Stronghold

by Stanley Ellin

  “While the women are in there with them?”

  “Yes. Because the women are our hostages as well as theirs. Don’t you think they know what’ll happen if they kill one of those women? It’ll blow their whole big deal. It’ll wipe out any control you might have over the police. Flood can’t risk that, with those men watching him and waiting for their money.”

  “There’s a chance he might.”

  “There’s a lot better chance of murder sooner or later if you try to do things his way. Marcus, listen to me. We can isolate that house. If we can get some help, we can completely cut off Flood from the outside. The police won’t know what’s going on up here. Nobody who might react the wrong way will know. Put yourself in Flood’s place under those conditions. Nobody shows up at noon with the money, but nobody shows up to attack the house either. Nothing at all happens. Twelve o’clock, one o’clock, it just goes on like that with nothing happening. What do you do then if you’re Flood?”

  I try to make sense of this. “I don’t know. I suppose I’d phone the bank to find out what’s happening. Call the police, for that matter. I’d threaten to kill one of the women if my orders weren’t followed.”

  “But the phone will be dead. You can’t threaten anyone.”

  “Then I’d take one of the women with me, a gun at her head, and go out to see what’s happening on the grounds. If there’s no threat, I’d settle down and wait.”

  “But what you find on the grounds,” David says, “is that this one road you can use for a getaway by car—still taking your hostages with you—is blocked by, let’s say”—he points ahead—“by that tree which is down right across the road. And if you try the other direction, there’s a tree across the road there before you get to the Marcy sisters’ place. Meanwhile, there are no police around to bother you, nobody to threaten you, nothing to worry about except that as loud as you yell, there’s nobody listening. Now what do you do?”

  What would I do? How would someone like Flood respond to any such situation? “I don’t know.”

  “That’s right,” David says. “And Flood can’t afford not to know. So far, he’s made good on everything he must have promised his gang. But when they realize he’s made a serious mistake, that he’s gotten them into something he can’t cope with, his authority over them ends.”

  “They’ll take it out on the women, David. Certainly Flood might. You said yourself he’s dangerously unstable.”

  “Granted. But do you think armed police moving up on the house will make him any more stable? He’ll use those guns of his at any provocation. World War Three up on the ridge, he said. And the women in the middle of it. Do you really believe they’ll be any safer that way?”

  “I don’t know. I still don’t know. And there’s the waiting. When does it end? How does it end?”

  David slowly shakes his head. “That must be their decision to make. Only theirs. If we try to influence it in any way, show our presence so we can negotiate, then they’ve got their real weapon back. The open line of communication. The threats, the demands that can be sent over it. And we can’t risk that. We’d have to stay out of range until they make their decision.”

  I say, “What if they take the women—just one of the women—and get away on foot?”

  “They might try that. I don’t think they’ll use the road once they find it’s blocked. For all they know, there could be an army right on the other side of those roadblocks. But there’s the trail in back of the house down to the highway. Flood would know about it, wouldn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “If the pressure builds up enough, he might take a chance on it.”

  I say, “It wouldn’t be hard for us to block that way out too. It’s almost two miles to the highway through those woods.”

  “No. We don’t block it. It stays open. When I was coordinating peace demonstrations, the one thing I tried to get across to the police was never to block every possible way out for our people. Pen a crowd up completely, and things could get ugly. Leave some way out, and there doesn’t have to be any trouble. It worked, Marcus. It can work here too.”

  Is this beginning to make sense, or am I grasping at straws? I say, “What about the women? We’ll be putting them through a brutal ordeal, David. They won’t know what’s going on any more than Flood will.”

  “They’ll know before he does. Marcus, if they could hear us right now, what do you think they’d tell us to do?”

  Emily. Deborah. Janet. What would they tell us to do?

  No.

  What would they tell us not to do?

  “All right,” I say to David, “what’s our first move?”

  A world of sleepers at the commune. Under blankets or in sleeping bags, most are ranged along the porch, a few are on the lawn. As David and I get out of the car, two youngsters—boys of about seven or eight carrying crude fishing tackle—come through the screen door of the house and start toward the road. If they are headed for the commune’s favorite fishing water, the pond on the other side of the meeting house, these children will be walking right past my home. Flood’s armed fortress.

  I call out to the boys, “Wait. Hold on,” but mine is the voice of authority to them, and as McGrath has boasted more than once, the children here have been brought up to despise any authority, even when it makes sense. Now they only move faster to indicate that they hear me and are putting me in my place. Luckily David catches on at once. “Hell,” he says in alarm, “they’ll be going by the house,” and sprints after them. He finally collars them both, and it is their squalling and struggling against his grip that rouses the sleepers.

  A few only sit up to see what is going on, but some get to their feet and walk over to David, who is by main force hauling the boys back toward the building. “Hey, man,” a young woman says angrily to David, “what is this?” and a tangle-haired, heavily bearded boy says, “Busting babies now, Dave? That is a real downer,” but no one attempts to release the children from his grip.

  “Nobody’s busting any babies,” David says. “Just get Ray out here. Right now.”

  The grim note in his voice makes it plain he is in deadly earnest. One of the men goes into the house, and a couple of minutes later Ray McGrath appears through the door. Lou Erlanger is not far behind him. Heavy-lidded, squinting against the sunlight, both of them take in the scene. McGrath says, “What’s it about, Dave?”

  “For one thing, it’s about keeping these kids close to the house for a while. All the kids you’ve got around here.”

  “You know we don’t do it that way,” McGrath says.

  “There’s a reason. I’ll tell it to you in private.”

  In private means a fair distance from the house, where the four of us gather in what had once been one of my late mother-in-law’s cherished gardens but which is now only a weed patch. Here, David describes the situation down the road, and it amazes me that neither McGrath nor Erlanger displays any strong reaction to what they are hearing. They listen, and that is it. Erlanger remarks, “Like some of them out there won’t let us find peace wherever we are, will they? Even in Utopia.”

  “Flies to the honey,” McGrath says. “Buzzards to the money. Now how do they figure to handle that much cash? They’ll need a freight car for it.”

  “No,” I say. “It doesn’t make that much of a load.”

  “Live and learn,” McGrath says. “Well, I’m glad you told us about it before our kids go running around there. We’ve got this boy Mike Roos who’s kind of a Pied Piper to them. He’ll see they stay put until you give us the all-clear. And if you want to use the phone to call in the police now, not that I ever thought we’d be using it for calling in the fuzz—”

  “We’re asking for more than that, Ray,” David says. “A lot more. We don’t want the police in on it. We want you in on it. All of you.”

  McGrath and Erlanger look puzzled. Erlanger says, “Being a posse is not our thing, Dave. You know that. You get ripped off by the black-hats with guns, you
ask the lawmen with guns to even things up. Not our kind of people.”

  “That’s it,” David says. “We don’t want any more guns in this. That means we can’t let the police know about it. No confrontation at all.”

  Erlanger says doubtfully, “That also happens to mean you can’t let anybody in the whole town know about it.”

  “Except you folks,” David says. “And the Friends. We’ll need them too.”

  I say to McGrath, “Be honest about it. Can you keep your people from spreading the word?” but it is Erlanger who says, “We’ll have to tell them about keeping the kids close to home anyhow. Once they hear what it’s all about, it’s all for peaceable ends, they could go along with it. Like, keep it bottled up. They won’t if anybody just orders them to do it.”

  “Well,” McGrath says to me, “you heard him. You want to settle for that, it’s all right with me.”

  I don’t want to settle for it. I am depressed by the very look of these superannuated ragamuffins, by the blandness of their manner. To leave a crisis in their hands? I have the eerie feeling that five minutes after David and I are out of sight, they might forget the whole matter. If they would only react like human beings, show some emotion. Show a light in those vague eyes. But David seems to have all the faith I lack. “We’ll settle for it,” he says. “But it means involvement for you. A lot of it.”

  “How?” McGrath asks.

  “We have to isolate Flood and his men in the house.” David picks up a twig, squats down, sketches a crude map in the dirt. Ridge Road, my home midway along it, the commune to the south, the meeting house to the north, the Marcy sisters’ place between the meeting house and my home. Winding down the ridge from the meeting house to town is Quaker Lane. From the Oates’ house—the commune—to town is the twisting line of South Lane.

  As the lines take form, I can appreciate how cannily Flood has chosen his victims. Not only had he absorbed from his father over the years much about the bank’s operation, but in the military sense he’s chosen an objective where he can settle in securely. The house stands on the highest point of the ridge. Any assaulting force leaving the concealment of the surrounding woodland can easily be detected. Long-range attack on the house is out of the question while the hostages are in it, which leaves only direct assault against the building across open ground. And worst of all, John Duffy, our chief of police, is exactly the sort of rigid, pompous, trigger-happy man who would welcome the chance to order such an assault. And Flood seems to be inviting it.

  David slashes two marks across the map. He says, “Right here in these two places, between the commune and the house, and the Marcy place and the house, we have to cut the road off so they can’t get away by car. If they’re able to use a car, they’ll pretty sure take the women along with them, and we don’t want that. What we’ll leave open for them, if they want to get away on foot, is the trail from in back of the house down to the highway.”

  “They can take the women that way too,” Erlanger points out.

  “I don’t think they will. Marcus says Flood knows that trail, so he’d know what a tough climb it is, even downhill. Push him to where he just wants to get away fast, there’s a good chance he won’t slow himself down taking hostages along. Look at it from his angle. He’ll be out there in the middle of the woods, not knowing who’s around him behind all those trees, and that’s no time to be dragging ass.”

  McGrath is getting interested. He studies the lines in the dirt. “How do you figure to block the road?”

  “Trees,” David says. “The kind it would take a block and tackle to move once they’re down across the road. Would you know how to fell trees that size?”

  McGrath shrugs. “I know how, but I’d sure hate to do it. These real big trees have been here a lot longer than we have.”

  “Is that all that worries you?” I demand. “The trees? Not the human lives involved?”

  McGrath shrugs again. “How do we know this whole thing will work out? And if it doesn’t, we’re back where we started, except that there’s a couple of great and beautiful trees gone which can’t ever be put back again.”

  “How about cars?” Erlanger suggests. “We must have maybe ten, twelve of them around here. And that old school bus clunker parked in back. We could get it going enough to block this end of the road with it, and pull a couple of the cars around to block off the other end.”

  “Better than the trees,” McGrath says.

  “All right,” David says, “cars will do fine. The other thing is to put the phones in the house out of commission.”

  “Easy,” Erlanger says. “There’s only one line along the whole ridge. We cut it, and the house is cut off.”

  David says, “Except that then the phone company would move in to find out what’s wrong. Best way is to have the company itself cut off service to the house. Which also means cooking up some story you people will back up if anybody starts asking questions. I don’t mean only the phone company. I mean everybody who isn’t in on this.”

  “Well,” Erlanger says, “how about letting it out that you and the family just shut up the house and went on a trip?”

  “That won’t work,” I say. “There’s the bank to attend to. We’ve got too many friends who’d never believe we’d go off without notice. It’s too implausible.”

  “An accident to somebody,” McGrath says. “A bad one. You had some big doctors up from New York in the middle of the night, and they’re on the job now. Working up to a brain operation maybe. Meanwhile, no phones working, no visitors, no anything.”

  “Well—” David says. He doesn’t seem any more satisfied with this than I am, but like me, he can’t seem to come up with anything better.

  “All right, then,” McGrath says. “Now who’d the accident happen to? Emily?”

  I say, “If it were Emily, I wouldn’t be at the bank, but Janet would be there taking over for me. It’s happened before when Emily was very sick. So it should be Janet. It’ll explain why she isn’t at the bank. But what about the meeting? The Friends will want to close around us. Do we tell them this same story?”

  “No,” David says. “When Anna and Elizabeth find the phone is out, they’ll certainly walk over to the house, and they’ll find the road blocked too. They’ll have to know the truth then. And if we tell them the truth, do we separate them from the rest of the meeting?”

  No, we don’t. And yet we must have the meeting close around us. Uri Shapiro, who runs The Mart, and Kenneth Quimby, who owns a boatyard on the lake, deal with a great many people in town, and whatever story they circulate will be believed. As true about Ethel Quimby, who has a wide circle of acquaintance, and Anna and Elizabeth Marcy, who spend so much of their time on the phone. But one of the earliest titles for the Friends was the Publishers of Truth, and more than a few had been jailed and hanged for publishing it. Am I now to make my meeting the publishers of an elaborate lie?

  David reads my thoughts. “What bothers you? That the Friends have to be involved in this kind of deception? It won’t work otherwise, Marcus.”

  “Maybe it will have to, David. I don’t see how I can impose this on the meeting.”

  McGrath looks me over curiously. Then he says, “You imposed it on us. It’s kind of a rip-off being told we don’t rate up there with the Friends in the purity department.”

  I think—I am almost sure—he means it in a joking vein, although God knows this is no time for jokes. But there is too much painful truth in it to be funny. Too much painful self-enlightenment offered me by it. And all this piled on the stomach-churning awareness that so many lives are right now dependent for their safety on a hair-splitting, panicky reed named Marcus Hayworth.

  I say to McGrath, “I’m sorry. I know what you mean, and you’re right. If you—”

  “Man,” he cuts in, “you don’t know what I mean. I’m putting you on. I think what you’re doing is beautiful.”

  Beautiful?

  Of all the words to describe a course where
the hoped-for end must justify a hateful means, that is the last one I would choose.

  The phone is in the inside vestibule of the house, and while I am on it Erlanger goes through the building advising the commune’s members of a meeting on the porch. Curiosity is not one of these people’s vices. They move by me to the porch without seeming to take any notice of me at all.

  My bad luck it is Anna Marcy, the more argumentative of the two sisters, who answers the phone. When I tell her I have a critical concern I must share with the meeting at once and ask if it is all right to gather in her home, she says, “Yes. But I don’t like the sound of this, Marcus. A called meeting so early in the morning? It is only ten minutes after seven now. And on such short notice? What is the concern?”

  “I can’t explain it now, Anna. I’ll tell you at the meeting.”

  “Is someone hurt? Is it Emily or one of the girls? Let me speak to Emily.”

  “You can’t speak to her right now.” And then, before she can continue this maddening inquisition, I burst out, “Don’t be a stubborn old fool, Anna Marcy. Don’t ask questions. Don’t, whatever you do, call my home. Just you and Elizabeth wait prayerfully, and we’ll all be there very soon.”

  I hang up on that, instantly sorry that I spoke in this tone and apprehensive that Anna will take it into her willful head to phone my house anyhow. It goes better with Uri Shapiro. Roused from sleep by my call, he comes wide awake at my words and simply asks, “Is it very bad, Marcus?” “Very bad,” I say, and he says, “All right, I’ll be there right away.”

  Ethel Quimby is as mercifully brief, then pulls me up short by adding, “But I’ll have to bring the kids. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

  It isn’t. Three of them, all little pitchers with big ears, all used to being among us even at meetings for business, where, no matter how rambunctious they occasionally are, they have things much their own way. They would not only be completely out of place among us now, but extremely dangerous. Back in town, what would stop them from letting slip to any outsider whatever they pick up at the meeting?