The Pursuit

I always play jazz with my eyes closed. Partly because I know that music is shy, won’t come out if it thinks it’s being watched. Partly, I admit, because I learned somewhere that’s just what saxophone players do. And partly (maybe mostly) to avoid having to look at my surroundings: the grime-gray concrete of the subway steps, the yellowish plaque between the cracked wall-tiles, the scanty flutter of coins and ones that don’t even come close to filling the upturned fedora at my feet.

The train would be here in a few minutes. I reached into the deep front pocket of my cargo jacket — never in fashion but always useful — and pulled out a little black book where I kept my songs. A ribbon was wedged into the center fold. To the left, all the songs I had written myself. Songs that someday I’d play for people who wanted to listen. Someday. To the right, the classics, sure to please a crowd — “Fly me to the Moon,” “Take the A Train,” “Body and Soul.” The notes read like my DNA: G-A-A-C-G-G.

I closed my book and tucked it back into the pocket alongside a few maxed-out credit cards and a half-smoked pack of cigarettes, slid up and down the scale to get my fingers flowing for “If I was a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof. The 5:06pm commuters usually got a kick out of that one. I couldn’t help but feel a touch of longing as I sang along in my head:

All day long I’d biddy-biddy-bum, if I were a wealthy maaan…

I peeked through my eyelids, pressed tight in concentration, to see who was recognizing the tune. A tall man with thinning blonde hair had set his briefcase down near where I stood, listening without looking at me. He was dressed the same as every other commuter — white button-downs with no tie, tucked into well-fitting black trousers. Lazy copies printed without even bothering to splurge on colored ink.

A tremble under my feet matched the vibration in my lips, a syncopated rhythm of wheels on iron became a swelling crash as the train approached. When the howl of brakes finally drowned me out I paused, taking a moment to breathe.

The man with the briefcase tossed a bill into my hat without looking at me, not in a grand way that celebrated my music, but in a habitual way, because that’s what someone with a white shirt and black pants does. The swell of bodies trickled into the subway doors and I watched them pool and spread out through the windows.

I opened my book again to choose the next song. A subway door muttered, ting, back open and I looked up, curious.

And then I saw it - the briefcase was still sitting on the platform where the blonde man had set it down, a few feet from where I stood. I glanced about hurriedly and, although I didn’t see him through the windows, I shouted, “Hey!”

There was no time to think. I stooped, grabbed my hat with one hand and shoved it onto my head, a few stray dimes tinkling down my shoulders. With the other hand I seized the briefcase and lunged for the closing doors.

Ting. They juddered open.

“Sir!” I called, standing on my toes to try to find the thinning blonde in this jungle of shoulders and heads.

The doors rolled in, and I caught the briefcase between them again. Ting. A few heads turned, half-interested, half-annoyed. None of them were the blonde man. “You forgot your briefcase,” I shouted at no one. The doors were rolling closed again.

I slipped onto the train just as the doors sealed themselves with a final thunk.

The train surged forward and the crowd swayed as if underwater. With nothing to hold onto, I lurched rather than swayed, the neck of my saxophone stabbing into an exposed armpit, and the bell of it swinging into an older man’s hip. I grabbed on to an overhead bar with one hand and tried to hug the instrument closer to me with the other, but I still held the briefcase and my elbow poked into a tall woman with tattoos climbing out of the neck of her shirt like vines. She glared. I tried to avoid eye contact and instead scanned the car frantically for the blonde man.

There! Over the swaying heads I spotted him at the end of the train. Quickly, I pressed after him, saxophone jostling around my neck, muttering, “Excsuse me, ‘scuse me, sorry.”

I heard the scraping of metal on metal, and the brakes sent me staggering forward again. As I regained my balance, I saw the man through the windows, already picking his way through the swarming platform. “42nd Street, Grand Central” the green-tiled mural read.

Cursing under my breath, I pushed my way back toward the open doors. By the time I shoved my way off the train the man was nearly to the top of the escalator. I rushed to the staircase and forced my way onto a step of the escalator, jammed on each side by bodies. The steps rose agonizingly slowly, until at last I burst from the murky tunnel into the echoing elegance of the station.

There he was, still well ahead of me in the crowd but visible— a blonde head, a white colored shirt. He was headed for the trains that went out of the city, a commuter, I figured, bound for Stamford or Greenwich. Indeed, he was turning now to head down into one of the Hudson Line tunnels.

Maybe it was time to give up, I thought. But something had compelled me to come this far and it seemed a shame to lose him now. “I hope he dropped a $20 in this hat,” I thought bitterly, hurrying forward again. I reached the tunnel that the blonde man had disappeared down and heard train hiss to life. Gaining speed, I rushed down the ramp, and barreled toward the blonde man. “Sir!” I called.

He turned, a look of surprise on his face. An unfamiliar face. I must have lost my target somewhere in the crush of semi-formal business sameness. I mumbled an apology and let my shoulders slump in discouragement as the man turned and boarded the train.

I walked back up to the top of the tunnel and sat heavily. Shaking my head, I smiled at the madness of it— here I was, chasing a man like some heist movie through the subway tunnels! What kind of hero did I think I was? All this effort, when I could just open the case and look for some identifying information— a memo containing an email address where I could send him a note and arrange for him to pick up his belongings. Simple, no grand pursuit involved.

I pressed the clasps of the suitcase and they popped open with a self-satisfied shnip. At first, I stared without seeing, waiting for the illusion to lift. But when I reached out to touch them they were real against my fingertips. Stiff, bitter-smelling, taught with potential. Carefully arranged like gray-green bathroom tiles. Neatly bound stacks of $100 bills.

I hunched over the bag to conceal its indecent contents from passersby, and carefully lifted the stacks to count them. Five across, two deep, two down. Ten per bundle. Math was made challenging by the kaleidoscope of possibilities in my head. $20,000. That was real money, life-changing money. The kind of money that I could never expect to gather in my ragged hat, maybe not even in the course of a year. The kind of money that let a man walk tall, let him buy a gift for his family — a new gift every week if he wanted to. The kind of money that could get a man out of a subway station and into a recording studio.

Slowly, as I stared, my spiraling fantasies lost their color, blurring into a dull, gray reality. A man does not just forget a briefcase that contains $20k. An unlocked briefcase that contains $20k. There was a heaviness forming in my gut now where the hope had so recently been bubbling.

I’d seen these things in the movies, and once or twice I’d even fancied I’d seen them in Harlem. A drop. Drug money or worse — maybe a kidnapping ransom, or a bribe to silence some terrible secret. And here I was, clutching this bag of cash that was not mine, and for which someone was surely looking… ready to do whatever it took to recover it. I snapped the briefcase closed and stood up. I needed to get out of here. Now.

As if on cue with my thoughts, a shout made me wheel around. Two tall men were hurrying toward me, one pointing, not running exactly but coming fast. They wore very-white shirts tucked into their fitted black slacks. One of them called out to me, but I could not hear what he said. They were gathering speed.

There was no time to think. I gripped the briefcase, turned, and ran, a full on sprint this time, trusting that the crush of people would part and make way to my frantic speed. They did. I felt my saxophone snag on someone’s shirt, but did not apologize. I felt my fedora loosening on my hair and didn’t care, even if it would take me a full month of busking to afford to buy a new one. A lack of money, ironically, was not the problem anymore.

I slowed my steps just slightly to risk a glance over my shoulder and saw them, weaving in and out of the crowd, running now too, and gaining on me. My stomach grew tight. I spun around and redoubled my speed, zigzagging around clusters of people, between surprised kiosk vendors, heading for the subway. The escalator going up was emptier than the one going down, so I rushed down it, ignoring the angry shouts of the people I crammed past.

I reached the bottom, leaping over the turnstile without breaking my step. My breath was ragged now, it sounded like little sobs in my ear. Little exclamations with every step. “No, no, no.”

There! Up ahead, a train with people slowly filtering on. I flew down the stairs, my feet stumbling over each other and staggering on missed steps, tumbled onto the platform just as the doors sealed themselves closed with that morbid thunk.

My heart and breath were a hurricane in my ears. No, no, no…

A hand grabbed my arm roughly from behind.

Wobbling with fear and exhaustion, I turned slowly to face my pursuers. Only one had caught up to me, the other stood at the top of the stairs. Both were red faced, breathing hard.

I thought of what I could say, what I could offer. Offer them their briefcase, it must be what they want, maybe they’d let me go after they took it from me. But I knew that was a futile hope. Not after how I’d run. Not now that I knew who they were.

The man in front of me reached a hand to his hip-pocket and I closed my eyes, knowing what was coming. I just wondered what it would feel like. Not the act of it so much, but after it was over.

“Hey,” the man said. I kept my eyes closed. I didn’t think I could keep my courage if I watched it happen, only from behind the safety of this close darkness. “Hey,” he said again, this time a little louder, insistent. “You dropped this back at the station. Looked important. Man, you’re in some kind of hurry though.”

Slowly, I peeled my eyes open just enough to see him, his arm extended, palm slightly sweaty, holding out to me like an offering my little black book of songs.