Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

“How’s the food on that tub?” he said.

“Lousy,” I said. “How’s it on yours?”

“Lousy.”

He leaned over and spat into the water again. I did the same thing from my rail.

“Where you from?” he said.

“Shanghai. Where you from?”

“New York.”

We played spit in the ocean again.

“You American?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess. You Japanese?”

He nodded slowly and spat one more time. “That’s what they tell me,” he said.

The crap game started up two days after we left Lourenço Marques bound for Rio, and by the time we had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, the informal gaming firm of Smalldane and Dye was $39,792 ahead. I helped Smalldane count it. When we were finished he looked at me. “Let’s quit winners, Lucifer.”

“Whatever you say.”

“We’ve got enough.”

“What will we do with it?”

“You’re going to get an education with yours.”

“I am already educated.”

“You don’t even know how to read and write.”

“I am wise in the ways of the world.”

“Where’d you learn that one?”

I shrugged. “I heard it someplace.”

Smalldane shook his head. “Okay, let’s agree that you’re smart. You can shill a crap game, pimp for a whorehouse, speak six or seven languages, roll drunks, and hustle the rubes. But you can’t read or write and you’re goddamned well going to school to learn how.”

“Will you go too, Gorman?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m too old.”

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know yet, kid. But I think I’ve got an idea.”

In Rio the FBI agents came aboard and started asking Smalldane how he’d acquired a son since he had never married.

“What do you care?” he said. “The kid’s American.”

“We’ve checked your record, Mr. Smalldane. You’ve never even been engaged.”

“So he’s a bastard.”

There were two of them. One was rather young, somewhere in his twenties. The other was older, thirty-five or so. Both were suspicious.

“If he’s not an American citizen, Mr. Smalldane, he can’t be permitted to enter the—”

“Tell them, Lucifer.”

“My name is William Smalldane. I was born in San Francisco on—”

“For Christ’s sake, the real one,” Smalldane said.

“Oh,” I said. “I am eight years old and my name is Lucifer Clarence Dye and I was born December 5, 1933, in Moncrief, Montana, United States of America, and my father’s name was Dr. Clarence Dye and I live at... at—” I stopped.

“He lives with me,” Smalldane said. “He’s my ward.”

“Where are his parents?” the younger man asked.

“Dead.”

“This is most irregular,” the older man said, and it was the first time I’d heard that phrase. I regret that it wasn’t the last.

“Cable Moncrief, Montana, and find out whether there was a Lucifer Clarence Dye born there on December 5, 1933, like the kid says.”

“Well, if you’ll accept responsibility for him—”

“I’ll accept it. Where do I sign?”

“That’ll be done in New York,” the older one said. “Still I don’t know.”

“Hell, he’s too dumb to be a spy,” Smalldane said. “He can’t even read or write.”

That was when I made up my mind to go to school.

On the voyage to New York from Rio a couple of the passengers panicked over what they claimed to be Nazi submarines, but nothing happened and we docked in Manhattan on August 26, 1942. There was nobody to meet us.

Once through officialdom’s incredible red tape, we took a cab to the Gotham where Smalldane had reserved us a room. He’d won the reservation from a correspondent who had had nothing left to gamble. When we were in the room and the money was in the hotel’s safe, Smalldane produced a package wrapped in red paper.

“It’s from Kate,” he said. “It was in the bottom of that basket of fruit and whiskey. She told me to give them to you when we got to New York.”

“What are they?”

“Your father’s diaries. She wants you to read them.”

“But I can’t read.”

“Kate said for you to learn,”

Booboo Robineaux drove me back to the hotel from the session with what I suppose could be called Swankerton’s city fathers. About halfway there I asked him, “Why do they call you Booboo?”

“My friends don’t,” he said. “Just my father.”

“What do your friends call you?”

“Boo.”

I thought about asking him how his face had come to be so nicely stitched, but I was afraid that it might turn into a longer story than I really wanted to hear, so I didn’t, but instead just thanked him for the lift.

I unlocked the door to my room in the Sycamore and started in. The Venetian blinds were down and the drapes were drawn. They hadn’t been that way when I left. It was dark. The door opened to my right so I slammed it against the wall, but it didn’t hit the wall. It hit someone who grunted. I started backing quickly into the corridor, but I didn’t move fast enough. I heard a faint sound like the beginning of a sigh, perhaps a sigh of regret, and something hard smashed into my left shoulder. I kept backing into the corridor and bumped against someone. I turned and it was Homer Necessary who gave me a genial smile.

“Trouble?” he said.

I massaged my shoulder with my right hand. “Trouble,” I said. “Two of them.”

“Well, now,” he said and smiled again. “Which side of the door is the light switch on?”

I thought a moment. “The left, lust inside. There’re two of them.”

Necessary reached into his right hip pocket and brought out a woven leather blackjack. He thumped it into his left palm. “Well, now,” he said again and moved to the door, reached his arm quickly around the jamb, and switched on the room’s overhead light. He was fast despite his bulk. He went in low, whirled, and the blackjack started up from near his ankles. I couldn’t see it land, but I heard it. It was a wet smack. Necessary turned to his left, still moving quickly, almost sinuously, like an overstuffed snake. Then he stopped, straightened, and grinned at me.

“He doesn’t want to get out from behind the door,” Necessary said. “You might as well come on in.”

I went in. On the floor at my left was the crumpled up body of a man. He wore a yellow velour short-sleeved shirt and tan khaki slacks. He wasn’t more than twenty-two or twenty-three and some blood drooled out of the left corner of his mouth. A piece of pipe wrapped in black friction tape lay a few inches from his right hand.

“Just reach over careful-like and close the door,” Necessary said. “You might even sort of slam it.”

I slammed the door shut. Behind it was another member of what I suppose is the misunderstood generation. He was all of twenty, wore a short-sleeved shirt with a turtleneck, some unsuccessful sideburns, and a panicky look. He carried a nine-inch length of tape-wrapped pipe in his right hand, but he seemed to have forgotten it.

Necessary slapped his blackjack into the palm of his left hand a couple of times. “Just drop it, kid,” he said. “Just drop it onto the floor.” The youngster looked at the pipe, smiled feebly and a little foolishly, and let the pipe fall to the carpet.

“Now go and sit in that chair over there,” he said. The youth moved to the chair that Necessary indicated and lowered himself into it. He still looked panicky.

I bent over the one who lay on the floor. “He’s not hurt bad,” Necessary said. “I didn’t even break his jaw, but he might have a few loose teeth. I got him right along here.” I looked up and watched him move his right forefinger along his jaw, just below the left ear.