Clemmie (8 page)

“Al, this is Craig Fitz. I think I’ve got a little problem.”

“
You’re
not in some kind of trouble!”

“No. Not steady old reliable Craig. Not me. Bill Chernek. I was with him. We were drunk. The cops knocked him out and took him in.”

“And let you go? You sound funny.”

“They didn’t spot me. It happened about two blocks from the corner of River Street and State Street. He was looking for a place called Connie’s.”

“Sane people don’t go down there, and Connie moved away over a year ago, I hear. She runs a call business. Is it just a D and D?”

“I don’t know. I guess he fought. They knocked him out.”

He could hear Jardine sigh. “Good old Bill. I’ll see what I can do. Want to meet me at the station?”

“I don’t think I should. I don’t think I’m an asset.”

“If he’s got one of those streaks on, I’m going to let him stay right there. I’d never be able to get him home alone. It won’t get in the papers. If it has to, I’ll make sure they typo the hell out of his name and address.”

“Thanks a lot, Al.”

“You take care of yourself, now. Say, how about coming around for dinner some night. Irene and I were talking about you the other day.”

“I’d like to, Al. Have Irene give me a ring at the plant.”

He debated calling a cab, decided against it. He was out of the worst of the area now. In a block or two he could cut over to Turner Street, and then it was only about five more blocks to the fringe of the theater district where he could get something to eat—if he could force it down.

When he came to an area of small frame houses with small lawns, where people sat on the front porches and kids ran whooping from lawn to lawn, he turned left and cut over to Turner. Two blocks up Turner he came to a lunchroom that looked sparkling clean. There was a low counter to sit at, and waitresses in yellow uniforms. He ordered black coffee. After that was down, and stayed down, hunger began to stir. He ordered a bowl of chili. It was hot and good. When it was gone he had a glass of milk and then another cup of coffee. He felt a great deal better. It was twenty after ten. It seemed to him that it should be much later. He realized there was nothing left to do but go home. It gave him a let-down feeling. After violence, the evening had dwindled off into nothing. He wondered about late movies and decided he had no urge to sit in the dark with strangers.

He paid and left. He walked slowly. As he passed a neighborhood bar near the corner, he paused and looked through the screen door. There was a good crowd in there, and they were watching a fight on television.

“… a left hook to the head and another right and a left to the body …”

He turned the corner, heading toward Federal Street.
There was a small parking lot beside the bar, with over a dozen cars in it. He glanced idly into the lot. He heard a girl’s voice, shrill and indignant. “That’s enough, God damn it! Stop! That’s enough!”

He paused, staring into the lot. He wondered if she was in one of the cars. He walked a few steps into the lot, listening. He could hear grunts and thuds and, in remorseless rhythm, the meaty splat of fists on flesh. He moved gingerly toward the sound. Just then a car swung around the corner and as the headlights swept by, he saw movement beyond the hood of a car thirty feet away, a car parked almost against the side of the bar.

“You’re
killing
him, damn you!” the girl yelled. Craig moved more quickly and when he went around the car, he could see the tableau. Enough life came from a high window. A short, wide man had wedged a taller man into the angle formed by a fence and the side of the bar. The taller man’s arms flopped and dangled. His face was a darkened smear. The short man worked on him with the rhythmic tenacity of someone chopping wood. A slim girl was hurling herself at the wide man’s back, yelling at him, kicking at him, striking at the back of his neck with her fists. She was having no effect on him at all. Craig hurried toward them. The blows were heavy, sickening, murderous. Just as he got there the man cuffed backhand at the girl without looking at her. He hit her across the face and she stumbled and sat down hard on the cinders.

Craig locked his arms through the man’s elbows. The man was shockingly powerful. Craig was whipped around, his feet frequently leaving the ground, but he managed to hold on. The beaten man, no longer supported by the tempo of the blows, had sagged into the corner.

Suddenly the stocky man stopped struggling. He seemed to exhale at great length. “Okay,” he said quietly. “Let go me.”

Craig let go and stepped back quickly and warily. The short man spat and turned around. He had the blunt face of an ex-fighter, cropped gray hair. He seemed to be about fifty, and solid as the stub of a tree. He was not breathing hard.

“You could have killed him,” Craig said. The girl was standing six feet away, hand to her cheek.

“Maybe I did, hey. Let me know. Pepper Henry is the
name. I’ll be right there in that there bar.” He worked his hands, flexing the knuckles. He spat again and walked away with a shoulder-rolling strut.

Craig and the girl went to the unconscious man. “Dewey is such a tiresome slob,” the girl said. “Is he breathing?”

Craig found the man’s pulse. It was steady and regular. “He’s not dead. His face is an awful mess, though. He’ll have to go to a hospital.”

“
I’m
not going to take him there. They can come and get him. Let’s not phone from the bar.”

“There’s a pay phone in the lunchroom.”

“Wait a minute. Can you sort of roll him over? Just get him stretched out flat.”

He moved the man gently. The man moaned but made no other sign of returning consciousness. She worked his wallet out of his hip pocket, opened it, took out the bills and put them in her pocket.

“Is it right to do that?”

“Don’t be a moralistic ass, my friend. It’s my money. Anyway, the first character who cuts through here will take it away from him. Get his watch too. I’ll make sure he gets it back.”

Craig unstrapped the man’s watch. She took it and put it in her pocket. He could not figure her out. He could not see her distinctly. Her voice had a finishing-school flatness to it, that husky polish rubbed there by money.

They went down to the lunchroom and she went back to the booth. It was the first time he had seen her in bright light, as she walked away from him. She had a trim little figure. Her hair was shiny black, and red-ribboned into a high pony tail. She wore a basque shirt with narrow, horizontal red and white stripes, lusterless black pants that came midway between knee and ankle and were slit at the sides, flat sandals with red straps. She walked with utter confidence; pony tail bobbing, small buttocks flexing under the tight pants, arms swinging, sandal heels clacking on the tile floor.

Just as his coffee was brought she sat on the low stool beside him and said, “Same for me, please.”

He turned toward her and they studied each other with frank curiosity. She looked to be about twenty. Her features were small and pointed and quite delicate. Her face was heart-shaped. Black, shiny bangs came almost to
thick, unplucked eyebrows. Her eyes were a very pale blue.

“Clemmie Bennet,” she said, and smiled widely and held out her hand. Her teeth were small and even and very white. They looked like the milk teeth of a child. He took her hand. She winced and pulled it away. She had gouged the heel of her hand on the cinders. “Damn,” she said. She dipped a paper napkin in his water glass and scrubbed at the hurt. Her hands were small and broad, with short fingers, thick pads at the base of the fingers.

“Craig Fitz,” he said.

She looked at him and tilted her head a little to one side. “You’re older than I thought. You know, you’ve got a hell of a reliable look. They could send you out with brandy around your neck.”

Craig was suddenly and uncomfortably aware that she had nothing on under the tight basque shirt. Her breasts were small and sharply conical. “I’m the reliable type,” he said.

“Maybe some day you’ll meet Dewey and he should thank you. He was being a slob and he had to stop for another drink so he could keep fighting with me. But he was yammering at me so loud they couldn’t hear the television fight and they couldn’t shut him up so that wide little man took him outside. Pathetic. Dewey couldn’t sucker-punch a stud butterfly. You should see him stripped. He looks like he was made out of pipe cleaners. There they come.”

He heard the siren come through the night, growl to a stop fifty yards away. Clemmie sipped her coffee and wore an expression of mild interest. Soon the siren went away. She said, “Later we’ll phone Stoddard General and see how he is.” She looked and frowned. “Fitz, this is a hell of a bright place. It must be the brightest place in town. Let’s move along. Are you always so quiet?”

“I haven’t had much—”

“Don’t start now. Let me guess.” She took his hand, turned it over. “Nice hand. No manual labor. An office type. College man. Conservative. And reliable. Pay the girl, Fitzie, and let’s get out of this operating room.”

They went out into the night. When she walked beside him she seemed quite small. He had felt conspicuous with her in the bright lights. He felt more at ease in darkness.
The dulled feeling had left him. He looked down at her and felt a tingle of excitement. “Where to?”

“Ah, some dim café, my love. With muted music. And people without faces. Where we can continue this mad affair between the innocent child and the conservative elderly type.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere.”

“I will use all my elfin charms to lead you on and destroy you. Former friends will avoid you. They’ll say poor old Fitz. The dangerous forties, you know. Fell in with a bit of fluff and they drummed him out of the club. Tore off his Rotary pin and broke his six iron. Pitiful thing for his wife. Poor Laura. Splendid girl. Salt of the earth.”

“Maura, not Laura.”

“Honestly? Brother, I’m hot tonight. All ESP.”

“What happens to me after this mad affair?”

“Isn’t it obvious? A broken man, slouching down shabby streets, begging on corners. Everything gone but the memory of me and how once we burned with a hard gemlike flame. Remember the night, darling, when you gave Fritz five thousand marks and the orchestra played for us until dawn?”

“Hans, dearest, not Fritz.”

She spun and walked backward in front of him, beaming at him appreciatively. “Hey, I think you could play my game too. Dewey always slobbed it up. No talent. Come on. Play some more.”

He hesitated and said, “Do you remember how long I stood outside that hotel in Madrid in the rain, darling?”

“And do you know, I can’t even remember that bullfighter’s name. His embroidery was all scratchy. I do remember that.”

“How about this place?”

She looked in. “Ideal. Time out on the game. It’ll be your lead next.”

They found a dark corner, a padded bench with a low table in front of it. They drank. He was able to play her game. It flattered him that he could play it well enough to please her, to make her laugh, to make her eyes gleam with her pleasure.

“That time in Spain,” he said, “it was a good and true
thing for us, because all brave things are good and true.”

“But don’t you see, dearest? That was the beginning of the end. When you went with the countess to Malaga, expecting me to follow you.”

“But you did follow me, remember?”

“Certainly, you fool. But you were killing my love, little by little.” She sniffled. She was hamming it, but she was uncannily convincing. She sighed. “We had so much, my darling. So very much, such riches. But we squandered them madly. We threw it all away.” She threw her head back and looked at him through tiny thickets of black lashes. “But … still … perhaps … a tiny ember is left in the ashes of my heart. And it can be fanned back to life.”

“I am too old,” he said, “to go through all that again. Too old and too weary. I have the missions, the soup kitchens, my broken shoes and my memories. I can’t walk back into your life.”

“Do you ever hear from Maura, dearest?”

“No. She married a wealthy industrialist named Paul Ober.”

“I wanted only joy, excitement. I did not mean to ruin your life.”

“You enriched it, Clemmie dear.”

“And Paris was the best, wasn’t it?”

“The very peak.”

“But by the time we reached Italy it had begun …”

“.. to wither.”

“Exactly, Craig. I cabled Daddy. He sent me money. I came back alone. For months I couldn’t smile. Tears would come without warning. I’m rich now, my darling. You need a year in a rest home. Good food, treatment, kindness. I shall write you a check.”

Over his protests she wrote an imaginary check. He took it, folded it, put it carefully in his pocket. There were more drinks. He did not seem to feel them. They played other games, took other parts. He played with an increasing facility that pleased her. It was a game, but in another sense it was love play. It made him intently aware of her, of the quickness of her body and the mobility of her face. When she would turn toward him as he lifted his glass, so that the back of his hand brushed the warmth
and tautness of her young breast, he could not tell if it was accident or design.

And quite suddenly she ended the game, looking at him almost without expression, her pale blue eyes wide, her mouth still and level.

“Now walk me home, Fitz,” she murmured.

When they were out in front he asked her if she wanted a cab. She said it was only a few blocks, and turned toward the river.

“Down this way?”

She hugged his arm against her. “Down this way, yes. Don’t sound like Daddy. Don’t go all moral and stuffy. You’ve been lovely so far. Don’t get stuffy, please, darling.”

She hummed as they walked and then began to sing in French in a voice that was husky, sweet and true.

“Pretty,” he said when she was through.

She giggled. “Then you don’t know French. A girl from Paris taught it to me. In a boarding school near Lucerne. A long time ago. Daddy was on wife number three then. The Canadian one. So they popped me off to school. The song is filthy, actually.”

“Is he still married to her?”