by Howard Fast
“I know the place.”
“When we finish talking, get in your car and drive over there. Go alone. The place is run by a guy called Mulligan, and he’s usually there until six-thirty or seven. Tell him you want to rent one of his boats, a ten-horsepower outboard. Tell him you want it for late tonight, and you can cook up any story you want to explain that. He’ll scream that he don’t let the boats out at night and that his season ain’t open. Give him twenty-five dollars. That’ll open his season and pay for overtime. If you don’t know how to run an outboard, tell him to show you. A halfwit can learn in about three minutes. Make sure the engine starts and that you got an extra can of gas. Tie the boat up at the landing there and go back to your house. Wait there. Some time around midnight, you’ll get another call and specific instructions. Make sure you got the key handy when that comes. Now listen—do like I say, exactly, and your kid will live. But louse me up, buddy, and so help me God, you’ll never see that kid again. Do you follow me, Camber?”
“I follow you.”
“No cops, Camber. You want to see your kid again, no cops. No one goes in or out of your house. You go out—your wife stays there. The bell rings, she don’t answer. Just play it straight, Camber. Got me?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Be good.”
He hung up. I stood there as Alice re-entered the room. She managed to smile. “I’m better now, Johnny,” she said. “I’m glad he called. It put my feet back on the ground. I guess I died a little during the past half hour. I guess most people die a little, some time or other. I suppose you have to, life being what it is. But I’m all right now. Polly’s alive.”
“I pray to God she is,” I said.
“She is. I feel clear about it. You know, they’re going to do it with a boat, and they expect us to bring the key. They’re almost sure we will but not one hundred per cent. They can’t be one hundred per cent sure, Johnny.”
“They could still—”
“No,” Alice said firmly. “They can’t kill Polly. Because they will not get the key or know where it is until we have seen Polly. So until we see her, she will be alive—”
“Unless we drop the key somewhere. I mean, they could propose a place for us to drop the key—without seeing them.”
“Perhaps, Johnny, but they can’t be sure. Why should they do it now when they can do it later? That is our presumption—because it must be, Johnny. We are going to be clear and cool from here on, and we’re going to play a game for Polly’s life. We’re going to use our heads, Johnny—and no more panic. Promise me.”
“All right, I promise,” I agreed. “What now?”
“You follow his instructions.”
“Now?”
“Right now, Johnny. I think they’re watching us.”
I went through my pockets. I had six dollars and forty cents. Alice’s purse yielded eleven dollars and twenty-two cents.
“It’s not enough,” I told her. “I can’t be sure that this Mulligan will do it for twenty-five dollars. Suppose he wants fifty?”
“Cash a check. Dave Hudson’s store is still open. He’ll cash a check for you.”
We went into the kitchen, where Alice kept the checkbook. Since it was almost but not quite the first of April, we had more than two hundred dollars in the bank. Our bank balance moves in a wave, and the end of the month was usually the crest of the wave.
“Make it for seventy-five dollars,” she said. “I think Dave can cash that much, and with the cash we have, it will be enough.”
I wrote out the check.
“Do what you have to do, Johnny. Just do it calmly and get back here.”
“You’ll be all right?”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll keep the door locked.”
I kissed her, and then I left.
8: Lenny
I backed out the car. If the house was being watched, I couldn’t see the watchers. Then I drove to Dave Hudson’s store, trying to keep my mind free of thought, free of everything except what I had been instructed to do.
Dave Hudson has a hardware and sporting-goods store that he set up after World War II. He had enlisted with his twin brother, both of them nineteen years old, and they had taken out small insurance policies with each other as the beneficiary. His brother was killed, and after the war Dave used the money to open the store; but half of him was gone. He never married and he kept late hours at the store, working at the small machine shop he had set up there. He invented things, and someday one of his inventions will make its mark and he will become fabulously rich. If that happens, he won’t be very happy because he’ll have to give up the store. A millionaire can’t run a hardware store in a small town.
I got to be pretty close to him because I taught him how to prepare blueprints and diagram devices. He was grateful and gave me good buys on whatever I bought in his place. He was a small man with sad blue eyes and a face that seemed to be trying to remember; his face said that he had forgotten something, lost it somewhere along the line, and was trying to recollect where and what.
It was six o’clock when I got to his store. There were no customers there, just Dave, hunched over the counter and reading a book. It was Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. He had finished only the first year of college, and he read things that he felt would improve him and give him some of the education he had missed.
When he looked up at me, he said, “What is it, Johnny? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, Dave,” I replied impatiently. “I’m in a hurry. I need a favor.”
“Anything you say, Johnny.”
“I got a check for seventy-five dollars. Can you cash it?”
“I think so.”
Watching me curiously, he went into his pocket for his money, took out a roll of bills, and peeled off seven tens and a five. I gave him the check. Nervously, I had been glancing here and there, and I noticed a case of target pistols behind the counter. They were automatic pistols.
“What are those?” I asked him, pointing.
“Target pistols, Johnny.”
“What caliber?”
“Twenty-two.”
“That’s the only caliber you carry?”
“What is it?” he asked curiously. “What’s eating you, Johnny? These are target pistols. They only come in twenty-two. I don’t carry any heavy-duty stuff.”
“Is it twenty-two long or short?”
“These are longs.”
“How much?”
“This is a fine pistol, Johnny. The magazine holds twelve shots. It costs thirty-eight dollars—”
“Give me one, Dave, and trust me for it. I’ll bring you the money tomorrow.”
“No.”
“Why not? Haven’t I dealt with you enough to trust me for a lousy thirty-eight dollars?”
“God-damn it, Johnny, you know it’s not any lousy thirty-eight dollars. You want fifty dollars or a hundred dollars—tell me. I’ll lend it to you. Your word’s good. But no—no, you don’t come in here this way, looking the way you look, and try to buy a gun. You don’t want it for target-shooting—”
“How the hell do you know?” I shouted.
“Listen to yourself. Look at yourself. There’s a mirror over there. Look at yourself—and you tell me you want a gun. You need help, Johnny, I’ll try to help you. You’re in some kind of trouble, maybe I can help you. But not with a gun.”
“God-damn you, Dave, I want a gun. I’m offering you cash money, you got to sell it to me. Here’s the money.” I went into my pocket.
“Like hell I do,” he said quietly. “Read up on the laws of this state. I don’t have to sell you a gun, and I won’t. There’s nothing wrong with anyone that a gun can cure—and that’s what you want to do, cure something with a gun. It’s written all over you. No. I say no. The hell with it! Guns are a disease, the disease this lousy, stinking world suffers from. No gun.”
He opened his book and began to read, but he was trembling all over with the emotion of his thoughts and what
he had said. I’m sure he didn’t see the page or the words. I stared at him a moment, and then said, “Thanks for nothing.”
He didn’t look up as I left.
Outside, the day was failing, finishing in a turgid pile of clouds, golden and then turning orange and red as I watched. It had been a hot spring day. It would go down in weather history as the warmest March day in many a year, and it was leaving the whole world in a golden glow. It was the first day of real spring, and the world had awakened, and in that world a child was crying. I was filled with those tears as I came out to my car; I was weak and frightened and filled with frustration and anger when I heard a woman’s voice call my name.
“Johnny Camber?”
She was sitting in a red Mercedes sports car, parked in front of my old Ford. I walked toward her with disbelief, and she held open the door and said, “Sit down, Johnny. Sit down for one minute. Don’t look at me like that.”
Pink light reflected from the store window lit her face, and through everything I felt, I also felt that this was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Lenny Montez stared at me with a wide-eyed purity, frank and open. I saw the face of a saint.
“You lousy bitch!”
“Don’t say things like that, Johnny. Sit down here, please, for one moment. I can help you.”
I sat down in the car next to her.
“You helped me,” I said. “You took my kid. God-damn you to hell—how could you? A little, defenseless kid, four years old. How could you?”
“I had to, Johnny.”
“You had to. Like hell you had to! Just like you had to watch me and follow me here!”
“I had to do it, Johnny. Would you want him to send Angie for that?”
“Where is she? Is she all right?”
“She’s all right now. I can’t tell you where she is.”
“She’s all right? You swear? They haven’t hurt her?”
“I swear. I swear. Johnny, just to meet you like this, I risk my life. That’s the truth. If Montez knew I was meeting you here like this, he’d kill me.”
“That’s a lie.”
“The truth, Johnny. Believe me.”
“Where’s Polly?”
“My God, I can’t tell you that, Johnny.”
“But you know?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Then what do you want?”
“I want you to listen to me, Johnny. For just five minutes, listen to me and believe me. Believe that I feel something for you that I never felt for anyone else.”
“The hell with what you feel for me!”
“Johnny, don’t make it harder for me—it is so hard already. You don’t know what my life has been. You can’t imagine. It’s not in your world and experience to imagine. You feel that you are a prisoner now of dirty people—well all my life I have been a prisoner of dirty people. And now Montez. Can you think of what it means to be married to someone like Montez? Can you think of what I feel when he touches me, not from enjoyment, but to remind me always who is master and who is slave? I am not saying I am a decent and good person, Johnny, but there are some decent and good things in me. All my life I dream of having a chance—of having it with a man who isn’t a swine or a madman. Now is that chance. I swear that I am telling you the truth, Johnny. I know where the safe-deposit box is. I know what is in it. I know where I can sell what is in it for two million dollars—two million dollars, Johnny, and you have the key. That’s all we need, the key, and two million dollars is ours, Johnny, yours and mine—us, together, Johnny—enough money—”
“And my wife?” I broke in.
“Your wife! Angie told me about your wife. She is a lump. She is nothing.”
“And Polly?”
“A man can get over anything, Johnny. I know that. You will forget about the kid. You will be unhappy, but no one can remain unhappy with two million dollars.”
“I forget about Polly. Why do I forget about Polly?”
“Because it’s no use. Do you expect them to give the kid back to you? So she can point a finger at me? At Angie? At Montez? You must be sensible and practical, Johnny.”
“Sensible and practical,” I repeated thoughtfully. “This is the world I live in, isn’t it?”
“Say yes, Johnny—please say yes.”
“I walk out on my wife. My daughter is murdered. But I have you and two million dollars, and then in time I am happy. You must believe that I can say yes to this. Isn’t that so? You wouldn’t have come to me with this if you didn’t feel that I would say yes.”
“And you will, Johnny?”
“What are you?” I whispered. “You and Montez and the others—is that what the whole world is? Am I only a stranger here? A fool, a helpless, hopeless simpleton? I sat down here, and I said to myself that before I left this car, I’d kill you. I’d strangle you with my two hands if that would help one little bit to bring my daughter back to me. And now I can’t touch you. You filthy bitch—I can’t touch you!”
She leaned toward me and expectorated full in my face. I didn’t move, didn’t wipe her saliva away. I was cold and tight and full of agony.
“It takes a long time for an American boy to grow up,” I said to her. “But sometimes it happens.” Then I wiped my face with my sleeve and got out of the car.
She started the Mercedes and gunned it, and pulled away like a drag racer.
I had a clear and vivid sensation of emptiness as I drove from the hardware store to the Boat Livery on the Hackensack River. It was not a mental sensation, but an actual physical feeling of being a husk that clothed emptiness. My heart and my stomach and my liver had disappeared, leaving a pit of want. It was a terribly forlorn feeling, and as darkness fell and my headlights picked a hole through the trees, I experienced the ultimate of loneliness, a man bereft of everything, who drives through the shapeless night in the symbolic eternity of a surrealist painting.
It was a relief to see the sign of the Boat Livery. I parked the car and climbed down the wooden stairs to a little house that stood at one end of a long, planked dock that poked out some forty feet into the river.
Here on the river, the light still lingered, a faint reflection of the last tint of color in the sky and the dancing ripples that mirrored the lights from houses along the riverbank. Upstream, where the highway crossed the river, an endless line of cars fled through the falling night, their tiny lights glittering like the devices on clever toys, their horns honking distantly, but apart from the river and unable to disturb its serene evening beauty; and the same sheltering evening hid the filth and garbage that habitually paraded through the Hackensack River, and turned the dirt and oil-crusted surface into a shining mantle of smooth ebony, streaked like black marble with the veins of light.
In spite of myself and my own burden of misery, the river caught and held me, so that for a long moment I just stood there staring at its surface and hearing as much with my mind as my ears the far distant and so-very-faint hooting of ships’ horns in the Newark Bay, miles to the south of where I was. It was the first deep stillness of evening, when a curtain of absolute silence seems to hang in the slim cleft that separates night from day, and in this silence, the most muted sound touches the eardrums and delivers its message.
Footsteps interrupted this, and made me turn to where a big, shambling man made his way toward me from the house.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked, but without malice. “This is private property and before the season and past the hours of honest business. What in hell do you want?”
He was in his fifties, red-faced, as much as I could see in the poor light, curly hair, and a mashed, fighter’s nose. His shoulders were bent, but power still lingered in their slope. He was not a man I would want trouble with.
“Are you Jack Mulligan?” I asked him.
“I am.”
“My name’s John Camber. I live over in Telton.”
“Camber. What can I do for you?”
“You rent boats?”
/> “When the proper time arrives, I do.”
“I need a boat for tonight—with a ten-horsepower outboard engine.”
“You must be kidding.” He smiled, snow-white and perfect false teeth gleaming in the dark. “I’m cleaning and painting now, not renting. Our season opens May 15, and when it does, the hours are six to six. And Camber, I don’t rent for moonlight sails or night fishing. The river’s no bargain by night, but when you get down on the Meadows, it’s all stops out. Wouldn’t I be a damn fool to give someone a boat by night for the lousy six dollars a day I charge?”
The Meadows he spoke of was no grassy grazing ground, but a vast expanse of swampland, thousands of acres, that begins a couple of miles south of where we were, at the point where the Overpeck Creek flows into the Hackensack River, and from there stretches all the distance south to the Newark Bay. This enormous tide-water marshland is no more than four miles, as the crow flies, from Fifth Avenue in New York, and on a clear day, from the middle of it, sitting in a boat, you can see the tower of the Empire State Building poking up into the sky from behind the Palisades. But its proximity to New York City has in no way blunted its quality of wildness and desolation, and while potentially one of the most valuable pieces of acreage in the world, it has so far defied the attempts of man to drain it and stabilize it.
Threaded through with creeks and narrow rivers, the bulk of the Meadows is covered over with a growth of tall marsh grass and is virtually inaccessible, a soggy slime, as much of a mantrap as quicksand when the tide is out, and a table of a few inches of water when the tide is in. While channels lead the Hackensack River through the whole length of it and eventually to the Upper New York Bay and the sea, most of it remains the untroubled domain of snakes, waterfowl, muskrats, and lizards. A half a dozen times I had been down the main channel to fish, but the fishing is poor, the summer air hot and stifling over the shallow water, and the whole aspect of the place sad and desolate.
Now I could only agree with Mulligan. “Maybe so,” I said, “but I got to have that boat.”