I shut the door behind me. “We’ve got some talking to do,” I said.
Belatedly he tried to get a grip on the authority he’d just forfeited. Shaking a quaking finger at me, he said, “You little punk, you realize the spot you put me in? You know what you’ve done to me?”
“Don’t be a moron, Uncle Al,” I told him. “Nobody’s trying to kill you, with the possible exception of me. Let’s go into the living room and sit down.”
He looked startled, and held his hands out as though for quiet while he half-turned his head and seemed to listen. “Your Aunt Florence,” he whispered. “She doesn’t know.”
“Maybe it’s time she found out,” I said.
“Charlie boy, don’t. Maybe you got it in for me, maybe you got every right, but I ask you on bended knee to don’t.”
He didn’t ask me on bended knee, actually, but I knew what he meant. I said, “We’ll talk it over.”
“Sure, Charlie. We’ll talk it over.”
“In your den,” I told him. “We won’t be disturbed there.”
“Right, in my den. We won’t be disturbed there.”
I wasn’t sure which threat worried him most, the pistol or Aunt Florence. In any case, the combination of the two was enough to pull Uncle Al’s sting and make him as quiet and agreeable as a new minister with the church elders.
Uncle Al’s apartment is a triumph of money over background. Aunt Florence knew just enough about taste to know her own was too uncertain to carry her safely through the furnishing of an entire apartment, so she handed a great big wad of Uncle Al’s money to a pretty young man with an extremely limp wrist, told him she wanted “quiet elegance,” and turned him loose. The only thing wrong with the result was that when you saw Uncle Al standing in the middle of it you figured he had to be a burglar; he couldn’t possibly be somebody who lived in this place. The pretty young man, unfortunately, had been given free rein to choose everything about the apartment but its occupants.
The den had been done in mahogany, ebony and burlap, all brought together by a rich green carpet on the floor. A black leather sofa was the most ostentatious item of furniture, but it blended so well with the rest of the room that even a Communist couldn’t have any real objection to it. The bookcase, which had been filled according to the strange but not at all uncommon literary criterion of the color of the book spines, gave a comfortably spurious air of age and solidity to the room, making it difficult to believe that this entire place had not stood here, exactly like this, for at least a hundred years. The den, in fact, had been done seven years ago.
Once we were in this room with the door shut, Uncle Al began to talk. I let him go on awhile because I wanted to see if he’d say anything of use to me.
“You got to understand, Charlie,” he said to begin with. “You got to understand the position you put me in. I get this phone call from this person, which you can see why I don’t want to mention any names, that tells me my nephew’s on the spot and what do I got to say about that, and what do I say? Charlie, you know me, I’m your Uncle Al, I done the best I could for you all your life. Your old man run out on you before you was born, to the best of my ability I tried to help take his place, you know that.”
I didn’t know any such thing, but I was letting him talk, so I said nothing.
“Your Aunt Florence and me,” he went on, patting himself on the chest with all his fingertips, “we wasn’t blessed with children, in a lot of ways you’re like my own kid, my own flesh and blood.”
I didn’t say anything to that one, either, though my mother had told me one time about a confidence she’d been given by Aunt Florence, to the effect that Aunt Florence had wanted children but Uncle Al hadn’t, Uncle Al even going so far as to tell Aunt Florence to be warned by what had happened when her sister — meaning my mother — got herself knocked up, referring of course to my father having deserted. But to this bit of twaddle, too, I remained silent.
“You know I always done my best for you,” Uncle Al went on, “even getting you the job out to Canarsie there. I went out on a limb for you that time, Charlie, you know that? You realize the kind of limb I went out on for you that time, you not even in the organization or anything? But there’s a limit, you got to see that, there’s a point where I got to say, ‘No, Charlie, no more. I know I’m your uncle, Charlie, I know you’re my nephew, but eventually comes the time I got to think of myself, I got to think of your Aunt Florence, I got to be practical. I help you out whenever I can, Charlie, but if you ever get in a serious jam with the organization there’s nothing I can do, not a single thing I can do.’ And it’s happened, right? You’re in trouble. You done something, I don’t know what, I don’t even want to know what, and you got the organization down on you. So what can I do? I get this phone call, ‘Your nephew’s on the spot,’ what can I say? I got to say, ‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ that’s all. There’s nothing else I can do.”
The time had come to break in. “You couldn’t even ask why? You couldn’t even find out what I was supposed to have done?”
“If they want me to know, Charlie,” he said, “they’ll tell me. If they don’t tell me, I don’t ask. That’s one thing I had to learn about the organization, if they want you to know some—”
“Wait, wait,” I said. “Wait, now. Stop for a minute.”
“Charlie, I’m only—”
“Shut up, Uncle Al.”
He did, too, for just a second. The surprise did it, I guess. But then he pointed a finger at me and said, “I’m still your uncle, boy, and you—”
I pointed the pistol at him and said, “Shut up, Uncle Al.”
A pistol is more forceful than a finger any day. He shut up.
I said, “You are my Uncle Al because you’re married to my Aunt Florence. Other than that, the relationship between us is kaput.”
“That’s perfectly all right with me,” he said. “If you think I—”
“Shut up, Uncle Al.”
He shut up again.
“Now, let me tell you something,” I said. “I didn’t do anything to the organization. They’re making a mistake. I didn’t talk out of turn to anybody, I didn’t lose a package or steal anything, I didn’t do a thing. It’s a mistake, and all I want to do is correct it.”
“The organization don’t make mistakes,” he said. “An organization as big as—”
“Shut.”
He shut.
I told him, “This time the organization did make a mistake. Now, what I want to do is find out what they think I did wrong, and then maybe I can convince them it wasn’t me that did it.”
He was shaking his head back and forth and back and forth. “Never in a million years,” he said. “You’ll never — in the first place, you can’t even get to the men in charge, I couldn’t do it myself.”
“I almost got to talk to Farmer Agricola,” I said, “but he was—”
“Who?” Astonishment made him look for a moment even dumber than he is. “What did you say?”
“Farmer Agricola.”
“How did you find out about him? Charlie, what you been up to?”
“Never mind,” I said. “The point is, I couldn’t talk to him because he was killed. But I did—”
“What what what?”
“Killed,” I said. “Listen faster, Uncle Al, I don’t have much time. I went to see Farmer Agricola, but somebody killed him before I got to him. Stuck a knife in his back. But I did find out—”