Snatch

by Gregory Mcdonald

  He picked up his suitcase, moved outside the impending accident area, sat down again, and watched. The desks closed on each other faster than Robby thought possible. They bumped against each other. The typing on each desk surface doubled the vibration on the other. The two desks were bouncing up and down together at a great rate.

  Thadeus Lowry stopped typing. He studied the quivering surface of his desk.

  The other man stopped typing and looked up angrily at Thadeus Lowry.

  Thadeus Lowry screamed, “I told you not to put your desk against mine!”

  “I have not moved this desk,” screamed the other.

  “Who did? Someone moved your desk!”

  “Thadeus, you moved your desk!”

  “I did not move this desk,” said Thadeus Lowry with great certainty. “The desk has not moved.”

  He stood up and proceeded to push his desk away.

  “I’m fed up with what you think is your scintillating sense of humor,” said Thadeus Lowry. “If you keep distracting me with your childishness, I’ll feed your toupee to a goat.”

  “Goddamn it,” the other man said, giving his desk a violent shove to the left. “I don’t know what your game is, Lowry, but if you’ve made me miss deadline, you’ll go home without any teeth.”

  The two gentlemen of the fourth estate resumed reporting the world to the world.

  A man with a camera wandered across the city room to Thadeus Lowry’s desk.

  “Who’s this?” he asked, jerking his thumb at Robby. “The new managing editor?”

  “He’s an Army Air Corps colonel,” said Thadeus Lowry. “He’s flown sixty-four missions over Europe.”

  “I’ve been hearing our pilots are getting younger.”

  “Photos to the desk for first edition,” said Thadeus Lowry. “Airbrush out the background.”

  “Anything you say, Tad.” Crouching, the photographer was focusing his camera on Robby Burnes sitting on his suitcase. “I’ll slug it AIR CORPS STILL FINDS WILLING YOUNG MEN.”

  “Slug it LOWRY-BURNES.”

  “I wish it were so.”

  “I’m not really in the Air Corps,” Robby said to the photographer.

  “I know, kid. You’re really a foreign correspondent.”

  The photographer left and Thadeus Lowry finished writing before his desk caused another incident.

  “Now,” he said, putting his typewritten sheets in their proper order, “do you have photographs of your parents?”

  “Yes, sir. In my wallet.”

  “Let me see them.”

  Robby had been wondering if Thadeus Lowry would like to see a picture of his old First World War friend.

  Thadeus Lowry gave the photographs only a glance. “Mother…father…” he said. He clipped them to his folded typewritten sheets and dropped the whole bundle in a wooden box on a corner of the U-shaped desk.

  “Let’s go home,” said Thadeus Lowry, putting on his overcoat.

  “The pictures of my parents, sir. Will I get them back, sir?”

  “Really, Robby,” said Thadeus Lowry. “Journalism does demand its sacrifices, you know.”

  Passing the colleague whose desk had given Thadeus Lowry trouble, Thadeus Lowry said, “Bastard.”

  * * *

  Outside the main door of The New York Star, the wind and snow assaulted them again.

  “We’ll have tea before continuing home,” Thadeus Lowry said immediately. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  Robby remembered that Thadeus Lowry had said his wife drank much and cooked little. “Yes, sir.”

  The clock in the city room had read six twenty-five.

  The snow was above the ankles of his kneesocks.

  They crossed the street and entered an establishment remarkably similar to The Three Balls Tavern. The sign outside this establishment read MONKEY’S MEN ONLY.

  A man put his glass on the bar and watched enquiringly while Thadeus Lowry ordered a double martini for himself and a Guinness for Robby.

  “A short person is following you, Thadeus,” the man said.

  “Our bundle from Britain,” said Thadeus Lowry. “My bit for the war. Fresh from the briny seas. Ours for safekeeping.”

  The man examined Robby with crossed eyes. “Can you squeeze a story out of him?”

  “Already have. With illustrations. Read The New York Star.”

  “I write for it. Do I have to read it?”

  “This is Robby Burnes,” said Thadeus Lowry. “Mr. Ronald Jasper, our most esteemed police reporter.”

  “Robby Burnes?” asked Ronald Jasper. “Who could be verse?”

  “Well, son.” Gin drink firmly in one hand, Thadeus Lowry handed Robby the glass of stout with his other. “Do you like journalism?”

  “You keep nice hours, sir. My father sits at Lords later.”

  Ronald Jasper addressed the bartender loudly: “I’ll have a drink on Thadeus Lowry! He finally got a story to write.”

  Thadeus Lowry put his elbows on the bar. His shoulders became round. “Ronald,” he said, “I badly need a big story.”

  “You sure as hell do, Thadeus. You haven’t had a big story since the Bishop stole the altar plate in 1938.”

  “A developing story,” said Thadeus Lowry. “A big story that would keep the Thadeus Lowry byline on the front page every day.”

  “You’re on such thin ice at the newspaper,” Ronald Jasper said, “you must have water on the knee by now.”

  “I’d be perfectly happy to go out and wait on an iceberg, if only the Titanic could be counted on to sink again.”

  “That’s a hard story to update, Thadeus.”

  “There must be someone left to interview—an obscure cabin boy, whose imagination is yet to go rampant.”

  “Nice thing about being a police reporter,” Ronald Jasper said, testing his drink, “is that it’s steady. Evil lurks constantly in the hearts of Man. You poor feature writers have to go find your own news.”

  “Maybe I could find a nice Nazi spy somewhere in New York who’d give me his story.”

  “I don’t think they list themselves in the yellow pages, Thadeus.”

  “The war, the war, the goddamned war. Mort à guerre. Nothing makes the front page except the war.”

  “People are tired of the war, Thadeus. They’re tired of reading about it, hearing about it, talking about it, thinking about it. They’re even tired of escaping from it.”

  “What we need,” said Thadeus Lowry, “is a good, juicy, sensational murder. Something to take the people’s mind off the war for a few days.”

  “Who would read about a single murder, however sensational, with hundreds a day dying in Flanders Fields?”

  “You’re right,” said Thadeus Lowry. “Individual murder pales next to universal carnage.”

  Standing on the brass rail, holding on to the raised edge of the bar with his elbows, Robby was eating from a bowl of peanuts.

  “What we need is a heartwarming story,” said Thadeus Lowry. “One that takes days to unravel. That involves the people, the reader. Tugs at his heartstrings. Allows him to do something. Allows him to be heroic at home by the fireside.”

  “A kidnapping,” said Ronald Jasper. “What New York needs now is a good kidnapping.”

  “New York!” exclaimed Thadeus Lowry, brightening instantly. “The whole country needs a good kidnapping, Ronald! The whole world!”

  Thadeus Lowry expanded physically to such a degree he knocked Robby off his precarious grip on the bar.

  “A sensational kidnapping.” Thadeus Lowry stepped so close to Ronald Jasper he stood on Robby Burnes’ foot. “That kid actress,” said Thadeus Lowry, “Shirley Temple. You don’t happen to have the name of Shirley Temple’s press agent, do you?”

  “I don’t think they’d go for it, Thadeus. They don’t like that kid taking too much time away from the cameras.”

  “Maybe not, maybe not,” said Thadeus Lowry.

  He looked down at Robby Burnes. His protuberant
eyes protruded even more. He blinked.

  “Please, sir. You’re stepping on my foot.”

  “The little bastard looks green, Thadeus.”

  “Do you think he might be sick?”

  “He must be,” said Ronald Jasper. “He looks like Eleanor Roosevelt appearing in public with Franklin.”

  “God love a goose, Ronald. What do I do?”

  “I suggest we have a quick one, Thadeus, then you get him out in the air.”

  7

  Held Up on the Way Home

  “Homeward the weary workmen wend their way!”

  Despite the six inches of snow soundproofing the abandoned streets and sidewalks of New York, Thadeus Lowry’s voice echoed from the stone and brick walls on all sides. Stars were visible above the streetlights. Robby sucked in cold, clear air like long drafts of spring water. Thadeus marched on, snow whitening his cuffs, using his walking stick with a brisk beat.

  After as many gulps of air as he could manage, to clear his head, to enable his feet to plow through the snow, Robby ran, the suitcase banging against either the front or the back of his right knee at every step, trying to keep up with the man in whose safekeeping he was.

  “A brisk walk,” Thadeus Lowry encouraged, “home to a nice, warm supper.”

  It was past eight o’clock.

  “You do have a home, sir?” Robby asked with great uncertainty.

  “In this city,” Thadeus Lowry amended himself, “people do not have homes. Allow me to explain. They have apartments. A few rooms for which they pay endlessly, but never come to possess—pay for the sheer pleasure of running them into filthy, untenable condition before moving out and on.”

  Robby moved his legs as fast as he could so he wouldn’t lose this new instruction, or this new instructor.

  “This country is not yet settled,” Thadeus Lowry continued, his voice barreling off solid walls on all sides of them. “It’s a vast land dotted with impossible, temporary shelters, inhabited by wanderers—travelers from nowhere going nowhere, marking the calendar of their lives by moving days, leaving nothing in their paths but crumpled leases.”

  “An hotel, sir? Do you live in an hotel? Is that it, then?”

  “Not a hotel. Apartment houses have none of the civilities of hotels: no man to greet you at the door; no boys to help you in with your bundles; no warm little bar tucked into a corner of the lobby to make your homecoming convivial—no staff at all, except for a congenital idiot who comes along once a week to dent your waste-baskets against the walls in the pretence that he is emptying them. Hotels, once considered cold shelter for the temporarily homeless, in transient America are the epitome of good living.”

  “A flat then, sir. Do you live in a flat?”

  “Flat is the correct word. We live flat. Oppressed by steam heat. Rooms with walls nearer than we want them. Windows looking out on more walls. We live flat on the level of unembellished boredom. Insipidity as a way of life. Flat, indeed.”

  “And can you cook at all, sir?”

  “By cook do you mean opening cans, ladling the contents—which are indiscernible from the contents of all other cans—into a saucepan and then drying out the synthetic garbage over the uncleansing fire of a two-ring electric stove?”

  “I mean preparing any food any how, sir.”

  “By cook do you mean to take what the butcher sells you at a vast price as meat but is less meat than you are gold dust—the frankfurter, ground bread packed in a pigskin casing; the hamburger, the eyes and entrails of animals spotted with floor-sweepings; the great American steak, leather tightly stitched with dental floss—by cook do you mean to plop these flaps of the American lifestyle into a frying pan greased with oleomargarine, place over a burner until they shrivel to a size right for filling a tooth cavity?”

  “Yes, sir. Anything at all like that, sir.”

  “No,” Thadeus Lowry determined, stabbing his walking stick into the snow. “I would not cook.”

  “But your wife, sir. She can cook, can’t she? I mean, if there were good reason to?”

  “Does my wife share in the illusion common to American women that she provides meals? Yes. Occasionally she makes a contribution to the Great American Dream and provides the appearance of a meal by ripping open packaged, prepared food.”

  “But will she, sir? Will she cook?”

  “No.”

  At that moment they were crossing the end of an alley. They had crossed several before. Snow-capped rubbish barrels lined each side of the alley entrance.

  From this alley stepped a man. He blocked their way. He wore a bulky jacket. His hat almost entirely obscured his eyes and ears.

  His hands were in his coat pocket.

  Gruffly, he said, “Into the alley, mister, and shuddup. Face the wall and lean your hands against it over your head.”

  “What is this?” shouted Thadeus Lowry as if sincerely in doubt.

  Even Robby had read of Robin Hood and knew the goals of such people who interrupt others on the road.

  “It’s highway robbery, sir!” Robby dropped his suitcase in the snow and threw his hands into the air. “Stand and deliver!”

  “Charlie McCarthy’s right, Edgar Bergen,” said the short thug. “It’s a stick-up.”

  Thadeus Lowry, his stick at parade rest, remained unmoving. He was looking at the thug with pure incredulity.

  “I have no intention of standing for this,” he stated, “or of delivering anything whatsoever.”

  Robby, reaching for the moon, felt his fingers get even colder.

  “Into the alley, you big-nosed balloon,” said the thug. “I have a gun.”

  “He has a gun, sir. He says he has a gun.”

  “This,” announced Thadeus Lowry, “is Tootsie’s corner!”

  The thug jerked his head up and looked into Thadeus Lowry’s face.

  “Tootsie? You know Tootsie?”

  “I am Thadeus Lowry of The New York Star,” intoned Thadeus Lowry of The New York Star. “I know everybody.”

  “How do you know Tootsie?”

  “We met on jury duty,” announced Thadeus Lowry, “in 1934. After Tootsie used up his per diem and was really down on his luck, couldn’t talk to a bookie anywhere, I told him I had observed this corner was available. I believe he has done well, over the years, mugging people on this corner. What, young man, are you doing on it?”

  “So you’re Thadeus Lowry.”

  “Of The New York Star.”

  “Nice to meetcha, Thadeus, nice to meetcha.” The thug began withdrawing his hand from his jacket pocket, possibly to shake hands with Thadeus Lowry.

  Thadeus Lowry swung his cane with remarkable force and accuracy through the air and against the thug’s head. A swish and a thwunk. The thug’s cap went into the snow. He raised his empty hands to his head, but did not touch it.

  His knees buckled.

  He knelt in the snow.

  “I asked you,” shouted Thadeus Lowry, leaning over him, “how you have the gall, the audacity to work Tootsie’s corner?”

  The thug sat on his heels, and then leaned forward. His bare hands groped for hard ground beneath the snow to support himself.

  Thadeus Lowry struck him on his back with the walking stick.

  “Where’s Tootsie? What have you done with him?”

  “Stop it, willya, mister?”

  Thadeus Lowry caned the man’s back again.

  “I said I have a gun! You’d better watch out,” protested the man doubled over in the snow. “I might use it!”

  “Do you really have a gun?”

  “Yeah. You think I’m a liar?”

  “Where is it?”

  “In my pocket.”

  Sitting on his heels, it took the thug a moment to rummage the gun out of his pocket. With it came a packet of chewing gum, a pencil stub and a house key. He held the gun in the flat of his hand. He looked distastefully at it. He blew the lint off it.

  Blood was dripping from his ear.

  “Where�
��s Tootsie?” Thadeus Lowry demanded.

  “In Florida. At the horse races. He goes every year, this time.”

  Robby’s hands were still up. His eyes were wide at the sight of the handgun.

  “I had forgotten that.” There was a touch of apology in Thadeus Lowry’s voice. “Tootsie’s winter vacation at Hialeah.”

  “You’re some Edgar Bergen,” said the thug.

  “Even if Tootsie’s away,” questioned Thadeus Lowry, “who says you can take over his corner?”

  “He did.”

  “Who did?”

  “Tootsie! Tootsie did.”

  “Why should I believe that?”

  “You afraid I might muscle Tootsie out of his corner?”

  “The thought had occurred to me.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “Tootsie’s my uncle, for Pete’s sake. He said I could work his corner while he’s south for Christmas playing the horses.”

  “Are you Minnie’s boy?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “How is she?”

  “She’s fine. I’ll tell her you asked.”

  “Still and all,” said Thadeus Lowry, possibly trying to justify his having thrashed Minnie’s boy, the thug, “how do I know you’ll give Tootsie back his corner when he returns?”

  “I’m only home for Christmas. I’m in the Navy, stationed somewhere in the South Pacific, like they say. I’m home on furlough. Uncle Tootsie said I could work his corner while he’s away so I can make some Christmas money.”

  “I see. Tootsie always was very kind. Which of Minnie’s boys are you?”

  “I’m Richard.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Richard.” Thadeus Lowry tucked his walking stick under his arm and helped Richard up. “Well, well. Minnie’s boy. Richard.”

  “It’s nice to meetcha, like I said,” said Richard, rubbing the blood off his ear. “I heard my uncle speak of you often.”

  “Well, well. In the Navy. Serving your country. In the South Pacific. Seen any action?”

  “Naw. There are no girls out there. I do better at home in Flatbush.”

  “I mean, fighting.”

  “Oh, yeah. That. Every once in a while the Japs fly over and drop bombs on things we just got finished buildin’. Maybe they think they’re fightin’ us. I dunno. Seems like they’re just keepin’ us employed, you know?”