The Stingray Shuffle полностью

They took the elevator to the exclusive bar on the sixty-fifth floor, facing the Empire State Building. “I saw them film Conan in this building. O’Brien, not the barbarian. And once I sat next to Katie Couric at the table right there. Scorcese opened his 1977 opus New York, New York in this room with Tommy Dorsey on the bandstand…. Let’s go!” Serge heading for the elevators.

“We just got here,” said Teresa.

“We just ordered,” said Maria, holding up a full beer.

But Serge was off to the races. The women chugged a few sips and ran after him.

“…And this is Sparks Steak House. Paul Castellano got whacked right there…. Back to the limo!”

They stopped at the corner of Broadway and Fifty-fourth; Serge ran down some stairs to a basement.

“And this is Flute, used to be a speakeasy. The acerbic writer Dorothy Parker came here all the time. Now that was a broad! Used to answer her phone: ‘What fresh hell is this?’”

“I was just about to say that,” said Sam. Teresa elbowed her.

“Back to the limo!”

“Slow down!” yelled Teresa. “Do you always move this fast?”

“No. When I’m alone, I move faster,” said Serge. “Like when I came to see Conan last year. I arrived four hours early and still almost missed it. As usual, I built in a vast cushion of time because I always have a lot of anxiety that I’ll be late. I didn’t plan on the museums.”

“The museums?”

“East side of Central Park, Museum Mile. You got the Met, the Frick Collection, National Academy of Design, the Museum of the City of New York, the Whitney, Cooper-Hewitt. I knew they were nearby. I just thought I had the willpower.”

“But you just couldn’t resist?” said Sam.

Serge nodded. “Which still wouldn’t have been a time problem until I remembered the Museum of Natural History was on the other side of Central Park. That’s where they have the Star of India, the world’s largest sapphire, stolen in 1964 by flamboyant Miami Beach playboy Jack Murphy, portrayed by Robert Conrad in the delightfully campy Murph the Surf. After the arrests and a lot of negotiation, an anonymous phone tip led detectives to an outdoor bus locker in Miami, where the sapphire was recovered and later put back on display. The caper is so carved into my brain that I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to see the gem in person. I made good time crossing Central Park to the museum, but then more trouble. To get to the gem room, you have to go through the Hall of Biodiversity. I really got hung up in there. Thousands of species on display, bacteria to great blue whales, phylums and families, marsupials, nocturnals, a rainbow of butterflies, blind fish from cold depths with no light, eels with scraggly teeth, bugs the size of your head, birds that can’t fly, squirrels that can, some shit with webbed toes and all these eyes, something else with dangling prongs sticking out its forehead. Then the other rooms, ancient civilizations, Neanderthals, dinosaurs, geological forces, continental plates, the stars and the cosmos, and finally, the Big Bang Room. My time-management was shot; started looking bad for Conan. Then, complete panic. My consciousness was expanding, id shrinking, the exhibits making me feel utterly insignificant, that life was a mere flashbulb going off, and I had a sensation of falling, trouble breathing, and I realized what it was. All this knowledge and awareness — I was getting closer to God. Which can be stressful. Takes a lot of intellectual curiosity and courage, and also you’ll get a bunch of heat from religious types because it involves evolution and science, which actually only points all the more to the existence of a deity, unfortunately not the kind you can use to boss others around….”

“So did you see it?”

“See what?”

“The sapphire.”

“Oh, the sapphire! Yes, I saw it. It was an unbelievable experience, the way the light breaks into six points across the oblate, azure surface. I got goose bumps. I was shaking so much I could barely hold the glass cutter steady.”

“A glass cutter,” said Rebecca, laughing. “What a riot!”

“Yeah, it was pretty funny. The guards had never heard that alarm before, and they didn’t know what to do. Two ran head-on into each other. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t finish getting through the glass. It’s a lot thicker than you’d expect.”

Maria tapped her watch. “Eleven o’clock.”

“Right,” said Serge. “We better get moving.”

The chauffeur parked as close as he could to the blocked-off streets, and they all began walking west on Forty-sixth, working their way through the packed crowd to Times Square. They reached the corner of Seventh Avenue and looked up. In one direction, a twenty-foot cup of steaming ramen noodles. In the other, the lighted New Year’s Eve ball.

“I’m hungry,” said Maria.

“Me, too,” said Rebecca. They went in a Sbarro’s for pizza by the slice.

Except Sam. She withdrew. She stood outside the restaurant watching a sidewalk portrait artist with no customers working on a charcoal of Tina Turner.