French Kiss

Chapter 4

The suffocating air on Madison Avenue almost shimmers with heat.

Where have all the beautiful people gone? East Hampton? Bar Harbor? The South of France?

I walk the block. I watch a man polish the handrail alongside the steps of Saint James’ Church. I see the tourists line up outside Ladurée, the French macaron store.

A young African American man, maybe eighteen years old, walks near me. He is bare-chested. He seems even sweatier than I am. The young man’s T-shirt is tied around his neck, and he is guzzling from a quart-size bottle of water.

“Where’d you get that?” I ask.

“A dude like you can go to that fancy-ass cookie store. You got five bills, that’ll get you a soda there,” he says.

“But where’d you get that bottle, the water you’re drinking?” I ask again.

“Us poor bros go to Kenny’s. You’re practically in it right now.”

He gestures toward 71st Street between Madison and Park Avenues. As the kid moves away, I figure that the “fancy-ass cookie store” is Ladurée. I am equidistant between a five-dollar soda and a cheaper but larger bottle of water. Why waste Papa’s generous allowance on fancy-ass soda?

Kenny’s is a tiny storefront, a place you should find closer to Ninth Avenue than Madison Avenue. Behind the counter is a Middle Eastern-type guy. Kenny? He peddles only newspapers, cigarettes, lottery tickets, and, for some reason, Dial soap.

I examine the contents of Kenny’s small refrigerated case. It holds many bottles, all of them the same-the no-name water that the shirtless young man was drinking. At the moment that water looks to me like heaven in a bottle.

“I’m going to take two of these bottles,” I say.

“One second, please, sir,” says the man behind the counter, then he addresses another man who is wheeling four brown cartons of candy into the store. The cartons are printed with the name and logo for Snickers. The man steering the dolly looks very much like the counterman. Is he Kenny? Is anybody Kenny? I consider buying a Snickers bar. No. The wet Armani suit is already growing tighter.

“How many more boxes are there, Hector?” the counterman asks.

“At least fifteen more,” comes the response. Then “Kenny” turns to me.

“And you, sir?” the counterman asks.

“No. Nothing,” I say. “Sorry.”

I leave the tiny store and break into a run. I am around the corner on Madison Avenue. I punch the button on my phone marked 4. Direct connection to Martinez. All I can think is: What the hell? Twenty cartons of candy stored in a shop the size of a closet? Twenty cartons of Snickers in a store that doesn’t even sell candy?

She answers and starts talking immediately. “Williams and I are getting nowhere with these two assholes. This whole thing sucks. Our intelligence is all screwed up. There’s nothing here.”

I am only slightly breathless, only slightly nervous.

“Listen to me. It’s all here, where I am. I know it.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” she says.

“A newsstand between Madison and Park. Kenny’s. I’m less than two hundred feet away from you guys. Leave one person at Taylor Antiquities and get everyone over here. Now.”

“How-?”

“The two vans, the garage…that’s all a decoy,” I say. “The real shit is being unloaded here…in cartons of candy bars.”

“How do you know?”

“Like the case in Pigalle. I know because I know.”