Lawrence Block - In the Midst of Death

What I wanted was a drink. But I wanted it badly enough to know not to have it. I had things to do,places to go, people to see. So I stuck with the coffee.

At the post office on Sixtieth Street I purchased a money order for a thousand dollars and another for forty-five dollars. I addressed an envelope and mailed them both to Anita. Then I walked around the corner to St. Paul's on Ninth Avenue. I must have sat there for fifteen or twenty minutes, not thinking of anything in particular. On the way out I stopped in front of the effigy of St. Anthony and lit a couple of candles for some absent friends. One was for Portia Carr, another for Estrellita Rivera, a couple others for a couple of other people. Then I put five fifty-dollar bills in the slot of the poor box and went out into the cold morning air.

I have an odd relationship with churches, and it's one I do not entirely understand myself. It started not long after I moved to my Fifty-seventh Street hotel. I began spending time in churches, and I began lighting candles, and, ultimately, I began tithing. That last is the most curious part of all. I give a tenth of whatever money I make to the first church I happen to stop in after I receive payment. I don't know what they do with the money. They probably spend half of it converting happy pagans and use the rest to buy large cars for the clergy. But I keep giving my money to them and go on wondering why.

The Catholics get most of my money because of the hours they keep. Their churches are more often open. Otherwise I'm as ecumenical as you can get. A tenth of Broadfield's first payment to me had gone to St. Bartholomew's, an Episcopal church in Portia Carr's neighborhood, and now a tenth of his second payment went to St. Paul's.

God knows why.

Doug Fuhrmann lived on Ninth Avenue between Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth. To the left of the ground-floor hardware store there was a doorway with a sign over it announcing the availability of furnished rooms by week or month. There were no mailboxes in the vestibule and no individual buzzers. I rang the bell alongside the inner door and waited until a woman with henna-bright hair shuffled to the door and opened it. She wore a plaid robe and had shabby bedroom slippers on her feet. "Full up," she said. "Try three doors down, he's usually got something available."

I told her I was looking for Douglas Fuhrmann.

"Fourth floor front," she said. "He expecting you?"

"Yes."Although he wasn't.

" 'Cause he usually sleeps late. You can go on up."

I climbed three flights of stairs, making my way through the sour smells of a building that had given up along with its tenants. I was surprised that Fuhrmann lived in a place like this. Men who live in broken-down Hell's Kitchen rooming houses don't usually have their addresses printed on their checks. They don't usually have checking accounts.

I stood in front of his door. A radio was playing, and then I heard a burst of very rapid typing, then nothing but the radio. I knocked on the door. I heard the sound of a chair being pushed back, and then Fuhrmann's voice asked who it was.

"Scudder."

"Matt? Just a second." I waited and the door opened and Fuhrmann gave me a big smile. "Come on in," he said. "Jesus, you look like hell. You got a cold or something?"

"I had a hard night."

"Want some coffee? I can give you a cup of instant. How'd you find me, anyway? Or is that a professional secret? I guess detectives have to be good at finding people."

He scurried around, plugged in an electric tea kettle,measured instant coffee into a pair of white china cups. He kept up a steady stream of conversation, but I wasn't listening to him. I was busy looking over the place where he lived.

I hadn't been prepared for it. It was just one room, but it was a large one, measuring perhaps eighteen by twenty-five feet, with two windows over looking Ninth Avenue. What made it remarkable was the dramatic contrast between it and the building it was situated in. All of the drabness and decay stopped at Fuhrmann's threshold.

He had a rug on the floor, either an authentic Persian or a convincing imitation. His walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves. A desk a full twelve feet in length extended in front of the windows. It too had been built in. Even the paint on the walls was distinctive, the walls themselves-where they were not covered with bookshelves — painted in a dark ivory, the trim set off in a glossy white enamel.

He saw me taking it all in, and his eyes danced behind his thick glasses. "That's how everybody reacts," he said. "You climb those stairs and it's depressing, right? And then you walk into my little retreat and it's almost shocking." The kettle whistled and he made our coffee. "It's not as though I planned it this way," he said. "I took this place a dozen years ago because I could afford it and there wasn't much else I could afford. I was paying fourteen dollars a week. And I'll tell you something, there were weeks when it was a struggle to come up with the fourteen bucks."

He stirred the coffee, passed my cup to me. "Then I got so I was making a living, but even so, I was a little hesitant about moving. I like the location, the sense of neighborhood. I even like the name of the neighborhood. Hell's Kitchen . If you're going to be a writer, where better to live than a place called Hell's Kitchen? Besides, I didn't want to commit myself to a big rent. I was getting ghostwriting assignments, I was building up a list of magazine editors who knew my work, but even so, it's not a steady business and I didn't want to have a big monthly nut to crack. So what I did, I started fixing this place up and making it bearable. I'd do a little at a time. First thing I did was put in a full burglar alarm system because I got really paranoid about the idea of some junkie kicking the door in and ripping off my typewriter. Then the bookshelves because I was tired of having all my books piled up in cartons. And then the desk, and then I got rid of the original bed, which I think George Washington must have slept in, and I bought that platform bed, which sleeps eight in a pinch, and little by little the whole place came together. I kind of like it. I don't think I'm ever going to move.

"It suits you, Doug."

He nodded eagerly. "Yeah, I think it does. A couple of years ago I started to twitch because it occurred to me that they could boot me out. Here I got a ton invested in the place and what do I do if they raise my rent? I mean I was still paying by the week, for Christ's sake. The rent was up, it was maybe twenty bucks, but suppose they raise it to a hundred a week? Who knows what they're gonna do, you know? So what I did, I told 'em I'd pay a hundred and twenty-five a month, and on top of that I'd give them five hundred in cash under the table. For that I wanted a thirty-year lease."

"And they gave it to you?"

"You ever heard of anybody with a thirty-year lease on a room on Ninth Avenue? They thought they had a real idiot on their hands." He chuckled. "On top of which they never rented a room for more than twenty a week, and I was offering thirty plus cash under the table. They drew up a lease and I signed it. You know what people pay for a studio apartment this size and this location?"

"Now? Two-fifty, three hundred."

"Three hundred easy. I still pay one and a quarter. In another two or three years this place'll be worth five hundred a month, maybe a thousand if the inflation keeps up. And I'll still pay one and a quarter. There's a guy buying up property all up and down Ninth Avenue. Someday they're going to start knocking down these buildings like ten-pins. But they'll have to either buy up my lease from me or wait until 1998 to knock the building down because that's how much time I got left on my lease. Beautiful?"