Grand Central Noir

The Drop – by J. Walt Layne

THE HARD WHEELS OF THE BICYCLE clattered and every bolt in the frame rattled over the rocky pathway behind the trench. The men heard the bike crossing no man’s land long before it came into view. The doughboys, save for the poor guys with the unlucky job of being snipers or spotters, stayed low in the trench to avoid being spotted by the Kaiser’s sharpshooters, whose rifles were equipped with very accurate telescopic sights.

Corporal Vincent Morgan lay in a notch atop the berm that ran along the forward zag at grid PF246105 on the Provence line, north of the Rhone River. Corporal Morgan was directing artillery fire on a German trench 1000 yards distant. It had been a quiet day, and despite the shelling, the German’s water-cooled machine guns had remained quiet. As he was calling in an effect fire order, Morgan heard the rattle of the bike and then the shrill trilling of the Communication Sergeant’s whistle.

He crawled back and then pulled his rifle to port before sliding down the embankment and running along the bottom of the trench toward the sound of voices. The grumbling of starving soldiers – whose hungry eyes measured the fat on the Communication Sergeant’s bones as he delivered the news of the armistice – was loud enough to wake the dead German soldiers, whose corpses were scattered across the valley.

A week later Morgan was bathing and eating in the war-torn remains of a four-star hotel. After a month, he had transferred back to Liverpool and boarded a troop ship for Fort Dix.

He thought about the brief romantic inferno that had burned between him and the peasant girl Estelle Argos. They had met when he was on patrol. She had given him a loaf of bread and he had given her his last of the pouch of pipe tobacco. Another day they had shared a hungry conversation over an end of bacon he had taken off a dead German soldier and brought to her. On the third day, he found her in the barn and their hunger for conversation and filling their stomachs had turned into a hunger for each other. It went on until the lines shifted and their liaison went from daily to weekly to too dangerous for either of them.

It was their final night together that he thought of as he rode quietly in the back seat of his father’s Westcott touring car. A Model T Pickup had backfired as they were leaving Grand Central and he had reflexively taken cover at the corner of a concrete buttress. His mother and father had been embarrassed. It was not something they had prepared for, and it was plain from the beginning that his shellshock was not a topic for family conversation.

In the twelve-block journey from the train station to their apartment in the Garment District, his father had wiped the unpleasantness of his military service from the family ledger and dictated Vince’s life plan, including a suggested betrothal to Charlotte Morris and returning to his clerking position in his father’s textile concern. Their voices faded from the static of road noise into the static of the Crosley table model radio.

At noon, Tuesday a month later, September 3, 1918, Vince sat on the dock eating a sandwich from the Jew’s Deli and contemplating the sound of traffic in the street when a tallish gentlemen in a starch pressed uniform entered the gate of the receiving lot and walked right up to him.

“Morgan, Vincent?” the husky voice asked, though it was more of a statement.

Vince sized him up. “Who wants to know?”

“The Pinkerton Agency has been contracted to deliver a certified post to Vincent A. Morgan.” He presented a small receipt book and Vince signed, giving the fellow a more critical eye. Something in the man’s countenance was surrealistically familiar.

The agent pocketed the receipt book and presented Vince a brown Kraft Paper envelope. Vince looked it over without opening it. The textbook perfect handwriting added to the brown Kraft paper pouch’s ominous look. He tore the end off and blew into it to puff it open. Couched snugly inside was a second envelope.

He slid the smaller envelope out and tucked the Kraft paper pouch under his knee. He read the front of the envelope, which stated only his name in a very proper looking copperplate hand.

He pursed his lips unconsciously, turned the envelope over, and ran the blade of his Boker folding knife under the seal. The weight of the heavy paper was worthy of note. He recognized its similarity to the heavy home deckled paper he had seen abroad. There was something familiar about the copperplate handwriting, which he could not place.

The note was brief and poetically to the point:

Mr. Vincent Morgan,

To your requisite knowledge, some matters are in motion to which you are a party, but must remain unknown to you for the time being. You will have received this request within a week prior to Monday, 09 September 1918. It is requested that you retain the second Monday monthly for the duration to receive a package on or about 15:30, on Platform 44, Grand Central Terminal. You will retain said package without opening and engage in service as courier to the below address:

Number A 247 West 42nd Street New York.

This task will be in your interest. Please do not fail in this duty and the eventual reward will be substantial. We ask only that you keep the time free and observe an amount of decorum in this matter.

Best to you and God’s Blessings,

A

“Hey what is this?” Vince looked up from the letter to address the Pinkerton Agent, but he was alone, save for the chill on the late summer’s breeze. He shook his head slightly and tucked the letter back into the envelope, and the envelope back into the Kraft paper pouch, which he folded several times and tucked into a pocket on the way back to his desk.

September 9, 1918 15:20.

Vince heeled it through Grand Central, counting a half dozen shine boys, two preachers, a singing barber, and a Fuller Brush salesman whose coiffeur reeked of Dapper Dan Pomade. He was still thinking that the brush salesman should have opted for religion over fashion and consulted either preacher over the barber’s advice on the pomade, but alas, city girls preferred the likes of a Dapper Dan Man to an altar boy any day.

He was contemplating a cigarette and the distant sound of Jacques Beaumont’s coronet coming from the oyster bar when a swirl of activity brought him up short. Vince sidestepped a small boy with very mature Irish features who raced past with the buxom Gretchen Stallhauer (a woman reputed to provide much more than interesting conversation to the gentlemen she escorted) on his tail, cursing at him in a mixture of gutter Dutch and German.

“Du kleine Teufel hunden, you come back here mit meine money,” she wailed, as she tore headlong after him up the concourse.

Vince smiled as he sank onto the bench beneath the “44” placard on the long varnished bench. He glanced at his watch and at the old Remington clock above the information booth. It read 3:26 p.m.

He reached for his tobacco pouch and rolled a cigarette while the 3:30 backed in. He lit the cigarette and took the first draw as the coach doors opened and the conductors swung down with their steps. The last conductor swung down and set his step in place. As if he were on a swivel, the fellow wheeled on his heel in an about face, and made a half dozen strides to where Vince sat.

“You’re Vincent Morgan?” he asked, though nodding assumption.

“Yes. What’s this about?” Vince asked a bit more wisely than the conductor was expecting. The big fellow jabbed the small parcel at Vince and loped back to the rear of his coach, where he tipped his hat to a lady and offered her his hand as she reached for the grab iron.

Vince watched the conductor a moment longer and made for the street, tucking the package under an arm, wary of the wee leprechaun and his buxom pursuer. As the door swung closed behind him, separating him from the roaring din of the crowd and Jacques Beaumont’s swinging eighths, he pulled out the letter and reread the delivery address, and read aloud, “A 247 West 42nd Street New York.”

“Dat’sa bush station.” A husky voice spoke Brooklynese from somewhere.

Vince looked around, trying to force his eyes to focus in the bright late summer sun.

“Bus station?” Vince said turning the direction he thought the voice had come from.

“Yeah’er, well not chet, but dis time next yeah,” the stout street sweeper said over his shoulder. “S’about sixish blocks, take yer ’bout fideen minutes ta walk it, prob’ly longer to take the train. By cab, good luck, pal.”

The guy’s voice fell on Vince’s back and shoulders, he was already heeling it uptown. He knew exactly where to go once the fellow had said bus station. The New York Port Authority’s new office of Public Transit was only a couple of block north of his home in the Garment District.

As it turned out, Letter A 247 West 42nd Street New York was a mailbox next to the locked door to the Pinkerton Agency, who was the contracted security for the Port Authority.

Vince repeated this chore on the second Monday monthly for the remainder of the year. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years passed without incident. His mother and father were blithely unaware of his monthly chore, and he liked it that way.

The only real development that would qualify as news was that his parents had a sudden development of interest in the leisure company of Howard and Ruth Morris, whose old country lineage had bred a daughter with a figure akin to a cello but a face more closely resembling some sort of wind instrument. Vince didn’t need to talk to her to find out if she was a kindly person, as he couldn’t lay eyes on her without mentally mouthing all manner of bane method insult in all keys, including those to her father’s multimillion-dollar kingdom. In short, he started spending a lot of time at the library.

On Tuesday, January 7, 1919, Vince was walking home from one of his post clerking trips to the library when, as he cut across traffic at 42nd Street, another of the Pinkertons stepped out of a storefront long enough to fall in beside him for a dozen steps. The agent passed him a Kraft paper pouch, got a signature, and disappeared.

Vince stepped up onto the curb and looked after the Pinkerton Agent. Rather, he glanced in the direction that he believed the chap had gone, but again the fellow had disappeared before Vince could question him. He went into the coffee shop at the corner of 7th Avenue and sat down at the back corner table.

The waitress, a woman he vaguely recognized from the neighborhood, brought him a cup of coffee. “Good evening, Saul just took a tray of onion bagels out of the oven. I’ve also got the fresh cream cheese.”

“Thank you, Missus…,” Vince stopped, her name was right in his mouth, but he couldn’t spit it out.

“Silverman. I’m Zelda, my husband is Saul. Your father and my husband worked together at, the buttoner, before…”

Vince realized what he’d had a mouth full of, and he decided swallowing wasn’t a bad thing to save an old woman’s feelings. “I remember. It was just before I went to France.”

She smiled and nodded. “Seems like a lifetime ago now. So you’re home from the war then?” He nodded, and aside from laying a motherly hand on his shoulder that nearly sent him to tears, she let him be.

He opened the brown paper pouch and withdrew the envelope, made of the same heavy home deckled paper. He tried to compare the handwriting on the Kraft paper pouch with the delicate copperplate on the inner envelope, but to his eye, it was impossible to believe that the same hand might have addressed both. However, the inner one still bore only his name.

Again, he read the short message and digested the short narrative about the necessities of life followed by the request that he continue to courier the parcel from Platform 44 to Letter A 247 West 42nd Street. He lowered the letter and thought about how long he planned to continue without explanation. News stories about kids running errands for the organized mob had been rampant in the papers since he was a child, and this was admittedly something out of a bad dime novel.

He raised the letter again and reread:

Mr. Vincent Morgan,

I tender my thanks to you for your service. Sometimes in life, we must do things out of necessity that might seem extraordinary in effort or vision to those who have not shared our experience. Please continue to perform the task for the present time.

Yours,

A

Vince dreamt of a dozen different hands he’d seen written throughout his life and his imagination could fit none of them with the copperplate hand of the letters, which he’d secreted in the base of his bureau, lest his mother or her housekeeper find them and start a row over something that was in fact none of their business.

Each year for the next five, on or about a week prior to the second Monday of January, he received a similar letter with a short narrative or parable written in the same even copperplate and asking that he continue to shuttle the parcel, which was always of similar size and rarely varied in weight.

Aside from the casual mark of change perpetuated by progress, the characters in Grand Central rarely changed. The anonymous throngs of people going about their business coursing through the public transportation heart of the city.

On a dog day afternoon, Monday, August 8, 1927, Vince arrived at Grand Central early. He planned to have lunch in the Oyster Bar and soak in some of the Stan Barber Trio. The trio had stood in for Jacques Beaumont on his annual sabbaticals to New Orleans for many years. Stan Barber and his boys had become a permanent fixture in 1925 when Beaumont caught the edge of a pimp’s razor in the French Quarter after he failed to ante up for services rendered.

Vince walked in at the end of a string of standards that the trio played as part of their mid afternoon set, just as a street punk was running out the door with the till. Vince wasn’t an imposing figure, but substantial in his way and when the thug attempted to barge through Vince set his feet, seized the fellow’s arm, pivoted with the man’s momentum and rode him to the floor.

Somewhere in the resulting fray of cussing, punching, and wrestling, a transportation cop showed up and much to the proprietor’s elation, the till was returned, and the young punk escorted to jail. Vince’s luncheon of poached oysters was on the house with an invitation to return with guests anytime.

When he arrived at his usual bench beneath the platform 44 marker, Vince discovered a woman of his age huddled beneath her hat. He noticed her small, gently sloped nose supported spectacles and was stuck in a book. He sat down just off the rounded corner, no more than a foot away and sighed.

She raised an eyebrow at his slouch and exhaust. “Do I owe you rent?”

“Hunh? Oh no, I was just thinking about my day -,” he started.

“I see you here sometimes, sitting exactly in this spot,” she said quietly but directly, not looking up from her book.

“You keeping track?” he said, a bit crasser than was normal for him.

“No, but I also see you in the Times Square Branch of the Library,” she hissed, as if she were indeed keeping track.

“So you are keeping track,” he asked, irritated, but playing along.

“I’m a librarian, along with controlling information, I also observe people,” she offered in quiet demure.

“What do you observe?” he asked as the 15:30 arrived. She said something of the rushing din of the terminal, but he didn’t hear her. He gestured to his ear and she granted him a very genuine smile, closed her book, and slipped it into her bag.

As per usual, the last conductor sung down from the end of the train, placed his step, and handed off the parcel, this time pressing it to Vince’s chest as he tried to communicate via eyeball with the young woman. He took the parcel, though slightly startled and only shifted his eyes from her momentarily. But he returned his gaze quickly lest she disappear as so many of the people he met performing this chore did.

She was still there and he stood up and walked over to her. “Are you going to Times Square now?”

“No.” She shook her head, rather surprised he had asked, and as he began to wilt, she followed quickly with, “I worked in Five Points today.” She wilted a bit. “I was merely avoiding going home to a quiet apartment. I took care of my gram, but she died last month and now it’s just quiet.”

“I understand. I’m a bachelor and aside from my father’s failing health and a job I don’t want, my mother’s racket isn’t much company,” he said, a bit more honestly than she’d expected.

“I left mother in Boston with my uncle’s stipend to keep her company. I wanted to go to college, but can’t afford it, so I work in a library and educate myself.”

He felt a smile break across his face. “It was an imposing volume.”

She grinned from ear to ear. “It is Watson’s Guide to Botanical Life.” She retrieved it from her bag and offered it to him. Politely, he took it and flipped a few pages to a drawing of some sort of shrub.

“Vincentia,” she said. “Most of them are poisonous.

“This will never work,” he said, dejected. “I’m Vincent.”

She laughed. “I’m sure you’re not poison.”

“Are you sure? Where are you going? I have to deliver this, on West 42nd.”

“Infectious maybe. I am going home. I live just south of 42nd at Eighth,” she said.

“I’m in the Garment District. I’ll walk you if you don’t mind.”

“I do mind,” she said with a wry grin. “The leash always disjoints my neck, as I am prone to gawking at birds.”

“Oh. I’m sorry I meant… What should I call you?”

“So long as you promise not to bring a leash you may call anytime. My name is Heather, which is a rapidly spreading flowering grass.”

They shared a laugh and embarked on the first of many walks. She made a fast and easy friend. A good listener, and for the final year of his father’s life, someone Vince could look forward to not pressing him to marry the hideous and yet available, Charlotte Morris.

The next year on an equally unique day, Vince walked from the factory to Grand Central and found Heather seated in his usual place beneath the “44” placard on a bench that was now showing signs of wear and needing a fresh coat of varnish.

“Good afternoon?” he asked.

“Not bad. The Five Points are always interesting. Mr. Ridley Ward, the director, paid me a visit today, and asked if I should be interested in either of two openings for head librarian at Times or The Points. He then inquired my matrimonial prospect and should my husband or lead suitor be objectionable to my working daily from nine to four.”

Vince swallowed hard, as something large and airtight rolled in his gut. “Oh. Well. Umm. I hadn’t considered that you might have another interested.”

She seized his arm as he started to shift himself to a less familiar position, “Vincent Morgan, I am not telling you this to solicit a proposal. I know that your highly refined mother and your father, rest his soul, would have you married off to that Bass Fiddle Morris and have half a dozen little viols by now, but I hadn’t felt insecure enough to need to voice my interest.”

“It’s that I just…” His voice broke not as a matter of temper, but genuine tears burned in the corners of his eyes and his voice was thick and his throat husky and hot. “I didn’t want to tender my interest and then not see you any longer if your interest was no longer the same as my interest.”

“Sir, do you know that men remain bachelors for fear of the interests of a woman.”

He smiled when she said it.

“So you would?” he ventured.

She straightened herself a bit. “I don’t know you haven’t asked me. We spend an awful lot of time together in public places, but I’ve not been welcomed to your mother’s home. Then we simply must discuss matters of importance.”

“Children?” he asked quietly, chastened.

“I love them. But I had scarlet fever. I am likely barren.” Her eyes searched his for the impact of truth.

“I’ve been through a lot and I find such intimacy difficult, though I’ve often considered the joys of having my days filled with the same joy of your company that I get even during the worst of our stolen time together.”

“Okay, so being without a guardian, I grant you my personal permission to pursue me as you see fit,” she said, quite a bit more seriously than he had expected.

He was fully flustered. “Oh, Well, I am sorry I won’t be of further trouble… Your permission? Really?”

She nodded. They were still embracing in mutual glow when the conductor cleared his throat loudly to gain Vincent’s attention, to pass over the parcel. Their walk was especially short and their mood light on the way to deliver the parcel to Letter A 247.

After Vince slid the Kraft paper wrapped parcel through the slot and they were on their way toward Eighth Avenue, Heather said, “I’ve meant to ask you for some time. Exactly what is in these packages?”

“Oh well. To be honest, I am not truly certain.”

After listening quietly, she remarked, “That is quite hard to believe. You are not in lack where loyalty is concerned.”

Vince started to wilt and then reversed himself. He had reached that turning point in the life of a man where his reactive threshold stops and his proactive self emerges. “Heather, it is time you met my mother. We will alter our destination to your doorstep. I want you to meet mother, but I also want you to read the letters I’ve received yearly on account of this monthly chore of mine, the letters that brought us together.”

She was quietly pleased that he’d taken some charge of things in the wake of their conversation, “Yes. I’d like to meet your mother. You don’t need to show me these letters. I believe you.” She said it knowing that it would cement his desire to share.

“I want you to know what’s there, so that there is no question in your mind beyond those in my own.” He remarked as they turned onto Eighth Avenue.

December 5, 1933, the city was alive with in a sudden celebration with spirits. Just after noon, the repeal of Prohibition hit in a Times Extra. By 4:30, when the Pinkerton Agent knocked on the door of Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Morgan, and at length the very pregnant Heather Morgan answered.

“Is your husband about ma’am?” the gent inquired.

“No sir, he is at the fac -” Out of breath, she leaned against the door and then slid down it onto her knees.

“Oh dear, Missus. I’ll get you to the hospital,” the agent growled from behind his moustache.

Later that evening, Vince entered a sickeningly antiseptic hospital room. He found Heather resting quietly with an equally tired infant taking a nursing break.

“Hello there,” he said as he kissed her forehead.

She smiled sleepily. “Vincent, meet your son. I haven’t named him yet, but I was thinking Vincent Michael Morgan, naming him after his father and mine.”

The baby clamped a fist around Vince’s finger. “That’s good. He’s perfect, you did good.”

For the next three years, they tried to get pregnant again, but despite their efforts and many consultations with the doctor, it was simply not to be. Despite his success at work, now leading his father’s company, growing it, and supporting other businesses, and despite their success as parents, still the hunger for another child gnawed at them.

Heather confided in him that for all her love of her son and her husband the thing that might bring her greater joy would be a daughter. It wasn’t her way to want for much, and it hurt Vince deeply that he could not provide for this singular want. They quarreled from time to time regarding his continuing loyalty to pick up and deliver the monthly parcel to A 247 West 42nd Street. His focus on making good on this duty was a source of frustration for her when on occasion he scheduled around the drop instead of trying to accommodate his family.

August 12, 1935, came and went. The delivery made and Vince hurried home to relieve Heather of teething duties with the baby. Twenty-month-old Vinnie’s gums were sore and Vince’s remedy of single malt whiskey was the only medicine that worked. Heather was showing signs of exhaustion since she’d laid off the maid and tightened up their personal budgets to avoid making cuts at the factory.

A week later, another Kraft paper pouch came via Pinkerton Agent. Vince opened the pouch and extracted the inner envelope, which was the usual rough home deckled paper. The stationary was a bit better, refined paper, but still of a very pedestrian and cheap variety. The copperplate hand was a bit more delicate and not quite so neat as it had been over the years. The note read:

Mr. Morgan,

It is long past time for you to understand what this has been about.

Yours,

A

Vince sat down on the corner of the porch and reread the note several times. He rechecked the pouch and envelope. Neither yielded anything more.

When it came time for September’s drop, he was there in plenty of time. The train backed in and he watched the conductor swing down, place his step, and then assist passengers down from the coach. When he finished, the passengers boarded and departed. There was no parcel after seventeen years.

October 14, 1935, Vince had lunch in the oyster bar and regaled the proprietor with Vinnie’s latest exploits. He left a tip, but the proprietor still refused his payment. He made his way to Platform 44 and stood near the brass rail, and glared at a sign proclaiming, “Wet paint.” After ten years of quiet waiting, the benches glistened of fresh varnish.

Again the train arrived, conductors and passengers disembarked, boarded, and departed without so much as a second glance from the rear conductor. Vince felt a pang of remorse at having come down despite Heather’s protest. He resolved that this would be the final year that he would continue this one point of contention between he and his wife.

On November 11, 1935, Armistice Day, Vince stopped to talk with the young troops waiting for their sergeant to put them on the train. He took a moment and told them about his time in France and they listened with reverence, then kidded him about the horses and water-cooled machine guns. He wondered why he bothered to talk to the kids as he made his way to his bench under the new metal sign that read, “Platform 44.” He wasn’t surprised as the train came and went without incident, and no parcel. He walked out into the November rain and hailed a cab to take him home.

It was a very tearful goodbye as he left the house on December 9, 1935. Heather had again shared her desire for a daughter, and stated her pitiful plea for another child. Vince hustled through Grand Central station and contemplated taking a train somewhere, anywhere away from the pain in his heart.

Today he didn’t stop and chat with anyone. He made his way to Platform 44 just as the train was backing in. He stood there, near the bench where he’d waited on this train for the past seventeen years. He watched as the conductor at the rear of the last coach swung down, and set his step in place.

Vince watched as the conductor straightened his jacket and offered a hand as the door opened and the first passenger stepped down. The young woman’s French Provincial features bore a strong and haunting resemblance to someone from his past. As she turned her head and made eye contact, he had the distinct notion that he was looking at his father’s maternal likeness, though her gait was more feminine and hinted at his mother. But, she was as much none of them, as she was both of them.

She walked up to him and offered an envelope. He took it and turned it over. His name appeared in a frail copperplate hand. He opened it and pulled out a very tattered tintype photograph of himself in his Army uniform.

“You must excuse me,” she said. “I would have come sooner but three months ago my mother Estelle took sick with cancer and passed away just after sending her letter to you – my father. She sent all the money she ever earned to the Pinkerton Agency to pay for our coming to America. With her dying breath, she asked me to tell you that she was sorry that she had given you a daughter and not a son.”

The young woman’s voice broke and tears rolled down her cheeks. “Father, I hope that you can find a place for me in your house until I can make it on my own.”