was still double-parked out front, with nobody in it. I turned left, toward Central Park, and ran.
Chapter 4
When I was sure they’d given up and gone away, I crawled out from under the bush again and headed across the park toward the West Side.
Now that the heat of the chase was gone, at least for a while, I was beginning to freeze. It was now about quarter to four, Wednesday morning, the twelfth of September. I don’t know exactly what the temperature was, but it was too low to be out walking around Central Park in just shirt sleeves. Walking briskly westward, I flapped my arms around like a drunk arguing with himself, while I pondered a future that now appeared to be as short as it was uncertain.
Where could I go now, what could I do? I’d escaped the killers for the moment, but I knew enough about the organization from newspapers and television to know I wasn’t free of them for good. They wouldn’t give up, no matter how far or how fast I ran. I was a marked man; the tentacles of the organization would reach out to deal me swift vengeance wherever I might try to hide.
My only goal had been Uncle Al. From him I had expected sanctuary, in him an ally, through him an explanation of why I’d been put on the spot. It still had to be a mistake, some sort of error; all I had to do was find the error and rectify it.
But now what? I was safe for the moment, but that was all. I had no coat, not much money, and now that the excitement was temporarily over I could realize I was exhausted. I should have been asleep hours ago.