Gandalph Cohen & The Land at the End of the Working Day by Peter Crowther Page B

the voices that ride the currents around 23rd Street. Just as they’re no strangers to the voices inside Jack Fedogan’s fabled bar.
    Most nights, the ambiance in the Working Day is just about right: not too many people so that it’s crowded but enough so’s you don’t feel like a single coin shuffling in a lint-lined pocket, bereft of old friends and realizing you’re the next one to go. But no matter how many people, there’s always laughter in the air, and talk, and company.
    Tonight is different somehow.
    It’s different because the place is just about empty and it’s different because the night itself is different … hesitant and expectant, its cosmically existential heart as alive to the myriad possibilities that confront it as a lightbulb is to the eternal promise of a daily dose of electric current.
    McCoy Brewer watches the reflected world through the big mirror, accepts his dry martini and nods to Jack Fedogan, who grunts obligingly and then shuffles along the bar trailing his towel down the polished surface while McCoy takes a slug of almost pure gin. Almost pure because Jack Fedogan’s dry martini means he simply immerses a glass pipette into the vermouth, waits until most of the liquor has evaporated or dripped off onto the waiting tissue, and then briefly submerges the now little-more-than-scented implement into the waiting highball glass of iced gin. Strong but good.
    It’s a little after six pm and McCoy feels the winter in his bones.
    The drink helps some, but only some, managing to dispel the memory of the darkness of the early evening streets but failing to touch the greater ebony gloom in McCoy Brewer’s soul. He feels it course down his throat and he slides sideways onto a barstool, already thinking of the next martini and the one after that one. While he thinks, he watches the people in the mirror-world behind the bar.
    Over in back, in one of the booths, a woman sits against the wall, a lady lifted straight from the musty dog-eared pages of a Jim Thompson paperback original, her nylon-stockinged right leg propped up along the length of the mock-plastic cushioned seat, the high-heeled shoe hanging from her foot and swinging to and fro in the narrow aisle that gives onto the ornately carved three-foot-high balustrades separating the booths from the tables. She’s sipping a cocktail, her fourth since five o’clock, and she looks as though she’s nowhere near finished yet. Almost as though she can feel him watching her, the woman glances up and looks across the tables into the big mirror, sees McCoy looking at her through the glass, sees his eyes, and smiles briefly.
    McCoy nods, lifts his own drink and raises it in salute, watching his own reflection and that of the woman lift their own glasses in response and in the silent camaraderie of drinkers, two characters in a lost Edward Hopper painting, swimming the dark seas of nighttime and solitude.
    The woman’s name is Rosemary Fenwick—a fact which McCoy will learn later—and she is drinking Manhattans to the memory of a husband and son she left behind in Wells, on the New England Atlantic coast, almost a year ago, seeing their faces in her mind’s eye superimposed on the face of the man in the barroom mirror, never having heard from them in all that time, silently wondering, now, this night, what they’re doing.
    Only one of the tables has people sitting at it. It’s a quiet night in the Working Day, unusually quiet. But maybe it has something to do with the mood of the streets outside. Sometimes the streets have a frenetic quality, a nervousness that splashes up unseen from the pavement and the sidewalks and seeps into the people of Manhattan like radiation, giving birth to uncertainty and a need to consolidate and re-group, maybe around a cocktail or two or a couple pitchers of beer.
    The streets disguise this activity under a cloak of subterfuge … worries about money, about health, about work and about the faithfulness of