John Passos - Manhattan transfer

‘Jez it’s lucky they didn’t start shootin; one of em had a gun.’

‘Scared to I guess.’

‘Trucks are off.’

‘Just one case got busted up… God there was five of them.’

‘Gee didnt he mix it up with em?’ screamed Annette.

‘Oh shut up,’ growled Cardinale. He had dropped into a chair and his wife was sponging off his face. ‘Did you get a good look at the boat?’ asked Congo.

‘Too goddam dark,’ said Johnny. ‘Fellers talked like they came from Joisey… First ting I knowed one of em comes up to me and sez I’m a revenue officer an I pokes him one before he has time to pull a gun an overboard he goes. Jez they were yeller. That guy George on the boat near brained one of em wid an oar. Then they got back in their old teakettle an beat it.’

‘But how they know how we make landin?’ stuttered Congo his face purple.

‘Some guy blabbed maybe,’ said Cardinale. ‘If I find out who it is, by God I’ll…’ he made a popping noise with his lips.

‘You see Meester ’Erf,’ said Congo in his suave voice again, ‘it was all champagne for the holidays… Very valuable cargo eh?’ Annette, her cheeks very red sat still looking at Johnny with parted lips and toobright eyes. Herf found himself blushing as he looked at her.

He got to his feet. ‘Well I must be getting back to the big city. Thank’s for the feed and the melodrama, Congo.’

‘You find station all right?’

‘Sure.’

‘Goodnight Meester ’Erf, maybe you buy case of champagne for Christmas, genuine Mumms.’

‘Too darn broke Congo.’

‘Then maybe you sell to your friends an I give you commission.’

‘All right I’ll see what I can do.’

‘I’ll phone you tomorrow to tell price.’

‘That’s a fine idea. Good night.’

Joggling home in the empty train through empty Brooklyn suburbs Jimmy tried to think of the bootlegging story he’d write for the Sunday Magazine Section. The girl’s pink cheeks and toobright eyes kept intervening, blurring the orderly arrangement of his thoughts. He sank gradually into dreamier and dreamier reverie. Before the kid was born Ellie sometimes had toobright eyes like that. The time on the hill when she had suddenly wilted in his arms and been sick and he had left her among the munching, calmly staring cows on the grassy slope and gone to a shepherd’s hut and brought back milk in a wooden ladle, and slowly as the mountains hunched up with evening the color had come back into her cheeks and she had looked at him that way and said with a dry little laugh: It’s the little Herf inside me. God why cant I stop mooning over things that are past? And when the baby was coming and Ellie was in the American Hospital at Neuilly, himself wandering distractedly through the fair, going into the Flea Circus, riding on merrygorounds and the steam swing, buying toys, candy, taking chances on dolls in a crazy blur, stumbling back to the hospital with a big plaster pig under his arm. Funny these fits of refuge in the past. Suppose she had died; I thought she would. The past would have been complete all round, framed, worn round your neck like a cameo, set up in type, molded on plates for the Magazine Section, like the first of James Herf’s articles on The Bootlegging Ring. Burning slugs of thought kept dropping into place spelled out by a clanking linotype.

At midnight he was walking across Fourteenth. He didnt want to go home to bed although the rasping cold wind tore at his neck and chin with sharp ice claws. He walked west across Seventh and Eighth Avenues, found the name Roy Sheffield beside a bell in a dimly lit hall. As soon as he pressed the bell the catch on the door began to click. He ran up the stairs. Roy had his big curly head with its glassgray gollywog eyes stuck out the door.

‘Hello Jimmy; come on in; we’re all lit up like churches.’

‘I’ve just seen a fight between bootleggers and hijackers.’

‘Where?’

‘Down at Sheepshead Bay.’

‘Here’s Jimmy Herf, he’s just been fighting prohibition agents,’ shouted Roy to his wife. Alice had dark chestnut dollhair and an uptilted peaches and cream dollface. She ran up to Jimmy and kissed him on the chin. ‘Oh Jimmy do tell us all about it… We’re so horribly bored.’

‘Hello,’ cried Jimmy; he had just made out Frances and Bob Hildebrand on the couch at the dim end of the room. They lifted their glasses to him. Jimmy was pushed into an armchair, had a glass of gin and ginger ale put in his hand. ‘Now what’s all this about a fight? You’d better tell us because were certainly not going to buy the Sunday Tribune to find out,’ Bob Hildebrand said in a deep rumbling voice.

Jimmy took a long drink. ‘I went out with a man I know who’s shiek of all the French and Italian bootleggers. He’s a fine man. He’s got a cork leg. He set me up to a swell feed and real Italian wine out in a deserted poolroom on the shores of Sheepshead Bay…’

‘By the way,’ asked Roy, ‘where’s Helena.’

‘Dont interrupt Roy,’ said Alice. ‘This is good… and besides you should never ask a man where his wife is.’

‘Then there was a lot of flashing of signal lights and stuff and a motorboat loaded down with Mumm’s extra dry champagne for Park Avenue Christmases came in and the hijackers arrived on a speedboat… It probably was a hydroplane it came so fast…’

‘My this is exciting,’ cooed Alice. ‘…Roy why dont you take up bootlegging?’

‘Worst fight I ever saw outside of the movies, six or seven on a side all slugging each other on a little narrow landing the size of this room, people crowning each other with oars and joints of lead pipe.’

‘Was anybody hurt?’

‘Everybody was… I think two of the hijackers were drowned. At any rate they beat a retreat leaving us lapping up the spilled champagne.’

‘But it must have been terrible,’ cried the Hildebrands. ‘What did you do Jimmy?’ asked Alice breathless.

‘Oh I hopped around keeping out of harm’s way. I didnt know who was on which side and it was dark and wet and confusing everywhere… I finally did drag my bootlegger friend out of the fray when he got his leg broken… his wooden leg.’

Everybody let out a shout. Roy filled Jimmy’s glass up with gin again.

‘Oh Jimmy,’ cooed Alice, ‘you lead the most thrilling life.’

James Merivale was going over a freshly decoded cable, tapping the words with a pencil as he read them. Tasmanian Manganese Products instructs us to open credit… The phone on his desk began to buzz.

‘James this is your mother. Come right up; something terrible has happened.’

‘But I dont know if I can get away…’

She had already cut off. Merivale felt himself turning pale. ‘Let me speak to Mr Aspinwall please… Mr Aspinwall this is Merivale… My mother’s been taken suddenly ill. I’m afraid it may be a stroke. I’d like to run up there for an hour. I’ll be back in time to get a cable off on that Tasmanian matter.’

‘All right… I’m very sorry Merivale.’

He grabbed his hat and coat, forgetting his muffler, and streaked out of the bank and along the street to the subway.

He burst into the apartment breathless, snapping his fingers from nervousness. Mrs Merivale grayfaced met him in the hall.

‘My dear I thought you’d been taken ill.’

‘It’s not that… it’s about Maisie.’

‘She hasnt met with an accid…?’

‘Come in here,’ interrupted Mrs Merivale. In the parlor sat a little roundfaced woman in a round mink hat and a long mink coat. ‘My dear this girl says she’s Mrs Jack Cunningham and she’s got a marriage certificate to prove it.’

‘Good Heavens, is that true?’

The girl nodded in a melancholy way.