by Howard Fast
“You know, I just don’t get this attachment. I mean, after all, one expects the best from Germany. I mean in the way of machine tooling—you’d expect the tolerance to be absolutely perfect. I mean, you would, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, right. Absolutely.”
“Then all one can say is that I’m going about it wrong. You wouldn’t think so with something you buy at Abercrombie. They do give you an impression of standing behind their merchandise.”
“Still, it wouldn’t happen at Harrod’s.”
“That’s a damned arrogant thing to say!” the General exclaimed, fitting the two parts together very slowly, gently as one might handle a bottle of nitroglycerin.
“I keep forgetting you’re not British.”
“Why? Because I don’t get down and knock my head on the carpet every time you say Harrod’s? Let me tell you something. Harrod’s is probably the most overrated store in the world. I once bought a necktie at Harrod’s, and no sooner did I put it on my neck—devil take it, it’s a silly argument. You can’t buy a silencer at Harrod’s. It’s against the law.”
“Quite.”
“So mind your own bloody business and let me get this bloody silencer on this bloody pistol!”
Margie could contain herself no longer. “What are you going to do with that pistol?” she demanded.
“Shoot you, my dear,” the General said, without looking up from his efforts. “What else?”
CHAPTER 9
In which Cousin Fenton runs.
FENTON COMPTON was a lunch-time runner. All day long he absorbed facts; noontime he digested them, eternally proving to himself that the retentive memory and the creative impulse can be found in one and the same man.
There are many people—and many of them born New Yorkers—who do not understand the role and the symbology of the runners, perhaps because the most active cult of runners centers around the Central Park reservoir. (Here the term runner is used generically to embrace both the walker and the actual runner, the walker swaying, rolling his elbows, and slapping the ground heel and toe, while the runner proceeds at a jog trot.) And perhaps because screened by park and trees as it is, the reservoir shelters the runner and protects him from the gaze of the curious.
Yet it must be admitted that any bona fide runner must have the bounce and the courage to face his fellow man (and woman) in all his nakedness. New York City never took official cognizance of the runner and built or assigned him a place to change. Therefore, in his costume of skimpy white shorts, sleeveless undershirt, and sneakers, he must proceed from home to park, head erect, shoulders back, braving the stares of the curious, the vulgar, and of course the tourist.
The bulk of the runners are between forty-five and sixty, although these are tempered with a sprinkling of youth and old age—if one can ever call a runner truly old. At the same time, while most of them are reservoir runners, there are also a minority of Sheep Mall runners and at least a handful of bridal-path and bicycle-path runners.
It is hard to generalize about runners, because they are in themselves iconoclasts. Fenton Compton was a lunch-time runner, even though the great majority of runners were morning runners; yet there were lunch-time runners, afternoon runners, and even one or two evening runners, although the local police frowned on this as the days shortened to winter.
Fenton Compton, based as he was on Sixty-fifth Street between Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue, had his work cut out for him. On those days when he ran he bounced out of the door of the Foundation House promptly at twelve-thirty. Today was such a day. His first battle was with the elements, for no valid runner hides in sweat shirts or windbreakers. Fenton breasted the chill in his sleeveless lisle underwear, took a sharp, steady pace toward Fifth Avenue, plunged into the park as a swimmer into water, quartered uptown, and then struck out westward toward the Sheep Mall—for only in the warm weather did he fight his way north to the reservoir.
As a runner Fenton always felt magically invisible. Here he was, dashing along with tiny duck shorts and a lisle underwear shirt, and no one looked twice at him. As in those dreams where one finds oneself in a crowded subway car in one’s underwear, a magic cloak of invisibility lay over him—and he drew no more than fleeting glances from the cops, mothers, children, checker players, and lovers, all of whom made up the normal park population. Free from all the constrictions and bonds of civilization, he became a runner—his thoughts floating as freely as his knobby knees bounced.
It was only natural that his thoughts turned to Margie. Those who heard about Margie were frequently as fascinated with her as those who actually knew her, and as Fenton reviewed the progression of circumstances that she had encountered this day, he suddenly realized that, as in most films about criminal matters, the single, central fact of important advice that he had overlooked was to tell his cousin Alan and Alan’s oversized friend to call the police.
Immediately he put his agile, lightning-quick mind to work on the project—and his heart constricted and went cold as the implications of his failure became clear. Like most Comptons, underneath his coldly logical and brittle exterior was a warm and compassionate heart—and when he saw a green police box in the distance as he coursed over the Sheep Mall, he headed straight for it, like a homing pigeon driving toward the goal of his mission. However, the police box was locked. On it, it said plainly, “Use to call police in emergency.” But no matter how hard Compton tugged at the police box, it remained closed.
All about him life went on. Across the mall two pairs of lovers strolled arm in arm. To Fenton’s right a game of touch football was in progress. In front of him, but a good distance away, some private-school boys were at football practice, and just to, his left a game of softball involved a couple of dozen teen-age lads. Babies dozed in carriages; kids flew model airplanes, and dogs strained on leashes. No one cared. A thin, frail, gentle young woman named Margie might at this moment be at death’s door, but no one cared, no one called halt, no one stood to defend her.
No one except Fenton Compton. He was both a man of letters and a man of action. The police call box was only a few yards from home plate of the softball game, and scattered behind home plate was a small but intriguing selection of bats. Fenton selected the stoutest of the lot and, before any of the spectators or players realized his purpose, hurled himself upon the police call box. If a girl’s life depended upon the opening of that call box, then Fenton would open it. A man could do no less.
The first blow struck the call box squarely, yet it remained closed.
From players and spectators,
“Hey—what gives?”
“Put down that bat!”
“He’s some kind of nut!”
“Stand back—he’s flipped.”
The second blow was struck, mightier than the first, and still the call box remained closed.
“Put down the bat, mister!”
“Take it easy!”
“It’s all right, mister—we’re your friends.”
“Let him work it out!”
The third blow fell, and still the call box remained closed, and as Fenton lifted the bat for the fourth blow, something round and hard jammed into the channel of his spine, and a cold authoritative voice said, “All right, buddy, just let that bat down slow and easy. I got a gun in your spine, but I would rather be friends. So just let the bat down and let go of it. Don’t turn around, don’t move. Just let the bat down and drop it.”
Fenton put the bat down and dropped it.
“Good. Now hands behind you.”
Fenton put his hands behind him and winced as the hand-cuffs snapped shut. The cop now came into view, dropped his gun back into its holster, and said ingratiatingly to Fenton, “Now be a buddy, Jack, and don’t give me no trouble. All I want is that you don’t catch cold, so just take it easy.” Then to the growing crowd, he shouted, “Go play baseball! We don’t need no cheering section!”
Then he turned to the call box, flicked the small, protruding lever with his fi
nger, opened the door, and rang the precinct. When he got his party at the other end, the officer said:
“Sarge, I’m over at the Sheep Mall—yes, this is Murphy—I’m over here at the Sheep Mall, and I got one of those runners, you know, the skinny ones in the sneakers and underwear—” He listened a moment, then said, “Don’t I know the difference between the Sheep Mall and the reservoir? Of course, it’s the Sheep Mall. No, they don’t all frequent the reservoir. Those are the uptown runners. You get a midtown crowd on the meadow north of the Weather Station, and you get the downtown crowd right here on the Sheep Mall.” He listened again and then said, “I know the Commissioner said to leave them alone. Only this one was trying to open the call box … He’s got a right?… So he’s got a right, only he was exercising it with a baseball bat. I took the bat away from him—”
All the way back to the precinct house Fenton Compton explained to two politely listening policemen. He was an excellent, logical exponent, a trifle didactic by nature and with the potential of being an excellent teacher, and when they finally reached the station house, Fenton had the comfortable notion that he had gotten his message across. They walked into the precinct, and one of the officers said to the desk sergeant:
“Call the pyschiatric section at Bellevue and see what their schedule is for today. We got a ripe one.”
“This,” Fenton cried, “is utterly outrageous!”
“You know how the runners are,” the desk sergeant said. “There’s no ipso facto that they’ve flipped. Some very important people around this town are runners.”
“I know that,” the officer declared. “It’s not that he’s a runner or even that he tried to open a call box with a baseball bat. I know about runners—you give a little, you take a little. But this one is like James Bond. He knows about a beautiful little doll called Margie who is being done to death by a pack of international oil desperadoes from the Dravinian Embassy who think she is the Countess Hutsinger—you know the rich broad in the Plaza now—”
“Of all the stupid, irrational reactions to a situation, this surely deserves a prize!” Fenton exclaimed. “In the past I have defended the police—not their mental ability, but at least their collective efficiency. But let one word bespeak the unusual, the different, the uncommon, and your only frame of reference becomes a semiliterate romance about an oversexed, Freudian evocation called o-o-seven, surely no more than a response to a condition of total sexual impotence—”
“Cool it, mister,” the sergeant said, and told the officer, “put him in the tank, and I’ll see what’s what downtown and I’ll ask the lieutenant—”
“I have rights!” Fenton snapped.
“We are not trampling on your rights, mister. We just want you to cool down for a while, and then you can call your lawyer or do as you desire—I mean within your rights. I will not charge you yet, even though we do not encourage assault and battery upon our call boxes. I don’t know what we have here. I don’t want to charge you at all if we can avoid it. But Lieutenant Rothschild is not here right now. He’ll be in within the hour. Meanwhile cool it a bit.”
“I will not cool it a bit!”
“Look, mister. Don’t get rough with us. You get rough with us, we get rough with you. You know that runners run on sufferance. You happen to be standing there in your underwear. The tank is empty right now and there are blankets there. So why don’t you make yourself comfortable for a little while.”
“Make yourself comfortable for a while!” Fenton snorted. “Isn’t it always the same? Hasn’t it always been this way? Speak the unusual, the remarkable, depart from conformity, and the world calls you insane. You pip-squeak,” he cried ringingly, addressing himself to the sergeant on duty, “you mite, you poor, Watsonian antique of action-reaction, you ninety-two I. Q., you unimaginative clod—”
“Oh, take him the hell out of here!” the sergeant snapped. “Put him in the tank and let him yell his head off.
“Go write a dictionary!” he threw at Fenton.
Like any dedicated seeker of the truth, Fenton continued to protest as he was led away by an officer. Fenton was locked up in the large cell called the tank, but he was given a cup of coffee, a salami sandwich, and an old police jacket to cover his nakedness. Meanwhile the arresting officer inquired of the desk sergeant concerning the use of Watsonian as an adjective.
“What the hell is this Watsonian crap?” he demanded.
The desk sergeant, a graduate of Brooklyn College, informed the arresting officer that it was a system of psychology not unrelated to the Pavlovian, but more or less outdated.
“I’d like to know more about that,” the arresting officer said.
“Drop dead,” the desk sergeant said and went back to his dope sheet. He rarely played the horses himself, but he had started a system on paper with a hundred-thousand-dollar investment—also on paper—and having had an exceptionally good run, he was now eleven million, six hundred and eighty-two thousand dollars in the black. It was a slow afternoon, and he decided that it was time to quit, while he was ahead. A glassy look on his face covered his excursion into dreamland, where he was spending his millions in frenzied thoughtlessness. He was on an enormous white yacht in the Mediterranean with twenty-two girls of his choice, a fine balance of blondes, redheads, and brunettes, when Lieutenant Rothschild entered, grunted a surly acknowledgment of his presence, looked at the blotter, and then proceeded upstairs to his office.
The desk sergeant went back to his dreams, found something nagging at the back of his mind, returned reluctantly, remembered Fenton, and wondered aloud, “Should I bother the lieutenant?”
“He’s in a lousy mood,” an officer observed.
“It’s his normal attitude.” He considered this for a while and then shrugged and picked up the phone and asked for the lieutenant’s office. “I hate to bother you, Lieutenant,” he said, “but we got a runner who was trying to bust up a call box with a baseball bat and he’s got a spy complex or something, you know, the foreign-agent routine … Yes, that’s what I said, he was trying to smash into a call box with a baseball bat … Why? Well, he claims he wanted to call us … You see, he’s got it figured that the Dravinians want to do away with a chick called Margie … What? Sure, sure—”
“What do you know?” the desk sergeant said to the officer who was leaning on his desk. “He wants to see the runner. Now. Immediately. He’s hot as hell on it.”
When the police want things to happen, they happen, and two minutes later Fenton Compton, accompanied by an officer who watched him suspiciously, stood in Lieutenant Rothschild’s bare and grimy office—a pathetic figure, a sort of Don Quixote barelegged under a huge threadbare policeman’s jacket.
“What’s your name?” Rothschild demanded.
“Fenton Compton, and my lawyers are Grinnell, Grinnell, South by, and Hushman, and all four of them are going to sue your lousy, incompetent, small-minded, inefficient imitation of a police force for five million dollars for false arrest.”
Lieutenant Rothschild, being attached to the Nineteenth Squad in the very heart of what is sometimes called the silk-stocking district, knew better than to throw muscle or even irritation at a runner. No group in all New York City contained so varied and odd an assortment of men as the runners, and the enraged, baldish head that faced him now might well be an ex-governor, a giant of commerce, a rentier of immense holdings, a college president, or even a councilman or a congressman or a state senator. Lieutenant Rothschild had come upon such cases in a group generally on a lower social level, the bicycle riders—a group that required only a small measure of the fierce pride and independence that marked the runners. This being the case, Lieutenant Rothschild ignored the burning pain of an ulcer that chose precisely that moment to kick up and said soothingly:
“It’s your right, Mr. Compton, to sue the police or any other city department. However, I must point out to you that you are not under arrest.”
“Then why am I being held in this rotten, unpainted,
bug-ridden antique of a building?”
“Only temporarily, sir, so that your irritation with police call boxes may pass. I understand that Officer Comsky interfered with your attempt to destroy one of them with a baseball bat.”
“I wanted to open it.”
“They are not locked, Mr. Compton.”
“This one was locked.”
“I understand Officer Comsky opened it in your presence. Is that so?”
Fenton nodded unhappily.
“I understand you were excited—over a girl in danger—a girl named Margie?”
Fenton kept his mouth firmly closed now. He had no desire to add further evidence of insanity to his already shaky position.
“I am very interested in this girl, the one named Margie who is mixed up with the Dravinians,” Rothschild said. “We have been trying to locate her. You could do us a great service and help the girl, too, if you can only tell us where she might be found.”
“I don’t know any Margie. Never heard the name before. And I desire to call my lawyer. Now.”
“Of course you can call your lawyer, Mr. Compton—it’s the Compton Foundation, isn’t it, and obviously there is some connection with Alan Compton, who designs for M.P. Creations. Now I am not trying to trap you into any admission of insanity, Mr. Compton. You know that—and I know you are not insane. So suppose we get together on this. That kid’s life may be in danger, and that would be a hell of a thing to have on your conscience, wouldn’t it, Mr. Compton?”
“How about your own conscience?’’ Fenton demanded surlily. “I said before that minutes counted, but those idiots could only surmise that I was some kind of nut.”
“Suppose we say that minutes count now. Where is Margie Beck?”
“All right,” Fenton agreed, “but don’t think I have forgotten or that I am any less firm in my purpose—”
“Where is she?”
“I can make a number of educated guesses. The first would be the offices of the Dravinian Oil Company on Park Avenue.”