Alice Read online

  “You’ve been sitting there for ten minutes looking at those plans.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was just wondering—”

  I didn’t answer, and the phone rang. Fritz took it, and then handed it to me. “For you, Johnny.”

  The phone was silent.

  “Hello?” I said. “Hello? Hello?”

  I was going to slam it down when a thick, guttural voice spoke. “Camber?”

  “This is John Camber,” I replied. “Who’s calling?”

  “You don’t know me, Camber. The old man was my father.”

  “What old man? Are you sure you want me? My name is John Camber.”

  “I know, Camber.”

  “Well, what do you want? Who are you?”

  “The name’s Shlakmann. Does that ring a bell?”

  I breathed into the phone without replying, and glanced at Fritz, who was watching me. He dropped his eyes to his work.

  “Shlakmann,” the guttural voice repeated.

  “Yes—”

  “Hans Shlakmann.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to talk to you, Camber.”

  “About what?”

  “Things, Camber. Things.”

  “I have nothing to talk to anyone about. How do I know who you are?”

  “Just take my word for it, Camber. What about the old man? Did he fall? Was he pushed? What about him?”

  “I can’t talk to you here.”

  “And the key, Camber? I hear you got the key.”

  “I can’t talk to you here,” I said hopelessly, and hung up. I looked at Fritz. He was bent over his board and intent on his work. I picked up a pencil, and my hand was trembling. Then the phone rang again. The same voice.

  “Camber?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t brush me off, Camber. Don’t hang up on me.”

  “I don’t know who you are or what you’re talking about.”

  “This is big ball, Camber, not the little league. Don’t be the horse’s ass. Don’t think you can walk into the game and walk out with the marbles. You met Angie.”

  I listened, breathing hoarsely.

  “I tell you something about Angie. Maybe he don’t look dangerous. Maybe he just looks like a skinny guy who can blow away in a wind. No. Believe me. No. Angie never carries no gun—brass knucks and a beer-can opener, but you’d vomit to see what he can do to a man with them brass knucks and a beer opener. Maybe worse than what the subway does to my old man. So be practical, Johnny boy. Be practical. That’s what I am, practical. I don’t shed tears over the old man. So he got it the hard way. If you and me have a dollar for every time he dished it out the hard way, we are rolling in it. All I say is I want to talk to you—and believe me, the sooner the better—for you. You got the key. You are so Goddamn hot—hot! You know about hot? That key is burning you, and all you got to lean on is the key.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” I whispered.

  “Crap! Just let me tell you this, Johnny boy. I can do you good. No one else can. Let’s talk.”

  I hung up the phone. As I sat there, staring at my drawing board, Fritz said, “Trouble, Johnny?”

  I shook my head. Not trouble as trouble was spelled. There was no name for this because it did not happen—not to anyone like Johnny Camber, not to myself.

  “They got me on this damn smokestack,” Fritz said, “and all I can think about is that two-mile high building Frank Lloyd Wright wanted to build, and how when I was a kid I used to dream that I would build it. I worshiped the man. I met him once. You know what he was like, Johnny?”

  “No,” I said dully. “What was he like?”

  “Civilization. Like the essence of civilization. No—it’s hard to put it—like a human being in a world of cave men.”

  Frank Jaffe called me into his office. Jaffe was a hard man who moved through life amiably. Between the partners, the division of labor called for Sturm to be the bastard and Jaffe to wear a heart of gold on his sleeve, and since we were underpaid and overworked, the arrangement was necessary and useful. Jaffe was a fat man, with a pear-shaped head and a number of chins, and he was a complex man who lived an apparently happy life with a wife and three children in Connecticut, performed as a deacon of his church, and kept a small penthouse apartment in New York, where he satisfied a taste for variety in women. This was local office gossip, with a couple of used and rejected typists to back it up; and as far as I was concerned, Jaffe could keep a harem, if he would only raise my pay and cut down on the overtime.

  But he hadn’t called me in to raise my pay. He was brooding over my work, and he glanced up curiously as I entered, smiled his ready smile, and asked me how I felt.

  “I feel all right,” I replied.

  “Sit down, Johnny.” I sat down in the leather chair next to his desk. “You don’t look all right. You look sick. I don’t know what else could explain this.” He waved at the drawing. “You loused it up—all right, you’re entitled to a certain amount of leeway. But this! You were late.” He shook his head. “If it was up to me, Johnny, you could come in at ten or eleven, as long as you got your work done. But it’s not up to me. We establish a rule and a pattern, and we got to stick to it. All right, forget it now. You got trouble at home?”

  “I don’t feel good,” I said. “You say, well, I’m fine, I’m fine, when someone asks you.” I shrugged. “I haven’t any excuse. I feel rotten. Today is one of those days.”

  “Are you sick, Johnny?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “You want the day off?”

  “I think so,” I nodded. “If I can be spared. I’ll take it without pay.”

  “You take it with pay,” he said magnanimously. “Go home and go to bed. Get yourself into shape.”

  I nodded and rose and thanked him and started for the door.

  “Johnny?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Johnny, I keep my hands off my employees’ personal lives. I make it my business not to pry. In this case—well, do you mind if I ask a personal question?”

  “No, sir—go right ahead.”

  “Are you having trouble with your wife?”

  I took a deep breath, swallowed, and replied slowly, “No, sir. I’m not having any trouble with my wife. We have our problems, but it’s not what you would call trouble.”

  “Are you a church-goer, Johnny?”

  It’s not worth losing a job to tell a man to go to hell, not when you have a wife and a kid and you owe more money than you’re going to make during the next twelve months, so I swallowed again and told Jaffe that I went to church intermittently.

  “But we don’t live intermittently, Johnny. We walk around with a knapsack full of concrete. Try laying it down once a week, Johnny. Try it, Johnny. Now go ahead and do yourself some good.”

  He grinned at me, a big, pear-shaped grin, and it did not help for me, as I closed his door behind me, to say to myself, “Lousy damn son-of-a-bitch.”

  But at least he gave me the day off, and God, how I needed it!

  3: The Diplomat

  Eleven-thirty; I walked out of the office, and the elevator that stopped for my ring had Chris Muldoon driving it. Muldoon is an undersized, ugly little man who carries a burden just by living with himself and is terribly grateful for any kindness. I was always nice to him. Now he grinned at me and said, “I’d leave early too if I had her waiting downstairs for me, Mr. Camber.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “The lady.”

  We started down and stopped to pick up others.

  “What lady?”

  “She asked me about you.”

  “What’s her name?” My heart was tight with the irrational notion that some disaster had brought Alice into town.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Camber. I told her where you worked, and she said she would wait downstairs in the lobby.”

  Then we were at the main floor, and Muldoon nodded at her as she turned
to face us.

  At first, there was only a haunting sense of familiarity, the feeling that I had seen her somewhere before, and within myself the kind of inner silence with which some men respond to serene and virginal beauty. Then I recalled her, I had seen her on the subway that morning, I had given her my seat; and with all else that troubled me, I responded with excitement and delight, less aware of the improbable fact of her being here and asking for me, than the fact that she had asked for me.

  She walked over to me, held out her hand, and said, “You are Mr. Camber, aren’t you?” Her voice was low, rich and pleasant—not an American voice; there was some faint trace of an accent, but not enough to label.

  “How do you know my name?” I asked foolishly.

  “We’ll come to that. My own name is Lenny Montez. I would like to talk a little—to you. Shall we have a walk?”

  “A walk? Where?” just as foolishly.

  “Anywhere. Around the block, if you please. It is very pleasant outside. Or do you have other business that is too important, Mr. Camber?”

  “No. No, I have nothing very important.”

  “Good.”

  She took my arm and steered me toward the building entrance. I stopped and faced her, and said, “I don’t understand. We haven’t met, Miss Montez.”

  “But we did meet. On the subway. You gave me your seat, so you are a gentleman, which is always so pleasant.”

  She was no one to ride on a subway as a matter of habit. She wore a diamond pin that would buy a substantial section of any subway, and the gray suit she wore, as if it had been draped and sewed on her that very morning, was not the kind of attire that subway riders go in for.

  She troubled me and puzzled me, but right then if she had asked me to walk up the side of the Empire State Building with her, I think I would have tried. And I would have sworn on all the Bibles in Kansas that she was incapable of thinking evil or doing evil. Close to me now, I could see that she was certainly older than the nineteen or twenty years I had bestowed on her when I first saw her, but even if she were twenty-seven or twenty-eight, her purity was not lessened.

  We walked out into the sunshine, and under the blaze of light, her skin was cream, soft and pure. It was not makeup, it was herself. As she took my arm, warmly, closely, as if we were the oldest of friends, I said to her, “This is all impossible, you know. How do you know my name? Who are you? This kind of thing doesn’t happen. You can live five lifetimes in New York, and it doesn’t happen. Robert Louis Stevenson might have written about this kind of thing, and the Victorians swallowed the impossible. I’m not a Victorian—”

  “But you are, Mr. Camber. You are very good-looking and very romantic—”

  “Like hell I am. Not today.”

  We walked down the street, and then turned toward Lexington Avenue. I let her guide me and I waited, and I don’t think I was too surprised when she said, “Of course you have enough wits to know that I waited at the bus terminal and then followed you into the subway. So it wasn’t a coincidence.”

  “I only hoped it was a coincidence,” I agreed glumly. “It’s the key, isn’t it? It’s that God-damn cursed key, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “It’s the key.”

  We walked over to Lexington Avenue, and then to Third Avenue, and then to Second Avenue, and not since I was a kid have I felt that way about a girl or walking next to a girl or feeling the warm, steady pressure of her arm through mine.

  “If it were not for the key,” I told myself, “she would look through me the way a girl like this one looks through any man, and I would have no importance or meaning to her whatsoever. I happen to be John Camber, whose take-home pay would just about keep her in handkerchiefs and lipsticks, and I’m having a great adventure and getting a schoolboy crush on a woman who has no other interest in mind than to get the key the easy way.”

  She glanced at me then, because I had been silent for a minute or two, and asked me, “What is it, Johnny?”

  After all, we had known each other for three or four city blocks. Why shouldn’t she call me Johnny? Why shouldn’t I call her Lenny.

  “You are very quiet.”

  “Yes—”

  “You like me very much, is that it, Johnny?”

  The plain words reveal nothing of the utter artlessness in the question.

  “You like me, and you think you are being gullible and childish. You are ashamed of yourself. You think about two worlds—your world and my world—”

  “I don’t know a damn thing about your world,” I muttered.

  “But still you think of two worlds, and you are unable to make up your mind whether I am good or bad. So I am right when I say that you are a Victorian. You want to make this a Victorian adventure, and you wonder if you should permit yourself to fall in love with me.”

  “I can’t afford to fall in love, not with you, not with anyone.”

  “The cheapest thing in the world—you can’t afford?”

  “Anyway, it’s the key. Let’s keep first things first. You want that damn key, and I’m the patsy. All right. I’m used to playing the part.”

  “And that’s all, Johnny? How much do you know about women? Or about yourself? I think you are not bad-looking. You are young and fresh—”

  “Fresh?”

  “My English is not always as good as I would like it to be. Fresh. I mean clean, young, open-faced, not sophisticated. That is what is American, and it is very refreshing. I am a European, Johnny, and such a quality is not something you find in European men. You are at least thirty-two or thirty-three—”

  “Thirty-five—”

  “Well, thirty-five, but the youth is not dirtied, and this is something very attractive in a man, to myself, at least.”

  “But the key is more attractive,” I said.

  “Why must you always keep talking about the key, Johnny?”

  “Because that’s what interests you.”

  “No, you interest me.”

  We had turned up Second Avenue, almost drifting through the pleasant March sunshine, walking slowly, her purpose whatever it was, and mine only to stretch this out, so that whatever else the key might bring me, it would also bring me fifteen minutes or a half hour alone with her.

  “What is that damn key? Why is it so precious? It’s the key to a safe-deposit box, isn’t it?”

  “Always the key, Johnny.”

  “I lived a normal life until a man put that damn key into my pocket. I had my problems, I had my troubles, but I was all right—”

  “Were you, Johnny?”

  “Yes, I was. I was all right. But since last night, that key has brought me nothing but fear and trouble—”

  “And myself, Johnny.”

  “Yes—and yourself, because like everyone else I talk to, you seem to want that key enough to do anything for it.”

  “No!” She stopped and faced me. “That is unfair, Johnny. That is not worthy of you. I don’t want the key. Not for myself, no. I agree. I said, yes, I will talk to Mr. Camber—”

  “There’s the whole damn thing!” I cried. “How did you know my name?”

  “It was a man, not a name. I will wait for him at the bus terminal, I will find out who he is and talk to him. So I follow you, and the little elevator man, he tells me that you are John Camber. I will do what I can to persuade him, for the key is important—not for myself but for others. Do you believe me?”

  I wanted to believe her. If she had said that she was the Queen of Samarkand, I would have tried to believe her, and even if I did not believe her, I could not face the fact that she was lying. To look into her eyes and think of her as a liar was impossible.

  “I wanted a key,” she went on, “and I found a man.”

  I shook my head. “I want to know about the key.”

  “So it will be always the key until it is finally settled. Will you trust me, Johnny?”

  I thought about it for a moment before I nodded.

  “Then come with me now.
You will have some lunch. You will talk about the key with someone who knows about the key. Then you can say, the business of the key is finished. Over. Done with. Other things are more important, believe me, Johnny.”

  “What other things?”

  “Myself. You.”

  “Where do you want me to go?”

  “You will trust me? We will take a cab and we will be there in just a few minutes. Will you come? Please, Johnny—”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll come.”

  In the taxi, she said to me, “Johnny—I want you to know this. I am married—” I stared at her. “You are also married, Johnny. People marry. They marry for all kinds of reasons. You are strange to me, you are something that America produces. I am something that my country produces. I am what I am. What you are, I like. I like it, Johnny. Do you like what I am?”

  I could have said that I didn’t know what she was, or very much about what I was, for that matter; but I didn’t. I only nodded.

  “You will meet my husband.”

  “When?”

  “In a few minutes. He is a diplomat, Johnny. He is a very brilliant man. He is Consul General for my country here in New York City, but he should be more than that, much more. I don’t say that because I love him. I don’t love him. He was good to me. He helped me when I needed help. So don’t ask yourself how I came to marry such a man—you wouldn’t understand. Promise me.”

  “What country is your country?” I asked dully.

  “You will see. We are going to the Consulate. Will you promise me what I asked you to?”

  “All right,” I nodded. I would have promised her anything she asked. I was in this thing now, neck deep in it, with caution and sanity and reason flung to the winds, my behavior not much more sensible than the behavior of a stricken sixteen-year-old might be, but with the difference that I was not in love with her. Or at least I tell myself that. This is not entirely hindsight or apology. I was frightened, troubled, and discontented, and at this moment, she was like necessary medicine. I was enchanted and calmed, and she made me feel that everything would be all right. She was married, but I was instructed not to ask why she had married her husband. I was a country boy who would proceed to be sophisticated. In any case, the question of the key would be settled.