After the First Death - Lawrence Block [46]
I felt as though everyone was staring at me, and I was sure I was doing something wrong. I dreaded running into some real soldiers and being saluted by them. I was sure I wouldn’t return the salute properly, or would otherwise find a way to reveal myself as an impostor. I forced myself to walk in a properly military manner, head back, spine ramrod-straight, shoulders set, covering the ground with long firm strides. After all those days of slinking along in the shadows, it was difficult to force myself into the role.
I went to another movie. It was mostly empty at that hour. I sat in the balcony and worked my way through a pack of cigarettes.
Uniforms are masks. Nobody recognizes a mailman in his off-duty clothes. All along they’ve seen the uniform first and the man within as no more than a supplementary decoration for the uniform. So it stood to reason that it would work the other way around just as well. If a uniformed man was hard to recognize in civilian clothes, then a civilian ought to become invisible when he put on a uniform. That, at least, was the theory, evidently worked out while under the merciful influence of alcohol, and somehow remembered the next day.
If I was going to get closer to the killer, I had to find out what the hookers knew about it, what one of them might have seen. I had to be able to roam Whore Row after midnight. I had to look as though I belonged there, and I had to look quite unlike Alexander Penn.
I sat in the balcony and worried a cigarette and began inventing some background material for myself. My name, my rank, my serial number. My outfit. My military experience. Where I was stationed. Such things.
It didn’t work. I was not an actor, and however elaborate a facade I worked up for myself, I was sure it would crumble at a touch. I gave it up and remained Major Anonymous. If anyone questioned me, if anyone suspected me, I would just turn around and run.
16
THE PIMP’S EYES NEVER MET MINE, HE WALKED TOWARD ME and past me and never looked directly at me. As he drew abreast of me he said, “Nice young girls, General.” His voice barely carried to my ears. I kept walking and so did he.
A few doors uptown from the Metropole a heavyset Negro girl flashed me a quick glance and a quicker smile. I started to slow down, then changed my mind and kept going.
It was a little past three o’clock in the morning. It was Friday night—or, more precisely, Saturday morning. Things start later on the weekend. I had taken a reconnaissance walk around midnight, and the streets were too full of tourists and teen-age couples fresh from the Broadway movie houses. Now the crowds had thinned way down. By four, when the bars closed, Seventh Avenue would be reduced to buyers and sellers and cops. Everyone would be there for a reason, and everyone else would know what it was.
I lit a cigarette. My fingers shook, and after I shook out the match. I watched the trembling fingers with clinical interest. I wondered what was shaking me up. It wasn’t the uniform. I had been walking around in it for enough hours to make me quite accustomed to it, if not entirely comfortable in it. My performance as Major Breakthrough (whose comrades in arms include Private Bath, Corporal Punishment and General Nuisance) had improved somewhat.
What had me on edge, I realized suddenly, was this scene and my role in it. It was something new for me, strangely enough. I had been here before, I had played the John before, but I had never done all of this without the superego well muffled by alcohol. I was now almost painfully sober. I had had nothing more exhilarating than coffee