The Fugitive Pigeon

Chapter 3

The way in and out of Canarsie, if you don’t have a car, is by subway, which is called the Canarsie Line, and which you get at the end of the line on Rockaway Parkway by Glenwood Road, about eight blocks from the Rock Grill. I ran that eight blocks till I got a stitch in my side, and then I kept running even with the stitch because I’d rather have a stitch in my side than a bullet in my head any day. I didn’t know how close those two guys were, or even if they were running after me; I was too busy to look.

I got to the station and it took forever to find change in my pockets and buy a token and run out on the platform. A lit sign said NEXT TRAIN and pointed an arrow at the only train there, on the right side of the platform. All the doors were open. I ran aboard, and then ran from car to car till I found one with four people already in it, and there I collapsed into a seat and panted and held my side where the stitch was now nine.

In one way I was lucky. Less than a minute after I ran aboard, the doors slid shut and the train started for Manhattan.

Making a getaway by subway is not good for the nerves. The train just barely gets rolling pretty good when it slows down again, and stops, and the doors slide open in a very ominous way with nobody near them. Two killers do not get aboard, and the doors close, and the train starts forward, only to go through the whole thing again two or three minutes later.

There are twenty-one stops between Rockaway Parkway and Union Square on the Canarsie Line, in case you want to know.

I couldn’t really believe, when I left the train at Union Square, that I’d escaped from them. Even though I hadn’t seen them yet, I was sure they were still on my tail. Scurrying, looking over my shoulder, I ran along the deserted passageways that led me to the Lexington Avenue Line, and stood on the platform there behind a soft-drink machine, waiting.

It was ten minutes before a local came in, and in the meantime every sound of footsteps on the concrete platform took another year or so off my life. But the local finally did show up, and I leaped from cover behind the soft-drink machine, ran low and zigzag across the platform the way they do in war movies, and barreled aboard the train like a one-man rush hour.

The Lexington Avenue local makes seven stops between Union Square and East 68th Street. I was seeing a lot of subway platforms.

I never know which way is which when I come up out of the subway in Manhattan. I was at 68th and Lex, and I wanted to be at 65th and Fifth, which meant south and west, but I had no idea which way was south. I finally took a chance on a direction that looked right, walked up to 69th Street, read the street sign there, and walked back again.

I told myself this was actually just as well; if anyone was tailing me, doubling back this way would confuse them and help me spot them. But of course I didn’t spot anyone tailing me, and didn’t really think I would.

The walk to Uncle Al’s apartment building was long and dark and scantily populated. A few solitary hunched walkers passed me, our separate fears mingling for just a second as we went by, but nothing happened, and I got to Uncle Al’s building at last, a tall and white and narrow building with a brightly lit little entranceway. I went in there, and pushed the button beside the name A. Gatling.

There was no answer. For a long while there was no answer, and then I pushed the button again, and then there was no answer some more.

I stood there shifting from foot to foot. Where was he, why didn’t he answer? Could it be he really was in Miami?

No. He suspected it was me at the door, that’s all. He didn’t want to answer because he figured it was probably me.

I pushed the button again, and just left my finger on it, and stood there that way. I leaned on the button, and glanced out at the street, and a long black car was pulling to a stop out front. They got out of it, those two guys. They looked up at me, and then they looked at each other, and they came walking toward me.

I stopped pushing Uncle Al’s button, and pushed all the other buttons instead. I stood there like the cashier at a supermarket cash register, pushing buttons. The two guys came across the sidewalk and up the steps. They were looking at me with no expression on their faces, and they were taking their time. I guess they figured they had me cornered. That’s the way I figured, too.

But I kept pushing buttons all the same. The round grille beside the row of buttons began shouting in a variety of sleepy angry voices, but I didn’t answer. I just kept pushing buttons.

One of the two guys looked at me through the glass, and reached for the knob of the outer door, and at last the buzzing sounded I’d been waiting for. I pushed open the inner door, slammed it behind me again, and for just a second I was safe.

But what I could do they could do. I ran across the little lobby and pulled open the elevator door and pushed yet another button; this one numbered 3, for the floor my Uncle Al’s apartment was on.

A very expensive building, this, seven stories high, with only two apartments on each floor. The elevator moved much faster than they do in buildings on the West Side. When it stopped, I pushed the 7 button and got out. The elevator went on up to the seventh floor, which would delay those two guys and might even fake them out.

Two white doors in the cream wall faced me across the white rug. The one on the right, with the brass B on it, belonged to my Uncle Al. I went over and knocked on it. Because I didn’t expect an answer right away, I just kept on knocking. I even kicked the door once or twice, making black marks on the white, which couldn’t be helped.

Behind me, with a whirring sound, the elevator went by on its way back to the first floor.

Why didn’t they take the stairs, why wait for the elevator? I tried to figure it out, while I kept knocking and kicking at Uncle Al’s door, and then I realized what had happened. The city fire laws, see, make apartment houses have staircases even when they have elevators, but most expensive East Side apartment houses are as embarrassed about staircases as if they had to have outhouses in addition to the indoor plumbing, so they put the staircases in and then put walls around them and blank doors leading to them and they hope nobody will ever notice them. Which nobody ever does.

In a minute they’d be coming up, via elevator. Would they stop at the third floor, or would they go on to seven? Did they know my Uncle Al lived here? They had to, there was no other reason for them to come here. They hadn’t followed me, I was sure of that. While I’d taken my route here by subway, they’d taken their route by car.

So they’d stop here, just to be sure, on the third floor.

Whirrr, they were coming up.

I’ve been coming to Uncle Al’s apartment since I was a kid, and kids always know geography better than adults. Kids know apartments better, buildings better, neighborhoods better. So I knew the door to the right of the elevator led to the staircase. I gave off kicking and knocking, and went through that door, and fixed a matchbook so the door didn’t close all the way. Through the narrow vertical slit, I could see Uncle Al’s door.

I’d been right; they got off the elevator at the third floor. Peeking one-eyed through the crack, I could see their backs, broad and black-coated. They didn’t just stand, they hulked.

They walked across the white carpet without any noise, and knocked on Uncle Al’s door. It was a special code-type knock, and anyone could tell that; one, and then three, and then one.

The door opened right away, and Uncle Al stuck his head out and said, “You got him?”

Uncle Al is a big hefty guy, about two-thirds bone and muscle, about one-third spaghetti. He has black hair so thick and shiny most people think he’s wearing a toupee, and his face is a normal collection of mouth, eyes, eyebrows, cheeks, chin and ears positioned around a nose the size and shape of the bald eagle’s beak on the tail of a twenty-five-cent piece. In the summer, when he pitches softball in his undershirt at clambakes, you can see he has black hair growing all over his chunky arms and chunky shoulders and chunky chest. I don’t know about his chunky stomach, but I suppose he has black hair growing all over that, too. When he sits in an overstuffed armchair and crosses his legs, another hairy region pops into view between the top of his black sock and the cuff of his black trousers.

Normally, Uncle Al has a voice to go with all this chunkiness and hair, a bass voice that makes him a natural for the barbershop quartets at the aforesaid clambakes, but right now, as he said, “You got him?” that voice had gone up maybe two octaves. It was the first time I’d ever seen or heard my Uncle Al scared.

One of the two guys said, “Not yet. Is he in there?”

Uncle Al said, “Are you kidding?”

The second one said, “You wouldn’t cover up for him, would you? Agricola wouldn’t like that.”

“I’m keepin’ out of it,” my Uncle Al said, “I want no part of it, no part of it.” All that showed of him in the hallway was his head, looking scared.

Standing there in the yellow stairwell, my feet on concrete and my forehead against the edge of the door and my eye blinking at the narrow vertical strip of corridor, I began at last to understand a couple of things. Way back in Canarsie, when those guys out there had first come after me, my immediate reaction had been to call Uncle Al, the only one I personally knew in the organization. I’d been too scared and excited myself to understand the meaning of his response on the phone; at the time, it had only meant to me that Uncle Al was being difficult to talk to. And the same again, when I’d been kicking futilely at the door. My relationship with Uncle Al has always involved a degree of difficulty in communication for both of us, so there was no reason this time should be any exception.

But now, seeing his face hanging disembodied in the hallway, hearing his voice, I understood I’d made this trip for nothing. Uncle Al wouldn’t help me because he couldn’t help me. He was too scared.

Out there in the corridor, while I was making my discouraging discoveries, they were still talking. The first one was saying, “He come up here.” Like it was an indictment of Uncle Al, an open-and-shut case.

“Would I cross Agricola?” my Uncle Al asked them. He pronounced it A-grić,-o-la. “Am I a dumbhead?” he asked them.

That was one of his favorite expressions. When he was young he used to drive a cab, and when he talks about it these days he says, “Drive a cab all my life? Am I a dumbhead?” The answer is supposed to be no.

The first one, meanwhile, was repeating, “He come up here. And he didn’t go back down.”

Uncle Al said, “What about the roof?”

They both shook their heads. “It don’t figure,” the first one said. “He come here looking for you.”

“Invite us in,” said the second one.

Uncle Al said, “Listen, I got trouble enough. The wife don’t know nothing about this, you follow me? The brat’s her sister’s kid, you know what I mean? How do I explain you two, this time of night?”

“We want the kid,” said the second one.

The first one, still working the same idea, said, “He come up here.”

Uncle Al said, “Maybe he went back down.”

“How?” said the second one. “We took the elevator ourselves. There it is.” He half-turned, and pointed at it.

Uncle Al said, “The stairs, maybe he took the stairs.”

“What stairs?” They both said it, while I was thinking to myself that I understood about how he couldn’t help me but it struck me he was going to far when he started helping them.

Uncle Al brought an arm out into the corridor to go with his head. He pointed the arm right at me, and said, “Those stairs there.”

They turned and looked in my direction, and looked at each other, and came forward.

That was all. Down the stairs I went, two and three at a time. I had to sacrifice either speed or silence, and I opted for speed. So I guess they could hear me going just as plain as I could hear them coming.

Doors, nothing but doors. I burst out the ground-floor door into the foyer, out the foyer door into the entranceway, out the entranceway door into the street. Their long black car was still double-parked out front, with nobody in it. I turned left, toward Central Park, and ran.