Ed McBain - Downtown

“May I cut in, please?” a voice said, and suddenly Michael was in the arms of a short, thin, mean-looking man with a thick black mustache, wearing a shiny silk gray suit that was supposed to make him look like the Tin Man.

“This is a knife,” he said, and Michael suddenly detected the faint Spanish accent, and realized at once that this was the man Mama had sent to meet Crandall on Christmas Eve. The knife was in the man’s left hand. The point of the knife was against Michael’s ribs. The man’s right arm was around Michael’s back, pulling him in tight against the knife. The man danced them away from Connie, who stood looking puzzled as a swirl of Dorothys and Cowardly Lions and Wicked Witches flowed everywhere around her in the dense green fog. Michael suddenly remembered that his bomber jacket was draped over the back of the bar stool. All the way over there, the pistols were of no use to him. The man smiled under his mustache.

“I’m Mario Mateo Rodriguez,” he said.

“You dance divinely,” Michael said.

“Thank you.”

“But I wonder if...”

“Mama for short,” the man said.

Michael looked at him.

“Mama,” the man said. “For Mario Mateo.”

“You’re a man?” Michael said.

“Nobody’s perfect,” Mama said.

Michael winced. Not because Mama had just quoted the best closing line of any movie Michael had ever seen in his life, but only because he accompanied the line with a quick little jab of the knife. Michael was suddenly covered with sweat. He did not know whether Mama planned to kill him right here on the dance floor under all these swirling green lights or whether he planned to dance him out of here at knife point, onto the yellow brick road, and over to the Hudson River, where once stabbed he could be disposed of quite easily, but either way was a losing proposition. Crandall and his Wicked Bimbo of the East had vanished into the green fog. So had Connie. There was only Michael now, and Mama, and the knife, and the pounding music and the swirling green lights and the enveloping smoke, and all of it added up to being in death’s embrace for no damn reason, no damn cause.

“May I?” the voice asked.

The voice belonged to Phyllis in his blue Glinda gown and his diaphanous wings. He held his magic wand in his left hand, and his right hand was gently urging Mama back and away from Michael. He was attempting to cut in, the dear boy, which Michael considered infinitely preferable to getting cut up.

There was a sweaty, uncertain, awkward moment.

Mama naturally resisting any intrusion at such an intense juncture.

Phyllis naturally intent on dancing the light fantastic.

Michael naturally wishing to stay alive.

The scream shattered the hesitant moment. High and shrill and strident, it cut through the din as sharply as the word that defined it.

“Knife!”

Someone had seen the knife.

“He has a knife!”

Mama froze.

Suddenly the center of attention, unprepared for such concentrated focus, he smiled in what seemed abject apology, made a courtly Old World bow, his arm sweeping across his waist, and then immediately straightened up and turned to run. Phyllis was directly in his path. Mama hit him with his shoulder, knocking him over backward, his wings crushing as he hit the floor, his head banging against the waxed parquet, his legs flying up to reveal gartered blue stockings under his Glinda skirt. Mama pushed his way through a gaggle of chittering midgets dressed as Tin Men instead of Munchkins, all of them squealing indignantly as he shoved them aside. More people had seen the knife now. Someone shouted at Mama as he pushed his way off the dance floor, knocking over chairs and tables on his way to the exit doors, cursing in Spanish when he banged his knee against a busboy’s cart, angrily slashing at the air with his knife. Michael was right behind him.

He wondered why he was doing this.

Chasing death (his way.

He knew only that to find his way again, he had to follow Mama, follow him out of the green smoke and through the green exit doors that swung out onto the sidewalk, follow him into the cold night air past Curly and the waiting hopefuls, onto the yellow brick sidewalk on Greenwich Street, follow that to where it ended as abruptly as a shattered dream, pound along after Mama on a plain gray sidewalk now, past Rector and a girl in her underwear standing under a red-and-green neon sign that read GEORGE’S LUNCH, and then Carlisle where an armless man stood under an elegant white canopy lettered in black with the words HARRY’S AT THE AMERICAN EXCHANGE, and then Albany on the left, the street, not the city, and Thames on the right, the street, not the river, and another canopy stretching to the sidewalk, tan and brown this time, PAPOO’S ITALIAN CUISINE & BAR, and then O’HARA’S PUB on the corner of Cedar and Greenwich, the place names blurring with the street names until at last Greenwich dead-ended at Liberty and the World Trade Center loomed high into the night on the left. Michael was breathing hard, sweating in what was no longer fear but what had become certainty instead: he would follow Mama to his death. That was what this was all about. Michael dying.

There.

Up ahead there.

A black Cadillac limousine.

A China Doll car, he thought.

Connie, he thought.

But no, it was only Arthur Crandall stepping out of the car with a gun in his hand. And suddenly the limo resembled a hearse.

“Join us,” Crandall said.

Michael figured he still didn’t know how to use a gun. But as he moved toward him. Mama suddenly appeared again out of the night, and the knife was still in his hand, and besides, Michael could now see that Connie was inside the car.

Mama grinned.

“Yes?” he said.

Michael nodded.

The limo was quite cozy.

Mama and Michael on jump seats facing Connie on the left, Crandall in the middle, and Jessica on the right. Crandall still had the gun in his hand. Mama had the knife pressed into Michael’s side between the third and fourth rib on the left. About where his heart was, he guessed. Jessica looked somewhat bewildered. He wondered if she knew what was going on here. Did she still think he’d murdered someone? How big a story had Crandall sold her? Her eyes kept snapping from the gun in Crandall’s hand to the knife in Mama’s.

“This is Mama Rodriguez,” Crandall said.

“Yes, we’ve had the pleasure,” Michael said, and then realized that Crandall was introducing Mama to Jessica. Which meant she’d never met him before tonight. Again, he wondered how much she knew about what was going on. He also wondered how much he himself knew about what was going on.

“How do you do?” Jessica said.

She seemed even more bewildered now that she knew this man’s name was Mama. A man with a thick black mustache? Mama? Her eyes now snapped from the knife in his hand to the mustache under his nose. Michael was more worried about the knife than he was about the mustache.

“You did say Mama?” Jessica said.

“For Mario Mateo,” Mama said, and smiled at her like one of the bandidos in Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

“I see,” she said.

She did not look as if she saw anything at all. She looked as confused as Goldie Hawn in a hot air balloon over the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Mama’s fingers were dancing all over the handle of the knife, as if he simply could not wait to use it. This was a good movie back here in the backseat of the limousine. Beautiful Chinese girl looking gorgeous and alert. Beautiful blonde girl looking like a dumb bimbo, which she probably was, Albetha had been right. Fat motion-picture director with a Phi Beta Kappa key across his belly and a gun that looked like a Luger in his hand. Little Mexican bandido holding an open switchblade knife in his hand, coveting either Humphrey Bogart’s high-topped shoes or the blonde’s sparkly red ones. And sitting on one of the jump seats, the hayseed from Sarasota, Florida, the death-defying orange-grower who after the Tet Offensive in the year 1968, when he was but a mere eighteen years old—