Snatch

by Gregory Mcdonald

  Robby said, “Sir? May I put my hands down now?”

  “Of course, Robby.”

  “This is still a robbery, you know,” said Richard.

  “Richard,” said Thadeus Lowry, “I don’t like your carrying a gun.”

  Richard looked at his gun, still flat on his hand.

  “Your uncle never carried a gun.”

  “No?”

  “If the police pick you up and you have a gun on you, I wouldn’t be able to get you out of trouble.”

  “I have to carry a gun.”

  “Why?”

  Richard looked around warily. “There are some real weirdos around here.”

  “I think you had better give me the gun.”

  “I can’t, Mr. Lowry.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s my service revolver. I snuck it home in my duffel bag, so I could work Uncle Tootsie’s corner for Christmas, you see. I have to bring it back after Christmas, or I’ll be in trouble.”

  “You can give it to me and pick it up at my apartment before you go back to the South Pacific. After Christmas.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  Richard gave Thadeus Lowry the gun and Thadeus Lowry gave Richard an address on Park Avenue.

  “You should have that ear looked after, Richard.”

  “You gave me quite a crack on the head.”

  “I didn’t realize you were Minnie’s boy, Richard, home on furlough.”

  “That’s all right. Any friend of the family. I appreciate your looking out for my uncle’s corner.”

  “Come for a drink,” said Thadeus Lowry.

  “I can’t. I’m workin’. Only eight more shopping days till Christmas.”

  “Some other time, then. When you come for the gun. After Christmas. We’ll sit and talk. Trade war stories.”

  “Okay,” said Richard. “That sounds nice. But now I’m robbing you.”

  “What?”

  “I still mean this to be a stick-up.”

  “You do?”

  “I do. Shouldn’t I?”

  “Tootsie never robs me.”

  “Listen, Mr. Lowry, I got a crack on the head. You have my gun. We’ve been talking here fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. I shouldn’t rob you?”

  “I guess you’re right,” said Thadeus Lowry. “After all, one should encourage the young in their work. Let me look in my wallet.”

  “No,” said Richard. “Let me look in your wallet.”

  Thadeus Lowry had his wallet in his hand, but drew it back. “That,” he said, “would be an indignity.”

  “An in-what?”

  “An invasion of privacy. I will look in the wallet.”

  He did so, in the light of the street lamp.

  “There are four ones here,” he reported. “Will you settle for three?”

  “I want all four. This is a robbery. You can keep the wallet.”

  “But taxi fare,” said Thadeus Lowry. “To get this poor, shivering child home.”

  “Hungry, too,” Robby said.

  “This poor, shivering, hungry boy home.”

  Robby picked Richard’s cap up off the snow and handed it to him.

  Richard said, “The kid needs pants.”

  “Here’s your three dollars,” said Thadeus Lowry, holding the bills in his gloved hand. “Don’t get me anything too expensive for Christmas.”

  “I want all four dollars, dammit.”

  “You do?”

  “I do. Shouldn’t I?”

  Thadeus Lowry beamed at him, and handed him the other dollar.

  “Of course, my boy. Here. Tootsie would be proud of you. Never give the sucker an even break. Here’s all four dollars.”

  “Okay.” Richard counted the four dollars twice, perhaps to make the sum eight. “Robbin’ you’s taken a long time, you know.”

  “Sorry. Now go back to the alley and lurk some more. I’m sure another customer will be along in just a minute.”

  “Good night,” Richard said.

  “Good night,” said Thadeus Lowry. “Merry Christmas.”

  * * *

  “Mr. Lowry?” Robby called. Two blocks away from where they had been held up, Robby, tripping and slipping, had fallen considerably behind Thadeus Lowry and wanted him to slow down. “Is four dollars a lot to pay for a gun?”

  Thadeus Lowry continued his brisk pace, but he did say, “I would have gone higher—if there’d been a need to.”

  The distance between them grew. Robby heard Thadeus Lowry’s voice boom, instructively: “There are lessons to be learned in every business, my boy. Even highway robbery.”

  8

  Care, Feeding and Education Are Discussed

  Halfway down the block on a side street they pushed through a glass door into the lobby of Thadeus Lowry’s apartment house. There was no man to greet them at the door; no boys to carry the suitcase and, Robby thanked God, no warm little bar tucked into a corner of the lobby to make their homecoming convivial.

  While waiting for Robby to catch up, Thadeus Lowry had stood on the front steps of his apartment house and sung sixteen bars of “The Donkey Serenade,” loudly.

  They went down a long cement corridor with puce cement walls to the elevator, which creaked and swayed as if it were as afraid of torpedoes as H.M.S. Scaramouche, but lifted them, over time, to the seventh floor.

  “Someone in this place cooks,” muttered Robby. “Boiled cabbage.”

  On the seventh floor they walked down another long corridor to a door marked 7Q. Thadeus Lowry inserted a key and pushed the door open.

  “Chérie,” he called, rather like a lark attaining a treetop. “Chérie, Chérie.”

  Through the short, narrow, crimson foyer, in another, more brightly lit room, Robby saw a woman’s feet suspended thirty centimeters from the floor. The shoes on the feet were polished red leather, with long heels. At the sound of Thadeus Lowry’s voice, the feet landed on the floor, and disappeared from view.

  “Lover! Is that you?”

  “No, chérie, sorry. It’s your husband.”

  In small steps the feet came around the corner and into the foyer. Mrs. Thadeus Lowry was not much taller than Robby, but she was a good deal more red. Her hair was ginger, her sweater rose, her skirt brick, her shoes crimson, and her fingernails and lips currant. Her eyes were bloodshot. The walls of the foyer (the walls throughout the apartment, Robby was to discover) were poppy red. Robby blinked slowly and swayed.

  “Ah, chérie…” she said. She held her martini glass to the side, so it would not spill.

  Mr. and Mrs. Thadeus Lowry put their heads together and exchanged fumes.

  “Did you have a damaging day?” she asked.

  “Brutal. Absolutely brutal.” He slipped his walking stick into an umbrella stand like a knight sheathing his sword once inside his own castle walls. “But I filed a wonderful story. Just wonderful.”

  “You must be exhausted.” She nodded. Putting her martini glass down on a hall table, she took his coat and hung it in the hall closet. She gave no appearance of seeing a blue-and-white boy amidst all the red.

  “I am, ma chérie,” he said, handing her his hat. “Simply exhausted.”

  He stood drooping in the hall while she put his hat on the closet shelf and regained her martini from the Chinese lacquer hall table.

  “This is Robby Burnes,” noted Thadeus Lowry. “Our bundle from Britain.”

  Her attention swiveled to Robby. Her eyes grew larger; her face grew larger, her head grew larger; her whole body grew larger. Both hands clutched her martini glass.

  Thadeus Lowry said, “Allow me to explain.”

  “Is he ours?” she asked.

  “For the duration.”

  “The duration of the war?”

  “He’s the son of a dead duke, it seems. In fact, he must be a duke.”

  “Are dukes ever that young?”

  “Oh, they must be. At some point in their lives.”

  “Isn’t he cute? Look at those knees, Thad
eus. Where will he sleep?”

  “Too big for a bureau drawer.”

  “Too small for the bathtub, even with blankets.”

  “Can’t sleep at the foot of our bed. We both have feet.”

  “And we can’t move to a bigger apartment. You remember, Thadeus, I strained my back Christmas shopping.”

  “Of course, ma chérie.”

  She spoke slowly, loudly and distinctly to Robby. She even had currant lipstick on her teeth. “What do you want, dear?” Her hands concealed the olive Robby had been eyeing in the martini glass. “What can we give you?”

  “Marvelous with children, chérie,” Thadeus Lowry said. “You’re marvelous with children.”

  “Something to eat, ma’am, and a warm tub, and, please, I’m very tired.”

  “‘A warm tub.’ I suppose he means a bath, Thadeus.”

  “I suppose he does.”

  Sweat was in Robby’s eyes, prickling his scalp, and running down his spinal column. He had never been anywhere as warm as the Lowrys’ apartment.

  “Please, ma’am, may I have something to eat?”

  “Yes, dear, of course. You darling. Go into a nice warm bathtub, and when you come out, I’ll have din-din ready for you.” She added, “He smells of disinfectant, Thadeus.”

  “Does he?” Thadeus Lowry sniffed the air. “I’ve been wondering why I’ve been nostalgic for the Maine woods all day. Especially seeing I’ve never been in the Maine woods.”

  “Right into the tub, darling.” Mrs. Lowry pointed ambiguously. “Take your sweet little suitcase. Around to the left.”

  Robby weaved across the foyer, along the near wall of a red, shimmering, stifling living room, and into the bathroom.

  He heard Thadeus Lowry’s voice say, “As long as you’re having one, I’ll join you.”

  “What did you say his name is?”

  “Who?”

  “The boy.”

  “Robby Burnes, with an E. Son of the Duke of Pladroman, if I’ve got it right. Not a very important duke, as dukes go, I suspect.”

  “He must go to school.”

  Robby had never lived in the front of a house before, within earshot of grown-ups other than servants. He was uncertain of the decorum of overhearing grown-up conversation. But Thadeus Lowry’s domicile had no front or back, no upstairs or downstairs. It had a middle. A very middle. The living room was a divan and two chairs on a rug separated by a coffee table. Steam hissed and snapped from radiators along every wall.

  He closed the door to the bathroom and turned the faucets on in the tub and removed the clothes he had been wearing since he had been a very young boy in England. He piled them on the radiator wondering if they would burst into flame.

  The only surprise he had in being naked this first time in many, many days, was that his stomach had vanished. It had been a pleasant round object just below his rib cage in which he used to put food. Now he felt for it with his fingertips. Definitely it was gone. Where his stomach had been, Robby’s fingers felt a hardness as if touching bone. He had felt that hardness increasing each time he had vomited aboard H.M.S. Scaramouche. Water splashing in the tub behind him, Robby jumped up and down, to see himself in the mirror above the wash-basin. Where his stomach had been were horizontal lines of muscle. Robby regretted that: It looked a poor repository for pastry.

  Robby lay in the full tub in the company of a bar of soap which floated. It wiggled and wobbled in the waves and went nowhere and reminded him of H.M.S. Scaramouche. He thought of the other children aboard ship, and wondered if any of them had been fed yet. And he wondered about the boys at Wolsley School and which meals they were between.

  In the living room, Thadeus Lowry was recounting his day. Robby wondered what he could do not to overhear.

  “Thus I discovered, chérie, it is easier to take over a human life, in these trying times, than to get a small loan from a bank.”

  “What an amusing thought, Thadeus.”

  “Then around the corner for a leisurely lunch…”

  Robby sank beneath the water and counted his toes.

  “…assured him in every way possible,” Thadeus Lowry was continuing. “Told him what great friends his father and I were, what a great hero his father was, how he and I had captured a town behind the lines without firing a single shot…”

  Robby went below the surface of the water and extended his fingers, stretched them as far as they would stretch.

  “…taxi to the office where I spent the rest of the day trying to hammer out a story.”

  “You’re very generous, Thadeus, giving him so much time and attention.”

  “Must be a big shock to him—coming from war-torn England to the land of milk and honey.”

  “We mustn’t spoil him, Thadeus.”

  “I think it was a great thrill for him to see the newspaper office. The hustle and bustle. The crackle of the police radio. The clattering of the teletypes.”

  “Is he especially bright, do you think?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say so. Ordinary sort of kid. Stares blankly at you while you’re speaking to him as if he can’t quite grasp what it is he’s hearing…”

  Underwater, Robby washed his penis. He was glad that it hadn’t gone the way of his stomach.

  “…On the way home we stopped for tea. I was sure he was missing that sort of thing.”

  “Then he won’t want much supper.”

  “He ate bowls full of crackers.”

  Robby went below the water facedown and held his breath. He rose to air only when his lungs hurt.

  Mrs. Lowry was saying, “How did you ever find time to file a story for the newspaper today?”

  “It wasn’t easy, chérie, it wasn’t easy. But, you know, a real professional can work anywhere, any time, under any circumstances.”

  Robby was dressing in clean clothes, identical to those he had just taken off, from the suitcase. His used clothes, on the radiator, were scorching nicely.

  “What’s the story about, lover?”

  “I think I’ll let you be surprised in the morning. Read The New York Star. Robby should be very surprised indeed. I’ve arranged a warm welcome for him, to this land where he’s come for safekeeping.”

  With that much of a clue to reestablish decorum, Robby entered the living room.

  “You don’t look a bit different,” said Mrs. Thadeus Lowry. “Come here and let me smell.”

  As apparently she was serious about the invitation (her hand was extended limply toward him), Robby drew near.

  On the coffee table was a glass of water, with ice in it. On a plate catsup oozed from between two pieces of bread.

  “Much better,” said Mrs. Lowry; contracting the veins that ran over her nose. “Now sit down and have your supper. Thadeus says you’ve been eating all day.”

  “Is that supper, ma’am?”

  “I’ll get you milk tomorrow, Robby. If my back is better.”

  In his mind, Robby drank the water and ate the sandwich seventeen times. Sitting on the divan, he drank the water and ate the sandwich once.

  “What are we going to do about schooling, Thadeus?”

  “He must go to school,” said Thadeus.

  “But where?”

  “The local piss, I suppose.”

  “The local piss?”

  “There must be a P.S. something or other within walking distance. It’s the law, isn’t it?”

  “Quite right. There must be a public school nearby. Well, that’s settled. Is tomorrow a school day?”

  “Tomorrow is Thursday.”

  “People go to school on Thursdays, Robby,” stated Mrs. Lowry.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It’s most important you go to school.”

  “The trick is,” advised Thadeus Lowry, “to leave the apartment in the morning and walk around the blocks in ever widening squares until you find a school.”

  “Sir?”

  Robby’s experience on the streets of New York already had caused him t
o pray that he would never have to enter them alone. If even Santa Claus got it on the streets of New York, who was to protect Robby Burnes? He had seen a highway robber thrashed, then brushed up to rob again.

  “But can he find the school by himself, Thadeus?”

  “He found America by himself,” Thadeus Lowry pointed out. “Children find schools the way women find hat shops. It’s a God-given instinct.”

  “But what about registering?” Mrs. Lowry rubbed her sore back. “Won’t he have to register?”

  “What’s there to register? He’s a schoolchild. Any schoolteacher can see that.”

  “Yes, of course. You’ll like going to school in America, won’t you, Robby?”

  Robby’s been looking forward to going to Wolsley School ever so long now, hasn’t he? his mother had asked.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am.”

  The catsup in his stomach yearned to be on the maroon divan.

  “We’ll set you off with a nice warm breakfast in the morning,” proffered Mrs. Lowry. “I’m sure you’ll have a lovely adventure—going to school first day.”

  “S-sir?”

  “Yes, Robby. What now?”

  “Can I take your gun to school with me?”

  “A gun!” gasped Mrs. Lowry.

  “Good heavens, no,” chuckled Thadeus Lowry. “What could happen to you on the streets of New York?”

  9

  The Streets of New York

  After dining at the Lowrys’, receiving no other instructions or invitations, Robert James Saint James Burnes Walter Farhall-Pladroman, S.Nob., continued to sit quietly on the divan. He closed his eyes against the maroon, crimson, cardinal, auburn, ginger, currant, rose, brick, poppy and puce and concentrated on keeping his catsup in the narrow tubes which once had led to his stomach.

  Thadeus Lowry continued to talk to his wife like a Johnson to his Boswell, only in that minor events were given stature in their telling (it was reported that an envious fellow threw his desk at Thadeus Lowry in the city room of The New York Star while Thadeus Lowry was composing a piece of literature for first edition), but not in that their telling enhanced the listener’s perception of the significant truths of the day.

  Robby’s attention to Thadeus Lowry’s lying discourse was disturbed by concern for what the radiators were doing to Robby, and what more they might do. Again Robby’s body was running with sweat. The air was so heavy to breathe Robby’s respiratory system was threatening to go on strike. They were circumvallated by radiators. The steam was so charging in the innards of the radiators, so clangorous in its importuning to be released into the room that fear of imminent death by vaporization was not unreasonable. Yet Thadeus Lowry was not condensed.