The Fugitive Pigeon

Chapter 24

Pardon me if you will, but I intend to drop into third-person narration for just a little while now. This next scene is far too nerve-racking for me to relive in first person. I want to view it all from as great a distance as possible — the middle of Long Island Sound, for instance.

Therefore...

The setting is a bit of sandy beach not far from Orient Point, one of the two eastern tips of Long Island. The other, Montauk Point, farther to the south, is better known, duller to look at, and more heavily commercialized. A ferry leaves Orient Point three times a day in summer, bound for New London, in Connecticut. In summer, also, pleasure boats cruise these waters, swimmers and sunbathers dot these beaches, but after Labor Day pockets of emptiness appear and grow, and by the first snowfall Orient Point is virtually deserted.

This particular stretch of beach is one of these pockets of emptiness, or was until a few minutes ago, when an automobile came driving slowly across the rolling sand from the direction of the invisible road. A big black car, new and gleaming, reflecting the mid-September sun. It stopped about a city block from the water’s edge, and two tall men in dark clothing got out. They wore dark topcoats and the sea wind whipped the coat tails around their legs.

A minute or two later a third man got out of the car, somewhat shorter and thinner than the first two, this one wearing a black raincoat which also whipped around his trouser legs.

The three began to walk away from the car, in single file, the one in the raincoat coming second. The other two walked hunched and stolid, their hands in their topcoat pockets, but the one in the middle appeared to be talking; his arms were in constant motion, like an erratic windmill, and his head bobbed with the speed and intensity of his words. The other two appeared not to be listening to him.

In their dark clothing, in the wind, in the sunlight, silhouetted against the light tan of the sand, the three walkers were impressive, curious, somehow frightening. They moved across the sand in a deliberate way, the two bigger ones picking their feet up high and leaning forward and moving their shoulders a great deal, the way men will walk through sand when their hands are in their topcoat pockets and they have a specific place to go. The one in the middle slid around in the sand more, seeming to be constantly on the verge of throwing himself off balance with his waving arms.

They walked at an angle in relation to the water, not directly toward it but rather off to the right away from the car, toward a small break in the beach where the ocean had eroded away a tiny cul-de-sac of water, a minuscule pool or cove or lagoon, walled in by sand. Gray driftwood choked this cul-de-sac, and more gnarled twisted pieces of driftwood up on the sand ringed it in.

As the procession moved closer to this cluster of driftwood the walker in the middle seemed to grow more and more agitated, as though the driftwood held for him a significance he found both unpleasant and impelling. His rapid, disjointed half-sentences rang out across the water, whipped away by the wind.

The trio reached the driftwood. The two taller men situated the talker where they wanted him, standing at the edge of the little drop to the water, standing amid the driftwood, his back to the water. They moved away from him, still facing him, and both took small machines from their pockets.

The one standing shin-deep in driftwood talked louder and faster than ever, and an occasional whole sentence blew out across the water: “What if I’m right? What if you’re wrong and I’m right? How did I know who went with you to the farm?” And other comments, loud and rapid and urgent in tone.

The other two raised the machines in their hands and pointed them at the talker. But then one of them lowered his machine and said something to his partner. The two of them spoke briefly together. They seemed undecided.

The talker kept talking, waving his arms. The wind blew his raincoat around him and the sun gleamed on his perspiring forehead.

The other two finally came to a decision. They motioned to the talker, who came back out of the driftwood and walked with them across the sand again to the car they’d arrived in. While the talker and one of the other two stood beside the car, the third man opened the door, slid behing the wheel, and operated an automobile telephone mounted under the dash.

A name was spoken, blew out over the waves: “Mr. Gross.”

There was a brief telephone conversation on the part of the man in the car, and then he handed the telephone receiver to the talker, the one who had just recently been standing amid the driftwood. The talker began to talk again, this time into the telephone, but just as urgently and rapidly as before. He stopped talking to listen, and then he talked again. The telephone was handed to one of the others to speak a word of corroboration to the man at the other end, and then handed back to the talker to talk into some more.

The wind blew. The sun shone. The water lapped at the beach. The black auto gleamed. The talker talked. The other two stood stolid and patient, dispassionate, not caring whether the talker convinced the man on the other end of the phone line or not. One of them lit a cigarette, hunching his back and cupping his hands to protect the match flame from the wind. The white smoke blew away, out to sea, along with the words of the talker, along with anything else that might be left here.

The talker was finished. He handed the telephone to one of the others, who spoke into it briefly, listened, nodded and spoke again, and then put the receiver back on its hook under the dashboard.

The trio got into the car, all in the front seat, the talker — now silent — in the middle. The car made a wide U-turn and drove away from the beach, toward the invisible road.