The Bind

by Stanley Ellin

  “Where?”

  “Not Wolfie’s again, otherwise I’ll fill up on coffee and cake between meals. I’ll tell you what. Lummus Park is on Ocean Drive where I live. Start walking south along the park from about Tenth Street, and I’ll pick you up on the way.”

  It was at 8th Street that Jake saw Magnes detach himself from the white-haired and withered audience gathered on the park lawn around an accordionist singing a Yiddish ballad and walk over to a bench facing the sea wall. Jake drifted across the lawn and sat down beside him.

  Magnes made a small motion of the head to indicate the gathering on the lawn. “Don’t let that happy music fool you,” he said. “A buch of nudniks, all of them. Sad people.”

  “They don’t look it.”

  “Then let me enlighten you about it. These are people who when they cash their Social Security check at Food Fair they get it all in pennies, so maybe that way they can stretch it until the next check. For the rest of their lives, God spare them, every day is panic day. That is not living, sonny. Living is when you can throw away a few dollars at Hialeah, or eat at Joe’s Stone Crab, or even take a lady friend to a nice show at the Carillon. If I couldn’t do those things when I wanted, you would not be sitting here talking to Abe Magnes. You would be talking to the ghost of Abe Magnes. Like all those ghosts over there waiting for the hearse to come down the street with their name on it.”

  “I see. Anyhow, it explains why you hit me up for ten thousand. Especially with the way they’ve been running at Hialeah this season.”

  “That’s why,” Magnes said. “Except that before we’re done you’ll admit to me you got value for every dollar. Like with this Bayside Spa thing which cost me a steam bath I didn’t want and eighty dollars I had to lose in a pinochle game to get in good with the help. But that was top value three ways. We found out about Thoren, we found out about that rubber, and, best of all when it comes to making the next move, we even found out his name is Bert Caldwell and that right now he’s holding down a job at the Royal Burgundian.”

  “That big yellow and white hotel near the Fontainebleau?”

  “The management likes you to say gold and silver. But that’s the one.”

  “Did you contact this Caldwell yet?”

  Magnes shook his head. “Any contact at the Royal Burgundian is not for me on this job. On some big jewel heists there, I was go-between for the recovery of the stuff, so everybody in Security knows me. This contact you should make yourself. They rent beach loungers by the day there, so tomorrow you take the girlie along with you and make it a nice day around the pool. Then you finish off with a Turkish bath and a rubdown. If you ask for Caldwell, and you let him know you were recommended by some people named Thoren, you should be all set.”

  Jake said: “It makes sense that way. Now let me tell you what Johnny Maniscalco turned up while he was trying to get a line on Thoren’s records.”

  Magnes took the detailed account of Thoren’s life and works with equanimity. “I’ll admit it’s not exactly what I expected, but, on the other hand, look what else has been turning up along the way. This Caldwell who was a sweat-bath rubber for the biggest hoods, and Bayside Spa which is not all that kosher, and now the Royal Burgundian which really has a smell to it.”

  “Financed by the Mob?” Jake said.

  “Sixty percent anyhow. And it’s one of those places every big insurance company hates like poison. You know. Where the bellhop spots where the jewelry is kept in the room, then he tells the Brain who lays out how the job should be done, and then he holds the stones until the go-between for the insurance company comes along to settle for so much on the dollar. Teamwork. And the only loser every time is the insurance company.”

  Jake said impatiently: “Maniscalco must have told you how many times I’ve been his go-between, so you know none of this is news to me. What are you really getting at? That Thoren was tied in with the Mob in this jewel heist racket?”

  Magnes said: “Why not? Isn’t it at least possible he was?”

  “No. It’s like when Maniscalco suggested that maybe he was a draft dodger. Definitely, he wasn’t that type. He wasn’t this type either.”

  “What makes you so sure?” Magnes said. “Because he was a squarehead, not an Italian or a Jew? If that’s what’s on your mind, I can tell you right now that with the Mob there is no prejudice except with the colored. The shvartzehs they only let collect the nickels and dimes for the numbers. Everybody else—Jews, Italianers, Irishers, rednecks, even Cubans—they’re all free and equal members of the team. Which could have included even a squarehead from Denmark who you yourself say was a killer. True, later on a victim. But first a killer.”

  “The killer-and-victim part I’ll buy. The rest I’ll wait and see about. What about Thoren’s being a registered voter?”

  “He is. All the way back to 1944. Which, to me, looks like he came down to Miami with the phony papers already in his pocket. It would be too dangerous for him if he had somebody right in his own back yard take care of it.”

  “It would. And what about Ortega? And that dead partner of his, Tucker?”

  “So far, only that the business is import and export with South America, and it looks legitimate. I have a guy working on it from the inside. In a couple of days he’ll give me a report on all the companies they deal with at both ends, the merchandise, the bank balances, and so on. Also, it’s true Tucker died from lung cancer a couple of years ago.”

  “And that’s all for now?” Jake said.

  “That’s all for now. Tomorrow I want to get what I can on everybody who’s in that Civic Planning Association Thoren used as a front. And I suppose you’ll be taking the girlie over to the Royal Burgundian and making contact with that Caldwell?”

  Jake stood up. “That’s what I’ll be doing.”

  “Well, be careful she don’t get so much sun again,” Magnes said. “And be careful for yourself, too. Any way you look at it, when you make contact with this guy you are walking into the alligator pool with your shoes off.”

  24

  What the Royal Burgundian provided them with, besides a pair of lounges and a beach umbrella on its crowded sun deck, was the use of a cabana, a choice of swimming pools, lunch al fresco, a steady parade of angular, poker-faced models demonstrating the minimum in beachwear, and a tall, bronzed beachboy named Eddie.

  When Eddie returned from the mission Jake had assigned him and reported: “Bert’s sorry, but he can’t book you for a rubdown without a couple of days’ notice,” Jake said: “Try him again, kid. This time tell him he was recommended to me by a Mr. Walter Thoren he used to know over at Bayside Spa.”

  Watching Eddie go on his way, laying a comb through his locks as he went, Elinor said: “Was that a good idea? It’ll only make Caldwell suspicious, won’t it?”

  “Not unless he has something to be suspicous about.”

  “If he’s the blackmailer, he has plenty to be suspicious about.”

  “Except that he’s not. He’s only the guy who’ll finger the blackmailer. And without even knowing it.”

  “But, Jake—”

  “Not so loud, baby. There are big ears fanned out all around us. Remember, for their benefit you’re my cute little wife only wondering when I’m coming through with your next mink.”

  Elinor made a noise in her throat. “The next one. I’ll bet I’m the only female around here doesn’t have at least two to start with.”

  When Eddie reappeared before them a few minutes later, it was to report that everything had been fixed up. “But Bert says it’s got to be right now, Mr. Dekker. It’s the only way he can fit you in.”

  “Right now couldn’t be better,” Jake said.

  Like everything else about the Royal Burgundian, its sauna was gargantuan in size, lavish in its use of gilded tile and classic statuary. Against this opulence, Bert Caldwell, heavily muscled and with a broad, good-natured face, looked like a farmhand drafted for service in a Byzantine palace.

  He said:
“Yeah, I knew Mr. Thoren for maybe ten, twelve years, and I used to think, well, here’s one good for another fifty years, the shape he keeps himself in. Then just like that he’s gone. Were you a friend of his?”

  Jake said: “No, my wife and I are friends of the family. We bought a place near theirs, and they’ve been going out of their way to make us feel at home. When I said something about missing the baths at the N.Y.A.C. they told me to look you up.”

  “Yeah. Well, It’s nice to be remembered like that. I guess I should have sent them a card when it happened, but you know how it is. Ten, twelve years I knew him. Built something like you, too. He used to have those fatsos around the spa wondering what he was there for, he was in that good condition. Okay, Mr. Dekker, you go in the steam room now. I’ll be waiting when you come out.”

  Jake came out of the steam room pouring sweat, was laid out on a marble slab and scrubbed with a coarse brush and soap, hosed down, and finally led back to the rubbing room with the feeling that every bone in his body had turned liquid.

  The rubbing room was long and narrow and blue with cigarette smoke. It contained a dozen tables in a row, most of them occupied. Against the wall at its far end was a larger than life plaster statue of Diana the Huntress on which someone had planted a straw hat and a pair of sunglasses. Several men garbed in bath towels stood beside the statue brooding over a horse-race sheet.

  Caldwell’s table was at that end of the room. Jake stretched out on it, and after laving him with oil, Caldwell went to work expertly kneading his shoulder muscles. Jake said: “You’re good at this all right. I can see why Thoren stuck with you all those years.”

  Caldwell grunted as he dug in hard. “Yeah, but it wasn’t only the rubdowns. They got those four-wall handball courts over at the spa, and he liked the game I gave him. I could take him maybe three out of five, but it was always close.”

  “Was that part of his routine at the spa?”

  “Uh-huh. He put in from eleven to four there once a week, and every minute was by the book. You could set your watch by him.”

  Jake said: “Well, he was really sold on you. I suppose you know he never went back there after you quit.”

  “No, this is the first I heard of it.” Caldwell dug a thumb into the sole of one foot, then the other. He took each toe in turn and wiggled it as if trying to shake it loose from the foot. “Now that I think of it,” he said, “it’s not too much of a surprise. When I told them I was quitting there, they paid me extra to hang around that week and like introduce the new rubber to my regulars. But that new guy must have somehow pissed-off Mr. Thoren very big.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Because when Mr. Thoren walked out that afternoon he was way ahead of schedule, for one thing. For another thing, he looked sore at the whole world, me included. No good-bye tip, no nothing. What the hell, just because the new guy didn’t know how to give him a rubdown, he didn’t have to take it out on me. I didn’t quit the spa to spite him. I was getting a lot more dough to come here.”

  “Nobody could blame you for that,” Jake said. “Did you talk it over with the new rubber afterwards? Ask him what went wrong?”

  “Well, I was going to next morning, but he never showed up again. I guess he figured the spa was no place for him if Mr. Thoren was the kind of customer he had to handle. Some guys are independent that way.”

  Jake said: “Maybe he was one of those seasonal workers. Up North for the summer, down here for the winter. That kind doesn’t worry too much about walking off a job.”

  “A snowbird?” Caldwell deftly twisted him over on his back and went to work on his chest and belly. “Nope, this was one of them nature boys from out of the Everglades. Probably never got further north than the Beach his whole life.”

  “Nature boys?”

  “Yeah. Swampers from out of the hammocks there. Run swamp boats, do some alligator poaching, but when they’re strapped for cash they’ll come into the city and take on a job for a while. That’s what this one was. A real jug-eared redneck. Only he seemed smarter than most.”

  Jake said: “I guess he’s probably back in the swamps now, with no regrets.”

  “Most likely. That kind of people, you stick a pair of shoes on them, they get all tensed up. His hard luck to run into Mr. Thoren first thing.”

  “That’s the way it goes,” Jake said.

  25

  Elinor was not there when he got back to the lounges. She showed up a few minutes later, dripping. “How’d you make out?” she said.

  Jake gave her a warning shake of the head. “Fine. Where were you?”

  “In the ocean. It’s kind of seaweedy, but great. There’s a million people in the pools and practically nobody at all out there. Come on in with me. We can talk there.”

  “In a little while. I want to do some thinking first.”

  “Well, if you’re not going to do it out loud, I’ll go ahead. But don’t take too long.”

  He did his thinking, then crossed the sun deck to the stairway leading down to the beach. From the head of the stairs he saw that it wasn’t much of a beach: a strip of gray sand flecked with patches of drying seaweed. But the surf, despite strands of seaweed floating in it, was an enticing emerald-green, and as far as a hundred feet out where the dun-colored ridge of a sandbar showed just below the surface, it was shallow enough for the bathers in it to stand at their ease no deeper than their chests. Beyond the sandbar, the water was evidently too deep for standing. A scattered handful of swimmers were out there, bobbing up and down on the waves that crested further inshore.

  He finally recognized Elinor as one of the swimmers by her bathing cap, a bright yellow rubber chrysanthemum which looked more ornamental than practical. He went down the staircase and took his time wading out through the tepid water toward the bathing cap. Then suddenly, as if shoved down by an invisible hand, it disappeared below the surface.

  It was still not back in sight after the next wave had passed over the sandbar. And the wave following the next.

  He plunged through the crest of the last wave and swam as hard as he could in the direction he had last seen the bathing cap. A few strokes beyond the sandbar he caught a glimmer of it below the surface. He took a deep breath and went underwater, to see Elinor and whoever had that unyielding grip on her ankles engaged in a twisting, turning, slow-motion struggle where her body, desperately arching toward the surface, was being borne down away from it to the roiled-up sandy bottom.

  The next instant it was all over. The man saw Jake, and despite his immense bulk, torpedoed out of range, then out of sight, with an almost fishlike speed and agility.

  Jake pulled Elinor to him and bobbed to the surface with her. She convulsively clasped her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist, straining to draw breath in a series of sobbing, retching gasps. He maneuvered them toward the sandbar, where he found a foothold barely within his depth. “Take is easy,” he said. “You’re all right now.”

  “Jake, he tried to kill me! If you didn’t come along—”

  “Sure, sure. But it’s a lot more likely he was only trying to scare you. Did you get a look at him?”

  “For a second. He’s all bald, and he must weigh a ton. Only it’s not fat, it’s muscle.”

  “That’s about what I made of him too. Do you think you could spot him, if you saw him again?”

  “I don’t want to see him again. He’s the blackmailer, isn’t he?”

  Jake said: “Maybe not the man himself, but he’s sure as hell connected with him somehow.”

  “Then they know who you are. I told you if you started talking to people about Thoren—”

  “Baby, now and then in this game you have to take your chances on a risky move. Otherwise, you just go around in circles.” When Jake tried to detach her arms from around his neck she clung all the more tightly to him. He said: “All right, tuck yourself into that brassiere and let’s get going. You can make it to shore now, can’t you?”

  “As
soon as I get my wind. Anyhow, the case is all washed up, isn’t it? You said if Mrs. Thoren found out who we really were, it would be.”

  “No, we’ve already gone too far for that. We passed the point of no return about three minutes ago. And it wasn’t Mrs. Thoren who found out who we are.”

  “But she will. They’ll tell her about it.”

  Jake said: “In that case, why’d they bother to get rough with you? Why didn’t they just go and tell her?”

  Elinor said pleadingly: “Even so, it’s a bad scene, Jake. Please don’t get mad, but I’d just as soon not be with it any more.”

  “You mean you’d cut out now when we’re really starting to move?”

  “I don’t like where we’re moving. And it’ll be a week tomorrow. If you’d settle for a week of the money coming to me—”

  “That wasn’t the deal.” He held her close with one hand against her back and paddled with the other to keep his footing as they rose and fell together on the gentle swells. Her cheek rested against his, her breathing was becoming steady. “You know,” he remarked, “for a girl with such a hard, muscular back, you have an exceptionally soft front.”

  “That’s a cheap trick, making a pass at me so I’ll change my mind.” Her voice was contemptuous, but she remained as she was in the circle of his arm, her cheek against his.

  “Oh? Anybody looking at us would say you’re the one making the pass.”

  “Well, I’m not. It just feels good having you take over after what I’ve been through.”

  “All the same, baby, you fall asleep on me like this, we’ll drift right to Havana, non-stop.”

  “I’m not falling asleep. I’m just all washed out. Numb.” Eyes closed, she turned her face toward him. Her parted lips lightly brushed his, slowly rubbed back and forth against them with growing warmth. She abruptly pulled her head away. “No, I won’t let you get to me. I wasn’t putting you on, Jake. I want to go back to New York.”