New York Minute

Friday Morning, 8 July 1977

MEATPACKING DISTRICT, MANHATTAN

Kane put the five spot on the edge of the table. The corner booth in Vic's Diner was across from the swinging door to the kitchen and through there an exterior kitchen door. To the rear were the bathrooms, with no exit or windows. With his back to the wall, Kane faced the rest of the diner, one end of the u-shaped counter anchored just past a pay phone on the wall between kitchen door and counter. There were six booths along Washington Street. Six more on the other side of the counter along Gansevoort Street. Cheap linoleum tables, sagging and slashed red vinyl booths, faded black and white tile floor all bore witness that Vic hadn't been big on upkeep. On the flip side, the floor, the counter and the windows were spotless.

The ceiling was made of tin tiles, artistic for those who were into old things and bothered to look up. The diner was air-conditioned, but the old industrial unit was having a hard time with the heat and humidity. While it seemed a tad chilly to Kane, everyone else was teetering on the verge of comfortable, leaning toward barely tolerable. Kane had clear fields of fire and a quick escape available through the kitchen.

The corner diner had two customer doors, one facing each street that formed the intersection of Gansevoort and Washington in the Meatpacking District on the northern edge of Greenwich Village. A faded sign above the diner's windows on each street proclaimed and promised:

VIC'S DINER!

GOOD FOOD!

It was BMNT in military and nautical terms: begin morning nautical twilight, when the sun is just below the eastern horizon and the eye has difficulty discerning shapes. When the French and Indians attacked and vampires returned to their coffins and the city hovered between the denizens of the night and the workers of the day.

This area in southwest Manhattan confused even some native New Yorkers who were used to the regular grid system of streets, numbered south to north and east to west that constituted most of the island. That pattern had been dictated by the city master plan in 1811, displayed on one of the prints leaning against the wall in Kane's apartment. By then the area that became Greenwich Village and lower Manhattan had been settled for almost two hundred years, businesses and houses established, and the irregular pattern of streets retained many of their Dutch names. Similar to the piers, the meatpacking element of the neighborhood was in steep decline, overtaken by the widespread use of refrigerated trucks and frozen foods.

The diner was on the southeast corner. Angled across the intersection was the stub end of an elevated rail-line, the High Line. It had originally run all the way south to the Battery, as indicated on another of Kane's maps, but as its use declined with the rise of the Interstates and truck usage, it had been amputated bit by bit, much like the industries it supported.

The waitress put a cup of coffee and a glass of tap water bobbing two cubes of ice in front of Kane along with a folded order ticket. Her nametag block lettered MORTICIA and that was bolstered by her long ebony hair with a single streak of white in it, pale face, and tight, ankle length black dress. Slender and a smidge under six feet tall, she was a presence. She'd first appeared on the job thirty-three days ago. She'd taken Kane's specific instructions reference coffee and water and cubes without comment that first morning and never asked again.

She was too old to have been named after the character on the TV show from only a decade earlier and either she'd modeled herself after the Addams Family matriarch and changed her name or she'd been christened with it by parents who valued the obscure. She was gone as abruptly and silently as she'd appeared, tending to another booth. She moved in a beguiling manner, taking short, smooth steps underneath that long dress so she appeared to glide over the floor.