Lydia

by Howard Fast

  “Like myself. I have no one, Harvey. And you know something funny, when the car went into the pond—do you know about the car, Harvey?”

  “I know about it.”

  “You’re a damn snoop, aren’t you, Harvey.”

  “I get around.”

  “I bet you do—and then what? You know everything, don’t you, the car and the college and even the necklace?”

  “Maybe almost everything. Not everything, no. Some of it—maybe even most of it.”

  “Well, when the car went into the pond, it was as if the last thing died. Then, as I walked away, wiping out my footsteps, I really felt it. I didn’t care about the car, but I had such a desire to curl up inside of it—maybe that’s back to the womb and all that. What do you think, Harvey?”

  “That’s not my line,” I said. I must have been reading and transposing, because against a building we were passing, this man stood, and he carried a card which said, “My lines connect me.” He was bearded, a long, uncombed beard that fell halfway to his waist, and he stood in his bare feet, wearing a robe of rough monk’s cloth. His wide-open eyes were veiled with the streaked blue and white of blindness, but he carried no begging cup of pencils or shoelaces to sell. He was tall and quite handsome.

  Lydia stopped and asked me to give him something. “Please, Harvey.”

  “He’s not a beggar,” I said.

  “Yes, I beg. I plead,” the blind man said.

  “For what? For money?” I still had only the ten-dollar bills that the man in the subway would not change.

  “Give it to him,” Lydia said.

  “Not for money,” said the blind man.

  Then Lydia asked him what the sign meant. “My lines connect me—”

  “With you—and him.”

  “And what do you beg for?” Lydia whispered. She had taken the ten-dollar bill from me. “I have a ten-dollar bill here. Please take it.”

  “I beg me not to be alone,” he said. “Keep the money. I don’t beg for money.”

  “Aren’t you alone?” Lydia asked, her voice trembling and tears running down her cheeks.

  “Not always, no, not always.”

  We walked away, and I wiped Lydia’s face. “I cry easily at some things,” she said, abashed. “But don’t think that I get sentimental so easy. I don’t. Have you seen him before?”

  “A hundred times,” I replied.

  “Oh? And barefoot in the winter?”

  “I suppose so. I don’t remember noticing.”

  “You don’t remember. You’ve got a stone inside your heart somewhere, Harvey. I was asking you before—are you alone? You know what I meant? My father and mother were dead, and there were some cousins or an aunt or something that I didn’t even know, and I was alone, that’s all.”

  “My father killed himself,” I told her finally. “Is that what you keep reading in me?”

  “What a thing to say!”

  “Well, how do you suppose I feel? I got a rock inside of my heart. I must say that you have a poetic turn of phrase, but why don’t you face things? Sarbine didn’t kill your father. He didn’t kill my father. He just wants to kill you and me, that’s all.”

  We were at the hotel now. She plucked her hand out of mine and stood facing me. “What a louse you are!” she cried.

  “Yes. One moment you love me, and then the next moment I’m a louse—”

  “I never loved you, not even for a moment!”

  “That may be as it may be. The point is, before we go in and sit down and have a drink and maybe get stoned, we ought to think about tonight. I’ve got a home, but how do we know Sarbine isn’t there already, or one of his monkeys? And you got to sleep somewhere. I’m going to get a pair of rooms here—”

  “No!”

  “Oh, come on and be reasonable about it.”

  “I will not!”

  “Just use your head,” I urged her. “I am not making any kind of a pass at you. I said two rooms. I don’t even want connecting rooms, do you understand?”

  She stared at me somberly.

  “Where will you go?”

  She shrugged, then nodded. “All right. Get the rooms. You’ll have to pay in advance, won’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I’m broke now, but I have enough money in the bank to take care of anything that may come up. I want you to understand that.”

  “I understand,” I agreed. “Every nickel we spend, you get cut in on half of it. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Also charity?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, a little while ago, when your hostility wasn’t showing so much, you were ready to throw that nut a ten-dollar bill that supposedly belonged to me—”

  “He wasn’t a nut!”

  “Nut or prophet, you were ready to throw him ten.”

  “Harvey, you’re a cheap bastard, you are! I swear, I’ll make out a balance sheet for today. I don’t want to owe you one nickel. Not one lousy nickel!”

  “Oh, the hell with that! It’s been a long day,” I said, and I walked over to the desk and registered, explaining that she was my sister and that we wanted separate rooms. She had come up next to me, and she gave me a look, as if to say that if she wanted anything less than to be my true love, it was to be my sister. The fact of the matter was that neither of us was a prepossessing sight. After examining our characters, our state of cleanliness and our lack of luggage, the desk clerk began to doubt that he had two singles available.

  “Look,” I told him, “I am too tired and it is too late to fight you about this, but half of this goddamn hotel is empty, and you know it. Do you want me to make a stink, or will you let us get into our rooms peacefully?”

  He grudgingly acquiesced, and a bellboy guided us up to the fifth floor and into two rooms that were side by side. I gave him a ten-dollar bill and sent him down for change and cigarettes, and then I told Lydia that I intended to wash up, and I suggested that she do the same.

  The bellboy came back with the change and the cigarettes as I finished the grime-removal process. He commented on the dirt.

  “You are nosy as hell,” I told him. “It happened rolling on my belly on a subway platform.” Then I gave him a dollar, and accepted in return my own cheap philosophy that the truth is meaningless.

  I combed my hair, stepped into the hall, and knocked at the door of Lydia’s room. Talking through either tears or mirth, she informed me that the door was open. When I went in, I saw that she was sprawled on the bed and laughing.

  “Let me in on the joke.”

  “No, you wouldn’t appreciate it, Harvey. You’re so ridiculous. I mean just the way you do things—like going down into the subway in the first place. It was so stupid.”

  “It was stupid,” I agreed.

  She sat up, wiped her eyes, and asked me seriously whether I had ever found anything?

  “What kind of a damn-fool question is that?”

  “I mean, this necklace isn’t the first thing they sent you out to find, is it, Harvey? Did you ever find any of the other things?”

  “Do you want a drink?” I asked her.

  “I do. You know something about being a maid, Harvey—it makes you humble.”

  “You? You are humble?”

  “Listen to me now and try to get what I want to tell you. I mean that when you have to stand around and listen to their talk and their filth and their narrow, grasping stupidity night after night, and be ordered around by them and never open your mouth to talk back, well if you don’t gather some humility, you go ape but completely—”

  I grabbed her arm and sank down on the bed beside her. “That’s right,” I said. “Of course—”

  “Of course what?”

  “You did listen to them talk week in and week out.”

  “Well, I had to. I worked there.”

  “Yes, you worked there. Did you listen?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Think about this. Did yo
u ever hear them mention the name of Von Kesselring?”

  “Who is that? Some German general?”

  “I don’t know who it is. I just want to know did you ever hear the name?”

  “I don’t know. I would have to think about it. But it’s funny—”

  “Oh?”

  “Were the Sarbines German?”

  “What gave you that notion?” I asked her. “I’m not saying that they were or they weren’t. I only want to know what gave you the notion that they were?”

  “It must have been things I heard—and I can’t remember.”

  “We’ll have a drink,” I said. “The trouble is, we’re suffering from too much of today. We’ll have a drink, and we’ll feel better about it.”

  We went downstairs and into the bar, and Lydia ordered a dry martini, and I had some whisky on ice. It didn’t taste good; I had spent the day with too many flutters inside of me for liquor to taste good, but according to the legend, it was what I needed. I think Lydia’s was what she needed. She drank it gratefully. “Poor Harvey,” she said, “I wish you weren’t what you are. This drink is so good. I wish you were lovable, Harvey.”

  “So do I.”

  “What made you become a private eye, Harvey?”

  “I am not—look, Lydia, you be nice to me and I’ll be nice to you.”

  “But why did you start, Harvey? I mean that.”

  “Because I needed a job.”

  “So you just answered an ad in the papers?”

  “That’s right.”

  “May I have another drink, Harvey?”

  “All right, if you want another drink. But I want you to know that I don’t like women who get drunk. And with kids, it’s worse.”

  “So I’m a kid, Harvey? The others are women, but I’m a kid.”

  “You’re a kid, that’s right.”

  “I’m twenty-three, Harvey, and you just better make up your mind that I’m not such a kid at all. So I’d like another dry martini, just the same as before.”

  I ordered it, and when it came, she sipped at it and watched me guiltily. “Sometimes I do like you, Harvey,” she admitted. “Was that true about your father killing himself?”

  “Yes.”

  “I feel very sorry for you, Harvey,” she nodded. “That links us together in some way, doesn’t it? How? I mean, would it come out in our children or what?”

  “What do you mean, our children?”

  “I have to marry someone—don’t I, Harvey? Can you imagine how lonely I was on that lousy job? Not one date—not one.”

  “What did you do on your days off?”

  “I went to the movies. You see, Harvey, I don’t want to be that lonely again. You understand that, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “And Harvey—”

  I had to smile at her. No matter how angry she made me, if she smiled at me, I had to smile back. I’d never come across anything just like that little-boy grin of hers, and it was simply impossible to look at it and remain remote and irritated.

  “I’m glad you are smiling, Harvey,” she went on, “because even if you are a sort of poor slob now, you will have a lot of money when you find the necklace—won’t you?”

  “If I find it.”

  “Fifty thousand dollars, Harvey. Will you cut me in for half?”

  “That is too much,” I said. “Enough is one thing, but that is absolutely too much. First you steal the damn thing, and then the Sarbines get it from you, and now you want to be cut in on the reward for finding it—”

  “Yes and no,” Lydia said.

  “What do you mean—yes and no? Didn’t you just ask me to cut you in for half?”

  “It is my necklace!” she cried indignantly.

  “It is not your necklace. You know that. It is Sarbine’s necklace. Is that what you meant when you kept insisting that you didn’t steal it?”

  “No,” she replied. She had finished her second drink, and her words and thoughts came more slowly. “No, that wasn’t what I meant at all, Harvey.”

  “Then you admit you did put it in the lard?”

  “No, Harvey. No. It’s really very confusing and complicated, or maybe you just make it that way.”

  “I see. I make it that way. Tell me one thing, Lydia—just level with me about one thing—”

  “Why do you keep calling me Lydia?”

  “I’m used to the name,” I said.

  “But you only met me today, I mean this morning. So how could you be used to the name?”

  “Look, Lydia, I’m trying to ask you something. Every time I try to ask you something, you go off somewhere—”

  “If you married me, would you still call me that?”

  “What?”

  “Lydia.”

  “That has nothing to do with it. I am not marrying you. I am simply asking you something, or trying to ask you something.”

  “Well, go ahead and ask me something,” Lydia said. “Don’t make such a fuss about it because I’m a little drunk. If I wanted another martini, would you let me?”

  “No.”

  She shook her head. “Nobody owns me, Harvey—not you, not Sarbine, no one—”

  “You asked me, I said no. Listen to me now, Lydia,” I said. “When you took that job with the Sarbines, it was to steal the necklace. Am I right?”

  She stared at me for a while—and then grinned. “You’re right, Harvey.”

  “But you were going to be a smart crook, weren’t you?”

  “The smartest. But just remember one thing, Harvey—it was my necklace. They tricked it out of my father, swindled him, and then drove him to his death—”

  “But it wasn’t your necklace, baby. And did it ever occur to you that the Sarbines set you up for the whole thing? Did it ever occur to you that maybe they knew who you were right from the beginning?”

  “No. Oh, no—no, you don’t believe that, do you, Harvey?”

  “I believe what I see. If something’s as plain as the nose on my face, I believe it. Right?”

  “You got a long nose, but it’s nice, Harvey—”

  “Lydia, for crying out loud, try to pay attention to me for just one minute. Don’t you see that you were a setup for the Sarbines, you with your sweet little southern accent. Everything was a prop that they set up—the dinner party, the guests, the necklace tossed around the way it was—everything set up for you to commit the perfect crime.”

  She stared at me now, her face crinkling.

  “All right. Take it easy. It’s done. And now they’ve got the necklace.”

  “No,” she said, the tears running down her cheeks again, “no, they haven’t.”

  “What do you mean, they haven’t? Come on, baby—just take it easy and think clearly. Then everything falls into place. You stole the necklace. I know, I know—you believed that morally it belonged to you, because you are Richard Cotter’s daughter, so you had every right to find a job with the Sarbines and lift it, and you hid it in a block of lard and they found it there—period.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean—no?”

  “Oh, Harvey, I keep telling you, and you’re so stupid—but I keep telling you.”

  “What?”

  “That I didn’t steal the necklace.”

  “Then what did you steal?”

  “A cheap, wretched imitation!” Lydia cried.

  “What?” I shook my head, closed my eyes, opened them then to look at Lydia, sitting there in that cramped, darkened cocktail room, her face screwed up, her cheeks wet with tears—and as I looked at her, piece after piece fell into place.

  “You act pleased,” she said. “Oh, you are the most miserable man, Harvey Krim.”

  “I could be pleased. Are you sure it was an imitation?”

  “Don’t you think I’d know? It was my necklace, Harvey.”

  “You couldn’t be mistaken?”

  “No, I could not be mistaken!”

  “All right,” I said. “I didn’t mean to
make you angry, Lydia. I just wanted to be sure. Now tell me this—and try to answer objectively and not emotionally—”

  “I am always objective,” Lydia interrupted.

  “Of course you are. Now this—was it a good imitation or a bad one?”

  “That wretched piece—”

  “Oh, oh—objectively, Lydia.”

  “I suppose it was a good imitation,” she shrugged. “What of it? You could have the best imitation in the world for less than a thousand dollars—I’m not one bit drunk any more, Harvey. Couldn’t I have another martini?”

  “No,” I said.

  “And if we were married, it would be the same thing, wouldn’t it—no, no, no—everything no?”

  “Maybe. But we’re not married.”

  “I can thank heaven for that!”

  “Maybe. Lydia—had you ever seen the necklace before?”

  “Of course I’d seen it! It was mine, wasn’t it? I remember seeing it when I was three years old—”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean at the Sarbines.”

  She had to think about that.

  “Well, wouldn’t you know right off?” I asked her.

  “It’s not as easy as that, Harvey. I remember seeing the case, and once I saw Mrs. Sarbine in her bedroom, and I was outside the room and she was handling it—I mean the necklace—but I only caught a glimpse of it, and I just took it for granted that this was the necklace itself—”

  “Dry your eyes,” I said, handing Lydia my handkerchief. “Could it have been an imitation that time?”

  “Harvey, I don’t know. I only caught a glimpse of it.”

  “But Sunday night there it was, spread out on the bed, waiting to be stolen by some such mastermind crook as you—”

  “Do you have to be so nasty about it, Harvey?”

  “I guess I don’t, Lydia. I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head and said that she just did not believe it. “You’re being very sweet to me, Harvey—”

  “Well—you know. You want another martini—you want to get stoned?”

  “Please, Harvey.”

  “Be my guest,” I said gallantly, and I called the waiter and instructed him. Then I asked Lydia, “Why? I mean why did you steal it if you knew it was a phony?”

  “Harvey—I don’t know. I cant answer that. I mean, I had seen it from outside the room, and then I saw some of the women trying it on, and I just made up my mind that this was the one, God-sent opportunity and that I was going to steal it. Then, when I saw it close up and realized it was a fake—well, I just went through with it and stole it anyway. That’s all.”