Act of Fear

by Michael Collins

  What do you say? Go on, tell me. You feel sick, sure, but what do you say? Do you tell them that no human being risks his child to help a Jake Roth? Sure, that’s true. It’s real easy to say, especially if you wear a white collar and drive to work through safe streets. Do you say that Lars Olsen and his worn-out old woman should go back and work themselves to death, risk all they have and what life they have left, to save their boy? It sounds good, only I’m not so sure how true it is. How far is a father responsible for saving his son from his own mistakes? How much must a mother endure in this life for her child? It’s easy to feel sick when no one is asking you to give up all that you have, all that you want, all that you need. Does it matter if the needs are rotten? Who says which need is good and which bad? And what about the other four kids? Do you sacrifice one boy to give the other four a better life – a life they at least think is better? Lars Olsen back on the docks at his age could do nothing for his kids. Magda Olsen was already an old woman long before her time. One for four. Are you so sure? I’m not.

  ‘You can go to the police,’ I said. ‘Maybe Pappas would be grateful.’

  Magda Olsen had made her decision. ‘With what? We don’t know where Jo-Jo is.’

  ‘You don’t know?’ I said.

  Swede Olsen watched his feet. ‘I don’t want I should know. Jo-Jo he’s okay. Jake is okay. Jake is a good man. He don’t hurt Jo-Jo.’

  Swede was still trying to convince himself. Maybe he was trying to convince his other boys. He was saying that he was, after all, a good father and a big man. He was telling me, his sons, and himself that he really believed that Jo-Jo would be all right. The old woman, Magda, did not bother. She knew. She knew the truth and she faced it. Jo-Jo was on his own. Magda Olsen had more important things to think about, consider, and she did not hide from the truth. She had decided about her life and where her duty lay.

  I left them.

  I did not feel well. Magda Olsen was a woman who faced the facts, and she knew where her duty was and what it demanded. I knew that, too. All the way down those dark stairs past the opened doors where shadows moved in silence inside the stifling rooms my feet hardly seemed to touch the stairs. My legs felt stiff, my feet almost numb. Because I had done it. I had stood up and rocked the boat. It was all out in the open. I could not prove anything, but I had told the world what I knew. I had told Jake Roth what I knew. Because it did not take much imagination to know that Magda Olsen would be on the telephone. She was probably calling Roth right now.

  All along that dark street my head felt light and my legs were still like stiff boards. I was a marked man now. Unless I could stop Roth, find Jo-Jo, and get some proof, I was a dead man.

  And I did not even know where Jo-Jo could be.

  Chapter 15

  In the hotel room I lay on the bed in the dark. The bottle was on the table beside the bed. A shot glass was full beside it. I had poured it, but I had not drunk it. Whiskey was not what would help now. I lay there with my hand behind my back and tried to think of what I could do next.

  I had made it back to the hotel without being followed, as far as I knew. I had been careful. Dark alleys and the shadows close to the buildings. I had walked as fast as my stiff legs would let me. The light was an enemy. Every street I crossed had been like a glaring stage with me naked across it. And all the way I had thought about the Olsens. On the hot slum streets where the victims of this world sat on chairs and drank beer and tried to find some air to breathe. The slum-streets that had shaped the Olsens and was the world they knew. Streets where, on nights like this, the people of the slums know for sure that they are the victims. They are the people the TV commercials do not speak to. They are the people who never appear in the American Dream, or any other dream. All their dreams are nightmares. There is no escape, and nothing will ever change. They were born in a stacked deck, they will die to the roll of loaded dice. And on nights like this, or when the snow winds blow in winter, they know for a moment who and what they are. They know that all their cunning schemes fool no one but themselves. All their long-planned deals are so many useless motions in a game someone else invented and made the rules for. They know that only self-deception gives them the illusion of life. They are Olsens without the strength of Magda or the luck of Swede.

  And they know, on hot nights like this, that they are not of the very few with the luck or the strength or the strange and unexplained psychological quirk to escape. They are not special, and how should they be? How many of us escape what we were born to, who we are, what we have? How many in the bigger, richer, happier world are asked to be better than they were born? Or even different? Here, in the slums of the Olsens, they know that what the people above them get without effort they can have only if they are very strong, or very lucky, or very special. There are no more special people in the slums than in the suburbs, and just as few can move out of the slums into the suburbs as can move out of the suburbs on to the estates. So what do you tell the Olsens? That they must fall back because they have climbed to where they are by false means? That they must go down again because to stay even as far up as they have come now requires a method that sickens the fastidious who have never been down? Do you tell them that in a dirty world, some dirt is good and some dirt is bad? They know better. They know that they have only learned what their betters above them have taught them, not by word but by deed. They know that they did not create Jake Roth and Andy Pappas, they only have to live with them. They know that there is only one man in a thousand who can be different, who escapes where he was born.

  That was when, on my back in the dark hotel room where I was even afraid to light a light now, I thought about Jo-Jo Olsen. Because it looked like Jo-Jo was one of the few. (I suppose I had somehow sensed this all along. I know I had sensed this. It was why I had kept going.) Jo-Jo was the one in a thousand. He could be different. He had been on his way out. Only now the slum, the world of all the victims, had reached up to pull him back. The world that he rejected had him by the ankle, if not the throat, and was dragging him down. He needed help if he was not to sink, quietly and unnoticed, out of sight into the slime of his birth. He needed help, because he was one of the special, the different. That Roth could not trust him, ever, proved in one way how different Jo-Jo was. Jo-Jo himself had proved it in another way.

  A regular in Chelsea, or perhaps anywhere in this world, high or low, had two choices when he was in the position Jo-Jo found himself in the moment he had that parking ticket. He could keep quiet and be trusted, or he could stay and turn that ticket over to Andy Pappas. He could have risked his family and turned that ticket over to Pappas. He could have thought of himself. Andy Pappas could make life good for a man who did him a favour. Pappas could keep him safe. As safe as a man could ever be when he chose sides in a hard game. To be safe, maybe rich, all Jo-Jo had had to do was betray Jake Roth and his own family. In Chelsea I know how that decision would go most of the time. (I know how it would go in the rest of the world, too, and the decision would be the same.) But Jo-Jo had taken the hard way. He had run out on it all. He had run with no safety from Roth, no protection from Pappas, no help from the police, and no shelter from his family. He had refused to join any side. That is the real path of danger.

  In the dark of the hotel room where I lay on the bed like some small animal afraid of the light, I laughed aloud. I laughed, but I did not feel amused. Jo-Jo had taken the way of real danger, and he might have made it. After a time, if Jo-Jo did not appear to finger him, Roth might have decided to give up. But Jo-Jo had a friend, and the friend had come to me, and I had brought in the police, and now Roth would not give up. Now Roth would be sure. He would have to kill Jo-Jo. He would have to kill me. Before either of us got to the police or to Pappas.

  So I knew I had to get to the police. I had known that since I walked down those stairs from the Olsens’ apartment. There was nothing else I could do. Instead, I lay on the bed in the dark with the untouched whiskey beside me. Because what could I tell t
he police? Roth would kill me before I got to the police, if he could, and yet what could I tell them? But I had to get to the police, because once I reached them I would be safe. I would be safe, and, the way it was, it was all I could do to help Jo-Jo.

  A telephone call to Gazzo, and I would be safe once they got here. If Roth or his boys didn’t find me before the police arrived, I was safe. Because once I had told my theory, Roth would have no more reason to kill me. All he would have would be a greater need to kill Jo-Jo. Because what I had was no more than a theory. The police would need much more. Even Andy Pappas would want some proof. For Andy it would not have to be much, but a little more than my hunch. Roth would deny it all. The Olsens would not back me. No one else alive knew anything. Except Jo-Jo.

  Jo-Jo would be on the spot, because Roth would be on the spot. He would not care about me any more, but he would care a lot more about Jo-Jo than he did now. The police, and Pappas, would check out my story. They would look harder for Jo-Jo. Roth could not let them find him. A dead Jo-Jo would prove nothing. More than ever, Roth would have to kill Jo-Jo before he could tell anything to anyone. And yet it was all I could do now to help Jo-Jo. At least it would make Pappas look for Jo-Jo and make the police really look. There would be some chance that they would get to Jo-Jo before Roth or his killers. And I would be safe.

  I had the telephone in my hand when I heard the scratching.

  I looked around. The only weapon was the whiskey bottle. I picked it up by the neck.

  The scratching came again. Someone was scratching lightly on my door. I got off the bed as quietly as possible. Maybe whoever it was would go away. I reached the door and stood there in the dark trying not to breathe. I saw a faint shadow in the line of light that came under the door from the corridor.

  The scratching came again. Small scratching, feeble, like an insect or some small mouse. There was an urgency to it and a lot of nervousness. Whoever was out there was becoming more desperate. It occurred to me that gunmen do not scratch on doors. I didn’t think they did.

  I could be wrong.

  If I was wrong and I opened the door or even moved to prove that I was in the room, then I was as good as dead. My bottle would not get two of them. Maybe it was only one? I listened again. I heard nothing but a kind of quick breathing.

  I opened the door.

  A girl stood there. For a moment I did not know her at all. I had no interest in any girls at this point. I looked up and down the dim and sleazy corridor of the Manning.

  ‘Let me come in, Mr Fortune,’

  She was nervous, and she was urgent. She pushed past me. She was shaking. A very scared girl. Then I recognized her. The Olsen daughter! I closed the door and locked it again. I put the whiskey bottle down on the bureau. The girl was looking at my face.

  ‘I had a chat with Cousin Jake,’ I said.

  The girl sat down. ‘When? Tonight? I mean …’

  I have seen fear, and I have seen terror. I have seen panic, and trembling and fright and cowardice. The Olsen girl was in terror. She could not control her hands. She could not remember how she had been taught to sit. Her knees kept coming apart. She crossed her legs. And uncrossed them.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not tonight. How’d you find me?’

  ‘I followed you.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘To the street. You were hiding, but I’m small, I know the streets. I’ve lived around here all my life.’

  ‘What do you mean, “to the street”?’

  ‘I saw you turn on this street. I didn’t see you after that. I took a chance on the hotels. This was the third. I asked the man downstairs what room.’ She looked at me. ‘You … you’re easy to describe.’ She was looking at my arm.

  ‘The man told you?’

  ‘I gave him ten dollars.’

  I believed that. My life was worth about ten dollars to the night clerk. I liked to think that if it had been men who asked, the price might have been twenty-five. (If it had been men, the price would probably have been zero. The clerk would have been too scared.) And she was right. I was not easy to hide. Not with my arm and my present scarred face. If a girl could find me, I was long overdue on the telephone to Gazzo. Then, I had been watching for men tailing me. I might have overlooked a girl while seeing men. I hoped that was true.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Anna,’ she said.

  ‘Okay, Anna, what did you want to find me for?’

  The girl shivered. ‘She was on the phone. Magda. My mother, I mean. I was in the bedroom and I heard and when you left she went on the phone, you know? I mean, she called him right off.’

  ‘Jake Roth?’

  She nodded. ‘You was just gone out. My father, he didn’t look so good. But Magda, my mother, she says … she says …’ The girl, Anna, looked at me. ‘… she says Jo-Jo he got himself into it. She says we got to go through … we got to trust Mr Roth. We …’

  Like I said, it was not exactly a surprise. I was now anxious to get rid of the girl and get on the telephone to Gazzo. I was more than anxious. It was past time to think about my own skin. I wouldn’t help Jo-Jo dead. I had no intention of being dead even if it would help Jo-Jo.

  ‘Did you hear what she told him? Roth, I mean?’

  ‘She didn’t talk to him,’ Anna said. ‘He wasn’t there.’

  I think I had the feeling a con gets in death row when the governor decides maybe the state doesn’t need his life.

  ‘She didn’t talk to Roth?’

  The girl shook her head. ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘She didn’t talk to anyone?’

  ‘No. She said to have Mr. Roth call her.’

  It was at least a reprieve. But not much. Roth and his hired boys had been after me already. Only they had not been after me as hard as they would be if they had talked to Magda Olsen. It gave me a good chance that I could call the captain and have him get to me in plenty of time. I wanted my story on the record where it would do Jake Roth no good to silence me.

  ‘Thanks, Anna,’ I said.

  The girl did not move to leave. ‘You … you said Mr Roth would kill Jo-Jo. You said Roth would never trust Jo-Jo?’

  ‘No, Anna, he won’t,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to make your father go to the police. Or at least to Mr Pappas.’

  The girl shook her head. ‘They won’t. All they said. And they’re scared.’ She looked up at me again. ‘I know where he is.’

  Well, I sat down. I had spent the whole week looking for Jo-Jo Olsen. I had not found him. I had decided that I could not find him. I was not sure I wanted to find him now. I had my course of action all mapped out, and a good chance that I would make it home safe. All I had to do was call Gazzo, get picked up, stay in the lockup a few days until everyone knew my theory, and then just stay away from dark alleys so Roth could not get at me easily just to punish me for talking. I had it all planned.

  ‘You know?’

  She nodded. ‘He wrote me. Just a note. He used a typewriter and sent it to where I work. He says he’s okay. He says he … here.’

  She handed it to me. An envelope and a single sheet of paper. I took them. The envelope was typed, and so was the note. There was nothing in it that said it was from Jo-Jo. Just a few words that said he was okay, the weather was good, he was working at some small job to eat, the work was lousy, but at least he was around the cars, and don’t worry. There was no signature and no address. Only that bit about the cars said it was from Jo-Jo, and maybe some things only his sister would know. The envelope had no address on it. But it did have a postmark. It was from Spanish Beach, Florida. Spanish Beach had a speedway.

  ‘Who else has seen this?’ I said. I guess I was looking for an out.

  ‘No one. I … I was scared.’

  ‘You’re sure? No one else saw this? Not your family?’

  ‘No one, Mr Fortune,’ Anna Olsen said.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Now you get out of here. We don’t want anyone to see us together. That clerk
might even call someone. You go home, and you stay there. Don’t let anyone see you leave the hotel.’

  She blinked at me. ‘Will you …?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve got to think.’

  I watched at the door until she was gone down the stairs. Then I went back into the room. I locked the door behind me. I went and stood at the window of the dark room and looked out at my city. It was not my city now, not as long as I had to hide in it. Their city, and I did not like that. The telephone stood on the table beside the bed. All I had to do was call, and I would be safe. Spanish Beach was not a one-street village, especially in race season. For all I knew to go to the police was still the only real way I could help Jo-Jo. Maybe the police could get to him first. Who was I to think that I could do better than the police?

  But maybe I could do better. I knew a lot about Jo-Jo by now. The Spanish Beach police knew nothing. I knew in what kind of place to look, what kind of man to look for, and who I was up against. Jo-Jo would be hiding, using a phony name, probably a disguise; and maybe I could move just a little faster.

  There was sweat under my arms and down my back. One phone call and I would be safe. The moment I stepped out of the room without the police I became a target, and there could be a gun waiting around every corner. Out of this room, on the streets, I was a rabbit in the open. Maybe, with luck, I could do just a little more than the police. Maybe I could find him just a hair faster.

  And risk a bullet in the back of the head all the way.

  A telephone call and I was out of it.

  And Jo-Jo maybe had one hair less chance of living another day.

  I took down the whiskey in that untouched shot glass in one good gulp.

  Who was I kidding? I was going to try to find Jo-Jo. In the long run my only real safety lay in putting an end to Jake Roth. When you came down to it, every little bit would help. I was going to call Gazzo, yes, and I was going to Spanish Beach. I had started, I had to finish. No, that was not it. Not that I had to finish a job, or that I personally wanted to end Jake Roth. Simply that if I did not go and Jo-Jo was found dead, I would never know if maybe I could have saved him.