‘That’s right, sir,’ I said. ‘I’m sneering, defiant Paul Standish, the union tough your daughter’s been writing about. Did you read the article?’
‘Yes,’ he said doubtfully. His eyes were harder and colder now; he was wondering what I was doing here.
‘Not very well written, of course,’ I said, ‘but it does show promise. By the time she graduates, I bet she’ll be ready for a full-time job with the Beacon.’
‘I’m afraid,’ he said carefully, ‘I don’t under—’
‘He was mad,’ his daughter told him. ‘He came up here to holler at me for betraying him.’
He stepped backward from the entranceway. ‘I think you’d better leave,’ he said.
‘Of course, sir.’ I stepped past him, then turned around to say, ‘I’m sorry, but when I get back to school I’ll have to tell Dr Reedman what happened to me here.’ I looked past him. ‘I’m sorry, Sondra, but you wouldn’t expect me to lie for you.’ I turned toward the door.
He said, ‘Just a minute,’ and I turned back to face him. He [was studying me as though puzzled. ‘Are you really a student at Monequois?’
‘Of course. Didn’t Sondra tell you?’
He looked at his daughter, and she said, ‘I guess he is. I’ve seen him around the halls sometimes.’
‘I confess,’ he said to me, ‘I don’t understand. Are you a graduate, is that it?’
‘No, I’m on my six months, the same as Sondra.’
‘With that—that union?’
‘It’s a legitimate job, Mr Fleisch. We don’t sell dope in school-yards. It’s a far more honest and moral job than the job your daughter did on me, or the job your police department did on me.’
‘I think we should talk,’ he said. ‘Do you have time?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Come into the living room. No, Sondra, you’d best stay.’
‘I have other things to do,’ she said angrily.
‘I want you to hear this, too,’ he told her. To me, he said, ‘Sit down in the living room. I’ll be right back. There’s something I want to show you.’
‘All right.’
We waited in hostile silence in the living room, not looking at one another. At one point, I picked up the section of newspaper with the story in it, and folded it up. ‘I’ll need it after all,’ I said. ‘For Dr Reedman.’ I tucked it away in my pocket.
She looked at me with angry contempt. ‘Why don’t you go to hell?’ Then she stared out the window again.
When Mr Fleisch came back into the room, he carried a maroon cardboard case with him, tied with its own string. ‘I don’t think you know very much about that union you work for, young man,’ he said. ‘When I came to this position here, I was aware of the fact that the Machinists had tried to organize a local in this area once before. I had the feeling, now the plant was under new management, they might try again, so I’ve been keeping a file of newspaper clippings, all about the Machinists. I think you ought to look at them.’ He untied the string, opened the flap of the case, and handed it to me, ‘They’re all jumbled up in there,’ he said. ‘There isn’t any real order to them.’
I took the case from him. ‘Thank you.’ As he sat down across from me, his hands folded in his lap, I started to read.
Most of the clippings had to do with various Congressional committee investigations into labour unions. Men like Jimmy Hoffa and Dave Beck had captured most of the headline space in those investigations, but a number of other unions had come under the Congressional surveillance as well, including the Machinists. Machinist officials were charged, in the halls protected by Congressional immunity, with misappropriating welfare funds and dues receipts. Several locals in larger cities like New York and Chicago had been shown to be largely staffed by men with criminal records. Elections in many of the same locals had turned out to be rigged and fraudulent. At least three local executives in as many parts of the country had continued to draw their union salaries while serving jail terms, two for gambling and one—in Detroit—for smuggling. All three cases were in the late forties, the most recent being 1949. An editorial clipped from a Southern newspaper—about half the clippings were from the eight Deep South states—stated: ‘The Machinists is, in its way, more dangerous than any Hoffa or any Torio, for it is faceless. There is no evil genius of the Beck-Hoffa-Torio type at the helm of this union, who can be readily exposed and stripped of his powers. The Machinists is run by a faceless committee of perhaps a dozen men, each as corrupt and venal as anyone in organized labour. Their number gives them a kind of anonymity, which means protection from the wrath of Public Opinion. There is no one name or one face to put before the Public as the architect of evil. Before the labour movement can truly be purged, this unholy combine which now holds the Machinists in its grip must be broken and scattered.’
I read through all the clippings, and then I looked over at Mr Fleisch. ‘This is selective, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, of course. The union can do a good job of telling its own good points. That in your hand is my rebuttal.’
‘I see two kinds of crimes here,’ I said, tapping the case. ‘The proved, and the charged. Proved crimes in every case occurred five to ten years before the committee hearing. Charged crimes, with no proof, were supposed to be current. But I don’t see any clippings about indictments or trials or verdicts. Just charges, in Congressional hearings.’
He smiled palely. ‘They are a clever group, the Machinists,’ he said. ‘They’ve covered their tracks very well.’
‘I see here,’ I went on, ‘where the Machinists insisted they’d already purged themselves, gotten rid of the criminal elements, and so on. But I don’t see any proof they were lying.’
‘As I said,’ he told me, ‘they’ve covered their tracks very well.’ I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t see that you’ve proved your case. You’ve selected the best you could find for your point of view from the hostile press, and you still haven’t proved your case. There isn’t a union in the country that hasn’t had to have a house-cleaning every once in a while.’
‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that it would not be in the best interests of the workers here to join the Machinists.’
‘Why not let them decide for themselves? That’s a method called Democracy.’
‘Frankly,’ he said, ‘I’d rather not chance it. I’m still a relatively new broom here. My name isn’t Mclntyre. In fact, to some the name Fleisch sounds positively Jewish, though I’m German. The point is that I haven’t yet managed to obtain the loyalty of the workers the way it was given to the McIntyres.’
I remembered Hamilton’s letter, and the signatures, and Walter’s statistics. ‘I can well believe that,’ I said.
He spread his hands, an affable gesture. ‘Now, see here,’ he said. ‘I’m going out of my way to explain the situation to you You’re young, you’re inexperienced, you’ve been thrust into this mess without knowing what was going on. I want you to see my side of it—and Sondra’s side, too—and I want to try to make you understand that perhaps you aren’t on the side of the angels after all.’
I tapped the case again. ‘Even granting everything in here is true,’ I said, ‘which I don’t grant, but even so, what’s the alternative? What’s your side of it? Your side of it is that you have corrupted the local police force to do your bidding—’
‘Now, just a minute!’
‘You came down to the motel in that Lincoln parked out there, and told your cops to rough the union boys up a little. They smashed a typewriter and ripped my suitcase and generally wrecked the place.’
‘I’m honestly sorry to hear that,’ he said.
‘Why? You ordered it. I went to jail and got slapped around You should see Walter. They blackened his eye and cut his face and stepped on his hand. And you ordered all of that, too.’
‘I most certainly did not. If your friend Walter tried to resist—’
‘Come off it.’ I got to my feet. ‘It doesn’t matter to you whether
the union is good or bad. The union wants to take a part of your power away from you, and it’s as simple as that.’
He smiled benignly. ‘Then why am I troubling to justify myself to you?’
‘Because I’m a babe in the woods. And you’re a civilized wolf, no you feel compassion. But your compassion is cheap stuff, and it can’t buy my loyalty.’
‘I’m not trying to buy your loyalty,’ he said. The smooth surface was beginning to be ruffled just a bit. ‘I was trying to make you understand the facts. If all you want is to be stubborn and bullheaded, you’re welcome to it.’
‘Do you care who killed Charles Hamilton?’
His head shook slightly. ‘What?’
‘I asked you if you cared that Charles Hamilton was murdered. Do you care who killed him?’
‘It’s the job of the police department to find out who killed that man,’ he said indignantly. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘A man was alive. Now he’s dead. You’ve used the fact of his death to give Walter and me a bad time, but does his death mean anything else at all to you? Don’t you care that he’s dead?’
The hands spread out again, and he said, ‘But I didn’t even know the man.’
‘You’ve got to care. Somebody’s got to care.”
‘Well, I imagine his wife cares. And his children, if he has any?’
‘He didn’t have any,’ said Sondra. Her tone was blank, noncommittal.
‘I don’t see the point,’ admitted Fleisch.
‘Don’t you remember Donne? “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well us if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”’
‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘Hemingway used that.’
‘Is that all that means to you? A parlour game. Guess who used this famous quote. Next we’ll try The Song of Solomon: Lillian Hellman, Peter de Vries, John van Druten—’
‘I think I’ve heard enough,’ he said. He was no longer at all genial.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think we all have.’
I went back out to the Ford, having accomplished next to nothing. I’d met the chiefest enemy in his own den, but if I’d bearded him there, neither of us had noticed it.
I turned the Ford around and drove back into town and through to the other side and the motel. First I went into the office to make the reservations for Mr Fletcher and his party, and then I went into the unit.
There was nothing more to do, nothing at all, not until Mr Fletcher arrived. I moped around the unit a little while, and then got out the paperback Walter had been reading. It was a private eye mystery, and as I read it I realized that the world in this book was the one I’d suddenly been thrust into. The difference was that the private eye in the book knew he was living in that world, knew what it expected and how to react. Whenever a knock came at his door, he reached for his trusty .45 instead of the knob, because in his world it wasn’t ever the Fuller Brush man or a neighbour on the other side of that door, it was always Trouble.
But that wasn’t my world. In my world, when somebody knocked on the door I opened it, and it was somebody wondering what tomorrow’s assignment in French was, or it was somebody selling magazine subscriptions, or it was somebody bringing a six-pack for a quiet evening’s bull session.
I read for about twenty minutes, and then a knock sounded at the door. I was startled by it, and dropped the book. But then I felt like an idiot, too caught up in the fictional world of the book and in my own dramatizing of the situation in a town more sordid than dangerous. I got up from the bed and opened the door.
Jerry came in, moving fast, pushing me back out of the way. Ben came in after him, and another man, the one who’d been along on the first police trip here. They shut the door and Jerry looked at me with mock-sadness and said, ‘You know something, Paul? You’re the slowest learner I have ever come across, do you know that? First you ditch Ben and me, and then you go up and bother Mr Fleisch. Now, when are you going to start getting some sense?’
‘What’s this, another trip to Captain Willick?’
‘Oh, no. No, indeedy. You got your last warning.’ The third man had come around to my left as Jerry was I a I king, and now he suddenly jumped at me and grabbed my arms. He stood behind me, holding my arms bent back, cupped inside the crook of his arms, and Jerry said to me, ‘You know where we are right now, Paul? We’re in the basement at headquarters, playing poker.’
Then he stepped aside, and Ben started hitting me.
Twelve
A cold wet cloth stung my face. I twisted away from it, jabbing my arms around, and a thick hempen knot turned in my guts, scraping the walls of my stomach with sharp pain. I stopped moving, tensed in an awkward half-turned position, my arms angled up into the air, afraid to move again because of the pain A gravelled voice said, low. ‘Take it easy, mister.’
Then I opened my eyes, and looked into a face I’d never seen before, and beyond it a ceiling. The face was very close, looking down on me, and I saw it with such bright clarity that every single stiff spike of grey beard stubble on his leather-wrinkled cheek stood out plain as a pyramid on a desert, making its own shadow. The nose, I saw, was knobby and twisted as a shillelagh, with great oval nostrils clogged with black hairs. The eyes were huge and watery and brown, like the eyes of an old dog, and though he wore no glasses I clearly saw the spectacle-dents on either side of his nose, way up close to the eyes. The forehead was seamed and cracked a thousand times, like the instep of an old boot, and was high and broad, with prominent temples and wispy straggles of grey hair lying limp down across it. Farther back were jug-handle ears, with centre holes sprouting more hair. A broad mouth with cracked dusky lips was stretched in a reassuring smile, showing uneven yellow-stained teeth in a ragged line along the top, too-even bright white teeth in a straight line along the bottom.
I looked at this face, and my first thought, before all else, was that it was a lonely face, the lonely face of a lonely man who had led a lonely life for more time than I had existed. After that came the thought that it was an old face, and the thought that it was a friendly face, and the thought that it was, in its way, a magnificently ugly face.
The broad lips moved, the teeth clacked together, and the gravelly voice said, ‘You shouldn’t ought to move, mister. Just take it easy.’
Warily, afraid of the knot in my stomach, I relaxed again onto my back. I was lying on the floor in the motel room, near the foot of the two beds. I remembered Ben, his face blank with concentration, his fists slamming into my stomach, left and right and left and right, and how he’d seemed to know just when to back out of the way so the stream of my vomit would miss him and land on the floor. And after that the fists had crisscrossed my face, working more delicately because he hadn’t wanted me unconscious yet. And when he had wanted me unconscious, how he had taken the full swing, and how the fist had grown larger and larger in my red vision, making me think of freight trains, and run over me and smashed me into nothingness until the rough texture of the cold wet cloth had stung my face.
The cloth came into my view now, held in the old man’s gnarled hand. It was a white washcloth, stained brownish-red in places. ‘I’ll try not to hurt you,’ he said, and the cloth came down and touched my face again. It stung, as before, but I held against it, refusing to pull my head away.
After a while, he went away to rinse the cloth out, and I lay breathing slowly, because when I breathed too deeply the knot twisted and scraped all over again. He came back, and stroked my face some more with the cloth, and then he said, ‘Do you think you can get up on the bed?’
‘I don’t know.’ My throat ached, too, as though I’d been breathing through my mouth for an incredibly long time, so when I spoke the best I could do was a
hoarse whisper.
‘I’ll help you,’ he said, and came around to grasp me under the arms. He was a lot stronger than I’d have supposed. Getting to a sitting position was terrible, because of the hempen knot, but after that it was easier. We didn’t try to get me to my feet; I crawled on my knees around to the side of the bed while he stayed with me, his arms in my armpits holding me up. Then he lifted me, as I clung to the bed covers, and rolled me onto the bed. I wound up on my back, gasping, salt tears stinging my eyes from the pain in my stomach, and he stood back and nodded in approval. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Some of Fleisch’s bully boys done this to you, I guess.’
‘Police,’ I croaked. ‘Ben. Jerry. Another man.’
He shook his head. ‘Don’t know the police,’ he said. ‘Don’t care to. Had a brother on the force, once. Shot by a bootlegger out of Canada. Different men down there now, different kind of men. Where’s it hurt?’
‘Stomach.’
‘Excuse the imposition.’ He smiled as he said the unlikely word, and then he unbuttoned my shirt, unzipped my trousers and pushed the clothing out of the way so he could see my stomach. His wide mouth frowned and he shook his head. ‘All bruised up,’ he said. He touched me, and I shrank away from fire ‘Hurts,’ he commented. He stuck a big knuckle in his mouth ami gnawed on it, looking down at me. ‘Expect we’d better get a doctor,’ he decided at last. He glanced around and said, ‘No phone? No. Well, don’t you go anywhere.’ He nodded at me, smiling that slow wide smile of encouragement, and went away from my line of vision. I heard the door open and close, and then I closed my eyes and decided not to be conscious any more, li was too much struggle to be awake.
Probing hands, burning the inside of my stomach with lit cigarettes, drove me back awake. I opened my mouth and screamed, a higher, louder sound than I’d known I was capable of, until a hand with a taste and smell and consistency of leather clamped down on my mouth. I stared up past it, goggle-eyed, and saw the old man again, shushing me. ‘We don’t want no attention, mister,’ he said. ‘You just got to keep it in.’
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