A Diet of Treacle (2 page)

But he wasn’t dressed very well, he realized—just dirty chinos and a t-shirt. Besides, his crew-cut had grown out to the point where he ought to start combing it or have it cut again. But he felt so cool, so utterly cool, that all the rest didn’t matter.

He walked to the girl’s table, slowly, easily, his eyes fixed on her face. She did not peer up, not even when he stood over her to stare down at her so intensely he was certain she must have been aware of his presence. Then he drummed a tattoo on the table-top. Startled, she raised her eyes.

“Hello,” he said, pleasantly. “Is your name Bernice?”

A second or two elapsed before she could reply. At last she shook her head rapidly.

“I didn’t think it was,” he said. “Neither is mine.”

She said nothing, her expression one of bewilderment.

“You look awfully familiar,” he said, pushing onward. “Have you ever been in Times Square?”

“Why I—”

“Great place, Times Square. Did you ever stop to think that there’s a phrenology parlor on Eighth Avenue that opens at 4:30 in the morning?”

Wide-eyed, lips parted, she seemed prettier than ever.

“I know what you’re doing,” he confided. “You’ve got the rest of these people fooled but I’m wise to you. They think you’re just drinking a cup of cappuccino but I know for a fact you’re planning the Portuguese invasion.”

He waited for that to sink in, wondering at the same time what in the world he was talking about. Then he flashed her a great smile and fastened one hand on the chair opposite her. She tried to say something but he beat her to it, timing everything with intuitive flawlessness.

“You’re very pretty,” he said, “even if your name isn’t Bernice and you’ve never been to Times Square and you don’t happen to be planning the Portuguese invasion. You don’t mind if I sit down, do you?”

For a moment she gave the impression of speechlessness, as if lost somewhere in left field, he thought, and he was on the point of sitting down without waiting for a reply when she finally managed utterance.

“Go ahead,” she said. “I mean…you probably would anyway, wouldn’t you?” He pulled back the chair and sat down, longing to glance at Shank triumphantly. Instead, he smiled at the girl.

“If you’re name isn’t Bernice, what is it?” Joe Milani inquired.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s Anita.”

“Hello, Anita.”

“Hello.”

“Do you live here in the Village, Anita?” He knew that she didn’t but it was as good a question as any.

“No, I’m just visiting.”

“Where do you live?”

“Uptown.”

“Uptown,” he said, “takes in a lot of ground.”

“116th Street between Second and Third.”

“Yeah? Way up in wop Harlem?”

She stiffened.

“What’s the matter?” He put the question with some concern.

“Do you have to use that word?”

“What word?” It was hard to avoid laughing but he made it.

“Wop,” she said softly. “I don’t like that word.”

This time he let himself smile. “I am called Joseph Milani,” he said in perfect Italian. In English he added, “So it is all right if I use the word?”

Anita, by now off-balance, was attempting to say something but she obviously had not the slightest idea of what it should be, so her mouth moved soundlessly. Confidently, he reached out a hand and let the fingertips touch hers.

She neither drew away nor flinched.

He examined her again. He decided her body was exceptionally good, decidedly not a trial to behold, a little on the slender side but starring breasts firm and well-shaped.

Joe considered he had her practically hypnotized. He said a silent prayer of thanks to the pot, flashed her a smile showing his white teeth, and pressed her fingers gently.

“Anita,” he said, “The Palermo is a pleasant place, but it’s too hot and too stuffy and too limited. Let’s make it.”

“Make it?”

“Split,” he said. “Cut out. Leave.”

“Oh.”

“Come on,” he said. He stood up; mesmerized, she stood up, too. He waited while she paid her check. Then she rejoined him, and he took her hand in his. Her hand felt very soft, but he resisted the temptation to give it a gentle squeeze. Leading her out of the coffee-house, he glanced at Shank.

But Shank was in another world, his head lolling back, his eyes veiled, and one hand lying limp on the table before him like a discarded napkin.

   Leon Marsten, whom nobody had called anything but Shank for the last four years, sat up abruptly at four-seventeen P.M. and blinked rapidly. He fumbled for a cigarette and lit it. Laboriously, he dragged smoke into his lungs and held it there. He blew it out slowly in a long, thin column that floated languidly toward the ceiling. When he finished the cigarette, he dropped it and elaborately ground it into the linoleum with the heel of his tennis shoe until it was completely shredded. The ritual completed, he turned and methodically surveyed the coffee shop. Satisfied that nobody was watching him, he stood up and strode out the door onto Bleecker Street.

To hell with The Palermo, he thought—the coffee was on the house for a change.

He walked west on Bleecker, moving quickly but not really in a hurry. At Macdougal Street he turned uptown and walked past coffee-houses and restaurants and gift shops toward Washington Square Park. Once in the park, he paused to drink at the water fountain. A little later, he stopped again to buy an ice cream sucker from one of the Good Humor Men haunting the Square, and resumed his stride as he ate his ice cream.

He halted at an empty park bench near the circle at the foot of Fifth Avenue, and sat down. From the back pocket of his dungarees he pulled a paperback novel. He relaxed on the bench and turned the pages of the book.

Shank was twenty years old. He had been born a little more than twenty years before to Jeff and Lucy Marsten who, not long after the boy’s birth, had mutually agreed to a divorce. Jeff Marsten had then married a girl named Susan Lockridge, the two remaining in El Cajon, California, while Lucy and her son had moved to Berkeley where, in no time at all, Lucy had once again become a bride, this time to a Mr. Bradley Galton. Shortly thereafter, Mr. and Mrs. Galton, son Leon in tow, had pulled up stakes to settle in Los Angeles.

But Leon—Shank—had developed an instant and abiding dislike for the fat and ruddy Bradley Galton. Shank had tried to compensate for his deepening hatred toward his stepfather by intensifying what he had at first felt to be love for his mother; but Shank’s love evidently could not have run too deep, because the fact that his mother had married Bradley had been enough to mock the boy’s desire to feel more affectionate toward her, and the more he had thought about that, the less delight had he felt in her presence. And after she had given birth to a baby girl, Cindy, Shank could feel no affection for his mother at all.

For that matter, Shank had not liked anybody, not until much, much later.

He grew up alone, a quiet, moody boy who went his own way and thought his own thoughts. He was more clever than intelligent, but his grades in school concealed the fact neatly. School was a challenge for him, not to work, but to avoid work and cause trouble. In the beginning he displayed no particular imagination at causing trouble. When he played with other children, in the days when there were still other children who would play with him, he broke their toys or fought with them or beat them up. He was always short and always thin, but his wiry frame and superb coordination won him every fight. On the other hand, it should also be mentioned that he never took on a fight unless he could count on victory.

Growing older, he grew more inventive. All through grammar school, Halloween was a special treat for him, but he never played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The other children in the neighborhood gave homeowners the option of trick-or-treat; Shank dispensed with the treats and soaped windows. That was the first year. The second year he observed Halloween he realized that playing the trick did not have to rule out the treat. He collected a huge bagful of candy that year. He also broke fifteen windows and slashed two tires with a paring knife he stole from the kitchen.

After that he habitually carried the paring knife in an improvised sheath. When he was fourteen he threw the paring knife into a sewer—he had purchased a switchblade, a well-made stiletto whose six-inch blade of keenly honed steel sprang instantly into position at the touch of the proper button.

Shank could not seem to stay out of trouble, and his stepfather, Bradley Galton, was constantly fishing him out. Shank committed shoplifting, vandalism, smoking in school—anything minor or major. After the boy’s second arrest for stealing, from which he was released once again into Bradley Galton’s custody, the judge recommended psychiatric treatment.

Bradley Galton thought that an excellent idea. So did Lucy. A psychiatrist was consulted and an appointment set up for Shank.

Shank ridiculed the whole idea. He never kept the appointment.

A month before his sixteenth birthday Shank met the first people he found he could like. There were about twenty of them, slum kids, members of a gang called the Royal Ramblers. And they liked Shank. They provided him with his name, a name he could get a lot more high on than Leon. They named him Shank because of the knife he always carried and the way he dug it. After the Royal Ramblers gave him the name, he refused to answer to Leon.

They also provided him with his first woman. A broken-down, feeble-minded thing the Royal Ramblers kept around for utility, but she had a passable face, a willing body and she knew how to knock off the one thing she was good for. Shank took her on a mattress on the Ramblers’ clubhouse floor, a vacant basement room on San Pedro Street, while four other boys waited their turns.

Shank enjoyed the girl. Sex had been a mystery and one to which he had not paid too much attention. There had been no friends to talk with or tell dirty jokes to. He had waited, and now he knew what sex was all about.

Naturally, other girls followed. What Shank lacked in handsomeness was made up for by his startling black hair and eyes in brilliant contrast to skin white as death, and his catlike walk enhanced the general hypnotic quality. He was usually successful with the girls who hung out with the Ramblers, and if a girl had any reservations all he had to do was show her the knife. He would take it from his pocket, snap the button and the girl’s eyes would fasten on the long blade of cold steel.

He never actually had to use the knife on a girl. He never had to play things the least bit rough, for that matter, because the combination of his cold, black eyes in a cold, white face coupled with his showing of six inches of cold steel was enough to warm any of the girls he met. And he liked the way they responded after he showed them the knife. Sometimes he would display the knife to a girl already willing to yield to him.

Friendship, a name, sex and marijuana—these were the gifts of the Ramblers. They were the gifts Shank wanted, too, and he indulged himself for the next two-and-a-half years. He dropped out of high school as soon as he passed the compulsory education age limit and he lived on the streets with his friends. His home was a place to eat breakfast at mid-morning and to sleep at night. He ate the rest of his meals at lunch counters on Fifth Street and spent the rest of his time doing next to nothing.

Shank was nineteen when his girl announced she was pregnant.

She wasn’t simply a nice roll in the hay, this girl. She was two years younger than Shank, a virgin when he’d met her, a pretty half-Mexican of almond-shaped eyes and a full-blown figure. She slept with him when he wanted her and spent time with him when he tolerated her presence.

At no time did she expect Shank to marry her; she knew better. Neither did she want to have a baby, so she asked him to give her money for an abortion. There was this doctor a friend of hers knew, she explained, and he would perform an abortion for two hundred dollars.

Shank considered the matter quite carefully. An abortion cost two hundred dollars, but a plane ticket to New York City cost less than half that sum. Simple economics, and a long-present desire to live in New York, influenced Shank to board a plane three days later as he wondered how long it would be before his mother missed the hundred and fifty dollars he had stolen from her.

He never left New York thereafter. A day after his arrival he settled in a single room on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side, a roach-infested cell without a sink and featuring one sagging bed for furniture. The condition of the room could not repel Shank as long as it rented at four dollars a week.

Still, money threatened to be a problem. The thought of a job occurred to him and he went so far as to buy a paper to glance through the classified section. He noted the jobs he thought he might be able to obtain, their hours, pay and type of work, and he promptly rolled up the paper and flipped it out the window. That was the last he thought about jobs.

A day or so later he drifted west to Greenwich Village and wandered around. He met a girl who managed to deploy him into a conversation. She was several years older than he, and a little overweight. She thought Shank interesting. He thought her stupid.

But before night sank into morning he had borrowed ten dollars from her, bought half an ounce of marijuana, taken her back to his room and made hectic love to her. Then she hurried back to the Bronx where she lived with her mother and father. When she returned the next afternoon he threw her out. She tried a second time, so he showed her the knife and explained in a confidential tone if she ever annoyed him again he would stick the knife in her stomach. As he pointed out the risk, his eyes were half-closed and his lips slightly curved. The plump girl tried to laugh, but it emerged as a hiccup.

He never saw her again.

At first Shank missed the Royal Ramblers. He made vague overtures to the neighborhood gang but they were Puerto Ricans, so he made no supreme efforts to work his way in. Besides, he was older than they were.

By the end of the first week New York began to bore him. He took what marijuana he had left, cut it with a sack of Bull Durham, rolled the result and peddled it at half-a-buck a cigarette. This gave him a little more capital, but money remained tight. The upshot was that he went down to the draft board to enlist. He could never determine just why he tried to join the army. In any case, he was rejected because the psychiatrist decided Shank was psychopathic, naturally withholding the information. At the time, the army appealed to Shank, perhaps because he felt a little lonely and out of place. But then he discovered there were others like himself, and he was glad the army had turned him down.