Лоуренс Блок - One Night Stands and Lost Weekends

Inside, she closed and bolted the door and turned to him, her eyes expectant and her mouth waiting to be kissed. He closed his eyes briefly. Maybe he could open them and discover that she wasn’t there at all, that he was back at the bar by himself or maybe out cold in his own cabin.

But she was still there when he opened his eyes. She was still standing close to him, her mouth puckered and her eyes vaguely puzzled.

“I’ll make you happy.” She said those four words as if they were the answer to every question in the universe, and by this time he thought that perhaps they were.

There was no other answer.

He clenched his teeth again, just as he had done when she squirmed before him on the barstool. Then he drove one fist into her stomach and watched her double up in pain, the physical pain of the blow more than matched by the hurt and confusion in her eyes.

He struck her again, a harsh slap on the side of her face that sent her reeling. She started to fall and he brought his knee up, catching her on the jaw and breaking several of her teeth. He hauled her to her feet and the sweater ripped away like tissue paper.

She was right. It was all her underneath.

The next slap started her crying. The one after that knocked the wind out of her and stopped her tears for the time being. His fingers ripped at the skirt and one of his nails dug at her skin, drawing blood. She crumpled to the floor, her whole body shaking with terror and pain, and he fell upon her greedily.

The bitch, he thought. The stupid little bitch.

Couldn’t she guess there was only one way to make him happy?

I’m not very bright. I’ve never been very smart, and even if I am four years older than Charlie, he’s smarter than I am. It’s been that way ever since I can remember. When we went to school, I was just one grade ahead of him. He skipped once and I flunked twice, because he’s almost as much of a smart guy as I’m a dope. It used to bother the hell out of me, but I got used to it.

Then we both quit after a couple years of high school, and me and Charlie were a team. It was just the two of us. Charlie and Ben, the brains and the brawn. That’s the way Charlie used to talk about it. I was lots bigger than him and stronger, but he had a brain like a genius. Let me tell you, we were a team.

Did he have a brain! That’s what I used to call him — The Brain. And he used to call me The Muscle, ’cause I was so strong. Except when I did something stupid he would call me The Dope. He would be kidding when he said it, and he never did it when anyone was around, so I didn’t mind too much.

We had it good — just me and Charlie, just the two of us. We didn’t stick around at home ’cause the folks were giving us a hard time ever since we left school. They wanted Charlie to graduate from Erasmus and go to college and be a doctor, but Charlie said the only college he’d ever get to was Sing Sing and he was in no hurry to get there. So we got the hell out of Brooklyn and took a room a ways off Times Square.

Let me tell you, that was the life. We bought some nice clothes, real fancy with sharp colors, and we ate all our meals in restaurants. There were loads of movie houses right around where we lived, and I’d see one or two shows a day. Charlie liked to stay in the room and read. He was a real brain, you see.

And once a week or so we’d pull a job. Charlie did all of the planning. He was a clever guy, let me tell you. One day he would go and case a store, and then he wouldn’t do anything but plan for the next three or four days. He would sit in the room all by himself and think. He figured every angle.

We went mostly to candy stores. Charlie would get the lowdown on how many people worked and what time the store would close, and he figured everything to the minute. Sometimes I wondered why he brought me along. The way he figured things out he could have done it all by himself.

But once in a while he would need me, and that’s when I felt real good. Like for instance the time we hit a candy store in Yorkville — that’s a German neighborhood uptown on the East Side. There was just this one old guy in the store, like Charlie figured. He was ready to close when we walked in. Charlie bought some candy and talked to the guy and the guy talked back in a thick accent as if he just got off the boat. Then Charlie had enough, and he pulled out his gun and told the guy to empty the cash register. The gun was another of Charlie’s ideas. It looked just like a real gun, but all it would shoot was blanks. It’s the kind you see advertised in magazines for when burglars come into your house. That way Charlie figured they couldn’t pick us up for armed robbery, but we could scare a guy silly by shooting the gun into the air. Now let me ask you how many guys could have figured that out? He was a brain.

But to get back to the story, the old guy gave us a hard time. He started rattling off a mile a minute in German and he got real loud. So Charlie just turned to me and said, “Take him, Muscle.”

That’s all he had to say, and he said it just like that. That was what I was waiting for. I stepped right in and belted the guy one in the mush, but not too hard. He went out like a light, let me tell you. We emptied the cash box and got the hell out quick.

Those were the days. I was happy, you know. I didn’t talk much, but I tried to tell Charlie how happy I was. Most of the time he just nodded, but one time he got mad.

“Happy?” he said. “What the hell are you happy about? We’re a couple of small-time mugs living in a dump. What’s to be happy about?”

I tried to tell him how nice it was, going to shows and just the two of us living together, but I don’t talk too good.

“You dope,” he said. “You’d be happy being a punk forever. That’s not for me, Dope.”

I couldn’t see what he was getting at so I went out to a show. It was this picture where Jimmy Cagney wants to be the top man in the rackets so his mother will be proud of him and he winds up getting blown up in a factory. It was a damn good picture, except for the ending.

When I got back to the room Charlie was sitting on the bed writing something down. I got excited, ’cause I knew he was making notes for the next job. He always wrote everything out in detail, and burned his notes in the wastebasket. He didn’t miss a trick.

I sat down next to him and gave him a smile. “What’s new, Brain?” He didn’t answer until he finished what he was writing, and then he smiled back at me. “A big one,” he said. “No more candy store junk.”

I didn’t answer and he went on to explain it. I didn’t get it all because I’m not too bright when it comes to that kind of thing, but there was some sort of office he knew about where they had the payroll set up at night and if we went in and robbed it we could get away with the whole payroll. He asked me didn’t it beat knocking over candy stores and I told him it sure did. A guy like me never would have figured out something like that, but Charlie was sharp as a tack.

We pulled the job the next night. It was just a few blocks away from where we lived, and the place was all locked up. Charlie said there was a watchman on duty in the back, where the money was. Then he took a little hunk of metal and got the door open. I don’t know where he learned how to do that, I really don’t.

I started to walk right in but Charlie made me slow down. He whispered that the old guy could give an alarm unless we got him by surprise. We walked in on tiptoe, and we were practically on top of him before he looked up, and Charlie had the fake gun pointed right at him. I thought he’d have a heart attack then and there.

“Open the safe,” Charlie said.

The old guy just stared for a minute, and then he stuck out his chin. “You boys better go home,” he said. “I’ll give you ten seconds before I call the cops.”