What was it? Not diesel fumes. Years earlier, when I quit smoking, I had loved standing behind buses as they pulled away and sucking up the carbon monoxide fumes they belched into city streets. It was both sickening and at the same time the source of a swell little high of a type I had lost forever.
The stench on the 1 and 9 platform was like that, but both sharper and more indoorsy. What was it? It smelled somewhat medicinal, a bit like cleaning fluid. Oven cleaner? This was Timmy's household-chore-cum-martyrdom, and I knew the smell only from distant corners of our Albany house.
I turned to the bench that was behind me against the station's old worn tile wall, and the odor was even stronger back there. I noticed a small pool of fluid on the wooden bench and an open vial on its side. A popper, that's what it was, that must have fallen out of someone's pocket or backpack. Amyl nitrite-heart medicine originally, and in recent decades a drug inhaled by some gay men, like Lyle Barner's friend Dave and his buddies, to heighten sexual excitement. It hit me that poppers smelled not just hospitallike but also a lot like-where had I just heard someone complaining about the smell?-nail polish.
Chapter 19
It was almost 1:30 by the time I climbed the stairs to Broadway and Seventy-ninth into a steady warm rain shower. It hadn't been raining in Brooklyn, but meteorologically New York was a vast continent, and I had moved underground from the Cote d'lvoire to Ethiopia.
Rainwear or an umbrella would have been nice, but haste was going to have to do.
Where were the Bumber-shoot people when you needed them most? Whenever Timmy and I had visited European cities in warm weather-Amsterdam, Paris, Florence-we had marveled at the way in which, whenever rain began to fall, tall Africans suddenly materialized selling umbrellas. We had concluded that the umbrella merchants were all members of a West African tribe called the Bumbershoot people. But either the Bumbershoots had not yet made it to New York, or Giuliani had had them all rounded up and shipped back to Europe.
Most of the Upper West Side coffee shops and Chinese and Greek restaurants were shut down by now, but the bars were still open, and there were still plenty of people on Broadway hurrying home or to whatever or whoever was next on their Saturday night dance cards. Just below Seventy-seventh, Big Nick's burger joint, open twenty-four hours, was lively, with people at tables out on the sidewalk under the scaffolding of a building that had been under renovation since early in the Abe Beame administration.
I found an open newsstand and picked up an early-edition Sunday Times, a News and a Post. Plankton's kidnapping was front-page but below the fold in the Times – Jay Plankton Abducted Outside Apartment -and full- page on the fronts of both the News -
Plankton Kidnapped -and the Post – Gay Radicals Snatch J-Bird.
I seated myself at a scuffed plastic table under the scaffolding at Nick's, the Upper West Side version of a cafe on the Champs-Elysees, and ordered black coffee from the harried middle-aged waitress, who looked Cambodian. I ordered the coffee because I had realized back on the platform of the Fourteenth and Seventh subway station that I was going to be up for a while, probably all night and into the next day. I wanted a shower first, and to make some phone calls, but I expected to be back in Brooklyn before the night was through, and then even farther out on Long Island.
While I worked at Nick's coffee, I read the news accounts of the two kidnappings and of Leo Moyle's release. Both the News and the Post had front-paged the 'I V Ricky Martin' and 'Kiss Me, Elton' tattoo pix, while the Times had chosen to forgo the lurid graphics and let a file photo of Plankton suffice. In the picture he looked far from wholesome, not a figure any self-respecting kidnapper would want to lay hands on, it seemed to me.
The stories on the abductions and Moyle's release were straightforward accounts from police sources and from those few eyewitnesses to the events Saturday afternoon outside the J-Bird's apartment. The FFF figured in all the stories, but the police said they could not be sure that the few vague but ominous communications they had received from the supposed kidnappers were legitimate.
Leo Moyle, all three papers said, remained under police protection in his East Side apartment and had not made himself available to reporters. Jerry Jeris, speaking for Moyle, said that Moyle had weathered his captivity 'as well as could be expected,' that he was praying for the safe release of his friend, and that he would be filling in for the J-Bird on his show, starting Monday at
6 AM.
The rain was coming down steadier now, but I needed to get moving. Using the bulky classified section of the Times as an umbrella, I headed west on Seventy-seventh and let myself into one of the older, well-kept brick apartment buildings interspersed among the brownstones on the leafy block just east of Riverside. Two friends, Susan and Liza, who lived in the building, let me keep not only a set of spare keys but a toothbrush and a change of clothes in a closet near their foldout couch.
Susan and Liza designed outdoor display lighting for tall buildings, and they were frequently in Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur. In New York, one of their jobs was choosing and installing the colored lights used on special occasions in the tower atop the Empire State Building. Both were in Salisbury, Connecticut, for two weeks, lighting a new Indian casino's full-scale replica of a Las Vegas reduced-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower-the developer had made it clear that he didn't want the Parisian tower, but
'the Vegas one'-so I had the apartment to myself.
It was just before two when I undressed, turned on the shower, and switched on the radio in the bathroom to the WINS all-news station. The traffic and weather reports had shifted to 'moderate' and 'warm with showers,' and the J-Bird report had changed too, but not for the better.
The news announcer said, 'Police have stepped up their efforts to locate Jay Plankton, the talk-radio personality who was abducted Saturday afternoon. Rescuing Plankton turned even more urgent tonight when a package was dropped off at the newsroom of the New York Post. Inside the package was a note and an object in a refrigerator bag. The note claimed that the object was Jay Plankton's tongue.
'The note also said that since Plankton had convinced the kidnappers that he could never be 'reeducated,' in their words, he would have to pay an even heavier price. The next piece of Plankton to be sent out would be 'an even more important part of him,' the note said. It was signed by the FFF, or Forces of Free Faggotry, the radical gay group that had been harassing Plankton.
'Police were not certain that the package was sent by the real kidnappers, or if the object inside was an actual human tongue. The package and its contents are being ana-lyzed, a police spokesman said, and NYPD is taking the threat very seriously.'
Next was an update on negotiations over an upcoming Bush-Gore debate, but I didn't hang around to listen to it. I postponed the shower, dressed again, found Barner's cellphone number, sat at Susan and Liza's desk, and dialed.
'Barner.'
'It's Strachey. I heard.'
'This is bad.'
'Does it look legit?'
'They think so at the precinct. The tongue thing's at the lab.'
'Are you still in Brooklyn?'
'For now. The assholes aren't back yet. I'd have every cop on Long Island looking for them if I knew what they were driving. Diefendorfer's truck is still here, and no vehicle is registered to a Samuel Day in the state of New York.'
I said, 'I'm coming back out there. I think I know who's got Plankton. It's not Day or Thad or any of them.'
'Oh yeah? Then who is it?'
'Lyle, you don't want to know.'
