Дональд Уэстлейк - The Fugitive Pigeon

It was a slow night, like any Tuesday. The late late show was High Sierra and there’s always a couple of Bogart fans around, in fact I’m a Bogart fan myself, so I figured to stay open till the movie was over and then lock up and go upstairs and get some sleep. After one-thirty I only had two customers, both regulars, both sitting at the bar, both watching the TV, both beer drinkers. I stood down to the far end of the bar, with my arms folded and my white apron on, and I watched the TV myself. Commercials, one or both customers had refills. I don’t drink on duty, so it was none for me.

My name is Charles Robert Poole, everybody calls me Charlie. Charlie Poole. Just so you know.

High Sierra ended with the cop shooting Bogart in the back and Ida Lupino glad society couldn’t treat Bogart bad any more, and I said, “Okay, gents, time to drink up. I need my beauty sleep.” It’s a neighborhood bar, regular customers, I like to keep an informal atmosphere.

These two were both good about it, not like some which come in mostly on weekends and want the night to go on forever. But not these two, they drank up and said, “Night, Charlie,” and out they went, waving to me.

I waved back and told them good night and rinsed their glasses and set them on the drainboard, and the door opened again and two guys came in with suits and topcoats, the topcoats all unbuttoned so you could see they were wearing white shirts and ties. Not what you mostly get in a bar in Canarsie two-thirty on a Tuesday night.

I said, “Sorry, gents, just closing up.”

“Yeah, that’s okay, nephew,” said one of them, and they came over and sat down on stools at the bar.

I looked at them then, and they were both grinning at me. Tough-guy types. I recognized them both, associates of my Uncle Al, they’d both been in before to drop off a package or a message or to pick one up. I said, “Oh. I didn’t recognize you at first.”

The one that talked said, “You know us, though, don’t you, nephew? I mean you know us to see, am I right?”

Calling me nephew like that was a kind of a playful insult. I got it from Uncle Al’s associates all the time. What it meant was, I wasn’t really a part of the organization, I only had this job here because of Uncle Al, if it wasn’t for my Uncle Al I’d probably starve to death. I knew that’s what this one meant when he called me nephew , but I didn’t get sore or anything. In the first place, these two and all the others in the organization were very tough mean nasty types. In the second place, facts are facts, it was the truth; I was born a bum and I’ve been a bum twenty-four years, and if it wasn’t for my Uncle Al and this job running this bar I would starve to death in a minute. So what was the point of starting an argument, just because a guy calls me nephew?

So all I said was, “Sure, I know you. I recognize you now. You been in here before.”

The other one said, “He recognizes us.”

The first one said, “Well, sure. We been in here before.”

Life imitates art. And yet I’d bet neither one of them had ever read Hemingway.

I said, “Is there anything I can do for you?” I was hoping it was just a drop, just a package they wanted to leave and then they’d go away. I was tired; if it hadn’t been for High Sierra I’d have closed the place at one o’clock.

The first one said, “Yeah, nephew, there is. You can tell me if this looks okay.” He reached into his topcoat pocket and came out with a small white card, like a calling card, and put it down on the bar between us, kind of slapped it down under his palm and then took his hand away. “How’s it look?” he said.

It had my name on it, and a thing like an ink blot. It looked like:

I said, “What’s that supposed to be?”

They looked at each other. The second one said, “Is he kidding?”

The first one said, “I don’t know.” He looked at me with a lot of mistrust. “You don’t know what that is?”

I just shrugged, and shook my head. I kept looking back and forth, from the card to their faces to the card to their faces. I was kind of almost-grinning, because I figured it was some kind of a gag or something. Every once in a while one of Uncle Al’s associates thinks it’s funny to pull a gag on me, on the useless bum of a nephew. It’s what I have to put up with for the soft berth.

The first one shook his head after a minute and said, “He don’t know, he honest to Christ don’t know.”

“What a nephew,” said the second one. “Nephew, you are the biggest nephew that ever lived. You’re all the nephews in the world rolled into one, you know that?”

“What’s the joke?” I said. “I give up, what’s the joke?”

“Joke,” said the second one. He said it flat, like it was too incredible to believe.

The first one tapped the card. He had thick fingers and dirty fingernails. He said, “That’s the spot, nephew, get me? That’s the spot, the black spot, and you’re on it.”

The second one said, “He still don’t get it. Would you believe it, he still don’t get it.”

“He will,” said the first one. His right hand reached in fast inside his coat and came out with a gun, a huge black thick right-angled glittering gun with a hole full of poison in the end of it and the hole pointed straight at me.

I said, “Hey!” I threw my hands up in front of my chest, or something like that. And I still had in the back of my mind that this was a gag, they were trying to scare the nephew. “Hey!” I said, therefore. “You want to hurt somebody?”

“Open the cash register,” said the first one, still pointing the gun at me. “The bit is, this has to look like robbery, you know? Do you know what I mean, nephew?”

“He don’t,” said the second one. “He don’t know a thing.”

“That’s right,” I said, giving them a chance to tell me what it was all about. “I don’t know a thing.”

“The spot means you’re done,” said the first one. “You’re all through. Go on over there and open that cash register.”

“Hurry, hurry,” said the second one. “Nephews should do like they’re told.”

I still didn’t get it. But on the other hand maybe the best thing was play along with them, and sooner or later they’d get tired of kidding around and they’d tell me what this was all about. So I went over and hit the No Sale key and the register drawer popped open and I said, “There. It’s open.”

“Pull the bills out,” the first one said. He was still holding that gun. “Put them on the bar there.”

There weren’t very many bills. The Rockaway Grill barely makes enough a week to pay my salary, never mind upkeep and stock and six per cent profit and all that. But it’s all right, nobody wants the Rockaway Grill to make any money, don’t ask me why. I asked my Uncle Al three, four times, and the first couple times he tried to explain it, something about taxes, on the books the Rockaway Grill makes a profit that is actually money the organization made somewhere else, something like that, but everytime my Uncle Al explains something to me it winds up he’s hitting himself on the forehead with the heel of his right hand so I don’t ask him any more.