The Thomas Berryman Number

The window is up ten stories over Central Park South. The building is picturesque, a dark, towering graystone hotel.

A famous fascist banker once killed himself out of one of the nearby floor-to-ceiling windows. He tied a rope to a radiator, jumped, hanged himself.

Because his neck is thick and his hair so black, Berryman looks fierce from the back. Face-on it’s different. People trust him right away. Nearly everyone does.

Thomas Berryman says he’s a hard worker, a brooder when it comes to work. He says he’d read all of Charles Dickens by the time he was fourteen, but that he just did it to accomplish a task.

He’s a broad-shouldered man, with beautiful woolly hair, and a seemingly darker, bushy, Civil War mustache.

His look reminded me of Irish football players, or at least my limited sports-desk experience with their pictures. Also, he would be right for Tiparillo cigar ads.

On this particular June morning, he flicked on a Carousel projector’s fan and tugged on a customary wake-up cigar.

He pulled curtains on a full wall of glass, and Central Park’s lollipop trees and hansom cabs disappeared. The Plaza Hotel disappeared.

One lazy-bodied horse in a blue straw hat disappeared last and caused Berryman to laugh. He hadn’t worked for four months. He’d played in the sun at MazatlÁn and Caneel Bay. He was fresh as a rose.

Thomas Berryman sometimes spoke of his individual jobs as numbers. He would talk about getting ready for another little number; about having performed a number. In that respect, this would be the Horn number.

For the next three days he arduously prepared for his meeting with Jimmie Lee Horn. He read everything ever written about Horn, and everything Horn himself had written. He read everything that was available, twice. Until his eyes began to hurt. Until his brain wore raw.

Sitting in his cramped library, he was thorough as an archbishop’s secretary, wore no cowboy boots, wore high-priced cologne, read Larry McMurtry books to relax. Thomas Berryman’s

idÉe fixe

was to

study, study, study,

and then

study

some more.

Life with Berryman had been good to Ben Toy.

He lived in a six-hundred-and-ninety-five-dollar-a-month penthouse. He owned and occasionally operated the Flower & Toy Shop on East 89th Street in Yorkville. The tiny florist shop was his hobby. Something he felt made him more than just a wiseass cowboy with a few dollars to throw around in bars.

One afternoon as he was locking up the shop—his free arm was holding a leather satchel; his cigarette was tilted up at a rakish angle—he was very suddenly drained of every ounce of cool, or bourgeois chic, or whatever it is that currently describes the Upper East Side demeanor.

Toy thought he had seen Harley Wynn watching him from the corner of East End Avenue.

First Toy squinted down the street into the sun. Then he started to jog, his handbag making him look slightly feminine in spite of his bulk.

Wynn—whoever it was—turned to light a cigarette out of the wind. Very Alfred Hitchcock. Then he disappeared into the chimney-red brownstone on the corner.

Toy ran up and stopped on the sidewalk in front of the house. He started to call out. “Wynn,” he shouted huskily. Up to the rooftops.

“Wynn! Yo! Hey Wynn. Hey you fucking asshole!” he shouted. “Hey, you!”

There were lots of blue and red flowerpots in the windows on the top floor. No lights on the second floor. No Wynn.

A little old woman in a whorehouse-red kimono came out on her terrace to look at him. Big dogs inside the house started barking. Doormen were peering down the street like the town gossips they were.

Ben Toy finally hailed a yellow cab dawdling on the side street. He took it over to the West Side. He popped a Stelazine tablet en route, and consequently forgot to tell Berryman about the man who looked like Harley John Wynn.

I bent over closer to Ben Toy. Either the mattress or his pajamas smelled of urine. “Harley Wynn,” I said.

His eyes popped open. They were blue. He’d been on the verge of falling asleep.

“Thorazine.” He licked dry, chapped lips. “Makes you sleepy as hell.”

“Just a few more questions,” I said. “A couple of important ones.”

Toy sighed. Then he nodded.

“Was Harley Wynn definitely a southerner?” I asked.

“Sure.” Toy curled up on the end of the bare mattress. He shivered. “Just as much as you are … Could I have a blanket?” He asked Asher in a sweet, boyish voice. It was a strange sound coming out of a big man with two days’ stubble on his chin.

“Answer his questions,” the aide told him. “You know you can have a blanket, Ben. So just cut the crap, all right?”

“Can I have a blanket

now?”

Asher pointed at me. He lighted up his pipe and stared out the window into blackness.

Toy struggled upright and sat with his bare back against the plaster wall. He was starting to pout, I thought. I hoped the aide knew what he was doing.

“Do you know where Wynn came from?” I asked.

Toy’s answer was curt. “Tennessee.”

“Are you sure?”

“I

said

Tennessee didn’t I.”