by David Mamet
The cops howled. They’d heard the story differently, but Parlow’s version was so far superior to their own, no one thought to stop or correct him.
They’d heard the “rookie was looking on” version of the story, and one had heard the variation in which the recovering cop had told it to his wife, which, of course, was patently untrue. No one knew the cop’s name, but all knew someone who knew someone who did.
Embellishments included that the rookie had swept the remaining packets of bills onto the floor, under the desk, and had later retrieved them and retired to Florida. That the cop’s brother-in-law, downtown, had seen to it that his wound was recorded as “in the line of duty,” and he had been fully pensioned. That it took place not in Chicago but in East St. Louis or Gary. That the cleaning rag had been in the overcoat pocket as the cop was setting up to shoot his cheating wife, his partner, a criminal, or a creditor.
Other embellishments held the notion that the revolver had been abstracted from the locker of the patrolman who had, in a divergent story, been romantically involved with the officer in question’s wife, the plan being to shoot her in admonition and plant the gun back in the patrolman’s locker. A further gloss, passing the end-of-watch, miserable Wisconsin morning, was that the offending weapon had been snuck back into the remarkably porous National Guard armory from which it sprung, there to rest undiscovered ’til the end of time.
But one of the cops had averred that, although the armory would function as an oubliette, it was also the robber’s Cave of Treasure. A rookie wondered that, as the cops had guns, and as the crooks had guns, who was there left to sell to? An older cop put his forefinger alongside his nose, the neophyte looked puzzled, while those in the know looked away in disapproval of his indiscretion.
Not included, but understood, was that none of the incidents, perhaps, had happened, and the stories were true only mythologically, but no less true for that.
The water kettle on the stove whistled. Parlow rose from the chair and stretched.
“Dowd will do it,” said one of the cops, and the rookie, Dowd, rose.
“I’ll do it,” Parlow said. He put on his overcoat. Parlow bundled and held his gloves in one hand, and used them to pick up the kettle. He took the steaming kettle outside.
False dawn added an indisputable and welcome gray to the night. Parlow walked to the car, his shoes squeaking on the hard frost. He poured the steaming water over the windshield, and enjoyed the melting of the rime.
The guard shack was in the middle of nowhere. The two-lane road ran, to the north and south, between sparse trees and flat farmland. Far to the south was a Model A, moving slowly, Parlow saw, to keep itself straight on the icy road.
When Parlow reentered, one of the cops was making coffee on the stove. The open door brought the cold in. The cop at the stove mimed shivering.
“You bet. Mike, wake up,” Parlow said. “Wake up.” Mike stirred on the cot.
He raised himself slowly to one elbow and looked around.
“Wake up, drink some water, throw the fuck up, and let’s get back to town,” Parlow said.
Mike nodded. But he had not been asleep. He was wakened earlier by the cops’ laughter and his hangover had kept him awake. And when Parlow had left the hut, the cops had begun a more private conclave, to which Mike had been listening.
The cops had segued from the gun rag in the overcoat to another story of a coat. Some fellow in an overcoat, dead in East Chicago. The rookie asked if it was true that a busboy reported the killers of Jackie Weiss, funny fellas, had worn coats of a “foreign cut,” that the report had been suppressed, and the busboy warned not to repeat it, as was the rookie now.
“And, on the subject,” the rookie was told, “you want to stay in, what the fuck are you about, cracking wise about the armory?”
And Mike heard the chastised rookie’s concern in his silence.
The car was freezing and the road was slick. A sick dawn was rising over the Lake.
Mike opened his eyes to see the red Burma-Shave signs on the roadside. He read them one by one as they passed.
How could . . .
Al Capone escape . . .
From absolutely . . .
Any scrape?
Burma-Shave.
“What were the cops doing up there?” Mike said. “We expecting to be invaded by Wisconsin?”
“Don’t take that attitude,” Parlow said. “They were no doubt checking for bootleggers. Ain’t that a plum assignment. Sit inside in the warm, all day, and drink.”
“Why were the fellas funny?” Mike said.
Parlow said, “What fellas?”
“Some jamoke, overcoat, dumped ’im in East Chicago. Funny overcoats. Shot Jackie Weiss. They said, ‘Funny fellas.’”
“Yeah. You been away. Overcoats, yes. Funny sleeves—raglan sleeves,” Parlow said.
“What are raglan sleeves?” Mike said. “Why are they funny?”
“. . . The funny thing,” Parlow said, “what did they find in the overcoat? What do you think? Fella in the dunes?”
“I’m too fucking cold to know,” Mike said. “The King of All the Belgians?”
“No,” Parlow said. “Hard candy.”
“Tell me again,” Mike said.
“In the pocket; big cloth sack. Tied with string. Hard candy.”
“So he liked hard candy,” Mike said.
“Thing of it,” Parlow said, “the bag? Tied with string. String glued together. Cops needed a knife, cut open the bag.”
“Maybe he used it as a cosh,” Mike said. “Jailhouse trick: bar of soap in the sock—you’ve got a cosh.”
“He had a cosh,” Parlow said. “S’pants pocket.”
“Maybe,” Mike said. “Maybe . . .”
Parlow leaned closer.
“Maybe he used it as a doorstop.”
“That’s the spirit,” Parlow said.
Mike began to shiver. Parlow passed him the pint. “You okay?” he said.
Mike shook his head.
On his return to Chicago, Mike found his own flat spotlessly clean. His clothing had all been washed, ironed, and pressed. His shoes were shined. His few possessions had been not only dusted but polished. The celluloid rabbit sat on his nightstand in the middle of a paper doily.
He understood it as a sign, that he had been adjudicated finished with his love affair with chaos.
He lay on his bed and slept for two days. When he woke he made a pot of coffee.
Chapter 24
He returned to the Budapest. The owner half-bowed to him at the door. He was shown to the window table he’d always shared with Annie Walsh. The owner had registered neither surprise, nor sympathy, nor appreciation of a customer’s return.
His “courtly reserve,” Mike thought, his natural grace and punctiliousness, his respect for the two young lovers, actually was stolidity. “The man’s simply a tea shop owner with a quiet manner, I supplied the rest. He bowed me in as a valued, returning guest? Of course he did. He does it for a living. And he showed me to my usual spot? What else does he have to remember? He sells coffee and cakes for a living.”
The first phrase he’d heard, in basic training, was that those looking for sympathy could find it in the dictionary, between “shit” and “syphilis.” Parlow had said, “‘Every cynic is a romantic’? Well. A romantic is just a cynic for whom, as yet, the nickel hasn’t dropped. You can’t get your heart broke if you don’t give a shit. A ‘fool’s paradise’ is a perfect redundancy. The paradise, whether it’s love or success, consists not in its, no doubt, pleasant attributes, but in the fool’s ignorance of their transiency. You can’t live in paradise, unless you’re a fool. Your time there runs out, join the cynics.”
“What about if you aspire to it?” Mike said.
“To what?”
“Paradise.”
“Good. You aspire to it,” Parlow said. “What do you want? Women, money, fame, happiness. You can aspire forever, and you quite well may, but, should you a
chieve them, you’re fucked.”
“Why is that?” Mike said.
“Because you’ve lost the sole talisman in the world against cynicism.”
“Which is?” Mike said.
“Desire.”
“Yes, paradise,” Mike thought. “Ain’t nobody here but us chickens. The owner’s a Hungarian tout, he’s probably German. God bless him, he’s got his pushcart, I’ve got mine.”
But he had lost his taste for it, and he knew it.
The perfect coffee and the delicate cakes tasted like dirt. Mike experimented with hating the owner: “He’s selling a happy alcove to the widows on the Drive: to break their afternoon of shopping for shit no one needs: what in the world is happening to me?”
Crouch had taught him, from his first day on the desk, to “write the police report.” The police report was Crouch’s version of the “Your Five Friends, the W’s,” reportedly taught in the journalism schools.
The Five Friends were What, Who, Where, When, and Why. Mike, once, challenged to recall them at the close of a late morning at the Sally Port, had included the sixth W, How, and no one remarked it, ’til the next meeting, when Mike was applauded for his streetwise orthography. The phrase, Crouch knew, was too formal, and too pat—suitable for the gullible who thought they could learn journalism in a classroom, but beneath the dignity of men who “went out there and got their nose broke.” But there it was.
“Write the police report,” Crouch said. “The sergeant, the lawyers, the judge, the jury, no one cares that ‘the crimson blood ran in rivulets.’ Tell me that he was shot. Tell me where, tell me who did it, if you know; tell me that, and only that, which IF YOU DON’T TELL ME, the captain is going to make a fool of you at roll call, and kick everyone’s ass.
“Write the police report.”
Mike smiled at the memory of his first and, he thought, most important lesson in aerial navigation. The fat sergeant had said: “This is a fucken map. This spot here? Is where we are. This there, is where you want to go. Draw a line on the map? Follow the line from ‘here’ to ‘there.’ When you get ‘there’? Stop.”
His police report, today, he saw, if well done, could not deal with his hopes, his fears, his state of mind, his troubles, or his history. All of these, as Parlow loved to say, would be “adducing facts not yet in evidence.”
The facts did not include the owner’s provenance nor demeanor, nor the appearance nor intention of the women at tea, who may or may not have come from Lake Shore Drive. The facts were: That he was in the Budapest, for the first time since Annie Walsh’s death. He had been back in Chicago two months. During that time, it had not occurred to him to enter the tearoom.
He had passed it, on his walks down Clark Street, several times a day, not even remarking its presence. The police report said that this day, it had occurred to him, or better, he had entered the restaurant. Now he felt the calm of discovery of the useful question: “Why?”
“Alright,” Crouch would have said, “yeah, fine, you’re brilliant, but you almost buried the lead. ‘For the first time since his lover’s murder, Mike Hodge, a reporter on the Chicago Tribune, entered the Budapest Café, 821 North Clark Street, the site of his courtship.’
“Well then,” Crouch would have taught, “thirty words into it, and you have yet to tell a lie. Bravo.”
Why had he come to the Budapest? The rule forbade conjecture. But what were the further facts?
The fact was, sitting at the window table, which he’d shared with Annie Walsh, his mind had run to a specific subject. That was a fact. What was the subject? The subject was: how to get from here to there; how to replace ignorance with actual information.
Of what was he ignorant? He was ignorant of the reason for his lover’s death—but could see his way to no solution. He had come into their trysting spot. Why? “In probability,” as Crouch would say, “to put a period to it and return to life as before.” What was that? What was before him could only be that which had been behind him. Which was a life as a reporter. Well, then. Let him report.
Jackie Weiss was dead. Morris Teitelbaum, his straw man, had been shot, and that was it. He couldn’t see why.
“The trick for writing for the pulps,” Parlow said, “is ‘Turn it inside out.’”
Turned inside out, two people had come to grief. As they were connected, it was not foolish to consider the connection, the connection was obvious—they were in business.
But what was the outlier? The outlier nagging at Mike’s mind was a man in a foreign-cut overcoat, with raglan sleeves, with candy in his pocket, dead in the dunes.
Two men in funny overcoats at the Chez. And at the funerals.
A woman in her forties entered the café. She wore a fur stole and a very expensive coat and hat, and had just returned, Mike saw, from an assignation with her lover.
She removed her compact from her purse. She applied powder and renewed her lipstick. She took a handkerchief from the handbag and blotted her lips against it, and checked them in the compact mirror. She put the compact away, and smiled her pleasure at the waiter’s arrival.
Her smile meant, I am here for a pot of tea, at the end of an hour’s shopping, and have not come from two hours in an unlicensed bed.
Mike took it in in that fraction of a second. She turned to look at him, angry not at his appraisal, but at his understanding. And when she saw he both knew and did not care, she looked down, her anger warring with her shame. For a moment the shame won out, then she raised her head, exchanged a word with the waiter, then lit a cigarette.
“That’s what happened today,” Mike thought. “That’s all I know. Alright.”
Years ago, fresh from the War, he’d asked the old drunk who was, that decade, the sage of the Sally Port: “How do you know when it’s time to quit?”
The man had covered the Spanish-American War, the Mexican Adventure, the Great War, and the various Crimes of the Century. And now he was, as they said, “sitting on third base, and waiting for someone to drive him in.”
The man was finished, but he had been great. And Mike was young enough to find the transition baffling.
“How do you know when it’s time to quit?”
And the man said, “When it feels like fucking your aunt.”
But it was not that time. And when he realized it, Mike rose and left the Budapest and returned home. He called the paper for the files on the Jackie Weiss case, and he began to write.
His return to the life of the City Room was eased by the shouted insults of his fellow reporters. Wisecracks high to low, all pretending to assume he had been absent on a prolonged sexual adventure. The quips ran from the Duke of Wellington’s comment that no reasonable man could spend more than forty-eight hours in bed with a woman—the comment having been attributed, the suggestion addended was that Mike had, perhaps, “caught his dick in a knothole.” The copyboys, fully aware of their position below any permission for humor, gave him the high sign, and one cub reporter tested his status by jokingly asking to be introduced.
Mike ran the gauntlet into Crouch’s office.
“What have you got?” said Crouch. Mike handed him the pages, and sat on the couch while Crouch read them.
“‘When last we heard of our stalwarts,’” Crouch read, “‘Jackie Weiss and Morris Teitelbaum had decamped for That Better Land.
“‘The Chez Montmartre, rialto of these western shores, remains open to all appropriately attired and capable of saying, “Joe sent me,” and the rivers flow into the sea. With the exception of our dear Chicago River, which, a marvel of engineering, flows from our inland sea, into the Fox River, and, thence, toward the Father of Waters, the Big Muddy. For the latest on our Little Giant pocket crime wave, keep your attention on these pages, obey the liquor laws, and buy American.’
“What the hell?” Crouch said. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”
Mike thought a moment, then, “I don’t know,” he said.
“I know,” Crouch said. “You either g
o out and drink less, or drink more. Something. But don’t break my heart come in here with this fucking valentine to your long-lost talent. Because someone at Hull House may care, but I’ve got to write a newspaper.”
Mike started to speak.
“This filth? Sounds like someone, trying to write like you, doesn’t particularly care if he gets caught.
“Yeah, she was the Irish girl,” Crouch said, “and her red bush was the closest that you’ll ever get to heaven. And you loved her. But she’s dead. And if you come back to work, work.”
Crouch lit a cigarette. He looked across the desk, and saw that Mike was lost.
“Alright,” Crouch said. “What was the weather, month ago today?”
“I don’t know,” Mike said.
“Why don’t you know?”
“’Cause I don’t care,” Mike said.
“Nobody cares,” Crouch said. “That’s why we don’t report it. We reported it then. Tell me who was shot in the head today. Tell me the Croquet Ball. You remember.” He took Mike’s pages, balled them up, and threw them across the room.
“Go fuck yourself,” Mike said.
“. . . But, but,” Crouch said, “and I’ve noted the insubordination; but you came back here. And here you are. Why?”
“Don’t tell me, I’m a ‘journalist,’” Mike said.
“That’s between you and your god,” Crouch said.
“I’m an agnostic,” Mike said.
“That’s because you were never in a foxhole,” Crouch said. “There Are No Atheists in Foxholes.”
“I’m not an atheist, I’m an agnostic,” Mike said. “And I’m sick to death of ‘No Atheists in Foxholes’; by which, and by extrapolation, we might conclude that anyone found in foxholes is a deist. For example, a fox.”
“Alright,” Crouch said.
“And if I’m not a journalist, why am I back here?” Mike said.
“Because where else are you going to go?” Crouch said. “I got something for you.”
“Maybe I just don’t want to write,” Mike said.