Cynthia

by Howard Fast

“Mrs. Brandon had a T’ang horse—or what presumed to be one. It turned out to be an Italian fake. It broke in two. I went around to look at it.”

  “Harvey, you’re a liar!” Rothschild snapped. “Now, look—I am coming to the point. Cynthia Brandon walked out of that apartment Monday past. Today is Thursday. On Tuesday, one of my men, Detective Gonzalez, saw Cynthia Brandon walking in Central Park with a man. If you remember, Tuesday was a lousy March day with snow—not so different from today, but they were holding hands. Everything lovey-dovey, except that Gonzalez thought he recognized the man. The man rang a bell somewhere. Anyway, Gonzalez has a fantastic memory for faces and he came back here and went through some of the books. He found this in the Interpol book, an album of mug shots that we get from Interpol twice a year.”

  Rothschild opened his desk drawer, took out a folder and from it a glossy photograph, which he handed to me. It was a picture of a good-looking dark man, with strong features and a pleasant smile—the kind of a face I have always liked and that I always compare favorably with my own.

  “Does it do anything to you?” Rothschild asked.

  “It makes me envious. That’s the way I would have looked if I had picked the right parents. Who is he?”

  “His real name is Valento Corsica, and he was born in Ragusa. That’s a town in Sicily. He was educated there, Milan and London. Perfect English, French—and, of course, Italian. Polished, well-mannered, and usually goes under the name of Count Gambion de Fonti. A count, yet. No criminal record, but three arrests by Italian police, two by Scotland Yard and one by the Sureté. Nothing ever held, but Interpol wired us over three thousand words on him.”

  “What’s his line,” I asked, “the rich heiress gambit?”

  “Oh, no—not at all, Harvey. Not one bit. In fact, in a poker game, Valento could cover all of E.C. Brandon’s bets and a good bit more. As for his profession—leadership.”

  “Leadership?”

  “Leadership.” Rothschild managed a smile. Not much of a smile, but for Rothschild it was a real achievement. “You see, Harvey, according to Interpol, for the past fifteen years or so, Valento Corsica has been trained to take over the leadership of the Mafia. Schooled, trained, groomed—”

  “Mafia? You’re putting me on.”

  “Mafia. Syndicate. Call it what you wish, Harvey—Valento Corsica was groomed to lead it. Twelve weeks ago, Joe Asianti, the incumbent, had a stroke and went to his Maker. Last Tuesday, Detective Frank Gonzalez sees the heir apparent walking in the park with Cynthia Brandon and thank God he has a good enough memory for faces to spot both of them. So, you see, Harvey, either you come clean with me, or so help me God, I’ll call in a cop to slug you and then charge you with assaulting an officer with a deadly weapon and then throw you into one of our own little detention cells, right here at the nineteenth, where you could sit for a week before anyone knew you were here.”

  “You wouldn’t do that.”

  “Want to try, Harvey?”

  “You’d call in a cop to slug me? I don’t believe it.”

  “That’s right Harvey. So believe it.”

  “OK.”

  “OK what?”

  “I’ll talk. I’m no good for a holdout. One twist of the arm and I break. E.C. Brandon thinks his daughter’s been kidnapped. I’m sworn not to tell the cops—so now you can see how deceitful I am.”

  “What?”

  “That’s him. I don’t think she’s been kidnapped.”

  “What do you mean, that’s him?”

  “I mean it’s Brandon’s notion that she’s been kidnapped. If I thought for one moment that she really has been kidnapped, you’d have to work me over with your rubber hoses to get it out of me. But I don’t think so, and your report from Gonzalez doesn’t sound like any kidnapped girl.”

  “No, it doesn’t. And furthermore, we don’t use rubber hoses. But there’s one little hole in your story, Harvey.”

  “I know.”

  “You,” Rothschild agreed. “How do you come into it? No stolen property—no jewels to be fenced. How do you come into it?”

  “I know. Brandon carries kidnap insurance.”

  “What?”

  I nodded, and I told him the whole silly story, and he just sat there behind his old, beat-up desk, nursing what was left of his glass of milk, and regarding me with sour disbelief. When I had finished, he took a deep breath, got up and left the room, and returned a moment later with a carton of milk, from which he poured a fresh glass.

  “All right, what did you leave out, Harvey?”

  I had left out the hundred thousand dollars, and I intended it to remain left out.

  “That’s the story.”

  “So that’s the story. Just where do you think you go from here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you forgot. Try to remember, Harvey.”

  “The trouble is that you have me pegged for being smart. I get one or two breaks, and the word is around that I solve problems.”

  “Not smart—crafty, Harvey. I don’t trust you. But that’s my cop nature. I don’t trust anyone.”

  “Lieutenant,” I said very sincerely, “I don’t have one blessed notion where that girl is, and the fact that she is holding hands in Central Park with the new top man in the Syndicate is news to me. Scout’s honor.”

  Rothschild did not deign to reply. He simply looked at me, something at which he is very good indeed.

  Chapter 4

  Friday I checked records, read about the Brandon family and skimmed through three books on the Syndicate; and then I called Dr. Fred Bronstein, the psychoanalyst on East 75th Street.

  “I can’t talk to you now, Harvey. I am with a patient.”

  I called him a halfhour later.

  “Harvey,” he said petulantly, “you know that during my professional day I welcome only professional calls.”

  “Well, how do you know that this isn’t a professional call?”

  “Look, Harvey, I don’t have time to horse around.”

  “I’m not horsing around. I’m in trouble. I want to see you.”

  “It’s got to cost you thirty dollars.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said.

  “It used to be twenty.”

  “Well, a quart of milk used to be twelve cents, Harvey.”

  “Not in my time.”

  “Thirty, Harvey. Take it or leave it.”

  I took it, and he complained that he would be giving me part of his Saturday morning.

  “You don’t know how I fight to keep Saturday morning for squash,” he said. And the following morning I was ready to believe him; the rackets were there and he had his tennis shoes on. “I could squeeze five sessions out of a Saturday morning, Harvey,” he assured me. “That would amount to one hundred and fifty dollars—but money isn’t everything.”

  “No?”

  “No, Harvey. Absolutely not. To you money is a symbol. Some people would call you chintzy—but that’s not a very acute diagnosis. It’s your attitude toward money, the attitude in itself—”

  “Whose time are we on?”

  “Yours, Harvey.”

  “Well, why don’t you let me talk? And it’s not money. The fact is that people don’t like me. You take this Lieutenant Rothschild—you know, he terrifies me—”

  “Why don’t you lie down, Harvey.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and I stretched out on his couch. “He’s got ulcers, and he looks at me and right away I can see that he’s blaming me for the goddamn ulcers—”

  “The same Lieutenant Rothschild, Harvey?”

  “The same one. My God, you don’t think there are two of them, do you?”

  “I don’t think it’s profitable to discuss Lieutenant Rothschild, Harvey. We’ve been through all that in the past. It’s yourself that we’re interested in—”

  “It’s myself that I am talking about. It’s what myself does to people like Rothschild.”

  “Harvey, I told yo
u—”

  “All right. All right. Rothschild—”

  “Harvey, I am going to play squash,” he said, grabbing his racket. “It is no bloody damn use. I try to make an hour productive and you spend it hating this Rothschild. I am going to play—”

  “On my money?”

  “It’s free. It’s a gift. Now, out with you!”

  I walked all the distance to the Donnell Library and took Lucille Dempsey to lunch at the Oak Room of the St. Regis. She accompanied me in a rather dazed state, and after she had looked at the menu, asked me whether I was all right.

  “Of course I am.”

  “Harvey, this lunch can cost you fifteen dollars.”

  “I know,” I answered moodily. “I know that. Go ahead. Eat. Enjoy it.”

  “How can I enjoy it? Every bite will cut you like a twinge of pain.”

  “OK—OK. What’s the difference? Do you know where this Cynthia Brandon kid is? She’s walking around in Central Park with the new king of the Mafia.”

  She looked at me with motherly concern, and I told her the rest of it. Then she ordered lunch. Then we ate and she turned the matter over in her mind. Like most superior women, she is always inventing childish ways to make me feel smarter than she is.

  “Harvey, where did Cynthia go to college?” she asked me.

  “Ann Bromley, which is a small college up in Connecticut, near Danbury. Four, five hundred students, all girls, all very rich.”

  “She graduated?”

  “Nope. She parted. They didn’t dare to throw her out, with the Brandon money behind her and she didn’t want to stay.”

  “Why did they want to throw her out?”

  “Because she tried to integrate the place. She turned up for her junior year with five Negro girls, wrote her own check for their tuition, and demanded that they be enrolled as students. The whole damn school nearly got a stroke. She threatened to blow the lid off with newspaper stories, and then the old man was called into the act and he beat her down.”

  “Oh? You know, Harvey, I am beginning to like your Cynthia. Was there a lot of wild talk about her using pot?”

  “How did you know?”

  “A kid like that has to try it. Do you have pictures of her, Harvey?”

  I took out the pictures and showed them to her.

  “I have a notion,” Lucille said, “so tomorrow morning, at ten o’clock, Harvey, we are going bicycling in Central Park. You do ride a bike?”

  “Of course I ride a bike. And what do we find—Cynthia holding hands with Valento Corsica?”

  “Maybe we just have a date, Harvey. It is Sunday, and you can afford to take a Sunday off, can’t you?”

  So instead of sleeping through Sunday morning, as any civilized human being has the right to do, I was finishing breakfast at the zoo with Lucille Dempsey, who is not by any means one of these tiny, skinny kids, but a solid five-foot-seven, one hundred and thirty pounds—and who, by virtue of this, had a bowl of oatmeal, two eggs, four strips of bacon, two slices of toast and two cups of coffee. As well as a large orange juice for a starter. All of which I watched from above my single cup of black coffee with a mixture of horror and envy.

  “You would feel better, Harvey,” she said, “if you had a good breakfast. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

  “Of which my mother never failed to remind me.”

  “Well, your mother was right.”

  “No one ever told you that the worst way in the world to get a man is to remind him that his mother was right?”

  “I am not at all sure that I want to get you, Harvey. The fact that I feel a certain tenderness toward you does not necessarily mean that I wish to marry you. Do you have the pictures of Cynthia with you?”

  “Why?”

  “I want one.”

  “Now?”

  “Now. You know, you always ask the obvious, Harvey.”

  I gave her the picture of Cynthia, which she slipped into her purse, and finally she finished the interminable breakfast and we began to walk to the boathouse, where the bike livery kept itself. The weather had changed, and this was a crisp, cool sunny morning, and since the Mayor kept the cars out of the park, the air was clean as crystal. Lucille wore a plaid skirt and a white turtleneck sweater and she was a pleasure to look at if you didn’t know her character, and had a surprising figure for a girl who ate three solid meals a day the way she did. Even the fact that she wore flat-heeled shoes and walked with a long, athletic stride did not make her less of a beautiful woman; and I decided that it was a simple fact of perfection that depressed me.

  “Why,” I asked her, “do you need the photograph? Do you suppose she’s still drifting around the park with Count Gambion de Fonti, alias Valento Corsica?”

  “Now, Harvey, just be patient.”

  “And why the bikes?”

  “Because it’s fun, Harvey. Bikes are fun. There is very little left that is really fun. Bikes are fun. There is also a Be-in. The bikes will take us to the Be-in.”

  “What is a Be-in?”

  “All in good time, Harvey. All in good time.”

  Behind the boathouse, we joined the crowd of the young, the old and the middle-aged, who were queued up to rent bikes. It was no atmosphere in which to remain depressed, and I realized that the simple fact of one’s presence in the park on a Sunday morning evoked gaiety. They brought us two beautiful British bikes with handbrakes, and a few minutes later, we were peddling north on the East Drive.

  “Once around,” Lucille said, “and then we’ll cut into the Sheep Meadow from the west.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we’re a part of the Be-in.”

  “And what in hell is a Be-in?”

  “It’s something you do when your heart is filled with love instead of hate, and anyway, Harvey, you are too old and cynical for me to explain it to you, so why don’t we wait.”

  We had reached the top of the hill behind the Museum now, and we shifted into high gear and raced north. This was not something I had ever done before, not as an adult in Central Park with the park all to myself and not an auto in sight, and I saluted the mayor and tried to catch Lucille. She was in better shape than I was—I suppose because her thoughts were purer and because of all the damned vegetables she ate, and as we approached 110th Street, I begged her to take it easier.

  “How are we going to see Cynthia at fifty miles an hour?”

  “Harvey!”

  “We’ll walk up this hill—just to keep in practice. When Sunday’s over, I have to walk again. For a whole week I’ll be walking.”

  But by the time we had rounded the northern end of the park and were on our way back downtown on the West Drive, I had got my second wind, and I realized that I felt better and more relaxed than in a long, long time. We coasted down the long hill to 72nd Street, up a part of the way toward the Sheep Meadow, and then we walked, leading the bikes. There was a general convergence toward the Sheep Meadow, youngsters for the most part, some on bikes but most of them on foot, boys and girls holding hands, most of them relaxed and smiling and at peace with themselves and the world.

  Some of the boys were bearded; some of the girls wore long, flowing kimono-type things; they were all a little beat and dressed beat to one extent or another, and they had flowers in their buttonholes, pinned on to their clothes, twined in their hair, and very often painted onto their cheeks. They drifted toward the knoll at the southeast edge of the Sheep Meadow, where well over a thousand of them had already gathered.

  “This is a Be-in?” I asked Lucille.

  “That’s right.”

  On the knoll, they had instruments, mostly drums, and they kept up a steady beat. A sort of sound came out of it. “Ba-na-na,” as near as I could make out, over and over again. Some of the kids had signs. One sign said LOVE, DON’T HATE. Another sign said, LOVE IS ALL.

  As we pushed our bikes toward the knoll, I asked one of the kids, “What is it?”

  “Be-in.”


  “He says it’s a Be-in,” I told Lucille.

  “I told you so.”

  “What’s a Be-in?” I asked him.

  “Too old, Dad.”

  “What?”

  “You, Dad.”

  “Too old to understand,” the girl with him said.

  “I told you,” said Lucille.

  Another kid, helpfully, said, “Be-in is love, Dad.”

  “Oh, don’t complicate it, feel it,” a tall, handsome girl said.

  “Feel it, Dad. This is a good place.”

  It became a crowded place now, approaching the knoll. There were twenty or thirty cops spaced around but nothing for them to do. No one was doing anything in particular except that the little group on the top of the knoll beat the drums.

  “I’m looking for my friend,” Lucille said.

  “This place is full of friends,” a bearded, redheaded boy who looked like a Viking in blue jeans, assured her. “Full of friends, Sister. Just feel it.”

  “They call you Sister and me Dad,” I complained.

  “You’re old, Dad,” a girl said. She had two long yellow braids, the face of an angel, and a pink muumuu. There was a silver spot pasted to the center of her forehead. “It’s not the years,” she added.

  “My friend’s name is Cynthia,” Lucille said.

  “Cynthia what?”

  “Brandon.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” the Viking grinned.

  We walked our bikes through the crowd, and it was certainly the best-natured crowd I had ever seen. Bikers like ourselves, older folk on foot, kids of every description, mothers with carriages—all drifted into the crowd. The engaging good humor and good nature of the insiders was irresistible, and no one was angry or petulant—though by now there were three or four thousand people around the knoll. Lucille stuck to the bedecked hippies, and asked her question endlessly and patiently.

  “Seen Cynthia anywhere?”

  “Sorry, sweetheart.”

  “Ba-na-na!” they chanted. “Ba-na-na!”

  It was late enough now for the staid and well-groomed strollers from Fifth Avenue to reach the scene, and they watched with dignified disapproval, asking the cops for explanations. But the cops shrugged it off. “As long as they keep the peace,” a cop said, “they can dress the way they want to.”