Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

He’d gone on the wagon for several years, then found he was able to drink normally again. A single martini before the evening meal, a pitcher of them at the conclusion of a job, an occasional beer with lunch when he was resting up between jobs. But drinking never became a problem again, and she thanked God for that, even as she prayed to God that he could get into a line of work that didn’t take so much out of him.

She raised the subject again one evening. He’d begun to talk about going back to work, not right away but before too long, and she wondered how he could face it so soon.

“You don’t have to work so much,” she said. “The kids are grown and gone. You and I have everything we want and money in the bank. You don’t have to drive yourself.”

“It’s not a matter of driving myself. I can’t sit idle too long. It gets to me.”

“I know, but—”

“Rather wear out than rust out. Trite but true.”

“Couldn’t you try something else some of the time? Couldn’t you try doing what you really want to do?”

He looked at her for a long moment, then turned his eyes aside and gazed off into space. Or, perhaps, into time.

“I’ve tried that,” he said at length.

“I didn’t know that.”

“I didn’t really want to talk about it. It didn’t work out.” Now he turned to face her again, and the expression on his face was enough to break her heart. “Maybe there was once something else I wanted to do. Maybe at some stage in my life I had the potential to do other things, to be somebody other than the man I turned into.”

But I love the man you turned into, she thought. I love the man you are, the man you’ve always been.

“I may have the dreams,” he said. “But that’s all they ever were, baby. Dreams. You know what happens to dreams when you wake up. They go where smoke goes, into the air. Maybe I was born to do what I do. Maybe I just trained myself and wound up painting myself into a corner. But I’m an old man now—”

“You are like hell an old man!”

“—and it’s all I know how to do and all I even seem to want to do. I’ve spent my whole life with crooks and grifters and strong-arm men, and I’ll spend the rest of it with the same awful types, and yes, there’ll be violence, but I guess I can go on living with that.”

He smiled suddenly, and not merely with his mouth. “It’s not so bad,” he said. “It’s depressing when I think of what might have been, but the hell with that, kid. I’m doing what I was cut out for. That’s a hard thing to admit to yourself and it hurts, I’ll say it hurts, but once you make yourself believe it, then it becomes a liberating thing.”

She thought for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”

And so shewas prepared a week later when he told her he was ready to go back to work. He’d been restless for a day or two, pacing back and forth across the living-room rug, jotting incomprehensible notes on long yellow pads of paper, even mumbling and muttering to himself. Then on Monday morning he looked at her over the brim of his second cup of coffee and told her.

“Well, the signs were there,” she said. “You’re sure you don’t want more time off?”

“Positive.”

“And you know what you want to do?”

“Uh-huh. I’m going to use Johnny again.”

“Johnny Speed. How many times have you used him?”

“I don’t know. Too many, I guess. He’s got a lot of miles on the clock but I guess he’s good for another go-round.”

“How long do you think it’ll take?”

“Couple of weeks.”

“Be careful.”

He looked at her. “Oh, come on,” he said. “The violence never touches me, baby. You know that.”

“Oh, but it does.”

“Come off it.”

“It’s a dangerous business.”

“Dangerous business,” he said, tasting the phrase. “I kind of like that.”

“Well, it is.”

“I like the phrase,” he said. “I don’t know that it fits my life—”

“I think it does.”

“—but it certainly fits the current project. Dangerous Business. A Dangerous Business. Which do you prefer?”

“I don’t know. The Dangerous Business ?”

“You know, that’s best of all. The Dangerous Business. I think I’m going to use it.”

“Don’t you have to make sure nobody’s used it already?”

“Doesn’t matter. There’s no such thing as copyright on titles. I thought you knew that.”

“I must have forgotten.”

“ The Dangerous Business. A Johnny Speed Mystery. Yes, by God, I’m going to use it. It has a nice ring to it and it fits the plot I’ve got in mind.”

“It fits, all right,” she said. But he was caught up in the book he’d start that morning and didn’t even notice the tone of her voice.

The cop sawthe car stop on the bridge but didn’t pay any particular attention to it. People were apt to pull over to the side in the middle of the span, especially late at night when the traffic was thin and they could stop for a moment without somebody’s horn stabbing them in the back. The bridge was a graceful steel parabola over the deep channel of river that cut the city neatly in two, and the center of the bridge provided the best view of the city, with the old downtown buildings clustered together on the right, the flour mills downriver on the left, the gentle skyline, the gulls maneuvering over the river. The bridge was the best place to see it all. It wasn’t private enough for the teenagers, who were given to long-term parking and preferred drive-in movie theaters or stretches of road along the north bank of the river, but sightseers stopped often, took in the view for a few moments, and then continued across.

Suicides liked the bridge, too. The cop didn’t think of that at first, not until he saw the man emerge from the car, and walk slowly to the footpath at the edge, and place a hand tentatively upon the rail. There was something in his stance, something in the pose of the solitary figure upon the empty bridge in the after-midnight gloom, something about the grayness of the night, the way the fog was coming off the river. The cop looked at him and cursed and wondered if he could get to him in time.

He walked toward the man, headed over the bridge on the footpath. He didn’t want to shout or blow his whistle at him because he knew what shock or surprise could do to a potential jumper. Once he saw the man’s hands tense on the rail, his feet lifting up on the toes. At that moment he almost cried out, almost broke into a run, but then the man’s feet came back into position, his hands loosened their grip, and he took out a cigarette and lit it. Then the cop knew he had time. They always smoked that last cigarette all the way down before they went over the edge.

When the cop was within ten yards of him the man turned, started slightly, then nodded in resignation. He appeared to be somewhere in his middle thirties, tall, with a long narrow face and deep-set eyes topped with thick black eyebrows.

“Nice night,” the cop said.

“Yes.”

“Having a look at the sights?”

“That’s right.”

“Saw you out here, thought I’d come out and have a talk with you. It can get lonely this hour at night.” The cop patted his pockets, passed over his cigarettes. “Say, you don’t happen to have a spare cigarette on you, do you? I must have run out.”

The man gave him a cigarette. It was a filter, and the cop normally smoked nothing but regulars, but he wasn’t about to complain. He thanked the man, accepted a light, thanked him again, and stood beside him, hands on the rail, leaning out over the water and looking at the city and the river.