Michael Collins - Silent Scream

“How did you happen to call me, Mrs. Morgan?” I asked.

“A pin in the phone book. You’re lucky.”

“The man in this snap,” I said. “Who is he?”

“I don’t know. I-”

I heard the outer door open. A tall, slender man stood in the doorway with a key in his hand. He had blue eyes set very deep under heavy brows in a gaunt, Lincoln-ugly face, wore an airline uniform, and looked at Mrs. Morgan and at me.

“You weren’t in the shop,” the airline man said to Mia Morgan. “Midmorning. Who is he?”

“Business, Levi,” the girl said. I heard a faint nervousness now in her voice. “I didn’t expect you yet.”

“We got in early. Business? In your apartment?”

There was more than anger in the airline man, a violent fury. If he expected to intimidate Mrs. Morgan, he failed. I could almost see the girl’s back go up.

“Private business,” she snapped. “Get a drink, Levi. Mr. Fortune is just leaving.”

She walked me to the door. The gaunt airline man didn’t try to stop me. She held the door as I went out.

“Call me,” she said, and closed the door.

I went down to the street and walked into the store again. The woman clerk came forward.

“Does Mrs. Morgan manage this store for someone?” I asked.

“No, sir, she owns it. Can I help-?”

“She’s pretty young,” I said.

“Yes.” Her voice was bitter. She wasn’t young, and she didn’t own a store.

I looked at all the far-flung crafts. “Who supplies her?”

“She buys directly, travels a lot. I really can’t-”

“The tall airline man,” I said. “Who is he?”

“Captain Stern? A pilot for El Al, I believe.” She reddened, annoyed. “I really can’t talk about Mrs. Morgan. You’ll-”

“Sure,” I said. “Sorry.”

On the avenue in the cold sun I lit a cigarette. One of the bad effects of being a hard boss was that your employees thought about you too much. The clerk who couldn’t talk about Mia Morgan had talked enough. My new client owned an expensive shop, traveled to remote places, and had an airline pilot for a boy friend-at least, for one boy friend.

A hand touched my shoulder. “Mr. Fortune?”

It was the old man in the white turtle-neck and dark blue suit who had been in Mrs. Morgan’s office. He wore a light, raglan topcoat now, a thin coat for the winter cold, and smiled under his white hair.

“I’ll buy you a drink,” he said.

It was much too early for the restaurant-Le Cerf Agile-to be open, and the old man interested me. He wasn’t the man in the snapshot, too short and thick, but he knew Mia Morgan.

“I never say no,” I said.

There was a neighborhood cocktail lounge at the corner. The old man had a solid, rolling walk with no trace of age. He opened the heavy door lightly, motioned me inside.

In the dim lounge booth the old man could have been anywhere from sixty to seventy. It was impossible to tell. Up close, there were deep creases in his pale leather-colored face, but the healthy skin had not sagged at all. His motion for the waitress was as firm as his walk.

“J and B, a little water,” he said, looked at me.

“Irish with some coffee.”

It was early in the day, and cold. We were alone in the lounge, the people and sounds of the avenue almost distant. The waitress returned soon. The old man sipped his Scotch. His hair was pure white. His eyes were dark and quick. He leaned back in the booth, watched me.

“John Albano, Mr. Fortune,” he introduced himself, smiled again. “I’m seventy-one. Everyone has some little vanity. First, luck-my family lives old. You don’t let go, you stay young. It gets harder every year. One day I fall apart.”

He’d guessed my thoughts, but he wasn’t psychic. It was like my arm. Everyone I met wondered about my arm, how I’d lost it. Everyone he met wondered about his age. I wondered about his voice. I heard a small accent now: Italian. More a vague intonation, and I’m not sure I’d have identified it if he hadn’t told me his name. He continued to watch me.

“Why does Mia need a detective?” he said.

I drank my Irish, some coffee. “Confidential, Mr. Albano.”

“Business trouble?”

“You better ask her,” I said, drank.

“Some trouble, to hire a detective.”

I finished my whisky. “Where’s Mr. Morgan? Around?”

“Not for a while. A kid marriage, she was sixteen. Married to spite her father. Morgan’s been gone two, three years. A kid.”

“You’re not a kid,” I said.

“Man trouble?” Albano said. “That it?”

I shook my head. “What’s your interest in her?”

“A friend, okay?”

“How good a friend?”

He thought about that in the dim booth. Another customer came into the lounge. The old man’s eyes jumped alert, followed the newcomer all the way to a seat at the bar before they turned back to me again.

“Okay, you’ve got ethics, you do a job. I’m Mia’s friend, maybe I can be your friend. Walk away from this job. Right now. No threat, just advice.”

John Albano got up, dropped three dollars on the booth table, and walked out of the lounge. I finished my coffee.

I had some hot soup at a diner before heading for my office. It’s one room on Twenty-eighth Street off Eighth Avenue-too hot in summer, too cold in winter. Par for the Chelsea area. It’s a walk-up-elevator buildings are status symbols in Chelsea, and mostly for outsiders-and has one window with an air-shaft view.

I walked up, unlocked my door, and went in to sit down and think about Mia Morgan’s job and John Albano’s “advice” before Le Cerf Agile opened. I didn’t sit down, and I didn’t have a view of my air shaft.

A man stood behind my desk blocking the window.

“Your office is not much,” he said.

The El Al pilot, Captain Levi Stern, still in his uniform and taller than my first impression. Over six-feet-four, skinny at maybe one hundred sixty pounds, his narrow shoulders hunched forward over a thin, hollow chest.

“How’d you get in here?” I asked.

“I am expert with locks. With many things.”

He had an accent, too. Stronger than John Albano’s accent, and harder to place. Maybe Israeli, or maybe German, overlaid with British English diction. I judged his gaunt-ugly face to be about forty, thin-mouthed, the intense blue eyes sunk in their deep sockets. He looked out my window at the grimy brick wall of the air shaft as if he hated brick walls.

“You do a job for Mia?” he said.

“Mrs. Morgan sent you?”

I went around my desk toward him.

“No,” he said, nodded at my empty sleeve. “The arm, you lost it in the war?”

“A kind of war,” I said.

The perpetual war of poor slum kids against the powers that ruled their lives. I lost the arm robbing a Dutchman ship when I was a kid here in Chelsea. I lost that battle, but I never went to jail, so I guess I won the war. At least, I survived to grow up more or less respectable, and come back to Chelsea a lawman of sorts. A detective-for-hire who didn’t ask too many questions, but did try to ask some.

“If Mrs. Morgan didn’t send you-”

His right hand moved in a blur, caught my lone wrist. His left had my elbow, forcing it backwards. A judo grip. I knew one more thing he was expert at. One sharp push and he could snap my arm like a straw.

To prove it, he pressed lightly. His grip was like a clamp, his skinny body all corded muscle. My teeth scraped.

“You have only the one arm,” he said.

A trained man, trained in violence, trained to find the weak point and strike at it. Naked fear is a sickening thing. I was sick down in the hollow of my stomach. What could a one-arm man fear more than the loss of his only arm? Sick fear.