“They kept me working late today,” he said. “I called Lisa and told her to go ahead and eat without me. You had dinner yet? Want to grab a bite somewhere?” I had already eaten, and told him so. “Then do you want to have a cup of coffee and keep me company? I’m not up for anything fancy, just the Flame or the Morning Star. Have you got the time?”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I don’t.” I pointed up Ninth Avenue. “I’m on my way to meet somebody,” I said.
“Well, I’ll walk a block with you. I’ll be a good boy and have a Greek salad at the Flame.” He patted his midsection. “Keep the weight down,” he said, although he looked trim enough to me. We walked to Fifty-eighth and crossed the avenue together, and in front of the Flame he said, “Here’s where I get off. Hope your meeting goes well. Interesting case?”
“At this stage,” I said, “it’s hard to tell.”
It wasn’t a case at all, of course. It was an AA meeting in the basement of St. Paul’s. For an hour and a half I sat on a folding metal chair and drank coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. At ten o’clock we mumbled our way through the Lord’s Prayer and stacked the chairs, and a few of us stopped in at the Flame to take nourishment and other people’s inventories. I thought I might run into Holtzmann there, lingering over the dregs of his Greek salad, but by then he’d gone on home to his little cabin in the sky. I ordered some coffee and a toasted English and forgot about him.
Sometime in the next week or two I saw him waiting for a Ninth Avenue bus, but he didn’t see me. Another time Elaine and I had a late bite at Armstrong’s and left just as the Holtzmanns were getting out of a cab in front of their building across the intersection. And one afternoon I was at my own window when a man who might have been Glenn Holtzmann emerged from the camera shop across the street and walked west. I’m on a high floor, so the person I saw might as easily have been someone else, but something in his walk or stance brought Holtzmann to mind.
It was the middle of June, though, before we spoke again. It was a weekday night, and it was late. Past midnight, anyway. I’d been to a meeting and out for coffee. Back in my room, I picked up a book and couldn’t read it, turned on the TV and couldn’t watch it.
I get that way sometimes. I fought the restlessness for a while, until around midnight I said the hell with it and grabbed my jacket off a hook and went out. I walked south and west, and when I got to Grogan’s I took a seat at the bar.
Grogan’s Open House is at Fiftieth and Tenth, an old-fashioned Irish ginmill of the sort that used to dot Hell’s Kitchen years ago. There are fewer of them these days, although Grogan’s has yet to earn a bronze plaque from the Landmarks Commission, or a spot on the Endangered Species List. There’s a long bar on the left, booths and tables on the right, a dart board on the back wall, an old tile floor strewn with sawdust, an old stamped-tin ceiling in need of repair.
They rarely get much of a crowd at Grogan’s, and this night was no exception. Burke was behind the bar, watching an old movie on one of the cable channels. I ordered a Coke and he brought it to me. I asked if Mick had been in and he shook his head. “Later,” he said.
This was a long speech for him. The bartenders at Grogan’s are a closemouthed lot. It’s part of the job description.
I sipped my Coke and scanned the room. There were a few familiar faces but no one I knew well enough to say hello to, and that was fine with me. I watched the movie. I could have been watching the same picture at home but there I’d been unable to watch anything, or even sit still. Here, wrapped in the smell of tobacco smoke and spilled beer, I felt curiously at ease.
On the screen, Bette Davis sighed and tossed her head, looking younger than springtime.
I managed to get lost in the movie, and then I got lost in thought, caught up in some sort of reverie. I came out of it when I heard my name mentioned. I turned, and there was Glenn Holtzmann. He was wearing a tan windbreaker over a checked sport shirt. It was the first time I’d seen him in anything other than a business suit.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I went to Armstrong’s but it was too crowded. So I came here. What’s that you’re drinking, Guinness? Wait a minute, you’ve got ice in your glass. Is that how they serve it here?”
“It’s Coca-Cola,” I said, “but they’ve got Guinness on draft, and I suppose they’ll give it to you with ice if that’s how you want it.”
“I don’t want it at all,” he said, “with or without ice. What do I want?” Burke was right in front of us. He hadn’t said a word, and didn’t say anything now. “What kind of beer do you have? Never mind, I don’t feel like a beer. How about Johnny Walker Red? Rocks, a little water.”
Burke brought the drink with the water on the side in a small glass pitcher. Holtzmann added water to his glass, held the drink to the light, then took a sip. I got a rush of sense-memory. The last thing I wanted was a drink, but for a second there I could damn well taste it.
“I like this place,” he said, “but I hardly ever come here. How about yourself?”
“I like it well enough.”
“Do you get here often?”
“Not too often. I know the owner.”
“You do? Isn’t he the guy they call ‘the Butcher’?”
“I don’t know that anybody actually calls him that,” I said. “I think some newspaperman came up with the name, possibly the same one who started calling the local hoodlums ‘the Westies.’ ”
“They don’t call themselves that?”
“They do now,” I said. “They never used to. As far as Mick Ballou is concerned, I can tell you this much. Nobody calls him ‘Butcher’ in his own joint.”
“If I spoke out of turn—”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’ve been in here, I don’t know, a handful of times. I’ve yet to run into him. I think I’d recognize him from his pictures. He’s a big man, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“How did you come to know him, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Oh, I’ve known him for years,” I said. “Our paths crossed a long time ago.”
He drank some of his scotch. “I bet you could tell some stories,” he said.
“I’m not much of a storyteller.”
“I wonder.” He got a business card from his wallet, handed it to me. “Are you ever free for lunch, Matt? Give me a call one of these days. Will you do that?”
“One of these days.”
“I hope you will,” he said, “because I’d love to really kick back and have a real conversation, and who knows? It might lead to something.”
“Oh?”
“Like a book, for instance. The experiences you’ve had, the characters you’ve known, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a book there waiting to be written.”
“I’m no writer.”
“If the material’s there it’s no big deal to hook you up with a writer. And I’ve got a feeling the material’s there. But we can talk about all that at lunch.”
He left a few minutes later, and I decided to pack it in myself when the movie ended, but before that happened Mick showed up and we wound up making a night of it. I had told Holtzmann I wasn’t much of a storyteller but I told my share that night, and Mick told a few himself. He drank Irish whiskey and I drank coffee and we didn’t quit when Burke put the chairs up on the tables and closed for the night.
The sky was light by the time we got out of there. “And now we’ll get something to eat,” Mick said, “and then ‘twill be time for the butchers’ mass at St. Bernard’s.”
“Not for me it won’t,” I said. “I’m tired. I’m going home.”
“Ah, ye’re no fun at all,” he said, and gave me a ride home. “ ‘Twas a good old night,” he said when we reached my hotel, “for all that it’s ending too early.”