Jabbo thought about this, and then stepped out of the car. Harry did, too, carrying the flight bag. They could smell the sea, and hear the ding-dinging of buoys, and see the skyline to the right and the lights of Staten Island and Jersey beyond. They walked to the end of the pier. The water was black and glossy. There was no moon.
“I’ve been seeing Mary Larkin,” Harry said, counting pilings at the end of the pier. “She’d divorced, you know. Kids grown up. We get this score, Jabbo, me and her are gonna go south. Orlando, St. Pete. I’ll have a grubstake, maybe buy a car, a 7-Eleven, something like that. Hell, fifty grand then must be worth three hundred
“And?”
“All you gotta do is go down and get it.”
Jabbo shook his head, smiling thinly, as he looked down at the swirling black water, fifteen feet below the pier.
“I’m forty-nine years old, Harry,” he said. “I’m not what I was. How do I get back up? And what do I use to pry the box off the piling? Presuming the box is even
Harry opened the flight bag and removed a coil of heavy rope, a claw hammer, a face mask.
“I’ll give you half,” he said.
Jabbo looked at the rope and tools, walked to the edge of the pier, gazed off at the black harbor. Then he started unbuttoning his coat. “What the hell,” he said. He tied one end of the rope around a piling. Five minutes later, barefoot, masked, the hammer in hand, Jabbo stood at the edge of the pier. “See ya,” he said, and went over.
Harry stared at the roiled water, held his breath as if in sympathy, then saw Jabbo’s head come up, gasping for breath. Jabbo gulped, his legs shimmering and pale in the blackness, then bent over and dived again. When he came up again for air, he was fifteen feet away from the pier. A tide was running. He bent and dove, and this time was under a long time. Harry banged his hands together, tense and cold. There was no sign of Jabbo. Impossible. He couldn’t be under this long.
And then he saw him, maybe forty feet out, shouting something Harry couldn’t understand, just his head bobbing in the water, receding, going out. The tide was ripping along now. And then above Jabbo’s head, he saw the box. Jabbo waved it once. Then he was gone.
“Jabbo!” Harry shouted. And then screamed: “Jabbo!” He heard nothing but the dinging of the buoys and the tide slapping against the pilings, and the distant moaning of a foghorn. And he thought: I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to go to the palm trees and the sun. He looked one last time at the harbor, which was as flat and black and final as death, and then he began to run.
WHETHER HE WAS AWAKE or asleep, the New York craziness never left Hirsch alone. Sometimes he tried to tell his wife, Margaret, about his dreams — the dark roaring tunnels, the gleaming yellow eyes of the leopard perched in the backyard tree, the baby with the metal tongue who never stopped screaming. She would always cut him off. “Hirsch,” she would say. “Calm down. You’re letting it get to you, Hirsch. You’re sounding paranoid, Hirsch.”
“Yes,” Hirsch would say. “But I do have enemies.”
Waking, a mask of calm pasted to his face, Hirsch would leave for the advertising agency promptly each morning at nine. He no longer took the subway from Brooklyn Heights. Junkies waited in the doorways near the station, he thought, and the subway was itself a brutal morning assault, an iron purgatory jammed with knife artists, hammer swingers, lobotomized crazies. They, too, inhabited his dreams, spraying paint down his throat, ramming switchblades into his heart, slicing him with smiles on their faces. Them. He was afraid of Them. Blacks and whites, people speaking mysterious languages, young men with eyes full of ancient evil:
Except that on this rainy Brooklyn morning, the car was gone.
“They’ve stolen the car,” he said, coming back up the stoop of the brownstone, his eyes wild: “They took the car!”
Margaret calmed Hirsch and called the police. Then she arranged for a car service to pick him up and take him across the bridge to work. Hirsch waited inside the vestibule for the car, seeing killers and marauders walking down his street. They don’t work, he thought; they patrol. They come around like rats, seeking weakness and vulnerability, and then they strike. I should have a gun. I should be able to shoot all of them.
There were two policemen in the reception room of the advertising agency when Hirsch arrived with his coffee and danish. Someone had broken into the office during the night and stolen two IBM Selectrics. The cops looked weary as they made notes in spiral pads.
“They wrecked the Xerox machine, too,” said Ruthie, the receptionist. “Just poured rubber cement into it and ruined it. Can you imagine?”
“Yes,” Hirsch said. “I can imagine.”
