by Howard Fast
“Ducky!” shrilled Sadaba.
“Ducky,” said Penelope, “if you lay one hand on me—”
Ducky reached out a hand to lay it upon Penelope, and for the first time in her life, Penelope struck a man. She landed a roundhouse of a right-hand slap full upon Ducky’s left cheek, and the moment the blow connected, she hated herself—going through exactly the same set of reactions that seize upon any civilized human being who strikes what cannot reasonably strike back. Ducky stood stunned, bewildered, hurt, the tears welling into his eyes, while Sadaba flung herself toward Penelope, crying:
“Thief! Murderer! Devil!”
Whatever might have followed from this was interrupted by a sharp knock at the door. Penelope had fended off the first furious attack, and from outside came the voice of Larry Cohen, attempting to be very official and commanding.
“Open up in the name of the law!”
Afterward, Larry Cohen admitted to Penelope that it was the first time he had ever used this construction, or had ever been in a position to instruct anyone to open any door. He considered it to be rather old-fashioned, but it had its effect. Sadaba opened the door to her salon, and Penelope said delightedly:
“Dear Mr. Cohen. Like a knight of old. What a perfect, perfect entrance!”
“Is Sadaba you are arresting?” Sadaba demanded, drawing herself up to her full height, looming over Cohen, Penelope, and Ducky. “Please to change your mind. Sadaba you are not arresting. Sadaba is not a fool. District attorneys are not arresting nobody.”
“Then suppose we all quiet down and forget this whole matter? I am willing to propose that you had no idea of your actions when you attempted to detain Mrs. Hastings here—something done in the heat of excitement. But if you should insist on making trouble, Madame Sadaba, I must remind you that forcible detention is a very serious charge indeed.”
“Ha!”
“When she says that,” Penelope interpreted, “it means that she does not agree with you.”
Ducky said nothing. Arms folded, he stared broodingly at the floor and dreamed of revenge.
“Exactly,” Sadaba nodded. “Sadaba does not agree with you. The police make arrest, and Sadaba exposes a thief.”
“What thief?”
Sadaba pointed a stern and accusing finger at Penelope. “Is standing right there, Mrs. James R. Hastings, who robs City Federal Bank across the street.”
“That is a very dangerous thing to say,” Cohen warned her. “Actionable, too, I might add.”
“And utterly ridiculous,” Penelope put in.
“Actionable? What is actionable when Sadaba is right—or doesn’t Sadaba see with her eyes?”
“And just what did you see?” Cohen demanded coldly.
“You are district attorney—whose side are you on? Sadaba tells you what she sees. She sees coming from bank across the street at moment of robbery, Mrs. James R. Hastings, wearing a black wig and yellow rag is absolutely the Givenchy suit. That is what Sadaba sees. Is Sadaba right, Ducky?”
“Sadaba is right,” Ducky said.
“But no proof?” Cohen asked. “No evidence—nothing except that your own judgment that a woman in a yellow suit with black hair was Mrs. James R. Hastings? Oh, come now, Madame Sadaba, Mrs. Hastings is a delicate woman of wealth and reputation. Are you seriously attempting to make me believe that she robbed a bank, that she mysteriously changed the color of her hair, the shape of her face? Well, really—”
Sadaba’s eyes narrowed. Her rage at the hurt and insult offered to Ducky had simmered down, and now again her larger plans were reshaping in her mind. She said nothing.
“You could call the police,” Cohen said. “Every citizen has the right, even the duty to call the police if he believes that he has evidence of the commission of a crime—or knowledge of the identity of the criminal.”
Sadaba shrugged. “Sadaba is not calling the police. You say Sadaba has no evidence—so what is the use calling the police?”
“Then suppose we write this off as one more error, perhaps a bit more unpleasant than most, and let bygones be bygones.”
“Sadaba is willing. Ducky is willing.”
Ducky stared at the floor, nodding somberly.
“Then suppose we leave, Mrs. Hastings,” Cohen said taking Penelope by the arm. But as they walked out of Sadaba’s salon, Penelope could only think of James and Sadaba confronting each other.
“Poor James,” Penelope sighed.
CHAPTER TEN
After they left Sadaba’s salon, Penelope and Larry walked for about a block in silence—and then Cohen took the bit in his teeth. Penelope knew that he was taking the bit in his teeth, having had a long and intimate acquaintance with men who took the bit in their teeth; and she also knew that when a man takes the bit in his teeth, there is nothing to do but hang on and endure the force of the wind.
Cohen began by saying, “Well, there you are.”
“Did I ask you to call me Penny?” Penelope wondered.
“Penny.”
“Yes. You know, so many people abhor nicknames—but I love mine. Do call me Penny.”
“Well …”
“Please?”
Larry Cohen was conscious of defeat, even if said defeat was not yet disaster. “Yes—of course,” he answered gallantly. “Penny … well, it makes me feel that I have known you for so long.”
“But you have. Twenty-four hours can be an eternity, if they are used well—just as a year can be a meaningless moment.”
“Oh? You didn’t read that somewhere?”
“My dear Larry—may I call you Larry?”
“Of course.”
“My dear Larry, I may have read it somewhere, or I may have made it up. I hardly know. It’s not remarkable, except in your world, where any bit of color or excitement in speech is, I suppose, remarkable.”
“My world? What is my world?”
“The world of men, affairs, politics—a very wide and important world, where you all play your games. My own world is much smaller, quieter—”
“You don’t care very much for your world, do you, Penny?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I have been trying to understand why you should rob a bank.”
For awhile they walked on, and Penelope made no response whatsoever to what Cohen had said. She had heard it as from a distance, and now she was wondering why Cohen’s accusation did not disturb her.
“Where are you taking me to lunch?” she asked. “Some very posh place to impress me—but you wouldn’t?”
“Where do you want to go?”
“To the cafeteria at the zoo. The odor is impossible and the food is dreadful, but right now I want to go there, if you don’t mind. I am sure it’s a pose. Poor Sadaba—she sees through all my poses, and the world rejects her. But James won’t reject her. Poor James. Sadaba will tell him that his wife is a thief, and he will pay Sadaba a very substantial amount of money to keep her mouth shut.”
“Do you mean that Sadaba is going to blackmail your husband?”
“Of course.”
“My dear lady—”
“There, you’ve stopped calling me Penny, and this means that you have taken the bit in your teeth, and you are now going to be dreadful and dutiful and exceedingly moral. I must say, though, that I take a very dim view of what gentlemen call morality. I have seen James force another banker back up against the wall and squeeze until the poor devil blew his brains out. Most moral. Right now, James has put into operation a vast advertising program—his brain child, of course—to talk people into borrowing far beyond their means, and then to borrow additionally to get out of their initial involvement, and so forth and so on. And I am sure that you do not want to listen to me lecture you, but I do get a little impatient with morality.”
“Penny, for heaven’s sake,” Cohen cried, “don’t you see anything wrong with blackmail?”
“Well, it’s not an open or shut matter, at all. It depends on whom you blackmail. Poor Sa
daba is only planning to blackmail James. I don’t see anything terribly wrong with that.”
“Don’t you have any sense of right and wrong at all?” Cohen demanded hopelessly.
“I certainly do, and I hardly think that you have any right to shout at me. I have a very well-developed sense of right and wrong—and I would like to point out to you that your being here with me, as a married man, without your wife’s knowledge, could hardly be construed as correct behavior. Now just fit that into your highly developed sense of right and wrong.”
“But aren’t you a married woman?”
“That’s completely different, Larry. Absolutely different, and with no bearing on the other.”
“Why?”
“Really,” Penelope said, “do you imagine for one moment that James and your wife are cut out of the same cloth?”
“Penelope, if you are trying to tell me that the man who strays is guilty but the woman who strays is innocent, why, it makes no sense at all.”
“Larry, I don’t care who is guilty or innocent. I am not the moralist—you are. If I feel sorry for your wife, I have every right to. And here is something to please her. I bet you never think of buying her anything pretty.”
With that, Penelope opened her purse and took out a small package wrapped in tissue paper. She slipped it into Cohen’s coat pocket.
“What on earth are you doing?”
“I am giving you something for your wife.”
“How can I give my wife a present from you?”
“Don’t be silly. Tell her you bought it.”
“What is it?”
“A divinely lovely bit of black froth and lace—a blouse by Chanel. You know, Madame Chanel has a gift that no one else ever approximated. She touches lace and silk and chiffon, and it comes alive under her fingers and turns into a thing of beauty—that is why she can command two or three hundred dollars for a blouse. You know, she is a very old woman—her fingers have the touch of another era. Her clothes make women beautiful and desirable, and I think it would be splendid to bring something to your wife in that mood.”
Larry Cohen was touched—touched and moved and very puzzled. “But my dear Penny,” he said, I can’t accept a gift of such value from you. It’s incredible—and so thoughtful of you. You must have bought it this morning—”
“It’s not for you. It’s for your wife.”
They were walking down Fifth Avenue now, on the park side in the direction of the zoo, and suddenly Cohen stopped and clenched both of his fists and shook his head and whispered.
“Oh no! No. I will not believe it. I will not.”
“What won’t you believe, Larry?” Penny asked gently.
“I will not believe—damn it, Penny!”
“Yes?”
“Did you steal that blouse?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘steal,’” Penelope replied after a long moment. “We live in such a world of semantics—”
“The hell with semantics! Penny, did you or did you not steal this blouse which is now reposing in my pocket?”
“Dear Larry, Sadaba was so dreadfully unpleasant to me, and when she sees James, she will be enriched by twenty-five thousand dollars at least, and I don’t know where she ever got a Chanel blouse, and certainly it doesn’t belong in that wretched shop of hers—”
“So you stole the blouse.”
“That’s a frightful way to put it.”
“How else should I put it?”
“You make it sound so beastly.”
“Penny, you rob banks, you steal jewels—almost a million dollars worth of jewels—you pick the police commissioner’s pocket, and now you steal a blouse—and you tell me that I make it sound wrong?”
“You do. Anyway, I don’t rob banks. I robbed one bank. One wretched bank that belonged to James anyway, and Gregory understands completely. And how on earth do you know about the jewels?”
“They were returned in the same type of manila envelope that you used to mail Comaday’s wallet back to him, and his money to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.”
“Did I?”
“You did.”
“Every criminal does make his mistake, doesn’t he, Larry?”
“We are not talking about every criminal, Penelope.”
“Poor Larry. Are you going to arrest me and send me to jail?”
“I am not a cop and I do not arrest people. As far as I am concerned, what has been taken has been returned. I will bring the damned blouse back to Sadaba or send it to her anonymously through the mail—”
“Larry, must you?”
“Yes, I must! Good God, Penny, what would happen if everyone took to this kind of thing?”
“Why, most of them would be caught, Larry. You talk about returning the blouse anonymously, but it isn’t that simple. You have no idea how the police trace things, a piece of string, an envelope—”
“I have no need for instruction in crime, Penny. We are still short forty-two thousand, six hundred and eleven dollars. Where is it? Or have you given it all to the Cancer Fund?”
“What a good idea, Larry. Would you let me?”
“No!”
“Don’t shout. I detest shouters. James is a shouter.”
“I am sorry.”
Penelope opened her purse and took out an oblong package wrapped in white tissue. “You don’t have to count it,” she said as she handed it to Cohen. “It’s all there. And it is a very pretty pass a thief comes to when she steals almost a million dollars and winds up without one penny of her ill-gotten gains.”
Penelope pecked at her food, drank her coffee, looked at the Central Park Zoo, so lovely and pretty and uncrowded in the January sunshine—and also looked at Larry Cohen, who was neither placid nor undisturbed. She could thread her whole life back through that wonderful and unlikely zoo, like an enchanted memory of Paris and Copenhagen and London set down in the midst of Manhattan Island and eternally beckoning and smiling, its lions and tigers and zebras and elephants as unreal as the obliging animals in a pleasant dream.
“It always makes me feel so good to be here,” she said to Larry Cohen. “You are a native New Yorker, aren’t you, so you ought to understand that? Here, and down on the Battery on an early summer evening, and Carl Schurz Park, and the old plaza here in the park on the lake, the funny Victorian place made out of red brick, and one or two other places, like the fish markets; and for me, that’s always the best of New York—”
“Penelope?”
“Don’t scold me, please.” She smiled. “Not right now. Don’t ask me to make any firm structure of my life—”
“But, Penelope—”
“Do you know the real difference between men and women—not the structure or the form, or anything physical, but very much deeper than that?”
“I’m not sure that I do.”
“Humor, Larry. Women have no sense of humor—which is a phrase men invented; but women are humor, because they never are permitted to take themselves seriously—which is perhaps the only really good thing men ever did for them. Men take themselves so dreadfully seriously—oh, so very seriously. They accuse women of having no sense of humor, but they only make the accusation because they themselves are so utterly without humor. That is why they resort to smut, poor things, and they become so angry when their wives do not appreciate the delicacy of their jests. But meanwhile, they are busy working away in this world which they have created—and heaven help us all if we women were to begin laughing at your men’s world! It would be quite dreadful, wouldn’t it, Larry?”
“I suppose it would. But—”
“And if we ran the world for a little while, Larry? Or if you ran households the way you run the world?”
“I don’t follow all this, Penelope.”
“I suppose not. I keep interrupting you,” Penelope sighed. “I won’t. Go ahead and ask me.”
“What?”
“What you have been dying to ask me—why do I steal?”
&nbs
p; “I think I know why.”
“Do you?”
“I think so.”
“Good.” Penelope leaned over and touched his hand. “Dear boy, you do feel that you are falling in love with me, and you are prepared to make great and noble sacrifices—”
“You’re laughing at me now.”
“I am not,” Penelope said indignantly. “I am touched and moved—and really, you are so brilliant, the way you worked everything out by yourself, and then you came to my rescue at Sadaba’s—Larry, you’re the only man I ever met in all my life who would believe that I am capable of robbing a bank.”
“I think you are capable of anything you set out to do, Penny.”
“Do you—really? My children tolerate me, my friends say, ‘Oh, Penelope!’—which means that I am rather feckless and witless; and my husband, James R. Hastings, considers me to be a sort of half-wit, a sea anchor of sorts, dragging away at his career.”
“All of which you foster carefully,” Cohen said. “And what on earth am I into now? I am an assistant district attorney of New York County, sitting here and having lunch with a confessed bank robber—”
“Did I confess, Larry?”
“Well, it amounts to the same thing.”
“Does it, Larry?” Penelope cocked her head at him. He really was quite attractive in a skinny, long-faced sort of way—a pleasing contrast to the stolid seriousness of Gregory Mannix. And he was unquestionably enamored of her. This made her feel guilty, and she hated to feel guilty.
“Well—”
“Larry, what evidence?”
Dumbfounded, Cohen said, “But you just handed me the money you stole.”
“Did I? Of course. You know, it slipped my mind completely. We were talking about so many good, interesting things.”
“It doesn’t bother you, Penelope?”
“Not as much as the fact that you don’t appear able to call me Penny. Why should it bother me, Larry?” she asked him seriously. “You have the money back. Even the insurance company was not the loser. Don’t you understand what it meant to me to be able to rob James’s bank?”
“I have the money, Penny. Now what on earth am I going to do with it?”
“Suppose you turn it over to me,” a deep, unloving voice said.