Evan Hunter - A Horse’s Head

Aside from the aroma of chloroform, the coffin was a very nice one indeed, lined with silk he could feel but not see since it was very dark in there even with the lid partly opened, roomy and quite comfortable. All in all, even though he wasn’t dead, he had to admit they had given him a coffin every bit as nice as Feinstein’s. In fact, and this was probably only pride of ownership, he had the feeling his coffin was even a little nicer than Feinstein’s. He did not know whether or not he was still on the airplane to Rome because he didn’t know how long he had been unconscious. He felt no sensation of movement, but maybe that was due to the comfortable padding of the coffin. He wondered why the original corpse had jumped out of the limousine on Fourteenth Street, and he also wondered who all those people in the stonecutter’s cottage had been, people of taste no doubt, witness the fine comfortable coffin and the beautifully tailored suit.

It was very quiet in the coffin.

He began to like being there. It afforded him the opportunity for a little contemplation, a luxury that had been denied him from the moment he had first laid a bet on the trotters at Yonkers. That was two years ago and, worse luck, he had won a hundred dollars. Well, all water under the bridge, he thought. I would not be on my way to Rome right now (or already there, for all I know) if I weren’t a horseplayer who’d been thrown down the stairs by Hijo, standing on the corner opposite S. Klein, Always on the Square. I would not be here right now if I were not Andrew Mullaney himself, which is after all the only thing to be, and a very nice thing to be when you own a comfortable coffin like this one. He was willing to bet not many people were blessed with such fine coffins, Irene should only see him now.

Since he had a lot of time on his hands and also a nice place for contemplation, he began thinking about Irene in earnest, and discovered as he always did that the image of her never varied. They had known each other for two years before getting married, and then had lived together in wedded harmony (he supposed) for an additional seven years before the divorce a year ago February; all in all, a good long time. But he always thought of her as she had looked when they met at the dance given by the Sons of Erin on Fordham Road, long red hair and sparkling green eyes, a saucy grin on her mouth, the absolute stereotype of every Irish girl whose skirts had ever been raised in a Dublin pub.

He thought how nice it would be if Irene were there in the coffin with him, they had never made love in a coffin. They had made love on a midnight train coming down from Quebec, where they had gone for a short vacation, and they had made love in the basement of their building at two a. m. while waiting for the clothes to get done, and they had almost made love on a Ferris wheel once, but Irene was afraid they wouldn’t be able to keep track of where they were once they got started and might end up screwing in front of everybody at Palisades. Still, they had almost. Well, almosts don’t count, Mullaney thought, a horse who almost shows doesn’t almost anything. Still, they had almost. It would probably be great fun in a coffin, too. Maybe not this coffin, because of the chloroform smell, but take a coffin like Feinstein’s, that would be a great coffin in which to make love.

Irene hadn’t known Feinstein at all; there were a lot of his friends she never got to meet, primarily because he himself had only met them after the divorce. She probably would have enjoyed someone like Feinstein, though, a truly great blackjack player with a fine sense of humor, and a rare piety, which is how he happened to get killed, but that was another story.

He wondered again if he was in Rome, and decided to try lifting the lid of the coffin, an excellent idea that had not occurred to him before this, so engrossed had he been in recalling Irene and the highly comical sequence of events that had led to Feinstein’s death. He tried the lid now, somewhat regretfully since he was enjoying his retreat very much indeed, and discovered that it moved quite easily. Well, he thought, all good things must come to an end, and he raised the lid completely, and then sat up and looked around the room. There were two windows in the room. There was a dresser against the far wall. Above it there hung a picture of an old man with a beard, probably Sigmund Freud. There was a lamp on the dresser. There was a chair across the room from the dresser. A man was sitting on the chair.

The man looked a lot like an Italian Everett Dirksen. He had white hair like Dirksen, and nice kindly puffy eyes like Dirksen, and his tie was sort of sloppily knotted the way Dirksen’s tie sometimes looked on television after a particularly heated session with Chet Huntley. The only thing about him, in fact, that did not look like Senator Dirksen was the gun in his hand, which, if Mullaney was not mistaken, appeared to be a very large American Colt. 45 automatic.

“Boo!” he said to the man, thinking he might faint dead away on the floor, the way they do in movies when a coffin opens and there’s a live person in it. But Dirksen just looked at him with his kindly puffy eyes, and nodded, as if he had known all along that Mullaney was only unconscious and that he would be waking up sooner or later. Mullaney shrugged. Dirksen got off the chair, went out of the room, and came back a moment later with another man who also looked like Dirksen.

“E desto, eh?” the new one said.

“Si,” the first one replied. “ A questo momento.”

“Va bene” the new one said and walked over to the coffin. “Out,” he said to Mullaney in English. “Out of the box.”

The coffin was resting on two sawhorses. Mullaney climbed out of it with great difficulty, cautiously looping one leg over the rim and then the other, certain he would split the tight pants.

“Where’s the money?” one of the men said.

“Are you talking to me?” Mullaney asked.

“Yes. Where’s the money?”

“What money?” Mullaney said, and realized instantly he had said the wrong thing. The man who had been talking to him suddenly made a face that indicated to Mullaney Oh are we going to play that game, where you pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about and where I have to get rough perhaps, when you know very well what money I mean? That was what Mullaney read on his face, and all at once he didn’t look at all like Senator Dirksen, neither of them did, they looked instead like people who could possibly get very mean if you didn’t tell them where the goddamn money was.

“He doesn’t know where the money is, Henry,” the first man said.

“He doesn’t know where the money is, George,” the second man repeated.

They both had rather pained expressions on their twin faces, as if they were distressed by what they now felt they must do. It was obvious that what they now felt they must do was knock him around a little, Roman style. It seemed to him that he had been getting knocked around a little ever since Hijo threw him down the poolhall steps, and he really had no desire to get knocked around any further, in any style. At the same time, since he didn’t know where the money was, or even which money they were talking about, he couldn’t very well tell them what they wanted to know. It all looked hopeless. He decided to ask for the manager.

“Where’s Gouda?” he said.

“Gouda is dead,” Henry said.

“That’s not true. I saw him only a little while ago.”

“Was he alive?” George asked.

“Of course he was alive.”

“He’s dead now,” George said.

“How did he die?”

“A terrible highway accident,” George said, and looked at his twin.