Manhattan Is My Beat

“Two minutes. Less now.”
    He asked her, “Want to go to a party?”
    Rune looked into his eyes. Brown, swimming, paisley. She said, “Maybe. Where?”
    “Your place, darling,” he said.
    Oh,
that
again.
    But he caught the expression on her face and, suddenly sounding much more down to earth, said, “All of us, I mean. A party. Wine and Cheez-Its. Innocent. Swear.”
    Rune looked at Frankie. He shook his shaggy head. “My sister’s gonna have her baby anytime. I gotta get home.”
    “Please?” Downtown Man asked.
    Why not? Rune thought. Recalling that her last date had been when there was snow piled up in the gutters.
    “One minute,” the man said. “Our time is almost depleted.” He was back in the ozone and was speaking to the blonde. She looked at the orange-haired friend and said, “We need a movie. Pick one.”
    “Me?” the Woodpecker asked.
    “Hurry,” the blonde whispered.
    The man: “We have less than a minute until the floods mount, the earth will tremble….”
    “Do you always talk that way?” Rune asked.
    He smiled.
    The Woodpecker grabbed a movie from the shelf. “How about this one?”
    “I can live with it,” the blonde answered grudgingly.
    Frankie checked them out.
    The man said, “Poof. Time’s up. Let’s go.”

CHAPTER SIX
     
    “This is an example of Stanford White’s finest work,” Rune told them.
    Riding up in a freight elevator. A metallic grinding sound, chains clinking. The smell was of grease and mold and wet concrete. Floors under construction, floors dark and abandoned, fell slowly past them. The sound of dripping water. It was a building in the TriBeCa neighborhood—the triangle below Canal Street—dating back to the nineteenth century.
    “Stanford White?” the blonde asked.
    “The architect,” Rune said.
    The mysterious man said, “He died for love.”
    He
knew
that? Rune thought. Impressed. She added, “Murdered by a jealous lover on the top floor of the original Madison Square Garden.”
    The blonde shrugged as if love were
never
worth dying for.
    The Woodpecker said, “Is this legal, living here?”
    “But what, of course, is legal?” the man mused. “I mean
whose
sets of laws apply? There are layers upon layers of laws we have to contend with. Some valid, some not.”
    “What
are
you talking about?” Rune asked him.
    He grinned and raised his eyebrows with ambiguous significance.
    His name had turned out to be Richard, which disappointed Rune. Somebody this truly renegade should have been named Jean-Paul or Vladmir.
    At the top floor the car stopped and they stepped out into a small room filled with boxes stenciled with block Korean letters, suitcases, a broken TV set, an olive-drab drum of civil defense drinking water. A dozen stacks of old beauty magazines. The Woodpecker strolled over to them and studied the covers. “Historical,” she said. The only door was labeled “Toilet” in blotchy black ink.
    “No windows, how can you stand it?” Richard asked. But Rune didn’t answer and disappeared behind a wall of cartons. She climbed an ornate metal stairway, which was in the middle of the room. From the floor above she gave a shrill whistle. “Yo, follow me…. Hey, you imagine the trouble I have getting groceries up here? As if I buy groceries.”
    The trio stopped cold when they reached the next floor. They stood in a glass turret: a huge gazebo on top of the building, its sides rising like a crown. Ten stories below, the city spread around them. The Empire State Building, distant but massive, stern like an indifferent giant out of a Maxfield Parrish illustration. Beyond it, the elegant Chrysler Building. Southward, the city swept away toward the white pillars of the Trade towers. To the east, the frilly Woolworth Building, City Hall. Farther east was a blanket of lights—Brooklyn and Queens. Opposite, the soft darkness of Jersey. Through the glass of the domed ceiling they could see low clouds, glowing pinkish from the city lights.
    “She’s out—my roommate,” Rune explained, looking around. “She’s playing Russian roulette in a singles bar. If I don’t find her back by this time, eating ice cream from the carton and watching sitcoms, that means she got lucky. Well, that’s how
she
describes it.”
    Rune pulled off her jacket; it went on a hanger, which she hooked onto the armature of a bulbless floor lamp that held an ostrich-feather boa and a fake-zebra-skin sport coat. She unlaced her boots and set them on the