Michael Collins - Act of Fear

I read the list aloud: Diego Juarez, George Hanner, Max Jones, Ted John, Andy Di Sica, Dan Black, Mario Tucci, Tom Addams. It was a nice list. It touched almost all bases. It could have been the United Nations or an East New York street gang. I smoked and laid the list in my lap and stared out into the blue space of Florida.

An alias is an interesting thing. The experts will tell you that a man can’t think up an alias that won’t give him away if you know enough about him. A man, they say, can’t have something inside his head that did not start somewhere in his life. The alias will point to some part of his life if you just know enough about his life. Sometimes you have to know a lot about him, and sometimes very little. That depends on how smart he is, or how worried. Most small-time crooks will take aliases that are so simple anyone can spot them — usually just another variation of the real name, or one with at least the same initials. Nick-names are the same. If your name happens to be Bonnaro and you work around the docks or have maybe a big nose, you become ‘Bananas’. Or if your name is Tucci, and you’re dark and maybe have a black moustache, you become The Turk. Those are easy, but the experts say that if you know enough you can spot an alias every time. No man can invent an alias that is not connected to his life at some point.

I believed this. I just hoped the experts were right, and that I knew enough about Jo-Jo. I went down that list one name at a time.

Diego Juarez. It rang no bell, and it was too unusual. The small man had given me a list of tall, Nordic boys. If a boy had the name of Diego Juarez and he was tall and Nordic, it had to be his real name, or it was his appearance that had been changed, not his name.

Max Jones and Ted John were out. They did not connect in my mind, and they were too common, they sounded phony. Jo-Jo was a bright boy.

Andy Di Sica and Mario Tucci were both possibilities. There are a lot of Italians in Chelsea, and in the rackets where Jo-Jo had grown up. And Jo-Jo dreamed of the name Ferrari. Jo-Jo thought a lot of Italy. They were possibles.

Tom Addams? I didn’t believe it. I heard no connection.

George Hanner. It was a good chance. It had the ring of a nice ordinary name, but one that no one had ever had. It sounded like some writer had made it up. And Hanner had a vague sound like Honda — the name of a motorcycle! I looked for quite a time at George Hanner. Then I looked at Dan Black. The bell rang. The bell clanged like an alarm. Dan Black. Nice, common, and simple, and it rang the big bell. I remembered about the Vikings. Jenny Rukowski had told me about Jo-Jo and the Vikings. Cecil Rhys-Smith had talked about Jo-Jo and the Vikings. Jo-Jo was obsessed by the Vikings. Jo-Jo knew all about them. He knew about their famous kings. I heard the list of names that Rhys-Smith had rolled off his tongue for me. The great Vikings. And one had been Halfdan the Black! You see? Halfdan the Black? Dan Black?

Was I right? How could I know until I tried? I had to make a start somewhere. I needed some luck. Don’t smile. No. Luck; I don’t care what you call it, how you explain it, how you think it operates psychologically. It is part of life. So many cases I’ve had, so many things in life, turn on luck, fortune, chance, accident, circumstances beyond your control. Unless you believe in some force that watches over us all and determines what will happen to us. An unseen force that can, after all, be called luck as well as anything else. I needed luck that my hunch was right about Dan Black. I needed luck that the others had not reached Dan Black yet. I would need luck to go against the two shadows, amateurs or not; aware that I was around or not. I needed luck that I would find Dan Black, alias, hopefully, Jo-Jo Olsen, at home when I got there.

I had been in a taxi all the time I was thinking about the luck I needed. I got some luck right away — the driver took me only about five blocks to a shabby motel. It was the address of Dan Black. A very cheap motel, and that was promising. An obscure transient motel, where the cabins were really shacks and the john was outside in a big central building with the showers. The driveway and courtyard were dirt. It was set back off the road, and it did not look like many cars stopped there.

I had my next luck — Dan Black was at home. The manager, a fat man uninterested in Dan Black or me or anything but the heat and his beer, said that Black was in Cabin Three. I went to Cabin Three. I was wary. It was the next to the last cabin in the row away from the road. The luck continued. There was no cover in front of the cabin and no one in sight. I circled and found no cover behind the cabin until some thick bushes about thirty feet back. Everything seemed normal. I had made it first.

That was all good luck. I got one more stroke of good luck. I knocked, and Dan Black opened the door, and I knew that I had found Jo-Jo Olsen. I felt like Stanley. I felt I had crossed Africa and Asia combined to reach him. He made no attempt to hide the fact that he was Jo-Jo Olsen.

‘Hello, Jo-Jo,’ I said. ‘Pete Vitanza sent me. I’m Dan Fortune.’

‘Yeh,’ Dan Black, alias Jo-Jo Olsen, said. ‘Inside. Fast!’

I stepped in. I had to step in. My good luck seemed to have run out. The big bad luck was in Jo-Jo Olsen’s hand. A large. 45 calibre automatic. The safety was off. Jo-Jo held it as if he knew how to use it, and it was aimed at my heart.

It had never occurred to me that Jo-Jo Olsen might not want to be rescued.

He had darkened his hair, cut it short instead of long as it was in the picture, put on dark glasses, and half-grown, half-pasted a dark moustache. But he was Jo-Jo.

‘I came down to help,’ I said.

His clothes were cheap and new, but clean. Work clothes. There was a bright look to his eyes, and his voice was deep and pleasant. His hands did not shake on the automatic. There was a second pistol on his bureau. But his eyes were not hard, they were only determined.

‘Who asked you to help, Fortune?’ he asked quietly. ‘Who asked Petey? I told him to forget it.’

I did not answer because I had no answer. Who had asked me to butt in? Who had ever asked Jo-Jo what he wanted?

‘How’d you find me so easy?’ Jo-Jo said.

‘Who said it was easy?’ I said.

He was seated on the single brass bed in that shabby room. I was in a broken-down wicker armchair. There was only the one room with two windows in the front wall and one window in the back wall, a curtained cooking area, and two shallow closets. The walls were paper thin. I could hear every sound in the next cabins and outside. I listened. Roth’s men could not be far behind me. It all depended on which end of the list they had started with.

‘My friend Pete,’ Jo-Jo said. ‘That’s how you found me.’

‘Your sister told me,’ I said. ‘She cares about you.’

‘Who asked her?’

‘They beat up Pete and killed old Schmidt,’ I said.

‘Pete? Schmidt?’ The automatic wavered. ‘Old Schmidt?’

‘They killed him trying to find you.’

The automatic steadied. ‘How do I know that, Fortune?’

‘Schmidt’s dead. Can you think of a reason? Pete’s in the hospital. Look at my face.’

‘A lot of guys’re dead. How do I know who killed Schmidt, or beat you and Pete?’

‘I know who beat me,’ I said, ‘I know Jake Roth when I see him. I’ve got a hunch we’ll both be seeing him pretty soon.’

‘You’re a liar. You’re working for the cops.’

The way he said, ‘You’re working for the cops.’ It was not the sound of the Jo-Jo Olsen I had come to know. Maybe, under pressure, we all revert to what is easy, to what we have rejected in our lives. The way a gentle man will often become the most violent when violence is forced on him. As if the thing rejected has been lurking all the time and waiting for its chance to burst out when our painfully constructed rational defences are down. Jo-Jo was being a hard boy. Tough and cold and bitter. I didn’t blame him much, but I had to reach him.