Muscle

by Alan Trotter

  She spoke to the attendant about the thing around Box’s head. ‘We don’t like to have him in it,’ said the attendant, abashed, as if he has been caught spoiling this dangerous, guilty man like a pet, ‘but when they took it from him he was very violent. This way we don’t have any trouble from him.’

  *

  Now she sits and eats a carrot. Over the course of the day she has finished a crossword, and knitted, and bored of knitting, and she has eaten half a dozen carrots. They are big, crisp, sweet carrots that a friend brought her from her garden. She’ll reach into her bag—the bag large enough to set to sea in—take a carrot from it, bite off the end and spit it back into the open bag. Then she’ll sit and thoughtfully chew through the rest of the carrot. When she finishes it she gives a big sigh about nothing in particular. ‘You’re not the first son of a bitch I’ve known,’ she says towards Box.

  She once knew a son of a bitch who got a bottle buried in his head in a bar fight. She knew everyone who drank at that bar—everyone who drank there knew everyone who drank there—and she was there when the fight broke out and saw the bottle come down on the head of this son of a bitch, and a shard the width of a hand that went through the top of his skull, straight down. Polly taps her head with two fingers to show. And it stayed there as if it had been set on a table. ‘I just about fell clean out of myself when I saw it,’ she says.

  The son of a bitch sat on the ground blinking, feeling around the bottle like he was trying to find a light switch. They took him to the hospital like that, and he walked with them, the bottle still there. He had to bend his knees to get through the door because of the extra height of the bottle.

  After that day he became good-tempered, charitable as a nun. His wife left, said she couldn’t recognise him any more, and that he kept giving away all their money, to anyone. ‘That’s how deep that piece of glass cut him,’ Polly says. ‘It was like a word had been crossed out on a sheet of paper, and everything he’d ever been with it. The son of a bitch just got cut away and left someone else.’

  *

  ‘Chester was a son of a bitch too, of course,’ she says. ‘Plenty would tell you.’

  She thinks about when she and Chester became engaged, and the engagement became known, and she started to get letters. They came from family members and friends, and more than one came without any name on it, and all warning about him. They told her all the things they knew Chester had done and many more they’d heard he might have. ‘People who hadn’t said two words to me in years decided that they had to warn me of the sort of man I was marrying, and they sat down and wrote me long letters,’ she says. ‘They let me know he’d been to jail, and more, and you could feel that they loved writing those letters.’

  She thinks through all the things they wrote. Reading the letters didn’t make her angry. Certainly, there was nothing in them to surprise her much. It hadn’t been long since she had met Chester, but they’d always talked: to the exclusion of everything and everybody else, they talked, from the day they met. She knew the man she was going to marry, and knew the man he had been. Still the letters frightened Chester. He worried they would work. He tried to move forward the date of their wedding. It was that which got her angry. ‘I told him—thimbles to that. Though not in those words. As if I’d change my wedding plans by as much as a single day because of those cowards. Ha,’ she says. She would not be deterred from the wedding by any letter writer; she would not be made to speed it up by Chester. They got married the day they’d always intended to. Two of her brothers didn’t come and she never spoke to them again.

  ‘It never occurred to any of them—the disapprovers, the letter-writers—that there might be stories about me too, of course,’ she tells Box. ‘They were incapable of thinking that a person might have more than one life, might be more than a half-inch deep.’

  *

  She stands and stretches out her back. It’s tiring, spending days sitting in this empty room. She walks two circuits around Box and then peers into the gridded face. She examines the tangle of hair, the beard overgrowing its trellis. Box’s eyes don’t follow her. That scaffold around his head, just an empty Box within a box within a box.

  She says, ‘I liked you, Box, the first time we met. For nearly half an hour I liked you. That’s how slow I am at thinking, how wrong I can be.’ She takes her seat again.

  *

  She thinks back to that time, the one time she met Box before Evvie’s death, before Box scurried out of his mind—or sank deep into it—and became just taxidermy here, in this eerie place.

  It was a Sunday and she was roasting a lamb and waiting for Evvie, who was going to come and have dinner with her. There was a knock on the door, earlier than Polly expected, and when she opened her door it wasn’t Evvie she found there but this tremendous man, so big that the first thing she did was laugh out loud at the size of him, and then she couldn’t help but laugh again at her own rudeness when she saw him blush at it. He had his hat bunched up in his hands like he was nervous, and when she got his name from him in a couple of struggling, breathy sentences that just endeared him more to her, and she thought she had him pegged: a sweet lunk, the sort of troubled soul Evvie picked up without even trying, brought them to her just by moving about the world. Polly assumed that her daughter had invited this man to join them for dinner, and so she brought him in, gladly. She sat him down at her kitchen table and said, ‘Well, it’d be a crime to waste a grip like you must have on you,’ and set him to squeezing lemons, and they worked together: Box squeezing lemons for lemonade, Polly sugaring and watering, and checking the lamb, and wondering if she had any furniture that she needed moving or cars she wanted thrown over the house, while she had this man who could reduce a lemon to dust in half a second.

  They were listening to music on the radio and Polly was trying to win a dollar from Box with a card trick when, half an hour later, Evvie came through the door. Polly’s laugh caught in her throat when she saw her daughter’s face. She turned to Box whose eyes dived to the ground, his jaw pulled tight, his hands shook. Evvie shouted at Box. ‘Why do you do this?’ she shouted, and Polly couldn’t think of the last time she’d heard Evvie shout. ‘Is it just to frighten me? To show me that you can?’

  Polly stood and told Box to leave in a voice that could have bent a tommy gun.

  But Box just turned obstinate and silent. Polly could do nothing to move him. Evvie started spinning on the spot, her arms gripped tight around herself, it unnerved Polly to see her so shaken. Box was just a malicious silent growth, a mould that sulked on a kitchen chair. Evvie had been speaking to herself, but now she grabbed Polly with both her hands and whispered in her ear that she would go and call for someone, and that if Box left, if he followed her when she went, if he did anything at all, then she shouldn’t try to stop him.

  She went out the front door, and Box didn’t follow. He just sat silent, sullen in the chair. Soon she sat too. Her in her fresh hatred, Box in whatever dark mood kept him in his place.

  ‘I liked you, Box, for nearly half an hour,’ Polly says.

  When the doorbell went again Polly found another man there, twice the size of a bridge, hat crushed in his hands. She wondered if her house was going to fill up with these gigantic men, and thought how it wouldn’t take many. This one’s nose was squint on his face, like a curtain pulled closed too sharply. He introduced himself as Bernard. He addressed himself to her politely and said that he’d been told that Box was here. He had come to get him.

  Polly let him in and watched without knowing how to be in the presence of this strange scene, while Bernard spoke to Box, pressuring him gingerly, handling him as you do a tired child.

  Soon Box, still without a word, stood, put on his hat and left. Bernard followed him, leaving gentle apologies like footmarks in a thick rug.

  *

  I sit in the device, I think slow, drifting thoughts, and I’m blinked in and out of existence, I’m cracked open, I crawl through the cracks, and I find myself
outside Holcomb’s again.

  It’s day and the glass in the phone booth is uncracked.

  I go in and up the stairs and as I approach the open door of the writer’s apartment I hear the pecking of his typewriter, and expect to find him sitting at his desk, and maybe find myself sinking into his couch, reading his magazines or sleeping on duty.

  Except it’s Swagger that sits at the typewriter. Only he is taller than he can possibly be. If Swagger is half a foot taller than most men, now he is half a foot taller than himself, and the fit isn’t right. He looks up and grins wide. I ask him what he is typing. He says he is typing up his official report on the Gold Mask Killers. He says that everyone knows the story of Mike Swagger and the Gold Mask Killers. I don’t know the story, I say, and his smile and his size and his presence here in this place all make me dogsick. Sure you do, Box, but why don’t I tell you some of it anyway. Take a seat, Swagger says. Swagger says:

  *

  One day I was in my office sitting carefully under my hat.

  I had a hangover like a stampede round a bathtub and I’d just taken the bottle from my desk to nurse it when Marly opened the communicating door. She looked me up and down with that indulgent, scornful look she has. ‘I’d say you looked like death,’ she said, ‘but I’m pretty sure I just met him.’

  ‘That so?’ I asked. ‘I’d have been grateful if he’d made it here a couple of hours ago, but now I’m inclined to try and beat the rap.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ she said, smiling. But then her expression changed to something serious. For a second she took my hand in her soft grip and told me to be careful. ‘Whatever he wants, just be careful,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this one.’ Well, I ought to have wised up enough to listen to her feelings by now.

  I tried to exude the well-mannered confidence of the modern private eye, and Marly showed in our visitor: one Mr Jean Cansel. She wasn’t wrong—he looked like death, like a horror flick. He was made of great, long bones draped with thin skin. But it was the man’s head … Most secretaries with this Cansel as their first customer of the day would have been found a week later, their hearts stopped, hair whitened, aged a hundred years in shock. He probably left a trail of them everywhere he went.

  The horrifying Mr Cansel took a seat and we exchanged pleasantries. He told me that he was looking for a man by the name of Jack Campbell, though he thought Campbell might be calling himself something different. You knew him by a different name, didn’t you, Box? He called himself Holcomb.

  ‘Good friend of yours,’ I asked Cansel, ‘this man whose name you’re not sure of?’

  ‘I am quite aware, Mr Swagger,’ said Cansel, ‘that you are being flippant, but I hope you will not mind if I do not participate in your badinage.’

  ‘Entirely fine, Mr Cansel,’ I said. ‘Badinage comes as part of the service, you won’t be billed any extra for it,’ and I took a cigar from the box I keep and chewed into it.

  Cansel explained that he had never met Mr Campbell, but that he used to work for the man’s family, as a ‘retainer’, he said, employed by Campbell’s uncle. ‘The family’s wealth,’ he said, ‘unfortunately, dissipated and, although we might both have wished it otherwise, it became ne-ses-serry’—he split his words like this, and with an accent I found hard to place—‘for us to part ways. I recently learned, with some not insubstan-ti-al sadness, that he had passed away. A final request from my old employer was passed on to me: that I find his nephew—Mr Jack Campbell—and inform him of his loss.’

  He said that some small amount of money had been given him to find Campbell, and some small amount more was set to go to Campbell, the scant remains of the uncle’s wealth. ‘Where exactly is it you come from, Mr Cansel,’ I asked. Cansel gave a smile that did not make him appear a hair’s breadth less ghastly and not a shadow’s weight more amused.

  As Swagger performs the smile, his own great head takes on the skull of Cansel: his eyes are pitted, his cheekbones sharp.

  A new voice, coarse and sharp and strangely accented comes from him as he speaks for Cansel.

  ‘I have travelled, Mr Swagger,’ Cansel said, but he wouldn’t be moved from his subject. ‘As well as Mr Campbell’s name, I can provide you with this’—he handed across the desk a small photograph—‘and tell you that he previously worked as a writer of stories for magazines. How long do you think it will take you to locate him, Mr Swagger?’

  The photograph showed a man in his 20s or early 30s, light-haired, well groomed, with a boyish handsomeness and a look on his face that seemed to suggest that he liked the photographer but felt tortured by what they were doing to him. ‘He wrote for the sleeks?’ I asked.

  ‘I believe,’ replied Cansel, ‘that he wrote romantic stories. A pulp writer.’

  That was about the end of the meeting with the ghoul. He laid out enough money to keep us working for the rest of the week, and told me he could be found at the Ambassador Hotel, then dusted, though if he’d gone through the window on great bat wings, I wouldn’t have blinked.

  Swagger is larger still.

  The typewriter looks like a toy in front of him, the desk looks like a miniature, a practical joke.

  When Childs got to the office I told him the story. ‘I wish you’d been here to talk Mike out of taking his money, Childs,’ Marly said. Childs was taking off his artificial leg, having a preference for sitting without it. ‘I haven’t stopped shivering since that man walked in the door.’

  I shrugged and said, ‘No sense turning away good money because we didn’t care for how its companion looked.’ I told Childs to find this Campbell, and get a read on why someone might be looking for him. ‘Then we can decide whether to feed him to the ghoul.’

  Except Swagger met Holcomb.

  It was at _____’s card table. He was there to collar a salesman called Polk and I don’t know how that squares with this story which begins with the ghoul, Cansel.

  It hurts my head that it doesn’t square, and I struggle to think while Swagger speaks, while he shifts and swells.

  Childs found Campbell easy enough. He had once collected a paycheque made out to his old name at a magazine, and that was all it took to match him to Holcomb.

  So Childs went to pay this Holcomb or Campbell a visit. Campbell seemed surprised to learn that he had an uncle to lose: he practically shooed Childs out the door. I guess he would have blown town, would have taken up another new name and left behind a new string of debts.

  Except the ghoul, or an associate of his, had trailed Childs. They followed him all the way to Campbell’s door—even though trailing Childs is no mean job. And before we could decide if we wanted to hand Campbell over—and before Campbell could vanish himself—they got to him …

  *

  I took a call from the buttons that night. And I can’t describe to you the fury I felt looking down at that boy’s corpse. They’d taken their time with him, Cansel and whoever he worked with. They’d had their fun. They’d wrung his neck, and worse than that. Then the last thing they did was put a bullet through his cheek.

  I promised myself I was going to find them, the men who had done this work. We had led them straight to their victim, and I didn’t plan to forget it.

  Cromarty, head of the buttons, was there, and he tried to reassure me. ‘There have been plenty of times that crooks have used an honest agency to do their dirty work for them,’ he said, but it was no good. The night lit with my anger and my voice rose to a preacher’s roar as I answered him—every flatfoot in that apartment turned to watch. ‘Cansel and everyone who worked with him, they’re all going to pay for this. They don’t get to decide that this kid deserved to die!’

  Swagger’s mouth grows wider and wider, it is a hothouse and a loudspeaker, his words shake the room.

  ‘They’re going to be sorry for the day they turned Mike Swagger into a weapon, because it’s not going to be cop justice they’re going to get, it’s not going to come to them through a jury, it’s go
ing to come from the barrel of a gun. And I’m going to make sure it isn’t quick. They’re going to feel it, and they’re going to pray for it to be over.’

  *

  The first call I made when I left the site of the killing was to a love interest of Campbell’s who Childs had made, a dame called Evelyn Heydt.

  ‘Mr Swagger,’ she said, ‘I heard about your ghoul. I had every question you’ve just asked me from the police.’

  She sounded abrupt and hurt and couldn’t have known less about Campbell if she’d been studying not knowing about him for weeks. She had a real beauty, which she seemed to resent sharing. When she walked me out the door I felt evicted from warmth into the cold city. I walked to a drugstore and made a call to the office to see if Childs had left any messages.

  I smoked a cigar and stomped my feet and couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something I had missed, something I hadn’t thought to ask, or hadn’t wanted to, and it took me back to Evelyn Heydt’s apartment.

  *

  When I got there, the vestibule door was open. Then I found the door to her apartment just slipping closed. I caught it, quietly, and I pressed my eye to the gap to peer in.

  He squints at me, leans forward, his eye, jelly white, size of a fishbowl, peers.

  I could hang on his eyelashes like rope.

  I could punch straight through his pupil.

  What did I see there, Box?

  I pressed my eye to the gap and I saw the backs of two men, the smaller of them carrying a knife. They were approaching Evelyn Heydt, who was retreating, beautiful and afraid.

  CHRIST, I felt angry.

  His fists crash down and the typewriter leaps from the desk.