Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

“Dream on,” I said.

At first we both made our moves rapidly, but as the game developed I found it harder to come up with something and began spending more time studying the board. Ten or a dozen moves into the game we exchanged knights, and somehow I wound up a pawn down. A little further along he forced an exchange of his remaining knight for one of my rooks. With each move he was mobilizing his forces for an attack, and all I could do was await it. My position felt cramped, awkward, indefensible.

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to find a move that did me some good. “I suppose I could resign.”

“You could,” he agreed.

I extended a forefinger and toppled my king. He looked sad, lying there on his side.

Barry said, “We wasn’t playin’ for stakes, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t duck across the street for a quart of Eight Hundred.”

“I’m not drinking these days, Barry.”

“Think I don’t know that, man? But when did you hear me say anything about drinking? Drinking’s one thing. Buying’s another.”

“That’s a point.”

“Basement of St. Paul’s,” he said. “That’s where I know you from, am I right?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t hardly get there. Used to come around for the coffee, and just to sit with folks. Drinking’s no problem for me.”

“You’re fortunate.”

“Long as I stay with the beer I seem to be all right. Was a time it was tending to make me sick.” He laid a hand on his right side, just beneath the rib cage. “Was hurting me some right about here.”

“The liver,” I said.

“I guess. What I think it was, I think it was the Night Train. That sweet wine’s a killer. But the beer, she seems to agree with me.” He grinned, showing a little gold at the corners of his smile. “For now, anyway. Beer’ll pro’ly kill me herself someday, but a man has got to die of something. Live long enough, sooner or later you die of too much living. If it’s not one thing it’s another. Isn’t that what they say?”

“That’s what they say.”

“And what do you say, then? You want to spring for a quart of OE and we’ll play another game?”

I found a five and gave it to him. He touched his index finger to his eyebrow in a mock salute and headed for the Korean grocery across the street. I watched him move in a loose-limbed, effortless gait, his long arms swinging easily at his sides. He was wearing a navy pea jacket and faded jeans and high-top sneakers, and he had to be sixty years old at a minimum, and he loped across Ninth Avenue like a man who had it all together.

I caught myself thinking that maybe Barry had the right idea. Stick to beer and ale, go to an occasional meeting for the coffee and the company, work on your chess game, and hustle a buck now and then when you get thirsty.

Yeah, right. And get through life sitting on milk crates. And what kind of shape was I in, pray tell, if Barry was starting to look like a role model? I had to laugh at myself, recognizing the thought for what it was, just one more note in the siren’s song of the booze. Its lure was endless, and infinitely resourceful, and whatever street you walked down it would be waiting around the next corner, ready to pop out and take you by surprise. You could make a million dollars and win two Nobel prizes and the Miss Congeniality award, and next thing you knew you’d walk past a Blarney Stone and find yourself wondering if the stew bums in the back booth knew something you didn’t. Because they got to drink and you didn’t, so how wrong could they be?

Barry came back with a quart of Olde English 800 in a paper bag. He twisted off the cap and drank without removing the bottle from the bag. He said I could have the black pieces this time or I could stay with white, whichever I’d rather. I said I figured that was enough chess for one day.

“Guess you don’t have a real feel for the game,” he said. “You’d think you would, though.”

“Why?”

“Well, the figuring-out aspect of it. Must be a lot like police work, scoping out the moves, calculating you’ll do this if I do that. You was a cop, right?”

“You have a good memory.”

“Well, the both of us has been around the neighborhood enough years now. Be a surprise if we didn’t reckanize each other. Guess I’d figure you for a cop anyway, on the basis of how you present and represent. This be about George?”

I nodded. “I saw you on television,” I said.

“Man,” he said, “is there anybody in this city didn’t see me on television?” He sighed and shook his head, treated himself to another long pull on the Olde English bottle. “How many channels now? Sixty, seventy if you got cable? Must be everybody watches Channel Seven, because everybody seen Barry on television. Everybody but me. I swear I must be the only person in New York didn’t see the damn program.”

We talked some about George, and I sensed I was getting what everyone got who mentioned having seen the TV spot, a sort of reprise of The George Sadecki I Knew. I steered him to Holtzmann and asked him what he knew about the man who got shot.

“You live here,” I said. “You keep your eyes open. You must have seen Glenn Holtzmann around the neighborhood.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Don’t recall him if I did. I seen his picture in the paper and didn’t reckanize him. Terrible thing, wasn’t it? Bright young man, whole life ahead of him.”

“What are they saying about him on the street?”

“Like I just said. Saying what a fine young man he was and what a bad thing happened. What else they gone say?”

“That would depend on what they knew.”

“Man, how would they know him? He didn’t live here.”

“Of course he did,” I said. “You can see his building from here.”

He made a show of following my finger as I pointed at the top floors of Holtzmann’s apartment building. “Right,” he said. “That’s where he lived, up on the fortieth floor.”

The twenty-eighth, I thought.

“That’s another country up there,” he said. “Man commuted from the fortieth floor over there to some other fortieth floor where his office is at. Where you and me are is the street. Man like that, the street’s just a place he’s got to pass through twice a day, getting from one fortieth floor to another.”

“He was on the street a week ago Thursday.”

“To get some air, so they say.”

“Meaning?”

“Oh, I ain’t signifying. Just seems to me there ought to be plenty of air up on the fortieth floor. Got nothing but air up there, wouldn’t you say?”

“So what was he doing on the street?”

“Could be Fate. You believe in Fate?”

“I don’t know.”

“Man’s got to believe in something,” Barry said. “What I believe, I believe I’ll have another drink.” He did, and all but smacked his lips. He said, “I’m hip that you don’t drink, but are you sure you won’t have a little taste?”

“Not today. What was there besides Fate and fresh air that could have brought Holtzmann to Eleventh Avenue?”

“Told you I didn’t know the man.”

“I figured you might know the street.”

“ ‘Leventh Avenue? I know where it’s at.”

“Did you ever go over to George’s room?”

“Didn’t even know he had one until just this past week. Knew there was some place he kep’ his stuff but didn’t know where. Far as Eleventh Avenue’s concerned, nothing much to draw me there.”

“You didn’t have to take your car in for a brake job?”

He laughed richly. “No, the brakes is just fine. Maybe I take a run over there, let ’em rotate the tires.” He had another pull of Olde English, and this time he drew the bottle halfway out of the bag and squinted at the label over the tops of his glasses.