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

A Garden Full of Snow by T. M. Adams

That Saturday, Carmine Bentavagnia had three things he had to do. Each was routine, each would require a certain amount of time; his whole day was planned for him.

The first task was simple. It took him to a welfare hotel in the cankered belly of the city, a rickety gallery of apartments in back overlooking the parking lot. Every air conditioner in the row wheezed and dripped asthmatically in the sweltering heat, except one. Apartment 46 had had its electricity cut off. Bentavagnia began to stagger a little, working up his act. Noting the name “Sheila Jameson” on the door of the apartment two doors down from 46, he knocked on 46 s door. “Sheila?” he said loudly, with a practiced slur. “Come on, Sheila, I know you’re in there!”

After two minutes of this, the door suddenly burst open. A stringy, red-face man in a T-shirt and jeans said, “Willya get outa here, she’s in 44!”

“Wanna talk to Sheila,” Bentavagnia blustered thickly. “Where is she?”

“Not here, jerk. Now get lost!”

“Isn’t this Sheila’s—” He mouthed the name on the half-open door. “Are you — what? — Frank Stanley?”

“Damn right.”

Bentavagnia swayed forward. Stanley put out a hand to fend him off, and Bentavagnia deftly slipped the legal paper into it. “Then, Mr. Stanley, it’s my duty to serve you with this notice of eviction.”

The red-faced man stared down at the notice and began to swear. As Bentavagnia turned to leave, Stanley grabbed him by the lapel and began to shake him, shouting almost unintelligibly. He was several inches taller than Bentavagnia. and in much better shape, but instead of twisting free and running for it Bentavagnia began to shout back, even louder and more furiously than Stanley himself.

Bentavagnia seemed able, like some sort of lizard, to blow himself up to twice his normal size and spit poison distilled from bile. His unenvied eminence among process servers was due to just this ability to take and dish out raw hate. It didn’t matter to him whether he served papers on a cheating wife or a starving squatter, on a crooked politician or an insurance-swindler’s mark. He didn’t care how underhandedly he approached them — whether he played delivery boy or accident victim or fireman, whether he crashed their parties or scaled their fire-escapes or blockaded their driveways. He made no allowances. His essential gift was a self-righteousness that encompassed all possible cases. He was an instrument of the law, wasn’t he? And these evaders of the law, who had offered him violence time and again, were the scum of the earth. And he told them so to their faces, at the top of his lungs, just as now, bringing all of Stanley’s neighbors out to listen and reducing Stanley to white-faced impotence. Bentavagnia loved to see the satisfaction on the neighbors’ faces whenever he evicted anyone; it reaffirmed his faith in human nature. He strolled off, whistling.

This first routine task of the day left him in a relatively good mood to approach the second, a visit with his kids. As he walked back to his car, he felt almost mellow. He had vented only a small portion of his vast reservoir of anger, but the experience, which would have raised another man’s blood pressure, and seemed to lower his. The old hypertension was still there, however, like an extra shirt in the summer heat. He was going to sweat right through to his jacket soon. This bothered him; he spent a great deal of money on his cheap-looking suits. They were in that style, originated by Las Vegas nightclub performers and metastasizing throughout the country via singles bars and discos, which bids fair to become the national costume, and the barrel-shaped Bentavagnia, with his sallow snapping-turtle face, brought out their every flaw. Only his tiny black custom-made shoes had class, and he had to pay twice what they were worth for that, the fitters had come to hate him so.

He had money, though, despite alimony and child support to pay. True, even a large city requires only a small number of full-time process servers, since junior law clerks can handle most of the court-issued citations, summonses, and subpoenas. But lawyers will take good care of the man who can tackle the determined evaders, even to the extent of filling in his slack time with their own routine evictions, foreclosures, and garnishments. Bentavagnia was making out all right — or so he told himself, glaring at total strangers on the street.

He visited his sons every Saturday at the same time. Myra, his ex, would leave the room while he showed them what he’d brought them. His presents were always expensive since he could find fault with anything not hidden behind a big price tag. Today he gave Tony, aged seven, and Jerry, six, each a book of rhymes and stories. The books were “personalized.” Throughout the text the name of a recurring character, the brave mouse, had been left blank and these spaces had been filled in with Tony’s and Jerry’s names in the same typeface, only spelled backward, to give them a fantasy look and make the gimmick more interesting.

Tony and Jerry received the presents without enthusiasm. Ordinarily active, vicious, cheerful kids, in their father s presence they were sullen, obedient, and fretful. He had them open their books, got them to turn to the same page with a minimum of shouting, and knelt down to show them where they could find their names.

“See here, where the mouse is in the garden, next to this snowbank? No, Jerry, look at your own book, it’s the same — see, right under the picture, the mouse’s name?”

“Ynot,” Tony said.

“That right, that’s ‘Tony,’ see, spelled backwards. And Jerry’s says ‘Yrrej.’ ”

“Stupid idiots put it in backwards,” Tony said.

“No, no, it’s supposed to be like that!” Bentavagnia said. “It’s cute.”

“Yeah, but too bad those stupid idiots hadda put my name in wrong,” Tony said.

“It’s supposed—”

“You gonna send them back, Daddy?” Jerry asked.

When Myra came in a moment later, the kids were in tears and Bentavagnia was in one of his rages. She called for her new boy friend, a truck driver, who grabbed the process server by his belt and collar and drop-kicked him into the street. Bentavagnia soon returned, a tower of righteous indignation. After giving everyone on the block a lecture on a father’s rights he went back to his car and drove off. From beginning to end the interview had been familiar and routine, the natural result of attempting good will in bad faith, a Bentavagnia specialty. It was now noon.

The third task of the day Bentavagnia had also done a thousand times before. He was to serve a man named Freddy Angel with a summons to testify in a suit arising from a traffic accident. It was a nuisance summons, but probably one that Angel wouldn’t strain to avoid. The only snags were that Angel was hard to get hold of and, worse, he was reputed to be a bagman for the Machine — and Bentavagnia wanted nothing to do with that outfit. He had even thought to ask Dominic about it the night before.

Dominic was his mentor and his only friend. A tall, white-haired man with a face from an old Roman coin, he was the proprietor of the Venetian Gondolier Cocktail Lounge. In exchange for Bentavagnia’s constant fawning, Dominic supplied him with liquor on credit, a sympathetic ear for his teary midnight maunderings, and occasional advice. Dominic’s influence over the process server even impelled Bentavagnia to attend Mass with Dom’s family occasionally; Bentavagnia had otherwise stopped pretending to have faith years before, when his mother had died. Dominic’s opinion about the Angel commission had been reassuring.

“This is a small thing, you tell me,” he had said, “and not related to his business. This is all right, if it is done properly. Introduce yourself straightforwardly. Give him the paper with an apology. If he takes it badly, offer to forget about it. Keep it quiet, and with respect.” It sounded reasonable.

Locating the target had been a problem. For tax purposes, they said, Angel maintained no legal residence in the city, although he was always around. Fortunately, the lawyer who had commissioned Bentavagnia had a reporter friend who had made Angel his special study. The reporter said that Angel always showed up on Saturday afternoons at the Department of Public Works building, in the office of his wife’s uncle, where he received instructions about cash pickups and other things Bentavagnia didn’t need or want to know about. Bentavagnia had promised the reporter he wouldn’t reveal his knowledge of Angel’s pattern by making his move in the Public Works building itself, but would wait and follow him a little distance away.

By two o’clock Bentavagnia knew that the promise had been a mistake. The way Angel was mixing up his trail, he was evidently on one of his errands, and it was all Bentavagnia could do to keep from losing him in the savage midday traffic. When his target suddenly pulled over and parked illegally, Bentavagnia had to cruise past him a full block before he could do the same.

It was easier to follow a man on foot, of course, unless he started to run. Bentavagnia picked Angel out of the crowd and slowly began to narrow the block between them. No, Bentavagnia thought, sweating beneath the dirty city sun, we don’t want to run. Angel had something of Bentavagnia’s short, tubby build, which was encouraging, but he was a few years younger and more fit. Besides, this had to be done quietly and with respect.

Within a few minutes, however, Bentavagnia was once again regretting a good resolution. Angel kept taking fast, wide-scanning looks behind him, forcing Bentavagnia to keep to a casual pace. At this rate he would never catch up, and already Angel had crossed one of the invisible lines that bounded off the worst fringe of the city, an area Bentavagnia didn’t even like to drive through. Not that it was unfamiliar territory, exactly, with its burned-out buildings, the squatters hiding from view, and the wolfish kid-packs. Bentavagnia had been there before — in Italy in 1944 and in a dozen nightmares since. The hell with it, he thought, and began to stride more purposefully, heedless of how conspicuous this made him in the increasingly empty streets.

He was gaining on him when suddenly Angel began to run. Swearing, Bentavagnia followed suit. He was twenty paces behind his target when Angel ducked around the corner. It took less than five seconds for Bentavagnia to reach the spot and have a clear field of view. Only about three seconds, surely, no more than four. But Angel was gone.

Both the street Bentavagnia had come from and the street he faced were empty for blocks. There were no parked cars, not even much litter — just the water-sheen indicating that a street-cleaning vehicle had recently passed through and, over to one side, some tarpaulins and a MEN WORKING barricade, as though someone had been doing road or sewer repair work earlier in the day. He walked over to check, halfheartedly. Angel hadn’t had the time to cross the street, lift the tarp, and crawl under it — he’d only had a few seconds. There was no one under the tarp, no trench to hide in — no rational explanation at all.

The buildings at this end of the street were all condemned, their doors boarded up. Even the alleyway entries farther along were blocked off. Angel couldn’t have gone fifty feet from the corner — had he done so, he could have found no place to hide — yet Bentavagnia drifted down the block, impelled, despite the desire to stay near the last place he’d seen Angel, by the frantic feeling that he had to hurry, that Angel was getting away.

Hadn’t there been a sound, a sort of chime, a signal at the moment he’d entered this strangely empty world? Or had that been only the old hypertension, a ringing in the ears?

He was coming to the end of the block. He’d had enough. It was time to leave the place to the arsonists and wreckers. There were still a few storefronts with FOR RENT signs in the windows, but they would never be rented again. Dead end on a through street, Bentavagnia thought.

But what was this? The last storefront on the block looked almost clean. There was a poster in the window: the words TALBOT FOR MAYOR surmounted by a larger-than-life photograph of a prissy, schoolmasterish face. Syndicalist Fusion Party? There was no such group in the city, not on the ballot anyway. And wasn’t it kind of early to campaign for mayor? Yet what little of the shop he could see past the edges of the poster looked kept up, swept out, new.

The storefront door opened. A tall, swarthy man looked at Bentavagnia balefully. “You looking for something around here, buddy?” he asked.

Bentavagnia snatched at the chance. “Freddy Angel?” he said.

“Yeah, O.K., Mr. Angel,” the man said, stepping aside. “We know what you’re here for.” And Bentavagnia stepped in out of the sunlight.

A second guard was sitting in the front room, a shotgun across his knees, peering around the edges of the poster at the bright slivers of street. “Is it him?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said the first. “Tell the Judge Freddy Angel’s here. Right this way, Freddy. We gotta hurry. Your money’s waiting for you.”

They went down a narrow corridor and the swarthy man motioned for Bentavagnia to enter a small dark room at the end of it. The only furniture was a short wooden chair, the only light a flyblown green-glass globe on the ceiling. Bentavagnia sat in the jungly dimness, scared and exhilarated.

The moment the man at the door had mistaken him for Freddy Angel, he should have spoken up — he knew that. But it had seemed the easiest way to collar Angel, to wait at the place where he was expected. He could see himself blustering it out — “Hey, hold on a minute, buddy, I never said I was Freddy Angel!” — and then, they’d mentioned money.

Freddy Angel was a bagman for the Machine. He went to expensive nightclubs, expensive hotels, and every now and then to not-so-expensive places where people gave him briefcases full of fifty-dollar bills, which he took to other places, quickly, secretly, with no one following him. Bentavagnia’s pulse hammered at the thought of that money being handed over to him, no questions asked. The Machine’s money, sure, and that was scary — but they would never know who had taken it, and in hours he could be farther away than they would ever look.

Why not? What would he be leaving behind? The city he’d been born in, his children, the only job he’d ever succeeded at — everything, in short, that blighted his days and poisoned his nights. He was going to do it. He was going to be Freddy Angel and take the money. The only uncertainty lay in the dreamlikeness of it all. As though he’d walked through Angel, into his shoes.

“Well, and if it isn’t himself,” said a stage-Irish voice at the door. This had to be the man they’d called the Judge, Bentavagnia decided — a tall, paunchy man with a florid face and grey-streaked red hair. He smelled drunk; his expensive, conservative suit looked slightly disarrayed. “Freddy Angel, come to collect a widow’s mite from his long-suffering friends in Detroit.”

Bentavagnia smiled uneasily. “You know, I don’t got much time for this,” he said, “so if you’ll just hand over the money—”

“Ah, sure and you can spare me a moment, Mister Freddy,” the Judge said. The two guards had entered behind him, and Bentavagnia didn’t like to be sitting down while the three of them stood. His system had reacted badly to the change in temperature too, and the mustiness of the air. But when one of the underlings handed the Judge a slim briefcase, Bentavagnia’s spirits picked up. “You see, I’ve a message of sorts for your wife’s uncle. In an organization such as ours, it’s sometimes necessary to take the time for these little discussions, isn’t that right?”

Bentavagnia nodded quickly. “Uh, quietly, and with respect,” he said inanely.

The Judge gave him a puzzled but delighted smile. “Just so. Sometimes it’s necessary to have a quiet, respectful chat to reestablish trust wherever it has... broken down. You follow?”

Bentavagnia made a noncommittal noise.

“Well, that’s the reason as brings me here,” said the Judge. “An outsider’s viewpoint, d’you see? And our little campaign headquarters should make for the necessary privacy, a lot less suspicious than an empty building, what with all these goings in and out. So let me take my time.

“Now it’s trust we’re talking about. Trust, Freddy m’lad, is a matter of deeds, not words. Many a man may talk loyal, but it’s acting loyal that counts. We all remember how persuasively you protested your own loyalty last May, as a for-instance, when one of your, ah, deliveries failed to reach Congressman Peavey. And we believed you, Freddy. We believed that some wino got lucky and picked that package out of the alley before Peavey’s boys got to it. We trusted your word, y’see.”

On and on he went, his musical voice reminding Bentavagnia of chimes.

What about chimes?... He’d gone around the corner, and he’d thought he’d heard a sort of chiming. Or was it a ringing? He couldn’t recall it any more. Had it been as loud as cymbals clashing, as soft as rosary beads clicking? He couldn’t tell, the memory was gone, subsumed in the Judge’s voice.

These Irish sure loved to talk. Bentavagnia thought of the old-time Irish lawyers who had still been around at the end of the war, packing them into the courthouses where Bentavagnia looked for work. That accent had been everything to them, although even then they’d probably been faking it, two or three generations removed from Cork or Killarney. They’d been colorful but stagey, with their crocodile tears and maudlin summations, their quotes from folk songs or Scripture. Judge or not, Bentavagnia thought, he wouldn’t be able to get away with that kind of garbage in court nowadays.

“But as it happened, we didn’t trust Congressman Peavey. We had marked his money so as to be able to threaten to show where it came from some day if need be. It could come in handy, we thought. And it did, it did.

“A few months ago, we were in the bidding for a piece of property in Atlantic City. A very big deal it was. But we lost the bid, and the fellow who won paid cash down, quite a lot of it. I won’t bore you with details — we know you’re in a hurry — but we prevailed upon a local official to give us a look at that money, and lo and behold, some of it was from that bundle meant for Congressman Peavey. Now we began to ask ourselves who was the source of this money, who stood behind the front man? Not some wino, you could bet. Perhaps the Congressman himself. Perhaps he’d lied and had received his cash. We had to check.”

These were secrets Bentavagnia didn’t want to know. But maybe if he didn’t interrupt, the old man would finish faster. Bentavagnia had to be back on the street before the real Angel arrived. But arrived from where? Bentavagnia squirmed in his seat, looking attentive, trying not to listen.

He knew whom the Judge reminded him of. Father Boyle, when Bentavagnia was six years old, at war with the Church and unrepentant. Father Boyle praying over him in his wonderful liquid voice, and little Carmine moving his lips in time and muttering rebelliously, too low to be heard, “Row row row your boat, gently down the stream.” And Father Boyle had said...

“Your own wife’s uncle, lad. Your own wife’s uncle. Now how could he have known where that money was without your telling him? Or giving it to him?”

“You should pay more attention,” Father Boyle had said sadly.

“Well, uh,” Bentavagnia said, realizing that despite the Judge’s smiling geniality, this was his last chance to speak. “Look, let me straighten you guys out. You seem to think I’m Freddy Angel or somebody — all I said was, I’m looking for Freddy Angel, see? I mean, here’s my identification—”

The Judge slapped Bentavagnia’s proffered wallet out of his hand and motioned to his underlings. Without seeming to move quickly, they were to either side of Bentavagnia, holding his arms fast. “Freddy, Freddy, we know how conscientiously you cover your trail when you’re on a job. We know all about your phony IDs,” the Judge said, going through Bentavagnia’s pockets, pulling out car keys and pocket comb and tossing them on the floor. He pulled a paper from Bentavagnia’s jacket pocket, glanced at it, then held it before Bentavagnia’s face. “But if you aren’t Freddy Angel, can you explain why you’ve been served with a summons in Freddy’s name?”

“Who do you think you—” Bentavagnia began, but his tirade was lost in the opening thunder of the Judge’s own.

“You thieving scut! You miserable shabby little dribbet of a no-good! Pledge your faith, then steal! Come ’round for more, then deny your own name! ‘You got the wrong man, Your Honor,’ ‘I wasn’t there, Your Honor,’ ‘He just asked me to hold the bag for him and ran off, Your Honor.’ What do you take me for, a fool?” His guards released him, and Bentavagnia sank into the chair, numbed by the Judge’s words.

Now the Judge lifted the briefcase from the floor and opened it out flat in the air. Inside it, neatly strapped in place against a red-velvet lining, were two silenced pistols and a cassette tape-recorder, its spools turning. The two guards had returned to the Judge’s side. Each took a pistol from the case, their faces reflecting disdain for these ritual theatrics. The Judge was enjoying himself, however, talking into the tape recorder in a stage whisper, cradling the opened briefcase in front of him like an ornate Bible.

“To sum up,” he whispered, then inhaled and began again, louder. “To sum up, the defendant does not deny that he has embezzled Machine funds and used them against the Machine. The defendant has offered no explanation, but has instead attempted, by the most piddling and pathetic means, to escape his just deserts.”

It wasn’t happening. He couldn’t have walked into a felon’s shoes. It was just a dream, a fantasy timed to the melody rising and falling in the Judge’s voice. He could feel the end of it coming, the crescendo before the final cymbal clash.

“As I stand here,” the Judge continued, “looking at this little man of loyal words and traitorous deeds, I am reminded of a nursery rhyme my own sainted mother taught me some fifty-odd years ago.

The guards exchanged sardonic looks. The tape-recorder whirred on.

Bentavagnia wasn’t listening to the dream-summation, not meant for him, anyway. He was listening to something within himself, a chiming in the ears maddeningly out of sync with the pounding of his heart. The Judge put his briefcase down, grabbed Bentavagnia by the lapels, and pulled him to his feet. He shook Bentavagnia rhythmically as he chanted, as if to get a rise out of him.

Bentavagnia could see nothing but the Judge’s eyes — they were waiting for some word — and he felt his heart stop — quite distinctly — and he tried to stammer out a last Hail Mary. “Gently down the stream,” he whispered. No, that was wrong, it was “Hail Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily...”

The Judge dropped him back in his chair disgustedly. The guards raised their unneeded guns.

Life is but a dream.

A few minutes later three men stood on the curb of that desolate street. The tallest was whistling a child’s song. His younger companions, as tough-looking as they were, seemed somewhat shaken. A limousine came for them, and the street was empty again.

Later that afternoon, there were a number of people clustered around the intersection at which Freddy Angel had disappeared, superintended by a young cop, whose squad car was detailed there. Two ambulances were parked next to him, one equipped with a winch and a miniature crane for traffic accidents. The ambulance medics were beginning to show the effects of many beers; after working for an hour in the intense heat one of them had gone to a deli for several cold eight-packs. There was no traffic, but a small noisy crowd had gathered, mostly children.

The focus of all the attention was a manhole, from which the medics were attempting to remove a heavy-set man, the chief obstacles to his removal being the splints on both his legs and one arm. A makeshift harness had been strapped around him, and now the crane could be employed. One of the medics from the second ambulance was telling the policeman that all of this waste of time and effort was due to the incredible incompetence of the guys in the first ambulance.

“Look, I’m still trying to figure out how to make out my report,” the cop said, interrupting him. “You say this guy was carrying several IDs but answers to the name of Federico Angeli, and the reason he wasn’t looking where he was going—”

“Here, the way I see it is this,” the medic said. “These guys who were down there working on the sewers broke for lunch, and you know what that means — for the day. Later somebody must have moved their barricades to the curb to clear the way, probably whoever was running the street-cleaning machine that came through this morning. Whoever it was didn’t notice that the manhole cover wasn’t on securely. Then I guess when the street-cleaning machine did go over, it dragged the cover nearly all the way off — and the whole trouble was, this is one of the old-style flat covers like you don’t see much any more.

“O.K., the stage is set. This guy Angeli is walking along. According to him, he gets the idea somebody is following him and he starts to run. He turns the corner and starts across the street, looking backward all the time to see if he’s being tailed, and drops right into the manhole. On the way down his chin catches that little edge of the cover that’s still hanging over the hole. Whap! The manhole cover levers over his head and plunks neatly into place. Ching! So the guy’s out cold, a couple of teeth missing, legs broken, arm broken — and no way for anybody to know where he went unless they were watching the exact second it happened. Poof! Like a magic trick.”

“Poof,” the cop said, nodding ponderously. “So how long was he unconscious?”

“Dropped around two o’clock, he says. Woke up and started screaming about four.”

The policeman ambled over to the manhole from which Freddy Angel’s face was now emerging. “What was he kvetching about down there?” he asked the medic.

“He says he has an appointment. All the time we’re working on him, besides screaming, he’s saying he’s got this important appointment.” Angel, seeing the cop, nodded his head and spoke, attempting to enunciate clearly despite a sore and swollen jaw. “Important. Lot of money. Business. Had to get there on time. Everything ruined now.”

The cop looked grave and wise from the beer he had cadged from the medics. His voice had a ring to it, as though fraught with meaning. “Buddy,” he said solemnly, “this just wasn’t your day.”