Alice

by Howard Fast

  “Why?”

  “I can’t tell you why.”

  “What’s with you, mister? You in some kind of trouble? Or are you asking for trouble?”

  “I’m in trouble,” I agreed. “I’m in pretty awful trouble. I got to have a boat.”

  “You can’t have one. Look, mister, I like to please a customer, but this kind of request is impossible. It’s before the season and it’s nighttime. Suppose you smash up the boat or lose it—or maybe you and the boat get lost. I lose the boat, I lose the motor, and I got big explaining to do for the cops. So do me a favor and forget about it. None of my boats are ready to go anyway.”

  “Mr. Mulligan,” I said, “I need that boat. Not for myself. It’s life and death for someone else. I’ll pay twenty-five, fifty dollars—whatever you ask. Only I must have that boat.”

  He peered at me thoughtfully for a long moment. Then he shook his head. “No. I can’t do it, Mr. Camber. Fifty bucks is a lot of money, but I can’t do it.”

  He started to turn away, and I grabbed his arm, hard and thick under my hand, and demanded, “Are you a married man, Mr. Mulligan?”

  “What the hell has that got to do with it?”

  “You got kids?”

  “Look, mister—blow. I don’t want to talk about this any more.”

  “Just tell me, you got kids?”

  “I got kids,” he said angrily.

  “Well I have one kid—a little girl, four and a half years old. Her name is Polly. My wife won’t have another kid, ever. My kid’s been kidnaped. Two or three hours ago, and that’s why I need the boat—because that’s my one chance of ever seeing my child again. So don’t turn me down. I would get down on my knees and beg you, if I had to. I must have that boat.”

  He thought about this for a while, and then he said, “Come on inside. We’ll talk about it.”

  He led the way to the little house that was not much more than a shack, one room piled with motors and parts, a table, and a desk in one corner, with ledgers and papers piled over it. He nodded for me to sit down, and then, from a small refrigerator, took two cans of beer and opened them. I shook my head. “Drink it,” he said. “You’ll feel better with some beer in your gut.”

  I held nothing back. Once I had broken the seal of silence that Alice and I had placed upon the whole business, there was no reason to hold anything back; and I knew one thing, that unless I got the boat, it was all over and done with, Polly included. Mulligan listened, squinting at me with bloodshot, gray eyes, his red face inscrutable and expressionless. When I had finished, he nodded and said, “You bought yourself a package of trouble, didn’t you, Camber?”

  I nodded.

  “And it smacked you right in the puss, didn’t it? Honest citizen, nice wife and kid, and now you’re neck deep with a lot of hoodlums. You never had no dealings with hoodlums before, did you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Sure—and they push you around the place. Tell me something, Camber, why don’t you go to the cops? They’re maybe not what the Boy Scouts make them out to be, but they got a lot of weight to throw around.”

  “Because Alice and I feel that Montez will kill Polly if anything like that starts.”

  “Oh? Well, you got to face some hard facts, Camber. They’re going to kill your kid anyway. That’s the pivot of any snatch—it’s the same rap whether the subject lives or dies. And the number-one witness is the party who’s snatched.”

  “They haven’t killed her yet. What else have we got, Mr. Mulligan? If there’s even one chance in a thousand that we can get Polly out of this alive, we have to take it. Don’t we?”

  “If you look at it that way.”

  “How would you look at it?”

  “The trouble with you, Camber, is that you’re an honest customer in a world of movers. The movers don’t play with no rules, and they’re not bothered by themselves. You are. You love your wife, you love your kid, and you want people to love you. You don’t want to take no one, and when you turn on your TV set, that sets you up, because you watch the patsies get away with it and you say to yourself that this is a world for patsies. It ain’t, and you got to grow up awful quick to believe that. They tell me that on TV, the mover’s got to lose. That’s crap. The loser loses—that’s why he’s a loser. By and large, the mover makes the grade.”

  “And I’m a loser?”

  “You’re a loser, Camber. You’re a customer, so I wouldn’t talk to you like this if it wasn’t for what you’re in. But you got to face something. What’s the boat for? They want you to make a drop. They want you to take that key and turn it over to them in a place where you’re clear and they’re clear. Maybe they show you the kid—maybe they got the kid in a boat down the channel—maybe in the bay. What difference does it make? They’re going to knock over the kid and you and your wife as well. That’s why they’re movers. They got no scruples. You sit into a game and you got to play your whole roll. Tell me something, Camber—if you had that key, would you sell it for twenty-five grand?”

  “No,” I whispered.

  “Why not? That’s awful big money.”

  “It’s no good to us, not to Alice, not to me.”

  “Sure. Not because you’re honest, but because you’re a loser. What the hell, you’re in a bind. If I had any brains, I’d wash my hands of this whole thing. It’s no skin off my back.”

  “No—please,” I begged him. “I got to have that boat.”

  “Sure, you got to have the boat. What do I do, join the Boy Scouts? You’ll get knocked over, and the boat’ll end up at the bottom of the bay. For a lousy fifty dollars, I’m out five hundred dollars’ worth of boat and motor, with cops swarming all over the place. I got to be a stupid, sentimental slob to go along with you.”

  “Please—please, Mr. Mulligan. It’s something I’ll never forget.”

  “I won’t forget it either.”

  I put my hand into my pocket for the money, and he said to me, “Look, you got fifty bucks—go pay your rent!”

  His voice was harsh and angry now. “Don’t go buying nobody with a lousy fifty bucks—you want to buy someone, come with a real buck and grow up. People like you make me sick. You want the boat, I’ll give it to you, and just bring it back. Just bring it back. I’ll have it tied up at the end of the pier, and I’ll put a twenty-horsepower Johnson on it. You know how to run a Johnson?”

  “I know how—” I managed to say.

  “Then take care of it. You know what one of those jobs cost. They don’t grow on trees.”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  “Just use your head. If they want ten horsepower on there, then you got an edge with twenty. I don’t know what kind of an edge, but maybe enough to bring back the motor. I’ll set a ten-gallon reserve can in the bottom of the boat, with a suction line on it, so you won’t have to try to refuel in the dark.”

  My lips were trembling as I tried to thank him.

  “For what?” he demanded. “For being a slob? You think that gives me pleasure?”

  “For saving my daughter’s life.”

  He snorted at that. “Jesus Christ, you got to face the facts of life someday, Camber! When are you going to start?”

  “Let me pay you something,” I said.

  “Ah, get out of here before I get some sense and change my mind!”

  He held the door open for me, standing there framed in the light after I had passed through, and when I was a dozen feet away, he called after me, “Camber!”

  I turned to him.

  “Just one thing, Camber. Tonight—”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Stop being civilized tonight. Stop crying over your sorrows. Get angry.”

  I nodded and walked away.

  9: Shlakmann

  Alice was watching for me. She saw me pull into the driveway, and she had the door open for me when I came around to the front of the house; and then she was in my arms, clinging to me.

  “Johnny, never say I don’t
need you and love you. You were so long. What kept you so long?”

  I kissed her, and we clung to each other for a moment, and I told her that I would tell her what had kept me, all of it.

  “But you got the boat?”

  “I got the boat,” I said. “Yes, I got the boat.”

  “Thank God. Johnny, you know, we haven’t eaten anything, either of us.”

  “I’m not hungry. I couldn’t eat anything now.”

  “Just a can of sardines that I opened and some sliced tomatoes. Try to eat something, Johnny.”

  “No—no, I can’t. Did anyone call. I mean—”

  “No,” she said. “Three calls. But not them. You know, people are strange—they get a sense that something is wrong. I don’t know how, but they get a sense that something is not the way it should be. So it was Jenny Harris who called and Freda Goodman—and Dave Hudson.”

  She was leading the way into the kitchen, and she turned to looked at me inquiringly. “He was disturbed, Johnny.”

  She had the table set, and there was the smell of fresh-made coffee.

  “Sit down. You’ll have coffee anyway. Why was Dave so disturbed? It wasn’t the check, was it?”

  “No, it wasn’t the check.”

  I told her about the gun. She heard me out, and then stood with her back against the counter, studying me with those wide-set eyes of hers.

  “Poor Johnny.”

  “I don’t want pity,” I said, annoyed.

  “What would you have done with the gun, Johnny?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been able to be angry, really angry. Whatever happened to me, I always blamed myself. Then I met this man at the Boat Livery—Mulligan was his name—of course, you know. I would have said to myself, ‘Well, he’s a roughneck, stay away from him, don’t even talk to him.’ The kind of a man who always frightened me. You never tell anyone that a kind of man frightens you, because you never want to appear like a frightened kid, but like a grown man. Women don’t have that problem; they don’t have to pretend that they are what a man pretends he is. This man Mulligan told me to get angry, and then all the way driving back here I was thinking to myself—‘Camber,’ I was saying to myself, ‘what are you? They’ve taken away the one thing in the world you loved more than anything else, and you’re frightened and sick and full of pity for yourself and your baby, but you’re not angry.’ That’s been my whole life, stuffing it inside of me and never letting any of it out—do you understand me, Alice? Do you know what I mean?”

  She turned this over, and then said, slowly and thoughtfully, “I think I do, Johnny. But that was after you tried to buy the gun from Dave.”

  “It was beginning. But I turned it all on Dave.”

  “Johnny, what good would the gun have been? Not for us. We can’t stop being what we are, no matter what happens to Polly. Do you think that you can point a gun at someone and pull the trigger?”

  I considered this for a moment before I said, “No. I couldn’t.”

  “I’m glad,” she nodded.

  “Because I’m no damn good in a situation like this? No good whatsoever?”

  “Because you are what you are.”

  Then I told her about Lenny Montez and the red Mercedes. I told her all of it, leaving nothing out, and then she remained silent for a minute or two before she said anything. What she said was peculiar. She wanted to know exactly what I felt for Lenny Montez.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “You could have forced her to go to the police station,” she said slowly. “Miss Clementine saw her when she took Polly. Didn’t you realize that, Johnny? Or did you?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  I had never seen a look like this on Alice’s face before, a look of blended horror and contempt.

  “I tell you I didn’t realize that. So help me God, Alice, it never occurred to me that Miss Clementine could have identified Lenny.”

  “No, Johnny?”

  Tears of frustration, anger, and hopelessness were in my eyes now. “No. No. No. What do you think I am? What kind of a monster do you think I am?”

  “Oh, Johnny—I don’t know any more. I don’t know what to think.”

  “But no matter what I did,” I pleaded, “they would have had Polly.”

  “Johnny—Johnny, don’t you see, and we would have had her. We would have had this bitch, and that would have been the one break we were waiting for, the one opening that would have let us go to the police and smash this whole thing wide open.”

  “What are you trying to tell me?” I cried. “That I just signed the death warrant of my own daughter? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “I’m not saying it, Johnny. You are.”

  “You have no pity, have you?”

  “You didn’t want pity,” Alice said.

  We sat in the living room in silence, watching the clock and performing our own agonizing countdown. It was almost half past eight, but time had lost all relationship to reality. I could tell myself that it was only twenty-six hours since an old man called Shlakmann, ex-SS Man and concentration camp commander, had clung to me in the Independent Subway and pleaded with me to help him, but the fact of the information was meaningless. I was thirty-five years old, and if on a scale the whole thirty-five years of my life were put in balance against today, today would weigh heavier and last longer.

  We had been sitting there for twenty minutes, but those were not simply twenty minutes; they were the worst twenty minutes of my entire life, the worst twenty minutes of this whole hideous nightmare of the key. Nothing that had happened was as desolate and unredeemable as these twenty minutes; nothing that would happen could compare with them. I sat under indictment, tried and found guilty of criminal witlessness, and self-convicted of the murder of my child. Put yourself in my place and think it through, if you would like to know how it feels.

  Alice knew how it felt. She didn’t try to ease the burden; that was no use, and she didn’t tell me that she had been wrong, and she didn’t lessen my burden of pain and stupidity in any way; but after the twenty minutes had passed, she said to me, almost matter-of-factly, “You know, Johnny, when you were gone, I kept thinking about the key—”

  I said nothing as she paused.

  “I kept thinking about it because even if we have some idea where it is, we will be stronger. And I think I know who took it.”

  “You do?”

  “I think so. I’m not sure. But the more I put the pieces together, the more certain I am.”

  “Who took it, Alice?”

  “Polly did.”

  “Polly?”

  “That’s right. After you telephoned this morning, I put it on the counter and then I was out of the kitchen, but Polly was there. Polly saw me put it on the counter. She asked me what it was. I showed it to her. ‘What a funny key,’ she said. ‘It’s flat.’ I told her it was a key to a place where one kept the most valuable things, very precious things, like her best dolls. So it must have taken her fancy. I left her in the kitchen, and when I was ready to leave, I just walked past to the back door and called her. ‘Come on, Polly,’ I said to her. ‘Come now or we’ll be late.’ It never occurred to me before, but now, the more I think about it, the more likely it appears.”

  “But if she took it, she would have held it in her hand, wouldn’t she. And then you would have seen it. Polly’s dresses don’t have pockets. Or do they?”

  “She was wearing her little gray spring coat, and that does have pockets. She could have taken it and dropped it into one of those pockets.”

  “Then if she did,” I said slowly, “they may have found it by now—”

  “I thought of that.”

  “And if they found it—”

  “Johnny, it’s just as possible that they haven’t found it and that Polly has forgotten all about it. They wouldn’t ask her for the key, and why on earth should they search her? And yet they might—oh, God, I don’t know. I just don’t know, Johnny.”


  It was then that the back doorbell rang.

  I went through the kitchen to the back door, my mind defending itself by accusing Alice. She could brand me as a witless blunderer, but didn’t it all go back to the key? If she hadn’t lost the key, we would have given it to Angie, and that would have been the end of it; yet even in this train of thought I had just enough decency left to admit to myself that there was a difference between the haphazard handling of a key—which by my own witness to her was of no great importance, as I told her on the phone—and a confrontation of the person who had kidnaped my daughter.

  I opened the back door. Or rather, as I turned the handle, the man on the doorstep outside flung it open, stepped through into the kitchen, and closed it behind him. He was a big man, one of the biggest, broadest men I had ever seen, not so much in height—though he was well over six feet—but in the breadth of his shoulders, the thickness of his arms, and the hamlike quality of his enormous hands. He had a round, pasty-white face, tiny blue eyes, a small, upturned nose, and blond hair cropped short, hair the color of straw and standing up from his head like straw. His face was small, and the great thickness of his neck made it appear even smaller, and his mouth was almost lipless. Altogether, he was one of the most frightening, unsavory, and repellent creatures I had laid eyes on.

  I had a taste of his strength. I was standing behind the door when he opened it, and it swept me back into the room. My shoulder had been touching it, so I was merely flung back into the kitchen, where I had to scramble to keep my feet. I think that if my head had been in the way when he threw the door back, it would have crushed my skull.

  This man who had entered stood there for a moment, staring and blinking at me. He wore black chino pants and a yellow sport shirt under a green waterproofed windbreaker, and his face was covered with a stubble of beard. Meanwhile, Alice had followed me into the kitchen. I could feel her standing behind me.

  “Who are you?” I asked him. “What do you want?”

  “You Camber?” The thick, hoarse voice with its faint trace of a guttural accent rang a bell somewhere in my mind. I had heard it before, but when and where?

  “Yes, I’m Camber.”