EPILOGUE. AT THE OYSTER BAR IN GRAND CENTRAL STATION
The shoeshine boys and the cops were hamming it up for the tourists outside of the 42nd Street entrance to Grand Central Station. The shoeshine boys were sticking their legs out on the sidewalk, tipping themselves back and forth on their boxes and generally goofing. They were all loose-limbed and slap-happy guys, as supple as the chamois cloths they flicked in the faces of their potential customers.
The cops were just being cops, standing in that ass-out way that cops have, so that their cuffs and revolvers are thrown into as much prominence as possible. They were all elbows and shirt epaulettes, these cops, dead casual.
It was a muggy afternoon in late May and the cops wanted the citizenry to know that about the best thing they could be doing for them in this city of cracked-up serial psychokillers was to maintain a strong goofing-with-the-shoeshine-boys presence. That was their routine.
Yellow cabs kept on driving down the slip road from the elevated section of Lexington Avenue and dumping more travellers on the sidewalk outside the station. Down they came, nosing their way off the steep ramp with that sloppy undulant motion that New York cabs have, then they shouldered their way to the kerb.
Inside the terminus the vast booking hall was cool, a twenty-two-piece gamelan orchestra from Indonesia was playing over by the subway entrance and the liquid notes flowed up and away into the airy marbled recesses of the hall's cranial dome.
At the far side of the hall from the 42nd Street entrance, wide tunnels lined with dressed stone blocks led down to the station's subterranean tracks. The tunnels were big enough to accommodate a hundred Hittites dragging a tranche of clay bricks intended for some ancient ziggurat, and this served to point up still further the impression that the station belonged to a forgotten culture, to an age when monumentalism went along with king-worship and collective consciousness.
Outside it had begun to rain. The cops and the shoeshine boy wrapped up their act, the tourists, the travellers and the city people rushed for cover. It was heavy rain that seemed to fall from a great height. It's like that in New York, the skyscrapers give the lie to nature's majesty, pushing the puny clouds up higher and higher so that the drops plummet down from twenty storeys, fifty storeys, a hundred storeys. It's not like London, in London the rain is two storeys high, at best.
Down on the second level of the station, the Oyster Bar was open for business. Even in the mid-afternoon there were still plenty of people who wanted a platter of Coney Island blue points and a glass of Bud.
The maître d’ had taken a booking that morning for a kids’ party. He suggested to the caller — a secretary from some bank or other — that they might like to have a table in the main dining room, or even the Saloon Room. She opted for the main dining room and he had supervised the table-laying himself, making sure that there were a few decorations on the red checkered tablecloth.
He had been expecting a group of five or six, but when the party turned up there was only this one guy with a funny-looking kid. The man was tall, English and plump. He apologised profusely to the maître d’ and explained that his secretary had misunderstood. He gave the maître d’ ten bucks and asked whether, if it wasn't too much trouble, he and his son could sit at the long nickel-plated oyster bar itself? The maître d’ said wouldn't it be a bit difficult for the kid getting on and off the high stools? But the man — without consulting the kid — said he wouldn't mind.
Carlton, who cooked on one of three raised tiers set behind the oyster bar, thought them an odd couple as well. He stood, stirring a mussel chowder in the stainless-steel basin set on its fixed tripod and watched while the kid finished off his second dozen oysters. Christ! The kid was only about two or three. Carlton had never seen a child that age do anything other than take a bite of seafood from a parent's plate but this tubby little thing was wielding his fork like a connoisseur, dipping mollusc after mollusc into the sauces provided. And such a strange kid to look at, almost entirely bald save for a moustache of fine blond hairs that shaded the creases at the back of his thick little neck, no eyebrows to speak of and those bulging eyes.
Carlton didn't want to be saying anything to anyone. He wasn't that kind of a guy. Since he had arrived in New York he'd done his best to cultivate a steady demeanour — Jamaicans had a bad reputation in this town. Despite the fact that he had been a commis chef back in Kingston and knew just about everything there was to know about cooking seafood, it hadn't been easy to get a job at all. He didn't want to do anything that would call attention to himself. He wanted to work quietly, save enough money to bring his wife and child over.
But whether or not it would get him into trouble Carlton knew he'd have to say something to the maître d’, because once or twice he was certain that he'd seen the tall Englishman surreptitiously give his son a sip from his glass of rye, and now that the kid had finished his second dozen, he turned to his father and Carlton heard him say, ‘I suppose I shall have to adjourn to the water closet for my post-prandial cigar.’