The Eighth Circle

by Stanley Ellin

  “It’s a business, all right,” Murray said. “The same kind Ralph Harlingen is in, or Arnold, for that matter. We’re all in the same barrel together, regardless of what kind of license gets us into it. Or didn’t you know you had to have a license to run an agency in New York?”

  “I never thought of it one way or the other. And I don’t know what you’re being so crabby about. Just because I made a perfectly harmless joke—”

  “In that case, skip it.”

  “Why do you keep telling me to skip things?” Ruth said irritably. “I want you to understand—oh, never mind. Let’s hear about Mrs. Donaldson. She was a lot better company than you are right now; I’ll say that much for her.”

  She had the power, he realized, to mollify him as readily as she could anger him, and it was a not unpleasant realization. “All right,” he said, “she came from a no-account family in Texas that kept goats in the yard, and by the time she was sixteen she couldn’t take any more of the family or the goats, so she went off to marry a millionaire. Naturally, she wound up in Dallas.”

  “Naturally. And this Donaldson was the millionaire. A goat of a different color, you might say.”

  “No, you might. But he was the one, all right. She worked in his office, and he started taking a fatherly interest in her, and then a different kind of interest, and it wound up with them getting plastered one night and running off to get married. The funny thing was that she wasn’t any beauty contest winner then; she didn’t have a fraction of the looks she has now, and he still went and married her. She thinks it’s because she was a virgin, and he found he couldn’t do anything about it except by marrying her. Guys like Donaldson are great ones for prima noctis, if you know what I mean. They can have almost any woman they want, but it takes that one unplucked fruit on top of the tree to really make their mouths water. And the fact that it might be a gawky seventeen-year-old kid doesn’t seem to make any difference. Anyhow, it didn’t in this case.

  “Still and all, she said it worked out pretty well for a while. She made a big project out of being the dandy little housewife, the kind you see in the magazine ads—it wasn’t hard, because she had a bunch of Mexican help to do all the work for her—and he was the loving husband, and seemed to get a big kick out of it. What she didn’t know at the time, of course, was that when he was away from home on business—and he was away plenty—the business was always women.

  “She didn’t find that out until they came to New York, and he really made a holy show of himself. I don’t know whether he didn’t care by then if she found out, or if he thought she wouldn’t, but it would have been hard for her not to. All she ever reads in the papers are the gossip columnists, and he was a natural for every columnist in town. He was not what you might call discreet about his amours.

  “So one day, without saying a word to him about all this, she just went out and dug up a lawyer out of the phone book. Her luck he happened to be somebody who used our agency, and that’s how I came to know her. I was along with her and the photographer when Donaldson was caught in the act. And I saw what it did to her. That’s why I say it was worse than a kick in the teeth. It was.”

  “Not for long,” Ruth said. “She seems to have gotten over it very nicely.”

  “That’s the point I’m making. She didn’t get over it. It’s the thing that shaped her into what she is now.”

  Ruth said caustically: “But whatever she is now, she apparently adores men; she just goes to pieces around them with love and devotion. If finding her husband was unfaithful really meant anything, it would work the opposite way, wouldn’t it? It would make her despise men.”

  “No,” said Murray, “it wouldn’t. You’ve got a nice theory there, but it doesn’t happen to fit Mrs. Donaldson. The only thing she despises is herself. She’d call me a liar if I told her that to her face, and she’d mean it, too, but it’s the plain truth. In her heart she feels inadequate. She feels there’s something she was supposed to provide in marriage—maybe sexually, maybe intellectually, whatever it is—that she didn’t provide. So what she did with Griffith, what she’s doing now with Alex, is overcompensate. She picks out some man she admires, and, by God, she’s out to prove to herself that she can be the perfect mate for him. The indispensable woman. That’s what Donaldson did to her. He knocked the props right out from under her.”

  Ruth looked at him curiously. “You like her a lot, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I pity her a lot. How much can you really like someone you pity?”

  He was deliberately aiming close to the mark with that, the thought of her tie to Lundeen uppermost in his mind, the need to rip apart that tie, to hurl Lundeen into limbo suddenly possessing him like a physical hunger. But Ruth only continued to look at him with appraisal, the scarred corner of her mouth drawn into a crooked little smile.

  “Quite a fragmented personality,” she said at last, and he felt that he had missed the mark completely.

  “Thanks,” he said. “And vulnerable. Don’t forget the vulnerable.”

  “And vulnerable,” she said.

  She was lost in her own thoughts the rest of the way home, and Murray could only wonder what the thoughts were without daring to intrude on them. It made a silent walk, but not an unpleasant one for him, because when they crossed the street at Union Square under the menacing headlights of the late traffic he drew her arm through his, and she did not withdraw the arm or make any objections. To that extent, at least, he told himself, he had taken physical possession, and had to smile inwardly at what Frank Conmy would have remarked about this peculiar game of love he was playing, and the devious way he was forced to play it, step by wary step.

  Frank had always maintained—using the Anglo-Saxon terminology to express himself—that there was only one question to ask a woman when you felt an itch for her, and it was her business to answer yes or no, I will or I won’t, no fuss and fancy footwork, no guitar solos under the window or carriage rides through the park behind a smelly horse, but yes or no, and to hell with her if it was no. Love, said Frank, was a biological urge with a pretty label on it. It was something cooked up by people who wrote popular music or advertising copy to help them sell their merchandise. And anyone who doubted that ought to be locked up for his own good, before he found himself with a wedding ring through his nose and being led along like an ox to the slaughter.

  Because Frank did not take kindly to disputation on his pet opinions, and because this opinion itself seemed to be weighted with logic, Murray had never given much thought to it, but had accepted it for what it was intended to be, wisdom for the good of a disciple’s soul. But he thought of it now, and of the way Frank looked delivering it—the big face red with a hectic flush, one hand sloshing brandy around the balloon glass, the other chopping the air with sharp strokes to emphasize a point, the voice booming out eloquently—and he found the thought a little painful. Maybe Frank had been talking good sense to him at the time, but the pressure of Ruth’s arm against him now made it seem only querulous and tinny and pitiable, and it hurt to think of Frank that way. Hurt, but couldn’t be helped. So much for Conmy, the old philosopher, Murray reflected uncomfortably.

  At the door of the house Ruth fumbled in her purse for the key, and then suddenly faced him and said, “You know, there is something to that Freud thing, after all. I mean, about forgetting things you subconsciously want to forget. What I wanted to tell you back at the party was like that. I just remembered what it was.”

  “That’s fine. But if it’s something you don’t want to talk about—”

  “I do want to talk about it. I really do. It was about the last time you brought me home—the way I acted. I was sick about it afterward, and I didn’t know how to apologize. I wanted to call you up, but every time I picked up the phone I’d start wondering what to say, and I’d put it down again. I suppose that’s what happened when I saw you at the party. I started off fine, and then first chance I had I just went blank. But I’m not blank now, thank h
eaven, so I can tell you that I did behave badly that time, and I do owe you an apology.”

  The cold wind whipped at him, sent dry leaves scraping past his feet, but he stood there looking at her, warmed by a marvelous quickening of the blood. “The funny thing is,” he said, “I was going around the same way. I thought it was my fault.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “I don’t know.” They were speaking in hushed nighttime voices, close together in the doorway, and a passing couple eyed them with interest. Ruth waited until they had gone by, and then said half-angrily, “I was afraid, I suppose. What difference does it make?”

  “None, as long as you’re not afraid now. Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of me?”

  “Yes. Oh, I don’t know. Why must you take everything I say so seriously? I told you it was like a Walpurgisnacht; everything’s all mixed up right now. And I did drink a lot. That’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and shook her once, very gently. “Are you really afraid of me?”

  “Oh, please,” she said, but there was no resistance to his hands, none of the effort to pull away from them that he had been prepared for.

  “Are you?” he demanded.

  “No.”

  “Good. Then when will I see you again?”

  “You can’t!” she said in alarm. “I mean, not this way, as if we were dating or something. Don’t you understand that?”

  “Tuesday would be fine for me,” Murray said. “I don’t have anything scheduled for the afternoon, so I could meet you after school, and we can take it from there. Dinner, theater, and a lot of talk. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds like everything else that happened tonight. It doesn’t mean anything. I’m not listening to it.”

  “Then listen. Tuesday’s the day. I’ll pick you up at the school.”

  “I don’t want you coming around the school.”

  “Then we’ll make it the house here. At seven.”

  “Isn’t there any way I can make you understand?” Ruth said in bewilderment.

  “I don’t see how, unless we sit down together and put our minds to it. We can do that Tuesday.”

  “I don’t even know if I’ll be free then. Besides, I can always call you, can’t I? If there’s some way I can arrange things—”

  It was a gambit not even worth casual notice. “You know what’ll happen,” Murray said. “You’ll keep picking up the phone and putting it down, and think of the wear and tear on your nerves. It’s better to settle it right now.”

  “You mean, settle it your way,” Ruth said helplessly. “Oh, all right, if you’re going to be so damn stubborn—”

  Walpurgisnacht, he thought, when she was gone and the door had closed behind her. And Christmas to come.

  17

  Late Tuesday afternoon Mrs. Knapp came into the office to tell him that she had the theater tickets for him, that a table for two had been reserved at Le Pavilion, and that George Wykoff had been phoning at regular intervals. He had been expecting to hear from Mr. Kirk, and what was going on there, anyhow?

  “What did you tell him?” Murray asked.

  “Oh, just that you weren’t available. From the way he sounded he wasn’t very happy about it.”

  “That’s his tough luck,” Murray said. He described to her the gist of his talk with LoScalzo, and Mrs. Knapp said, “Well, in that case we certainly don’t have any choice, do we? I’ll take care of it if he phones again. I’ll tell him you’re out of town or something. Did you know that a couple of agencies are going to be called to Albany for hearings on illegal wire tapping next week?”

  “No, where’d you pick up that information?”

  “Somebody from Inter-American told Mr. Strauss about it. The ones they’ve grabbed aren’t competitors, unfortunately, just a pair of small operators, but can you picture how this will stir up things in Albany now? They don’t know one agency from another up there. It would be the worst possible time for us to get into any kind of trouble”

  “It’s always the worst possible time,” Murray said

  On the way back to the St. Stephen to dress for dinner he bought an evening paper, and while soaking in the tub he read it, starting with the comic strips—Mary Worth’s latest protégée was in a real mess this time—and wending his way through the sports section to land in Dr Marie Zinsser’s People’s Problems, a long-winded column, couched in psychological gobbledegook, and dedicated to the proposition that anyone who wrote in for advice must be guilty of something to start with.

  The first letter struck a familiar note.

  Dear Dr. Zinsser,

  Right after we got back from our honeymoon my husband said he wanted his mother to live with us a little while. Even though she is mean and bossy I said all right, but it is three years now, and I am so unhappy all the time I could die. How can I make my husband understand that it is wrong for his mother to live with us while she can afford to live by herself?

  Edith

  Murray read the answer with fascination.

  Dear Edith,

  When you say “wrong” don’t you mean it is only “wrong” for you? The lives of two other people are involved in this, you know, and I am afraid that unconscious antagonisms in you prevent you from taking this into account. One must understand his own motivations fully before he—

  It was an answer, Murray had to admit, squarely in the great Zinsser tradition.

  While dressing, he put Berrigan’s “I Can’t Get Started” on the phonograph and set it for replay. He briefly considered his neighbors in the apartment next door, dismissed the thought, and turned up the volume of the machine. There were only two suites on the top floor of the St. Stephen, and the couple who occupied the other one—a retired rear admiral and his wife—had acute hearing partly compensated for by a sense of humor. They would tolerate three replays of any record at the peak of its volume, and then would knock at the door in good-natured protest. When Murray opened the door, one or the other would say, “Now, hear this!” which was his cue to say, “Aye, aye, sir,” and turn the machine’s volume down.

  But what he needed now, Murray knew, was loud music and strong drink. Even an old sea dog would appreciate his feelings if he ever got one look at the reason for them. Murray poured himself the strong drink, downed half of it, and took the remainder to the bedroom as sustenance while he finished dressing. Pushing the cuff links into his shirt, he mentally framed his own letter to Dr. Zinsser.

  Dear Dr. Zinsser,

  I am a romantic-type fellow who is hopelessly in love with a girl who imagines she is engaged to a cop who is under indictment for perjury. Tell me, do you think I have any right to expect a wedding present from a man in jail?

  The familiar knock sounded just as Berrigan had completed his third mournful round of the song, and while Murray was still trying to draft a proper Zinsserite answer to himself. He loudly goose-stepped to the door and threw it open. “Aye, aye, sir,” he said.

  The man standing there blinked at him. It was not the admiral. It was a chauffeur in dark livery, his driver’s cap held close to his chest in both hands. A compact little man, a head shorter than Murray, with a slightly battered-looking face and bright, black shoebutton eyes.

  “Hell,” said Murray, “I’m sorry. I thought you were somebody else.”

  “My name is Caxton, sir,” the chauffeur said. “I’m from the Clientele Limousine Service. Are you Mr. Kirk?”

  “Yes, but I don’t think I’m the Kirk you want. I didn’t order any car.”

  The man looked with puzzlement over Murray’s shoulder into the empty room beyond. “Do you have someone else here who might have called, sir?”

  “No. You can see for yourself there’s nobody else here.”

  “Well, thanks, Mr. Kirk,” Caxton said, and when he said it Murray knew that he had been beautifully taken. But there was no time to make any move now, no time for anything but
regrets. Not after the man flipped the chauffeur’s cap aside with one hand to show the gun held in the other, its barrel in a straight line with Murray’s belly. It was an ugly-looking gun, made even uglier, somehow, by a stubby, two-inch barrel. “Go on,” said Caxton. “Back up.”

  Murray backed up. It was the first time in his life, including his army service, that he had ever found himself looking into the business end of a gun, and the sight washed all the bravado out of him, leaving a sick and helpless anger in its place. Caxton followed him into the room and slammed the door shut with his foot. He frowned with distaste at the phonograph. “Turn that thing off,” he said. “How can you stand all that noise?”

  Murray switched off the phonograph and faced the gun again. It struck him that if the man had really intended to use the gun then and there, he would have wanted as much noise as possible around him to muffle the sound. For what it was worth it was an emboldening thought.

  “What’s all this about?” Murray said. “Who put you up to it?”

  “Nobody put me up to anything, Mr. Kirk. I mean, if you’re trying to make out I’m some kind of hood you got me all wrong. I’m very legitimate. Six Caddie limousines working for me, and ten guys on the payroll, and a half interest in a nice garage—that’s legitimate, ain’t it?”

  “Sure,” Murray said. “Especially the way you go out and get customers with a gun. Who owns the other half of the nice garage? George Wykoff?”

  “Maybe he does, and maybe he don’t,” Caxton said blandly. “Whichever way it is, Mr. Wykoff happens to be a very good friend of mine. I mean, he’s the kind of a friend where if he says, ‘I wish I could get close to a certain Mr. Murray Kirk,’ why, I’m glad to fix it for him. Do him a favor, you might say. Mr. Wykoff’s got a lot of friends like that. Few days ago he got all bothered because a certain Mr. García—some greaseball who runs a lunch stand over on Eighth Avenue—was being kind of mysterious about things, so last night one of those friends got sore about it and jumped all over Mr. Garcia. He’s up in Montefiore Hospital now. I mean, in case you want to drop in on him with a box of candy or something.”