Dark Maze

rich!” he said. “The circus!”
    “Did you ever get to paint what you wanted to paint? I mean, did you ever paint seriously?”
    He said to Nobody, “Ho, ho, did I paint or did I paint? Was I serious or was I serious? And, how come did I paint what I painted?”
    To me, he said, "Serious paintings? Them I got loads of hanging around town. Here and there, like me; not so anybody should notice, also like me. Which is how come it’s such a big goddamn joke they call me Picasso, hey?”
    He added, “Matter of fact, friendly, guess where I got one Painting hanging as we speak?”
    “Where?”
    “In a bar where you yourself hang out regular...“
    The bus groaned to a stop in front of us, killing my last chance to ask Picasso exactly how long he had been watching me. And exactly why.
    Picasso stepped aboard.
    Then—just before the pleated doors closed behind him, before he walked to the rear of the bus and sat down, and laughed and laughed at me through the broad back window as I stood there on Tenth Avenue staring at him like a dopey cop—he said:
    “Yah—and since you’re interested—maybe you want to know that I am very sick to death of all the how comes of my busted-up life. Which is how come I am working a plan, a plan to kill what’s been responsible for making me fall so far and spectacular as you seen I have fell...”

TWO

    In the city that I sometimes love and sometimes hate, I have been assaulted many scores of times by fists, bottles, sticks, metal pipes and miscellaneous blunt objects. I have also been spat on, stoned and shot at (by bullets in all such cases, save for the time I chased through Central Park in unsuccessful pursuit of a perpetrator with a bow and quiver of arrows). And then, of course, there are the unsolicited homicidal sentiments from the likes of “Picasso.”
    Such events come with the territory of Manhattan, whether or not you are a cop. Which, of course, I am.
    I am Detective Neil Hockaday and I carry the gold shield of the New York Police Department, which has assigned me to a special squad known as the SCUM Patrol, which very fittingly stands for Street Crimes Unit, Manhattan.
    To most, I am just plain Hock. And mostly I am out doing my job in the streets every day, dressed like a plain ordinary vagrant so that you would not likely have reason or desire to look my way.
    But if you did, you might reasonably believe that you see in me a man sadder but wiser for all the times he has dealt with life’s ruder angels. At least that is how I see myself; at least, I try to keep in mind the only clear fact of life in the kind of place I live: New York, where everybody mutinies and nobody deserts.
    The clear fact is that my city is an incubator for crazies. Every day of every year there are maybe a thousand budding crazies who hit town. All of them are dead sure they have found the Emerald City, and that very soon they will swing on stars. One or two of them will be right, or lucky. And by such crazy odds, we know that New York is not Kansas.
    I know, I know.
    And I know the others—the ones who discover that travel is not necessarily broadening, and that New York offers few tender embraces for its immigrants.
    Some of these will return home to make of that what they can. Some settle into lives in New York that are remarkably similar to life in Kansas.
    Some get mean. Their lives grow as rough and cracked as plowed cement. Then finally they become the dark, unseen essence of the Emerald City—falling men finding their shelter in crazy shadows—and the bailiwick of the SCUM Patrol.
    There is precious little we can do to protect ourselves against the perils of falling men. Is that not so?
    And all I am is one mere cop, bom into the world where I live and work. Like all others here, I am sometimes persuaded that life in New York is a constant struggle to die of natural causes.

    So there stood I on that April day, staring dumbly at the wire-frame spectacles and the red-gray goatee and the bouncing beret in the back window of a disappearing bus. I told myself, Okay, so remember this, pal: you’re at liberty, ¡ you’re not obliged to get involved. Besides which, nothing happened.
    Is that not so?
    Now I no longer wished to think. Tomorrow would be soon enough for that. Now I wanted a drink.

    I had never studied it before, though it had been there all this time. Odd how I had scarcely even noticed the thing. Well, but maybe this was because it was so unassuming and