Stronghold

by Stanley Ellin

  We stand waiting while Santiago lowers himself to the ground. He pulls a snub-nosed pistol from his hip pocket, tugging hard to get it loose, goes over to the LeSabre to take a good look inside it. Then he walks up to us smiling, the gun moving back and forth, covering us. “I hope you don’t mind,” he says, and gives each of us a quick one-handed frisking.

  “You are a very suspicious fellow,” Coco says.

  “Yes. There is a bad element in this business lately.” Santiago motions with the pistol at Harvey. “The money?”

  I say, “You told us we could look over the inventory first.”

  “Did I? Well, I changed my mind. First the money.”

  The trouble is that he’s planted square in the line of fire between Lester’s foxhole and the man on the truck. No use trying to take him out while that spray gun is aimed at us from the truck. I say, “You saw our money last night. So far, all I see is a couple of beat-up food lockers.”

  “You’ll see what’s in them fast enough when you pay for them.”

  “Everything there as ordered?” I ask. He gives me the feeling he is rooted to that spot, he is going to spend the rest of his life rooted there, blocking our play. “The real goods? No switches?”

  “Only for the better. The submachine guns are Uzi, not Thompson. Israeli. You can’t do better than that, and they’re the same price to you. And the rifles are M-fourteens, not sixteens. There’s too much heat on to get sixteens. But you don’t need them when you can get fourteens.”

  I motion at the truck. “How about letting us see for ourselves?”

  “The money, please.”

  “All right,” I say, “the money’s in the car. In the glove compartment. I’ll get it for you.”

  “No.” He waves the pistol at me. “Just stay where you are. I will do the getting, mister.” He sidles toward the car, his eyes fixed on us, the pistol at the ready. He fumbles for the door handle, finds it, opens the door, then leans inside, reaching across the steering wheel for the glove-compartment knob.

  “Probably locked,” Coco says. “Here is the key, man,” and walks to the car holding out the key. For this moment Santiago, wedged behind the steering wheel, might be a roast turkey laid out on the carving rack ready for the knife. And where is our son of a bitch redneck sniper, Lester Shanklin, at this moment? Asleep in his foxhole?

  The sound of the carbine under the car is like a whip being cracked at my ankles. Coco suddenly has the carving knife for this turkey—an eight-inch switchblade—in his hand. He drives it into Santiago’s back so hard that he has to strain to wrench it out for the follow-up blow. Santiago screams, struggles to get himself clear of the wheel, and I move as fast as I can to get at him and pull the pistol from his hand. I turn and see Harvey charging the truck like a rhino, clambering aboard the truck bed. The man with the submachine gun is not in sight there. Harvey looks down at his feet, gives me a V-for-victory sign. Total elapsed time: ten seconds, give or take a second.

  Coco says to me, “Lend a hand. This bugger is bleeding all over the car,” so I lend a hand with Santiago, who is not quite gone but is making a gargling sound with each breath as he pours blood from the rent in back of his jacket. We haul him out on the ground, where I kick him a couple of times in the crotch for being the blubbery nuisance he is and then put a bullet between his eyes. The blood on the car seat and floor Coco quickly attends to with a rag wet in the canal. After that I back the car clear of Lester’s rifle pit, and Lester comes out of it smeared with muck, groaning, trying to flex his knees.

  Harvey already has the ropes off the two freezers when we climb on the truck. Near them, Santiago’s partner lies on his back, a large bloody hole where his eye had been, part of his skull gone and spattered against the back of the truck’s cab.

  “One shot,” Lester says, admiring his work.

  “It took you long enough to get it off,” Coco says.

  “Because I had that fat bastard in my way,” Lester says. “He blocked off the whole truck where he was standing. You were supposed to keep him clear of the truck.”

  “And how was I supposed to do it? I said there were too many unpredictables in your planning. That means poor planning.”

  Harvey says, “It came out fine, didn’t it? Now lend a hand with this stuff.”

  The stuff is in the two freezers, weapons in one, ammunition cases in the other. Two Uzi submachine guns, five hundred rounds of 9mm ammunition for them; two M-14 army rifles, a hundred rounds of 7.62mm ammunition for them; four Colt Police Positive revolvers, six-shot .38s, with a hundred rounds for them; and six hand grenades. In the locker with the ammo is the bonus Santiago agreed to throw in, four G.I. gas masks. The merchandise is prime. Even at Santiago’s steep price, it wouldn’t have been a bad deal. At our price, it is the best possible deal.

  I had laid out phase two from every piece of writing on the subject I could lay hands on, especially the Munich Olympic job, which was fouled up by an Arab miscalculation, something no one mentioned in all the analyses of it. That is, the nature of the hostages. A collection of semi-professional athletes, muscle men in the Shanklin class, was no emotional deterrent to the German police when it came to estimating the risk of a showdown. The nature of the Company’s hostages will be different, a solid deterrent. But the odds on an assault and a siege are strong enough to mean that proper measures must be taken. Granting even a two- or three-day siege before the attackers lose nerve, we now have the weapons to guarantee a stand-off, which is all we need.

  We stow the weapons on the floor in back of the LeSabre, a blanket over them, and plant the ammunition on the floor beside the driver’s seat to help trim the chassis as much as possible. Then after extracting a vital two hundred-odd dollars out of the wallets of Santiago and his man, we get them into the cab of the truck, and Lester heads the truck into the canal. The murky water is not all that deep; the roof of the cab shows above it; so the Shanklins take the time and trouble to lay a mat of brush and grass over it as camouflage, although Coco is now twitching to get moving, mumbling under his breath about donkeys doing whippet work.

  “ ’Copters,” Harvey says when he catches the complaint. “They buzz around here, and somebody looks down and starts wondering, and then what?”

  We finish our housekeeping at eleven. A few minutes after one we are across the Dade County line, heading north through Broward County, and phase one is finished.

  Marcus Hayworth

  It is a sizable meeting for worship, the largest in some weeks—all thirteen of our members being present, as well as Ray McGrath and Lou Erlanger of the commune, and three well-dressed ladies who arrive in a chauffeured car from some resort on Lake George to, I suspect, look us over as part of their vacationing entertainment. The chauffeur himself, an elderly Negro, will not enter the meeting house, although urged on by several of us to share our worship. No doubt, like my family’s one-time housekeeper Wilhelmina Snyder, he has been overly well trained in his role of servant.

  But numbers, of course, do not automatically make the good meeting. Once I clear a clutter of extraneous thoughts from my head, it is the sense of gathering which makes this meeting meaningful to me, the sense of being in silent communion with kindred, all of whom, whatever the differences among us, wait in unity upon the Light which may give us understanding of our troubled selves and guidance to our otherwise uncertain courses.

  Two messages are offered during meeting, one from Anna Marcy, a tender reflection on the joys of having the children among us, and the other by Uri Shapiro, one of our most cherished Friends, a transfer from Fifteenth Street Meeting in New York City, when, long years ago, Uri left the city to manage The Mart on Front Street in Scammons Landing.

  The message is, as so many of Uri’s messages have been, based on a Talmudic or rabbinical admonition, in this case, Where there are no men, be thou a man, and it leads me to reflect on the question of manhood in a society where it is supposed to be marked by one’s willingness to engage in violence. By my
Light, which leads to the acceptance of the peace testimony and the tactics of non-violence as the only solutions for the world’s most bitter troubles, and which had led to my three dismal years in federal prison for refusing to register for the draft in the Second World War, true manhood is best demonstrated by non-violent resistance to violence. Logic alone demands this. The advice to turn the other cheek was never intended to prepare the victim for another blow, but to provide evidence that more often than not the assaulter, faced by deliberate defenselessness, will not be able to deliver another blow.

  But were those three prison years the highwater mark of my manhood? Friends are not supposed to casually use such divisive terms as Hicksite and orthodox, activist and quietist, but I use them in my mind sometimes, sorting out answers to my own questions. The Quimbys and Deborah and David were certainly activists against our country’s engagement in Asia. In fact, Deborah had first met David at an anti-war demonstration she attended with the Quimbys in Washington. The Marcy sisters and Janet are just as certainly opposed to the meeting’s support of anything beyond an individual concern for someone in town who needs a helping hand, and even there they take strict account of who needs the helping hand and whether the need is certified genuine.

  And where do I stand? Have I become over the years what my grandfather had been, a quietist out of the last century, powerfully convinced that never mind what direction other meetings took, Scammons Landing Meeting is no more or less than a refuge from the world, a retreat for us when the surrounding world is too much against us?

  At fifty-five, am I ready to undergo a transformation, help lead the meeting on the course David urges, have it enter into the town’s affairs, move out into the community as part of all those hopeful associations which will tomorrow solve everyone’s problems, open its meeting house to everyone in the county for round tables and discussions and gatherings?

  Outreach, David and Deborah call it.

  Missionary work, the Marcy sisters say. “Thee has missionary instincts, young Friends,” Anna Marcy told them during one coffee hour after meeting for worship. “I do not hold with that. Friends lead by example, not by meddling.”

  Well, well, the Marcy sisters are dear old Friends, mainstays of the Committee on Ministry and Oversight, upholders of the old days and the old ways, and cantankerous as only proper Friends can sometimes be. But are they so wrong?

  I have just planted the question mark on this question when I realize that Emily at my side is gripping my hand tightly and affectionately; the meeting is over. And then the three well-dressed ladies from their Lake George resort approach me, all apparently well pleased with their experience.

  One of them gestures widely at the room. “So glad we came,” she says. “So quaint.”

  For this moment at least, I have the answer to my question. “Is it?” I say. “It wasn’t intended to be.”

  We walk home from the meeting house along Ridge Road, my family and the Marcy sisters and the two attenders from the commune, keeping our pace slow so that Anna and Elizabeth are not put to any inconvenience, stopping at Lookout Point, the one place along the road where you can catch a view of Lake George through the heavily wooded incline of the ridge. It is an incredibly beautiful and deeply moving view to me no matter how often I see it, spoiled only a little now by the sight of all the motorboat traffic on the lake during the July season.

  We see Anna and Elizabeth to their door, then continue the quarter mile to home, where I discover we have visitors waiting for us on our porch. Two men—one small and slight, with neatly trimmed hair and beard, the other a very tall, very dark Negro, both, despite the sweltering weather, in jacket and tie—are seated there helping themselves to a pitcher of refreshment before them. Sarah Frisch’s watery lemonade probably, one lemon to a gallon of water. And there are two battered valises on the porch, suggesting that these are more than passing strangers.

  “Good heavens,” Emily says, “it’s Jimmy. Jimmy Flood.”

  And so it is, quickly standing to greet us, shaking hands warmly, smiling with evident pleasure in this reunion. Introducing us to his companion, the Reverend Hubert Digby, who when he stands up is even taller than I first guessed, who shows splendid teeth in his smile, and who speaks with a melodic, liquid accent that stamps him instantly as from the West Indies. He says, “James told me that when you see him, you will instantly think, ‘Oho, the bad penny has turned up again.’ Well, dear people, I must inform you that this is no longer a bad penny.” He hugs Jimmy’s shoulders in a comradely gesture. “This is now pure gold. This is a man who has delivered himself to Jesus. A soul reborn.”

  I have mixed feelings about this. The ornate “delivered himself to Jesus” talk makes me uncomfortable, but on the other hand, looking at this Jimmy Flood, I have the feeling he might really have found peace for himself, and what does it matter how one does that? The sad part is that his Light appears to have been kindled by evangelism—probably Pentecostal, which is now so popular among the young—and so that has succeeded where Quakerism has failed. Jimmy had lived close to us, had shared our family life, had taken part in the meeting during his later teens, his most impressionable years, yet our example has meant nothing to him, and the aggressive ministry of the evangelicals has evidently come to mean everything.

  Still, I can console myself for our Friendly failure by reflecting that Jimmy Flood is not your usual case. I would never go so far as Janet once had in acidly remarking that he was a sort of youthful Jekyll and Hyde—Tom Sawyer and Mr. Hyde was the way she put it—but there is no question that this undersized, silent, almost too polite and respectful boy so much in our presence during his adolescence had a bewildering and sometimes frightening side to his personality.

  His job after school each day was to tend our grounds and to help with the maintenance of the meeting-house property. He would do this with ferocious bursts of energy, then fall into a stupor of inactivity—daydreaming perhaps—always leaving part of the job undone. Talk to him about this, and he would stare at you blankly with those goatish eyes, nostrils flared, lips compressed, so that you got a feeling of seething hostility behind those neat features.

  After all, one couldn’t help taking into account that this was a boy who was involved in a shooting episode—a near-murder—before he was out of his childhood. Even accepting the testimony of the psychologist at the trial that this was a high-strung adolescent going through natural hormonal changes, an honor student too rigidly dedicated to success, too repressed in his social behavior, so that the episode was really an uncontrollable explosion in him—even accepting all this psychological verbiage, it was hard to get out of the mind that this child had aimed a gun and fired a bullet at an unoffending stranger.

  It made me awkward in my dealings with him. Indeed, there were times when I wound up sessions with Jimmy feeling guilty for being so inept a surrogate father and then feeling resentful that I, not Donald Flood, the natural father, should be weighed down with any responsibility at all for the boy. Especially at a time when I had enough troubles trying to handle a sullen, uncommunicative eighteen-year-old daughter of my own, not to mention a ten-year-old daughter who had just discovered the power of her pretty face and winsome ways.

  I suppose my initial mistake was in trying to play surrogate father under conditions where, after spending part of each day with us, Jimmy would then return to the home he shared with his proper father. Emily was wrong about Donald Flood’s taking up alcohol after his wife abandoned him and her child for another man, but this is one of those romantic myths—a man drinking himself to death because of a lost love—which dies hard. In fact, Donald, a big, bulky man with an unpleasantly servile nature not too well masked by a loud, hearty manner, always had a drinking problem and had managed to hang on for years as a bookkeeper at the bank only because of my own weary patience in abiding with it.

  Certainly my mistake in the matter was compounded by involving the Friends in my concern for the boy. This came at a time when
the anti-war movement was growing strong, and there was a corresponding uneasiness in the meeting that we were contributing very little to its strength despite the more and more frequent messages during worship regarding the peace testimony. Only Kenneth and Ethel Quimby among us took an active part in the anti-war movement in its early days, tirelessly attending every conference, vigil, and demonstration they could get to, as far away as Washington.

  So the opportunity to function positively by taking Jimmy Flood under its care came at the right moment for Scammons Landing Meeting. An intelligent, emotionally disturbed boy, a potentially lost cause who might be salvaged for better things, he made an appealing concern, or, as the Quimbys sarcastically charged during one acrimonious meeting for business, a fine dose of conscience balm. At the time, Uri Shapiro and I disagreed with them about their position and their use of this un-Quakerly language. It was only long after the event that I admitted to myself that the position, if not the language, might have been justified.

  But even the Quimbys shared our concern on a practical basis, and so the whole meeting saw to it that Jimmy had all the odd jobs he could handle, was made as much a part of the meeting as he would allow himself to be. And, at considerable cost, was funded into college and through two years of it, where, ultimately, all our good intentions were blown sky-high by his joining with the most extreme, violence-prone elements of the student movement.

  Why had he taken this course? The Marcy sisters and Emily firmly believed it was because he had been removed from the meeting’s influence. The Quimbys and Janet—it was one of the few things on which they agreed—felt it was because he had been unfettered from his father. When I remarked to Janet that this didn’t make much sense, since Donald Flood was, if anything, a bad influence on his son, she answered, “Sure he was. But he was the one person on earth Jimmy was afraid of.”