by Trevanian
Guttmann nods.
“Well—” LaPointe’s voice is husky with fatigue, and he speaks quietly. “After we left you back there on the path, I followed him along a trail I could barely see. But there wasn’t anything around. No shack, no hut, nothing. Then the Vet went behind a patch of bush and bent over. I could hear a scrape of metal. He was sliding back a sheet of corrugated roofing that covered a pit in the ground. I went over to the edge of it as he jumped down, sort of skidding on the muddy sides of the hole. It was about eight feet deep, and the bottom was covered with wads of rag and burlap sacking that squished with seep water when he walked around. He had a few boxes down there, to sit on, to use as a table, to stash stuff in. He fumbled around in one of these boxes and found the wallet. It was all he could do to get out of the pit again. The sides were slimy, and he slipped back twice and swore a lot. He finally got out and handed over the wallet. Then he slid the sheet of metal back over the hole. When he stood up and looked at me… I don’t know how to explain it… there was sort of two things in his eyes at the same time. Shame and anger. He was ashamed to live in a slimy hole. And he was angry that somebody knew about it. We talked about it for a while. He was proud of himself. I know that sounds nuts, but it’s how it was. He was ashamed of his hole, but proud of having figured it all out. I guess you could say he was proud of having made his hole, but ashamed of needing it. Something like that, anyway.
“One night a few years ago, he was drunk and looking for a place to hide, where the police wouldn’t run him in for D and D. He found this cave-in hidden away among some bushes. Later on he thought about it, and he got a bright idea. He went back there at night with a spade he pinched somewhere, and he worked on the hole. He made it deeper and made the sides vertical. And whenever the sides crumble from him scrambling in and out, he works on it again. So his hole is always getting bigger. Rain gets in, and water seeps up from the slime, so he keeps adding rags and bags he picks up here and there. It’s a clever little trap he’s made for himself.”
“Trap, sir?”
“That’s what it is. That’s how he uses it. He’s afraid of being picked up drunk and put in a cell and left to scream. So every time he thinks he’s got enough wine inside him to be dangerous, he buys another bottle and brings it back to his kip. Down there in the hole, he can drink until he’s wild and raving. He’s safe down there. Even when he’s sober, it’s hard for him to climb up those slimy sides. When he’s drunk, it’s impossible. He traps himself down there to save himself from being arrested and put inside. Of course, he’s a claustrophobic, so sometimes he gets panicky down there. When his brain’s soggy with wine, he thinks the walls are caving in on him. And he’s terrified that a big rain might fill his pit with water when he’s too drunk to get out. It’s bad down there, you know. When he’s drunk, he can’t get out to shit or piss, so it’s… bad down there.”
“Jesus Christ,” Guttmann says quietly.
“Yeah. He lives in a small hole in the ground because he’s a claustrophobic.”
“Jesus Christ.”
LaPointe leans back in the booth and presses his mat of cropped hair hard with the palm of his hand. “And what do you do if you have to live in a slimy, stinking hole? You brag about it, of course. You make the other bommes despise you. And envy you.”
Guttmann shakes his head slowly, his mouth agape, his eyes squeezed in pity and disgust. LaPointe’s punitive intent in telling him about this has been effective.
“Tell you what,” LaPointe says. “Don’t come by to pick me up tomorrow until around noon. I need some sleep.”
Without turning on the lights, he closes the door behind him and hangs his overcoat on the wooden rack. He flinches when the revolver in his pocket thuds against the wall; he doesn’t want to wake her.
There is a crackling hiss in the room, and the crescent dial of the old Emerson glows dim orange. The station has gone off the air. Why didn’t she turn the radio off? Ah. He forgot to tell her that you also have to jiggle the knob to turn it off. Then why didn’t she pull out the plug? Dumb twit.
The ceiling of the bedroom is illuminated by the streetlamp beneath the window, and he can make out Marie-Louise’s form in the bed, although she is below the shadow line. She sleeps on her side, her hands under her cheek, palms together, and her legs are in a kind of running position that takes up most of the bed.
He undresses noiselessly, teetering for a moment in precarious balance as he pulls off his pants. When he aligns the creases to fold the pants over the back of a chair, some change falls out of his pocket, and he grimaces at the sound and swears between his teeth. He tiptoes around to the other side of the bed and lifts the blankets, trying to slip in without waking her. If he curves his body just right, there is enough room to lie next to her without touching her. For five long minutes he remains there, feeling the warmth that radiates from her, but it is impossible to sleep when the slightest movement would either touch her or make him fall out of bed. Anyway, he feels ridiculous, sneaking into bed with her. He rises carefully, but the springs clack loudly in the silent room.
…at first the creaking bed had made Lucille tense. But later she used to giggle silently at the thought of imagined neighbors listening beyond the wall, shocked at such carryings-on…
At the noise, Marie-Louise moans in confused irritation. “What’s the matter?” she asks in a blurred, muffled voice. “What do you want?”
He lays his hand lightly on her mop of frizzy hair. “Nothing.”
7
“Hey?”
He does not move.
“Hey?”
“Ugh!” LaPointe wakes with a start, blinking his eyes against the watery light coming through the window. It is another gray day with low skies and diffused, shadowless brightness. He squeezes his eyes shut again before finally opening them. His back is stiff from sleeping on the narrow sofa, and his feet stick out from below the overcoat he has used as a blanket. “What time is it?” he asks.
“A little before eleven.”
He nods heavily, still drugged with sleep. He sits up and scratches his head, grinning stupidly. These last two nights have taken their toll—his joints are stiff and his head cobwebby.
“I’ve got water boiling,” she says. “I was going to make some coffee, but I don’t know how to work your pot.”
“Yes. It’s an old-fashioned kind. Just a minute. Give me a chance to wake up. I’ll do it.” He yawns deeply. His overcoat covers him from the waist down, but his thick chest is exposed. He rubs the graying hair vigorously because it itches. “Tabernouche!” he grunts.
“Hard night?” she asks.
“Long, anyway.”
She is wearing Lucille’s pink quilted dressing gown again, but she has been up long enough to brush out her hair and put on eye make-up. There is a slight smell of gas in the room. She must have had some difficulty lighting the gas fire.
In his sleep, his penis has come out of the fly of his undershorts. He manages to tuck it back in with the same gesture as that with which he pulls up his overcoat and puts it on in place of a robe. Barefooted, he goes into the kitchen to make coffee.
She laughs half a dozen ascending notes, then stops short.
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh, nothing. You look funny with your bare legs coming out of the bottom of your overcoat.”
He looks down. “Yes, I suppose I do.”
While he is pressing hot water through the fine grounds, it occurs to him that only one thing triggers her peculiar, interrupted laugh: people looking ridiculous. She laughed at her black eye, at him with soap on his cheek, at herself wearing Lucille’s coat, and now at him again. It’s a cruel sense of humor, one that doesn’t even spare herself as a possible victim.
He gives her a cup of coffee and carries one with him to the bathroom, where he washes up and dresses.
Later, he fries eggs and toasts bread over the gas ring, and they take their breakfast in the living room, she coiled up on the sofa, her
plate balanced on the arm, he in his chair.
“Why did you sleep out here?” she asks.
“Oh… I didn’t want to disturb you,” he explains, partially.
“Yeah, but why didn’t you use the blankets I used last night?”
“I didn’t really mean to sleep. I was just going to rest. But I dozed off.”
“Yeah, but then why did you take your clothes off?”
“Why don’t you just eat your eggs?”
“Okay.” She spoons egg onto a bit of toast and eats it that way. “Where did you go last night?” she asks.
“Just work.”
“You said you work with the police. You work in an office?”
“Sometimes. Mostly I work on the streets.”
That seems to amuse her. “Yeah. Me too. You enjoy being a cop?”
He tucks down the corners of his mouth and shrugs. He never thought of it that way. When she changes the subject immediately, he assumes she isn’t really interested anyway.
“Don’t you get bored living here?” she asks. “No magazines. No television.”
He looks around the frumpy room with its 1930’s furniture. Yes, he imagines it would be dull for a young girl. True, there are no magazines, but he has some books, a full set of Zola, whom he discovered by chance twenty years ago, and whom he reads over and over, going down the row of novels by turn, then starting again. He finds the people and events surprisingly like those on his patch, despite the funny, florid language. But he doesn’t imagine she would care to read his Zolas. She probably reads slowly, maybe even mouths the words.
Well, if she’s bored, then she’ll probably leave soon. No reason for her to stay, really.
“Ah… why don’t we go out tonight?” he offers. “Have dinner.”
“And go dancing?”
He smiles and shakes his head. “I told you I don’t dance.”
This disappoints her. But she is resourceful when it comes to getting her way with men. “I know! Why don’t we go to a whisky a go-go after dinner. People can dance by themselves there.”
He doesn’t care much for the thought of sitting in one of those cramped, noisy places with youngsters hopping all around him. But, if it would please her…
She presses her tongue against her teeth and decides to gamble on pushing this thing to her advantage. “I… I really don’t have the right clothes to go out,” she says, not looking up from her cup. “I only have what I could sneak out in the shopping bag.”
His eyes crinkle as he looks at her. He knows exactly what she’s up to. He doesn’t mind giving her money to buy clothes, if that’s what she wants, but he doesn’t like her thinking he’s a dumb mark.
He sets down his cup and crosses to the large veneered chest. He has a habit of putting his housekeeping money into the top drawer every payday, and taking out what he needs through the month. He knows it’s a bad habit, but it saves time. And who would dare to steal from Claude LaPointe? He is surprised at how many twenties have accumulated, crumpled up in the drawer; must be five or six hundred dollars’ worth. Ever since the mortgage on the house was paid off, he has more money than he needs. He takes out seven twenties and flattens them with his hand. “Here. I’ll be working today. You can go out and buy yourself a dress.”
She takes the bills and counts them. Maybe he doesn’t know how much a dress costs. So much the better for her.
“There’s enough there to buy yourself a coat too,” he says.
“Oh? All right.” Before falling asleep last night, she thought about asking him for money, but she didn’t know quite how to go about it. After all, they hadn’t screwed. He didn’t owe her.
While she sits looking out the window, thinking about the dress and coat, LaPointe examines her face. The green eye shadow she uses disguises what is left of her black eye. It’s a nice pert face. Not pretty, but the kind you want to hold between your palms. It occurs to him that he has never kissed her.
“Marie-Louise?” he says quietly.
She turns to him, her eyebrows raised interrogatively.
He looks down at the park, colorless under yeasty skies. “Let’s make a deal, Marie-Louise. For me, I like having you here, having you around. I suppose we’ll make love eventually, and I’ll enjoy that. I mean… well, naturally, I’ll enjoy that. Okay. That’s for me. For you, I suppose being here is better than sitting out your nights in some park or bus station. But… you find it dull here. And sooner or later you’ll go off somewhere. Fine. I’ll probably be tired of having you around by then. You can have money to buy some clothes. If you need other things, I don’t mind giving you money. But I’m not a mark, and I wouldn’t like you to think of me as one. So don’t try to con me, and don’t bullshit me. That wouldn’t be fair, and it would make me angry. Is it a deal?”
Marie-Louise looks steadily at him, trying to understand what he’s up to. She’s not used to this kind of frankness, and she doesn’t feel comfortable with it. She really wishes they had screwed and he had paid his money. That’s neat. That’s easy to understand. She feels as if she’s being accused of something, or trapped into something.
“I knew there was money in that drawer,” she says defensively. “I was looking around last night, and I found it.”
“But you didn’t take it and run off. Why not?”
She shrugs. She doesn’t know why not. She’s not a thief, that’s all. Maybe she should have taken it. Maybe she will, someday. Anyway, she doesn’t like this conversation. “Look, I better get going. Or did you want to come shopping with me?”
“No, I have work—” LaPointe hears a car door slam down in the street. He half rises from his chair and peers down from the second-story window. Guttmann has just gotten out of a little yellow sports car and is looking along the row for the house number.
LaPointe tugs his overcoat on rapidly. He doesn’t want Guttmann to see Marie-Louise and ask questions or, worse yet, pointedly avoid asking questions. The sleeve of his suit coat slips from his grasp, and he has to fish up through the arm of the overcoat to tug it down. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll see you this evening.”
“Okay.”
“What time will you be through shopping?”
“I don’t know.”
“Five? Five-thirty?”
“Okay.”
As he clumps down the narrow stairs he grumbles to himself. She’s too passive. There’s nothing to her. Want some coffee? Okay. Even though she doesn’t like coffee. Shall we eat at five? Okay. Do you want to stay with me? Okay. Do you want to leave? Okay. Shall we make love? Okay. How about screwing out on the hall landing? Okay.
She doesn’t care. Nothing matters to her.
Guttmann has his ringer on the buzzer when the front door opens with a jerk and LaPointe steps out.
“Morning, sir.”
LaPointe buttons up his overcoat against the damp chill. “Your car?” he asks, indicating with a thrust of his chin the new little yellow sports model.
“Yes, sir,” Guttmann says with a touch of pride, turning to descend the steps.
“Hm-m!” Obviously the Lieutenant doesn’t approve of sports cars.
But Guttmann is in too good a mood to care about LaPointe’s prejudices. “That’s to say, the car belongs to me and the bank. Mostly the bank. I think I own the ashtray and one of the headlights.” His buoyancy is a result of a rare piece of good luck. When he called the girl this morning to tell her he would have to cancel their date, she beat him to it, telling him she had one hell of a head cold, and she wanted to sleep in to see if she could shake it off. He managed to sound disappointed, and he arranged to look in on her that evening.
LaPointe finds the tiny car difficult to get into, and he grunts as he slams the door on his coattail and has to open it again. In fact, he feels silly, riding around in a little yellow automobile. He would rather walk. Give him a chance to check on the street. Guttmann, for all that he is bigger than LaPointe, slips in quite easily. With a popping baritone roar, the car starts up
and pulls away from the curb.
LaPointe cranes his neck to see if Marie-Louise is watching from the window. She is not.
They find a parking space on Clark, only half a block up from the rooming house. Opening the door, LaPointe scrapes it against the high curb; Guttmann closes his eyes and winces. LaPointe mutters something about stupid toy cars as he squeezes out and angrily slams the door behind him. Because it is Saturday, the street is full of kids, and one of them has paused in his game of “ledgey” to remark aloud that old men shouldn’t ride around in little cars. LaPointe raises the back of his hand to him, but the boy just stares in sassy defiance as he wipes his nose gravely on the sleeve of a stretched-out sweater. LaPointe cannot repress a grin. A typical pugnacious French Canadian kid. A ‘tit coq.
The rooming house is like others around the Main. Dull brick in need of paint; dirty windows with limp curtains of grayish fabric that hangs as though it is damp; a fly-specked card in the window of first floor front advertising rooms to let. This doesn’t necessarily mean there is a vacancy. The concierge is probably too lazy to put the card in and take it out each time a short-time vagrant comes or goes. LaPointe climbs the wooden stoop and twists the old-fashioned bell, which rattles dully, broken. When there is no answer, he bangs on the door. Guttmann has joined him on the landing, looking back nervously at the small group of ragged kids that has gathered around his car. LaPointe bangs more violently, making the window rattle.
Almost immediately the door is snatched open by a slovenly woman who pushes back a lock of lank gray hair and snaps, “Hey! What the hell’s wrong with you? You want to break down the door?” Her lower lip is swollen and cracked where someone hit her recently.
“Police,” LaPointe says, not bothering to show identification.
She looks from LaPointe to Guttmann quickly, then stands back from the doorway. They enter a hall that smells of Lysol and boiled cabbage. The woman’s attitude has changed from anger to tense uncertainty. “What do you want?” she asks, touching two fingers gingerly to the split lip.
