The Singapore Wink

Chapter VI

Sydney Durant was barely twenty years old when a car full of UCLA students found him wandering down the middle of Sunset Boulevard at two-thirty in the morning, his mangled hands held out before him, almost chest high, the palms turned inward. The students thought he was either drunk or high until they saw the hands. Then they put him gently into their car and rushed him to Mount Sinai hospital. The only thing that Sydney said to the students was: “They had to do it twice. The bastards had to do it twice.” At the hospital he told them his name and also managed to mention Trippet’s. Then he collapsed.

Trippet told me all this as we waited for someone to come out of the operating room and tell us about Sydney and whether he would have one hand or two or none.

“I was able to reach Doctor Knofer,” Trippet told me.

“Good,” I said.

“He’s a specialist in this sort of thing, you know.”

“‘Messy cases,’ he called them.”

“He knows Sydney,” Trippet said. “When we were doing that old Aston Martin for him he used to drop by at odd times and just watch Sydney work. He came to know him rather well.”

“What’s he predict?”

“He doesn’t. The bones aren’t just broken, some of them are crashed, and there’s also extensive nerve damage. Then there are the veins to worry about. He didn’t sound optimistic.”

Nobody was waiting for Sydney Durant to come home; there was no one that we should call. He had wandered in off the street eighteen months before, looking for a job, and equipped only with the totally unsupported claim that he was, in his own profane estimate, “the best goddamned body man in town, especially aluminum.” He offered no references or information about his past other than that he came from “back east” which, in our town, could have meant Syracuse or Salt Lake City. Because Trippet prided himself on being an extraordinary judge of character, Sydney was hired on the spot.

He proved to be as good as he said he was, perhaps even better, and when the business expanded it was Sydney who recommended Ramón Suarez as “the best goddamned cloth man in town.” Ramón, who at nineteen spoke a vague brand of English, turned out to be superb with canvas and leather. Our third employee, Jack Daugherty, a Negro who was older than the other two by a couple of years, was another Sydney Durant find. All that Sydney had said to Trippet about Daugherty was: “He knows engines — almost as good as you.” He did.

Dr. Benjamin Knofer looked exhausted when he finally came into the waiting room at five-thirty that morning and slumped into a chair. He bummed a cigarette from Trippet, puffed on it moodily, and then held his hands out in front of him. He stared at them for long moments.

“Goddamn, you’re good, Knofer,” he said softly. “You’re really good.”

In his late thirties, the doctor was a rake of a man with extraordinarily small bones and a face that wore a look of what seemed to be perpetual exasperation. He also found it difficult to communicate without cursing.

“It was a bitch,” he said to us finally, and ground out his cigarette on the floor. “A real bitch. I saved the kid’s hands, but he won’t even be able to blow his nose or wipe his ass by himself for a long time to come. What was it, a gang fight?”

“We don’t know really,” Trippet said. “All we know is that he said that someone slammed a car door on his hands. Twice.”

“Somebody sure had a hard-on for him,” Doctor Knofer said. “Have you talked to the police?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“The hospital’s been in touch. They’ll probably be around to see you tomorrow.” He yawned and looked at his watch. “Jesus, it’s five-thirty and I’ve got another one at ten. Who gets the goddamned bill?”

“We do,” I said.

“For everything?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ll fix it with that broad in admittance,” he said. “She was getting ants up her fanny about who was going to pay.” He held out his hands before him and stared at them again. “A real bitch,” he said, “but goddamn, Knofer, you’re good.”

“When can we see him?” Trippet asked.

“Tomorrow,” the doctor said. “Around two. Cheer him up, will you? Tell him his hands will be okay. He’s a goddamned good kid.”

When the doctor had gone, I turned to Trippet. “I’ve decided to see the man in Washington.”

He nodded, as if he hadn’t expected me to say anything else. “Your new friends are most persuasive.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s not that at all. Angelo Sacchetti has been on my back for two years. You know all about it. You’ve seen me freeze a couple of times. Now they say he’s alive. I think I’ve got to find him unless I want to carry him around with me for the rest of my life.”

Trippet was silent for almost a full minute. “I think,” he said slowly, “that it’s out of our hands now. I think it’s time to let the police handle it.”

“All right.”

“You agree?” Trippet asked. He sounded surprised.

“Why not?” I said. “I don’t want to go to Washington, not now, not even in cherry blossom time. But the police have nothing to do with my going. If they can find the goons who smashed Sydney’s hands, I’m all for it. But I already know who’s ultimately responsible, and he’s in Washington, and there’s no way in God’s world that they can ever pin it on him. But I have something that Charles Cole wants, or thinks he wants, and he also has something that I want and that something’s Angelo Sacchetti. And perhaps eventually they’ll all pay for Sydney’s hands.”

“Which, if not victory, is yet revenge,” Trippet murmured.

“Yours?”

He shook his head. “Milton’s.”

“Then you’re both wrong,” I said. “It’s not revenge I’m after. They just owe me something. They owe me for Sydney — that’s first — and they also owe me for two years of the sweats and the shakes. I’d like to collect.”

“How?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I won’t know until I see Cole in Washington and maybe I won’t even know then.”

Trippet chewed on his lower lip for a while and then said: “They must want you most desperately.”

“Enough to do what they did to Sydney. If I say no once more, they won’t hesitate to repeat the performance. I don’t like hospitals. I don’t want to have to come around asking how the cast feels and when are they going to take it off and whether you’ll be able to walk again without a cane.”

A nurse entered the waiting room, gave us a curious glance, and disappeared through another door, moving with that no-nonsense stride that most nurses seem to have. Trippet stirred on his chair, as if to relieve a cramped muscle.

“Do you really think you can take on this man Cole in Washington — and all the brethren — by yourself? I don’t mean to be rude, Edward, but the fact that you dealt in violence for a number of years doesn’t exactly qualify you—” He let the sentence fade away and even seemed a bit embarrassed that he’d made it. As I’ve said, he was polite.

“What do you think I have in mind? A showdown in the lobby of the Washington Hilton?”

“I’m afraid of something like that, but then I’m an incurable romantic.”

“I didn’t deal in violence,” I said. “I dealt in action, or at least that’s what they liked to call it It was spurious violence — faked — no more real than the death scenes. This country has a taste for violence, both real and faked, but I think it’s having a hard time separating the two. You can switch on a news program and watch a South Vietnamese police chief put a pistol to a VC’s head and pull the trigger. Thirty minutes later you can watch a western marshal gun down the visiting bully. Which is more real to the viewer? The police chief or the marshal? I’ll put my money on the marshal.”

“But your new friends are real,” Trippet said.

“Very real.”

“And you think I might be their next target if you refused again — or would it be Ramón or Jack?”

“There’s somebody else,” I said.

“Who?”

“Your wife.”

For the first time since I had known him, Trippet almost lost his poise. He ran a hand nervously through his long, grey hair. “Yes,” he said, “I suppose they are capable of that. I hadn’t thought of it.” He paused for a moment, then rose, turned to me, and made a small, almost apologetic gesture. “I say, would it be terribly inconvenient for you to give me a lift home?”