by Paul Auster
I was pushing eighteen by the time I caught up with him. I’d grown to my full height of five feet five and a half inches, and Roosevelt’s inauguration was just two months away. Bootleggers were still in business, but with Prohibition about to give up the ghost, they were selling off their last bits of stock and exploring new lines of crooked investment. That’s how I found my uncle. Once I realized that Hoover was going to be thrown out, I started knocking on the door of every rum-runner I could find. Slim was just the sort to latch onto a dead-end operation like illegal booze, and the odds were that if he’d begged someone for a job, he would have done it close to home. That eliminated the east and west coasts. I’d already lost enough time in those places, so I began zeroing in on all his old haunts. When nothing happened in Saint Louis, Kansas City, or Omaha, I fanned out through wider and wider swatches of the Midwest. Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit. From Detroit I went back to Chicago, and even though I hadn’t turned up any leads on three previous visits there, the fourth one changed my luck. Forget about lucky three. Three strikes and you’re out, but four balls and you walk, and when I returned to Chicago in January of 1933, I finally got to first base. The trail led to Rockford, Illinois—just eighty miles down the road—and that’s where I found him: sitting in a warehouse at three o’clock in the morning, guarding two hundred smuggled cases of bonded Canadian rye.
It would have been easy to shoot him right then and there. I had a loaded gun in my pocket, and seeing that it was the same gun the, master had used on himself three years before, there would have been a certain justice in turning that gun on Slim now. But I had different plans, and I’d been nurturing them for so long, I wasn’t about to let myself get carried away. It wasn’t enough just to kill Slim. He had to know who his executioner was, and before I allowed him to die, I wanted him to live with his death for a good little moment. Fair was fair, after all, and if revenge couldn’t be sweet, why bother with it in the first place? Now that I’d entered the pastry shop, I aimed to gorge myself on a whole platterful of goodies.
The plan was nothing if not complicated. It was all mixed up with memories from the past, and I never would have thought of it without the books that Aesop read to me back on the farm in Cibola. One of them, a large tome with a ragged blue cover, was about King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. Except for my namesake Sir Walter, those boys in the metal suits were my top heroes, and I asked for that collection more than any other. Whenever I was most in need of company (nursing my wounds, say, or just feeling low from my struggles with the master), Aesop would break off from his studies and come upstairs to sit with me, and I never forgot how comforting it was to listen to those tales of black magic and adventure. Now that I was alone in the world, they came back to me often. I was on a quest of my own, after all. I was looking for my own Holy Grail, and a year or so into my search, a curious thing started to happen: the cup in the story started turning into a real cup. Drink from the cup and it will give you life. But the life I was looking for could only begin with my uncle’s death. That was my Holy Grail, and there could be no real life for me until I found it. Drink from the cup and it will give you death. Little by little, the one cup turned into the other cup, and as I went on moving from place to place, it gradually dawned on me how I was going to kill him. I was in Lincoln, Nebraska when the plan finally crystallized— hunched over a bowl of soup at the Saint Olaf Lutheran Mission—and after that there were no more doubts. I was going to fill a cup with strychnine and make the bastard drink it. That was the picture I saw, and from that day on it never left me. I’d hold a gun to his head and make him drink down his own death.
So there I was, sneaking up behind him in that cold, empty warehouse in Rockford, Illinois. I’d spent the past three hours crouched behind a stack of wooden boxes, waiting for Slim to get drowsy enough to nod off, and now the moment was upon me. Considering how many years had gone into planning for this moment, it was remarkable how calm I felt.
“Howdy there, unc,” I said, whispering into his ear. “Long time no see.”
The gun was pressed into the back of his head, but just to make sure he got the point, I cocked the hammer with my thumb. A bare, forty-watt bulb hung above the table where Slim was sitting, and all the tools of his night watchman’s trade were spread out before him: a thermos of coffee, a bottle of rye, a shot glass, the Sunday funnies, and a thirty-eight revolver.
“Walt?” he said. “Is that you, Walt?”
“In the flesh, buddy. Your number-one favorite nephew.”
“I didn’t hear a thing. How the hell’d you sneak up on me like that?”
“Put your hands on the table and don’t turn around. If you try to reach for the gun, you’re a dead man. Got it?”
He let out a nervous little laugh. “Yeah, I got it.”
“Sort of like old times, huh? One of us sits in a chair, and the other one holds a gun on him. I thought you’d appreciate my sticking to family tradition.”
“You got no call to be doing this, Walt.”
“Shut up. You start to plead with me, and I plug you on the spot.”
“Jesus, kid. Give a guy a break.”
I sniffed the air behind his head. “What’s that smell, unc? You haven’t shit your pants already, have you? I thought you were supposed to be tough. All these years, I’ve been walking around remembering what a tough guy you were.”
“You’re nuts, I ain’t done nothing.”
“Sure smells like a turd to me. Or is that just fear? Is that what fear smells like on you, Eddie boy?”
The gun was in my left hand, and in my right I was holding a satchel. Before he could continue the conversation—which was already grating on my nerves—I swung the bag around past his head and plunked it on the table before him. “Open it,” I said. As he was unzipping the satchel, I moved around to the side of the table and pocketed his gun. Then, slowly pulling my own gun away from his head, I continued walking until I was directly opposite him. I kept the gun pointed at his face as he reached in and dug out the contents of the bag: first the screw-top jar filled with the poisoned milk, then the silver chalice. I’d pinched that thing from a Cleveland pawnshop two years before and had been carrying it with me ever since. The metal wasn’t pure—just silver plate—but it was embossed with little figures on horseback, and I’d polished it up that evening until it glowed. Once it was sitting on the table with the jar, I backed up a couple of feet to give myself a broader view. The show was about to start, and I didn’t want to miss a thing.
Slim looked old to me, as old as the hills. He’d aged twenty years since I’d last seen him, and the expression in his eyes was so hurt, so filled with pain and confusion, a lesser man than myself might have felt some pity for him. But I felt nothing. I wanted him to be dead, and even as I looked into his face, searching it for the smallest sign of humanity or goodness, I thrilled at the idea of killing him. “What’s all this?” he said.
“Cocktail hour. You’re going to pour yourself a good stiff drink, amigo, and then you’re going to drink to my health.”
“It looks like milk.”
“One hundred percent—and then some. Straight from Bessie the cow.”
“Milk’s for kids. I can’t stand the taste of that shit.”
“It’s good for you. Makes for strong bones and a sunny disposition. Old as you look now, unc, it might not be such a bad idea to sip from the fountain of youth. It’ll work wonders, believe me. A few sips of that liquid there, and you’ll never look a day older than you do now.”
“You want me to pour the milk into the cup. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Pour the milk into the cup, lift it in the air and say ‘Long life to you, Walt,’ and then start drinking. Drink the whole thing down. Drink it to the last drop.”
“And then what?”
“Then nothing. You’ll be doing the world a great service, Slim, and God will reward you.”
“There’s poison in this milk, ain�
��t there?”
“Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. There’s only one way to find out.”
“Shit. You gotta be crazy if you think I’m going to drink that stuff.”
“You don’t drink it, a bullet goes into your head. You drink it, and maybe you’ve got a chance.”
“Sure. Just like that Chinaman in hell.”
“You never know. Maybe I’m doing this just to scare you. Maybe I want to drink a little toast with you before we get down to business.”
“Business? What kind of business?”
“Past business, present business. Maybe even future business. I’m broke, Slim, and I need a job. Maybe I’m here to ask your help.”
“Sure, I’ll help you get a job. But I don’t have to drink no milk to do that. If you want me to, I’ll talk to Bingo first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Good. I’ll hold you to that. But first we’re going to drink our vitamin 3D.” I stepped forward to the edge of the table, reached out with the gun, and jabbed it under his chin—hard enough to make his head snap back. “And we’re going to drink it now.”
Slim’s hands were trembling by then, but he went ahead and unscrewed the top of the jar. “Don’t spill it,” I said, as he started pouring the milk into the chalice. “You spill one drop and I squeeze the trigger.” The white liquid flowed from one container into the other, and none of it landed on the table. “Good,” I said, “very good. Now lift the cup and say the toast.”
“Long life to you, Walt.”
The skunk was sweating bullets. I breathed in the whole foul stench of him as he brought the goblet to his lips, and I was glad, glad that he knew what was coming. I watched the terror mount in his eyes, and suddenly I was trembling along with him. Not from shame or regret—but from joy.
“Snark it down, you old fuck,” I said. “Open your gullet and make with the glug-glug-glug.”
He shut his eyes, held his nose like a kid about to take his medicine, and started to drink. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t, but at least I’d held out a little scrap of hope to him. Better that than the gun. Guns killed you for sure, but maybe I was only teasing him about the milk. And even if I wasn’t, maybe he’d get lucky and survive the poison. When a man has only one chance, he’s going to take it, even if it’s the longest long shot on the board. So he plugged up his nose and went for it, and in spite of how I felt about him, I’ll say this for the creep: he took his medicine like a good boy. He downed his death as if it were a dose of castor oil, and even though he shed some tears along the way, gasping and whimpering after each swallow, he gulped on bravely until it was gone.
I waited for the poison to kick in, standing there like a dummy as I watched Slim’s face for signs of distress. The seconds ticked by, and still the bastard didn’t keel over. I’d been expecting immediate results—death after one or two swallows—but the milk must have buffered the sting, and by the time my uncle slammed the empty cup down on the table, I was already wondering what had gone wrong.
“Fuck you,” he said. “Fuck you, you bluffing son of a bitch.”
He must have seen the astonishment in my face. He’d drunk enough strychnine to kill an elephant, and yet there he was standing up and shoving his chair to the floor, grinning like a leprechaun who’d just won at Russian roulette. “Stay where you are,” I said, gesturing at him with the gun. “You’ll be sorry if you don’t.”
For all response, Slim burst out laughing. “You don’t have the guts, asshole.”
And he was right. He turned around and started walking away, and I couldn’t bring myself to fire the gun. He was giving me his back as a target, and I just stood there watching him, too shaken to pull the trigger. He took one step, then another step, and began disappearing into the shadows of the warehouse. I listened to his mocking, lunatic laughter bounce off the walls, and just when I couldn’t stand it anymore, just when I thought he’d licked me for good, the poison caught up with him. He’d managed’ to take twenty or thirty steps by then, but that was as far as he got, which meant that I had the last laugh after all. I heard the sudden, choked-off gurgling in his throat, I heard the thud of his body hitting the floor, and when I finally stumbled my way through the dark and found him, he was flat-out stone dead.
Still, I didn’t want to take anything for granted, so I dragged his corpse back toward the light to have a better look, pulling him face-down by the collar across the cement floor. I stopped a few feet from the table, but just when I was about to crouch down and put a bullet through Slim’s head, a voice interrupted me from behind.
“Okay, buster,” the voice said. “Drop the gat and put your hands in the air.”
I let go of the gun, I raised my hands, and then, very slowly, I turned around to face the stranger. He didn’t strike me as anything special: a nondescript sort of guy in his late thirties or early forties. He was dressed in spiffy blue pinstripes and expensive black shoes and sported a peach-colored hanky in his front pocket. At first I thought he was older, but that was only because his hair had turned white on him. Once you looked into his face, you realized he wasn’t old at all.
“You just knocked off one of my men,” he said. “That’s a no-no, kid. I don’t care how young you are. You do something like that, you gotta pay the penalty.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” I said, “I killed the son-of-a-bitch. He had it coming, and I did him in. That’s the way you treat vermin, mister. They crawl into your house, you get rid of them. You can shoot me if you want, I don’t care. I done what I came to do, and that’s all that matters. If I die now, at least I’m going to die happy.”
The man’s eyebrows went up about a sixteenth of an inch, then fluttered there for a moment in surprise. My little speech had thrown him, and he wasn’t sure how to react. After thinking it over for a couple of seconds, it looked as if he decided to be amused. “So you want to die now,” he said. “Is that it?”
“I didn’t say that. You’re the one holding the gun, not me. If you want to pull the trigger, there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about it.”
“And what if I don’t shoot? What am I supposed to do with you then?”
“Well, seeing as how you just lost one of your men, you might think about hiring someone to replace him. I don’t know how long Slim was on the payroll, but it must have been long enough for you to figure out what a crud-brained bucket of slime he was. If you didn’t know that, I wouldn’t be standing here now, would I? I’d be stretched out on the floor with a bullet in my heart.”
“Slim had his faults. I’m not going to argue with you about that.”
“You didn’t lose much of anything, mister. You look at the plus and minus, and you’ll see you’re better off without him. Why pretend to feel sorry for a no-good nobody like Slim? Whatever he did for you, I’ll do better. That’s a promise.”
“You got some mouth on you, shorty.”
“After what I’ve been through these past three years, it’s about the only thing I got left.”
“And what about a name? You still got one of those?”
“Walt.”
“Walt what?”
“Walt Rawley, sir.”
“Do you know who I am, Walt?”
“No, sir. I don’t have a clue.”
“The name’s Bingo Walsh. You ever hear of me?”
“Sure, I’ve heard of you. You’re Mr. Chicago. Right-hand man to Boss O’Malley. You’re King of the Loop, Bingo, the shaker and mover who cranks the wheel and makes things spin.”
He couldn’t help smiling at the buildup. You tell a number-two guy he’s number one, and he’s bound to appreciate the compliment Considering that he still hadn’t lowered the gun, I was in no mood to spread unkind words about him. As long as it kept me alive, I’d stand there scratching his back until the cows came home.
“Okay, Walt,” he said. “We’ll give it a shot. Two, three months, and then we’ll see where we stand. Sort of a trial period to get acquainted. But if you don’t
pan out by then, I dump you. I send you off on a long trip.”
“To the same place where Slim just went, I suppose.”
“That’s the deal I’m offering. Take it or leave it, kid.”
“It sounds fair to me. If I can’t do the job, you cut off my head with an axe. Yeah, I can live with that. Why the hell not? If I can’t catch on with you, Bingo, what’s the use of living anyway?”
That was how my new career began. Bingo broke me in and taught me the ropes, and little by little I became his boy. The two-month trial period was hard on my nerves, but my head was still attached to my body by the time it ended, and after that I found myself warming to the business. O’Malley had one of the largest setups in Cook County, and Bingo was responsible for running the show. Gambling parlors, numbers operations, whorehouses, protection squads, slot machines—he managed all these enterprises with a firm hand, accountable to no one but the boss himself. I met up with him at a tumultuous moment, a period of transition and new opportunities, and by the time the year was out he’d solidified his position as one of the cleverest talents in the Midwest. I was lucky to have him as my mentor. Bingo took me under his wing, I kept my eyes open and listened to what he said, and my whole life turned around. After three years of desperation and hunger, I now had food in my stomach, money in my pocket, and decent clothes on my back. I was suddenly on my way again, and because I was Bingo’s boy, doors opened whenever I knocked.
I started out as a gofer, running errands for him and doing odd little jobs. I lit his cigarettes and took his suits to the cleaners; I bought flowers for his girlfriends and polished the hubcaps on his car; I hopped to his commands like an eager pup. It sounds humiliating, but the fact was I didn’t mind being a lackey. I knew my chance would come, and in the meantime I was just thankful he’d taken me on. It was the Depression, after all, and where else was someone like me going to get a better deal? I had no education, no skills, no training for anything except a career that was already finished, so I swallowed my pride and did what I was told. If I had to lick boots to earn my living, then so be it, I’d turn myself into the best bootlicker around. Who cared if I had to listen to Bingo’s stories and laugh at his jokes? The guy wasn’t a bad storyteller, and the truth was, he could be pretty funny when he wanted to be.
