Act of Fear (3 page)

‘He’s a part-time instructor we use sometimes. You can find him almost any time at The Tugboat Grill. Which is why we only use him sometimes. He knows more about fuel injection than any man in New York, only most of the time the fuel he knows best is alcohol.’

I left the instructor brooding. His real trouble was that he still cared. He cared about Jo-Jo Olsen and all the others. He wanted to teach them, so he hated them. Somewhere deep in the hidden corners of his heart he was a true teacher, and each time one of his boys failed him his heart could not help whispering that perhaps it was, after all, he who had failed.

For Cecil Rhys-Smith the whisper of his own failure had long ago become a shout that could only be lessened by the rush of booze down his always thirsty throat. I found The Tugboat Grill moored at the edge of the river so close beneath the West Side Highway that the shadows of cars flickered the window all day long.

Cecil Rhys-Smith sat on a bar stool with the air of a man who has learned that a bar stool is man’s best friend. His beer glass was not quite empty. If the glass had been empty he would not have been allowed to sit there without refilling it. And if he were not there at the bar, how could some generous stranger buy him a drink? It was clear that Rhys-Smith did not have the price of a refill, only the hope. I braced him with the offer of a free whiskey. The suspicion that had begun the instant I had approached him vanished. On the strength of one whiskey and the perpetual hope of one more, he allowed me to take him to a reasonably private back booth.

‘Missing?’ Rhys-Smith said when I told him about Jo-Jo. I had wondered. He’s a generous boy for one so young.’

Rhys-Smith looked at my missing arm. ‘The young are not often generous, Mr Fortune. Generosity requires some suffering.’

I was not in the mood to tell the story of my arm. Not any of the stories of my arm. So I watched Rhys-Smith. He fitted his name if not his present location. Cecil Rhys-Smith is not a name heard often in Chelsea.

He was a small man, slender and wiry, with the light skin and ruddy complexion of the British Isles. His moustache was thin and pale, and his hair was thin and had once been pale. The hair was grey now, and it looked like he cut it himself. His clothes had once been good tweed. He looked like a man who had once been someone. Not someone important, just someone. He had been a man who had something to do and a place in the world. Now he was no one, and what had happened was as obvious as the shaking of his hands when he tried to sip, not gulp, his free whiskey. Somewhere in his life his way out had become a monster on his back, and he had ended in a cheap bar a long way from home.

‘Talk to me,’ I said, ‘and there’ll be more.’

He was not all the way down yet. ‘I would talk about my friend Jo-Jo without it, Mr Fortune. I will also take every dram you care to offer.’

‘Sorry,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘It’s a simple life. Only one problem to think about every day, and a good chance that the problem will not last long. But tell me about Jo-Jo?’

‘He seems to have vanished. His family say he’s just on a trip. Peter Vitanza thinks different.’

‘His family, yes,’ Rhys-Smith said. ‘I never met them. There is some trouble there, Mr Fortune. Jo-Jo was disturbed about his family. I would say that he hated them, and yet, well, he loved them, you see? He is a close-mouthed boy.’

‘Where could he have gone?’

‘I don’t know, but never far from cars or some kind of motor racing. I suppose the Vitanza boy told you of Jo-Jo’s dreams? Plans, I should call them. He’ll do what he says. All he needs is training and experience. He has the drive.’

‘They both do,’ I said, and told him about Petey coming to me, and about the fifty bucks.

‘A good boy, Petey, but not strong the way Jo-Jo is. Peter has the dreams, not the drive. He’s too human, he wants too many other things. Jo-Jo is a rock. Pride if you like.’

‘Where do you fit in?’

‘I once drove for Ferrari.’

He looked at his empty glass. I waved for another round for both of us. I never let a man drink alone. For a drunk that is demeaning. I’m lucky; I don’t depend on a drink. Not yet. My hiding places have not become prisons. That doesn’t say that they won’t someday, and I try to remember that. A man in prison needs a human word.

‘A relief man,’ Rhys-Smith said. ‘Useful to test the cars. There was the bottle. Once I had ideas. When I did not get what I needed the bottle was the consolation. Now I console the bottle. But I was a driver. I know racing. I know fuel injection. Jo-Jo liked to talk to me. He is a generous boy.’

‘Can you give me any leads where he might go?’

‘I don’t really know much about him beyond his plans.’

‘What about women?’

‘No, none that I ever saw. He was a remarkably controlled boy. Pete and women, definitely.’ Rhys-Smith smiled. ‘Pete is like me. Not that Jo-Jo did not have use for a female. But he did not get involved.’

‘And Vikings?’

Rhys-Smith laughed. ‘Ah, yes, the Vikings. He knew all the sagas. How brave they were, he would say. They could outsail anyone. They had pride, he said, style. Yes, style. He could reel off their names: Harald the Stern, Sweyn Fork-Beard, Halfdan the Black, Harald Fair-haired, Eric the Red, Sweyn Blue-Tooth, Gorm the Old. All they needed was their ship, so Jo-Jo said.’

‘That’s all? A hobby?’

‘He did not like it that his father let people call him
Swede
when they are Norwegians. It seemed important.’

‘Maybe he took a trip in a time machine,’ I said.

Rhys-Smith smiled politely. He was in that cosy world where it is always warm for a drunk with enough booze. He was feeling fine, and closing time would never come. I slipped a dollar into his jacket pocket when I left. It made me feel big.

Outside the bar I flagged another cab and rode back up to Twenty-Third Street. The McBurney is a big YMCA, but the pool man thought he remembered an Olsen who was a regular. He checked his sign-in sheets for me. Jo-Jo had not missed a week-end at the pool in over a year – until now. Jo-Jo had not signed into the pool at the past week-end.

In the street again I felt half foolish. A nineteen-year-old cuts some classes and a test, leaves a buddy high and dry, skips a big race, and doesn’t swim for a week-end. For all I knew, Jo-Jo was on the beach at Atlantic City. There are a thousand things that can make a nineteen-year-old suddenly change his mind, and what is four days?

Marty was waiting for me, and I don’t like to keep Marty waiting.

And yet I felt only about half-foolish – Jo-Jo Olsen did seem to be a little missing.

Chapter 4

I decided to work on Jo-Jo Olsen a few more days, go through at least the standard routine. Pete Vitanza’s fifty was worth that much, and, somehow, Jo-Jo did not sound like he should have done a rabbit. Maybe he had been pushed.

I checked the hospitals, the jails, and the morgue, with no results. They had no Olsen, and only two John Does fitted Jo-Jo’s description at all. One was a blond kid off a ship, who turned out to speak no English, and the other was an over-age ‘youth’ in Bellevue who had been rolled by a sailor and who said that Jo-Jo sounded
darling.
It was slow, hot, tedious work. Do you have any idea how many hospitals there are in New York City with emergency wards?

I tried the taxi companies and the airports. I turned up one lead. A taxi driver had had a passenger early last Friday who he thought had looked something like the picture of Jo-Jo. The driver thought maybe he had taken the fare from Chelsea to the East Side Air Terminal. Some lead.

Bad as the lead was, it ended at the terminal anyway. Even if I could have had a look at passenger lists, I didn’t think it would have helped. If Jo-Jo was doing a fadeout, he was sure to be using a phony name.

I put out feelers for information to some of my more reliable connections in the bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, coffee shops, and candy stores in Chelsea, the Village, and Little Italy. I hinted at something being in it for words on Jo-Jo. (For fifty dollars I could not put out much; but, all else aside, most cases in this world are solved by informers, and informers sing only for cash. Eighty per cent of the time police work consists of waiting for a stool pigeon to call.) So I let it be known that I wanted to hear about Jo-Jo Olsen and sat back to wait for someone to come to me and let me earn my fifty.

Two days passed. I had no results from my own hard work. And my feelers turned up nothing at all. No one even whispered to me. I had not really expected the pigeons would sing to me. Not only do I carry the taint of
cop,
despite the old ‘pirate’ nickname and the ancient history of being like most people in Chelsea, but I don’t really belong in Chelsea anymore. I’m not regular. I don’t act quite right. I’ve been away too long and too far.

Over the last twenty years I’ve lived in a lot of places. In most of the big cities of the world. I’m a city man, that much I know about myself. Big cities: London and New York, Paris and Amsterdam, San Francisco and Tokyo. Sometimes I think that that is about all I do know about myself. At that, it’s probably more than most men know about themselves.

In Chelsea most men stay home if they are regular. They set their role in life early, and they don’t change it. If a man is a longshoreman, he doesn’t sell shoes. If a man is a hustler, he won’t pick pockets. A safe-cracker does not strong-arm in alleys. Chelsea likes to know who and what a man is, just the same as the big world wants to know. A man should decide early and for keeps what he will be from the choices he is given. That is what people want in Chelsea, and in the big world. The only difference is that in Cheslea the choices tend to be different.

I’ve had too many jobs in too many places. I’ve been a seaman and a waiter, tourist guide and farmhand, private cop and actor, newspaperman and over-age student. Almost any work a man can do with one arm, no special training except in juvenile delinquency, and a useless education. I remember a professor I had out in San Francisco who complained that all I had learned in my haphazard studying didn’t add up to a hill of beans. I’m not an engineer or a CPA. I’m not a scientist or a scholar. And I’m overqualified, as they say, to make a good waiter or deckhand. All I had done, that professor pointed out, was learn a lot without increasing my market value.

In Chelsea this adds up to not being regular. When a dockhand knows more than the hiring boss, people are uneasy. I keep my mouth shut as much as possible, and most people in Chelsea don’t know my whole guilty secret; but I can’t hide it all, and they sense that I don’t quite belong anymore. They know that I read books. Reading is one of the dangers of the sea. A sailor has too much time. It is also a danger of living too much alone in strange cities. A man can learn too much by reading. Too much that he can’t change and can’t forget. They also know that I left Chelsea soon after I lost my arm. They don’t know that I’ve been straight since that day; and they remember the juvenile bandit, but they are not sure about me. They don’t know that I came back to Chelsea only because I wanted to stay in one place for a time now and that one of the things I have learned is that it does not matter where a man lives because he lives inside himself anyway and that a man’s home is easiest to hide in. But they are uneasy about me sometimes.

I was born in Chelsea, so I’m not an outsider. But, somehow, I’m not quite regular. So I’m in a kind of limbo where people know me, will talk to me, will even help me at times. They will often tell me what I ask, but they will be wary when it comes to talking about someone who might not want me to know what I ask about him. They are not sure about me. And in Chelsea people like to be sure about a man. In fact that was what almost cost Jo-Jo Olsen his life, but I did not know that then.

What I knew was that two more days of work had left me as ignorant about Jo-Jo Olsen as the day I had started and that no one was talking to me about Jo-Jo. I also knew that it was hot, that it was looking more like Jo-Jo Olsen had just taken a trip he had not told Pete Vitanza about, that I could make better use of my time by spending it with Marty, and that I could think of no more good reason to work hard than I could ever think of.

‘How about hunger, thirst and me,’ Marty said.

Marty is one of the reasons I decided to stay in one place for a while. We’ve known each other three years now, and her name is on my life insurance. That does not tempt her, which says a lot about her character these days when you read about kids who kill their parents for the insurance money to go to college.

‘That’s not enough,’ I said.

And it’s not. A man does not need much money to eat, sleep dry, and get enough to drink to quiet the voices in his head or the pain in an arm that isn’t even there. How can something hurt that isn’t there? A stupid question. I’ve read my Freud. What’s missing hurts more than anything else, especially when you are alone at night. Sometimes I find myself lying awake and wondering if the arm is still alive somewhere and missing me. I wonder where the arm is now, and if it is lonely. Those are thoughts that can keep a man awake for a long time.

No, I make enough money for my needs. Real work is for something else. Real work has to be for more than a full belly or a paid-up woman. Real work has its own reasons for being done; reasons that are part of the work itself. That, too, was a fact that Jo-Jo Olsen was going to have to think about before we were finished with each other.