Phyllis

by Howard Fast

  “Where is Miss Goldmark?”

  “She’s here in this building,” Comaday replied flatly.

  “You haven’t any reason to hold her here. Why don’t you let her go?”

  “We haven’t any reason to hold you here, Clancy.” Fredericks shrugged.

  I ignored him and repeated to Comaday, “Let her go. You gave me a job and I did the job. You told me to find Horton and I found Horton. She wasn’t in it. Let her go.”

  Quietly Comaday said, “Like hell you did a job, Clancy. Like hell you did.”

  I thought about that remark for awhile before I answered him. Then I asked, “Would you like to know what I think, Commissioner?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re a louse, Commissioner. I think you’re a cheap, dirty louse—that’s what I think, Commissioner.”

  His neck swelled and blood gorged his face until it was bloated and red. He started out of his chair and then controlled himself and sat down again. He took another puff on his cigar and then he said to me, “That will cost you, Clancy.”

  “What will it cost me, Commissioner?” I demanded, my voice so hoarse and muted that even to me the sound was like that of another person. “What will it cost me? What are you going to do, Commissioner? Are you going to have me murdered and put away? Rip up slabs in the basement and set me down under them?”

  Comaday didn’t answer, but Fredericks said, “Don’t be so goddamned proud of yourself, Clancy.”

  “What then? I know what they would have done to Grischov. Grischov knew it too. Do you think he liked to die? You’re three smart men. Do you think Grischov plunged out there into those guns because he was a hero? Like hell he did. He added it all up and he decided that six of one was half a dozen of another. So maybe he took the easy way—or maybe he just thought he was taking the easy way. But he was a Russian—we’re not Russians, are we?”

  Arthur Jackson spoke for the first time and told me, “You got a loud mouth, Clancy. You got a loud mouth and a big head.”

  Comaday said, “Make it easy, Clancy, make it easy for yourself, make it easy for us, make it easy for everyone.”

  I walked over close to the three of them and I said to them, almost in a whisper, “I told you before and for two days I told it to your psychologists downstairs—there isn’t any bomb. There never was a bomb.”

  Fredericks jabbed a finger at me. “Even if we swallow your story, Clancy, hook, line, and sinker—even if we swallow it, how do you know Horton wasn’t lying?”

  “I know.”

  “You know a hell of a lot!” Comaday roared.

  “I know he didn’t make a bomb,” I said, keeping my voice soft and somehow or other controlling it.

  “You could make a bomb. Why not Horton?”

  “Because I’m not Horton and Horton was not me.”

  “That’s what we’re afraid of,” Jackson smiled. “You’re not Horton.”

  I didn’t like any of them, but I liked Arthur Jackson least. They were working on a theory and a presumption and, as a cop or a former cop, I could give professional credence to their theory and presumption and respect it and go along with it, at least to a certain point. But as far as Jackson went, it was neither a theory nor a presumption—it was a certainty. In either case, there was no more for me to say and no point in saying it, and when they began to talk, they simply asked the same questions oyer and over again.

  I either kept my mouth shut or said “Yes” or said “No” until they got on to the subject of Grischov and then I asked them whether they seriously believed that if there had been a bomb, Grischov would have gone downstairs and out into the street the way he did. I tried to make a point. I told them that Grischov had a wife and children in Moscow.

  “What does that prove?” Comaday wanted to know.

  “That if there was a bomb, Grischov wouldn’t have committed suicide.”

  “He didn’t Commit suicide,” Jackson insisted. “He tried to blast his way out of there. He had Gomez’s Luger and his own gun. He tried to blast his way out of there and leave you and the girl and Horton like sitting ducks. Suppose there was a bomb—in New York—that would mean a hell of a lot to Grischov. He’d weep tears for New York, wouldn’t he?”

  “You turn my stomach.” I said this directly to Jackson. “You turn my stomach when you talk like that, I swear to God you do. Grischov had as much chance of blasting his way out of there as I have of blasting my way out of here, and you know it.”

  “We don’t know a goddamned thing,” Fredericks sighed.

  “You’re a snotnose,” Comaday said with disgust. “You don’t learn, Clancy. You’re sitting on the roof of the barn and you don’t climb off—not one bit.”

  Then they called back the two officers and they took me out of there and back to my room. But now they had taken away the cigarettes and the candy bars and the Pepsi-cola, and there wasn’t a book or a newspaper or a word of writing to read. They took away my belt and my necktie and my jacket and my socks and they left me like that until just before dawn. They had taken my watch, too, so I don’t know what time that was—maybe five in the morning, maybe six in the morning. There was a tiny window in the room, high up and sealed with a heavy plate of frosted glass, but it seemed to be glimmering with a little less than total darkness and that made me think that it was either the beginning of the morning or close to it.

  This time three of them came in and they weren’t psychologists. They were old fashioned, old time, bullet-headed muscle boys and they began to work on me. They used short lengths of rubber hose and sometimes their hands, but they worked on me carefully and professionally and did most of it so that it didn’t show too much. I don’t know how long they worked on me; it might have been three hours or four hours or five hours or maybe only an hour; time ceases to have any meaning when you’re living in that kind of condition.

  They worked on me and they asked me questions. They sat me in a chair and knocked me off the chair. They turned on a hanging light and put it into my face. They questioned me and worked me with their rubber hose. They let me lie on the floor and dream that it was over or that I would lose consciousness and then they worked me across the room with the toes of their boots. They stood me up against the wall and worked me expertly down to the floor and then they dragged me up again and repeated the process over and over until I lost count.

  At first I tried to remember Hans Kempter and my own reactions when he sat in a quiet room. I tried to remember a homemade atom bomb and give them the due that while it did not exist for me, they had to establish the presumption that it existed for them. I said to myself that if I am reasonable and charitable and objective, I can maintain my sanity.

  But the trouble with such a state of mind lies in its very artificiality. It is not rooted in the conditions that accompany it; and after a while I had to let go of my objectivity and begin to hate. Hatred is a sickness, but under certain conditions it becomes a medicine for survival and by the time they finished with me I hated them as I had never hated anyone before.

  They picked me up and put me on the cot and then they went out. There was nothing personal in their coining, and nothing personal in their going. They had called me no names and they had used no obscenities. They did their work competently, professionally, and well.

  After they had gone, I lay face down on the cot, whimpering and pleading to a God I only half believed in for unconsciousness. My prayers were answered—at least to the degree that a doctor’s appearance occasioned. He examined me quickly but carefully and then gave me an injection of morphine and left me to float away into the peace and beauty of unconsciousness or sleep.

  For two days after that they left me alone and in those two days I healed up and pulled myself together. When Fredericks came in to see me on the third day after the beating, I hurt only when I moved or when something touched the bruises. My eyes were opened and I could see through the swollen lids and a finger I had felt certain was broken proved to b
e only badly wrenched and sprained.

  Fredericks sat down at the plain wooden table, which is always a part of the equipment of a quiet room, and nodded for me to join him. I seated myself across the table from him and accepted a cigarette he offered me. It tasted better than any cigarette I ever remember smoking, and when Fredericks saw the expression on my face, he tossed the whole pack on the table and said that I should keep them. I thanked him.

  “How do you feel about me, Clancy?” he asked.

  “The hell with that. I’m no good any more for personal observations. You’re doing your job, Fredericks. Don’t bring me any guilts.”

  “I haven’t any guilts,” Fredericks said thoughtfully. “We had to have a presumption, you know that, Clancy, as well as I do. Put yourself in my place and you would have the presumption too.”

  “I don’t put myself in your place.”

  “All right, Clancy, the fact remains that we had to have the presumption.”

  “Where’s Phyllis?” I asked him.

  “She’s here,” he said. “She’s all right. She’s well cared for.”

  “Like I’m well cared for, Fredericks?”

  “Look, Clancy,” he sighed, “we can either talk like civilized human beings or we can sit here and throw recriminations at each other. Which is it going to be?”

  “Civilized human beings,” I smiled. It was the first time I had smiled in days and the smile hurt. The muscles of my mouth hurt and my broken lips hurt when I twisted them into the grimace, but still in all it was a smile. It expressed appreciation and amusement. It said to me, as well as to Fredericks, that I was still a human being; for the biological fact of the matter is that animals don’t smile.

  “What is this?” Fredericks wanted to know. “Are we playing for marbles or are we playing with the lives of eight million people here and maybe almost as many in the Soviet Union? Give us that break, Clancy, use your head. Use your brains. You’re no fool.”

  “What do you want from me now, Fredericks?”

  “Are you ready to talk sense?”

  “I’ll try,” I nodded.

  “All right, then,” Fredericks began. “We had to state a presumption to ourselves, as wild as it might sound, we had to organize a premise on the fact that you and the girl knew where that bomb was. Now we’ve come to a point where our premise becomes inoperative. I’m not talking to the fact of whether or not there ever was a bomb, nor am I talking to the fact of my beliefs. My own beliefs don’t count. John Comaday’s beliefs don’t count. Beliefs are colored by experiences and emotion and by a philosophical point of view. You can hang your own life on a belief, Clancy; you can hang your wife’s life or your kids’ lives on a belief, but you can’t hang the lives of twelve or fifteen million people on a personal prejudice. That’s why we had to have a premise. Do you understand me?”

  “I understand you,” I said tiredly.

  “All right then. The premise becomes inoperative, not because we have abandoned it, but because we have to face the fact that we know of no way to make you or the girl tell us where that damn bomb is.”

  I wasted enough breath to tell him that there was no bomb.

  “Suppose there is no bomb, Clancy. For Christ’s sake, think like a cop for just two minutes—like an intelligent cop!”

  “I’m not a cop any more, Fredericks.”

  “I’m saying ‘Think like one!’ Think like one, Clancy. Can you ever abandon the premise? Could you ever go to sleep at night without asking yourself whether Clancy and Goldmark knew where that goddamned bomb was? Could you ever get up on a witness stand and swear that they didn’t know? Could you, Clancy?”

  I thought about it for awhile and then I shook my head. “No, I couldn’t,” I said.

  “All right,” Fredericks nodded. “Now we have it established. The premise exists. It’s going to continue as long as you and Miss Goldmark live and even afterwards. Maybe it will become comparatively unimportant, but it can never disappear, Clancy. Horton is dead, Grischov is dead, and Simonovsky has not been found. Maybe he never will be. Only you and Miss Goldmark were with Horton and no one else on this earth knows or will ever know what you said to him and what he said to you; so the premise exists. If we killed you now; if we followed your own crazy romantic notions and did away with your bodies and destroyed every evidence connected with you, that would still not change the premise that Horton made a bomb and that the bomb exists.”

  “Don’t argue the point, Fredericks,” I said wearily. “Grischov and I established the premise. I think we established it the moment Horton said that there never was a bomb—the moment we knew and understood that there never could have been any bomb. Do you know, I never met anyone like Grischov. You’re a Justice Department man, Fredericks, so maybe it’s a little hard for you to swallow. He didn’t come over to your side. He didn’t chicken out. He never turned his back on what he was or what he believed in. He just saw the premise all at once and clearly and he knew about it and that was the end of his road. He gave up. He had come so far and he could go no further. So he put a stop to it—to himself.”

  “But you didn’t give up, Clancy.”

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t give up. I was in love, Fredericks, and the woman I loved was there in the room with me. Maybe Grischov was in love too—I don’t know—but if he was, the woman he loved was five thousand miles away and his mind and his imagination couldn’t bridge the gap to a point where he would ever see her again. The premise was there for both of us, but Phyllis was there with me. Grischov’s wife wasn’t.”

  “Have it your way,” Fredericks shrugged. “My own advice, Clancy, would be to leave politics to the politicians. We’re going to keep you here one week longer than the time limit in Horton’s letter. That doesn’t mean anything except that, if we’re going to have the premise, we have to add an automatic device to it. When that extra week is up, you and Miss Goldmark can leave. We want you to remain in this city for the time being. You’ll be watched, but not too carefully. Make it easy for us. Don’t make it hard for us, and we’ll stretch the premise as far as we can. Keep your mouths shut and let all this be a bad dream that never happened.”

  “It’s been a bad dream, Fredericks,” I said to him. “From the first hour when I walked into Comaday’s office and saw you and Jackson and the rest of them, it became a bad dream; it was never anything else.”

  “There’s no dream you can’t forget,” Fredericks said, standing up now and looking at me appraisingly. Then he stretched out his hand and I stood up and shook hands with him, and then he left. I never saw him again.

  The remaining days went by slowly but they went by. They gave me things to read and they let me write letters to Phyllis and receive her replies. They brought back the chocolates and the soda water and the restaurant-cooked food. Then when the time was up they gave me a new suit and a clean shirt and took me up to Comaday’s office.

  I walked into the office and Phyllis was there, sitting in one of the leather-upholstered chairs and waiting for me. She was thinner than I remembered her as being, paler, smaller, but there was a light in her eyes that I had not seen there before and, when she stood against me with my arms around her, there was a wholeness about the two of us that I, at least, had never felt before.

  I had only a few words with Comaday. We both accepted the fact that I was no longer on the force. The papers of resignation were prepared and I signed them, and then he took out of his desk a package of money.

  “Here’s five hundred dollars of expense money, Clancy,” he said to me. “I don’t know what you had in mind when you asked for it but you never touched it. It was in your wallet when we took your wallet. The money was written off and now I’m using it as severance pay.”

  “Keep it, Commissioner,” I said shortly.

  He lost his temper then and shouted at me, “Take it, you thick-headed Mick, and get the hell out of here.”

  I swallowed what I began to say and controlled myself and very softly, bending
close to him, I let Comaday know what he could do with the money. Then we left. I didn’t shake hands with Comaday and he didn’t offer his hand to me. I think he disliked me as thoroughly and as conscientiously as I disliked him, and we were both of us content to leave it as it was. We walked out of there and out of the Building into the spring sunshine. I took Phyllis’s hand and we walked away from everything that had been. There was a great deal for each of us to think about and a great deal for each of us to say. But that could wait. Now, at this moment, our only purpose was to savor the taste of each other and the touch of each other, to breathe the clean morning air and to walk along with the knowledge that we were free—perhaps freer than either of us had ever been before.

  A Biography of Howard Fast

  Howard Fast (1914–2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast’s commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.

  Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast’s mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London’s The Iron Heel, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.