Дэвид Гейтс - The Blue Mirror

from Alfred, Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

“You know how long a tail gunner’s supposed to last in combat?” Stanley asked me. “Twenty-four minutes, on average. Me, I beat the odds, did my fifty missions, came back to the States, went on a bond tour.” He shook his head ruefully. “Now the cancer’s got me, I won’t live out the year.’’

I’d known Stanley Kosciusko most of my life. He came from Fitchburg, just north of Leominster, where me and my brother Tony grew up. There were quite a few Poles up there, close to the New Hampshire border, and a fair number of Finns, oddly.

The Poles had come originally to work in the paper and textile mills, the Finns to make furniture — Windsor chairs and dining room sets. Stanley had married a Finnish girl himself after the war. Maria Aho.

“You got to have an appreciation for life’s little ironies, ain’t it the truth?” he remarked.

Did his wife know? I wondered out loud.

“About the cancer, sure. This other thing, no.” It was the other thing he’d come to talk to me about.

“I lied about my age,” he went on. “Enlisted when I was seventeen. Wound up in a B-24 Liberator, flying out of Sicily bombing the Ploesti oilfields. Froze your ass off in those planes, but man, you’d sweat bullets when the German fighters came at you, Fockes and Messerschmitts. Anybody claims they weren’t scared stiff is retarded or just plain crazy.”

I was thinking about how old he was. Fifty-odd years since D-Day. Add it up, and Stanley was in his mid-seventies. He still seemed vigorous enough, but now that I knew what to look for, I saw the tightness around his eyes from holding in the pain, and a metallic cast to his skin, tarnished and dull. In the afternoon sunlight coming in my office windows I noticed he’d used some kind of rouge or blush to give his face the color it lacked. I figured that was harmless enough.

“Your dad was in the war, wasn’t he?” he asked.

“Different war,” I said. “Korea.”

Stanley nodded. “I knew that,” he said, as if it were important for me to understand he still had all his buttons. He’d dressed for the occasion, too, like he had to impress me.

Stanley was a retired auto body man. Tony and I had hung around his shop on Saturday mornings when we were kids because Stanley could fix anything. You could take him your bike or a broken kitchen appliance your mom was ready to throw out or a Lionel locomotive with a bad armature, and he’d make it work. He loved tools, not just what he used on the job, breaker bars and socket sets and orbital sanders, but old hand tools like rabbeting planes and Yankee drills, miter boxes and shake splitters, anything that had a purpose, because Stanley himself was purposeful. Me and Tony would hunt up objects in the abandoned mills and the local landfill just to have Stanley tell us what they were for. He’d examine a rusty, weathered thing, a spokeshave or a bit-and-brace with a corroded ratchet, and take it apart, clean it up, hone the bit or the blade, and put it back together so he could show you how well it suited your hand, you wanted to make a paper-tight join or dowel a table leg. He could repair a grandfather clock or a.22 rifle, and the trick was his curiosity, that certain knowledge that somebody else had made it, whatever it was, had designed it with a use in mind.

“I blame myself,” Stanley said. “You have to own up to the responsibility for what you’ve done or haven’t done.”

“Cancer’s not your fault, Stanley,” I said.

“You think I don’t know that?” He shifted his weight awkwardly, his suit making him self-conscious. “Jack, there’s somebody looking to hurt me. Or my family, which amounts to the same thing.”

His namesake was a Revolutionary War general who later went home to Poland and led a hopeless revolt against the Russians.

“Here’s what I need you to do for me,” he said. “I’m dying on the vine here. I got to have me a surrogate.”

I could still see him breaking some Cossack’s neck with his bare hands.

“See, if the damn Commies hadn’t killed Stosh over in Vietnam, things’d be different,” he said. “The way it is, I’m stuck with it. But me, I can’t hardly lift a glass.”

Life’s little ironies. If somebody’s going to be dead inside a year, what do you threaten him with? But more to the point, how do you turn him down when he asks you for help?

~ * ~

Here’s the rest of what Stanley told me. I was explaining it to my brother Tony over a beer.

“Stanley junior died in Vietnam, right?” he asked.

“First Cav,” I said.

Tony swung his wheelchair over to the sink. I’d just helped him move into this place, and he was still adjusting to being on his own. He’d resented being dependent, and once he was out of rehab he didn’t need nursing care, but it was a big step all the same. He rinsed out his beer bottle and left it on the drainboard. “And there’s a grandson?”

“Andy. Andy Ravenant. He took his stepfather’s name after his mom remarried, but he and Stanley have always been close.”

“Ravenant. Why’s that name ring a bell?”

“You used to see his ads on late-night TV, after Star Trek. Raving Richie Ravenant. Sold rugs and wall-to-wall.”

“Out in Lynn on the discount strip?”

“Next door to Adventure Car-Hop, home of the Ginsburger.”

“He must do a pretty high volume,” Tony said. “You’d think somebody would go after the carpet king, not Stanley.”

“Except the stepdad’s been dead for eight years, and Andy’s mom lives in Florida.”

“Puts a crimp in that line of inquiry.”

“Assuming you were using Andy for leverage,” I said.

“Unless it’s the other way around.”

I took my own bottle to the sink, rinsed it out, and got two more out of the fridge. I cracked the tops.

“Okay,” Tony said, taking the beer I handed him, “why is who-ever-this-is bothering Stanley? If they’ve got a beef with the kid, what’s it have to do with the grandfather? And how did Stanley get wind of it anyway?”

Stanley was seeing a specialist out at Beth Israel, off the Jamaicaway. He’s coming out of the hospital, headed for where he’d parked on Brookline Avenue, and some greaseball — Stanley’s description — starts giving him a hard time.

“Explain that a little better,” Tony said. “This guy comes out of nowhere?”

“Apparently,” I said. “Stanley’s like, hel-LO, what’s your story? Homeless vet, willing to work for food?”

“I take it not, unhappily.”

The guy’s trying to act smooth, but he’s antsy, like he has someplace else to be and this is just a pit stop.

“Coked up?” my brother asked.

“Good observation,” I said. “Except that Stanley wouldn’t know what to look for. I’m reading between the lines. The dude was looking over his shoulder.”

“Sorry,” Tony remarked, smiling. “You were saying?”

According to Stanley, the guy couldn’t seem to get to the point, or it was like he was talking in code. He kept using these veiled, oblique references as if they were supposed to make sense to Stanley, and Stanley finally gets fed up and just steps around him. The other guy is so frustrated with Stanley for, like, willfully refusing to understand that he calls after him he’ll send him his grandson’s tongue in a pickle jar.

“This is the first overt mention of Andy, right?”

“Right. The rest of it’s been this sly jive-ass hinting around.”

“I can see this going one of two ways,” Tony said. “Or one of one, namely Stanley drop-kicking the guy to Chestnut Hill.”