Elsinore

by Jerome Charyn

  “I agree with my dad,” Paul said, and this was the brother who worried Holden. The quiet ones were always the first to go mad.

  “Phippsy, ask the boy what he thinks,” Ethan said.

  “I agree and disagree,” Holden said. “I like your island, Mr. Coleridge. I really do. I could live here. But I’d be unhappy about the thought of never seeing London again.”

  “London?” Ethan said. “A pigsty.”

  “Have you ever been?” Holden asked.

  “Have I been to London? No. But there’s nothing to miss.”

  “The best sandwiches I ever had came from Holland Park. And there’s nothing like tea at Brown’s. You have to reserve a chair for high tea.”

  “Dad,” Minot said. “Make him stop.”

  “Don’t be rude to the boy,” Ethan said.

  “I mean, he’s talking like one of those cosmopolites. We don’t ride on planes. And we don’t drink tea. I play checkers with my dad and I win … dada, he’s wearing a gun. It’s bulging out of his pants.”

  “What do you expect him to wear? He’s Phippsy’s agent.”

  “But he could have left it on the porch.”

  “We’re friends, Minot, don’t you forget that.”

  “Give them the paper, dad, and tell them to blow.”

  “I can’t do that, son. Phippsy was my protégé. He gave you presents when you were a toddler. He gave you toys.”

  “I don’t like his friend,” Paul said.

  And Holden blamed himself for becoming Phipps’ companion. Now he’d have to strangle a seventy-five-year-old man.

  “Ah, I know how you feel,” Phipps said. “Strangers upset them. They were always shy, your boys.…”

  “They’re like animals,” Ethan said. “They never married … and after their mama died, they couldn’t stand another woman in the house. I wanted to marry again. You know what Paul said? ‘We’ll kill you and the whore, dad.’ I’m their prisoner, Phippsy, swear to God.”

  “Who’d ever marry you, dad?” Minot said. “You can’t pee straight any more. And you have a tube in your dick.”

  “Brother,” Paul said, “why are you telling this to strangers, giving them intimate details about our father?”

  “You’re right,” Minot said. “Give them the money, will you?”

  The brothers smiled, and Ethan started to shake.

  “Boys, I want no violence in this house.”

  “Violence, dad?” Minot said. “We’re giving them their cash.… Fetch it, brother.”

  Paul went into a back room and returned with a pair of enormous suitcases. The leather had that same maddening orange rust. Minot must have salvaged them from the junkyard.

  Holden picked up the suitcases; his eyes began to water from all that weight.

  “Good-bye, Ethan,” Phipps said. “Good-bye, Minot. Good-bye, Paul.” He hugged the baron of Rhode Island and tried to hug Minot and Paul, but the boys moved away from him and smiled.

  “Count the paper,” Minot said.

  “I trust you. I know your father almost seventy years. I worked for him, Minot.”

  “Count the paper.”

  Phipps turned to Holden. “Please.”

  Holden unbuckled the first suitcase. It was stuffed with a potpourri: packages of fives, tens, twenties, and thousand-dollar bills. Holden had never seen a thousand-dollar bill before. He felt like some king of the currency. But the king was more like a fool, counting on his knees. He unbuckled the second suitcase. No one talked. Ethan looked like a sick snake. It took Holden half an hour to count all the cash. He buckled up the suitcases and carried three million two hundred twenty thousand and sixty dollars to the door.

  “See you, sonny,” Minot said.

  Holden began to grumble once he left the house with Phipps. “How am I going to carry this, Phippsy, across three fucking fields?” The sun had gone down and Holden knew the dogs were out there.

  “Stay,” Phipps said. “I’ll fetch the car.”

  “No.”

  “Then let me carry one of the cases.”

  “No. I don’t like your friends, Phippsy. They belong in an institution.”

  “Ah, Ethan’s all right. And the boys are bitter. You heard Ethan. They never married.”

  “What kind of deal did you make?”

  “It wasn’t a deal. The money’s mine. I came to collect it, that’s all.”

  And Holden trudged across the fields of junk with Phipps behind him. He had to stop and rest after fifty feet. His hands were torn by the time they reached the car. None of the dogs had bothered them.

  Holden put the suitcases in the trunk. Then he drove toward the ferry.

  “Phippsy, you might have had an agreement with the father, but not with the sons. We’ll be lucky to get off the Vineyard alive.”

  “They wouldn’t go against their father,” Phipps said.

  “They’re bumpers,” Holden said. “And they’re crazy.”

  The ferryman took them across the creek, and already Holden was suspicious. He didn’t like the ferryman’s dumb smile.

  “We’ll stay on the island tonight,” Phipps said. “I booked a room in Edgartown.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a hot idea. We ought to distance ourselves from those boys.”

  “We’re staying at the Charlotte Inn.”

  They drove to South Summer-Street and Holden parked in a little lot. He carried the suitcases into the inn. Phipps signed the book. And then Holden managed to get the money up the stairs to their room. He wasn’t so jumpy inside the Charlotte Inn. The furniture and the little crooked hallways reminded him of Brown’s, where Holden liked to stop in London, when he was stealing patterns for his tailor. He loved the wallpaper at Brown’s, the adventures he had exploring the hotel, finding a corner where he could sit and read a book. There were always clergymen around, factory owners from Devon or Lancashire, and Yanks like himself. But he could never understand English hotels, because no one hounded him for the bill. The idea of cash seemed beneath the dignity of a hotel. And Holden had the illusion of staying at Brown’s for free.

  And so the Charlotte Inn soothed him, and he didn’t worry so much about Ethan’s boys. He had his shooter. He could relax a bit. And somehow he didn’t believe that they would wander into the inn and start knocking on doors in the middle of the night. But they weren’t rational beings. They’d been hiding too long, living with their dad, and Holden didn’t take a chance. He slept with the gun.

  The room had a fireplace and a soft couch and an old clock that ticked in Holden’s ear. He built a fire for the old man, crumpling paper around the logs. Holden missed his VCR. It felt like a good night for The Big Sleep. He opened one of the suitcases and borrowed a thousand-dollar bill.

  The old man had gone into the toilet and sat for an hour. Then Holden began to hear a rabbity noise, like a small animal crying. “Phippsy,” he said through the door. “Are you in trouble?”

  Phipps didn’t answer at first. Then he said, “Come in, please.”

  But the toilet was locked.

  “Open up.”

  “I can’t.”

  And Holden had to stab at the lock with his pocket-knife. It took him another five minutes to enter the toilet. The old man was sitting on the pot with his pajama bottoms caught between his legs.

  “I’m a bloody invalid. I need a nurse.”

  “It’s nothing,” Holden said, untangling the old man.

  And they went to sleep in their twin beds, Holden with his gun, his mind like a night crawler, picking at sounds while he dreamt. The old man snored.

  They had breakfast downstairs in an enclosed garden. Fresh orange juice and English muffins and cups of coffee with cream. There was a great clutter outside the inn. A film crew had captured Edgartown. Holden saw caravans and trailers and lighting trucks. Men with walkie-talkies stood on the trucks and breathed signals across the town. They were shooting Jaws 5. And Holden wondered what kind of shark they’d concocted for the film. />
  “Sid,” the old man said, “did you ever think of changing careers? You dress like an actor. Where’d you learn to walk without a wrinkle?”

  “It’s not the walk,” Holden said. “It’s the quality of the wool.” And he carried the suitcases down to the car. But Phipps didn’t want them buried in the trunk.

  “The back seat will do.”

  They caught the noon ferry. Holden sat with Phipps in the car barn. The engines churned, and water began to spill into the barn. The same puddles formed. Holden thought the car would float off in a lake inside the barn. Phipps wasn’t worried about water. He watched the suitcases. And that was fatal. Because he didn’t see Minot and Paul standing outside the car in their galoshes, holding Webley automatics with very long noses. And when Holden saw them, it was already too late. The boys had come from his blind side. They tapped on the window with their Webleys. The last time Holden had seen such long guns was in a British spy film, with Peter Lorre. He almost started to laugh.

  “Open,” Minot said.

  “They can screw,” Phipps said.

  “Phippsy,” Holden said. “We’re not immortal. They can poke us right through the glass.”

  He opened his door. Minot reached in. “You’re naive, grandpa. Did you really think you’d get off the island with our stash?”

  “It’s my paper,” Phipps said.

  “But you shouldn’t have let us sit on it so long.”

  Paul opened the rear door and collected both suitcases. Holden still couldn’t understand the old boy’s agility. He carried the suitcases across that little lake, up the stairs, and out of the barn.

  Minot smiled. “I think I’ll sit and watch the scenery with you, if you don’t mind. I promised dad I wouldn’t hurt a hair off your head, Mr. Phipps, unless I had to. He cried when I told him about this journey we were taking. ‘Phippsy’s my oldest friend.’”

  Minot must have been an actor in public school. He was much too involved with his own narration. He gestured with the Webley, and Holden picked it right out of his hand. And when he struggled to get his gun back, Holden dug the silencer into the old boy’s mouth.

  “Here, Phipps, take the gun. And if he blinks, blow his brains out. We have nothing to lose.”

  And Holden had to go up those stairs to look for Paul. He wandered into that little lake wearing three-hundred-dollar shoes. His socks had come from the Duke of Windsor’s closets. He went all around the ferry, from deck to deck. The ocean looked like coiling skin. He searched under the lifeboats, in the ferry’s luncheonette, in the storage bins. He wondered if Paul could have vanished inside the pilot room. Then he turned the corner and found Paul sitting on the suitcases and eating a hot dog. Paul was so busy with his dog, he never looked up. Wasn’t a soul around. Holden could have tossed him into the Atlantic, but he was done with all that.

  His instincts had gone bad. He’d forgotten that Paul had bumped before Holden was born. The old boy had sniffed Holden’s shadow. He reached for his Webley, and Holden hit him twice in the throat. Paul’s eyes bulged. Then he fell into Holden’s arms. Holden took the Webley and tossed it over the rail. The gun arced out, started to spin, and dropped like a hammer into the sea.

  Suddenly Holden had fingers at his throat. He’d hit the old boy as hard as he could, but it wasn’t hard enough. Their eyes locked, and Holden understood what a career Paul must have had. Ten years ago Sidney Holden wouldn’t have had a chance. There was no pity in Paul’s eyes, no alarm. He wasn’t burdened with memories of Cézanne or a fiancée who’d lost her reason. And he didn’t have Andrushka’s long legs to think about. Just murder and money. Paul found Holden’s windpipe, but not fast enough. He could have suffered from arthritis. Holden slapped Paul’s elbows apart, then hit him again. He had to leave the suitcases for a moment. Three million plus riding above the spray. He sat Paul down in a deck chair and hooked him to the chair with Paul’s old belt. It was a trick he’d learnt from a bumper in the fur market. Paul would sit like that until he woke.

  He discovered two linen handkerchiefs in the old boy’s pockets, wrapped them around his own hands, and carried the suitcases down to the car. Minot still sat with the gun in his mouth.

  “Phippsy, let him go.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “He can’t hurt us. Let him go.”

  The ferry was about to dock.

  “You don’t give the orders,” Phipps said.

  Holden took the gun out of Minot’s mouth.

  “Minot, you’re too fucking old for this.”

  “Where’s my brother?”

  “Taking a little sun. Get out of the car.”

  Minot got out. He stood there like a lost child while Holden drove out of the barn.

  The Pinkerton

  Man

  6

  Holden went out to Elsinore.

  Dr. Garden wasn’t there.

  Garden’s sanitarium had one attendant, a fat man who wasn’t unfriendly. He wore a guard’s uniform with a dress tie. He didn’t have a nightstick or a gun. He had a pencil holder clipped to his pants.

  “I’d like to see my fiancée.”

  “I wish I could help you,” the guard said. “But I can’t.”

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Out on a picnic.”

  “When will they be back?”

  “The doctor has his own bus. He drives them to a lot of places.”

  “He took the whole caboodle? Nurses and …”

  “It ain’t a regular nuthouse. He don’t do shock therapy and all that shit. He tells his patients to swim.”

  “Where’s the pool?” Holden asked.

  “It’s somewhere, but I’ve never seen it.”

  The guard didn’t prevent him from wandering through Elsinore. Holden went into Garden’s office. The furniture was gone. There wasn’t a diploma on the wall, not a single scroll that would suggest an institution, not a stitch of paper with the word “Elsinore” on it.

  He returned to the guard.

  “You never met Dr. Garden.”

  “No.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “That’s convenient,” Holden said. “You work for an agency?”

  “It’s my own getup. I’m an actor, currently unemployed.”

  “And you just wandered into this gig, huh?”

  “A woman called me. Left three hundred dollars in my mailbox. She gave me the address and told me to sit.”

  “For how long?”

  “Didn’t say.”

  “Did she tell you I would come?”

  “Yeah. You’re Sidney Holden. But she said you wouldn’t hurt me if I was nice.”

  “What did she sound like, this woman on the phone? Young? Old?”

  “Young,” the guard said.

  “Cultured?”

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lavender Hall.”

  “No one’s named Lavender Hall,” Holden said.

  “That’s my stage name … Lavender Hall.”

  “Give me your wallet.”

  “Why?”

  “Your wallet.”

  The fat man had a driver’s license, a social security number, and a swimming pass under the name of Lavender Hall.

  “All right. I believe you … That woman calls again, you get in touch with me, understand? Night or day, you call.”

  Holden scribbled his name and number on the back of Lavender Hall’s swimming pass and handed him two hundred dollars.

  “You’re in my stable now.”

  “I don’t get you,” the fat man said.

  “Sonny, you belong to me.”

  Holden’s natural juices had come back. He was gathering spies again. He could provide the lightning for a lot of storms. He went to his encyclopedist, Tosh. He handed Toshie the thousand-dollar bill he’d swiped from Phipps.

  “Holden, are you collecting antiques? This bill is older than you.”
r />   “But is it for real?” Holden said.

  “Of course it’s for real. Only an imbecile would queer a thousand-dollar bill. You can’t pass off that kind of denomination. You’d have the whole Treasury department after your ass.”

  “I figured as much. But check it for me. There’s always that odd chance …”

  They moved to the back of Toshie’s bookshop. Tosh laid the bill inside a machine that looked like a pants presser with a window on top. He locked that pants presser and Grover Cleveland’s face appeared in the window, big as Tosh. The image startled Holden. He could see all the dots and dashes around Grover Cleveland’s neck, all the flurry of lines, the simple cross-hatching of any thousand-dollar bill. But that old fat president still haunted Holden.

  “Watch the eyes, Holden. Watch the eyes.”

  “I’m watching.”

  “No counterfeiter could imitate that look. The eyes stare right out at you.”

  “Toshie, I’m getting the creeps. The face is fucking alive.”

  Tosh laughed and unlocked the pants presser. “Who told you the bill was bad? That cantor, Phipps?”

  “Yeah. He says he wasn’t a cantor.”

  “He’s full of crap.”

  “What about his daughter, Tosh? Mrs. Vanderwelle.”

  “There is no Mrs. Vanderwelle.”

  “If her name isn’t Vanderwelle, what is it?”

  “Church.”

  “That’s the name of Phipps’ old sweetheart. I remember. Judith Church.”

  “This one is also Judith.”

  “A pair of Judiths? So why does little Judith call herself Gloria Vanderwelle?”

  “Beats the shit out of me,” Tosh said.

  “What does big Judith do for a living?”

  “She doesn’t have to do much. Phipps supports her. But she’s a drama coach on the side. And she has her own little theater company, the Manhattan Mimes. They do a lot of pantomime and straight stuff.”

  “How’d you learn so much about the lady?”

  “I told you. I was an actor once. I even studied with Judith for a while.”

  “Did you ever meet little Judith?”

  “I don’t think so,” Toshie said.