The Night and The Music (14 page)

I still light a candle now and then for Carolyn Cheatham and Miguelito Cruz. Not often. Just every once in a while.

Reliable’s offices are
in the Flatiron Building, at Broadway and Twenty-third. The receptionist, an elegant black girl with high cheekbones and processed hair, gave me a nod and a smile, and I went on down the hall to Wally Witt’s office.

He was at his desk, a short stocky man with a bulldog jaw and gray hair cropped close to his head. Without rising he said, “Matt, good to see you, you’re right on time. You know these guys? Matt Scudder, Jimmy diSalvo, Lee Trombauer.” We shook hands all around. “We’re waiting on Eddie Rankin. Then we can go out there and protect the integrity of the American merchandising system.”

“Can’t do that without Eddie,” Jimmy diSalvo said.

“No, we need him,” Wally said. “He’s our pit bull. He’s attack-trained, Eddie is.”

He came through the door a few minutes later and I saw what they meant. Without looking alike, Jimmy and Wally and Lee all looked like ex-cops, as I suppose do I. Eddie Rankin looked like the kind of guy we used to have to bring in on a bad Saturday night. He was a big man, broad in the shoulders, narrow in the waist. His hair was blond, almost white, and he wore it short at the sides but long in back. It lay on his neck like a mane. He had a broad forehead and a pug nose. His complexion was very fair and his full lips were intensely red, almost artificially so. He looked like a roughneck, and you sensed that his response to any sort of stress was likely to be physical, and abrupt.

Wally Witt introduced him to me. The others already knew him. Eddie Rankin shook my hand and his left hand fastened on my shoulder and gave a squeeze. “Hey, Matt,” he said. “Pleased to meetcha. Whattaya say, guys, we ready to come to the aid of the Caped Crusader?”

Jimmy diSalvo started whistling the theme from
Batman
, the old television show. Wally said, “Okay, who’s packing? Is everybody packing?”

Lee Trombauer drew back his suit jacket to show a revolver in a shoulder rig. Eddie Rankin took out a large automatic and laid it on Wally’s desk. “Batman’s gun,” he announced.

“Batman don’t carry a gun,” Jimmy told him.

“Then he better stay outta New York,” Eddie said. “Or he’ll get his ass shot off. Those revolvers, I wouldn’t carry one of them on a bet.”

“This shoots as straight as what you got,” Lee said. “And it won’t jam.”

“This baby don’t jam,” Eddie said. He picked up the automatic and held it out for display. “You got a revolver,” he said, “a .38, whatever you got — ”

“A .38.”

“— and a guy takes it away from you, all he’s gotta do is point it and shoot it. Even if he never saw a gun before, he knows how to do that much. This monster, though” — and he demonstrated, flicking the safety, working the slide — “all this shit you gotta go through, before he can figure it out I got the gun away from him and I’m making him eat it.”

“Nobody’s taking my gun away from me,” Lee said.

“What everybody says, but look at all the times it happens. Cop gets shot with his own gun, nine times out of ten it’s a revolver.”

“That’s because that’s all they carry,” Lee said.

“Well, there you go.”

Jimmy and I weren’t carrying guns. Wally offered to equip us but we both declined. “Not that anybody’s likely to have to show a piece, let alone use one, God forbid,” Wally said. “But it can get nasty out there and it helps to have the feeling of authority. Well, let’s go get ‘em, huh? The Batmobile’s waiting at the curb.”

We rode down in the elevator, five grown men, three of us armed with handguns. Eddie Rankin had on a plaid sport jacket and khaki trousers. The rest of us wore suits and ties. We went out the Fifth Avenue exit and followed Wally to his car, a five-year-old Fleetwood Cadillac parked next to a hydrant. There were no tickets on the windshield; a PBA courtesy card had kept the traffic cops at bay.

Wally drove and Eddie Rankin sat in front with him. The rest of us rode in back. We cruised up Sixth to Fifty-fourth Street and turned right, and Wally parked next to a hydrant a few doors from Fifth. We walked together to the corner of Fifth and turned downtown. Near the middle of the block a trio of black men had set up shop as sidewalk vendors. One had a display of women’s handbags and silk scarves, all arranged neatly on top of a folding card table. The other two were offering T-shirts and cassette tapes.

In an undertone Wally said, “Here we go. These three were here yesterday. Matt, why don’t you and Lee check down the block, make sure those two down at the corner don’t have what we’re looking for. Then double back and we’ll take these dudes off. Meanwhile I’ll let the man sell me a shirt.”

Lee and I walked down to the corner. The two vendors in question were selling books. We established this and headed back. “Real police work,” I said.

“Be grateful we don’t have to fill out a report, list the titles of the books.”

“The alleged books.”

When we rejoined the others Wally was holding an oversize T-shirt to his chest, modeling it for us. “What do you say?” he demanded. “Is it me? Do you think it’s me?”

“I think it’s the Joker,” Jimmy diSalvo said.

“That’s what I think,” Wally said. He looked at the two Africans, who were smiling uncertainly. “I think it’s a violation, is what I think. I think we got to confiscate all the Batman stuff. It’s unauthorized, it’s an illegal violation of copyright protection, it’s unlicensed, and we got to take it in.”

The two vendors had stopped smiling, but they didn’t seem to have a very clear idea of what was going on. Off to the side, the third man, the fellow with the scarves and purses, was looking wary.

“You speak English?” Wally asked them.

“They speak numbers,” Jimmy said. “ ‘Fi dollah, ten dollah, please, thank you.’ That’s what they speak.”

“Where you from?” Wally demanded. “Senegal, right? Dakar. You from Dakar?”

They nodded, brightening at words they recognized. “Dakar,” one of them echoed. Both of them were wearing Western clothes, but they looked faintly foreign — loose-fitting long-sleeved shirts with long pointed collars and a glossy finish, baggy pleated pants. Loafers with leather mesh tops.

“What do you speak?” Wally asked. “You speak French? Parley-voo
Français
?”The one who’d spoken before replied now in a torrent of French, and Wally backed away from him and shook his head. “I don’t know why the hell I asked,” he said. “Parley-voo’s all I know of the fucking language.” To the Africans he said, “Police. You parley-voo that? Police.
Policia.
You capeesh?” He opened his wallet and showed them some sort of badge. “No sell Batman,” he said, waving one of the shirts at them. “Batman no good. It’s unauthorized, it’s not made under a licensing agreement, and you can’t sell it.”

“No Batman,” one of them said.

“Jesus, don’t tell me I’m getting through to them. Right, no Batman. No, put your money away, I can’t take a bribe, I’m not with the department no more. All I want’s the Batman stuff. You can keep the rest.”

All but a handful of their T-shirts were unauthorized Batman items. The rest showed Walt Disney characters, themselves almost certainly as unauthorized as the Batman merchandise, but Disney wasn’t Reliable’s client today so it was none of our concern. While we loaded up with Batman and the Joker, Eddie Rankin looked through the cassettes, then pawed through the silk scarves the third vendor had on display. He let the man keep the scarves, but he took a purse, snakeskin by the look of it. “No good,” he told the man, who nodded, expressionless.

We trooped back to the Fleetwood and Wally popped the trunk. We deposited the confiscated T’s between the spare tire and some loose fishing tackle. “Don’t worry if the shit gets dirty,” Wally said. “It’s all gonna be destroyed anyway. Eddie, you start carrying a purse, people are gonna say things.”

“Woman I know,” he said, “she’ll like this.” He wrapped the purse in a Batman T-shirt and placed it in the trunk.

“Okay,” Wally said. “That went real smooth. What we’ll do now, Lee, you and Matt take the east side of Fifth and the rest of us’ll stay on this side and we’ll work our way down to Forty-second. I don’t know if we’ll get much, because even if they can’t speak English they can sure get the word around fast, but we’ll make sure there’s no unlicensed Batcrap on the avenue before we move on. We’ll maintain eye contact back and forth across the street, and if you hit anything give the high sign and we’ll converge and take ‘em down. Everybody got it?”

Everybody seemed to. We left the car with its trunkful of contraband and returned to Fifth Avenue. The two T-shirt vendors from Dakar had packed up and disappeared; they’d have to find something else to sell and someplace else to sell it. The man with the scarves and purses was still doing business. He froze when he caught sight of us.

“No Batman,” Wally told him.

“No Batman,” he echoed.

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Wally said. “The guy’s learning English.”

Lee and I crossed the street and worked our way downtown. There were vendors all over the place, offering clothing and tapes and small appliances and books and fast food. Most of them didn’t have the peddler’s license the law required, and periodically the city would sweep the streets, especially the main commercial avenues, rounding them up and fining them and confiscating their stock. Then after a week or so the cops would stop trying to enforce a basically unenforceable law, and the peddlers would be back in business again.

It was an apparently endless cycle, but the booksellers were exempt from it.

The court had decided that the First Amendment embodied in its protection of freedom of the press the right of anyone to sell printed matter on the street, so if you had books for sale you never got hassled. As a result, a lot of scholarly antiquarian booksellers offered their wares on the city streets. So did any number of illiterates hawking remaindered art books and stolen best-sellers, along with homeless street people who rescued old magazines from people’s garbage cans and spread them out on the pavement, living in hope that someone would want to buy them.

In front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral we found a Pakistani with T-shirts and sweatshirts. I asked him if he had any Batman merchandise and he went right through the piles himself and pulled out half a dozen items. We didn’t bother signaling the cavalry across the street. Lee just showed the man a badge — Special Officer, it said — and I explained that we had to confiscate Batman items.

“He is the big seller, Batman,” the man said. “I get Batman, I sell him fast as I can.”

“Well, you better not sell him anymore,” I said, “because it’s against the law.”

“Excuse, please,” he said. “What is law? Why is Batman against law? Is my understanding Batman is
for
law. He is good guy, is it not so?”

I explained about copyright and trademarks and licensing agreements. It was a little bit like explaining the internal-combustion engine to a field mouse. He kept nodding his head, but I don’t know how much of it he got. He understood the main point — that we were walking off with his stock, and he was stuck for whatever it cost him. He didn’t like that part but there wasn’t much he could do about it.

Lee tucked the shirts under his arm and we kept going. At Forty-seventh Street we crossed over in response to a signal from Wally. They’d found another pair of Senegalese with a big spread of Batman items — T’s and sweatshirts and gimme caps and sun visors, some a direct knockoff of the copyrighted Bat signal, others a variation on the theme, but none of it authorized and all of it subject to confiscation. The two men — they looked like brothers, and were dressed identically in baggy beige trousers and sky-blue nylon shirts — couldn’t understand what was wrong with their merchandise and couldn’t believe we intended to haul it all away with us. But there were five of us, and we were large intimidating white men with an authoritarian manner, and what could they do about it?