by Ross Thomas
“Whatever you say.”
“We’ve got enough.”
“What will we do with it?”
“You’re going to get an education with yours.”
“I am already educated.”
“You don’t even know how to read and write.”
“I am wise in the ways of the world.”
“Where’d you learn that one?”
I shrugged. “I heard it someplace.”
Smalldane shook his head. “Okay, let’s agree that you’re smart. You can shill a crap game, pimp for a whorehouse, speak six or seven languages, roll drunks, and hustle the rubes. But you can’t read or write and you’re goddamned well going to school to learn how.”
“Will you go too, Gorman?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m too old.”
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know yet, kid. But I think I’ve got an idea.”
In Rio the FBI agents came aboard and started asking Smalldane how he’d acquired a son since he had never married.
“What do you care?” he said. “The kid’s American.”
“We’ve checked your record, Mr. Smalldane. You’ve never even been engaged.”
“So he’s a bastard.”
There were two of them. One was rather young, somewhere in his twenties. The other was older, thirty-five or so. Both were suspicious.
“If he’s not an American citizen, Mr. Smalldane, he can’t be permitted to enter the—”
“Tell them, Lucifer.”
“My name is William Smalldane. I was born in San Francisco on—”
“For Christ’s sake, the real one,” Smalldane said.
“Oh,” I said. “I am eight years old and my name is Lucifer Clarence Dye and I was born December 5, 1933, in Moncrief, Montana, United States of America, and my father’s name was Dr. Clarence Dye and I live at—at—” I stopped.
“He lives with me,” Smalldane said. “He’s my ward.”
“Where are his parents?” the younger man asked.
“Dead.”
“This is most irregular,” the older man said, and it was the first time I’d heard that phrase. I regret that it wasn’t the last.
“Cable Moncrief, Montana, and find out whether there was a Lucifer Clarence Dye born there on December 5, 1933, like the kid says.”
“Well, if you’ll accept responsibility for him—”
“I’ll accept it. Where do I sign?”
“That’ll be done in New York,” the older one said. “Still I don’t know.”
“Hell, he’s too dumb to be a spy,” Smalldane said. “He can’t even read or write.”
That was when I made up my mind to go to school.
On the voyage to New York from Rio a couple of the passengers panicked over what they claimed to be Nazi submarines, but nothing happened and we docked in Manhattan on August 26, 1942. There was nobody to meet us.
Once through officialdom’s incredible red tape, we took a cab to the Gotham where Smalldane had reserved us a room. He’d won the reservation from a correspondent who had had nothing left to gamble. When we were in the room and the money was in the hotel’s safe, Smalldane produced a package wrapped in red paper.
“It’s from Kate,” he said. “It was in the bottom of that basket of fruit and whiskey. She told me to give them to you when we got to New York.”
“What are they?”
“Your father’s diaries. She wants you to read them.”
“But I can’t read.”
“Kate said for you to learn,”
CHAPTER 17
Booboo Robineaux drove me back to the hotel from the session with what I suppose could be called Swankerton’s city fathers. About halfway there I asked him, “Why do they call you Booboo?”
“My friends don’t,” he said. “Just my father.”
“What do your friends call you?”
“Boo.”
I thought about asking him how his face had come to be so nicely stitched, but I was afraid that it might turn into a longer story than I really wanted to hear, so I didn’t, but instead just thanked him for the lift.
I unlocked the door to my room in the Sycamore and started in. The Venetian blinds were down and the drapes were drawn. They hadn’t been that way when I left. It was dark. The door opened to my right so I slammed it against the wall, but it didn’t hit the wall. It hit someone who grunted. I started backing quickly into the corridor, but I didn’t move fast enough. I heard a faint sound like the beginning of a sigh, perhaps a sigh of regret, and something hard smashed into my left shoulder. I kept backing into the corridor and bumped against someone. I turned and it was Homer Necessary who gave me a genial smile.
“Trouble?” he said.
I massaged my shoulder with my right hand. “Trouble,” I said. “Two of them.”
“Well, now,” he said and smiled again. “Which side of the door is the light switch on?”
I thought a moment. “The left, lust inside. There’re two of them.”
Necessary reached into his right hip pocket and brought out a woven leather blackjack. He thumped it into his left palm. “Well, now,” he said again and moved to the door, reached his arm quickly around the jamb, and switched on the room’s overhead light. He was fast despite his bulk. He went in low, whirled, and the blackjack started up from near his ankles. I couldn’t see it land, but I heard it. It was a wet smack. Necessary turned to his left, still moving quickly, almost sinuously, like an overstuffed snake. Then he stopped, straightened, and grinned at me.
“He doesn’t want to get out from behind the door,” Necessary said. “You might as well come on in.”
I went in. On the floor at my left was the crumpled up body of a man. He wore a yellow velour short-sleeved shirt and tan khaki slacks. He wasn’t more than twenty-two or twenty-three and some blood drooled out of the left corner of his mouth. A piece of pipe wrapped in black friction tape lay a few inches from his right hand.
“Just reach over careful-like and close the door,” Necessary said. “You might even sort of slam it.”
I slammed the door shut. Behind it was another member of what I suppose is the misunderstood generation. He was all of twenty, wore a short-sleeved shirt with a turtleneck, some unsuccessful sideburns, and a panicky look. He carried a nine-inch length of tape-wrapped pipe in his right hand, but he seemed to have forgotten it.
Necessary slapped his blackjack into the palm of his left hand a couple of times. “Just drop it, kid,” he said. “Just drop it onto the floor.” The youngster looked at the pipe, smiled feebly and a little foolishly, and let the pipe fall to the carpet.
“Now go and sit in that chair over there,” he said. The youth moved to the chair that Necessary indicated and lowered himself into it. He still looked panicky.
I bent over the one who lay on the floor. “He’s not hurt bad,” Necessary said. “I didn’t even break his jaw, but he might have a few loose teeth. I got him right along here.” I looked up and watched him move his right forefinger along his jaw, just below the left ear.
“You’re good,” I said to Necessary, rising.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “I know.” Then he turned to the young man in the chair. “You got a name?”
“Frank. Frank Smith. That’s the God’s truth. It’s Smith.”
Necessary returned the blackjack to his hip pocket and slapped Frank Smith across the face. It was a hard, brisk slap. “That’s what you get for telling the truth, Frank. You can just let your imagination work on what you’re going to get when you start lying.”
Not if, I noticed, but when. I lit a cigarette and watched the exchief of police operate. I decided that he must have enjoyed his former line of work.
“How much?” Necessary said.
“For what?”
Necessary slapped him again. “Fifty bucks. Each.”
“Who? I mean who paid you?”
“I don’t know. Just a guy.
”
That earned him another slap.
Frank Smith’s face was red now from both rage and the slaps. “He was just a guy, I tell you. We meet him in Emmett’s—”
“What’s Emmett’s?” Necessary said.
“We shoot pool there, hang around, you know.”
Necessary shook his head. “It always starts in a poolhall,” he said. “It always starts there with just a guy. What did just a guy look like, Frank?”
Frank Smith moved his shoulders up and down a little. “I don’t know. Christ, he was about average.”
Necessary reached into his hip pocket and took out the blackjack. He did it casually, as if fishing out a pack of cigarettes. Frank Smith tried to ignore it, but failed. It fascinated him.
“I don’t want to use this on your arm, Frank,” Necessary said. “Right below your shoulder. It’ll make it sore. Maybe for weeks. I don’t want you to have a sore arm. I don’t think you do either, do you?”
“No.” It was barely a whisper.
Necessary slapped the blackjack into his left palm again. He had a certain way of doing it so that it made a crackling sound as if he were breaking all the bones in his hand. I wondered what old-time cop he had learned that from.
“He was medium heighth—” Frank Smith pronounced height with a “th” at the end and I couldn’t see how he would profit from it if I were to correct him. “Around five foot nine or ten. Weighed maybe hundred and fifty, hundred and sixty. Black hair. He had on a suit, I remember. A tan suit.”
“What color were his eyes?”
“I don’t know,” Frank Smith said. “Shit, I don’t remember the color of his eyes.”
“You’d be in trouble if you did,” Necessary said. “What’d he call himself?”
“He didn’t.”
“No name at all?”
Frank Smith shook his head.
“You ever see him before?”
“No.”
“Okay. What’d he say? Everything you can remember.”
“Well, he says there’s this guy over in eight-nineteen in the Sycamore and this guy owed him some gambling money and won’t pay. So he says he’ll give us fifty apiece to mess the guy up a little. Then he gives us the key to the room and an envelope to leave with the guy when we get done.”
“What else, Frank?”
“Well, he says the guy’s out of the hotel right now and we can wait for him in his room. Then he gives us the fifty each and we come on over and start waiting.”
“Why you?”
“Huh?”
The “huh” won him another slap. “Why’d he pick you two, Frank?” Necessary said, and his voice was curiously gentle.
Frank Smith didn’t seem to find much comfort in the tone. “I don’t know—and don’t hit me! He seemed to know us. He walked right up to us and called us by name.”
“How many times’ve you been booked, Frank?”
“Three. Maybe four.”
“Car theft?”
“Once.”
“Assault?”
“Maybe twice.”
“D and D?”
“Once.”
“What else?”
“Nothing.”
“What else, Frank?”
“Nothing. I swear.”
“How much time in the joint?”
“Six months.” Frank Smith muttered it.
“Car theft?”
“Yeah.”
“State?”
“At Mandersfield.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
“What’s your buddy’s name?”
“Joe Carson.”
“Where’d you meet him, at Mandersfield?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What was he in for?”
“Breaking and entry. He done a year.”
“How long’ve you been out?”
“Couple of months.”
Joe Carson groaned and I turned around. Necessary didn’t bother. Carson moved a little, but it was really only a twitch.
“Either of you on parole?” Necessary said.
“No. We done it all.”
“You’re lucky.”
Joe Carson groaned again and this time Necessary turned to look at him. Then he looked at his watch and nodded in a satisfied way. “Just about right,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else. He turned back to Frank Smith. “You got the envelope?”
“Joe’s got it,” Frank Smith said.
“Well, then, I want you to go over to Joe and get the envelope and hand it to Mr. Dye who you were supposed to give it to in the first place. I also want you to give me the fifty bucks that ‘just a guy’ gave you and I also want the fifty he gave Joe over there. You got that?”
Frank Smith nodded and moved over to Carson. He took an envelope from Carson’s hip pocket, found the fifty dollars, and returned to where Necessary stood. “You want the money?” he said to Necessary.
“That’s right.”
“Here’s Joe’s fifty.” He handed it over. Then he dug into his own pocket and came up with another wad of bills. “Here’s mine.” Necessary stuffed them into his own pocket.
“He gets the envelope?” Frank Smith said. He seemed determined to do everything correctly.
“That’s right,” Necessary said.
“Here,” Frank Smith said and handed me the envelope.
“Now drag him out of here before he wakes up and vomits all over the place,” Necessary said.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all, Frank.”
“Yessir.”
Frank Smith bent over Carson, grasped him under the armpits, and started dragging him toward the door. Carson groaned again. “Can you get the door, mister?” Frank Smith said to me, I held it open while he dragged Carson into the corridor. “What do I do with him now?” he said.
“That’s your problem,” I said and closed the door.
“How was your meeting?” Necessary said.
I nodded my head as I opened the envelope. “They propositioned me.”
“What’s it say?”
I handed the single sheet to him. It was printed in penciled block letters. Necessary read it aloud, giving each word the same emphasis as those who aren’t accustomed to reading aloud usually do. “Just a sample,” he read. “Next time is for keeps.” He shook his head. “Amateurs,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“Pros don’t give away second chances.”
“I know.”
“They may try again and then it won’t be a couple of punks.”
“Probably not.”
“It bother you?”
“Sure it bothers me,” I said.
“That’s good. I’d be a little worried if it didn’t.” He sighed deeply. “I guess I’d better stick a little closer.”
“You did fine a while ago. Thanks.”
“Orcutt sent me down.”
“He want something?”
Necessary shook his head. “He just got a hunch. He gets them sometimes. So he got a hunch that I should come down to your room. He was right.” He paused a moment. “As usual.”
“I’ll thank him too.”
“We’d better go see him.”
“Has he got a drink up there?”
“Sure.”
“All right. Let’s go.”
Necessary started toward the door but paused. “You want I should split the hundred with you?”
“You keep it.”
“Half’s yours if you want it.”
“You earned it,” I said.
He started moving toward the door again and again stopped. “What’d they really want with you at that meeting?”
“They wanted to know if I was banging Carol Thackerty yet.”
“What’d you tell them?”
“The truth. I said not yet.”
CHAPTER 18
Major Albert Schiller and I got hit within thirty seconds of each other on April 17, 1953, about halfw
ay up—or down—the Korean hill called Pork Chop which they made a motion picture about some years later. I think it starred Gregory Peck. The major and I could have used him. I was then nineteen years old and a master sergeant, the youngest in the entire United States Army, or so I’d been told. The major was thirty-six which made him, he falsely claimed, the oldest major in the army, and he didn’t make lieutenant colonel until shortly before he retired in 1961.
We had stumbled halfway to the top of Pork Chop Hill to set up our equipment at an outpost supposedly held by E Company of the 31st Infantry. The equipment consisted of a battery of loudspeakers similar to those used for public address systems in ball parks, college gymnasiums, and football stadiums. I was to use the speakers to address the CCF from the E-Company outpost. I was to insult the CCF, revile it, even taunt it.
“Hit ‘em right in the guts, son,” the general had said to me. “Make ‘em wonder who’s screwing their wives. Make ‘em itchy to get home. You know, undermine their morale.”
The CCF, whose morale I was supposed to undermine, was of course the Communist Chinese Forces who were more or less ignoring the truce negotiations that were then underway at Panmunjom.
Major Schiller had dreamed up the project all by himself and then went scouting for a Chinese-speaking American. He found me, fresh from the States, in an infantry repple depple and promptly had me transferred to what he fondly called his “little psy-war shop.” He somehow had convinced a National Guard general of the merit of his scheme and the general personally had bucked most of Schiller’s proposed table of organization through channels. The approval enabled the major to zoom me from private to master sergeant in two weeks. I had a corporal who was a clerk-typist under my command and together we composed all that there was of Major Schiller’s little psy-war shop.
On April 15, 1953—or 15 April 53, as the army likes to write it— the major got permission from the general to launch the project that was supposed to undermine Chinese morale to the point where they would lay down their arms and rush back home. But first, the major and I went calling on the general to show off my proficiency in Chinese. “Say something in Chinese, sergeant,” the general said, so I smiled and called him the abandoned son of a syphilitic running dog.
“Sure knows it, doesn’t he, sir?” Major Schiller said and smiled at me fondly. “Of course, he won’t talk that politely to them. He’ll talk to them in gutter Chinese that’ll hit ‘em right where it hurts.”