Horrible Imaginings
Page 8
Nor did the Vanishing Lady honor either his disappearance or his captors’ with even one last glance as she impatiently shifted the brass tube to her other nostril and applied it to an edge of the diminished pile of crystals outspread on the white packet paper, the sight of which had instantly recalled to her mind the use of that tube and much more besides, not all of which she was tickled to relearn: the sullen waitings for Artie Stensor, her own entrapment by the thirteenth floor, the finding of Artie there in his new and degenerate imprisoned form, the sessions that reduced her also to such a form, her deal with the reigning homunculi, the three services (or was it four?) she’d promised them, the luring and entrapment of the other two tenants. She put all that out of her mind as she inhaled slowly, very evenly, and deeply, the mouth of the brass tube like that of some tiny reaping machine eating its way up and down the edge of the coke or “snow” or whatever else you might call the sovereign diamond sparkling dream drug, until the paper was empty.
She felt the atoms of her body loosening their hold on each other and those of her awareness and memory tightening theirs as with a fantastic feeling of liberation she slowly floated up through the ceiling of the cage into the stale air of the dark and cavernous shaft and then rose more and more swiftly along the black central cables until she shot through the shaft’s ceiling, winked through the small lightless room in which were the elevator’s black motor and relays, and burst out of the apartment tree into the huge dizzying night.
South shone the green coronet of the Hilton, west the winking red light that outlined the tripod TV tower atop Sutro Crest, northeast the topaz-sparkling upward-pointing arrow of the Transamerican Pyramid. Farther east, north, and west, all lapped in low fog, were the two great bridges, Bay and Golden Gate, and the unlimited Pacific Ocean. She felt she could see, go anywhere.
She spared one last look and sorrow pang for the souls entombed—or, more precisely, immured—in San Francisco and then, awareness sharpening and consciousness expanding, sped on up and out, straight toward that misty, nebula-swathed multiple star in Orion called the Trapezium.
THE AUTOMATIC PISTOL
Inky Kozacs never let anyone but himself handle his automatic pistol, or even touch it. It was blue-black and hefty and when you just pressed the trigger once, eight .45 caliber slugs came out of it almost on top of each other.
Inky was something of a mechanic, as far as his automatic went. He would break it down and put it together again, and every once in a while carefully rub a file across the inside trigger catch.
Glasses once told him, “You will make that gun into such a hair-trigger that it will go off in your pocket and blast off all your toes. You will only have to think about it and it will start shooting.”
Inky smiled at that, I remember. He was a little wiry man with a pale face, from which he couldn’t ever shave off the blue-black of his beard, no matter how close he shaved. His hair was black, too. He talked foreign, but I never could figure what country. He got together with Anton Larsen just after prohibition came, in the days when sea-skiffs with converted automobile motors used to play tag with revenue cutters in New York Bay and off the Jersey coast, both omitting to use lights in order to make the game more difficult. Larsen and Inky Kozacs used to get their booze off a steamer and run it in near the Twin Lights in New Jersey.
It was there that Glasses and I started to work for them. Glasses, who looked like a cross between a college professor and an automobile salesman, came from I don’t know where in New York City, and I was a local small-town policeman until I determined to lead a less hypocritical life. We used to ride the stuff back toward Newark in a truck.
Inky always rode in with us; Larsen only occasionally. Neither of them used to talk much; Larsen, because he didn’t see any sense in talking unless to give a guy orders or a girl a proposition; and Inky, well, I guess because he wasn’t any too happy talking American. And there wasn’t a ride Inky took with us but he didn’t slip out his automatic and sort of pet it mutter at it under his breath. Once when we were restfully chugging down the highway Glasses asked him, polite inquiring:
“Just what is it makes you so fond of that gun? After all, the must be thousands identically like it.”
“You think so?” says Inky, giving us a quick stare from his little, glinty black eyes and making a speech for once. “Let me tell you, Glasses” (he made the word sound like ‘Masses’), “nothing is alike in this world. People, guns, bottles of Scotch—nothing. Everything in the world is different. Every man has different fingerprints; and, of all guns made in the same factory as this one, there is not one like mine. I could pick mine out from a hundred. Yes, even if I hadn’t filed the trigger catch, I could do that.”
We didn’t contradict him. It sounded pretty reasonable. He sure loved that gun, all right. He slept with it under his pillow. I don’t think it ever got more than three feet away from him as long as he lived.
Once when Larsen was riding in with us, he remarked! sarcastically, “That is a pretty little gun, Inky, but I am getting very tired of hearing you talk to it so much, especially when no one can understand what you are saying. Doesn’t it ever talk back to you?”
Inky smiled at him. “My gun only knows eight words,” he said, “and they are all alike.”
This was such a good crack that we laughed.
“Let’s have a look at it,” said Larsen reaching out his hand.
But Inky put it back in his pocket and didn’t take it out the rest of the trip.
After that Larsen was always kidding Inky about the gun, trying to get his goat. He was a persistent guy with a very peculiar sense of humor, and he kept it up for a long time after it had stopped being funny. Finally he took to acting as if he wanted to buy it, making Inky crazy offers of one to two hundred dollars.
“Two hundred and seventy-five dollars, Inky,” he said one evening as we were rattling past Bayport with a load of cognac and Irish whiskey. “That’s my last offer, and you better take it.”
Inky shook his head and made a funny noise that was almost like a snarl. Then, to my great surprise (I almost ran the truck off the pavement) Larsen lost his temper.
“Hand over that damn gun!” he bellowed, grabbing Inky’s shoulders and shaking him. I was almost knocked off the seat. Somebody might even have been hurt, if a motorcycle cop hadn’t stopped us just at that moment to ask for his hush-money. By the time he was gone, Larsen and Inky were both cooled down to the freezing point, and there was no more fighting. We got our load safely into the warehouse, nobody saying a word.
Afterward, when Glasses and I were having a cup of coffee at a little open-all-night restaurant, I said, “Those two guys are crazy, and I don’t like it a bit. Why the devil do they act that way, now that the business is going so swell? I haven’t got the brains Larsen has, but you won’t ever find me fighting about a gun as if I was a kid.”
Glasses only smiled as he poured a precise half-spoonful of sugar into his cup.
“And Inky’s as bad as he is,” I went on. “I tell you, Glasses, it ain’t natural or normal for a man to feel that way about a piece of metal. I can understand him being fond of it and feeling lost without it. I feel the same way about my lucky half-dollar. It’s the way he pets it and makes love to it that gets on my nerves. And now Larsen’s acting the same way.”
Glasses shrugged. “We’re all getting a little jittery, although we won’t admit it,” he said. “Too many hijackers. And so we start getting on each other’s nerves and fighting about trifles—such as automatic pistols.”
“You may have something there.”
Glasses winked at me. “Why, certainly, No Nose,” he said, referring to what had once been done to me with a baseball bat, “I even have another explanation of tonight’s events.”
“What?”
He leaned over and whispered in a mock-mysterious way, “Maybe there’s something queer about the gun itself.”
I told him in impolite language to go chase himself.
Well, the years kept passing and the bootlegging business stayed good except that the hijackers became more numerous and Inky got a couple of chances to show us what a nice noise his automatic made. Then, too, we got into a row with some competitors bossed by an Irishman named Luke Dugan, and had to watch our step very carefully and change our route every other trip.
Still, business was good. I continued to support almost all my relatives, and Glasses put away a few dollars every month for what he called his Persian Cat Fund. Larsen, I believe, spent about everything he got on women and all that goes with them. He was the kind of guy who would take all the pleasures of life without cracking a smile, but who lived for them just the same.
As for Inky Kozacs, we never knew what happened to the money he made. We never heard of him spending much, so we finally figured he must be saving it—probably in bills in a safety deposit box. Maybe he was planning to go back to the Old Country, wherever that was, and be somebody. At any rate he never told us. By the time Congress took our profession away from us, he must have had a whale of a lot of dough. We hadn’t had a big racket, but we’d been very careful.
Finally we ran our last load. We’d have had to quit the business pretty soon anyway, because the big syndicates were demanding more protection money each week. There was no chance left for a small independent operator, even if he was as clever as Larsen. So Glasses and I took a couple of months off for vacation before thinking what to do next for his Persian cats and my shiftless relatives. For the time being we stuck together.
Then one morning I read in the paper that Inky Kozacs had been taken for a ride. He’d been found shot dead on a dump heap near Elizabeth, New Jersey.
“I guess Luke Dugan finally got him,” said Glasses.
“A nasty break,” I said, “especially figuring all that money he hadn’t got any fun out of. I am glad that you and I, Glasses, aren’t important enough for Dugan to bother about, I hope.”
“Yeah. Say, No Nose, does it say if they found Inky’s gun on him?”
I said it told that the dead man was unarmed and that no weapon was found on the scene.
Glasses remarked that it was queer to think of Inky’s gun being in anyone else’s pocket. I agreed, and we spent some time wondering whether Inky had had a chance to defend himself.
About two hours later Larsen called and told us to meet him at the hide-out. He said Luke Dugan was gunning for him too.
The hide-out is a three-room frame bungalow with a big corrugated iron garage next to it. The garage was for the truck, and sometimes we would store a load of booze there when we heard that the police were going to make some arrests for the sake of variety. It is near Bayport, about a mile and a half from the cement highway and about a quarter of a mile from the bay and the little inlet in which we used to hide our boat. Stiff, knife-edged sea- grass taller than a man, comes up near to the house on the bay side, which is north, and on the west too. Under the sea-grass the ground is marshy, though in hot weather and when the tides aren’t high, it gets dry and caked; here and there creeks of tidewater go through it. Even a little breeze will make the blades of sea-grass scrape each other with a funny dry sound.
To the east are some fields, and beyond them, Bayport. Bayport is a kind of summer resort town and some of the houses are built up on poles because of the tides and storms. It has a little lagoon for the boats of the fishermen who go out after crabs.
To the south of the hide-out is the dirt road leading to the cement highway. The nearest house is about half a mile away.
It was late in the afternoon when Glasses and I got there. We brought groceries for a couple of days, figuring Larsen might want to stay. Then, along about sunset, we heard Larsen’s coupe turning in, and I went out to put it in the big empty garage and carry in his suitcase. When I got back Larsen was talking to Glasses. He was a big man and his shoulders were broad both ways, like a wrestler’s. His head was almost bald and what was left of his hair was a dirty yellow. His eyes were little and his face wasn’t given much to expression. And that was the way it was when he said, “Yeah, Inky got it.”
“Luke Dugan’s crazy gunmen sure hold a grudge,” I observed.
Larsen nodded his head and scowled.
“Inky got it,” he repeated, taking up his suitcase and starting for the bedroom. “And I’m planning to stay here for a few days, just in case they’re after me too. I want you and Glasses to stay here with me.”
Glasses gave me a funny wink and began throwing a meal together. I turned on the lights and pulled down the blinds, taking a worried glance down the road, which was empty. This waiting around in a lonely house for a bunch of gunmen to catch up with you didn’t appeal to me. Nor to Glasses either, I guessed. It seemed to me that it would have been a lot more sensible for Larsen to put a couple of thousand miles between him and New York. But, knowing Larsen, I had sense enough not to make any comments.
After canned corned-beef hash and beans and beer, we sat around the table drinking coffee.
Larsen took an automatic out of his pocket and began fooling with it, and right away I saw it was Inky’s. For about five minutes nobody said a word. Glasses played with his coffee, pouring in the cream one drop at a time. I wadded a piece of bread into little pellets which kept looking less and less appetizing.
Finally Larsen looked up at us and said, “Too bad Inky didn’t have this with him when he was taken for a ride. He gave it to me just before he planned sailing for the Old Country. He didn’t want it with him any more, now that the racket’s over.”
“I’m glad the guy that killed him hasn’t got it now,” said Glasses quickly. He talked nervously and in his worst college professor style. I could tell he didn’t want the silence to settle down again. “It’s a funny thing. Inky giving up his gun—but I can understand his feeling; he mentally associated the gun with our racket; when the one was over he didn’t care about the other.”
Larsen grunted, which meant for Glasses to shut up.
“What’s going to happen to Inky’s dough?” I asked.
Larsen shrugged his shoulders and went on fooling with the automatic, throwing a shell into the chamber, cocking it, and so forth. It reminded me so much of the way Inky used to handle it that I got fidgetting and began to imagine I heard Luke Dugan’s gunmen creeping up through the sea-grass. Finally I got up and started to walk around.
It was then that the accident happened. Larsen, after cocking the gun, was bringing up his thumb to let the hammer down easy, when it slipped out of his hand. As it hit the floor it went off with a flash and a bang, sending a slug gouging the floor too near my foot for comfort.
As soon as I realized I wasn’t hit, I yelled without thinking, “I always told Inky he was putting too much of a hair trigger on his gun! The crazy fool!”
Larsen sat with his pig eyes staring down at the gun where it lay between his feet. Then he gave a funny little snort, picked it up and put it on the table.
“That gun ought to be thrown away. It’s too dangerous to handle. It’s bad luck,” I said to Larsen—and then wished I hadn’t, for he gave me the benefit of a dirty look and some fancy Swedish swearing.
“Shut up, No Nose,” he finished, “and don’t tell me what I can do and what I can’t, I can take care of you, and I can take care of Inky’s gun. Right now I’m going to bed.”
He shut the bedroom door behind him, leaving it up to me and Glasses to guess that we were supposed to take out our blankets and sleep on the floor.
But we didn’t want to go to sleep right away, if only because we were still thinking about Luke Dugan. So we got out a deck of cards and started a game of stud poker, speaking very low. Stud poker is like the ordinary kind, except that four of the five cards are dealt face up an
d one at a time.
You bet each time a card is dealt, and so considerable money is apt to change hands, even when you’re playing with a ten-cent limit, like we were. It’s a pretty good game for taking money away from suckers, and Glasses and I used to play it by the hour when we had nothing better to do. But since we were both equally smart, neither one of us won consistently.
It was very quiet, except for Larsen’s snoring and the rustling of the sea-grass and the occasional chink of a dime.
After about an hour, Glasses happened to look down at Inky’s automatic lying on the other side of the table, and something about the way his body twisted around sudden made me look too. Right away I felt something was wrong, but I couldn’t tell what; it gave me a funny feeling in the back of the neck. Then Glasses put out two thin fingers and turned the gun halfway around, and I realized what had been wrong—or what I thought had been wrong. When Larsen had put the gun down, I thought it had been pointing at the outside door; but when Glasses and I looked at it, it was pointing more in the direction of the bedroom door. When you have the fidgets your memory gets tricky.
A half-hour later we noticed the gun again pointing toward the bedroom door. This time Glasses spun it around quick, and I got the fidgets for fair. Glasses gave a low whistle and got up, and tried putting the gun on different parts of the table and jiggling the table to see if the gun would move.
“I see what happened now,” he whispered finally. “When the gun is lying on its side, it sort of balances on its safety catch.
“Now this little table has got a wobble to it and when we are playing cards the wobble is persistent enough to edge the gun slowly around in a circle.”
“I don’t care about that,” I whispered back. “I don’t want to be shot in my sleep just because the table has a persistent wobble. I think the rumble of a train two miles away would be enough to set off that crazy hair-trigger. Give me it.”