At first it had seemed incredible that she could have remained unaware of her father’s true self, but in the course of her denials, facts about her life came out which helped to explain it. In the first place, her mother had died when Miss Althea was still an infant, so Farmer Agricola was her only parent. In the second place, she had spent practically all of her life in boarding schools, and was only rarely at home on the Staten Island farm. Summers had been spent with other relatives in various parts of the world. She was only at home now because there was a two-week hiatus between the end of her summer visit to an uncle and aunt in Southern California and the beginning of the fall semester at the girls’ college in Connecticut at which she would be a junior this year.
So if her father told her he was a farmer, why shouldn’t she believe him? And if he told her he had his money invested in stocks and real estate that gave him a good high return, what was wrong with that? And if he told her Clarence wasn’t a bodyguard but was hired to run the farm, he was hardly any more improbable a foreman than some she’d seen on television or in the movies. And if men like the two in the black car, who stopped by occasionally to confer in private with her father, were announced as either old friends or business associates, why should she disbelieve?
I know it isn’t exactly the same thing, but I myself didn’t really know what Uncle Al did for a living till I was twenty-two years old, and then I only found out because he got me a job at the bar, which by all rights I should have been in Canarsie opening instead of riding across the George Washington Bridge with a gun in my hand, a hostage in my hair, and — for all I knew — a price on my head.
Approaching the New York side of the bridge now, Chloe spoke up for nearly the first time, saying, “Where to?”
Where to? I didn’t really know. “Mr. Gross,” I said. “I guess I have to find Mr. Gross.”
“But which way do I go?” Chloe wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how to find Mr. Gross.”
“Let’s put it this way,” Chloe said. “The end of the bridge is coming up. Do I take the Henry Hudson Parkway or do I take the local streets? See the signs?”
I saw the signs, but I didn’t really know what to tell her. Artie took the decision out of my hands, saying, “We’ll want to go downtown anyway. Take the Parkway.”
“Fine,” said Chloe. She changed lanes, terrifying an orange Volkswagen, and we left the bridge.
Artie turned in the seat to say to me, “About Mr. Gross I can’t help you. From what you say, from what I heard those guys say, he’s got to be higher up in the rackets than Agricola was, and Agricola was the highest up I ever even heard of.”
Miss Althea said, “Why don’t you just give up? It isn’t going to do you any good. I don’t believe you and I won’t believe you, so why don’t you stop?”
“Shut up,” I asked, “I’ve got to think.”
“How about your Uncle Al?” Artie suggested.
“What about him? I tried to get him to help me before, and he betrayed me instead.”
“You didn’t have a gun last time,” Artie pointed out.
“Hmmm,” I said.
“You’re all insane,” Miss Althea said. “Insane.”
“All right,” I said. “Back to Uncle Al.”
Chapter 11
There was a fire hydrant just down the block from Uncle Al’s building. Chloe carefully parked the Packard next to it and Artie said, “We’ll keep hold of the hostage, don’t worry.”
“I appreciate this, Artie,” I said. “I really do.”
“Don’t be silly, baby,” he said. “Since I quit peddling the pills, life has been dullsville.”
“If a cop makes us move,” Chloe said, “I’ll circle the block.”
“You’re all insane,” Miss Althea said. She’d tried to jump out of the car when we were stopped for a light at 72nd Street and West End Avenue, and I’d had to slap her face to calm her down, and since then she’d maintained an insulted and dignified regality, like a member of the French court on the way to the guillotine. Had I been Madame Defarge, I might well have blanched a bit in her presence.
However, “I’ll hurry,” I said, and got out of the car, and returned to Uncle Al’s building.
I didn’t want him to know I was coming until I was right at his door, so I didn’t push the button next to his name this time but pushed the button for apartment 7-A instead. When a male voice came out of the grille, wanting to know who it was, I said, “Johnny.”
“Johnny who?”
“Johnny Brown,” I said.
“You got the wrong apartment,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said, and rang the bell for apartment 7-B.
There was no answer at all from 7-B, so I tried 6-A. This time it was a female voice that answered, one of those voices that sounds as though its owner has been drinking rum and writhing nude on a bearskin rug just to get warmed up for your arrival. “Who’s there?” she asked, making those two nondescript and pedestrian words reek with suggestiveness.
“Johnny,” I said.
“Well, come on in,” she said, and the buzzer sounded.
Isn’t that always the way it is? The really great opportunities to connect with sex bombs always come along when you’re already tied up with something else. That, I suppose, is the difference between fiction and reality. In fiction the sexy voice says, “Come on in,” and the guy goes on in, whereas in reality the guy has seven minutes to get to work and the boss told him if he’s late one more time he’s fired and he can’t afford to lose this job because he’s still paying off his Playboy subscription. In fiction, if you want to know something, it’s a good thing the sexy voice does speak up, because the guy doesn’t have a thing to do, and if it wasn’t for that unexpected sexy voice he would undoubtedly have dropped dead from boredom in another two, three days.
So much for philosophy. I did not go to apartment 6-A, once I’d gained entrance to the building, but went to apartment 3-B instead. I remembered the way those two guys had knocked last night, the code knock, one and then three and then one, so that’s the way I knocked now. Then I put my hand inside the pocket of Artie’s jacket, where I had the pistol we’d taken from Tim. It was smaller than the automatic I’d gotten from Miss Althea, so Artie and I had switched guns before I left the car.
I waited so long after knocking that I was beginning to think this time Uncle Al and Aunt Florence really were in Florida when at last the door pulled open and Uncle Al’s astonished face appeared before me. He saw who it was, and saw the gun in my hand, and promptly started to close the door again.
But I said, “No, Uncle Al,” and pushed forward, across the threshold.
If he had taken a firm stand, if he had told me to get the hell out of here or had demanded to know just what I thought I was doing, I’m not sure what would have happened next. Having grown up without a father, I’d had no one but Uncle Al to look to for a symbol of male strength and confidence. I was used to Uncle Al ordering me around, used to Uncle Al weighing me in the balance and very loudly finding me wanting, used to Uncle Al shouting at me to get out of his sight. I was so used to it that if he’d done the same thing now, I might even have obeyed him. Only for a second, maybe, but anyway long enough for him to shut the door again in my face, and certainly long enough for him to get control of the situation.
But I was learning something about Uncle Al. He respected power above all things, with a respect born of fear and a fear born of utter cowardice. Just as he had been terrified of the two men who had come here last night, too terrified of them and Agricola and the organization to even talk to me much less help me, so now he was terrified of the little pistol in my amateur hand, and as I moved forward across his threshold he moved backward into the apartment, and in that instant the old relationship between my Uncle Al and me was gone forever.