Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 24, No. 3, March 1979

The Appeal by Barry N. Malzberg

The one-time maiden special who ran in the maiden claimer proved to be there for a reason — the horse broke down on the backstretch and came home on three and a half legs — so I was down another four hundred. One should not parlay losings. Nevertheless, convinced that my bad streak was now at its logical end, I took a limousine to the famous and relatively new casino hotel in Atlantic City and applied the principles of Martingale to roulette, driven by the fact that anyone so famous as to have a system named after him had to have something going for him. Seven turns of the red taught me the probable reason why the professor had been dead for so long.

Things were getting serious so I tried card-counting at blackjack but a blonde disturbed my recall and the cigarette smoke was hurting my eyes. Also, at a certain point the dealer brought in a new deck.

“You can’t do that,” I said to him desperately.

“Is that a law?” he said with an expression so quizzical and winsome that I found myself without a comeback.

Monmouth Racetrack is not inconveniently far north from the famous new hotel casino and so, knowing that matters were at a most difficult pass, I took public transportation rather than a limousine to the shore, arriving there at eleven in the A.M., which gave me two hours and fifteen minutes to work on my specialty, which happens to be the daily double. Someone in the upper grandstand was rumored to have hit the $3,400 double which occurred on this date but I did not make the acquaintance of this person either before or after the race. With seventy-three dollars left, I decided to make one of those perilous leaps into the unknown which have in the past made me known to my friends as a spirited and adventurous man. But hurdles races in the late fall are a leap into the unknown for the wretched horses who run them, let alone the horseplayers. Accordingly, I presented myself in the offices of Louis the Fourteenth on the following day.

Louis is called the Fourteenth, or the Quatorze as he sometimes prefers because of the touch of class, since he is the fourteenth direct descendant of his family engaged in. the same trade. At least this is what the Quatorze claims, and I do not dispute with him, nor does the Quatorze tend to surround himself with those with whom one would wish to dispute. It took me forty-three minutes to get into his offices and it was not worth it, but of course I had no choice. “I will need a little more time, Louis,” I said to him. “It is a simple matter of assembling collections already due me but I am unable to settle the obligation at the present time.”

The Quatorze looked at me unhappily. There is something about the unhappiness of a short dapper man which can be peculiarly unsettling. “The tab is seven thousand dollars,” he said. “Not to forget the change which is three hundred and forty-three dollars and I do not mean cents.”

“I know that, Louis.”

“I would prefer if you would address me more formally. You promised settlement for today.”

“I know that.”

“There have been extensions,” the Quatorze said, biting his lip and looking at the paper in his hand. “Several extensions. The extensions, as a matter of fact, appear to have begun three months and fourteen days ago.”

The Quatorze is a precise man with good help, an unbeatable combination. “I know about that,” I repeated. “It is merely unfortunate difficulties which I am having — family illness, an aged father, difficult debts, business pressures...”

The Quatorze put the paper aside and leaned on his elbows alertly. “You have no family,” he stated, “other than that which has disowned you, including your aged father who lives very well on the coast of Florida. You have no business. Pressures and debts you do have.”

I nodded at him as gracefully as possible under the circumstances. “Your information is very good.”

“In my line of work my information had better be good. I am dependent upon my sources. My sources, however, have let me down in allowing a tab of this size to accumulate. I will have to get some new sources.” Louis picked a small slice of lint from the area covering his kneecap. “I will have to hit my sources over the head and drop them south of here if they do not do somewhat better than they have in your case.”

“I just need a little time,” I said.

“The gambler and the alcoholic do not need time,” Louis said. “I have thought about this deeply. Gambling and alcoholism are an attempt to suspend time with which it is otherwise difficult to deal. I am not a simple man, you know. I am a complex person. I come to this kind of work through inheritance and I think deeply. I want the money.”

“I don’t have—”

Louis put his palms flat on the desk, and raised himself. In this position, he had no height problem whatsoever. “I want the money,” he said. “I will give you until tomorrow morning because I am a reasonable man and the banks are already closed. If the money is not here by the opening of business tomorrow I will have to consult with my sources, who in turn must consult with you. I am unable to speak for them. They are not very dependable but then again they have very literal minds.”

“Louis—” I said, venturing an appeal.

“Appeals are useless,” he said. “Appeals will not work. Pleas for mercy, expressions of reason, mild and sensible requests for delay — all purposeless. It is a difficult world. Time passes, time pressures; it is different coin for an institution, which I am, than for a gambler, which you are. You will please leave now.”

“Now, Louis—”

“You will leave,” Louis said, and at my elbow appeared two assistants whose presence in the room up until that point had been masked perhaps by my own urgency. They conveyed me with stunning speed and force to an antechamber where I was permitted to wipe my forehead and adjust the cuffs of my best suit. “You hear him,” one of the assistants said. “You hear him good.”

“I don’t have to take abuse,” I said. “The fact that you work for the Quatorze does not entitle you to assume his role.”

“You must be some kind of a college graduate,” the other assistant said.

“On the contrary,” I said, “I am self-educated.”

“You are a clown.”

“I am entitled to my dignity.” I added various other things while in the process of making my exit. It is useless to argue with the assistants of the Quatorze, who do not share his relative dispassion or his height problem. In the street, however, the difficulties of my situation came, so to speak, crashing down upon me and fragments of my departing dialogue bubbled to my lips. “Dignity is all we have,” I said, and, “The only way out is to make the extended reach,” and, “It’s all metaphysical,” and so on and so forth. All of this speculation, the outcome of strong self-education, carried me in a half-comatose condition through several hours and several miles of public and private transportation until I reached that place which I must have always known I would reach but of course could not have attempted had I given it conscious thought. A man after all has his pride; even maiden claimers are registered thoroughbreds.

“I need seven thousand three hundred dollars, Mother,” I said after we had gone through the amenities and settled in the rather large living room. “I have never seen fit to call on you like this before and have kept you well segregated from all of my activities — the Quatorze, for instance, not being aware that I do have a family or, more strictly speaking, that I have you.”

“What do you need seven thousand three hundred dollars for?” she said quietly. I twitched on my chair. My mother has always intimidated me. The only person who has ever really been able to stand up to her is my stepfather but my stepfather is unfortunately often out of town for reasons of his own. “Sit up straight,” she said. “Address the question. Don’t look at your shoes.”

“I have had business reverses,” I said.

She laughed, a laugh that sounded oddly like that of the Quatorze. “You have no business,” she said.

“You have no idea what I have. Our lives have not exactly been closely touching these many years.”

“And a good thing too,” she said, adjusting her glittering spectacles, little flickers of ruined light bouncing from the fluorescence off the lenses. “A very good thing. Seven thousand three hundred dollars. That is an extraordinary amount of money.”

“It is half the price of a new Cadillac. It is a third of a year’s income for a steelworker. It is not—”

“You are not a steelworker and you don’t own a Cadillac. Business reverses!” she said. “I know what it is.”

“I do not come to be lectured—”

“It’s the wheel of fortune, that’s what it is!” she said, and laughed until she began to cough. She quieted herself into little sobs and chuckles with a cigarette. She is not a woman of endearing habits. “You’ve been into all that stuff again, the horses and the dice. You probably never stopped.”

“Will you help me or won’t you?” I said. I paused. “This is not easy for me, you know. In fact it is rather humiliating.”

“Life is a humiliation,” my mother said. “The sooner you accept the fact that you like it that way, the better off you’ll be.” She took off her glasses, took a sip of coffee. “Seven thousand three hundred dollars,” she said. “How very strange. How very odd that you would think that I would give it to you. Where did you get the idea?”

“Lend it to me. At interest.”

“Lend it,” she said. “Ah yes, lend it. Of course.” She shook her head. “Your father was right about you. It was the only thing that man said that I agreed with but he was right. You’ll never change, will you?”

“You have the money,” I said. “I mean I know you have it around. In here, in the house. You always kept twenty or thirty thousand dollars around. You said you believed in the cash on hand, that you never knew the value of money or how to respect it unless you could have it in your hands.”

“That was a long time ago. Things have changed. Besides, I wouldn’t keep that kind of money around with your stepfather in the house. Totally untrustworthy. Half a crook if I must tell you the truth. I made a mistake with that man but what can I do?”

“You can lend me seven thousand three hundred dollars.”

She clasped her hands. “Absolutely not,” she said. “In the first place I don’t have it in the house, and in the second place I don’t have it, and in the third place I wouldn’t give it to you on principle. You’re twenty-nine years old. It’s time you accepted responsibility for your condition.”

“You’re like the Quatorze,” I said.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Everybody knows what I should do. Everybody has the answers. But none of you know the pain.”

“I know the pain,” she said, looking at me keenly. “For one thing I have a son like you and you had a father like that man down in Florida now. I know pain, believe me.”

“I’m going to be in bad trouble if I don’t get the money,” I said. “I have nowhere else to turn. Those people are serious. They talk in funny sentences and they kid around a lot but the Quatorze is not the fourteenth of his generation because he wears plaid jackets or talks out of the side of his mouth. The Quatorze is dead serious. And so am I.”

“And so am I. No.”

“I can’t speak for what could happen to me.”

“You can go away,” she said. “You can disappear. You got here, didn’t you? You say they don’t know about me, right?”

“It’s different,” I said. “I cannot go away, not any more. And surely if they don’t know I am with you at this moment they would have ways to find out. So you’re involved whether you like it or not.”

“There is nothing more to say,” she said. “I was going to offer you cheesecake and coffee for old times’ sake — you are my only son after all, my only child — but there is no reason for it. You are hopeless. I want you to leave now.”

“I want the money. Where is the-money?”

“I won’t tell you. Anyway, it’s not here.”

“You had places,” I said. “You had a few places. I used to look when I was young. I would never take, almost never anyway, but I would look. I figure I could find it here from a standing start in an hour. It isn’t that big a house. And you’d keep it close to your bed. I’d find it all right.”

She stood, pushed her glasses under the cushion. “This is enough,” she said. “This is quite enough—”

“I’m in bad trouble, Ma. I’m in real bad trouble.” I had not called her Ma for years but the appeal had no weight. The woman simply has very little humanity and this is the truth. Maybe if she had been different I would not have turned out this way, although of course I do not wish to look for excuses. “I’m hurting,” I said. “I’m hurting badly.”

“So am I.”

“All you ever thought of was how you were being hurt. You never thought of other people at all.”

“I’ll make it a police matter,” she said. “That’s what I’ll do, that’s how serious I am. I want you to leave.”

“You used to threaten to call the cops on me, Ma. You used to threaten all the time. When I was six or seven you’d even go to the phone and pretend to dial. Do you have any idea what that kind of thing can do to a young kid growing up? The fear?”

For once she was quiet. She stood looking at me.

“You had no compassion, Ma,” I said. “I looked for compassion for a long time but it was never there. Then I started to look for it elsewhere. From toteboards and people like the Quatorze.”

She shook her head. “It’s too late,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I know it’s too late.”

I stared at her. These people aren’t clowns in rubber suits, I thought, the plaid jackets and the language does not make them unwilling to kill. It is that kind of a world. It is a killing world. Underneath the rubber masks and noses it’s murder.

My mother said, “I’ll never give you the money. I’d rather die than give you the money. It’s as simple as that.”

“I know,” I said. “I know. I know how you feel about money. You taught me the importance of it and that it was worth anything to try and get it. Anything except feeling, that is.” My palms were sweating slightly. Her eyes fixed on me.

It’s six to five, I thought. Six to five and pick ’em, vigorish either way which means that it’s a ten percent cut off the top or maybe five because I am a great customer but still a losing proposition booked up all the way. Six to five. Six to five.

“You won’t do it,” she said. “You won’t do it.”

“Don’t bet on it, Ma,” I said quietly. “I might book it myself.”

And then for a long time while I thought about a little of this and a lot of that, we stood there in the house built over the swamp on the far western tip of the ruined state of New Jersey and we looked at each other.