The Christmas Kid

The Final Score

THE LITTLE GRAY-HAIRED MAN walked into Rattigan’s a few minutes before closing time and went straight to the bar. He was wearing a navy peacoat and faded jeans, and bounced when he walked. He was carrying a Pan Am flight bag. Jabbo Collins knew him right away.

“Harry Willis,” Jabbo whispered, reaching across the bar with both hands to grip the little man’s shoulders. “I don’t believe it.”

“I’ve been lookin’ for ya for weeks,” Harry Willis said. “You ain’t easy to find, Jabbo. Nobody in the old neighborhood knew where you was. Except Father Conners. He knew.”

“He knows everything,” Jabbo said, and smiled. He glanced at his customers: Fitzie was asleep, with his head on his forearms, and Old Margaret was humming the words to “Mona Lisa.” Jabbo whispered: “When did you get out?”

“Three weeks ago,” Harry said, laughing in that high-pitched way that always sounded to Jabbo like the sound of a bird. Jabbo shook his head, ran a hand through his thinning hair, and began to close for the night. He put a shot glass and a bottle of Dewar’s in front of Harry Willis, wiped off the bar, woke up Fitzie and led him to the door, then waited while Old Margaret threw down her nightcap, gathered her coat, purse, and dignity, and walked into the night. Jabbo locked the door and turned to embrace Harry Willis.

“Eight years,” Jabbo said, his old swimmer’s body swelling with a deep breath as he stepped back. “I thought three years was bad. But eight…I don’t know how the hell you didn’t go crazy, Harry.”

“Maybe I did,” Harry said, and threw down a shot. Jabbo turned off all the lights except the night-light over the register; he stashed the night’s receipts under the floorboards; he removed his apron and poured himself a shot and a beer. All through this, Harry was talking. He talked about the people they knew when they were young, and the good times they all had. He talked most about the summers, when Jabbo was the greatest swimmer in the history of Coney Island, and of the Sunset Park pool and Red Hook, too. Jabbo laughed at that, and talked about the women they once knew, remembering all their names and who they married, and which ones were divorced, and the few that were already dead. And Harry talked about the first job he and Jabbo pulled, at the Aladdin Carpet Company one Saturday night, carrying away four rugs, selling them for the price of a couple of pairs of pegged pants.

“Dumb kids,” Jabbo said.

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “We did time. That’s as dumb as you can get.”

There was a long, silent moment. Then Harry said: “Let me ask you something, Jabbo. Would you—”

“Forget it, Harry. Don’t even ask. I’m through with alla that. I been clean for five years and I’m gonna die that way, Harry. I don’t make much more here, but it’s mine. I’m single. I got only my own mouth to feed. I got a nice little apartment. I’m never goin’ back to the can.”

“You never let me ask the question.”

Jabbo sighed and said: “You don’t have to, Harry. I know you. I see what’s in your face, Harry. It’s a scheme, Harry. And schemes are trouble, Harry, and I don’t want trouble anymore.”

Harry took a pack of Pall Malls from his pocket and lit one with a book match. He inhaled, sipped the whiskey. Then he said, “You remember the last job?”

“Yours, Harry?” Jabbo said. “Or mine?”

“The one I did.”

“I never got to talk to you about it, Harry. Remember? You pulled the job and they grabbed you the next day.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “But they never got the swag. Remember that part? Remember how the papers said it was worth fifty grand? I mean, fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry. Remember that part?”

Jabbo squinted and reached for Harry’s Pall Malls.

“Well,” Harry said. “I know where the stuff is.”

Jabbo said, “You’re kidding me.”

“You got a car?”

“I do,” Jabbo said. “A piece of junk, but it runs.”

“Let’s go for a ride.”

They drove through the empty Brooklyn streets, heading down off the Slope toward the waterfront. Harry gave directions and talked all the way. He talked about the old days, and the fun they had in the Cube Steak on 9th Street, and the night Jabbo flattened Danny Mac in Bickford’s and the night Cacciatore the Cop and his partner, Bill Whalen, locked them up for burglarizing the RKO Prospect. Harry talked about Ocean Tide, too, out at the end of Coney Island, and how terrible he felt because he couldn’t swim, and how proud he was of Jabbo the day he raced Vinnie McAleer out past the third barrel, and thought Jabbo wouldn’t stop swimming until he reached Europe.

“That was all a long time ago,” Jabbo said. And then he slowed the car and looked ahead at the Columbia Street dock.

“It’s out there,” Harry said.

“In the bay?”

“In a metal box, nailed to a piling under the pier.”

Jabbo laughed and stopped the car. “You’re out of your mind, Harry,” he said. “It couldn’t be there after eight years. The tide woulda ripped it away. Kids woulda found it.”

“I think it’s there,” Harry said. “Charlie Barrett put it there for me. Remember him? Big guy, good swimmer. Got killed in a stickup right after. Down in Florida. He told me an atom bomb might take it away, nothin’ else.”

“If he knew where it was, he’d’a taken it himself, Harry,” Jabbo said.

“I put him on the Greyhound that night, Jabbo. He got killed in Lauderdale two days later. When’d he have time?”

Jabbo thought about this, and then stepped out of the car. Harry did, too, carrying the flight bag. They could smell the sea, and hear the ding-dinging of buoys, and see the skyline to the right and the lights of Staten Island and Jersey beyond. They walked to the end of the pier. The water was black and glossy. There was no moon.

“I’ve been seeing Mary Larkin,” Harry said, counting pilings at the end of the pier. “She’d divorced, you know. Kids grown up. We get this score, Jabbo, me and her are gonna go south. Orlando, St. Pete. I’ll have a grubstake, maybe buy a car, a 7-Eleven, something like that. Hell, fifty grand then must be worth three hundred Gs today.” He stopped at the seventh piling. “This is the one.”

“And?”

“All you gotta do is go down and get it.”

Jabbo shook his head, smiling thinly, as he looked down at the swirling black water, fifteen feet below the pier.

“I’m forty-nine years old, Harry,” he said. “I’m not what I was. How do I get back up? And what do I use to pry the box off the piling? Presuming the box is even there…It’s nuts, Harry. Let’s go get eggs.”

Harry opened the flight bag and removed a coil of heavy rope, a claw hammer, a face mask.

“I’ll give you half,” he said.

Jabbo looked at the rope and tools, walked to the edge of the pier, gazed off at the black harbor. Then he started unbuttoning his coat. “What the hell,” he said. He tied one end of the rope around a piling. Five minutes later, barefoot, masked, the hammer in hand, Jabbo stood at the edge of the pier. “See ya,” he said, and went over.

Harry stared at the roiled water, held his breath as if in sympathy, then saw Jabbo’s head come up, gasping for breath. Jabbo gulped, his legs shimmering and pale in the blackness, then bent over and dived again. When he came up again for air, he was fifteen feet away from the pier. A tide was running. He bent and dove, and this time was under a long time. Harry banged his hands together, tense and cold. There was no sign of Jabbo. Impossible. He couldn’t be under this long.

And then he saw him, maybe forty feet out, shouting something Harry couldn’t understand, just his head bobbing in the water, receding, going out. The tide was ripping along now. And then above Jabbo’s head, he saw the box. Jabbo waved it once. Then he was gone.

“Jabbo!” Harry shouted. And then screamed: “Jabbo!” He heard nothing but the dinging of the buoys and the tide slapping against the pilings, and the distant moaning of a foghorn. And he thought: I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to go to the palm trees and the sun. He looked one last time at the harbor, which was as flat and black and final as death, and then he began to run.