361

by Donald E. Westlake

  Another time, a reporter explained that the name was pronounced “Jan-o-lease,” and was originally spelled Gianolliese, but the family had shortened and somewhat Anglicized it.

  No one had ever done a profile on him.

  Friday night, I saw two science-fiction horror movies on 42nd Street. The weekend inched by. Sunday morning, I awoke with a bitter headache at eight o’clock, with less than four hours sleep. But I couldn’t drop off again, and it took me an hour to understand why. Then, feeling like a fool, I got up and dressed and found a Catholic Church, and prayed for Bill, who wasn’t here. It wasn’t that I attended Mass. Bill’s stand-in came to Mass, and he was me. When Mass was over, I left with no more interest in the place, my duty done. I went back to the hotel, and to bed, and to sleep.

  Starting Monday, I read the papers, all of them. It was five days since the meeting at Lake George. The coup d’etat should begin soon.

  It began on Wednesday night. Reading Thursday morning’s papers, I nearly missed it. I took a cab back to the hotel from the Daily News building on East 42nd Street, where I had bought the Brooklyn and Queens and Bronx editions of that paper. I bought the other morning papers in the hotel lobby and went upstairs and worked my way through them. I sat cross-legged on the bed, turning pages with my left hand, holding the Old Mr. Boston bottle in my right.

  I went all the way through, and something was bothering me. Something in the News. I took the Queens edition and went through it again, and this time when I came to the candy store explosion I stopped.

  It was a small candy store in a bad section of Queens. At ten-thirty last night, a gas heater in the back of the store exploded, killing the proprietor. It was the proprietor’s brother, a man named Gus Porophorus, who told the firemen about the gas heater.

  There was a photograph of the burned and jumbled back part of the store. The photograph showed a blackboard along one wall.

  I got up from the bed and lit a cigarette and walked around the room, laughing. I’d seen posters in subway stations, advertising the Daily News. The poster would have a big blowup of an unusual photograph, and the caption, “No one says it like the News.”

  A blackboard in the back room of a candy store! No one says it like the News. The horseplayers wouldn’t have anywhere to place their bets in that neighborhood for a few days.

  I’d been expecting something like the movies. Banner headlines screaming, gangland slaying. I’d forgotten what Kapp had said to Irving Baumheiler: “Quiet hits. Hits, but quiet hits.”

  I went through all the papers again, and this time I knew what to look for. A stationery store fire in the Bronx, owner killed in the blaze. And a man named Anthony Manizetsky, 36, unemployed, killed when his car rammed into a steel support under the West Side Drive at 22nd Street. There was a photo of the car, last year’s Buick. And an import firm’s warehouse burned down on Third Avenue in Brooklyn.

  I got yesterday’s papers out of the closet, wondering if I’d missed the opening gun. But I hadn’t. It had started last night.

  I felt twenty pounds lighter. I had been hating the hotel room. I put the top on the Old Mr. Boston bottle and called Ed Johnson. When I told him who it was he said, “I wondered what happened to you. It’s been almost a month now.”

  I said, “Have they been asking you questions about me any more?”

  “No, thank God. Just the one time. I had a tail for about three days after that. He was lousy, but I figured it would be a bad move to lose him. Since he left, nothing at all.”

  “Good. I’ve got a job for you, if you want it. Can I trust you?”

  “If you think you can trust my answer to that,” he said, “you think you can trust me.”

  “All right. I want a man’s address. I want to know where I can find him for sure.”

  “Is this number one, or are you still poking around?”

  “If I don’t tell you, you can’t tell anybody else.”

  “All right, I’m not very brave. I don’t get paid enough to be brave. What’s the name?”

  “Ed Ganolese.” I spelled it for him. “I’m not sure what the Ed is short for.”

  “All right. He’s in New York, for sure?”

  “Somewhere around here. Maybe he commutes.”

  “Wait a second, I’ve seen this name somewhere.”

  “He’s one of the people who run the local syndicate.”

  “Oh. Well—I’m not sure. I can’t guarantee anything.”

  “I know that.”

  “I’ll have to be careful who I ask.”

  “More than last time.”

  “I know who it was that time. I wish I had the guts to do something about it. Where do I call you?”

  “I’ll call you Saturday. Three in the afternoon. At your office.”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “This isn’t my league.”

  “Then don’t kick yourself for it. I’ll call you Saturday.”

  Then I went out and bought a pair of scissors. I came back and clipped the war news.

  Twenty-Three

  The afternoon papers carried more of it. A boiler explosion in a residence hotel off Eighth Avenue, in the middle of Whore Row. A liquor-store owner shot to death in what the papers called a hold-up attempt, though the “bandit” had stolen nothing—it was suggested that he had been scared off after firing the four shots that had killed the owner. Another fatal automobile accident, this one in Jackson Heights, in which the driver, who had been alone in his year-old Bonneville Pontiac, was listed in the paper as “unemployed.”

  The coup was less than twenty-four hours old. I had seven clippings. Each separate item was explainable in some manner less dramatic than the truth. No outsider, reading these separate and minor reports from the front, would guess that a revolution was taking place.

  Most of the action wouldn’t be hitting the papers at all. There were surely men who had disappeared in the last twenty-four hours, and who would never be heard from again, but no one would be calling the police to find them. Other men, insisting that they had fallen downstairs, would be entering hospitals with no more public fanfare than is given any obscure accident victim. Store owners would be gazing gloomily at wrecked showcases and merchandise, about which they would not be calling the police or the insurance company.

  Thursday night I walked around Manhattan steadily for five hours. I avoided midtown and Central Park, so most of my time was spent between 50th and 100th Streets, on and near Broadway. I had no goal. I simply had to burn the energy off. I saw no signs of the struggle.

  Friday morning, I added three more clippings. Friday afternoon, I added another five. Among them was a resident of the Riverdale section of the Bronx, who broke his neck when he fell down a flight of stairs in his house. I recognized the name. He was one of the men who’d been at the meeting in Lake George. So the incumbents were fighting back.

  The police must know what was going on. But they wouldn’t be anxious to advertise it. Like Irving Baumheiler, they would want it all very quiet. No sense upsetting the citizenry.

  Saturday morning the papers reported, without knowing it, the results of a major battle the night before. The News, the Mirror and the Herald Tribune all reported the Athletic Club blaze in Brooklyn. The Herald Tribune and the Times reported the boiler explosion in the East Side night club half an hour after closing. Two more of the Lake George insurgents had run into fatal accidents, one in his home and one in his car. All in all, I had clippings on eleven incidents in the battle, no one of them found sufficiently newsworthy to be mentioned by all four of the morning papers.

  When I called Johnson at three, he sounded nervous. “What the hell were you setting me up for, Kelly?”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Nothing. I stuck my nose in and pulled it right back out again. Something’s going on.”

  “I know.”

  “You could’ve warned me.”

  “I did. I told you to be careful.”

  “Listen, just do me one
favor. Don’t call me any more, okay?”

  “All right.”

  “Whatever the hell it is, I don’t want any part of it. I don’t even want to know about it.”

  “All right, Johnson, I understand you. I won’t bother you again.”

  “I’d like to help you out,” he said, and now he sounded apologetic. “But this just isn’t my league.”

  “You said that before.”

  “It’s still true. I’m great on divorce.”

  “In other words, you don’t know where Ganolese is.”

  “I got both his addresses. An apartment in town here, and a house out on the Island. But he isn’t at either one of them. And whatever’s going on, this doesn’t look like a good time to ask where else he might be.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m sorry. I did my best.”

  “I know. Don’t worry about it. This shouldn’t be anybody’s league.”

  We hung up, and I lit a cigarette and decided I’d have to do it the other way around. I looked in the phone book and found William Cheever’s law office listed, but no home phone. He wouldn’t be there on Saturday afternoon.

  It was a long weekend.

  Twenty-Four

  Cheever’s office was on West 111th Street, the edge of Harlem. Monday morning I took the subway uptown.

  I got off at 110th Street, the northwest tip of Central Park, and walked north into the ghetto. I wore my raincoat over my suit, bulky enough so Smitty’s gun made no bulge under my belt. It was daytime, so no one looked at me twice.

  The building was eight stories tall. A large record store chromed the first floor. The rest of the building, ancient brick and dusty windows, stuck up out of all that chrome and glass and gaiety like a wart.

  The door I wanted was off to the left, stuck under the record store’s armpit. I went up narrow-canted stairs for three flights, each time looking up toward a bare twenty-five watt bulb.

  William Cheever’s name was fourth of four on the frosted glass panel of the door. It wasn’t a law firm, it was one of those set-ups where a number of unsuccessful professional men get together to share the rent and the receptionist and the futility.

  The receptionist was as light as a Negro can be and still have Negroid features. She had relentlessly straightened her hair and then recurled it in neo-Grecian twists. She wore a high-necked and lace-fringed blouse designed for the bustless girls of midtown, and she was far too ample for it. Looking at her dressed in it, the first word that came to mind was “unsanforized.”

  She smiled at me and closed a slim volume of Langston Hughes, one finger marking the place. “May I help you?” Her accent was softly British, so she was probably Jamaican.

  “William Cheever,” I said. I hoped the attorneys at least had separate offices.

  “He isn’t in this morning.”

  “Oh.” I frowned as worriedly as I could. “I wanted to get in touch with him. As soon as possible. Would you have any idea when he’d be back?”

  “Mister Cheever? Oh, no. He very seldom comes to the office.” She withdrew the finger from the Langston Hughes book. “In fact, to tell you the honest truth, I sometimes wonder why he has an office here at all.”

  “Doesn’t he meet his clients here?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice it.” She’d been dying to talk about Cheever for days, maybe weeks. “The only clients of Mr. Cheever’s that I’ve ever seen,” she said archly, “are those gamblers and bookmakers and numbers sellers that he sends here for Mr. Partridge to represent.” She leaned confidentially forward, her bosom bracketing Langston Hughes. “Personally, I think Mr. Cheever is using Mr. Partridge, giving him business like that. I think it can do terrible harm to Mr. Partridge’s reputation as a courtroom lawyer if he becomes linked in the public mind with hoodlums and gamblers.”

  I smiled at her earnestness and the well-memorized sentence, phrased and rephrased in countless imaginary dialogues. “Once you marry Mr. Partridge,” I told her, “you’ll be able to overcome Mr. Cheever’s influence, I’m sure.”

  She blushed. She was light enough to do it beautifully. Her fingers fussed with the papers on her desk.

  I was sorry to embarrass her, she was a pleasant girl. But she would sooner answer my question if distracted. I said, “Could you give me Mr. Cheever’s home address? I do have to talk to him today.”

  “Yes, of course!” She was overwhelmingly grateful at something else to think about. She scooped up a small notebook and leafed through it. I borrowed pencil and paper and copied down the address. It was only a few blocks away, on 110th Street, a building facing the park on the north side.

  It was a sprawling old stone apartment building, dating back to Harlem’s days of eminence, when all four sides of the park were limited to the white well-to-do. It had fallen since. Plaster peeled in the huge foyer. The same drab obscenity was scratched seven times in the elevator walls. The eighth floor corridor was marred by bubbled, cracked, dry and eroded paint crumbling from the walls. I went through a gray door marked service E-H. I was in a small pentagonal gray room. Bags of rubbish leaned against the walls. The concrete floor was a darker gray. The four doors curving around me in Cinemascope each had a letter scrawled on it in white paint, far less professionally than on the front apartment entrances out along the corridor.

  The door marked G was locked. I stopped when I realized how relieved that made me.

  I had killed one man without meaning to. I had killed another man in the midst of rapid action, without having a chance to think about it. I had no idea whether I could kill a man coldly and intentionally.

  What if I couldn’t? To talk of revenge is one thing, but what if I couldn’t do it?

  I forced into my mind my last picture of Dad, dying in terror, spewing blood. I thought of Bill, and the wife I hadn’t met. I remembered how I had looked in the full-length mirror at Lake George. I felt the dead seed in my head where a small glass football could not replace an eye. I looked at the jagged hole that had been clawed into my life.

  But it did no good. I didn’t hate Cheever. I didn’t hate any of them. I felt a sad lonely pity for myself, and that was all.

  Wasted, it was all wasted. I was frail and ineffectual, I’d come all this way for nothing.

  I leaned back against the entrance door and slid down it till I was sitting on the floor, knees high before my chest, raincoat bunched around my hips. I crossed my forearms on my knees and rested my brow on my arms. Weak, and wasted, and meaningless. Lost, and broken, and impotent.

  Until I got mad, at myself. I raised my head and glowered at the white-painted G and whispered stupid insults at myself in idiotic fury. And then after a while that dulled too, and I just sat there, legs stretched out now, and looked at the bags of rubbish, and let my head do whatever it wanted.

  I sat there about two hours. When I got up my back was stiff, but I had my role straightened out. I had jerrybuilt a justification for my existence. I was a weak and unworthy vessel, but I would take the life from William Cheever and the other one. If I had been strong and capable, I could kill them out of a cold fury, a dispassionate rage. Instead, I would kill them cheaply, I would kill them only because that was what I was supposed to do.

  Back doors get cheap locks. A nail file between door and jamb worked as well as a key in the lock. I pushed the door open silently, and entered the kitchen. Some rooms ahead, I could hear the murmur of talking.

  I went left through an empty bedroom. The door was closed, but didn’t set snug. Through the crack, I saw him in the living room, talking on the phone. I could only see a narrow strip of the room, so I couldn’t tell if he were alone.

  He was abusing the receptionist for having given away the secret of his address. His face was naked and jagged and gray. I was glad he was afraid of me.

  It hurt him that he couldn’t let the girl know just how strongly he was upset. He was having trouble restraining himself, keeping his voice down. He was making do as best he could with heavy sarcasm
and cruel caricature of her accent. At last he said, “No, he hasn’t come here. How long ago was he there?—It’s over two hours. You should have called me, sweetheart, and not wait around till I called you.—Honey, none of my clients are ofay, you know that. When was the last time you saw a white man in that office? Oh, the hell, why waste time talking to you? Besides, it’s time for you and Benny Partridge to have lunch together on his sofa, isn’t it?—What do you suppose I mean, dumplin’?”

  He listened a few seconds more, then slammed the receiver down and glared desperately around the room. The way his eyes moved, I could tell he was alone. I reached in under the raincoat and jacket and dragged out Smitty’s gun.

  Cheever reached for the phone again. He dialed jerkily. I counted ten numbers, so he was calling someone out of town. He told the operator his number, and then he waited, fumbling a Viceroy out of the pack one-handed. All at once he dropped the pack and said quickly into the phone, “Let me talk to Ed. Willy Cheever.—Yeah, sure, I’ll hold on.”

  He managed to get the cigarette out and lit before he had to talk again. Then he said, “Ed? Willy Cheever. Somebody came around to my office this morning, asking for me.—Well, the thing is, the stupid girl at the office gave him my address.—I’m home now. I want to come up, Ed. If I could stay at the farm just a couple days—Just a couple days, Ed, until—Ed, for God’s sake, she told him where I live!—There isn’t anyplace else.—Ed, I’ve never asked you for any special favor before. I—Ed! Ed!”

  He jiggled the receiver and I stepped into the living room and said, “He hung up on you, Willy.”

  His head swiveled around and he stared at me. He didn’t move. I had Smitty’s gun in my right hand. I went over and took the phone out of his hand and cradled it. Then I backed off from him and said, “You better pick up your cigarette. It’s burning the rug.”

  He picked it up, moving like a robot, and put it in the ashtray beside the phone. It smoldered there, and he stared at the gun.