Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [14]
“It was even before mine,” he said. “But I grew up here, just a few blocks away, and I can tell you nobody called it Clinton then. You probably know what they called it.”
“Hell’s Kitchen,” she said. “They still call it that, when they’re not calling it Clinton.”
“Well, it’s more colorful. It was the real estate interests who plumped for Clinton, because they figured nobody would want to move to something called Hell’s Kitchen. And that may have been true then, when people remembered what a bad neighborhood this was, but now it’s spruced up and gen-trified and yuppified to within an inch of its life, and the old name gives it a little added cachet. A touch of gangster chic, if you know what I mean.”
“If you can’t stand the heat—”
“Stay out of the Kitchen,” he supplied. “When I was growing up here, the Westies pretty much ran the place. They weren’t terribly efficient like the Italian mob, but they were colorful and bloodthirsty enough to make up for it. There was a man two doors down the street from me who disappeared, and they never did find the body. Except one of his hands turned up in somebody’s freezer on 53rd Street and Eleventh Avenue. They wanted to be able to put his fingerprints on things long after he was dead and gone.”
“Would that work?”
“With luck,” he said, “we’ll never know. The Westies are mostly gone now, and the tenement apartments they lived in are all tarted up, with stockbrokers and lawyers renting them. Which are you?”
“Me?”
“A stockbroker or a lawyer?”
She grinned. “Neither one, I’m afraid. I’m an actress.”
“Even better.”
“Which means I take a class twice a week,” she said, “and run around to open casting calls and auditions.”
“And wait tables?”
“I did some of that in the Cities. I suppose I’ll have to do it again here, when I start to run out of money.”
“The Cities?”
“The Twin Cities. Minneapolis and St. Paul.”
They talked about where she was from, and along the way he told her his name was Jim. She was Jennifer, she told him. He related another story about the neighborhood—he was really a pretty good storyteller—and by then her Rob Roy was gone and so was his Jameson. “Let me get us another round,” he said, “and then why don’t we take our drinks to a table? We’ll be more comfortable, and it’ll be quieter.”
He was talking about the neighborhood.
“Irish, of course,” he said, “but that was only part of it. You had blocks that were pretty much solid Italian, and there were Poles and other Eastern Europeans. A lot of French, too, working at the restaurants in the theater district. You had everything, really. The UN’s across town on the East River, but you had your own General Assembly here in the Kitchen. Fifty-seventh Street was a dividing line; north of that was San Juan Hill, and you had a lot of blacks living there. It was an interesting place to grow up, if you got to grow up, but no sweet young thing from Minnesota would want to move here.”
She raised her eyebrows at sweet young thing, and he grinned at her. Then his eyes turned serious and he said, “I have a confession to make.”
“Oh?”
“I followed you in here.”
“You mean you noticed me even before I ordered a Rob Roy?”
“I saw you on the street. And for a moment I thought …”
“What?”
“Well, that you were on the street.”
“I guess I was, if that’s where you saw me. I don’t … Oh, you thought—”
“That you were a working girl. I wasn’t going to mention this, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way …”
What, she wondered, was the right way?
“… because it’s not as though you looked the part, or were dressed like the girls you see out there. See, the neighborhood may be tarted up, but that doesn’t mean the tarts have disappeared.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“It was more the way you were walking,” he went on. “Not swinging your hips, not your walk, per se, but a feeling I got that you weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere, or even all that sure where you were going.”
“I was thinking about stopping for a drink,” she said, “and not sure if I wanted to, or if I should go straight home.”
“That would fit.”