by Alan Handley
“Come on, Lou,” said the first soldier. “Mac’s okay now. We got ten minutes to catch that bus.”
“You okay, Mac?”
“For Christ’s sake,” I said, “I tell you he tried to kill me.”
“Aw, he’s still goosey,” said Lou. “Come on.” He started for the door.
“Wait a minute,” said the first one, “this crap about someone trying to kill you, that on the level?”
“I’m trying to tell you. That rubber tried to kill me in an alley and then he locked me in the steam room.”
“I told you he was screwy,” said Lou. “Come on. If we miss that bus we’re AWOL. You’re just hungover, Mac, better go in and sleep it off.”
I looked around the room. It was empty except for the three of us.
“Where’s the rubber that was here?” I asked.
“How the hell should we know? Lou here forgot his dogtags. He left ’em in the steam room and we come back for ’em—and the door wasn’t locked, either.” He started for the door, too. “Lou’s right. You better try and sleep it off…but not in a steam room. Come on, Lou.”
“Wait a minute,” I yelled. “Don’t leave me here alone. Help me out to the street.”
“Look, Mac,” said the first soldier. “We got ten minutes to make the bus back to camp. We don’t know nothing about you. If you say someone tried to kill you, okay, someone tried to kill you, but we’re getting back to camp. So long.”
“For God’s sake just help me get out to the street, won’t you? That’s all I want, I can get a cop there and prove it to you.”
“We ain’t got time to prove anything. If you want we should help you out to the street, come on. We’ll hold your hand out to the street but we ain’t got all day.”
“Aw, leave him alone…he’s nuts I tell you,” said my pal Lou.
“Naw…we’ll get you out to the street if that’s all you want—two seconds to get into your clothes or you go out bare ass.” I didn’t argue. I ran across the room and got in my clothes that were still bundled on the chair. I didn’t bother with socks or underwear or shirt. The soldiers watched me throwing on my clothes.
“You got it bad, Mac. You ought to give it up.” Lou jammed my hat on my head and grabbed up the rest of my clothes while I was still putting on my coat, which was stiff as a board. They dragged me through the hall and as we flew past the counter the basket man yelled something after us but we didn’t wait to find out what it was. The fresh air was wonderful. Lou threw my clothes at me and they both started running down the street.
“So long, Mac,” Lou called back. “Be a good little boy and lay off the stuff.”
“Wait a minute,” I yelled after them. “I’ll get a cop and prove it to you.”
“Some other time, Mac.” And they ran around the corner.
I tore after them for a couple of blocks but had to give it up.
I was mad. I wanted to brain the soldiers. I wanted to brain the rubber. I wanted to hit somebody. I was the maddest I’ve ever been in my life. But even that wasn’t mad enough to make me go back into the Regal Baths by myself. I set off to find a cop. We’d get this thing settled once and for all, I thought.
I eventually flagged a patrol car over on Eighth and told the cops my story. They did agree to come back with me, but they wouldn’t let me soil the sacred precincts of their shiny patrol car, I had to hang on the outside while we drove back. We pulled up in front of the Regal Baths and one of the cops got out.
“So you think some guy tried to lock you in a steam room after he beat you up in an alley. The same guy, huh?” It was heaven just to look at that uniform…the pretty shining buttons…the beautiful badge…the city’s finest…As far as I was concerned he didn’t have a face—just that wonderful, wonderful, reassuring uniform.
“Yes,” I said. “There were witnesses, too.” He wearily pulled out a notebook.
“Okay. What are their names?” The first fine flush of reassurance began to fade. Where had I played this game before…? At the Casbah after I’d found Kendall in my room…In Lieutenant Heffran’s office…Always they want names, and always I don’t know them.
“I—I don’t know their names.”
“Oh. Well, where can we get in touch with them?” Where could we?
“I don’t know that, either.”
“Say, what’s going on here?”
“There were two people….” I said hurriedly. “A man and woman—he was a musician I think—and then there were two soldiers…One of them was named Lou and the other one had a big scar on his stomach….”
“That’s fine. That’s great.” He put the book away disgustedly. “Well, come on. Let’s see about the rubber guy.” We entered the Regal Baths and we’d no sooner got through the doors than the basket man rushed up to us and started in.
“Where did you catch him, Officer? I was just calling the station.”
“So you were just calling the station, were you?” said the cop with a suspicious look at me. “And why were you doing that?” For some reason the basket man didn’t seem hard of hearing now. He answered the first time.
“This punk tried to run off without paying. He tried to run out on me.”
“Oh, he did. Well, we’ll get around to that later. Tell the rubber to come out here.”
“What rubber?” said the basket man.
“This man says your rubber tried to cook him in the steam room.”
“He’s nuts. We don’t have no rubber on at night. I told him that when he first come in and asked for a room. That’s a buck and a half he owes me for the bed and shower.”
“Come on back and I’ll show you,” I said to the cop. But even while we were going down the hall I knew it was no use. The room was empty. We looked in the shower stalls and the room with the beds, dormitory-type, see, even the toilets. There were a couple of padlocked clothes lockers where the basket man said the rubber that works only days kept his stuff, but there was no rubber.
“I told you he was nuts,” said the basket man. “He come in drunk as a skunk and wants a bed and shower and rub. I tell him no rubber so he settled for a bed and shower and then tries to run out on me. Ask him if that ain’t so. That I told him we don’t have no rubber.”
“Is it?” said the cop. What was the use? I said it was. “Okay, get it up. A buck and a half he says.”
“So now I got to pay for almost getting killed?”
“Wise guy, eh.” The cop started to look mean. “You got a fat lip, son. Maybe you’d like to go down to the station.”
“Never mind. I’ll pay.” I handed over the money. “No charge for the steam?”
“Still punchy,” said the basket man. I started to go. There wasn’t much else I could do. “Wait a minute,” said the basket man. “Now that you’re paid up honest, I’ll give you these you dropped back there.”
He handed me a pair of harlequin glasses.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I WENT OUT INTO THE STREET still staring at the glasses the basket man had put in my hand. The cop followed me and got in the patrol car and drove off.
I got away from the Regal Baths as fast as I could—walking in the middle of the street this time.
So Bobby LeBranch had been there, too. He must have been in the alley with Jo-Jo the dog-faced boy. It had probably been Bobby’s voice that had whispered, “Hold it. Someone’s coming.” It was all so simple now. The phone call at Peters the Dancing Boy’s. “No, I tell you. You can’t come up here.” He probably didn’t want to get nasty old blood all over his nice monk’s-cloth slipcovers. The mickey in the Scotch. Jo-Jo and Bobby waiting outside Peters’s since he was too finicky to let them take care of me in his apartment. Then following me till I got sick in the alley and almost finishing me then and there if it hadn’t been for the musician and his girl. But Bobby was no fool. He just sent Jo-Jo around the corner after they had beat it up the alley to play Good Samaritan and be so helpful and suggest the dreamiest little Turkish bath he knew of. One t
he tourists hadn’t discovered yet…He hadn’t left the Baths at all while I was talking to the basket man…just slipped into the back and put on his working clothes. Maybe he worked there during the day, or at least had at one time. And what a really groovy way to take care of me: asleep at the switch in a steam room—who can prove anything? The motherly care with which he had washed me off first—always wash it before you cook it—it’s a wonder he didn’t put an apple in my mouth. And the sadistic delights of the rubdown just like the way you tickle a lobster to make him relax just before you pop him in the boiling water…And then calling in his pal Bobby through the back door to watch the final death throes through the little window. Bobby was probably shuddering with such delicious delight that he never even knew his glasses had fallen off.
What a pity the soldier forgot his dogtags—they had had to beat it out the back door before the final exquisite spasm. But it didn’t matter…there was always tomorrow—or the day after—and there wasn’t a goddamned thing I could do about it.
I’d been beaten up, almost roasted alive and only some blisters, bruises and scratches to show for it. Lieutenant Heffran would give me the same brush-off this time, just like this last cop. No proof…You admit you had been drinking? How can you be sure you weren’t just imagining the whole thing? Soldiers, you say? Well, who are they? What are their names? Oh, one is named Lou and the other has a scar on his belly? Well, isn’t that peachy. Oh, a couple, too?…But still no names. And then running out without paying your bill. Tsk, tsk, now was that a nice thing to do. I have here a report from Officer Pushface—good man, Officer Pushface—here there would be a pause for business of fingering reports. He says you were drunk and almost disorderly…. I’m afraid, Mr. Briscoe, you were just imagining the whole thing. Now why don’t you go away for a nice long trip somewhere and leave me the hell alone?
At the moment I was so tired and frustrated and mad that I would have been glad to believe the whole thing was just imagination…D.T.’s…anything. But it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t.
But why? That’s what I didn’t get. Evidently I knew something a lot of people didn’t want me to know, or, at least, they just thought I did. But what was I going to do? I couldn’t just say, “It’s all a mistake, boys. Honestly, fellas, I don’t know a damn thing.” Because in the first place I didn’t know who to say it to and you can’t go around being careful if you don’t even know who you have to be careful of. The smart thing to do would be to get out of town before it was too late. But I had a job—for the first time in months—and I was damned if I was going to run from something now. Particularly when I didn’t even know what it was.
I took a cab to the Casbah, showered and shaved as well as I could around the scratches. I put Mercurochrome on the cuts and Band-Aids on top of that and my face looked like a camouflage net for snowy terrain. I knew how to treat the blisters on my hands and feet, so I wasn’t worried about them, but what the hell was Frobisher going to say when he got a load of my patchwork puss, particularly since he’d come right out and told us that the only reason Maggie and I were in the show was to look pretty, and scabs and Band-Aids don’t do anything for you.
I wondered for a moment if he could fire me. This was no act of God…this was an act of that bastard Bobby. And to get fired on top of everything that had happened to me last night would be the last straw.
But what happened to me last night wasn’t going to happen to me again, not if I could help it. I hadn’t done so well with my bare hands, so from here on in I was going to have a gun, gun-control laws notwithstanding. The law had been conspicuously absent last night when I could have used it, so the law could just shove it.
My German pistol, which was almost standard equipment for every G I veteran of the war, was still in a shoe at the bottom of my closet. Bobby must have found the Youth and Beauty Book that time before he got as far as looking in my shoes. There was still too much oil in the barrel and it would never have passed an inspection, but there wasn’t time to do anything about that now. It would shoot. The clip was still loaded and the click as I shoved it into place was mighty comforting. I always figured I’d hock it when I got completely broke, but never quite did. The S.S. Major who owned it originally and I had played a very interesting scene in which the pistol was an important prop, and I was kind of proud of my performance.
I got dressed and wrapped the pistol in a handkerchief and put it in my breast pocket. It pulled my coat down on the right side, though by experimenting in the mirror I found that if I kept my hand in the right pants’ pocket, it wasn’t so noticeable.
Well, that seemed to be all. As I closed and locked my door I thought to myself how nice it was there was nobody around to say, “This is it!”, an expression that always made me want to retch.
But I must admit that as I went down the steps and out into the street it was what I was thinking.
I didn’t even stop for breakfast at Riker’s. I was taking no chances today. The last time I had had coffee and eggs some very unpleasant things happened soon after. Let’s face it—I was scared. Every man on the street was a potential Bobby and he wouldn’t even be wearing his fancy glasses now to help identify him. I had them hidden behind the baseboard at the Casbah. While I waited for the subway I hugged the walls of the station. I stayed on the local. It was too easy to get pushed accidentally on purpose in front of a subway train. You think about those things after someone you don’t know deliberately tries to kill you.
I’m so conditioned by the movies that I half expected during the walk up from Times Square to be shouldered into a waiting black sedan and whisked away for the final chase, and I sighed with relief when the Lyceum stage door came into view.
Almost the entire company was standing around on the sidewalk getting a few final gulps of fresh air before rehearsal on the dusty stage. I pulled my hat down farther over my face and tried to make the stage door before anyone noticed me, but it didn’t work. Showers grabbed my arm and pulled me back on the sidewalk.
“Can such things be?” he declaimed, hamming it up with gestures. “And overcome us like a summer’s cloud without our special wonder.” I tried to shake him off, but then Miss Randall joined in.
“I pray you speak not. He grows worse and worse.” Which was no lie. I was getting mad. “Question enrages him. At once good night. Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once…” With all that, even I could recognize the quotation now. Banquo’s ghost scene from Macbeth. It had been in Kendall’s unfinished letter to Bobby, but I didn’t have time to think about it now, I was too busy trying to dream up a plausible story. I couldn’t tell them the truth…. Why should they believe me any more than the cops? And even if they did, I’d probably get fired. Mr. Frobisher certainly wouldn’t want valuable rehearsals interrupted with someone trying to kill one of his bit players all the time. The show must go on! As it was, Mr. Frobisher was about as frantic as he could get with the story I did whip up. Lord knows what he would have done with the truth, probably busted a gut.
I made up a story about stumbling down some stairs and scratching myself on a plaster wall and a few doors that happened to be around. The whoops of laughter this brought from the rest of the cast didn’t make me feel any better, either. I was glad that Maggie wasn’t there yet because she would undoubtedly shut them up by telling them the whole thing, or as much as she knew and I didn’t want that…not yet.
Mr. Frobisher kept cross-examining me. Wanted to know where the stairs were, exactly how it had happened—had I seen a doctor? I must be careful the cuts didn’t get infected. Those things can be dangerous. He was telling me! I told him I had put the stuff on myself but he would have none of it.
“You go see my doctor now.” He wasn’t asking—he was telling. “We’re starting with the first act so you’ll have time. I don’t want you to take a chance, Tim…I know what can happen.” He got an odd look in his eye and I knew what he was remembering so I asked him for the address and started to go.
Just then two cabs pulled up and getting out of the first one was old Square-Mouth, Margo. She had certainly taken me at my word. Libby had made me promise to introduce Margo to Mr. Frobisher when I was definitely set and Margo was holding me to it. All that business about her wanting to act being Libby’s idea was a lot of whoop-de-doo. Even though judging by Frobisher’s fatherly interest in my scratches I was in pretty solid, I still didn’t want to annoy him with women getting over divorces by going into the theater. But there didn’t seem to be any way out of it. I had promised.
“Mr. Frobisher,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but a friend of mine would like to see you about an understudy job.” And before he had a chance to refuse I called Margo over. She was just finished paying off the cab and at least had the good grace to pretend she was surprised to see me there. She came over very reluctantly but she didn’t need to overdo it. A dark fur coat softened that Bennington look today and as far as type went she wasn’t too much of an impossibility to understudy Miss Randall after all. But Mr. Frobisher wasn’t buying any.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Briscoe, but I don’t make it a practice to interview people on street corners.” He turned on his heel and stalked through the stage door. Two minutes ago I was Tim and mustn’t take a chance getting my little cut infected and now I was Mr. Briscoe and I could drop dead. That’s what happens when you try to help someone.
“Whew,” I whistled after he’d gone. “I’m sorry, Margo, but I tried.”
“It doesn’t matter.” But I could tell that it did. No woman likes to be cut dead on the street. “I had no business imposing on you this way. It was all Libby’s idea really. Thanks for trying, anyway. But what happened to you? Were you in an accident?”
“Yeah, I’ll tell you all about it sometime, but I’ve got an appointment right now. So long.”
“Perhaps I can drop you off.”