Phyllis

by Howard Fast

  He shook bis head slightly.

  “Do you know who Professor Simonovsky is?” Her voice was soft and with no note of alarm or anxiety—with no implication of any threat.

  “I know Simonovsky,” he answered weakly.

  “Do you remember the letters you wrote? You said that you were going to make a bomb. Do you remember those letters, Alex?”

  “I remember the letters.” His lips trembled, whether in a smile or out of nervous hysteria I don’t know, and he repeated, “I remember, Phyllis, but there was no bomb.”

  “You said you were going to make a bomb,” she insisted. “Simonovsky said he was going to make a bomb.”

  “That is how we planned it,” Horton whispered, “but not ever to make the bomb. We didn’t have to make the bomb. All we had to do was to disappear. It was the threat that counted, Phyllis, don’t you see, not the bomb.”

  “But the uranium was missing.”

  He was silent for awhile. He closed his eyes, and then lay there for a little while in silence. Neither Grischov nor I moved nor did we utter a sound. Phyllis crouched over him, holding up his head, waiting patiently, sitting with his head nestled in her arms as gently as if he were a little child and she was his mother. Then Horton opened his eyes and asked her, “The uranium was missing?”

  “It was missing here,” Phyllis said. “It was missing in Russia.”

  Horton smiled a real smile. It was the only time I ever saw him smile. “We counted on that,” he said. “The way they do things—some would have to be missing. They do things loosely. You tell them that something is missing and then they’ll find that it’s missing. But there isn’t any bomb, Phyllis. There never was a bomb—not here—not in Moscow.”

  Now she pleaded with him and again in her tone was the quality of a mother who pleads with a child. “Alex, tell me the truth. Please, you must tell me the truth. It’s very important for you to tell me the truth—the most important thing in the world. Where is the bomb?”

  “No bomb. I’ve been here all the time, Phyllis, here in this apartment, day and night. I never left it. How could I make a bomb? Where would I put it? I never left this apartment and now I’m never going to leave it. I’m dying, Phyllis. Can’t you see that I’m dying? I’m all eaten away, inside and outside. I’m glad you’re here.”

  Phyllis nodded at him. There was no change in her face, but even in that dim candlelight I could see the tears form and well out of her eyes and run down across her cheeks.

  “I didn’t want to die alone.”

  “You’re not going to die, Alex.”

  His eyes closed again and, after a movement or two, Phyllis lowered his head gently, rose, and came over to us. “He’s very sick, I think,” she said softly, “he’s very hot.”

  “We have to get him out of here and get him to the hospital. That’s the main thing now,” I told them, “to get him to the hospital. We don’t know how sick he is or whether he’s going to live or die.”

  “Do you believe him?” Grischov asked me strangely.

  “About his dying?”

  “About the bomb,” Grischov said.

  “Yes, I believe him—or maybe I was ready to believe him. I have felt it from the beginning, that it would be this way.”

  Grischov shrugged. “Whatever the truth is, the main thing now is to get him out of here.” And then a sharp, flat voice from the entrance into the kitchen snapped at us,

  “I agree with you. That’s the main tiling to get him out of here.”

  We turned to face the voice. It was Maximilian Gomez. He stood in the door of the room, a heavy Luger in his hand and leveled at us. He was no longer the smiling, urbane, and soft-voiced sugar diplomat whom we had met in Great Neck. He was hard now, cold as ice and full of the triumph of the moment As he must have seen it, the whole world was just almost—actually almost in the palm of his hand, and, as with Sodom and Gomorrah, here were two cities that were his to wrap in columns of flame. He felt like God and spoke as he felt. He was tall and handsome and virile and triumphant—and filled with hatred and malevolence and concern for the great property of power that was about to be his. He was also honorable. He had no obligations, for the one hundred fifty thousand dollars he had paid to make me his leader into darkness had been declared forfeit. I had betrayed him, he had riot betrayed me. And so his appearance was in summation and in action. But the realization of this was not nearly so long as it takes to put it down. When you make a story or a film out of such a thing it is full of conversa- tion and dickering over the point of a gun, but when life becomes a little more of a nightmare than anyone can concoct, the gun finishes the decision, it does not begin it. I knew that and Grischov knew it; and when we turned around, we did what we had to do and there was no thought and no hesitancy and no more time lost than the fractions of seconds that disappear into the smoke of motion.

  I flung Phyllis aside and dived for the wall. Grischov threw himself onto the floor, firing through the jacket of his coat, then rolling over and crimped against the wall and burning shot after shot through his clothes at Gomez. Gomez lost because he had two targets and it took him that fraction of a second that is life or death to choose. I shot first through my jacket and then, rolling on the floor, clawed my gun out. But Gomez was already staggering when my gun came up. Gomez fired twice. Grischov must have shot at him four times. I fired once through my pocket—the second time a wild shot and the third and the fourth time into Gomez’s falling body. Gomez fell on his face and, when we got up and went to him and turned his body over, we saw that he had been hit five times, twice in the head and three times in the body.

  Horton had fainted. He lay motionless when we had left him, his eyes closed. Phyllis stood pressed against the wall where I had flung her, breathing hoarsely and staring with wide open eyes and horror and disbelief at Gomez’s body.

  I went into the kitchen and locked the kitchen door on the inside. Then I felt my way through to the front of the house and turned the bolt on the front door. On the lower floors the windows had been boarded over, but when I felt for the boards here in the front room of the apartment, I discovered that the windows were covered only with drawn shades. I raised one of these shades and looked down into the street. It was nighttime now—a night of moonlight and starlight in this little wasteland in the heart of Manhattan, and on the street in front of the house I saw three of them standing. I recognized Jackie, the all-American forty-year-old boy. He stood in front of the house, heavyset, large, thick, and ugly. One of the others might have been his companion, Mr. Brown, but they were all of a piece—thugs, gunmen, hoodlums, hired guns and paid to kill and waiting there to kill. I made my way back to the rear of the apartment. Phyllis hadn’t moved. Grischov stood at a rear window and motioned for me to join him. I went over to him and he pointed. In the rubble behind the house were two more of them, standing and looking up at us. I don’t think they could have seen us—they just stood there and watched the building and waited to know what the gunshots portended.

  There was a noise at the door of the apartment which led into the hallway from the back room. Someone tried the handle of the door and then, from the outside, a body pressed its weight against the door. Grischov took his gun from his scorched and burned pocket, leveled it thoughtfully at the door, seeking a place, and then just as thoughtfully and carefully pulled the trigger. Phyllis cried out as the sound of the shot thundered in the little room and outside, but not less clear for the closed door; we heard the man scream and heard the sound of his body as it fell.

  Hard as ice and cold as ice, Grischov turned to me, looked at his gun, pulled out the clip, and thrust it back. “I have no cartridges, Clancy,” he said, “do you?” I shook my head and spun the cylinder of my revolver. “Two shots left,” I replied.

  “Mine holds seven,” Grischov said. “Two shots left to match yours. We are a couple of fine cops, Clancy, you and me. No lights, no cartridges, no telephone, and no way out. What do we deserve, Clancy?”

&nb
sp; “They’ll fire me,” I said. My hand which held the revolver was trembling. “I suppose you’ll be sent to Siberia or shot or something of the sort.”

  “Something of the sort,” Grischov shrugged, and went over to Gomez and took his automatic. Quickly and expertly he went through Gomez’s pockets. There were no cartridges there. Grischov removed the clip from the big automatic.

  “How many?” I asked him.

  “Five,” he said. “Two in my gun—that makes seven—two in your revolver, nine all together.”

  “What are you?” Phyllis whispered. “Tell me what are you and what are you made of to stand there and count bullets like that? Alex is dying; you’ve killed two men. What kind of terrible games do you play, Clancy?”

  Grischov shook his head. “The games of the world we live in, Miss Goldmark. All the pretty games of the twentieth century. What should we do, Miss Goldmark? They’re waiting out there. They’re in the hall and they’re outside in the street and they’re waiting in back of the house. What should we do? Can you tell us what we should do?”

  Phyllis stared at him without replying. I walked over to Grischov and said to him, “Give me Gomez’s gun, Grischov. One of us has to get out of here and get through them.”

  Grischov pushed me away. “Not you, Clancy.”

  “I can do it better, Grischov.”

  “Like hell you can. This is my game, Clancy. I was trained for it.”

  “You weren’t trained for it, Grischov,” I said evenly. “You know damned well what is the case with you.”

  “You tell me,” Grischov growled at me.

  “Sure, I’ll tell you. You’ll go back to that goddamned house of yours on Park Avenue and you’ll tell them what Horton said and you’ll tell them that there’s no bomb—not here and not in Moscow—and then they’ll sweat you because they won’t believe you.”

  “Will they believe you?” Grischov cried.

  “They won’t believe you and they’ll sweat you and they’ll twist and tear every nerve and muscle in your body. And you’ll say that there was no bomb and still they won’t believe you. And they’ll give you a dose of all the ways that man ever devised to make men say what they don’t want to say.”

  “You’re a fool,” Grischov snarled, “a stupid fool. You’re filled up with your own lies and your own crazy thoughts. Now listen to me, Clancy, don’t argue with me. Listen to me. I’ll go out the front door of the apartment I’ll make it downstairs. You got two shots in your gun. You cover me from the window. Don’t argue—I tell you there’s no time to argue. Only don’t let Horton die. You hear me, Miss Goldmark?” he said, turning to Phyllis, “Don’t let him die. We can’t have political discussions now. This is a trap we never made. Now cover me, Clancy.”

  Phyllis was watching both of us, weeping silently and silently shaking her head. Grischov put his automatic in his pocket, hefted Gomez’s big Luger in bis right hand, and then led the way through to the front of the apartment. At the door there he whispered to me,

  “Bolt the door behind me. Now give me your hand, Clancy.”

  He passed the Luger into his other hand and we clasped hands there in the darkness, in the pit of black in which we neither of us existed or had being except in the sound of our breathing and in the flesh of our hands clasped together. His face close to mine, he whispered to me, “The hell with them, Clancy. The hell with all of them. The hell with their lousy world and their bombs and their politics. You and me, Clancy, we had a little bit of something else, didn’t we?”

  “We did,” I replied chokingly.

  “A little bit of what used to be and what maybe will be again, Clancy.” He was proud of his Americanisms, that man Grischov. “Be good,” he said to me.

  “Easy,” I said.

  Then he went out of the apartment and I closed and bolted the door behind him.

  I went to the front window and forced it open, raising it as high as I could. I was doing that when the Luger thundered on the stairs outside. And then I leveled my revolver through the window and prayed for my arm to stop shaking.

  Grischov leaped out of the front of the house. I hadn’t expected him that way. I hadn’t dreamed that he would be so fast, that he would move with the wild agility of an animal. He came out of the front of the house in long, leaping strides. And as Jackie, who was dead ahead of him, raced toward him, Grischov dropped to the pavement, rolled over, came to a stop, and shot Jackie. The other two men were firing as they converged on Grischov, but you can’t move or run and hit anything at the same time if you’re using a pistol. I used my left hand to steady my right hand against the side of the window jamb and I aimed carefully and fired carefully. My first shot missed. My second shot brought down the small, thin man, who might have been Mr. Brown. Grischov got the third one, but now they were shooting at him from the hallway down below. Grischov staggered to his feet, fell, crawled on. Two men came out of the house down below and a third man came around the end of the group of three houses and ran down the middle of the deserted street toward Grischov. I flung my empty revolver at them and then they converged on Grischov and they kept shooting at him until he was dead—dead and filled with death. There were three at first, and then four and then five—all of them in a circle around Grischov and shooting at him. And I stood in the room upstairs with my face against the dirty window jamb, weeping and praying and feeling myself fill up with the sickness of waste and death.

  It was then that the police cars came with their lights and their howling sirens to scatter what remained of Gomez’s hoodlums and to pursue them across the broken wasteland of the project—first a single squad car, then a second, and then Comaday’s big black limousine.

  But it was too late.

  I walked back through the apartment. Phyllis had been kneeling beside Horton, and now she rose to face me and told me that Horton was dead.

  “Grischov too,” I said.

  Everything began to drain out of me now. I was becoming emptier and emptier. I walked over to Horton and lifted the quilt. One of the two shots that Gomez fired had found him and he lay there in peace now and at long last, a Luger bullet in his chest. I drew the dirty quilt up over his face and then I went over to Phyllis. There was nothing to say and nothing that I could say. I looked at her and, after a moment, she took my hand. Now the two of us stood together, waiting.

  part fourteen CENTRE STREET

  THREE DAYS passed before they sent for me, and I was taken up out of where I was and back to Comaday’s office. Those three days were not in a cell but in a room in the main building. They put a cot in the room so I could sleep there. It was a quiet room, but during those three days it was not intended to be anything else. They were being kind and reasonable with me. They kept me well supplied with cigarettes, chocolate, Pepsi-cola and once a half-bottle of mixed martinis, hoping that I would take enough of it to make me amiable. I was amiable at the beginning, but it didn’t last. The meals were good. They had the food sent in from outside. On the first day it was steak; the second day lamb chops; and the third day beef stew.

  At first it was Comaday but only for a few hours, and then he turned me over to two men, whose names were Stark and Bingham. They were good men with years of experience in making people talk about what they wanted discussed. They were not muscle men or plug-uglies, but psychological types. They set out to win confidence and friendship and they put a man at his ease. They turned up on each of the two days at ten o’clock in the morning. They sat down and suggested that I try some of their cigarettes; they also had cigars in case my taste went to cigars. They were full of smiles and they knew all sorts of ways in which to quiet anxiety. Stark always began it. Stark would say,

  “Bingham and I, we are reasonable, Clancy, we are essentially reasonable men. All we’re asking of you is that you be reasonable.”

  I would nod and demonstrate my reasonableness.

  Then Bingham would say, “Let’s take it from the top, Clancy.”

  Maybe one of the reasons Com
aday made me a teacher was because now and then I had demonstrated an exactitude of language. There were expressions I avoided. I don’t know whether I would have stood by it but, now and again, it occurred to me that I would let myself be strangled before I used an expression like “take it from the top.” So I would ask Bingham, “How do you mean, ‘take it from the top’?”

  “The top, Clancy.”

  And Stark would say, “Work easy, Clancy, easy.”

  “We’ll take it from the top, that’s all I’m saying, Clancy, we’ll take it from the top.”

  Then I would say, “There’s no bomb—that’s the long and short of it, beginning and end. There never was a bomb—not here and not in Moscow.”

  “Did I ask you if there was a bomb, Clancy? All I said to you was, ‘Let’s take it from the top.’ We start at the beginning. We start back the first time you ever heard of Alex Horton; then we take it from there—”

  And so it would go, hour after hour, back and forth and around again in circles. They had patience if they had nothing else, but then, when you think about it, they were drawing their weekly pay check no matter what they did, and they might just as well have spent their time in a little room with me as anywhere else. As I said, the first day it was Comaday. The second day they questioned me from ten o’clock in the morning until midnight. They gave me no time off and in that room there was nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. They questioned me while I used the open toilet in the corner. They questioned me while I brushed my teeth and washed my hands and undressed. They questioned me while I lay on the cot that had been provided for me, trying to sleep. They were soft, uninspired, and persistent. On the third day they began all over again, but this time they continued only until four o’clock. At four o’clock a couple of officers in uniform came for me and took me up to Comaday’s office.

  There were three of them in Comaday’s office—the Commissioner, Sidney Fredericks, the man from the Justice Department, and Jackson of Central Intelligence. I had not seen Jackson since this all began. He wasn’|t pleasant with me then and he was no more pleasant with me now. The three of them sat in leather upholstered armchairs in Comaday’s office and smoked cigars and looked at me when I came in. Comaday waved the officers out. Then they went on puffing their cigars and observing me. No one asked me to sit down, no one smiled, no one made any gesture to indicate that I was roughly of the same species of human being that they were. They only sat there and smoked their cigars and looked at me. I didn’t find the performance too impressive. I thought it was calculated and a little childish and, after waiting a few minutes, I said to Comaday,