by John Roeburt
A time passed before Marco could find words. “You like to cut me down,” he said.
“I don’t really,” the detective said, “You’re not as big to me as you are to yourself.”
Marco said, “I’ll tell you what I left out the other day. I had trouble with Rocky, sure. But not over money…that hundred thousand dollars. It went deeper. For me anyhow…”
Marco’s face brooded as if in recovery of an emotion that still lay close upon him. “It was the way Rocky asked me to release him. Cold…with no feeling for me…no appreciation. This nothing I found in the gutter and gave fifty dollars to for a porcelain tooth. What could he have amounted to without Marco’s help? A crummy barber, or a dockworker. I gave him a home, I introduced him to people. Good people, no riffraff. I saw that he got the best matches. I sent the word around that he was Marco’s protégé. So he’d get the right treatment…so no punk promoter would make a monkey out of him.
“And every fight was on the level, Devereaux. I saw to that too. No set-ups, no tankers, no fixes. He had to win on his ability. I wasn’t blowing up a paper bag, a paper champion. Laugh and call Marco a liar, go ahead. But I’m telling you a fact. Rocky was another son to me… I had that feeling for him. And my own sons are fine boys, like their mother is a fine lady. They don’t lie, they don’t cheat anybody…”
Devereaux said, “We’re not now talking about your sons.”
Marco said, “I’m trying to make you understand something.”
“That you’ve got a feeling for boys,” the detective said. “You don’t corrupt them, or make them into your image. You’ve made that point, for what it’s worth. But don’t work it to death.”
Marco said, “You’re a coldblooded bastard.”
The music had stopped, and the prancing horses. Marco was staring at the still carousel. A play of expressions crowded the diminutive gangster’s face, and for some queerly personal moments he was lost to the detective and to the interrogation.
Soon Marco said apropos nothing, not speaking to Devereaux, or to himself. “In Bologna, that’s in the Old Country… I was born in Sicily, but raised in Bologna… I had a grandfather who used to make carousel horses. By himself, with an old broken saw and by hand. He was a carpenter and an artist, the old man. I used to help him mix the colors and paint them up, I remember. Colors like those over there. Pink, pistachio green…
“Learn a trade, the old man kept telling me. Don’t be a peasant like my dead father had been. He even kept me out of school, so I wouldn’t lose any time learning a trade. But I never learned to work the tools. Only to mix the paint. My grandfather had an accident with the saw. He lost two fingers on his right hand. A month later, they cut off his arm on account of the gangrene. In six months, they buried him. He died of a broken heart, I heard an aunt say…”
Now Marco turned to Devereaux. “Carousel horses. I’ve got one over at my place right now. On the rear lawn. Next time you visit, have a look. I bought it for twenty dollars in a junk shop in Germantown. I paint it every spring myself. I scooped the back out and lined it with copper. I’ve got geraniums growing in it…”
Devereaux said, “The soul of Marco. You keep trying to prove it. But I’m not your priest.”
Marco said deafly, “I saved the payoff on my grandfather for the end. You hate stories, but you’re stuck hearing this one out. It’s something I found out about my grandfather when I got to be twelve. Those horses…he was making them, and stacking them away in an old mill. They weren’t for sale. He earned money by begging in the streets. Money to buy wood and paints, so he could make carousel horses and hide them away. He was crazy, people said. The family kept trying to put him away.”
Devereaux said, “What does all this mean?”
Marco stared and then shook his head. “I don’t know…nothing. Just a memory that came up.” His face shadowed. “After he died, I thought about him. For a long time. My grandfather and me…how we relate. As people, mind you. It took years to get him out of my head. Now you’ve got me here in the Park, and I’m thinking of him again.”
The music resumed with a clang, clang of bells.
“Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me…”
Devereaux said, “Rocky Star, Marco. You’ve so far done a beautiful job of talking beside the point.”
Marco said, “Rocky got religion. Only thing, he forgot it was Marco who opened the Bible for him. He came to see me and made a speech. His freedom; he wanted out of our contract. He was respectable, and I was dirt. He was ashamed of his connection with me.” The gangster’s mouth drew into a bitter line. “Mind you, like he’d only just found out I was Marco.”
“He talked to me like you talk to me, Devereaux. To cut me down, to rub my nose in the dirt. No gratitude for what I’d done for him. No human feelings toward me.”
Devereaux said, “What did you do?”
“His freedom for the asking. No strings, and my best wishes. I give you my word, Devereaux! All Rocky had to do was come to me like a man…”
Devereaux said, “I asked what did you do?”
“I showed him I was Marco. I put a price on our contract. One hundred thousand dollars. Cash, in forty-eight hours…” Marco stopped warily before his next disclosure.
Devereaux said, “Don’t shy away from it. I’ve already heard it from The Flipper.”
Marco said, “Rocky thought he held a trump. Our contract was illegal, and I couldn’t enforce payment. He’d put the Boxing Commission on me.”
Devereaux said, “That’s when you really showed him you were Marco.”
“I’ve got feelings, and I’ve got pride.”
Devereaux said, “You keep insisting…” His voice was flat and toneless. “You enforced payment. When your goons called time on their assignment, Rocky had two broken hands.”
Marco said, “I gave him his first fifty dollars. I bought him a porcelain tooth.”
Devereaux said, “Hands mashed like through a wine press. You saw to it that Rocky would never fight again.”
Marco said nothing to it, and the detective said, “Those two sons of yours. What if one of them comes up and makes a speech. The same unsentimental speech you heard from Rocky. You’re dirt to him, and he’s ashamed of his relationship to you. What’s Marco’s remedy for that?”
Marco’s face drew forbiddingly, but Devereaux continued, “That upcoming medical graduate say. The sensitive son with the surgeon’s hands. It can happen, Marco. And the chances are, it must. One son or both makes the speech to you…so they can live with themselves…”
The movement was too quick for the eye to follow. Marco had a small flat automatic in hand. There was a purpling swell to his cheeks like the first throes of a convulsion. His face thrust at the detective and a hand clawed blindly at Devereaux’s throat as if to cut off speech at the source.
“Shut your mouth about my boys. Devereaux, another remark about my sons, I’ll kill you. I can take so much…”
Devereaux drew back, some inches farther down the bench they shared, to watch Marco in stony detachment. He could feel the smarting on his neck where Marco’s nails had torn the skin.
Soon Marco was almost his wonted and orderly self. The facial muscles were controlled again, and the stain of fever gone from his cheeks. The closing of his hands from their talon-like spread came harder: the fingers seemed fixed in their rigidity and beyond Marco’s mastery. From the way it was held, the pistol was oddly aimed now. If fired, it must explode the top of Marco’s own head.
There was no resistance as Devereaux took the pistol from Marco, emptied the barrel and pocketed the bullets, then dropped the automatic in Marco’s coat pocket.
“No use my also confiscating the gun,” Devereaux said. “You’ve no doubt got a license for it. And a deputy sheriff’s commission somewhere to make it twice as legal.”
Marco said morosely, “Twenty years now, and I haven’t lost my head like that.”
Devereaux smiled slightly, “I provoke you, I know. But
back on our tack. Vendetta. You really went after Rocky Star. You broke his hands, and later you ordered his murder.”
Marco shook his head almost listlessly, and the detective said, “I’m not rubbing your nose now… I’m making a point. The hurt and the rejection—Rocky turning against you the way he did. It cut deeply you say, and I’m prepared to believe it. Father and son…that feeling you say you had for Rocky. I’ll believe that too. You were vicious with Rocky, because it was a nightmare come true. You’re in fear that your real sons will someday confront you the way Rocky finally did. Call you by your right name, and see you only for your crimes. Call you dirt, call you murderer…”
Devereaux continued, “Rocky said it, but the voice you heard was one of your sons. Rocky was a pre-taste, a trailer for a drama still to be played…”
Marco’s eyes on Devereaux were full of awe. “Kill this thing you fear and dread,” the detective said. “Obliterate it by murder, so it would never happen to you, never happen again… Murder’s been the story of your success. So why not this time, why not one more wonderful success?”
Marco said, “I’d need rocks in my head to think like that.”
Devereaux said, “Rocky Star the victim. Rocky Star the sepulcher. Vendetta against the son who turned in hate. Kill Rocky and spare your own sons. An irrational notion, but you’re not a rational man, Marco. You’re the breeder of roses and the electrocuter of cats. You’re the chameleon with the antiseptic look. You’re the perfect husband and devoted father and the King Butcher of the Universe.”
Marco said, “I didn’t kill Rocky Star.”
Devereaux got up on his feet. “Somebody did.”
Marco said, “The brother Aldo.” Now his mouth trembled in a burst of speech. “I’ll hang him by his toes until he talks. Devereaux, I make you the promise! The brother Aldo…he got Rocky. You can’t get the truth out of him, Marco will. A week, no!—two days. Just give me two days.”
Devereaux said, “A fine old Marco specialty. A fall guy sacrificed to justice.”
“No fall guy. The kid brother’s it—He’s the killer! I’ve been thinking a lot. Since that day you dropped over, I’ve been picking my brains! Who could have killed Rocky Star, I asked myself. Who! Then I remembered the crazy kid brother, and things Rocky used to tell me about him. And the knife Aldo threw into Rocky once. Vendetta was the word you used. The right word, Devereaux—Vendetta. But you used it on the wrong fellow. Throw the word at Aldo Starziani!”
The detective said, “Squirming like you are now and sticking out at the seams…you’re not pretty. I almost prefer the country squire behind his stone wall.”
Marco said, “You’ve got my face in the dirt. Your heel’s on the back of my neck.”
Devereaux said coldly, “You’ve got troubles, I know. But they didn’t begin with me.”
Marco was on his feet. “Devereaux, I laid it on the line. The absolute facts, the God’s honest truth. Now I demand decent consideration.”
Now Marco’s face and hands were frantic. “Devereaux, leave me up in the air like this, I’ll go out of my head!”
Devereaux wrenched an arm free. “Find a high building,” he said.
The detective quit the circle swiftly. A hand in a pocket coiled around the bullets that had been in Marco’s automatic. He grouped them in his palm, a finger feeling each in an involuntary count. Marco in his wake, Marco was his facade fallen and berserk… He could feel the flame in his back. The flame, and the chill.
Devereaux clasped the bullets tightly, glad for them.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Part 1.
They were close, flank to flank, with the warmth of her flowering into him. Her arm was on his thigh, casual and intimate, and arched gracefully at the wrist in a curve that was a swan’s neck, and her tapering fingers that were long and slender and beautiful were drumming lightly on his kneecap.
The recessed lights in the ceiling overhead had the amber pall of perpetual dusk, but Devereaux had the sensation of suns, a calendar of suns penetrating him to thaw the frost inside, to bake the outside that was winter-white and scrofulous, free of its fat. This hard, lean image of himself, nude to his toes and nut-brown, a timeless and unmarred youth, was the sum of Nina Troy to him. It was the effect he wished, even if delusion; his fancy of love, that love he had never known, not early or late, but only forever in a long dream.
They were whispering, close within walls invisibly around them, as if the wide, populous Artists Lounge on the second floor of this Network Building was a booth. Their talk, mainly Devereaux’s detailed review of fact and happening, left them untouched for its violence and portent. It was an artifice with words, an excuse for this closeness and intimacy, a coded talk that was lovemaking to lovers, yet improbable words like murder and insanity to passing ears.
She read her wrist watch and held it for Devereaux to see. He glanced at the watch, and then into the depths of the Lounge where the elevators were, to see Sam Solowey emerge from the box, magnificent in his girth but sausage-tight in a suit that was a bare fit.
Nina quit the sofa, to smooth her dress front and pull the sides down to proximity with her girdle. Devereaux reached beside him, to hand up a decorated shawl, a handbag, and a mimeographed manuscript. He stopped to read the title page of the latter. It was a radio soap opera. Laura Brooks, Public Health Nurse, a five-times-a-week installment tale of the joys and exacerbations of a dedicated career woman with a floundering husband, a foundering marriage, and a foundling child of neglect.
Devereaux flipped the dozen-odd pages, then smiled up to Nina. “Who are you in the cast?”
Nina grimaced, “The lady Laura Brooks. My daily fifteen minutes of acute nausea.”
“So bad?”
“I don’t dare tell the writers. They swear it’s Living Literature. Simple, and unashamed, and as real as the analyst’s couch. They spend hours around the bottle proving Faulkner distorts life, and Hemingway dishonors it.” There was a brilliance of teeth. “But five-times-a-week and a contract. I’m fortunate, I’m envied. It’s money in the bank.”
Devereaux got up. She kissed him quickly and lightly on the cheek, just touching the corner of his mouth. “I’ve got to run,” she said. “Dry reading’s at eleven, sharp. The Director’s a fanatic about promptness. He’s young enough to think every day is the Grand Premiere of a Broadway play. He’s so insecure.”
She read the question in Devereaux’s face. “I’m on roller skates all day, and through the evening. It’s the schedule of your fantasies when you’re a student in the Academy of Dramatic Arts. I play a lady killer at two P.M. Then Sister Kenny in a special documentary at seven. That’s a tie-in with the Polio Fund Appeal. All of these radio. At ten tonight, I’m a television actress. A dramatic excerpt in the middle of a Variety Show. I happen somewhere between the Magician and the Adagio Dancers. Shaw’s Antony and Cleopatra. I wear a rope wig. I’m Queen of the Nile for ten ecstatic minutes.”
She called over her shoulder as an afterthought. “I’ll be home a stroke before midnight, Johnny. Come over if you like. Or anyhow call me.”
Devereaux watched her cross the Lounge and turn into a long, narrow corridor, then turn right and vanish. He was still absorbed and staring, when he felt the tug at him from below.
Solowey was seated on the sofa. He wore a raffish smile, not characteristic to him, modeled only for this moment. “The pang of leave-taking,” the portly detective said. “Your ephemeral lady of mist. And if you never find her again, Devereaux. If you lose her to the storms?”
Devereaux dropped into his seat. “I’ll dig a grave and throw you into it. I’ll be so brokenhearted.”
Solowey laughed outright, then eyed Devereaux keenly. “Another man’s wife, Devereaux.”
“Another man’s widow.” Devereaux frowned in momentary thought. “Wife or widow, Nina’s emotionally free. Has been for years. The Tiger Man happened in another fife for her. She was somebody else, not the Nina Troy of today. Rocky Star magica
lly alive, she’d promptly divorce him. I have her word on that. Her big stake is the legitimacy of her child. But I know The Tiger Man is dead.”
Solowey said, “Love has come to Johnny Devereaux.” He said it as a question.
Devereaux said moodily, “Yes, and no. I feel a wall I can’t climb. Don’t yet know how to climb. I only engage half of her, and she only half of me. The half is great. The years drop off. I can’t remember a care. I go sailing, I’m swinging in the trees. The whole would be sensational.”
Solowey nodded sympathetically, as if somehow really understanding it. After a few politic moments, he got down to the case on hand. “The evolving portrait of The Tiger Man, Devereaux. I’ve come by a new, remarkable detail.”
“Supporting the Saint or Sinner?” Devereaux asked.
“The Saint. A prodigious credit, Devereaux. A stunning repudiation of Rocco Starziani, whelp of the tenements and juvenile delinquent, by Rocky Star, Champion of the World.” Solowey warmed to his theme. “When Rocky found his fists, he also found his strength. And found his soul too. It was good deeds for bad. Expiation without the ostentation of prayer or psychoanalysis. But by positive acts; the fine, noble act of giving…”
Devereaux said drily, “Good you’ve at last found your graven image. I know a certain uptown Shrine you can worship in. You’ll find a taxi-driver there to give you absolution.”
Solowey said seriously, “I’m a lifelong agnostic.”
“Then stop making noises like an Evangel. Saint Rocky—I’m left cold! Theft, pillage, rape—The stuff of his boyhood and youth haunted him. And don’t explain the very precious sociology to me. The insecurities that ravished young Rocco, the grinding pressures of the slums and so forth. It doesn’t move me. I came out of the same dark bedroom. The same rats stood on my chest and woke me out of a sleep. I heard the same tune sing in the plumbing fixtures. At thirteen, a mortician buried my father and proclaimed me a Man. But I didn’t steal my neighbor’s purse, or rape his daughter. I merely went to work.”