Black Duck

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  The room I lay in was cold and dark, with the dank air of a cellar. Faint fingers of light crept in beneath a closed door. I tried to get up and could not. I was bound to a bed of some kind, roped down so tight the twine cut into my shins and wrists.

  The voices came from above, along with other noises: chairs scraping, china clinking, the heavy tread of boots. A smell of frying meat and wood smoke wafted down. I guessed that I was lying below a kitchen and that a meal was under way. As I listened, the conversation began to piece itself together.

  A man with a flat Boston twang spoke loudest and most often. He was angry about some job that had gone wrong. Cases had been lost, “scuttled” was his word. With that, I knew I was in the hands of a gang of rumrunners.

  “Well, we know where we dropped ’em. They’re not going anywhere,” a younger voice replied.

  “So why didn’t you go back already?” the Boston voice said. “There’s a hundred cases of Johnny Walker Red just lying out there in the harbor? Wait’ll the big boys hear that!”

  “How’re we supposed to get ’em when it’s blowing from the north?” a high, nervous voice asked. “You can’t do nothing when it’s blowing that way.”

  “The big boys don’t care if it’s blowing from Timbuktu! You get out tomorrow night and pull up those cases before they wash ashore. Get that guy with the fancy hook that did it for us last time. What’s his name?”

  “Louie,” somebody said.

  “Yeah, him. What’sa matter with you guys? You should’a thought of that yourself.”

  Everybody was quiet for a while. Then someone with a country drawl launched into a story about a new transport van he had that was painted to look exactly like a Bushway’s Ice Cream truck. He was laughing about it.

  “The Feds are out of the loop on this one! I’ve got that truck backed up to my cow barn a couple’a times a week, taking on loads for Boston, Providence, wherever. Only thing is, my neighbors next door had been watching. Last week one of ’em buttonholes me and says with a wink: ‘All this Bushway’s coming and going! You sure must be making a pile of money in the ice cream business.’

  “I told him: ‘Yeah, we got great ice cream. Comes straight from the isle of Bermuda. You ever try that flavor?’

  “‘And what flavor is that?’ he asks.

  “I say to him: ‘Hot buttered rum!’”

  A heavy round of guffawing came down through the floor. Then chairs squeaked and it seemed as if the atmosphere changed. A more serious topic arose, one that must have been under discussion before I woke up, because it sort of started in the middle. I took a while to catch the drift, but when I did, my ears were burning.

  “How many cases are we talking about?” a voice asked.

  “Over three thousand, fancy stuff like champagne and high-priced scotch.” This was the Boston accent again.

  “Jeez, that’s worth a bundle.”

  “It was scheduled to come in for Christmas. Now the big boys have got word it should be arriving just before New Year’s. She’s a freighter name of Firefly.”

  “She’s coming from St. Pierre?”

  “Canada, yeah. Packed to the gills. A private trader. She’s bypassing Boston and coming straight down.”

  “How come?”

  “Don’t know. Our gang didn’t set it up.”

  “So who did?”

  “That big operator who was running around us, Tony Mordello, in New Bedford. He knew he’d make out big on it. Guess what he used for a ticket?”

  “What?”

  “A fifty-dollar bill ripped in half.”

  “Fifty bucks!”

  “He had it on him when we bumped him off, but nobody knew. Then, one of his boys talked.”

  “So, who talked?”

  “That stoolie cop Charlie Pope. He was in with Tony until he saw what happened to him. Then he decides to come over to our gang to keep the deal afloat since it’s already paid for. He stays in touch with the Canadians, pretends Tony’s still alive and in charge. Everything’s on schedule except no one can find Tony’s ticket. Charlie has his suspicions about where it went, but he can’t prove it. Then the big boys get a new tip. That’s why the kid’s downstairs. They heard he’s got the ticket stashed away somewhere.”

  “Where’d the tip come from?”

  “Who else? The badge.”

  “That cop is in on everything.”

  “Slippery as an eel. I keep warning the big boys, don’t trust him. Whoever pays him the most, he goes with. Anyway, if this kid knows where the fifty is, I’m supposed to get it outta him. Hey, Ernie, did you check on the punk lately?”

  A minute later, footsteps sounded on the stairs coming down to my cellar. I took a couple of deep breaths, then a key turned in the lock and the door swung open.

  My first idea was to keep my eyes shut and play dead. My head was burning up, though, and the ropes were cutting into me. When Ernie looked in, I looked back at him and asked for a drink of water.

  “Harry!” he called. “He came to. What d’ya want me to do?”

  “Let him alone. I’ll be down.”

  “He’s asking for water,” Ernie called. “He can’t have it till he talks, right?” He was a big man with a wide, fleshy face. Some greasy scrap from supper still hung on his chin.

  “Get him some,” came the reply.

  The door closed. Ernie went back upstairs and returned with a mug, which he tipped so hard into my mouth that most of the water ran down my face.

  “Here! Get your head up!” he said. Since even my neck was tied down, this was impossible. Ernie thought that was hilarious. He sat back and laughed at me.

  A thin, narrow-eyed man wearing a fisherman’s cap stepped into the room. I recognized him right off. Suddenly I knew who Ernie was, too. They were the gangsters with the machine guns who’d shot Tom Morrison’s Viola. My blood went cold.

  “Let the kid up,” the thin guy said. “Nobody can drink lying down.”

  “Sure thing, Harry.”

  I was untied and allowed to sit up on the edge of the bed to drink more water. Three other gang members came down to watch. One of them was John Appleby.

  “Hello, Ruben,” he said, with a sneer.

  If I could, I would have spit in his face. I’d figured out by then that this was the Boston gang headed up by the College Boys. Marina was right, they’d been all around me, watching and waiting. I’d been a blind fool.

  As soon as I’d drunk my fill, Harry started in on me. He was the one with the Boston drawl.

  “We know you picked that body on the beach. We know what you picked, too, so don’t bother with the funny stuff. Where’s that fifty-dollar bill?”

  “What bill?” I said.

  “You know what. Your little friend saw it.” Harry stabbed his finger into my chest. “He says you put it in a schoolbook. Where is it now?”

  I kind of choked. I’d more or less forgotten Jeddy had seen me drop the bill in front of our lockers. Even worse, though, I couldn’t believe he’d tell on me. My mouth got dry.

  Harry moved in so his breath was on my face.

  “What’s your name, kid?” he asked.

  From behind him, John Appleby answered for me. “Ruben Hart. His dad is manager of Riley’s store.”

  “Now, Ruben, listen up. We don’t want to hurt you. We want to get you back to your dad as soon as possible. This is just business, see? That bill is part of a deal we’re doing. We’ve got to have it or the deal won’t go through. So, where’s this book? At school?”

  If only that bill still was in my book at school, I would’ve told them. If I’d had it on me, I would’ve handed it over in a minute. What did I care about some freighter from Canada? The trouble was, it was in the tobacco pouch under my mattress at home, and I didn’t want Harry or Ernie or any of those gangsters going anywhere near my house. My mother and Aunt Grace were there, probably by themselves.

  “I don’t have it anymore,” I told Harry.

  “C’mon, kid. We’r
e not stupid.”

  “I threw it away.”

  “That’s a good one.”

  “I did. How did I know anybody’d want it? You can’t buy anything with half a fifty dollar bill. I kept it for a while, then I threw it away.”

  “Where? When?”

  “At school, in the wastebasket in my classroom, about a week ago.”

  Harry’s eyes went narrow. I could see he didn’t believe me and was trying to make up his mind what to do about it. The rest of the gang stood around like vultures, watching.

  “C’mon, boss, let me pop him a few times,” Ernie said. “He’ll talk.”

  Harry looked as if he was considering this when a phone started ringing upstairs.

  “Get that,” he ordered. John Appleby went for it. You could see he was low man on the totem pole, the same as he was at the store. After a minute, he yelled down:

  “Harry! It’s the badge.”

  “That weasel. What does he want?”

  “He says to quit working on the kid. On orders from the big boys.”

  “What? Why?”

  “The badge says he got a call from Boston. There’s been a change of plans. They’re sending somebody else over to talk to the kid.”

  Harry went into a string of terrible curses when he heard this. “Here I’ve done the dirty work and caught the punk, and now they’re turning him over to somebody else? That doesn’t make sense. Hold the phone, I’m coming up.”

  “He hung up already.”

  A grim look came over Harry’s face when he heard this.

  “I smell a rat. I’m calling Boston to check this. You take over with the kid,” he told Ernie, and went off.

  I was petrified. I knew if I was left in Ernie’s hands, I’d be dead, or knocked out again at the least. Just looking at Ernie told you he lived his life on a short fuse. Any little thing could set him off. He’d shot Viola for tripping over her.

  Harry must have had second thoughts, too, because halfway up the stairs he stopped and yelled back.

  “Wait! Tie the kid up again. And Ernie, don’t touch him. You hear me? I don’t want no mark on him when I come back.”

  So I was tied down to the bed again. Ernie looked disappointed not to be able to work on me, but he followed orders. Since I was awake, he gagged me this time. When he finished, John Appleby, who’d been hanging around smirking, gave my bed a kick.

  “How d’ya like that?” he said. “You’re in trouble now and your daddy ain’t here to fix it, is he?”

  I tried to look daggers back at him, but he just laughed at me. Then he and Ernie closed me in and went upstairs. I was alone in the dark again, except for those little fingers of light coming under the door. I began to get scared. For one thing, I was wondering who this cop “the badge” might be. Or rather, I wasn’t wondering, I was pretty sure I knew. The air around me suddenly got colder and denser. The walls of the cellar seemed to creep in on me. I tried to wiggle my feet and hands to keep the blood flowing, but slowly the feeling went out of them. I gave up and lay still. Whatever was ahead for me, I knew I didn’t have anything but a prayer to raise against it.

  SEEING STARS

  TIME PASSED, I COULDN’T TELL HOW MUCH. Hours, maybe. I dozed on and off. At one point, I heard a knock on the door upstairs and a lot of feet stamping around overhead. There was some talking. I couldn’t make out the words.

  I heard the next thing all right: a gun went off from a place that seemed right over my bed. My heart took a giant leap. Upstairs in the kitchen, someone swore and another shot let loose. I heard a body fall down, then a bunch of grunts and crashing furniture. A fight was going on. A few minutes later, it stopped, and footsteps came thudding down the stairs to my cellar. The door blasted open. A couple of brand-new characters walked in.

  “Found him!” one yelled. He came over and started trying to yank me off the bed.

  “He’s tied down,” the other guy said.

  “Well, cut him loose.”

  The second man flicked open a jackknife and cut me free. They both started trying to drag me up the stairs.

  “C’mon, kid. Walk!” they were telling me, but my legs had gone dead. I couldn’t make them work. Finally, one of them hauled me over his shoulder like a sack of flour and we went up.

  “Where am I going?” I asked.

  “Shut up,” he said.

  We came to the top of the stairs and turned down a hall that led to the front door. On the way, I saw Harry and Ernie standing in the kitchen with their hands in the air. Somebody was holding a gun on them and they didn’t look happy about it. John Appleby had a gun on two others. The little squealer had switched sides.

  A man was lying on the floor. Whether he was shot dead or just wounded, I couldn’t tell because I was traveling sort of upside down and backward. I caught a glimpse of Harry turning around to watch me as I went by.

  “Who are you guys?” I heard him say to one of the boys holding the guns. “Hey, we can cut a deal. You want in on the freighter? Tell the badge we got no problem with that. We didn’t know he wanted to go that way. We got no problem at all.”

  Nobody answered. Harry looked as if he couldn’t believe what was happening. I couldn’t believe it, either. I was being kidnapped again.

  My head slammed into a hard edge. I saw a fountain of sparks and then a warm, wet curtain came down over my eyes. I’d been thrown into the backseat of a big roadster and now a bunch of guys were piling in after me. The engine cranked up and we started away down the road. The man sitting next to me was angry.

  “Idiot! He’s bleeding like crazy. Why’d you dump him like that?”

  “I didn’t!”

  “Can you stop it?”

  “Get that blanket outta the trunk.”

  My head was feeling strange, woozing in and woozing out. They tried sitting me up, laying me down, wrapping handkerchiefs around my head and covering me up with the blanket. Nothing would stop me. I was bleeding all over the place.

  “He’s going to need a docter,” somebody said. “We can’t deliver him this way. Take the gag off.”

  When they got it off me, another voice in the front seat said: “We ain’t got time for no docter. Listen, kid, we didn’t mean to hurt you. Can you breathe better now?”

  I nodded. There was something familiar about that voice. I’d heard it before.

  “Cripes, he’s a mess. Farino, what were you thinking, throwing him in like that? You know he’s gotta talk!”

  “Well, he weighed a ton.”

  “What’d he hit?”

  “A case of booze.”

  “Cripes!”

  The car went very fast at times and slowed down to a crawl at others. There were a number of turns and swerves. They’d laid me down on my back on the seat, my legs stretched across two or three laps. Whenever I opened my eyes, I could see stars shining in the dark sky through the car window. I recognized a couple of constellations Jeddy and I used to point out to each other: Orion’s Belt and Scorpio. I saw the Big Dipper. After a while, we must have been driving in more or less one direction because the same constellations stayed there, inside the window frame. I’d get dizzy and close my eyes, and when I opened them, Orion would still be riding along with me. I didn’t know where I was going but even in my bad state, I knew who I was going with. Somewhere along the way, I figured out who that voice in the front seat belonged to.

  Stanley Culp.

  I was traveling with the New York mobsters.

  “Hello, Mr. Culp. It’s me, Ruben Hart,” I remember saying once. I was dumb enough to think he’d somehow missed this fact.

  He glanced at me over a shoulder in his lazy way. “Sorry about this, kid,” he said, and turned back around.

  I must have passed out because the next thing I knew, I was being carried from the car and taken inside another house. The room I was put in this time was upstairs, a kind of attic. I was still bleeding, going in and out of consciousness. At some point, a man with a face that sagged like a old
sack down one side came to look at me. I figured he was one of the kingpins because everyone was kowtowing to him, holding his coat and backing up to give him room. He leaned over and gave me a hard stare.

  “Poor kid. You messed him up good,” he said.

  That was it. He left. He’d decided I was beyond talking at that moment, and he was probably right. The funny thing was, I was ready to talk if only I could have. I was scared sick. These New York gangsters struck me as real efficient professionals, the kind that don’t play around with dumping bodies at sea that might wash up on shore later. If they wanted to get rid of someone, they’d know how to do it. Like Danny Walsh in Providence, there’d be nothing left behind and no one to tell why.

  Later, when I found out that the man with the sagging face was probably Lucky Luciano himself, come out from New York City for the very purpose of directing operations in our area, I wasn’t surprised. A face like that you don’t forget. A face like that could’ve asked me and I would’ve told him: “Under the mattress, in the tobacco pouch.” My mother and Aunt Grace would’ve had to take their chances.

  After a few hours, one of the New York gang brought me up a bowl of soup and stood around while I tried to eat it.

  “If I were you, I’d get better fast and talk,” the guy said. He had a sort of deadpan face. There was no telling what he was thinking.

  “I will,” I croaked.

  “They don’t want you around here. They’ll get rid of you.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Even if you talk, they’ll probably get rid of you,” he went on. “It’s cleaner that way. Nobody to squeal on us.”

  After that, I couldn’t eat anymore. He took the soup bowl, tied me up and put the gag over my mouth. He turned out the lights on me the way the Boston gang had done, closed the door and went downstairs. The only window in the room had a shade pulled over it. I was alone in the dark, and this time there were no fingers of light to hang on to. I began to drift.

  At times I seemed to be on a rolling sea, and at other times I lay in a dark forest, trees waving over my head. I imagined myself floating up toward a ceiling, which I expected to bump into at any moment, though I never did because it always lifted higher in the nick of time to make room for me. What I found out was, there’s a point beyond which you can’t bring up enough energy even to be afraid anymore. What was happening was happening, and I wasn’t me but a spectator to myself, waiting and watching and, in an oddly distant way, curious to see how it would end.