Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

33

ALICE DOMBEY NEEDED CULTURE the way the John Birch Society needs Godless Communism; it defined her existence and furnished her with purpose. Plump and matronly and as neat as a zeppelin, she was not at all what I’d expected from the wife of weasely Bob Dombey, not even after the fruitcake and the book. She managed to let me know within an hour of our meeting that she belonged to a dozen book clubs, subscribed to a dozen of the more cultured magazines, saved old copies of the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times, had bought the imitation paintings all over her walls at different visits to the Greenwich Village Art Show, drove to places like Albany and Buffalo to browse in their museums, and had ferreted out a Monday Club of like- minded local ladies to join. “It helps us ‘keep up’ with current events,” she told me, smiling in her bubbly way, and the quotation marks fairly hummed in her voice.

Marian loved her. The two women got along beautifully from the outset, Marian humoring Alice and Alice “allowing for” Marian, as she would undoubtedly herself have phrased it. Each permitted the other to feel superior, and what more could anybody hope for than that? The dinner party we had been invited to, at which I met Alice and at which Marian was introduced to the rest of the tunnel insiders, turned out to be a successful affair all the way around, though I did personally spend a lot of the evening twitching with leftover apprehension. I couldn’t seem to get used to the idea that the boys knew that Marian knew and that it was all right.

My second day back in the gym I’d learned that one of my fears, about Phil and the others finding out I’d told a girl in town the truth about myself, had already happened, and I’d been wasting my time chewing my nails over that particular indiscretion. Max, immediately on my telling him and swearing him to secrecy, had gone straight to Phil and told him the whole story. He had also given Phil my side of it, the presence of Stoon and the absence of a sensible alternative, and finally he had given Phil an encouraging report about Marian herself. So the group had met and discussed the situation and eventually had decided it wouldn’t be necessary to murder Marian and me after all. “You got a majority in the vote,” Max told me. I said, “It wasn’t unanimous?” and he said, “Don’t worry about the past, Harry.”

So Marian was now an insider, and I was the only one present with a date at the Dombey dinner party at which I finally met Alice, and which was given mostly in my honor, to celebrate my return to full privileges.

The dinner party itself was a bit unreal. Alice Dombey, wife of a convicted professional forger, produced an incredibly complex and tasty dinner (Gourmet was one of the magazines she subscribed to) for eight AWOL cons who sat around making polite conversation with one another. Alice beamed genteelly at everybody, used her knife and fork as though it were an intricate skill she’d learned from a correspondence course, and actually extended her pinky when lifting her coffee cup.

At the other end of the scale, and the table, there was Billy Glinn, absentmindedly snapping chicken bones and crunching through his food as though he’d wind up by eating the plates. Jerry Bogentrodder became silly and giddy in Marian’s presence, coming on with her in the style of a collegian who has drunk too much at his first beer party. Max also came on with her, though both more subtly and more seriously; I was beginning to feel a bit ambivalent about that fellow.

As to the others, Phil and Joe spent most of the evening talking shop with one another: guns, alarms, lawyers, stolen goods. And Eddie Troyn kept popping in and out of his Captain Robinson persona-never in quite far enough to call me Lieutenant, but in enough for me to recognize the genial authoritarian style. And Bob Dombey, our host, was so clearly madly in love with his wife and his home, so patently proud of both, that the great warmth of his feeling filled the room with a kind of amber Dickensian glow.

Afterwards, Marian and I rode to her place in her Volkswagen, and she said, “I keep thinking it has to be a put- on. I know you’re a practical joker, and this is a whole elaborate rib. No way on Earth those people are crooks.”

“Oh, they’re crooks, all right,” I said. I hadn’t mentioned the bank robbery, or the stings by which the others supported themselves, and though I was tempted now I once more refrained. Even with Marian I didn’t feel that trust could be one hundred per cent.

“Some of them I can believe,” she said. “Like that monster Billy Whatsisname.”

“Glinn.”

“Right. And Eddie Troyn, your Army friend. He seems crazy enough to commit anything. And Max Nolan; I knew a long time ago he couldn’t be trusted.”

That made me feel better. “There,” I said. “That’s half of them already.”

“Bob Dombey,” she said. “That’s no more a criminal than Santa Claus.”

“You ought to meet Andy Butler,” I said. “You can’t tell a book by its cover, honey.”

“That’s catchy,” she said.

“Don’t be a smartass.”

“And Jerry Whatsisname,” she said. “What did he do, cheat in an exam?”

“He’s a burglar and an armed robber,” I said, “and a general strongarm man.” I considered telling her that between one and three of the men at that dinner party had recently voted to murder the both of us, but that too I thought was best kept to myself. And I wondered which of them it had been, and just how close a margin I was alive by.

Conversation flagged after that. We arrived at Marian’s, and in the bedroom I said, “Be sure to set the alarm for four-thirty. I have to get back to the prison.”

She shook her head. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think- I would have been better off going to Mexico with Sonny.”

“No you don’t,” I said, and a while later she said. “All right, I don’t.”