Ambient 06 - Going, Going, Gone

second he was gone; he’d been replaced. He turned into a young woman in her twenties, wearing a Yankees cap, her blonde hair pulled through the opening in the back and tied in a ponytail. She wore a sleeveless guinea T and dancer’s black tights. On her feet she wore the fanciest-looking sneakers I ever saw. The wires for her hearing aid ran from her ears down to her waist. She trotted past us, looking neither right nor left; if I hadn’t stepped out of her way, I think she’d have run right into me.
    »Eulie –«
    »Seen.«
    We stood there for a minute or so, frozen in place as we watched her turn the corner at Third and head south. »What happened? Eulie, who was that? What happened to the old coot?«
    »Unknown,« she said, wide-eyed. Both of us glanced upward; nothing, still, but blue sky. When we returned our gaze to the sidewalk ahead of us, we watched three dented metal garbage cans turn into a pile of black plastic bags filled with something that didn’t seem to be sand; they barricaded the sidewalk, safeguarding it from Eighteenth Street traffic. A pair of pigeons poked along the curb, filling up on seed some kind soul had dumped for them. One turned into a sparrow, and flew away.
    »Let’s get inside,« I said, hurrying her along to my building’s stoop. »Quick.«
    »Walter, something’s happening –«
    »I know. I don’t want to know what, yet.«
    We made it up the stairs much quicker than I figured we would; nothing within my building changed – the dark wainscotting still lined the walls up to where the painted tin began, there were still white tile swastikas embedded in the scuffed red of the ground floor hall – but somehow the look of everything seemed just as frightening as it had started to seem, outside. We didn’t pass any of my neighbours on our way up; whether they were inside their apartments, or somewhere around the corner, I wondered if they were still themselves. The humidity was terrible, that afternoon; we were sweating buckets by the time we got to my floor. I had my keys out and ready, and was about to shove them into the locks when someone opened the door for us.
    »Well, well, well,« Bennett said, sitting in my chair, at my kitchen table, one foot propped up on the stove as if he owned the place. »Here’s our wandering boy now.«
    Before we could step back out the doorman, a fairly hulking bruiser wearing Secret Service glasses and with the look of Agency muscle about him seized both Eulie and myself, dragging us inside. Bennett was looking up at a sign I’d nailed up over the door leading to the music room, one I’d found hung on the fence at Tompkins Square the year before, NO LEFT TURNS UNSTONED.
    »You’re a card, Walter,« he said, evidencing a fine case of the smirks. »A regular card.«
    »Can’t say I’m as pleased to see you as you are to see me, my brother,« I said. »Any special occasion for this break-in?«
    »Where were you, anyway? We looked high and low.«
    »You’d never look high enough.«
    Another big grin flashed in our direction. Off in the music room I heard the sound of crunching, as if someone were eating celery. Sartorius stepped out of the room, one of my discs in his Nazi mitt. From ten feet away I could see the Paramount label. Holding it out in front of him – farsighted, no doubt, but to admit the need for glasses would have been a sign of inferiority – he read aloud the pertinent information. » Sugar Tin Blues. Charles Patton. This is your American Negro music?«
    »Yes. Put it down.«
    He lobbed it discus-like across the room; when it struck the wall just above the sink, that was the end of Charlie.
    »When the performers are gone,« he said, »why should there be music?«
    »And I figured you spent all your money on drugs,« Bennett said.
    I craned my neck and managed to glimpse what remained in the music room. Every shelf was emptied; the floor was several inches deep in shattered shellac and black wax. Sartorius’s footsteps crunched as if on fresh-fallen snow.
    »So Walter, have you seen the papers?« Bennett asked. »I know you don’t usually pay much attention but I thought this morning’s headlines might have caught your eye.«
    »Get out of my house,« I said. »I told you I quit. I –«
    »Oh, shut up,« he said. »I have to hand it to you, though. Mission accomplished with a minimum of bloodshed.« Clearly he didn’t know about the Astor; not that it mattered, at this point. »Bobby out of the running, thanks