THE GOULDEN FLEECE
Raymond Obstfeld
© Raymond Obstfeld 1979
Raymond Obstfeld has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1979 by Charter Books.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
To Bill McDonald, who advised me to stop all this writing nonsense and open a kosher delicatessen.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter One
After he hit me the first time, I figured for sure he was one of Harrison’s men, but after he hit me the eighth time I began to have doubts. Sure I owed the most money to Harrison, but then again I owed money the longest to the phone company. So for all I knew these two guys beating me up could have been from the phone company. As far as that goes though, I owed money to just about everybody in New York City, so it wasn’t until the guy holding my arms muttered Harrison’s name that I knew exactly who my benefactor was.
It was about the time that the first guy slugged me for vomiting on his new suede shoes that I decided it might be wise to move to a healthier climate. After all, as long as I still had a choice, I felt that relocation was preferable to dislocation any day.
It was too dark for me to see their faces clearly, besides which my eyes were swollen and watery, but the guy who was hitting me looked, in my bleary haze, like an upholstered mailbox. He was short with extremely broad shoulders and dressed in an all-leather outfit that squeaked every time he threw a punch. All I knew about the guy who was holding my arms was that he was very tall, because whenever he exhaled, the air from his nostrils would skim across the top of my head and muss my hair. For some reason, the thought of him mussing my hair was very irritating to me. The only thing I hated worse than having my hair mussed was having my face punched. Yet, it wasn’t until the upholstered mailbox skinned his knuckles on my front teeth that they finally began to ease up.
“Christ!” he cried, shaking his hand. “The son of a bitch bit my goddam hand.” He appraised the damage as best he could in the dark alley. Then, having made his diagnosis, he began to tenderly suck the wound.
“How bad is it, J.J.?” J.J. practiced opening and closing his hand. “Let me try again.”
Gus tightened his grip on my arms as J.J. punched me in the stomach, quickly stepping back to protect his suede shoes from further insult. He blew on his hand and sucked the wound some more. “It’s no use, it hurts too much.” Then he looked at me accusingly. “Christ, I hope I don’t catch no disease from him. I guess you’ll have to take over while I hold him.”
Gus hesitated, not so much holding me back as holding me up. “To tell you the truth, J.J., I’m not much in the mood tonight.”
“What do you mean you’re not in the mood?”
Gus shrugged.
“What’s the matter?” J.J. asked compassionately.
“I don’t know. I think it’s my ulcer acting up again. I shouldn’t have had that second helping of ravioli tonight. You know how spicy they make it there at Mamma Leone’s. Ever since then I’ve had a lot of gas and acid.” He released me with one hand to rub his stomach and belch as an offer of proof, quickly reaching back to catch me as I sagged.
“I told you so,” J.J. said in an I-told-you-so voice. “I told you that’s what would happen, but you just wouldn’t listen. How many glasses of milk have you had today?”
“One,” Gus answered sheepishly.
“That’s what I thought. And you know you’re supposed to have at least three. That’s minimum. Now what are we going to do with this guy?”
Gus shrugged again. “He looks like he’s had enough. I think he got the message, so why don’t we just leave him?”
J.J. considered this for a moment. “All right, I guess there’s nothing else to do,” he agreed, then added in a concerned tone, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you lately, Gus. You don’t seem to be as involved in your work as you used to. You seem to have lost interest. In fact, you’ve held the arms the last three times we’ve gone out. What’s the matter? Trouble at home again?”
“Nothing’s the matter, J.J., honestly,” Gus protested. He released my arms again, holding me up with his left hand clutching the front of my shirt. “Does this look like I’ve lost interest,” he said, slapping me sharply in the face several times. “Or this,” he said, punching me in the stomach and letting me fall onto the curb. “Or this,” he said, kicking me in the chest and leg.
“No sir,” J.J. grinned, slapping Gus warmly on the back as they strolled away. “It certainly does not.”
“I had to agree with J .J.—it certainly did not.
Chapter Two
My nose, while not exceptionally large, has always had a tendency to bleed at the slightest provocation. Consequently, when I emerged from the alley following my conference with J.J. and Gus, my face and clothes were decoratively splattered with blood, my face was a swollen range of lumps and bruises, several of my teeth were loose, and I limped painfully from Gus’s farewell kick. In most places, the appearance of someone in that condition on a major city street would have been cause for some alarm; but by New York City standards, I was being tastefully inconspicuous.
I took the next uptown subway to Washington Square and in fifteen minutes I was back on Bleeker Street standing in front of my apartment door on which Louie Bertocelli, the landlord, had changed the lock—as was his habit whenever I owed him more than three months in back rent. Usually all I had to do was give him one month’s rent and he would let me in, but since I was leaving town tonight, I needed all the cash I had.
I hobbled down the stairs to Louie’s apartment and knocked on the door.
“Who is it?” Louie asked through the door.
“Harry Gould,” I answered through the door.
“What do you want?” Louie asked through the door.
“I want to pay the money I owe you,” I answered through the door.
By this time I had grown vaguely accustomed to the various aches and pains pulsating throughout my body, and had altogether forgotten about my dishevelled appearance. But when Louie Bertocelli opened his apartment door, gaped at me from head to foot, slapped his cheek and shouted, “Holy Virgin Mother!” I began to feel slightly self-conscious. I touched my face absently and several flakes of dried blood chipped off. Louie and I watched them float lazily to the floor.
“You get in some kind fight?” Louie asked in his heavy Italian accent. Louie was a short balding man with a thick black moustache and thick eyebrows. He was standing as usual in his familiar dirty undershirt around whose straps the thick black hair on his shoulders had grown like vines. I had often suspected that the reason Louie always wore the same undershirt was because he was unable to remove it without first shaving the hair on his back and shoulders.
“Well, to tell you the truth Louie, I was mugged on my way home.”
Louie shook his head philosophically. “It’s like a jungle out there. Nobody care about nobody. No more religion left.” I nodded in agreement. “They get much?”
“Ohhhhhh,” I groaned suddenly,
clutching my head. Louie rushed out of the doorway and helped me over the stairs to sit down. I gasped and mouthed some silent words while waving a limp hand in the general direction of my apartment at the top of the stairs.
Louie frowned in confusion. “What you want? You want doctor? No? Police? You want go to your room?”
I nodded weakly.
“Okay, okay. I help you up,” he said, helping me up. “But first, you pay me like you say,” he added, setting me back down.
“Ohhhhhhhhhh!” I groaned again, but Louie didn’t budge.
“All right Louie,” I said, sitting up. “I’ll give it to you straight. I came here tonight with enough money to pay you all the back rent I owed, but like I said before, and as you can see for yourself, I was mugged on the way here. Now I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to go to my bank.”
“Then you have to wait until tomorrow to go to your room.”
“Look, if you want I’ll write you a check.”
“No check!” Louis said wisely.
“But I’ve got to go up to my apartment, Louie. I’ve got to report this to the police. They’ll want to come down here and investigate, you know, ask me questions.”
“Then they don’t have far to go, ’cause you don’t get in apartment until I get money.” Louie crossed his arms firmly, accenting his resolution with a single determined nod.
“Oh my God!” a shrill voice screamed. “Oh my God! What have they done to you? What have they done?” Arlene fluttered through the front door, completely ignoring the fact that I had thrown her out of my apartment only a week before. “What happened, hon?”
“Well to tell you the truth, I was on my way to see you, Arlene, to apologize for what happened last week by taking you out for a night on the town, when suddenly these two kids mugged me. They took every last dime I had and then beat me up because I didn’t have any more. So I came back here to clean up a little before coming to see you. But now Louie won’t let me in until I pay him this month’s rent.”
“He won’t huh?” she said, fixing cold menacing eyes on Louie. “And just how much does he owe you, Mister Bertocelli?”
“Well, you give me hundred dollars now and he can pay rest later,” Louie said apologetically.
“Then here,” she said, slapping a hundred dollars into Louie’s hairy hand.
Louie handed her the key and started to help me up the stairs, but Arlene insisted that she could do it without any assistance from him, so Louie shrugged and returned to his own apartment.
“Fascist,” I mumbled as he closed his door.
Arlene lowered me gently onto my bed and hurried to the bathroom to gather compresses, bandages, Mercurochrome and, incidentally, to use the toilet. “I haven’t had a chance all day,” she confessed, closing the door.
Arlene and I had first met about two months ago in a scene straight out of a hundred “B” movies. She was sitting at a bar all alone when this drunk slides up next to her and tries to pick her up in the crudest possible way. She calmly attempts to ignore the guy, but he’s so drunk that he’s practically drooling in her drink. Finally, a tall dark stranger who’s been watching the whole thing steps up to the drunk and suggests that he leave the lady alone. The drunk sneers at the stranger and tells him what he can do with his suggestion. The stranger then punches the drunk in the face, sending him sprawling onto the floor.
Unfortunately, I turned out to be the drunk.
That wasn’t the only trouble though. The way it’s supposed to go in those scenes is that the tall dark stranger, by virtue of having disposed of the lecherous drunk in an appropriately masculine way, gets to go off with the beautiful woman and be rewarded. Only in this case, the tall dark stranger was not a tall dark handsome stranger like the script is supposed to read—just tall and dark. Also extremely fat, with pitted skin and teeth the color of discarded chewing tobacco.
In the meantime, Arlene, faced with the prospect of rewarding her rescuer, decided that a short, skinny (by comparison) drunk would be easier to handle than the three hundred and fifty pounds stuffed into a bowling shirt (with “Butch” embroidered on the pocket) and smiling expectantly at her.
“What have you done to my husband, you big ox!” she shouted, quickly stooping down and compassionately lifting my head from the dirty floor where I had been watching the whole scene, completely fascinated by my new perspective on the world. “Don’t just stand there,” she commanded, “help him up!”
Apparently Butch’s brain hadn’t yet untangled for him exactly what was going on and how he should act, so he had to rely on pure instinct—and instinct told him that when a woman yells at you to do something, you’d better damn well do it. He reached down with his right hand, grabbed a fistful of sports jacket, Banlon shirt, and chest hair and lifted me easily to my feet.
The punch in the face and the hair wrenched from my chest had sobered me enough to keep my mouth shut as Arlene fastened her arm around my waist and guided me toward the door.
“Hey, what about these drinks?” the bartender shouted from behind the bar.
Arlene jerked her head back and nodded sharply at Butch. “He’ll take care of it.” Butch started to protest, but still relying on instinct just shrugged instead.
By the time we were outside the bar I was almost completely sober; so I introduced myself as Martin Lewis, which was the name on my credit cards for that day, apologized for my previous behavior, and promptly took her to dinner at a restaurant where neither I nor Martin Lewis of Battle Creek, Michigan, was likely to be recognized. I lured her back to my apartment and she moved in the nest day.
There were no big fights or anything; it wasn’t that kind of an arrangement. We weren’t in love, we were just breaking up the monotony of living alone by living together. We quickly settled into a comfortable routine. She went off in the morning to work as a big-city secretary and I went off in the afternoon to work as a small-time crook. She got home from work around 5:30 and made supper, and I got home around six and ate supper while watching “Star Trek” reruns on the television. Everything was going smoothly for two months until one night she threw my TV Guide out the window and shouted, “I hate ‘Star Trek’!”
That was the night I threw her out.
*
“Oh, poor Harry,” she said, sympathetically when she returned from the bathroom. Yes, eventually I even told her my real name, although I never explained why I often used other names, or what exactly I did for a living.
When she had finished washing and bandaging my wounds, she sat on the edge of the bed, held my hands, and looked meaningfully into my eyes. Not certain what was expected of me, I decided to tell her about my plans to leave the city that night.
“Arlene . . .” I started.
“Yes, yes, I know, Harry. We both were foolish and made stupid mistakes. We were both cruel without meaning to hurt.”
That’s the way she always talked when she was being romantic. Personally, though, I couldn’t see where I had done anything wrong at all.
“Arlene . . .”
“There’s no need for words, Harry,” she said, laying a finger on my lips. “Let’s just forget what happened. We’re both sorry.” She smiled shyly. “In fact, the reason I came over tonight was also to apologize.” She leaned over and kissed me. “Well,” she said happily, “How about some supper?”
“Fine.” I had planned on leaving right away, but the mention of supper reminded me that I was hungry, having deposited most of my lunch earlier on J.J.’s suede shoes. Besides, there wasn’t anything to pack. All I was taking with me was what I’d be wearing, my cash savings which I kept hidden in my apartment for just such emergencies, and a few necessities I would pick up from Maxie on my way to the airport.
When we had finished supper I told Arlene that I had to go see a friend for a few minutes, but that I would be back in an hour. I figured that there was no need to upset her with the truth at this late date. After all, I had tried to tell her. She pouted playfully and carried t
he dishes into the kitchen.
“See you a little later,” I called as I slipped into my suit jacket.
“Just a second,” she called back.
I glanced at my watch, sighed, and straightened my tie in the mirror, ignoring the bruises and lumps that stared back. When I turned around, Arlene was standing in front of me wearing nothing but a mischievous grin.
I grinned back. “I’ve really got to be going, Arlene.”
“Ohhh, couldn’t you stay just a little while longer?” She cooed, playing with my buttons.
“Really Arlene, I’ve got an appointment.”
“Just a little while,” she said, pressing against me.
“Well, maybe just a little while,” I said.
And did.
Chapter Three
Maxmillian Kreuger and his son Roland lived on West 14th Street above The Heavy Pants Record Store, only a few blocks from my apartment. Since Maxie and I were what you might call business associates and because of the nature of our business, it was not at all unusual for me to drop in on him at any time of the day or night to conduct a business transaction. For that reason, I felt perfectly at ease walking to Maxie’s at 11:30 that night wearing my best leaving-town-in-a-hurry suit and carrying my usually empty wallet, now snugly stuffed with $800 in cash.
Maxie and I had first met more than two years ago while I was still stealing cars for Randy Hiller. I had just made off with somebody’s double-parked XKE when I noticed a wallet wedged tightly into the seat cushion. There wasn’t any money in it, just a stack of credit cards and a driver’s license, so when I delivered the car to the garage, I showed it to Randy for a laugh. I think I even had some kind of punch line about the kind of society where a guy ends up stealing someone else’s credit. (I’d spent a year in a community college once and felt like I was expected to be insightful).
At first, I thought it would be a nice gesture to send the wallet back to the owner. But Randy said that the credit cards were valuable, only they might be dangerous for somebody who wasn’t experienced in handling them—although I still might be able to pick up a few bucks by selling them to Max Kreuger, an old German pickpocket who had just got out of the pen a few months ago.
The Goulden Fleece Page 1
