She said, coolly:
“I’m not worried about them. I’m worried about Vincent, if he’s alive, and Stanley, and you.”
She was coming back to me. In another moment, when that idiot Vincent got on the phone, she would be all mine.
“Well, I just thought you’d like to know. When Talcott and the Griscoms heard my telephoned confession, they were very strong about urging me to forget it, but when I wouldn’t, they gave me the impression they were going to retire. For a short while, only. Into the safer precincts of legal extortion.”
“And what about Stanley? What are you going to do with him?”
I didn’t like the opaque look her eyes were getting again. I shifted, and stared again at the ceiling.
“Shana, you must understand that nothing actually happened to anybody. Nobody got killed, nobody was even hurt. There was a car accident in Central Park, and accidents like that are always happening everywhere, at any time. Outside of that, which was a real accident, nothing happened. And about Stanley. He’s a tame cat. I’ve been thinking. I think I’ll keep him on. If there’s another attempted raid, it will be through Stanley, and if he’s there, this way I can always keep an eye on—”
I broke off as she heard and then responded to a voice from the telephone. Color flooded back into her face, and I knew she was talking to Vincent.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it’s Shana. You’re all right, aren’t you? Yes, Jay told me. I don’t understand, but Jay tried to explain. I still don’t understand. But you are all right?” She was nearly radiant. “Wait, Vincent. Jay wants to talk to you.”
She handed me the phone, and I said, into the speaker:
“Greetings, greetings, Big Chief Sitting Duck. How do you sleep at the bottom of Gravesend Bay?”
The grateful reply from my true friend was somewhat blurred with cognac, and also angered.
“You bastard,” said Vincent. “You scared me out of twenty years’ life. And some splinters from the bullet in the framework of the door caught me in the side of the puss. To hell with you.”
“Hell, I thought my marksmanship was perfect,” I said.
“Well, thank God you were sober.”
“No, it’s lucky you were drunk. I really aimed at the other side of your head, but you sort of wobbled.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. That steely hocus-pocus when you walked into my office. I’ll never forgive you for that, you slob. I still wonder if you meant some of that, or if it was all your lousy sense of humor.”
I did have a certain amount of wit, but Vincent gave me too much credit.
“I hadn’t made up my mind,” I said. a But it had to look good, Vincent, and to make it look good, you had to act the part. And that meant I had to act it, too. Now am I forgiven?”
Vincent emitted a string of noncommittal noises at this, then he quieted down, and in a wholly different tone, subdued and stricken, he asked:
“I suppose you’ve heard about Stanley?”
“No. What about Stanley?”
There was a deep, withdrawn silence, and then:
“He’s dead, Jay. Suicide. I got it from a radio newscast, about an hour ago. Cut his wrists in a tub of warm water.”
I heard this, but at the same time did not hear it. My mind was far away, on everyone else, but especially on Shana and myself.
“What kind of a suicide, Vincent? Was there any hint whether it was bona fide, or just another job?”
“I think this was on the level, Jay. Lucille got a registered letter from him this afternoon. It was incoherent, a note of condolence to the widow, except that he couldn’t say I’d been murdered. He wanted her to know I had not voluntarily disappeared, my absence was not desertion but part of a big risk I was undertaking for great principles. I don’t think he’d decided just what he was actually going to do, when he wrote it. It said that he and I found out we were surrounded by false friends who turned out to be crooks, you especially, and the shock to him was even greater than it must be to Lucille. Does this mean something to you, Jay? What does it mean, have you got any idea? Jay? Are you listening, Jay?”
For a moment I laid the phone down upon my chest and stared at the ceiling. Then I picked it up, and said:
“I’m listening. And it’s my guess Stanley was hoping to out-confess me when the lid blew off of your murder. Then something happened. What? I think he just panicked. He saw he couldn’t make a dime out of it, he was through, no matter what happened. But I don’t really know, any more than you do, what he meant. Stanley was good at spreading fear, but he couldn’t stand any of it, himself.”
Vincent considered this estimation, and added his own.
“He was certainly bawling like a baby after you bumped me off up there in the office.”
“Yes. That was genuine hysteria. But I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it, no matter what fancy name we give it. But, personally, I think I’ve had all I can stand. Don’t you?”
Blurrily, Vincent told me:
“Yes, I’ve had it. Jay, if I live to be a billion, I don’t think I’ll forget that last shot you fired point-blank across my left ear. It’s still ringing. Was that some more humor? Never mind. I don’t want to hear the answer. OK. I’ll see you at the office.”
“In two weeks, yes,” I said. “Not before. Until then, you lie low and stay at home, strictly under wraps. By then the wrecking squad will know I must have backfired everywhere along the line. They won’t monkey with us again. Nobody will, for at least a year. Got it all?”
Vincent said that he got it, and I replaced the phone. Then I tried to settle back, knowing that sweat channeled down the furrows of my face, that the color of it was probably wax, and that Shana was examining it with care.
“What’s the matter, Jay?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“I know. You told me there was nothing the matter before, too. But now your tame partner Stanley has killed himself. Who’s next, Jay? Me? You?” I gathered her in, but she was not really all mine. Not yet. Maybe she never again would be. “It may be all right,” she admitted, beginning to thaw. “But I don’t understand.”
I said, kissing her here and there:
“What don’t you understand?”
“You, Jay. You. How can you walk through all this slime and horror, and come out of it untouched?”
“What makes you think I have not been touched, and stabbed to the very heart?”
She thought this over for seconds that mounted and became an age.
“I see,” she said, at last.
“You don’t see,” I told her. “And neither do I.”
“This experience, this ghastly experience. It has made different people out of us. We are not the same people we were before. Our lives together, our professions, they once seemed so ordinary and guileless. Then suddenly we were guilty of everything.” I couldn’t think of any reply to this that wouldn’t shock her still more, and I made none. Anyway, I had found a new birthmark, very small, behind her left shoulder blade. It occurred to me that she might not even know it was there. I kissed it, testing, and sure enough, she didn’t know about it. Instead, she went right on, seriously and almost somberly, “You know, Jay, there was a moment or two when I didn’t trust you. And I think for a while you didn’t trust me, either.”
I rolled away from her, and stared again at the ceiling, hands clasped at the back of my neck. And I thought. And thought some more. And then I said:
“You’re right, we are different from the people we once thought we were. Maybe worse, maybe better. Changed, anyway. You may have shriveled when they turned on the heat, but you didn’t crumble. I know you didn’t, you know I know it, and you also know I didn’t, either. You’re probably right, we are not the same people we were. But I like the new people just as well. Better, in fact. Whatever got burned up, it shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
She turned, half-smiling, and I think she said: “Does all that nonsense mean something
?” I started to say no, it didn’t. But I was tired, and once again in love. And besides, it really did.
The Generous Heart Page 21