Problems…
“You want me to turn around?”
My driver’s voice shook me out of my reverie. He had pulled to a stop and had turned around to blink at me through the Plexiglas partition that kept him safe from homicidal fares. “Senny-first ’n’ Wes’ End,” he announced. “You want this side or the other?” I blinked back, turned up my coat collar, shrank down inside it like a startled turtle. “Mac,” he said patiently, “want I should turn around?”
“By all means,” I said.
“That means yes?”
“That means yes.”
He waited while traffic cleared, then arched the cab in the traditional illegal U-turn, braking smoothly to a stop in front of my very own building. Could I spare a minute to duck inside, grab some clothes and my case money, be out in no time at all…
No.
His hand reached to throw the flag shutting off the meter. “Hold it,” I said. “Now drive downtown.”
His hand hovered over the flag like a hummingbird over a flower. Then he withdrew it and turned again to look querulously at me. “Drive downtown?”
“Right.”
“You don’t like this place no more?”
“It’s not as I remembered it.”
His eyes took on that wary New York look of a man who realizes he’s dealing with a lunatic. “I guess,” he said.
“Nothing’s the same anymore,” I said recklessly. “The neighborhood’s gone to hell.”
“Jesus,” he said, cab in motion now, driver at ease. “Lemme tell you, this here is nothin’. You oughta see where I live. That’s up in the Bronx. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Bronx. But you’re talking about a neighborhood on the skids-”
And talk about a neighborhood on the skids is precisely what he did, and he did it all the way down the western edge of Manhattan. The best thing about the conversation was its utter predictability. I didn’t have to listen to it. I just let my mind go wherever it wanted while my mouth filled in with the appropriate grunts and uh-huhs and izzatsos as the occasion demanded.
So I sent my mind on a tour of my friends, such as they were. The woodpushers I whipped routinely at chess, the card sharps who just as routinely trimmed me at poker. The sports fans. The drinking companions. The disconcertingly short list of young ladies with whom I’d been lately keeping the most cursory sort of company.
Rodney Hart.
Rodney Hart!
His name popped into my mind like a fly ball into shallow right field. A tall fellow, spare of flesh, with high and prominent eyebrows and a longish nose, the nostrils of which tended to flare when he was holding anything much better than two pair. I’d first met him at a poker game perhaps a year and a half ago, and since then I’d seen him precisely two times away from the card table-once in a Village bar when we happened to run into each other and chatted our way through a couple of beers, and another time when he had the second lead in a short-lived off-Broadway show and I went backstage after the performance with a young lady I was trying to impress. (It didn’t work.)
Good old Rodney Hart!
What, you may well ask, was so wonderful about Rodney? Well, in the first place, I happened to know that he lived alone. More important, he wasn’t home now and wouldn’t be back in town for a couple of months. Just the other week or so he’d turned up at the poker game and announced we wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore. He’d just signed for the road company of Two If By Sea and would be traveling the length and breadth of these United States, bringing Broadway’s idea of culture to the provinces. And he’d even dropped the gratuitous information that he wasn’t subletting his apartment. “Not worth it,” he’d said. “I’ve had the place for years and I pay a hot ninety a month in rent. The landlord doesn’t even bother getting increases he’s entitled to. He likes renting to actors, if you can believe it. The roar of the greasepaint and all that. He eats it up. Anyway, it’s worth ninety a month not to have some sonofabitch sitting on my toilet and sleeping in my bed.”
Ha!
He didn’t know it, but the sonofabitch who would be sitting on his potty seat and lolling between his percales was none other than Bernard Rhodenbarr. And I wouldn’t even pay him ninety a month for the privilege.
But where the hell did he live?
I seemed to remember that he lived in the Village somewhere, and I decided that was as much as I had to know while I was in this particular cab. Because I had unquestionably made myself a memorable passenger, and the papers would shortly be full of my face, and the driver might, for the first time in his unhappy life, actually go so far as to put two and two together.
“Right here is fine,” I said.
“Here?”
We were somewhere on Seventh Avenue now, a couple of blocks from Sheridan Square. “Just stop the cab,” I said.
“You’re the boss,” the driver said, using a phrase which has always seemed to me to be the politest possible way of expressing absolute contempt. I dug out my wallet, paid the man, gave him a tip designed to justify his contempt, and while so doing began to regret bitterly the thousand dollars I’d paid to Ray and Loren. Hardly the best investment I had ever made. If I had that thousand now it might give me a certain degree of mobility. But all I had, after squaring things with the cabbie, was seventy dollars and change. And it seemed somehow unlikely that Rod would be the sort to leave substantial quantities of cash around his empty apartment.
And where was that apartment, anyway?
I found that answer in a phone booth, thinking as I turned the directory how providential it was that Rod was an actor. It seems as though everyone else I know has an unlisted number, but actors are another breed; they do everything but write their numbers on lavatory walls. (And some of them do that.) Good old Rod was listed, of course, and while Hart is a reasonably common name Rodney is reasonably uncommon, and there he was, praise be to God, with an apartment on Bethune Street deep in the bowels of the West Village. A quiet street, an out-of-the-way street, a street the tourists never trod. What could be better?
The book gave not only his address but his phone number as well, as telephone books are wont to do, and I invested a dime and dialed the number. (One does this sort of thing before breaking and entering.) It rang seven times, which I thought was probably enough, but I’m compulsive; I always let phones in potentially burglarable apartments go through a tedious twelve rings. But this one rang only seven before someone picked it up, at which point I came perilously close to vomiting.
“Seven-four-one-nine,” a soft female voice said, and my risen gorge sank and I calmed down. Because just as actors have listed phones so do they have services to answer them, and that was what this voice represented; the number which had been spoken to me was nothing other than the last four digits of Rodney’s phone number. I cleared my throat and asked when Rodney would be back in town, and the lady with the dulcet tones obligingly informed me that he would be on tour for another fifteen weeks, that he was in St. Louis at the moment, and that she could supply me with the number of his hotel there if I wished. I didn’t wish. I suppressed an infantile urge to leave a comic message and returned the phone to its cradle.
It took a little doing but I managed to find Bethune Street and walked west on it until I located Rod’s building. It was half a block west of Washington Street in a neighborhood that was half brownstones and the other half warehouses. The building I wanted was a poor but honest five-story brownstone indistinguishable from its neighbors on either side but for the rusty numerals alongside the front door. I stayed on the street a moment to make sure there was no one taking obvious notice of me, then slipped into the front vestibule. I scanned the row of buttons on the wall, looking for names of illustrious actors and actresses, but Helen Hayes wasn’t listed and neither were the Lunts. Rod was, however; one R. Hart was inked in as occupying Apartment 5 – R. Since there were five floors and two apartments to a floor, that meant he was on the top floor at the rear of the building, and what could be less obtrusive than that?