Michael Collins - Shadow of a Tiger

“Why’d they let the Chinaman go, Fortune?” Charlie said.

“They found the stolen stuff, Jimmy Sung never had it. He’s clear. Why, Charlie? Where do you fit?”

“I ask the questions, Fortune.”

Too much TV, too many movies. The manner, the dialogue, of every tough guy who snarled his way through the cameras between commercials. With TV, anyone can know in an hour the way an FBI man, a Mafia soldier, or a Corsican bandit talks, looks, and acts. What no one can know from TV is why the Corsican acts as he does, how he got that way, what he feels inside. To know that is life, not television, and these kids did not know life beyond the slum streets and the hovels of their parents. An imitation, a surface ritual, that depended on the proper responses to maintain it. I wasn’t about to play.

“Crap,” I said. “You didn’t rob the shop, Charlie. You wouldn’t have dumped the loot. But you were at the shop that night. Why? Money? Some scheme? Did you give Eugene Marais too much? He could have hurt you? So you killed him?”

Charlie Burgos was up. “No way! I swear-!”

Automatic. This was real, an accusation. He had been accused all his life, and he reacted-protesting. Weak, a zero in the real world, and the weak can only protest, plead their innocence before power. Forgetting for the moment that in the dim room he was supposed to be the power, that he had me. The ritual lost for an instant. Then remembered, the script back.

“Back off, Fortune. You got nothing. We got you.”

What else did the street kids know? What did they have to do with their time? A dreary past, a hungry present, and no future at all. Today would always be the same, unless it got worse, until they died. For one reason or another, for each of them this room was home. Parents who could give them nothing. Afraid of organizations, because, for them, all organizations turned into a man with a whip. Their only view of the bigger world from their depths was, like Gorky’s bakers in their cellar, a single small window-the television set. They dealt with the bigger reality through the surface imitation of television, faced the tiger through its shadow.

I said, “Where do you fit, Charlie?”

“My business,” he said, sat down. “The cops got any leads?”

“Ask them.”

Another boy said, “We got you, we ask you, mister.”

“Shut up,” Charlie Burgos said, the boss. “The cops’re nowhere. Maybe you got some ideas who killed the old man, Fortune?”

“You’re worried, Charlie?”

“I got no worries. No problems at all.”

“Danielle?” I said. “Maybe you know something about her? Her own father, you know?”

Charlie Burgos laughed. “Man, you’re sure crazy.”

“He didn’t like you much, Charlie. Not for her.”

“Hell, the old man was Jell-O, you know? No problem.”

“How about Paul Manet?”

Charlie Burgos’s face was bland. “What about him?”

“Manet and Danielle, maybe? Eugene Marais didn’t like that? A fight, maybe? An accident? Maybe that’s your interest in the thing, Danielle was dumping you for Paul Manet? You-”

“Danielle don’t dump me for anyone. You’re way off,” the youth said, leaned toward me in the dim room. “Look, the old man was knocked over in a two-bit grab-and-run. Happens all the time in hock shops, right? Danielle and me we got plans, okay? She got to get something now the old man’s dead. Only everyone’s nosing around, and Danielle don’t like that. You got her old lady paying you through the nose. That’s money out of our pockets. For nothing. Whyn’t you let the fuzz handle it, okay?”

“You beat me up, grab me, just because Mrs. Marais is paying me and that’s lost money to you?”

“You’re gettin’ in the way.” His voice was angry now. “Why the hell don’t you leave town, take a vacation.”

Was he needling me about Marty?

“I’ve got a job, I need money to eat, too.”

“Okay, how much? How much to drop it, fade out?”

“I thought you figured I was taking money out of your pocket already.”

One of the others said, “He’s a hardhead, Charlie. Let’s get rid of him.”

“Yeh,” one said.

“Permanent,” a third added from the shadows.

It scared me. They were imitation tough guys, playing at an illusion, but they believed their own script, and if they followed it through all the way I’d be as dead as if they were a real gang of musclemen. They’d be caught, they weren’t really strong, but that wouldn’t help me. That they might kill me, I didn’t doubt a second. They believed themselves. They had to. Alone in a big country that ignored their existence, alienated and forgotten, they had no chance and less hope. These boys had been given no hope, so they invented it-the hope of schemes, and plans, and big dreams of power and triumph.

I said, “Charlie, tell me what you know. I’ll help you. Whatever you’re doing, you’ll get hurt unless-”

He broke in, cold. “I won’t get hurt, mister. I’m on my way. Maybe you’ll get hurt. Maybe the boys are-”

Only when I heard the car door slam below the dim room did I realize that the rain had stopped. The street boys heard the car door too. One of them went out of the room. He came back almost at once.

“Some guy parked in the alley. He’s got a gun out!”

Charlie Burgos lifted the corner of the blanket covering a window, peered down. “It’s that Kraut hanging around Danielle’s uncle. What the hell does he want?”

They all crowded around Charlie Burgos at the window, whispering urgently. Like a pack of curious puppies. They were, after all, kids, most of them younger than Charlie Burgos. That had saved me in the alley when they attacked me, and it gave me my chance now. I walked to the door of the room, quick but softly, watching them. They didn’t see me. I made the door and out.

I was almost down to the second floor when I heard them howl up in the room. Then I ran.

I came out of the building-an abandoned, crumbling, condemned brownstone, I saw now. I did not know where I was. The only unboarded door opened at the side of the brownstone into a narrow alley slick and cool with the rain. A narrow front yard was tall with brown weeds, wet in the night after the rain.

They would expect me to run to the street-the safety of a city man. So I ran left up the narrow alley and past a parked black car. At the rear corner of the condemned building I saw a shape, a face white in the night, a hand with a pistol.

“You, Fortune!”

I ran on into an open space behind the abandoned brownstone where two buildings had already been demolished leaving an emptiness in the city like a scar. I scrambled over the wet mounds of debris in the open space. The voice behind the pistol in the alley had been the ex-Legionnaire “associate” of Claude Marais-Gerd Exner.

I reached the far street. It was dark and deserted, the people not yet out again after the summer storm. I trotted left toward the wider avenue, no sound of running behind me. I didn’t think they would come after me in the open when I was ready for them, but I watched the corner ahead in case they tried to head me off. There was no one at the corner. They probably didn’t even know which way I had run. I looked back down the dark street toward the open space and the alley to be sure, and saw the black car turn out of the alley toward me.

I jumped into the cover of a doorway as the black car came to the corner, but the ex-Legionnaire, Gerd Exner, saw me. The car skidded to a stop, began to back up. Exner had a gun, I didn’t, and I couldn’t know what he wanted with me, or which side he was on. I ran up the wide avenue. The black car ground gears to come after me, the traffic on the avenue light in the dark after the storm.