The Novels of William Goldman

by William Goldman

  “I’m sorry, and I did come here for a reason, but telling you my situation sure wasn’t it. And neither was the money, but I did have to go someplace where I could get the guy paid—he was sort of cruising half asleep on Twelfth Avenue by the docks and I ran in front of his car or he never would have stopped—I don’t think he knew the word ‘apparition,’ but he figured that’s what I was so he said, ‘Yes sir, yes sir,’ when I gave your address, and did we make time. I came here because there were other circumstances involved, but you’ve been terrific, putting up with me like you have, and I really thank you.”

  “There’s nothing else I can do?”

  “I’d love some money—ten dollars for taxis and stuff, twenty if you have it.”

  “My wallet’s still in my robe.” He took it out and handed over twenty. Levy nodded thank you. “Is that the end?”

  “No, I’d sure love an old raincoat or something, Professor Biesenthal, I feel like such a jerk moving around town in these pajamas.”

  “There’s a raincoat in the foyer closet, yours when needed. Is that the end?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “All right then; why did you really come here?”

  “Why did I come here?” Levy said softly; then he shook his head, stopped dead silent.

  “Pretend it’s for your orals,” Biesenthal said after a time, “make believe you have to answer something.”

  “Yes sir,” Levy said, and he got up, moved to the window, looked out over Riverside Park. “I bet you can get a great view from here,” he said.

  “Particularly when the sun is up,” Biesenthal replied.

  Levy whirled on him: “I’m really smart, Professor Biesenthal; you may never get the chance to find if that’s true, and I know I sound like an idiot, but I promise you, you never had anybody better when it comes to hitting the books, and what I’m about to say doesn’t make sense, and when you’re supposedly strong in the brain department as I am, it bugs you when you can’t sort things out straight, but here’s the thing, before my Dad died, I was the family dunce—I was only ten, but every teacher I had, I knew they felt I wasn’t near what Doc was—”

  “Doc?”

  “Henry David—my brother—his first three years at Yale he led his class, no one had marks as good as Doc’s in a decade, he was that smart, and he was getting better, he was going to be this genius lawyer, this defender of the downtrodden, demolishing tyrants whenever they had the guts to face him, and he was twenty when Dad died, and his senior year, well, naturally things slipped for him, it’s shitty when your father kills himself, and somehow, without meaning to, I became the defender of the faith and he became the money grubber—I think, goddammit I know, we were both reacting to the same event, the shooting, and this guy who knew Doc, he said to me earlier tonight, ‘Your father was guilty, wasn’t he?’ and I blasted him pretty good, lemme tell you, I set him straight, but now I know he must have gotten that from Doc, it’s what Doc must have thought too, he went one way because of what he thought and I went the other, and I have to know something you can tell me, and that’s, was he innocent, my old man?”

  Biesenthal closed his eyes. “The guilt still lingers after all these years.” He shook his head. “You know, the ecologists warn us that plastic takes hundreds of years before it disappears, decomposes. I think that’s nothing, compared to guilt. Down it comes through the generations like an uncounted gene.” He opened his eyes, looked at Babe. “But this isn’t answering your question, is it, sir? You want to know was your father, the noted H. V. Levy, a commie-pinko-fellow-traveling-radical-red-filthy-bolshevik-bomb-thrower?” Biesenthal almost smiled, but sadly. “He was the perfect patsy, that’s all he ever was: brighter than anyone had any right to be, and he seemed arrogant, and he was impatient, he never learned to suffer fools, and he tended to appear patronizing if you didn’t realize that was just his insecurity being blanketed away, and he was the head of the History Department at a capital letters Eastern Establishment Ivy League University, and he had been invited to Washington by the Opposition Party, and he had a funny name, and he was Jewish. My God, half a dozen H.V. Levys and Joe McCarthy might have made President.” Again the bright eyes closed. “How did Keats put it in the poem about Chapman’s Homer? Cortez was Keats’s image, when he first sees the Pacific. Your father was as innocent of charges as Cortez was of the Pacific’s existence the moment before he found out it existed.” The eyes opened, watched. “Sufficient?”

  Babe nodded, went toward the foyer for the raincoat. It was too small, but not so much that you’d stop traffic with it.

  Biesenthal followed. “Please let me help.”

  “You already have, you must know that.”

  “At least call the police. Or if you won’t, let me do it for you.

  “Police?” Babe blinked. “Police? Why would I call them, what good would that do?” He buttoned the raincoat. “I don’t want justice, are you kidding, screw justice, we’re way past justice, it’s blood now. ...”

  He took a cab outside Biesenthal’s building, took it to 96th and Amsterdam, got out, paid, hurried to the deepest shadows, and moved through them down to 95th. All of 95th was dark, the whole of it from Amsterdam to Columbus; with the delinquents that lived on this block, what chance did a light bulb have? Still, he stayed close to the building line as he crept toward his brownstone. Every so often, when he’d forget to keep his teeth covered, the night air would attack the nerves so he felt like crying out, but he kept control, simply sliding his tongue up over the injuries or covering his whole mouth with his hand, moving silently on. He had to get back into his apartment, if only for a minute; he needed to get there, everything hinged on that, but there was a good chance it was the single most monumentally stupid thing he could do, because New York was the Apple, a lot of places to hide, and the only place Janeway knew about was his apartment, so if Janeway was going to try to head him off, it would be there, at his place, in case he was dumb enough to try getting back, but there were risks you had to take, stupid or not, and dammitall—

  —a car was double-parked several houses down from his building. It was too far yet to see if it was empty or not, and maybe it was just some drunken Spaniard who couldn’t find a hydrant to sleep it off in front of, so he just passed out when he’d gone as far as he could.

  Please be a drunken Spaniard, Babe thought as he took another few quiet steps. He never realized he could be so silent under pressure, and that was about to give him the kind of bucking-up-fear-banishing pride he needed a few bottles of right about then, until he realized it was pretty hard to be noisy when you were barefooted, and that’s what he still was, a shoeless weirdo creeping down 95th Street in the night toward ...

  ... toward what? Babe stood by a building, trying to tell as precisely as he could about the double-parked car. It was still too far and it was still too dark to be very specific, but this much was sure: There was a man inside. And he wasn’t passed out, he was sitting there. A big man, probably. Maybe even as big as Karl.

  And if it was Karl, he wouldn’t be alone, Janeway would never have allowed something important to be Karl’s job alone, so that meant Erhard too. Somewhere. In his mind now, through remembered pain, Babe vaguely heard Szell screaming at the three of them, ‘Do once something right without me!’ so Janeway had to be around too, all of them in different darknesses, waiting.

  Babe crept forward. A little more. A little more.

  He stopped when he was as close as he dared, waiting for his eyes to get as accustomed as they could to their surroundings, and New York had millions of big guys, monsters like Karl, lumbering around, snorting hello to each other as they shouldered past the common folk into the subways each morning.

  So this wasn’t Karl. The odds were just too strong.

  Babe stared. He froze his body and concentrated as much attention as he had left on the vehicle.

  It was Karl all right.

  Waiting.

  Without a pause, Babe moved to the next
brownstone, slipped silently up the steps and into the foyer, and began pushing the Melendez button as hard as he could. First there was nothing, no reply, so he kept at it, working the button with his thumb, jabbing at it, holding it down for a while, then jabbing again, stab, stab, stab, then hold, then stab, stab—

  —suddenly this Spanish woman was screaming at him over the intercom.

  “Listen ...” Babe whispered, “... I can’t talk loud, but if this is Mrs. Melendez I’m really sorry to bother you, but ...”

  Her scream built in insistence.

  “... I need your boy, your son ...” His knowledge of Spanish was next to nil; beyond “Sangria” he was in deep trouble, but he had never had cause to regret his ignorance till now. “... Child,” Babe said, “the young man, the ... the ...” what the hell else should he try, “bairn”? “urchin”? “scion”?

  It didn’t matter. With a final vituperative burst, she hung up.

  Babe pushed again. He just jammed his thumb against the Melendez buzzer and kept it there.

  This time when she came back she was really in full voice, screaming steadily, and all his “Please you’ve got to understands” and “I’m terribly sorry but this is important” couldn’t wedge their way through, so before she had a chance to hang up on him again he pushed the buzzer really hard, until suddenly another Spanish voice was forcing its way through the mother’s, and then the stoop kid was saying into the intercom, “You wanna lose your finger, keep buzzing.”

  “It’s me,” Babe whispered, taking his finger quickly away. “Me, you know—”

  “—just one more buzz and it’s coming off—”

  “Melendez,” Babe said, louder than he wanted to, “don’t you recognize me, listen, listen for Chrissakes, it’s me. Me.” Hating himself, Babe said it: “The creep.”

  There was a pause. Then: “Creepy? That you?”

  “Sure.”

  “What you want?”

  “Talk.”

  “Okay.”

  “Private,” Babe said, and when Melendez pushed the button from upstairs, the foyer door opened. They met a moment later on the first landing, by Melendez’s place.

  “What?” from Melendez.

  Babe took a deep breath. “I want you to rob my apartment,” he said.

  Melendez just looked at him funny.

  “Right now; you have to do it. If you won’t do it now, it’s no deal. You can’t do it alone, you’ll need as many of the others from the stoop as you can get, and if any of you have weapons, you better tell them to bring them along.”

  “You kidding? Who don’t have a weapon?” Then, “Why?”

  “That’s a little hard to explain without getting detailed, but there are some people who are kind of after me and if I go myself they’d have me and I don’t much want that and I don’t think they’ll be as anxious to try anything with you.”

  Melendez couldn’t help smiling. “That’s some swell-looking raincoat, Creepy, but isn’t it a little big for you?” and then he said, “Hey, are those pajamas?” and started to laugh.

  “Just tell me yes or no, I don’t need your shit,” Babe said.

  That stopped the laughter for a while. “What’s in it for me?”

  “Well, I got a radio and a black-and-white TV that’s not too bad and a ton of books you’re welcome to sell, probably you’d do best at the bookstores around Columbia, they do a real business on used stuff, and of course any of my clothes you want, and hell, I don’t care, whatever you can carry you can have, and if you’re caught I’ll tell the cops I told you you could have it all so they won’t be a factor.”

  “I’m all relieved,” Melendez said, “I’m sure glad the cops won’t be no factor.” Then: “What’s in it for you?”

  “Well, I’d like my Adidas shoes, they’re probably in the middle of the floor someplace—”

  Melendez started laughing again.

  Babe told him what else he wanted.

  Melendez cut the laughter.

  “The door’s probably locked,” Babe said, “I was going to try and find the super but—”

  “Doors aren’t no problem,” Melendez said. Then, “What’s the catch?”

  “The catch is it’s dangerous.”

  “That’s not the catch,” Melendez said. “That’s the fun.” Smiling.

  Karl smiled rarely. Many times people thought that was because he didn’t have a sense of humor, but he knew that was wrong; the truth was things just didn’t strike him funny very often. What he felt inside most often was restlessness. He looked ponderous, with his great muscled arms, but what he needed to keep him in any kind of decent spirits at all was activity. He liked little jobs, lots of them, one piled on the next. That was pleasure.

  Sitting was no pleasure.

  Karl sat in the car, his hands around the steering wheel, his head still, his eyes moving from a glance through the windshield to another into the rear-view mirror. Those had been his instructions from Janeway, and he was going to fulfill them perfectly, because Janeway was trouble: If Karl ever made a mistake, Janeway would tell. It was ridiculous—the street was so dark it didn’t matter which way he looked, there was nothing to see, no Jew, and so confident was he of his inability to spot anything that when the half dozen niggers suddenly appeared, coming toward him from behind, Karl came as close as he ever did to being startled.

  No. Not niggers, he realized, spics. Half a dozen or more, perhaps even seven, dressed strangely, hardly dressed at all, none of them with socks, all moving in a group behind one leader.

  I hope they come for me, Karl thought. I hope they see a man alone in a car and try to steal it. He glanced quickly at the doors, making sure they were unlocked. He had a knife only, but he did not think he would need it for spics. Just grab the first by the arm, swing him into the others, keep that up until the sound of the arm eventually snapping would send them into desperate flight.

  The group came to a stop before the Jew’s building. For a moment he thought of getting out and making sure they kept on going. Give them a good scare; with his size, in this darkness, they would flee.

  But, of course, those had not been Janeway’s rules. Janeway had said wait for Levy, and if he came, take him. If he comes, I’ll do that, Karl decided. In the meantime, let Erhard worry about the spics ...

  Erhard, from his position at the rear of the main floor, saw the gang halt in front of the building, and he felt immediate panic. If he had been better at violence, he would have enjoyed it more. But, tilted as he was, unbalanced as he always stood, he was forced to enter any fight at too great a disadvantage. Perhaps if he had overcompensated as a child, had whipped his misshapen body into always doing more than it happily could, had spent his nights with barbells for company, well, perhaps then he would have grown into a terror.

  But he had been too smart. That was his flaw. He was too smart for strength and not smart enough to overcome the unpleasantness of his appearance. You saw him, you thought, “freight elevator operator,” or you envisioned some night person, a man who came out after sundown, did his job, got his pay, and then was back inside before the sun grew too bright.

  The gang was starting into the foyer of the building now.

  Erhard moved as far back in the hallway corner as he dared. Probably he should somehow alert Janeway or maybe go to Janeway and tell him, but they had no signals for this kind of thing—who would dream of signals for this kind of thing?—and there was nothing to tell Janeway yet. Just a bunch of Spanish teen-agers in the foyer of a building; perhaps they lived there, the Puerto Ricans had enough children, maybe they were all from one brood mare of a mother, dark and pendulous and—

  One of the gang was working at the foyer door.

  I should tell Janeway, Erhard thought. But how? In order to get to Janeway, he would have to move to the stairs, and the stairs were by the foyer door, and what if he got there at the same time they managed to open it and there he was, alone, at the mercy of all those venomous Spanish?

&
nbsp; “It’s not my job,” Erhard whispered, half aloud. His job was to stay silent watching the fire escape in the rear, and if Levy tried to get to his apartment using the fire escape, then he was to act, stop Levy, kill him perhaps, if required. Erhard had a gun. He was not good at shooting it, it made so much noise and he hated noise, but close up he could hit Levy, he could kill a Jew if he had to, especially if such a thing would please Szell. Szell rewarded when he was pleased. When he was not pleased, he could crucify, but that was his right, he was Christian Szell, alive and breathing in the 1970s, a marvel; different rules applied to him than to cripples.

  The foyer door opened.

  “My God, what if they come for me?” Erhard thought. He could shoot them. Some of them he could shoot. But not enough. And what would the others do to him then? He was afraid of Puerto Ricans when he rode the subway by himself; the idea of four or five avenging their dead brothers, kicking his crippled body to pieces, was too much for Erhard. Janeway. Janeway. He filled his mind with the name. This was Janeway’s operation, Janeway would know what to do.

  The gang started silently up the stairs.

  Erhard wiped the sudden sweat from his face, listening to the footsteps rise. Thank God, decisive action was up to him no longer. It was Janeway’s problem now ...

  Janeway, standing in the darkness at the far end of the corridor from Levy’s room, thought the footsteps belonged to the police, and he was not at all upset. Levy leading police perhaps; even that didn’t much bother him. First, he was with Division, and could easily prove it. Second, a Division man had been retired tonight, in this very place, so why shouldn’t he be there, waiting, lurking, doing whatever he damn well felt like to avenge a fellow worker, the police were noted for always doing just exactly that too. And if Levy had made melodramatic charges, well, why shouldn’t he, the boy had been through hell, a brother had died in his arms, could any of us truthfully know how sanely we would react on such a night?