I didn’t burn many calories. I took the elevator to the lobby, walked out onto Fifty-seventh Street, turned right, and walked a few doors to Ninth Avenue. I turned right again, and Armstrong’s was halfway up the block.
And did I feel a magnetic pull? I don’t know. Maybe. I suppose I was attracted and repelled at the same time, and in about equal measure.
I opened the door, walked in, and one breath told me I was in a place where people drank beer and smoked cigarettes. Two thoughts hit me at the same time—that it smelled awful, and that it smelled like home.
There were ten or a dozen people at the bar, and I recognized most of them. Around a third of the tables were occupied. No large parties, just groups of two or three. The conversation throughout was sufficiently muted so that you could hear the music. Jimmy got rid of the jukebox shortly after he opened the joint, and kept the radio on an FM station that played nothing but classical music.
The walls at Armstrong’s are a collection of incongruities, and the pick of the litter is the mounted elk’s head hanging on the rear wall. Directly beneath it, looking across the room at me through a pair of Buddy Holly–style horn-rimmed glasses, was a stocky guy around my age wearing a suit and a tie and a half smile on his thin lips. He was smoking a cigarette. From the looks of the ashtray, it wasn’t his first.
“ ‘Lucille,’ ” he said. “You know the song, don’t you? Hell, everybody knows it. She picked a fine time to leave him, with their four snot-nose brats and a crop in the field. So the singer decides not to nail her after all, because he feels sorry for the whiny-ass husband. Never happen in real life, not if she was as fine-looking as the song makes out. Sit down, for God’s sake. What do you want to drink?”
The waitress was new to me, a dishwater blonde, tall and slender. She had an air about her that suggested she was easily confused, but she got the drink order right, bringing me a glass of Coca-Cola and Steffens another Scotch. He said, “Vann Steffens. You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Have we met?”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I don’t know. But I recognized you the minute you walked in. Of course I was expecting you. Couple of times, you and I were in the same place at the same time. Not this place, but one that’s not too far from here. Or was, until it closed. Morrissey’s, the after-hours. You remember the place?”
“Of course.”
“They performed a humanitarian service, the Brothers Morrissey. Made sure a man didn’t die of thirst just because it was past four in the morning. I was there now and then over the years, and I saw you there at least twice and maybe more’n that. You were with a guy named Devoe, had a piece of a joint on the next block.”
“Skip Devoe. His bar was Miss Kitty’s.”
“Another joint that’s closed. And it seems to me I heard he died. Our age, wasn’t he? How’d he die?”
“Acute pancreatitis,” I said, and that was indeed what it said on Skip’s death certificate. I always figured it was a mix of drink and sadness that took him out.
Steffens shook his head. “Hell of a world,” he said. “You and me, did we ever get introduced at Morrissey’s? I can’t say one way or the other. I was never there before three, four in the morning, and by then I was half in the bag, so there are things happened that I don’t remember, and things I remember that never happened. Anyway, when I heard your name the other day, I knew who they were talking about.”
“How did that happen?”
“A fellow was talking,” he said, “about how you were looking for a fellow named Robert Williams with a wife who maybe had an affair with Jack Ellery, who I understand got himself killed recently.” He lit a cigarette, crumpled the now-empty pack. “You don’t smoke, do you?”
“No.”
“And you’re in here drinking Coca-Cola. I heard you were off the booze these days. Make you uncomfortable, sitting in a joint like this?”
“No,” I said. That wasn’t entirely true, but I didn’t see that I owed him the truth. “You said your name’s the same as the muckraker.”
“Joseph Lincoln Steffens, dropped the Joseph in his writings. Wrote The Shame of the Cities, about municipal corruption. Put an end to it, too, as you may have noticed.” He grinned, dragged on his cigarette. “But what he’s most famous for is what he wrote when he came home from a trip to the Soviet Union. ‘I have seen the future and it works.’ Except everyone got the line slightly wrong, because he wrote that he’d been to the future, not that he’d seen it. And he changed his mind about it anyway, decided it wasn’t the future and it didn’t work. Proving you’d better be careful what you say, because people are going to change the words around on you, and go on quoting them long after you stop believing them yourself.”
“Interesting.”
“You’re being polite, Matt. I know enough about him to be a bore on the subject, but that comes of sharing a name. And no, we’re not related. The family name got changed a generation or two back. It used to be Steffansson, like the polar explorer, and no, he’s not a relative either.”
“And your first name is Vann?”
“Evander,” he said. “But I’ve forgiven my mother for that one, God rest her soul. I chopped it down to Van, and then I tagged an extra N onto it because people thought that was my last name, Van Steffens, like Van Dyke and Van Rensselaer.”
“And they’re not your relatives, either.”
“You begin to see the pattern, huh?” He patted his breast pocket, remembered he’d just finished the pack. “I need a cigarette,” he announced. “Where’s the machine?”
I shook my head. “No machine. There’s a little food market next door, the Pioneer. They sell cigarettes.”
“And this place doesn’t? Why the hell not?”
“Jimmy’s against smoking.”
“There’s an ashtray on every table. Half the people in here are smoking.”
“He’s not going to prohibit it. He just doesn’t want to encourage it.”