Act of Fear

by Michael Collins

  I went out and walked to the precinct station. That’s always the first stop. They had no record on Jo-Jo Olsen, but Lieutenant Marx seemed interested. I wondered some about a kid who had reached nineteen in Chelsea without even a juvenile record of any kind. Not even a prank arrest. It made this Jo-Jo sound even more special. I also wondered why Lieutenant Marx seemed interested. I asked him if Jo-Jo Olsen mean something to him, record or no record. Marx said no. He offered no other comment. The police do not give out free information.

  I saw the big man when I came out of the precinct into the hot sun.

  He was across the street. He was very interested in the window of a bookstore. Which is one of the things that caught my eye. He did not look like a man who read books, and I was pretty sure the level of his eyes and the angle at which he stood showed that he was not looking at the books at all. He was watching the station-house in the window.

  The second thing that caught my eye was his shoes. He had the smallest feet I ever saw on such a big man, and the shoes were those old-fashioned, pointed, two-tone brown and beige the sports wore in the twenties.

  I started across the street. He walked away fast. I watched him go and thought about the silent telephone call.

  Chapter 3

  Tommy Pucci was on the bar at Fugazy’s. I drank two beers before I started the questions. That is protocol. In Chelsea protocol is as rigid as it is at the Court of St. James, maybe more rigid. With my third beer I asked the question. Tommy wiped the bar.

  ‘I ain’t seen Olsen,’ Tommy said.

  ‘For the record or for real?’ I said. ‘Jo-Jo is clean. A friend just wants to find him.’

  Pucci thought. It must have seemed safe. ‘I ain’t seen him in a couple days. I told Vitanza.’

  ‘Tell me something you didn’t tell Pete. Any friends, girls, Pete doesn’t know about.’

  Tommy thought. ‘Maybe the Rukowski pig.’

  ‘A girl?’

  ‘Jenny Rukowski. I seen Jo-Jo go out with her sometimes. I never seen Vitanza near her.’ Tommy grinned. ‘I figure Jo-Jo is maybe ashamed he’s seen with Rukowski. I know how he feels.’

  ‘Where do I find her?’

  ‘Wait around. Only she don’t come in that much.’

  Tommy went to tend to business. Rukowski had to be Polish. Polish meant Roman Catholic. I dropped money and a buck for Tommy and walked a couple of blocks to St. Ignatius (Polish) Roman Catholic Church: Father Martinius Reski.

  Father Reski turned out to be an old man who knew Jenny Rukowski all right – a no-good girl who never came to mass. When I told him that I was a cop of sorts, he gladly gave me her address. I think he hoped that Jenny, the tragedy of her poor mother’s life, was about to be punished for her wickedness.

  The address was near the church. It was the usual shabby tenement. The Rukowskis lived on the third floor. The girl who finally answered my knock was tall and big all round. She looked like she was sleeping off a hippo of a hangover when I knocked.

  ‘Jo-Jo Olsen!’ she said when I asked. As if it was a dirty word.

  ‘You do know him?’

  Her hair was a dirty blonde and thick. It needed a comb. She was not pretty. She was heavy and ugly and her eyes had a tendency to blink even in the dark hallway. She did not ask me in.

  ‘Put-put-put,’ she said. ‘Those damned bikes. Put-put-put, crap! No kicks. I mean, that creeper never turned on, you know?’

  ‘But he was a boyfriend of yours?’

  She giggled. ‘You’re a sweet one. Hell, man, he was a creep I made it with sometimes before I knew he was a creep. I ain’t got boyfriends, if you read me.’

  ‘I read you,’ I said. She seemed to have no interest in making it with me even before she knew I was a ‘creeper’. I did not know whether to be flattered or hurt. About then I had gotten the message. Jenny Rukowski spent most of her time on Cloud Ninety-seven, and not from whiskey. Whiskey did not reach as high as she lived.

  ‘You know where Jo-Jo went, Jenny?’ I asked.

  ‘Went?’

  ‘He seems to be missing, vanished, gone,’ I spelled out.

  She blinked. ‘You’re puttin’ me on, mister! Jo-Jo? You got to be kiddin’! Jo-Jo a rabbit? Christ, he wouldn’t never leave that monkey job. Like he sleeps in the grease pit.’ Then she brightened. ‘Hey, maybe he got with it, yeh? Maybe he turned on. Turn on, tune in, drop out.’

  ‘How about a girl,’ I tried. ‘Some girl give him a bad time?’

  ‘Jo-Jo?’ She kept saying the name as if not sure just who we were talking about. ‘He had his bike, put-put-put.’

  She seemed to think that sound was very funny. I watched her blink. ‘There was a square broad. Old, too. Maybe twenny-five! Only it was the broad was after Jo-Jo, yeh.’

  ‘Does she have a name?’

  ‘Who got a name? Hell, maybe he joined the Vikings.’

  ‘Vikings?’ I said. ‘A street gang?’

  ‘Man, like you got no education. The Vikings, them old-time guys, you know? I mean, Jo-Jo was hipped on them. Horns on their heads ‘n all. Beards ‘n horns.’

  ‘The Vikings,’ I said. I think I stared. In Chelsea no one cares about the past, not even yesterday. ‘He was interested in history?’

  But I had lost her again. ‘Hey, one arm! Crazy!’

  She had spotted my missing arm. Her eyes dilated as she stared at my pinned sleeve.

  ‘Who else knew Jo-Jo good?’ I asked.

  ‘One arm!’ she said. ‘Like crazy.’

  ‘You can count,’ I said. ‘Now tell me more about Jo-Jo.’

  ‘Beards’n horns. Crazy.’

  She was gone. I left her dreaming of beards and horns and one-armed men. She had her troubles. She was big and ugly and her home was a sinkhole. Maybe she made a lot of her own troubles, but don’t we all when you come down to it? I went down and out into the heat and sun.

  I walked across town to Water Street and Schmidt’s Garage. Schmidt wasn’t there. The garage office was locked. Schmidt had not replaced Jo-Jo. I studied my list. Both the YMCA and Automotive Institute were up on Twenty-Third Street. My feet hurt already. I took a taxi.

  The Automotive Institute was closest to the river, and the cab reached it first. I went in and asked about Jo-Jo Olsen. They handed me over to a thin, pale man who wore glasses and a snarl and was called an instructor.

  ‘No, I haven’t seen Olsen! He had an important exam on Friday. He didn’t come. He had shop on Saturday. He missed it!’

  He was annoyed as hell about Jo-Jo. He seemed to think that it all made him look bad. He took it personally. He acted like a man who would enjoy kicking a student out.

  ‘Do you know anyone who might know about Jo-Jo?’ I asked. ‘Some student, maybe? A special friend?’

  ‘Rhys-Smith,’ the instructor said. ‘He might know what Olsen was up to. Not that I don’t know what Olsen is kicking around.’

  I perked up my ears. ‘You know?’

  ‘Who doesn’t? They’re all the same. I try to teach them how to be useful. All they want is some floozie. I know Olsen.’

  I sighed. Everyone has a hobby horse in his brain. The instructor spent too many hours trying to teach kids who really only wanted to grow up fast and be big men. The instructor was discouraged by too many years of failure. He was bitter. A teacher who had learned that no one wanted to be taught; they just wanted an easy road to easy money.

  ‘What about this Rhys-Smith?’ I said. ‘Who is he and where do I find him?’

  ‘He’s a part-time instructor we use sometimes. You can find him almost any time at The Tugboat Grill. Which is why we only use him sometimes. He knows more about fuel injection than any man in New York, only most of the time the fuel he knows best is alcohol.’

  I left the instructor brooding. His real trouble was that he still cared. He cared about Jo-Jo Olsen and all the others. He wanted to teach them, so he hated them. Somewhere deep in the hidden corners of his heart he was a true teacher, and each time one of his boys failed
him his heart could not help whispering that perhaps it was, after all, he who had failed.

  For Cecil Rhys-Smith the whisper of his own failure had long ago become a shout that could only be lessened by the rush of booze down his always thirsty throat. I found The Tugboat Grill moored at the edge of the river so close beneath the West Side Highway that the shadows of cars flickered the window all day long.

  Cecil Rhys-Smith sat on a bar stool with the air of a man who has learned that a bar stool is man’s best friend. His beer glass was not quite empty. If the glass had been empty he would not have been allowed to sit there without refilling it. And if he were not there at the bar, how could some generous stranger buy him a drink? It was clear that Rhys-Smith did not have the price of a refill, only the hope. I braced him with the offer of a free whiskey. The suspicion that had begun the instant I had approached him vanished. On the strength of one whiskey and the perpetual hope of one more, he allowed me to take him to a reasonably private back booth.

  ‘Missing?’ Rhys-Smith said when I told him about Jo-Jo. I had wondered. He’s a generous boy for one so young.’

  Rhys-Smith looked at my missing arm. ‘The young are not often generous, Mr Fortune. Generosity requires some suffering.’

  I was not in the mood to tell the story of my arm. Not any of the stories of my arm. So I watched Rhys-Smith. He fitted his name if not his present location. Cecil Rhys-Smith is not a name heard often in Chelsea.

  He was a small man, slender and wiry, with the light skin and ruddy complexion of the British Isles. His moustache was thin and pale, and his hair was thin and had once been pale. The hair was grey now, and it looked like he cut it himself. His clothes had once been good tweed. He looked like a man who had once been someone. Not someone important, just someone. He had been a man who had something to do and a place in the world. Now he was no one, and what had happened was as obvious as the shaking of his hands when he tried to sip, not gulp, his free whiskey. Somewhere in his life his way out had become a monster on his back, and he had ended in a cheap bar a long way from home.

  ‘Talk to me,’ I said, ‘and there’ll be more.’

  He was not all the way down yet. ‘I would talk about my friend Jo-Jo without it, Mr Fortune. I will also take every dram you care to offer.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘It’s a simple life. Only one problem to think about every day, and a good chance that the problem will not last long. But tell me about Jo-Jo?’

  ‘He seems to have vanished. His family say he’s just on a trip. Peter Vitanza thinks different.’

  ‘His family, yes,’ Rhys-Smith said. ‘I never met them. There is some trouble there, Mr Fortune. Jo-Jo was disturbed about his family. I would say that he hated them, and yet, well, he loved them, you see? He is a close-mouthed boy.’

  ‘Where could he have gone?’

  ‘I don’t know, but never far from cars or some kind of motor racing. I suppose the Vitanza boy told you of Jo-Jo’s dreams? Plans, I should call them. He’ll do what he says. All he needs is training and experience. He has the drive.’

  ‘They both do,’ I said, and told him about Petey coming to me, and about the fifty bucks.

  ‘A good boy, Petey, but not strong the way Jo-Jo is. Peter has the dreams, not the drive. He’s too human, he wants too many other things. Jo-Jo is a rock. Pride if you like.’

  ‘Where do you fit in?’

  ‘I once drove for Ferrari.’

  He looked at his empty glass. I waved for another round for both of us. I never let a man drink alone. For a drunk that is demeaning. I’m lucky; I don’t depend on a drink. Not yet. My hiding places have not become prisons. That doesn’t say that they won’t someday, and I try to remember that. A man in prison needs a human word.

  ‘A relief man,’ Rhys-Smith said. ‘Useful to test the cars. There was the bottle. Once I had ideas. When I did not get what I needed the bottle was the consolation. Now I console the bottle. But I was a driver. I know racing. I know fuel injection. Jo-Jo liked to talk to me. He is a generous boy.’

  ‘Can you give me any leads where he might go?’

  ‘I don’t really know much about him beyond his plans.’

  ‘What about women?’

  ‘No, none that I ever saw. He was a remarkably controlled boy. Pete and women, definitely.’ Rhys-Smith smiled. ‘Pete is like me. Not that Jo-Jo did not have use for a female. But he did not get involved.’

  ‘And Vikings?’

  Rhys-Smith laughed. ‘Ah, yes, the Vikings. He knew all the sagas. How brave they were, he would say. They could outsail anyone. They had pride, he said, style. Yes, style. He could reel off their names: Harald the Stern, Sweyn Fork-Beard, Halfdan the Black, Harald Fair-haired, Eric the Red, Sweyn Blue-Tooth, Gorm the Old. All they needed was their ship, so Jo-Jo said.’

  ‘That’s all? A hobby?’

  ‘He did not like it that his father let people call him Swede when they are Norwegians. It seemed important.’

  ‘Maybe he took a trip in a time machine,’ I said.

  Rhys-Smith smiled politely. He was in that cosy world where it is always warm for a drunk with enough booze. He was feeling fine, and closing time would never come. I slipped a dollar into his jacket pocket when I left. It made me feel big.

  Outside the bar I flagged another cab and rode back up to Twenty-Third Street. The McBurney is a big YMCA, but the pool man thought he remembered an Olsen who was a regular. He checked his sign-in sheets for me. Jo-Jo had not missed a week-end at the pool in over a year – until now. Jo-Jo had not signed into the pool at the past week-end.

  In the street again I felt half foolish. A nineteen-year-old cuts some classes and a test, leaves a buddy high and dry, skips a big race, and doesn’t swim for a week-end. For all I knew, Jo-Jo was on the beach at Atlantic City. There are a thousand things that can make a nineteen-year-old suddenly change his mind, and what is four days?

  Marty was waiting for me, and I don’t like to keep Marty waiting.

  And yet I felt only about half-foolish – Jo-Jo Olsen did seem to be a little missing.

  Chapter 4

  I decided to work on Jo-Jo Olsen a few more days, go through at least the standard routine. Pete Vitanza’s fifty was worth that much, and, somehow, Jo-Jo did not sound like he should have done a rabbit. Maybe he had been pushed.

  I checked the hospitals, the jails, and the morgue, with no results. They had no Olsen, and only two John Does fitted Jo-Jo’s description at all. One was a blond kid off a ship, who turned out to speak no English, and the other was an over-age ‘youth’ in Bellevue who had been rolled by a sailor and who said that Jo-Jo sounded darling. It was slow, hot, tedious work. Do you have any idea how many hospitals there are in New York City with emergency wards?

  I tried the taxi companies and the airports. I turned up one lead. A taxi driver had had a passenger early last Friday who he thought had looked something like the picture of Jo-Jo. The driver thought maybe he had taken the fare from Chelsea to the East Side Air Terminal. Some lead.

  Bad as the lead was, it ended at the terminal anyway. Even if I could have had a look at passenger lists, I didn’t think it would have helped. If Jo-Jo was doing a fadeout, he was sure to be using a phony name.

  I put out feelers for information to some of my more reliable connections in the bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, coffee shops, and candy stores in Chelsea, the Village, and Little Italy. I hinted at something being in it for words on Jo-Jo. (For fifty dollars I could not put out much; but, all else aside, most cases in this world are solved by informers, and informers sing only for cash. Eighty per cent of the time police work consists of waiting for a stool pigeon to call.) So I let it be known that I wanted to hear about Jo-Jo Olsen and sat back to wait for someone to come to me and let me earn my fifty.

  Two days passed. I had no results from my own hard work. And my feelers turned up nothing at all. No one even whispered to me. I had not really expected the pigeons would sing to me. N
ot only do I carry the taint of cop, despite the old ‘pirate’ nickname and the ancient history of being like most people in Chelsea, but I don’t really belong in Chelsea anymore. I’m not regular. I don’t act quite right. I’ve been away too long and too far.

  Over the last twenty years I’ve lived in a lot of places. In most of the big cities of the world. I’m a city man, that much I know about myself. Big cities: London and New York, Paris and Amsterdam, San Francisco and Tokyo. Sometimes I think that that is about all I do know about myself. At that, it’s probably more than most men know about themselves.

  In Chelsea most men stay home if they are regular. They set their role in life early, and they don’t change it. If a man is a longshoreman, he doesn’t sell shoes. If a man is a hustler, he won’t pick pockets. A safe-cracker does not strong-arm in alleys. Chelsea likes to know who and what a man is, just the same as the big world wants to know. A man should decide early and for keeps what he will be from the choices he is given. That is what people want in Chelsea, and in the big world. The only difference is that in Cheslea the choices tend to be different.

  I’ve had too many jobs in too many places. I’ve been a seaman and a waiter, tourist guide and farmhand, private cop and actor, newspaperman and over-age student. Almost any work a man can do with one arm, no special training except in juvenile delinquency, and a useless education. I remember a professor I had out in San Francisco who complained that all I had learned in my haphazard studying didn’t add up to a hill of beans. I’m not an engineer or a CPA. I’m not a scientist or a scholar. And I’m overqualified, as they say, to make a good waiter or deckhand. All I had done, that professor pointed out, was learn a lot without increasing my market value.

  In Chelsea this adds up to not being regular. When a dockhand knows more than the hiring boss, people are uneasy. I keep my mouth shut as much as possible, and most people in Chelsea don’t know my whole guilty secret; but I can’t hide it all, and they sense that I don’t quite belong anymore. They know that I read books. Reading is one of the dangers of the sea. A sailor has too much time. It is also a danger of living too much alone in strange cities. A man can learn too much by reading. Too much that he can’t change and can’t forget. They also know that I left Chelsea soon after I lost my arm. They don’t know that I’ve been straight since that day; and they remember the juvenile bandit, but they are not sure about me. They don’t know that I came back to Chelsea only because I wanted to stay in one place for a time now and that one of the things I have learned is that it does not matter where a man lives because he lives inside himself anyway and that a man’s home is easiest to hide in. But they are uneasy about me sometimes.