The Erection Set

We were halfway down the block before my friend could find the right words. I knew his smattering of French had let him in on the conversation, and the look he gave me was almost one of awe. “How the hell do you do it, Dog? Nobody gets a suit out of Weller-Fabray under four weeks. It takes a dozen fittings and ten character references to even get a shirt there!”

“It’s all a game, pal, and I haven’t got time to play games.”

“Baloney. You know they wouldn’t make a suit for the mayor? They refused that polo-playing millionaire and Count Stazow because they thought they were boorish. Ha!”

“You got in, didn’t you?”

“With a knockdown from two bankers who owed me a favor and an abject air of proper humility for great crafts-men. I’m not listed in their golden file case, but I get my picture in the papers on all the right occasions and don’t demean their product. But you ... you walk in like a slob, all soaking wet, and they lay out the red carpet.”

“They know class, kid.”

“Shit.” He ducked his head against a blast of rain. “Now where’re we going?”

“Downtown to Barney’s. I’m going to pull a couple things off the racks for tonight. Might even get a raincoat if this weather gets any worse.”

“I wish I could figure you out, Dog.” Lee gave me a nervous, sidewise glance. “Frankly, I still think you’re crazy. You’re trouble on the hoof.”

“Don’t let your imagination run away with you.”

“Then why lay a trail as broad as the Hudson River behind you?”

“Why not?”

“Because you have too much to hide,” he said. “Like that money.” Lee paused a moment, then pushed me into the alcove of an office building. “Your French is perfect, buddy. How many other languages do you speak?”

I shrugged and looked at him curiously. “A few.” “Turkish?”

I nodded.

“Any Arabic?”

I nodded again. “Why?”

“Some interesting items have been showing in the newspapers lately. You know anything about narcotics, Dog?”

My face was cold and hard when I looked at him and he pulled back instinctively. “Never touch the stuff,” I said.

Lee squeezed his mouth shut until his lips were a thin line, but he wouldn’t let go of it. “There has to be a reason for somebody dropping out of sight like you did. For showing up the way you did too. I thought I knew you, and maybe I did back there during the war, but I sure as hell don’t know you now at all. Talk about enigmas, you’re the perfect example. What happened, Dog?”

“We all get a little older, kid.”

“Okay, let it go at that. You’re still the guy who saved my ass too many times, so I’m sticking with it. You got me shook, but the ride is wild. Maybe I’m as sappy as you are. Only don’t blame me if I get the shakes and suddenly cut out. I’m just not geared to this kind of living. Goose bumps come awfully easy and last a long time. You got me so I’m looking over my shoulder half the time. I’m beginning to think I’m back in the blue in a P-51D peering into the sun for bogeys.”

“Good thinking, then. Keep your head out of the cockpit and you won’t get it shot off.”

“That was the first thing you ever told me,” Lee said. “I get the chills hearing it said again. At least the last time you were talking about the war.”

“Everything’s a war,” I told him.

He looked into my eyes, shivered involuntarily, then turned his raincoat collar up around his neck. “Okay, buddy, so be it. I kind of have the feeling you really don’t need me bird-dogging you around, so I’m going to peel off and get back to work. The date still on for tonight?”

“Sure. I want to meet all your beautiful people.”

“Look a little decent, will you? They’re kind of important. You really going to get clothes off the rack at Barney’s?”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

He grinned at me, spotted a cab coming and ran out to the curb to flag it down, then held the door open for me so I wouldn’t get any wetter. He stood there shaking his head in annoyance when I told the driver to take me to Barney’s.

They built New York’s first skyscraper downtown at Twenty-third Street and called it the Flatiron Building, an ornate, old-fashioned triangular antique that rose on the south side of Twenty-third at the juncture of Fifth Avenue and Broadway where it stared out majestically on a city about to explode into growth, and remained a couple of generations later, still staring, but with windowed eyes a little sad and clouded with the dirt the new age had thrown up. It was a wistful building, its orginal name and history almost forgotten now, but a building that had lived through many years and a multitude of experiences, yet still stood like a miniature fortress planted in the middle of an anthill.

On the seventeenth floor, in the pointed nose of the structure, Al DeVecchio had his office. The door had triple locks and the gold-leaf sign simply read L.D.V., Inc., beautifully ambiguous, not at all encouraging to solicitors, yet in certain areas well known and caustically respected.