Dancing Aztecs Read online

  Wally waited. Nothing more was said under his feet, and then a minute or so later Angela’s voice sounded in the bedroom again, saying, “Jerry says the other guys are coming over, too.”

  “I wonder what’s up,” said the husband.

  “Beats me. I’ll get dressed and be down in a minute.”

  “Mmmm. Love ya, baby.” And there was the unmistakable smack sound of a palm against a bathrobed behind.

  Could he get away now? Wally was just fumbling for the doorknob when the door abruptly opened about a foot wide and Angela’s hissing voice said, “Stay there!” and his presentation book full of swimming pool photos, which had been left downstairs, was jabbed painfully into his midsection. “Oof,” he said, and the door slammed again.

  And the husband’s voice, beneath his feet, said, “What’s up, Jerry?”

  “Wait till everybody’s here. I only want to tell the story once.”

  What the dickens was going on? Stooping, trying to shove clothing and hangers out of the way without making too much of a racket, Wally hunkered down in the darkness, shoved his presentation book away somewhere, and started feeling around among the grab bag of shoes. The voices continued just below his fingers, discussing traffic and the weather, and Wally felt a loose corner of carpet. He pulled, and a triangle of light appeared.

  This two-story one-family Cape Cod in Hollis, Queens, not far from Belmont, had been built during the housing boom just after the Second World War, and had been altered and adapted and converted by any number of handyman owners since then. Mel and Angela had added the wall-to-wall carpeting in their bedroom, and the floor covering man had thrown in carpet for the closet as well, covering the grill of a hot-air register dating from before a shuffling of upstairs walls had made this space a closet. The equivalent grill high on the wall of the dining room downstairs had been left alone, partly because it wasn’t bothering anybody and partly because nobody currently connected with the house knew what it was for. The result was, when Wally put his face and shoulders right down amid the shoes on the closet floor, with his butt stuck up in the air behind him, and when he looked down and at an angle to his right, he could see very clearly through two gridwork grills into almost the entire dining room, where a somewhat chubby man in a white short-sleeved shirt and dark slacks was talking with a younger man in white coveralls.

  The doorbell was ringing, and the chubby man was saying, “I’ll get it.” From his voice, he was the husband. He left the room and the other man—this would be Jerry—paced around the dining room table, looking annoyed but thoughtful.

  Now was the time to leave, of course. Even if he couldn’t get downstairs with all those men arriving and walking around, he could still go out a second-story window and jump into the backyard. He’d done it before, and so long as you keep your knees bent and land on grass you won’t break anything. Your feet will hurt for a little while, but there are worse fates in this life. Lots of them.

  So it was time to go, and it was sensible to go, and it was Wally’s style to go. And yet, there was something intriguing, something mysterious and interesting, in the manner and conversation of these men. He didn’t know why he had this impression; he only knew his instinct told him it would be to his advantage to find out just what was going on in this house.

  So he shifted himself among the shoes, trying to find a more comfortable position, and settled down to listen.

  WHEREUPON …

  Jerry sat at the dining room table and waited until the other two showed up. Mel was hot to know what was going on, but Jerry just said, “Wait. I only want to tell it once.” Because it was clear in his mind now, he was calm, he was sure of himself, and none of the trembling showed. He was still vibrating inside, but that was just excitement, adrenalin, the feeling in a toreador the first time he goes out and sees that bull.

  Floyd McCann came first, and then his brother Frank. Angela, dressed now in slacks and a halter top, took orders for beer and iced tea and coffee, and at last the four men settled down around the dining room table, with all eyes on Jerry, who started by saying, “We got something here. Something different.”

  Frank said, “You made the switch?”

  “No.” Jerry had already decided to give it to them the way it happened, and not pop the finish all at once. “I drove into the city,” he said, “and I went to this Bud Beemiss outfit on Forty-fifth Street, and some girl there at a desk said, ‘Oh, the other boxes already went to the restaurant.’ And I said what restaurant, and she told me this Chinese restaurant uptown. And then she told me the idea was, all the statues in those boxes were being given out to people as like prizes. Sixteen different people.”

  Frank shook his head. “Not good,” he said.

  “Right. So I quick got back in the truck and headed uptown, and the goddam traffic was murder. By the time I got there it was too late; the statues were all gone and the people were gone and it was over. So I called the contact, right from there in the restaurant, and he told me call back in ten minutes, they wanted to think it over. So while I was hanging around I asked the Chink headwaiter there who these people were that got the statues, and he said they’re called the Open Sports Committee. So I figure these statues must have been like bowling trophies you see around.”

  Frank said, “Those statues aren’t bowling, they’re taking a crap.”

  Mel said, “Hold it, Frank, let’s listen to this. Then what, Jerry?”

  “So after ten minutes I called back, and they said it didn’t matter, don’t worry about it, it wasn’t that important. So I said okay, and I left.”

  Floyd McCann said, “So we’re off the hook, right? We don’t have to worry about the box any more.”

  “That’s what I figured, too,” Jerry said. “At first. But pretty soon it didn’t sound right any more. I mean, these people were really hot to get that box, then they think about it for ten minutes and all of a sudden it doesn’t matter, think no more about it.”

  Frank said, “They wrote it off, that’s all.”

  “When they were so hot before?”

  Frank said, “They’re smuggling something inside the statues. Heroin, something like that. They wrote it off.”

  “No,” Jerry said. “One little shipment of heroin isn’t as important as they were acting up till now, and it isn’t as unimportant as all of a sudden they’re telling me on the phone. See what I mean?”

  “No,” said Frank.

  “I mean,” Jerry said, “they know we wouldn’t go after a couple bags of H. If they’re trying to make it sound small, it’s got to be big.”

  Mel was looking very interested. “I think you’ve got something, Jerry,” he said. “I think you’re onto something there.”

  “Me, too,” Jerry told him. “So I took the Manhattan Bridge down into Brooklyn and I went to the big library down there by Grand Army Plaza. You know the one?”

  Mel knew the one, but the others didn’t. Frank said, “Get on with it Jerry.”

  “So I went in there,” Jerry said, “with one of these statues, and I found some girl to help me find out what it was. She went through hell, that girl, she called people in other libraries, she looked in books, and finally she came up with it.”

  From his coverall pocket Jerry took a crumpled piece of paper and smoothed it out on the tabletop. The librarian’s neat small handwriting was a little archipelago in a sea of white. “What these things are,” Jerry said, “is copies of an old statue in South America, from before Columbus. It’s called the Dancing Aztec Priest. But here’s the thing: The original is made of solid gold, and it has emeralds for eyes, and it’s worth a million dollars.”

  Everybody was taken aback. Frank said, “A million dollars? For a statue taking a crap?”

  “That’s the story.”

  Floyd said, “But what’s the point? What we’ve got is copies, and they aren’t worth any million dollars.”

  “That’s right,” Jerry said. “But think about this. What if somebody wanted to steal tha
t statue down there in South America, and smuggle it into the United States and sell it to some rich guy or something? How’s the best way to get it past Customs? With a whole bunch of copies!”

  “Goddam, Jerry,” Mel said, sitting up straight, “I think you’re right!”

  Frank said, “Jesus, do you think so? A million dollars?”

  Jerry said, “That’s why they didn’t want us looking any more. Not once it’s out of the box and mixed with the others. Then they’ve either got to tell us the truth or unload us.”

  Mel said, “Jerry. You want to go after it, don’t you, Jerry?”

  “You know it.”

  “Wait a minute,” Floyd said. “If it really is the original, worth a million dollars, they’ll be after it themselves.”

  “But we’ve got a leg up on them,” Jerry said. “The guy I talked to on the phone, he wanted to know what was the name of the group that had the statues, and I told him I didn’t know. But I did know. So what we do is get the names of the members of the Open Sports Committee, and then we track down the real statue.”

  Frank said, “How do we get these names?”

  “We’ll call the Daily News,” Jerry told him. “They’ll know.” He’d been thinking this out all the way from the library.

  Floyd said, “If all those statues look the same, how do we know which is which?”

  “Gold doesn’t break,” Jerry said. He had all the answers, he had them all.

  “A million dollars,” Mel said. “Split four ways.”

  “A quarter each,” Floyd said. He had a faraway look in his eyes. “You know what a quarter of a million dollars is?” he asked them, and answered it himself: “It’s a quarter of a million dollars!”

  SO THAT …

  The man who jumped out the second-story window into the Bernsteins’ backyard had a very thoughtful expression on his face.

  AND THEN …

  When Jerry finally got off the phone with the Daily New—the Sports Department had referred him to the News Department, which had referred him to the Information Service—he wasn’t cheerful. “It isn’t any kind of sports team at all,” he told the others. “It’s some kind of black political bunch.”

  Mel said, “Blacks?”

  Floyd said, “Holy gee. We’re supposed to go rob a bunch of niggers?”

  Jerry was slowed, but not stopped. There wasn’t any reason it should be easy. What do you want, life on a plate? It was winning the tough ones that mattered. No; it was going after the tough ones that mattered. “A million dollars,” he said. “It’s still a million dollars.”

  Frank gazed at the wall as though seeing painted on it a panorama of hell. “Four white guys,” he said, “crawling around on fire escapes in Harlem.”

  “Hold on,” Mel said. “If it’s black politics, there could be whites in it, too. Jerry, did they give you any names or addresses?”

  “One name. The leader is somebody called Oscar Russell Green.”

  “That sounds like a nigger,” Floyd said.

  Mel said, “We’ve got to get that membership list.”

  Then Frank said, “How about Patty Shea?”

  While the others looked bewildered—who in hell was Patty Shea?—Floyd said, “Hey, you could be right.”

  Jerry said, “Who the hell is Patty Shea?”

  “He’s a cousin of ours,” Frank told him. “And he’s on the police.”

  Jerry nodded. “I get it. A political bunch, the cops might know them.”

  Floyd said to Frank, “You call him, you thought of it.”

  But Frank said to Floyd, “No, you call, you always knew him better than me.”

  Jerry said, “Somebody call.”

  So Frank did it, while the others watched and listened: “Patty! Is that you? — Yeah, it’s Frank. — Frank. — Frank McCann, dummy, your own cousin. — Yeah, well, I understand. Listen, Patty, the reason I’m calling, I’m looking for the membership list of a black radical bunch called the Open Sports Committee. — Now, man, you’re a police officer, you don’t want to know why I’d want a thing like that. — Well, you can draw your conclusions if you want, but the question at the bar is, will you help us? — That’s right, the Open Sports Committee.” Then he went on and gave Mel’s phone number and hung up, saying to the others, “He’ll call back, probably within the hour.”

  Jerry said, “He thinks he can do it?”

  “If this bunch ever caused any trouble, the police department will know about them.”

  “What kind of black radical organization would they be,” Mel said, “if they didn’t cause trouble?”

  Frank spread his hands. “Then we’ll have the names within the hour.”

  Actually, it was closer to two hours before Patty Shea called back. The four men spent the time playing draw poker at the dining room table, with a two-dollar limit. Jerry noticed that Angela seemed kind of nervous and irritable for a while as she served the beer and iced tea and sandwiches, probably because she wasn’t used to a bunch of guys underfoot in the middle of the day, but then she went upstairs and changed her clothes again and after that she seemed more cheerful.

  Jerry was thirty-seven dollars ahead when the phone finally rang and it was Patty Shea. Frank got on the line with paper and pencil and right away started copying down names and addresses. “Sixteen of them, huh?” he said to Shea, and grinned at the other guys in the room. “A nice round number.”

  Jerry stood looking over Frank’s shoulder as the list grew, trying to figure out which of those people were black and which white. But that was hard to do; blacks have all different kinds of names. Jerry himself knew a black guy out at Kennedy named Murphy.

  “Thanks a lot, pal,” Frank said at the finish. “Listen, we’ll have to get together soon. Have Margaret give Teresa a call, why don’t you? — Okay, fine. — [Laughter] No, you won’t, don’t worry about it.” And he hung up.

  Jerry said, “What won’t he? What was that at the finish?”

  “He said he hoped he wouldn’t read about us in the papers.”

  “I’ll go along with that,” Jerry said.

  Mel said, “Okay, now we have the list, what’s next?”

  Jerry said, “We split up, that way we can cover four of these people at the same time. Remember, those other guys are after the statue, too.”

  Floyd, who almost always hung around with his brother Frank and never did anything on his own, said, “But what if one guy can’t do the job? Maybe it’s a place where you got to break in or something and it’ll take two guys.”

  “We’ll help each other out,” Jerry told him. “Mel, you explain the situation to Angela; she can stay here, and if one of us has trouble he should call in. Or, as soon as one of us finds it, call in. We keep in touch all the time, and then we can help one another out if it’s needed.”

  Mel said, “That’s nice, Jerry. Like a regular military operation.”

  Floyd said, “What do we do? Just everybody grab four names they like?”

  “Come on, Floyd,” Jerry said. “Let’s be organized. Look at these addresses, they’re all over the lot. Here’s Jersey, here’s Connecticut, they’re every goddam place. What we’ll do, we’ll sort them into groups in the same general area, then we won’t have to keep running all over the place. Mel, you got any road maps?”

  Mel did, and in ten minutes they’d organized the members of the Open Sports Committee into four groups clustered more or less into four different geographical locations. It was Jerry’s idea next to number these groups from one to four, place four numbered pieces of paper in a hat, and then each of them would draw a piece of paper to learn his assignment.

  All of which worked fine, up to the point where they couldn’t find a hat. Jerry’s baseball cap was too small and too shallow for the task, nobody else was wearing a hat at the moment, and though Mel was sure he had a hat somewhere around the house, his extensive search for the damn thing produced only his comment when he’d come back downstairs, “Boy, that bedroom closet�
��s a mess. We oughta straighten that up, Angela.”

  “How about a pot?” Angela said. She’d been given a rundown of the scheme, with an introduction to her own role in it—“Taxi dispatcher,” she’d commented—and she was sitting on a spare chair in the dining room, smoking cigarettes and restlessly fidgeting her crossed leg.

  There was something deflating about getting your assignments out of a pot—the bottom half of a double boiler, as it turned out—but Jerry decided it was worm sacrificing a little dignity to get this show on the road, so the traditional hat was dispensed with, the four hands reached into the aluminum pot, and then nobody liked what they drew.

  “Harlem,” Floyd said, and either through fright or by contrast with his assignment his face had never looked whiter. “I’ve never been in Harlem in my life!”

  “What about me?” his brother Frank demanded. “I get the South Bronx. That’s worse than Harlem.”

  “I can’t do it,” Floyd said. “That’s all, I just can’t do it.”

  “You think you’ve got troubles,” Mel said, “look at my list. I’m all over the place, I’ve got Long Island and Connecticut and New Jersey, it’ll take me a month.”

  Then everybody talked at once, until Jerry shut them all up by banging the pot on the dining room table—“Dents!” yelled Angela, but whether about the pot or the table she didn’t say—and when the bong-bongs had startled everybody into silence Jerry said, “We worked out those four bunches together. Nobody complained ahead of time, so nobody should complain now.”

  “I can’t go to Harlem,” Floyd explained.

  Jerry was unsympathetic. “You want to drop out? If you want, you go home now and you don’t get a split, and no questions asked.”

  Floyd stood there blinking, stuck between the rock and the hard place, and his older brother Frank clapped him on the back, saying, “You can do it, Floyd. Any good Irishman is worth ten niggers.”

  “There’s more than ten niggers in Harlem,” Floyd said.

  Frank clapped him on the back again, rather forcefully, and told the others, “Don’t worry about Floyd. He gets nerved up ahead of time, that’s all, but when the ball’s in the air he’s fine.”