Cat and Mouse with Inspector Vidocq

I wear a nondescript hoodie and jeans and prowl the late morning streets of New York on foot. A block behind me, Inspector Vidocq is following my footsteps. He’s the man Father sicced on me to make sure that I’m never up to any funny business. Considering that he’s always been there for the past twenty years—he keeps an apartment across the street and hounds me wherever I go—I feel like I should have some sort of affinity for him.

I don’t.

He’s tried sticking cameras and microphones in my room in the past. Each time I cleared them out, he replaced them in new places with new disguises. Eventually, I had enough of it. I collected as much evidence as I could, mailed it off to the FBI, and I guess they had a conversation or two with him, because there were no more hidden cameras in my room or secret trackers on my laptop after that.

He’d also watched on in morbid delight once when I was getting beat up at the other end of an alley.

I need to lose him today. The Inspector is surprisingly hard to shake off. He knows all the twists and turns in this city that I do; he has followed me for twenty years, after all.

I do my best anyways. I head down a decrepit MTA entrance, the steps covered in mysterious brown splotches that weren’t there yesterday. I try not to inhale and pick my way around the spots, swipe into the station, sprint to the platform and hop onto the 1 Train that’s just arrived. I see the Inspector running for the platform through the subway car window right as we begin to pull away, his neatly combed hair flapping from the wind.

The ride down south is much like any other New York subway ride. A black guy dressed in a light blue Oxford yammers into his phone about some musical or another that he went and saw yesterday night. A teenage girl wearing black and nothing but black mooches in the corner of the car, glaring at everyone under her matte-black headphones. There’s an ad for some kind of mattress store on the opposite wall (“Leave the rest to us!” it cheerily says).

The Times Square station is a horrific flood of tourists, so that is where I get off. I dive into the crowd, eager to be lost in the density, and resurface for air somewhere around 38th street. From there, I weave as byzantine of a path as I can in a city designed on a grid system, cutting across backstreets and doubling back on occasion.

I get to my destination without spotting a trace of the Inspector. The place is a rundown alley where crumpled beer cans live next to squalid dumpsters. Tucked away in the back is a small lot, just large enough to park a car or two. There lies a pile of ratty blankets turned black by the years, and atop it, a homeless man who stinks of sewage and dead dreams. His heavy coat, more patches than material at this point, lays discarded by the side, and his beard too is patchy from the places where he’s pulled it out.

“Jericho! How you doing,” I say, taking a seat down in the lot next to him.

“It’s alright here,” he says. “Been kinda hot lately, but I got no problem with that. ‘ts better than the cold, I tell you that.”

“Hey, I got something that’ll cool you right down,” I say, and I open up my backpack, pulling out the beers. His face lights up as I toss him one, and we both crack open our Narragansetts.

He gulps it down greedily, but thoroughly—not a drop is wasted on this man, and he savours the liquid with clinical precision, eyes squeezed shut so he can experience the beer in all its wonder.

“I wish I had more of this prep-boy crap when I was growing up,” he says after he finishes the can. “Maybe I woulda turned out differently.”

“Well, it didn’t work for me,” I say, and he barks out a laugh, the harsh noise sounding awfully phlegmatic.

“That’s cause yer a fuck-up, Markie-boy. A fuck-up just like me.”

I’ve never told Jericho my name. He just figured it out one day. He’s got his own brand of sharpness, one that I’ve sought out every couple weeks or so.

“Some day, you’re going to die out here from exposure, and I’m going to be the only man who misses you.”

“The sonnofabitches who kick me out of the shelters sure won’t,” he laughs. “Throw me another can, would ya?”

I do, and I hand him my phone with it.

He looks at it, pockets it, cracks open the beer and nods at me solemnly. Then, he closes his eyes to savour the beer. By the time he opens them again, I’m no longer in the lot.