old easy chair he was sitting in, a few feet away. “Rex have your car ready for you in a snap.”
A monster black car rolled up. I never saw anything like it. Only had two doors, but it was bigger than any limo. More like a freight car than something you drive.
The black guy in the uniform hopped out, and went back to his post. The old guy held the door open for Solly. “The boy ain’t got a clue, do he, suh?”
“Which one, Lester?”
“Oh. Oh, I didn’t mean nothin’, Mistah Vee. I wasn’t saying nothin’ about your young man.” Meaning me, I guessed. “I was talking about Rex over there. He my sister’s youngest boy. Ain’t too swift, but the building, all they just wanted was someone stay down here, make sure it’s safe for the residents.”
“How many years we know each other?” Solly said.
“More than I likes to remember, suh.”
“Me, too. So why’re you still running that plantation game on me?”
The old black guy lowered his voice. “Been playing it safe so long, it’s all I know, I guess,” he said.
“Yeah,” Solly told him. “Guys like us, we got no choice, do we?”
He slipped the old guy a bill.
“Get in,” he told me.
There was no door handle, so I pushed the button where it should have been, and the door opened. From the outside, the car gleamed like it had been dipped in a pool of black ink. Inside, it looked new. Solly pulled away, slow and smooth. I couldn’t hear the engine.
“What the hell is this?” I couldn’t help asking him.
“Putz,” he said. “You never heard of the Lincoln Continental?”
“Sure. But …”
“Not a Lincoln Continental, Sugar; the Lincoln Continental. You know how they have them all with numbers, like the Mark III or the Mark IV, like that?”
“I guess so.”
“This one’s got no number. Know why? Because this is the first of the line. If they had a Mark I, that’s what this would be. Back when this was new, they built cars to last, not like the crap they make today.”
“They were all like this?”
“Don’t be a clown, kiddo. A Chevy’s always been a Chevy; a Ford’s always been a Ford. But this baby never saw an assembly line; it was hand-built. Not just top-of-the-line, top of them all.”
“I’m not surprised it lasted this long—feels like we’re in a damn tank.”
“A tank with plenty of pep. Not that you want to go racing around in a car like this. That would be … Well, it would just be wrong.”
“I don’t get it. The whole car thing, I don’t get any of that.”
“It’s not the car; it’s what it means. Me, I wanted one of these from the minute I first saw one, a couple of years after the war. A car like this, it sets you apart.”
“From who?”
“From everyone. I don’t care if you’re a young shvartser in Harlem or an alter kocker in Miami, your idea of heaven is still a Cadillac. But next to this beauty, a Caddy’s a piece of shit. Back when we were kicking the crap out of the krauts, this was the best car on the planet.”
“You were in that?”
“You think I’m, what, a Zen Buddhist? Back then, a Jewish boy, he couldn’t walk the streets unless he was home on leave. Better be in uniform, too. Otherwise, the old ladies, they’d spit on you. And the young ones—forget it.
“Don’t get me wrong, that was one job I couldn’t wait to get in on. Look at me now, you wouldn’t believe it, but back then I was a lion. The only thing I ever worried about was getting sent to the Pacific Theater.”
“That was extra bad?”
“It was all bad, kid. But how was I gonna get to kill any Nazis over there?”
“You wanted to kill them?”
“I wanted to kill all of them. I just wish the assholes who ran the government had dropped that big one on Berlin, too.”
“The atom bomb, right? You mean, they only had the one?”
Solly slapped himself on his forehead. “Who am I talking to? We had lots of them, Sugar. You think we only hit Japan one time?”
“Well, if they had so many—”
“They weren’t gonna drop nukes on white people, kid. Simple as that. I don’t know how it was out west back then. But here, the Germans had their own part of town. First Avenue in the low nineties. They even called it ‘Germantown.’ Before the war, they had a lot of pull in