A Matter of Conviction

by Ed McBain

  “All right.”

  “You’ll know you’re being awakened.”

  “Will I?”

  “Yes. You’ll know,”

  “Why don’t you go to sleep?”

  “I’m too excited. I love you too much. We’ve got three days together, Hank. Oh, I’m so happy, I’m so damn happy!” She chuckled and then caught herself. “I mustn’t,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Laugh on Friday, cry on Sunday,” she said. “Don’t you know that expression?”

  “This is Saturday,” Hank said. “It’s past midnight.”

  “Yes, but it’s really Friday,” Karin said adamantly.

  “That’s not logical. It’s not even sensible.”

  “Laugh on Friday, cry on Sunday. I don’t want to cry on Sunday.”

  “This is Saturday. You can laugh all you want.”

  “When I was a little girl, all I did was wet my pants and cry. That’s what my father said, anyway. He used to call me ‘Benässen und Weinen.’”

  “What’s that?”

  “It means ‘Wet and cry.’”

  “It’s a good name. I’ll call you that from now on.”

  “Don’t you dare! Go to sleep. I’ll wake you later.”

  “You twisted my arm,” he said.

  He was asleep again almost instantly. She listened to his heavy breathing and she thought again, He’s so tired, I should let him sleep. She got out of bed and walked to the dresser where he’d put his cigarettes and his billfold and his dog tags. She shook a cigarette free from the pack, lighted it, and then went to stand at the window, looking out over the fields, silvery white in the moonlight. The floor was cold. She stood by the window for just a little while, one arm folded across his pajama top, the other moving to her face each time she sucked in on the cigarette.

  She put out the cigarette then and went back to the bed. “You’re so warm,” she said. He grunted in his sleep and she grinned delightedly and thought, He really is. He’s the warmest human being I know. He’s always so warm. His feet are never cold. How does he keep his feet so warm?

  “Warm my feet,” she said, and he grunted again, and she stifled a laugh.

  I mustn’t laugh. It’s really Friday, no matter what he says, it won’t be Saturday until I wake up in the morning, why are men so ridiculous about time? She lay in bed with a smile on her face, holding his hand between her own, clutching his hand to her bosom. In a little while she fell asleep, the smile still on her mouth.

  She heard the shower going, and she opened her eyes. She could not have been asleep for more than a few hours; there was bright sunlight streaming around the edges of the leaded casements. He began singing in the bathroom, quite suddenly and quite awfully, and she grinned and stretched and pushed her blond head deeper into the pillow, feeling very luxuriant and very loved and also very tired.

  Well, he sings in the shower, she thought. She was pleased, even though he sang terribly. She pulled the covers to her throat, feeling that she looked very impish and pure and clean without make-up, and probably very horrible. When he sees me, he’ll run out of the room screaming. Maybe I ought to get up and put on some lipstick. The singing stopped, and then the sound of the water. The bathroom door opened. He had wrapped the towel around his waist and he headed for the dresser now, apparently going for a comb. He had not dried himself very thoroughly. There were droplets of water clinging to his shoulders; his face and hair no were still wet, the hair clinging to his forehead. He moved totally unaware of her, stepping into a narrow wedge of sunlight, his eyes suddenly flashing very blue. She watched him, the broad shoulders and the narrow waist, the pathetic droplets of water clinging to him, the damp hair flattened against his forehead, his face glistening wet, the blue eyes captured by sunlight. She watched him silently, seeing the man as he moved toward the dresser, thinking, This is the man unawares, this is the man I love.

  She made a small sound.

  He turned, mildly surprised, his eyebrows quirking upward, his mouth beginning a smile. “Oh, are you awake?”

  She could not answer for a moment. She loved him so much in that instant that she could not speak. She nodded and kept watching him.

  “You look nice,” she said at last, inadequately.

  He went to the bed, knelt by it, took her face in his hands and kissed her. “You look lovely,” he said.

  “Oh, ja, ja, ja. I’ll bet.”

  “Oh, ja, ja, ja. You’d win.”

  “I look horrible. I’m a horror.”

  “You’re the most beautiful horror I’ve ever seen.”

  She ducked her head into the pillow. “Don’t look at me, please. I have no lipstick on.”

  “The better to kiss you, my love,” he said, and he turned her face to him, capturing it in his hands again. His mouth was reaching for hers when they heard the airplanes. He lifted his head. The noise of the planes filled the sky, and then the small room. His eyes turned toward the window. A squadron of planes, Karin thought, heading for Berlin, and then she noticed that he was trembling and she was filled with instant alarm.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  She sat up and gripped his arms. “What is it, Hank? You’re shaking. You’re—”

  “Nothing. Nothing. I … I …”

  He got off the bed and walked to the dresser. He lighted a cigarette quickly and then went to the window, following the progression of the squadron across the sky.

  “Transports,” he murmured.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “The war is over, Hank.”

  “In Germany it is,” he said. He took a hasty drag at his cigarette. She watched him for a moment and then threw back the covers, swung her legs over the side of the bed and went to stand alongside him at the window. The planes were out of sight now. Only their distant hum could be heard in the sky.

  “What is it?” she said firmly. “Tell me, Hank.”

  He nodded bleakly. “I’m flying on Monday. That’s why I got the weekend. I’m taking some brass to …”

  “Where?”

  He hesitated.

  “Where?”

  “One of the islands in the Pacific.” He squashed out his cigarette.

  “Will there be … shooting?”

  “Possibly.”

  They were silent.

  “But you aren’t sure?” she said.

  “Half the island is still held by the Japanese,” he said. “There’ll be shooting. And planes probably.”

  “Why did they pick you?” she said angrily. “It isn’t fair!”

  He did not answer her. She faced him, looking up at him, and she said, very softly, “You’ll be all right, Hank.”

  “Sure.”

  “You will, darling. Whether they shoot or not, you’ll be all right. You’ll come back to Berlin. You have to, you see. I love you very much, and I couldn’t bear losing you.”

  And suddenly he pulled her to him, and she could feel tension surging through his body like a sentient force.

  “I need you,” he whispered. “I need you, Karin. Karin, I need you so much. I need you so much.”

  And now even the sound of the planes was gone.

  EIGHT

  This was McNalley’s jungle.

  It didn’t look like a jungle at all.

  Hank had come down the long street, starting in Italian Harlem and walking west, retracing the steps of the three young killers on that night in July. Now, on Park Avenue, he walked into the market beneath the New York Central tracks, listening to the babble of voices around him. He felt as if he had truly entered a foreign land, but he felt no fear. He felt again, and very strongly, that the idea of three Harlems existing as separate territories was truly a myth. For, despite the change of language, despite the change of color—the Puerto Rican people ranged from white to tan to brown—despite the strange vegetables on the stalls and the religious and mystic pamphlets printed in Spanish, he felt that these people were no different from their n
eighbors to the east, or the west. In fact, they shared a common bond: poverty.

  And yet he could, in part, understand McNalley’s fear. For here was, on the surface at least, the alien. What ominous words were being spoken in this foreign tongue? What malicious thoughts lurked behind these brown eyes? Here among the botanical herbs on the stalls, the hedionda, and maguey, and higuito, and corazón, here where the housewives haggled over the price of fruit and vegetables—“How much the guenepas? The chayote? The ají dulce, the mango, the pepino?”—here was another world, not a jungle certainly, but a world as far removed from Inwood as was Puerto Rico itself. Here, in a sense, was the unknown. And McNalley, the caveman squatting close to his protective fire, looked out into the darkness and wondered what terrible shapes lurked behind each bush, and he fed his own fear until he was trembling.

  He walked to the exit at the end of the long tunnel and came out into sunlight again. On the corner of the street a butcher shop nestled beneath the tenement, its Carnicería sign advertising the meats resting on trays in the window. Alongside it was a bodega, cans of groceries stacked in the window, strings of peppers hanging overhead. He walked past the grocery and into the street where Rafael Morrez had been killed.

  The people knew instantly that he was the law.

  They sensed it with the instinct of people who have somehow discovered the law to be not their protector but their enemy. They allowed him a wide berth on the sidewalk. They watched him silently from the front stoops of the tenements. In the open lots strewn with rubbish, children looked up as he walked by. An old lady said something in Spanish, and the crone with her began laughing hysterically.

  He found the stoop where Morrez had been sitting on the night he’d been killed. He checked the address again and then walked past a thin man in his undershirt who was sitting outside on a milk-bottle case. The man was smoking a long black cigar. The undershirt was stained with sweat. Hank paused in the hallway and struck a match, examing the mailboxes. Four of the boxes had been sprung from their locks. None of the boxes carried a name plate. He walked out onto the front stoop again.

  “I’m looking for a girl named Louisa Ortega. Do you know where I—”

  “No hablo Inglés,” the old man said.

  “Por favor,” Hank said hesitantly. “Donde está la muchacha Louisa Ortega?”

  “No entiendo,” the man said, shaking his head.

  Hank stared at him. His Spanish had been slow and halting, but certainly intelligible. And then he realized the man did not want to tell him.

  “She’s not in any trouble,” Hank said. “It’s about Rafael Morrez.”

  “Rafael?” the man said. He looked up at Hank. His brown eyes said nothing. “Rafael está muerto,” he said.

  “Si, yo comprendo. I’m investigating. Soy investigator,” he said lamely, wondering if that were the Spanish word. The man looked at him blankly. “Habla Italiano?” Hank said, in a desperate thrust at establishing communication.

  “No,” the man said. He shook his head. Then, in English, he added, “Go ’way. Don’ bodder me.”

  “Who you looking for, mister?” a voice said, and Hank turned. The boy stood at the foot of the stoop, his hands on his hips. He wore dungarees and a gleaming white tee shirt. His complexion was tan, his eyes brown, his black hair cut close to the scalp except for a high crown at the front of his head. His hands were square, with big knuckles, a signet ring on the third finger of his right hand.

  “I’m looking for Louisa Ortega,” Hank said.

  “Yeah, and who are you?”

  “District attorney,” Hank said.

  “What do you want with her?”

  “I want to ask her some questions about Rafael Morrez.”

  “You got any questions, you can ask me,” the boy said.

  “And who are you?”

  “My name’s Gargantua,” the boy said.

  “I’ve heard of you.”

  “Yeah?” A slight smile formed on his mouth. “Yeah, maybe you have. I been in the papers a few times.”

  “I didn’t get your name from the papers,” Hank said. “I got it from a member of the Thunderbirds. A boy named Diablo.”

  “Don’t talk to me about that stinking creep. I ever see him again, he’s dead. Wham! Dead.”

  He clenched his fists when he spoke, and his face became transposed in that instant to a grimace of hatred, as if he were acting out the real murder of Diablo. His expression, the way his big hands tightened when he spoke, left no doubt that he truly wanted Diablo dead.

  “Where do I find Louisa Ortega?”

  “I told you. You talk to me.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Hank said, “but I really have nothing to say to you. Unless you happened to be sitting on this stoop the night Morrez was murdered.”

  “Oh, you admit he was murdered, huh?”

  “Cut it out,” Hank said impatiently. “I’m on your side. I’m prosecuting this case, not defending it.”

  “A cop on my people’s side?” Gargantua said. “Ha!”

  “Don’t waste my time,” Hank said. “Do you know where she is, or do I have to send a detective to pick her up? I can guarantee he’ll find her.”

  “Don’t get excited,” Gargantua said. “What’d Diablo say about me?”

  “Nothing more than that you were warlord of the Horsemen.”

  “Was he straight?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you know? Most of them Thunderbirds are on junk. You know what I mean? They’re addicts. They all take dope. One thing you never find on our club is a guy who’s hooked. We kick him off so fast, his head spins.”

  “That’s interesting to know,” Hank said. “Where’s the girl?”

  “Apartment fourteen on the first floor. She probably ain’t even home.”

  “I’ll take a chance,” Hank said.

  “Listen, I’ll wait for you. I want to talk to you.”

  “I may be a little while.”

  “That’s okay. I got nothing to do, anyway.”

  “Fine,” Hank said, and he went into the building.

  Tenements are tenements. There is no such thing as an Italian tenement or a Puerto Rican tenement or a Negro tenement. They’re all the same, he realized, and they all stink. The stink begins building in the outer lobby with the broken mailboxes and the shattered naked light bulb in the ceiling. It assails you as you climb the narrow stairs in the dark hallway, punctuated by feeble air-shaft light at each landing. The camouflaging Lysol stench is almost as overwhelming as the urine smell it attempts to cover. The smells of cooking reach out from every doorway, half a hundred apartments oozing the smell of fish, the smell of meat, spaghetti, arroz con pollo, cabbage, bacon, until all the smells unite into an unsavory stench which has no origin, and no association with food. It’s like a poison gas seeping through the hallways, invading the nostrils and the throat, a total assault wave designed to make you retch.

  As he climbed to the first floor of this tenement in Spanish Harlem, he was aware of the mounting attack of smell, aware of the putrescent aroma of garbage coming from behind the steps on the ground floor where the garbage cans were stacked. He found Apartment 14 and twisted the bell set at shoulder height in the door. The door was painted to simulate natural-grain wood, the painter’s idea of this being to paint the door a deep brown and then smear erratic tan lines over the brown. The wood of the door itself was covered with a tin coating, and it was over this that the painter had exercised his artistic flair. The bell was loose. It did not sound with a clear sharp ring. It rattled noisily in its metal cup and then died. He tried it again. Again the bell issued its deathlike trembling.

  “Sí, sí, vengo!” a voice shouted from inside the apartment.

  Hank waited. He could hear the steel bar of the police lock inside the door being lowered to the floor. The door opened a crack, stopping sharply when the additional precaution of a chain caught it. Part of a face appeared in the crack.

&nb
sp; “Quién es?” the girl asked.

  “I’m from the district attorney’s office,” Hank said. “Are you Louisa Ortega?”

  “Sí?”

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions. May I come in?”

  “Oh.” The girl seemed flustered. “Oh, not now,” she said, “I am busy now. There ees someone with me.”

  “Well, when—”

  “It will be soon,” she said. “You come back fi’, ten minutes, okay? I talk to you then, okay?”

  “All right,” Hank said. The door closed, the girl’s face vanished. He could hear the bar of the police lock being wedged back into place. Wearily, he went down to the street again. Gargantua was nowhere in sight. Neither was the old man in the undershirt. Hank looked at his watch, lighted a cigarette and leaned against the wall of the building. A stickball game was in progress in the middle of the street. The game went on excitingly, with the usual number of temper flareups and arguments. But the players might just as well have been in Yankee Stadium performing before thousands of people. In fact, there was possibly more violence in a major-league game than was evident in this street game played by teen-agers who conceivably were capable of slitting another teen-ager’s throat.

  Standing on the front stoop of the building, he realized that Harlem, on its surface at least, was as well-ordered and nonviolent as any other community in the city. True, you could not equate a Harlem tenement with an apartment building on Sutton Place. You could not simply discount the fire escapes cluttered with the paraphernalia of living, could not easily ignore the lots covered with rubble, the flies crawling over the meat in the window of the butcher shop, the poverty which sprang from every darkened doorway. But the tempo here, the feel, was not much different from what you would find anywhere else in the city. These were people going about their daily tasks. There was no trace of a violent undercurrent running through the life of the community—not now there wasn’t, not at ten o’clock on a sunny morning in midsummer. Then why did violence erupt here? Why did three kids from Italian Harlem, three blocks and three thousand miles away, stride into this street and take the life of an innocent blind boy? He could not lay it all at the doorstep of racial misunderstanding. He had the feeling that this was only a symptom and not the disease itself. Then what was the disease, and what caused it? And if the three boys who killed were diseased, were sick, was the state justified in eliminating them from society?