“Larry, let me come and get you.”
“No! No! No!”
I was running out of things to say when it dawned on me there was something worth risking. Given how little progress I’d made with him to that point, I figured I had nothing to lose if it failed.
“Let me come and get you. Let me come and get you. Let me come and get you,” I fairly sang.
And for the first time since this mind-bending conversation started, there was a pause on his end. I could hear him take a deep breath. Then he sobbed.
“It is you, Moe. I couldn’t be sure. There are enemies everywhere and they can take any shape, speak in any voice.”
“It’s me, Larry, yeah. How can I help?”
“You can’t,” he whispered. “You’re not invisible.”
“Are you safe? At least tell me you’re safe.”
“As long as I’m invisible I am.”
Uh oh, he was losing it again. I went along with him because what else could I do? “Then stay that way.”
“I will.”
There was a click and dead air. Silence. Invisibility.
Aaron was in our bedroom, doing his weekly paperwork for a job he essentially hated. But that was my big brother for you. It didn’t matter that he hated the job. He was learning, getting experience, getting a paycheck. I couldn’t see me doing any of that, not for a second. Even when I was little I couldn’t understand doing things you hated doing no matter the payoff. That said, Aaron was really smart and a good big brother. He was especially good in bad situations, and a bad situation is what I had on my hands. I was worried about Larry, but I didn’t want to tell his parents how worried. He needed help, but to get him that help, his parents would have to bring the cops into it. Once the cops were into it, they might find out about his business and that would just make everything worse for everyone involved. Larry needed a stint in the psych ward at Kings County, not a stretch in Sing Sing.
I opened my mouth to say something to Aaron. Nothing came out. I couldn’t figure out a way to tell him what was going on and still protect everyone who needed protecting. Was there ever a way to do that, to protect everyone who needed protecting?
“What?” Aaron barked at me. “You just gonna stand there like a putz staring at me, or you gonna ask me what you came in here to ask me?”
“Can I borrow your car tomorrow?” I asked, because I had to say something, not because I needed or even wanted his car.
He shook his head at me, but reached into his pocket and threw me his keys. “Your lucky day, little brother. We have meetings in the city for the next two days. Taking the subway in and won’t be home until Tuesday night. But take good care of it and fill it up. Understand?”
“Thanks, man.”
“How’s your girlfriend doing?”
“Better, I think,” I said. “It’s hard to know.”
“Okay. Now get outta here and go watch Ed Sullivan while I finish my work.”
I closed the door behind me. I had his keys, but no ideas about what I should do to save Larry.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Koblenz, Pennsylvania, was a tiny town in the Pocono Mountains near the border with New York. It had taken me about five hours to get there. It would’ve taken an hour or two less had I any knowledge of where the hell I was going. Growing up in Coney Island didn’t exactly prepare me for cartography. The only map I knew how to decipher was a subway map. Generally, Brooklynites don’t do maps. We give directions in terms of landmarks and number of streets, up and down, left and right. You go two blocks down, make a left by the Sinclair gas station, go two more blocks up by the new church, and there it is on your right. Without the sun I wouldn’t have known east from west; north from south I learned only because the avenues in Manhattan ran north and south. So now you understand why it took me as long as it did to get to Koblenz. Why I was there in the first place was another matter altogether.
The idea of it came to me in my sleep. Not much else did, certainly not much sleep. How the fuck could I sleep while I was worrying about Lids? Given the state he was in, I had no clue about what he might do to himself or if he really was in danger from the people who’d murdered Billy O’Day. Most people with Larry’s financial resources could have found a safe place to hide, at least for a few days. And hell, the guy dealt drugs, so he wasn’t stupid about surviving on the street. Then there was the fact that he was a goddamned certifiable genius. Somehow none of that was of much comfort to me. Larry wasn’t most people. What did money or smarts or intellect mean when you were as damaged as he was? Pusher or not, he was more fragile than anyone else I knew. My little sister Miriam was made of sterner stuff than him.
I’d called his dad back, neglecting to mention the repetition and rhyming of the words in Larry’s answers or his son’s extreme agitation or his free-floating paranoia. I just lied some more, telling him that I’d spoken to his son and that Larry was calmer, but needed time alone to sort things out. Who knows how much of it he believed? After I’d finished with Larry’s dad, I called the only person I could: Bobby. I told him the bare minimum. I didn’t connect Lids to Billy O’Day or Billy O’Day to 1055 Coney Island Avenue. I just said that Lids had cracked again and was out there alone somewhere. It wasn’t like Lids and Bobby were best buddies. They knew each other from school, from the neighborhood, and Bobby knew Larry was a dealer. He didn’t object. Still, Bobby wasn’t enthusiastic about doing me this favor.
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“C’mon, Bobby, you’ve got a million connections. Please ask around. I’m telling you, Lids is going off the deep end. He could hurt himself, maybe other people too.” I gave him the phone number I’d used to get in touch with Larry. “Don’t call him yourself. He won’t answer. Just see if you can find someone to track him down before it all goes wrong.”
“All right … for you, Moe. I’ll see what I can find out.”
Now, driving along the twisting, snowy roads of Koblenz, that conversation felt like it had taken place a lifetime ago and not the night before. Above me, the heartless winter sun hung low in the sky behind a cataract of gray, nearly opaque clouds. It seemed to know I was around, but not where, exactly. That made two of us. Although I’d spent parts of many summers in the Catskills and should have been prepared for a place like Koblenz, I was so out of my element, so utterly out of place in the Poconos. I think I felt a little like Lids must have felt, my grip on things slippery at best. Three hours of fitful sleep and the long hard trip had no doubt messed with my head, but it wasn’t lack of sleep or the strangeness of the place that was messing with my head. It was fear, plain and simple. For just like that first time when I walked into the fix-it shop on Coney Island Avenue, I was about to step into a situation I was completely ill-equipped to face. Funny how sometimes the best ideas get worse and worse the closer they come to fruition.
I stopped at a general store to buy some flowers and get directions.
“Flowers?” the woman behind the counter looked at me like I was from Mars. “Notice the weather out there, son? This ain’t New York City.”
I forgot how obvious a Brooklyn accent was to the rest of the world. “Yeah, sorry. Stupid question.”
“I’ve got some artificial flowers if you’d like, and some nice dried and pressed flowers one of our local church ladies makes.” She didn’t wait for me to ask to see them and went into the rear of the store. When she returned she was carrying a bunch of godawful pink plastic tulips in one hand, and three small but lovely wreaths of dried and pressed flowers. The flowers were glued to circles of woven twigs.
“Those,” I said, pointing at the wreaths. “How much?”
“Ten bucks for the lot of them.”
I put a twenty on the counter. “I’ll take them and a cup of coffee, milk, no sugar.”