The Great Wash

by Gerald Kersh

  “What the hell do you guys want?” asked Monty Cello; and his voice now was thin, flat, and dangerous.

  “Calm, calm, calm! We are neither coppers nor robbers, Monty: we only want to know for the sake of knowing . . . to follow knowledge like a sinking star beyond the utmost bounds of human thought . . . we want to know, Monty. It is as simple as that. What the hell did Leuwenhoek want when he poked his home-made microscope at a drop of dirty water? Simply to know. We are made that way, you see; the same as Galileo who aimed the first telescope at the stars. . . . So felt I as some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. You have swum into our ken, Monty, and we want to know. Eh, Albert?”

  I said: “That’s it. The idea is, that George and I already know so much about you that we can’t rest until we know some more. But what really started us off was that comic opera business with Major Chatterton at the Savoy. Let me freshen your glass.”

  Monty Cello covered his glass with an outstretched hand, shaking his head.

  George Oaks said: “Just so, Albert. . . . If you consider our conversation of this evening, you will see how much we know of you already. Now, among other things, but first and foremost, we want to know just why you are so terrified of Major Chatterton, and what your connection is with him, and therefore the Lord Kadmeel. Be sensible, Monty, and talk. For all you know, Albert and I may be the very ones you came to England to contact——”

  “—I told you, I came for a vacation——”

  “—Apart from your pal in London who slipped you the word that Chatterton was in town. Eh? I mean, the one who phoned you at the Savoy and threw you into such a sweat that you were out of the place in ten minutes.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Monty Cello, through his teeth. Then his voice changed. “Lay offa me, George, for God’s sake, willya?”

  “If you won’t tell us, Monty, we’ll have to guess,” said Oaks. “You came to England en route for some other destination in Europe, and stayed in London to make contact with some other friends, because you believed that Major Chatterton was looking for you elsewhere. You wanted to avoid Chatterton until such time as you could make some deal with Lord Kadmeel through him—some time when he would gain nothing by hurting you. Now my guess is this: (One) what you have got, and Chatterton wants, is in the form of papers——”

  “—Who says so?”

  “Must be; Kadmeel is too big to send Chatterton chasing after mere money, or money’s worth. Obvious as a punch in the mouth . . . (Two) you have those papers on your person. Why? Because if you had had an opportunity to dispose of them safely as you had planned, you would already have done so, and therefore have met Chatterton man to man, and made your deal. Eh?”

  “Go on,” said Monty Cello.

  “(Three) these papers were of such a nature that you dared not entrust them to a bank vault, to which, in certain circumstances, the police might have access. And to which you, if you were strictly on the run, would not dare to go. Eh?”

  Monty Cello was silent. Oaks patted him encouragingly on the knee and proceeded: “I’ll bet you, furthermore, that you were expecting your London contacts this very evening; because you thought that no one else in England knew that a certain party going by the name of Monty Cello was to be found at the Savoy (as for Chatterton’s appearance on the scene—as I guess it, the man who sold you your passport squealed for a consideration). . . . Poor old Monty,” said George Oaks, dreamily. “. . . I can see you waiting in that room, tense as a banjo string, with your eyes on your wrist where you wear that three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar chronometer watch that tells the barometric pressure, the date, the hour, and the split second—ears cocked at the telephone—eating your lips, wishing you had a sniff of the stuff they cured you of taking in Joliet——”

  “—I was not in Joliet!”

  “—Then ting-a-ling!—gentlemen to see Mr. Monty Cello. Oh, joy! Your nerves are shot. Obviously you have never before met the party, or parties, you are expecting. You look over the visitors at the desk, take a chance, come forward. If these are wrong guys, you reason, I’m a gone goose anyway. Case of mistaken identity. Disappointment is mixed with relief and, by the very preponderance of relief, Monty, it is demonstrated that you are lonely and frightened. So you drink with the two strangers, of all the ten million strangers in London, who happen to be Albert Kemp and George Oaks. The God is just, Monty. For all you know, we might be the two that were sent to help you. Now be calm. In any case, don’t you see, we have you by the short hairs. In effect, you are situated like Gilliatt in The Toilers of the Sea: to go is impossible, to stay is madness. If you go, I’ll have you collared in three-quarters of an hour. If you stay, you must trust yourself to us; in other words, talk a little. Whichever way you jump, Monty, I catch you. But here’s a consideration for you: upon my word of honour, Albert and I are not friends of Major Chatterton, and we hate Lord Kadmeel.”

  “George never said a truer word,” I said. “Friends! Very far from it, Monty. As for Kadmeel’s New Movement, Sciocracy, we’d fight it to the last ditch—wouldn’t we, George? So you see, if Chatterton is against you, we are for you . . . to that extent, at least. So why not talk to us?”

  “You will talk eventually to someone, Monty,” said Oaks, “mark my words, you will. If you’ve fallen foul of Crazy Kadmeel and his Sciocrats, you’re in a devil of a hole, in one way or another. Better tell us what’s on your mind while there’s time.”

  Monty Cello snapped his fingers and drew a deep breath which he held for quite ten seconds before he let it out—that was the longest sigh I ever heard. Then he said: “If you guys play ball with me I can get you a million bucks. What do you say?”

  Oaks replied: “We say nothing, Monty. It is you who must do the saying. Tell us about your connection with Lord Kadmeel and the Sciocrats.”

  “About that I don’t know from nothing. I never saw this Lord Kadmeel. I don’t think I ever even saw his picture in the papers.”

  “No, he never liked to have his picture printed—afraid of being recognised in public, and assassinated,” said George Oaks. “He had me thrown out of the Kadmeel Building, and black-listed on all his papers, for riding in his private elevator: fear of assassination again—it frequently goes with megalomania. An uncouth, gross, horrid man, Monty. Imagine the Emperor Nero modelled in cream cheese, with a dark moustache. An unprepossessing figurehead for the Sciocrats, who propose, through the application of unadulterated Reason, to rule the world. But go on.”

  Monty Cello said: “Money rules the world. Senators rule the world, and if you got the dough, can’t you buy off Senators? Sciocrats, hell! Money rules the world, you take it from me. I know. I learned it before I could walk. I never saw this Kadmeel, and I don’t want to.”

  “But you did see Major Chatterton?”

  “I guess I’ve gotta trust you,” said Monty Cello sadly. “Yes, you’re right. Like I said, I was in Hollywood at the time, drawing six hundred bucks a week from Sam Feinlight, but not for writing. It was part of—kind of insurance Sam Feinlight was paying in case of any labour problems coming up, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Oaks, “and a very dirty racket you were in.”

  “Well, like fruit and flowers, film is a perishable commodity——”

  “—Like men?” I said.

  “Oh, all right then—it’s a dirty racket? Okay. So that makes me a dirty racketeer? Okay. If I didn’t do it, somebody else would, wouldn’t they? It’s either that, or be a sucker. My father wasn’t a dirty racketeer, he was a bricklayer; so he got killed when a building fell down before it was finished on accountta the concrete was no good. The crook that sold that concrete to the city left seven and a half million dollars, and his daughter married a Bulgarian Prince. So I’m a racketeer. All right, I’m a racketeer. Governor Ferguson of Texas we
nt to jail for being a crook—admitted it in the papers, like it was a good joke—came out, and got himself elected again. So I’m a crook. Ah, you make me tired! In all my life I never knocked off more than six guys, always strictly for business. So I’m a murderer! The contractor that put up that building murders forty-two men in five seconds. So he dies rich, in a penthouse on Park Avenue. The guys he murdered were mostly honest men. . . . Four of ’em died slow—it was three days before they could dig ’em out. Anyone I knocked off was a dirty racketeer, like what you’d call me; an enemy of society, and good riddance. And anyone I killed, I killed quick and clean—I saw my father when they dragged him out; I hate mess. And if I hadn’t done it, somebody else would’ve. The State, maybe. And if I had to choose, believe me, I’d rather get shot than burned in the Chair, or hung up with a rope, or choked in a gas chamber. But what’s the use of talking?”

  Monty Cello paused and leaned back, looking up at the great black oak beams. Looking, he grew tense again, and said: “Say, there’s a bad crack in that middle beam up there”—and shifted uneasily in the deep chair.

  “Calm, calm, Monty,” said George Oaks; “that timber was felled when Richard Plantagenet was a pup, and shaped when Henry VIII was a twinkle in his father’s eye. It rests on solid stone; it’ll last out our time; it’ll stand, please the God, when you and I are gone and forgotten. Go on, Monty, go on.”

  “. . . Five hundred years, eh?” said Monty Cello, shaking his head. “Can you imagine that? I can’t. I don’t know that I want to. You build a house to stand up five hundred years. So then you die. So where does it get you?”

  “Major Chatterton?” said George Oaks. “You were going to say . . .”

  “As I was saying, this Major Chatterton contacted me on the Coast, in Hollywood. First of all, I couldn’t figure what he wanted me for. Even if I was a real writer, this Major Chatterton wouldn’t go out of his way to ask somebody in my bracket to come to his suite at the Ambassador for a quiet drink. But I got nothing to lose, so I go over; and this Major Chatterton treats me like a Prince. He tells me he’s heard a lot about me, and he’s interested in my life story. Well, I could show you a dozen grifters that get twenty-five grand and more for a lot of hooey that they called their ‘life stories’. I mean, it’s found money; you pay some poor bum a thousand, fifteen hundred bucks, to build it up around a few clippings from the newspapers, and he writes it up; and all you do is write your name on the top. There’s nothing to it. Naturally, in a case like that, you sing like a canary, but, strictly speaking, you say nothing that everybody didn’t read already, and forgot. Because, take it from me, the truth pays no dividends. Well, this Major Chatterton, he’s got a few clippings on me about three-four raps I beat; one in Portland, the Riggio killing in Detroit, the McTeague Massacre in Gary, and how One-Eye Regan got knocked off in broad daylight in a telephone booth in Philadelphia . . . stuff like that. Nothing. It was in all the papers. I never kept my clippings; that’s a mug’s game; but it’s all there for anybody to read. Open and above-board, if you get what I mean; because they got nothing on me. Apart from punk stuff, like when they sent me to reform school when I was sixteen for carrying a concealed weapon, and a couple of raps I took for income tax, and for being in possession of narcotics. This Major Chatterton looked like easy money, see? It doesn’t worry me even when he tells me my real name.”

  Monty Cello paused, and I asked: “Which is——?”

  “Jack Orsini. Otherwise ‘Lippy’ Orsini, on account of an impipediment in my speech; also because I used to be a talker in Carny. You know something? Talk in a Carny talker’s singsong, and you’ll never stutter.”

  George Oaks said: “True. The orator Cicero found that out two thousand years ago.”

  “Cicero?”

  “A sad-looking suburb, even for Chicago, isn’t it? But go on, Monty, go on.”

  “Well,” said Monty Cello, “I wasn’t known as Jack Orsini for a hell of a long time. But that don’t matter; it’s on the records for anybody to look up. All the same, I begin to wonder what’s on this Major Chatterton’s mind, if he goes to all this trouble to find out about me, when there’s plenty of big shots he could contact without any trouble at all. And even while I’m wondering, this Major Chatterton kind of smiles at me, and this smile puts the fear of God into me. Yes, like I said, my nerves ain’t too good; still, I don’t scare easy. All the same, this Major Chatterton, all of a sudden, scares the hell out of me.” The man who called himself Monty Cello moistened his lips. “He says: ‘All this is very interesting, Mr. Cello; but you haven’t told me about the little affair of Casimir Pulacki, otherwise known as “Loopy the Polack”, in Saratoga, in 1948. What about that, Mr. Cello? Surely, you remember when Pulacki was shot down in the lobby of the Hotel Alexander Hamilton, and the unidentified killer, making his getaway, murdered State Trooper Laugherty near the Pike?’ he says . . .

  “Well, only one other man in the world could know about that, and he’s supposed to be dead; but, dead or alive, this was one guy in the world I could trust. If he squealed, this is one rap I would never beat . . . Pulacki had it coming to him, and with the cop, I fired in self-defence; according to plan, the cop had no business to be there at that time. That was either a slip-up somewhere or a double-cross. But it’s too late to argue. This Major Chatterton has got me cold; he makes it clear—I got to do like he says, or I burn ‘on information received.’ . . . Conklin must have squealed, somehow. I hate to think what they did to him, to make him talk! But that’s how it was: this Major Chatterton don’t want my life story—he wants my life; he knows the story already. It’s obey, or burn. Put yourself in my place.”

  He stopped to take a mouthful from his glass, and George Oaks made a non-committal sympathetic noise. But I, feeling myself called upon to say something, right or wrong, murmured: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

  At this Monty Cello turned, quick as a snake, positively hissing with hate: “Aaah! There but for the grace of God goes you—says you! And who the hell are you? Ain’t I entitled to the grace of God as well as you? Oh, shut up! Don’t give me that stuff! I once heard a Governor talk like that—those very same words—and he’d got greased by every grifter in the state. One of the boys went to the Chair: and there but for the grace of God went him! . . . I’m sorry, Al. Forget it. . . . As I was saying; put yourself in my place. You’re me, see? And this Major Chatterton puts it to you like this: ‘My friend, I have only to drop a certain word in a certain quarter to fry you like an egg. I will not drop that word if you do exactly what I tell you to do. If you do what I am going to tell you to do, I guarantee your safety, and will see to it that you are heavily paid for your work. If you don’t . . . well . . .’ What do you say to that?”

  George Oaks said: “First of all, I say—‘Major Chatterton, what’s the job?’ ”

  “Okay,” said Monty Cello. “And then what if I say to you: ‘Say Yes or No, Mister; but if you say No, you burn . . .’ What do you say then, George?”

  “Why,” said George Oaks, “putting myself in your shoes, Monty, that’s easy. I say: ‘Major Chatterton, first I must know the inwardness of what you want me to do. I am a great sinner, sir, and may burn in Sing-Sing for my crimes to date. But, as I am taught, beyond the hot squat there is a place where our ‘fires are not quenched.’ ”

  Monty Cello began: “Ah, you’re full of . . .” Then he felt under his shirt, and changed his tone. “Leave my religion out of it, will you, George? This Major Chatterton, he never asked me to do anything wrong. It was like this: there was a guy, strictly legit, but crazy. See? This guy had actually been in a nut-house, somewhere in Pennsylvania, but they got him out. It was a neat break, smoothly organised. Major Chatterton, and his set-up, were hiding this nut under cover in Canada.”

  “Who was this so-called nut?” George Oaks asked.

  “A scientist, but he’d gone crazy, so the
Government locked him up.”

  “He had been working for the Government, then?”

  “That’s right. And the F.B.I. was watching him—but close! All the same, Chatterton’s set-up got him loose—it must have cost them plenty—and hid him out, in Canada. They must be worth all the dough in the world. Well, after a little while this crazy scientist broke loose—he couldn’t have been so crazy, to get past Chatterton’s mob—slipped back over the border, and disappeared, like that.” Monty Cello snapped his fingers. “Chatterton’s mob traced him as far as Kansas City, and then lost track of him. He just evaporated—psst!—like spit on a hot-plate. The F.B.I. were looking for him, too; but they didn’t have a chance in hell of catching up with him, unless he gave himself up of his own free will.”

  “How was that?”

  “Well, as soon as Chatterton’s set-up got him to Canada they operated on him, and changed his face. See? And I don’t mean just altered his nose, like with Dillinger. They did a real job on that guy’s face, like you couldn’t get done for ten grand in a legitimate hospital—built up a new chin with plastics, pulled his hair-line down a good inch, made skin grafts, and everything; even tattooed a genuine social security number on his arm. So you can see, this Major Chatterton and his set-up must have wanted him pretty bad; they must have spent a fortune on this guy. Well, what I had to do was this: find this guy, wherever he was, and bring him back to Chatterton all in one piece, safe and sound. That’s all.” Monty Cello laughed bitterly.

  “And how were you to recognise him?”

  “They took pictures of him after his face was healed, full-face and profile, just like police photographs, in case of emergency. Those guys, I tell you, they give you the creeps. Well, so this Major Chatterton gave me ten grand in advance, and there was another twenty grand coming when I delivered. You can guess what this guy must have been worth to Chatterton, eh? And this Major Chatterton says: ‘And don’t imagine for a moment, my friend, that you’ll get away with any monkey tricks. Find this man Rheingold and bring him back, and you have thirty thousand dollars and perfect security. Fail, and you die. Now be off.’ ”