Brain Guy: A gang killer meets his match in a TNT blonde (28 page)

“Gimme the gat.” His fingers dug into Duffy’s throat like grapnels as if he’d tear the heart out of voice.

Slowly Bill picked up the pistol, obeying McMann, who was as godly or evil as the radio or the city noise shut out behind the window. He didn’t look at Duffy. His ears banged with sound, with the high-climbing city’s voice of brick and steel, the sound of the machines clicking out, lives and machines that were unlives, with fury of words and foreign tongues, with the power of the unknown radio speaker. In this din, his own heart missed a beat, hammering into consciousness so that he heard his heart, his inner self beating. McMann dominated all the sounds. “Dumb bastard. Want’m to live?” McMann’s voice was the saddest of all, the most human, for none of the other voices were of any interest. The city didn’t care nor the radio nor Bill’s own blind heart. He surrendered the gun. One sound more. Duffy lay on the floor, a mean persistent thing to be avoided. His gaze lowered, and now it filled his gaze, and his eyes were with tears. Duffy lay on his face, the purple gown spread about him aspirant like wings.

The radio clamored. Its voice of the dead speaking unintelligibly of matters the living had no concern for. McMann put on his gloves, carefully rubbing barrel and hilt with a handkerchief, then placing the pistol near Duffy’s hand. He whispered very respectably: “Let’s beat it, huh?” Bill admired his decorum in the presence of the dead.

They went up two flights, buzzed for the lift. The lobby was full of living folk, the streets so crowded death seemed the biggest rarity. Bill thought: McMann’s a ghost, a magician, someone you can’t harm. As in all their crimes, they appeared to be wearing invisible rings. Nobody ever saw them, nobody was the wiser.

“The kids is ourn,” said McMann.

“If I didn’t hand you the gun?”

“Why not? Don’t I know I kin depend on ya?”

It was exciting from a gangster movie into bright sunlight. He felt sorry for Duffy. Good God, Duffy wasn’t Cagney or Robinson or Raft. Duffy had been real, Duffy wouldn’t ever come to life like the movie fellows when the film was over. “What’d you do with the coke?”

“I tolya, him, I give back his knife. Duff got his gun. I don’ feel so hot. Too much excitement. I’ve gotta get drunk this minute. Come ‘long.”

“I suppose so. I feel sorry, yeh, sorry, I feel punchdrunk, groggy, sick, I don’t know how I feel.”

McMann grimaced. “Quit bitchin’. Think I had a grand time? Le’s get soused’n forget it.”

“Sure,” said Bill. “I meant I was going to say I was sorry for the both of us. For you and me, not for them.”

“I don’t make you outa all.”

J
OE
dressed rapidly after his brother left with McMann. No wonder Bill was the way he was, pals with such an egg. The hell with them. He couldn’t be worrying about his brother. He had no effect on him. After breakfast he left the house. March was burning itself out in sun, the sky a blue promise, the wind the one force remembering winter, a little harsh and chilly. He spent an hour at the Library, idling up Fifth to Central Park. He opened his coat to the wind, repeatedly wiping a slight sweat from his upper lip. The world was on the move, no time for lagging steps. He was alive, he was in love. The Park was empty.

There was no getting away from it. He was in love with Cathy. He wanted her, and why not? She was only a woman like everybody else. He had had dreams at night, warm before-dropping-asleep images of Cathy being courted by him man-fashion. But why feel so paralyzing stifling hot today? Why this day with Bill running off God alone knew where? There was a crisis in his brother’s affairs, he might be in danger, and yet he didn’t really give a damn. He’d tried his best, failing, and now reverting to the stone basis of his being, the passion slowly accreted in the months. There was a crisis in his body. The flesh and youth of him were demanding. No use waiting. Gazing on the women passing by, their trim legs, the coats tight about their bodies, he was battered again by the beastly fecundity in him that didn’t give a damn about anything, wanting only to slake itself. Oh, to be lying down with Cathy on a June shore! Cathy, I love you.

All that wandering morning in the city, with his halts at the Library, at a cafeteria for a bite, conjured up his fever. Was it him, Joe Trent, approaching the desk at a hotel and asking for a room? He didn’t focus the clerk, just knew it was somebody in charge. He paid in advance, took his key, and visited his room, brooding among the whiteness of linen. Downstairs he memorized the room number in case he should lose the key, jamming the key in his inner jacket pocket and stuffing a handkerchief on top of it.

“Let’s go for a long walk,” he said to Cathy at three o’clock.

“It’s a beautiful day.”

“And I know somebody beautiful, too,” he said, his voice humorless. In silence they strolled away from the multitudes of girls, green and dapper as frogs. “Getting on to April. The hell with it. I’m not stalling around. I got a room today at a hotel so we can go up there and talk. To talk,” he repeated swiftly, as if the trees in Gramercy Park were a forest about him. He stepped gingerly. Her hip touched his own. He listened to the song of these things. Hip and arm spoke grandly.

“We can’t go up,” said Cathy. She didn’t blush, but her words seemed to be all red and white.

For God’s sake, he preached, didn’t she love him? He wanted her alone. It was natural. They came out on Fifth and Twenty-third, winding through Madison Square, and their way that morning was all parked and green to the eye. Northwards to Forty-second, and the sense of brown trees accompanied them. What they said was forgotten and they were hearkening to the voices in their bodies, the city voice muted down to one inconsolate cry of longing. The tremendous phallic gleam of the Empire State caught their visions and they glanced skywards saying how big it was, jostled by people pausing for the traffic lights. At Fifty-ninth, north again was the endless country of Central Park. Their conversation had a summer hum. “I love you,” he said; “do you love me?” “I love you,” she said, “but it isn’t right.” He’d make it right. Why, how could he? He knew how. Let her wait and see. (St. Patrick’s Cathedral had given him an idea — not a nice idea, but he meant it right.)

“How can you make it right?” she said.

“Gee, you’re set. Don’t you love me? If you do you’ll see. Just hold your horses.” Then, excited he led her up the cathedral steps, under the central doorway into an immense hush of darkness, folding and draping their bodies so that they were part of the hush. “I brought you here for a reason. You’re Cath’lic. This is a Cath’lic church. I want to say I love you and will you marry me? I want you to.” They hadn’t been inside a minute, and yet the hush followed them. Breathing deep of cool air didn’t help that funny feeling of God spying down and saying: O.K., Joe, it’s a go, you’re man and wife. This feeling wasn’t part of his idea. On Fifth the whole idea seemed plain dopey. Her face was averted, but he swaggered, stepping briskly like a man fetching a slave home from market. He loved her. That was plenty. If he loved her he wouldn’t harm her, would he? The world flashed before him in hard gleaming color, enameled by his emotion. The avenue was thick yellow sun. Diamond points of light glittered from autos. The sky waved down between the rows of buildings like a blue flag. Thank God the loneliness was over, the crucifixion of the time before three o’clock. The long walk uptown belonged to another period, to the emptiness before the cathedral. He owned a new mind and body that hadn’t existed ten minutes ago.

When they were alone in the room, they were shy as newly weds, standing far apart, smiling down at the city. She wore her hat and coat, waiting for him to act, to do, to be the man. He knew it, idling, hearing time ticking into agony. Now that he had her here, the warm visions and lusts he’d counted on had stayed behind, not entering the room. He was solitary, a young fellow with no merry sensual company urging him on. Love? Hugging? Why was she silent? Her yellow hair, silky above her pale forehead, had no prettiness for him. Looking into her eyes he was more helpless than ever. They were just eyes. Animals had eyes. Men had eyes. He fastened his glance on her listless virginal arms, her pink lips, and it seemed strange that he had dreamed with such a dream of this thin girl with the narrow hips and the silence of a hunted rabbit. His words and her answers were both stupid. Was this how lovers talked? It couldn’t be. They were two suspicious animals, contemplating each other because they were in one cage. This wasn’t love. This wasn’t anything.

Seeing him this way, his arms strapped to his body, his mouth gagged, she felt pity. “Why you so goofy, Joe?”

“Hell, you’re goofy yourself.” Her eyes were softer. He hated her pity, remembering something at Metz’s … all these slum girls were the same, all of them were, the same, the same, ready to flop over soon they got outa diapers, diapers, and a guy outa pants, pants, outa pants. He thought this memory, but without believing it. Pity. It was pity in her, and nothing else.

“I want you to know,” he began tediously, “that I love you and will marry you some day like I said back in the church.” And after speaking to his conscience, reassuring God it was on the up-and-up, he hugged her with the formality of a kid with his number one official sweetheart, his neck twisted, his head stiff as if repelled by her nearness.

“Not so hard,” she said. “You’re strong.”

He smiled like an idiot, relaxing his grip, sitting down and pulling her onto his lap. What a sap he was! His insides broke free from tautness. He was himself again. “I’m crazy and you’re the reason.” He was masterful, home again with the knowledge gained from piling on sluttish maids. He kissed all the area of her face, for this lingered in his mind as part of the ritual. Inside of him the deep flame of quiet, gentle, intense, overwhelmed the tricks. He forgot all he’d learned of the art and the way, holding her tight to him on the chair as one would a valuable possession. They were two children in the first greenest gladtime of love. They had no harm for each other.

She was so sweet and vague, so little the woman or piece of tail, he remembered she was virgin. He said seriously: “You’re just a kid. You can guess what I mean. I can’t love you the way I want. We must wait or else. Gee, it’s hard to say. I’ve got to love you slowly, by degrees. I don’t want to hurt you all at once.” She was blushing, helpless as if he’d beaten her. He had sounded brutal and now asked if she understood. He wouldn’t hurt her. He loved her too much, but he had to love her. He had to.

The blood receded in her, she seemed sick from blushing, diseased with the irregular burstings of blood in her head, but when she answered, she was practical as a woman in love or a woman in passion. “Where’ll we go? I love you, Joe. I do.”

“I’ll take a room by the week.”

“What of the money?”

“You do love me.” They kissed in a tense second that broke down in its duration the churchly scruples of all her childhood and youth.

Later in the afternoon McMann and Bill, stewed to the gills, hopped a cab for McMann’s new diggings, stopping en route for ginger ale and a carton of ice. McMann dug the booze from one of the valises. They were alone in a strange room, their faces flaming, their hands trembling. McMann’s eyes were so bloodshot they seemed wounded. He was very confidential. “Tha’s how it goes. Yesterday’n today I bops two guys. Me. I kilt two guys. Can ya beat it? That steppin’ or ain’t it? Naw’n I don’ like it. But them or us. Think I liked that Duffy rat’s mug, the yeller bastard. Your fault when ya gets down to’t.”

“My fault!” yelled Bill; “how’n hell you get that way?”

McMann peered drunkenly above the rim of his glass, the low square brow of forehead beneath his red hair wrinkling. “I was nothin’ till you blowed round with your dope.”

“Then what you bitching?”

“I ain’t bitchin’.”

“What the hell you call bitching if you ain’t?”

“Paddy usta say to me you’re a smart sonufabitch.” He grinned fondly, inveigled towards a feeling of auld lang syne. “The first time I saw ya. At Paddy’s.”

“And you fetched down a guy in a trunk.” They laughed like two old men recalling a childhood memory, pleased that they both remembered, sighing, their whisky breaths filling the room.

“Jeez, yeh. It’s plain no-good.” He complained so dully Bill was sorry. “It ain’t fair. N.G. What a lousy life! Two ginks dead. Not my fault, it ain’t. Faulta lousy life. Looka,” he exclaimed. “My ole man ain’t worse’n the rest, nor me old lady, but they’re plain stinkin’ Irish, sockin’ me when they had nothin’ on. Out in the gutter with the other kids, that’s me, learnin’ to drive by hockin’ cars, jumpin’ into one after ‘nother. Lotsa saps never shut off their motors. When we got jammed up I run away. I learn every damn thing that way. Myself. Myself. Not one bastard to help me.” He refilled his glass, his small clever head perched on his neck, swaying gently as he talked. “Tha’s too bad,” said Bill. Injustice in the world, you could bet on it. A lot of injustice directed against them. It wasn’t fair, with the world ganging against their drunkenness. His insides were heated. The room was humid as if summer were outside, yet his cool mind held guard. He didn’t trust McMann even when he spoke of his kid days, never done before even under liquor. Why now? McMann could drink a barrel and not feel it. Why was he blabbing all the bunko about kid days. He thought: I’m sitting here with a murderer, he’s killed two men in a day and a half. He is feeling me out. He is pulling a fast one. Maybe I am to be killed.

Bill consoled himself drunkenly. Why, he was an accessory to Duffy’s murder. He’d handed over the gat. (Why in hell had he done it?) And as McMann mumbled about his kid days, Bill’s streak of sanity like a lightning fought itself clear of the thundery cloudy darkness of the booze. The few months, the few yesterdays. All in a life. He was in dutch with guys wanting him. Hanrahan, Duffy, McMann, sat morbidly at his funeral, the death of his former life, staring at his new life sweeping along. Murder. Oh, Christ, Hanrahan the bull, the kids, the stickups, Metz, Joe and Cathy, the clubhouse. This compacted past was creating a future even while he breathed and sprawled in a strange room.