Дональд Уэстлейк - The Fugitive Pigeon

“Baby!” he said, looking quick at my right shoulder, my left ear, my widow’s peak, my right elbow, my left nostril, and the stain on my collar. He jabbed his hands around. “Glad you could make it!”

“I need a place to sleep,” I shouted.

“Anything, baby!” he shouted back. He looked at nine parts of me, said, “Make yourself at home!” and disappeared.

Fine. It was almost four-thirty in the morning by now, I was too tired to stand up straight. I moved through the people, most of whom gave me half a sentence or so on the way by, and opened the bedroom door. It was dark in there, which seemed like a good idea. I closed the door, but didn’t turn the light on, and groped my way to the bed.

But there were people in it, I’m not sure how many. A voice growled, “Watch it, you.”

“Sorry,” I said. There was a rug on the floor. I lay down on it and closed my eyes. The party noises went away.

The funny thing is, I knew I was dreaming, but I didn’t know what I was dreaming. That was the damnedest dream ever; to be dreaming, and know you’re dreaming, and know it’s a bad dream, a terrifying dream, and not to know what the hell the dream’s all about.

I guess that was the most frightening part of it. Terror of the unknown and all. I wanted so hard to know what I was dreaming about that I popped myself out of sleep like a cork out of a champagne bottle.

I was lying on a floor, in a swatch of sunlight.

This was wrong. My bedroom windows face north; I get an acute angle of sunlight, a narrow beam, only at the very peak of summer. Besides, in my bedroom I sleep in bed, not on the floor. This was very wrong.

The body wakes up first, and then the mind. I opened my eyes, and moved my arms, and remembered everything.

I sat bolt upright. My back twinged as though someone had just yanked my spine out. I said, “Ngahh,” and lay down again. Sleeping on the floor isn’t a good idea at the best of times.

I got up more slowly on the second try, and this time made it all the way to my feet. I stood there, bent forward a little bit, and surveyed the room.

There was still someone in the bed, but now it was Artie and he was alone. On every flat surface in the room — dresser, night tables, straight chairs — there were half-empty glasses. The closet door was open, and clothing was lying in a heap on the floor in front of it.

There was the smell of coffee in the air. I followed it from the bedroom, and at the kitchen-closet I found a sloe-eyed raven-tressed beauty in dungarees and black turtleneck sweater, scrambling eggs. She was barefoot, and very short, and she had that Chinese-French-Negro look that Jewish girls get when they go to the High School of Music and Art.

She was the first to speak. “You were asleep on the floor,” she said. Matter-of-fact, the way you’d comment on the weather.

“I guess I was,” I said. My back hurt, my hands were greasy-feeling, my mouth was furry, and I remembered perfectly why I wasn’t in my own safe apartment above the Rock Grill. I said, “Could I have some coffee?”

She pointed at the pot with a fork that dripped scrambled egg. “Help yourself. You’re hung over, huh?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t drink last night. What time is it?”

“Little after two.”

“In the afternoon?”

She looked at me. “Sure in the afternoon,” she said. She went back to stirring the eggs. “Must have been some party,” she said.

“You weren’t here?” I was opening cupboard doors, looking for a cup.

“They’re all in the sink,” she said. “No, I’m the morning-after girl.”

“Oh,” I said.

It was close quarters there, her at the stove and me at the sink. I picked a cup out of the pile of dishes in the sink, washed it as best I could, and poured coffee in it.

She said, “I never saw you around before.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I don’t get up here very much.”

“Up here from where?”

“Canarsie,” I said.

She made a face like I’d just told a very corny joke. “Come on,” she said.

“No, it’s true.”

She already had a plate for herself. She scraped the eggs into it and put the pan back on the stove. “You want eggs, you got to make them yourself,” she said. Not being nasty about it, just letting me know.

“No, that’s all right,” I said. “Coffee’s enough for me.”

She carried her eggs and coffee over to the cluster of furniture in the middle of the room and sat down. Artie had no kitchen table. I followed her and sat down facing her and sipped at my coffee, which was still too hot to drink. She didn’t pay any attention to me, but just shoveled scrambled egg in the way you might shovel coal into a furnace, just scoop, scoop, scoop. Like Patrolman Ziccatta and his nip, nip, nip. Steady, machinelike.

I said, “When do you figure Artie’ll get up?”

“When I’m done breakfast,” she said. “You don’t have to stick around.”

“Oh, but I do,” I said. “I have to talk to Artie.”

Now she did look at me. “What about?”

“A problem,” I told her. “A jam I’m in.”

“What’s Artie supposed to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, which was the truth. There just wasn’t anyone else I could think of to talk to.

“If it’s money,” she said, ‘he’s broke. Believe me.”

“It isn’t money,” I told her. “I need his advice is all.”

She looked at me over the vanishing eggs and went scoop, scoop, scoop. Then she paused a second and said, “What is it, you need an abortionist?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Nothing like that.”

She said, “If it isn’t money and it isn’t sex, then I don’t know. You aren’t a junky, are you?”

“Me? No, not me.” The idea was surprising as the idea that two professional killers might have been sent out to practice their profession on me. Me a junky? Me a threat to the organization?

“I didn’t think so,” she said. “You look too healthy.” It was a comment that could almost have been an insult, delivered matter-of-fact between mouthfuls of scrambled egg.

‘It’s just some trouble I’ve got,” I said. I drank some of the coffee, and walked around the room a little. I’d slept in all my clothes, and I had that swollen puffy moist feeling you get when you’ve slept in all your clothes. I felt as though I’d just slept my way through a cross-country bus ride. “I’m sorry if I’m being mysterious,” I said. “But I don’t think I ought to talk about it too much.”

She shrugged, finished the eggs, and got to her feet. “I don’t care,” she said.

As she went over to dump the plate in the sink, I remembered something I could tell her. “My name’s Charlie,” I told her. “Charlie Poole.”

“Hi,” she said, standing at the sink, her back to me. She didn’t offer me her name. “You want to wake Artie now?” she asked me.

“Is it okay?”

“If you don’t,” she said, “I do.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Don’t take too long,” she said.

“Okay.”

I went back into the bedroom, carrying the coffee cup, still half full. Artie was lying on his stomach, arms and legs spread out in a pale twisted swastika. He looked like he was sleeping five miles down.

I said, “Artie? Hey, Artie.”

Surprise. He opened his eyes right away, flipped over on his back, sat up, looked at me, and said, “Chloe?”

“No,” I said. “Charlie. Charlie Poole.”

He blinked, and then flashed a great big smile and said, “Charlie baby! Nice to see you, long time no see, baby!”

“I came in last night,” I reminded him. I wasn’t entirely convinced he was awake.