Authors: Ross Macdonald
“Wait here. I’ll have to get dressed and go out for a minute. Read a book if you like.”
“I’m not in the mood for reading. Can you get me one?”
“Yes. I think so. In my profession, you know, you make contacts with all sorts of people. I’ll be back in fifteen or twenty minutes.” He withdrew his head with the suddenness of a startled gopher, and ran up the stairs, two at a time. A few minutes later I heard him come down and leave the house.
Allister was a queer duck, I thought, but he had his points. Not everyone would leave a total stranger alone in his house at night. And he had gone much further than that—gone out of his way to provide me with the one thing I needed to go on living in the same town with Kerch. He hated Kerch as sincerely as I did, and though he didn’t seem to have much physical courage, he had moral daring. In spite of his position, he had the daring to step outside the law for a purpose that seemed good to him. He wasn’t my type at all, but I felt respect and affection for him, as if he were at the same time both my older and my younger brother. The idealism that made him seem unrealistic and a little silly was the thing in him that I knew I could depend on, because he was a man ruled by general ideas. In a way he reminded me of Kaufman, the radical who sat in the back of his secondhand shop like an old spider, too disinterested to catch flies.
My mind skipped from Kaufman to his granddaughter
Carla. Where would she be in five years? What would she be doing? How did she feel about me? Would I ever see her again? Probably, because I certainly seemed to be getting around. It didn’t occur to me that I could ever die.
The night had passed its three o’clock crisis, and the patch of earth where the city stood was turning now not away from evening but towards morning. An hour before, I had felt almost finished, beaten down and about ready to quit. Since then a tide had turned in my blood. My head was light and sore, but I felt ready to fight the city again. I waited for Allister impatiently. I wanted to be on my way.
I lit a cigarette, the first I had remembered to smoke all night. But the smoke I drew into my lungs had a predawn bitterness. I crushed it out in the bottom of a steel wastebasket. There were no ashtrays in the room.
Then I heard hurrying footsteps coming up the walk to the porch, and the front door opening. I opened the door of the den, and Allister trotted in, wearing a gray pin-stripe suit and a fedora. He closed the door behind him with a conspiratorial gesture that made me smile to myself.
“Did you get it?”
He brought his hand out of the pocket of his outer coat, holding a heavy automatic by the muzzle. “I hope you know how to work an automatic, because I don’t. Be careful how you handle it. It’s loaded.”
I took it from him and saw that it was a Colt .45. I slid out the clip and ran my fingers over the copperheaded bullets nestling together like peas in a pod. I dropped it in my pocket, where it made a reassuring weight.
“I can use it. Have you got any extra shells?”
He handed me a small cardboard box which dragged down my other pocket. There was a confused gleam in his eyes, as if he was frightening himself but was pleased and surprised by his own temerity.
“And I need some money. My pockets were cleaned out.”
He took out an alligator billfold and counted out five tens. “If you need more, you can come to me,” he said. “But if you get into trouble, it wouldn’t do to bring me into it. It wouldn’t help you, and it would do me a terrible lot of harm. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I told you you could count on me. I’ll send back your money when I can.”
“Forget about it. I don’t need it. But you won’t send the gun back, will you?”
“If it does what I hope it will, I’ll have to ditch it anyway.”
He opened the front door for me and gave me his slender hand in a rigid boy-scout grip. “Good luck. Take care of yourself.”
“I think I can, now,” I said. “I won’t forget your help.”
I went down the walk to the dark street and turned towards the center of town.
I walked on tree-lined sidewalks beside broad lawns for five or six blocks, cut across a triangle of public park, and abruptly found myself in the slums again. They seemed to form a circular zone which surrounded the heart of the city, as if the money that was concentrated in the downtown banks and business houses was thrown outward by centrifugal force, skipping the rundown areas around the center and enriching the periphery. Now there were no more lawns and no more trees. The massed tenements shouldered in to the street and narrowed the sky. A drunk was sleeping noisily in a doorway, and in another a pair of dispossessed lovers possessed what they could of each other against the wall.
An all-night restaurant in the next block reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since noon the day before. There were no customers, and I went in and slid into an enclosed booth at the back.
“A couple of fried eggs,” I told the young man in the dirty apron who dabbled halfheartedly at my table with a wet rag.
“No eggs. All I got is fish and chips.”
“Make it fish and chips.”
He shuffled away, as if sleepiness was an element he waded through all night. My table was covered with checkered brown oilcloth, worn threadbare by many threadbare elbows. At the end of the table against the wall were a glass canister of sugar with a pouring spout, a bottle of vinegar, salt and pepper, and an unlabeled bottle of ketchup with a bloody mouth. A cockroach stepped out from behind the ketchup, gave me a quick impassive once-over, decided that I was of the Brahmin faith, and walked earnestly across the table on errands of his own. Somebody had left a newspaper on the bench beside me, and I picked it up and swatted the cockroach, permitting his soul to transmigrate into the body of a quartermaster.
The paper had been left open at the editorial page, and the title of one of the editorials caught my eye: “Our City, an Example to the Nation.” I read idly down the column:
During recent months this country as a whole has been swept by an unprecedented wave of disastrous labor troubles. In city after city, industry after industry, organized labor under the leadership of foreign-born Reds and terrorists, has broken its pledged word to the American people and forced strikes and violence on our industrial leaders, who have thus been interrupted in their great task of reconverting the country’s factories to peacetime production. Organized labor has made a mockery of the hopes of our returning veterans for peace and security. They have come back from the bloody fields of France and Okinawa to find not peace
but a sword, disrupted production schedules resulting in shortages of essential goods, wasted man-hours, anarchy where there should be discipline, the blood of their brothers running in the streets under the bludgeons of gangs of terrorists.
We can praise God and the foresight of our local leaders that the life of our fair city has not been blighted and blasted by C.I.O. threats and Communist violence. Nearly two years ago, in May 1944, while Armageddon was still upon us and our industries were straining every nerve to win the battle of production, our city fathers, led by that grand old man of municipal life, Alonzo P. Sanford, and our newly elected Mayor, Freeman Allister, foresaw the danger of labor violence and nipped it in the bud. At that time, under cover of wartime manpower needs and the fatuous favoritism of the Administration, C.I.O. agitators, Communistic-minded propagandists, and other dissident elements had infiltrated our local industries, attempting to lay the groundwork for future disruptive and revolutionary activities, such as we see today in other parts of the country. But the guardians of our municipal virtue were vigilant and alert. With the efficient co-operation of our excellent police force, the agitators who would have sabotaged our contribution to the national effort were weeded out and properly dealt with. Ours was one city that had a citizenry intelligent enough to perceive the dangers ahead, and a municipal government courageous enough to act to avert them in time.
As a result we can claim without false pride that the local industrial area is one of the few zones of quiet in
the chaotic labor situation which overspreads the country. And let no moon-struck visionaries of the Wallace type claim that our city is antilabor. Our armies of cheerful and well-trained workers, organized under local and truly American auspices in independent unions that protect all their rights as individuals, would be the first to laugh such an idea to utter scorn.
Ours is the American way. We offer our shining example, which shines like a good deed in a naughty world, as the Bard says, to a distraught nation torn by violence and industrial strife. Our local Chamber of Commerce welcomes inquiries from new businesses, or from old firms seeking a new location, which are interested in the possibilities of a disciplined and patriotic labor supply on the doorstep of the great markets of the Middle West.
“Pretty hot stuff, eh, Mac?” the waiter said over my shoulder. “I read that one myself.”
“You liked it?”
“Don’t kid me.” He set my plate in front of me and spat on the floor. “My old man and my old lady worked out at Sanford’s for the last thirty years. They’re gettin’ old now, and they make less than they did when they started. My brother was there for a while, till they broke his elbow with a lead pipe and threw him out of town. He was one of the foreign agitators they were talkin’ about in this story in the paper. If Bobby was a Communist, I’m Uncle Joe Stalin with bells on.”
“How does the story go over with people in general?”
“Those that want to believe it, believe it.” He gave me a knife and fork and pulled the vinegar into the center of the table. “Practically everybody that’s got any money in the bank and thinks he can squeeze some more. And all the goddam little bank clerks and salesmen and stenographers that go around suckholing their bosses. The rest of us take it for the crap it is. Christ, everybody knows who owns the paper.”
“Sanford?”
“You’re a good guesser. Coffee?”
“Yeah.”
“With or without?”
“With.”
He brought me coffee in a thick white cup, and shuffled away again.
When I was swallowing the last of my fish and chips, the door of the restaurant opened and somebody came in. On general principles I slumped down in my seat so that my head wouldn’t show over the back of the booth. It was just as well I did that, because the voice I heard was Joe Sault’s:
“You can give me that brief case now.”
“You’re damn right I can,” the waiter replied. “You think I like keeping stuff like that under the counter?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Everybody in the insurance business carries a brief case, don’t he? I got a right to carry a brief case, don’t I?”
“So now you’re selling insurance? If the cops found that thing in here, it’d fix me.”
“No cop interferes with my business.” A coin rolled on the counter. “Here. Buy yourself a syringe and keep your nose clean.”
“Yeah,” the waiter grumbled. “That goes for everybody, Sault.”
“Mr. Sault to you, eh?” The door opened and closed.
“To hell with you, Joey,” the waiter said to himself.
I leaned around the corner of my booth and made sure that Sault was clear of the windows. On the way out I flipped the waiter a half and told him to keep the change.
From the doorway I saw Sault pass under a street light halfway down the block, walking jauntily with his black brief case swinging beside him. I followed him at the same pace until he had turned the corner, then walked faster to shorten the distance between us. When I reached the corner, he was about two hundred yards ahead of me, headed downhill towards Main Street.
I didn’t want to go downtown, where my friends the police were concentrated, but I decided to follow Sault. Perhaps he would lead me to Kerch, or to somebody else I’d like to know better. I could have caught him and tried to make him talk, but that had failed before. I was losing faith in the direct approach. And now that I had a gun I felt I could afford to wait a little.
At the next corner he went straight on across the street and down the next block. I crossed to the other side and moved up on him, ready to duck into a doorway if he turned his head. There were few pedestrians on the streets and even fewer cars, but Sault swaggered for his own benefit as if he were walking among admiring crowds at high noon, the local boy who had made good.
Someone tapped lightly on a first-floor window just above my head, and I recoiled as if a gun had popped. It
was only a late whore holding out her heavy breast the way a butcher holds up a steak for the customer’s approval. I wagged my head and she jerked down her blind to keep out peeping toms.
A woman with a streetwalker’s jaded lilt in her step approached Sault from the opposite direction and stopped him under a street light. She put her hand on his arm in a gesture of appeal, but he brushed it off. She lifted her skirt, dug into the top of her stocking, and showed him something in her hand. He jerked his head in my direction, and I slid into the mouth of an alleyway. They crossed the street towards me, Sault walking ahead and the woman trailing along behind like a German wife. They seemed to be headed for my alley, and I retreated with my hand around the butt of my gun.
I squatted against the wall behind a big paper carton and heard the two sets of footsteps, one heavy and assured, the other quick and uncertain, coming down the alley towards me.
“O.K., Gert,” Sault said, “put up and you can have it. No money, no smokey.”
They had stopped before they came to me, and stood together in the faint light that reached them from the street. Their shadows lay along the dirty concrete in front of me, enlarged to heroic size. The woman’s shadow raised its elongated hand to its tall head, posed like a baroque saint in agony.
“I can pay you for what you give me now,” she said urgently. “If I pay you for last week, I won’t have any money left.”
“Sure you will, Gert. You can always make some money, a fine girl like you.”
“I want to go home,” she whispered. “I been pounding the pavements since eight o’clock. Give me a break, Joey. I couldn’t get to sleep for three nights now.”