Black Alice

by Thomas M. ; Sladek Disch; Sladek Disch

  'Later this afternoon I'm going to ...'

  'Yes, I read that. Do you think you can find time meanwhile to do a bit of routine inquiry for us?' Madding delivered his orders so that one might have thought he was really in doubt whether Gann could find time.

  'Oh, I guess it's possible,' Owen allowed.

  'Good enough. It's a kidnapping case in Baltimore. Little girl, eleven years old, name of Raleigh. Here's her picture. It was taken only two months ago at her school. St. Arnobia's. Over near Charlottesville.'

  'Pretty little thing.'

  'I suppose she is. She was grabbed Saturday morning, so the statutory three days are over and we're on the case officially now.'

  'And they think she's down here?'

  'Nothing as definite as that. But the girl's uncle is a lawyer— and incidentally he's in charge of her trust fund—and he showed up Sunday at the Baltimore field office with a lawbook under his arm. Seems as if there was another kidnapping, back in '49, that was done almost the same way: a little girl, a large inheritance, and kidnapping the governess along with the girl to use her as a messenger.'

  'So she must have given you a description of the man.'

  'Only of the Negro chauffeur that's in on it. The girl was transferred to another car, a Buick, copper-coloured, '57 or thereabouts. The governess didn't see the driver of that car. We showed her Dorman's latest prison photos but she couldn't say one way or another. At least we know she isn't suggestible.'

  'Dorman, I take it, was the man who pulled the '49 kidnapping.'

  'Mm-hm. He got life sentence, which was commuted, and he was released less than a year ago.'

  'It sounds more and more like he's the man.'

  'Except that Dorman isn't dumb. There's more than one way to get an eleven-year-old girl into a car. Why should he repeat himself—right down to the detail of the Negro chauffeur? It's almost as though he'd signed a letter and mailed it to us. As a matter of fact, he's done that too.'

  'Oh, come on!'

  'Well, the parents received a typed threatening letter yesterday with a Norfolk postmark. And Norfolk is where he used to operate from.'

  'Well, if it isn't him, then...'

  Then someone is systematically laying a false trail. Whoever is doing it, even if it is Dorman, must know that we'll connect the two kidnappings. Even without the assistance of the girl's uncle. Though, admittedly, he got there first.'

  'Could it be him, the uncle?'

  The man's seventy, and he already has control of the trust fund. What motive could he have?' Madding, as has been noted, was not one to interest himself in questions of motive.

  'What about the governess then. Since so much of the information comes from her...'

  'The Baltimore police have messed that up. Hauled her off to jail, gave her the third degree when she was damn near hysterical already. Now she won't talk unless she's got her lawyer sitting beside her. Not that she's been un-co-operative. If the story that she's telling is true, then she's been a model witness. She even drew a pretty good picture of the chauffeur from memory.' Madding showed him a photostat of the drawing.

  Owen's lips tightened. 'A nigger.'

  Madding laughed. 'You'd make a great Klansman.' Owen blushed. He had forgotten Madding was a Yankee.

  'As a matter of fact, so is she. Negro, that is. She also had the presence of mind to plant a clue on the kid that may make it easier to trace her. She gave her a first edition of Just-So Stories, which looks like a piece of junk but which is worth a couple of hundred dollars. It was a gift from the uncle. We've put ads in the newspapers up and down the coast and phoned bookstores, offering $400 if they've got the edition we want. With Luck, it'll be tossed into a garbage can and some scavenger will notice it.'

  The threatening letter you mentioned—what was that about?'

  They'd found out somehow—or guessed—that the girl's father had gone to the police, and they were making noises to frighten him. Nothing to be learned from the letter except the postmark and that whoever wrote it wasn't illiterate.'

  'Are the parents going to pay the ransom?'

  'Yes and no. It's not the parents' money, you see. Comes from the trust fund that the girl's maternal grandfather set up when he cut the parents out of his will. But the ransom is being paid. In fact, the girl's father is giving it to them today. The Baltimore office is keeping its eye on that operation, of course.' Madding smiled, the way a man will when he's itching to tell a very funny joke.

  'How much?' Owen asked.

  'A million dollars. Yes, I whistled too. But, to come back down to earth, your job will be to go around to these places...' Madding handed Owen a typed list, '... and find out the last time anyone there saw your good friend Harry Dorman.'

  Owen looked at the names on the list—bars, cheap hotels, and ... 'What in God's name did Dorman have to do with the Green Pastures Funeral Home?'

  'I thought you'd ask that,' Madding said. 'As it happens, Green Pastures is no longer what it once was. It has become a cathouse, and Dorman used to pimp for it.'

  Owen grinned boyishly and rose to leave. 'Well, I suppose that's all of it for now, eh?'

  'Not quite, Owen. Sit down. Before you go, I'd like to tell you a dirty story...'

  Chapter 8

  'Here?' Alice asked, pointing at the sign nailed to the fluted wooden pillars of the porch, and, just perceptibly, cringing. 'Oh, surely not here!'

  'You ain't going to make a scene now, are you, child?' Bessy tightened her grip on the girl's hand and began dragging her towards the swaybacked steps. It was five o'clock of a misty Sunday morning on North Tidewater Road, so that no matter what kind of fuss Alice put up at this point, it would make no difference.

  'But the sign! Why do you want to come here? What are you going to do?'

  'Oh—the sign!' Bessy had gone in and out the front door so many times that she wasn't even aware now of the weathered, but still distinct legend: Green Pastures Funeral Home—then, beneath, in larger, gilt letters UNDERTAKING. When she'd bought the place at auction, Bessy had decided to leave the sign up as a joke, and from a sense, besides, of the traditional; now the joke was grown so stale as to be, in Bessy's eyes, invisible. 'Don't take no account of that sign, honey. This here ain't no funeral home no more.' Then, though this joke too had lost most of its punch: 'Now it's a fun house, and we got different undertakings going on.'

  Reassured but still dragging her feet, Alice let herself be led up the steps. Despite all the sleep she had had on the bus out of Baltimore, and then in the bus station in Richmond, and in the second bus, she was still groggy. Her back ached from having had to sit up all night, and her feet were raw from the long walk in shoes but no stockings. Worst of all, she was starving; since yesterday's breakfast she hadn't had anything but one ham-and-cheese sandwich on the bus. In a sense, she had been just as glad as Bessy to be here, to be anywhere so long as it marked an end, so long as she could take off these shoes and eat and take a shower to wash off all this brown ook

  Bessy rummaged through her carryall for her house-key, then, growing impatient, began pounding on the door. Within, Alice could hear running footsteps and a little girl's giggle (had someone else been kidnapped too?), and more footsteps ...

  'Christ Almighty, Clara,' Bessy called out, 'stop playing footsy, and open this damn door.'

  The lock rattled, and the door swung open, creakingly, upon a darkened foyer. There were more footsteps and whispers, but it was too dim to see anything but the indefinite, hulking silhouettes of furniture. Alice tiptoed through the foyer, straining to see and holding her breath. This was more like it! This was what kidnapping should be like—a strange, dark house, whispers, mysterious footsteps!

  Behind her, Bessy closed and locked the door, then demolished the splendid suspense by throwing on the light switch and discovering, perched at opposite ends of a tawdry leatherette couch, in the centre of the most ordinary living-room, two grown-ups, a man and a woman. The man was black, the woman white.

/>   'Clara, Fay, say Hello to Dinah.'

  The white woman said, 'Hello, Dinah,' and broke into giggles. Alice realised with a pang of disappointment that it was her laughter that she had mistaken for another child's.

  'What the hell!' said the black man, who was ugly and buck-toothed and not, after all, a man.

  'You watch your language around Dinah, you hear, Clara?'

  'My name isn't Dinah!' Alice said with exasperation. 'I tried to explain to you yesterday, but you wouldn't listen. My name is...'

  'It's Dinah now, honey.' Bessy sighed gratefully as she began to ease off her shoes. 'Babydoll, why don't you go out in the kitchen and make us up some nice stiff drinks?'

  'Okay!' said Fay brightly. 'With ice cubes!' Fay was, despite that she wore only a ratty seersucker bathrobe, as pretty as a movie star, and when she jumped up from the couch it was with a bouncy, lithe grace astonishing in a woman of mature years. Her hair was the same whitish blonde that Alice's had been only hours before.

  'She gonna turn tricks?' Clara asked Bessy.

  'Now what do you think? Good Lord, Clara, she ain't no more than ten years old, and she's littler than a cheese mite!'

  'I'm eleven, going on twelve!' Alice protested. 'And my name is Alice !'

  But Bessy and Clara continued their enigmatic conversation quite oblivious to what Alice had to say.

  'So if she ain't here to work, what's she doing here? You sure as hell ain't gone and adopted her, for the love of sweet charity!'

  Bessy's sigh expressed both resignation and pleasure—resignation at Clara's obstinacy and pleasure at being altogether out of her shoes. 'Since when does anyone work around here?' she inquired of her shoe. 'Ain't no one been working so's I'd notice it these last ten years.'

  'Like hell!' said Clara. For a moment Alice wondered if maybe she wasn't a man. She was dressed like a man, in levis and a denim jacket. She had, as nearly as Alice could tell, a man's figure, albeit she was scrawny. She moved like a man. Her hair was cut short and shaped, with the aid of a pound or two of grease, into a spiky ducktail. Lastly, she had, if not a man's voice, a man's way of speaking.

  'Clara honey, you are in pain, a real pain,' Bessy said good-humouredly.

  'Shove it!' said Clara fiercely.

  From the next room came a tinkling sound, like Japanese wind-chimes. Fay entered the living-room backwards through a swinging door, carrying a tray upon which four glasses of what Alice hoped without much conviction, might be cream soda were arrayed in a neat square. She served Bessy first.

  Bessy sipped her drink. 'Why, that tastes very good, Fay. Thank you.'

  Fay beamed. 'I made it myself.'

  'It's real good—but why did you make four?'

  Fay's blue eyes opened very wide. 'Because I counted! I didn't forget Fay this time. I counted one, two, three, four!'

  'Crap!' said Clara. 'Don't you know nuthin? Dinah here can't drink this stuff. Fay. She's only ten years old.'

  'Eleven,' Alice whispered to herself dismally. But no one was interested in the truth.

  A puzzled finger strayed up to Fay's pouting lips, allowing the tray, upon which the glasses were no longer symmetrically disposed, to teeter portentously. Clara quickly took her own glass off the tray, and the tray righted itself.

  Fay's smile, when it came, was dazzling. 'Why, then I get both of these! And...' (glancing mischievously at Alice) '... you don't get none!'

  'I don't get any,' Alice corrected her. She knew it wasn't good manners, but then Fay herself was hardly a model of deportment.

  With a little squeal of pleasure Fay plumped down on the couch, one glass in each hand. Seeing that abundance of rosy pink flesh before her, Alice felt more poignantly than ever how dirty and black she was. Fay looked as fresh as a baby, despite the cosmetic excesses spread over her pretty face. Her lips were so thickly frosted with lipstick that they looked like two pieces of pink fudge, and her eyes were like the glass eyes of a very expensive doll, the clearest sky-blue. They regarded the great world round about with a wide-open look of perpetual astonishment—an effect much heightened by the thin mascara arches that were inscribed upon her forehead fully half an inch above the probable line of her eyebrows. Her short, turned-up nose was very pink about the nostrils, as though she cried a lot, or had a cold, or was a bunny rabbit. She was, in short, very pretty, though it was not the sort of prettiness Alice would have wished for herself—under any other circumstances than the present.

  Clara, by contrast, seemed to have set out to make herself ugly with the same deliberation with which Fay tried to look nice. Admittedly both of them had considerably native endowments. Clara's eyes protruded from a long, wedge-shaped face that was the hue of a charred pine log; beneath wide cheekbones her face tapered to a point at, unfortunately, her mouth, where one large white tooth overlapped a second, which in turn stood forth in proud independence from the lower lip. It was a weaselish face across which flitted a weaselish range of expressions: suspicion, calculation, a readiness either to pounce or to retreat, in equal measure, and when she glanced sideways at Fay, which she did not a little, something like hunger.

  'Here comes Donald Duck,' Fay announced, raising one glass to her pink-frosting lips. 'Donald Duck wants to come in the door. Open the door for Donald Duck!' The door opened for Donald Duck and Fay took a delicate sip of her drink.

  'Now here comes Micky Mouse. He wants to come in the door too.' She raised the second glass to her lips, and the door opened for Mickey Mouse.

  Alice looked questioningly at Bessy, who stirred uneasily in her chair. You see, honey,' she explained, 'by the looks of her, Fay seems to be a grown-up woman, but inside she's just a little girl. Inside she ain't even as old as you are.'

  'But I'm not a baby!' Fay announced in a concerned tone.

  'No, you're not a baby,' Bessy agreed.

  Clara pointed a warning finger at Alice. 'You keep outa my way, understand! Just keep outa my way, and I'll keep outa yours.'

  'But I'm not in your way,' Alice protested. 'You're sitting down, for heaven's sake!'

  'Just keep out of it, that's all I'll say. Kids don't have any business in a place like this. Christ, how I hate kids!'

  'I love kids,' Fay said solemnly. I'm a mother, and I just adore babies. Would you like to see my baby?'

  'Not if she's sleeping,' Alice replied.

  'Oh, I can wake her.' Fay set her two glasses down on a three-legged end-table that was jammed into a corner of the room for support, then she got down on her hands and knees and felt beneath the sofa. 'Here she is,' she exclaimed at last. She held up a cheap, naked plastic doll by one leg. 'Isn't she just the sweetest?'

  Fay sat back and began crooning over her baby and letting it drink from her glass of whiskey. 'I used to have a name for her, but I forget now what it was. Shall I call her Dinah now— for you?'

  'My name isn't Dinah. If you want to name your baby after me, you should call her Alice.'

  'Alice, my sweet little baby Alice,''Fay purred

  'Your name is Dinah now, young lady, and you remember that. You say your name is Alice one more time, and I'm gonna let Clara give you a whipping with her strap. And believe you me, that won't be no fun.' Clara smiled weaselishly, in agreement. 'Now if someone asks you what your name is, what you going to tell them?' ' ;

  'Dinah,' Alice answered sulkily.

  'That's right. Because you is Dinah now, honey.'

  'Can I take a shower?'

  'Ain't no shower,' Clara declared flatly.

  'A bath, then? I want to wash this ook off of me.'

  Clara regarded Alice with curiosity, while Bessy laughed softly into her depleted whiskey glass. 'You go take a bath, Dinah honey, if that's what you want, but ain't nothing going to wash off you but a little dust from our bus ride. On account of you're coloured folks now, the same as Clara and me.'

  'A Negro?'

  'If that's what you want to call it, honey.'

  Alice ran down the long hallway, opening doors to the bedr
ooms until she found the bath. It was a very queer bath indeed, with a tub fully eight feet long, but Alice could not spare a second thought for even the most anamalous tub now She scrubbed her face and hands with soap and hot water, but the

  only result seemed to be that her face became darker,

  A Negro! She thought of all the times this summer she had wished for a nice tan, of the times she had wanted to be like Miss Godwin. And now she was, if anything, darker than her governess—and it was awful, awful! She wanted desperately to be herself again. Instead, she was ... Dinah. Dinah had been a Negro, but on the other hand, Dinah had not been real. She'd been a fantasy—part of Alice's sickness. But she was over her sickness now, and she knew that Dinah had never been anything more than pretending. Pretending—and then, believing in it. Dinah didn't exist.

  But as she stared into the mirror of the medicine cabinet, she seemed to hear a teeny-tiny voice in her head, and it said: 'Oh yes I do!'

  Bessy could hear Alice sobbing in the bathroom, but there wasn't very much she could do to comfort her. Besides, she thought, there were plenty enough little girls in this world crying their eyes out about the colour of their skin, and they was always going to be just one colour, black. Whereas Alice would start turning pale again in a week if she didn't take another pill. Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea if all white folks took one of those every so often, just so they'd see what it was like to be coloured folk.

  'Oh my dear little baby Alice' crooned Fay over her doll. Clara gave her the raspberry and tramped upstairs to her bedroom.

  Alice: Bessy had to stop thinking of her as Alice, or she'd let her tongue slip one of these days. She was Dinah now. Strange, that it had to be just that name, and not Georgia, for instance, or Mae Pearl. That would have been a better name for her: you don't hear of any white girls by the name of Mae Pearl. But Dinah was all right too. Bessy wasn't going to change the plans she'd been told, not a jot nor a tittle.

  Not that she had any urge to. The more she thought the whole things over, the better she liked it. The idea of feeding them pills to the kid was a stroke of genius. Bessy hadn't even known there was such pills, but it turned out they was made of the same stuff that went into those special suntan lotions that people used in the winter instead of going to Florida—only about fifty times stronger. The beauty of it was that Bessy could take Alice anywhere, and she wouldn't be noticed. Because she wasn't Alice any more—she wasn't the little white girl who'd have her pictures in the newspapers—she was Dinah, a black little pickaninny, and the next best thing to invisible, as far as white folks was concerned.