by Trevanian
“Say-hey, Lieutenant. How’s it going?” The Gimp’s speech is blurred by the affliction that has damaged his centers of control. His mother was diseased at the time of his birth. He speaks with the alto, adenoidal whine of a boxer who has been hit on the windpipe too often.
LaPointe looks at the cripple with fatigued patience. “What are you doing at this end of the street, Gimp?”
“Nothing, Lieutenant. Say-hey, I’m just taking a walk, that’s all. Boy, you know, this pig weather is really hanging on, ain’t it, Lieutenant? I never seen anything like…”
LaPointe is shaking his head, so the Gimp gives up his attempt to hide in small talk. Taking one hand from his overcoat pocket, the Lieutenant points toward a narrow passage between two buildings, out of the flow of the crowd. The cripple grimaces, but follows him.
“All right, Gimp. What are you carrying?”
“Hey, nothin’, Lieutenant. Honest! I promised you, didn’t I?”
LaPointe reaches out; in his attempt to step back, the cripple stumbles against the brick wall. “Hey, please! We need the money! Mama’s going to be pissed at me if I don’t bring back any money!”
“Do you want to go back inside?”
“No! Hey, have a heart, Lieutenant!” the cripple whines. “Mama’ll be pissed. We need the money. What kind of work can a guy like me get? Eh?”
“Where’s it stashed?”
“I tol’ you! I ain’t carrying…” The Gimp’s eyes moisten with tears. His body slumps in defeat. “It’s in a tube,” he admits sullenly.
LaPointe sighs. “Go up the alley and get it out. Put it inside your glove and give it to me.” LaPointe has no intention of handling the tube.
The cripple moans and whimpers, but he turns and lurches up the alley a few steps until he is in the dark. LaPointe turns his back and watches the passing pedestrians. An old man steps toward the mouth of the recess to take a piss, then he sees LaPointe and changes his mind. The cripple comes back, clutching one glove in his withered hand. LaPointe takes it and puts it into his pocket. “All right, now where did this shit come from, and where were you bringing it?”
“Say-hey, I cant tell you that, Lieutenant! Mama’ll beat me up for sure! And those guys she knows, they’ll beat me up!” His eyes, bisected by the rims of his glasses, roll stupidly. LaPointe does not repeat his question. Following his habit in interrogation, he simply sighs and settles his melancholy eyes on the grotesque.
“Honest to God, Lieutenant, I can’t tell you! I don’t dare!”
“I’d better call for a car.”
“Hey, no! Don’t put me back inside. Those tough guys inside like to use me ‘cause I’m a cripple.”
LaPointe looks out over the crowd with weary patience. He gives the Gimp time to think it over.
“…Okay, Lieutenant…”
In a self-pitying whimper, the cripple explains that the stuff came from people his mother knows, tough guys from somewhere out on the east end of town. It was to be delivered to a pimp named Scheer. The Lieutenant knows this Scheer and has been waiting for a chance to run him off the Main. He has not been able to put a real case together, so he has had to content himself with maintaining constant harassing pressure. For a moment he considers going after Scheer with the Gimp’s testimony, then he abandons the thought, realizing what a glib defense lawyer would do to this half-wit in the witness box.
“All right,” LaPointe says. “Now listen to me. And tell your mother what I say. I don’t want you on my patch anymore. You have one month to find someplace to go. You understand?”
“But, say-hey, Lieutenant? Where’ll we go? All my friends are here!”
LaPointe shrugs. “Just tell your mother. One month.”
“Okay. I’ll tell her. But I hate to piss her off. I mean, after all… she’s my mother.”
LaPointe sits at the counter of a cafe, his shoulders slumped, his eyes indifferently scanning the passersby beyond the window.
A small white radio on a shelf by the counterman’s ear is insisting that
Everybody digs the Montreal Rock
Oh, yes! Oh, yes!
Oh, yes! O-o-h YES!
Everybody digs the Montreal Rock!
LaPointe sighs and digs into his pocket to pay for the coffee. As he rises he notices a sign above the counterman’s head. “That’s wrong,” he says. “It’s misspelled.”
The counterman gives a sizzling hamburger a definitive slap with his spatula and turns to examine the sign.
Appl Pie—30?
He shrugs. “Yeah, I know. I complained, and the painter cut his price.”
“Samuel?” LaPointe asks, referring to the old man who does most of the sign painting on this part of the Main.
“Yes.” The counterman uses the inhaled oui typical of Joual.
LaPointe smiles to himself. Old Samuel always makes fancy signs with underlinings and ornate swirls and exclamation points, all at no extra cost. He is given to setting things off with quotation marks, inadvertently raising doubts in the customer’s mind, as in:
“Fresh” Fish Daily
He is also an independent artist who spells words the way he pronounces them. The counterman is lucky the sign doesn’t read: Epp’l Pie.
Not fifty paces off the Main, down Rue Napoleon, the bustle and press are gone and the noise is reduced to an ambient baritone rumble. The narrow old street is lit by widely spaced streetlamps and occasional dusty shopwindows. Children play around the stoops of three-story brick row houses. Above the roofline, diffused city-light glows in the damp, sooty air. Each house depends on the others for support. They have not collapsed because each wants to fall in a different direction, and there isn’t enough room.
It is after eight o’clock and cold, but the children will play until the fourth or fifth two-toned call of an exasperated mother brings them toe-dragging up the stoops and off to sleep, probably on a sofa in a front room, or in a cot blocking a hallway, covered with wool blankets that are gummy to the touch—bingo blankets that absorb body warmth without retaining it.
LaPointe leans against the railing of a deserted stoop, holding on tightly as the tingle rises in his chest It is a familiar feeling by now, an oddly pleasant sensation in the middle of his chest and upper arms, as though there were carbonated water in his veins. Sometimes pain follows the tingling. His blood fizzes in his chest; he looks up at the light-smeared sky and breathes slowly, expecting to find a little flash of pain at the end of each breath, and relieved not to.
Little kids a few stoops away are playing rond-rond, and at the end of each minor-key chant they all fall giggling to the sidewalk. The English-speaking kids play the same game with different words—about a ring of roses. All the children of Europe preserve in their atavistic memory the scar of the Black Death. They reel to simulate the dizziness; they make sounds like the symptomatic sneezing; they sing of bouquets of posies to ward off the miasma of the Plague. Then, giggling, they all fall down.
When LaPointe was a kid in Trois Rivieres, he used to play in the streets at night, too. In summer, all the grownups would sit out on the stoops because it was stifling indoors. The men wore only undershirts and drank ale from the bottle. And old lady Tarbieau… LaPointe remembers old lady Tarbieau, who lived across the street and who used to tend everybody’s onions. She always pretended to care about people’s problems in order to find out what they were. LaPointe’s mother didn’t like old lady Tarbieau. The only off-color thing he ever heard his mother say was in response to Mme. Tarbieau’s nosiness. One night when all the block was out on the stoops, old lady Tarbieau called across the street, “Mme. LaPointe? Didn’t I see the rent man coming out of your house today? It’s only the middle of the month. I always thought you paid your rent the same way I do.” And LaPointe’s mother answered, “No, Mme. Tarbieau. I don’t pay my rent the same way you do. I pay in money.”
Poor Mme. Tarbieau, already aged when LaPointe was a boy. He hasn’t thought of her for years. He pictures the old busybody
in his mind, and realizes that this is probably the first time anybody has remembered her for a quarter of a century. And probably this will be the last time any human memory will hold her. In that case, she is gone… really gone.
The tingle in his arms and chest has passed, so he pushes his fists further into his pockets and walks on toward the liquor store, in and out of the cones of streetlight, where kids dart from stoop to stoop, like starlings on a summer evening.
One summer, the summer after his father left home never to come back, LaPointe discovered that playing with the other kids around the stoops had become dull and pointless. In the long evenings, he used to walk alone on the street, looking up at the moon through newly hung electric wires. The moon would follow him, sliding along over the weaving wires. He would turn quickly and go up the street, and the moon followed. He would stop suddenly, then go again, but the moon was never tricked. Once, when he had been running, then stopping, running and stopping, all the time looking up and getting a little dizzy, he was startled to find himself standing only inches from the Crazy Woman who lived down the block. She grinned, then laughed a wheezing note. She pointed a finger at him and said he was a fou, like her, and they would sizzle in hell side by side.
He ran away. But for the rest of the week he had nightmares. He was terrified at the thought of going crazy. Maybe he was already crazy. How do you know if you’re crazy? If you’re crazy, you’re too crazy to know you’re crazy. What does “crazy” mean? Say the word again and again, and the sense dries out, leaving only a husk of sound. And you hear yourself saying a meaningless noise over and over again.
That was the last summer he played on the streets. The following winter his mother died of influenza. Grandpapa and Grandmama were already dead. He went to St. Joseph’s Home. And from the Home, he went into the police.
LaPointe squeezes his eyes closed and pulls himself out of it. He has found himself daydreaming like this a lot of late, remembering old lost things, unimportant things triggered by some little sound or sight on the Main.
He smiles at himself. Now, that is crazy.
The middle-aged Greek counterman looks up and smiles as LaPointe enters the deserted liquor store. He has been expecting the Lieutenant, and he reaches up for the bottle of red LaPointe always brings along to his twice-weekly games of pinochle.
“Everything going well?” LaPointe asks as he pays for the wine.
The counterman gulps air and growls, “Oh, fine, Lieutenant.” He gulps again. “Theo wrote. Got the letter—” Another gulp. “—this morning.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Fine. He’s up for parole soon.”
It was too bad that LaPointe had to put the son inside for theft so shortly after the father had an operation for throat cancer. But that’s the way it goes; that is his job. “That’s good,” he says. “I’m glad he’s getting parole.”
The counterman nods. For him, as for others in the quarter, LaPointe is the law; the good and the bad of it. He will never forget the evening seven years ago when the Lieutenant walked in to buy his usual Thursday night bottle of wine. A young man with slick hair had been loitering in the store, carefully looking over the labels of exotic aperitifs and liqueurs. LaPointe paid for his wine and, in the same movement of putting his change into his pocket, he drew out his gun.
“Put your hands on top of your head,” LaPointe said quietly to the young man.
The boy’s eyes darted toward the door, but LaPointe shook his head slowly. “Never,” he said.
The young man put his hands on top of his head, and LaPointe snatched him by his collar and bent him over the counter. Two swift movements under the boy’s jacket, and LaPointe came up with a cheap automatic. While they waited for the arrival of a police car, the boy sat on the floor in a corner, cowed and foolish, his hands still on top of his head. Customers came and went. They glanced uneasily toward the boy and LaPointe, and they carefully avoided coming near them, but not one question was asked, not one comment made. They ordered their wine in subdued voices, then they left.
There had been several hold-ups in the neighborhood that winter, and the old man who ran the cleaners down the street had been shot in the stomach.
It never occurred to anyone to wonder how LaPointe knew the boy was pumping up his courage for a hold-up. He was the law on the Main, and he knew everything. Actually, LaPointe had known nothing until the moment he stepped into the shop and passed by the boy. It was the tense nonchalance he instantly recognized. The Indian blood in LaPointe smelled fear.
The Greek counterman is comforted to know that LaPointe is always out there in the street somewhere. And yet… this is the same man who arrested his son Theo for auto theft and sent him to prison for three years. The good of the law, and the bad. But it could have been worse. LaPointe had put in a good word for Theo.
The Lieutenant continues north on the Main, the bottle of wine, twisted up in a brown paper bag, heavy in his overcoat pocket. He passes a closed shop and automatically checks the padlock on the accordion steel grid covering its window. Once a beat cop…
But LaPointe had better get moving along. He doesn’t want to be late for his pinochle game.
2
“…so all the wise men and pilpulniks of Chelm get together to decide which is more important to their village, the sun or the moon. Finally they decide in favor of the moon. And why? Because the moon gives light during the night when, without it, they might fall into ditches and hurt themselves. While the sun, on the other hand, shines only during the day, when already it is light out. So who needs it!” David Mogolevski snorts with laughter at his own story, his thick body quaking, his growling basso filling the cramped little room behind the upholstery shop. His eyes sparkle as he looks from face to face, nodding and saying, “Eh? Eh?” soliciting appreciation.
Father Martin nods and grins. “Yes, that’s a good one, David.” He is eager to show that he likes the joke, but he has never known how to laugh. Whenever he tries out of politeness, he produces a bogus sound that embarrasses him.
David shakes his head and repeats, his eyes tearing with laughter, “The sun shines only during the day! So who needs it!”
Moishe Rappaport smiles over the top of his round glasses and nods support for his partner. He has heard each of David’s jokes a hundred times, but he still enjoys them. Most of all, he enjoys the generous vigor of David’s laughter; but sometimes he is tense when David starts off on one of his longer tales, because he knows the listener has probably already heard it, and may be unkind enough to say so. There is no danger of that with these pinochle friends; they always pretend never to have heard the stories before, although Moishe and David have been playing cards with the priest and the police lieutenant every Thursday and Monday night for thirteen years now.
The back room is cramped by stacks of old furniture, bolts of upholstery, and the loom on which Moishe makes fabrics for special customers. A space is cleared in the center under a naked light bulb, and a card table is set up. At some time during the night there will be a break, and they will eat sandwiches prepared by Moishe and drink the wine LaPointe brought.
Father Martin contributes only his presence and patience—and this last is no small offering, for he is always David’s partner.
Throughout the evening there is conversation. Moishe and Father Martin look forward to these opportunities to examine and debate life and love; justice and the law; the role of Man; the nature of Truth. They are both scholarly men to whom the coincidences of life denied outlets. David injects his jokes and a leavening cynicism, without which the philosophical ramblings of the other two would inflate and leave the earth.
LaPointe’s role is that of the listener.
For all four, these twice-weekly games have become oases in their routines, and they take them for granted. But if the games were to end, the vacuum would be profound.
Each would have to search his memory to recall how they got together in the first place; it seems they have
always played cards on Thursdays and Mondays. In fact, Father Martin met David and Moishe while he was canvassing the Main for contributions toward the maintenance of his battered polyglot parish. But how that led to his playing cards with them he could not say. LaPointe entered the circle just as casually. One night on his way home after putting the street to bed, he saw a light in the back of the shop and tapped at the window to see if everything was all right. They were playing three-handed cutthroat. Maybe LaPointe was feeling lonely that night without knowing it In any event, he accepted their invitation to join the game.
They were all in their forties when first they started playing. LaPointe is fifty-three now; and Moishe must be just over sixty.
David rubs his thick hands together and leers at his friends. “Come, deal the cards! The luck has been against me tonight, but now I feel strong. The good Father and I are going to schneider you poor babies. Well? Why doesn’t somebody deal?”
“Because it’s your deal, David,” Moishe reminds him.
“Ah! That explains it. Okay, here we go!” David has a flashy way of dealing which often causes a card to turn over. Each time this occurs he says, “Oops! Sunny side up!” His own cards never happen to turn over. He sweeps in his hand with a grand gesture and begins arranging it, making little sounds of surprised appreciation designed to cow adversaries. “Hello, hello, hel-lo!” he says as he slips a good card into place and taps it home with his finger.
David’s heritage is rural and Slavic; he is a big man, unsubtle of feature and personality; gregarious, gruff, kind. When he is angry, he roars; when he feels done in by man or fate, he complains bitterly and at length; when he is pleased, he beams. The robust, life-embracing shtetl tradition dominates his nature. In business he is a formidable bargainer, but scrupulously honest. A deal is a deal, whichever way it turns. Although it is Moishe’s skill and craftsmanship that make their little enterprise popular with decorators from Westmont, the business would have failed a hundred times over without the vigor and acumen of David. His personality is perfectly reflected in the way he plays cards. He tends to overbid slightly, because he finds the game dull when someone else has named trump. When he is taking a run of sure tricks, he snaps each card down with a triumphant snort. When he goes set, he groans and slaps his forehead. He gets bored when Moishe and Father Martin delay the game with their meandering philosophical talks; but if he thinks of a good story, he will reach across the table and place his hand upon the cards to stop play while he holds forth.