The Fugitive Pigeon

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Artie,” I said, because I figured now he really was awake, “I’m in a kind of a jam. I need help, Artie.”

  He looked up from the floor, and his smile this time was puzzled, his eyes sort of glassy. “Charlie Poole,” he mused. “Little Charlie Poole. Slept on the floor. Got himself in a jam. Little Charlie Poole.”

  “I need help,” I repeated.

  He spread his hands. “Tell me, baby,” he said, more quietly and sincerely than I’d ever heard him say anything. “Tell me all. Begin.”

  Begin. Begin where? Two people were trying to kill me, that was part of it. The whole explanation about Uncle Al and the organization and the bar in Canarsie, that was part of it. Being out with little money and no coat, that was part of it. But where was the beginning of it?

  Then I remembered the name I’d heard in the conversation between Uncle Al and the killers last night: Agricola. Agricola was the beginning of it, I supposed, the man who’d ordered the killers to kill me. So I said, “Artie, do you know of anybody named Agricola? In some kind of criminal organization or something.”

  “Agricola? The Farmer? Hell, yes.”

  “You do know him.”

  “Farmer Agricola,” he said. “Everybody knows him. Knows of him, anyway. I never met him myself, of course, he’s too big. Besides, he stays out on his farm on Staten Island most of the time.”

  “Staten Island,” I said.

  “Sure. I knew about him back when I used to sell the pills, you know? He’s way up in the higher echelons there, maybe he runs the whole thing for all I know. Did you know I quit selling them things? I saw this documentary on television, the evils of narcotic addiction, and let me tell you, baby, it was like a revelation. You’re looking at a new Artie Dexter, a new man, believe it or don’t. I am now so loaded with social conscience you—”

  “Agricola,” I said.

  “If you’re thinking,” he said, “of making an extra kopek, peddle the pills like at that bar you run out there, take my advice and don’t do it. Some morning you’ll look at yourself in the mirror, you’ll say—”

  “No,” I said, “that isn’t it. This guy Agricola sent—”

  But then the door opened and the sloe-eyed raven-tressed beauty came in and said, “Time, gentlemen, please.”

  Artie shouted, “Chloe!” He threw back the covers and spread out his arms. “Come to Papa!”

  “I hope to Christ not,” she said.

  Artie didn’t have any pajamas on at all. Feeling that old adolescent blush staining my cheeks like the Sherwin-Williams paint can had just been dumped on my head instead of the globe, I said, “Well, uh, Artie, uh, I’ll, uh, talk to you, uh, later on, uh …” Meanwhile backing up. I left the room by the other door, the one leading to the bathroom, because that way I didn’t have to get closer to Chloe, who was taking off her dungarees and ignoring the dickens out of me.

  I felt much better when I had the closed bathroom door between us. I heard Artie shout, “Ah hah!” and then there was silence from in there.

  As long as I was in the bathroom anyway, and nothing to do, I washed. I didn’t take any clothing off, because I would have had to put the same dirty clothing on again and I didn’t want to have to do that. I knew, for instance, that my shirt collar must be black by now, but it didn’t bother me as much as it would if I were actually to see it. So I simply washed my face and hands, brushed my teeth with toothpaste and my finger, gargled a little bit on general principles, and left the bathroom by the other door feeling somewhat better.

  As I was going out to the living room, I heard the telephone ring. I looked around, but the phone was in the bedroom, and I heard Artie bellow, “Every time! Every goddam time!” The phone didn’t ring any more, so I guess he answered it.

  I searched the living-room shelves, found in amid the record albums an old paperback of Charles Addams’ cartoons, and sat down with it to distract myself from thoughts of violence and mayhem.

  Somehow, I think I picked the wrong book.

  After a while Artie and Chloe came out, both dressed now, both looking bouncy and healthy. Artie rubbed his hands together briskly and said, “Now! Charlie boy, you wanted to talk.”

  Chloe said, “Coffee?”

  “Right,” said Artie. “A round of coffee. Coffee for me and my troops. Charlie?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Great,” said Artie. He clapped his hands together and came over and sat down in a chair facing me. “We begin,” he said.

  “And,” said Chloe from the kitchen-closet, “you can tell your Uncle Al he’s got a rotten sense of timing.”

  I said, “My Uncle Al?”

  Artie frowned and said to Chloe, “That was supposed to be a surprise, schmo. He didn’t want us to tell him.”

  “I forgot,” said Chloe. “Sorry.”

  I said, “What is this?”

  Artie said, “Let’s talk. You had a problem, you wanted to talk. Something about Farmer Agricola, right?”

  “No, wait,” I said. “This is important. What about my Uncle Al?”

  Chloe said, “Forget it, will you? I’m sorry I spoke up, I didn’t mean to ruin anything.”

  “The bit’s blown,” Artie told her. “It don’t matter any more, idiot, you already opened your big mouth.” But the manner wasn’t as harsh as the words. It was as though he couldn’t really be mad at her right now.

  She said, “So sue me,” and went back to making the coffee.

  I said, “So tell me.”

  “That was your Uncle Al on the phone,” Artie told me. “He wanted to know were you here, and I said yes did he want to talk to you, and he said no he’d come on down and pick you up but don’t tell you because he wanted it to be a surprise. So when he comes in, will you act surprised?”

  Chapter 6

  You read about it in the papers all the time. A city bus driver, bored and bedeviled by years of driving back and forth over the same restricted route, all at once makes a left turn and drives to Columbus, Ohio, instead. Not that he wants to go to Columbus, Ohio, or even knows anyone there. It is only that Columbus, Ohio, is off that damn bus route. You remember reading about things like that, right?

  Well, some day it’s going to happen on a Staten Island ferry. Some day the guy at the wheel of the Staten Island ferry is going to get sick of going back and forth between Staten Island and the Battery, and he’s going to turn left and steam to Nantucket instead. It hasn’t happened yet, but you mark my words; some day.

  Riding the ferry to Staten Island now, and thinking about it, I was wishing today would be the some day, and this ferry the ferry that would do it. Nantucket, Bermuda, even the Azores. Or, Fidelistas hijack airplanes and take them to Cuba, why not ferryboats?

  I don’t know why not, but they don’t. Or didn’t, not the one I rode. The one I rode went to Staten Island, of all places, and I got off and went looking for Farmer Agricola.

  I had left Artie’s place, of course, in a hurry. But first there’d been a few more things to say; I’d borrowed a jacket from him, and swore him to secrecy about where I was going and that I knew the name Agricola. “Don’t tell my Uncle Al,” I said. “Don’t tell anybody.”

  “Baby, tell me what’s going on,” he said.

  “No time, no time. I’ll come back when I can, I promise.”

  “Right,” he said. “My lips are sealed. Hers, too.” He looked at her. “Right, big mouth?”

  “Sure,” she said. She shook her head at me. “Don’t worry, Charlie,” she said. I’m not sure, but I thought she seemed more interested in me now than before.

  Anyway, “I’m off,” I said, and got into the black basketball jacket Artie was loaning me. The arms were too short, so the sleeves of my white shirt stuck out halfway from wrist to elbow, and I couldn’t close it across to zip it up, but it was better than nothing.

  I ran back down to the street, and two blocks away I saw them, the killers, rolling slowly along in their black automobile with my Uncle Al between them on
the front seat. They didn’t notice me; they were too busy looking at street signs, trying not to get lost in the Village.

  I picked up the Seventh Avenue subway at Sheridan Square, took it to South Ferry, the end of the line, and got aboard a Staten Island ferry, which set sail for Europe but only got as far as Staten Island.

  It was a beautiful day for a sea voyage; a cloudless sky, a bright warm sun, a brisk but not cold breeze. I stood out on the upper deck, at the front, where if for one reason or another I should go over the rail I would land on a car roof and not in the Atlantic Ocean, and I tried to build up some spirit of adventure from the voyage and the weather and the mission, but all I was was scared.

  And hungry. When the ferry docked at St. George I walked up to the main street, built diagonally across one of the steep hills that Staten Island has so many of, and found a luncheonette, and had myself a hamburger and a cup of coffee. When I paid, I had seventeen dollars and thirty-eight cents left.

  The luncheonette boasted a phone booth. I went over to it and looked in the narrow Staten Island directory, not expecting to find anything, but Agricola, A. F. was practically the first entry. It didn’t give a street address, just a town, Annadale.

  This wasn’t necessarily the right Agricola, but on the other hand, how many people named Agricola would be operating farms on Staten Island? If it turned out to be the wrong one, maybe he’d know where I could find the right one.

  I asked the man behind the luncheonette counter how I would get to Annadale, and he told me what bus to take and where I’d find it.

  Staten Island is a very odd place. It’s one of the five boroughs of New York City, just as much a part of the city as Manhattan or Brooklyn or the Bronx, but on the other hand, it’s this crazy island tucked in next to New Jersey, and until the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge you couldn’t even drive to Staten Island from any of the other boroughs. It’s still the only borough with no subway, and it has no skyscrapers, and there are great expanses of it that are just scrubby weedy fields. It has slums, because every place has slums, but the slums don’t look like New York City slums, they look like Poughkeepsie slums or the back part of Bellville, Illinois. And even though the whole island is only one-fifth of a city, it itself is a collection of little towns, separated by countryside and woods. There’s St. George, where the ferry lands, and Port Richmond and Howland Hook, and New Dorp and Eltingville, and Pleasant Plains and Richmond Valley, and Bulls Head and New Springville, and Annadale, where a man named Agricola lived.

  Annadale is a pleasant underpopulated town between Arthur Kill Road and Drumgoole Boulevard, in case you’d like to hear two street names that didn’t make me feel any better.

  The old-time comedians that made so much fun of Canarsie and New Jersey mostly just left Staten Island alone. Maybe it was out of sympathy for the Islanders, or maybe it was because Staten Island is so improbable, in concept and appearance, that even a comedian couldn’t think of anything to say about it.

  My bus let me off where Arthur Kill Road and Drumgoole Boulevard meet at Richmond Avenue. There was a Gulf station there, and I stopped in and asked the man if he knew where I’d find the Agricola farm. He didn’t, but he suggested I walk down Drumgoole Boulevard a ways and inquire again.

  Drumgoole Boulevard was built during the Second World War by the United States Army in order to move troops quickly from New Jersey, via Outerbridge Crossing, across Staten Island to the embarkation points along the northeastern coast. From the looks of it, it hasn’t been repaired since, not once. It gets very little traffic, and for the most part there are just woods and fields on both sides of the road. Now and again I’d pass a cluster of houses built all in a row, four or five of them, usually of brick, very nice-looking but lonely. Now and again a car would pass me, headed west toward Outerbridge Crossing, or coming the other way. The cars all drove in the left lane, because the right lane was in such bad shape, the concrete all crumbling and pitted. There were no sidewalks, so I walked down the grass island in the center of the road, weaving in and out of the tree trunks and streetlight poles.

  I’d walked quite a ways, not having seen a gas station or store of any kind, and beginning to wonder who I was going to ask about Farmer Agricola next, when a black car raced by me, headed west.

  It was the car, I knew it the second I saw it. Yes, and the two of them in it, both in the front seat. I stood where I was, on the island, and watched the car shoot up to the top of a long gradual hill ahead of me, and there turn right.

  Had they questioned Artie, threatened him, perhaps threatened his girl? Had one or the other, Artie or Chloe, told them what I knew, that I knew the name of Agricola and that I was coming to Staten Island in search of him?

  Or had they merely come back for further instructions? They wouldn’t dare use the telephone for a matter like this, not with all the wiretapping going on these days. They maybe went to Artie’s place, found me gone, and knew they’d lost my trail again. So back they came to Staten Island to confer with Agricola, to decide what to do next.

  They must know by now they couldn’t use Uncle Al any more to betray me, that I would be defending myself against Uncle Al’s phone calls from now on.

  This was twice they’d gone by me today without noticing me. Having gone past me this second time seemed to prove that neither Artie nor Chloe had talked; if the killers had known I was on the Island they would surely have checked everyone they saw who could possibly be me.

  So they must be returning to Agricola. Which meant Agricola’s farm must be off to the right, at that intersection up ahead.

  I didn’t know how long they would be with Agricola, or how soon they would come rushing back, so I left the central island and went over to the right edge of the road and walked along the grass and weeds there by the curb, where the sidewalk would have been if the Army engineers had expected us to win the Second World War.

  The intersection was at a street called Huguenot Avenue. Naturally. I turned right and kept walking.

  For some reason all of Staten Island, even the most expensive parts like Princess Bay, has a faintly grubby look, as though everyone had given up years ago in the attempt to keep the place looking bright and cheerful. The most fiery red, exposed a brief while to the aura of Staten Island, fades into a pedestrian tone, modest and a little grimy. The Island from end to end, has the same feeling as the ferries that service it.

  Huguenot Avenue had this aura, in buckets. I walked along past just slightly seedy homes, and past just slightly scuffy fields and copses, and now and then a stretch of farmland, sometimes with dead cornstalks in faded cream rows. A couple of time I passed dirt roads, with rural delivery mailboxes on poles at the edge of the road.

  Rural delivery mailboxes, in New York City!

  The names were on the mailboxes: Guyon, Hylan, Barrett, Agricola …

  The dirt road went off to the right, fenced in barbed wire on both sides. On its left was a cornfield, on its right a grazing pasture. Ahead, the road ran into a copse of trees.

  I didn’t want to go in that road, on which I would be open and exposed and trapped, while there was any chance I’d meet those two killers coming the other way. So I went past the entrance, and down the road a ways farther, and where a tree had fallen over to make a natural bench beside the road I sat down to wait.

  It was getting to be late afternoon now, the sun losing some of its warmth, the breeze adding to its chill. I lit a cigarette, and scuffed my feet around a little in the dirt beside the road, and sat on the fallen tree, and wondered what I was doing here.

  Trying to save my life, I supposed.

  Though it did take some of the heart out of the expedition to have Uncle Al turn traitor that way. And having those two guys in their black car show up everywhere I went was beginning to give me the willies.

  What if I couldn’t convince Agricola? What if he wouldn’t listen to me? What if he took one look at me, realized who I was, and started shooting?

  If only I had a gun of m
y own, I could hold it on him and force him to listen to me while I talked. If I had a gun. And if I wouldn’t be too scared to use it, which I would be.

  Sitting there on the tree, thinking about things, I began to get myself more and more frightened and more and more depressed. Surely the best thing for me to do was go away to Mexico or Tierra del Fuego. Regardless I had only seventeen dollars and twenty-three cents. I could stow away on a ship, on a plane. I could hitchhike to Mexico. In Brasilia perhaps I could find a job, learn the language—could Portuguese be learned?—and build a new life for myself.

  But I knew it was a false dream. Wherever I might try to hide, from Aabenraa, Denmark, to Zywiec, Poland, they would find me. From Zululand to Afghanistan, from Etah to Little America, the wrath of the organization would seek me out. There was no use trying to run away from the organization. All I could hope to do was convince the right people that I wasn’t someone they wanted to kill after all.

  Down the road, the black car nosed out into view. I tensed; they were returning to action, armed with fresh orders from their boss, off again in their search for me.

  The car turned right. Toward where I was sitting.

  My first instinct was to throw myself on the ground behind the fallen tree, put my face in the grass and my arms up over my head, and await my end in as cowardly a manner as possible. But I resisted; all was not lost, not all, not entirely. They couldn’t be expecting to see me here, and that was to my advantage.

  So all I did was fold my arms in front of myself, to hide the shortness of the jacket sleeves, and lean forward with my head slumped as though I were asleep. I was well aware what an inviting target I made for a hit-and-run accident, my bent head sticking out there just at headlight height, but I locked every nerve and every muscle and every joint, and I waited.

  The black car rolled by me, with a purr of engine and a hiss of tires. I sagged a bit, in relief, but otherwise held my pose until I was sure they were out of sight. Then I sat up, and looked to left and right, and I was alone on the road.