“It was pretty bad out there today ma’am.”
“You were outdoors? Working? I hope not.”
“Indoors ma’am, studying.”
“Oh you’re a student? How marvellous. A gentleman and a scholar, I can’t say I am surprised.”
“Oh I wouldn’t go as far as that. Not even close.”
“Mr Cottlebridge and I have lived here for a long time, and this area, Robert, isn’t what it used to be. It’s nice to still be able to rely on one’s neighbours.”
“Well you know you can count on me, Mrs Cottlebridge. If you ever need anything – I’m in 5B. And if that’s a little far up – ask Mr Jones to come up and get me. He’s always around.”
Mr Jones, the caretaker, occupied a small apartment on the ground floor, behind the street-front shops. A young man who seemed perpetually distracted, he’d somehow (and perhaps unwittingly) inherited the position from the late Mr Jones; who died of a heart attack on the day of his fiftieth birthday, which he had celebrated by visiting his native Wales. It was reported he had been laughing at a joke shortly after a fine dinner and had simply fallen from his seat, dead before he hit the ground. The journey had been his first back after almost three decades of exile – and as the family did not contemplate the extravagance of returning him to the United States, Jones Senior was buried among the beautiful green hills of home, alongside twenty generations of his family and less than six miles from the cottage in which he had been born.
They were now on her floor and heading towards her room. Robert waited patiently while she found her key.
“Thank you very much young man.”
“Like I said ma’am, I’m in 5B. I’m away during the day mostly but you just have Mr Jones leave me a message or come get me any time. Alright? 5B.”
“Take care now,” she said and he worried she wasn’t taking it in. She seemed to be dreaming as she slipped inside, smiling but not at him, closing the door quietly behind her.
Robert was left standing outside her door, and turned away to head towards the stairs and the exit – once again focussed on his intention to see Anna again, this time to ask her out for dinner – that night if possible. He looked down at himself as he walked. I’m dressed like a bum, he thought, then laughed. So what? His laughter vanished as he headed down the hall between the smoke shop and the newsagents… He had remembered what the old lady had said; ‘Mr Cottlebridge and I have lived here for a long time’ and his eyes filled with tears. The cold gripped him on the sidewalk and he blinked them away.
What the hell is it all about? He wondered.
He remembered the old Argentine he’d met a long time ago – an old Wobbly - who’d said ‘it’s all about love, Roberto – in the end, it is about nothing but love’. And then what? He wished he could ask the Argentine now as he’d been too young to know better when he saw him last. And then what? He pushed through the encroaching night and watched his own breath before his eyes – he already knew the way by heart and knew he could walk it in twenty minutes if he made his chest and legs ache. He saw the time and pushed harder still – ‘If only I was there right now,’ he cursed.
Through the window he saw her still working and worried that if he rapped on the door it would frighten her. He whistled instead, and she looked up and out. He knew she wouldn’t be able to see him properly in the dim light outside so he waved. She recognised his frame and set down her work, opening the front door just two inches.
“Crazy man. What time is it?”
“Time for dinner. Come on – I bet you’ve been working since sun-up.”
She smiled in a way that told him it was true.
“You use the promise of food to bribe me. Where?”
“I know a nice Greek place. Do you like Greek food?”
“I like all food. I must get my coat.”
And she came just like that – with her work clothes and a coat, setting Robert entirely at ease despite his earlier concern that he looked like a bumpkin. He’d never worried about his attire before; he believed in functionalism, and relished looking like the worker he always had been. He was almost delighted when the occasional ‘sophisticat’ (as one of his yard co-workers had called them) wandered into his part of town and looked down their noses at him. His part of town… He felt like he’d lived there for years.
Anna was unlike anyone he’d known before – he thought her entirely genuine and completely unpredictable. His life had been divided between two radically contrasting camps of people; both doctrinaire in their own way. She was in no one’s camp and never would be - of this he was convinced beyond doubt. Greco had a handful of regulars in and welcomed Robert like an old friend, lavishing him with praise so manifestly for Anna’s benefit that he turned beet-red and grinned sheepishly. She was, in turn, charming to the proprietor in warm, sincere way (Robert felt jealous and then immediately foolish for it). Greco, delighted, brought out some grappa “to get you started” and told them to ignore the menu on the board, as he would make them “something really special”. He even produced a little blue glass lantern with a thick white candle burning within and put it on the table, setting off the blue and white checked table cloth beautifully.
“He’s, ah… He has a good sense of humour.” Robert said quietly.
“You mean the things he says about you are not true?”
“Well, he’s very generous.”
“One of you is lying,” she said. “And I suppose I will have to find the truth for myself.”
*
Two days later Robert and Comely stood at the corner of the yard. It was rare for the great man to appear there in person, but he’d had heard rumours ugly enough to churn a normal person’s stomach and he knew a walk-through would calm the waters if they needed calming. As it turns out they did, though they didn’t really know it yet. Robert asked almost immediately the question Comely had expected and dreaded.
“Mr Comely, who is The Blue Man?”
“Sounds like a comic book character to me.”
“You’ve never heard of him?”
“I didn’t say that. What about you?”
“Well, clearly, I have.”
“Obviously what you heard worried you.”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
Comely smiled at Robert’s sharpness. The young American peasant had never been a bumpkin.
“Let’s hit Greco’s.”
Greco was pleased to see them both, and grinned good-naturedly at Robert in particular.
“The usual?”
Comely smiled. “Not today. I’ll have what the big guy has.”
Greco gaped.
“Two glasses of hot milk?”
“You got it chief.”
At the table Comely wasted no time.
“Tell me everything you know.”
“I should be asking you!”
Comely looked out the window. “I’m listening.”
Robert wringed his enormous hands together.
“They say two guys disappeared from that warehouse on sixth, you know the one. Two night watchmen gone and the whole placed stripped.”
“This isn’t news.”
“Everyone thought it was an inside job. The two guys fleeced the place with some help and left town. But they didn’t leave town. They vanished.”
Comely raised an eyebrow.
“And how do you know they haven’t just left town. They’d have needed a few trucks to empty that place. They wouldn’t want to try to hide them around here. What makes you think the whole gang didn’t just load up and drive right out of the state?”
“The foreman visited the house where one of them lived. The police had already been, of course, but the boss wanted his man to see it himself. His wife and kids were still there – no money to pay the rent. No missing clothes. Nothing. She had woke up early as usual and made the guy dinner – a light dinner at sunrise, would you believe that? It was still sitting in the oven two days later. She’s on th
e brink of going nuts. Are you hearing me?”
Comely did not answer.
“The foreman went looking for the other guy. He was a younger guy, single with a little place. The landlord had wanted to sell everything but the police sealed up the place. Nothing missing as far as anyone who might know could tell. The landlord said the guy had a little dog barking like hell – it went to the pound. They say the guy was crazy about that little dog. You think he left it behind to starve? Left everything behind apart from his uniform, his thermos and his fucking lunchbox?”
Comely stayed calm.
“Foul language is unbecoming from you Robert, as it is from any gentleman.”
The milk arrived and Robert held it in both hands. The warmth calmed him a little and Comely saw his opportunity, but Robert cut him off before the first word.
“We heard two hoods had showed up a week before. They said they would visit every second Tuesday and collect ten per cent of the yard’s taking in this metal case they had. Ten per cent. The manager and the accountant told them to take a hike. These two thugs, you know what they said?”
“The holy church must have its tithe.”
Robert just about leapt out of his seat.
“You knew it!”
Comely sipped his milk.
“You know Robert, this is just as good as I remember.”
The story of The Blue Man can not be told without revealing more of the story of Comely, which is part of the reason Comely did not discuss The Blue Man. Comely took a moment to prepare. He would give Robert the digestible edition of the truth, and then only a portion of it, as follows;
Some time earlier, this kid showed up seemingly out of nowhere. He was young and loud and, it seemed, stupid, making a name for himself only for his lack of discretion. Wiser heads predicted he would go nowhere. Some wag nicknamed him The Blue Man because he always wore an absurd teal suit and white shoes. Soon enough, he started to make a name for himself for two things, a low cunning that enabled him to swindle and swipe with some success and an almost super-human capacity for brutality that shocked some potential rivals into a passive state, like the paralysing venom of the spider who then eats you alive. When angry, The Blue Man was nothing more or less than a rabid dog with a capacity for calculation – making him extraordinarily dangerous to the underprepared. Wiser heads predicted he would soon go down in flames. The stories grew in number and size, and the true ones were even worse than the myths. He stabbed a pregnant woman in the stomach (the child lived). He torched a grocer’s shop while the grocer’s family was upstairs. He crushed a rival’s button man in the back of a garbage truck. He vowed to take over every shadow in the city. Wiser heads started to roll. When The Blue Man castrated the only son of an old family, a respectable old family still more powerful than he had assumed, those who had once laughed at him fell silent, and were terrible in their silence.
Comely abridged the following details to advise Robert simply that The Blue Man had been disfigured in a revenge attack.
He was taken alive. His low cunning had slowed down drunk on success and blood, slowed down enough for him to get sloppy. The respectable old family smashed his balls with a sledgehammer, trussed him up and hung him upside down from a pulley and lowered him into a pot of water. They ran power into this bucket, then stopped, then again, then stopped, then again, then stopped. They must have fried him two hundred times that night. They figured it was the only thing a beast like that would understand. By some horrendous miracle he kept managing to get enough air to stay alive. He thrashed as best he could but finally fell still. They hauled him out red and black, seeping and peeling, and threw him, still trussed up, into the East River. The bastard swam like an eel and snaked onto the shore. Some unsuspecting longshoremen got him help and he survived. No one knew until it was too late, or they’d have cut him to pieces while he lay in hospital. When word was out so was he, and the hell that followed made eunuch sons and garbage truck executions seem like a fond memory.
The short war ended with The Blue Man still alive but strictly off the map, flying low, staying out of the limelight. For a few years no one saw The Blue Man. His low cunning kept him alive and in some small time business, and his pride kept him in the city. Some inventive dope once decided to wear a mask and a teal suit to a Halloween party. He got a thousand yards from his house before he was shot twice, he was shot twice by two different guys who didn’t know each other. If that didn’t tell The Blue Man how loved he was nothing would. And nothing did. Eventually, he came to quarrel with Aldous Comely.
Comely simply told Robert that he had run The Blue Man out of town.
“There is one thing I can not abide, Robert, and that is gratuitousness.”
Robert suspected that whatever had been left out was something no normal person would want to hear. He wondered about what Comely had seen and what he’d done. He felt in his heart Comely was not a bad man, but hearts can get things badly wrong. Just one week ago he could have turned his back and ran – but everything had changed radically since then.
Comely wondered why The Blue Man was back.
*
It was just on six the following evening and Robert had been at the yard twelve hours. He had been fit and healthy on the farm, where twelve hours work was a welcome change from most days, but with the city air in his lungs and the thought of the ‘holy church’ heavy on his mind he felt tired.
Romero walked in to the small wooden office at the centre of the yard but stopped just inside the doorway, leaning his left shoulder against the frame. He called Robert by his full name, as he did all people, though he personally preferred to be called simply Romero.
“Hm?” Robert looked up from a list of orders the yard had received.
Romero was a quiet man - which lead some to assume his command of English was limited when it in fact exceeded that of most native born - dark-featured, bright-eyed, lean but broad-shouldered and strong. He was the yard’s most reliable man, Comely had advised Robert, but had refused the foreman’s post as he did “not like telling people what to do”.
“Mr Romero,” Robert had taken to calling him. “Would you like a seat?” There were only two seats in the tiny single free-standing room.
He remained standing, still leaning – staring at Robert intently. Robert stood up.
“What is it?”
“They have not been here yet, but they will come.”
Robert looked out the windows, small square panes in wooden crossing frames made almost white with dust on one side and paper-thin frost on the other. Work carried on as usual, though twilight had arrived and the air was starting to bite.
“Who else knows this?”
“Some believe, but I know.” Romero opened the left side of his jacket, showing Robert a black revolver in a shoulder holster before letting it drop again. His expression had not changed. Robert had handled guns from a young age, but here – and on Romero – a pistol seemed shockingly out of place.
“You know them.”
“I am older than I look.”
Robert more sagged than sat on the desk, sending a fountain pen rolling off and to the ground where it coughed a tiny squid’s cloud on to the floor, clean and jet black against the worn wood. He looked at it and waited. Romero did not speak for a long time.
“You are not made for this.”
“You’d be surprised – when I get to where I am going I’ll need to carry one like yours.”
Romero looked surprised.
“Where? Not here, not for Aldous Comely?”
“Mexico.”
It was the first time Robert had seen Romero look surprised.
“Why would you want to do a thing like that?”
Robert motioned for Romero to walk with him and ducked on his way out. They took just a few paces before he pointed to the two main gates of the yard.
“Should we have men there, two on each ingress?”
“We already do.”
/> He turned to Romero stunned.
“What? You’re telling me we have armed guards and it has been a secret? Since when? Comely didn’t tell me – no one told me.”
“Since before you were here. Look, did you need to know? You know we have two night watchmen, right? Well, there are four men on duty here during the day, armed, who work near those entries – McCulloch, Johnson, Viroslav and John Chen. They work like anyone else, after a fashion, but they don’t stray from their area unless they absolutely have to – and there’s always one of them with a hand free in the area. Did you need to know? Better when you did not need to – and now you do. Do you know why you do?”
“Comely ran him out of town years ago. It is a vendetta.”
He decided that was all Robert needed to know.
Romero wore a heavy coat over his jacket. It was darkening fast and he crossed his arms, never having grown accustomed to the northern winters. Both men faced the same direction.
“Vendetta. You use the old tongue – but there is no law of arms here now. They won’t come here looking for their tithe, and when they come – the men know what to do. Do you?”
“I think he wants to believe they won’t come. That’s the impression he has given me.”
Romero turned to face Robert with his black in black eyes.
“Your shift is almost over, you should go home.”
Romero had been there since noon and would be working into the evening. Last orders for the next day were taken at nine, and last deliveries stopped at eight.
Robert looked up.
“Red sky tonight. What are the sunsets like in your hometown Mr Romero?”
Romero looked to the sky.
“I can’t remember.”
He went back to work and Robert walked back into the office, pulled on his coat and threw the keys to Rudkus.
“Lock up the office for me after the last orders are taken, alright?”
The Lithuanian, middle-aged but still possessing his giant’s strength, nodded. Robert remembered that the man had no family, so was unsure of what to say next.