Down Here

“Yeah. But she said ‘dinner’ that first time, and you said—”

“Oh, do shut up,” she said, closing the subject.

That night, I motored up Third Avenue, taking my time—as if I had any choice, at that hour. Still, I was in place twenty minutes before I was to meet Laura. The Plymouth isn’t the kind of car any cop lets sit at the curb, so I circled the block, budgeting ten minutes for each pass.

I wasn’t far off. At 6:55, she was already standing at the curb, wearing a fuchsia dress. As I pulled over, I could see her shoes matched it.

“I hope I didn’t keep you waiting,” I said, out the window.

“Oh!” she said, as if startled. But she trotted around to the passenger door and let herself in.

“You look—” I said, deliberately cutting myself off, like I’d said too much.

“What?” she said, flashing a smile. Her lipstick was only minutes old.

“I was going to say ‘great,’ I guess. But I didn’t want you to think I was—”

“What? Being polite?”

“No, no. Being . . . unprofessional.”

“Hmmmm . . .” she said.

“Where to?” I asked.

“The Midtown Tunnel,” she said. “I’ll guide you once we get out.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, touching two fingers to my forehead.

^“This is quite an . . . unusual car,” she said, as we waited in line at the tunnel entrance.

“It’s one of my hobbies,” I said. “I restore muscle cars from the Fifties and Sixties. This is an original Plymouth Roadrunner.”

“Roadrunner, like in the cartoon?”

I “meep-meeped” the horn for her. She clapped in delight.

“Oh, that’s exactly it. Are these . . . cars valuable?”

“Well, it’s not a Bugatti or a Duesenberg,” I said. “This one was mass-produced, and not exactly to the highest standards. But clean survivors are pretty rare now. When I get it all done, it should be worth, oh, thirty-five thousand.”

“And how much will all that cost you?” she said, looking over the raggedy dashboard out to the gray-primered hood.

“Depends on how much of the work I do myself,” I said. “Like, see this steering wheel? It’s an original Tuff model,” I bragged. “Pretty hard to find.”

I tapped the thick-rimmed, smaller-than-stock wheel, with its center horn button and three brushed- aluminum “holed” spokes. It wasn’t exactly a bolt-in—the turn-signal lever had to be shortened, so I wouldn’t risk snagging my left leg when I got out—but the look was still semi-original.

“Were they fast?” she asked, rolling up her window as we entered the tunnel. “When they were new, I mean.”

“The Hemi Roadrunner was one of the legitimate kings of the street, back in its glory days,” I said, not mentioning that the reincarnation I was driving wasn’t a Hemi. Or that the hogged-out wedge motor in mine would have inhaled anything that was prowling the boulevards back then.

“Didn’t they come with air conditioning?” she said, reaching in her pocketbook for a tissue.

“Not the serious ones,” I told her. “Those were stripped to the bone.”

“That doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

“Different people, different pleasures,” I said.

“Did you want a car just like this when you were a kid?” she asked, as we exited the tunnel and got in line for the toll booths.

“I wanted a lot of things when I was a kid,” I said, wishing I could pull back the ice in my voice as soon as I spoke.

“Oh! I didn’t mean to . . . I’ve just noticed that some of the men I know, they collect all kinds of things they wanted when they were young. One of the guys I work with, he’s got every baseball card ever made, I bet.”

“Well, I say it’s my hobby, but this is the only car I have,” I said, chuckling to muffle what she had triggered with her innocent question. “And I’ve had it a long time, like a project that never gets completed.”

“Are you going to make it perfect?”

“Perfect?”

“Like, what’s the word I’m looking for . . . concours? I have clients who fix up old cars so they’re exactly like they were brand-new. Then they have shows for them.”

“No,” I laughed. “I’m going to make it perfect, all right. But perfect for me, not for anyone else. Besides, I don’t see a piece of Detroit iron like this making the grade in that company.”

We took an E-ZPass lane, letting the scanner read the box I had fastened to the windshield instead of having to pay the toll in cash. Very efficient system. Speeds the traffic flow. And keeps very good records. I have “spares” I can use when I want to go certain places to do certain things, but tonight wasn’t anything I cared if the government knew about.

“The LIE’s a pain at this hour,” she said. “But it’s still the fastest . . .”

“I’m in no hurry,” I said.

“It must be frustrating.”

“What?”

“Having such a fast car, and not being able to go fast.”

“Not all the time, no. But that’s okay. Sometimes, knowing you can do something is pretty much as good as doing it.”

“That’s how I feel,” she said. “About my work. But that’s a mistake I can’t make too often.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“In my job, being very good at something, even being brilliant at it, doesn’t count. Only results do. If you allow yourself to just, I don’t know, luxuriate in your abilities, like a bubble bath with soft music and candles, you can forget that the world—my world, anyway—isn’t about strategy, it’s about success.”

“I thought those were the same thing.”

“No,” she said, turning in her seat so her whole body was facing me, despite the seatbelt. “Strategy is what I love. The game of it. But if I come up with a perfect strategy to, say, put a deal together, and I don’t make the deal, my bonus is going to be light that year.”

“I think I know what you mean.” I goosed the throttle to switch lanes ahead of an overfilled minivan. “Kind of like my book, isn’t it?” I said.

“Strategy?”

“Not exactly. I mean, I already sold it. The book, that is. I’m talking about my idea for it. I know it’s perfect. But if I can’t bring it off, the book will still happen, but it won’t be as good as if—”

“That’s one idea,” she said. “I was talking more about . . . models.”

“Models?”

“Ways of doing things. Ones you develop over time, testing and retesting . . .”

“Like a system for picking winners at the racetrack?”

“A little more sophisticated than that, I hope,” she said, chuckling. “And a little more successful, too. None of those ‘systems’ really work, do they?”

“I never heard of one that did,” I told her, pure truth.

“Here we go,” she said. “You know the Maurice Avenue switch-off?”

“Sure,” I said. “I once worked as a cab driver. To get perspective for a piece I was doing.”

“Okay, now just follow it around until we get to Sixty-first.”

“That’s Maspeth, right?”

“Yes, it is. Not many people from the City know that.”

“That’s one of the things about having a car,” I said. “You go places where the subway doesn’t.”