I’d been driving at thirty; the cab didn’t try to pass me, though its top lights were on, which meant it had no fare. At night cab jockeys seldom drive so slow when they’re out on the Parkway where there’s not much chance of picking up a customer.
Cars passed him, passed me; he stayed about a hundred yards behind me. I speeded up to fifty, passing other cars; he hung right there on my tail.
I swung off a Parkway exit, switched off my lights. He slowed, came right up to the exit, stopped for a second, then rolled on toward the city. If there was anyone riding in the rear seat I couldn’t see him; it was too dark and too far away for me to tell if the flag was down.
Nerves, Gilbert, I chided myself. Be peeking under your bed before you turn in, next thing you know.
Nerves or not, two people had been bedded down in the morgue already. I kept an eye out for a trailing taxi all the way to the East River Drive, but how was I to tell one cab from another? All I’d seen of the hackie was a low-pulled cap and an undershot jaw.
I crossed to Fourth, went down Lafayette, over to Broadway, west a block on Rector. Washington Street looked like something out of a Currier & Ives print of pre-Civil War New York.
Next to an imposing marble bank, a row of narrow stores; windows full of brassware and rugs and jewelry; squiggly black Arabic signs; the only English lettering names such as those on upper windows along Fifth Avenue below Thirty-Fourth. Bardwil, Maluf, Lian.
A brightly lighted coffee shop. More curlicue signs. A row of brick houses with dark hallways and gloomy alleys leading on back to courtyards somewhere. Small, dark, bearded men wearing derby hats and pointed slippers. Thin-boned women with beautiful oval faces and enormous almond-shaped eyes, long hair down over their shoulders. And strange, pleasant, spicy smells.
Sixteen and a half was between a coffee shop and a window full of musical instruments that looked like mandolins and guitars with the mumps.
I had to go to Battery Park to find a place to park. I kept an eye out for taxis as I walked back. There weren’t any.