“The cops are after me,” I said.
“Only until it’s over,” he said. “Try to relax.”
“Sure. The cops are after me, I’m on my way to join an organization of lunatics and bombers, I’m wired for sound, my necktie turns into a smokescreen, my handkerchief will make you throw up, my Diner’s Club card explodes, I’m the leader of a subversive terrorist organization composed entirely of undercover federal agents, newspapers all over the country are saying I killed my girl, and I’m on my way to meet a twenty-five-year-old Nazi built like Bronco Nagurski. If relaxed means limp, don’t worry about it. I’m relaxed. I’m relaxed all over.”
14
Jack Armstrong was not in the Queens directory as such; but under N there was a listing for the National Fascist Reclamation Commission, with an address on 67th Drive. I took a subway from Grand Central, where P had let me off, and found Armstrong’s home at a little after one in the morning.
This block, in fact this whole neighborhood, was composed of neat, smallish, compact houses, mostly frame, here and there brick, and very occasionally stone. They were two stories high, most of them, and though some had begun life with porches, in almost every case family expansion or some such reason had later forced the enclosure of the porch, leaving odd-looking houses with a lot of windows across their fronts downstairs. The lawns before these houses were invariably small, and almost invariably made even smaller with hedges, bushes, and small trees, plus lawn statuary, rustic signs bearing reflector numerals, other rustic signs saying The Lombardis or The Brenners, and now and again carriage lamps on black poles.
This was a respectable neighborhood, lower-middle-class white workingman, and at one A.M. it was quite respectably and with self-satisfaction asleep. Fairly large trees growing at intervals in the strip of earth between sidewalk and curb minimized illumination from the widely spaced streetlights, leaving great patches of mid-block in almost absolute darkness, but it was a wholesome darkness, a darkness without terrors. None of the evils that hover in city darkness menaced these sidewalks; this was a neighborhood, too gentle, too mild-mannered, too nice for such goings-on.
The address I wanted, world headquarters of the National Fascist Reclamation Commission, was a small one-and-a-half-story yellow clapboard house on a corner plot, flanked on its left by the cross street and on the right by its own blacktop driveway leading to a narrow neat garage. The garage, while hardly bigger than a doghouse, took up most of the backyard. A white sign with rustically serrated edges and reflector letters was mounted on the lawn between a slate walk and this driveway, and read The Armstrongs. The first-floor porch had been enclosed, puffy bushes lined the front of the house, and a rusted basketball ring with weathered backboard was mounted over the garage doors.
I walked on by the house, stopped at the corner, looked in all directions while trying to decide what to. do next, and then noticed faint light at one of the basement windows. I moved down the cross street, angled over the rise of lawn at the side of the house, edged along the wall, squatted down next to the window, and peeked in.
It was a basement like any basement. The cement floor had been painted the dark red favored by owners of clapboard houses, the vertical metal pipes supporting the main I-beam had been painted in barber-pole stripes of red and white, and off to the left a small bar bristling with gadgets, gewgaws, signs, statuary, whatnots, light fixtures, thingummys and colored glasses had been built and promptly abandoned; stacks of old newspapers atop the bar were mute and foolish indicators of the abandonment.
Almost directly below the window through which I was peeking was Jack Armstrong himself. At least, I assumed it was he, because he was wearing the right uniform and had the right terrifying build. But his back was to me as he worked, moving steadily and rhythmically.
How sad: for him, for me, for all of us. He was turning the crank of a mimeograph machine.
For one wild, hopeful, childish, irretrievable second, as I watched him turn and turn, watched the sheets of paper slide one after the other into the tray, it seemed to me that all the dreams, all the ideals, all the perfections I had hoped for and dedicated my life to all these years were all attainable, and quite simply so. What a wealth of common humanity there was between this boy and me! The familiar futile motion of the mimeograph crank was the bond between us, the symbol of our common dedication and our common foolishness. Surely all I had to do was show him, explain to him, point out to him...
On the far wall, beyond Jack Armstrong’s moving back, a large color portrait of Adolf Hitler — head and mustache and shoulders only — glowered at me with the gloomy suspicion that nihilism is self-defeating. Flanking this portrait, tacked flat to the wall, was a pair of very large Nazi flags, the well-remembered red, the white circle within, the innermost black swastika.
Show him? Explain to him? Point out to him?
Reality, the death of all symbol, closed in on me with a crunch. This was hardly the time, hardly the place, hardly the cast with which to make the sudden leap to millennium. So he and I shared an experience: both of us operated mimeograph machines. But I ran a mimeograph because I couldn’t get a printing press, whereas Armstrong no doubt ran a mimeograph because he couldn’t get a submachine gun. A subtle difference, perhaps, but decisive.
All right; back to the plan. Feeling very reluctant, but at the same time in a perverse hurry to have the whole damn thing over with, I closed my left hand into a fist, extended the knuckle of the middle finger, licked that knuckle for luck, and rapped that knuckle against the window.
Armstrong practically climbed into his machine. He was so patently startled out of his wits that I immediately and forever lost all terror of him. He might be the most violent disciple Adolf Hitler ever had, but it made no difference. Everyone else in the group Eustaly and Tyr — Leon Eyck (Leon Eyck, Leon Eyck, Leon Eyck, I must remember that!), everyone else in that group might continue to terrify me, and probably would, but not Jack Armstrong; so far as I was concerned, his fangs had just been pulled.
I rapped at the window again, not to torture the poor boy, but simply because there wasn’t anything else to do. Sooner or later, if I repeated the sound often enough, he would come out of his panic sufficiently to recognize it for what it was, at which point he would look toward this window, I would show him my face, and possibly we could begin to communicate.
Well, rap number two didn’t do it. It goosed him out of the mimeograph again, and off into a dim corner behind the furnace, where I could just see his eyes gleaming.
(I think now that this was yet another example of the fact that everyone is most susceptible to his own favorite weapon. The FBI man, for example — A, I think it was — whose sign-language theory was scuttled by a knowing look. The reports we’ve all seen of advertising men who turn out to be the biggest suckers for advertising gimmicks. And here, a terrorist terrorized by something that went rap in the night.)
I had to find some better way to attract his attention, before I frightened him out of the cellar entirely. I thought about it a few seconds, and then decided to rap out the familiiar rhythm, shave-and-a-haircut — two-bits. That, it seemed to me, would have to strike Armstrong as the work of a friendly rapper.
And so it did. Out from behind the furnace he came, in response to it, still wary but no longer paralyzed. He moved cautiously toward the window, in which I was now showing myself as best I could, and finally unlatched the window and lifted it open just slightly, enough for me to hear him whisper, “Who are you? What you want?”