Vince looked around, trying to force his eyes to focus in the bright late summer sun.
“Bus station?” Vince said turning the direction he thought the voice had come from.
“Yeah’er, well not chet, but dis time next yeah,” the stout street sweeper said over his shoulder. “S’about sixish blocks, take yer ’bout fideen minutes ta walk it, prob’ly longer to take the train. By cab, good luck, pal.”
The guy’s voice fell on Vince’s back and shoulders, he was already heeling it uptown. He knew exactly where to go once the fellow had said bus station. The New York Port Authority’s new office of Public Transit was only a couple of block north of his home in the Garment District.
As it turned out, Letter A 247 West 42nd Street New York was a mailbox next to the locked door to the Pinkerton Agency, who was the contracted security for the Port Authority.
Vince repeated this chore on the second Monday monthly for the remainder of the year. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years passed without incident. His mother and father were blithely unaware of his monthly chore, and he liked it that way.
The only real development that would qualify as news was that his parents had a sudden development of interest in the leisure company of Howard and Ruth Morris, whose old country lineage had bred a daughter with a figure akin to a cello but a face more closely resembling some sort of wind instrument. Vince didn’t need to talk to her to find out if she was a kindly person, as he couldn’t lay eyes on her without mentally mouthing all manner of bane method insult in all keys, including those to her father’s multimillion-dollar kingdom. In short, he started spending a lot of time at the library.
On Tuesday, January 7, 1919, Vince was walking home from one of his post clerking trips to the library when, as he cut across traffic at 42nd Street, another of the Pinkertons stepped out of a storefront long enough to fall in beside him for a dozen steps. The agent passed him a Kraft paper pouch, got a signature, and disappeared.
Vince stepped up onto the curb and looked after the Pinkerton Agent. Rather, he glanced in the direction that he believed the chap had gone, but again the fellow had disappeared before Vince could question him. He went into the coffee shop at the corner of 7th Avenue and sat down at the back corner table.
The waitress, a woman he vaguely recognized from the neighborhood, brought him a cup of coffee. “Good evening, Saul just took a tray of onion bagels out of the oven. I’ve also got the fresh cream cheese.”
“Thank you, Missus…,” Vince stopped, her name was right in his mouth, but he couldn’t spit it out.
“Silverman. I’m Zelda, my husband is Saul. Your father and my husband worked together at, the buttoner, before…”
Vince realized what he’d had a mouth full of, and he decided swallowing wasn’t a bad thing to save an old woman’s feelings. “I remember. It was just before I went to France.”
She smiled and nodded. “Seems like a lifetime ago now. So you’re home from the war then?” He nodded, and aside from laying a motherly hand on his shoulder that nearly sent him to tears, she let him be.
He opened the brown paper pouch and withdrew the envelope, made of the same heavy home deckled paper. He tried to compare the handwriting on the Kraft paper pouch with the delicate copperplate on the inner envelope, but to his eye, it was impossible to believe that the same hand might have addressed both. However, the inner one still bore only his name.
Again, he read the short message and digested the short narrative about the necessities of life followed by the request that he continue to courier the parcel from Platform 44 to Letter A 247 West 42nd Street. He lowered the letter and thought about how long he planned to continue without explanation. News stories about kids running errands for the organized mob had been rampant in the papers since he was a child, and this was admittedly something out of a bad dime novel.
He raised the letter again and reread:
Mr. Vincent Morgan,
I tender my thanks to you for your service. Sometimes in life, we must do things out of necessity that might seem extraordinary in effort or vision to those who have not shared our experience. Please continue to perform the task for the present time.
Yours,
A
Vince dreamt of a dozen different hands he’d seen written throughout his life and his imagination could fit none of them with the copperplate hand of the letters, which he’d secreted in the base of his bureau, lest his mother or her housekeeper find them and start a row over something that was in fact none of their business.
Each year for the next five, on or about a week prior to the second Monday of January, he received a similar letter with a short narrative or parable written in the same even copperplate and asking that he continue to shuttle the parcel, which was always of similar size and rarely varied in weight.
Aside from the casual mark of change perpetuated by progress, the characters in Grand Central rarely changed. The anonymous throngs of people going about their business coursing through the public transportation heart of the city.
On a dog day afternoon, Monday, August 8, 1927, Vince arrived at Grand Central early. He planned to have lunch in the Oyster Bar and soak in some of the Stan Barber Trio. The trio had stood in for Jacques Beaumont on his annual sabbaticals to New Orleans for many years. Stan Barber and his boys had become a permanent fixture in 1925 when Beaumont caught the edge of a pimp’s razor in the French Quarter after he failed to ante up for services rendered.
Vince walked in at the end of a string of standards that the trio played as part of their mid afternoon set, just as a street punk was running out the door with the till. Vince wasn’t an imposing figure, but substantial in his way and when the thug attempted to barge through Vince set his feet, seized the fellow’s arm, pivoted with the man’s momentum and rode him to the floor.
Somewhere in the resulting fray of cussing, punching, and wrestling, a transportation cop showed up and much to the proprietor’s elation, the till was returned, and the young punk escorted to jail. Vince’s luncheon of poached oysters was on the house with an invitation to return with guests anytime.
When he arrived at his usual bench beneath the platform 44 marker, Vince discovered a woman of his age huddled beneath her hat. He noticed her small, gently sloped nose supported spectacles and was stuck in a book. He sat down just off the rounded corner, no more than a foot away and sighed.
She raised an eyebrow at his slouch and exhaust. “Do I owe you rent?”
“Hunh? Oh no, I was just thinking about my day -,” he started.
“I see you here sometimes, sitting exactly in this spot,” she said quietly but directly, not looking up from her book.
“You keeping track?” he said, a bit crasser than was normal for him.
“No, but I also see you in the Times Square Branch of the Library,” she hissed, as if she were indeed keeping track.
“So you are keeping track,” he asked, irritated, but playing along.
“I’m a librarian, along with controlling information, I also observe people,” she offered in quiet demure.
“What do you observe?” he asked as the 15:30 arrived. She said something of the rushing din of the terminal, but he didn’t hear her. He gestured to his ear and she granted him a very genuine smile, closed her book, and slipped it into her bag.
As per usual, the last conductor sung down from the end of the train, placed his step, and handed off the parcel, this time pressing it to Vince’s chest as he tried to communicate via eyeball with the young woman. He took the parcel, though slightly startled and only shifted his eyes from her momentarily. But he returned his gaze quickly lest she disappear as so many of the people he met performing this chore did.
She was still there and he stood up and walked over to her. “Are you going to Times Square now?”