God Save the Mark Page 3

  No! For once in my life I had to remain the skeptic. And if this wasn’t the opening shot of a variation on the badger game, I wasn’t the good old Fred Fitch known and loved by grifters from coast to coast. (“After all,” as Reilly had once said, “if they don’t have songs about you, Fred, it’s only because they don’t sing.”)

  I said, “Young lady, you have made a mistake. I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

  “If you don’t help me,” she said rapidly under her breath, “I’ll tear off my clothes and swear you attacked me.”

  “In Madison Square Park? At ten minutes to one in the afternoon?” I gestured at the hordes of lunch-munching office workers, pigeon-feeding widows, and auto-hypnotic retirees filling the benches and paths around us.

  She looked around and shrugged. “Oh, well,” she said. “It was a good try. Come on, Fred, let’s go have a drink and talk it over.”

  “You know who I am?”

  “Of course I know who you are. Didn’t your Uncle Matt talk about you all the time? How he used to dandle you on his knee when you were no higher—”

  “I never met Uncle Matt in my life,” I said. “That one wasn’t even a good try.”

  She got very irritated, put her hands on her hips, and said, “All right, smart guy. Do you want to know what’s going on or don’t you?”

  “I don’t.” Although, of course, I did. The other half of gullibility is curiosity.

  She stepped closer to me again, so close the marzipan nearly touched my shirtfront. “I’m on your side, Fred,” she said softly. She began fingering my tie. Watching her fingers, looking both little-girlish and sexy, she murmured, “Your life’s in danger, you know. Powerful interests in Brazil. The same ones who murdered your Uncle Matt.”

  “What’s your part in all this?”

  She looked quickly around and said, “Not here. Come to my place tonight—160 West 78th. Smith. Be there at nine.”

  “But what’s it all about?”

  “We can’t be seen together,” she said. “Too dangerous. Tonight at nine.” With which she spun away from me and walked briskly off toward Madison Avenue, her skirt twitching about her legs as she walked. Even the retirees on the benches roused themselves from their stupor enough to watch her walk by.

  I murmured to myself, “160 West 78th,” committing the address to memory. But then I shook my head, angry with myself; I was on the verge of falling into another trap. Forcing determination, I walked on southward, met with no further incidents, and found waiting on my doorstep as brassy a blonde as I ever want to see. If the other one had been made of marzipan, this one was made of pillows encased in steel. She looked like the model for all those cartoons about tough-looking broads being led into paddy wagons.

  She’d been leaning against my door, arms folded—probably running through a few choruses of Lili Marlene—but when I arrived she straightened up, put her hands on her hips—that’s two women who’d faced me that way in fifteen minutes—and said, “So you’re the nephew, huh? You don’t look like much.”

  “Don’t start,” I told her. “Whatever you’re up to, I’m on the alert.”

  “I bet you look a lot like the milkman,” she said. “I told Matt you were nothing but a fruit, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “A what?”

  “A fruit,” she said. “A fig. A fuzzy peach. An apperycot.”

  “Now, look—”

  “You look,” she said, and opened a patent-leather black purse and handed me a letter. “Read that,” she said.

  My name was written on the envelope in a scrawling and shaky masculine hand. I took the letter and turned it around without opening it and said, “I suppose inside here there’s a note purporting to be from my Uncle Matt.”

  “Purporting? What kind of word is that? You been seeing that fag lawyer?”

  “You mean Goodkind?”

  “That’s the one. And never mind purporting, that letter’s the jake.”

  “I’ll do you a favor,” I said. “I won’t even open this letter. You just take it back and go on about your business. I won’t turn you over to the police, and we’ll just call it even.”

  “You’re a sweetheart,” she told me. “You’re a goddam prince. Read the letter there while I find my violin.”

  “I’m not going to read it,” I said, “and if I did read it I wouldn’t believe it.”

  She looked at me with a very cold eye, and continued to stand in front of my door with arms akimbo. “Is that right?” she said.

  “That’s right,” I said, expecting her any instant to go into a crouch and start throwing left jabs.

  Instead, she pointed a scarlet-tipped finger at me and said, “Let me tell you something, honey. It’ll take a better man than you to pull a fast one on little Gertie. You just better wise up.”

  “Little Gertie? Is that supposed to be you?”

  “Oh, you are a one,” she said. “Read the damn letter and quit fooling around.”

  “You really want to go through with this, do you?”

  “Read the letter.”

  “All right. Excuse me one minute. Just step aside, there, I want to unlock the door.”

  She stepped aside, I unlocked the door, and we went into the apartment. “Oh, isn’t this sweet,” she said, looking around the living room. “Of course, it could use the masculine touch.”

  “Well, you’d be the one to give it,” I said, and went over to the telephone.

  She watched me for five seconds of surprise, and then she barked with sudden laughter, saying, “Well, well, he’s got a little sting in his little tail, hasn’t he?” She tossed her patent-leather purse on the sofa—the sofa cringed away from it—and said, “You got anything to drink in here? I mean, besides peach brandy.”

  “You won’t be staying that long,” I said, and began to dial Reilly’s office number.

  “Don’t make a complete horse’s ass of yourself, honey,” she said, strolling around the room and grimacing at my paintings. “Call Goodkind first and ask him about me. Gertie Divine, the Body Secular.” She raised her arms above her head, half-turned toward me, and did a bump that caused a sonic boom.

  She seemed so sure of herself. And yet, didn’t they all seem sure of themselves? Hadn’t the one-armed man, and Clifford, and this morning’s phony cop?

  Still, I’d already made one bad mistake, sicking Reilly on Goodkind. Was it possible that this was another? I stopped dialing Reilly’s number, hung up, found the phone book, found Goodkind’s number, and phoned him instead.

  He was all oil. “Well, well, if it isn’t my favorite client. Not to mention the man I’m about to sue for defamation of character. Heh, heh.”

  I said, “Have you ever heard of Gertie Divine?”

  “What?” He sounded as startled as if I’d hit him with a cattle prod. “Where have you heard about her?”

  “She’s right here.”

  “Get her out of there! Don’t listen to her, don’t listen to a word she says! As your attorney, Fred, I urge you, I urge you vehemently, get that woman out of there this instant.”

  I said, “I really wish you wouldn’t call me Fred.”

  “Get her out of there,” he said, a bit more quietly. “That’s the long and the short of it, get her out of there.”

  “She says she’s got a letter from Uncle Matt,” I said.

  That set him off again. “Don’t read it! Don’t even touch it! Close your eyes, close your ears, get her out!”

  “Should I call Reilly?”

  “For God’s sake, no! Just get her out of there!”

  “Will you tell me one thing?” I asked. “Will you tell me who she is?”

  There was a brief pause while he got hold of himself, and then very quietly he said, “Why do you want to concern yourself with this woman, Fred? She isn’t a good type of woman, believe me.”

  “I’d prefer it,” I said, “if you didn’t call me Fred.”

  “She’s cheap,” he said. “She’s un
educated. She’s lower class. She’s not your sort at all.”

  “What did she have to do with Uncle Matt?”

  “Uhhhhhh. Well, she lived there.”

  “On Central Park South?”

  “The doormen hated her.”

  “Wait a second. You mean, she lived with Uncle Matt.”

  “Your uncle was a different sort of man,” he said. “Rough and ready, a sort of pioneer type. Not like you at all. Naturally, his taste in women differs from yours, and so the sort of woman he would—”

  “Thank you,” I said, and hung up.

  She was seated on the sofa, legs crossed, one arm stretched out across the top of the sofa back. She was wearing black spike-heel shoes with straps halfway up the shin, nylons, a black skirt, and a white blouse with a frill at the throat. The blouse was coming out of the skirt at the side, revealing pale skin. She had also been wearing a black jacket, but that was now hanging on the doorknob.

  She said, “So he gave you the word, did he?”

  “He said I should get you out of here. I shouldn’t listen to you. You’re lower class.”

  “Is that right?” She bridled a bit, and said, “He’s the one you shouldn’t listen to, the shyster crook. He’d peddle his sister for candy bars and cheat her on the split.”

  That about summed up my own impression of Attorney Goodkind, but the fact that this woman—could she possibly be named Gertie Divine?—and I shared an enmity did not necessarily mean I could trust her. I said, “I suppose I might as well look at this letter.”

  “I suppose you might as well,” she said. She picked it up from her lap and handed it to me. “While you’re reading,” she said, “how about a little hospitality?”

  I didn’t want to offer her a drink because I didn’t want her to have an excuse to stay any longer than necessary, so I pretended not to have heard, turned my back, and opened the letter.

  It was short, pungent, and difficult to read, being also in the same scrawled shaky masculine handwriting. It said:

  Nepheu Fred,

  This will interduce Gertie Divine, who used to headline at the Artillery Club in San Antonio. She has been my faithful companion and nurse, and she is the best thing I got to pass on to you. You keep her happy and I give you a garantee she’ll keep you happy.

  Your long lost uncle,

  Matt

  I looked up from the letter and found myself alone in the living room. Then I heard a clink of ice cubes, and went out to the kitchen to find Gertie Divine making a screwdriver with tomorrow morning’s orange juice. “You want something, gracious host,” she said to me, “you can make it yourself.”

  I held the letter up. I said, “What does this thing mean?”

  “It means I’m yours now, honey,” she said. She picked her drink up and went off the other way. “Is this the bedroom back here?”

  6

  A FEW MINUTES after Gertie Divine went out to the supermarket there was a tentative tapping at my door, and when I opened it Wilkins from the second floor was there, lugging an ancient scuffed black suitcase all done up with broad leather straps. He set the suitcase down, puffed, shook his head, and said, “Not as young as I used to be.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that. Besides, my head was still full of the problem of Gertie Divine, and what was I to do with her when she came back. If she came back. Anyway, I simply stood there and looked at Wilkins and his suitcase and continued to think about Miss Divine.

  Wilkins was all in blue, as usual; one of his old Air Force blue shirts and a blue ink-stained right hand. After puffing a while longer and shaking his head some more, he finally said, “Like to see you, my boy. Like to take a minute of your time.”

  “Certainly, sir,” I said, though I wasn’t certain at all. “Come on in. Here, let me take that—”

  But before I could get to the suitcase he’d swooped onto it himself, grasping its ancient handle and lifting it out of my reach. “S’all right,” he said hastily, like the hero of embezzlement movies when a redcap has offered to carry the bag of swag, “I’ll take it myself.”

  In order to carry the suitcase at all, he had to lean far over in the opposite direction, so that he stood like a number 7, in which position he could just barely walk, clumping one foot forward at a time and swiveling his whole body with each step. Thus he came staggering into my apartment, looking as comic and deformed as a Beckett hero.

  In the center of the living room he finally set the suitcase down again, and proceeded to puff some more. He also wiped his hand across his forehead, using the ink-stained hand, leaving above his brows the cartoonist’s triple streak representing speed, so that he now reminded me of an ancient and wizened Mercury.

  Hospitality seemed required of me, I had no idea why, so I said, “Uh, would you care for a drink?”

  “Alcohol? No, no, thanks, I never touch alcohol. My late wife broke me of the habit thirty-seven years ago. Thirty-eight, come September. Wonderful woman.”

  “How about some coffee?”

  He cocked a quizzical brow at me. “Tea?” he asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “No trouble. I’ll just be a minute, take a seat there.”

  I went to the kitchen to make the tea, and there I could get back to my interior monologue about Gertie Divine. She had apparently moved in, though not exactly with bag and baggage, and so far as I could tell she intended to stay here. What she intended the arrangements to be I could only guess, but I thought the guess a good one, and the prospect a bad one.

  But what was I to do? She just assumed everything; she marched cheerfully along without the faintest thought that someone else might not agree with her plans. Like searching my kitchen, announcing I had no food at all worthy of the name, and then snapping her fingers at me and saying, “Give me ten bucks, I’ll go to the store.”

  Had I argued? Had I refused? Had I asked her who she thought she was? No. What I’d done was take out my wallet, give her the ten-dollar bill the bogus cop hadn’t taken, and open the door for her when she left, patent-leather purse swinging from her forearm.

  I had brave thoughts about refusing to let her in when she returned, I had bittersweet thoughts about her running off with my ten dollars and not returning at all, but in my heart I knew what was going to happen. She was going to come back with a double sack of groceries, she was going to order me to put them away while she ripped down the curtains in my living room, and I was going to put those awful groceries away.

  Ah, well. In the meantime there was Wilkins. I made us both cups of tea, and when I brought them into the living room he was still standing beside his suitcase, exactly as I’d left him.

  I said, “Why don’t you sit down, sir?”

  “Ah, tea!” he exclaimed, and took a cup from me, and stood there holding it, smiling brightly and falsely at me. “Heard about your good fortune,” he said. “Want to offer my congratulations.”

  “You heard? How?”

  “Phoned the authorities. What did you call it? Bunco Squad. Wondered how things had gone this morning.”

  “And they told you.”

  “Said I was neighbor, friend. Polite young man, most helpful.”

  “I see.” I glanced at the suitcase. “And, uh, that?”

  He looked down and smiled more broadly than ever, saying, “Life’s work, my boy. Planned to show it you, never got around till now.”

  “Life’s work? You mean, something to do with the Air Force?”

  He smirked, and winked, and screwed his face up into remarkable expressions, and said archly, “You could say so, my boy, you could say so.”

  I had no idea what it was all about, and with my distraction over Gertie Divine, I really didn’t care. I carried my cup of tea over to my reading chair and sat down. Wilkins could either take the hint and sit down himself or he could go on standing guard over the suitcase indefinitely, the choice was up to him.

  Wilkins watched me avidly, waiting for me to express burning curiosity about hi
s damn suitcase, but when it finally became obvious to him that no burning was about to begin he abruptly went over to the rocker, sat down, put his tea on the marble-top table to his left, and said, “Really a nice place you’ve got here. Fixed up first-rate.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “So difficult to get just the right furnishings these days.”

  “Yes, it is,” I said.

  “Specially on retired pay. Can’t do much on short rations, can we?” He did a sort of barking laugh, picked up his teacup, and slurped down a huge swallow.

  “It does take careful shopping,” I said, wondering what on earth we were talking about and why we were talking about it. Meanwhile, in the middle of the room the suitcase had begun to grow. Not literally, of course, but in my mind. While Wilkins had been making such a fuss about it I couldn’t have cared less about the thing, but now that we appeared to be talking about furniture or shopping or short rations or whatever it was, now that we weren’t concerning ourselves with the suitcase at all, its enigmatic presence in the middle of the floor, all wrapped in leather straps with blackened buckles, was beginning to prey on my mind. What could be inside the thing, what could it contain? A model airplane? A set of spaceship plans? An H bomb?

  “What a man really needs, these days,” Wilkins was meanwhile saying, oblivious of my growing curiosity, “is a lot of money. Cash on the line. Of course, the best way to do it is your way, inherit the lot, don’t lift a finger, let it fall your way. But those of us not so lucky, we’ve got to scrounge around, find a way to make ends meet and hope to build up for a windfall, something to put us on Easy Street.”

  Although this entire speech had been said in an open and friendly and chipper fashion, I suddenly found myself feeling guilty at having come so abruptly into unearned wealth. I said, “Well, I suppose it is difficult on a fixed income …”

  “Not fixed for long,” he announced, even more chipper than before. He nodded his head toward the huge suitcase. “That’s what that’s all about, of course. Make a killing.”

  “You said you wanted to show it to me,” I said, as casually as possible, trying my best to cover my curiosity.