The Eighth Circle

by Stanley Ellin

  Lucy Manfredi was seated at the kitchen table drinking coffee when they walked in. In a pair of worn slippers, her housedress down at the hem, her hair in pin curlers, and with a newspaper propped before her against the sugar bowl she looked like an exaggerated picture of weary domesticity. She raised her eyebrows at the sight of her husband’s companion.

  “Well, what do you know?” she said caustically. “Look at the great man himself. I’m surprised he even came in here when one of my ugly girl friends might jump out of the closet and grab him.” She pointed an accusing finger at Murray. “You got a nerve, you, with that kind of talk. You ought to be ashamed.”

  “Me?” said Murray. “What did I do?”

  “You know. He knows, too.” Lucy turned the finger on Bruno. “Didn’t you tell me—”

  Bruno sighed. “I told you. Now let him alone, because he’s already got a girl friend. And what’s it your business, anyhow? Just fix up some coffee for us, and stop worrying about who’s getting married to who. Or would you rather have a shot of hard stuff?” he asked Murray.

  “A shot,” Murray said. “A big one.”

  He had a big one, and then another, while Lucy regarded him with unabashed interest, her elbow planted on the table, chin cupped in her hand. “Who’s the girl friend?” she asked. “The crazy one from Texas you had here that time?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe. Ah, you’re still talking like that, Murray; you’re still old Mr. Careful. Say, you know what I think? I think you’re turning into one of those guys who’s so scared of marrying the wrong girl they never get married at all. They just dry up and get mean. You wait and see if that don’t happen.”

  “All right, if that’s what you want, I’ll wait and see.”

  “You can’t have any kids that way,” Lucy warned.

  “That’s what you think,” said Bruno. “Look, I told you to let him alone. Now will you clear up this table so we can get some work done? And then go inside and watch television.”

  Lucy deposited dishes in the sink with a clatter. “I don’t want to watch television. I got a bellyful of television. I want to sit right here in my own kitchen, and read my newspaper, and tend to my own business like I always do. If you don’t mind.”

  She plopped herself down into her chair and picked up the newspaper, defying them. Bruno said helplessly to Murray, “If you want me to fix up a table inside—”

  “Hell, no,” Murray said. “It’s all right the way it is.”

  “Thank you,” said Lucy from behind the newspaper.

  Murray laid the binder on the table. The sheets of paper it enclosed were tissue thin, but even when pressed tight together they bulked as large as a good-sized volume. Bruno drew up a chair alongside Murray’s, and they studied the first pages together.

  “It’s from this year,” Bruno said, “but that’s all I can make of it. What do you make of it?”

  The pages were divided into a series of columns, each column a solid row of figures. Murray ran his finger along the horizontally ruled line at the top of a page and said, “Some of it is easy. We’ll skip this first one—11B1—because that’s probably a code for the exact date. But then we’ve got $220 under gr, which must be the gross receipts for that day, and $140 under nt, which would be the net amount left after bets were paid off, and then Immediate Cash Expenses, which, I’d say, is incidental expenses they deducted from the net. And next we have 13E277, which is a code for something else. What we want to work out first are these dates. Then when we hit May third and see a thousand bucks marked down there we know we’ve got Lundeen pegged right. He probably took a lot of graft, but the only payment that means anything to this indictment is the one on May third.”

  “Wait a second,” Bruno said. He peered closely at the page. “I thought so. Somebody’s got a real sense of humor in that outfit. You know what Immediate Cash Expenses stands for?”

  “Sure. It’s outlay. Whatever it cost that day to run the operation.”

  “And how. You look at those initials there, friend, and you’re looking at I-C-E for ice. The old payola. The graft. And right next to it here, Murray, these are shield numbers. They marked down the number of every cop who collected from them. That’s what this 13E277 is. Now why should they want to go to all that trouble? What difference does it make, as long as the pay-off was made?”

  “A lot of difference. Every cop whose number is down here must have been a bagman, a captain’s man, and his job was to collect and pass it along to the man over him. But what happens when some big shot says to Wykoff, ‘You missed a payment last week. How about that?’ Then all Wykoff has to do is check his records here and say, ‘We paid one hundred bucks or whatever it was to a cop with this shield number.’ And they catch the double-crosser right at the source.”

  “Do you mean that Lundeen—?”

  “That’s what I mean. Lundeen collected from Miller, all right, but he tried to keep it all himself instead of passing it on to the higher-ups. He was a marked man after that; the word must have gone out to get him as soon as anybody had a chance. And when LoScalzo grabbed Miller, that was Miller’s chance.”

  Bruno said with awe: “What a beautiful setup. What a beautiful, beautiful setup. You get the picture? While we’re sitting here with this one book in front of us, there’s somebody—some guy on top of the whole organization—and he’s got forty, fifty of them from all over the country to play with. Maybe a hundred! You know how much money that comes to, Murray? Jesus, you can’t even figure it! And the way they run it, so whoever’s in charge can put his finger right down on a page and say, ‘This corner in Chicago pays off so much a week, and this cop here wants so much for a cut.’ I mean, this is a way to operate something.”

  Lucy lowered her newspaper. “Look, lover boy,” she said. “Don’t go getting any ideas.”

  “Ideas?” Bruno threw out his arms in an appeal to the heavens. “That’s fine,” he said. “Thanks for advising me about it. Now if somebody comes along and asks me do I want to run the gambling syndicate for the whole United States I know what to tell him. Otherwise, I wouldn’t know what to say. And it could happen tomorrow, couldn’t it?”

  “From what I’m reading in this paper,” Lucy said, “anything could happen tomorrow.”

  “Will you two quit?” Murray said. “Look, Bruno, this date thing doesn’t make sense. Here it starts with 11B1 and figuring 11 for the month and 1 for the day you’ve got November first. But the series runs up to 11B38, so that’s out, because no month has thirty-eight days. Right?”

  “Yeah, but suppose that B is the day, and—no, that don’t make sense, either. Anyhow, what’ve they got all these B’s for? The whole page is full of them. The whole book.” Bruno flipped through some pages and then stopped short. “Wait a minute. Here’s an M. Maybe there’s some others, too.”

  He went through the pages more slowly. “Sure there is. Here’s S, and here’s Q—what the hell, Q—and here’s X. I guess that’s all. Now what do we have?”

  Murray checked them off on his fingers. “B, M, Q, S, and X. Five of them. Hey, that’s something. What comes in fives, boy?”

  “Basketball players.”

  “Boroughs,” said Murray. “The five boroughs—Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and X for the Bronx. How much would you want to bet on that?”

  “No bet,” said Bruno. “But that’s a fine system of figuring dates you got now. If this column is all locations, it means there’s no dates in the whole book, except for the year they got down on that first page.”

  “My friend,” Murray said. “Well, there’s only one way to work on it. I’ll take this left-hand page, and you take that right-hand page, and we’ll go over them a few times to see the pattern. Then we’ll switch around.”

  “How about doing it tomorrow?” Bruno suggested. “It’s kind of late, and you can get cross-eyed looking at these numbers.”

  “Now,” said Murray. “And get some pencils and paper. They might help us
.”

  They didn’t. At the end of an hour of experimentation, with dates substituted for numbers and then applied to a section of the book at random, the problem looked hopeless. “I think the best thing to do,” said Bruno out of the middle of a yawn, “is get this Lundeen’s shield number, and then go through the whole book and hope it turns up somewhere. Maybe we’ll go blind doing it that way, but this way is getting us nowhere, Murray.”

  “I’m not so sure. Do you have any numbers missing from a sequence? My page runs right through from 11B1 to 11B38 but then the next number is 13B1. But where are all the 12’s?”

  Bruno sleepily scanned his page. “Not here,” he reported. “This runs from 13B2 all the way up to 21B1, but—hey, the 19’s are missing!”

  “You’ve got it cold,” Murray said. “The 12’s are out, the 19’s are out, and if you look ahead you’ll find the 26’s are out, too. Every seventh number must be out. There’s seven days in a week, but there’s no work on Sunday for these bookies.”

  Bruno jubilantly flipped pages again, and then clapped a hand to his forehead. “Maybe some bookies like to work even when the horses don’t run, Murray. Here’s the 26’s.”

  Murray felt the rage mount in him. “What the hell was Wykoff trying to do—fool the Russians?” He studied the column that Bruno indicated. “How can that be? What’s the next one missing?”

  Bruno scanned a series of pages. “The 123’s,” he said, and Murray saw the light in a blinding flash.

  “Bruno,” he said, “if you want to write the month and day the short way, how do you do it? Take today, December twentieth. What’s the shortest way of writing that?”

  “Twelve-twenty,” said Bruno, and then blinked as the light hit him, too. He snatched at the book. “Look at this. 11B1 is one-one-Brooklyn. January first, Brooklyn. And that means January second and ninth and sixteenth and twenty-third are all out. There’s no 12B, 19B, 116B, and 123B. All of them were Sundays. But what’s this number after the B stand for? This Bl?”

  “That’s the territory in Brooklyn. It’s the code number for the district, however they marked it off. But one thing is sure, they didn’t manufacture maps for this. They used some kind of ordinary map, something handy for them. Maybe election districts. Something like that.”

  “Yeah, but where does that leave us? I don’t have any maps like that around.”

  Lucy was deep in a crossword puzzle. “There’s maps in the telephone books,” she said. “Maybe that’s what you need.”

  It was, although they missed on their first try, using telephone zones. Then Bruno said, “There’s this other map here of postal districts and they all have numbers, too. What’s the highest number Wykoff had down for Brooklyn there?”

  Murray turned pages with furious haste. “It’s B38.”

  “And,” said Bruno, “the highest number of these Brooklyn postal zones is 38.”

  They looked at each other with tired approbation, and Lucy said: “You’re both so smart. If I didn’t tell you about the telephone books—”

  “I know,” Bruno said. “How did I ever get along before I got married?”

  Lucy smiled. “You’re both so smart.”

  “Now the acid test,” Murray said. “We’ve got to put down Lundeen in code and see if he’s here. That was May third in Manhattan—53M, that would be—he collected a thousand dollars graft, and his shield number—” Murray struggled to remember and found that when he closed his eyes to concentrate the only thing sharply defined for him was the pounding of a pulse in his forehead. “I’m not sure. I think it was 32C something-or-other.”

  Bruno was following this with a pencil. “All right, so now we got 53M—and from this map here Miller’s district was number 19—so we look through the records for 53M19.” He arranged his glasses on his nose and thumbed through pages of the binder, squinting at them closely. Then he stopped and looked around at Murray. “Friend,” he said, “meet Mr. Miller and Patrolman Lundeen.”

  53M19, the line read: gr $870 nt $480 $1000-32C720

  The bed in the guest room had a swaybacked mattress that sounded to Murray as if it were stuffed with corn shucks—an assurance, he told himself grimly, that there would be little sleep for him this night—and after a moment’s contemplation of this bleak prospect he was sound asleep. He awoke in darkness wondering where he was. Then he became aware of the metallic clunk-clunk of an endless freight train passing by his window, and remembered. Remembered, too, the stray thought that had prowled all through his dreams, staying just out of reach. A man. An identity. A name—

  He slid out of the bed, shuddering as his feet touched the floor, which was as cold as the snow-encrusted ground outside Wykoff’s house, and groped around for the light. With his eyes narrowed against its glare he looked at his watch and saw that it was not quite six o’clock. He debated trying to get back to sleep, and decided against it. Now that he had that name on his mind it would be impossible, anyhow.

  Wykoff’s record book was on the dresser. He took it into bed with him and opened it. The name was in the book—it was the only name in the book written out fully—and while it shouldn’t have meant anything to him, it did. It was signed in a fine, round hand at the end of each month’s records, obviously attesting to the accuracy of the figures that preceded it. Okay—Chas. Pirozy, C.P.A., it said; the signature and pedigree of a Certified Public Accountant proud of his professional standing, and not afraid to go down on the record, as long as the record was safely locked up in Wykoff’s charge. What Chas. might feel now, Murray thought, was something else again.

  But it was not that thought that bothered him. It was the feeling that the name was familiar, that somewhere he had met it before, which affected him like a gnat hovering before his nose. But where? He sat with the book propped on his knees trying to match the name with someone who might have had reason to mention it to him. It had to be someone who knew Wykoff, who was close to him—Miller, Schrade, Caxton, Dowd, possibly Mona Dowd—no, it didn’t seem to be any of them. He could have sworn to that.

  Harlingen? Now why, Murray wondered, should the image of Harlingen keep interposing itself. He was brooding over this when he heard a noise at the door, the sound of a fingernail tapping against it. “Murray,” Bruno whispered, “are you awake?”

  Murray opened the door and observed that Bruno was in pajamas and was not alone. Riding piggyback on his shoulders was the youngest and smallest Manfredi, who, also garbed in pajamas, kept his balance by a tight grip on two upstanding tufts of his father’s thinning hair. When he saw Murray he bounced up and down on Bruno’s shoulders, his eyes bright with interest.

  “Quit it,” Bruno commanded amiably. “I saw your light on,” he told Murray, “so I wondered if it was too cold in here. You need another blanket or something?”

  “No, I’m all right. I was just wondering where I heard that guy’s name before, that one who handled Wykoff’s books. You know how it is when you start wondering about something like that. Not that it matters any.”

  “I know. But wouldn’t it be in Lundeen’s file?”

  “If it was, I’d remember it. I know that file backward and forward. Funny thing, though, it keeps reminding me of Harlingen. No, wait a second, not Harlingen—Harlingen’s kid. But what would she have to do with it?”

  “Well,” Bruno said, “Harlingen said he always keeps her in touch with everything. He’s afraid she’ll have a nervous breakdown on him, if he doesn’t. Maybe he told her, and she told you, and that’s how it went.”

  “I think you’ve got the wrong slant on Harlingen,” Murray said. “Anyhow, let it go. It’ll come to me sooner or later, if I don’t bother about it.” He indicated Bruno’s rider. “Which one is this?”

  “Oh, this one? This one is Vito,” said Bruno. “He’s a big boy now. Last time you saw him he was wearing diapers, but he don’t wear diapers any more. That’s why we go for a ride every morning this time. Isn’t that so, Vito?”

  Vito waved an arm behind him,
pointing at something. “No Sanny Cross,” he said querulously.

  “What’s that mean?” Murray asked. “Oh, no Santa Claus. Sure there’s a Santa Claus, Vito. Don’t let your father hand you that stuff.”

  Vito bounced up and down and pointed again. “No Sanny Cross,” he protested stormily. “No Sanny Cross. No Sanny Cross.”

  “Ah, turn it off,” Bruno said. “This is a real character, this one,” he told Murray. “Saturday, I took the whole gang to the show at the Music Hall, and afterward we ate at the Automat. So while I’m down in the men’s room with Vito, who walks in and lines right up next to him but one of them charity Santa Clauses. You know, all done up with the white whiskers and the red suit and everything. The poor kid’ll never get over it. Now, every time I take him to the john he figures to see Santa Claus there. Don’t you, Vito?”

  Vito was not paying attention. He leaned forward and poked a finger at Murray’s face. “Din,” he said in a melting voice. “Din. Din.”

  “What’s he saying now?” Murray asked.

  “Who knows?” said Bruno. “Half the time the only ones who can make out what he’s saying are the other kids, so if they’re not around I’m really flying blind.” He settled Vito firmly on his shoulders. “You ought to get back to bed before you freeze your feet. That linoleum is murder in cold weather.”

  Murray shook his head. “No, I’ll get dressed and get going. This thing about Harlingen and his girl is too much on my mind, and if I get to his place before she leaves for school I can talk to them both about it. I’ll leave Wykoff’s book here, and what you have to do is take it to the office and have the lab run a film of it. As long as we’ve got a film of it put away safe, we’ve got Wykoff backed into the corner. I don’t think he’ll try any rough stuff then, what with the Treasury Department ready to give its right arm for this book. It must be worth about five hundred years in jail for the guy on income-tax evasion.”

  “You don’t think LoScalzo wouldn’t give his right arm for it, too?” Bruno said. “You know what it could mean to him in this investigation? Man, that bundle of paper is the hottest thing in town right now. Drop it on the floor, it’ll send up a cloud like an atom bomb.”