Millie

by Howard Fast

  Half-finished, my cigar had gone out. The general pressed another on me. “Try a Cuban. Trouble with Cuban cigars, Brody, is that most of them arrive here devoid of moisture or life. These are brought in humidors. Most of us have forgotten the taste of a real, fresh Cuban cigar.”

  I accepted his offer, cut it carefully, lit it slowly. At last I knew. The darkness had been dispelled. It was not unnatural of them to expect me to display and feel a certain amount of pride. Here I was, sitting as an equal with two great captains of finance. Millions of dollars were being discussed in a world where the rules made for lesser men were of no account. There were no questions of right or wrong, morality or immorality. It was not a world of cheap thugs or gangsters or the Mafia or television antics of gunplay and physical violence. This was a world where the brandy sipped like velvet, where the silver service was a hundred years old and where Cuban cigars retained their moisture. And I was admitted. Al Brody had made it.

  “Try us again,” the general suggested.

  I thought about that for a while and then shook my head. “No. It’s your turn. Make me an offer.”

  They exchanged glances. The general poured himself another glass of brandy. The senator took a cigar and clipped the end with thought and precision.

  “All right, Al, here it is. We’ll give you half a million in cash, good, clean money. We also have a company that deals in plastics, quite large and quite legitimate. This company will engage your firm and will contract to pay you fifty thousand dollars a year for ten years. I think that’s reasonable, fair and generous in the bargain. I need not say that the services you will be required to render the plastics outfit are only nominal.”

  “No. I’ve been in this line of work for five days, and I want out. No connections, no services.”

  “Suppose we give you the half a million in cash and put another half million in a numbered account in Switzerland.”

  “No. I don’t play in numbered accounts in Switzerland.”

  “You should,” said the general. “It’s legal. Thousands of Americans do it. And your Swiss franc is a damn sight healthier than the dollar.”

  “It’s not my life-style.”

  “What are you getting at, Al?”

  “Cash.”

  “Cash is a rope around your neck,” said the general.

  “That’s my worry.”

  “Damn it, Al, what can you do with cash?”

  “You don’t know my wife.”

  “You’re divorcing your wife.”

  “That’s why I need cash.”

  “Six hundred thousand.”

  I hesitated now. I was playing a game and I had only the vaguest notion of the rules and penalties. I had been lucky, but I was still blindfolded and running in circles in the dark. Whether there was any way out of this or not, I had no notion. I had no plan, no purpose, except to stay alive and walk out of the Big Sur Hunting and Fishing Club at the first opportunity. So far, whenever they opened a door, I had plunged in. I knew that I had to play their game, and part of the game was greed. Greed could destroy me, but greed was also the only thing that could protect me. Everything the senator and the general had said appeared to make sense. So far as I knew, they were being straightforward and direct. A little mental arithmetic, dividing, say, ten and a half million dollars by seventy, brought the price of pure uncut heroin to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a pound. On the face it appeared incredible, but then everything that had happened this evening was incredible. I tried to remember news stories I had read about drug seizures and the prices quoted, but in that direction my mind was a blank. The price could be what they quoted or twice that; there was no way I could tell. Then what was the six-hundred-thousand-dollar offer worth? If I accepted too readily, I would simply arouse their suspicion; if I held out for too much, they might go another way. On the other hand, their first two offers had amounted to a million dollars.

  I pointed that out to them.

  “The offer still stands,” the senator said. “Drugs are a commodity, Al. So is cash. There’s an advantage in cash; we recognize that. It relieves you of the necessity of trusting us. On the other hand, to put together a large bundle of cash is no small task. This country does not function on cash, and the moment you deal with more than a few thousand dollars in bills, you are inviting difficulties. My advice is to accept the half million and the Swiss account.”

  “No, sir. I’ll take seven hundred thousand in cash—take it or leave it. No bills larger than fifty dollars. That’s it, and I will not discuss it further.”

  Again they exchanged glances.

  “Al,” the senator said, “would you wait in the living room? We need a few minutes with this.”

  3

  Millie was in the big living room, curled up in a corner of the couch in front of the fire, her fine long legs under her, an open book on her lap. She closed the book as I entered and looked at me.

  “Hello, Al.”

  I nodded and walked over to her.

  “Sit down, Al. Did you make a deal?”

  I took the other end of the couch. “I think so.”

  “I hope you squeezed those two bastards dry.”

  I looked at her curiously. Then I reached over and picked up the book she had been reading. It was Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, an edition as old yet as well-kept as the lodge itself.

  “It’s a lovely book,” Millie said.

  “You are the damnedest strange woman I ever knew in my life.”

  “Why, Al?”

  “Do I have to itemize?”

  “No, I suppose not. Do you hate me, Al?”

  “I’m out of practice.”

  “Don’t be such a goddamn tin-horn saint.”

  “That’s old-fashioned western,” I said. “Do you really come from Boston?”

  “I grew up in the slums of Long Beach, Al, about five blocks from where they found Joey Leone. I was put in an orphanage at the age of twelve, after my father beat my mother half to death and out of her mind. I was working in a cannery at the age of fourteen. I taught myself shorthand and got a job as a secretary and did high school at night and entered U.C.L.A. at the age of twenty. You want to think about that a bit? My real name is Mary Pilusky, and no one ever felt sorry for me, not myself, not anyone else.”

  “I don’t feel sorry for you.”

  “The hell you don’t!”

  “Funny thing is, I don’t. I think you behaved like a shit, if you want it plain and direct.”

  “All right, you put it on the line, plain and direct. Only tell me this. What did I do to you that has you so pissed off? Did I ever put you in danger? Did I sell you out? Did I try to squeeze out of you what Capestone told you? Don’t think I couldn’t have if I really wanted to. You were meat for the grinder, and if you don’t know that, you’re a plain horse’s ass. But I didn’t squeeze it out of you. I set up this meeting and I gave you a chance to be cut in. Do you know what would have happened to you if you had tried to peddle that horse? You would have been cut to pieces. This way you come out with a piece of the pie and your hands are clean.”

  I stared at her in disbelief. “Will you say that again?”

  “Your hands are clean.”

  “That’s the way you see it?”

  “Don’t moralize with me, Al. I didn’t make this world. I only live in it—and that’s not by choice but by circumstances.”

  “All right, there it is.” I shrugged.

  “Al?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you hate me too much to do me a favor?”

  “I told you I didn’t hate you.”

  “Will you drive me home with you? I don’t want to stay here tonight.”

  “Why? Is the general too amorous? He’s sixty if he’s a day, but then you have a taste for older men.”

  “You bastard!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said after a moment. “That was a lousy thing to say. I’ll drive you back to Los Angeles.”

  “
You’re all heart,” she said.

  The general and the senator appeared then. The general directed my attention to the decor. “You won’t find many rooms like this today, Brody. It speaks of a time when there was law and order, honor and distinction in this land of ours. A place like this will be standing when you and I are forgotten. I’d take pleasure in showing you around the place tomorrow, if you stay the night—our own greenhouses, rifle range, trapshooting, trout stream, eleven hundred acres of land. It’s a way of life that’s rare now. Do you hunt?”

  I shook my head. “No—and I must get back tonight.”

  “Well, Al,” the senator said, “you’ve got yourself a deal. When can we have the goods?”

  “Sunday.”

  “Why not tomorrow?”

  “Sunday. When can I have the money?”

  “You give us the merchandise and we’ll pay for it.”

  “Where?”

  “Here,” the general said. “I spend my weekends here.”

  “No. My house.”

  “There’s no deal then. You bring it here.”

  “All right,” I agreed. “Late afternoon on Sunday. And don’t play games with me, General. I’m a press agent, and if I don’t drive out of here with the money, the whole world will know every detail of what happened, whether I’m dead or alive.”

  “Don’t dramatize yourself, Al,” the senator said. “We are businessmen. We have a deal. Keep your end, we’ll keep ours.”

  4

  Millie was silent on the drive back to Los Angeles. For two hours neither of us said a word. Then I asked her the one question that had been rooting at my brain, the question I had sworn to myself I would never ask: “Why did you have to say you loved me?”

  “Did I?”

  “You damn well remember.”

  “I remember, Al.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe I love you, Al. Does that make any sense?”

  “No.”

  “Did you love me, Al?”

  “I’m not competent to answer. I don’t know what love is.”

  “No.”

  “Do you think I know what love is?”

  “No.”

  “You’re very sure, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, Al,” she said quietly, “tell me something. If you loved me—and that’s a presumption on my part—why didn’t you trust me?”

  “I trusted you.”

  “But not enough to tell me where the stuff was. You could have played it that way, Al. You chose not to.”

  “I chose not to,” I agreed.

  That was all I said on the way back, all she said; but I wanted her then as I never wanted another woman in all my life. I wanted her with an ache so desperate that it was like a physical pain. I have thought about it a great deal since then. It was not simply wanting her; it was knowing that I could have her, that she would be mine as much as any woman ever could be mine, all of her, the crazy, twisted morality, the cold practicality, the wit, the bright intelligence, the long, lean and beautiful body, the mass of black hair and the dark, shrewd eyes. It was something that I had never encountered before in my life and that I knew quite well I would never encounter again. I might even convince her somehow that I did not know where the heroin was. We could make a run for it, just the two of us, and there was an outside chance that we might make it. Could I convince her? I went over that again and again in my mind. How much had they paid her? How much could I offer? Do love and money go together that bleakly?

  So my thoughts went, leaping here and there in a kind of insane speculation, and to break out of the trap I began to think about Capestone, whose ashes would repose in a niche at the Loving Care mausoleum in the name of Andrew Smith—for perhaps as long as Los Angeles existed. What had happened to Capestone? How does a decent, brilliant man become what he had become? What is a man’s soul worth, if indeed man has a soul? Well, it was locked up now. No one would ever write Andrew Capestone’s story.

  But would anyone write mine? I had to ask myself. The thought that seventy pounds of heroin was hidden in my house and had defied the efforts of the general and his people to find it was laughable. What Capestone had done with the heroin had died with him or with Joe Leone.

  Then what happens to one Alvin Brody?

  That was a good, sensible question. It bore repeating. If I had asked it of myself once, I asked it of myself a hundred times.

  And then we were in Los Angeles, racing along the Freeway through Sepulveda and out onto Wilshire Boulevard. I pulled up in front of Millie’s apartment house. She got out of the car, hesitated for a moment and then said quickly, “Thanks, Al.”

  I drove home, opened the door and walked into my house. I expected it, but that did not change the fact that it hit me like a blow in the face. There is nothing quite like walking into a house that has been thoroughly searched. A world that is normally and acceptably lunatic becomes totally demented. Every container of any kind had been emptied. Drawers dumped, boxes opened and emptied, clothes ripped out of the closets, suitcases dragged down and opened, furniture slashed and ripped, rugs pulled aside, pictures dragged off the walls and thrown helter-skelter, wall safe drilled, the knob plucked out, the contents dropped on the floor. I keep a thousand dollars in cash as well as the best of Evelyn’s jewelry and certain securities in the wall safe. It was all there, cash, jewels and securities dropped carelessly on the floor.

  I went into the kitchen, where the insane chaos had been repeated, the refrigerator and freezer emptied, the flour bin turned over and emptied onto a pile of sugar, dry cereal, rice and beans. The laundry bin overturned, every package, every container examined.

  I walked from room to room, found myself picking up this and that, and then gave up in despair. It was two o’clock in the morning. I stripped off my clothes, sprawled out on Evelyn’s bed and fell asleep almost instantly.

  It had been a long day.

  PART FIVE

  Ararat

  1

  I had a dream. I left my office, got into the elevator and punched Bl, which is the garage floor. But the elevator did not stop at Bl; it went down and down, quickening in its descent, until I had the feeling that we were racing at the speed of light. Then I woke up, but the dream stayed with me. It was Saturday morning. It was eight o’clock.

  I lay in bed, trying to crawl back into the beautiful shelter of sleep. Even the descending elevator was preferable to being awake in the world I now occupied. But sleep was over. I was wide awake and listening to the rain, while the sun crept in through the blinds, I made certain primitive associations and decided that it does not usually rain when the sun is shining. I remembered that it was Saturday morning when my gardener, Soto, came, and guessed that he was probably now engaged in watering plants and washing the walks in the garden behind the house. I pulled on my trousers and a T-shirt and went through the chaos of the house to the garden. Soto had turned off the hose and was now skimming the pool.

  “Morning, Mr. Brody,” he called out to me.

  We were old friends. He had worked for me these fifteen years past. I gave him excellent cigars and tickets for openings, and he brought me cuttings of rare and beautiful plants. He was a marvelous gardener, and he appreciated the fact that I could discuss the garden intelligently.

  “Morning, Soto.”

  He looked at me appraisingly and then shook his head. “You look pretty beat up, if I may say so.”

  “I haven’t shaved yet. A red beard going white is like taking ugly pills.”

  “Take a good swim, Mr. Brody. The pool’s clean, and I got it up to eighty degrees.”

  “You know, I haven’t been in that pool in months.”

  “Best exercise in the world. How’s Mrs. Brody?”

  “Down in Acapulco with my daughter.”

  “Well, you know what I’d do if I was in your place?”

  “What?”

  “I’d be in that pool floating around like a king all day long.
That’s what I’d do.”

  “Maybe you have something there.”

  “You’d better believe it,” Soto said. “Tell you what, Mr. Brody, I got something new and I’d like to try it out here, but I don’t want to do it without discussing it with you. You see, I’m ecology-minded. I think any good gardener is. Now this here’s a new powder. You know how either you spray a rosebush or you dust it?”