Part 26

“All right show her in.... It’s that old bitch from the school board.... All right Joe, drop in again next week.... I’ll keep you in mind, you and your army.”

Dougan was waiting in the outer office. He sidled up mysteriously. “Well Joe, how’s things?”

“Pretty good,” said Joe puffing out his chest. “Gus tells me Tammany’ll be right behind us in our drive for the bonus ... planning a nation wide campaign. He gave me some cigars a friend o his brought up by airplane from Havana.... Have one?” With their cigars tilting up out of the corners of their mouths they walked briskly cockily across City Hall square. Opposite the old City Hall there was a scaffolding. Joe pointed at it with his cigar. “That there’s the new statue of Civic Virtue the mayor’s havin set up.”

* * * * *

The steam of cooking wrenched at his knotted stomach as he passed Child’s. Dawn was sifting fine gray dust over the black ironcast city. Dutch Robertson despondently crossed Union Square, remembering Francie’s warm bed, the spicy smell of her hair. He pushed his hands deep in his empty pockets. Not a red, and Francie couldn’t give him anything. He walked east past the hotel on Fifteenth. A colored man was sweeping off the steps. Dutch looked at him enviously; he’s got a job. Milkwagons jingled by. On Stuyvesant Square a milkman brushed past him with a bottle in each hand. Dutch stuck out his jaw and talked tough. “Give us a swig o milk will yez?” The milkman was a frail pinkfaced youngster. His blue eyes wilted. “Sure go round behind the wagon, there’s an open bottle under the seat. Dont let nobody see you drink it.” He drank it in deep gulps, sweet and soothing to his parched throat. Jez I didn’t need to talk rough like that. He waited until the boy came back. “Thankye buddy, that was mighty white.”

He walked into the chilly park and sat down on a bench. There was hoarfrost on the asphalt. He picked up a torn piece of pink evening newspaper. $500,000 HOLDUP. Bank Messenger Robbed in Wall Street Rush Hour.

In the busiest part of the noon hour two men held up Adolphus St. John, a bank messenger for the Guarantee Trust Company, and snatched from his hands a satchel containing a half a million dollars in bills ...

Dutch felt his heart pounding as he read the column. He was cold all over. He got to his feet and began thrashing his arms about.

* * * * *

Congo stumped through the turnstile at the end of the L line. Jimmy Herf followed him looking from one side to the other. Outside it was dark, a blizzard wind whistled about their ears. A single Ford sedan was waiting outside the station.

“How you like, Meester ’Erf?”

“Fine Congo. Is that water?”

“That Sheepshead Bay.”

They walked along the road, dodging an occasional bluesteel glint of a puddle. The arclights had a look of shrunken grapes swaying in the wind. To the right and left were flickering patches of houses in the distance. They stopped at a long building propped on piles over the water. POOL; Jimmy barely made out the letters on an unlighted window. The door opened as they reached it. “Hello Mike,” said Congo. “This is Meester ’Erf, a frien’ o mine.” The door closed behind them. Inside it was black as an oven. A calloused hand grabbed Jimmy’s hand in the dark.

“Glad to meet you,” said a voice.

“Say how did you find my hand?”

“Oh I kin see in the dark.” The voice laughed throatily.

By that time Congo had opened the inner door. Light streamed through picking out billiard tables, a long bar at the end, racks of cues. “This is Mike Cardinale,” said Congo. Jimmy found himself standing beside a tall sallow shylooking man with bunchy black hair growing low on his forehead. In the inner room were shelves full of chinaware and a round table covered by a piece of mustardcolored oilcloth. “Eh la patronne,” shouted Congo. A fat Frenchwoman with red applecheeks came out through the further door; behind her came a _chiff_ of sizzling butter and garlic. “This is frien o mine.... Now maybe we eat,” shouted Congo. “She my wife,” said Cardinale proudly. “Very deaf.... Have to talk loud.” He turned and closed the door to the large hall carefully and bolted it. “No see lights from road,” he said. “In summer,” said Mrs. Cardinale, “sometime we give a hundred meals a day, or a hundred an fifty maybe.”

“Havent you got a little peekmeup?” said Congo. He let himself down with a grunt into a chair.

Cardinale set a fat fiasco of wine on the table and some glasses. They tasted it smacking their lips. “Bettern Dago Red, eh Meester ’Erf?”

“It sure is. Tastes like real Chianti.”

Mrs. Cardinale set six plates with a stained fork, knife, and spoon in each and then put a steaming tureen of soup in the middle of the table.

“Pronto pasta,” she shrieked in a guineahen voice. “Thisa Anetta,” said Cardinale as a pinkcheeked blackhaired girl with long lashes curving back from bright black eyes ran into the room followed by a heavily tanned young man in khaki overalls with curly sunbleached hair. They all sat down at once and began to eat the peppery thick vegetable chowder, leaning far over their plates.

When Congo had finished his soup he looked up. “Mike did you see lights?” Cardinale nodded. “Sure ting ... be here any time.” While they were eating a dish of fried eggs and garlic, frizzled veal cutlets with fried potatoes and broccoli, Herf began to hear in the distance the pop pop pop of a motorboat. Congo got up from the table with a motion to them to be quiet and looked out the window, cautiously lifting a corner of the shade. “That him,” he said as he stumped back to the table. “We eat good here, eh Meester Erf?”

The young man got to his feet wiping his mouth on his forearm. “Got a nickel Congo,” he said doing a double shuffle with his sneakered feet. “Here go Johnny.” The girl followed him out into the dark outer room. In a moment a mechanical piano started tinkling out a waltz. Through the door Jimmy could see them dancing in and out of the oblong of light. The chugging of the motorboat drew nearer. Congo went out, then Cardinale and his wife, until Jimmy was left alone sipping a glass of wine among the debris of the dinner. He felt excited and puzzled and a little drunk. Already he began to construct the story in his mind. From the road came the grind of gears of a truck, then of another. The motorboat engine choked, backfired and stopped. There was the creak of a boat against the piles, a swash of waves and silence. The mechanical piano had stopped. Jimmy sat sipping his wine. He could smell the rankness of salt marshes seeping into the house. Under him there was a little lapping sound of the water against the piles. Another motorboat was beginning to sputter in the far distance.

“Got a nickel?” asked Congo breaking into the room suddenly. “Make music.... Very funny night tonight. Maybe you and Annette keep piano goin. I didnt see McGee about landin.... Maybe somebody come. Must be veree quick.” Jimmy got to his feet and started fishing in his pockets. By the piano he found Annette. “Wont you dance?” She nodded. The piano played _Innocent Eyes_. They danced distractedly. Outside were voices and footsteps. “Please,” she said all at once and they stopped dancing. The second motorboat had come very near; the motor coughed and rattled still. “Please stay here,” she said and slipped away from him.

Jimmy Herf walked up and down uneasily puffing on a cigarette. He was making up the story in his mind.... In a lonely abandoned dancehall on Sheepshead Bay ... lovely blooming Italian girl ... shrill whistle in the dark.... I ought to get out and see what’s going on. He groped for the front door. It was locked. He walked over to the piano and put another nickel in. Then he lit a fresh cigarette and started walking up and down again. Always the way ... a parasite on the drama of life, reporter looks at everything through a peephole. Never mixes in. The piano was playing _Yes We Have No Bananas_. “Oh hell!” he kept muttering and ground his teeth and walked up and down.

Outside the tramp of steps broke into a scuffle, voices snarled. There was a splintering of wood and the crash of breaking bottles. Jimmy looked out through the window of the diningroom. He could see the shadows of men struggling and slugging on the boatlanding. He rushed into the kitchen, where he bumped into Congo sweaty and staggering into the house leaning on a heavy cane.

“Goddam ... dey break my leg,” he shouted.

“Good God.” Jimmy helped him groaning into the diningroom.

“Cost me feefty dollars to have it mended last time I busted it.”

“You mean your cork leg?”

“Sure what you tink?”

“Is it prohibition agents?”

“Prohibition agents nutten, goddam hijackers.... Go put a neeckel in the piano.” _Beautiful Girl of My Dreams_, the piano responded gayly.

When Jimmy got back to him, Congo was sitting in a chair nursing his stump with his two hands. On the table lay the cork and aluminum limb splintered and dented. “Regardez moi ça ... c’est foutu ... completement foutu.” As he spoke Cardinale came in. He had a deep gash over his eyes from which a trickle of blood ran down his cheek on his coat and shirt. His wife followed him rolling back her eyes; she had a basin and a sponge with which she kept making ineffectual dabs at his forehead. He pushed her away. “I crowned one of em good wid a piece o pipe. I think he fell in de water. God I hope he drownded.” Johnny came in holding his head high. Annette had her arm round his waist. He had a black eye and one of the sleeves of his shirt hung in shreds. “Gee it was like in the movies,” said Annette, giggling hysterically. “Wasnt he grand, mommer, wasn’t he grand?”

“Jez it’s lucky they didn’t start shootin; one of em had a gun.”

“Scared to I guess.”

“Trucks are off.”

“Just one case got busted up.... God there was five of them.”

“Gee didnt he mix it up with em?” screamed Annette.

“Oh shut up,” growled Cardinale. He had dropped into a chair and his wife was sponging off his face. “Did you get a good look at the boat?” asked Congo.

“Too goddam dark,” said Johnny. “Fellers talked like they came from Joisey.... First ting I knowed one of em comes up to me and sez I’m a revenue officer an I pokes him one before he has time to pull a gun an overboard he goes. Jez they were yeller. That guy George on the boat near brained one of em wid an oar. Then they got back in their old teakettle an beat it.”

“But how they know how we make landin?” stuttered Congo his face purple.

“Some guy blabbed maybe,” said Cardinale. “If I find out who it is, by God I’ll ...” he made a popping noise with his lips.

“You see Meester ’Erf,” said Congo in his suave voice again, “it was all champagne for the holidays.... Very valuable cargo eh?” Annette, her cheeks very red sat still looking at Johnny with parted lips and toobright eyes. Herf found himself blushing as he looked at her.

He got to his feet. “Well I must be getting back to the big city. Thank’s for the feed and the melodrama, Congo.”

“You find station all right?”

“Sure.”

“Goodnight Meester ’Erf, maybe you buy case of champagne for Christmas, genuine Mumms.”

“Too darn broke Congo.”

“Then maybe you sell to your friends an I give you commission.”

“All right I’ll see what I can do.”

“I’ll phone you tomorrow to tell price.”

“That’s a fine idea. Good night.”

Joggling home in the empty train through empty Brooklyn suburbs Jimmy tried to think of the bootlegging story he’d write for the Sunday Magazine Section. The girl’s pink cheeks and toobright eyes kept intervening, blurring the orderly arrangement of his thoughts. He sank gradually into dreamier and dreamier reverie. Before the kid was born Ellie sometimes had toobright eyes like that. The time on the hill when she had suddenly wilted in his arms and been sick and he had left her among the munching, calmly staring cows on the grassy slope and gone to a shepherd’s hut and brought back milk in a wooden ladle, and slowly as the mountains hunched up with evening the color had come back into her cheeks and she had looked at him that way and said with a dry little laugh: It’s the little Herf inside me. God why cant I stop mooning over things that are past? And when the baby was coming and Ellie was in the American Hospital at Neuilly, himself wandering distractedly through the fair, going into the Flea Circus, riding on merrygorounds and the steam swing, buying toys, candy, taking chances on dolls in a crazy blur, stumbling back to the hospital with a big plaster pig under his arm. Funny these fits of refuge in the past. Suppose she had died; I thought she would. The past would have been complete all round, framed, worn round your neck like a cameo, set up in type, molded on plates for the Magazine Section, like the first of James Herf’s articles on The Bootlegging Ring. Burning slugs of thought kept dropping into place spelled out by a clanking linotype.

At midnight he was walking across Fourteenth. He didnt want to go home to bed although the rasping cold wind tore at his neck and chin with sharp ice claws. He walked west across Seventh and Eighth Avenues, found the name Roy Sheffield beside a bell in a dimly lit hall. As soon as he pressed the bell the catch on the door began to click. He ran up the stairs. Roy had his big curly head with its glass-gray gollywog eyes stuck out the door.

“Hello Jimmy; come on in; we’re all lit up like churches.”

“I’ve just seen a fight between bootleggers and hijackers.”

“Where?”

“Down at Sheepshead Bay.”

“Here’s Jimmy Herf, he’s just been fighting prohibition agents,” shouted Roy to his wife. Alice had dark chestnut dollhair and an uptilted peaches and cream dollface. She ran up to Jimmy and kissed him on the chin. “Oh Jimmy do tell us all about it.... We’re so horribly bored.”

“Hello,” cried Jimmy; he had just made out Frances and Bob Hildebrand on the couch at the dim end of the room. They lifted their glasses to him. Jimmy was pushed into an armchair, had a glass of gin and ginger ale put in his hand. “Now what’s all this about a fight? You’d better tell us because were certainly not going to buy the Sunday _Tribune_ to find out,” Bob Hildebrand said in a deep rumbling voice.

Jimmy took a long drink. “I went out with a man I know who’s shiek of all the French and Italian bootleggers. He’s a fine man. He’s got a cork leg. He set me up to a swell feed and real Italian wine out in a deserted poolroom on the shores of Sheepshead Bay....”

“By the way,” asked Roy, “where’s Helena.”

“Dont interrupt Roy,” said Alice. “This is good ... and besides you should never ask a man where his wife is.”

“Then there was a lot of flashing of signal lights and stuff and a motorboat loaded down with Mumm’s extra dry champagne for Park Avenue Christmases came in and the hijackers arrived on a speedboat.... It probably was a hydroplane it came so fast ...”

“My this is exciting,” cooed Alice. “... Roy why dont you take up bootlegging?”

“Worst fight I ever saw outside of the movies, six or seven on a side all slugging each other on a little narrow landing the size of this room, people crowning each other with oars and joints of lead pipe.”

“Was anybody hurt?”

“Everybody was.... I think two of the hijackers were drowned. At any rate they beat a retreat leaving us lapping up the spilled champagne.”

“But it must have been terrible,” cried the Hildebrands. “What did you do Jimmy?” asked Alice breathless.

“Oh I hopped around keeping out of harm’s way. I didnt know who was on which side and it was dark and wet and confusing everywhere.... I finally did drag my bootlegger friend out of the fray when he got his leg broken ... his wooden leg.”

Everybody let out a shout. Roy filled Jimmy’s glass up with gin again.

“Oh Jimmy,” cooed Alice, “you lead the most thrilling life.”

* * * * *

James Merivale was going over a freshly decoded cable, tapping the words with a pencil as he read them. Tasmanian Manganese Products instructs us to open credit.... The phone on his desk began to buzz.

“James this is your mother. Come right up; something terrible has happened.”

“But I dont know if I can get away....”

She had already cut off. Merivale felt himself turning pale. “Let me speak to Mr. Aspinwall please.... Mr. Aspinwall this is Merivale.... My mother’s been taken suddenly ill. I’m afraid it may be a stroke. I’d like to run up there for an hour. I’ll be back in time to get a cable off on that Tasmanian matter.”

“All right.... I’m very sorry Merivale.”

He grabbed his hat and coat, forgetting his muffler, and streaked out of the bank and along the street to the subway.

He burst into the apartment breathless, snapping his fingers from nervousness. Mrs. Merivale grayfaced met him in the hall.

“My dear I thought you’d been taken ill.”

“It’s not that ... it’s about Maisie.”

“She hasnt met with an accid...?”

“Come in here,” interrupted Mrs. Merivale. In the parlor sat a little roundfaced woman in a round mink hat and a long mink coat. “My dear this girl says she’s Mrs. Jack Cunningham and she’s got a marriage certificate to prove it.”

“Good Heavens, is that true?”

The girl nodded in a melancholy way.

“And the invitations are out. Since his last wire Maisie’s been ordering her trousseau.”

The girl unfolded a large certificate ornamented with pansies and cupids and handed it to James.

“It might be forged.”

“It’s not forged,” said the girl sweetly.

“John C. Cunningham, 21 ... Jessie Lincoln, 18,” he read aloud.... “I’ll smash his face for that, the blackguard. That’s certainly his signature, I’ve seen it at the bank.... The blackguard.”

“Now James, don’t be hasty.”

“I thought it would be better this way than after the ceremony,” put in the girl in her little sugar voice. “I wouldnt have Jack commit bigamy for anything in the world.”

“Where’s Maisie?”

“The poor darling is prostrated in her room.”

Merivale’s face was crimson. The sweat itched under his collar. “Now dearest” Mrs. Merivale kept saying, “you must promise me not to do anything rash.”

“Yes Maisie’s reputation must be protected at all costs.”

“My dear I think the best thing to do is to get him up here and confront him with this ... with this ... lady.... Would you agree to that Mrs. Cunningham?”

“Oh dear.... Yes I suppose so.”

“Wait a minute,” shouted Merivale and strode down the hall to the telephone. “Rector 12305.... Hello. I want to speak to Mr. Jack Cunningham please.... Hello. Is this Mr. Cunningham’s office? Mr. James Merivale speaking.... Out of town.... And when will he be back?... Hum.” He strode back along the hall. “The damn scoundrel’s out of town.”

“All the years I’ve known him,” said the little lady in the round hat, “that has always been where he was.”

* * * * *

Outside the broad office windows the night is gray and foggy. Here and there a few lights make up dim horizontals and perpendiculars of asterisks. Phineas Blackhead sits at his desk tipping far back in the small leather armchair. In his hand protecting his fingers by a large silk handkerchief, he holds a glass of hot water and bicarbonate of soda. Densch bald and round as a billiardball sits in the deep armchair playing with his tortoiseshell spectacles. Everything is quiet except for an occasional rattling and snapping of the steampipes.

“Densch you must forgive me.... You know I rarely permit myself an observation concerning other people’s business,” Blackhead is saying slowly between sips; then suddenly he sits up in his chair. “It’s a damn fool proposition, Densch, by God it is ... by the Living Jingo it’s ridiculous.”

“I dont like dirtying my hands any more than you do.... Baldwin’s a good fellow. I think we’re safe in backing him a little.”

“What the hell’s an import and export firm got to do in politics? If any of those guys wants a handout let him come up here and get it. Our business is the price of beans ... and its goddam low. If any of you puling lawyers could restore the balance of the exchanges I’d be willing to do anything in the world.... They’re crooks every last goddam one of em ... by the Living Jingo they’re crooks.” His face flushes purple, he sits upright in his chair banging with his fist on the corner of the desk. “Now you’re getting me all excited.... Bad for my stomach, bad for my heart.” Phineas Blackhead belches portentously and takes a great gulp out of the glass of bicarbonate of soda. Then he leans back in his chair again letting his heavy lids half cover his eyes.

“Well old man,” says Mr. Densch in a tired voice, “it may have been a bad thing to do, but I’ve promised to support the reform candidate. That’s a purely private matter in no way involving the firm.”

“Like hell it dont.... How about McNiel and his gang?... They’ve always treated us all right and all we’ve ever done for em’s a couple of cases of Scotch and a few cigars now and then.... Now we have these reformers throw the whole city government into a turmoil.... By the Living Jingo ...”

Densch gets to his feet. “My dear Blackhead I consider it my duty as a citizen to help in cleaning up the filthy conditions of bribery, corruption and intrigue that exist in the city government ... I consider it my duty as a citizen ...” He starts walking to the door, his round belly stuck proudly out in front of him.

“Well allow me to say Densch that I think its a damn fool proposition,” Blackhead shouts after him. When his partner has gone he lies back a second with his eyes closed. His face takes on the mottled color of ashes, his big fleshy frame is shrinking like a deflating balloon. At length he gets to his feet with a groan. Then he takes his hat and coat and walks out of the office with a slow heavy step. The hall is empty and dimly lit. He has to wait a long while for the elevator. The thought of holdup men sneaking through the empty building suddenly makes him catch his breath. He is afraid to look behind him, like a child in the dark. At last the elevator shoots up.