Howling sirens drove the panicked East Villagers into the Astor Place Subway. Most failed to pierce the scrum at the head of the stairs to the station and they raised their eyes to the speck falling to Earth. A white flash vaporized New York into the ionosphere.
“DOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNAAAAAAA."
The subhuman scream ping-ponged up the canyon of East 10th Street tenements. Inside the third-floor railroad flat’s bedroom a man’s naked body twitched on the floor futon. An arm over his face failed to block out the madman's wail and the thirty year-old tossed off the damp sheet to jump out of the bed. The blood drained from his skull and he collapsed toward the window. The temperature was climbing into the 90s. All June had been hot since his return from Paris. Outside a middle-aged Polish woman fled down the sidewalk from a dope-sick junkie mauling a parked car with an iron pipe. Sparkling fragments flew in the sunlight. Sean’s motorcycle was a single car-length from this psycho-storm. Down below the madman arched his face to the broiling sun and emptied the ashes of his soul.
"DOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNAAAAAAA."
No woman answered his two-syllable aria. A cop car rounded the corner. The madman stood erect and waved to the officers. His good posture masked his mania Nothing short of an 'officer-down' call was extricating the policemen from their air-con cruiser. With the cruiser out of sight the junkie demolished another windshield.
His Yamaha 650XS was on deck for batting practice. Sean rushed to fill a trash bag with water from the brimming tub in his kitchen to save his motorcycle. Quickly aiming, he heaved the heavy plastic sack out the window. Liquid beads sprayed from its rupturing seams. Ten pounds of water accelerated from forty feet and the impact leveled his target to the sidewalk.
The torn plastic shroud flapped over the flattened man. Water dropped from that height could be fatal. Sean reached for the phone to call 911. As the phone rang, the madman staggered to his feet off in the directions of Tompkins Square Park. It was hard to kill junkies. There were no witnesses on the street. He hung up the phone.
Sean flopped on the living room couch. The floor fan pushed sullen air around the living room. Sweat ran down his body like he was a martyred saint’s miraculous weeping statue. The madman had only been a menace to property and his Yamaha XS 650 wasn’t worth a life. Every psychiatrist and girlfriend had blamed his violent streak on his childhood. His parents had provided him everything necessary to be normal and he tried to examine his past for the millionth time to discover what set him apart from everyone else. Dyslexia, bullying, and speech impediments were clue to a mystery not yet solved and now these dreams of nuclear destruction.
He lay on the battered sofa. Seconds swelled to minutes and the hours thickened until a tainted breeze from the distant Hudson stirred heat-swollen air. Sheet lightning crackled across the sky and the thunder echoed the rumbling of the nine-pin balls from Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Nobody read him anymore.
The WINS radio reported not a hint rain ahead to relieve the overheated city. He shut off the radio and slipped into the tub in the kitchen. It had been full for several days.The water wrapped around his body like a discharged placenta.
After the murder at the Continental in the winter of 1982 Sean had fled New York. Lisa had sworn to meet him in Paris. A week later heard from a friend that she had gone to LA to get into the movies. He didn’t blame her for not coming to France, but she was always on his mind. His fingers wrinkled after twenty minutes. They were ready to become thirty. The ringing of the telephone broke his trance. He leaped from the bath and grabbed the phone on the third ring.
It was an oversea call. Lisa wasn’t on the other end. A German was.
"This is Kurt Oster. You remember me?" A man's voice crackled over trans-Atlantic connection.
"Who can forget Paris?" The German possessed a jet set life of multiple-city dwellings, cars, and beautiful women. Sean had translated some documents for his teletype business in his second-story house on Rue Des Deux Pont. Kurt liked when asked if he needed anything Sean had requested champagne. He served him Moet. It was 10am. They had done drugs together more than a few times. The two of them were acquaintances more than friends.
“Sure, I remember you.”
A puddle of water spread beyond his bare feet. He wrapped a towel around his waist and sat on a kitchen chair. Outside in the alley the willow branches were still in the breathless heat.
"New York in the summer. Hell, no?"
"Pretty close to it. Only me, the poor, the depraved, and the dying."
"You speak a little German, yes."
His high school class had ridiculed Sean’s reading of Kafka's DAS URTEIL, until the warty Bavarian teacher had snubbed out his Pall Mall.
"Herr Coll's accent is better than the rest of you hairdressers."
Sean had a lisp and a stutter as a young man. He didn’t even speak English well. "Ein bissen."
"You are Irish, yes?" This was an interview.
"Irish and American." That nation had granted second-generation blood citizenship in both Ireland and the EEC.
"Good, because you need papers to work at my new club in Hamburg. Your friend, Bertram Bellepas, will be the DJ. You know him.”
“Yes.” They had worked together in Paris.He was almost a friend. As much a ny junkie can be a friend.
“The city is beautiful in the summer. The women more so. It’s the summer solstice and the days are long. I will pay you a thousand Deutschmarks a week, plus a one and a half percentage of the gross, which I figure about two-thousand marks a month. If you agree, a ticket will be waiting at Lufthansa. I will meet you at the Hamburg airport. It will be summertime and the living is sleazy.”
Sean had seen the city in Wim Wenders AMERICAN FRIEND, the film-noir 1977 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s RIPLEY’S GAME. It looked dangerous, but the name also conjured up the Beatles at the Star Club, a vast harbor on the North Sea, and sex trade on the Reeperbahn. Working six months came to roughly fifty thousand marks or roughly $30,000.
"Ich musste uber es zu denken."
“What’s there to think about?”
Sean’s savings from working the winter at a Paris nightclub were down to a couple of hundred dollars. Rent was due on the first of July. There was only one reason to stay here and Lisa had been gone over six months, still Sean answered, "I'll tell you tomorrow."
"You'd be making a big mistake not to come. Here’s my number.”
Sean wrote it down. “Tschus.”
Sean said the same. It was more familiar than Auf Siedersehen. The line went dead.
He had not expected fate to provide a salvation in Hamburg. At worst Bruder Karl had to be smiling in heaven at the prospect of his worst student working in Germany. Hopefully his classmates were destined for hell. They all had been Tyrannen or bullies, except for the one black student in the class. For some reason they left him alone, which was inexplicable in a Boston suburb. The long summer's day surrendered to night without any temperature drop. It was the solstice and the was setting at the western terminus of 10th Street.Sean got on the Yahama and drove up 1st Avenue to East 77th Street. He parked the bike on the corner and walked halfway down the block. The windows of the third-floor apartment across the street were dark. Lisa's name remained on the mailbox and last week the building super had said her rent had been paid in full for three months. She had to show up some time. A bottle whistled by his head.
"Bastard. Man. Bastard."
A wizened woman in shredded plastic bags searched the garbage for another missile.
"I'm the only crazy on this block. You're not crazy. You're only in love with a woman who left you for another man and she’s never coming back. You don't think I see you, because I'm nobody, but I've seen you and your whore. You didn’t lose your girlfriend. Just your turn. She was fucking that Russian and everyone else. All you bastards want is for us to be whores, and when we’re not your mothers, then you throw us out on the street.”
He had seen the old woman many times. He sometimes gave her a dollar. Her name was Estelle. She never told her story and never had a kind word for anyone. He expected no less. The old woman tore apart her plastic sheath. Her skin was caked with rivulets of sweat. He returned to his motorcycle. The kickstart ignited the 650cc engine with a flaming backfire. Dogs barking joined the howl of car alarms. He revved the motor and raced up the block to 2nd Avenue.
Only one thing was capable of erasing the old woman’s accusations. He burned the next red light. A newspaper truck missed him by inches. It was just a question of time, until an impact with steel car exorcised his obsession with Lisa.
At 23rd Street he broke free of the traffic flow and shifted into fifth gear. At this speed any crash was fatal. At 14th a redhead the same height as Lisa was getting into a taxi. Sean braked and swerved to a halt. A man in a suit ran up and lifted the young redhead’s skirt. She laughed, while he forced her into a taxi.
The yellow Checker pulled away from the curb. Sean blasted through the red light in pursuit. A siren whooped behind him. The redhead turned and Lisa's mirage dissolved into another woman’s face. No cop in the New York would believe his having seen his ex-girlfriend’s double, but running from the police was always a bad idea, unless he had a few day’s head start.
Sean veered to a stop at the curb and pulled off his helmet. Two car doors slammed and cop shoes flapped against the pavement. A flashlight beam blinded his vision. A gruff voice ordered, "Get off the bike."
"What's the problem, officers?” Sean balanced his bike on the kickstand and lifted his hands.
"You see what I see, Kev?"
"I can't friggin' believe my eyes. Sean Coll in the flesh."
"I told you that was his bike, but you said, "Naw, Seano's out of town.” Guess you were wrong," the tobacco-harsh voice commented with the pleasure of being right.
The flashlight shut off and Sean blinked away the sunbursts. The two NYPD officers grinned like drunken hunters discovering a snared animal. Kevin Driscoll was thinner than his partner, but still had forty pounds and a few inches on Sean. Neither cop was shy about tossing around their weight.
They were the pride of the 9th Precinct. The setting for the TV show KOJAK. Nothing on that show snitched out these two cops’ crimes.
"Welcome back, Seano." deRocco took off his perforated summer-weight cap and scratched his balding head. “We heard you were in Paris. You shoulda stayed out of town."
"I'm leaving as soon as I can." Sean had not counted on deRocco and Driscoll. They were as lucky as he was unhappy that they were still in uniform.
"You believe that, Kev?" deRocco was the brains of the pair.
"Nah, it's bullshit." Kevin Driscoll waved on the gawking drivers and deRocco stepped closer. The whiskey heavy on his breath never a good sign in hot weather. "Drop yer fuckin' hands. This ain't no arrest. We just wanna talk with you."
"I haven't talked to no one about the night Johnny Fats was killed."
"Why should we believe you?" Driscoll slapped the flashlight into his palm.
One thin dime changed this balance of power.
"If I had ratted you out, would I be here now?”
“No, you would be in a grave.”
“A cop in jail isn't a pretty sight."
"You threatenin’ us?" Driscoll dropped his hand to his .38. The citations above his badge attested to multiple cold-blooded shootings in line of duty to the NYPD.
"Not at all.”
Seven months ago on a snowy evening Sean had discovered the precinct's bagman in the Caddy parked behind their after-hour club on East 14th Street. A single bullet hole perforated Johnny Fat’s left temple. A gun in his left hand. Johnny Fats was right-handed. Somehow a Grand Jury ruled it 'death by misadventure'. The ensuing IAU investigation suspended fifteen cops from the Twentieth Precinct. Two were in upstate prisons serving long term for various crimes. None of them murder. No one had all the answers to the whys and whos. Sean possessed more than most.
“Just I saw you leave with Johnny Fats.”
"We weren’t involved with his death." Driscoll protested, not knowing what if anything the bagman had said to Sean.
"Shut up, Kev." deRocco's eyes were blank of emotion. “We came back before he was offed."
"Sgt. Ferguson thinks that piece of timing is a little off." The IAU sergeant had plenty of theories, mostly of them unprovable hunches on the money.
"That cocksucker." deRocco spat out the words.
Sean smirked, having heard the precinct cops gossip about deRocco's sexual leaning. They had once been staking out of dope drop on East 4th Street. Te gang member made them and approached the unmarked car. They discovered two men engaged in a sexual act. Queer had saved both their lives.
"What you smilin' about?"
"Nothing." Cops had a hard job in New York City, however these two were well past redemption. AS lucky as they had been, bad luck was waiting for the, but not tonight. “Today I got a phone call today from Germany. They offered a job at a nightclub there. Maybe I should go?” “And stay away for a while too.” deRocco lit a cigarette. "You're a lucky fuckin' Mick, Seano."
"You want to contribute to my bon-voyage fund?"
Driscoll feigned a punch and Sean ducked to his right.
“Don’t push it, Seano. Consider yourself another asshole from Boston who lived in New York too long. Just get the fuck out of town. You have three days.”
"Sure, I'll send you a postcard. Ich liebe dich.” The two officers returned to their blue-and-white cruiser, and then u-turned across 14th Street into the Ninth Precinct. Sean had to face the truth that he had come back to the scenes of the crimes, because of his love for Lisa. Thousands of other women lived in this city. Falling in love with one seemed cursed by his obsession with Lisa. She was not coming back any time soon. Of this he was sure.
Sean obeying all the lights back to his apartment.
By the time he reached East 10th Street, he thanked deRocco and Driscoll for forcing him to accept Kurt's offer. Maybe a life a few thousand miles away from New York might free his soul. Something had to someday.
Photo (th Precinct Investigation Unit 1979
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