Wolf's Mouth

by John Smolens

  I got a cup of water from the cooler in my office. When I returned to the workshop, he was sitting up, his back against the file cabinet. He drank the water down without stopping, and then said, “What they do with my glasses?”

  I looked under the workbench and found his dark-framed glasses lying amid TV and radio parts, one arm broken off. “They need a little repair.” I took the roll of electrical tape down off the pegboard, sat on the floor next to Leon, and began taping the arm back on his glasses. “What happened?”

  “Last night. I was just finishing up that Zenith. It musta been elevenish. There was a rap on the door, and when I went out, there were two men, one young, one old.”

  “The old one blind?”

  “Guess so.” Leon took the glasses from me and bit off the roll of tape. “You never could fix anything, Frank.” He slid the glasses on and said, “That looks rather stylish, huh? Sorta Cary Grant. Or Sammy Davis Jr.”

  “How young?”

  “Oh, everybody looks too young to me now. Late twenties—thereabouts.”

  “What they say?”

  “Say? Not much. They were looking for you, surprise-surprise. German accents, or maybe Austrian? I did my best Bogart, and the young one—his name’s Anton—bopped me good. This could be a father and son routine? The old man asks all the questions while his boy does the heavy work.”

  “He had a cane.”

  “That’s your man.” Leon’s glasses sat at an angle on the bridge of his nose.

  “You want a doctor?”

  “No.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Lying on this friggin’ floor all night. What I could really use is a cup of coffee, laced.”

  I took him by the arm and helped him to his feet. “Let’s go down to Tony’s.”

  “They’re not open this early.”

  “No, but they’ll be there prepping for the day.” We went out into the showroom. Then I paused and said, “Wait here a sec.”

  I went back into my office and unlocked the safe. We didn’t have a bank account and nearly everything we had was in there. I took out all the cash, bills wrapped in elastic bands. No time to count it, but I did a rough tally and figured there was something over eight thousand dollars. I switched off the light as I left the office. “We’re going to be closed for business for a while,” I said. “And you’re going on a paid vacation.”

  “I am?”

  “Don’t you have a sister—Saint Somewhere?”

  “St. Louis.”

  I counted out two thousand dollars and handed it to him. “Have a swell time.”

  We walked over to Tony’s Grill and they were all there, preparing for the day, Tony behind the bar, Ginger and a couple of cousins setting up tables. The smell of onions and garlic came from the kitchen. Ginger got out of the booth where she had been refilling all the sugar bowls. “Your girlfriend,” she said, squinting against the cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, “said she didn’t want to sit in our apartment all day, so she’s out back helping Paolo.” Then taking Leon by the arm, she turned him so she could see better by the light from the front window. “What the hell, Leon?”

  “Had a little run-in with this great pair of knockers. I mean cleavage with an echo like the Grand Canyon.” He rose up on his toes and leaned toward her white satin blouse. “Hellooo!”

  Ginger took her cigarette from her mouth and cocked her head, disappointed. “You pay for that sort of thing on the street, Leon, this is what happens. Dope.”

  “No, no, I was doing pro bono work.” He touched his jaw tenderly. “I think this was more of a knee-jerk reaction. Know how it is when you tall girls hit the bull’s-eye—they constitute a physical threat.”

  She looked at me, her eyes both curious and angry. “It’s you, isn’t it? All this, this crap—it’s because of you.”

  “Guilty.” Looking over at Tony behind the bar, I said, “How ’bout a couple of coffees, and doctor his.”

  “Sure thing,” Tony said.

  Ginger helped Leon into the booth and then sat down next to him and resumed filling the sugar bowls. After each one was filled, Leon flipped closed the stainless steel lid, which made a nice solid clink. The cousins got back to their chores.

  I went over to the bar, where Tony was filling two mugs of coffee. One he topped up with Irish whiskey. “Splash?” he said.

  “Thanks, no.”

  I took the mugs over to the booth and gave Leon the laced coffee. He was content helping Ginger. I was going to sit down across from them, but Ginger fixed me with an eye and I thought better of it. I went up to the front window and worked on my coffee. This hour of the morning, the sun, rising over the river a dozen or so blocks east, floods the street with angled light, long shadows. Back in the kitchen I could hear the rapid knock of a knife blade on butcher block, and the radio that Paolo kept on while doing prep. After a commercial jingle ended, the news came on, leading with the story about the police finding Hans Krantz’s flayed body in the river. The chopping ceased; there was the clatter of something—a knife?—falling to the floor.

  Paolo swore in Italian, nothing unusual around Tony’s.

  I followed Tony back to the kitchen. Paolo and Braun were at the sink, and he held her left hand under running water. There was blood on her apron, on the floor, smeared by shoes. She was white, her eyes streaming tears, but she was quiet, perhaps in shock. We were like a surgical team. First, we wrapped the cut finger in one clean towel, and after several minutes, when it had been used up, we got a second towel. Paolo continued to swear in Italian, and at one point he said to me and Tony, “È cucina mia. Is no good.”

  “It’s a little cut,” Tony said. “You get cuts and burns all the time.”

  “No.” Paolo walked away and began checking his pots simmering on the stove, a gesture that suggested he was washing his hands of further involvement.

  Tony and I continued to work on the cut, putting pressure on the finger. Braun stared at her hand as if it wasn’t hers. When the bleeding had pretty much stopped, Tony went into the office for the first aid kit.

  “They skinned him.” She continued to stare down at the towel wrapped around her hand. “Skinned him alive, and then they threw him in the river. Do you think—”

  I knew what she was going to ask, so I said, “It’s my fault. I should have thought to come in and tell you, before you found out—” I nodded toward the radio, which was perched on a windowsill.

  “This little cut hurts,” she said, a note of fascination in her voice, “but that. How can they do that to someone?” She looked at me for the first time, her eyes pleading.

  “Don’t ask me to explain it. The war, it did things to people.”

  Tony came back with the first aid kit and got out gauze pads and a roll of white tape. I assisted as best I could, but Tony had done this before, and we talked about how often I almost lost a finger when I had first started working in the kitchen. When the finger was bandaged, Tony said, “Five years I wrapped wounds in the South Pacific. Trust me, you’ll be fine in a few days.”

  I said to Tony and Paolo, “Give us a minute, will you?”

  They both understood and left the kitchen.

  “You’re getting out of Detroit,” I said. Braun continued to stare down at her bandaged finger. “This morning. I’m going to take you back to Tony and Ginger’s apartment. We’ll pack up your suitcase, and then I’m taking you to the bus station.”

  Her lips tightened, and for a moment I thought she was going to cry, but then she asked, “Where?”

  “Sault Ste. Marie.”

  “That’s, like, way up north.”

  “Exactly. My wife’s up there, and she’s alone in this apartment with an extra bedroom. It’ll be fine. You’ll be there by tonight.” I waited a moment, until she looked up at me. “Besides, I want you to take something up to her.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know that. Until it’s over.”

  She then did something I wasn’t prepared f
or: she stepped into my arms and hugged me tightly. I placed my hands on the small of her back and she laid her head on my shoulder. After a moment, she asked, “These lumps under your coat—what is that, Frank?”

  “It’s the money I want you to take up to my wife so the two of you will be all right.”

  Then she stepped back and patted the holster on my left side. “And this is not money. I know what this is. This is the thing you need even more than money. You should get out of Detroit, too.”

  “I’d like to. But somebody’s got to stay.”

  I borrowed Tony and Ginger’s Pontiac and, after a brief stop at their apartment, took Leon and Braun to the bus station: Leon to St. Louis and then Braun to Mackinaw City, where she’d take the ferry across the straits and catch another bus from St. Ignace to Sault St. Marie.

  “Funny,” Leon said before boarding his bus, “how many places in America are named after saints.”

  “Why funny?” I asked.

  “Don’t know.” He glanced up at me, and I half expected him to wink. “You’d think we were in Spain. Or maybe Italy.” Then he climbed on the bus, humming “That’s Amore.” He paused at the top of the steps. Turning around, he seemed to enjoy the fact that for once I had to look up at him. “Frank,” he said. “I’m onto you.”

  “Onto me what?”

  He shook his head. “Listen, brother, you can’t go on like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like underestimating a dwarf.” Dead serious for the longest moment, his brown eyes enlarged by his glasses, which were still taped at one corner and were slightly crooked on his face—and then he smiled.

  “You take care, Leon.”

  “I always do.” He started down the aisle, and though he was out of sight, I heard him say in his most pleasant television voice, “Why, ma’am, would you mind if I sit next to you in this vacant seat? I do like to be near the front of the bus, you know, so’s I can keep an eye on our driver. It just makes me feel safer, you know?”

  I waited for the woman’s response, but then the bus doors closed with a hiss and a sigh.

  As I walked Braun to her bus, she said, “In the movies, I’ve always liked those scenes at the bus or train station. Broken hearts and imminent danger.”

  “The best ones are when they manage not to make a scene.”

  “I feel like the heroine.” She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek.

  After we had seen Leon off, she had gone to the ladies’ room; I took it as an opportunity to go to the men’s, where I stuffed the wads of bills inside her suitcase.

  “Don’t let that out of your sight,” I said as I handed her the suitcase.

  “I could take the money and run. Denver. San Fran. Rio.”

  “You could, but it’s not what heroines do.”

  “Your wife, what’s her name?”

  “Claire, but she’ll appreciate it, now and then, if you call her Chiara.”

  “Will this be all right with her?”

  “It’s nice of you to ask. It will be fine with her. She’s all alone up there. You’ll get along fine. I’ll call her, and she’ll be at the station when you get in tonight.”

  “When you call, tell her I’m the girl who looks like she’s carrying the loot.” Braun gazed down the platform, searching for a last impression to take with her. “This would be better in a train station—all that steam shrouding the platform in mystery.”

  “You are a romantic.”

  “I’m nervous, I think.” She tried to smile. “I’ve never been that far north.”

  “You’ll like it. She says it’s . . . cooler than down here. You’ll need a sweater.”

  “A sweater?”

  “There’s still snow on the ground.”

  “You kidding? It’s May.”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “Snow,” she said, as though she’d never really considered what the word meant before, and then she shifted her suitcase to her other hand and boarded the bus. I stepped back on the platform and watched as she got settled. She put the suitcase in the rack above her seat, and then sat down next to a window just as the bus began to pull out of the station. As she looked down at me, her eyes seemed disinterested but resigned, and it reminded me of how during the war, before I was captured, things would happen suddenly, we’d be ordered to prepare to march. You just did it. You had no choice. And you never knew whether you were headed toward safety or harm. You just didn’t think about that, then.

  22.

  Second lives, second thoughts. When you live a second life, you think about things later. Which too often means regrets. Things you should have done, things you shouldn’t have done. But eventually you arrive at the place where you are—all these things you might have done, or might not have done, they don’t matter, because you’re here now, and that’s the only important thing to keep in mind. Klaus Stemple had said, Did any of us ever think this would become our new lives? Of course not. How could we? I was the boy who once played an A-minor chord on the maestro’s piano. I never imagined leaving Italy, and certainly not spending years—decades—here in America. I hoped to one day meet someone like Claire, but had no idea it would be under such circumstances. For that alone, for her, I could never have any real regrets.

  My only second thought, actually, had to do with my gun. I’d bought it from a guy Tony knew: Louie. He was so insistent about not giving his last name that people called him Just Louie. A few months after I’d started working at the grill, he came into the kitchen one night as I was cleaning up, and said, Just call me Louie, and my friend Tony out at the bar tells me you might be interested in some personal protection, so I would like to be of assistance, if I may. He was short and wide, and wore a good tweed overcoat and a black fedora that had snow melting on its stingy brim, which sported a small red-and-white feather in the hatband. He placed his briefcase on the stainless steel table I had just finished wiping down, and when he opened it, there were four handguns displayed on what looked like black velvet. I remember glancing toward the door, fearing that someone might intrude (though Paolo had already left for the night—first thing you learned from Paolo was it was his kitchen, and he didn’t stick around to clean up at the end of the night). Not to worry, Just Louie said, we will not be disturbed during our consultation. And then he proceeded to display his wares. He had the natural delivery of a salesman. Never actually assertive, always seeking the customer’s opinion, trying to home in on the option that would close the deal. You like the fit of this one in your hand? You comfortable with this weight? And ever suggestive. Have you considered how you plan to carry it? With a flip of a latch, he opened the inside of the briefcase lid, which offered a display of several styles of shoulder holsters. Just Louie was a true salesman in every detail, right down to his trimmed mustache and manicured fingernails. I learned more from him about sales than about weapons. The secret was to deal with the customer as though you shared a secret. He could have sold anything: firearms, automobiles, even lampshades.

  Ultimately, I decided upon the Beretta 1934, which was the pistol I’d been issued in the army. However, my eye kept wandering to the Colt Python, which Just Louie explained had gone into production the previous year, and in his opinion might be the best double-action revolver ever made. He picked it up and placed it in my hand and said, Now don’t you feel like a cowboy? I agreed that it had good heft, but I wasn’t a cowboy, and it was too expensive. The used 1934 wasn’t as powerful, but Just Louie sensed that I was familiar with it, so he talked up the fact that the Berettas had been making firearms since the Middle Ages. You’re not a cowboy but a man with history on his side, and he gave it to me at what he claimed was an incredible discount (a nice way of saying he was dumping it), which included the convenience of easy financing.

  That first year in Detroit, what little money we made went toward food, rent, and obtaining the necessary papers—birth certificates, wedding license—that would legally declare that we were Mr. and Mrs. Frank Green
. But every day when I stepped out onto the street, I looked both ways up and down, expecting someone to handcuff me or, worse, shoot me. I had such second thoughts about the Beretta that I considered asking Just Louie if I might trade up. But as the months passed, and we had been Frank and Claire Green of Detroit, Michigan, without any difficulties, I began to leave the pistol in a shoebox on the shelf in the bedroom closet, and from that moment on I really began to think—and act—like any law-abiding citizen. It was my best bet. But now I wished I had that Colt Python, because I kept thinking I shouldn’t get too close. With Vogel and his assistant, I needed to somehow see them from a distance before they saw me. I needed something with long-range accuracy. But what I had tucked under my left arm was going to have to do.

  I was going to have to get close.

  I couldn’t afford second thoughts—not now.

  And I was not accustomed to talking to Claire on the phone. Not long-distance. A quick call from the office to say I’d be home half an hour late and could I pick up something on the way—that was one thing; but Detroit to Sault Ste. Marie, over a crackling phone line, it was impossible to say what you meant. It was harder to understand what she meant. The result was we both said very little. I told her that I had moved out of the apartment. I told her that I appreciated her letter, but wouldn’t be collecting the mail from either the apartment or the store for the time being. I told her I would call her whenever I could, which was met with a lengthy silence.

  “Where are you now?” she said finally.

  “Phone booth in the lobby.”

  “No phone in your room?”

  “This is not exactly the Ritz.”

  I was looking out the front windows of the lobby, watching three buses pull up in front of the Huron Hotel. I told Claire about Braun, about her arriving on the bus in Sault Ste. Marie that night, about the five thousand dollars she had in her suitcase.