Night Work (21 page)

What could Cassidy tell him? That the war changed him, that he came back from it unable to find traction, that he saw a recruiting poster, walked in and joined up? Did any of that make sense? Only to him. “I wanted to serve.” A shading of the truth.

“Sure.” Neutral, neither belief nor disbelief. “Are you political?”

“I vote.”

“You're not a lefty, are you? There are a couple of notes in your jacket.” He tapped a file folder squared to the edges of the desk. “They say you might be a lefty.”

“Do they?”

Clarkson waited, but there was no more. “Who'd you vote for in fifty-six?”

“Mickey Mantle. He had a good season. Batted three oh four, had thirty-nine home runs. I figured it was time for him to move up.”

“Don't screw with me, Cassidy. I don't give a shit who your rabbi is. I ask you a question, you answer it.” He did not raise his voice. “Who'd you vote for?”

“Sanctity of the voting booth. The secret ballot. One of the foundations of Democracy.” He did not have a rabbi, a protector, but everyone thought he did, in part because he had thrown another cop out a third-story window, twice, and had never been punished.

“How long do you think you can be a pain in the ass and stay in the Department?” Clarkson showed no anger, only mild curiosity.

“I don't know.” Maybe he was reaching the point where he did not care.

“What do you think of the Commies?”

“I don't like them. Dictatorship of the proletariat is still a dictatorship.”

“The bastards want to take over the world. At least they don't make any bones about it. Telling it straight out. Khrushchev, Stalin, not an ounce of difference. The biggest mistake we made was not letting Patton push on to Berlin and beyond at the end of the war. We should have stopped the Russians on the Polish border. It would've saved us a lot of trouble. Hell, we probably should have run them back to their own borders, dropped the A-bomb on the bastards before they got one of their own. Let them know how the world was going to work.”

Cassidy said nothing. He remembered how tired they'd been after ten months of fighting, those who'd survived D-Day, France, Belgium, the Bulge, Germany—exhausted, running on fumes. Ten days of combat wore you out. Ten months took you someplace you did not know existed. The only ones who weren't tired were the dead. The only ones who didn't remember hadn't been there or had been far enough up the chain of command to sleep in a bed most nights. He wondered what Clarkson had done in the war. A lot of police were declared essential to the war effort and never left home. The war lovers, he had discovered, the most belligerent, were the men who had never seen combat and now suspected they had missed something wonderful.

“Cuba.”

“Yes, sir?”

“This fellow Fidel Castro is making a visit to the States on April 15. A couple of days down in Washington, and then he's coming up here. It's not a State visit. He's been invited by a bunch of newspaper editors. The Secret Service will cover him when he's in DC with the help of the DC police and the FBI. When he gets up here, he's our problem. I've been assigned to set up the security detail. You're on it.”

“Why me?”

“You've been down there, right? You were there when the shit hit the fan New Year's Eve, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You speak Spanish.”

“Yes.”

“You know some of the players.”

“I never met Castro. I was out of there a couple of days after they took Havana. He wasn't in the city yet.”

“Well, you met someone, because someone asked for you specifically, a fellow named Ribera. Carlos Ribera. Do you know him?”

“Yes, sir.” So Ribera had moved into the inner circle.

“Well, there you are. I don't know why they want you, but they do, and we will accommodate them. We'll be setting up a command post down here at Centre Street. You'll be detached from your precinct. Are you working anything right now?”

“A murder in Central Park.”

“Wrap it up or pass it off to someone else. When Castro gets here, you're mine.”

“Yes, sir.” He still had time before Castro arrived. “I'd like to bring my partner on the security detail.”

“Sure. We're going to need bodies.”

“I don't know much about setting up security.”

“I do. I'll be running the show.” Cassidy took out a pack of Luckys and started to tap one out. “Please don't smoke. This is not going to be an easy assignment. Castro has made a lot of enemies. Last night we had an incident at a Cuban restaurant in Williamsburg. A man walked into the dining room and shot four people with a pistol. Very cold, very efficient. All four dead. The shooter walked out through the kitchen and disappeared. The restaurant was a known haunt of supporters of Castro. One of the dead was a Castro advance man. He was here to set up hotel rooms, make reservations. Not an important member of the new administration in Havana, and we do not know if he was the target or if the other three were, but we are treating it as an attack on the new regime.”

“Any leads?”

“Only a description, and you know what that's like. The shooter is anywhere from five feet six to six feet six, a hundred twenty-five pounds to two hundred fifty pounds, wearing dark clothes, light clothes, red hair, black hair, one gun, two guns, a machine gun. Eyewitnesses.” A cop's contempt.

“Do you think there will be an assassination attempt on Castro?”

“We entertain the possibility. Let me assure you that I will be extremely annoyed if anything happens to Mr. Castro while he is in our jurisdiction.”

“I'm sure he will be too.”

“Cassidy, I'm sure you're a funny man to many people, but I have no sense of humor. You would do well to stifle your instinct to amuse while in my presence.”

“I'll do my best, sir.”

*   *   *

He went to bed early and woke after midnight from a splintered dream of Dylan. Not in Cuba. Too much cold concrete for Havana. New York? Maybe New York.
She was crouched over a man lying on the ground. Who was it? Was it himself? No. Someone else.
He lay in the dark trying to pin a fragment that would lead him back into the dream, but they all slipped away and he was left with nothing but an image of her smile, and a hollow feeling. He got up and padded naked through the apartment to the living room and stood at the open window looking out. The breeze brought the salt smell of the river. Just to the north, the El carrying carcasses rattled into the meatpacking district and stopped with a screech of metal on metal. Somewhere uptown a siren wailed. Sleep was gone. He returned to the bedroom, got dressed, and went out into the night.

The taxi dropped him at 28th Street and Sixth Avenue. The neon sign above the White Rose blinked and frizzed, and he went into the saloon and ordered a Jack Daniel's neat and drank it among the late-night drinkers who leaned against the bar in silence, content with their internal conversations with private ghosts. He bought a bottle from the bartender and carried it to 821 Sixth Avenue, a five-story building of dilapidated lofts, and up to the cheerful seething disorder of Gene Smith's apartment.

Some people called it The Jazz Loft, because there was always music playing. Depending on the night you might find Thelonious Monk, Roy Haynes, or Bill Evans jamming, and if they weren't, there would be someone you'd never heard playing like he should have been famous. It didn't matter what time of the day or night, if you were looking for great music and for a lift, you could head to 821 Sixth. It was where disparate strands of the city wound together and produced energy that no one strand could spark by itself. It was a sanctuary for weird talents, thieves, pimps, and whores, artists, con men, known geniuses and unsung ones, teen runaways, and a sprinkling of uptown types, the ones who had a knack for where offbeat life was going on in the city. When Cassidy came in, Zoot Sims was roaming through the higher registers of his alto sax while Roy Haynes leaned over his drums and found a rhythm and urgency that supported and pushed, and some kid who couldn't have been more than fifteen played the upright piano against the wall like he'd invented bebop. The air in the place was the usual fug of reefer smoke, tobacco, and alcohol. It was crowded with people who had lost all sense of time. A dwarf with white hair that sprang from his head as if scared played chess near the window against an impossibly thin Negro man with a head as round, black, bald, and polished as a bowling ball. Three women and two men were dancing to a beat that wasn't coming from the trio with the piano. A woman in a green evening dress and uptown jewelry sat in a chair in a corner and cried as if her heart had broken while a man in blue jeans, work boots, and a leather jacket crouched next to her and tried to comfort her. The walls were covered with black-and-white photographs and unframed canvases of local artists.

The joint belonged to W. Eugene Smith, one of the great war photographers who had been blown up but not killed on Okinawa, a tall, thin man with a narrow mustache and a severe face that had seen more than most men could stand. He was leaning against a wall talking to an up-and-coming bantamweight fighter from Brooklyn named Benny Marquez. Cassidy had seen Marquez spar at Stillman's gym, hands like a snake's strike and vicious intent. Smith, as usual, held a camera down near his waist and was taking photographs from that angle without checking the viewfinder. Cassidy held up the bottle and Smith gave him a nod of thanks. Cassidy headed for the kitchen and the unlikely possibility of a clean glass. As he passed the door to the bathroom it swung open and he had a quick glimpse of a woman with her high-heeled foot up on the toilet, her skirt pulled back above her garter belt while another woman inserted a hypodermic in her thigh.

He found a glass and washed it at the sink and discovered a block of ice melting in a galvanized tub. There was an ice pick stuck in the wall above the tub, and he used it to chip off chunks to fill the glass and then poured bourbon over it and swirled it with his finger to cool it and went back into the big room. A good-looking woman with a white streak in her black hair looked at him with invitation.
Come talk to me. Let's see what happens.
He liked women and they knew it, and on other nights he would have taken up the invitation, but tonight he was not ready for the tension of the new, the feeling out, the exploration, the excitement or ultimate disappointment. Why not? The dream of Dylan? Maybe. It was not a scab he wanted to pick.

The kid on the piano was flying, and Sims and Haynes were drafting in his slipstream exchanging looks of glee. People broke out in applause after one improbable riff that turned back on itself a couple of times, finding seams and strands, following them, and then blowing out the walls, yanking a spontaneous laugh from Cassidy.
What the fuck was that?
And then a hand touched him on the shoulder and warm breath huffed against his ear, and a soft voice said, “Ooooh, I know you. How are you, kidder?”

He turned. “Alice.” He was delighted.

“Oh, a girl does like it when a guy she only met a couple of times remembers her name.” Alice Brooks, the tall, pneumatic brunette from Havana. He had last seen her when they got off the plane in Miami after the revolution. Her brown hair was now blond and cut in a different way so that it framed her face.

“How could I forget? I've been looking for you all over. Where've you been hiding?”

“Liar. But I do like it.” She swatted him gently and took the glass out of his hand and drank from it. Her voice was the same, languid, low, full of easy humor.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came with a guy.” She made a face. “He'd heard about the place and wanted to see it, and he heard I'd been, so what the hell? He buys dinner; I bring him here. Here I am. Here you are. It's fate.”

“Where's he?”

“Oh, he's around.” She blew out a breath of weariness, and drank some more of Cassidy's drink. She looked at him speculatively. “Are you going to save me from him?”

“I think I might.” He liked her, liked her cheerfulness, her openness.

She grinned. “I always thought we could have some fun. I was kind of sorry you didn't want to stay in Miami when we got off the plane from Havana. Well, I am a firm believer in second chances. Do you want to get out of here?”

“What about the guy?”

“The hell with the guy. He was a bench warmer. He was never going to make the rotation. But at least I got dinner at 21.”

“Cold.”

“Hey, it's a cold world. There are only a couple ways for a girl to make her way these days, and I can't type.”

They found a taxi on Sixth, and Cassidy gave him the address of his apartment on Bank Street. Alice settled against him and put her head on his shoulder and purred.

They climbed the four floors to his apartment, and he unlocked the door and reached in to turn on the lights, and then stepped back to let her enter. She stood in the center of the living room and took it all in while he went into the kitchen and cracked an ice tray into the bucket.

“Oooh, I like this. Wow, you'd never think the place was so big from the outside.” She went to the window and looked out at the distant lights across the river. “Is that New Jersey?”

“Yes.” He found the bourbon and poured a splash over an ice cube in a glass. She came to lean on the counter. “Do you want a drink?”

“No, thanks. Which way is the bedroom?”

“Over there.”

“Unzip me, will you?” She turned her back and he leaned across the counter and unzipped her dress.

“Thanks.” She held the front against her, smiled at him, and walked to the bedroom.

He put the whiskey down untasted and followed her.

*   *   *

Cassidy made coffee in the morning and was finishing his first cup when Alice came out of the bedroom dressed in his bathrobe with the cuffs rolled up.