When the Sacred Ginmill Closes

"But no one meets here on Monday nights."

"No. There was a women's consciousness-raising group that met here Mondays up until about three months ago, but I believe they decided to meet in one another's homes instead." He cocked his head. "You're suggesting that the, uh, sinners would have had to be in a position to know the space would be empty last night."

"I was thinking that."

"But they could have called and asked. Anyone could have called and posed as someone interested in the space, and checking on its availability."

"Did you get any calls like that?"

"Oh, we get them all the time," he said. "It's not something anyone here would bother to remember."

"WHY are you comin' around here all the time?" the woman wanted to know. "Askin' everybody about Mickey Mouse."

"Who?"

She let out a laugh. "Miguelito Cruz. Miguelito means Little Michael, you know? Like Mickey. People call him Mickey Mouse. I do, anyway."

We were in a Puerto Rican bar on Fourth Avenue, nestled between a shop that sold botanicals and one that rented formal wear. I'd gotten back on the N train after my visit to the Lutheran church in Bensonhurst, intending to ride it back into the city, but instead I found myself rising abruptly at Fifty-third Street in Sunset Park and leaving the train there. I had nothing else to do with the day, no logical direction to take in Skip's behalf, and I thought I might as well put in some time justifying my fee from Tommy Tillary.

Besides, it was lunchtime, and a plate of black beans and rice sounded good to me.

It tasted as good as it sounded. I washed it down with a bottle of cold beer, then ordered flan for dessert and had a couple of cups of espresso. The Italians give you a thimble of the stuff; the Puerto Ricans pour you a full cup of it.

Then I barhopped, staying with beers and making them last, and now I'd met this woman who wanted to know why I was interested in Mickey Mouse. She was around thirty-five, with dark hair and eyes and a hardness to her face that matched the hardness in her voice. Her voice, scarred by cigarettes and booze and hot food, was the sort that would cut glass.

Her eyes were large and soft, and what showed of her body suggested that it would have a softness to match the eyes. She was wearing a lot of bright colors. Her hair was wrapped up in a hot-pink scarf, her blouse was an electric blue, her hip-hugging slacks canary yellow, her high-heeled shoes Day-Glo orange. The blouse was unbuttoned far enough to reveal the swell of her full breasts. Her skin was like copper, but with a blush to it, as if lighted from within.

I said, "You know Mickey Mouse?"

"Sure I know him. I see him all the time in the cartoons. He is one funny mouse."

"I mean Miguelito Cruz. You know that Mickey Mouse?"

"You a cop?"

"No."

"You look like one, you move like one, you ask questions like one."

"I used to be a cop."

"They kick you out for stealin'?" She laughed, showing a couple of gold teeth. "Takin' bribes?"

I shook my head. "Shooting kids," I said.

She laughed louder. "No way," she said. "They don't kick you out for that. They give you a promotion, make you the chief."

There was no island accent in her speech. She was a Brooklyn girl from the jump. I asked her again if she knew Cruz.

"Why?"

"Forget it."

"Huh?"

"Forget it," I said, and turned a shoulder to her and went back to my beer. I didn't figure she'd leave it alone. I watched out of the corner of my eye. She was drinking something colorful through a straw, and as I watched she sucked up the last of it.

"Hey," she said. "Buy me a drink?"

I looked at her. The dark eyes didn't waver. I motioned to the bartender, a sullen fat man who gazed on the world with a look of universal disapproval. He made her whatever the hell she was drinking. He needed most of the bottles on the back bar to do it. He put it in front of her and looked at me, and I held my glass aloft to show I was all right.

"I know him pretty good," she said.

"Yeah? Does he ever smile?"

"I don't mean him, I mean Mickey Mouse."

"Uh-huh."

"Whattaya mean, 'uh-huh'? He's a baby. When he grows up, then he can come see me. If he grows up."

"Tell me about him."

"What's to tell?" She sipped her drink. "He gets in trouble showin' everybody how he's so tough and so smart. But he's not so tough, you know, and he's not so smart either." Her mouth softened. "He is nice-lookin', though. Always the nice clothes, always the hair combed neat, always a fresh shave." Her hand reached to stroke my cheek. "Smooth, you know? And he's little, and he's cute, and you want to reach out and give him a hug, just wrap him up and take him home."

"But you never did?"

She laughed again. "Hey, man, I got all the troubles I need."

"You figure him for trouble?"

"If I ever took him home," she said, "he'd be all the time thinkin', 'Now how am I gonna get this bitch to let me put her on the street?' "

"He's a pimp? I never heard that."

"If you're thinkin' about a pimp with the purple hat and the Eldorado, forget it." She laughed. "That's what Mickey Rat wishes he was. One time he hits on this new girl, she's fresh up from Santurce, from a village near Santurce, you know? Very green, and she's not Seсorita Einstein to start with, you know? And he gets her to turn tricks for him, you know, workin' outta her apartment, seein' one or two guys a day, guys he finds and brings up to her."

" 'Hey, Joe, you wanna fock my seestair?' "

"You do one lousy PR accent, man. But you got the idea. She works about two weeks, you know, and she gets sick of it, and she takes the plane back to the island. And that's the story of Mickey the pimp."

By then she needed another drink and I was ready for a beer myself. She had the bartender bring us a little bag of plantain chips and split the side seam so the chips spilled out on the bar between us. They tasted like a cross between potato chips and wood shavings.

Mickey Mouse's trouble, she told me, was how hard he worked trying to prove something. In high school he had proved his toughness by going into Manhattan with a couple of buddies, roaming the crooked streets of the West Village in search of homosexuals to beat up.

She said, "He was the bait, you know? Small and pretty. And then when they got the guy, he was the guy who went crazy, almost wanted to kill him. Guys who went with him, first time they said he had heart, but later they started to say he had no brains." She shook her head. "So I never took him home," she said. "He's cute, but cute disappears when you turn the lights out, you know? I don't think he woulda done me much good." She extended a painted nail, touched my chin. "You don't want a man that's too cute, you know?"

It was an overture, and one I somehow knew I didn't want to follow up on. The realization brought a wave of sadness rolling in on me out of nowhere. I had nothing for this woman and she had nothing for me. I didn't even know her name; if we'd introduced ourselves I couldn't remember it. And I didn't think we had. The only names mentioned had been Miguelito Cruz and Mickey Mouse.

I mentioned another, Angel Herrera's. She didn't want to talk about Herrera. He was nice, she said. He was not so cute and maybe not so smart, but maybe that was better. But she didn't want to talk about Herrera.

I told her I had to go. I put a bill on the bar and instructed the bartender to keep her glass full. She laughed, either mocking me or enjoying the humor of the situation, I don't know which. Her laughter sounded like someone pouring a sack of broken glass down a staircase. It followed me to the door and out.

Chapter 20

When I got back to my hotel there was a message from Anita and another from Skip. I called Syosset first, talked with Anita and the boys. I talked with her about money, saying I'd collected a fee and would be sending some soon. I talked with my sons about baseball, and about the camp they'd be going to soon.

I called Skip at Miss Kitty's. Someone else answered the phone and I held while they summoned him.

"I want to get together with you," he said. "I'm working tonight. You want to come by afterward?"

"All right."

"What time is it now? Ten to nine? I've been on less than two hours? Feels like five. Matt, what I'll do, I'll close up around two. Come by then and we'll have a few."

* * *

I watched the Mets. They were out of town. Chicago, I think. I kept my eyes on the screen but I couldn't keep my mind on the game.

There was a beer left over from the night before. I sipped at it during the game, but I couldn't work up much enthusiasm for it, either. After the game ended I watched about half of the newscast, then turned the set off and stretched out on the bed.

I had a paperback edition of The Lives of the Saints, and at one point I looked up Saint Veronica. I read that there was no great certainty that she had existed, but that she was supposed to have been a Jerusalem woman who wiped Christ's sweating face with a cloth while he was suffering on his way to Calvary, and that an image of his face remained on the cloth.

I pictured the act that had brought her twenty centuries of fame, and I had to laugh. The woman I was seeing, reaching out to soothe His brow, had the face and hairstyle of Veronica Lake.

MISS Kitty's was closed when I got there, and for a moment I thought that Skip had said the hell with it and gone home. Then I saw that the iron gates, though drawn, were not secured by a padlock, and that a low-wattage bulb glowed behind the bar. I slid the accordion gates open a foot or so and knocked, and he came and opened up for me, then rearranged the gates and turned the key in the door.

He looked tired. He clapped me on the shoulder, told me it was good to see me, led me to the end of the bar farthest from the door. Without asking he poured me a long drink of Wild Turkey, then topped up his own glass with scotch.

"First of the day," I said.

"Yeah? I'm impressed. Of course the day's only two hours and ten minutes old."

I shook my head. "First since I woke up. I had some beer, but not too much of that, either." I drank off some of my bourbon. It had a good bite to it.

"Yeah, well, I'm the same way," he said. "I have days when I don't drink. I even have days when I don't have so much as a beer. You know what it is? For you and me, drinking's something we choose to do. It's a choice."

"There's mornings when I don't think it was the most brilliant choice I could have made."

"Jesus, tell me about it. But even so it's a choice for us. That's the difference between you and me and a guy like Billie Keegan."

"You think so?"

"Don't you? Matt, the man is always drinking. I mean, take last night. All the rest of us, okay, we're pretty heavy drinkers, but we took it easy last night, right? Because it's sometimes appropriate and sometimes not. Am I right?"

"I guess."

"Afterward, another story. Afterward a man wants to unwind, loosen up. But Keegan was shitfaced before we got there, for God's sake."

"Then he turned out to be the hero."

"Yeah, go figure that one. Uh, the plate number, did you-"