Appointment in Samarra (4 page)

“And I would like to say,” Julian said to himself, “that I thought it was about time someone shut him up.”

But he knew he would not throw this drink, now almost gone, or the fresh drink which he was about to mix. Not at
Harry Reilly. It was not through physical fear of Reilly; Reilly was more than forty, and though a good golfer he was short-winded and fat, and unquestionably would do anything in the world to avoid a fist fight. For one thing, Harry Reilly now practically owned the Gibbsville-Cadillac Motor Car Company, of which Julian was president. For another thing, if he should throw a drink at Harry Reilly, people would say he was sore because Reilly always danced a lot with and was elaborately attentive to Caroline English.

His thoughts were interrupted by Ted Newton, the dentist, who stopped at the table for a quick straight drink. Ted was wearing a raccoon coat, the first season for it if not actually the very first time he had had it on. “Going?” said Julian. That was all he felt like giving to Newton, and more than he would have given him if Newton had not been a Cadillac prospect. Had a Buick now.

“Yeah. Lillian’s tired and her folks are coming tomorrow from Harrisburg. They’re driving over and they’ll be here around one, one-fifteen.”

Never mind their schedule, thought Julian. “Really?” he said aloud. “Well, Merry Christmas.”

“Thanks, Ju,” said Newton. “Merry Christmas to you. See you at the Bachelors’?”

“Right,” said Julian, and added in an undertone, while the others said good-night to Newton: “And don’t call me Ju.”

The orchestra was playing Body and Soul, working very hard at the middle passage of the chorus. The musicians were very serious and frowning, except the drummer, who was showing his teeth to all the dancers and slapping the wire brushes on the snare drum. Wilhelmina Hall, six years out of Westover, was still the best dancer in the club, and was getting the best rush. She would get twice around the dance floor with the same partner, then someone would step out of the stag line and cut in. Everyone cut in on her, because she was such a good dancer, and because everyone said she was not in love, unless it was with Jimmy Malloy, and she certainly wasn’t in love with him. At least that’s what everybody said. The males
who cut in on her were of all ages, whereas Kay Verner, now at Westover, and much the prettiest girl, got her rush almost exclusively from the prep school–college crowd. And she was in love with Henry Lewis. At least that’s what everyone said. Constance Walker, the little fool, was not wearing her glasses again, as if everyone in the club didn’t know she couldn’t see across the table without them. She was known on the stag line as a girl who would
give you a dance;
she was at Smith, and was a good student. She had a lovely figure, especially her breasts, and she was a passionate little thing who wasn’t homely but was plain and, if she only knew it, didn’t look well without her glasses. She was so eager to please that when a young man would cut in on her, he got the full benefit of her breasts and the rest of her body. The young men were fond of saying, before leaving to cut in on Constance: “Guess I’ll go get a work-out.” The curious thing about her was that four of the young men had had work-outs with her off the dance floor, and as a result Constance was not a virgin; yet the young men felt so ashamed of themselves for yielding to a lure that they could not understand, in a girl who was accepted as not attractive, that they never exchanged information as to Constance Walker’s sex life, and she was reputed to be chaste. The worst thing that was said about her was: “Yeah, you may think she isn’t attractive, and I agree with you. But did you ever see her in a bathing suit? Hot-cha!”

The band was playing Something To Remember You By.

The stag line was scattered over the floor by the time the band was working on the second chorus of the tune, and when Johnny Dibble suddenly appeared, breathless, at the place where his cronies customarily stood, there were only two young men for him to address. “Jeez,” he said. “Jeezozz H. Kee-rist. You hear about what just happened?”

“No. No,” they said.

“You didn’t? About Julian English?”

“No. No. What was it?”

“Julian English. He just threw a highball in Harry Reilly’s face. Jeest!”

III

Al Grecco knew the road from Philadelphia to Gibbsville pretty much as an engineman knows the right-of-way. On a regularly scheduled run, an experienced engineman can look at his watch and tell you that in four-and-one-half minutes his train will be passing a schoolhouse to the right of the tracks. Or, he can look out at a haystack or a barn or other landmark, and tell you to the half-minute what time it is. Al Grecco could do almost the same thing. He knew the 94½ miles from Philadelphia to Gibbsville—he knew it cold. And it certainly was cold tonight. The gasps of wind told him that. It was warm in the car, with the heater on. He was driving a V-61 Cadillac coach, and he had lowered the window in the door at his right about three inches from the top. He was an expert driver. He had made the trip to Philadelphia several times in under two hours, leaving Gibbsville in the early morning; and tonight he automatically checked his time as he was passing the gate posts which marked the entrance to the Lantenengo Country Club: two hours and a little over forty-five minutes from his hotel in Philadelphia. Not bad, considering the snowdrifts and the condition of the roads down on the lower entrance to Reading, where cars were scattered all along both sides of the road. He was going as fast as he could with safety. It was a business trip.

Although he never had seen anything but the roof of it, Al knew that the country club was built on a plateau. The clubhouse was scarcely visible from the state highway. Cars leaving the club did not come into view from the highway until they were a third of the way down the long drive, which opened upon the highway at the gate posts. Al Grecco noticed as he was passing that another Cadillac, a big sedan job, was just coming into sight on the drive. The moment he saw the car he recognized it. He more or less made it his business to be able to recognize important cars, and this sedan looked important. It was a demonstrator, and would be driven by Julian English, the Cadillac distributor.

“The louse,” said Al. But he was not angry with Julian. It was because of an order from Julian that he had had to go to
Philadelphia. It looked like Julian was going to have a good party some time between Christmas and New Year’s, because he had asked Ed Charney, the big shot, if he could get him a case of champagne, good champagne, and deliver it the day after Christmas. Ed, of course, said he’d be only too glad to get some good champagne, and he had attended to the matter himself. Ed had phoned Philadelphia and made sure that it was good champagne. Ed liked Julian English. Julian English belonged to the Lantenengo Street crowd and he was the kind of a guy that was a high class guy and would be a high class guy in any crowd. You could tell by looking at him he was a high class guy. And he always spoke to the boys on the street. He wasn’t like some of them (mostly the older guys), who would do business with Ed, say business at the bank or insurance or something on that order, but they wouldn’t even see Ed when they met him on the street. Or even guys who didn’t know Ed, they would call up and say this was So-and-so, president of such and such a company, and could Ed do them a favor and get a case of genuine Scotch at a good price. In the early days Ed would try to put himself out for the respectable people, the ones that thought they were high class. But Ed saw it didn’t pay; they didn’t appreciate it when he did them a favor, and they didn’t even say hello to him the next time he saw one of them on the street. So there were only a few of the Lantenengo Street crowd who could get a favor out of Ed without paying cash on the line for it. But Julian English certainly was one of them. And it wasn’t only because he spoke to you; it was the way he did it. He spoke to you like a human being, and now and then he even sat down for a cup of coffee with Ed. “That English, he’s my boy,” Ed once said, and that was enough. “For my money,” Ed said, “I will take that English. He’s a right guy.” That was plenty. In Ed’s position you had to be a good judge of what a man was like, and the English was copacetic. And Al agreed with Ed. Not that it would have made any difference if he didn’t agree with Ed. You either agreed with Ed, between Reading and Wilkes-Barre, or you got a job in the mines. That was the
least
that could happen to you if you didn’t agree with Ed: you just weren’t in the mob
any more. The worst could happen to you was you would get held by a couple of the boys while a couple others kicked you till they got tired kicking you, and then they would put a couple of slugs in you and that was that. But Ed very seldom had occasion to do that kind of thing. In the beginning, yes. There were several cases that the state police were still bothering about that Al knew more about than he wished he knew. That was when Ed was beginning to organize booze and the girls and the numbers racket. He had to put the screws on a few people here and there, or they would have become pests. You had to be tough in this business, or you weren’t anything. You didn’t get anywhere. Just the same, you had to be regular, you had to be on the up-and-up with those that treated you right. Al Grecco turned up his coat collar. He had felt a chill, and even though there was no one else in the car he felt a little ashamed, because he recognized that the chill was kid stuff; the way you feel when you have done something very good for somebody, or the way you feel about your mother. That was the way he felt about Ed Charney. He felt loyal.

Recognizing this he wanted to do something to show how loyal he could be, and the nearest thing at hand that gave him any chance to do something for Ed was the champagne. He turned to see that the champagne was still covered with blankets and secure against bumps. Ed would want the goods delivered in the best possible shape. Then he remembered the sedan, with English in it. He reduced his speed to thirty miles an hour and allowed the sedan to overtake him.

In a short time the sedan did overtake him and Al Grecco could see by the way English was driving that he was sore about something. As a rule English was an artistic driver, as good to a car as men used to be to horses. And this particular job that English was driving was a demonstrator, which he kept tuned up all the time. But now English shot the car up over a rut and pushed through a six-foot drift in passing Grecco. Not that there wasn’t plenty of room, and not that Al Grecco wouldn’t have moved over or stopped if English had blown his horn. English didn’t blow his horn, though. He just
tramped on the gas and gave the sedan hell. The sedan hit the drift with a hard wallop, swaying from side to side, and almost as soon as he hit the drift and punched a hole in it, English swung the steering wheel and got back on the cleared part of the road. If you could call it cleared.

Stew stuff, Al Grecco decided.

In the few seconds that it took English to pass him Al Grecco noticed that English had his hat on the back of his head, which wasn’t like English. English wasn’t what you would call a snappy dresser, but he was always neat. Al also noticed that there was a woman in the car, slumped low in the front seat, low and as far away from English as she could get. That would be Mrs. English. It never occurred to Al Grecco that it could be anyone else, because Al never had heard anything about English and other women—and if English had been a chaser Al would have heard about it. Around Gibbsville if you were a chaser it meant you had to go to the roadhouses, and Al made it his business to know who went to the roadhouses. A lot of wise guys in Gibbsville thought they were getting away with murder by taking their girl friends to the country hotels in the Pennsylvania Dutch part of the county. The wise guys thought they were pretty smart, going to those places instead of showing at the Stage Coach, which was the big roadhouse, where the drinks were six bits apiece and there was dancing and a hat-check girl and waiters in uniform and all that front. But if the chasers only knew how wrong they were! Al made it his busìness to know about the chasers, because you never could tell when it would come in handy to know that So-and-so was cheating, especially if So-and-so happened to be some local big shot that could be useful to Ed up at the courthouse or in politics or even at a bank. Al remembered one time such information had come in handy. There was a councilman who was not on the take. Ed for some reason hadn’t been able to get to him with a dime, not a dime. One night Ed got the tip that this councilman was going to shoot off his mouth about a couple of speakeasies which Ed was interested in. This councilman was making a big play to get the Republican nomination for
mayor. So Al happened to be there when Ed got the tip, and Al said: “Who did you say’s going to do that?”

“Hagemann,” said Ed.

“Oh, no he isn’t,” Al said, and told Ed why Hagemann wasn’t going to shoot off his mouth. And was Ed pleased! He went to Hagemann’s office and he said to him something like this: Mr. Hagemann, you’re a great Church man and you represent the good element in this town and all that, so if it gets around that you’ve been going places with a certain lady about thirty years old that wears glasses…. And Ed didn’t have to say any more. Hagemann just got up and shut the door and when Ed left they were the best of friends and still were. Ed even arranged it that Hagemann could get away with cheating on the one with glasses. Oh, in this business you had to look for all the angles.

Al Grecco stepped on it to keep up with English, who now had the accelerator down to the floor, and was keeping it there. You could tell that that was what he was doing, because when the wheels of the sedan got out of the tracks the car would leap up to the side of the road, slapping the long pile of snow. Al noticed that Mrs. English, who had her fur collar turned up higher than her ears, did not turn on English. That meant she was mad. Any woman ordinarily would be sitting up on the seat and bawling her husband out. But if he was any judge, Al was sure she was not saying a word. He began to wonder about this English dame.

He just had a feeling, that was all, but he went back in his memory and tried to recollect something, anything at all, that fitted in with the idea he was beginning to get about her. The idea he was beginning to get about her was that she might be a cheater herself. But he could not remember anything. He knew she never had been to any of the country hotels. She got loud once in a while at the Stage Coach, but no worse than a lot of others, and English was always there when she was. No, it was just one of those things. You got an idea about some person and you didn’t have any reason for it; but Al Grecco in his twenty-six years had learned one thing, namely, that if you
had a hunch about a person, a real hunch that kept bothering you, something usually happened to prove that your hunch was either dead wrong or dead right.