Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  We entered the restaurant at about ten-thirty. No one gave me a second look.

  When Lawless introduced himself the maître d’ guided us to a table in an isolated corner of the main dining room. Lawless put himself in a seat with his back to rest of the room. I was seated in an alcove, hidden from view by the bauguette.

  He ordered salmon hash with shirred eggs and I had the Marscapone pancakes with a side of apple smoked bacon.

  After the breakfast was served I said, “I’m not going to work for you, you know.”

  “I know that you don’t expect to take the job but the day is young.”

  “No. I’m not working for you under any condition. I don’t even know what we’re doing now. How can I take a job where I don’t even know where I’ll wake up in the morning?”

  “You’d rather have a job where you’ll know where you’ll be every day for the rest of your life?” he asked.

  “No. Of course not, but, I mean I don’t want to be involved with criminals and dirty politics.”

  “You’re the one who said that he always pays his taxes, Felix,” he said. “That makes you a part of an elite criminal and political class. If you buy gasoline or knitted sweaters or even bananas then you belong to the greatest crime family on Earth.”

  I don’t know why I argued with him. I had been around people like him ever since college. Politico dingbats is what my father calls them. People who see conspiracies in our economic system, people who believe America is actually set against the notion of liberty.

  I talked about the Constitution. He talked about the millions dead in Africa, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Nagasaki. I talked about the freedom of speech. He came back with the millions of dark-skinned men and women who spend most of their lives in prison. I talked about international terrorism. He brushed that off and concentrated on the embargos imposed on Iraq, Iran, Cuba, and North Korea.

  I was about to bring out the big guns: the American peoples and the part they played in World War Two. But just then a familiar man came up and sat down at our table.

  “Right on time, Ray,” Archibald Lawless said.

  Our guest was dressed in a dark blue suit with a white shirt held together at the cuffs by sapphire studs. Raymond, I supposed his first name was. The only title I knew him by was Captain Delgado.

  “Archie,” he said. “Felix. What’s up?”

  The way he said my name was respectful, as if I deserved a place at the table. As much as I wanted to deny it, I liked that feeling.

  “Two tables over to your right,” Lawless told the police captain. “A man and a woman talking over caviar and scrambled eggs.”

  I leaned over and slanted my eyes to see them. Through the clear glass frames of my disguise I recognized Valerie Lox, the Madison Avenue real estate agent. The whole time we had been talking she was there meeting with a man who was unknown to me.

  She was wearing a red Chanel suit and an orange scarf. I’d never seen the man she was with. He was porcine and yet handsome. His movements were self-assured to the degree where he almost seemed careless.

  “You were recently made aware of a diamond theft, were you not, Captain Delgado?” Lawless asked.

  “Are you telling me or digging?” the cop asked back.

  “Red diamonds,” Lawless replied. “Millions of dollars’ worth. A syndicate represented by Lionel Strangman reported it to their insurance company.”

  “You have my attention.”

  “Is Felix still being sought in connection with the murder of Henry Lansman?”

  “Until we find another candidate.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Why would you even think of me?”

  Delgado shrugged but said nothing.

  “The boy has a right to know why he’s being sought,” Archibald said.

  “The gems,” the police captain said as if it were patently obvious. “A special unit started investigating Lamarr as soon as the theft was reported. They had Lansman, Brexel, Cornell, and Ms. Lox over there under surveillance. There was a tap on her phone. When she called Cornell we picked up your name. Then when you were photographed at the scene of Lansman’s murder you became a suspect.”

  “Why not Sacorliss?” I asked.

  “He’s out of bounds,” Delgado said. “Works as an informant for the FBI.”

  “Regardless,” Lawless said. “Sacorliss is your killer.”

  “Who does he work for?” Delgado asked.

  “As you indicated,” Lawless said with a sense of the dramatic in his tone, “the same people that you work for. He also killed Benny Lamarr and Kenneth Cornell. If you look into the records of those deaths you will find that they have disappeared. Gone to Arizona, I hear.”

  “Fuckin’ meatheads,” Delgado muttered.

  “I agree,” Lawless said. “You have another problem however.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The man sitting with Ms. Lox is Rudolph Bickell, one of the richest men in Canada. She is passing the diamonds to him. She may have already done so.”

  “You want me to arrest the richest man in Canada on your say-so?”

  “It’s a toss-up, my friend. Take the plunge and maybe you’ll lose everything. Don’t take it and pass up the chance of a lifetime.”

  Lawless gestured for the bill and then said to Delgado, “You can pay for our meal, officer. Because even just the arrest of Wayne Sacorliss will keep you in good standing with your superiors.

  “Come on, Felix,” he said then.

  And he left without paying another bill.

  20

  Even the Wall Street Journal covered the arrest of the billionaire Rudolph Bickell. They also asked how the mysterious entrepreneur was able to make bail and flee the country within three hours of his arrest at the posh Peninsula Hotel in New York City. Bickell’s spokesperson in Toronto told reporters that the industrialist had no knowledge that the diamonds he was purchasing were stolen; that there was no law against acquiring the gemstones from the legal representative of a diamond dealer. Valerie Lox, who was in jail, was working for a man named Benny Lamarr who had died in an unrelated auto accident.

  The Journal didn’t cover the murder of optical materials dealer Wayne Sacorliss. I had to read about that in the Metro Section of The New York Times. The police had no motive for the crime but they had not ruled out theft. It seemed that Sacorliss was known to carry large sums of cash.

  No one connected Sacorliss with Lamarr.

  There were no policemen waiting at my door either.

  The next morning at five-fifty I was at the front desk of the Tessla building marveling bleary eyed at the saintliness of Joan of Arc.

  “Mr. Orlean,” a young red-headed guard said.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Mr. Lawless gave us a picture of you so that we’d know to let you in even if you came in after five fifty-five.”

  He answered the door before I knocked. That morning he wore white overalls and a bloodred shirt. At his gesture I went into his office and sat on the tree trunk I’d used a few days before.

  “What was it all about?” I asked him.

  “That why you’re here, Felix?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You want to know why,” he said with a smile. “It bothers you to sit alone in your room thinking that the papers might have gotten it wrong, that the police might be covering up a crime. It’s troubling that you can be exonerated from suspicion in a murder case with a few words over an expensive breakfast in midtown Manhattan. That’s not the world you thought you were living in.”

  If I were superstitious I might have believed that he was a mind reader. As it was, I thought that he had incredible logical and intuitive faculties.

  “Yes,” I said, “but there’s something else.”

  “First,” he said, “let me tell you what I know.”

  He sat back in his chair and brought his hands together in front of his face as if in Christian prayer.

  “There was, in the works of Agin
eau Armaments, a shipment being readied for delivery in Ecuador at the end of next month. The company slated to receive the shipment is a dummy corporation owned by a conservative plantation owner in Venezuela. It’s not hard to see where the shipment is bound for and who will use the guns.”

  “So Bickell is funding conservative guerrillas in Venezuela?” I asked.

  “Bickell wanted the diamonds. Sacorliss wanted to fund the revolution.”

  “Why?”

  “That, my friend, is an argument that we will have over and over again. For my money Sacorliss is a well-trained operative of the United States government. His job was to plan a robbery set to fund our clandestine interests in South America. You probably believe that it isn’t such a far-reaching conspiratorial act. Only time, and blood, will tell.”

  “What about Valerie Lox and Lana Drexel?”

  “Lox was released from jail. She claimed that she knew nothing about stolen gems, that Lamarr had always been a reputable dealer. The prosecutors decided to believe her which makes me believe that she is also a government operative. I sent Drexel her money. She’s moving to Hollywood. I’ve been trying to decipher the code of Sacorliss’s computer. One day I’ll succeed and prove to you that I’m right. All we have to discuss now are the final terms of your employment.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “You don’t expect that I’m going to come work for you after what I’ve been through.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of your aunt, of course. You’ll agree to work for me for a specified amount of time and I will agree to do what your father refused to do, free your aunt from jail.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck rose up then. I hadn’t even considered this option until the middle of the night before. My face must have exposed my surprise.

  “I need you, Felix,” Lawless said. “You complete a faulty circuit in my head. You give me the three years that your aunt has left on her sentence and I will make sure that she’s out of the joint by Sunday next.”

  “I still won’t be involved in any crimes,” I said.

  “Agreed. I won’t knowingly put you in the position of breaking the law. You will write down everything of import that I say, regardless of your own opinions. I in turn will open your eyes to a whole new world. As a journalist you will learn more from me than from a thousand seminars.”

  There was no reason for me to argue.

  “Okay,” I said. “But I have two needs and one question.”

  “And what might those be?”

  “First is salary.”

  “Forty-two thousand dollars a year payable from a fund set up by Auchschlous, Anterbe, and Grenell, the world’s largest insurers of rare gems. They prepared the account at my behest.”

  “Two,” I said, “is that you agree not to lie to me. If I ask you a question you answer to the best of your ability.”

  “Agreed,” Lawless replied, “depending upon circumstances. It might be that the truth would be giving away someone else’s secret and that I have no right to do.”

  “Okay. Fine. Then I agree. Three years terminable if you decide I can’t do the job or if you break your word to me. All of course contingent upon the release of my aunt Alberta.”

  “You had a question,” Lawless reminded me.

  “Oh. Yeah. It didn’t have to do with our contract.”

  “Ask anyway.”

  “Who was the woman who came to your apartment door, the one in Harlem? I think she said her name was Maddie.”

  “Oh. No one. She had nothing to do with our business.”

  “But who was she?” I asked.

  “My fiancée,” he said. “She’s been looking for me for a couple of years now.”

  ______

  I’m still in school, still out of contact with my parents. My aunt Alberta was freed from jail on a technicality that a colleague of my father turned up. She’s coming to live in New York.

  I work for the anarchist at least four days a week. We argue almost every day I’m there. I still think he’s crazy but I’ve learned that doesn’t always mean he’s wrong.

  SHARYN MCCRUMB

  _________

  Sharyn McCrumb holds degrees from the University of North Carolina and Virginia Tech. She lives in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains but travels the United States and the world lecturing on her work, most recently leading a writer’s workshop in Paris in summer 2001. Her Ballad series, beginning with If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O (1990), has won her numerous honors, including the Appalachian Writers Association’s Award for Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literature and several listings as New York Times and Los Angeles Times notable books. In the introduction to her short-story collection Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories, she details the family history in North Carolina and Tennessee that contributed to her Appalachian fiction. One of the continuing characters, Sheriff Spencer Arrowood, takes his surname from ancestors on her father’s side, while Frankie Silver (“the first woman hanged for murder in the state of North Carolina”), whose story McCrumb would incorporate in The Ballad of Frankie Silver, was a distant cousin. “My books are like Appalachian quilts,” she writes. “I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life, and local tragedy, and I place them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the nature of the mountain south.” The seventh and most recent title in the Ballad series, Ghost Riders, appeared in 2003. Her most recent novel is St. Dale.

  THE RESURRECTION MAN

  Sharyn McCrumb

  Haloed in lamplight the young man stands swaying on the threshold for an instant, perhaps three heartbeats, before the scalpel falls from his fingers, and he pitches forward into the dark hallway, stumbling toward the balcony railing where the stairwell curves around the rotunda. From where he stands outside the second floor classroom, it is thirty feet or more to the marble floor below.

  The old man in the hall is not surprised. He has seen too many pale young men make just such a dash from that room, from its stench of sweet decay, hardly leavened by the tobacco spit that coats the wooden floor. They chew to mask the odor—this boy is new, and does not yet know that trick. The tobacco will make him as sick as the other at first. It is all one.

  He makes no move to take hold of the sufferer. They are alone in the building, but even so, these days such a thing would not be proper. The young man might take offense, and there is his own white linen suit to be thought of. He is not working tonight. He only came to see why there was a light in the upstairs window. More to the point, he has long ago lost the desire to touch human flesh. He stays in the shadows and watches the young man lunge for cold air in the cavernous space beneath the dome.

  But the smell of the dissecting room is not escaped so easily, and the old man knows what will happen if the student does not get fresh air soon. Somebody will have to clean up the hall floor. It won’t be the old man. He is too grand for that, but it will be one of the other employees, some acquaintance of his, and it is easy enough to spare a cleaner more work and the young man more embarrassment. Easy enough to offer the fire bucket as an alternative.

  A gallon bucket of sand has been set outside the dissection room in case a careless student overturns an oil lamp, and in one fluid motion he hoists it, setting it in front of the iron railing, directly in the path of the young man, who has only to bend over and exhale to make use of it, which he does, for a long time. He coughs and retches until he can manage only gasps and dry heaves. By the time he is finished he is on his knees, hunched over the bucket, clutching it with both hands. The retching turns to sobbing and then to soft cursing.

  A few feet away the old man waits, courteously and without much interest in the purging process. If the student should feel too ill to return to his work, he will call someone to tend to him. He will not offer his shoulder unless the tottering young man insists. He does not care to touch people: The living are not his concern. M
ost of the students know him, and would shrink from him, but this one is new. He may not know whom he has encountered in the dark hallway. For all the boy’s momentary terror and revulsion, he will be all right. He will return to his task, if not tonight then tomorrow. It is the night before his first dissection class, after all, and many a queasy novice has conquered his nerves and gone on to make a fine doctor.

  The young man wipes his face with a linen handkerchief, still gulping air as if the motion in will prevent the motion out. “I’m all right,” he says, aware of the silent presence a few feet away.

  “Shouldn’t come alone,” the old man says. “They make you work together for a reason. ‘Cause you joke. You prop up one another’s nerve. Distractions beguile the mind, makes it easier, if you don’t think too much.”

  The young man looks up then, recognizing the florid speech and the lilt of a Gullah accent beneath the surface. Pressing the handkerchief to his mouth, he takes an involuntary step backward. He does know who this is. He had been expecting to see a sweeper, perhaps, or one of the professors working here after hours, but this apparition, suddenly recognized, legendary and ancient even in his father’s student days, fills him with more terror than the shrouded forms in the room he has just quit.

  He is standing in the hall, beside a bucket filled with his own vomit, and his only companion is this ancient black man, still straight and strong-looking in a white linen suit, his grizzled hair shines about his head in the lamplight like a halo, and the student knows that he looks a fool in front of this old man who has touched more dead people than live ones. He peers at the wrinkled face to see if there is some trace of scorn in the impassive countenance.

  “I was here because I was afraid,” he says, glancing back at the lamp-lit room of shrouded tables. He does not owe this man an explanation, and if asked, he might have replied with a curt dismissal, but there is only silence, and he needs to feel life in the dark hall. “I thought I might make a fool of myself in class tomorrow—” He glances toward the bucket, and the old man nods. “—And so I came along tonight to try to prepare myself. To see my—well, to see it. Get it over with. Put a cloth over its eyes.” He dabbed at his mouth with the soiled handkerchief. “You understand that feeling, I guess.”