A Well-Known Secret by Fusilli Jim;

Author:Fusilli, Jim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2002-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

I half-expected the young cabbie with the dark, memorable eyes to be perched up by the Marriott, his off-duty sign stubbornly aglow to turn away the eager or the exasperated caught in the discouraging task of flagging a taxi in the booming heart of Tunes Square.

Or maybe McDowell would be outside the Aladdin Hotel, behind the wheel of a black Ford, nightstick at the ready, his ruddy face made redder by memories of the ass-blistering that Tommy the Cop gave him echoing above the radio blare.

Alfie Bascomb? Not yet, not again.

I went toward Seventh.

And I started south, moving more purposefully than the crawling crowd of wide-eyed yet cautious tourists around me, though without the scowl of a typical New Yorker caught behind a crawling crowd, some of whom had traveled 1,000 miles to stare up at a giant TV that was showing the same thing they could see at home. As I passed Father and Sons Shoes, I stopped short to avoid bashing into a stout, silver-haired woman with over-sized glasses who, for some inexplicable reason, had decided to open her handbag and withdraw her wallet. Then I noticed a young man on the island that separated Broadway and Seventh who had pulled down his video camera to focus in on the handbag lady. With all there is to shoot here in the new electronic circus, in Tokyo West—giant stock symbols swirling overhead and underfoot, reflected in murky puddles; billboards of perfect models, sullen in fresh underwear; familiar labels and slogans on rippling banners affixed to the faces of the towers and buildings, on moving billboards mounted on flatbed trucks; flashing, dazzling lights; manipulation—and he decides to videotape a woman—

She withdrew a snapshot, the kind they take at Sears, at elementary schools, and held it high for the camera.

“We’re thinking of you, Wendell,” she shouted. “Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

She held it high until the man on the island held up his thumb, turned the bill of his baseball cap to the front and started across Broadway, camera at his side.

She looked up at me as she tucked the photo back into her wallet.

“My grandson,” she smiled. She wore a red, white and blue ribbon on her green, fuzzy-collared coat.

“And him?” I asked, gesturing with my head toward the young man with the video camera and the NY Fire Department logo on his hat.

“The other one,” she said as she snapped the clasp of her bag.

The April sun had returned, but I lost its rays as I moved under a block-long construction scaffold in Chelsea.

I hadn’t worked it out yet. Bascomb resurfaced to visit an old friend. The first time, he waited near the friend’s theater, then came at me with a wrench to leave me splayed in a pool of blood that would’ve run to the stage door. The next time he told his friend I’d been hired to kill Sonia. In between, he called on Danny Villa, counselor to the disenfranchised, media star.

Resurfaced? No, he’d been running a junkyard in Queens.

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