The Dead of Winter

by William H Hallahan

  With guns blazing, his society would come roaring onto the pages of history, calling for righteous anger, smiting the atavistic transgressors, ridding the nest of vermin and filth. Kicking doors open and blasting with automatic arms, shotguns. Quick night raids. Line them up against a subterranean brick wall. Rat-tat-tat. Bodies sprawled amidst the money and dice, the packages of clandestine narcotics, smashing one cabal after another until crime, criminals were at bay everywhere, until selling a package of dope on a corner could be followed by a single rifle shot and another criminal corpse for the police to cart away.

  Nor would the corrupt police be immune. Shot in the back of the head when the grasping hand was held out. And public officials on the take. And crooked businessmen. It might take years. But soon enough society’s head would be turned back. Corruption would no longer be regarded as smart or daring. Outraged morality would put it down and render his society superfluous, no longer needed.

  Victory!

  That forty-three million dollars could save mankind.

  In his excitement, Tyler drank the seltzer too soon and found himself chewing half-dissolved tablets.

  Snow was in the air.

  A muffling blanket of thick gray clouds floated down from the northwest in the early afternoon, driven by a relentless breeze. By three the weather forecast was warning of an eight-inch fall.

  Lyons decided it was time to make his move. He left his office, took the Lexington Avenue subway downtown to the offices of the Peregrine Line, Maritime Passenger Desk, then took the subway to Brooklyn.

  It was December 23.

  Vincent Reece’s apartment windows were open.

  Both of them were open four or five inches. The breeze was steady and hard, coming off the Jersey meadows and across the broad flat harbor. It flopped the hems of Reece’s curtains without cease.

  Lyons paused at his cellar gate, frowning at them, then he went in under the brownstone steps. The hallway near his door was crowded with furniture.

  The gutted couch was against a wall, moulting large wads of batting. Vincent Reece’s rug and linen lay forward along the same wall. The kitchen table and chairs stood near the subcellar door, and other impedimenta lay strewn along the passageway.

  Lyons went up the carpeted inner stairway feeling a strong draft. More furniture stood about the first-floor hallway. The bureau, the loose drawers now containing the pile of rifled clothing, shoes. The door to the apartment stood ajar.

  The whole building was chilled by the draft. Cold air was seething through the apartment windows.

  Lyons pushed the door open slowly. The bathroom was crammed with furnishings. A lamp stood at a crazy angle in the lavatory sink. All the kitchen material—empty cans and boxes, dishes, wastebasket—all were piled in a rubble in the kitchen sink. The wooden flooring of the apartment had been completely cleared.

  From the front-window wall to the rear of the pullman kitchen, the checkered parquet flooring had been machine-sanded to the bare wood and freshly varnished.

  Under the heavy breeze pouring through both windows, it was nearly dry.

  Teresa Raphael’s facial expression was a combination of anger and confusion. She sat in the hallway on Vinny Reece’s armchair, still wearing her heavy winter coat and hat.

  “No,” she said to Dan Lyons. “I didn’t order it. I don’t know who did it. It must be some kind of a mistake.”

  “Maybe the owner of the building,” Lyons said.

  “Owner? Dan, I’m the owner.”

  Surprised, he searched her face. “You’re the owner?”

  “Yes. Will you go in there and shut those damned windows? It’s going to take four hours to get this building warm again and there’s a snowstorm coming.”

  Lyons walked along the slightly tacky floor to the windows and shut them. The room smelled strongly of freshly cut wood and varnish.

  The old hardwood parquet flooring showed a handsome grain in the faint light. It was a beautiful job.

  Lyons found Teresa Raphael still slumped in the chair. She was smirking at him. Then she laughed and coughed. “Dummy. He did the wrong house—wrong apartment. I got a free floor-sanding job. There must have been fifteen coats of old shellac and varnish on that floor. Look at this hallway. God, what a mess!”

  Lyons nodded at her as he listened to her rattling laughter.

  Joe Tyler arrived first.

  “Hell of a note!” he shouted at Dan Lyons. He shouldered his way past and up the staircase.

  Lyons followed him and watched silently.

  Tyler clumped loudly across the floor, his footfall echoing in the empty room. He came back to the doorway, his brown eyes small with anger. “Wiped out! We let it get through our hands! Dumb, dumb, dumb!” He strode up and down. “What does she know about all this?”

  Lyons shrugged. “She thinks the refinishers came to the wrong house.”

  “Of course. Obvious as hell. Some slopehead with a floor-sanding business—a third-grade education—and he writes the wrong number down over the phone. And wipes out one of the most fantastic opportunities in the history of man!”

  “Is that the way it was?”

  “It’s cold as hell in here, Lyons.” Tyler paused. “What does that crack mean?”

  Lyons watched Tyler steadily without answering him.

  Tyler walked slowly up to Lyons. “You …” He pointed at the floor behind him. “Nah. Wait.” He stopped and reflected. “Let’s go down to your place and sit down a minute.”

  Basche arrived warily. He paused on the sidewalk and examined the now shut windows of Reece’s apartment, then scanned the street in both directions. He knuckled Lyons’ window through the grating softly.

  He entered without speaking. His eyes swept over the furniture in the hallway, the flotsam, jetsam of Vinny Reece’s life, then walked up the stairs as he had done on many a poker night.

  The heater, laboring to overcome the penetrating chill from the draft, banged and stuttered the pipes in walls on every floor. He stalked across the hall carpeting, opened the door and stood looking in. Then he turned and faced Lyons in the hallway and Tyler peering up from the stairwell. Wordlessly he stepped past them both and descended.

  “What do you think?” demanded Tyler. “The landlady says it was a mistake.”

  “Bullshit,” said Basche. He squatted on one of Lyons’ chairs, arms propped on knees, hands dangling. Thoughtfully he tapped a foot. He scowled furiously.

  “Lyons thinks it was our friend with the scar,” said Tyler.

  “Bullshit,” said Basche. His haughty eyes studied the two of them. “Forty-three million dollars. We could have set up a hundred armies for you, Tyler, and still have had plenty for … other things.” He smote his knee with a palm. “Well, maybe it’s for the best. This was becoming an uneasy arrangement anyway. God damn! I’ve been feeling a draft down my back for a while.”

  Lyons leaned with arms folded on the doorjamb and watched him with narrowed, sullen eyes.

  “God in heaven,” said Tyler. He sat down lumpishly in a chair.

  Lyons watched Tyler, looking small and deflated in wrinkled clothes, then turned to Basche, huge, taut like a spring and flawless in his tailored overcoat. Wordlessly Basche smacked a palm on his knee again and showed his even white teeth.

  Lyons waited.

  Basche glanced at him, seeing the implacable folding of the arms and the belligerent, lowered head. “This is your terrain, Lyons. You get me?”

  Lyons watched with his mouth shut.

  “What are you talking about?” demanded Tyler.

  Basche didn’t answer.

  “Back off, Roger,” said Tyler. “We three aren’t out of the woods by a far cry. He didn’t arrange that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s illogical—and Lyons is anything but illogical.” Tyler brushed his mustache thoughtfully and looked at Basche’s cold, cold eyes. “How do you know I didn’t do it? Or the landlady?”

  Basche’s e
yes lowered an instant, then flicked at Lyons.

  “Sure,” said Tyler. “Maybe Lyons and the landlady. You can afford a few partners when you have forty-three million. But maybe it was you, Roger.”

  “Ha!”

  “Ha, my ass! Dummy up, Roger. We didn’t do this. None of the three of us—especially Lyons. Use your goddam head for something other than a hair holder. He found it. If he’d wanted it all for himself, he wouldn’t have told us about it in the first place.”

  “People change their minds,” said Basche.

  “And you’d better change yours. I think someone has us tagged and we’d better regroup and plan or we’ll all die—separately or together. Dummy up, Roger.”

  Basche looked at Lyons. “You got anything to say?”

  Lyons looked Basche over slowly from head to foot. “How much did you pay the floor sander?”

  Basche stood up. “You son-of-a-bitch! Don’t you cat-and-mouse me!”

  Lyons straightened up. “You slopeheaded bastard! You’re the only one of the three of us dumb enough, clumsy enough to engineer that piece of stupidity.”

  “Lyons, I’m warning you.”

  “You’re warning me what?”

  “Roger, shut up,” said Tyler. “Both of you shut up. The hell with the money. I’m interested in seeing us come out of this alive. And that means we have to stick together. Trust each other.”

  “Too late for that,” said Lyons.

  “It can’t be! Listen, Roger, whoever did that job up there did it to set us at each other’s throat. Then he’ll pick us off one at a time.”

  “Uh.” Roger brushed a hand through the air.

  Lyons crossed the room. “Look, Basche, I think we’re going to see the end of our alliance tonight. I think we’re going to go our separate ways. But just for the sake of solidarity and survival—yes, survival—I’ll try to spell it out for you. I didn’t do that upstairs. He didn’t and you didn’t. If you don’t believe that, then take a walk. Because there’s no basis for us to stick together otherwise. If you do believe that, then you can see we’ve been set up. And we have to form a plan or we’re dead.”

  Basche watched him without speaking.

  “Roger, we have to do something,” said Tyler.

  Basche nodded. “O.K. I’ll think about it. Tomorrow.”

  “There’s no tomorrow, Basche,” said Lyons.

  “I said ‘tomorrow.’” Basche stood up.

  ‘Lock your door,” said Lyons.

  Tyler looked out of the window. “It’s snowing,” he said.

  13

  The phone rang at ten after nine that night.

  Dan Lyons picked it up. “Hello,” he said. The line clicked and went dead. Lyons listened a moment longer and hung up.

  It was time to get started. He looked again out at the snow falling in the street. Not a slowly turning flaky Christmas-card snow now, but fine, granular snow carried on a bitter northeast breeze.

  Lyons went to his closet and pulled out a large two-suit leather bag and a smaller leather bag. Then he went down to the cellar. He located his foot locker in a storage bin, finely powdered with white cellar dust. He lugged it up the stairs to his apartment and wiped it off with a wet cloth.

  He removed piles of folded clothes from his bureau and stacked them on the couch. Then he began packing the locker and the two pieces of luggage with them.

  At a quarter of ten the phone rang.

  Lyons picked it up. “Hello.” Click. “Hello.” He hung up again. He looked at his slowly ticking wall clock. Seven hours and fourteen minutes to go. Then down the rabbit hole.

  He looked at all the miscellaneous papers he’d acquired. Quickly he began sorting through them, flipping them singly onto the couch.

  Hurry. Hurry. He leafed the pages of Fleagle’s diary. xxxah aheil rahcy odere droxx. How long ago? Ten years? Five years? Twelve days? Just twelve days ago. A watershed day that separated the old Dan Lyons, half man, half angel, from the new Dan Lyons, half man, half devil. Seas incarnadine. And no road back.

  He tossed the diary on the couch. Then his translation of it. And his notes on his phone calls to the Brooklyn Fleagles. “Strapless evening gown. No visible means of support.”

  He riffled the papers from Ozzie New York Avenue’s desk. “Ham on rye. Two coffees.” Charlie’s Laundry. He dumped them in one handful. Then the Pell papers and the contents of Pell’s wallet, then the wallet and the green bills.

  He slipped a brown paper bag from his sink cabinet and opened it.

  The phone rang again. Lyons glanced at his wall clock. 10:14. He picked it up and held it to his ear without speaking. After a moment it went click. Dead. He hung it up and went to a front window. The ground was completely covered with snow, and one side of the shaggy-barked white oak tree was whitened with snow in the crevices.

  The street was empty.

  The phone rang again. Lyons glanced at the clock. 10:15. He picked it up and listened. “Dan? Dan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s me. Joe. Have you been ringing my phone?”

  The apartment-house complex was enormous—an entire city block, in fact. The basement, which consisted of endless corridors conveying pipes and wires, was like the hold of a ship. It was spotless. Dustless. Shipshape in fresh deck paint, walls and floor.

  Lyons followed a long row of overhead lights in the main corridor, periodically passing the doors to dumbwaiter shafts, each with its row of apartment buzzers. He heard only the sound of his own footfalls.

  Several times he glanced over his shoulder, then stopped and listened. There was the distant hum of a generator or a heater, a steady, remote, almost inaudible sound. And there was silence. He watched the long corridor behind him for a few moments. It remained empty.

  Turning, he followed the corridor to the end and at the turning found a door marked “Incinerator.” He went in. The door softly closed behind him.

  The room was very warm and there was a faint odor of garbage. Rows of empty galvanized barrels stood against a wall. From a steam-hose a faint wisp of steam fluted. Set into the fire-brick wall was a door with a thick glass window.

  He looked through the window at the rows of gas burners, jetting fingers of flame through a mound of white ash. The cast-iron door carried the legend: AJAX SMOKELESS INCINERATORS. Lyons opened the door and threw the paper bag into the jet of heat and shut the door. As he watched through the window, the bag ignited and flamed like a log. Slowly, like a paper under water, the bag unfolded and relaxed. Pieces of it turned to white ash and floated away. The interior papers flamed and charred away. Pell’s money burned eagerly. The gas flames consumed everything, leaving finally a white fly ash. Sticking through that was Pell’s wallet. It burned with an intense blue flame, writhing, opening like a clam, its corners and edges, pierced with holes, blond with flame. The wallet grew thinner. Its edges in a hurricane of hot air tumbled away, eaten by heat and fire. When it stopped burning, it was a crumpled sheet of gray ash in a depression of white ash.

  Lyons opened the corridor door and listened. Then he walked back along the corridor. He looked at his watch: 11:25. Only six hours and thirty-five minutes to go. Hang in there. He hurried—to be back in his apartment before 11:45. Tyler’s plan was zany. But he’d agreed to go through the motions.

  He mounted the outside steps of the high-rise apartment building to street level. The air was numbing, eager, and it hustled the fine snow at the ground on an angle with sharp driving force like something on the attack.

  Lyons zipped up his jacket quickly, feeling the wind freeze the perspiration on his brow. He zipped the hood up on his head and tied the drawstrings under his chin.

  Christmas lights and electric candles burned in many windows of the apartment building. In a number of them pre-Christmas Eve parties were evident.

  He shuffled through the powdered snow, following his own footsteps in his Tingley boots. As he walked his eyes searched for ominous movement.

  There were over
two inches of snow on the ground, and it was falling thickly, with a long night ahead of it. Cars on both sides of the street were blanketed now, and white stripes covered window ledges, stone walls, bare tree branches and gates. There were no people on the streets. His eyes searched every doorway and every shadow under the parading street lamps.

  If anyone had followed him, it was a beautiful job of tailing.

  Lyons walked around the corner and down the street to his apartment. He opened his wrought-iron gate and stepped in. Then he unlocked his vestibule door and slammed it from the outside. He stood under the steps and waited, listening.

  The city was silent. He was alone with the vast susurrating sound of snowfall. He waited still longer. Then he stepped up to the railing and leaned out over the sidewalk. He studied the street with care, doorway by doorway, car by car, shadow by shadow. Then he turned and looked into Vinny Reece’s dark windows.

  Satisfied, he unlocked the vestibule door and stepped into the hallway just as the phone rang. He unlocked his apartment door quickly and picked it up.

  “Lyons?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Basche. What time do you show?”

  “Eighteen minutes of.”

  “Right. That’s what I’ve got. Are you ready?”

  “Wait a second.” He unzipped his coat and tossed it on a chair. Then he picked up the Brooklyn phone directory. “What page?”

  “First page of listings. Skip the initials and begin with the first name.”

  “Starting with Aaron, Able A.?”

  “Yeah.”

  “O.K. Aaron, Able A., 814 Albemarle Road.”

  “Aaron, Arthur K., 3506 Avenue L,” replied Basche.

  “Aaron, Eliot P., 1082½ East 28th Street,” read Lyons.

  At the bottom of the column Basche said, “I have fourteen minutes to twelve.”