A Long Line of Dead Men

"A photo stylist. She showed up at the shop yesterday and wanted to rent that little Biedermeier chair as a prop for a magazine ad. I had it tagged three-fifty and I would have taken three hundred for it, and she's paying a hundred dollars to rent it for two days. Isn't that great?"

"It is if you get the chair back."

"Oh, she gave me a damage deposit and everything. It's a nice way to make money, don't you think? But that's not helping you."

"No."

"JS, JS, JS. Just Shopping. Jonas Salk. Jesus Saves. Jelly Sandwich. I'm sorry, I'm no help at all."

"That's okay."

She struck a pose. "I've got it," she said. "Jewish Sexpot. What do you think?"

"I think it's bedtime," I said.

And so I went to bed and forgot all about James Shorter and his several aliases, and the next morning, shaving, it came to me.

I put on a suit and tie, drank a cup of coffee, and took a cab to Penn Station.

Sixteen hours later I emerged from Penn Station. It was past midnight. There was a man I wanted to talk to, but it was too late to call him. It would have to wait until morning.

It was cool for a change, and although I'd been on my feet a lot earlier in the day, I'd spent the past several hours sitting on the train. I felt like stretching my legs, and I wound up stretching them all the way to the corner of Tenth Avenue and Fiftieth Street.

"I thought of you today," I told Mick Ballou. "I was in Washington, and I went to have a look at the Vietnam Memorial."

"Did you now."

"I saw your brother's name."

"Ah," he said. "Then no one's gone and rubbed it out."

"No."

"I hadn't thought they would," he said, "but you never know what someone might do."

"You don't."

"It's quite a sight, isn't it? The Memorial. The shape of it, and all of those names. Name after name after name."

"It's a long line of dead men," I said. "You were right about that."

"You couldn't have gone just to look at Dennis's name. You scarcely knew him."

"That's true."

"You knew Eddie Dunphy, and Eddie knew Dennis, but beyond that-"

"I knew him by sight, but no, I didn't really know him."

"So you must have had other business in Washington, and just thought you'd have a look at the Memorial while you were there."

"No," I said. "As a matter of fact I went there just to look at the Memorial."

"Did you then."

"I used the directory," I said, "and I managed to find Dennis's name, and the names of a few other men I'd known who died over there. The brother of a girl I knew in high school. Fellows who'd gotten killed over there twenty or twenty-five years ago, and I thought of them for the first time in years and looked for their names and there they were."

"Ah."

"And then I found myself doing what you mentioned having done, just walking along and reading names more or less at random. It was very moving. I'm glad I went, if just for that."

"But you didn't go just for that."

"No," I said, "I didn't. There was another name that I went to look for."

"And was it there?"

"No, it wasn't."

"So you went all the way there for nothing?"

"No," I said. "I found what I was looking for."

29

I met Ray Gruliow in a bar called Dirty Mary's a block from City Hall. They do a brisk lunch business there, the crowd running to lawyers and bureaucrats, the specialty of the house a shepherd's pie topped with cheddar and browned under the broiler, but we were an hour too early for lunch and the place was empty except for a couple of old lags at the bar who might have been left over from the night before.

Hard-Way Ray looked as though he, too, could have been left over from the night before. His face was drawn and he had dark circles under his eyes. He was in a booth with a cup of coffee when I got there, and I told the waiter I'd have the same.

"No he won't," Gruliow said. "He'll have an ordinary cup of coffee. Black, right?"

"Black," I agreed.

"And I'll have another the hard way," he said. That, he explained when the waiter had withdrawn, was with a shot in it. I told him I'd figured that out.

"Well, you're a fast study," he said. "I don't usually start the day this way, but I had a hell of a night last night. Anyway, I've been up for hours. I had to be across the way there when the gavel came down at nine o'clock. I got a postponement, but I had to show up and ask for it." He sipped his fortified coffee. "I like drinking out of coffee cups," he said. "Gives you an idea what Prohibition must have been like. And I like a shot of booze in a cup of coffee. It keeps the caffeine from making you too edgy."

"Tell me about it."

"You used to drink it that way?"

"Oh, once in a while," I said. I took out a copy of the sketch and handed it to him. He unfolded it, got a look at it, shook his head, and started to refold it. I put out a hand to interrupt the process.