Phyllis

by Howard Fast

  “Where the hell are you, Clancy, and where is Phyllis Goldmark? I don’t like this. You go off on your own in whatever half-baked direction takes your fancy and, as far as you’re concerned, we don’t exist.”

  “You exist,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Comaday spluttered, “I am charmed and delighted. What about Miss Goldmark?”

  “She’s with me.”

  “I don’t want her uncovered, Clancy, not for one moment. I want to put a man on you as well. Do you understand? Where can we meet?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Give me a little time, Commissioner. I don’t want to take her home and I don’t know yet where she’ll spend the evening. Let me call you back.”

  “In how long?”

  “In about an hour,” I said, “it shouldn’t be much more than an hour.”

  Grischov regarded me with a raised brow as I put down the phone. He was checking a gun—a small, efficient-looking automatic of a type I had not seen before. Now, as he replaced the clip, he said,

  “That was the Commissioner?”

  “Put the gun away. Suppose someone walks in here. What the devil are you thinking about, Grishcov? What does this add up to for you?”

  He shrugged and shook his head.

  “If I was in Moscow,” I said, “would they let me walk around with a gun?”

  Grischov put the automatic into the side pocket of his jacket and replied impatiently, “Sometimes, Clancy, you make me sick.”

  “This is no time for either of us to make the other sick. Or if we do, let’s keep it to ourselves.”

  Grischov nodded, rose, and put on bis hat and coat. I was wearing an old raincoat which I threw over my shoulder. We went out of the building and walked over to Amsterdam Avenue and stood on the corner and had time, each of us, for a single cigarette before Phyllis joined us. Grischov managed to conceal his irritation and when Phyllis came he greeted her with a smile and we arranged ourselves on either side of her. She took our arms as we walked downtown bearing eastward, and she said,

  “I like both of you, but liking you has a bad reaction on me. It makes me a little sad and I want to cry and then I want to laugh. Where are we going now? What do you expect to find?”

  “Horton,” I told her foolishly. Grischov shrugged and said,

  “Whatever we find, Miss Goldmark, maybe we can take your mind away a little from all the troubles you have and all that you’ve been through today. So we’ll pretend that we’re just walking in the early evening with a beautiful young lady.”

  I silently thanked Grischov for that. Phyllis squeezed my arm and we walked on. Below 110th Street we turned east to Columbus Avenue and walked south and then there it was—what we were looking for: the wilderness and wasteland of buildings going up, buildings being wrecked; buildings half torn down and skeletons of buildings, block after block of piled rubble, the whole gigantic housing development dwarfing one’s imagination—a city within a city being destroyed and reconstituted.

  I looked at Grischov and he was responding to the sight. His eyes gleamed strangely as they wandered over that tangle of broken houses and new beginnings. He said to Phyllis, “Was this the way you walked that day with Horton?”

  “We were across the street,” Phyllis said.

  “Take us the way you went then.”

  We crossed the street. Phyllis clung to my arm a little more tightly. We walked south again and then we turned into a side street. Here, among the litter of half-destroyed buildings, three old tenements still stood side by side, boarded up and isolated.

  “Like so many other people in my country,” Grischov said, “my first feeling for America is jealousy. I admit that we’ve done things. We’ve put rockets up where you’ve never dreamed of putting them but in all the world there’s no one who ever built the way you do. My God, how you can build! You tear down a city and build it up again. With us a war destroys a city and it’s a tragedy. But you take a mile of a city and do to it what only a war could do and, while you’re wrecking it, you’re building it again.”

  “I often wonder,” I said, “what you mean, Grischov, when you say ‘my God.’ Is it just an expression?”

  “I learned your language, Clancy. It’s full of God. That’s the way you shaped it.”

  “Why do you two keep tearing at each other?” Phyllis demanded. “Have they succeeded in making both of you so sick that you must perpetually fight your little war?”

  It was the last thing in the world that I had expected her to say, and we stopped there and both Grischov and I looked at her and then at each other. Then I looked at Phyllis again and I realized that I was meeting her newly, the way you meet a stranger. I was being introduced to her. Her eyes met mine, as if they were saying to me, “Your job is over, Clancy. You can look at me now—no more duties and no more obligations.”

  “What you said about Horton before,” Grischov wanted to know, “it was here, Miss Goldmark?”

  Phyllis nodded. “It was here.”

  His voice soft and different and wary, Grischov said to me, “What do you think, Clancy?”

  “It’s a long shot, but why not?”

  “Do you think that Miss Goldmark should leave us now?”

  I looked at Phyllis again and then I shook my head. “No,” I said, “I think that she stays with us unless—”

  “I want to stay with you,” Phyllis said.

  “Then suppose we try the center one first,” I suggested, nodding at the three lonely boarded-up tenements across the street from where we were. “I suppose the power’s turned off. You wouldn’t have a flashlight with you, would you, Grischov?”

  He shook his head and I made some observation on what kind of cops we both were. Then we went across the street. In front of the tenement Phyllis squeezed my arm and whispered to me,

  “Thank you, Clancy.”

  Grischov had gone on ahead a few paces. He was on the little stoop, trying the front door.

  “For what, Phyllis?” I asked her. “Only tell me for what.”

  “For the whole day, Clancy. I couldn’t have lived through today without you. I don’t care how it began, Clancy, no matter how it began, I love you very much.”

  “I love you,” I said. “I had to resign from the police force and stop being a cop before I could say that and have it make any sense. That’s what happened today. So far it only happened in my own mind. But I talked to myself about it and I made my decision. Even if there was more time than there is now—even if there was all the time in the world, I wouldn’t know how to make it clear to you, Phyllis.”

  “You have made it clear, Clancy.”

  “I love you. Do you believe me?”

  “I believe you.”

  Then we went up the stairs to join Grischov, who explained that the door was locked. We were all of us talking in whispers now. I don’t know why. It was after five o’clock and the workmen had gone and there was no one in sight in that whole broken world of destruction and construction except the three of us; yet we talked in whispers, oppressed by the conclusions we had drawn and somehow forgetful of the fact that we had spun this whole involved fancy out of thin air. It did not matter that we had spun it out of thin air. We had taken a line, a path, and followed it to a conclusion.

  The upper part of the door was glass. I took out my gun, used it to break one of the panes, and then reached inside and unlocked the door. And then we went in. It was an oldlaw tenement, the kind of building in which the apartments long, long ago took on the name of railroad flats, and through all my youth and growing years had been called that and nothing else. Still speaking in whispers, I explained about that to Grischov, that there were two apartments on a floor, each apartment stretching through the length of the building from the street in front to the courtyard in the rear, a string of tiny rooms linked together in darkness and squalor.

  “That means,” said Grischov, “that there are no windows in the center rooms.”

  “No, there are windows—on eit
her side of the building there is a narrow courtyard. If my memory serves me, there might just be a room without a window, but the front windows are boarded up anyway. Perhaps not the real windows. We’re acting like damned fools, Grischov. We should have brought-flashlights.”

  “I guess so, but we’re here.”

  I nodded and led the way forward into the dark hallway. It was filled with the stink of wet plaster and ruin and abandonment and all the lingering, fetid smells of the poverty and the airlessness of half a century.

  “Take the left hand apartment,” I said to Grischov. “I’ll take the one on the right.” I whispered to Phyllis to stay close to me. “Close enough so that I can feel you,” I said. I tried a doorway and it moved under my hand. A ground floor apartment. It was almost pitch black. I stumbled over a piece of broken furniture and heard rats scurrying in the darkness. Phyllis’s hand clenched on my arm and her whisper came in my ear,

  “It’s all right, Clancy, I’m all right.”

  Toward the rear of the apartment there was a flicker of gray light from the air shaft windows and from the rear windows which, as I expected, were not boarded over. The rear of the apartment was empty of anything except filthy and abandoned rags and broken furniture. Back in the hall, Grischov was waiting for me, a shapeless figure in the semidarkness.

  “Nothing,” I said. And he said, “Nothing, Clancy.” I led the way upstairs to the second floor and once again we each of us examined an apartment. When we rejoined each other in the almost pitch blackness of the hallway, Phyllis whispered.

  “It makes no sense, Clancy. It’s evening now and it’s getting dark outside. You can’t do anything here without light.”

  We went up to the third floor, feeling our way, step by step. Again Grischov took the apartment on the left, Phyllis and I the one on the right. But this time the door of the apartment was locked. I moved the handle and tried to force it, but it would not give. “There’s another door in the rear,” I whispered to Phyllis. I held her hand as I felt my way through the black hallway to the rear door. It was also locked. Guiding by the wall, we felt our way to the front door and waited for Grischov. After a moment or two, I heard the shuffle of his feet as he made, his way toward us in the darkness.

  “Grischov?” I said softly.

  “Nothing in there, Clancy.”

  “This one’s locked.”

  “What kind of locks are they, Clancy?” he wanted to know.

  “I can’t say. These buildings have been standing for sixty, seventy years. They keep changing the locks.”

  “Let me feel it,” Grischov said. I guided his hands toward the door and then heard the soft rustle of his fingers caressing the lock. It was very still in that hallway. We could hear the creaking, the contracting and the expanding that is a part of any very old house. We heard rats moving. I heard the hoarse breathing of Phyllis as she pressed close to me there. Grischov whispered into my ear,

  “I think I can open it, Clancy. I’ll try, anyway.” I heard the jangle of his keys as he removed them from his pocket. “Skeleton keys and all. You never miss a trick, do you, Grischov?” His soft laugh was reassuring. We were all three of us very tense, and the scraping of his keys as he tried one after another in the lock sounded loud enough to arouse anyone in that old stinking ruin of a house. “This does it,” he whispered. He turned the knob and the door opened. I led the way into the blackness, striking a match. It was the first match that any of us had struck and it flared with a brilliance that hurt my eyes. The room was empty except for a rat that shot past us out of the door we had just opened. The match burned out. I struck a second match and led the way toward the first connecting room. The door to this room was closed. When I opened it, a different smell touched my nostrils. The tenement had been full of cold dead smells but this smell was alive and threaded through with decay.

  Phyllis must have sensed it too because she pressed closer to me. I took my gun out of my shoulder holster and dropped it into the side pocket of my jacket. My match burned out. Grischov lit another match. His matches were better than mine for illumination—the long wooden safety matches that are called torches. In one corner of this room on the floor there was a little pile of books. They had been eaten and chewed by rats. Grischov pointed to them. Phyllis stepped over and picked up one of the books, and I lit another match. It was a copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, dirty, damp, and in part eaten by the rats. She opened it and there, on the inside of the cover, by the light of our matches, we read the name “Alex Horton.” We looked at each other, all three of us, stared silently at each other until the heat of the burning matches caused us to drop them and plunge the room into darkness again.

  I led the way into the next room, which was filled with a vague twilight that filtered in through the air shaft window. This had once been the kitchen of the apartment. There was no need for matches here. Paper that had once enclosed loaves of bread was scattered in fragments across the floor. Rats had eaten the bread. On one of the kitchen cupboards two cans of beans stood. There were two aluminum pots, one with some beans at the bottom of it and the other with a sour trace of canned soup in it. For some reason, the rats had not gotten to them. In the cupboard, behind the doors of the cupboard, we found four boxes of salted crackers. On the stove there was a large pot with about an inch of water in the bottom of it. Also in the cupboard were some cans of fruit juice and some bottles of ginger ale.

  Now we went through to the rear of the flat. Here again there was enough light from the rear windows to enable us to make out what the room held. That we found Horton there did not surprise us; at this point it would have only surprised us if we had not found him there. He lay in one corner of the room, his back against the wall, a dirty and torn quilt pulled over him. His eyes were closed and he had a bad cut on one cheek, where, as we learned, a rat had bitten him. But there was no atom bomb in the room—no contraption of shotguns or gadgets or pellets of Uranium 235—nothing but filth, dirt, disorder, and, in one corner, what was left of Alex Horton under a ragged quilt.

  part thirteen ALEX HORTON

  OF ALL THE THINGS that happened in that dark and rotten tenement building, the most amazing was not the discovery of Alex Horton, but the process that took place in Phyllis—a process I hardly know how to describe. It was a process of change, of growth, of saturation, of decision, of equanimity—and, I suppose, of other things too. Perhaps it was something that had been happening to her for many years. It builds up and it saturates and then suddenly it appears. It may also be that some such change was taking place in myself—I don’t know; or at least I think I knew better from watching it and from watching her, what went on with Phyllis.

  Now, while Grischov and I stood transfixed where we were, it was Phyllis who calmly and confidently went forward to Horton. She knelt beside him and raised his head. He was filthy and emaciated and his face was covered with a growth of whiskers and begrimed with dried blood. He was full of the wretched smell of sickness and of his own decay; but this in no way deterred Phyllis or indeed appeared to affect her in any manner.

  She called over her shoulder to us, “Find something for him to drink.”

  Grischov went back into the kitchen. I struck more matches. The faint light in the room was fading now, but here and there, perched on the wide ancient molding where the rats could not get at them, were stumps of candles. I lit four of these stumps, and since the room was a very small room, the candlelight gave enough illumination for us to do what we had to do.

  Grischov returned with a can of fruit juice that he had opened and a glass that he was wiping clean with his handkerchief. He poured some of the fruit juice into the glass and handed it to Phyllis, who very gently and carefully fed it, sip. by sip, to Horton. I would have moved in to help her—perhaps to raise Horton to a sitting position—but when Grischov saw me start, he motioned me back and shook his head. Horton’s eyes were open, but they were glazed and without focus. He was very thirsty. God knows how long it had been since he had
anything to eat or drink, and, though he could only sip, there was a ravenous need in the way he finished the juice. Grischov filled the glass again.

  Phyllis raised Horton’s head and said to him very gently, “It’s all right, Alex. I am Phyllis Goldmark. It’s all right now, Alex, everything is going to be all right.”

  His eyes found her and fixed on her and stared for a while in perplexity at the wavering candlelit image of her face.

  “Phyllis Goldmark,” she repeated slowly, “your good friend, Alex. You remember me.”

  “Yes, I remember you,” he said suddenly and very clearly.

  “You’re going to be all right now. I’m here with good friends. They’re good friends of mine and they’re good friends of yours, Alex. Do you understand me?”

  “I understand you,” he said, his’ voice acquiescent and compliant, like the voice of a little child.

  “How do you feel?”

  “I feel very bad, Phyllis. I think I’m dying.” She handed the glass back to Grischov and touched Horton’s forehead. I looked at her inquiringly, and she nodded as if to indicate that he was hot and feverish. “You’re not dying, Alex; you’re going to be all right. We’ll take you to a hospital where they’ll take care of you and then everything will be all right.”

  “No, I’m dying; I’ve been dying here for days. The rats were eating me. I felt them eating my face.”

  With my lips but silently I framed the words for Phyllis, “Ask him—ask him now” She shook her head. “Ask him,” I insisted again, “you must. Ask him now.” .

  Phyllis sighed and nodded. Horton never took his clouded, bloodshot eyes from her face. “Alex,” she said, “you must tell me now—where is the bomb?”

  “The bomb?” he whispered.

  “The atom Bomb, Mess.. The bomb that you made. You made an atom bomb here in New York. Professor Simonovsky made an atom bomb in Moscow. Do you remember? Do you understand me?”