I could faintly hear the crackle of the voice speaking into Eileen’s ear. What was he saying? Would he deny everything? Would she believe him?
“That isn’t the point,” she said. I frowned, watching her, unable to guess what had been said to cause that response. Then she said, “I know I am. Nobody ever said I shouldn’t be.” The crackle went on, impassioned and impatient, and she interrupted it, saying, “You want me to come home right now? I’ll get a job.” Crackle, crackle crackle. She glanced at me, shook her head, looked away, and when next she spoke I felt she was as much describing the situation for my benefit as to continue the dialogue with her father. “Look, Daddy,” she said. “Maybe we are broke, I don’t know. This is the first I’ve heard of it.” Crackle. “No, let me talk for a minute.” Crackle. “I don’t care, I want to say this. If we’re broke somebody should have told me. And maybe it is a legitimate excuse, and I don’t know what right those damn monks have to be smack in the middle of mid-town either, and if we have to set fire to their papers and punch them in the nose then maybe we have to do it. What I want to know is, did we do it?”
There was silence now for quite a long time, and when the crackle started again it was lower and slower. And Eileen interrupted it: “You already said that, and I already agreed with you.” More crackling. “That’s a good point, I’ll ask him.” Crackle? “Of course he’s here,” she said calmly. “Hold on.” And without covering the mouthpiece she said, “My father says, if there was arson and assault and illegal bugging and all that, why didn’t anybody call the police?”
“Because we couldn’t prove it,” I said.
“Why not? You could identify Alfred, couldn’t you?”
“Yes, but I’m the only one who could. Nobody else saw him.”
“What about my brother? Didn’t somebody else see him?”
“Not his face,” I said.
She gave me a long calculating state. “Next,” she said, “you’ll tell me you were the one who found the microphone.”
Was I blushing guiltily? Why did I feel guilty, when I knew I was innocent? “Yes,” I said, and had trouble meeting her eye.
Into the phone she said, “Just a minute, Daddy,” and this time she did put her palm over the mouthpiece, to make our conversation private. She studied me, and she’d never looked more beautiful, but it was a very unhuman beauty. Her skin was thin and taut and almost blue over her cheekbones, and her eyes were so deep-set they seemed to be studying me separately from somewhere deep in the center of her head. I met her gaze — with difficulty — trying to look innocent and finally she said, “Is this whole thing a con job, Charlie?”
“No! Of course not, why would I — what would I gain, what’s in it — what—?”
“I can’t figure that out either,” she said. “What do you hope to get out of it?”
“Look,” I said. “I can’t prove anything, I wasn’t even going to talk about that part with you, I just wanted to know what you meant when you said you could help us and I got caught up in, in, in everything, and I don’t know where I am anymore.”
“My father says we need the money,” she told me. “When I said I could help, I meant I knew he was embarrassed about selling the monastery, he blustered with us and tried to justify himself, and I know how to handle him when he gets that way. But not if the family’s broke. I wouldn’t be able to talk him into changing his mind even if I wanted to, and why should I want to? If the family’s broke I’m broke. I don’t get any alimony from Kenny Bone, believe me.”
“But what if it’s dishonest?” I said. “What if the, the monks have the right to stay there, it’s in the lease, and they’re being cheated just so you can afford to go on hanging around with these, these, these people you’re hanging around with?”
“What’s the matter with these people?” She was really bridling at that.
“Nothing,” I said forcefully. “I think they’re all terrific.”
The phone had been crackling petulantly for a while now, like a mosquito locked in a medicine cabinet, and Eileen spoke abruptly and severely at it, saying, “Will you wait just one minute?”
I said, “Does he deny about that clause? Did you ask him about the clause?”
She ignored that. Palming the phone again, she said to me, “Now, what’s this about the people around here? They’ve treated you all right, haven’t they?”
“They’re fine people,” I said. Me and my big mouth. “And they don’t have anything to do with any of this. The point is—”
“The point is,” she said, “this doesn’t have anything to do with people punching one another and all this mystery movie nonsense about microphones and arson and all that silliness. You just think you’re better than we are.”
“No, I don’t, I—”
“You think we’re silly useless people who don’t have any reason to be alive, and you’re some sort of saint. A whole bunch of saints there on Park Avenue.”
Knowing that she was accusing me of attitudes toward her friends that she herself held — or why else was she constantly trying to get away from them? — didn’t help me a bit. “I never said I was a saint, or any of us was—”
She slammed the phone into its cradle, ending the call, and jumped to her feet. “You think you can shame me into helping you?”
“The clause!” I wailed, pointing at the phone. “You didn’t ask him about the clause!”
“Just look at yourself!” she challenged me. “Just how holy are you? You come down here like any con man, you jump into the sack with me, you try to turn me against my own family, turn me against my friends, and you’re the biggest fake of all!”
“I never tried to—”
But I was wasting my breath. Turning on her heel, she marched away into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her, shaking the house. And the click I heard an instant later was the lock.
I was still standing there, trying to figure out what words exactly I wanted to try speaking through that locked door, when the phone rang. I looked at it, looked at the door, and it rang again.
No, she wasn’t coming out. Not for me, not for a ringing phone, not for anything.
On the third ring I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Is my daughter there? Eileen, let me speak to Eileen.” It was a heavy and angry and yet hesitant voice.
I said, “I’m not sure, uh... Hold on. I’ll just—”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Is that the monk?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Just what the hell are you up to? You’re pretty goddam cute, aren’t you, attacking a man through his family.”
“I what?” I was so flabbergasted I couldn’t think of any answer at all.
“Do you call that Christian behavior?”
“Me!”
“Listen,” he said, “I never said I was a saint. I’m just a fella trying to make it in one world at a time. This Dwarfmann deal here, this could pull me out of a real hole.”