Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)

by Stephen Hunter

  “I need more. I need the kind of detail a clever man can provide, a shrewd man, who’s fooled by nothing in this world. That would certainly be you. A man doesn’t last in the brothel profession unless he’s a keen judge of character. So you would notice things others might not. Tell me, Memphis, about them. About him.”

  “You mean they bossman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Suh, I don’t mean you no disrespect, but if Grumleys all you got to go agin that boy, then, suh, you be in a peck o’ hurt. You be in a tub o’ hurt.”

  “Describe him, please.”

  “Uh, he mean serious bidness.” He scanned his memory for helpful images. “Nigguhs talk about Bumpy in Harlem.”

  Bumpy Johnson. Owney knew Bumpy well. Bumpy used to sit with his own gunman at a back table in the Cotton Club and even the toughest white mobsters avoided him directly. Yes, he saw the comparison, for Bumpy’s every motion and dark, hooded eyes said: If you mess with me, I will kill you.

  “Bumpy in Harlem. Yes, I knew him.”

  “He had that. Whatever Bump had, this boy had it too. Nigguhs can pick that up. A nigguh hafta figger out right quick if a man mean what he say. And this here fella, he surely did. His own dyin’ don’t mean shit. Don’t mean shit.”

  “We call him the cowboy,” said Owney.

  “My gal Trina? She say he worked it upstairs so no nigguh gals git shot. All them bullets flyin’, he worried about ’hos gittin’ shot. Ain’t that nuthin’? Ain’t no white man like that down here. Hear tell they got some like that up North, but ain’t no white man like that down here.”

  “What do you mean, Memphis?”

  “He wouldn’t shoot no gals. He shot over they heads. So they don’t kill no nigguh gals.”

  Now this was a new detail that hadn’t emerged in Owney’s investigations.

  The cowboy had something for Negroes? What on earth does that mean?

  “And my main gal, Marie-Claire? She say, that ol’ Grumley holdin’ a gun agin her throat, sayin’ he shoot her. Now, suh, you know any white polices in America just laugh and say, ‘Go’n and shoot that nigguh gal!’ Be laughin’ all about it! But this here fella, he lif’ his rifle, aim careful, and hit that las’ Grumley right upside the haid. So Marie-Claire twist away, and them other fellas, they hammer that las’ Grumley. Ain’t no white cop do that, and nobody know that better than Memphis Dogood, I’m tellin’ you right, suh. I gots the scars to prove it.”

  “You are probably right,” said Owney; he knew that in that situation in every city in America the policemen would have simply fired away, killing both the felon and his hostage and therefore accomplishing two objectives: saving themselves any danger, and providing a highly amusing few seconds.

  The cowboy loves the Negro people for some reason.

  Interesting.

  “Well, you’ve been very helpful, Memphis.”

  “Thank you, suh,” said Memphis Dogood.

  “Unfortunately, I can’t drive you home.”

  “Suh?”

  “Yes. Can’t be seen with you. You know, appearances, all that. Those fellows over there, they’ll take care of you.”

  “Mr. Maddox, them’s Grumley boys and—”

  “Nothing to worry about, old man. You have my guarantee.”

  He smiled. The door was opened, and Owney’s driver leaned in, put his large hand on Memphis’s shoulder, and directed him outward.

  Some Grumley boys, young ones, watched, then began to mosey over to Memphis.

  28

  Among the many things his colleagues did not know about Walter F. (formerly “Shorty” and now “Frenchy”) Short was the following: he was wealthy.

  Not rich, not a millionaire, not a playboy, a polo player or a “movie producer,” but still he had a private income that would keep him perpetually comfortable to indulge his pathologies, as derived from old family investments in Canadian timber, American pharmaceuticals and railroads and a large interest in a Philadelphia manufacturing company that made, of all things, the little brass ringlets that served as belt notches in the web gear GIs had used in defeating the Axis in the recent war.

  So when Frenchy arrived in Hot Springs in overalls, a threadbare khaki shirt, a beat-up coat and a low-slung fedora, a .45 on his belt behind his right hip, his first move would have surprised everyone. It was to go to his apartment.

  He kept it in the New Waverly Hotel, and slunk through the lobby, largely unnoticed. He showered, beating off the road dust of the bumpy bus ride. Then he toweled off, and took a nap until later in the evening. Arising, he went to his closet and picked out a nice Brooks Brothers whipcord suit, light for summer, a pair of Weejun loafers, a blue shirt and a red-and-black-striped regimental tie. Under a crisp panama hat, he went out and about the town, a perfectly dressed sporting man whom no one could possibly associate with the grim young posse of Jayhawkers who had so alarmingly shot the town up over the past several weeks.

  At first he did what any young man would do in such circumstances. He gambled a little, he had a nice meal, a few drinks, and then he went to one of the finer establishments at the far end of Central, traveling past the Ohio, the Southern, the Arlington and so many other monuments to Hot Springs’ principal obsessions, and got himself laid up one side and down another.

  That accomplished, he taxied back to the New Waverly and slept for two straight days.

  On the third day he made a trip to a surplus store, and made a number of surprising purchases. That afternoon and night, he pleasured and partied again. He made no phone calls, because he had no friends and his family was not particularly interested in where he was or what he was doing, not after the trouble he had caused it; they just wanted him far out of Pennsylvania, for the rest of his life.

  On the fourth day, he slept late again, took a light meal in the New Waverly dining room, then repaired to his room. There he opened the paper sack he’d brought from the surplus store the day before, removed his new ensemble and put it on: a new pair of black gym shoes, a black Norwegian sweater and a pair of rugged blue denim work pants. He also had a light tool kit in a brown valise. He slipped out the back of the hotel, and negotiated his way through alleys and lanes and byways, as if he had secretly studied the town’s layout on maps (he had) until at last only a fence separated him from his destination.

  Someone once said, in discussing the OSS, that aristocrats make the best second-story men and Frenchy was about to prove the wisdom of this judgment. He climbed the fence and moved swiftly to the building, a four-story brick affair. A skeleton crew managed the switchboards, but that bullpen was on the first floor, just off the main entrance. The upper floors were all dark.

  Frenchy found a foothold that was a brass hose outlet, and from there made a good athletic move up to a window ledge, used the strength in his wrists and forearms to haul himself up to the roofline of the first-floor rear portico, gave a mighty oof! and pulled himself finally to the roof of the portico. He lay there, breathing heavily, imagining himself pulling such a stunt against the German embassy in Lisbon in search of codes or secret agent identities, just like his uncle had done.

  But there were no SS men with machine pistols guarding the Hot Springs Bell Telephone office in late August of 1946. They had, as a species, largely vanished from the earth. The only potential opposition for Frenchy was a night watchman who never left his post on the first floor. Why should he? Who on earth would even conceive of breaking into a phone company? What would a thief be after—nickels from the pay phones?

  Frenchy was fully prepared with shims and picks to crack the building; after all, at Choate he had famously liberated a biology exam for the first-formers, and made himself a legend among the populace while going blithely unpunished. At Princeton, he had tried the same trick with a physics exam, and gotten caught and expelled (the first time), but getting caught was a function of being ratted out by a bluenose prick who didn’t believe in such things.

  But—hello, what’s this?—instead of havi
ng to use his treasury of deviant devices, he found the second-story man’s best friend, the unlocked window. In a trice, he was in.

  He discovered himself in a darkened office and snapped on his flashlight. He learned instantly that this was the foyer of the personnel office, of no use to him whatsoever. He stepped carefully into the hallway, then taped the door lock so that it wouldn’t lock behind him, then left another tiny mark of tape high on the door so he could remember which one it was for his escape plan, and then began to patrol.

  He walked down darkened corridors, checking out door titles. BOOKKEEPING. BILL PAYMENT. DIRECTORY PREPARATION. REPAIR ASSIGNMENTS. SALES. And so on and so forth, all the little fiefdoms so necessary for the care and maintenance of a modern monopoly. At last, on the silent third floor, he discovered what he thought he needed: ENGINEERING.

  He used a shim to pop the lock, slid adroitly in, and again taped the lock behind him. He sent his flashlight beam bouncing around the room. Only banality was revealed: a number of drafting boards, a number of messy desks, some cheesy, cheery Bell Telephone morale posters on the institutional green walls, the glass cubicle of a supervisor, and finally and most important a horizontal filing cabinet, that is, a wall-length chest of thin, wide drawers, each marked by geographic grid references.

  Shit, he said.

  Time to get to work, he thought.

  Many of his former friends and his family thought that Frenchy was lazy. Exactly the opposite was true; he was capable of very hard work, relentless and focused. His oddity of mind, however, was that it never occurred to him to simply do what was required of him; rather he would invest three times more energy and six times more discipline in figuring out how not to do it. He was addicted to shortcuts, quick fixes, alternative routes, cutting corners, doing things his own way, no matter what, no matter how much the cost. “Does not follow directions,” his kindergarten teacher had written and no keener insight into his personality was ever revealed. It had made for quite a colorful first twenty years on the planet—his was one of those rare, bright but naturally deviated minds. He was cunning, practical, nerveless, self-promoting, rather brave and completely self-possessed at all times, or nearly all times.

  So now he applied himself with a concentration that would have astonished his many detractors, who had never been allowed a glimpse of the real Frenchy and who had nicknamed him Shorty. He began at the beginning, and studiously invested close to four hours in running over the diagrams in the drawers which he correctly assumed to be wiring diagrams.

  His thinking on this problem was original and far in advance of D.A.’s or Earl’s and a prime example of how well, when focused, he could work things out. He reasoned that Owney Maddox’s empire was only secondarily an empire of force, violence, debt collection and municipal subversion; primarily, it was an empire of the telephone. Everybody knew this: the racing data had to pour in from the tracks of America, there to be distributed instantaneously to all the minor duchies of the empire, the dozens of nondescript books around town in the back of Greek coffee joints, drugstores, haberdasheries or what have you. The legendary but mysterious Central Book was therefore, as all agreed, the linchpin to the operation. They could only really bring Owney down by taking it out, drying up the info and therefore starving him out in a short while. Earl and D.A. especially knew this.

  But Frenchy determined the next step, which is that the Central Book could only be accomplished with phone company collusion. Somewhere, somehow, someone in this building had made secret arrangements for wires to be laid into an otherwise bland building in Hot Springs, and those wires had to be routed somehow so they wouldn’t pass through the switchboard that unified the town. A stranger couldn’t call an operator and say, “Honey, get me Central Book!” Therefore, somewhere in this building had to be an answer.

  He now industriously examined wiring diagrams. He quickly learned that a symbol, a little black diamond, indicated the presence of a phone junction, and suspected that the Central Book would have an unusual concentration of black diamonds. So his eyes searched the schematics for clusters of black diamonds. But the problem wasn’t that there weren’t any, but that there were too many. It seemed every page had a cluster and sometimes more than one, and often enough he recognized them from the addresses—one, for example, was the Army and Navy Hospital, which made sense, because wounded boys still lingering from the war’s effects would be in constant telephone contact with family and loved ones. So what he had to do was hunt for a cluster of black diamonds that had no justification.

  This sounds like boring work, and for most it would be. For Frenchy it was pure bliss. It enabled him to forget who he was, what his demons commanded him to do, his paranoia, his fears, his considerable accumulation of resentments, the perpetual nervousness his bravado only partially concealed. He worked swiftly and with great intensity and thoroughness, pausing now and then to write down the address of a diamond cluster he couldn’t identify.

  On and on he worked, until it was growing light in the eastern sky. He looked at his watch. It was 6:00 A.M., and soon the day shift would come along. He still had five drawers to search, and not enough time to do so.

  He determined to come back the next night, and the next too, if need be. Quickly he closed the drawer he was working on, looked to see if he’d left traces of his presence, and noted nothing and stood to rise.

  But then he said: what the hell.

  He plucked open one of the drawers yet unexamined, and pulled at a pile of diagrams, as if in a blur or a dream. He didn’t even look hard at them, but simply let them flutter through his peripheral vision. He saw that somebody had spilled some ink. They’d made a mistake. He passed onward.

  But then he thought: there haven’t been any other mistakes.

  He rifled back, found the page, and Jesus H. Christ Mother Mary of God, there was a concentration of phone lines so intense it looked like a Rorschach ink blot. In it, he saw his future.

  He noted the address, and said to himself: Of course!

  29

  “No,” said Ben, “no, that one has splatters. It didn’t have splatters. No splatters.”

  “What did it have, darling? You have to help me, you cute little booboo,” said the Countess.

  “You two birds,” said Virginia, “you actually think this shit is fun! My feet hurt. We been walking for ten years.”

  “Virginia, I told you not to wear them really high heels.”

  “But she looks gorgeous, darling,” said the Countess. “She’s more edible than any of these paintings, and I love the shade of her pretty pink toenails.”

  “Dorothy, you’re the one they should call Bugsy. You’re as screwy as they come.”

  The threesome stood in the modern wing of the Los Angeles County Museum before a bewildering display of the very latest in decadent art. The painting immediately before them looked like Hiroshima in a paint factory, an explosion of pigment flung demonically across a canvas until every square inch of it absorbed some of the fury of the blast.

  “That guy has problems,” observed Bugsy.

  “He’s a bastard. A Spanish prick who collaborated with the Nazis and beats all his women. But he’s the most famous artist in the world. He gets a lot of pussy.”

  Ben leaned forward to read the name.

  “Never heard of him,” he said. “He ought to take drawing lessons.”

  “You never heard of him! You never heard of nothing didn’t have a dame or a ten-spot attached,” said Virginia, bored. Dammit! The spaghetti strap of her right shoe kept slipping off her foot and coming to nestle in the groove of her little toe. There, it rubbed that poor painted soldier raw. She kept having to bend over to readjust it. She did so one more time, and heard boyfriend Ben say to his best friend Dorothy the Countess from directly behind her, “Now that’s art!”

  “You dirty-minded Jew-boy,” she said. “Ben, you are so low. You come to look at pictures and you end up doing close-ups on my ass!”

  “He’s just a b
oy,” said the Countess. “Virginia, what can you expect? That’s why we love him so.”

  “Yeah, Dorothy, but you don’t have to uck-fay him no more. I still do.”

  The Countess laughed. Her raffish friends filled her with glee. They were certainly more amusing than the dullards she’d grown up with in Dutchess County.

  “Anyhow, dear: no splatters?”

  “None. Not a one. I’m telling you, it looked like Newark with a tree.”

  “Newark?”

  “I been to that town,” said Virginia. “It’s New York without Broadway. It’s just the Bronx forever. Wops and guns. I wouldn’t go back on a bet.”

  “Newark meaning? What was its quality of Newarkness?”

  “Square, dark, dirty, crowded, brown. I don’t know why I thought of Newark.”

  “Oh, it’s so obvious. In that little rat brain of yours, darling, New York is still glamorous and adventurous. But if you subtract the neon and the glamour, you’re left with nothing but masses of grimy buildings. Voilà: Newark.”

  “I wish I could remember the fucking name. He told me the name. It just went right out of my head. Virginia, you remember the name? Oh, no, that’s right, you were rubbing your tits against Alan Ladd.”

  “I don’t think he noticed. He’d never get me a part in a picture. His wifey wouldn’t let him.”

  “Our attentions are wandering again, are they not?” said Dorothy. “Let us recommit them to the object at hand.”

  “It may not matter, anyhow,” said Bugsy. “He’s smack in the middle of a fucking war down there. Eleven of his boys got blown out of their boots in some nigger cathouse thing. Everybody’s talking he’s going down.”

  “That cowboy may get him,” said Virginia. “Dorothy, did our hero ever tell you how he straightened this cowboy out at the train station in Hot Springs? Guy lights my cigarette, so Benny pulls his tough-guy act on him. But the cowboy ain’t buying it. So Ben gives him a poke. Only it don’t land, and the cowboy hits Ben so hard it almost makes him bald. Ben cry-babied for a month and a half and I notice he ain’t been back to Hot Springs. He ain’t going back until somebody takes care of the cowboy.”