The Americans Read online

  In the stillness, they all heard a thumping at the far end of the hall. Sancosa’s face blanched. “Blood of the Mother! Someone’s coming.”

  Ortega half turned. “The landlord?”

  “No, it’s two men.”

  Sancosa stepped through the door into the corridor just as a man appeared—a man who was no more than a round black silhouette. Carter saw a knife tear through Sancosa’s coat and sink into his belly. Sancosa dropped to his knees, dying, and Josie screamed.

  CHAPTER XIV

  A VIOLENT LESSON

  i

  CARTER CLAMPED BOTH HANDS on Ortega’s wrist, more to defend himself than out of any impulse toward heroics. Ortega spewed curses in Portuguese, hammering his free hand into Carter’s ribs while trying to wrench his knife hand from the younger man’s grip.

  Sancosa slumped over in the hall. Carter heard a rapid thump-thump, as of a cane striking wood. Ortega threw his weight forward. The attack rammed Carter backward, forcing him under the slope of the roof. He hit his head again, dizzyingly hard.

  Ortega forced his knife hand over so that the blade penetrated the back of Carter’s left hand. Sudden pain made his fingers fly open, and Ortega tore free.

  Josie saw Ortega balance himself on the slippery pallet, ready for one last lunge at Carter’s belly. Because of hitting his head, Carter was dazed, slow to react. Josie screamed again, just as Carter realized the nature of the tapping sound. A crutch, moving rapidly over the floor—

  A sick terror filled Carter as Ortega drew his arm all the way back, preparing for the killing stroke. Simultaneously, a hobbling figure entered the room. Against the light, Carter saw something with a fishhook shape. It was a longshoreman’s box hook, clutched in Captain Eben Royce’s right hand.

  Somehow, despite his grotesquely crippled fingers, Royce managed to keep his grip on the handle of the hook. Just as Ortega started to drive the knife into Carter’s stomach, Royce whipped his arm forward. The curved point of the steel hook shot past Ortega’s jaw from behind. Royce jerked backward and the point of the hook sank into the Portugee’s throat.

  Royce pulled hard. Ortega was dragged off his feet. “Jesus!” Carter cried, almost out of his mind with fright. Ortega’s throat opened and an artery pumped blood that spurted over him, and stained the ceiling and the pallet with big dark splotches.

  Carter staggered away, turning his head as Ortega went down. In the corner, he covered his mouth with both hands and somehow managed to keep from throwing up.

  “Carter?” he heard Eben Royce say behind him. “You all right?”

  “Yes, yes—God.” He was choking. “Is he—?”

  There was no emotion in Royce’s voice as he answered, “I hope so. It’s what he deserved. Tillman came to find me. I’ve been waiting a long time.”

  ii

  Before the night’s work was finished, the fog was whitened by an unseen sunrise.

  Carter had regained a measure of composure, but he doubted he could ever forget the images of those last moments.

  Ortega’s face.

  The knife turning in tormenting circles.

  The smell of fish on the blade.

  The blood pumping from the cut artery—

  Tillman and Eben Royce were much calmer than either Carter or Josie. Tillman had given the girl a stiff drink of rum to keep her from crying hysterically. She had never stopped since Sancosa fell back into the room, Tillman’s knife in his belly.

  The older men displayed no remorse about the two bodies, and methodically went about the jobs that had to be done.

  Tillman left the room just as Phipps came upstairs. The landlord peered into Josie’s room before Royce could prevent it, and promptly vomited in the hall. When he had recovered a little, Royce pressed the box hook against his chest and talked to him softly. Carter couldn’t hear what was said, except that Phipps kept nodding and repeating, “Yes, yes, yes.”

  Phipps located some old bedding; Tillman returned with a long coil of ship’s line. He looked at Carter, who by then was dressed.

  “Are you steady enough to help me truss ’em? We have to get rid of both bodies or we’re all in dutch.”

  “I—I know,” Carter said, nodding. The images persisted. Ortega’s face. Ortega’s stinking knife. Ortega’s throat spouting great dark blots of blood onto the ceiling. He wanted to run and hide.

  Royce was still talking to Phipps. Carter heard him say, “You’ll never be able to get the wood clean. Lock the room. Board it up. Never use it again. Understand me?”

  “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  Somehow, Carter pulled himself together and helped Tillman wrap the bodies in the bedding, then tie each with pieces of line. They carried the bundles down to the main room. Carter was thankful that Tillman took Ortega’s body; he didn’t think he could have managed that.

  “I found two big stones,” Tillman gasped as he lurched toward the side door with his burden. “We’ll lash one to each and drop ’em into the water. I don’t know a better way—’specially with morning coming soon.”

  Tillman reconnoitered the fog to be sure no one was about. Then he motioned Carter outside. In the clammy darkness, they weighted the feet of the dead men and slipped the corpses into the water. Tillman stood up and wiped his palms on his trousers, murmuring. “If we’re lucky, the tide will take ’em a long way out after they rot a while.”

  Carter could only nod and stare into the heavy fog, which hid the water lapping just a couple of feet below the ramshackle pier. He saw Ortega. He saw the knife. He squeezed his eyes shut but still he saw them.

  Inside, Eben Royce poured rum for Phipps and the others. Then, still in an emotionless voice, he spoke so there would be no misunderstanding. “It had to be done, but it’s still against the law. So the safety of all of us depends on the silence of each of us.”

  “I’ll keep quiet!” Phipps exclaimed, bringing the dented pot of rum to his lips with both hands. Even grasping it that way, he could barely hold it still enough to drink.

  Royce looked at Carter with a strange, forbidding gaze. The crippled man was not the man Carter remembered. He was a little wild-eyed, yet chillingly calm as he nodded and said, “I know you will.”

  “So will I,” Josie said in a faltering voice. She sat limply at a table, wrapped in an old flannel robe. The rum had taken the edge off her hysteria, and she was watching the others in an almost childlike way, as if she still couldn’t believe the events of the past hour had taken place there in her room. They belonged in dark, late-night dreams.

  “We all have to watch what we say,” she added after a moment. “I guess that man—the little one, Ortega—still has friends on the docks.”

  “And the other one—” Carter began.

  “Sancosa,” Phipps said.

  Carter gave him a hard stare. “He has friends at the plant, I suppose.”

  “Nothing will happen if we all trust one another and keep our mouths shut,” Royce said. “Even if the bodies are found in the harbor in a few months, no one will connect them with this place so long as we don’t say anything.”

  “Someone told those two I was upstairs,” Carter said with another ferocious look at Phipps.

  “I had to!” Phipps cried. “They were going to kill me.”

  Carter didn’t believe that, but it no longer mattered. He just wanted to get out of this godforsaken place and go home and sleep for a year. He turned to Royce.

  “You can be sure about me, Eben. I won’t say anything.”

  Royce gave him a stare that made his spine crawl. “If you do, I’m done for.”

  “I won’t. I owe you my life.”

  “Pay the debt with your silence. And stay away from here from now on.”

  “But if I disappear from the plant, they’ll suspect something immediately.”

  Royce thought that over. “You’re right. Just stay away from this place, then.”

  Without looking at Josie, Carter nodded.

  There was silence again. Phipps
drank noisily from the pewter pot. Josie put her hands to her face and began to weep, long, racking sobs, like those of a scared child.

  Carter blinked and rubbed his eyes and noticed that the bottle-glass windows looked pale.

  Morning was coming. He wanted to forget this night. He knew he never would.

  “Well—” he began, extending his hand and realizing too late that he couldn’t shake Royce’s splayed fingers without embarrassing the man. Tillman bent over the serving counter, refusing to watch.

  Royce looked at him, though, and in those old, hurt eyes, Carter saw no one he recognized, only a faintly maniacal stranger.

  “Goodbye,” he whispered as he bolted for the door, never realizing how foolish and unnecessary the utterance was.

  iii

  He stood a few moments on the edge of the pier, facing the ocean.

  He could hear marine traffic out there: engines, bells, foghorns. But he saw nothing except the white veil of fog, and, due east above the unseen horizon, the hot white disk of the risen sun with its edge clearly defined. He was alone in an eerie white world, and he didn’t know how he could get through the next few days and weeks.

  But he would get through them. He had to in order to survive.

  The immediacy of the night’s events was lessening. The images were softening—blurring in memory like recollected nightmares. But he was still shaken to the marrow by what had happened, and while he stood silhouetted against the sun floating in the fog, the simple, stark meaning of what had happened came home to him: when you resorted to violence, you invited terror, and you took the most foolish of all chances. You exposed yourself to death. Young as he was, he had in one night come to an understanding of his own mortality—the kind of understanding most human beings didn’t reach until they were in their middle years. He understood the fragility of his own life—all life—and he knew how stupid he’d been ever to imagine that the violent atmosphere of the Red Cod was exciting.

  He wiped his mouth and stared into the strange glowing whiteness as if searching for the sunken bodies. He couldn’t see them, of course. He could barely see the water. But he would see them as long as he lived.

  As long as he lived.

  A sickening smell of fish surrounded him. He realized it was only imagination. Putting his stiff hands in his pockets and lowering his head so as not to be recognized, he turned and disappeared in the direction of the city, chastened and changed forever.

  CHAPTER XV

  A DETECTIVE CALLS

  i

  THE WEDDING TOOK PLACE as scheduled.

  Leo’s father, Efrem Goldman, had come with his son from his home in the ghetto of New York’s lower East Side. The Goldmans were met at the depot by Gideon’s largest and handsomest coach, a Brewster pulled by four matched bays. As Gideon had told Will, coaching was becoming a popular avocation among the well-to-do. It was also one of the few conspicuous displays of wealth that Gideon truly enjoyed—probably because he’d liked being around horses ever since his boyhood in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

  Carter was present for the ceremony, having just come home from another three-day absence without offering a word of explanation. He wore a sober black suit, which accentuated his pallor. The whole family noticed how haggard and tense he looked. He’d looked that way for the last couple of weeks in fact, but he had resisted all his stepfather’s attempts to question him.

  Will attended the ceremony, too, of course. So fascinated was he by Mr. Goldman’s black skullcap, fringed prayer shawl, and phylacteries, he paid hardly any attention to the words intoned by the justice of the peace. Earlier, Gideon had told his son that the pair of little leather cases, one worn on Mr. Goldman’s arm and one on his forehead, contained slips of paper inscribed with religious texts. The phylacteries were meant to remind the wearer to observe the laws of his faith—something that was particularly important to Mr. Goldman today, surrounded as he was by Protestants.

  He looked uncomfortable about that. But his daughter didn’t. Berthe Goldman, a fat, cheery spinster from Chicago, was the only one of Leo’s nine sisters to attend the wedding—the only one, apparently, who was willing to acknowledge that her brother was marrying one of the goyim. Will liked her. With her good humor, she seemed determined to make up for the absence of the other eight Goldmans.

  Leo looked fine in a new suit of dark wool, a white shirt, and black cravat. Eleanor had chosen an emerald silk travel dress with the requisite bustle, an item of feminine apparel Gideon found ridiculous, if not downright inhuman. Eleanor already had her valises packed. A buffet supper with champagne was to be served after the ceremony, and then the Brewster coach would whisk the newlyweds to the piers and a coastal ship for New York. By tomorrow evening they’d be steaming toward Europe and enjoying Cunard’s finest accommodations.

  The justice was droning: “—and so, by the authority vested in me by the Commonwealth—”

  Gideon’s eye wandered to the bridegroom. Leo was handsome almost to the point of prettiness. With massive shoulders, a slim waist, and hair and eyes nearly as dark as Carter’s, he definitely had the look of a leading man. He had a beautiful speaking voice, too, rich and deep. Eleanor said he could reach the highest gallery of any theater without strain.

  “—pronounce you husband and wife.”

  Efrem Goldman sniffed and rubbed his patched brown sleeve across his nose. Gideon was unexpectedly touched by the sight of his daughter enfolded in Leo’s arms there between the immense floral baskets Julia had ordered for the occasion. He started to wipe a tear from his good eye. Suddenly he felt Julia tug at his arm.

  “What is it?” he asked in a whisper.

  She pointed. He turned around to see Crawford standing at the parlor door. He was summoning Gideon with sharp, urgent gestures. Irked, Gideon stepped behind his wife’s chair and hurried out.

  In the foyer, the butler presented him to a pair of unexpected guests—a stocky man who identified himself as Detective Dennis O’Goff of the Boston police, and a burly uniformed officer whom O’Goff introduced as Sgt. Mulvihill. O’Goff looked to be in his late thirties, with a ruddy face, blue eyes so pale as to be almost colorless, and heavy inlays of gold in several front teeth. His suit was neat but of poor quality. He had a tough, hostile air about him.

  Gideon frowned at the intruders. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

  “Sorry to interrupt the festivities,” O’Goff said, turning the brim of his derby in his fingers. “But there’s a mistake here. Evidently this man didn’t listen—” The detective’s tone betrayed a bitter envy of the sumptuous surroundings in which he found himself—or so Gideon thought, anyway. O’Goff added, “I said I wanted to speak with Mr. Kent.”

  “But I’m—”

  “Mr. Carter Kent.”

  Gideon’s palms turned cold. “Yes, Crawford did misunderstand. Carter Kent is inside. What do you want with him?”

  O’Goff scowled, but he answered. “To ask him some questions.”

  “Can’t it wait a few hours?”

  “I’m afraid not,” the detective replied with a self-importance that annoyed Gideon even more. He signaled Crawford to close the parlor doors, then snapped, “I demand to know what this is all about.”

  A smug smile curved the detective’s mouth. His pale eyes danced in anticipation of the blow he was about to deliver to the highfalutin owner of this fancy Beacon Street house.

  “Happy to tell you, Mr. Kent. It’s about a dead body which was found floating in the harbor two nights ago. A Portugee chap. A bad actor. We’ve discovered that your son—”

  “Carter is my stepson, but go on.”

  O’Goff didn’t like being interrupted. “We’ve discovered that he knew the deceased. We think he may be able to shed some light on how he died. I don’t make this inquiry lightly, sir. Not lightly at all. It’s clear that the dead man came to a very violent end.”

  He obviously hoped to intimidate Gideon with the last remark. He succeeded.

 
ii

  When Carter was pulled aside at the end of the wedding ceremony, he knew something disastrous had happened. He soon found out what it was. The blankets in which Ortega had been wrapped had loosened much more quickly than Royce or the rest of them had counted on. The lines holding the stone had obviously loosened too, because the floating body had been found by the captain of a fishing smack returning to harbor from the Georges Bank.

  Because of Gideon’s name and position in the community, O’Goff didn’t take Carter to headquarters. But he did insist that other members of the family be absent during the interrogation. He closed the door of Gideon’s study and the uniformed officer placed himself in front of it, as if to make sure Carter understood he was a temporary prisoner.

  Carter understood all too clearly.

  Crossing the foyer with the policemen, he’d watched Eleanor’s face, and his mother’s; he’d seen the surprise and the uneasy suspicion there. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to look at Will. Inwardly, he was aching from tension.

  After the bloody night at the Cod, he’d gone back to his job without exciting any suspicion. Since Sancosa worked in another section of the plant, his disappearance wasn’t even mentioned by those with whom Carter worked. He had started to believe the whole matter had sunk from view just as those two hideous bodies had. And now this.

  “Well, now,” O’Goff said, dry-washing his hands as he stood before the chair in which he’d ordered Carter to be seated. A fire roared in the grate, and in seconds Carter’s face was shiny with perspiration. “Well,” O’Goff said again, keeping up that damnable schoolteacherish washing motion, “where shall we begin?”