The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [57]
“Oblivion?”
“You’d think so. Say, I know where we can go.”
I flagged a cab and we rode down to Sheridan Square, where there’s a basement joint with the same name as a long-gone Harlem jazz club. They start around midnight and stay open past dawn, and it’s legal because they don’t serve alcohol. I used to go to late joints for the booze, and I learned to like the music because I heard so much of it there, and because you could just about taste the alcohol in every flatted fifth. Nowadays I go for the music, and what I hear in the blue notes is not so much the booze as all the feelings the drink used to mask.
That night there were a lot of different musicians sitting in with what I guess was the house rhythm section. There was a tenor player who sounded a little like Johnny Griffin and a piano player who reminded me of Lennie Tristano. And as always there was a lot of music I barely heard, background music for my own unfocused thoughts.
The sky was light by the time we dragged ourselves out of there. “Look at that,” Elaine said. “It’s bright as day.”
“And well it might be. It’s morning.”
“What a New York night, huh? You know, I loved our trip to Europe, and other places we’ve gone together, but when you come right down to it — ”
“You’re a New York kind of gal.”
“You bet your ass. And what we heard tonight was New York music. I know all about the music coming up the river from New Orleans, all that crap, and I don’t care. That was New York music.”
“You’re right.”
“And nobody died,” she said.
“That’s right,” I said. “Nobody died.”
Elaine said, “You never stop working, do you?”
I looked at her. We were in Florence, sitting at a little tile-topped table in the Piazza di San Marco, sipping cappuccino every bit as good as the stuff they served at the Peacock on Greenwich Avenue. It was a bright day but the air was cool and crisp, the city bathed in October light. Elaine was wearing khakis and a tailored safari jacket, and looked like a glamorous foreign correspondent, or perhaps a spy. I was wearing khakis, too, and a polo shirt, and the blue blazer she called my Old Reliable.
We’d had five days in Venice. This was the second of five days in Florence, and then we’d have six days in Rome before Alitalia took us back home again.
I said, “Nice work if you can get it.”
“Uh-uh,” she said. “I caught you. You were scanning the area the way you always do.”
“I was a cop for a lot of years.”
“I know, and I guess it’s a habit a person doesn’t outgrow. And not a bad one, either. I have some New York street smarts myself, but I can’t send my eyes around a room and pick up what you can. And you don’t even think about it. You do it automatically.”
“I guess. But I wouldn’t call it working.”
“When we’re supposed to be basking in the beauties of Florence,” she said, “and exclaiming over the classic beauty of the sculpture in the piazza, and instead you’re staring at an old queen in a white linen jacket five tables over, trying to guess if he’s got a yellow sheet and just what’s written on it — wouldn’t you call that working?”
“There’s no guesswork required,” I said. “I know what it says on his yellow sheet.”
“You do?”
“His name is Horton Pollard,” I said. “If it’s the same man, and if I’ve been sending a lot of looks his way it’s to make sure he’s the man I think he is. It’s well over twenty years since I’ve seen him. Probably more like twenty-five.” I glanced over and watched the white-haired gentleman saying something to the waiter. He raised an eyebrow in a manner that was at once arrogant and apologetic. It was as good as a fingerprint. “It’s him,” I said. “Horton Pollard. I’m positive.”
“Why don’t you go over and say hello?”
“He might not want that.”
“Twenty-five years ago you were still on the job. What did you do, arrest him?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Honestly? What did he do? Art fraud? That’s what comes to mind, sitting at an outdoor table in Florence, but he was probably just a stock swindler.”
“Something white-collar, in other words.