Act of Fear df-1

by Michael Collins

  ‘Tell me about the other guy,’ I said.

  ‘Beat it,’ Magda Olsen said.

  ‘Did Jo-Jo see that cop mugged?’

  ‘Get lost, mister!’ Magda said.

  If I had had Swede alone, I think I could have made some progress. As it was, I was ready to go on with the dance. I did not have the chance. Two men entered from some other room, and the music stopped. They were boys, not men, but they were big boys. They looked enough like Swede to tell me that I was looking at two of Jo-Jo’s brothers. There was a girl behind them. The girl was pretty. The boys were not.

  ‘Take off,’ one of the blond boys said.

  ‘My mother said get lost,’ the second giant said.

  I had the pistol in my belt. I did not even show it this time. The two boys looked about as dumb as Swede, and they did not have his forty-odd years of learning that caution pays. They had not had all the long, hard years to develop doubts. They would not hesitate. I turned without a word and went.

  I left them all there in that gaudy sewer of a living room, standing in a line like a firing squad. The boys and Swede were all broad grins. My back going away without a fight made them feel big and strong. The women were not grinning. The ruined face of the mother was as stony as ever above that expensive black dress. As I reached the door I glanced back and saw the old woman already talking hard to Swede.

  Then I saw the girl. She had to be Jo-Jo’s sister. I saw her eyes watching me. I had the sudden impression that she was the only one of them who was not completely happy to see my back.

  Chapter 6

  In the hot summer nights of New York 4 a.m. is the bad time. The bars and clubs close at 4 a.m., and then there is no more escape from the heat and no more escape from the troubles that follow a solitary man. Four o’clock in the morning is that final moment of truth — the time when there is nowhere else to go but home. If a man has a home.

  For me, though, 4 a.m. is one of the good times. When the bars and clubs close Marty has time for me. I often find myself waiting with the last sad drunks for four o’clock. They wait with fear, and I wait with anticipation. It gives me an edge. It makes me feel smug. We are all human. I have somewhere to go, and the wait until 4 a.m. is long. I had a lot of time to consider what I had learned. I did not even feel much like drinking, but the Riviera Tavern was air-conditioned. So I drank slow beers while I waited and considered.

  I knew no more than when Petey had come to my office about where Jo-Jo was or why. But it did look like Jo-Jo was really missing and not just on vacation. The Olsens were not surprised at the thought that I was not the only one looking for Jo-Jo. The only apparent reason for Jo-Jo to be wanted was that he knew something about Stettin and that he was afraid for his life. Would a man who had only mugged a cop and left him alive then risk the chair by killing a witness? Would the mugger turn assault into murder? You’re damned right he would. It’s one thing to commit a crime without murder when you expect to get away with it and another thing to face a sure prison term if you leave a witness alive.

  Yet I did not like the answer that Jo-Jo had witnessed the mugging of Stettin.

  It was not enough. In Chelsea the best kid in the world has it from the cradle that a man does not fink to the police, does not get involved, does not see what he should not see. (Not just in Chelsea these days, either. Nobody gets involved, nobody sees, everybody turns and walks away.) How different could Jo-Jo be? If he were so different that he rejected the entire code of Chelsea, then the simple act was to go to the police. He had not gone to the police, and he had vanished, and there had to be more than the witnessing of a mugging. But what? What was so very special and dangerous about Stettin’s mugging? If that was the problem at all.

  Four o’clock came at last, and we were all sent out into the night. My fellow last-ditch drinkers shuffled off slowly to reluctant destinations or to no destination at all. To some alley or doorway where they could hide until the bars opened again.

  I walked briskly, I felt smug, I was sober, and Marty should be home by now. And I continued to think about the Olsens. They were worried. But not about Jo-Jo. I was certain of that. They were worried about themselves. As if they were in some kind of collective trouble. I did not think it was police trouble. They were angry-worried, not scared-worried. They were like people on eggshells. They acted as if they did not want to breathe if breathing would expose them. Why?

  I was coming up with a lot of questions and few answers. What was there about their missing son that worried the Olsens so much? Concern, yes, that I would expect. But the Olsens did not seem concerned about Jo-Jo; they seemed concerned about themselves. They seemed worried about anyone looking for Jo-Jo — for what it would do to them, not to Jo-Jo. And then I could have it all wrong. Maybe they were just protecting Jo-Jo.

  I felt uneasy. The night was hot, and as I walked I did not feel good. Questions without answers make me uneasy. Key questions that I can’t get a grip on, that keep slipping away, make me as uneasy as hell. It is like looking into a dark abyss and wondering what monsters might be lurking down there. Monsters that might be waiting for me. Nobody likes the unknown.

  ‘You look terrible,’ Marty said at the door. ‘Come on in.’

  Martine Adair. That is her name on the off-Broadway theatre programmes and on the semi-nude come-on posters outside the tourist club on Third Street. It is not her real name. Her real name doesn’t matter. She changed her name for a new identity, and I tell stories about how I lost my arm because I don’t like the real story. Marty is twenty-seven. Young but no kid. She has not been a kid since she was sixteen. She’s a good actress and an adequate girl-show dancer. Her work is more important to her than anything else in the world. The acting, not the girl-show. She studies hard. She has a reason to work. She acts because she must act, for its own sake. And she is good. Someday other people may even know that.

  ‘Irish?’ she asked.

  ‘Beer. It’s hot enough to boil whiskey.’

  ‘Not in here it isn’t. In here it’s cool. Respect my air-conditioning; it cost plenty.’

  She brought my beer from the kitchen. Her pyjama top came down to the bottom of her white panties. Marty wears only white underwear. She says she gets sick of coloured skivvies in her money work. She never wants to see a spangle or a fringe anywhere in her apartment.

  ‘With the beer I’ll be cool inside and out,’ I said.

  Her apartment is a big, rambling affair. A typical Village apartment: old, inadequate, comfortable, and expensive. The furniture was added one piece at a time because she wanted each piece for itself. Antiques are her major hobby. She refinishes them herself. (That is one of the moments I will remember no matter what happens to me in the end: Marty in a white shirt smeared by wood stain, her face dirty, her hands the colour of old leather, her small body encased in torn dungarees, her hair in her eyes, the eyes bright as she works over an old table she loves.)

  She is a small girl, and the hair in her eyes is red just now. It has been other colours in our three years. She has big eyes and a small face that could be the face of a boy. Her mouth is her gimmick — the mouth of a sad little boy on her woman’s body, and the combination makes the drunks drool. Her manner is brisk. She strides when she walks. Her walk is almost a run. She does everything fast and eager. She is very alive, and she looks too young for me. She is not too young, but she will probably ruin me.

  ‘Bring me up to date,’ she said. ‘Who hit you?’

  We were on the couch that she bought at a sell-off of old hotel furniture. It is big enough for a giant to stretch out on, if there were any giants any more. I like that couch. I lay at one end, and Marty lay at the other. Our legs touched. I told her about Swede and the Olsens. She frowned.

  ‘Can you drop it? It has a smell, a stink.’

  ‘I took the fifty. I’ll go a little longer.’

  ‘This Jo-Jo has trouble, baby,’ she said. ‘He took his own way out. Maybe he doesn’t need you.’

  I
said that she changed her name because she wanted a new identity and that I tell stories about my lost arm because I don’t like the real story. Those things are only partly true. She changed her name for a new identity, yes, but also to forget the old identity. She wanted to shut out the past because her past, her childhood and her family, was her trouble. I tell stories about the arm not so much because I’m ashamed of the real way I lost it, but because how I lost it is part of my youth. My youth is one of my troubles. So when I see people stare at my missing arm I tell yarns.

  I tell them that I lost it on Normandy Beach with the first wave under that terrible fire. I was in the OSS and lost it trying to assassinate Hitler. I was trapped in a sinking submarine and had to cut the arm off to free myself and reach the surface. I tell it many ways, most of them involved with the war, and, strangely, my listeners usually believe me. I suppose we all really want to believe what we are told, and the war is a long time ago now. My lies are as real now as the true stories, even to the men who were there. All my stories are exciting, even heroic. Why not; people like heroes and excitement even second hand in a tavern. Actually, of course, I never made the war, since the arm was gone by then, except on merchant ships, which is how I started on the sea.

  None of that is the point. The point is that Marty understands troubles and the way people use to solve troubles. She understands a man’s way out; she has her own. She does not go around knocking anyone’s way out. She knows that some use whiskey and some use women, that some use junk and some watch TV ten hours a day, that some turn on with pot or acid and some beat their kids, that some chase girls up dark alleys and some chase boys. She knows that most of us use some kind of act, some mask we show the world and usually come to believe is our real face after all. She knows that everyone has a hideout. The hideout can be a saloon or a needle in the vein. It can be a bowling alley twice a week or a bridge club every day or a fraternal club where they wear silk robes and funny hats and give ritual oaths and passwords. It can be the Nazi Party or the Fascist Party, a tree house or just the upstairs back bedroom. She knows that the hideout can be a dream or just a dark place inside a man that comes out alone in bed in the dead of night. She knows her own hideout, and she knows that one of mine is the stories of my arm.

  It was the stories that first made her look at me. They intrigued her; she recognized them as a hideout. The first weeks she made me tell her every story I could dream up. Except the real one. She only let me tell her the real yarn a long time later, after I had the key to her apartment. We still lie around in bed and she makes me tell a story. She always acts as if she believed the story. I suppose because she knows that, in a way, I almost believe them myself. Why not? As Marty says, what is true when you come down to it? Especially what is really true that we tell, or know, about ourselves?

  ‘Jo-Jo has no troubles,’ I said. ‘Not to hear Petey Vitanza tell it, and not that I can find.’

  ‘A good boy who saves his money, has ambition, and works hard,’ Marty said. She sipped her martini. ‘But he’s run, and his father tries to beat you to stop you finding him.’

  ‘To stop me from even looking,’ I said. ‘There’s a difference. He wants me to stop looking.’

  ‘No one knows everything about someone else,’ Marty said. ‘This Jo-Jo is in trouble the Vitanza boy doesn’t know about.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but what?’

  ‘Look at his dream and his family,’ Marty said. ‘One or the other, and sometimes both. You take me, Dan. Sixteen and a lush for a mother, and the college boys treated me like dirt because I was a town girl and not sorority. I decided to be free and famous. A hundred-to-one it’s the family.’

  ‘Patrolman Stettin is in it somewhere,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And you get mixed up in a cop beating for fifty bucks?’

  ‘Maybe Jo-Jo’s already dead,’ I said. ‘Damn it, Marty, I can’t even buy that. All he had to do was go to the cops. They’d have had a cop mugger so fast no one would have noticed Jo-Jo.’

  ‘So what are you going to do? You decided to be a private cop.’

  ‘I decided to eat,’ I said. ‘A private cop was the only experience I had to sell around here. If I went back to sea, who would take care of you?’

  ‘The way you take care of me you could have picked up coins in the street. But go ahead, worry about who would take care of me. I like you to worry about that.’

  ‘You sound like you want me to make you honest.’

  ‘Maybe I’m getting domestic,’ she said. ‘Or just tired.’

  ‘That’ll do it,’ I said, ‘and don’t scare me.’

  ‘Would it scare you so much?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘and that’s the part that really scares me. I might even like it.’

  ‘I wish I could put your arm back,’ Marty said.

  She was lying there in the dark of the big room, smiling at me from the far end of the couch. Face to face ten feet apart with our legs touching. I touched her leg with my hand. She sipped her martini.

  ‘No one can put back what’s missing, but you put me back into the world,’ I said.

  ‘Is that what I do?’

  She does. Sometimes Marty is the only reason I can think of for getting out of bed in the morning. Sometimes even Marty isn’t reason enough. I get out of bed anyway. There is a very big question in that fact somewhere.

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ she said.

  It takes a one-armed man longer to undress. Marty’s bedroom is large, and the bed is king-sized. There is a radio on the bed table and a TV set for watching when she is alone. A neon sign in the street below blinks red and yellow most of the night. Marty likes the blinking sign below, and she likes the noise of a jukebox that filters up. She is afraid of the dark, of hearing no sounds and no voices. She is afraid of going to sleep. In bed she laughs a lot. She plays games. But when the games are over she holds me tight. I know the feeling. I know the need and the fear that fills our world. And now I found myself wondering what Jo-Jo Olsen needed and where he was. I waited in the bed for Marty and wondered if Jo-Jo, too, was lying in some bed somewhere needing voices, afraid to sleep.

  ‘Dan.’

  Her voice was low. I looked. I expected to see her face close in the dark with the expression that she wanted me. She was not close. She was at the bedroom window looking down at the dark street. I got out of bed and went to her. She held the heavy drapes open a crack.

  ‘There,’ she said.

  At this hour the street was all dark. The neon sign had gone off, the jukebox was quiet. It was the edge of morning, and a faint grey tinged the sky to the east. The street itself was the deep black that precedes the dawn. But I saw them.

  ‘Yes,’ I said softly.

  There were two of them. Shadows hidden in a recessed doorway across the street. I knew them. Not their names and not their faces, but I knew them. If we had been in some other country they could have been secret police or assassins waiting for some leader of men. They could have been the thin and starved rebels in too many countries where tyranny still rules. Here and now, on the Village street, they would be none of those things. They were hoods, gunmen, muscle boys; the soldiers of an underworld that was the shame of the country. And from where they waited they had a clear view of only one building — Marty’s building.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘They must be after me. They won’t try to come in.’

  ‘Dan, I don’t like it.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ I said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

  The ways of fear are strange. We wanted each other.

  Marty went to sleep just as the dawn came. I lay awake. The two men down there in the street made all this something else.

  I wondered what I had got into for fifty bucks and a kid who wanted to find his friend?

  Chapter 7

  The ringing of the telephone woke me up at ten o’clock. Marty was still asleep, and I wished I was. But I groaned my way to the telephone. The voice on the other end was unfami
liar and official. It identified itself as a Lieutenant Dolan, New York City Police Department, and its message was that Captain Gazzo wanted to see me — now.

  I hung up and went back to the bed wondering if this was it. Had they found Jo-Jo? Floating in the river? Under a pile of old garbage in a cellar? I had no doubts what Gazzo wanted to talk about. My feelers on Jo-Jo would not have gone unnoticed at headquarters. And Gazzo is Homicide. I looked at the bed, and my whole body groaned to get back in and vanish under the covers. Instead, I took a deep shudder to try to wake up and touched Marty.

  She snarled and burrowed deeper into the pillow. She does not like to wake up any more than she likes to go to sleep. Under the sheet she was small and slender and pale. At that moment it did not seem that there could be anything important enough to leave her for. And yet I would leave. If I could.

  I went to the window to check. My two shadows were still there. In a way I felt for them; it must have been a long night. I dressed and went to kiss Marty. She swore at me and flopped over.

  ‘Don’t open the door to anyone you don’t know,’ I said.

  I slapped her rump. She opened one angry eye.

  ‘You got that?’ I said.

  She closed the one eye and nodded.

  I slipped out and went down to the first floor. I took the back way out into the yard. I went over a fence and through the building behind Marty’s building and out into the next street. To be sure, I did a few fancy turns around the blocks and through a few more doors and back yards. The heat had instantly drained any desire for breakfast. I settled for two cups of coffee at a luncheonette and took the subway downtown to headquarters.

  Captain Gazzo is an old cop. I’ve know him since I was a kid. He knew my mother, and he calls me Dan if it’s not official. He never married; he has only his work. Most of the time he is a good cop, the kind who knows that his job is to help the people of the city, not scare them. He knows that a cop is a necessary evil, and he does not complain often when the rights of citizens get in his way, as they must. But he is human, too, and there are times when the restraints make him swear. There are other times when he says he is crazy, because the world he lives in is crazy and you have to be crazy to handle it. He says that he would not know what to do with a sane person, because he never gets to meet any. He includes me with the insane. Maybe he knows.