A Drop of the Hard Stuff

Steffens shook his head. “Hell of a world,” he said. “You and me, did we ever get introduced at Morrissey’s? I can’t say one way or the other. I was never there before three, four in the morning, and by then I was half in the bag, so there are things happened that I don’t remember, and things I remember that never happened. Anyway, when I heard your name the other day, I knew who they were talking about.”

“How did that happen?”

“A fellow was talking,” he said, “about how you were looking for a fellow named Robert Williams with a wife who maybe had an affair with Jack Ellery, who I understand got himself killed recently.” He lit a cigarette, crumpled the now-empty pack. “You don’t smoke, do you?”

“No.”

“And you’re in here drinking Coca-Cola. I heard you were off the booze these days. Make you uncomfortable, sitting in a joint like this?”

“No,” I said. That wasn’t entirely true, but I didn’t see that I owed him the truth. “You said your name’s the same as the muckraker.”

“Joseph Lincoln Steffens, dropped the Joseph in his writings. Wrote The Shame of the Cities, about municipal corruption. Put an end to it, too, as you may have noticed.” He grinned, dragged on his cigarette. “But what he’s most famous for is what he wrote when he came home from a trip to the Soviet Union. ‘I have seen the future and it works.’ Except everyone got the line slightly wrong, because he wrote that he’d been to the future, not that he’d seen it. And he changed his mind about it anyway, decided it wasn’t the future and it didn’t work. Proving you’d better be careful what you say, because people are going to change the words around on you, and go on quoting them long after you stop believing them yourself.”

“Interesting.”

“You’re being polite, Matt. I know enough about him to be a bore on the subject, but that comes of sharing a name. And no, we’re not related. The family name got changed a generation or two back. It used to be Steffansson, like the polar explorer, and no, he’s not a relative either.”

“And your first name is Vann?”

“Evander,” he said. “But I’ve forgiven my mother for that one, God rest her soul. I chopped it down to Van, and then I tagged an extra N onto it because people thought that was my last name, Van Steffens, like Van Dyke and Van Rensselaer.”

“And they’re not your relatives, either.”

“You begin to see the pattern, huh?” He patted his breast pocket, remembered he’d just finished the pack. “I need a cigarette,” he announced. “Where’s the machine?”

I shook my head. “No machine. There’s a little food market next door, the Pioneer. They sell cigarettes.”

“And this place doesn’t? Why the hell not?”

“Jimmy’s against smoking.”

“There’s an ashtray on every table. Half the people in here are smoking.”

“He’s not going to prohibit it. He just doesn’t want to encourage it.”

“Jesus. Next door?”

“Out the door and turn left.”

“Jesus. It’s a good thing he’s not against drinking. Place would have a tough time making ends meet.”

XX

WHILE HE WAS GONE, the waitress came over and emptied the ashtray. I thought about the Morrissey Brothers and the after-hours they used to own and operate, one flight up from an Irish off-Broadway theater. I thought about Skip Devoe, and I thought about Jack Ellery, and I thought about the Scotch and melting ice cubes in Vann Steffens’s glass.

There was a pay phone on the wall at the far end of the bar, and just as I looked at it a fellow with a goatee and a crew cut hung up, checked to see if his quarter had come back, and headed for the men’s room.

I called my sponsor. “I’m in a bar,” I said, “meeting an informant, or at least I think that’s what he’s going to turn out to be. I didn’t want to be here but I felt I had to.”

“And you’re all right?”

“I’ve been drinking a Coke. He left the table, and his Scotch is sitting there, and I figured I’d spend a quarter and wake you up.”

“I was awake. The Scotch look good to you?”

“It started fucking with my head,” I said. “I’m at Armstrong’s.”

“Ah.”

“And old times managed to get into the conversation. I never met the guy, but I guess we must have traveled in similar circles.”

Through the window, I saw Steffens emerge from the market. He stopped on the sidewalk to open his pack of Luckies. “There’s my guy,” I told Jim. “I’ll get off now. I’m okay, I just thought I ought to call.”

“And you’ve got plenty of quarters.”

“Always,” I said.

“Best seat in the house,” Steffens said. “You know why?”

“I bet you’ll tell me.”

“Anywhere else and you’re staring at the fucking moose. Sit right under it and you don’t have to look at it.”

“I believe it’s an elk.”