She said, “We could drive around like this all night, you know.”
“Please. I’m trying to think.”
“Then we’re lost,” she said.
“Ha ha,” I said. “Very funny.”
The light, as they all do, turned green, and yet again I turned right. Hudson Street is one way north. I drove one block, to Christopher Street, and got stopped by a red light.
“This is ridiculous,” Chloe pointed out. “There’s got to be some way to get in there.”
I said, “Such as.”
We were both silent. We sat and watched the red light, and after a while it did guess what. I drove north up Hudson Street, past West Tenth Street — hello, West Tenth Street! — and past Charles Street, and past Perry Street — hello, Artie’s apartment, a block and a half to our right — and between Perry and West Eleventh I found a parking space. It was a little small, and I stuck the Packard in it like someone putting a marshmallow in a ring box. When it was at last within walking distance of the curb, I turned everything off and said, “All right. The apartment is two blocks from here. Let’s think of a way in.”
So neither of us said anything for a while. I sat with arms folded and stared gloomily out at the hood, glinting evilly in the night. I couldn’t think of a thing. In fact, I had trouble thinking about thinking about the problem. I kept going off into reveries in which none of this had happened, in which I was at this very moment standing behind the bar in the ROCK GRILL, watching Baby LeRoy, on television, throw the can of clams at W.C. Fields.
Chloe said, abruptly, “Maybe...”
Wrenched back from Baby LeRoy — now spilling the molasses on the floor — I turned my head and said, “Maybe what?”
With maddening slowness she said, “It might work.” She was gazing out at the street and frowning in concentration.
A trifle impatient, I said, “What might work?”
“Neither one of them,” she said thoughtfully, “got a good look at me. You’re the one they know by sight.”
“So?”
“In fact,” she said, “Mr. Gross thinks I’m Althea, and Trask and Slade know what Althea looks like, so I’m perfectly safe. Perfectly safe.”
“I’m happy for you,” I said. She seemed less irritated now, no longer waspish, but I was having trouble making the adjustment.
“No, listen,” she said, letting sarcasm pass for the first time in over an hour. “I’ll go first. I’ll walk along like I’m drunk, and when I get to his car I’ll make a racket. I’ll sing or something, or fall all over his car. I’ll make a great big fuss and distract him, and you duck inside: Then I’ll come in.”
“What if he gets suspicious?”
“Why should he get suspicious? A drunk girl in Greenwich Village at one o’clock in the morning? What could be more natural?”
“I don’t like it,” I said.
“You think you should disapprove,” she told me, “because I’m female and because Errol Flynn would disapprove.”
“Then go right ahead and do it,” I told her, cut to the point where I hoped she would get into a jam with Trask or Slade. “Have a big time,” I told her.
“Don’t be snippy. I know we’re both tired, but control yourself.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’m controlling myself.”
“Good. Now, here’s the key. It unlocks both the downstairs door and the apartment door.”
“Last night,’ I said, “the downstairs door wasn’t locked.”
“Oh?” She didn’t seem very interested. She opened the door on her side. “Leave your jacket in the car,” she said. “I’ll wear it when I come back around, so he won’t know I’m the same girl.”
I said, “You really want to do this?”
“Yes. I’m tired, and it’s perfectly safe, and we haven’t been able to think of anything else.”
I shrugged and got out of the car. I took my jacket off and left it on the front seat, then locked the door on my side and walked around to the sidewalk, where Chloe was standing and waiting for me. I said, “Maybe we ought to get a hotel room some place instead.”
She looked at me. “There are so many things wrong with that idea,” she said, “I hardly know where to begin.”
“Like what?”
“Like number one, for instance, he couldn’t get a hotel room, we’d have to get two hotel rooms.”
“You could sleep at your own place.”
“If I leave you alone, God knows what you’ll do. Number two, neither of us have the money to waste on hotel rooms. Number three, we still want to get back in touch with Artie, and how do we do that if we don’t go to his apartment?”
I said, “All right. You convinced me.” I locked the door on this side of the car and gave her the keys. “Good luck,” I said.
“Watch me,” she said, and winked.
We walked down to the corner of Perry and Bleecker Streets together, and I stationed myself against the corner building, where I could peek around Perry Street and see what was doing. Chloe said, “Wait till I’ve got him good and distracted.”
“Right.”
“See you,” she said, and walked around the corner. She began at once to sing, very loud and not on key: “‘Hail to the bastard king of England...’” And so on.
I’d never heard that song all the way through before. That was really a very dirty song.
Singing, waving her arms in grandiose gestures to amplify the song, Chloe tottered down the block and angled across the street toward the black car. In her dungarees and black turtleneck sweater and long straight black hair she was every Greenwich Village free-love cliché ever spawned, and I didn’t see how Trask or Slade could be anything in this world but distracted out of his mind.
Chloe, however, was taking no chances. Still singing, she brought up against the front left fender of the black car, and stood swaying there a few seconds, studying the obstruction. I couldn’t see Trask or Slade from where I was, but it seemed a safe bet he was looking at Chloe and not across at Artie’s building. I took a deep breath and prepared to make my dash.
Then Chloe took her sweater off.
The clown; she distracted me. I just stood there and gaped.
“‘Now I lay me down to sleep,’” Chloe bellowed, top of her voice, and climbed up on the black car’s hood. She arranged her sweater as a pillow and curled up on the hood like a cat on the hearth.
She wore a black bra.
Lying there, she finished the prayer, allowed a second or two to go by for reverence’ sake, and then began to sing that song again.
Trask or Slade abruptly came boiling out of his car, shouting and hollering and waving his hands, like an orchard owner shooing kids out of his apple trees. “Get offa there! Come on, come on, get offa there!”
Chloe told him something I will not record, and rolled over on her other side.
At last I moved. I ran, like unto the wind. Chloe and Trask or Slade continued to shout at each other — I’m not sure but what I heard Chloe mention rape, as a matter of fact — and I did a Roger Bannister halfway down the block, turned left, up the steps, and into the building.
The downstairs door was unlocked tonight, too. I thundered up the stairs and unlocked my way into Artie’s apartment.
There was no light on in here, and I had to leave it that way. If Trask or Slade looked up and saw light from these windows, he’d surely come and investigate. Still, there was faint illumination from outside, and I made my way around the perimeter of the furniture lumped in the middle of the room, and when I got to one of the windows I looked down and saw a very rumpled-looking Chloe standing on the sidewalk next to the black car, pulling her sweater on. Trask or Slade stood on the street side of the car, still making shooing motions with his hands. The two of them were still hollering at one another.