Cynthia

by Howard Fast

  “What else do you know?” I asked him.

  “You’d be surprised, Harvey. I happen to know that foreign feller we got stuffed away—where’d you put him, boys?”

  “Laundry bin,” Joey Earp replied.

  “Good enough. Well, I just happen to know that little feller’s one Valento Corsica by name, alias Count Gambion de Fonti, and the new top man in the Mafia—”

  A high-pitched wail from Cynthia interrupted this; then the wail was cut off. Suddenly, quite normally, Cynthia said, “He wasn’t, of course.” She then took several deep breaths.

  “Wasn’t what, honey?” Lucille asked.

  “The head of the Mafia. He really was a count. They paid him ten thousand dollars to do this, and now you’ve killed him—you’re such hateful animals—and I never liked Texas and anyway my father was born there—”

  “Come on now, baby,” Coventry said soothingly, “don’t get all riled over nothing. Texas ain’t to blame at all. It’s just that this here Mafia been running hog wild for too long, and it’s time some citizens saddled up for a posse. We simply got to let them Mafia folks know that their day is done. This here’s the first step.”

  “You mean that’s why you’re in New York?” I asked him.

  “Lord, no, Harvey. We got various and sundry interests in New York, but when the Mafia began putting out a feeler here and there to buy this here hotel, I got suspicious. We been having a bit of trouble with the Mafia on and off. They don’t know that we own this shack and they like the location. But I bugged every suite in the place. Don’t listen to all of them, but Lady Luck turned our way when my listening man heard about them slipping the count here into the country and marrying him off to some fine, clean-cut American girl, and a Texas girl too. You wouldn’t say that was exactly a gentlemanly thing to do, would you, Harvey?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “He was more of a gentleman than you’ll ever be,” Cynthia put in, dabbing at her eyes with a small lace handkerchief. I was able to take a good look at her now, and I must admit that she was a striking girl, red-headed, pretty in her own way, which was a sort of lanky, long-faced, long-legged way. “He can afford to be nice to you,” Cynthia said to me, beginning to sniffle again. “I’m the only one who saw the poor count murdered—by that little rat there—”

  Billy the Kid grinned.

  “So I’m the one he has to eliminate, so there’ll be no witness to the killing, and if you think I’ve had one damn bit of pleasure out of being a rich man’s daughter, you’re mistaken, Mr.—?”

  “Krim,” I told her. “You just call me Harvey, kid.”

  “You just call me Harvey,” Lucille mimicked in a whisper.

  “Lord, Missy,” the fat man said, “there’s no reason for you to be fretful. What about the eighteen other contracts Billy here done? Might as well be hanged for a cow as a sheep—don’t you agree, Sonny?” he asked Billy.

  Billy grinned again. He was examining the upholstery of the chair and picking away at it with his fingernail. “You know, Mr. Coventry,” he said, “I like this here chair mighty fine. You wouldn’t think of shipping it back down to Texas for me, would you?”

  “I might just at that, Billy.”

  He grinned and the other men grinned. It was plain that they were mighty fond of their talented youngster.

  “You know what else I’d like to do, Mr. Coventry?”

  “Just what, Billy?”

  “Why I’d like just to curl up in this here big chair and bang the hell out of that long-legged red-headed girl there.”

  “Well, maybe that too can be arranged, Billy.”

  “Over my dead body,” Cynthia said.

  “We’ll see. Here I’ve gone and told you that we have no intentions of eliminating you, and right off the mark, you get fresh. I don’t like fresh kids. You take a tip from Billy, here. He’s mighty respectful. All the time.”

  “Well, sir, Mr. Coventry,” I said, taking a tip, “I can’t tell you how relieved I am that you look at the whole matter so philosophically. Since you know all about me, there’s no use trying to deceive you. I have only one purpose in mind—to bring Cynthia Brandon back home safe and sound and in one piece.”

  “I reckoned that was what you had in mind, Harvey. The kid’s heavily insured, huh?”

  “Well, so, so,” I shrugged. “But you know the way insurance companies are, Mr. Coventry. Can’t stand to pay out a dollar if there’s some other way around.”

  “I certainly do, Harvey. Matter of fact, I got a piece of a little insurance company down in Dallas. But, do you know, Harvey, you got to make more sense. You wouldn’t suggest that I simply let the three of you walk out of here right now?”

  “That’s what I had in mind.”

  “Harvey!”

  “Well, I mean we could sort of give you our word—”

  “Harvey!”

  “Well, Goddamn it, what are you going to do with us?”

  The fat man thought about that for a while, and then he said, “First things first, Harvey. One hand wipes the other. You got your interests in mind, I got mine. You help me, I help you. You want Cynthia. Well, I want a little something too, matter of fact. Yes, sir.”

  “You got a proposition—make it.”

  Both girls looked at me now, and I wondered what each was thinking, and I got no clue. Lucille’s eyes moved from me to Coventry and then back again to me and then around the room over that curious circle of Texas hoodlums. Cynthia watched only me. I watched Coventry and then I watched Billy the Kid, who curled in his chair like a big cat, the gun in his shoulder holster bulking under his arm.

  “Trade even, Harvey,” the fat man said. “Now I sure as hell can’t turn you loose here in New York with Valento Corsica stuffed into the laundry bin, can I?”

  I shrugged, and Cynthia snapped, “He was not Valento Corsica.”

  “So I got to get the body to the bottom of the river, maybe, and then get someone else to take title to this here hotel, and then finish up my business and get out of New York, and that’s a heap of trouble you and these girls caused me, Harvey, so what makes sense is for me to kill the lot of you and put you on the bottom of the river with Count Gambion, don’t it?”

  “But you got a proposition.”

  “Indeed I have, Harvey. I’m ready to trade even—what I want, for the girls. Well, now, I might have to take you all down to Texas with me and give you a week or two at the ranch until the heat is off, but that’s the kind of fine healthy vacation you city folks really never get to have.”

  “And what do you want?”

  “Not money, Harvey—because even if I kidnapped that there kid, it would only be for peanuts. Anyway, kidnapping’s a sucker’s game. I want some real goods, and I think you’re the boy can lead me to it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, sir. You heard of something called Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer?”

  “What?”

  The four hired hands grinned with pleasure.

  “Yes, sir, Harvey—Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.”

  “He means the painting, Harvey,” Lucille explained icily. I did not need her explanation; I was a step ahead of her and with the fat man.

  “It’s in the Metropolitan. Museum of Art, Harvey,” Lucille said. “They paid two million dollars for it.”

  “That’s right, Harvey,” said the fat man. “You got a mighty smart-ass little girl there. That’s right where it is—in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And I hear your company carries the coverage on that building.”

  “Come off it, Mr. Coventry,” I said. “No company in the world is big enough to insure the Met. We carry some of the coverage—so do ten other companies, and then it’s reinsured and laid off and reinsured again, because you couldn’t find an adding machine large enough to add up the dollars and cents worth of what’s in that building up there on Fifth Avenue.”

  “I know that, Harvey.” Coventry smiled. “But what matters to me is not how m
uch coverage you got there, but the fact that you got entry, Harvey—entry, and that you know how their protection works. I don’t reckon I want the whole building, Harvey—I just want that one little old painting, because I got me a client down in Texas who is ready to put five million dollars on the line when I turn it over to him. And five million dollars, tax free, Harvey, is nothing to sneeze at. No, indeed, Harvey—not at all.”

  Chapter 12

  If there is any generalization that fits fat men, it is an awareness of a human being’s need for nourishment, and Coventry had a very substantial lunch sent up for us, champagne and four kinds of sandwiches and salad and cheese and fresh fruit, red wine for those whose taste it matched, coffee, a tray of pastry, mints and a bottle of brandy. It was a magnificent table, wheeled into the Bridal Suite by Billy the Kid. When I asked him to help himself, he shook his head. “I don’t eat with the guests,” he said. “I’m just a hand.” It was very humble and straightforward of him. They had left us alone there. When I went out the back service door, there was Jack Selby alias Ringo, picking his teeth. When I poked my head out of the front door, there was Billy the Kid, practicing his draw from a shoulder holster. “But you just caint draw quick with one of these here automatic pistols. Give me a silencer any day of the week. What kind of gun do you hanker after, Mr. Krim?”

  “Wrigley’s Spearmint,” I said, making a lousy pun out of it, and I slammed the door and tried the telephone. The telephone was dead, which I might have expected.

  Lucille was pouring champagne and trying to get Cynthia to accept a plate of sandwiches, and paused just long enough to suggest that I get right onto the phone and call the police.

  “Good thinking,” I agreed.

  “Now do you think I’m going to eat sandwiches with poor Gambion stuffed into the laundry bin? What kind of a heartless thing do you imagine me to be? You’re as bad as my mother.”

  “Gambion’s not in the laundry bin any longer,” I informed her. “They wrapped him up in spare sheets and sent him down the laundry chute. He’s probably snug at the bottom of the river right now.”

  “What a rotten, callous thing to say!”

  “I’m only trying to help your appetite. Myself, I am starved.” I took a sandwich, downed it in two bites, drained a glass of champagne and followed that with another sandwich. They were delicate sandwiches and hardly more than a bite each.

  “How do you know?” Lucille asked me.

  “What?”

  “About Corsica.”

  “He’s not Corsica,” Cynthia exclaimed. “Why don’t you listen to me?”

  “Coventry told me,” I answered Lucille, and then asked Cynthia, “How do you know he’s not Valento Corsica?”

  “Oh, because the poor jerk broke down and told me. He’s the penniless younger son of a penniless count, and he lost his nerve and we never got married but he went through with the motions. He was a sweet little guy and he was gay, but that wasn’t his fault but the bombshell he had for a mother, and they gave him the money he needed so desperately to go through the computer dating routine and lay a phony trail to snarl up immigration and the fuzz, and I liked the poor little shnook, and then, bango. Just like that.”

  “Eat something. You’ll feel better,” Lucille said.

  She started on the champagne, downed two glasses as if it were water, and then began to eat. For a skinny kid, she had a healthy appetite, and the sandwiches just kept going down. She explained to Lucille that her ability to talk with a mouth full of food stemmed from her private school training.

  “It’s one of the few advantages of being a rich kid. Can you imagine, putting him down the laundry chute!”

  “Well, you don’t play footsie with the Mafia. He should have thought twice.”

  “You still don’t believe me.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Who knows?” I thought about it for a moment. “It doesn’t matter. Whoever he was, he took their cash. What followed, followed.”

  “Come on, Harvey,” Lucille said, “don’t turn moralist. You’re going to cooperate, aren’t you? I mean his lunatic scheme to rob the Met.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I am.”

  “Oh, great—just great.”

  “Look,” I said, “isn’t it about time both of you ninnies got some sense into your heads. I don’t cooperate—he kills the three of us. I help him pull it off, he’s grateful—we got a chance. That’s how it works—just that way.”

  I took my notation pad out of my pocket and wrote down, “The whole place is bugged, stupid.” I showed it to both of them, and then I wrote, “We play it by ear, do you understand?” Then I went into the John, tore up my notes and flushed them down the toilet. When I returned, Cynthia was observing me with a speculative glint in her eyes.

  “He’s thirty-six years old,” Lucille observed coldly. “That makes him sixteen years older than you, lovey, unless you have the popsie complex that’s rampant today. Furthermore, he’s divorced, unreliable, neurotic and poor. He has a reputation for being smart, but now that he’s a working part of a plan to rob the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I have my doubts about that too.”

  “I think he’s adorable,” Cynthia said.

  At that moment, the doorbell rang, and I rushed to swing the door open with some delirious hope that I would see the ulcer-drawn face of Lieutenant Rothschild. Fats Coventry stood there.

  “The girls will be safe enough, Harvey,” he said. “They have a twenty-one inch color television, and I am having newspapers and magazines sent up, so I reckon they’ll be able to pass the time smartly. You come along with us, and help us chew over some of our smoke signals—”

  Under the Hollywood cowboy talk, I seemed to detect a trace of Brooklyn or perhaps Patterson, New Jersey, but well-hidden. He had astonishingly small feet and he minced in his cowboy boots and he tugged at the fringes of my memory. We went out of the Bridal Suite into the small landing and then into the Presidential Suite—which was pretty impressive, I imagine, even to Presidents. It was all done like a studio set for a film about Dolly Madison and how the British burned Washington, D.C., full of curved table legs, gilded mirrors acting as eagle perches and fake antique Aubusson carpets of pale blue, with gold and ivory trim.

  Coventry had the pride of a true host as he exhibited the wonders of the place, although he had to admit that as yet no President had tried the bed. “Now you would think, wouldn’t you, Harvey,” he complained, “that a Texas President would maybe throw a little business our way. No, sir. He goes straight back to the Carlyle, like there wasn’t no other hotel in the city.”

  The smoke signals were being chewed over in the study, where black leather set the keynote and busts of the first President and the Great Emancipator faced each other sternly. The cowhands sat around in their shirtsleeves—that is, Freddy Upson and Joey Earp did, while the other two did guard duty—with their forty-five automatics strapped visibly in their armpits and with long panatellas to sweeten the taste of their Bourbon. I was served with the same ingredients, and then Coventry called the meeting to order with a simple, straight forward question:

  “How about it, Harvey—can the Met be robbed?”

  “Any place can be robbed if you put enough brains and muscle into it. The burglar-proof box is a myth. Whatever one man makes, another man can break into.”

  “I like that kind of an answer,” Coventry said. “Yes, sir—yes, indeed. That’s a sensible answer and what I would expect from a man in your profession, Harvey. What’s the catch?”

  “Do you think you could get into the Met after closing?” I demanded. “You must have looked it over.”

  Coventry nodded at Upson. “Freddy there’s done more burglar jobs than you could shake a stick at, Harvey. He looked it over. Tell him what you think, Freddy.”

  Upson stretched his legs and drawled, “A kid could break into that place, I reckon.”

  “How?”

  “The way I figure it, the easiest spot is the ground floor, where they have that there
Junior Museum, as they call it. You know the spot?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, they got a door leading from the parking lot, a double door, two sets, and just strong enough to be opened with a pair of scissors. The outside set is glass, one inch thick. Cylinder lock at the base of each door. I got keys to open the lock and if I didn’t have keys, I could open it with a slide-hook, or I could use a set of double-action clamps to pluck it clean. Any one of the three ways would take all of thirty seconds. The inside door is wood, two inches thick, same type locks at the bottom of each door. Both sets are swinging doors meeting at center without a jamb. Everything goes right, I can go through both doors in ninety seconds; I get a bad break, it takes me two minutes. Then I’m in a sort of medium long hall where they got models of these here old ranch houses, places called the Parthenon and such—you know, them places where the old gods spent their time. You go through there, up a flight of stairs, turn left and into the big main entrance way. Then up the big stairs into the Italian room, turn right, third room turn left, and there you are with this here painting there on the wall and not one cotton picking reason not to take it down and whistle off with it.”

  “How about that, Harvey?” Coventry asked.

  “Like he said, getting in is no problem.”

  “Right, Harvey. But getting out?”

  “There’s the rub,” I said. “Getting out. You just wouldn’t get out.”

  “Unless you got us out, Harvey.”

  “Impossible. Good heavens, do you know what happens when you open the first lock?”

  “That’s just what we need you for, Harvey,” the fat man said with satisfaction. “What happens?”

  “It breaks a circuit. That’s basically the difference between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and say, for example, the Museum of Natural History. It underlies the difference in the insurance rates they pay. Not that there isn’t great wealth in the Natural History building but most of it is not marketable, and their whole outlook is different. That’s how those young hoodlums from Florida managed to get in and walk off with the jewels. No one thinks of Natural History and jewels together—not even the curators. But here, one small exhibition case can and often does hold over five million dollars worth of value, and the point of view is different. You don’t rob Fort Knox. You don’t rob the Met. That’s just about what it amounts to. Every single entry, door, window, air-shaft, chute, sewer or crawlspace has some sort of mechanism for electronic response. There it is.”