Dark Maze

writer ought to write. Which is know everything there is to know about your subject, then toss it all out except for the essentials. Hemingway called it resonance. Princess would call it soul.”
    Then Ruby folded her hands and tucked them under her chin and leaned forward. I leaned forward, too, and kissed her. And the Little Kitchen band played “Old Devil Moon,” and I believe that was the exact moment when I knew that Ruby Flagg and Í were slow-dancing together.
    “You haven’t told me yet if you believe in the Emerald City,” I said.
    “No, but I believe in the Yellow Brick Road,” Ruby said.
    “Along which, the advertising dodge was, what, a pit stop?”
    “You might say. The trick was to get back on the road after the stop.”
    “And how did you do that?”
    “One day, I just got up from my big desk in my corner office with the view of the East River clear down to the Williamsburg Bridge. I walked out and never returned. Not even for my final paycheck...“
    Damn me! Damn my thoughts for drifting back to Charlie and Celia! What about Charlie Furman’s failures as a husband and father? “The wife, she went rotten. The kid went Christian. ” What about the taller man in the snapshot from a happy day at Coney Island back in the summer of ’ 54 ?
    „...So now, as you know, I am living over the shop. Over my very own little theatre. Only we do real plays there, written by real playwrights. My apartment upstairs is smaller than my old office uptown, and I draw less than ten percent of what I used to make.”
    I said, “Made, not earned.”
    “That’s right.”
    “And I suppose you would tell me that you have never been happier.”
    “Are you accusing me of having a mind that’s easy to read?”
    I laughed. Then I kissed her again.
    And then we just ate our supper and ordered sweet-potato pie and coffee for dessert. Then Ruby asked, in all innocence, “What’s it like being a cop?”
    Which is the perfect question to ask a cop when you want to be entertained because there are things that happen in the life of a cop that nobody who writes books and movies about cops could ever dream up.
    For instance, there was the perfectly usual morning a few years ago when I stopped in at my usual neighborhood spoon and ordered my usual eggs over easy with sausages and rye toast and black coffee. And when I had finished the mess, I left the usual dollar tip. Thus fortified with usualness, I hit the street. And then the street hit me, in a manner of speaking.
    “Outta my way, bub!”
    This was shrieked at me by an agitated heavy-hipped curly-haired crone in a straw bonnet and pink dress with cabbage roses all over it. She looked like the wallpaper in the parlor of the Hell’s Kitchen apartment where I grew up, which is not so far from my Hell’s Kitchen apartment today.
    Anyway, the crone backed up her words with a right straight-arm to my Adam’s apple, which just about decked me. So I stepped out of harm’s way to see what her rush was all about.
    What she was trying to do, it appeared, was catch up with a skinny punk sauntering down the street with the handbag he had recently snatched off her shoulder. The crone was making plenty of good squawk, but nobody on the street besides me seemed to care about it, which did not make it much of a sporting proposition. The poor old thing with the mean right had too many years on her and too much ballast. Well down the street now, the punk turned around and laughed at us both.
    I went over and asked her what was up. She had stopped, and was catching her breath. “Honest t’God,” she said, “would you look at that little snot down there? He swiped my purse and my rent money inside of it and my keys and my last bottle of Kaopectate. And it ain’t nothing but a joke to him. He’s thinking he’ll get clean away with it. He’s prob’ly one of them crack junkies. Where’s a goddamn cop when you need one?”
    I did not have the chance right then to introduce myself professionally because just then the punk started coming back toward us. I suppose he was a crackhead; dopers do very crazy things, like right away returning to the scene of a crime.
    “Now’s my chance!” the old lady said.
    She waited until he was about a half-block away, then she did something as amazing and exciting and dead-on gorgeous as anything I have seen speeding off Phil Niekro’s knuckles back when he was on the mound up at Yankee Stadium in the bottom of the ninth with two away