“He has every reason to.” In the front hall of the apartment building Thadeus Lowry frowned for a long moment. “Young man?” he finally said. “You’re in trouble.”
“I know, sir. Is my return imminent?”
“Perhaps to your Maker.”
“You see, Tony Savallo doesn’t know which building I’m in. He found my school cap in the snow, so he knows I’m somewhere here.”
“Playing cat to your mouse, eh? The minute you show your whiskers he grabs you by the neck and bangs you against the floor until you die? That it?”
Robby felt Thadeus Lowry’s analogy in the back of his neck. “He has a gun, sir.”
“Ah,” said Thadeus Lowry. “So he simply blows your head off.”
The simplicity outlined by Thadeus Lowry caused a stab of pain between Robby’s eyes. “Yes, sir.”
“Permit me to reconnoiter.” Thadeus Lowry reconnoitered by walking a small circle in the front hall. “Is there a telephone in this building?”
“No, sir. I don’t think so.”
“But a Mrs. Clearwater called me last night, saying you could be picked up at this address.”
Robby remembered Mrs. Clearwater leaving the building twice yesterday. The first time she returned with groceries and a newspaper. The second time she returned with nothing. “She went out, sir, to make the call.”
“I see. Where’s the back door?”
“There isn’t one. There’s a cellar door. It’s stuffed with rubbish and the cellar stairs are missing.”
Thadeus Lowry pointed up the stairs with his walking stick. “Door to the roof?”
“Blocked with snow and ice, sir.”
“Fire escapes? Are there fire escapes?”
Robby recollected what he had seen from the front and back windows of Mrs. Clearwater’s apartment. “No, sir. I haven’t seen any fire escapes.”
Thadeus Lowry’s face was grim. “Some church owns these buildings,” he said. “Doubtless they want their tenants to get a taste of hellfire before they perish. This place is a firetrap.”
“A people trap, sir.”
“Yes. More to the point: a people trap. Well, Robby, no point in our cowering under a stairway, as it were.”
“No, sir.”
“This is rather like how your father and I met. I think. We were both cowering under a stairway, so to speak. In France.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Makes a nice story, anyway. Mort à guerre.”
“Lovely story, sir. I enjoyed it.”
“Never mind, Robby. I’m brave enough for both of us.”
“That’s good, sir.”
“Now, I’ll tell you what to do, Robby.” Thadeus Lowry took Robby by the elbow. His voice became lower, somber, confidential. “I want you to go to the front door, open it, start out. Pretend you see Tony Savallo for the first time. Act surprised. Dash back in here. Slam the front door. Run and hide back here again, underneath the stairway.”
Robby looked up at Thadeus Lowry. “And if he shoots me, sir, in the meantime?”
Thadeus Lowry nodded wisely. “Then we’ll have to think of something else.”
“Please, sir.”
“I assure you, Robby. I’ve thought it all out. This is the best plan. It’s called drawing the hare, or something.”
“It’s called putting me out for bait, sir.”
“The only way. After all, it is you he wants to shoot. Who wants to shoot at a tired old journalist?”
“Almost everybody, sir.”
“Now, now, Robby. It’s our only way. Duty, Robby.” Thadeus Lowry urged Robby forward by the elbow. He stood back, waiting for Robby to precede him down the corridor. “Duty,” Thadeus Lowry admonished.
Robby’s knees, despite all the healthful exercise and fresh air they’d had, didn’t feel very strong to him at the moment. As articulately as thin, wobbly, clattering joints could, they wobbled Robby to the front door.
He put his hand on the knob. Robby remembered the last time he had followed Thadeus Lowry’s instructions. Not only had he not found a school, he had been kidnapped, threatened with dismemberment, pursued and shot at since. “Thadeus Lowry?”
“Right behind you, Robby.”
“I’m awfully glad you’re brave.”
His hot hand twisted the doorknob. He opened the door a crack and felt the cold air against his perspiring face. He opened the door more.
There was something in Robby which absolutely prohibited his looking across the street. He could feel Tony Savallo; he didn’t need to see him. If Robby were going to be shot, he felt the event would be bad enough without his being an actual witness to it.
Robby kept his eyes on his feet. He put his right shoe onto the packed snowy surface of the top step. He shrieked. He considered he had gone far enough. He pulled in his foot, stepped back into the hall, and slammed the front door.
He turned around in the hall.
Thadeus Lowry was nowhere in sight. He had disappeared. The large, fat man with his huge coat and his scarf and his walking stick had vanished from the front hall!
“Whup!” said Robby in a hoarse whisper.
He rattled down the corridor toward what he knew was a dead end. His feet moved more side-to-side than frontward, as if he were trying to run up a steep hill. His knees vibrated so that his teeth shook. His posterior felt that it was behind him, somewhere behind his knees, rather than where it should have been.
His forward motion was negligible. He was only halfway down the corridor when he heard the doorknob rattle again. Suddenly the roar and scrape of a snowplow filled the front hall.
Robby lost what little control he had over his legs. His knees shook and rattled him around so that he was facing the front door.
Tony Savallo was inside the open door of the building. His feet were spread apart and his knees were bent. His arms were in front of him, more or less straight. He was pointing his gun at Robby’s chest. One of Tony Savallo’s eyes was closed. The intensity of the look in his one open eye made his squint almost comical to observe.
“Oh!” said Robby.
Thadeus Lowry stood beside Tony Savallo.
Thadeus Lowry had stepped out from behind the open door. His side was to Robby. In Thadeus Lowry’s hand was the gun he had taken from Tootsie’s nephew, Minnie’s boy, Richard. Thadeus Lowry’s gun was only centimeters away from Tony Savallo’s head.
“Oh!” said Robby.
One of the guns went off.
Robby said, “Oh!”
Tony Savallo’s head went onto his right shoulder as if folded. His left foot left the floor as if scalded. His right knee buckled as if hit from behind. His body fell to his right, hard, as if smitten by the full weight and force of justice.
Subsequently, Robby believed the efficiency with which Tony Savallo was executed would have been appreciated by Tony Savallo. It did not make a mess.
But at the moment Robby looked down at his own chest. His own hands. His own feet. His skin was sweated as if he were in deepest jungle; his body shivered as if he were in frozen tundra. But there were no holes in him; he did not bleed. He was intact and standing.
“Oh!” he said.
He could hear doors opening throughout the building.
Thadeus Lowry was bending over Tony Savallo, who lay on his side in the front hall. Voices from upstairs and outside were beginning to shout. “What was that?” “A gunshot!” “No, no, the snowplow backfired!” “Call the police!” “What happened?” Thadeus Lowry took Tony Savallo’s own pistol from his right hand and stuck it into the pocket of Tony’s green windbreaker. Then Thadeus Lowry put the pistol he himself had used into Tony’s left hand. Carefully he fed Tony’s index finger through the trigger bracket. Without causing the gun to fire again, Thadeus Lowry squeezed Tony’s hand around the gun.
The front steps of the apartment house were crowded with people, as were the steps leading to the second floor.
Thadeus Lowry stood over Tony Savallo’s body.
<
br /> “He shot himself!” Thadeus Lowry declared. “I was the first one here! The poor boy shot himself!”
“He shot himself,” said the people on the top step of the apartment house. And the word was passed down the steps. “He shot himself,” said the people on the bottom step of the staircase leading to the second floor of the apartment house. And the word was passed up the stairs.
Magisterially placing his walking stick at a dignified angle to himself, Thadeus Lowry again declared, as if he had heard the news and was merely confirming it: “He shot himself.”
Mrs. Clearwater was coming down the stairs through the people. “Hunh! Hunh! Hunh!” People moved aside for her great girth, as it was descending and made weightier by gravity. “The po’ bo’ weevil! What happened to that bo’ weevil?”
“Robby?” said Thadeus Lowry.
Robby stepped forward, but as he did so he watched Mrs. Clearwater kneel on the floor by Tony Savallo. She let herself down on one haunch. She picked up Tony Savallo’s head and brought it into her own lap. Gristle spilled from Tony Savallo’s head onto the floor, and onto her skirt.
Passing her, Robby saw her red, torn carpet slippers, their toes aspiring toward Lordy Lord, and he loved her.
“Lordy Lord,” she said, cradling Tony Savallo’s head in her lap. “What they done to you, bo’ weevil?”
“Robby.”
Robby Burnes stood with Thadeus Lowry in the door. “He shot himself,” Thadeus Lowry said.
Robby wobbled down the front steps of the building, through the people.
“Yes, yes,” Thadeus Lowry assured the people. “He shot himself.”
On the sidewalk, Thadeus Lowry said, “This way. I have a taxi waiting at the corner.”
Immediately he proceeded to stamp along the sidewalk. He used his walking stick through the chunks of snow in a perfect rhythm as if it were a lovely spring day, birds chirruped from every bush, and they had just been to see an exhibition of roses growing.
Robby wobbled along behind.
“Violent country,” Thadeus Lowry proclaimed. “Violence everywhere. Never get used to it. Barely stick your nose out the door and you’re witness to untoward violence. Still…” Robby caught up to him by sliding down a mound of snow Thadeus Lowry had had to circumnavigate. Thadeus Lowry was smiling to himself: a retired journalist who discovered there was one more story he must write. “All grist for the mill.”
They came to the corner where a taxi waited, its motor running. The driver’s face was wizened as it watched Thadeus Lowry. Robby wondered if the driver’s face was wizened before Thadeus Lowry had first gotten into his cab.
Robby slithered over a snow pile and trudged into the backseat of the taxi.
Thadeus Lowry made his lap in the street and backed into the cab. He landed cater-cornered on the backseat.
“The Waldorf-Astoria,” he instructed from that position.
The driver with the wizened face said, “Close the door, willya, Mac?”
“My feet are still in the street.”
Struggling, Thadeus Lowry collected his feet into the cab. He constructed himself on the backseat, feet on the floor, hat firmly in place, walking stick propped between his legs. He looked forward. The taxi did not move. “Waldorf-Astoria,” Thadeus Lowry repeated to the driver. “We have an appointment.”
The car slithered forward, not going by the building in which Mrs. Clearwater and Heddy and Franklin and Wellmet and Arthur and Ugly Mary lived. Through the window Robby saw down the street that two police cars had drawn up in front of the building.
“Cheer up,” Thadeus Lowry said. “No good looking green about the gills. We’ll have a brunch tucked away in some quiet corner of the Waldorf-Astoria. Discuss old times. Compare notes. Celebrate my retirement from the world of affairs.”
“Will I get breakfast, sir?”
“How does kippered herring, bangers and strawberry marmalade sound?”
“Like something you made up, sir.”
Thadeus Lowry reached in his overcoat pocket and withdrew Robby’s school cap. He handed it to Robby.
“Very careless of you,” Thadeus Lowry said. “Losing that. What would your father say? My dear friend, your father, the Duke of Pladroman…”
26
“Allow Me to Explain.”
“Allow me to explain,” said Thadeus Lowry.
Thadeus Lowry and Robby Burnes were tucked away in a quiet corner of the mammoth Waldorf-Astoria. It was shy eleven o’clock in the morning. It was Tuesday. Robby had been in America a week shy one day.
A waiter craned over them.
“A double extra-dry martini,” Thadeus Lowry said to the waiter. “I just shot a man through the head.”
“Very good, sir,” said the waiter.
“After you bring that,” said Thadeus Lowry, “let the boy order. Although how he can eat anything, I don’t know.”
The waiter withdrew.
“But first,” Thadeus Lowry said to Robby, “if you’ll excuse me, I must phone in a story.” Sitting forward in his chair, Thadeus Lowry pinched the skin on the bridge of his nose between index finger and thumb. “No rest for the weary. Thought I’d done my last story. Yet here I am, in a state of retirement, responding to journalistic duty…Let me see…The murderer of Ginsy O’Brien was found dead before ten o’clock this morning in the vestibule of an apartment building in Harlem. The gun with which he shot himself was discovered in his hand. Ballistic tests will prove that a second gun, found in the pocket of his green windbreaker, is the very instrument of death which executed Ginsy O’Brien on West 26th Street last Saturday night.” Thadeus Lowry opened his eyes and blinked at Robby. “How do you like that?”
“All right, sir, but—”
“No ‘but’ about it! Apparently distraught by his recent foul deed, the crime of murder, Anthony Savallo, age 23, apparently took his own life.”
“There is a ‘but,’ sir.”
“There is no ‘but’ that anyone will notice.”
“You took one gun out of his right hand and put another gun in his left hand.”
Thadeus Lowry stared at Robby. Thadeus Lowry stood up from the table.
“He was right-handed, sir. You put the gun in his left hand.”
Thadeus Lowry’s protuberant eyes protruded even more. “How many perfect crimes do you expect me to perpetrate in a week?” he demanded. “I shot him in the left side of the head! I had to! The door opened to his left!”
“Won’t the police notice, sir? I mean, a right-handed person shooting himself with his left hand?”
“Not if I tell the story first!”
The waiter appeared with his tray. Thadeus Lowry sucked the martini off the tray as easily as a vacuum cleaner sucks up peanut shells.
“People always believe what they read in a newspaper,” Thadeus Lowry said.
* * *
While Thadeus Lowry was at the telephone dictating his most recent pack of lies, Robby ordered kippered herring, bangers, eggs scrambled and fried, fried tomatoes and fried potatoes, toast, strawberry marmalade, orange juice, milk and tea. His order arrived with a double gin martini.
Robby was eating quietly when Thadeus Lowry returned.
“God love a goose,” said Thadeus Lowry, eyeing the various plates in front of Robby. “Is eating all that good for you?” Thadeus Lowry did not slide into his place at the table. He drew his chair back, settled on it, more or less threw a line to his martini, and berthed. “Ah, well, we have to wait anyway. I’ve ordered a photographer to come around and take your picture. To run with my final story tomorrow. Concerning your return to safekeeping.” Thadeus Lowry’s eyebrows knotted in genuine concern. “You really shouldn’t look too well fed,” he said. “I mean, in the photograph.”
“I won’t, sir.”
“I mean, the color is beginning to come back into your cheeks.”
“I’ll try to look pale, sir.” Robby continued eating. “After breakfast.”
Ignorant of the happ
y ending Thadeus Lowry already had written for Robby, nevertheless Robby thought there would be a happy ending, however fictitious. Hoping to glance a glimmer of his forthcoming glee, Robby thought he would try the gambit of polite conversation.
“You said you’re retiring, sir?”
“Yes,” said Thadeus Lowry. “Superannuation. After long, hard years of sterling service, I have quit the newspaper.”
“I’m sure your work will be missed.”
“But I’ve quit with a bang.”
“I’d say so, sir.”
“You’ve been reading me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What do you think?”
“I think I’m eight years old, sir.”
“What did I write?”
“Ten, sir.”
“A typographical error, my boy. A typographical error. Those damned printers can’t get anything straight.” Thadeus Lowry leaned forward over his elbows on the table. “Allow me to explain. Thursday night I didn’t have a story. No one knew you were missing. Chérie thought you were out being a jubilant delinquent in some schoolyard. I had had an exhausting day out tramping around the city looking for a story to write. I was sitting at my desk at The New York Star, keeping my eye on that bastard who keeps shoving his desk up against mine, when the phone rang.”
“The man with the ‘icy, metallic voice,’ sir?”
“As a matter of fact, it was William O’Riordan, one of New York’s finest.”
“Will’um the policeman, sir? You knew who it was?”
“Do you think I’d listen to anyone who hadn’t identified himself properly?”
“Of course not, sir.”
“Can’t have just anybody calling the newspaper with a story, you know.”
“Of course not, sir.”
“One must always be sure of one’s sources.”
“Yes, sir.”
“William told me you were at home with his sister, Marie, and his brother-in-law, Frankie Savallo, stuffing down lamb Parmesan, and that they’d all appreciate it if I would consider you kidnapped.”
“You believed him because he was a policeman, sir?”
“Of course. If you can’t trust the guardians of law and order, whom can you trust?”
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