7

Stan Murch, in a uniform-like blue jacket, stood on the sidewalk in front of the Hilton and watched cab after cab make the loop in to the main entrance. Doesn’t anybody travel in their own car any more? Then at last a Chrysler Imperial with Michigan plates came hesitantly up Sixth Avenue, made the left-hand loop into the Hilton driveway and stopped at the entrance. As a woman and several children got out of the doors on the right of the car, toward the hotel entrance, the driver climbed heavily out on the left. He was a big man with a cigar and a camel’s-hair coat.

Murch was at the door before it was halfway open, pulling it the rest of the way and saying, “Just leave the keys in it, sir.”

“Right,” the man said around his cigar. He got out and sort of shook himself inside the coat. Then, as Murch was about to get behind the wheel, the driver said, “Wait.”

Murch looked at him. “Sir?”

“Here you go, boy,” the man said and pulled a folded dollar bill from his pants pocket and handed it across.

“Thank you, sir,” Murch said. He saluted with the hand holding the dollar, climbed behind the wheel, and drove away. He was smiling as he made the right turn into 53rd Street it wasn’t every day a man gave you a tip for stealing his car.

It was rush hour, and several cabs had to be hustled out of their jocks before Murch reached Eleventh Avenue. Three times he got the supreme accolade: Cabbies in his wake opened their doors, put one foot on the pavement, stepped out, and shook their fists.

The West Side Highway was no good at this time of day, as Stan Murch well knew, but it was possible to make fairly good time if one drove under it, down along the docks. You had to be willing to go around trucks parked sideways every block or so, but that was all.

The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel was hopeless, as usual, but at rush hour there just isn’t any sensible way to get to Brooklyn, so Murch waited it out, revving the engine in park and drumming his fingertips on the steering wheel to a stereo cassette of “Mantovani Swings Bartok for Sleepy Lovers”; these cassettes were very nice, particularly in a tunnel where the radio couldn’t pick up anything.

On the other side, Murch paid the toll, angled across seven lanes of fist-shakers, and took an obscure exit marked “Local Streets.” While the rest of the world faced stop-and-go traffic on Flatbush and Prospect Expressway, Stan Murch angled down through neighborhoods that hadn’t seen a strange face since the Brooklyn Navy Yard closed, and in the general vicinity of Sheepshead Bay he stopped in front of a metal garage door in a long gray brick wall and honked three times. A small door beside the garage entrance carried a sign reading “J & L Novelties — Deliveries.” This door opened; a thin black man with a sweatband around his head leaned out, and Murch waved at him. The thin man nodded, disappeared, and a second later the metal door began to creak upward.

Murch drove into a huge concrete room that looked much like a parking garage, with metal support pillars spaced all around it. A dozen or so cars were scattered around the walls, leaving most of the space empty. These were all in the process of being repainted. A used oil drum next to one pillar was half full of license plates, most of them from out-of-state. A dozen men, most of them black or Puerto Rican, were working on the cars; this was obviously an equal-opportunity employer. A battered plastic radio in a far corner raspingly played WABC, a local shlock-rock station.

The thin black man with the sweatband motioned for Murch to leave the Imperial over against the wall to the right. Murch left it there, went through the glove compartment on the off chance, found nothing of interest, and walked back over toward the door. The thin man, who had shut the garage door again, grinned at Murch and said, “You sure do bring in a lot of cars.”

“The streets are full of them,” Murch said. “Tell Mr. Marconi I’d appreciate the money in a hurry, okay?”

“What do you do with all your money?”

“I’m the sole support of my mother.”

“She isn’t back in the cab yet?”

“Still got the neck brace on,” Murch said. “She could drive, but people generally don’t like to ride in a cab with a driver with a neck brace on. It’s a superstition, I guess.”

“How long’s she got to keep it on?”

“Till we settle out of court,” Murch said. “Tell Mr. Marconi, will you?”

“Sure,” the thin man said. “But, by the way, he isn’t Mr. Marconi any more. He changed his name to March legally.”

“Oh, yeah? How come?”

“The Italian-American Defamation League made him do it.”

“Huh,” Murch said. He rolled the new name on his lips:

“Salvatore March. Doesn’t sound bad.”

“I don’t think he’s happy with it, though,” said the thin man. “But what’s he gonna do?”

“True. See you around.”

“So long,” said the thin man.

Murch left and walked four blocks before he found a cab. The driver gave him a mournful yet frantic look and said, “Tell me you want to go to Manhattan.”

“I’d like to tell you that,” Murch said, “but my mother’s in Canarsie.”

“Canarsie,” said the driver. “And I thought it couldn’t get worse.” He faced front and headed across the sixth and seventh circles of Brooklyn.

After a while, Murch said, “Listen, would you mind a suggestion about the route?”

“Shut your face,” said the driver. He said it softly, but he was hunched forward and his hands were gripping the steering wheel very hard.

Murch shrugged. “You’re the boss,” he said.

They got there eventually. Murch gave him a nearly 15 percent tip, in honor of his mother, and went inside to find his mother walking around without the brace on. “Hey,” he said. “What if I was an insurance adjuster?”

“You’dve rung the doorbell,” she said.

“Or looked through the window.”

“Don’t give me a tough time, Stan,” she said. “I’m going crazy cooped up in this house.”

“Whyn’t you go for a walk?”

“I go out with that brace on,” she said, “kids come up and want to know am I a publicity stunt for Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”

“Little bastards,” Murch said.

“Language.”

“I tell you what. I’ll take tomorrow off, we’ll go for a ride.”

She perked up a bit. “Where to?”

“Montauk Point. Break out the maps. Let’s figure a route.”

“You’re a good boy, Stan,” his mother said, and soon the two of them had their heads together over road maps opened on the dining-room table. They were like that when the doorbell rang.

“Damn!” she said.

“I’ll get it,” Murch said. “You put on your brace.”

“I’m using it,” she said.

Murch looked at her, and she didn’t have it on. “What do you mean, you’re using it?”

“You put it upside down on the drainboard,” she said, “it’s just perfect for drying socks.”

“Aw, Mom, you don’t take this seriously.” The doorbell rang again. “What if that’s an insurance adjuster and you’ve got socks on your neck brace?”

“I’ll put it on, I’ll put it on,” she said, and went away to the kitchen, while Murch moved more slowly toward the front door.

It was Kelp out there. Murch opened the door wide and said, “Hey, come on in. Long time no see.”

“I figured I’d —”

“Mom! Forget it!”

Kelp looked a little startled.

Murch said to him, “Sorry, I just didn’t want her to put her brace on.”

Kelp tried a smile but went on looking baffled anyway. “Sure,” he said. “I just figured I’d —”

Murch’s Mom appeared with her neck brace on. “You called me?”

“Hey, Mrs. Murch!” said Kelp. “What happened?”

“I wanted to tell you to forget it,” Murch said.

“I couldn’t make out what you …” She stopped and frowned at Kelp. “Kelp?”

“You hurt your neck?”

Disgusted, she said, “I put this thing on for you?”