Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [57]
Wait a minute, where was down there? Where was I?
I looked around. The street appeared the same as it had moments before, except that I was seeing it from above. Holy Christ, was I dead?
Freddie appeared. “How you doin’? You all right?”
“All right? I think I’m dead.”
“Yeah, pretty much,” he said and looked down. Paramedics were covering the dead cop—me—with a white sheet.
“Why’d you warn me against shooting?” I asked him. Then I realized that I didn’t have to ask. I knew without his telling me that he was just doing his job as my guardian angel.
Then I knew something else. I wasn’t supposed to be dead. Freddie had screwed it up.
“Yeah,” he said, acknowledging my newfound understanding. “What did you expect?”
I thought about it. I really had no one to blame but myself for being dead. After all, what could I expect with Freddie Prinze as my guardian angel?
THE ORGAN GRINDER
BY MAAN MEYERS
Lower East Side
Antonio Cerasani rolled the mobile contraption over the broken cobble where Broome Street met Jefferson. The barrel organ had two wheels and handled like a pushcart. Every part of it gleamed in the bright sunshine. Even the country scene painted on its side seemed to glow with its own light.
He settled the cart as close to the curb as possible in the least of the refuse that layered the streets. With the cart in place, he began to crank the organ. Music poured from the barrel with sweet abundance, almost blocking out the other sounds: babes howling, the scraping of thick shoes on the asphalt pavement, metal-clad hooves and wheels clamoring on the cobblestones, passersby in screaming conversations.
The cacophony of everyday life. But here the very intensity of it was an abomination.
Indifferent to the heat of the day, Tony wore heavy trousers, a vest, and a long brown coat. His shabby, dark brown hat sat atop his black hair. An enormous mustache hid his mouth. Only a wisp of smoke from the stub of the twisted black cigar gave any indication of where it was.
The bitter tang of the cigar almost wiped away the stench of horse shit. Almost. The organ grinder hated the smell from when he was a boy in Palermo and had to sleep in the stable of his father’s padrone. New York was like a giant stable full of horse dung, particularly in this neighborhood where the White Wings, the street sweeping brigade, seldom ventured. Here the streets were ankle deep in dung and garbage, and the air, only barely modified by the briny reek of seaweed from the East River, was putrid with the rot of humanity.
“La Donna e Mobile” rolled from Tony’s machine. He sang in a rich tenor voice. “Women are fickle, like a feather in the wind.” And as always, the children on the street laughed and danced haphazardly to the organ grinder’s music.
He searched the tenement windows where once-white sheets stirred languidly in the tepid breeze. Several pennies wrapped in paper dropped from the windows and landed at his feet. The organ grinder, never stopping his music, tipped his hat to his benefactors, collected the coins, and dropped them into his coat pockets.
One lone coin lay just beyond Tony’s stretch, but he did not want to interrupt the flow of music for the moment it would take to claim it, lest he lose further pennies. Tony cranked and Verdi gushed, but no more coins rained down on him.
There came a loud braying, as of animals. Shouting. Blaspheming. Pounding feet. Racing toward the organ grinder were four boys, arms slender as the sticks they carried, their clothes ragged and dirty.
Tony knew these demon boys; they lived on the street. They would steal the nails from the Savior’s cross. He stopped playing. The noise of the streets held sway again. He bent to retrieve the last coin, his coin, when with a cruel twitch of his ass, the largest of the boys bumped Tony, knocking the organ grinder into his organ, setting it trembling, akilter. He grabbed at the cart for balance, but misjudged and sank to his knees in the gutter filth.
Screeching with laughter, Butch Kelly leaned over and scooped up Tony’s errant penny. The runt