Manhattan Is My Beat

movie?”
    “There’s a bank robbery in the 1930s or ‘40s, okay? Somewhere down in Wall Street. The robbers’re holed up with a hostage in the bank and this young cop—you know, in love with the girl next door’s name is Mary,
that
kind of hero—goes into the bank to exchange himself for the hostage. Then he kills the robber…. And then what happens is the cop can’t resist. See, he’s in love and he wants to get married but he doesn’t have enough money. So he takes the loot and sneaks it out of the bank. Then he buries it someplace. The cops find out about it and throw him off the force and arrest him and he goes to jail.”
    “That’s all?”
    “I think he gets out of jail and gets killed before he digs up the money, only I got bored and didn’t pay a lot of attention.”
    Frankie said, “Hey, here it is. Listen.” He read from the video distributor catalogue. “
‘Manhattan Is My Beat
. Nineteen forty-seven.’ Oh, this is so bogus. Listen. ‘A gripping drama of a young, idealistic policeman in New York City, torn between duty and greed.’ “
    Rune glanced at the clock. Quitting time. She locked the door. “All I know is, if I ever made a movie, I’d shoot anyone who called it a ‘gripping drama.’ “
    Frankie said, “If I ever make a movie anybody can call it anything they want, as long as I, like, get to play on the sound track. Hey, it says here it’s based on a true story. About a real bank robbery in Manhattan. Somebody got away with a million dollars. It says it was never recovered.”
    Really? Rune hadn’t known that.
    “It’s late,” she told Frankie. “Let’s get out of here. I need to—”
    A loud knock on the glass door startled them. A threesome stood outside—a man and woman, arm in arm, and another woman. In their twenties. The couple was in black. Jeans, T-shirts. She was taller than he was, with very short yellow-white hair and pale, caked makeup. Dark purple lips. The man wore high black boots. He was thin. He had a long face, handsome and angular. High cheekbones. They both had yellow Sony Walkman wires and earphones around their necks. Her cord disappeared into his pocket. The look was Downtown Chic and they displayed it like war paint.
    The other woman was chubby, had spiky orange hair and she moved her head rhythmically—apparently to music that only she could hear (she
didn’t
wear a Walkman headset). The cut and color of her hair reminded Rune of Woody Woodpecker’s.
    Another knock.
    Frankie looked at the clock. “What do I say?”
    “One word,” Rune said. “The opposite of Open.”
    But then the young man in black touched the door like a curious alien and gave Rune a smile that said,
How can you do this to us?
He lifted his hands, pressed them together, praying, begging, then kissed his fingertips and looked directly into Rune’s eyes.
    Frankie called, “Like, we’re closed.”
    Rune said, “Open it.”
    “What?”
    “Open the door.”
    “But you said—”
    “Open the door.”
    Frankie did.
    The man outside said, “Just one tape, fair lady, just one. And then we’ll depart from your life forever….”
    “Except to return it,” Rune said.
    “There’s that, sure,” he said. Walking into the store. “But tonight, we need some amusement. Oh, sorely.”
    Rune said to the blond woman, “When do you have to have him back to Bellevue?”
    The woman shrugged.
    The Woodpecker said nothing but walked through the racks of movies, studying them while her head rocked back and forth.
    “Are you members?” Rune asked.
    The blonde flashed a WSV card.
    “Three minutes,” Rune said. “You’ve got three minutes.”
    The man: “Such a small splinter of life, don’t you think?”
    “Two and three-quarters,” Rune responded. “And counting.”
    Was this guy over the edge or not? Rune couldn’t decide.
    The blonde spoke. She asked Frankie, “What’s good?”
    “Like, I don’t know, I’m new here.”
    “We’re all new everywhere,” the young man said meaningfully, looking at Rune. “All the time. Every three minutes, every two and a half minutes. David Bowie said that. You like him?”
    “I
love
him,” Rune said. “How’d he get two different-colored eyes?”
    The man was looking at her own eyes. He didn’t answer. Didn’t matter; she forgot that she’d asked him a question.
    Rune found her lipstick and carefully put it on. She brushed out her hair with her fingers. She decided she should be more coy. Looked at her watch.