Manhattan Is My Beat

people who lived in the Magic Kingdom: lawyers and secretaries and accountants and deliverymen. It wasn’t a magic place at all; it was just a big, teeming city filled with good people and bad people.
    That’s all. Just a city. Just people.
    It’s a factory, Rune. There’s shit and pollution. It makes a living for people and they pay taxes and give money to charity and buy sneakers for their children. Who grow up to be lawyers or teachers or musicians or people who work in other factories. It’s nothing more than that
.
    Once over the bridge she walked north toward the courthouses, past City Hall, staring up at the twisty gothic building—the north face made of cheap stone, not marble, because no one ever thought the city would spread north of the Wall Street district. Then into Chinatown and up through SoHo to Washington Square Park.
    Which, even this early, was a zoo. A medieval carnival. Jugglers, unicyclists, skateboard acrobats, kids slamming on guitars so cheap they were just rhythm instruments. She sat down on a bench, ignoring a tall Senegalese selling knockoff Rolexes, ignoring a beefy white teenager chanting, “
Hash, hash, sens, sens, smoke it up, sens
.” Women in designer jogging outfits rolled their expensive buggies of infant lawyers-to-be past dealers and stoned-out vets. It was Greenwich Village.
    Rune sat for an hour. Once, some vague resolve coalesced in her and she stood up. But it vanished swiftly and she sat down again, closed her eyes, and let the hot sun fall on her face.
    Who
were
they? Emily? Pretty Boy?
    Where was the money?
    She fell asleep again—until a Frisbee skimmed her head and startled her awake. She looked around, in panic, struggling to remember where she was, how she’d gotten there. She asked a woman the time. Noon. It seemed that a dozen people were staring at her suspiciously. She stood and walked quickly through the grass, north through the white, stone arch, a miniature Arc de Triomphe.
    They were old films, both of them.
    One was
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
, the John Wayne cavalry flick. It was playing now. Rune didn’t notice what the other one was. Maybe
The Searcher
or
Red River
.
Yellow Ribbon
was showing when she sat down. The seats in the old theater on Twelfth Street were stiff—thin padding under crushed fabric upholstery. There were only fifteen or so people in the revival house, which didn’t surprise her—the only time this place had ever been crowded was on Saturday night and when they were showing selections from the New York Erotic Film Festival.
    Watching the screen.
    She knew the old John Ford-directed western cold. She’d seen it six times. But today, it seemed to her to be just a series of disjointed images. Salty old Victor McLaglen, the distinguished graying Wayne, the intensified hues of the forty-year-old Technicolor film, the shoulder-punching innocent humor of the blue-bloused horse soldiers …
    But today the movie made no sense to her. It was disconnected images of men and women walking around on a huge rectangle of white screen, fifty feet in front of her. They spoke funny words, they wore odd clothing, they played into staged climaxes. It was all choreographed and it was all fake.
    Her anger built. Anger at the two dimensions of the film. The falsity, the illusion. She felt betrayed. Not only by Emily Symington or whoever she was, not only by what had happened in Brooklyn, but by something else. Something more fundamental about how she lived her life, about how the things she believed in had turned on her.
    She stood and left the theater. Outside, she bought a pair of thick-rimmed dark glasses from a street vendor and put them on. She turned the corner and walked down University Place to Washington Square Video.
    Tony fired her, of course.
    His words weren’t cute or sarcastic or obnoxious like she’d thought he’d be. He just glanced up and said, “You missed two shifts and you didn’t call. You’re fired. This time for real.”
    But she didn’t pay him much attention. She was staring at the newspaper on the counter, lying in front of Tony.
    The headline:
Mafia Witness Hit
.
    Which didn’t get her attention as quickly as the photo did: a grainy flashlit shot of Victor Symington’s town house in Brooklyn, the six surviving dwarfs, the shattered window. Rune grabbed the paper.
    “Hey,” Tony snapped. “I’m reading that.” One look at her eyes, though, and he stopped protesting.
    A convicted syndicate money launderer who