“Yes.”
“Eldorado nine, two six three two. Can you remember that?”
“Yes.”
“You look so tired. Apartment Three B. Are you stationed in New York? Is stationed the right word? Fifty-three West Fifty-fourth Street.”
“I’m not exactly stationed in New York. I have been stationed in Washington but I got sick and I have a long leave now and I’m going to spend it in New York.”
“Eldorado nine, two-six-three-two.”
“I stay with a friend of mine, a newspaperman. We were in Korea together.” Marco ran a wet hand over his face and began to hum “La Seine.” He had found the source of the sound of the open A. It was far inside this girl and it was in the sound of the name Dassine oult Yemma. He couldn’t get the back of his hand away from his mouth. He had had to shut his eyes. He was so tired. He was so tired. She took his hand gently away from his mouth. “Let’s sit down,” she said. “I want you to put your head on my shoulder.” The train lurched and he almost fell, but she caught and held him, then she led the way into the other car where there were plenty of seats.
Raymond’s apartment was on the extreme west coast of the island where firemen had heavy bags under their eyes from piling out four and five times a night to push sirens to brownstone houses where nobody had any time to do anything about too many bone-weary Puerto Ricans living in one room. It was a strip of city too dishonest to admit it was a slum, or rather, in all of the vastness of the five boroughs of metropolis there was a strip of city, very tiny, which was not a slum, and this was the thin strip that was photographed and its pictures sent out across the world until all the world and the minuscule few who lived in that sliver of city thought that was New York, and neither knew or cared about the remainder of the six hundred square miles of flesh and brick. Here was the ripe slum of the West Side where the city had turned so bad that at last thirteen square blocks of it had had to be torn down before the rats carried off the babies. New York, New York! It’s a wonderful town! The west side of the island was rich in façades not unlike the possibilities of a fairy princess with syphilis. Central Park West was all front and faced a glorious park betrayed only now and then by bands of chattering faggots auctioning bodies and by an excessive population of emotion-caparisoned people in the somewhat temporary-looking sanitariums on so many of its side streets. Columbus and Amsterdam avenues were the streets of the drunks, where the murders were done in the darkest morning hours, where there were an excessive number of saloons and hardware stores. They were connected by trains of brownstone houses whose fronts were riotously colored morning and evening and all day on Sunday by bursts and bouquets of Puerto Ricans, and beyond Amsterdam was Broadway, the bawling, flash street, the fleshy, pig-eyed part of the city that wore lesions of neon and incandescent scabs, pustules of lights and color in suggestively luetic lycopods, illuminating littered streets, filth-clogged streets that could never be cleansed because when one thousand hands cleaned, one million hands threw dirt upon the streets again. Broadway was patrolled by strange-looking pedestrians, people who had grabbed the wrong face in the dark when someone had shouted “Fire!” and were now out roaming the streets, desperate to find their own. For city block after city block on Broadway it seemed that only food was sold. Beyond that was West End Avenue, a misplaced street bitter on its own memories, lost and bewildered, seeking some Shaker Heights, desperately genteel behind an apron of shabby bricks. Here was the limbo of the lower middle class where God the Father, in the form of sunlight, never showed His face. Raymond lived beyond that, on Riverside Drive, another front street of large, grand apartments that had become cabbage-sour furnished rooms which faced the river and an excessive amount of squalor on the Jersey shore. All together, the avenues and streets proved by their decay that the time of the city was long past, if it had ever existed, and the tall buildings, end upon end upon end, were so many extended fingers beckoning the Bomb.
Marco paid the cab off in front of Raymond’s building. On an April day the city was colder than Labrador, and the wind had found teeth which tore at his face.
Marco felt like a giant. He had slept three hours on the train without dreaming and he had awakened in Rosie Cheyney’s arms. He would have a very delicious therapy to tell those pate doctors about when this was all over. When it was all over but the sobbing. Big joke. All over but the sobbing, he thought, giving the driver a quarter tip. He got into the elevator feeling confident that behind Raymond’s mustard-colored eyes there was an almost human understanding, not that Raymond was any monotreme but he seemed pretty much like a Martian sometimes. Fifty-three West Fifty-fourth, apartment Three B. He just wanted to hear Raymond tell how he had gotten the Medal of Honor. He just wanted to talk about blackboards and pointers and Chinese and that crude animated cartoon with the blue spot. Eldorado nine, two six three two. He wouldn’t talk to Raymond about the murders in the nightmares. Rosie. Eugénie Rose. My Wild Arab Nose. Oh, What a Gorgeous Nose! Cyrano: Act I, Scene 1: Pedantic: Does not Aristophanes mention a mythologic monster called Hippocampelephantocamelos? That projection room and the American voice on the sound track and the flat, empty, half film cans like pie plates used as ash trays. Suddenly, he could taste the yak-dung cigarettes again and it was marvelous. If he could only remember the name of that brand, he thought, but somehow he never could. He thought about the movement of the many red dots on the screen, then of Raymond, symbolized by the blue dot, and the canned voice telling them that they were seeing the battle action in which Raymond had been willing to sacrifice his life, again and again, to save them all.
The elevator operator indicated the doorway directly across the hall. Marco rang the bell while the operator waited. Chunjin answered the door. He stood clearly under good light wearing black trousers, a white shirt, a black bow tie, and a white jacket, looking blankly at Marco, waiting for an inquiry, not having time to recognize the major, and most certainly not expecting him. To Marco he was a djinn who had stepped into flesh out of that torment which was giving him lyssophobia. Not more than four fifths of a second passed before Marco hit Chunjin high in the chest, having thrown the desperate punch for the center of the man’s face, but the Korean had stepped backward reflexively and had saved himself, partially, from the unexpectedness of Marco’s assault. Because he had not thought of himself as being on duty while Raymond was out of the city, Chunjin was unarmed. However, he was a trained agent and a good one. He held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Soviet security forces and he had been assigned to Raymond on a crash basis. He had recognized Marco too late. He was entirely current on Marco’s dossier because the major was Raymond’s only friend.
The elevator operator, a sturdy twenty-eight-year-
old, watched the Korean carried backward and the door flung inward to bang against the pink plaster wall. He rushed in fast behind Marco and tried to pull him back. Marco held Chunjin off with his left hand and cooled the elevator man with his right. Chunjin took that left arm and drew Marco into a prime judo catch and threw him high across the room so he could get at Marco’s neck, coming down on it hard enough to break it in the follow-up, but Marco rolled and kept rolling when he hit the floor and slipped locks on hard when Chunjin came down, missing him.
They were both Black Belts, which is the highest judo rank there is, this side of a Dan. Marco had weight on his man, but Marco was in a run-down condition. However, he had been lifted into a murderous exhilaration and was filled to his hairline with adrenalin because he had at last been permitted to take those nightmares and one of the people in them into the fingers of his hands to beat and to torture until he found out why they had happened and where they had happened and how they could be made to stop. What worked the best was the twenty-nine extra pounds of weight and, as four neighbors watched with studious curiosity from the safer side of the doorsill, he broke Chunjin’s forearm. The Korean almost took the side of his face and his neck off, not losing a beat of his rhythm during the fracture and appalling Marco that such a slight man could be so tough. Then Marco dislocated the man’s hip joint as he leaped to jab his foot into Marco’s larynx, and it was that second catch which brought out the great scream of agony.