I hardly noticed the direction they took me; what difference could background make at a time like this? It was all a blur of shadows heavy-laden with imminent death. I knew in my heart this was a one-way journey.
When the car stopped finally, I was vaguely aware of the dim outline of some large house directly before us. I was hustled inside before I could further identify it. The driver of the car as well as the man who had seized me on the train both came inside with me. The door opened as we reached it, as though we had been sighted beforehand. I tried to turn my head and see who had been behind it, but the hand of one of my captors caught me tightly at the back of the neck, just below the skull, and held me rigid there while they continued to thrust me forward between them.
I was shoved into a room in which there was a cobblestone fireplace and wood panelling on the walls. Whatever this place was, it was fitted up as though it was used for dwelling purposes, was someone’s residence. There were two men in it, waiting for us. One standing, the other negligently balanced across the corner of a heavy table, one leg dangling short and repeatedly flipping an open jackknife in air and catching it almost miraculously each time by the flat of the open blade between two fingers before it could bite into the polished table-surface. The one standing was the man I had given the slip to at the night-club.
He came forward and he said: “Here. You forgot something.” And he let me have one of my own patent dress-shoes full in the face. It stunned me for a minute. I went back against the table, and the ones who had come in with me held me up between them. I heard one of them say: “Don’t do that till Ed sees him.”
One of them left the room, and there was a short wait. Then he reappeared followed by a short, heavy-set man. The latter was fully dressed, but he was in the act of shrugging on his jacket as he came through the doorway. He buttoned it, then he raised both hands and smoothed back his stringy black hair, as though he’d been taking a nap fully-dressed when they summoned him. He appeared to be in his early forties, and he was probably younger than he looked. The others drew back from me as he came on, I noticed, as though to give him plenty of room.
He walked all around me two or three times, looking me up and down, almost like a fitter in a clothing-store inspecting someone trying on a new suit. “Uh-huh,” he grunted affirmatively a couple of times, “uh-huh.” Then he stopped finally, directly before me. “So this is what you’re like.”
I said, a lot more defiantly than I felt: “You’re not the police. What’s this for, what’s it about?”
“We’re our own police.”
“What’re you doing with me here, exactly what do you want with me?”
He withdrew to the other side of the table, ensconced himself in a swivel chair, cocked one leg up over the other, stripped a cigar. One of his henchmen supplied the match.
Finally, when I thought he was never going to speak again, “I’m Eddie Donnelly,” he said. “Mean anything to you?”
“No, because I’m not—”
“It should,” he overrode me. “Well it would to your father, if he hadn’t been smart enough to die before I could get my hands on him.”
“I haven’t any fa—”
Again he bore me down. “Maybe I should refresh your memory. Joe Nugent, your father, and mine were partners. A crooked partner and a partner that was honest. The crooked one swindled the honest one, and hundreds of oilier people that trusted the honest one besides. Then he disappeared, and let the innocent one take the rap for him. It’s an old story, old as the hills. But I never yet grew tired of repeating it. Because it happened to me and mine!”
His face darkened. “My father went to jail, for something he didn’t do. Yours hid his family out of sight for a while, and went off by himself, out of reach, to another country, where he lived off the fat of the land on stolen money, waiting for things to blow over. But it didn’t end there. My father died in jail. He never came out alive again. It killed him just as surely as a gun or a knife. He was murdered. They took me up to see him near the end. Yes, I was just a kid, but they took me up to see him, that was his last request. And his dying words to me were: ‘Get even for us, Eddie. Get even on that man that’s done this to us, on him and his, if it takes all your life.’ I swore I would, and I keep my oath to a dying man.”
He flung down his cigar, as though the memory of all this made it taste bad. “I saw my mother scrub floors on her hands and knees, until she died too, years before her time, a worn-out drudge. I saw my sister — well something even worse happened to her, because there was no one to give us a home any more. I grew up on the streets myself, and then in reform school. All because my birthright was taken away from me.
“But I had one thing through it all to keep me going. My oath to get even. And it still hasn’t been fulfilled. I caught up with him years later. I tracked him down until I’d caught up with him. And I was just too late. Just a few weeks too late. He’d died safe in bed, in the beautiful mansion that blood-money had bought him. He’d died a respected, honored, adopted citizen in that second home of his in a foreign land. I couldn’t take that away from him. My oath went unfulfilled. But I knew he had a son somewhere. A son he was too cowardly to come back and acknowledge.” His list came down with a sound like thunder. “And now I’ve got his son. That’s something even better!”
“Only you haven’t,” I said. “I was born George Palmer. I never heard of any Lee Nugent until a few short days ago. I picked the name at random out of a newspaper because I saw there was some money waiting to be claimed, and I went down there and impersonated him. You’ve got the wrong guy. You’ve got a fake, a phony. What good is it to your vengeance to get even on somebody entirely different? I haven’t got the blood of your father’s enemy in my veins—”
To my surprise he’d shut up completely. I hadn’t thought it would be this easy to convince him. Suddenly, for some reason or other, he seemed uncertain. They were all looking at him curiously, I saw. He made a steeple of his fingertips and poised them before his mouth. “It’s always possible, of course,” he said quietly, “that me and my fellows here have made such a mistake. Isn’t it, boys?”
He turned and looked hard at them, one by one. I saw the corners of his eyebrows quirk upward. Then he turned back to me again. “I don’t want to be too hasty. I’ve waited a long lime. I can afford to wait just a little longer, for the sake of being sure. Suppose I send down to your old neighborhood, bring someone up here and see if they recognize you. There’s no one has such long memories nor such keen eyesight for familiar faces as old-time neighbors—” He was soft as silk now; he was good. “Naturally, I don’t mean where you were first raised, you were too small then,” he interposed smoothly. “I mean from where you moved to after that, from where he hid you out later—” He snapped his fingers helplessly a couple of times, like you do when you’re trying to remember a name.
“Read Street?” I blurted out incautiously. “But they weren’t there long enough—”
“What d’you mean they weren’t there long enough?” he said glibly.
“There was a fire, the very first night after they’d moved in. The building at 295 burned down and—” I clamped my jaws shut too late, felt like biting off my tongue.
He didn’t do anything for a minute. There was silence. Then he turned and looked at the others like he had before. With the same quirk to his eyebrows. As if to say, “See?”