by Howard Fast
“I’m Shlakmann—Hans Shlakmann. I talk to you on the phone this morning, remember?”
“Yes,” I whispered, trying to clear my throat and force my voice to be a voice. “I remember. It was your father—”
“That’s right,” Shlakmann grinned. “My old man picks the train for a meat grinder. Or do you dump him there?” He looked me up and down, and then shook his head, still grinning. “No, you do not dump him. You don’t dump no one under a train. You’re nothing but a stinking little fart.”
“And who are you?” Alice cried. “You’re not that old man’s son. You wouldn’t stand there grinning like a big ape if you were.”
“Listen to her,” Shlakmann said, poking a beef-slab hand at Alice. “Just listen to her. Well let me tell you something, lady—if that old son-of-a-bitch Shlakmann was your old man, maybe you do some grinning too. Old son-of-a-bitch! You want me to cry for him?”
He was moving around the kitchen as he spoke, his step surprisingly limber for so big a man.
“You got a can of beer, lady? I’m dry. You want me to cry for Gus Shlakmann? Lady, if you was beaten once the way that old bastard beat me maybe five hundred times, you be dancing jigs on subway tracks. I ain’t no angel, lady. How about that beer, you got it?”
He opened the refrigerator and found a can of beer. Fascinated by him, watching him with a combination of fear and curiosity, I handed him an opener. He opened the can, tilted it back, and drank with the beer dribbling down the corners of his lipless mouth.
“Ah. Good. No, I ain’t no angel, lady, but I run no concentration camp. The old man’s dead. Screw him. I’m alive, and I want that key.”
“The key,” I repeated foolishly.
“The key, buster—”
His slang was oddly overlaid with the trace of the accent. He finished the beer, and put down the can. Then he grinned, picked up the can again, and squeezed it without effort. The beer can crumpled in his fingers. The grin turned the small, pasty-white face into the visage of some uncatalogued reptile.
“I like it nice,” he said. “I always like it nice. Who wants trouble? Why don’t you give the fat man the key?”
Alice shook her head hopelessly.
“I don’t play games,” Shlakmann said. “The fat man plays games. You was stupid, Camber, stupid, and now the fat man got your kid and I’m going to get the key. You don’t play no games with the fat man. You two don’t know to wash behind the ears, but you play games with the fat man. Stupid! You try to put a squeeze on him for the twenty-five G’s—that’s stupid too. The fat man would cut his mother’s throat for twenty-five G’s. Now you got no kid, no key. Where are you now, tell me, huh? The fat boy is watching out front and I come in the back. Where are you? I say screw both of you—stupid bastards. Now gimme the key.”
“We haven’t got it,” I whispered.
“I like you,” Shlakmann smiled. “Two stupid piss pots—and you stand there and tell me stories.”
He picked up the beer can again, bent down the ends with his thumbs, and then twisted the whole can, as if it were wet dough before baking.
“See that? Camber, suppose I take your arm, just like that, and began to twist? You think then maybe you give me key, huh?”
“You know what I think,” Alice burst out suddenly. “I think, Mr. Shlakmann, that you are as stupid as any of us. In fact, I don’t think there’s an ounce of intelligence among the lot of you—you with your muscles and Angie with his brass knuckles and the fat man with his alley-cat wife—you all make me sick.”
Shlakmann began to giggle. “Camber,” he said to me, “we make her sick. Son-of-a-bitch, we make her sick.” It struck his fancy, and he rocked with his giggles.
“Sick,” Alice repeated. “You all smell of the sewer—I never in my life knew that people like you existed. And you don’t think. Can’t you understand that if we had that cursed key, we would have given it to them?”
Shlakmann stopped giggling and said seriously, “No, lady. Why should you give it to them?”
“If for no other reason, then simply to prevent apes like yourself from coming in here to threaten us.”
“Lady, that key is money.”
“Only sorrow to us.”
“Money, lady. Money.” He grabbed my arm and squeezed, and I winced with pain.
“Stop it!” Alice shouted. “Listen to me!”
He let go of me and nodded. “All right, lady. I listen.”
“You want the key?”
“I want the key, lady.”
“All right. You want the key. We want our child. Are you with the fat man or against him?”
“I’m for me, lady. I want the key for me, not for the fat man.”
“Good. Now the key isn’t here. Just listen, and don’t start using those muscles of yours. This morning, I put it right there on the counter.”
Shlakmann moved over to the counter and stared at the spot Alice had indicated.
“Yes, right there,” Alice said. “Then I left my little girl here and went back to the bedroom. Then I took my child to school, and when I came back, the key was gone. That’s why we couldn’t give it to Angie—and that’s why they took our child.”
“And twenty-five thousand dollars, lady?”
“We had to tell Angie something. He would have killed us—so we put him off.”
“Only to gain a few hours, Shlakmann,” I said. “We lied to Angie. My God, all I wanted was to get rid of that key—but we couldn’t find it. It was gone.”
“But now you got it.”
“No,” Alice said. “But I know where it is. My little girl took it, and it must be in the pocket of her coat. It has to be there because there’s no other place it can be—and if you want it, you can have it. All we want is our child. If you can find the child, you can have the key.”
“Maybe you know where she is, Shlakmann,” I put in. “It makes sense and we both benefit. You get the key and we get Polly.”
“And I believe this?” Shlakmann snorted. “You tell me this and I believe it?”
“You have to believe it,” I insisted. “Maybe you have no children, Shlakmann, but you’ve read about what happens to people whose child is kidnaped. Look at us. Are we lying to you? Just look at us. We’ve been through hell. We’re living in a nightmare.”
“Wait a minute,” said Shlakmann, spreading his big hands. “Just wait a minute.” It was an effort for him to think. He had to grapple with thoughts in a physical sense. His face became more lizardlike than ever as he pursed his thin lips, puffing out his cheeks, and squinting at us.
“Inside that box is worth over two million dollars. You don’t give the key to Angie, so why should you give it to me? You would lie. I can deal with lies,” he finished, his mind made up. He started toward me again.
“Just listen!” Alice shouted. “Just listen, Shlakmann, and don’t be a fool! You could kill us with your bare hands—isn’t that so?”
Shlakmann grinned. “So, lady. Watch what I do to him. I give you a pretty damn good demonstration.”
“Then listen to me. You show us where our child is, and we’ll go with you. If Polly doesn’t have the key, then you can kill us or do anything you want to do. Would we play tricks with you, knowing what you can do to us?”
He thought about that. “You don’t call the cops?”
“No. I tell you all we want is our child. You want the key. We can have both. If you beat us up now, we lose both. Don’t you see?”
He watched us and thought about that, the three of us standing tight and silent there in our kitchen. Then he said slowly, “You know something, Camber, and you, too, lady—we are playing funny game. Like dealing a deck of cards, you are going to cheat, you got to know who you play with. My father, Gustav Shlakmann—he was no angel, but the fat man is worse. The old man was a mean bastard. It give him pleasure to kill. That was why he is in SS. I got nothing against SS, it gave a guy opportunity. The old man didn’t want no opportunity—all he wanted was a ch
ance to be top man and kill. He got kicks from it. Understand me?”
We nodded, and Alice said that she understood him.
“O.K., lady. You’re smart. You got brains. You see what I mean?”
“I see what you mean,” Alice said.
“All right. But the fat man’s worse than my father—worse in spades. A man kills for kicks—I say all right, it takes all kinds. But the fat man kills when he thinks someone is inconvenience. Like that!” He snapped his fingers. “You understand?”
We nodded.
“I’m double-crossing the fat man. That means I don’t give nobody a chance to double-cross me. Understand?”
“You want what’s in the box for yourself.”
“For myself, lady. But you double-cross me—so help me God, I kill you, him, and the kid. You believe me, lady?”
“I believe you,” Alice whispered.
“All right. We got a deal. They told you to get a boat, Camber. You got it?”
“I got it,” I said.
“Where?”
“At the Livery. On the Hackensack River.”
“All right. You got a gun?”
I shook my head.
“Stupid bastard,” he said. “You want to play with fast company, but which side is up, you don’t know. All right, we play it without a gun.”
“Just one thing—I go with you,” Alice said.
“What?”
“You heard me. I am going with you.”
“Ah, shove off, lady,” he said. “I don’t want no tomato with me.”
“It’s my child and I’m going. Just listen to me, Shlakmann, don’t you ever dare talk to me like that!”
“Like what?”
“When you speak to me, call me Mrs. Camber. Not lady, not tomato. Mrs. Camber. Do you hear me?”
Unbelieving, Shlakmann stared at her.
“I’m not impressed by your muscles,” Alice said. “I agreed to this because I love my child and want her alive. But either you behave like a gentleman or the whole deal is off. Now, do you understand?”
“All right, so you come along, lady. Just keep your yap shut. Yak, yak, yak drives me crazy.”
10: The River
It occurred to me to wonder what would happen if Polly did not have the key. Each step Alice took was an improvisation upon the moment, and where I would have been paralyzed by the implications of the future, she was content to postpone disaster.
Looking back, it must appear that we were operating without any plan or purpose, devising a hasty step for each contingency, and to some extent that was true. At the same time, in each crisis we did the only thing we could do, and we acted wisely at least to the extent that we preserved our ability to function. That fact, the preservation of our ability to function, was of paramount importance; for we had arrived at a point where three lives were linked—mine, Alice’s, and Polly’s—and these three lives existed so precariously that one misstep would have begun the process of snuffing them out. In all our improvisation, we at least achieved the purpose of staying alive.
We were concerned with a question of time. Since that night, I have thought a good deal about time and have come to realize that its only real validity is subjective. Exactly twenty-six hours had elapsed between the time I met Shlakmann on a subway platform and the time Alice and I left our house with his son; but that was chronological time. Subjectively, I had lived through a great deal more than any day could hold. I had experienced craven fear, total terror, utter despair, and malignant hatred—and I had learned, at least to some degree, how to cope with each of these manifestations. I had gone through an extraordinary experience with two women—one of them my wife for a good many years—and now I had allied myself with a psychopath who admired the SS and whose father had been the commanding officer of a concentration camp under Hitler.
I did this knowing that generous odds existed for the presumption that he would kill me, and perhaps my wife and child as well, before the evening and night were over. There was no way I could fight him or resist him, yet knowing all this and accepting it, I was still able to function. This would not have been the case twenty-four hours in the past. I didn’t preen myself or even think about it very much, but the fact was there. Even John Camber was capable of change.
Shlakmann had parked his car a few blocks away. We left our car in the driveway, slipped out of the back door with him, went through our hedge into the yard of the Mcauleys, whose house backed ours, and then down the street to Shlakmann’s car. We left all the lights burning in our house, and we managed the escape with no particular trouble. The Mcauleys had a poodle, who set up a squeaky racket, but I imagine they were out this evening. Anyway, no doors or windows opened and no one shouted after us.
In Shlakmann’s car, we drove to the Hackensack River; and it was then that I asked him about his father and the two keys.
“Who was after him?” I asked. “Was it Angie?”
“I guess so. Angie followed you out of the subway.”
“Why did your father have two keys, Shlakmann?”
“For Christ’s sake, grow up, Camber. He had one, the fat man had the other. He stole the fat man’s key. The old bastard was going to clean out the box and clear out. Leave me and Montez both out in the cold. After all I did for that lousy old crumb. You just won’t believe it. I tell you something, we come out of Germany after the war and get to Montez’s country, I’m twelve years old. You think the old man takes me along for love? Like hell he does. He takes my mother and puts her out for hire as a whore, and that’s how he lives the first year in the fat man’s country. But my mother don’t go if I don’t go, and then she ends up dead with a knife in her back, and the old man gets two more girls, and I’m out on the street pushing the pimp end of it. I say to myself right there, I kill him some day—but not until he gets some money, not until he’s loaded, not until there’s something to make it worth my while. Then he get together with the fat man, and they begin to build up this business—”
“What business?” Alice asked, trying to keep the horror out of her voice and make the question casual.
“What’s in the box, lady.”
“Shlakmann,” I said, “we don’t know what’s in the box.”
“What?”
“That’s the truth. We don’t know.”
“I’ll be damned,” Shlakmann said, beginning to giggle again.
“What’s in the box, Mr. Shlakmann?” Alice asked.
“Peanuts,” said Shlakmann, shaking with laughter. “Peanuts.”
The moon was rising as we drove up to the Livery on the riverbank, the lip of the moon over the horizon, a fat, bloated orange moon, more a summer moon than the moon one gets at the end of March, a harvest moon, a moon for endings and not for beginnings. The light was out in Mulligan’s shack, but true to his word, the boat was waiting for us at the end of the dock.
Shlakmann put his car in the parking place up above the Livery, and then the three of us went down to the dock. It was a good boat that Mulligan had left for me, a sixteen-foot aluminum hull, light and fast, with the powerful Johnson twenty-horsepower hung onto the stern. In it was a set of oars, a boat hook, and a coil of light rope attached to a ring at the bow—and a ten-gallon auxiliary gas tank attached with a vacuum line to the motor. Mulligan had not merely given me a boat; he had chosen it thoughtfully and outfitted it thoughtfully, and silently I thanked him and took a pledge that someday I would repay his kindness.
When we were out on the dock, I said, “I want to know where we’re going, Shlakmann? I want to know where my daughter is?”
“She’s on the fat man’s boat.”
“Where’s the boat?”
“Just take it easy, Camber. When the time comes, I show you the boat.”
“What kind of a boat?”
“A cabin cruiser. Now what the hell are all the questions for? We made a deal—you get the kid, I get the key.”
“I want to know where I’m going.”
“All y
ou got to know is to run this lousy boat. Can you do that?”
“I can run it.”
“Then get in and stop the yak, yak.”
“Don’t argue, Johnny,” Alice said. “We’re in this now, and there’s no turning back.”
I held up my wrist to catch a reflection of the moonlight. It was eighteen minutes to ten o’clock. The night was still and windless, the river high with the tide and like glass, the black water threaded with orange moonlight. To the north of us, I could see the bright jets of headlights as the traffic rolled over the highway bridge; to the south, a dark sky with here and there a glow where the lights of a town brightened the sky.
Shlakmann got into the front of the boat and sat half facing us. Alice and I sat in the back. Shlakmann cast off, and I drew the cord to start the motor. It required only one tug—and then the engine roared into life. It was a beautiful motor, finely tuned and responsive. I throttled it down and we slid out into the river. Now I cursed the stupidity that had allowed me to come away without a flashlight, but as long as the sky was unclouded and the moon overhead, I could do without one. The visibility was nothing to boast about, but I could easily see the outlines of the riverbanks and I had fair warning as we slid through the piers of the bridges.
The Hackensack is not a wide river. Making its beginning as a placid country brook, some twenty miles north of where we were, it runs down onto the flat and becomes tidewater almost immediately. For a few miles, the tidewater holds the shape of a river, twisting and turning, its banks almost solid with factories that pour filth and chemicals into the turgid water and connected by a succession of ancient railroad and highway bridges; then it merges with the Meadows, the great expanse of waste and swampland, a trackless wilderness as large as Manhattan and a stone’s throw west of Manhattan. Once in the Meadows, the river loses it banks. There are a few markers and buoys—but for the most part, one must sense its course, feel it, and anticipate it.
Here where we were, however, it was still river, and I took my course in the center of the channel and ran slowly southward. Shlakmann wanted more speed, and God knows, I could not have been more anxious myself, but I made him understand that it was senseless to roar down a black river through the night.
