Peril

CARUSO

So, could Piano Man be Batman? Caruso wondered as he sipped his beer. The guy sure didn’t fit the image he’d had in his head. But facts were facts, and he’d watched from just across the street and seen Mortimer talking somberly to this same guy who sat, playing the piano, utterly ordinary, nondescript, and who for all the world didn’t look like he could find a black guy in Harlem, much less some crazy broad who ditched her husband and sure as hell didn’t want to be found.

He grabbed his beer and strolled to the back of the bar.

Piano Man had just come to the end of a song, so it seemed to Caruso that it was a perfect time to chat him up.

“You worked here a long time?” he asked.

“Seems like forever,” the man answered.

Caruso took a quick sip of beer, then glanced about the nearly empty bar. “Slow night.”

“It’s early,” the man said. “We get a better crowd at night.”

“So, you got entertainment.” Caruso nodded toward the piano. “I seen the sign outside. Abe Morgenstern at the piano.”

Piano Man shrugged. “I just like to keep from getting too rusty. We used to have a singer.”

“This all you do, piano?” Caruso lit a cigarette.

“No, I own the place,” Piano Man answered.

“Own the place, no shit,” Caruso said. He smiled. “My father had a small business,” he lied. “A bakery. Lived right over it. All night he could smell the work he’d done that day. Never got away from it. It eats you alive, a small business.”

“It takes up a lot of time, that’s for sure,” Piano Man agreed.

“So, you’re like my dad, you live upstairs?”

“No,” Piano Man answered. “I got a place over on Grove Street.”

Caruso smiled cheerfully. He couldn’t tell if Piano Man was lying, but he hoped he was. He loved being lied to because it confirmed a truth he needed for his work, the fact that people were scum, so whatever you did to them, they fucking deserved it.

But that wasn’t the point at the moment, Caruso realized. The point was to nail the guy down, get something for Labriola to chew on. “So, I was wondering,” he began. “If I was looking to get a place in this part of town, would Grove Street be good?”

“Yeah, sure,” Piano Man said.

“What kind of rent would I be looking at?”

“A bundle.”

“Like how much?”

“Depends on how big. You got a family?”

The fact that he didn’t have a family stung Caruso briefly, like admitting to another guy that he couldn’t get it up. “No,” he answered quietly.

“So a studio, that would be enough?”

“A studio, yeah.”

“I would guess a couple grand at least.”

“A month?” Caruso gasped, momentarily taken in by his own ruse, the absurd notion that he was looking for a place in the city. He wasn’t, of course, and he told himself that immediately. Still, the fact that he couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan even if he wanted to made him feel like a guy who would always come up short, have a car, an apartment, a girl that was a couple notches down from the ones he really wanted. But this was a point uncomfortable to pursue, and so he returned to the issue at hand. “So the bar, it makes you a good living, I guess.”

Piano Man shook his head. “No, I barely scrape by.”

Caruso smiled delightedly. If this were really Batman, then he was lying through his teeth. Because Batman probably had plenty of dough. The trouble was that Piano Man didn’t look like he had a nickel. He wore a faded shirt and flannel pants and talked about how he was just scraping by, and if Piano Man was Batman, then all of that was bullshit. The problem was that the pose was solid. Piano Man actually looked like a down-at-the-heel guy. He talked like one too. Simple. Direct. He gave nothing away. Put it all together, Caruso reasoned, and it was the secret of his success. If it were all a disguise, no amount of small talk could cut through it. The guy was good. A real pro. Caruso realized that he could stand around and yap all night and not get through the mask.

“Well,” he said, “I better get going.” He downed the last of the beer and stared Piano-Man-Maybe-Batman right in the eye. “Take care of yourself,” he said.

“You too.”

Caruso headed for the door, but before going through it, looked back. Piano Man was making his way toward the front of the bar, his expression curiously vacant, his thoughts obviously somewhere else. On the woman maybe, Caruso thought, the one he’s tracking down.