The Winter of Our Discontent (34 page)

“Hope you catch some big ones.”

“Never catch anything,” he said.

“Stripers come in sometimes.”

“I don’t believe it.”

A red-hot optimist, but at least I had set the hook in his attention.

And Jennie Single rolled along the sidewalk. She moved as though she had casters instead of feet, probably New Baytown’s least reliable witness. Once she turned on her gas oven and forgot to light it. She’d have blown herself through the roof if she could have remembered where she had put the matches.

“Morning, Miss Jenny.”

“Good morning, Danny.”

“I’m Ethan.”

“Course you are. I’m going to bake a cake.”

I tried to gouge a scar in her memory. “What kind?”

“Well, it’s Fannie Farmer but the label fell off the package so I really don’t know.”

What a witness she would make, if I needed a witness. And why did she say “Danny”?

A piece of tinfoil on the pavement resisted the broom. I had to stoop down and lift it with a fingernail. Those assistant bank mice were really mousing the hour with Cat Baker away. They were the ones I wanted. It was less than one minute to nine when they burst from the coffee shop and sprinted across the street.

“Run—run—run!” I called and they grinned self-consciously as they charged the bank doors.

Now it was time. I must not think of the whole thing—just one step at a time and each in its place, as I had practiced. I folded my anxious stomach down where it belonged. First lean the broom against the doorjamb where it could be seen. I moved with slow, deliberate speed.

From the corner of my eye I saw a car come along the street and I paused to let it go by.

“Mr. Hawley!”

I whirled the way cornered gangsters do in the movies. A dusty dark green Chevrolet had slid to the curb and, great God! that Ivy League government man was getting out. My stone-built earth shuddered like a reflection in water. Paralyzed, I saw him cross the pavement. It seemed to take ages, but it was simple as that. My long-planned perfect structure turned to dust before my eyes the way a long-buried artifact does when the air strikes it. I thought of rushing for the toilet and going through with it. It wouldn’t work. I couldn’t repeal the Morphy law. Thought and light must travel at about the same speed. It’s a shock to throw out a plan so long considered, so many times enacted that its consummation is just one more repetition, but I tossed it out, threw it away, closed it off. I had no choice. And light-speed thought said, Thank God he didn’t come one minute later. That would have been the fatal accident they write about in crime stories.

And all this while the young man moved stiffly four steps across the pavement.

Something must have showed through to him.

“What’s the matter, Mr. Hawley? You look sick.”

“Skitters,” I said.

“That’ll wait for no man. Run for it. I’ll wait.”

I dashed for the toilet, closed the door, and pulled the chain to make a rush of water. I hadn’t switched on the light. I sat there in the dark. My quaking stomach played along. In a moment I really had to go, and I did, and slowly the beating pressure in me subsided. I added a by-law to the Morphy code. In case of accident, change your plan—instantly.

It has happened to me before that in crisis or great danger I have stepped out and apart and as an interested stranger watched myself, my movements and my mind, but immune to the emotions of the thing observed. Sitting in the blackness, I saw the other person fold his perfect plan and put it in a box and close the lid and shove the thing not only out of sight but out of thought. I mean that by the time I stood up in the darkness and zipped and smoothed and laid my hand on the flimsy plywood door, I was a grocery clerk prepared for a busy day. It was no secretiveness. It was really so. I wondered what the young man wanted, but only with the pale apprehension that comes from a low-grade fear of cops.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” I said. “Can’t remember what I ate to cause that.”

“There’s a virus going around,” he said. “My wife had it last week.”

“Well, this virus carried a gun. I nearly got caught short. What can I do for you?”

He seemed embarrassed, apologetic, almost shy. “A guy does funny things,” he said.

I overcame an impulse to say, It takes all kinds—and I’m glad I did because his next words were, “In my business you meet all kinds.”

I walked behind the counter and kicked the leather Knight Templar hatbox closed. And I leaned my elbows on the counter.

Very odd. Five minutes earlier I saw myself through the eyes of other people. I had to. What they saw was important. And as he came across the pavement, this man had been a huge, dark, hopeless fate, an enemy, an ogre. But with my project tucked away and gone as a part of me, I saw him now as an object apart—no longer linked with me for good or bad. He was, I think, about my age, but shaped in a school, a manner, perhaps a cult—a lean face and hair carefully trimmed short and standing straight up, white shirt of a coarse woven linen with the collar buttoned down and a tie chosen by his wife, and without doubt patted and straightened by her as he left the house. His suit a gray darkness and his nails home cared for but well cared for, a wide gold wedding ring on his left hand, a tiny bar in his buttonhole, a suggestion of the decoration he would not wear. His mouth and dark blue eyes were schooled to firmness, which made it all the more strange that they were not firm now. In some way a hole had been opened in him. He was not the same man whose questions had been short, squared bars of steel spaced perfectly, one below its fellow.

“You were here before,” I said. “What is your business?”

“Department of Justice.”

“Your business is justice?”

He smiled. “Yes, at least that’s what I hope. But I’m not on official business—not even sure the department would approve. But it’s my day off.”

“What can I do for you?”

“It’s kind of complicated. Don’t know quite where to begin. It’s not in the book. Hawley, I’ve been in the service twelve years and I’ve never had anything like this before.”

“Maybe if you tell me what it is I can help you do it.”

He smiled at me. “Hard to set it up. I’ve been driving three hours from New York and I’ve got to drive three hours back in holiday traffic.”

“Sounds serious.”

“It is.”

“I think you said your name was Walder.”

“Richard Walder.”

“I’m going to be swamped with customers, Mr. Walder. Don’t know why they haven’t started. Hot-dog-and-relish trade. You’d better start. Am I in trouble?”

“In my job you meet all kinds. Tough ones, liars, cheats, hustlers, stupid, bright. Mostly you can get mad at them, get an attitude to carry you through. Do you see?”

“No, I guess not. Look, Walder, what in hell’s bothering you? I’m not completely stupid. I’ve talked to Mr. Baker at the bank. You’re after Mr. Marullo, my boss.”

“And I got him,” he said softly.

“What for?”

“Illegal entry. It’s not my doing. They throw me a dossier and I follow it up. I don’t judge him or try him.”

“He’ll be deported?”

“Yes.”

“Can he make a fight? Can I help him?”

“No. He doesn’t want to. He’s pleading guilty. He wants to go.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!”

Six or eight customers came in. “I warned you,” I called to him, and I helped them select what they needed or thought they did. Thank heaven I had ordered a mountain of hot-dog and hamburger rolls.

Walder called, “What do you get for piccalilli?”

“It’s marked on the label.”

“Thirty-nine cents, ma’am,” he said. And he went to work, measuring, bagging, adding. He reached in front of me to ring up cash on the register. When he moved away I took a bag from the pile, opened the drawer, and, using the bag like a potholder, I picked up the old revolver, took it back to the toilet, and dropped it in the can of crankcase oil that waited for it.

“You’re good at this,” I said when I came back.

“I used to have a job at Grand Union after school.”

“It shows.”

“Don’t you have anybody to help?”

“I’m going to bring my boy in.”

Customers always come in coveys, never in evenly spaced singles. A clerk gets set in the interval to meet the next flight. Another thing, when two men do something together they become alike, differences of mind become less ragged. The Army discovered that black and white no longer fight each other when they have something else to fight in company. My subcutaneous fear of a cop dissipated when Walder weighed out a pound of tomatoes and totted up a list of figures on a bag.

Our first flight took off.

“Better tell me quick what you want,” I said.

“I promised Marullo I’d come out here. He wants to give you the store.”

“You’re nuts. I beg your pardon, ma’am. I was speaking to my friend.”

“Oh, yes. Of course. Well, there are five of us—three children. How many frankfurters will I need?”

“Five apiece for the children, three for your husband, two for you. That’s twenty.”

“You think they’ll eat five?”

“They think they will. Is it a picnic?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then get five extra for dropping in the fire.”

“Where do you keep the Plug-O for sinks?”

“Back there with the cleansers and ammonia.”

It was broken up like that and was bound to be. Edited of customers, it was like this:

“I guess I’m in a state of shock. I just do my job and it’s with mugs for the most part. If you get conditioned by crooks and liars and cheats, why, an honest man can shock the hell out of you.”

“What do you mean, honest? My boss never gave away anything. He’s a tough monkey.”

“I know he is. We made him that way. He told me and I believe him. Before he came over he knew the words on the bottom of the Statue of Liberty. He’d memorized the Declaration of Independence in dialect. The Bill of Rights was words of fire. And then he couldn’t get in. So he came anyway. A nice man helped him—took everything he had and dropped him in the surf to wade ashore. It was quite a while before he understood the American way, but he learned—he learned. ‘A guy got to make a buck! Look out for number one!’ But he learned. He’s not dumb. He took care of number one.”

This was interspersed with customers so it didn’t build to a dramatic climax—just a series of short statements.

“That’s why he wasn’t hurt when somebody turned him in.”

“Turned him in?”

“Sure. All it takes is a telephone call.”

“Who did that?”

“Who knows? The department’s a machine. You set the dials and it follows through all the steps like an automatic washer.”

“Why didn’t he run for it?”

“He’s tired, right to his bones he’s tired. And he’s disgusted. He’s got some money. He wants to go back to Sicily.”

“I still don’t get it about the store.”

“He’s like me. I can take care of chiselers. That’s my job. An honest man gums up my works, throws me sky high. That’s what happened to him. One guy didn’t try to cheat him, didn’t steal, didn’t whine, didn’t chisel. He tried to teach the sucker to take care of himself in the land of the free but the boob couldn’t learn. For a long time you scared him. He tried to figure out your racket, and he discovered your racket was honesty.”

“Suppose he was wrong?”

“He doesn’t think he was. He wants to make you a kind of monument to something he believed in once. I’ve got the conveyance out in the car. All you have to do is file it.”

“I don’t understand it.”

“I don’t know whether I do or not. You know how he talks— like corn popping. I’m trying to translate what he tried to explain. It’s like a man is made a certain way with a certain direction. If he changes that, something blows, he strips a gear, he gets sick. It’s like a—well, like a do-it-yourself police court. You have to pay for a violation. You’re his down payment, kind of, so the light won’t go out.”

“Why did you drive out here?”

“Don’t know exactly. Had to—maybe—so the light won’t go out.”

“Oh, God!”

The store clouded up with clamoring kids and damp women. There wouldn’t be any more uncluttered moments until noon at least.

Walder went out to his car, and came back and parted a wave of frantic summer wives to get to the counter. He laid down one of those hard board bellows envelopes tied with a tape.

“Got to go. Four hours’ drive with this traffic. My wife’s mad. She said it could wait. But it couldn’t wait.”

“Mister, I been waiting ten minutes to get waited on.”

“Be right with you, ma’am.”

“I asked him if he had any message and he said, ‘Tell him good-by.’ You got any message?”

“Tell him good-by.”

The wave of ill-disguised stomachs closed in again and it was just as well for me. I dropped the envelope in the drawer below the cash register and with it—desolation.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The day went quickly and yet was endless. Closing time had no relation to opening time, so long ago it was that I could hardly remember it. Joey came in as I was about to close the front doors and without asking him I punched a beer can and handed it to him, and then I opened one for myself and I have never done that before. I tried to tell him about Marullo and the store, and found I could not, not even the story I had accepted in exchange for the truth.

“You look tired,” he said.

“I guess I am. Look at those shelves—stripped. They bought things they didn’t want and didn’t need.” I unloaded the cash register into the gray canvas bag, added the money Mr. Baker had brought, and on top I put the bellows envelope and tied up the bag with a piece of string.

“You oughtn’t to leave that around.”

“Maybe not. I hide it. Want another beer?”