Black Mask (Vol. 21, No. 10 — January 1939)

A Thousand Iron Men by H. W. Guernsey

The $1000 bill burned holes in the little bum’s pockets while its owners burned holes in each other.

Emil Fiddlemarch was the proprietor of a pale, bony nose, with a lean and waxy length to it which had the effect of pulling his eyes together and belittling his mouth. He frequented the Times Square area, the railway terminals, the Village, and crowds.

On a stagnant morning in August he was following his nose on Broadway above 42nd Street, breakfastless. There was a girl ahead of him, moving right along as though she were going places. As far as he could tell from her eloquent rear, she was a peach. She had a long bob of yellow hair that moved fluidly against her neck and shoulders as she hiked along, and choice long legs against which her skirt played provocatively.

Emil accelerated to keep up with her; it was this innocent pastime of getting an eyeful of seductive curves that brought him to the spot at the mathematical tick of time.

It was on its way down, a dozen feet above the girl’s head, when he first sighted it, and with lightning perception he knew what it was. In its descent it flipped over and over as though on an axis, rolling steadily down an invisible incline at such a degree that all he had to do was snatch it out of the air. Just like that — grab.

The grab brought him a couple of passing stares, but no challenge from other pedestrians. No one else had seen it. Finders keepers. But within one step after his brief hesitation he heard the yell from overhead, muffled by height. Way, way up, a redheaded man leaned out of a hotel window and roared, “Hey! Hey, you!”

Simultaneously a man burst out of the hotel entrance ahead. He was a young fellow in spite of his bald spot, and he had the build of a tough customer. He collided with the blond girl, spilling her interestingly across the sidewalk, and didn’t wait to see how she fared. After a hurried glance aloft at the redhead he started belligerently for the bunch of pedestrians including Fiddlemarch.

“Which one of you—” he began.

Emil turned in his tracks and fled.

His pursuer shouted, “Hey! Grab that little guy!”

Even on an empty stomach Emil could run, and he got going now with all the industry and vigor of fear. He zigzagged among people, jumped the curb and set sail through the Main Stem’s unsolvable traffic problem. He didn’t look around once, merely bent his wits to dodging fenders at top speed.

By the time he bolted down the stairs of a subway entrance and reached the turnstiles he had gained enough ground to drop a nickel in the slot like any honest person. Thereafter not a hand was laid on him as he tore through the station. Behind him, Bald Spot jumped the turnstiles, and a uniformed guard promptly ducked in and joined the chase.

There was a train at the platform; like red embers the lights over the doors were winking out one by one. Only one light remained, and that door was grinding shut.

Skinny as he was, Emil had to knife through the closing slot to freedom with less than nothing to spare. The door’s rubber bumper slammed into his hip, bounced as he clawed his way inside, and shut decisively as his pursuer arrived. Too late, the man scrabbled furiously at the door, pounded on the window as the train began to roll. The last Emil saw was a contorted face and a grim-looking guard grappling with the man.

Emil lurched his way down the car to the vestibule at the other end, where he could be alone and lean his hip against the brake wheel. His heart was ticking as fast as a watch, and his breathing snuffled as though he were laughing under it. But he had no cause for mirth, not when there was so little doubt about his being a goner. He had been around enough, mooching and scavenging wherever there were cash customers, and he knew a great number of characters who obtained their living after his own fashion.

His feeling about what he had just done was akin to horror, for he had recognized both of those men and they must have recognized him. His pursuer was Farr Luette, and the man Luette was working with was the redheaded Ira Terrin. They pulled big jobs; they hired out to murder a man they never saw before, if the price was right, and followed people home from night clubs to waylay them of money and jewelry. Things like that, strictly above Fiddlemarch’s class — those two.

At 34th Street, where he left the train, Emil copped a peek at what he had in his hand. It was the wherewithal, all right, wadded up as tight as a spitball. Covertly he peeled a corner open, and his eyes glazed. He swallowed, and his fingers jumped shut again. The banknote was a grand. A thousand frogskins! No wonder Luette had got down on his tail in such a rush.

Farr Luette rode the hotel elevator back up, mopping his face and the bald pink crown of his head, taking care not to disturb the meticulously combed, curly black remainder of his hair around the sides. He wasn’t used to running much, and he was still breathless when he got back to Terrin’s room.

“Catch him?” Terrin demanded.

Luette shook his head. “No.” Gasp. “Caught a subway.”

“You sure about that,” Terrin stated suspiciously.

“Ah, don’t pull that.” Luette snapped. “I said he got away. Damn it!”

“Of all the lousy—” Terrin swore, muttering the profanity. He stuck his heavy fists in his pockets and paced the room. He was built like a gorilla, thick through the chest, neck, and head, broad-shouldered, beefy. His face was heavy, loose-lipped, and his red hair commenced only a couple of fingers above his red eyebrows.

“Listen,” said Luette, “I seen that little runt somewhere around. Maybe we can pick him up.”

“A hell of a lot that’ll do,” Terrin growled. “How much of that grand you think we’d find on him?”

“What’s the difference? I hate to think of some little wart like that making me run my legs off. I hate to let him get away with it.”

“Go head and ask around, then,” Terrin suggested angrily. “You find out who he is, then what? The guy’s got rabbit blood in him, and besides that, you make chumps out of us.”

Luette gave Terrin a hard look, sweat beading his upper lip. It was Terrin’s clumsiness that sent the grand out the window, but Luette didn’t make any cracks about it. He compromised by beefing: “So we don’t get nothing out of this job. Well, I guess I’ll go down and lay a couple of bets.”

“Wait a minute.” Terrin’s eyes were bright squints. “You know this guy we did the job for?”

“Sure; Polumbo. Jack the Bug Polumbo.”

“And this Frankie Liano we bumped off — what did Polumbo have against him?”

“Something about a girl,” Luette said deprecatingly. He always got the essential information for Terrin before they pulled a job. “Name’s Audrey Starr, used to be in burlesque, and she’s Polumbo’s girl. Liano was a waiter at the Lisbon, and he was making little Audrey, I guess. So Polumbo has us bump Liano.”

“The Lisbon, ugh? Is that where we find Polumbo? Where is it?”

“It’s one of them joints. Over on the West Side, straight across from here, almost.”

“Come on, guy; let’s go.” Terrin shrugged into his coat and buttoned it, patted what might have been a bulge of muscle near his left armpit.

“What have you got on?” Luette asked.

“We’re gonna get another grand out of Polumbo. Maybe a couple of grand.”

“Yeah? We can’t do that, Ira.”

“The hell we can’t! Coming?”

“You dumb slob,” Luette said softly, but he followed him and the two marched over to the Lisbon.

The Lisbon bar was near the middle of the block, on the right going uptown. It was on the second floor over the dirty windows of a plumbing shop.

Terrin and Luette went through an unpainted doorway and mounted a flight of uncarpeted wooden stairs. A man might be delivered here if he was drunk and amorous and asked a hack-driver where he could find some nice girls at two o’clock in the morning, in midtown. The Lisbon Bar had been converted from a deep floor-through apartment, and its ceilings were stamped tin, painted gray.

The barkeep was a young guy with a fresh white apron on; he had a solitary customer, a fat man in a light, wrinkled summer worsted, whose eyes looked as though they had been cooked.

“Where’s Polumbo?” Terrin asked.

The kid wagged his head briefly.

“He’s not around.”

“Maybe he is.” Terrin leaned both elbows on the rim of the tiny bar. “He wants to know about Liano.”

The kid — on the bar-shelf a sign with a removable name-plate stated that “Jimmy” was on duty — indicated a door near the back of the bar. He said, “Last door down the hall, on the right.”

“Thanks, Jimmy.” Luette trailed after Terrin while looking back at Jimmy. The lock on the door clicked, and they went through.

Jimmy inspected a cigarette burn on the walnut bar, polished it thoughtfully with a beery rag. He told the fat man: “I think you better beat it.”

“One more drink,” the fat man said. “Make it stiff; I can’t feel nothing.”

At the back of the hall, Terrin grasped the doorknob, found the door open. Luette crowded into a small chamber behind him and closed the door gently.

Jack the Bug Polumbo had been awake all last night. The skin under his eyes looked deadish and baggy. He had bunchy ears like mushrooms, straight black hair, and he was a bigger man than Terrin, who was big. He was writing in a canvas-bound ledger on a littered desk, and his head came up with a wondering, weary slowness. He had somber, dead-black eyes, and be asked in a monotone, “What did you come here for, you Gawd-damned fools?”

He folded the ledger shut and sat there, two hundred and twenty-odd pounds of fat and muscle bulging through his soiled clothes.

“We lost that grand,” Terrin said. “We come back for another one.”

After a stare Polumbo said, “You’re out of your mind. How did you get in here?”

“Jimmy, out there. Pal of ours.”

The muscles bulged momentarily along Polumbo’s swarthy jaws. After another pause he asked. “What makes you think I owe you a grand? Didn’t I pay you guys once?”

“I just told you it got lost.” Terrin made his voice heavy and patient. “It blew out the window; a guy picked it up and beat it before we could get down there.”

“You must be going nuts!” Polumbo complained. “Is it my fault if you lose your dough?”

“You don’t get it.” Terrin started over. “We did this job for you — we bumped this guy — and we got nothing to show for it. See? We can’t bump off a guy we never seen before, and not get any dough for it. You can see that: that’s business.”

“What’s business? Listen, Terrin,” Polumbo said, “the only thing I heard about you was that you’d do a job if the price was right, and you said you’d do it for a grand. I never heard that you were dumb. I passed you that grand down in that bar yesterday, and now you’re trying to tell me I didn’t.”

“Sure you did,” Terrin agreed calmly. “Only we haven’t got it any more. We didn’t use any part of it; if we used some of it would be different. You owe us a grand.”

“Say, what’s the matter with you guys? I paid you a grand, didn’t I? How do you figure, anyhow?”

“You wrote on the back of that bill.”

“Sure I wrote on it. What the hell? Do you think I want to shoot off my mouth that I’m hiring you to kill a guy, and some fink will hear me and tell the cops? You looked at it, didn’t you? That’s all there is to it.”

Terrin’s heavy lips grinned. “It’s your fault we lost that grand. You wrote on the back — the guy’s name, Frank Liano, and his address, and so on.”

“Sure. You read it.”

“Sure I read it. Only we had to buy an eraser to erase that off. We couldn’t pass it that way. I was at the window in the hotel erasing it, and all of a sudden the damned bill blew right out the window. Things like that happen. We had to erase it, and if that writing wasn’t on it, it wouldn’t have happened.”

Polumbo kept his hands spread out in sight, and they twitched a little on top of the ledger. They were whopping big hands, with stumpy, pale fingers like country sausages. For all his size he could move fast and handle one of them, but not both Luette and Terrin. He temporized, “Did you take care of that Liano all right? How?”

“We picked him up where you said,” Terrin recounted. “We took him down to the car. He got rubber legs and we had to drag him, but that was all right, he was drunk, maybe or scared. Up on the Number 3 Transverse in Central Park I just took the thing out and stuck it under his ear. There was no cars or anybody around, except maybe somebody in the bushes.”

“Your car must look nice.”

“I’m not dumb. I had the guy on the flood with his head on an old pillow. He was just like jelly. I was telling him this one about the drunk that was trying to break into his own house, see, and I stuck the thing under his ear while he was listening, and it just made a little pop. And the slug sticks in the pillow, too.”

Polumbo’s face expressed something like satisfaction.

“Then we drove east to the river, and found a dead end where there was nobody around, and dropped him off a barge.”

Polumbo nodded, eying his callers critically. There was his girl, Audrey Starr, whom he was keeping in the apartment down in the Village. She had been two-timing him with young Frankie Liano; he couldn’t take it out on her because there weren’t enough like her to go around, as it was; so he got the same result by removing the temptation.

There was nothing to connect him with the murder except these guys. He had paid them, and the dirty chiselers were back already with a squirrely story about losing the grand out the window. As though that could happen! If he gave in to them now, they’d keep right on coming back for more.

“O.K., boys,” said Jack the Bug. “But you don’t think you’ll be coming this way again, do you?”

“Not a chance,” Terrin promised readily. He looked steadily at Luette.

On the desk was a large cashbox, and alongside it a couple of canvas bags of coin. The lid of the box was up, but the contents couldn’t be seen. Polumbo stuck his paw into the box with deliberation, scowling, grasped firmly the butt of the .38 revolver which acted as a paperweight for a loose pile of currency. Terrin advanced expectantly.

Polumbo fired through the lid of the box. With the advantage of surprise he thought he could get both men, and nearly did. But Luette had a gun in his hand as though it had simply sprouted from his fist, and the two reports occurred almost together.

Jack the Bug sat still for a minute with his eyes open. Then his lungs deflated with a bubbling sigh, spattering blood across the ledger. There was a puncture in his fat, perspiring neck, and some of the back of his head was missing. Luette had ducked and fired upward, but Polumbo’s bullet had hit his pal, Terrin. Polumbo leaned forward heavily, struck the desk with his chest; his chair shot out behind him, dumping his bulk to the floor with a crash.

Luette bent over Terrin. There was a hole in the redhead’s back under the shoulder blade, so that was that. He darted his eyes around, listening and breathing hard, his ears ringing.

He looked into the cashbox. There was a lot of money in it, much more than the receipts of one night’s business; plainly it constituted Jack the Bug’s entire wealth. Closing the perforated lid, he tucked the box under his arm. He cracked the door open furtively, listened some more, slipped out and cat-footed down the hall toward the bar.

When he heard the blunt bark of a shot, then another in swift succession, Jimmy raised his head with an air of quiet malice. Then came a crash from the back room, as though someone had felled an ox. He said to the fat man, “Scram.”

The fat man didn’t have to be told. A Collins slipped from his hand, smashed on the bar rail. With his stomach bouncing ludicrously in his waddling run he reached the head of the stairs. At which point he had propelled his bulk to such a speed that his short legs couldn’t keep up; he sat down and went rumbling in that fashion all the way down to the street.

Crouching behind the bar, Jimmy heard the hall door thrown wide with a suddenness intended to imply command. That told him it wasn’t the boss standing there.

Then came the footfalls, with no effort at stealth. That told Jimmy that it was only one man, that two of them had got it in there. The survivor had seen the smashed Collins and heard the fat man’s toboganning descent.

But Jimmy wasn’t chicken-hearted. He might be short on conscience and a schemer, but he was a deserving lad on the whole. He was a rugged individualist, and he wasn’t going to stay poor all his life like his father and mother. So he popped his head up, gripping the revolver Polumbo kept under the bar, just as the astonished Luette came abreast.

Firing point-blank he couldn’t miss, but besides being excited he wasn’t the best shot in the world, knowing nothing more about a gun than that you held onto it and kept on beckoning with the trigger.

The first slug only laid a red three-inch groove down the center of Luette’s bald spot, but the second socked him through the pan, alongside the nose.

That did the trick all right.

Shaken and wiping the sweat from his face on his sleeve. Jimmy issued from the bar. Luette had gotten his gun out and it lay on the floor with the cashbox. The box had burst open with the weight of the two bags of silver. There was no point in giving the police the idea that a hole-in-the-wall like the Lisbon was a money-making proposition, so Jimmy appropriated better than ninety per cent of the currency and concealed it well in the refrigerator, in an enameled box under lettuce, celery, radishes and stuff.

With no waste motion he paid a visit to the back room, and saw that things spoke for themselves in that welter. Next he used the phone, dialing the number of Audrey Starr to give her the bad news. The call awakened her, since she never got up until mid-afternoon, and her voice was as mean as snarled wire.

It turned to honey with bubbles of true love in it when Jimmy gave her a brief outline of the slaughter. He said, “I don’t know where that lousy spic kept it all the time, but he must have been counting it when those guys busted in. Baby, we’re all set! We’re going places!”

Before he called the police he swallowed down one stray crumb of conscience. The door to the rear quarters of the Lisbon was pretty solid and equipped with an electric lock, worked by a push button under the bar shelf. Jimmy disconnected the batteries and disposed of them simply by dropping them down the chute into the barrel used for broken bottles. He then knocked the lock itself out of commission with a mallet and screw driver.

Lastly he spoiled all his carefulness by getting himself paralyzed on the best in the house, because after all he was only a young fellow with his nerves shattered by his experience.

Fiddlemarch entered a telephone booth near the escalators in Macy’s and closed the door, and turned his back on it. He took the receiver off the hook and held it to his ear; with his right hand he spread the thousand dollar bill out fiat, holding it close to his chest to conceal it. It was a handsome thing, a thousand bucks and no doubt about it. Not queer; back and front, green and black, the engraving was strictly governmental. There was some writing on the back — some guy’s name and address. The previous owner’s, maybe.

He hung up, wiped his face with a handkerchief, surreptitiously folded the banknote into it and crammed it back in his pocket. He looked around on the floor to make sure that it hadn’t dropped. There was a whole cigarette there, which he nonchalantly sniped and lighted with a paper of matches advertising free admission to a burlesque house where the gals stripped no more, nor teased, nor ground, nor anything. There was one he remembered in particular, that Audrey Starr. He stuck his finger into the return slot of the phone before leaving, but there were no forgotten coins, no wadding.

He walked around the store for a few minutes while he smoked the cigarette, returned to the telephone booth and fished out his gray handkerchief. The bill was still there. He spread it flat, folded it very neatly and tucked it in behind the matches with the busted theater ad.

On his way down Seventh Avenue he considered the fact that he was going to have a time breaking the grand. Not only that, but he was harried by the fear that the word about him had been passed around. Luette and Terrin would have been asking for him, and he might be spotted at any time.

In one drugstore after another, down the line, he made the telephone booths, and by the time he had penetrated the Village he had collected two dollars and forty-five cents. Unusually good pickings from the return slots. That made close to ten dollars that he had on his person, not counting the thousand brave soldiers. He couldn’t include the grand until he cracked it.

Before he became a moocher, in the past, Emil had been much better off, starting with the time he found the emerald ring in the hack and held out for six hundred bucks reward. Four hundred had been offered in the Lost & Found. The woman who paid him the money acted as though he was a maggot or something, but it wasn’t his fault if the ring had a sentimental value. Even in the palmy days he never did much hack-riding, but the girl was plastered that time, and if she said, “Please,” when he asked her if she wanted a hack, and let him get in with her, she was asking for it. He always wondered what happened about that. And he had found the ring right there on the seat, besides.

He used to hang around subways late at night and roll lushes when he got the chance. He never would forget the time he found the guy snoring on the bench and took his watch and wallet, and then just as fast as the tick of a clock the guy’s mitts were wrapped around his throat and Emil’s eyes were bugging out. The guy was a detective.

That was the only time Emil went up the river, and it would be the last time; because even if he found a lush lying in the gutter and nobody in sight he wouldn’t take the guy’s watch out to see what time it was. That had been the reason why he took the detective’s gold watch; he just wanted to know the right time, and then of course he took the wallet to see whether some lush-worker had already found the man and rolled him. The judge and everybody else in the court laughed like fools.

Anyhow, he knew it was going to be tough breaking the grand. The bill would be on record. Every time it went through a bank, the cashier had to take down the serial number, and there weren’t so many grands floating around, either. Privately, every owner would make a note of the number, if he had any brains, because it was a lot of money in one piece. Emil figured that he wasn’t a thief until he spent a piece of the grand. That might happen if he walked into just any bank to get it changed. The number might be on record in just that bank already, for either Terrin or the owner must have phoned the number around.

In the first place, any cashier would wonder how a seedy individual like Emil Fiddlemarch happened to have a piece of jack that long. Passing the grand was worse than trying to get a check cashed, and people have starved to death trying to cash perfectly good checks in Manhattan.

And the can. Back up the river for a double stretch. He couldn’t do another stretch; he’d get T.B. or something in those cells. Or stir-crazy.

He switched the grand from the paper of matches to his watch-pocket, then to another pocket. There were fourteen pockets in his suit, and in no time at all he reached the conclusion that it wasn’t safe in any of them.

Knocking off for lunch, he went up Lexington to a bar above 42nd, and nursed a ten-cent beer long enough to snitch about eighty-seven cents worth of pretzels, potato chips, little kamoojies of bread spread with ground meat, cheese, and other delicacies. He inspected with curiosity only some oily, curled-up strips of meat, since it was the first time he knew that red angle-worms had bones.

He thought of trying to cash the bill in a place like this, but knew it couldn’t be done. It was too big to cash anywhere he knew of besides a bank, except maybe one of the big department stores. There again the money would go to the tube room, the girl would turn it over to somebody, and somebody would turn the serial number over to the banks, and a store detective would walk up behind Emil Fiddlemarch.

He was not unacquainted with certain places where a large denomination could be broken up without fuss, but the boys handling that kind of dough knew that Emil never owned a yard in his life, and besides, Luette and Terrin were acquainted with those same places.

Telephone call: “If a little shrimp with a long beak on him comes in with a grand...”

While he bore his cross during the afternoon, the banknote journeyed from his shoe to his shirt sleeve, which he rolled up, carrying his coat because it was a broiling day. Its next stop was the inside of his necktie, where he pinned it. But the pin could catch and fall out, and so could the bill. It spent a few cozy moments under the lip of his spectacle case. He didn’t wear glasses; he had just found this thick-lensed pair lying on the low brick wall surrounding a Village church last Sunday morning. The gold frames might be worth selling, but Emil had hopes of their being advertised for yet. Their owner couldn’t possibly see without them.

Emil could figure things out.

Somewhere en route he acquired a needle and thread, and tailored the hot grand into the cuff of his trouser leg. But he had gotten used to the sweet velvety feel of it, and he had to get it out and count it again. It came out to a thousand iron men, even.

At length he salvaged a newspaper from a Keep the City Clean basket; since it was now quite dark he had little fear of being observed while he smoothed the leathery banknote out, laid it carefully between pages ten and eleven of the newspaper, folded the paper again and again and tucked it under his arm. He sat in Jackson Square looking down his nose and brooding.

The end of his day was approaching, and there was no place where he could safely keep that grand. When he went to sleep, some bum would come by and cop the newspaper. And tomorrow, when Luette and Terrin caught up with him... Bitter medicine: The only way to keep absolutely secret (1) is to have no secrets; (2) is not to do that which needs to be concealed.

He retrieved the banknote from the newspaper, which he dropped on the bench, and stood up. He shrugged his shoulders, folded up the grand and kept it in his fist, where it had been in the first place.

Going down 8th Avenue Emil happened upon a cop named Hutchinson, who was off duty and just strolling along the fence of Abingdon Square, batting his leg with his night-stick every other step.

“Here,” Emil said with animosity. He offered something and with his left hand rubbed his nose as though it itched.

“What is it?” Hutch asked, taking the folded bill.

“I found it; I’m turning it in.”

“What’s wrong with it? Is it phony?” Hutch asked, seeing that it was a piece of U.S. currency.

“Nope,” Emil said, turning away.

A little dumfounded at meeting an honest man face to face, Hutch called, “Hey! Where’d you find it?”

“A couple of feet off the ground!” Fiddlemarch snarled. Suiting action to his words, he broke into a run pell-mell up the avenue, and turned a corner.

The condition of Hutch’s feet being what it was, he couldn’t be bothered with guys in a hurry, besides suspecting that this was some kind of prank. He said, “Hell with him, then.”

Wherewith he examined the banknote under the next light. It had undergone considerable wear and tear, and looked as though it had been eaten by a goat and partially digested.

“A thousand fish!” Hutchinson ejaculated with awe. “Ho-ly sassafras!”

On the reverse of the banknote were still legible a couple of lines of writing in pencil. Liano was the name of a stiff who had been fished from the East River after being sighted, bobbing, from a Staten Island ferry. Emil Fiddlemarch could have discovered the same, and learned of the massacre in the Lisbon Bar, and how the cops found several thousand dollars mixed up with some groceries in the Lisbon’s refrigerator — all in the newspaper he had just discarded unread.

A lousy thousand iron men, orphan.