Free Manhattan Noir 2 by Lawrence Block

Make it a mistake.
    Suddenly there’s open space between the cradle and the receiver, and I’ve done it. I’ve picked it up. It’s just as easy as pulling out one of your own teeth by the roots.
    The prayer gets scratched. The call is for me, it’s not a wrong number. For me, all right, every inch of the way. I can tell from the opening words. Only—it’s not the one I feared; it’s friendly, a friendly call no different from what other people get.
    A voice from another world, almost. Yet I know it so well. Always like this, never a cloud on it; always jovial, always noisy. When a thing should be said softly, it says it loudly; when a thing should be said loudly, it says it louder still. He never identifies himself, never has to. Once you’ve heard his voice, you’ll always know him.
    That’s Johnny for you—the pal of a hundred parties. The bar-kick of scores of binges. The captain of the second-string team in how many foursome one-night stands? Every man has had a Johnny in his life sometime or other.
    He says he’s been calling my apartment since Wednesday and no answer: what happened to me?
    I play it by ear. “Water started to pour down through the ceiling, so I had to clear out till they get it repaired…. No, I’m not on a tear…. No, there’s nobody with me, I’m by myself…. Do I? Sound sort of peculiar? No, I’m all right there’s nothing the matter, not a thing.”
    I pass my free hand across the moist glisten on my forehead. It’s tough enough to be in a jam, but it’s tougher still to be in one and not be able to say you are.
    “How did you know I was here? How did you track me to this place? … You went down the yellow pages, hotel by hotel, alphabetically. Since three o’clock yesterday afternoon? … Something to tell me?”
    His new job had come through. He starts on Monday. With a direct line, and two, count ’em, two secretaries, not just one. And the old bunch is giving him a farewell party. A farewell party to end all farewell parties. Sardi’s, on 44th. Then they’ll move on later to some other place. But they’ll wait here at Sardi’s for me to catch up. Barb keeps asking, Why isn’t your best-man-to-be here with us?
    The noise of the party filters through into my ear. Ice clicking like dice in a fast-rolling game. Mixing sticks sounding like tiny tin flutes as they beat against glass. The laughter of girls, the laughter of men. Life is for the living, not the already dead.
    “Sure, I’ll be there. Sure.”
    If I say I won’t be—and I won’t, because I can’t—he’ll never quit pestering and calling me the rest of the night. So I say that I will, to get off the hook. But how can I go there, drag my trouble before his party, before his friends, before his girl? And if I go, it’ll just happen there instead of here. Who wants a grandstand for his downfall? Who wants bleachers for his disgrace?
    Johnny’s gone now, and the night goes on.
    Now the evening’s at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there’s a lull—like the calm in the eye of a hurricane—before the reverse tide starts to set in.
    The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Danny’s and Lindy’s—yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go—and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from—and that’s home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: New York, New York, it’s a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery’s down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground —
    Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it’s a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart;