The War Heist

by Ralph Dennis

  There is no other way. He is my Cross and he is my Job’s sores. And my brother.

  Randy had his shoulder pressed against the train-coach window, his face printed on the glass. His breathing was somewhere between a blocked nasal snort and a wheeze.

  Clark had the aisle seat next to him.

  Harry Churchman was in the seat directly in front of Clark. Oh, that was a smooth man for you. He was slick as warm pork fat. He’d explained all of it away. It was either that he hit Randy and slap Clark as well or they’d have been booted and stomped to death by those bastards.

  Clark pretended to believe him. He’d acted like he wasn’t mad about the slap Harry gave him. What Clark really believed was that, if they’d wanted to, they could have stood shoulder to shoulder, the way friends do, and they could have taken on that whole bar and come out all right.

  “The girl was thirteen,” Harry said.

  Clark nodded. The rage in him, unspoken, had answered: Then if she is that young what is she doing in that shitty tavern? And then he’d asked God to forgive him his bad language. Please, Lord, I won’t again.

  “She’s the daughter of the bartender,” Harry said, as if he read minds. “The men in that bar all think of her as a little girl.”

  Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher. No, that was what Randy said. He never allowed himself to say nasty things. Not before now. That is the rage, the anger, talking in me.

  “You see the boots they were wearing?”

  Clark shook his head.

  “Hobnails. You ever see what hobnails do to a man?”

  Clark shuddered. He didn’t have to see. He knew. But it would not have happened if Harry had stood shoulder to shoulder with them.

  “I did. Once in Washington State. It wasn’t pretty. The man’s face looked like chopped meat. You couldn’t tell where his eyes had been, or his nose.”

  Clark shuddered again.

  “It was better the way I handled it,” Harry said. “Randy got part of what he deserved and he got off without being stomped. Let’s drop it at that and call it even.”

  “All right, Harry.” I am lying, Lord.

  “But the next time he gets out of line I am going to come down on him like the wrath of God.”

  That is a mistake, Clark thought. If that is not taking the Lord’s name in jest, then I do not know what is.

  “After this is over you two can do anything you want to. I don’t give a moral shit one way or the other. You two can have all the ten-year-old girls you want.”

  Clark agreed. Not that he wanted any ten-year-old girls, and Randy didn’t either. But he would try to control Randy the best way he could.

  There is, he told himself with tight lips, a reckoning to come. It is a day that belongs to the Lord God and me.

  Harry didn’t sleep much that night. He wanted to be sure where he was. Now and then he’d have a chat with the conductor to get his bearings. At first light the train was still around four hundred miles from Halifax.

  When first call for the dining car came, he awoke the Gipsons and they ate early.

  At some point about two hundred fifty miles from Halifax, Harry tapped Randy on the shoulder. Randy moved into a window seat on the left side of the coach. Clark kept his window seat on the right. Both men had pads and pencils.

  They were careful. Harry kept a watch. It was wartime, and they didn’t want to be taken for spies.

  Randy and Clark charted the last two hundred or so miles of track. Stations and sidings and the terrain, too.

  When they reached the gray flint banks outside Halifax, Harry nodded at the Gipsons, and they closed the pads and passed them to Harry.

  It was done, he hoped.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “No room at the stable,” Harry said. It was what he’d expected.

  Harry returned to the Halifax train station under the Nova Scotian Hotel. The Gipsons had waited there while he tried the hotel. The clerk at the Scotian had looked at him like he was speaking some foreign language. As if questions about vacancies hadn’t been asked since the war began.

  They tried several other hotels. The last one was the Carleton. Nothing available there either, not even when Harry offered a bribe.

  When they left the Carleton, their baggage stored there for a fee, they walked down the sloping road toward the waterfront.

  You could tell them right away. The uniforms weren’t the ordinary ones, not Navy and Army, the ones that packed and massed on the streets.

  Theirs were the uniforms of yellow sweat and grease and dirt and oil. There weren’t any standard colors or designs to these uniforms. They were tan cotton or blue denim and even bib overalls.

  Harry and the Gipsons found the day train-yard crew in a Chinese café called Toy’s. It was on a narrow, sloping street a few blocks up from Water Street.

  It was funny as hell. Harry almost broke into a laugh. There were about a dozen of the roughest, hardest-looking men Harry had ever seen, and they were sitting at tables in Toy’s and drinking tea from those delicate eggshell cups.

  Harry had his look. He dropped an eyelid at Randy and Clark while he ignored a Chinese waiter who wanted to seat them in the far dining room. Harry took a table right next to one where four of the trainmen were.

  The waiter got a pained look on his face and looked toward the heavens. What could he do? He seemed to be asking that. Then he trotted away and returned with menus.

  Harry tossed the menus back at him without looking at them. “We want what they’re drinking,” he said.

  “Tea?”

  “If that’s what it is,” Harry said.

  The waiter returned a few minutes later. He placed the eggshell cups on the table and poured the pale-brown liquid into them from a ceramic pot. He backed away, smiling.

  Harry had a swallow. It was tea, goddam scalding tea.

  Randy turned in his chair and stared at one of the trainmen. A squat man with thick shoulders and a broad, flat face. The man saw the question on Randy’s face and leaned toward him.

  “What you drinking?” Randy asked.

  The broad face broke into a grin. Teeth missing top front. He passed the cup he had to Randy. Randy sniffed at it.

  “What is it?”

  “Rum,” the trainman said. “Newfoundland Screech.”

  Randy passed the cup back to him. “How do we …?” He tipped his head toward his own cup.

  “From the States?”

  “Yeah,” Randy said, “and me and my brother used to railroad if it makes a difference.”

  “It might.” The man had a sip from his cup. There was a hesitation while the man read them. He took most of the time trying to figure Harry. He didn’t look right. “We got to be careful,” he said. “We don’t want to get Toy in trouble, and we don’t want to dry up the well, either.”

  “No danger from us,” Randy said. “We’re tourists.”

  “Shorty.” The man waved a huge arm at the Chinese waiter. “Over here.” The waiter trotted over and made a little bow. “The special tea for my friends from the States.”

  The waiter hesitated only a moment. Then he nodded and swept the cups with the real tea from Harry’s table. When he returned he brought fresh cups and a different teapot. He poured each cup full to the brim.

  Harry had a sip. Yes, that was the real, raw stuff.

  “On my check,” the broad-faced man said.

  “Yes, Mr. Cody.”

  After that drink Harry bought a round for the other table. It turned out that Cody was the crew foreman. A sip into the second drink, and the Gipsons and the other crew members were talking railroading. More drinks. The rounds kept coming. Harry passed Randy some bills under the table when it was his turn to buy a round.

  It was getting dark, dusky, when the train-yard crew began drifting into the street. It was time, Cody said, to make room for the real customers, the ones who came to Toy’s for the food.

  On the street Harry mentioned to Cody that they were having tro
uble finding a place to stay.

  “I can find you a bed for a night or two,” Cody said. “It’s not the luxury I understand you Yanks expect.”

  “I’m not shy,” Harry said. “You ought to see some of the places I’ve camped out in my time.”

  “It’s a boardinghouse. Most of the train crew sleep there.”

  “No matter,” Harry said. “It’s got to be better than sleeping on the street.”

  “A bit,” Cody said.

  They circled by the Carleton Hotel to collect their baggage. Then they walked the seven or eight blocks to the boardinghouse. It was dark by then and the streets swarmed with soldiers and sailors.

  Cody led them through some dark streets where lines seemed to be forming up outside dark, curtained houses. “This what I think it is?” Harry said.

  “It’s a booming profession,” Cody said. “It’s the only product you can sell all day and night and still sell all over again the next day.”

  At an open window on the second floor of one of the houses, a girl naked to the waist leaned on the window ledge and gulped fresh air.

  Gunny Townsend was lost. He had been turned this way and then that, and all the Montreal streets had started to look the same.

  For the best part of two hours, after meeting them on a street corner, he’d been driven around the outskirts of Montreal, wedged between two swarthy men who smelled of garlic and perfume. The two men were silent most of the time. When they did speak to each other it was in French, and that was as bad as Greek as far as Gunny was concerned. All he remembered from his time in France in World War I was how to say hello and how to ask for a piece of ass. Neither of the men, when they did speak, said hello to Gunny or asked if he wanted a girl.

  Finally the driver pulled to the side of a street and puffed his garlic breath at Gunny. “Do you know where we are?”

  “Not a bit,” Gunny said. “This is nowhere close to my briar patch.”

  The driver looked around Gunny toward the other man. He said something in French. It had a rise at the end like there was a question in there somewhere.

  The other man who smelled of old sweat and some kind of perfume as well as the garlic said, “It is his way of saying that he is lost.”

  “That’s right.” And it was the Lord’s truth. The streets all blurred and ran together. It had been a long day. After all the phone calls, the call to this number and the call to that one, each time using the phrase scrap pipe, he’d reached the right man. The man had sent these two to pick him up on a street corner down the way from the boardinghouse on Rue Ontario. It had been full dark then and now it was dark as night in a bat cave.

  “He’ll be at the Club now,” the driver said to Gunny.

  “I’m in no hurry,” Gunny said. “It is not every day that I get a free tour of nighttime Montreal.”

  The driver stared at Gunny. The other man said, “He is making a joke.”

  “It is not much of a joke,” the driver said in that prissy French way that bothered Gunny.

  The driver was wiry and about as hairy as a pig-bristle brush. He looked something like a monkey that has almost grown to a man’s height and has just learned to walk on his hind legs. He wore a starched white shirt with the sleeves rolled high, almost to the shoulders.

  The other man was tall and bony. His head was bald-slick and he wore a crushed gray-felt hat. The hat was sweat-stained above the black band that ran around it. The man’s nose had been broken a time or two and the tip of it curled off to the right side of his cheek.

  The driver pulled into the street once more. He did a few more circles. Maybe he didn’t believe Gunny when he said he was lost. Another ten minutes, and he pulled off the wide main street into a narrow one. There was very little light on the street. There were shops on both sides and the windows had been blanked by shades that had been drawn down. The street was rough, paved with cobblestones.

  Halfway down on the left a neon light fluttered. It was above a doorway that was outlined by a string of blue lights.

  The driver was looking for a parking space. He pulled past the neon sign and the lighted doorway and bumped the car up over the curb. He braked it on the narrow sidewalk. The man in the felt hat got out and held the door for Gunny.

  They crossed the street and Gunny noticed that they still kept him flanked, one on each side. Closer, almost at the doorway, he could read the fluttering neon sign. papa jean’s. Just before they stepped through the doorway, the driver pushed past Gunny and went in first. The other man motioned him to follow and walked in after him. Straight ahead, after they’d entered, Gunny saw the maître d’ behind a high podium-like reservation desk; beyond him, the glare of white tablecloths and the diners. It looked busy, almost all the tables occupied. Gunny could smell butter and fish and spices.

  The driver took a sharp left as soon as he was past the doorway. There was a staircase there, going down. One flight down, and there was a light above a closed door.

  The sign on the door was in English as well as French.

  men’s club only

  no women allowed

  members only

  The driver stopped in the circle of light and flipped through a heavy key ring. He selected a brass key. The door opened with a single twist of the key, and the driver withdrew the key while he held the door open and motioned Gunny inside.

  It was a dim, small barroom. There were a few tables along the edges of the walls, but they weren’t being used. The customers were all at the square bar, on the three sides that were lined with barstools. The fourth side was the bar shelf with its display of bottles and glasses.

  There was a man in a white jacket at the near corner of the bar. He turned his barstool, and his feet touched the floor when he saw Gunny. His face had “mean” and “go away” written on it. Then the driver stepped around Gunny and waved at him. But he remained standing until he was approached by the driver; then he turned his ear and let the driver whisper something to him.

  The man in the white jacket nodded. He waved Gunny and the other two men down the bar. He backed away and lifted his butt and put it on the stool. Even as he turned, his head lifted and he stared up at the ceiling.

  Gunny moved down the bar until the driver touched him on the arm. He sat in the seat the driver indicated. The driver took the stool on his left, the other man in the felt hat, on his right.

  “What do you drink?” the driver asked.

  He wanted Southern Comfort but he knew they wouldn’t have it. “Brandy,” he said.

  The bartender arrived just in time to hear Gunny. He swung away and returned with a glass and a bottle. He poured a large one without using a measure.

  “Usuals?”

  The driver nodded. Gunny had a sip of the brandy. It was raw fire.

  “I understand you wish to speak to me.”

  Gunny heard the voice on his left. It wasn’t the voice of the driver. He looked around and found that another man had replaced the driver on the stool there. The driver was on his feet, just behind that man’s back.

  This man was in his late forties or early fifties. He looked like a movie actor. The one who always played the rich father. He had gray hair, and his face and his hands were tanned. He smelled of some kind of flower soap, lilac or verbena. His eyes, even in the dim bar light, looked like gray metal washers.

  “If you’re the man with the hardware …” Gunny stopped and corrected himself. “If you’ve got the scrap pipe.”

  “That is better,” the man said.

  Gunny edged his stool seat to the left so that he could lean toward the man. “Thompsons?”

  “I have the new models.”

  “The 1928s?”

  “That is correct.”

  “I need five,” Gunny said.

  “Drums as well?”

  “A fifty-round drum with each and a spare and a couple of cases of ammunition.”

  “Five 1928s, two drums with each …”

  “And two cases of ammo.”
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br />   “That is possible.” The man nodded at the bartender, and the bartender brought him a glass and a small crystal pitcher of water. The glass held a clear liquid that turned cloudy when the man added a few drops of water to it from the pitcher. “The 1928s are rare now. There is a shortage here in Canada.”

  “But you have them?”

  “I have them,” the man said. “I thought you should know how rare they are.”

  “But not priceless,” Gunny said.

  “There is a price for everything,” the man said. He had a sip of his cloudy drink.

  “I could also use a case, maybe two, of grenades.” Gunny was close enough to smell the man’s drink. It smelled like licorice.

  “Are you starting a war?”

  “There’s already one,” Gunny said. The man’s face didn’t change. Gunny shook his head. “My boss likes to hunt deer with the 1928s.”

  “And the grenades?”

  “For fishing.” Gunny smiled. “My boss is not a patient man. He doesn’t have time for the fish to take the hook.” Gunny pantomimed pulling the pin and tossing the grenade. “All the fish he wants for supper float to the top.”

  “He would seem to be eccentric, this boss of yours.”

  “You have the money?” the man asked.

  “I have it.”

  “My price is five hundred American dollars for each of the 1928s. At that price, I throw in the drums and the spare ammunition. The case of grenades will be two hundred dollars.”

  “Too much,” Gunny said. “Even in mint condition they’re not worth more than a hundred dollars.”

  “I have told you how rare they are.”

  “Mint condition?”

  “They have not been used,” the man said.

  “I can go as high as two hundred for each of them.”

  “You are wasting my time,” the man said. “I might consider an offer of four-fifty for each of them.”

  “Two-fifty,” Gunny said.

  “I am sick of this. I do not like to haggle. The five 1928s are yours for a round sum of two thousand dollars. One hundred for the spare ammunition and one hundred more for the grenades. That is a grand total of two thousand and two hundred dollars.”