Manhattan Is My Beat Page 8

  "Because of what Rimbaud says about the city."

  "Uhm." Wait. She'd seen the movie and hated it. She didn't know Rambo'd been a book. She thought of the cardboard cutout in Washington Square Video--of Stallone with his muscles and that stupid headband. "Not sure."

  "Remember his poem about Paris?"

  Poem? "Not exactly."

  "Rimband wrote that the city was death without tears, our diligent daughter and servant, a desperate love, and a petty crime howling in the mud of the street."

  Rune was silent. Trying hard to figure Richard out. Downtown weird and smart. She'd never met anyone like him. She was watching his eyes, the way his long fingers went through a precise ritual of pulling a beer can out of the plastic loops that held the six-pack, tapping the disk of the top to settle the foam, then slowly popping it open. Watching his lean legs, long feet, the texture of his eyes. She had a feeling that the posturing was just a facade. But what was underneath it?

  And why was she so drawn to him? Because there was something she couldn't quite figure out about him?

  Because of the mystery?

  Richard said, "You're avoiding my question. Why did you come here?"

  "This is the Magic Kingdom."

  "You're not addressing Rimbaud's metaphor."

  Addressing? Why did he have to talk that way?

  Rune asked, "You ever read the Oz books?"

  "'Follow the yellow brick road,' " he sang in a squeaky voice.

  "That's the movie. But Frank Baum--he was the author--he wrote a whole series of them. In his magic kingdom of Oz, there were lots of lands. All of them are different. Some people are made out of china, some have heads like pumpkins. They ride around on sawhorses. That's just what New York is like. Every other city I've ever been in is like a discount store. You know--clean, cheap, convenient. But what, basically? Unsatisfying, that's what. They're literal. There's no magic to them. Come here." She took his hand and led him to the window. "What do you see?"

  "The Con Ed Building."

  "Where?"

  "Right there."

  "I don't see a building." Rune turned to him, her eyes wide. "I see a mountain of marble carved by three giants a thousand years ago. They used magic tools, I'll bet. Crystal hammers and chisels made out of gold and lapis. I think one of them, I forget his name, built this castle we're in right now. And those lights, you see them over there? All around us? They're lanterns on the horns of oxen with golden hides circling around the kingdom. And the rivers, you know where they came from? They were gouged out of the earth by the gods' toes when they were dancing. And then ... and then there're these pits underground, huge ones. You ever heard the rumblings underneath us? They're worms crawling at fifty miles an hour. Sometimes they get tired of living in the dark and they turn into dragons and go shooting off into the sky." She grabbed his arm urgently. "Look, there's one now!"

  Richard watched the 727 making a slow approach to LaGuardia. He stared at it for a long time.

  Rune said, "You think I'm crazy, don't you? That I live in a fairy story?"

  "That's not bad. Not necessarily."

  "I collect them, you know."

  "Fairy stories?"

  Rune walked to her bookshelves. She ran her finger across the spines of maybe fifty books. Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Perrault's Fairy Tales, the Quiller-Couch Old French stories, Cavendish's book on Arthur and three or four volumes of his Man, Myth and Magic. She held up one. "An original edition of Lady Gregory's Story of the Tuatha De Danann and of the Fianna of Ireland." Handed it to him.

  "Is it valuable?" Richard flipped through the old book with his gorgeous fingers.

  "To me it is."

  "Happily ever after ..." He scanned pages.

  Rune said, "That's not the way fairy stories end. Not all of them." She took the book from him and began thumbing past pages slowly. She stopped. "Here's the story of Diarmuid. He was one of the Fianna, the warrior guards of ancient Ireland. Diarmuid let an ugly hag sleep in his lodge and she turned into a beautiful woman from the Side, that's the other side, capital S--the land of magic."

  "That's sounds pretty happy to me."

  "But that wasn't the end." She turned away and stared past her dim reflection at the city. "He lost her. They both had to be true to their natures--he couldn't live in the Side and she couldn't live on earth. He had to return to the land of mortals. He lost her and never found love again. But he always remembered how he much he'd loved her. Isn't that a sad story?"

  She thought, for some reason, of Robert Kelly.

  She thought of her father.

  Tears pricked her eyes.

  "You sure have a lot of stories," he said, eyes on the spines of her books.

  "I love stories." She turned to him. Couldn't keep her eyes off him. He was aware of it and looked away. "You were like him, coming after me. The other night, all dressed in black. I thought of Diarmuid when I first saw you. Like a knight errant on a quest." She scrunched her face up. "Accompanied by two tacky wenches."

  Richard laughed. Then added, "I was on a quest. For you." He kissed her. "You're my Holy Grail."

  She closed her eyes, kissed him back. Then said suddenly, "Let's eat."

  The cutting board in the shape of a pig was her kitchen table. She cut open a round loaf of rye bread, spread mayonnaise on both sides. She noticed him watching her. "Watch closely. I told you I could cook."

  "That's cooking?"

  "I think I can really cook. I just haven't done it much. I have a bunch of cookbooks." She pointed to the bookcases again. "My mother gave them to me when I left home. I think she wanted to give me a diaphragm but lost her nerve at the last minute, so she gave me Fannie Farmer and Craig Claiborne instead. I can't use them much. Most recipes you need a stove for."

  She poured cold Chinese food from the carton onto the sliced loaf and cut it in half. The cold pork poured out the sides when she sawed the dull knife through the bread, and she scooped up the food with her hands and spread it back between the domes of rye.

  "Okay," he said dubiously. "Well. That's interesting."

  But when she handed him the sandwich he ate enthusiastically. For a skinny boy he had quite an appetite. He looked so French. He really had to be Francois.

  "So," he asked, "you going with anybody?"

  "Not at the moment."

  Or for any moments in the last four months three weeks.

  "Half my friends are getting married," he said. He went through his beer-can ritual again, his long fingers beating out a hesitant rhythm on the top of the can, then opening it and pouring the beer while he held the glass at an angle.

  "Marriage, hmm," she said noncommittally.

  Where was all this headed?

  But he was on to a new subject. "So what're your goals?"

  She took a big bite of rye bread. "To eat dinner, I guess."

  "I mean your life goals."

  Rune blinked and looked away from him. She believed she'd never asked herself that question. "I don't know. Eat dinner." She laughed. "Eat breakfast. Dance. Work. Hang out ... Have adventures!"

  He leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. "You taste like Hunan mayonnaise. Let's make love." His arms encircled her.

  "No." Rune drained her second beer.

  "You sure?"

  No ...

  Yes ...

  She felt herself pulled forward, toward him, and she wasn't sure whether he was actually pulling her or she was moving by herself. Like a Ouija board pointer. He rolled on top of her. They kissed for five minutes. Growing aroused, that warm water sensation flowing up her calves into her thighs.

  No ... yes ... no.

  But she was saved from the debate by a voice shouting, "Home!" A woman's head appeared up the stairway. "Zip it up!"

  A woman in her late twenties, wearing a black minidress and red stockings, climbed up the stairs. High heels. Her hair was cut short in a 1950s style and teased up. The hair was black and purple.

  So th
e roomie's date hadn't turned out the way she'd hoped.

  Rune muttered, "Sandra, Richard, Richard, Sandra."

  Sandra examined him. She said nothing to him but to Rune: "You did okay." Then turned toward her half of the room, unzipping her dress as she walked, revealing a thick white strap of bra.

  Rune whispered. "She's a jewelry designer. Or that's what she wants to do. Days, she's a paralegal. But her hobby is collecting men. She's slept with fifty-eight of them so far. She has the score written down. Of course she's only come twenty-two times so there's some debate on what she can count. There's no Robert's Rules of Order for this sort of thing."

  "I suppose not."

  Richard's eyes followed a vague reflection of Sandra in the window. She was on the far side of the cloud wall, stripping slowly. She knew she was being watched. The bra came off last.

  Rune laughed and took his chin in her hand. Kissed him. "Darling, don't even think about it. That woman is a time bomb. You get into bed with her, it's like a group grope with a hundred people you don't know where they've been. Christ ..." Rune's voice grew soft. "I worry about her. I don't like her but she's on some kind of weird suicide thing, you ask me. A guy looks at her, and bang, it's in the sack."

  Richard said, "There're ways to be safe...."

  Rune shook her head. "I knew a guy, a friend used to work at one of the restaurants I tended bar at. I watched his boyfriend get sick and die. Then I saw my friend get sick and die. I was at the hospital. I saw the tubes, the monitors, the needles. The color of his skin. Everything. I saw his eyes. I was there when he died."

  An image of Robert Kelly's face came back to her, sitting in the chair in his apartment.

  An image of her father's face ...

  Richard was silent and Rune knew she'd committed the New York City crime: being too emotional. She cleaned up the remnants of dinner, kissed Richard's ear, and said, "Let's watch a movie."

  "A movie? Why?"

  "Because I have to catch a killer."

  CHAPTER TEN

  She'd already seen Manhattan Is My Beat once but watching it this time was different.

  Not because she was on a quote date unquote with Richard, not because they were lying side by side in the loft, with hazy stars visible overhead through the peaks of glass.

  But because when she'd watched it before, it had just been a movie that a nice, quirky old man had rented. Now it was the rabbit hole--a doorway to an adventure.

  The film was hokey, sure. Filled with those classic images from that whole cumbersome era she'd told Frankie Greek about--the baggy suits, stiff hair, the formalities of the dialogue. The young cop, twirling his billy club, would say, "Well, now, Mrs. McGrath, how are the Mister's corns this morning?"

  But she paid little attention to the period costumes and the words. Mostly what she noticed, watching it this time, was the grit. The film left a sandy uneasiness in her heart. Shadows everywhere, the contrasty black and white, the unanticipated violence. The shootings--where the robber winged one of the hero's fellow cops and a bystander, for instance, or the scene where the cop died in front of the hotel--were very disturbing, even though there was no Sam Peckinpah slow-motion blood splattering, no special effects. It was like that great old Alan Ladd movie Shane--unlike modern thrillers, there'd been only a half dozen gunshots in the entire film but they were loud and shocking and you felt each one of them in your gut.

  Manhattan Is My Beat also seemed pretty G-rated. But Rune felt the studio pulling a fast one in its portrayal of the cop's virginal girlfriend, played by--what a name-- Ruby Dahl. It was so clear to Rune that the poor thing was lusting. You'd never know it from her lines ("Oh, I can't explain my feelings, Roy. I just worry about you so. There's so much ... evil out there.") But if her dresses and sweaters were high-necked, Ruby's bosom was sharp and beneath the tame dialogue you knew she had the hots for Roy. She was the character that got the long camera shot when the judge announced that her fiance was going to prison. She was the one Rune cried for.

  At two A.M. Sandra threw a shoe at them and Rune shut off the VCR and the TV.

  "Not bad once," Richard said. "Why'd we have to sit through it twice?" He himself had given up his own quest for the evening and had kept his hands off her for the past several hours.

  "Because I didn't take notes the first time." She rewound the tape, the bootleg copy she'd made for Robert Kelly. She looked at the scrawl of notes she'd written on the back of a flier for a health club.

  Richard stretched and went into some weird yoga position, like a push-up with his pelvis pressed into the floor, his head back at a crazy angle, staring at the stars above them. "Okay, I slept through most of it the second time, I have to be honest. Were you joking about the killer?"

  "The movie is why that customer I told you about is dead."

  "He saw it three times. He couldn't take it anymore. He killed himself."

  "Don't joke." She was whispering and he missed the flare in her voice.

  She pulled her bag toward her and handed him the clipping she'd found in Kelly's apartment. He looked at it but put it down before he could have read more than a couple of paragraphs. He closed his eyes. She frowned and took the yellow, brittle paper.

  "What it is," she explained, "the movie was a true story. There really was a cop in the thirties who stole some robbery money and hid it. He denied the whole thing and nobody ever found the million dollars. He got out of Sing Sing and got gunned down a few days later. And supposedly he never had a chance to collect the money. It's just the way it happened in the film."

  Richard yawned.

  Rune, on her knees, crouched like a geisha, holding the clipping. "I think what happened was Mr. Kelly bought an old book at a secondhand store on St. Marks.... You know the book vendors near Cooper Union? There was this clipping in it. He read it--I think he was interested in New York history--so he got a kick out of it but didn't think too much about it. Then what happens?"

  "What?"

  "Then," she said, "last month he's walking past Washington Square Video and sees the poster for the film. He rents it, he watches it. And he gets the bug. You know what I mean? The bug." She waited. Richard seemed to be listening. She said, "That feeling that gets to you when you know there's something out there. But you don't know what. But you have to find out what the mystery is."

  "Like you. You're mysterious."

  She felt a trill of pleasure. "That's what my name means, you know."

  "Rune? I thought a rune was a letter."

  "It is. But it also means 'mystery' in Celtic."

  "And what does 'Doris' mean?"

  "Anyway," she said, ignoring him, "I think Mr. Kelly and I were a lot alike. Sort of like you and me."

  She let that sit between them for a minute, and when he didn't respond she wondered, And what's your mystery, Francois Jean-Paul Vladmir Richard?

  After a moment he said, "I'm awake. I'm listening."

  Rune continued. "What Mr. Kelly did was decide he was going to find the money."

  "What money?"

  "The money the cop took! That was never recovered."

  "The million dollars? Come on, Rune, the robbery was when, fifty years ago?"

  "Sure, maybe somebody found it. Maybe it got burned up.... You can always find excuses to give up on your quest before you start. Besides, quests aren't just about finding money or grails or jewels. They're about adventures! Mr. Kelly'd been alone for years. No family, not many friends, living by himself. This was his chance for an adventure. What was his life? Just sitting by the window all day and watching pigeons and cars. Here was a chance for a treasure hunt." She started bouncing up and down, remembering something. "He told me, listen to this, listen, when he took me out to lunch, he told me when his ship came in, he was going to do something nice for me. Well, what was the ship? It was a million dollars."

  Richard said, "I'm tired. I have to work tomorrow."

  "On your novel?"

  He hesitated for a minute. And she didn't
think he was being completely honest when he said, "That's right."

  First date. Too early to push. She asked, "Are you going to put me in it? In your novel?"

  "Maybe I will."

  "Will you make me a little taller and grow my hair out?"

  "No. I like you just the way you are."

  As he rolled over on his side she reread the old newspaper clipping.

  "Now, remember, in the movie, what the cop did with the money?"

  The groggy answer: "He snuck outside the bank and gave it to a shoeshine boy, who took it home. The cop broke into the kid's house and stole it. I was awake for that part."

  "And there was that totally melodramatic struggle, all that loud music, and the boy's mother fell down a flight of stairs," Rune pointed out. "That was big in old-time movies. Old ladies falling down flights of stairs. That, and angelic kids getting the dread unnamed disease guaranteed to make them waste away slowly." She thought back to the film. "Okay, in the newspaper stories there was a shoeshine boy. The cop--his real name was Samuel Davies, not Roy--gave the kid the money and said take it home or, basically, I'll beat the crap out of you. That was the last anybody every heard of the money in real life. But in the movie the cop gets it back from the kid and buries it in a cemetery someplace. Who came up with that idea? Hiding the money in a graveyard?"

  "The writer, who else? He made it up." Richard's eyes were closed.

  The writer ... Interesting ...

  Then her attention returned to the TV. She turned the VCR on again and fast-forwarded it to the scene where Dana Mitchell, playing the dark-haired, square-jawed cop, buries the suitcase in a city cemetery.

  She hit the freeze-frame button on the VCR and advanced the tape one frame at a time.

  As the images shuffled slowly past, Rune said, out loud but mostly to herself, "The answer's here. It's here someplace. He watched it eighteen times, eighteen, eighteen, eighteen...." Chanting the word. "Mr. Kelly gets a clue, he finds out something. And then he figures out where the money is. Or, okay, maybe ... he can't get it himself, he's getting old. He had arthritis, a limp. He can't go digging around in cemeteries alone. He needs help. He tells somebody. A friend, an acquaintance. Somebody younger--who can help him. Mr. Kelly tells this guy everything and then, what's he do? He gets the money and kills Mr. Kelly. Maybe he was the guy in the green car...."