The Snatch

10

Shortly before five a prim little nurse with eyes like two watermelon seeds imbedded in cotton came in and said that there was a telephone call for me, did I feel well enough to walk down the corridor and take it?

I said I felt well enough. She helped me on with a hospital robe, and we walked down to the floor reception desk. There were a lot of patients abroad-old women and old men with death in their eyes, leaning on canes or sitting in wheelchairs or on window benches like fragile and antediluvian artifacts; a tearful young girl immense with child walking on swollen ankles; a portly guy with his face swathed in bandages, making pitiable whimpering sounds as he walked. The scent of fear was strong in that corridor. It was not the consuming fear which had permeated the air inside the war-zone hospitals, but it was potent enough to initiate nausea swirling through my stomach and a kind of weakness at the back of my knees. I had to hold on to the edge of the reception desk for a moment, breathing through my mouth and exerting a conscious effort of will to keep from being violently sick.

“Are you all right, sir?” the nurse asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just give me a minute.”

She watched me uncertainly as I fought down the nausea and the laboredness of my breathing. When I took a couple of steps to where a pay phone with the receiver placed carefully on its lower shelf sat on the adjacent wall, she seemed satisfied that I was not going to keel over on her and moved away.

I caught up the receiver and said hello.

A familiar voice said, very sourly, “Well, you must be in pretty good shape if they let you come to the phone. You goddamn dagos have hide six inches thick.”

Eberhardt. I smiled a little. “Thanks for your touching concern, jewboy,” I said. The racial jibes were an old thing between us, but they were nothing more than an expression of warmth, of understanding, of comradeship; we had known each other when it was fashionable for the masses to hate and deride the Jews and the Italians along with the other minorities, and we had taken plenty of abuse in our time. We had lived with it, and weathered it, and we had earned the right to make a small joke of it between us. We could relax with our heritage at long last, and God, how nice that was! Maybe there would be a day when this same ease would supplant the bristling hatred extant in some of the other minorities today, and an understanding shrug would replace the stiffened back and the defiantly jutting chin. It would be a fine day if it came.

I said, “How did you hear about it, Eb?”

“I came on at four today,” he said, “and there it was on my desk. I thought somebody was pulling a gag at first.”

“It’s no gag, brother.”

“Yeah. How you feeling?”

“Not too bad.”

“When they letting you out?”

“Tonight, maybe.”

“Jesus,” he said, “twenty-seven stitches in the belly,” and his voice had gotten softer. He was not nearly as hard or as confirmed a cynic as he liked you to believe; it was a facade, the same way Donleavy’s sleepy appearance was a facade. Eberhardt was a good man, a good cop, a good friend; I had been the best man at his wedding twenty-one years ago, and I was his oldest daughter’s godfather. I knew that the report on what had happened to me had affected him considerably more than he was letting on.

He said, “Look, as soon as I heard about it and checked with the hospital, I called up Erika and told her. I knew damned well you wouldn’t have, and I figured it was better coming from me than from the newspapers.”

“I hope you didn’t alarm her, Eb.”

“How do you sugar-coat a knife in the guts?”

I took a breath. “What did she say?”

“She said she was leaving right away to come down there,” Eberhardt said. “She was scared and she was worried, what did you expect?”

“Just that, I guess.”

“I’d come down myself if I wasn’t on duty.”

“I can get along without it.”

“Yeah.” He was silent for a moment; then: “Listen, take it easy, will you?”

“Don’t worry.”

He said, “Some chance, a big tough private-eye guy like you,” and hung up very gently in my ear.

When I returned to my room, the nervously energetic doctor was waiting for me. He examined my wound, supervised the changing of the dressing, and pronounced me fit to go home-after delivering a list of instructions as to what I could or could not do, eat, and subject myself to.

I asked one of the nurses for the afternoon newspapers, and she brought me copies of the San Francisco Examiner and the San Mateo Times. The pictures of Lockridge, and the boy in his military uniform, were spread across the front page of both, and the accompanying stories under seventeen-point heads were sketchy and suffered from a lack of salient facts. My name was mentioned twice in the Examiner, three times in the Times, misspelled once in the latter; I was purported to have been wounded, though not seriously, during the delivery of the ransom money, but my whereabouts were not divulged. I could imagine the number of reporter-placed calls my answering service had gotten in San Francisco, and I wished that the District Attorney’s Office had not given out my name at all.

I got out of bed, carefully, because I had developed a restlessness, and went over to the window. I was standing there, watching vacillating threads of gold and burnished brass and coralline interweave on the clear western horizon to fashion the intricate symmetry of an autumn sunset, when Erika arrived at a quarter to six.

She was all in pink-pink scoop-necked shift, pink square-heeled shoes, pink coat with big leather buttons, pink handbag, her hair done up with a pink velvet ribbon in it. She looked twenty-seven instead of thirty-seven. She looked very good.

She came over to me and I kissed her and held her shoulders. Her eyes were deep pools of translucent water, and in them I could read a curious mixture of emotions, some I wanted, some I did not.

“Eberhardt called me,” she said. “I had to hear it from him.”

“I didn’t want to worry you, Erika.”

“That’s very considerate of you.”

“Honey, please, it’s not that serious …”

“You were almost killed, that’s not serious?”

“But I wasn’t killed,” I said. “I’m alive, I’m going to be all right. Isn’t that the important thing?”

Her eyes probed mine for a long moment, and then her face softened and she lifted her arms and cupped my face between her palms. “Yes, yes, that’s the important thing. Oh God, old bear, it makes me sick inside just to think about you being cut that way, with a knife!” I could feel her shoulders trembling beneath my hands, but she did not cry; Erika had ceased shedding tears in response to a crisis a long time ago.

I drew a long breath, holding her, and then I noticed that in her left hand was a large paper bag with the name of some clothing store on it. I said lightly, “Hey, what’d you bring me?”

“I stopped to buy you some clothes. Eberhardt said yours were … ruined and you needed something to get home in …”

“Lord, you’re a wonder.”

“Sure.”

I took the bag gently out of her hand and kissed her again and said, “It’s time I got out of here, honey. Let’s go home.”

Twenty minutes later I was dressed in a white shirt and a pair of flannel slacks and a poplin jacket, checking out at the reception desk. They gave me a statement there, and the amount on it seemed exorbitant at first-but I did not say anything about it; perhaps it wasn’t really so much, after all, for my life. The doctor was there with more instructions, and I promised him that I would see a local physician in San Francisco within the next couple of days to have the dressing changed and healing progress on the wound checked. We shook hands, solemnly, like two church deacons at a Sunday social, and then Erika and I went out into the cool night air.

She had a three-year-old beige Valiant, and she drove it like an old lady in an Essex: body rigidly erect, both hands locked on the wheel, the speedometer needle frozen at fifty-five once we got onto Bayshore North at San Bruno Avenue. She made me nervous watching her, and I stared out through the windshield instead, sitting low on the seat with my legs splayed out to ease the constriction in my stomach.

I made a couple of attempts at conversation, but Erika wasn’t having any. She had her mouth pulled tight at the corners, and I knew that she was brooding and why she was brooding, and I thought that it was a good thing she wanted silence. I kept on staring out the windshield, trying to decide what I was going to do about Martinetti’s offer.

I went over the pros and cons of it a half dozen times, and resolved nothing at all. I knew what I ought to do, and that was to tell Martinetti no when he called, to just wash my hands of the whole thing. And yet, the prospect of doing that made me feel edgy and impotent. I was not a quitter, and to step out of the affair now made me just that; as long as I did not violate any laws, or get in anybody’s hair, I had something of an obligation to myself to stay with it until it was concluded, one way or another.

I thought: Well, maybe it will all break by tonight and I won’t have to make any decision. I hope that’s the way it is; Christ, I hope that’s the way it is.

San Francisco was blanketed in fog, and as we left the freeway I could feel a coldness settling on my spine despite the warmth of the car’s heater. The shredded gray tendrils of mist recalled last night and its violent chain of events vividly to my mind; I shivered a little, and the pain grew gnawing across my lower belly.

There was a parking space almost directly in front of my building, for a change, and Erika spent three minutes putting the Valiant into it. She came around and took my arm as I got out of the car, holding on to it tightly, and we went up onto the porch. The police and the hospital staff had gathered my personal effects from the blood-soaked ruin of my own clothing. When I used my key on the front door and my apartment door, I was breathing only just a little heavily from the climbing of the single flight of stairs.

Erika let her eyes wander with distaste over the living room as we stepped inside. She said, “My God, how can you stand to live like this?” But there was a lightness to her words, the first she had spoken since we’d left the hospital, that gave the impression of relaxation inside her now. She had finished her brooding, having apparently come to some conclusion or resignation; the tightness was gone from the corners of her mouth, and she was beautiful and soft for me again.

I said, “You say the same thing every time you come here.”

“It doesn’t seem to do any good.”

“Can I help it if I’m a slob at heart?”

“Oh, go lie down, will you?” she said. “I’ll fix you something to eat. Are you hungry?”

“Sure.”

“Well, that’s a good sign anyway.”

Erika took off her coat and went over and hung it up in the coat closet. Then she disappeared into the kitchen and clicked on the lights and made an exasperated sound and began banging pots and things around. I walked to the couch and swept some newspapers onto the floor and lay down.

There was a package of cigarettes on the coffee table, and I looked at it and thought about having one. But the craving was not at all strong, and I did not want to provoke Erika into any kind of argument. Besides that, I had a running start on quitting them now, the kind of start I would not have again; if I was going to do it at all, this was the right time.

I picked up the copy of Black Mask that I had been reading two nights ago, and began to thumb idly through it. I started to glance over the story I had begun then, without any real hope of being able to concentrate, but the opening gripped me this time and I was ten pages involved in it when Erika came in with a tray a few minutes later.

She put the tray down on the coffee table, clearing away some of the dishes and things. She said, “Don’t you ever tire of reading those silly magazines?”

“No,” I said. “Don’t you ever tire of cleaning up?

“What do you think?”

“You’ll make some guy a good wife anyway.”

“I can give you the names of two guys who wouldn’t agree with that,” she said.

“A hell of a lot they know.”

“Maybe they know best of all.”

“Nuts,” I said. I looked at the tray. There was some beef broth and a fluffy omelette and a dish of applesauce. It wasn’t the kind of stuff I liked to eat as a rule, but I sat up dutifully and put the pulp aside and went to work on the food.

I was halfway through the meal when the telephone rang. I looked up at the sunburst clock over the false fireplace; it was eight-thirty. I said to Erika, “Answer that, will you, honey? If it’s Louis Martinetti, I’ll talk to him. Nobody else.”

She looked at me sharply, and then went into the bedroom and cut off the phone in mid-ring. I heard her tell somebody that I wasn’t available for comment just now, she was sorry, and a moment later she came back into the front room. “Somebody from the Chronicle” she said.

I finished the meal she had prepared, and Erika took the tray away and came back and began to clean up. I lay down again and tried to read some more of the Black Mask story, but it was no good now. I was tense and waiting for Martinetti’s call, because I knew what I was going to tell him; I had known it the instant the telephone rang before and I had thought it might be him.

He called at five to nine.

Erika went in to answer it, and returned with the phone on its long cord. She gave it to me, mouthing Martinetti’s name silently, and went away into the kitchen. I said, “Yes, Mr. Martinetti?”

“There’s nothing yet,” he said, “nothing at all.” Even over the wire, his exhaustion was plainly evident. “I’ve just heard from the District Attorney’s people.”

“Then you still want me to keep working for you?”

“Yes. Will you do it?”

I blew a soft breath away from the mouthpiece. “All right, Mr. Martinetti. I’ll do what I can. But I want you to understand that it probably won’t be much, and that I don’t want any money unless I make some kind of contribution.”

“Whatever you wish,” he said.

“Call me at any time if you have some news. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll know there aren’t any further developments.”

“Yes.” He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “I … I appreciate this. More than I can tell you.”

“Sure,” I said. “I hope I can help, Mr. Martinetti.”

We said goodbye and I replaced the handset in its cradle. I sat there and looked at the phone and I felt better about it all now, having reached a decision. I turned away to lie down again and Erika was standing just behind the couch with the tightness back at the corners of her mouth and her eyes very dark.

I said, “You were listening.”

“Yes, I was listening,” softly, flatly.

“Erika …”

“You damned fool,” she said in sibilant tones, “oh, you poor damned fool. You can’t let it alone, can you? You’ve got to stay right in there until the bitter end.”

“Look,” I said, “you don’t understand …”

“Don’t I? I understand very well, you’d be surprised what I understand. I understand that you’ve got a knife wound in your stomach from this business, this skulking around in the night, and now you want to keep right on with the case. Can’t walk out on a client, isn’t that the way it goes? Well, maybe next time the man with the knife won’t miss. Maybe next time he’ll kill you and you’ll die gloriously in the name of truth and right and justice.”

“For Christ’s sake, Erika …”

“No, you hear me out,” she said. “I’m going to say what’s on my mind, what’s been on my mind for a long time now. I’m fed up, old bear. I’m fed up with waiting around for you to change, for you to grow up. I’m fed up with this private-detective business of yours, this cloak-and-dagger crap, this pointless losing proposition that you cling to so damned tenaciously. You haven’t had ten clients this year, and yet you go down to that musty-dusty office of yours every morning and you sit there and wait for the telephone to ring like some character in one of those pulp magazines you collect.”

I could feel the anger beginning inside me, and my stomach throbbed painfully now. But it was impotent anger, because there was nothing for me to say to her, no way to make her understand.

She kept on with it. She said, “You want to know the real reason you quit the police force to open up that agency of yours, the real deep-down reason? I’ll tell you: it was and is an obsession to be just like those pulp-magazine detectives and you never would have been satisfied until you’d tried it. Well, now you’ve tried it, for ten years you’ve tried it, and you just don’t want to let go, you can’t let go. You’re living in a world that doesn’t exist and never did, in an era that’s twenty-five-years dead. You’re a kid dreaming about being a hero, and yet you haven’t got the guts or the flair to go out and be one; you’re too honest and too sensitive and too ethical, too affected by real corruption and real human misery to be the kind of lone wolf private eye you’d like to be. You’re no damned hero, and it hurts you that you’re not, and that’s why you won’t let go of it. And the whole while you’re eating and sleeping and living yesteryear’s dream world, to salve your wounded pride you’re deluding yourself that you’re an anachronism in a real-life world that couldn’t care less one way or the other. You’re nothing but a little boy, and I’m damned if I’ll have a little boy in my bed every night of the year. That’s the reason I wouldn’t and I won’t marry you; I can’t compete with an obsession, I won’t compete with it-”

Abruptly she stopped, face flushed with the passion of her words, her gray eyes flashing and silvery with what may have been tears. Then she turned and ran over to the closet and got her coat out. I struggled up onto my feet, but before I could reach her she had the door open and I could hear her shoes clicking on the stairs going down. A moment later the front door slammed and there was only silence.

I stood listening to the echo of her words in my ears, the cutting sting of them. No, I thought, no, she’s wrong, she’s all the way wrong, that’s not the way it is, Jesus, that’s just not the way it is!

I went back to the couch and sat there with the pain hot and sharp now in my stomach, staring over at the door. I said aloud, to break the deepening silence, “She’ll be back. She didn’t mean any of it, not that way.”

The words sounded uncertain, supplicating, in the suddenly cold and shabby room.

* * * *