The Fugitive Pigeon

Chapter 11

There was a fire hydrant just down the block from Uncle Al’s building. Chloe carefully parked the Packard next to it and Artie said, “We’ll keep hold of the hostage, don’t worry.”

“I appreciate this, Artie,” I said. “I really do.”

“Don’t be silly, baby,” he said. “Since I quit peddling the pills, life has been dullsville.”

“If a cop makes us move,” Chloe said, “I’ll circle the block.”

“You’re all insane,” Miss Althea said. She’d tried to jump out of the car when we were stopped for a light at 72nd Street and West End Avenue, and I’d had to slap her face to calm her down, and since then she’d maintained an insulted and dignified regality, like a member of the French court on the way to the guillotine. Had I been Madame Defarge, I might well have blanched a bit in her presence.

However, “I’ll hurry,” I said, and got out of the car, and returned to Uncle Al’s building.

I didn’t want him to know I was coming until I was right at his door, so I didn’t push the button next to his name this time but pushed the button for apartment 7-A instead. When a male voice came out of the grille, wanting to know who it was, I said, “Johnny.”

“Johnny who?”

“Johnny Brown,” I said.

“You got the wrong apartment,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said, and rang the bell for apartment 7-B.

There was no answer at all from 7-B, so I tried 6-A. This time it was a female voice that answered, one of those voices that sounds as though its owner has been drinking rum and writhing nude on a bearskin rug just to get warmed up for your arrival. “Who’s there?” she asked, making those two nondescript and pedestrian words reek with suggestiveness.

“Johnny,” I said.

“Well, come on in,” she said, and the buzzer sounded.

Isn’t that always the way it is? The really great opportunities to connect with sex bombs always come along when you’re already tied up with something else. That, I suppose, is the difference between fiction and reality. In fiction the sexy voice says, “Come on in,” and the guy goes on in, whereas in reality the guy has seven minutes to get to work and the boss told him if he’s late one more time he’s fired and he can’t afford to lose this job because he’s still paying off his Playboy subscription. In fiction, if you want to know something, it’s a good thing the sexy voice does speak up, because the guy doesn’t have a thing to do, and if it wasn’t for that unexpected sexy voice he would undoubtedly have dropped dead from boredom in another two, three days.

So much for philosophy. I did not go to apartment 6-A, once I’d gained entrance to the building, but went to apartment 3-B instead. I remembered the way those two guys had knocked last night, the code knock, one and then three and then one, so that’s the way I knocked now. Then I put my hand inside the pocket of Artie’s jacket, where I had the pistol we’d taken from Tim. It was smaller than the automatic I’d gotten from Miss Althea, so Artie and I had switched guns before I left the car.

I waited so long after knocking that I was beginning to think this time Uncle Al and Aunt Florence really were in Florida when at last the door pulled open and Uncle Al’s astonished face appeared before me. He saw who it was, and saw the gun in my hand, and promptly started to close the door again.

But I said, “No, Uncle Al,” and pushed forward, across the threshold.

If he had taken a firm stand, if he had told me to get the hell out of here or had demanded to know just what I thought I was doing, I’m not sure what would have happened next. Having grown up without a father, I’d had no one but Uncle Al to look to for a symbol of male strength and confidence. I was used to Uncle Al ordering me around, used to Uncle Al weighing me in the balance and very loudly finding me wanting, used to Uncle Al shouting at me to get out of his sight. I was so used to it that if he’d done the same thing now, I might even have obeyed him. Only for a second, maybe, but anyway long enough for him to shut the door again in my face, and certainly long enough for him to get control of the situation.

But I was learning something about Uncle Al. He respected power above all things, with a respect born of fear and a fear born of utter cowardice. Just as he had been terrified of the two men who had come here last night, too terrified of them and Agricola and the organization to even talk to me much less help me, so now he was terrified of the little pistol in my amateur hand, and as I moved forward across his threshold he moved backward into the apartment, and in that instant the old relationship between my Uncle Al and me was gone forever.

I shut the door behind me. “We’ve got some talking to do,” I said.

Belatedly he tried to get a grip on the authority he’d just forfeited. Shaking a quaking finger at me, he said, “You little punk, you realize the spot you put me in? You know what you’ve done to me?”

“Don’t be a moron, Uncle Al,” I told him. “Nobody’s trying to kill you, with the possible exception of me. Let’s go into the living room and sit down.”

He looked startled, and held his hands out as though for quiet while he half-turned his head and seemed to listen. “Your Aunt Florence,” he whispered. “She doesn’t know.”

“Maybe it’s time she found out,” I said.

“Charlie boy, don’t. Maybe you got it in for me, maybe you got every right, but I ask you on bended knee to don’t.”

He didn’t ask me on bended knee, actually, but I knew what he meant. I said, “We’ll talk it over.”

“Sure, Charlie. We’ll talk it over.”

“In your den,” I told him. “We won’t be disturbed there.”

“Right, in my den. We won’t be disturbed there.”

I wasn’t sure which threat worried him most, the pistol or Aunt Florence. In any case, the combination of the two was enough to pull Uncle Al’s sting and make him as quiet and agreeable as a new minister with the church elders.

Uncle Al’s apartment is a triumph of money over background. Aunt Florence knew just enough about taste to know her own was too uncertain to carry her safely through the furnishing of an entire apartment, so she handed a great big wad of Uncle Al’s money to a pretty young man with an extremely limp wrist, told him she wanted “quiet elegance,” and turned him loose. The only thing wrong with the result was that when you saw Uncle Al standing in the middle of it you figured he had to be a burglar; he couldn’t possibly be somebody who lived in this place. The pretty young man, unfortunately, had been given free rein to choose everything about the apartment but its occupants.

The den had been done in mahogany, ebony and burlap, all brought together by a rich green carpet on the floor. A black leather sofa was the most ostentatious item of furniture, but it blended so well with the rest of the room that even a Communist couldn’t have any real objection to it. The bookcase, which had been filled according to the strange but not at all uncommon literary criterion of the color of the book spines, gave a comfortably spurious air of age and solidity to the room, making it difficult to believe that this entire place had not stood here, exactly like this, for at least a hundred years. The den, in fact, had been done seven years ago.

Once we were in this room with the door shut, Uncle Al began to talk. I let him go on awhile because I wanted to see if he’d say anything of use to me.

“You got to understand, Charlie,” he said to begin with. “You got to understand the position you put me in. I get this phone call from this person, which you can see why I don’t want to mention any names, that tells me my nephew’s on the spot and what do I got to say about that, and what do I say? Charlie, you know me, I’m your Uncle Al, I done the best I could for you all your life. Your old man run out on you before you was born, to the best of my ability I tried to help take his place, you know that.”

I didn’t know any such thing, but I was letting him talk, so I said nothing.

“Your Aunt Florence and me,” he went on, patting himself on the chest with all his fingertips, “we wasn’t blessed with children, in a lot of ways you’re like my own kid, my own flesh and blood.”

I didn’t say anything to that one, either, though my mother had told me one time about a confidence she’d been given by Aunt Florence, to the effect that Aunt Florence had wanted children but Uncle Al hadn’t, Uncle Al even going so far as to tell Aunt Florence to be warned by what had happened when her sister — meaning my mother — got herself knocked up, referring of course to my father having deserted. But to this bit of twaddle, too, I remained silent.

“You know I always done my best for you,” Uncle Al went on, “even getting you the job out to Canarsie there. I went out on a limb for you that time, Charlie, you know that? You realize the kind of limb I went out on for you that time, you not even in the organization or anything? But there’s a limit, you got to see that, there’s a point where I got to say, ‘No, Charlie, no more. I know I’m your uncle, Charlie, I know you’re my nephew, but eventually comes the time I got to think of myself, I got to think of your Aunt Florence, I got to be practical. I help you out whenever I can, Charlie, but if you ever get in a serious jam with the organization there’s nothing I can do, not a single thing I can do.’ And it’s happened, right? You’re in trouble. You done something, I don’t know what, I don’t even want to know what, and you got the organization down on you. So what can I do? I get this phone call, ‘Your nephew’s on the spot,’ what can I say? I got to say, ‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ that’s all. There’s nothing else I can do.”

The time had come to break in. “You couldn’t even ask why? You couldn’t even find out what I was supposed to have done?”

“If they want me to know, Charlie,” he said, “they’ll tell me. If they don’t tell me, I don’t ask. That’s one thing I had to learn about the organization, if they want you to know some—”

“Wait, wait,” I said. “Wait, now. Stop for a minute.”

“Charlie, I’m only—”

“Shut up, Uncle Al.”

He did, too, for just a second. The surprise did it, I guess. But then he pointed a finger at me and said, “I’m still your uncle, boy, and you—”

I pointed the pistol at him and said, “Shut up, Uncle Al.”

A pistol is more forceful than a finger any day. He shut up.

I said, “You are my Uncle Al because you’re married to my Aunt Florence. Other than that, the relationship between us is kaput.”

“That’s perfectly all right with me,” he said. “If you think I—”

“Shut up, Uncle Al.”

He shut up again.

“Now, let me tell you something,” I said. “I didn’t do anything to the organization. They’re making a mistake. I didn’t talk out of turn to anybody, I didn’t lose a package or steal anything, I didn’t do a thing. It’s a mistake, and all I want to do is correct it.”

“The organization don’t make mistakes,” he said. “An organization as big as—”

“Shut.”

He shut.

I told him, “This time the organization did make a mistake. Now, what I want to do is find out what they think I did wrong, and then maybe I can convince them it wasn’t me that did it.”

He was shaking his head back and forth and back and forth. “Never in a million years,” he said. “You’ll never — in the first place, you can’t even get to the men in charge, I couldn’t do it myself.”

“I almost got to talk to Farmer Agricola,” I said, “but he was—”

“Who?” Astonishment made him look for a moment even dumber than he is. “What did you say?”

“Farmer Agricola.”

“How did you find out about him? Charlie, what you been up to?”

“Never mind,” I said. “The point is, I couldn’t talk to him because he was killed. But I did—”

“What what what?”

“Killed,” I said. “Listen faster, Uncle Al, I don’t have much time. I went to see Farmer Agricola, but somebody killed him before I got to him. Stuck a knife in his back. But I did find out—”

“The Farmer’s dead? Is this on the level?”

“Uncle Al, I don’t have much time. Yes, the Farmer’s dead. His bodyguard and chauffeur think I did it, but I didn’t. I’ve got his daughter for a hostage, and now I’ve got to—”

“Charlie!” He just stared at me, about the way Artie stared at me when I came out of the barn back at Agricola’s farm. “What’s come over you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s self-preservation. Now, be quiet a minute and listen to me. I found out the name of the man above Mr. Agricola is Mr. Gross. Now, Mr. Gross is the man I got to talk to, and you’re the one has to tell me where I find him.”

“Me! Charlie, you don’t know, you can’t—” He sputtered, and gestured, and carried on, and finally got a complete sentence out: “I’d get gunned down in a minute if I told you that.”

“If you won’t tell me,” I said, “you’ll tell Aunt Florence. I know she’ll help me.” I backed toward the door, still aiming the pistol at him.

He said, “Charlie, you wouldn’t. Charlie, for the love of God don’t tell your Aunt Florence!”

“Either you tell me right now where I find Mr. Gross, or I call for Aunt Florence. And if I call for Aunt Florence, I tell her everything.”

Times have changed since my Uncle Al told my Aunt Florence he’d leave her if she got pregnant. That was twenty years ago or more, and my Aunt Florence has learned since then how to control her lunk of a husband. Until last night I’d been under the impression my Uncle Al was afraid of nothing in this world with the exception of Aunt Florence. Of course, now I knew better, and Aunt Florence’s accomplishment in housebreaking Uncle Al no longer seemed quite so incredible, but the accomplishment still remained in effect.

I could see Uncle Al thinking madly. He gnawed on his lower lip, stared in torment at the floor, rubbed his hands nervously together. Which he was more afraid of — the organization or Aunt Florence?

To help him decide, I said, “Nobody knows I came here, and nobody has to know. Nobody has to know I got the address from you. I got to Agricola’s farm out on Staten Island, and you didn’t tell me that.”

“If they ever found out,” he said, “I’d be done for.”

“They won’t find out from me.”

“Charlie, you don’t know what you’re asking.”

“So I’ll ask Aunt Florence,” I said, and reached for the doorknob.

“Nonono, wait!”

I hesitated.

“All right,” he said. “All right. But don’t get me in a jam, whatever you do. You know I’d help you if I could, if you say you didn’t do nothing to earn the spot I believe you, I know you wouldn’t lie to me, boy, but my hands are tied. You can see that. They know you’re my nephew, they figure I’m prejudiced in your favor, so what could I do?”

“The address,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah. Wait, I’ll write it down.”

He hurried over to the desk and I said, “Don’t open any drawers, Uncle Al.”

He looked at me. His feelings were hurt. “My own nephew?”

“Just don’t open any drawers.”

Wounded, he said nothing. But he didn’t open any drawers. There was a memo pad on the desk, with “From the desk of Albert P. Gatling” at the top of each sheet, and an ornate penholder set with a marble base and two fountain pens. Using these, he wrote the address and handed me the paper.

I said, “If this is a false address, Uncle Al, I’ll come back here, you can count on it. And I’ll go straight to Aunt Florence.”

“Charlie, I’m giving you the goods, I swear I am. I can’t help you, I told you that, but you’re like my own son, my own flesh and blood, and the least I can—”

“Sure,” I said. “But don’t call Mr. Gross after I’m gone.”

“Call him? Are you nuts? Call him and tell him I gave his private address to a kid with a grudge and a gun? Charlie, the minute you leave here your Aunt Florence and I go straight to Florida.”

“No, you don’t. You stay here in town. If I have to phone you in Florida, it’s Aunt Florence I talk to.”

“Charlie, let me build up an alibi!”

“No. I may need to know something else before this is done.”

He looked very gloomy when I left, and he didn’t walk me to the front door.