Silent Scream

CHAPTER 19

The big car came on fast. Beyond the dead-end barrier a vast dump stretched in the darkness, an automobile graveyard piled with rusted old cars. Albano’s car steamed from a cracked radiator. No time to reach the ghostly factory buildings.

“You’ve got your gun,” Hal cried. “When the car stops we can-”

“No chance, even if I could shoot. Three to one at least.”

“Then let me have the gun! I’ll handle them, all of them,” Hal raged. “Ten bums like them!”

John Albano didn’t waste time or words. “The dump!”

The old man plunged down a short slope into the dump, trotted ahead picking his way smoothly. An old man who knew what he was doing. We weaved among the junk and garbage and old cars, the smell rising like steam in the night. There were shots behind us. I couldn’t hear where the shots went. We ran on.

We could hear cars on the parkways, but the dump seemed endless, and around it nothing moved. A kind of jungle, with tigers stalking, and which way was safety? How many of them were there? Who were they?

“Charley?” I said.

“Maybe,” John Albano said. “He could have spotted us at his house.”

“He’d hurt you?”

“Not in the open, bad for his reputation. But if no one knew, could prove it.”

Hal said, “What about that Max Bagnio? With friends.”

“Or the others, the Anglo types in the brown suits,” I said.

We went on straight ahead. As long as we didn’t circle or go back, we should be ahead of them. We came to a deep, dark canal, its edges frozen in the February night. We could swim it, but then we’d have to get warm somewhere quickly or freeze, and on the far side was a high fence-too high.

Hal held up his hand, listened.

We could hear them somewhere behind us, stumbling through the junk and garbage. Not hurrying, not shooting at shadows, but moving toward us carefully, inexorably.

“Maybe we can swim the canal, climb that fence,” John Albano said.

If anyone could, he could. In his condition, even at his age, he could probably even survive the night soaking wet. I wasn’t so sure about myself. Hal studied the distant fence.

“If we took too long, they’d corner us,” Hal decided. “It’s better we dig in, take cover, make them find us.”

John Albano agreed. “They like the advantage, Dan. Out here they’ll stay together, not get caught alone.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said.

We moved cautiously back through the junk and old cars. Hal stopped every few feet to listen. We heard them around us, all close together. In the dark I saw Hal’s teeth. He was smiling. He was better at this than they were. They had the guns-the hunters, and we were the rabbits, but old John Albano was a tough rabbit, and Hal had the skill.

They went past us, making too much noise and not seeing us where we crouched silent. But they would reach the canal and know that we were still in the dump. Hal searched the night.

“There,” he said.

It was an old panel truck wreck, sunk to its fenders in the dirt, but solid and with only the one opening through its rusted rear doors. Its front was buried in a mass of other junk, and from the doors we could see in all directions. We slipped inside. It was warmer, and there was no thought of trying to escape back to the road. They would have left men to watch. In the dark dump, stumbling around, we could run into them. In the hidden old truck they would have to find us. We would wait them out.

I sat near the rear doors with my old gun. Hal and John Albano sat against opposite sides of the wrecked truck, facing each other. Hal’s eyes gleamed in the dark, in action, no longer moody. John Albano’s eyes were closed. We waited.

At eight o’clock, Hal took my place at the doors with the pistol. He crouched very alert. John Albano still sat with his eyes closed, breathing quietly. I listened.

Twice they came close. Once two shadows passed across the open space in front of the doors, and went on. Once someone climbed the mound of junk behind us, but didn’t come down. John Albano took the gun at ten o’clock.

There were long silences, and then we’d hear them again. Coming closer, and moving away. Circling the mounds of junk.

We waited.

It was my turn at the door again at midnight, and after that we didn’t hear them again. We waited.

At 1 A.M., Hal lit a cigarette back in the truck, cupped it carefully.

“You think they’ve gone?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” John Albano said. “They stayed looking longer than I’d have expected. They want one of us a lot.”

“Which one?” I said, watched the dark night.

“We better wait,” Hal decided. He leaned back against the rusted truck, smoked. “Your son is one of them, Albano? A hoodlum, gangster?”

“Yes,” the old man said. “My son and my daughter, but not my granddaughter. She escapes.”

Hal laughed. Sudden, almost nasty. All our nerves raw in the rusted old wreck, the stink of the dump all around, the night beginning to freeze.

“So damned powerful,” Hal said, “and they can’t catch an old man, a cripple, and a two-bit painter with one gun between us! They wouldn’t last an hour in a real battle. Straw men.”

“They know how to get what they want,” John Albano said.

“We let them,” Hal said. He smoked, a shadow in the cold dark of the truck body. “How’d you escape it, Albano? You handled the car getting off the highway like some old getaway driver.”

“I almost was one,” the old man said. “You don’t always get a choice in this world, circumstances force you one way. But I got a choice. To the brotherhood the world is like a card game. Only so much in the game, and you pass it around, fight for your share. You add nothing. Money, status, momentary advantage, and afraid of losing it any minute because it’s all you’ve got. Not so different from any businessmen. Except the Mafia is in a war, them against everyone else. Parasites on the world.”

The old man found one of his long cigars in his pocket, lit it, the quick glare lighting his face. “I’ve built all over the world. I’ve taught college, consulted for struggling governments, worked for the U.N. in a lot of places. I’m not important, no one is afraid of me. But I’ve added something, done a job. Damn, I’ve enjoyed life-and I could have been like Charley.”

His eyes were cold in the glow of the cigar. “The only bad mistake I made. Away too much, let other people teach my kids. You two are still young enough, stay close to your kids.”

“Kids don’t always listen,” I said.

“We never had kids,” Hal said. “Diana and me. Good, maybe.”

I watched the night, my old gun cold in my hand. It was black and still, only the sound of the rats in the dump, and that sense of forces in the night. Indifferent forces, blind.

“You did some soldiering, too,” Hal said to John Albano.

“Yes, some. More than one place. I try to forget it.”

“I could tell out there tonight,” Hal said. He shifted unseen in the dark. “Over in Korea we dropped behind their lines this night. Knock out some pillboxes were pinning our guys down. We split up, my squad got one pillbox. They counterattacked, blew up the pillbox with us in it. I thought I was dead, but I wasn’t. When I came to, I was pinned under rubble. Me and an old sergeant. It was fourteen hours before they came and got me out, our people. The old sergeant died somewhere in there, and I thought I was dead again fifty times.

“All the while I lay there, I thought about after the war, about a woman, about my life. I swore that if I lived I’d do something. Something big, something for myself. I swore I’d never do anything I didn’t want, never let anyone tell me what to do, never get pushed around. I saw faces, all the destroyers who ran the world, put me under that pillbox. I’d never again just exist, let things happen! So I came home, became a painter, met Diana, and now-?”

He stopped talking, but he wasn’t silent. I could hear him moving in the dark against the rusted truck wall. Thrashing, the hidden car another pillbox and he was pinned under it again, Diana and Emily Green dead around him like that old sergeant.

“Easy, son,” John Albano said. “You sound like a man blaming himself. You can’t control everything that happens, shape it all your way. Save it for what you can control, or try to.”

Crouched at the truck doors my hand was frozen and my legs stiff. I could hear the traffic on the parkways, light now in the distance near 2 A.M., see the outline of the mounds of rotting and rusted junk. In the hidden truck I couldn’t see either of them, but I sensed them there, huddled in the cold, and I wanted to laugh. The losers! Frozen and hiding from men who knew how to win in this world. The three losers, nursing our impotent dreams of being better men, the proud solitaries who wanted the world to be better than it was. Perfect.

At 2 A.M., Hal took the gun and the post at the doors.

We waited.

There were no more sounds, and at some time John Albano took the gun, and once I became aware of even the distant traffic on the parkways becoming a single car that passed from time to time in some direction.

Then there was light. Gray at first, growing brighter. I sat up where I had slept against the truck wall. John Albano was slumped asleep at the door, my old gun large in his hand. Hal lay curled in a corner, stirring and moaning in his sleep. I woke Albano first. He came alert at once, his old eyes fully awake. He looked out into the dump.

“Wake up, Hal,” he said. “I’ll take a look.”

I shook Hal. He jerked awake, his eyes almost manic. He saw the light, scrambled to his feet. Outside I heard trucks and men working. John Albano came back.

“They’re gone. My car’s the only one back on the road.”

“People around,” I said. “The one thing they don’t like.”

We went out, and a dump-truck driver took us to the nearest garage. The garageman towed in Albano’s car. It would take two hours to fix, so I talked the garageman into renting us a car, and we drove into New York. Hal and John Albano reported to Captain Gazzo with me. He listened to our story.

“You didn’t see them, got no license numbers, but maybe there is a gang fight building,” Gazzo said. “I’ll check into Ramapo Construction. Not a damn thing new, and Bagnio’s still loose. In the same area, we think. Watch yourselves.”

Hal had to go to Diana’s funeral. They wouldn’t let him go to Emily Green’s burial. John Albano dropped me at my apartment. I shaved, took a shower, and was planning some sleep when the telephone rang. It was John Albano again.

“I went to Mia’s. She’s out in Jersey. They’re burying Andy today. Charley’ll be there, everyone. Want to go?”

I wanted to go.