Criminal Conversation

by Ed McBain

  The man was smoking what his mother called a “guinea stinker.” His name was Giustino Manfredi. He did not look as important as he really was. Wearing rumpled black trousers that seemed a trifle long for him, and a white dress shirt open at the throat and rolled up at the sleeves, and a little black vest, he reminded Andrew of Louis the tailor, except that he didn’t have white hair. Manfredi’s hair was black and straight, and parted in the middle. He kept puffing on the little thin cigar, sending up clouds of smoke that drifted out over the square.

  This was ten o’clock in the morning on a beautiful sunny day during the last week of April. The little bar was virtually empty at this hour of the morning, and besides, Manfredi had chosen a table at the extreme far end of the outdoor space, under the canopy close to the bank next door, which he suggested with a laugh he would not mind robbing one day. Manfredi lived in Palermo, but he had chosen Milan as the city for their meeting, explaining in his broken English that for the moment it was extremely difficult for businessmen to conduct any sort of business in Sicily. It was not much better in Milan, for that matter, but here you could at least sit and talk about financial matters without the carabinieri rushing in with machine guns.

  Both men were drinking espresso served to them by a young man who seemed more intent on impressing a buxom German girl sitting under the other end of the canopy than he was in serving a man who could order him dropped into the fucking Adriatic tomorrow morning with an anvil around his neck. Manfredi seemed not to mind. He knew he wasn’t well known in Milan, which was why he’d chosen the location to begin with. He alternately puffed on the cheap cigar or waved it grandly in the air when he spoke, a man supremely confident of himself, secure in the knowledge that what they were discussing would net him millions and millions of dollars, which in turn would allow him to continue dressing like a ragpicker and smoking cheap little cigars.

  The more he spoke, the more Andrew felt like an American.

  The man’s English was atrocious.

  At one point, Andrew burst out laughing, and then—when he realized Manfredi was about to take offense—immediately explained why the comment had been so comical.

  Manfredi had been explaining that the goods could move freely in or out of any number of Italian seaports …

  “Ma non la Sicilia, eh? Too difficult now Sicilia. Other ports, naturalmente. We have much ports, Italia …”

  Andrew was thinking his mother should be here listening to this greaseball …

  . . . explaining now that most ports in Italy were available to them for their purposes, which translated as controlled by them, which he would not say aloud either in Italian or in his impoverished English, and then uttering the words that caused Andrew to explode in laughter.

  “We come in, we do what to do, eh? And then we just pass away.”

  The laughter burst from Andrew’s mouth like a cannon shot. Manfredi was so startled he almost dropped his foul-smelling cigar. Rearing back as if fired upon, his eyes and his mouth opening wide in surprise, he realized in an instant that he was being laughed at, and he was on the narrow edge of displaying some fine Sicilian rage when Andrew quickly said, “Let me explain, Signor Manfredi,” and then managed to control himself long enough to define the American euphemism. The definition immediately tickled the Sicilian’s funny bone, causing him to burst into laughter as well, which allowed Andrew to join him before he busted.

  “Pass away, Dio mio,” Manfredi said, drying his eyes, still laughing. He signaled to the waiter for refills, but the waiter was now staring into the German girl’s blouse and impressing her with his command of English, greater than Manfredi’s to be sure, but nothing to write home about, either. The girl seemed overwhelmed by the pimply kid’s Italian charm. Andrew felt more and more American.

  Manfredi was telling him that all next week he would show him the various ports …

  “Better more than one port, eh?”

  . . . that would be offloading the product from the East …

  Refusing to say either “China” or “Asia” …

  . . . which should be arriving in Italy sometime late in May. He was hoping the southern product …

  Refusing to say either “Colombian” or “South American” …

  . . . would be arriving in Italy at about the same time so that they could begin their work here.

  The way this came out in his hopeless English was, “They come Italia, the ship, we lift one, two, immediatamente …”

  And we just pass away, Andrew thought, and almost burst out laughing again.

  That night, long after he and Manfredi had parted company, Andrew walked the streets of Milan and tried to find something in common with these elegantly dressed men and beautiful women who moved by on the soft spring night trailing hushed foreign voices behind them. Even the Italian they spoke seemed different from the language he’d heard when infrequent visitors from distant provinces in Italy dropped by smoking stogies as foul as Manfredi’s and stinking up his mother’s drapes. Her face said I’m American, what are you doing in my house?

  These people were foreigners to him.

  This country was alien and strange to him.

  He recognized in Italy a place of beauty and grace, a gentle land of soft light and rolling hills, but nowhere could he find any real connection to himself, nowhere could he discover those much touted “roots” Americans were incessantly seeking all over the world. He wondered again why anyone born in America should have to seek his roots elsewhere. That was the irony of it. Americans swarming all over the globe searching for identities denied them in their native land.

  He bought a gelato on a cone at a stand in one of the arcades, and was stepping out onto the ancient cobblestoned street again when he almost collided with a tall man whose eyes were as blue as his own.

  “Mi scusi, signore, mi scusi,” the man said.

  “Sorry, my fault,” Andrew said.

  They did a little sidestepping jig around each other, each apologetic and smiling, and as the man rejoined his companion, Andrew heard him softly explain, “Americano.”

  Yes, he thought.

  The girls were sweaty and tall and the boys were sweaty and short. This was a fact of life when you were twelve and had just done forty minutes of gymnastics in Morningside Park. Mollie and her best friend, Winona Weingarten, called the seventh-grade boys “Munchkins”—sometimes, and cruelly, even when they were within earshot. Boys and girls alike were, wearing the blue-shorts, blue-sweatshirt gym uniform with the white Hanover crest over the left breast. Mollie was wearing the sneakers she’d finally found the day she and her mother and Aunt Heather had gone shopping together. Winona was wearing identical sneakers. The seventh-grade boys called the girls “Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” in retaliation for the Munchkin label and also because they did look very much alike, both of them tall and slender with long blond hair tucked now under identical billed caps, and also because they talked some kind of dumb secret language only the two of them understood.

  The girls were straggling a bit behind the other kids, talking that language now. The language was called “Frankendrac,” named for Frankenstein and Dracula because it was supposed to sound like a Baltic mix of German and Slavic even though it was an entirely new language with a vocabulary the girls had invented themselves when they’d first met at Hanover at the age of five. The girls would not have revealed the structure of their language even if threatened with torture or rape. The rapid-fire mélange sounded like gibberish to anyone else, but made total sense to both of them. At Hanover, you had to study two foreign languages; Frankendrac was their third. Enjoying the bright sunshine on this last Friday in April, the first truly glorious spring day they’d had so far, the girls ambled behind the others, chatting like a pair of foreigners in their native tongue.

  This was not a day for physical exertion—which they both deplored, anyway, despite Miss Margolin�
�s total obsession with fitness, fitness, fitness. Nor was it a day for contemplating a return to the classroom after half an hour of jumping up and down. What they both would have preferred doing was walking up to Rosa’s on a Hundred-­Tenth and Amsterdam, buying some sweets, and then strolling along lazily while they savored every luscious bite. Instead, there’d be a mad scramble in the locker room to change out of gym uniform and back into the de rigueur pleated watch skirt and white blouse before rushing off to their next class, which happened to be French, and much easier than the language they’d invented.

  Empty crack vials lay strewn along the sides of the park path.

  “They look like those little perfume samples they give away,” Mollie said in Frankendrac.

  And to her utter astonishment, Winona said, “Ich kenner-nit vetter thenner giu.”

  Which translated into English meant, “I can’t wait to try it.”

  She had been counting the days since he’d left for Italy, counting the days till his return, and she wondered now what her response would be if Andrew again suggested, sometime in the future, that she accompany him on a trip someplace. She could not have gone this time, in any event; she was a teacher and the last week in April was not a school holiday. The first week in April might have been another story. Passover started at sundown on Monday, and then Good Friday fell in the same week, followed by Easter Sunday—she might have been able to make a good case for taking off those extra few days in the middle of the week. A good case with the school, anyway. What she would have told Michael was quite another matter. But the very idea of a week alone with …

  “. . . know what it is in a minute,” Michael said.’

  “Uh-huh,” she said, and realized she hadn’t been listening to him, hadn’t heard a word of what he’d been saying for the past two or three minutes.

  “So I’m thinking of a hot dog wagon instead,” he said, as if that would explain it all.

  “Uh-huh.”

  They were finishing their coffee and dessert. Mollie was crosstown with her friend Winona for the weekend. Andrew was in Genoa. Tomorrow he would be in Naples. And the day after that …

  “. . . with the striped umbrellas, you know? Sabrett, whatever. Have Freddie Coulter rig it with a video camera, none of the locals’ll think it’s a detective selling knishes and pretzels down there. What do you think?”

  “Down where?” she said.

  “That I can’t tell you,” he said.

  “This is some kind of surveillance, right?”

  “Yes. The case I’m working.”

  “Which you still can’t …”

  “Can’t, sorry.”

  “But you can tell me you’re thinking of putting a camera in a hot dog wagon.”

  “Yeah. Well, one of those carts, you know?”

  “Sounds like James. Bond!” she said.

  “Half the things Freddie rigs are James Bond.”

  “Why do you have to rig something so elaborate?”

  “Because there isn’t a facility we can use in the building across the street.”

  “Then I think it’s a good idea,” she said, and nodded.

  “If Freddie thinks it’ll work.”

  “And if you can find a detective with dirt under his fingernails,” Sarah said.

  “So he’ll look like a real hot dog seller,” Michael said, and they both burst out laughing.

  Michael suddenly reached across the table and took her hand in his.

  “What?” she said, surprised.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and shrugged.

  But he did not let go of her hand.

  The lights were out and they were speaking Frankendrac. Winona was saying she thought it was all a conspiracy that their parents and teachers had cooked up to keep them from having a good time. She was saying she couldn’t see anything wrong with using drugs, and she couldn’t wait to be old enough to try them.

  This from Winona Weingarten, her very best friend in the entire world, who had an IQ of 156, and who spoke Frankendrac like a native.

  “Miekin bro stahgatten smekker pot venner hich har twofer tin,” Winona said.

  Which translated loosely as “My brother started smoking pot when he was twelve.”

  In English, Mollie whispered, “That was another time and place, Win.”

  “Zer lingentok!” Winona warned.

  Mollie immediately switched to their secret tongue, telling Winona she could not for Christ’s sake compare her brother growing up in 1972 with what was happening today, when all these dangerous drugs were on the market …

  “That’s what they said about LSD, too,” Winona said in the language. “My brother tried LSD, do you see him running around like some sort of crazed freak?”

  “Crack is insidious,” Mollie said, having a tough time translating “insidious” because it wasn’t a word in the secret vocabulary, but Winona seemed to catch the improvisation, because she immediately replied in letter-perfect Frankendrac, “No more lethal than pot, my dear.”

  “You’re so eager to try something,” Mollie said in English, and before Winona could shoot her another warning glare, immediately said, “Tryker zin blowden jobber.”

  Both, girls burst out laughing.

  In bed that night, Sarah found the courage to explore what she hadn’t been able to at dinner.

  Michael had been reading, and she knew from the heavy-lidded look of his eyes and his deeper breathing that he was about ready to doze off.

  Out of the blue, she said, “Would you be terribly upset if I went off for a few days with the girls?”

  “Mollie and Winona?” he asked.

  She’d started off on the wrong foot. She never called women “girls.” She’d done so now only because she was nervous and the cliché had come so readily to mind, a night out with “the girls,” a few days off with “the girls.” She quickly said, “I meant the other teachers. Some of us. We were thinking we might get away for a weekend this summer …”

  “A weekend?” he said.

  “Or during the week, to discuss the fall curric—”

  “When did this job get so serious all of a sudden?”

  “Well, it’s always been serious, Michael, you know that.”

  “Well, yeah, but Jesus, Sarah …”

  “We thought we’d keep contact over the summer …”

  “You’ve never done that before.”

  “Well, I know, but …”

  “Eight years now at Greer …”

  “Yes, but …”

  “All of a sudden, meetings every week …”

  “Well, that’s the whole …”

  “All of a sudden, a few days off with the girls …”

  “That’s the whole idea, Michael. We’re trying to make this a more coordinated teaching effort. If we can get input from each other on a regular basis …”

  “We’re going to France this summer, remember?”

  “Well, this wouldn’t be then, Michael.”

  “When would it be?”

  “We haven’t set any dates yet. Three of us are married, we wanted to discuss it with our husbands first.”

  “Weekends are out of the question,” he said.

  “With all the weekends you’ve been working, I would have thought …”

  “This is an unusual case.”

  “It would seem so.”

  “And I’ve worked weekends before.”

  “Yes.”

  “In the past.”

  “Yes. So it’s okay for you to work weekends …”

  “Going away with the girls isn’t working, Sarah!”

  “Oh, isn’t it?”

  “Where would you be going?”

  “I have no idea. ‘We haven’t taken it that far yet. I told you, Michael. Jane and Edie are married
, too. They have to discuss it with their husbands. We’re talking two or three days here, for Christ’s sake, not two months in the country!”

  “You said a weekend.”

  “Or a few days during the week, I said. I didn’t know this would be so upsetting to you, Michael.”

  “It’s not upsetting.”

  “You sound upset. Look, forget it, I’ll tell them I can’t …”

  “Sure, make me the heavy, right?”

  “Michael, what’s wrong with you?”

  “The other husbands’ll say, ‘Sure, darling, go to Tokyo for a month, that’s fine with me.’ It’ll just be Michael the Shmuck who makes a big fuss.”

  “It’s not that important,” she said. “Forget it. I’ll tell …”

  “No, no, it’s fine with me. Just let me know in …”

  “I wouldn’t think of …”

  “. . . advance, so I can send out for some Chinese food.”

  She wondered if she should accept graciously, or back out while she still had the chance. Her heart was pounding. She hadn’t even suggested to Andrew that she might be able to get away for a few days, but now it seemed almost too easy, and Michael’s final if reluctant compliance made her feel manipulative and cheap. Tell him no, she thought. Tell him it was a stupid idea. Do it now, this minute. But the thought of driving up to New England someplace, finding a quiet little inn, spending two or three days there with Andrew …

  “It’s just that I’ll miss you,” Michael said, and kissed her on the cheek and then reached up to turn out the light.

  In the dark, her eyes wide open, Sarah wondered what she’d become. She did not fall asleep for a long, long time.

  At nine o’clock on the balmy spring evening of May fourth, the telephone in the Welles apartment rang, and Michael picked up after the second ring.

  “Hello?” he said.

  There was a click on the line.

  “Hello?” he said again.

  Nothing.

  He looked at the receiver, annoyed, and then hung up.