Unfinished Sympathy

by Andy Conway

  “But my wife is in there!” Gustav yelled.

  This couple and their histrionics. They were one long rolling tragic opera. The plodding police would only slow them down with questions and statements and warnings about where not to go in Manhattan. Lieutenant Becker would relish the chance to throw him in jail again.

  But the police didn’t come. It was the local enforcers — Mock Duck’s own crew. A bunch of burly tong gangsters, pushing through the crowd.

  For a moment, as they stormed in, Mitch feared they might be on the end of a kung fu bashing, but they simply grabbed them and bundled them inside as the door to Mann Fang opened.

  They had been spirited off the street in an instant.

  There was a great deal of shoving and yelling until they were pushed through to a back room and thrown at the feet of a short man in a silk shirt, lounging on a throne of satin cushions.

  The man they called the mayor of Chinatown.

  Mock Duck.

  — 33 —

  “I WARN YOU,” MITCH blurted out, “this is Gustav Mahler, the conductor of the New York Metropolitan Opera, and if any harm comes to him, people very high up in this city will want to know why. We have left word that we are here.”

  Mock Duck smiled and bowed his head. “I am honoured to meet the great Gustav Mahler.”

  He gestured to his thugs, as if they had forgotten some vital point of etiquette, and two low chairs were brought. Mitch noticed that Mock Duck’s fingernails were as long and sharp as Barracuda teeth.

  “I believe it is the polite custom to send word that one is visiting, is it not, rather than hammer a door with threats? Though I am not an expert on the customs of the First Four Hundred.”

  An old man glided in with a porcelain tray, laid it on the low table between them and poured fragrant black tea from a tiny yixing clay teapot into three dainty porcelain cups.

  Mock Duck smirked at their astonishment and folded a napkin. “Please, do drink. It is an honour.”

  They sipped at the tiny cups. Bitter, but instantly refreshing. Gustav tapped his fingers on the table and it seemed he was preoccupied with a melody again, but Mock Duck smiled and bowed his head as if some signal had passed between them.

  “Tell me,” said Mock Duck, “what brings such honoured guests to my door?”

  “My wife,” said Gustav.

  “She’s gone missing,” said Mitch. “Kidnapped.”

  Mock Duck pursed his full, sensuous lips for a moment, as if hurt at the suggestion that this might be anything to do with him. “And you think I have kidnapped your wife?”

  “We think a man called Selig Silverstein has kidnapped her.”

  “So why do you come to me?”

  “Because someone told Selig Silverstein to come to you, or at least, they told him to come here, to Mann Fang. You are the only lead we have.”

  He closed his languid eyes as if too tired for this. They had woken him at a time he probably rarely saw. Mitch guessed he lived by night, like most gangsters.

  “I do not know this Selig Silverstein. Which gang does he belong to?”

  “We’re not sure. He’s an anarchist.”

  “Ah, I know of the anarchist gangs, though I do not know this Mr Silverstein.”

  “He might be involved with the Eastman gang, with Jack Zelig.”

  Mock Duck nodded. “The Eastman gang do not step foot in Chinatown. They know that would be most unwise.”

  And there, through the bitter tea and polite deference, was the unmistakable air of threat.

  “What about the anarchists,” Mitch said. “Would they set foot in Chinatown?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, they have not.”

  “And yet someone told Selig Silverstein to come to this place.”

  Mock Duck nodded and considered this. One of his thugs whispered in his ear and Mock Duck rose and bowed. “Please excuse me for a moment.”

  They disappeared to the next room. The rest of the gang stood watching them. Mahler sipped his tea and tapped his finger.

  “We have to get out of here,” Mitch whispered.

  “Don’t be scared,” said Mahler. “Mr Duck is an honourable man. I trust him.”

  The thug returned and signalled them to follow. They rose and walked through to the next room. This was it, Mitch thought. They would be hacked to death and dumped in the East River.

  Mock Duck stood facing the wall, like a naughty schoolboy. He turned and invited them to stand with him.

  A spyhole. He was looking through a spyhole to the street below.

  “This man. He is with you?”

  Mitch peered through the hole. A man in a green suit, portly, skulking in a doorway opposite.

  Gilhooly.

  “He’s not with us, no.”

  “He followed you here.”

  That uneasy feeling that Mock Duck had also followed them. From the moment they had stepped foot on Canal Street, his eyes had watched them.

  “He took an interest in this place yesterday, with a party of tourists. But it was obvious to my men that he was not the usual rich person interested in, as you say, slumming.”

  Mahler took a turn at the spyhole and gasped.

  “You know him,” said Mock Duck. It wasn’t a question.

  “He was my wife’s bodyguard, until a few days ago.”

  “He is not a member of the Eastman gang,” said Mock Duck.

  Again it was a statement, not a question, but he seemed to be mulling it over, considering the possibility.

  “We wondered if he was involved in the attempt to blackmail Mrs Mahler,” Mitch said. “He is a suspect.”

  Mock Duck nodded, piecing it together. “This man, as of last night, has shown great interest in another place, not far from here. A place that is controlled by the Eastman gang.”

  “Then surely it’s him,” said Mahler.

  “My man, Sing Dock, will show you the place.” He delivered a volley of rapid Chinese to one of his men, who bowed in return. “Go with him. He will show you.”

  He wasn’t going to hack them to pieces and throw them in the East River. He was actually going to help them.

  Mahler bowed and clasped his palms in prayer. “Sir, thank you for your help. I feel I have dishonoured you.”

  “It is my honour to receive such a distinguished guest. I only wish it was in better circumstances. Please feel free to visit Mann Fang at a better time, with your wife, and I will regard that as recompense.”

  Mahler bowed again.

  Mitch decided he had better do the same as they were walking out with their lives intact.

  — 34 —

  SING DOCK LED THEM through the kitchen, ripe with the pungent smell of soy. Two old women watched inscrutably as they walked out through a back yard and then pushed on through a dark alley between the tall buildings.

  He turned left and then right, through a warren of winding alleys, and entered a building through the back door, calling out a greeting in Chinese. They pushed through to a jewellery shop, its shutters down, but the throb of city life resonating through the shop door.

  He motioned them to look through glass panes. Canal Street, just down from the metro station. They had walked right past this spot only an hour ago.

  The enormous Chinese guide pointed again.

  The building across the street. Mitch tried to read the signage above the door. A mirror and picture-frame manufacturer.

  Sing Dock nodded.

  The shopkeeper unlocked the door and Gustav and Mitch stepped outside. The door closed after them and Mock Duck’s help was at an end.

  They crossed the street, threading their way between carts and carriages, and stood before the closed shop front.

  “So Gilhooly has taken an interest in this place since last night,” said Gustav. “What are the chances he was here just as Alma was taken?”

  “If Mock Duck can be trusted.”

  “I trust him. Though I had to work hard to gain his respect.”

 
; “What? How did you do that?”

  “You noticed me tapping my finger?” said Gustav.

  “And that was your big act of persuasion?”

  Mahler grinned. “Finger tapping is the customary way to show thanks to the tea master. The custom originated in the Qing dynasty.”

  So a secret signal had passed between them. Mock Duck had shown unexpected deference. Surely he knew nothing about Mahler the composer, nor anything about the Met. It was simply that Gustav had been the first white man to show any kind of respect for him as a Chinese man.

  “How are we to enter here?” Gustav said, sizing up the closed shop front.

  He strode to the door and was about to knock when Mitch snatched his arm back.

  “No. We’re not knocking up any more gangsters. We find a way through the back.”

  Gustav nodded. They idled along the row, pretending to be innocent passersby. A dank, narrow alley to the side, barely wide enough for them to pass through side by side. Mitch slipped in and Gustav followed. The busy street faded, its hubbub suddenly remote, even though they had only stepped a few paces. They crept forward, tip-toeing so their steps didn’t echo.

  There were no windows on this side of the building, just a sheer wall, and the sensation that the alley was narrowing, its walls closing in, so they might not be able to squeeze out at the far end.

  Mitch kept glancing back, not to check that Gustav was close, but that Gilhooly hadn’t returned. He would only stand so long watching Mann Fang before he realized they were gone. Mitch rubbed his cheek, remembered the sting of the slap Gilhooly had delivered. He didn’t fancy engaging the bruiser in a fist fight.

  He’d been right. It’s often an insider, the person so close that you don’t see them. Gilhooly had been behind it all along. But was he a plant for someone else? Perhaps working with Selig Silverstein, or the Eastman gang. It was Gilhooly who’d found the vital clue that pointed to Silverstein. Maybe it had been a diversion. Maybe Selig Silverstein, the hapless anarchist, had been nothing to do with this all along.

  But Gilhooly had been hired by Otto Kahn. Could the banker really have hired a gang member to protect the Mahlers? And if he had, was it deliberate?

  The alleyway fractured into a yard at the rear of the building, with an access drive from that side. There was a loading bay where warehouse stock could be shipped in and out, but it was all silent.

  Shutters padlocked, a door that Gustav rattled. Mitch put a finger to his lips and pointed up. A tiny window, open, barely large enough for a man to slip through.

  Barrels marked ‘GLUE’ sat below the window. Mitch took off his overcoat and suit jacket, doffed his hat, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and hopped up onto a barrel.

  Peering through the slit of the window, he could make out a loading bay, stacks of picture-frames leaned against the walls but no sign of life.

  He gripped the window frame and hoisted himself up, grunting at the effort. He was too old for this. Tilting himself forward, he let the window frame take his weight, pushing his feet off the barrel, praying the window wouldn’t collapse, shatter and impale him. He heaved himself forward, scraping his belly, a spasm of pain shooting through his abdomen. He felt Gustav grab his ankles and shove him forward. He toppled in, violent pain flaring through his thighs as he slid in and fell to the floor.

  The clatter echoed through the building.

  He paused, holding the searing pain inside himself, biting his fist. No sound. No one running to see what the noise was.

  Stiff and sore, he got to his feet and unlocked the door.

  Gustav slipped in, clutching the bundle of clothes to his chest, like a child. Mitch put his jacket back on, smoothing it out, as much to ease the pain as anything else, shrugged into his overcoat and put on his hat, still shaking with agony and holding the scream inside.

  Gustav walked forward to the edge of the loading bay, peering down a corridor to the rest of the building and yelled, “Alma!”

  Mitch put hand over Gustav’s mouth. Too late. His shout echoed through the building like a gunshot.

  A commotion far away of shuffling feet, the scrape of a chair on floorboards. A woman’s voice cried out.

  “Gustav!”

  Faint, echoing through the cavernous warehouse, but from upstairs somewhere.

  Gustav was running to her before Mitch could stop him. He was running to his wife, the only thing he could hear.

  He didn’t hear the unmistakable sound of heavy boots running towards them.

  Mitch scrambled after him, clawing the air behind him, through a cavern of picture-frames stacked high. It opened out into a vast warehouse space.

  A wooden staircase to the side, down which two men in overcoats came pounding.

  Two men with pistols.

  Gustav stopped and Mitch slammed into him. Stumbling, they fell to the floor.

  Before he could jump to his feet, Mitch was looking into the barrel of a gun.

  — 35 —

  ALMA WAS STILL CALLING from upstairs. A distant shriek echoing through the warehouse.

  “Gyp. Go shut that dame up,” said the man pointing the gun in Mitch’s face. He was a giant. A gorilla in a suit. “Gag her if you have to.”

  The second was a boy, short and squat, with a tangle of dark hair. “Maybe I’ll strangle her, Louie. That ought to shut her up.”

  “You lay a finger on my wife and I’ll—”

  Gyp slapped Mahler a vicious swipe that left him clutching his nose and howling in pain. “Cut out that chinning. Cheese it!”

  “Nice and quiet now, Gyp,” said Louie.

  Hadn’t Lieutenant Becker mentioned these two, reeling off the list of gangsters Mitch might know? Gyp the Blood and Cyclone Louie.

  Gyp smiled down at Mahler, a funny, cruel little smile, which he turned on Mitch, as if to say, look what I can do; maybe I’ll do it to you too. Then he shrugged and headed up the wooden staircase.

  They heard his footsteps break into a trot, echoing up there. Mitch tried to follow the sound along the ceiling, to get an idea where Alma was. Towards the rear of the warehouse. The crump and hustle of steps, rapid. Another staircase, to the rear and left.

  Alma stopped calling with a sudden little shriek.

  Gustav went to jump to his feet. Mitch yanked him back down.

  Cyclone Louie smiled and pulled a cigarette out of a silver cigarette case, thumbed a match out of a box, struck it with his thumb nail and lit it, all with one hand — the other pointing the gun.

  “So you’re Cyclone Louie, yes?” Mitch said.

  A flicker of surprise that barely disturbed the big man’s nonchalance. “What’s it to ya?”

  “Lieutenant Becker was asking about you only yesterday. You and Gyp the Blood.”

  “Ain’t that nice?” he joked, looking to his left as if his crony was still standing by his side. “You tell Charlie Becker I said hello.”

  Something about the way he’d called him Charlie — the amused nonchalance of a guy who’s talking about a friend — could Lieutenant Becker be a crook? Had Becker asked if Mitch knew those names because he was checking on his associates?

  Gyp the Blood came tramping back down the wooden staircase, grinning like a frat boy who’s hidden your shoes and knows it’ll take you hours to find them.

  “Best send the boy,” said Cyclone Louie.

  “For what?”

  “For Big Jack.”

  Gyp the Blood fixed a psychotic glare on them, as if to say, this man may order me around, but I’m in charge of you guys, don’t you forget it. “What we gonna do with these schmucks?”

  “In the stock room, I reckons. Away from the dame.”

  Cyclone Louie waved his pistol at one of three doors on the other side of the warehouse. They got to their feet and trudged towards it.

  Mitch could see nothing by way of a weapon, just acres of picture-frames and mirrors stacked up. Each step was a step closer to a locked room and no hope of rescuing Alma. He thought of turning swiftl
y and kicking at Cyclone Louie’s pistol, but he could hear from his tread that he was a few paces behind, just out of reach, but close enough to shoot them if they tried anything.

  Gustav filed in and Mitch followed, turning in time to see Gyp the Blood’s manic grin as he slammed the door.

  The key turned in the lock.

  They were prisoners.

  — 36 —

  THE ROOM WAS A CRAMPED stock room, with shelves stacked high with pots of glue.

  A slit of daylight streamed in from a high, narrow acid-etched window that didn’t open. Gustav stood on a chair and tried to peek through.

  “Nothing. I think it goes onto the side alley we came up, not the street.”

  Mitch tried to remember if there had been any windows along that alley. He hadn’t noticed. The window was too narrow. If they smashed it they couldn’t crawl through. Nor even call for help. He remembered how the sound from Canal Street had seemed so distant only a few feet down the alley. No one would hear them.

  The only way they were getting out of there was through the door.

  He scoured the room, looking for something, anything, they might use, hoping in vain that this store room might offer up a crowbar, a spare key, a screwdriver to take the hinges off.

  “Just glue,” he said. “A few hundred pots of glue.”

  “We are stuck,” said Gustav.

  Mitch checked his deadpan face. Mahler shrugged, as if his humour was falling on the wrong audience, rather than being delivered at the wrong time.

  Mitch slumped on the floor, chill despair seeping up through the floorboards. “We’re doomed,” he said.

  “Not so,” said Gustav. “We have found Alma. We know she’s alive. We know these people want money. It’s simply a matter now of how we give it to them.”

  He was strangely resigned to the situation, almost cheerful of it turning out for the best, and Mitch wondered if it were different now that it was he, Gustav Mahler, kidnapped, rather than his wife. He had not wanted to pay when it was Alma; now it was the great composer and conductor of the Met, it would all be resolved by someone else handing over the money.