The Scarlet Ruse

by John D. MacDonald

  We talked our way up, over, across and around the Sprenger situation, after I had given him the Willy Nucci perspective.

  It was agreed that Sprenger had the contacts to get an accurate reading on Hirsh Fedderman before opening negotiations. So it was possible that he could have set Hirsh up, that by devising a way of switching the rarities, he had invented a way of doubling his money. The stuff had a ready market. And Hirsh would pay instead of run. But it did not seem to be Sprenger's style, even without knowing the man. If he wanted to play tricks and games, wouldn't he rather play them in his own jungle?

  We decided that if we could figure out how the switch had been made and that might involve walking Hirsh and Miss. Mary Alice through a typical bank visit complete with philatelic props it might be possible to work backward from the method to the conniver.

  Which would mean letting Mary Alice Mcdermit know for the first time that important stuff was missing.

  "I'd say she's about twenty-seven," Meyer told me.

  "One of those big, slow, sweet, gentle girls. You know the type? Dark hair, fair skin, blue eyes, expression always on the edge of a smile. A beautiful disposition. Five years with Hirsh. I think I heard him say the other woman had been there fifteen years. She would be close to forty. Jane Lawson. A service widow. Teenage kids, I think. Small woman, quick and cranky and very smart. I don't think Mary Alice has any children. I'm sure of it. She is separated from her husband. This is the way I read that store and the relationship. They are dependent on Hirsh and on the job. He pays them more than they could get elsewhere. So between them they make it up to him by making that little store pay off.

  It's kind of a family, the three of them. They take care of each other."

  We both agreed that any frontal approach to Frank Sprenger had an unhealthy flavor. Nucci had marked him high for hard, high for smart.

  He was in a slot where he had to be suspicious of any approach from any direction.

  Meyer came up with one faintly promising thought.

  "Even though those aren't famous rarities he bought for Sprenger, not things any dealer would recognize on sight, maybe there is some kind of way of identifying them. I don't know enough about it. But did you notice that Philatelic Foundation certificate he showed us? There was a photograph glued to it, and an embossing seal used. If just one of those things can be traced... "

  "There were numbers in the margin of those blocks of four and six he showed us."

  "We need to know more about it, Travis."

  "Do we?"

  He leaned forward and peered at me very intently.

  "Hmmm. A kind of disapproval? That's what's bothered me most. Why should Travis Mcgee give a fault damn what happens to an elderly party who isn't too careful whom he deals with and inevitably gets stung? The desirable quality of shining innocence isn't there this time. And is it a total disaster? He has a place to go, people to look after him.

  You could get involved, but it would be going through motions."

  "Sometimes it isn't any more than that."

  "Are you saying no?"

  "Not quite yet."

  "But you might?"

  "It is a distinct possibility." He looked tired. He sighed. He pushed a piece of gristle around his plate and finally hid it under his potato skin. I caught the eye of the redcoat who had served us. He had saved up all his cordiality for the critical moment of check and tip. The service had been Indifferent, the orders not quite correct. What do you do? If you are cross, tired, and immature, you take it out on the waiter. The world is not enhanced to any measurable degree by one, or by one million, confrontations with venal, lazy waiters. And it impedes the processes of digestion. So you compute the tip and leave in good order and try to remember never to return.

  But it had been one more smear on an already dingy day. All day I had been trying not to think of the eviction notice. But it was in the back of my mind. Willy Nucci had depressed me more than I had been willing to admit. He wanted to get out, and he was not at all sure he could. So, out of accumulations of anxiety, he had talked and talked and talked.

  The old men in the old bar had depressed me.

  And children with ice picks are not amusing. And I wished I'd gone to eat at Grimaldis' when Vito and Rosa were in trouble. I might have been able to help. It was easy to see that I had a new remorse. It was one of the night thoughts of the future. If I had only... I have a long list of those.

  After Meyer had gone to his home afloat, I made myself a hefty nightcap and turned the lights off and went up to the sundeck in a ratty old blue robe and sat at the topside controls, bare feet braced on the dew-damp mahogany. It was a soft night. Car lights, boat lights, dock lights, star tight. Sound of traffic and sound of the sea. Smell of salt and smell of hydrocarbons. The Flush wind-swayed under me and nudged against a fender.

  "Hey, Mcgee? Mcgee?" she called from the dock.

  I got up and went aft and looked down at Jenny Thurston under the dock lights, in basque shirt, baggy shorts, baseball cap, and ragged boat shoes.

  "Hey, is it really true?" she asked.

  "Come on aboard. Want a drink?"

  "I got most of this here can of beer, thanks."

  She came up topside and took the other pilot chair, beside me, and swiveled it around to face me in the night.

  "I got back around five, and they showed me in the paper, and all of them were bitching about it. I looked for you to check it out."

  "It's true enough, Jen."

  "Well, goddamn them! Nobody is going to move me ashore, Mcgee. I was born on a boat. We'll have to find a place where they're not trying to iron everybody out flat.

  Maybe down in the Keys?"

  "Maybe."

  "But it won't be the same as here. Never."

  Jenny lives aboard a roomy old Chris and paints aboard her. Jenny paints three paintings. One is of a beach with a long cresting wave, sandpipers, and overhanging palms. One is of gulls in the wind, teetering over the abandoned, stove-in hulk of an old dory on a rocky beach. The last is of six old pilings at low tide, with weed and barnacles on the exposed part, with four brown pelicans perched on individual pilings, and two more sailing in to land on the empty ones.

  She paints them in varying sizes and frames them in different styles, in order to have a useful range of prices. They all sell. They hang in untold hundreds of northern living rooms, all signed in the bottom right corner. Jennifer Thurston.

  She is chunky, forthright, salty, and loyal to her friends.

  She paints as many paintings as she needs, in order to get along. She has pretty eyes and good legs. From time to time, sturdy young men move in with her, aboard the West Bank. The average four of duty has been about three months. The old timers have learned to estimate the probable date of departure very accurately. They detect in the young man a certain listlessness, a sallowness, a general air of stupor.

  So we sat in the night and talked about old times and people long gone.

  Sam Taggert. Nora Gardino. A girl named Skeeter. Puss Killian.

  Remember when... Hey, what about the time... Were you around when... It was all nostalgia, sweet and sad, and it was good therapy.

  Sometimes you need that special land of laughter.

  I went down the ladder way with her and walked aft to the gangplank. I bent and kissed her and felt her mouth sweeten and flower under the pressure when she grabbed hold to make it last longer. She sighed as I straightened, and she said, "Sometimes I wisht I didn't have my rule about sleeping with my friends."

  "A lot of the trouble in my life has come from not following your rule, Jen."

  "It's always better when you don't have to give a damn."

  "Take care of yourself."

  "Let's try to see if we can find a place most of the old hands can tie up permanent. You know. Enough room and everything."

  I watched her walk away. She slapped her old boat shoes down with stumpy authority. Her hair had smelled fresh and sweet. I needed a lady to be happy
with. Not that lady, though. It had been a long time between amiable ladies. Chauvinist pig yearning for new play toy new love object? Not so as you would hardly know it. Reverse of Jenny's dictum: It's always better when you give a damn. But how do you tell a genuine damn from one you muster up to justify tupping the wench? Well, you can tell.

  That's all. You can. And so can she. Unless, of course, she is just a female chauvinist pig yearning after you as a play toy a sex object, and drumming up her little rationalizations.

  I dreamed about a lady I saw on one of those stamps.

  Antigua. 1863. Lady in profile in rosy mauve, with an elegant neck, a discreet crown on her pretty head. She turned with a half smile, looking out of the stamp at me, then shook her head, frowned, and said, "Oh, golly. You again, huh?"

  Five.

  The First Atlantic Bank and Trust Company occupied the first two floors of its own office building on a noisy corner. The four of us walked from Fedderman's shop to the bank. Meyer walked ahead with Hirsh.

  I followed with Mary Alice Mcdermit. Anyone would probably mention that she was tall enough for me. In hardly any heels at all, she came close to six feet. It was a stifling Thursday morning.

  September can be a seething bitch in Miami. She wore some kind of sun back dress with about five inches of skirt.

  Maybe six inches. Her glossy black hair bounced to her free stride.

  Her fair skin had taken a tan the color of weak butterscotch. Her face had good bones, but it was slightly plump, and something about her expression and the way she dressed made me think of a very large twelve-year-old girl.

  "I can't believe it," she kept saying.

  "I just can't believe it."

  "Hirsh believes it. He got a good look two weeks ago today. The good stuff is gone, except what you put in that day."

  "We knew something was awfully wrong. The way he's been acting. Jane and I talked about it. We tried to find out from him. I just can't believe it."

  It felt good to walk with a girl who matched my stride, nice brown knees alternating. Any kind of a close look and that twelve-year-old impression was gone all of a sudden.

  She said, "It wasn't any of your really great stuff. You know. Like one-of-a-kind or tied to historical covers or anything. But it was all really first-class, high-catalog material, the kind you can depend on to hold value."

  "You like futzing around with postage stamps?"

  She gave me a blank, frowning look.

  "What do you futz around with, huh? Hitting an innocent little white ball with a long stick? Soldering wires together and playing four-track stereo? Slamming some dumb little car around corners, upshifting and downshifting? Are you a gun futz or a muscle futz?"

  "I think I know where you're going with that."

  "Where I'm going is that there's no list to tell you where you rate on some kind of scale of permanent values and find out how unimportant you are. But I can tell you what nobody ought to be doing."

  "What's that?"

  "Nobody ought to be sneering at anybody else's way of life."

  "Mrs. Mcdermit?"

  "Mmm?"

  "Could we set our personal clock back and start over again?"

  Her smile was bright, vivid, personal, merry.

  "Why, you dummy? We're getting along pretty remarkable."

  "We are? Good."

  "I like people. I really do. Here's the bank."

  The safety deposit vault was in the back left corner.

  There were three people on duty there. Hirsh Fedderman signed the slip and put down the number of his own personal box. They let us all in, and had the three of us wait in the corridor off to the side which led to the private booths and little rooms. Hirsh joined us, with his box under his arm. The attendant led us back to one of the little rooms.

  There was a table, three chairs. The attendant said he would bring another chair. I told him thanks, not to bother.

  The table was butted against the wall. It was narrower than a card table and about half again as long. They moved the chairs to where they had been in an identical little room on September seventh. As I stood with my back against the closed door, Hirsh and Mary Alice sat at the right, Mary Alice nearest me, facing Meyer across the table Meyer, of course, representing Sprenger.

  I said, "Try to make as exact a reconstruction as you can. I'll stop you if I have any questions." Hirsh said, "I put the box right here, against the wall, nearest me, and I opened it like this and took the stock book out. Okay. Here is the stock book I brought, so... "

  "Put it in the box and close the box and then take it out as you did before and do with it exactly what you did the other time."

  Hirsh took it out and put it in front of Mary Alice and said, "Other clients, I hand them the book. They want to take a look at their money.

  Not Sprenger. I tried at first.

  He wouldn't take it. He'd just shrug." Mary Alice said, "That was when I was taking the new purchases out of my purse, like this. And the inventory sheet. I gave the inventory sheet to Mr. Sprenger, and I put the new stamps, in their mounts, right here, where they would be handy for Mr. Fedderman."

  "I took a copy of the list out of my pocket," Hirsh said.

  "I put it here in front of me, like this. Then I read off the items and found each one and showed it to Sprenger and then pushed it toward Mary Alice." "By then," she said, "I'd taken the book out of the slip case and opened it up, and as Hirsh pushed them toward me, I would pick them up and slip them into the book like this, into these transparent strips. I used these tongs because you have to have something to lift the edge of the strip. The stamps were in mounts like this, so it was just because it's easier for me, not to protect the stamps, I used stamp tongs."

  "Is that the same inventory list?" I asked.

  "Exactly," she said.

  "And I fixed up the right number of mounts and the right size. But these stamps I just put in are junk from the new issue service." "Go ahead just the way you did with him," I said.

  Hirsh tried to smile.

  "I'd try to give a little spiel. Clients like it. I couldn't tell if Sprenger did or not. We never got loosened up with each other. He'd grunt. He always seemed bored, like I was taking too long. Okay. I'll say the sort of thing I said to Sprenger. It won't be exact, but it will be close."

  I watched intently. I had them do a repeat of Mary Alice looking back through the book to see if there was room on a prior page to put the new Barbados stamps with the previous Barbados stamps. I had Hirsh take the book and leaf through it and give it back to Mary Alice.

  She put it in the fiber slip case and handed it to Hirsh. He opened the box and put the stock book in and closed the lid.

  "Then I picked up the box and started to stand up, but he said he had some money. I thought he had it with him so I sat down, but he said he would be in touch and get it to me soon. I haven't seen it yet. We left the room. When I came out of the vault, he was gone. Mary Alice was waiting for me. We walked back to the store. Like always, I would have been kind of depressed. He never said, "Very nice. Very pretty."

  Nothing. You like people to take an interest. But I was too scared to be depressed. I was terrified. My head was spinning. I almost told this girl." "You should have told me, Hirsh. Really."

  "I should worry your pretty head with total disaster?"

  She looked at me.

  "Did you see anything?"

  "Nothing at all. Did you always do it that way?" "Always," she said.

  "With him and the other clients too. Just like that. Except it's more fun with the others." Meyer said, "Do either of you remember a distraction?

  Did anybody yell fire, drop anything, fall off a chair?"

  They remembered nothing like that. They had been buoyed by a fragile hope. It seeped away. Hirsh went from looking sixty-two to looking ninety-two. Meyer was somber. The girl bit her thumb knuckle and blinked rapidly.

  So we all got out of there. We went back to the shop.

  Jane Lawson
looked at us with anxious query when we all walked in.

  Hirsh and Mary Alice shook their heads no.

  Jane looked bitterly depressed. An old man with hair like Brillo sat erect on a stool, using gold tongs with great deftness as, one by one, he examined stamps and replaced them in the stock book in front of him.

  "Fedderman," he said, "everything here is perfectly or Ill dinary, quite tiresome, exceedingly unremarkable."