Park Avenue Tramp

by Flora, Fletcher

  He had practically nothing to do that had to be done, and there was practically nothing that could have been done that he wanted to do, but it was essential to his survival to be constantly committed, if not genuinely occupied. All his life he had lived in private terror under the perpetual threat of personal disintegration. He shored himself with the minutiae of a self-imposed and obsessive regimentation. He substituted rigidity for strength, cruelty for courage. In the observation of the infliction of pain, he took an almost orgiastic pleasure. He was monstrously vain.

  Miss Carling, who usually did all her day’s work in thirty minutes and frequently in no minutes, was expected, nevertheless, to be present for seven hours. She arrived at nine and departed for the day at five and took an hour for lunch between noon and one. Farnese lunched between one and half-past two. He went regularly to his club, where he received from the head-waiter a copy of the planned luncheon menu a week in advance, which enabled him to plan his personal menus in advance also, and so he always knew exactly what he would eat on any day, exactly what he would drink before and after the meal, and almost exactly how long it would require to do it. His schedule was rarely disturbed by the claims of other members on his time, for he was not understood or liked, and he usually drank and ate alone. At any rate, he was inevitably at his desk in the office at two-thirty, and often he sat there for the rest of the afternoon and did nothing at all.

  • • •

  This afternoon, however, he had an appointment at three o’clock with a private detective. The detective arrived six minutes early and was compelled to wait in the outer office. He was a grossly obese man whose swollen body with its narrow shoulders and heavy mammae and broad, tremulous hips and rump gave him, in spite of his size, a womanish appearance. His head was bald, his scalp scored and pocked by some kind of skin infection he had once had, and his face was gray and soggy. His name was Bertram Sweeney, and for more than a year it had been his job to shadow Charity McAdams Farnese and report regularly on her activities to Oliver Alton Farnese, her husband.

  At three o’clock, he was told by Miss Carling that be could go into the inner office, and he went in and sat down in the chair from which he always made his reports. He removed a notebook from a sagging side pocket of his coat and opened it to the place where Charity had entered it yesterday afternoon, and then, without speaking, he sat holding the open notebook on one knee and looking at Farnese. He hated the man who had hired him. He hated Farnese for many reasons, some of them valid, but mostly he hated him because it was so much easier to hate anyone than to like him or to be indifferent to him.

  Farnese also sat without speaking for quite a long time. He sat erect in his chair with his hands folded on the desk in front of him, and there was in the rigid immobility of his posture a cataleptic quality that was almost frightening. A tall, slender man with blond, graydusted hair and a face like a narrow wedge of stone, he might have been in his withdrawal either psychotic or ascetic, but what he was in the opinion of Sweeney could best be expressed in the language of the gutter, which Sweeney spoke fluently, and now to himself in the merest whisper he called Farnese the name of what he was, forming the word with livid lips. He wasn’t fooled, either, by the pose of quietude that Farnese held. He had learned long ago to sense the sickening turbulence beneath the surface of icy reserve, and when he sat and made his reports with quiet malice, he laughed and laughed within himself, the laughter growing and becoming so enormous inside his flabby body that he was sure it would break loose like thunder in the room.

  When Farnese spoke at last, his voice, like his face, did not betray his feelings. It was modulated and flat, deviating only slightly from a monotone. His thin lips barely moved to permit the passage of words, and if there was any sign of emotional disturbance at all, it was in the fine line of a scar that followed so precisely for about three inches the line of the mandible that it seemed to have been made deliberately by a scalpel. This scar was ordinarily invisible, but sometimes it turned dead white, as now, and could be seen plainly against darker flesh, and Sweeney found it extremely interesting, and useful as a kind of adrenal barometer. He had thought at first that Farnese was older than he admitted, that the scar was evidence of plastic surgery, but he now knew definitely that this was not so. Farnese was forty-five. He had married Charity McAdams when he was forty-one and she was twenty-five. They had been married, after a fashion, four years. These were vital statistics of which Sweeney was certain.

  “All right,” Farnese said. “Begin whenever you’re ready.”

  • • •

  Sweeney began. Using his notes to remind himself of specific times and places, he reported that he had been waiting yesterday afternoon, as per instructions, in the office of the garage in the apartment building on Park Avenue in which the Farneses lived. At exactly 4:57 be had received a telephone message from the Farnese maid that Mrs. Farnese had just left the apartment. He, Sweeney, had picked her up at the front entrance and followed her to the apartment of Miss Samantha Coy, who was not new to Sweeney’s notebook. Mrs. Farnese had remained here for nearly two hours, leaving with a party of six, including herself, at 6:43. The party of six was evenly composed of men and women in pairs, and they had apparently had quite a few cocktails, and they drove in one car, a Cadillac, to an Italian restaurant on Tenth Street. They had arrived at the restaurant at 7:18.

  “Never mind the exact timetable,” Farnese said. “I’ve told you before that it isn’t necessary.”

  “I like to be accurate,” Sweeney said.

  “Never mind it. When I want to know a time, I’ll ask for it. Get on with the report and omit the details.”

  Sweeney bowed his head above his notebook and whispered to himself the name of what Farnese was. He continued his report.

  After leaving the Italian restaurant, the party of six had driven in the Cadillac to Fourth Street, where they visited three nightclubs in about three hours. While they were in the third of these, Mrs. Farnese had deserted the party and had gone away with a young man in a white Mark II. Sweeney did not know the identity of the man, but he had obtained the license number of the Mark II, and it would be a simple matter from that to get the identity.

  “Don’t bother,” Farnese said. “I know who he is.”

  “Oh,” Sweeney said.

  Mrs. Farnese and the man in the Mark II, he said, had gone to a place in the area of Sheridan Square. Another night spot. The place was very crowded and noisy, filled with confusion, but Mrs. Farnese and the man had sat at a small table not far from the bar, and he, Sweeney, had managed to grab a stool from which he could observe them clearly. After a while, Mrs. Farnese had got up and gone away alone, presumably to the ladies’ room. Since the man had remained at the table, it was a fair assumption that Mrs. Farnese would return, which was the assumption that Sweeney made, and this was a mistake, or had almost been one, for she didn’t return after all, and it was only by the sheerest luck that he had caught a glimpse of her at the last second as she was going out past the check stand.

  When he got outside after her, she was standing on the sidewalk in front of the building, just standing there very quietly, and there had been, he thought, an odd expression on her face. Or maybe it had been the absence of any expression at all. A kind of vacancy. It was pretty hard to describe, but about the best word he could think of was gone. She’d looked gone. Not there. Nobody home.

  Moving suddenly, as if she’d just remembered something, she’d started walking down the street with him behind her, and she’d walked very rapidly for several blocks and had then stopped in front of still another night spot, a crummy little place identified by a few twists of neon tubing as Duo’s. She’d patted the bricks by the door as if she were in love with them, and had gone inside and sat at the bar and talked for quite a while with the bartender.

  “Is this bartender important?” Farnese said.

  “What do you mean?” Sweeney said.

  “Did she do anything with him, go away with h
im, give any indication at all that he was any more to her than a common bartender?”

  “No. Nothing like that. She just talked with him and drank the Martinis that he made for her.”

  “Then why make a point of him? Please get finished.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Sweeney took a deep breath, held it five seconds, released it slowly. “There was a piano player there. A so-so thumper. Name’s Joe Doyle. He’s the one she went away with. After quite a while, that was. I was sitting at the bar talking to a redhead who hit me for a drink.”

  “Did you follow or stay with the redhead?”

  “Followed. When I’m on a job, the job comes first”

  “I congratulate you on your integrity. Where did they go?”

  “They picked up his car in the alley and made a tour of half a dozen places. Didn’t stay long in any one of them. They seemed to be looking for someone, and it’s a good bet it was the guy in the Mark II.”

  “Possibly. But they didn’t find him, of course.”

  “No. Finally they drove to the place this other guy lives. The piano thumper. Joe Doyle.” “Where is this?”

  “An old residence south of Washington Square. Probably he has a room there. Maybe a small apartment.” “Quite likely. What did they do then?”

  “Well, that’s a matter for speculation.” Watching the stony face of Farnese, Sweeney spoke now with deep, delicious malice. “They went inside together, and they didn’t come out. Not before daylight, anyhow. I waited that long, and then I went home for a nap. A guy has to sleep now and then.”

  Farnese said nothing. He sat rigidly erect in the cataleptic pose, and Sweeney kept his eyes on the fine white line of scar tissue along the mandible, and the thunderous mirth grew in Sweeney’s gross body.

  “That’s all,” Sweeney said.

  “Very well,” Farnese said.

  “Shall I continue on the job?”

  “Not today. Perhaps tomorrow or the next day. I’ll let you know.”

  “All right,” Sweeney said.

  He folded his notebook and replaced it carefully in the sagging pocket of his coat. Rising, he walked to the door and let himself out of the room, and Farnese continued to sit unmoving in his chair. He sat with his hands folded and submitted himself to the violations of fury and terror and incongruous desire.

  CHAPTER 7

  Bertram Sweeney went directly to his office, which was a small malodorous room at the rear of the third floor of a building that was headquarters for a dozen fringe operations. He stood for a couple of minutes in the center of the room, rubbing his scarred scalp with the palm of his right hand, and then he walked across to a narrow window and stood staring down through dirty glass into the litter of an alley.

  The world today, he felt, was even a worse place than it usually was, and this made it intolerably bad. The world was a pustule, and of all the infectious organisms that lived in it, there was none more loathsome than Bertram Sweeney. He didn’t know how he could possibly stand himself and the world for the rest of the day, and so he began to do what he always did when the gross ugliness of the two, the world and Sweeney, became too oppressive for him to bear. He began to slip softly into fantasy.

  Turning away from the window, he sat down in the swivel chair behind his desk and removed an 8x10 photograph of Charity Farnese from the desk’s belly drawer. He stood the photograph on the desk and rocked back in the chair and sat staring at the face of Charity with a kind of drugged dreaminess in his eyes and an odd, unpleasant slackness in his mouth. He had got the picture at the beginning of his service to Oliver Alton Farnese, and it had been then much smaller, about the size of an identification photo you could carry in a wallet, but he had taken it to a studio and had it blown up and two copies made. One of the copies he kept at home, the rented room in which he slept, and the other one he kept here, in the office, and so he had a picture of Charity, whichever place he was, to look at and talk to and take with him in dreams to a different world in which there lived a different Bertram Sweeney.

  “You lovely,” he whispered. “You wanton, prowling little lovely.”

  Charity looked back at him with an expression compounded of excitement and tenderness and ineffable sadness, as if she understood quite well that she was surely going to do something for pleasure that would later cause her pain. Her pale hair fell forward on the heavy side, and in her eyes was a capricious solemnity. He could have sworn that her lips moved in the slightest of smiles and shaped the suggestion of a tender word.

  They were lovers, of course. They existed in a detached and intimate devotion to each other in this second world of Bertram Sweeney, and Charity in the second world was precisely as she was in the first, except that in the second her dispersed and wasted self and love were reserved entirely for Sweeney, who was a tall, straight man with heavy hair and a fine, plain face and flat belly and long, strong legs. They were restricted only by the resources of fantasy, and they were at different times in many places, but the best and most recurrent place was a long beach of white sand between lush green growth and a bright blue sea in a hot country.

  He was standing suddenly on the beach at the edge of the water, and the water whispered up the sand and broke like a salty caress around his ankles, and his strong brown body gleamed like bronze in the tropical sun. Then he heard her call his name, once and clearly, and she was running toward him from a distance, closer and closer to Bertram Sweeney, her body as bare and bronzed as his, so light and fleet and airily moving that it left no prints at all upon the sand.

  Her hands solicited his love. She whispered soft salacities. Now they were quiet in the ebb of desire. Now they were roused in its flux and flow. All day they were lovers in the sun. Night came, and they were lovers in the night. They slept entwined on the white sand beneath enormous stars.

  So it was with Bertram Sweeney, who consistently spied upon and betrayed the woman he loved in two worlds and possessed in one, and his ability to do this could be explained only as a miracle of adjustment to a complex situation. He had thought at first, when Farnese hired him, that he was being retained simply to obtain evidence of adultery for a divorce, and this would have been simplicity itself, the matter of a minor effort on any one of many nights, and the only thing he couldn’t understand was why Farnese, a man of great wealth, would hire a fringe operator like Bertram Sweeney. Then, as the arrangement continued, he began to understand that Farnese did not want a divorce on grounds of adultery, or any grounds at all, and he had hired a fringe operator because that was the only kind who would serve him in his purpose. What this purpose was precisely, Sweeney did not know, but he knew that it was not pleasant and possibly abnormal. He was no fancy psychiatrist, Sweeney wasn’t, but he had sat and sensed the agony of emotions in the man he served and hated, and what he had sensed besides the natural fury of a cuckold was an intense excitement that was not natural at all.

  Well, Sweeney could understand that, in a way, although he was only a fat and ugly man in hopeless love, not a husband with certain claims and rights to assert. It was part of the miraculous adjustment to a complexity, as far as Sweeney was concerned, and he had felt many times the same fury and excitement he sensed in Farnese. He felt it when be stood at the end of a night’s work outside whatever place Charity had gone with whatever man, and afterward he would go home and look at the picture and go south to the white beach.

  Farnese was a stinking sadist, of course, and probably it gave him a charge to be on top of the situation, knowing always the truth and saying nothing, knowing that he could, if he chose, exercise the advantage of an executioner at any time. As he had, in fact, exercised it twice in the cases of two selected men. Sweeney had been the agent in both cases. He had arranged the details and had felt afterward that the revenge was as much his as Farnese’s. His conscience did not disturb him appreciably.

  Sweeney was certain of Farnese’s sadism, and he was also certain of something else. The sadism was not exercised against Charity Farnese for the sa
ke of a more subtle cruelty, but if it ever was, to Sweeney’s knowledge, then Sweeney would kill Farnese. He had even decided how he would do it. He would simply walk into Farnese’s office, as he had today, and he would sit down in the chair he had sat in today, and he would take from the pocket of his coat, instead of the notebook, a gun. He would look at Farnese and say nothing and shoot him dead, and Farnese would understand clearly in the end why he was dying. There would be a kind of artistry in the simplicity of it, and the necessary sacrifice of Bertram Sweeney would mean nothing much to anyone on earth, not even to Bertram Sweeney.

  So he sat at his desk this particular day that followed a particular night. Bertram Sweeney, private detective and consistent betrayer for pay. He sat at his desk in a fantasy of love at the edge of a whispering sea.

  CHAPTER 8

  By four o’clock, Charity was needing a Martini very badly The aspirin she had taken had helped her headache a little, but it was still bad enough, and not even a hot bath and a long time of lying quietly on the bed had reduced it appreciably more. What she needed was a very dry, cold Martini, and she was sure that if she had one it would make her head quit aching immediately.

  She lay and thought about the Martini for quite a while, the cold, whitish liquid in a crystal shell, the crystal cold in her fingers. She wished there were a way of getting the Martini without getting up and dressing and going to make it, but the only other way was to have Edith make it and bring it to her, and she didn’t want to see Edith or give her the satisfaction of knowing that she, Charity, needed a Martini at four o’clock in the afternoon. She did need the Martini, however, after thinking about it for so long, and so she got up very slowly in deference to her head and put on a robe, which was a compromise with dressing, and went out to the kitchen and got some ice, which she carried into the living room, where she got two bottles and a shaker from a cabinet. She carried the ice and the two bottles and the shaker back to her room, and it seemed to her that it would be very poor economy of effort to mix only one Martini when she could mix two or three with practically the same expenditure, and so she mixed three and poured one and drank it quickly.