By Ed Staskus

  When Stan Riddman took the stairs two at a time coming up from the basement of the Flatiron Building it wasn’t a dark city, yet. The new night was still on its way. The sky was a dirty blue, full of car exhaust and coal smoke from the city’s generating stations. It was the first day of the second week of fall, but felt more like the middle of summer, except for the shorter days. Stan wore a short sleeve shirt and linen trousers. His back pocket was flush with more tens and twenties than it was with its usual ones and fives. 

   He gave the leather billfold in his pocket a friendly pat. The seven-card stud he had gotten in on in the spare room next to the furnace room had been good to him. He could buy Dottie some new clothes, stash some of it away for the office rent when work was slow, and score tickets for the World Series.

   The Socialist Labor Party used to have offices in the Flatiron Building, but not down in the basement. They had their heads in the clouds. They thought they were shooting sevens back then. They didn’t know they were shooting snake eyes. He wondered if they would have banned poker, making out that it was exploitive, if they had ever come to power. You took your chances at cards, but it was only exploitive if you had no skill at it. You deserved to be taken if you played your dreams. Stan never did that. He never tapped on the glass at the poker table. He never shot dice, either. He never put himself at the mercy of bones bouncing around at random. He walked down 22nd Street to Lexington Avenue, turned right, walked through Gramercy Park to Irving Place, and looked for a phone booth.

   The prospect of a Subway Series was coming up fast. The Yankees were in and the Indians were out, that was for sure. The Redlegs were running on an outside track. The Dodger ace Sal Maglie had no-hit the Phils earlier in the week at Ebbets Field and the Cardinals were going hard at the Braves out in the boondocks. The Braves were neck and neck with the Bums. It was going to come down to this weekend as to whether the Fall Classic was going to be all New York, the same as last year, or not.

    The championship that year had gone seven games. The Yankees won their three games at Ebbets Field while the Dodgers won all theirs at Yankee Stadium. Neither team won on their home field. Nobody had taken that bet beforehand because it wasn’t in the cards. When the time came, nobody took the backside odds on the seventh game, either, seeing as Jackie Robinson wasn’t penciled in for the Bums to play the deciding nine innings. At least, nobody except Stan and Ezra Aaronson, and anybody else who simply flipped a coin and didn’t care about losing it.

   “I got a feeling,” Ezra said.

   Stan went along with him, even though he didn’t believe in feelings, outside of Dottie and Vicki. He believed in a personal code he couldn’t explain, even to himself, and professional loyalty. He was loyal to Betty, Ezra, Oats, and their clients. He believed the city he lived in was more corrupt than not. Everyone had a price or a reason.

   Who would have thought the Cuban Hot Rod would be the difference-maker in the deciding game when he took over right field in the sixth inning? Stan was in the upper deck with Ezra. They were on the same side as the Yankee dugout, on the first base side. All the other Bum fans were on the third base side. A client who was a Yankee fan, after Stan had gotten him the black and white photograph he needed to get his divorce done, gave him a pair of passes. They ended up on the wrong side of the cheering, but by their lights they were cheering for the right team.

   “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Ezra said, stoical in a sea of Bronx Bomber fans.

   When Yogi Berra hit an opposite field sure-fire double, Ezra sprang out of his seat, like everybody else, but suddenly the lightning-fast right fielder Sandy Amoros, the Cuban Hot Rod, caught it coming out of nowhere. He fired a pill to Pee Wee Reese, who relayed it to Gil Hodges, who doubled up Gil McDougald caught off first base, ending the last threat Stengel’s Squad made that afternoon in 1955.

   Casey Stengel managed the Yankees. Back in his playing days, when he still had legs, he had been a good but streaky ballplayer. Fair bat, good feet, great glove. “I was erratic,” he admitted. “Some days I was amazing, some days I wasn’t.” When he wasn’t, he played it for laughs, catching fly balls behind his back. One afternoon he doffed his cap to the crowd and a sparrow flew out of it. Another day, playing the outfield, he hid under the grate of a storm drain and popped out of the drain just in time to snag a lazy fly ball.

   When he stood leaning over the top rail of a dugout, he looked like a scowling Jimmy Durante dressed up in pinstripes. He was called the “Ol’ Perfessor” even though he had been at a loss all through high school. He graduated only because his high school didn’t want him back for another year. He managed the Braves and Dodgers for nine years and chalked up nine straight losing seasons. Casey Stengel might not have been a for-real professor, but he knew enough not to give up and take advantage of an opportunity when it came his way. After the New York Yankees hired him in 1948, the only year he hadn’t taken them to the World Series was 1954.

   Stan and Ezra were the only men in their section of the stands who had not fallen back into their seats, stunned, after Sandy Amoros snagged Yogi Berra’s liner. Stan had to pull the clapping and cheering Ezra down so there wouldn’t be any hard feelings. As it was, Ezra got so excited there were hard feelings, after all, and Stan had to drag him away to a beer stand.

   “This beer is bitter,” Ezra complained, looking down at the bottle of Ballantine in his hand. Ballantine Beer was featured on the Yankee Stadium scoreboard, its three-ring sign shining bright, flashing “Purity, Body, Flavor.” Whenever a Yankee hit a homer, Mel Allen, the hometown broadcaster, hollered, “There’s a drive, hit deep, that ball is go-ing, go-ing, gonnne! How about that?! It’s a Ballantine Blast!” 

   The Brooklyn Dodgers, Ezra and Stan’s team of choice, played at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Their scoreboard boasted a Schaefer Beer sign, with the ‘h’ and the ‘e’ lighting up whenever there was a hit or an error. Below the beer sign was an Abe Stark billboard. “Hit Sign, Win a Suit.” Abe Stark was a big noise in the men’s haberdashery trade.

   “That’s some kosher beer, that Schaeffer,” Ezra said, giving his bottle of Ballantine a sour look. “The Yankees don’t know good beer from spitballs.” He threw the half-finished bottle towards a trash can. It bounced away on the walkway. Nobody paid any attention to the bottle rattling and rolling past them.

   Stan had a home but not a home borough. His apartment was in Hell’s Kitchen, up from Times Square and down from the Central Park Zoo. He wasn’t from New York City. He was from Chicago, although he wasn’t from there, either. His mother died in childbirth. His father moved the family from Chicago, which was himself, his new Polish wife, two boys, including Stan, two girls, two dogs, and all their belongings a year later to a small house behind St. Stanislaus Catholic Church in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in the Warszawa neighborhood south of the steel mills, where his father ended up working the rest of his life, providing for his family. Otis Steel was where Stan worked for three years after high school while still living at home. It had the longest continuous strip mill in the world. The factory floor was always hot, a hundred and twenty degrees and more. He volunteered for the armed forces the minute World War Two started. 

   He wasn’t working on anything at the moment that he thought might get him free World Series passes this year like last year. As long as I squirrel most of this away, he thought to himself, walking down Irving Place, thinking of the jackpot in his pocket, I can blow some of it tonight and still have enough left for some more card games. 

   His daughter Dottie was at Marie’s for the weekend. Marie had once been Stan’s wife. Her taking any interest in Dottie happened about as often as the World Series. It wasn’t too early or too late tonight, and if Vicki hasn’t taken any work home, and is at home, and picks up the phone, maybe she could meet him for dinner. He found the phone booth he’d been looking for and called her. It rang twice before Vicki answered. That’s a good sign, he thought.

   “Hello.”

   “Hey, Vicki, it’s Stan.”

   “Stan, my man,” she laughed.

   “How’s the Stuy tonight?”

   “Hot, quiet, lonely,” she said. What Stan liked about Vicki was she didn’t talk much about what didn’t matter. She didn’t talk overmuch at all, even though her workday life revolved around words. She was quick on her feet. She wasn’t a sexpot, but she liked sex well enough. Marie had been romantic as a pair of handcuffs. Towards the end she had taken to waving her leg shaving razor in his face while telling him no, not tonight.

  “How about meeting me at Luchow’s for dinner? I’m flush and I’m buying.”

   “Stan, I love you for the dear Polack or whatever it is you are, but the food at Luchow’s is not so good, even if you can ever get though that insanely long menu of theirs.” 

   “That’s what I’m for. A sharp-eyed private eye like me will make sure to look into everything the kitchen’s got to offer and find what’s edible.”

   “More like a dog-eared private eye.”

   “Hey there, don’t go battle-ax on me.”

   “All right, but the other thing is, since they seat more than a thousand people, how am I going to find you? And by chance, with that strolling oompah band of theirs, if we do bump into each other and maybe get a table in that goulash palace, we’ll only be able to make ourselves heard some of the time and not the rest of the time.”

   “We can always take our coffee and their pancakes with lingonberry over to the square after dinner and chew the fat,” Stan said. “It will be quiet enough there.”

   “Chew the fat? What it is I like about you? Sometimes I just don’t know.”

   “I’ll take that for a yes.”

   “Yes, give me a few minutes to change into something fun,” she said, making merry. “I hope there’s no goose fest or barley pop festival going on.”

   “Meet me at the far end of Frank’s bar. He’ll find a quiet spot for us. He says the new herring salad is out of this world.”

   “Don’t push your luck, Stan, don’t push your luck.” Herring always made her feel like throwing up. Just the thought of the silvery fish made her stomach turn.

   Luchow’s was a three-story six-bay building with stone window surrounds, pilasters, and a parapet on top, while below a red awning led to the front door. The restaurant was near Union Square. It looked like the 19th century, or an even earlier century, dark, heavy, and Teutonic. An oversized painting of potato gatherers covered most of a wall in one of the seven dining rooms. Another of the rooms was filled to the rafters with animal heads, their offspring being eaten at the tables below them, while another room was a temple of hand-painted hinged steins. There was an old-fashioned beer garden in the back.

   “Welcome back to the Citadel of Pilsner,” Frank the bartender said. He gestured Stan to the side. “Did anybody tell you Hugo died?”

  “No, I hadn’t heard, although I heard he wasn’t feeling well.” Hugo Schemke had been a waiter at Luchow’s for fifty years. He always said he wasn’t afraid of death. He had firmly, no ifs ands or buts, believed in reincarnation.

   “Did he say he was coming back before he left?”

   “He did say that, but I haven’t seen him, yet.”  

   “How’s Ernst doing?” 

   Ernst Seute was the floor manager, a stout man both friendly and cold-hearted. He had been at Luchow’s a long time, too, since World War One. He was deadly afraid of death. He didn’t believe in reincarnation, which made passing on even deadlier.

   “He took a couple of days off,” Frank said. “Remember that parade back in April over in Queens? They got some kind of committee now, and he’s over there with them trying to make it an annual thing here in Little Germany, calling it the Steuben Parade.”

    “You going to be carrying the cornflower flag?”

   “Not me, Stan, not me.” Frank was from Czechoslovakia. “I’m an American now.”

   Frank led Vicki and Stan to a small table at the far end of the bar. He brought them glass mugs of Wurzburger beer and a plate of sardines. Vicki ordered noodle soup and a salad. “Hold the herring,” she commanded. Frank looked puzzled. Stan asked for a broiled sirloin with roasted potatoes and horseradish sauce on the side.

   “I saw Barney the other day,” Vicki said, cocking her head. “He told me you’ve made some progress.”

  “I didn’t think there was anything to it the first day I saw him, that day you brought him over to the office. I didn’t think there was much to it that whole first week. Then there was all that excitement and Betty finally got the business end of it worked out, that it was the shrink. So, we know who did the thing to get Pollack to drive himself into that tree of his up in Springs. We know how they did it. What we don’t know is why they did it.”

   “Do you know who they are?”

   “No, I don’t, even though one of them, a crackbrain by the name of Ratso Moretti, who roughed up Ezra, is being held at the 17th. He doesn’t seem to know much, but what he does know says a lot. The head shrinker is probably the key. He is going to tell me all about it soon, at least what he knows, and maybe what he doesn’t know, too. He hasn’t gotten the news flash about the talk we’re going to have, but he and I are going to have a sit down soon.”

   “You don’t think Jackson Pollack had anything to do with it?”

   “He was the wrong man in the wrong place, that’s all, if you look at it from his point of view. Betty and I think he was a test run. We think they’re up to something bigger. It’s hard to figure. It’s got to be big, but we can’t see the pay-off in it. You know Betty, though. She’ll piece it together if she has to tear it to pieces.”

   After dinner they looked at the dessert menu, but their look only amounted to a glimpse. Vicki shook her head no. “How about coffee and dessert at my place?” Stan asked. “We can stop and get pastry at that Puerto Rican shop on the corner and eat up on the roof.” It had become a clear night. An onshore wind had blown the smog away.

   “I can’t pass up that tasty-sounding pass,” Vicki said.

   They hailed a Checker Cab. “Take us up 5th to 59th, to the corner of the park,” Stan told the driver. 

   “Gotcha, bub,” the cabbie said.

   He dropped them off at the Grand Army Plaza and they walked into the park, following the path below the pond towards the Central Park Driveway and Columbus Circle. Stan liked Vicki’s easy way of walking, fluid and relaxed. He liked everything about her. They didn’t notice the two teenagers, as they quietly strolled down a path south of Center Drive, until the two of them were in front of them, blocking their way.

   One was taller and older, the other one shorter and younger, their jet black hair oiled and combed back. Both of them were wearing high tops, jeans, and white t-shirts, one of them dirtier than the other. The older boy had a pack of Lucky Strikes rolled up his t-shirt sleeve. The younger boy, he might have been sixteen, had a half-dozen inflamed pencil-thick scratches down one side of his face. Small capital SS’s topped with a halo drawn in red ink adorned the left sleeve of his t-shirt. 

   The older boy had LAMF tattooed on his neck above the collar line to below his right ear. Stan knew what it meant. It meant “Like a Mother Fucker.” He kept his attention fixed on LAMF’s hands.

   “Hey, mister, got a double we can have for the subway, so we can make it back home,” the older boy asked Stan, smiling, his teeth big as Chiclets, although not as glossy. One of his front teeth was crooked.

   They were Seven Saints. They were a gang whose favorite easy pickings was holding open the door of a subway car until just before it was ready to leave the station. One of them would grab and run off with a passenger’s pocketbook while the other one released the door so the woman would be shut inside the train as it moved away from the platform. Every Seven Saint carried either a knife or a zip gun for when the pickings weren’t as easy as a pocketbook.

   “Where’s home?” Stan asked, stepping forward a half step, nudging Vicki a half-step behind him with his left hand on her hip. 

   “You writing a book, or what?” LAMF asked. The other boy laughed, sounding like an excited doorbell ringer on Halloween.

   Stan asked again, looking straight at the older boy.

   “East Harlem, where you think?”

   “Why do you need twenty dollars? The fare’s only ten cents.”

   “The extra is for in case we get lost.” 

   “It’d be best if you got lost starting now. “

   “I mean to get my dub,” LAMF said, pulling his lips back like a chimp, reaching into his back pocket.

   Stan took a quick step forward, his right foot coming down on the forefoot of the boy’s sneaker, grabbing his wrist as it came out of his back pocket a flash of steel, and broke his nose with a hard jab using his right elbow. He let him fall backward and turned toward the other boy, flipping the switchblade he had taken away from the no-good on the ground so its business end was facing front.

   “Go,” he said to the younger boy. “Get away from here before you break out into a sweat and get sick.”

   The boy hesitated, looked down at the other Seven Saint on the ground, splattered with blood, and ran away like a squid on roller skates. Stan let the switchblade fall to the ground and broke the blade of the knife, stepping on it with his heel and pulling until it cracked at the hinge. He tossed it at the older boy who was getting up. It hit him in the chest and bounced away. 

   “The next time I see you,” he sputtered in a rage, on his feet, trying to breathe, his nose floppy, his mouth full of blood.

   “The next time you see me, you fill your hand with a knife, I’ll break your face again,” Stan said. He said it matter-of-factly. He took a step up to the boy, grabbed his ear, holding tight, and whispered  into it. “Actually, I’ll do to you what you do to cats, except I’ll use a sap, and when I’m done there won’t be a whole hell of a lot left of that face of yours. The minute I see you is when I’ll stack you up. Make sure you never see me again. Make sure I never see you.”

   He took Vicki by the arm, pushed the Seven Saint to the side, and they walked away.

   “You didn’t have to do that,” Vicki said. “You won plenty of hands at the Flatiron tonight. You might have given them a dollar-or-two.”

   “I know,” Stan said. “But they were japping, working themselves up to be dangerous, and that had to stop. The sooner the better.”

   “They are just kids.”

   “You saw the scratches on the face of the kid who ran away.”

   “Of course, the side of his face was gruesome.”

   “The Seven Saints have an initiation to get into the gang. They find a stray cat and strap it to a telephone pole. The one getting initiated has his hands tied behind his back and he gets to become a Seven Saint if he can kill the cat using his head as a club.”

   “Oh, my God!” Vicki said, stopping dead in her tracks. “That’s horrible. How do you even know that?”

   “I make it my business to know, so I don’t get taken by surprise,” Stan said. “I care about you, not them. I don’t give a damn about them. They can jump off the nearest bridge for all I care, the higher the better.”

   They approached the USS Maine Monument at Merchant’s Gate. The monument was splattered with bird droppings. “I’m like that warship. I don’t like anybody in my face. Nobody gets off trying to blow me up, not while I can help it.”

   Stan pushed a bad memory of the war away. It had been more than ten years ago. He had gotten enough of blow-ups during the hostilities. He had gotten enough of the full-on in Germany afterwards, where he had been an Army M. P.  The country was in ruins. Some cities like Berlin and Nuremberg had been reduced to rubble. Expanses of forest were bare. Most of the trees had been cut down for fuel. The black market was dangerous as a bazaar run by lunatics. There were let-go prisoners of war and desperate refugees everywhere. It was a stew of good and evil.

   They walked out of the park under a quarter moon, crossing Columbus Circle, and strode down Ninth Avenue. At West 56th Street they turned towards the river, stopping in front of a four-floor walk-up with a twin set of fire escapes bolted to the front of the flat face of the brick building.

   “Anyway, maybe it will do those greasers some good,” Stan said, fitting his key into the front door lock. “Not everybody is as nice as I am. Someday somebody might go ballistic on them.”

   “Ballistic?” 

   “Like a rocket, a missile that goes haywire.”

   “I wish we had a rocket to take us upstairs” she said, as they took the stairs up to the fourth floor. “Oh, darn, we forgot to get our pastry.”

   “Next time,” Stan said. “The Boricua’s aren’t going anywhere, except staying here.” 

   At the door of the apartment he slid his key into the lock, opened the door, reached for the light switch, and let Vicki go around him as he did. In the shadows at the back of the room there was a growl and a sudden movement. It was Mr. Moto. His eyes were glowing.

   Mr. Moto was no great sinner, but he wasn’t a saint, either. He thought saints were more honored after life than during their lives. That wasn’t for him. He was alive and kicking and had his own code of honor. If push came to shove and he ever got his claws into a Seven Saint, there would be hell to pay for their sins. 

   He crossed the room fast. He made for Vicki’s lead leg as she stepped over the threshold. “Hey, watch my stockings.” She was wearing Dancing Daters. “I’ll smack you right on your pink nose if you make them run.” Mr. Moto skidded to a hasty stop a whisker’s length from her leg. 

   “That’s better,” Vicki cooed, bending down to rub the top of his head. The big black cat arched his back and purred.

Excerpted from the crime novel “Hell’s Kitchen.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Hell’s Kitchen”

“A Cold War thriller that captures the vibe of mid-century NYC.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer, New York City, 1956. A high profile contract killing in the works. Stan Riddman, a private eye working out of Hell’s Kitchen, scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication