“Put down the phone, Sam. Don’t make me do something we’ll both be sorry for. The Bolivian General Staff is in the next room.”
“Just get me any police, lady. This is an emergency.”
“I’ll make you rich and famous, Sam. We’ll share the black bird between us. Don’t make me push the button.”
“All lines are tied up,” the operator was saying. “Hang up and dial again. This is a recording. This is.”
“You leave Dragon Lady no choice,” she said and pushed the button.
When she pushes the button, Wilmer and Fritz come in, followed by the massive configuration of the fat man. From the pained look on Katerinka’s face, I can see it is not what she expected.
“Scotland Yard,” says the fat man, flashing a phony shield.
“You have something in your possession, madame, that belongs, if I’m not mistaken, to Her Majesty’s government.”
“Don’t believe him, Sam,” she says. “He’ll say anything.”
“How do I know, Stockholm,” I say, “you are who you say you are?”
“Sir, who else would I be?”
His answer puts an end to civil conversation. Our guns are out, his three to my one, putting me at an obvious though inessential disadvantage. When the fat man claps his hands, Fritz and Wilmer begin to take the room apart. Katerinka uses the occasion to slip noiselessly behind me. “If we get out of this alive,” she whispers, “I’ll tell you everything I know.”
The fat man and his colleagues desolate the room. Hours of tedious quest pass before Wilmer discovers a package wrapped in newspaper in a hollow space under the floorboards. “We have here the fruits,” Stockholm says, stripping the wrapping with his grotesquely truncated fingers, “of years of single-minded dedication. …Fools.” Inside the package is a single black open-toed woman’s shoe. “It is not even my size,” he says and laughs insanely. Fritz accuses Wilmer of a double cross. Wilmer in turn accuses Fritz. Several guns go off. In the confusion I grab the treacherous Katerinka and leap through a window. She is the last proof of my innocence.
“My hero,” she says as we fall. “My black bird.”
Wherever I go, the bird comes up one way or another. We pass a newsstand on the way to the police station. The headline on the late edition reads:
MARKEY CASE CLOSED
ALL IS FORGIVEN
The fix was in, I guess. It always is, even when the whole world stands on its head and says no.
“I’ll make you rich,” she whispers.
I say something about truth and justice coming before money and having to look at your face in the mirror in the morning when you shave.
“Who’s talking about money,” she says, “or shaving for that matter.”
I take her to an abandoned warehouse in the West Bronx overlooking the Harlem River and question her intensively night and day without rest, without regard for personal safety. There is more evidence than one can say. The lines of implication are myriad and complex. Guilt is everywhere.
“Hurry,” she whispers, my silky-skinned, downy-legged spy. “I have to be home at six to give the kids dinner. And please, whatever you do, Sam, don’t leave any marks.”
Sometimes in this business, you can be on the same case for as long as you live.
Neglected Masterpieces IV
The other night this unusual novel crossed my desk and I lost two days and two nights contending with it, unable to put it down for more than ten minutes at a time. A compelling fiction of nine hundred odd pages attenuation, it is titled THE SWAN FLIES AT MIDNIGHT’S FALL and comes full blown from the pen of the pseudonymous Sexton Lovelady. Lovelady is a master storyteller and plot twister as I hope a brief recitation of the narrative will evidence.
At the center of THE SWAN FLIES (etc.) lies Cora Boardway, a secretary out of Cedar Falls, Iowa, who falls in love with and marries Harmon Stores, the fourth richest man in the world. At the time Harmon and Cora meet, Harmon has just learned that he has a hereditary disease (“the sins of his father visited on the son”) and that he has a life expectancy of no more than five years. Up until then, Harmon Stores had been a ruthless and unfeeling man, self-regarding in the extreme. The news of his mortality causes him, after not a little soul searching and self-recrimination, to make an effort to change himself for the better. As a step in that direction, he elects to make plain, unassuming Cora his fourth wife. Harmon decides to marry Cora, not because he loves her, though in time that too will come to pass, but because she is different from all the other women he has known (most of them great beauties), and because he wants to leave his fortune to someone sincerely deserving. Cora, in his view, is unspoiled and highly principled, the most decent person of his own generation to come into his life. She is reluctant to marry Harmon because of the disparity of their situations, but finally she is too much in love with him to let his inordinate wealth stand in the way.
Most of the preceding is offered to us in flashback or through dialogue between Stores and his friend and advisor, Dr. Rankin. When the novel starts Cora and Harmon are celebrating their first anniversary. They seem happy together — indeed we learn they are exceedingly well mated — though Harmon has a nasty predilection for chasing tail. He explains it to Cora in a characteristically eloquent passage as a “cursed disease” and assures her that “you alone illumine the dark places” in his life. “I can’t share you,” she tells him. “I’m not made that way.” Harmon promises his wife to resist the evil stirrings in his nature. He is able to keep this promise until the beautiful television newscaster, Donna Amanda Tortona, comes to interview him for a series she is planning on self-made men. They are instantly attracted to each other and drift into a volcanic affair. When Cora learns of her husband’s infidelity — she actually discovers Harmon and Donna Amanda (“their ruby thighs o’erlapped”) making love in the maid’s room — she feels that she can no longer continue living in the same house with her husband.
Cora leaves no forwarding address and Harmon hires a private detective to find her and bring her back. This is one of the most interestingly plotted sections of the novel, an interstice between circumstance and metaphor. The detective, Bill Wall, turns out to have been a high school sweetheart of Cora’s from Cedar Falls and is a personification of her innocent past. Following a hunch, Bill Wall discovers Cora working as a waitress in Beverly Hills, it is what she had always dreamed of doing as a child — and orders a tuna fish sandwich on rye toast at her table. There is a dead fly in the sandwich, a symbol of the difficulties Wall will confront in trying to bring Cora back to her prodigal husband. Wall pretends to Cora that their meeting is circumstantial, that he just happened to wander into the obscure luncheonette — a place called Hand to Mouth — in which Cora is slinging hash.
The detective is attracted to Cora all over again — he is a man who likes a woman with an intelligent face — and so has difficulty pretending to be what he’s not. Lovelady gives us a beautifully proportioned flashback at this point, showing Cora and Bill fifteen years before. Bill has taken her on a date to Lover’s Lane and is trying to persuade her to come into the backseat of the car. Cora holds out against his persuasion, winning Bill’s undying respect. In the present, in marked contrast, Bill and Cora succumb to the pleasures of the sack at first opportunity. Cora apologizes afterward, saying that she was just using Bill to get at someone else. The next day Bill wires Cora’s husband to come to Beverly Hills to collect his bride.
When Cora discovers that Bill has betrayed her — she has trusted him more than she realized — she is terribly disillusioned. “How could you have done it?” she would ask him. “If I can’t trust my friends, who can I trust?” Her questions go unanswered. Bill has absented himself from the scene.