Short story: The Warriors Wife

 


November, 1980. 

She keeps a black and white photo of them by the front door and she glances at it whenever she enters or leaves the house. It’s framed in silver and sits on a windows ledge, faced away from the sun. The photo was taken on the steps of the Trinity Catholic Church on N street on their wedding day. She was a nominal Episcopalian but he was a Catholic, a staunch Catholic, and although he insisted on virtually nothing in all the years he knew her, he refuse to marry outside the church.

She wrapped herself in a long, soft brown winter coat with a matching cashmere scarf, black leather gloves and locked the large red door behind her. She pulled the knob tightly, they’d been robberies in the neighborhood. Robberies and Georgetown are almost synonymous. She carefully and slowly made her way down the brick steps to the even sidewalk and strolled slowly down 28th Street. Lifting her coat collar against the wind.

They met on a blind date right after the Second war ended. She was a ne’er-do-well unpaid intern to a New York Senator. He was back in the states after four years in combat in Europe and was working for what was then a new and unknown government body called the National Intelligence Authority. They married a month later. She was 25, he was 30. They had one child, a small, dark haired gentle soul they named Dora but called Doe, their little Doe. She was born with epilepsy and anorexia and all of her short life was spent in and out of one hospital after another. She rarely knew a day without pain and suffering.

She took a right on Dumbarton, that wonderfully old and dignified street. The wind ceased and the dull winter sun peaked through a cloud. As always, she stopped and lifted her eyes to the tall windows of a magnificent Georgian where an ancient Beagle lay at his post on the floor, half-asleep soaking in the days first rays of the sun, one eye open. As he did every morning, he slowly raised himself up when he noticed her and pressed his nose to the bottom window pane. She waved to him. He sneezed a greeting back her and she continued on.

All of that seemed so long ago now, but it wasn’t. Not many years had passed since then, it just seemed as that way. But he was gone, their little Doe was gone, just memories now and when she thought often that after she was gone all of those memoires of them, the three of them, would disappear with her. 

It was Wednesday. The day the ladies met at a cozy new pastry shop on the far end of O Street in Georgetown. Well, new, the place had been there for over thirty years but the ladies had been a part of Georgetown for decades longer than that. She stopped at the crosswalk on Wisconsin Avenue, waited for the light and crossed.

The ladies were fiercely loyal to one another because they only had one another. It was difficult, no, impossible really, for any of them to build relationships of any kind in that life. The Life of a company family because balancing a life of secrecy in an open society is more work than its worth, so they, the people in that world, they close down, they shut down, they learn to block out others, to watch what they, to think before they speak and when it’s over and their husbands role in the missions were done forever they, the women of that generation, found themselves alone and isolated without friends, with no community that would understand them so they created their own. 

Their husbands had been a cold warriors from the first day they met them and they were their husband’s window dressing and they were good at what they did, skilled in fact and a learned and vital skill it is. Anyone could risk their lives and be a field operative with the company but it took a truly remarkable person to be a company wife. The wrong word at the wrong time in the wrong county could cost a life. They said that with a company wife the government got two employees for the price of one and it was true. Everything about them, their very identities are wrapped around their husbands and the company and the mission. 

There were times when, really, she didn’t know what role she was playing. When they were at a brief posting in Stockholm right after the war he told her they a Foreign Service family. She leaped in to each job title and role with her typical enthusiasm and charm, shoring up his weak cover and convincing many people that he was in fact what he said he was — a diplomat, a military attaché, a file clerk, whatever the job cover was. In Rome she immersed herself in the country’s language and religious and artistic heritage while he disappeared for days and sometimes weeks to prevent a Communist victory in Italian elections.

Inside the café, Betty Willoughby sat next to her, she always did. They knew from a posting in Peru, twenty or more years ago. More than that she thought. The countries all sort of blended together after a while. So did the years. Betty’s husband was gone to, heart attack a year after he retired.  She liked Betty. There was no pretense in her. Despite the demeanor of toughness around her, the years and the worry of all those years showed on her face. All the company wives eventually looked like that. 

 “Let’s see a show of hands.” Betty rasped “Did you ever turn on the washing machine because he couldn’t figure out how to do, but he needed it on to muffle his phone conversation?”

They all smiled and raised their hands.

“Mine preferred the blender” Mary Rose said.

“Running bath water” said another.

Angie Robins held her open palm up and said “Do you know where we went for our honeymoon? To Scandinavia. He said we would tour at the castles. And we did. At every stop his operatives picked up radio devices hidden in the car’s trunk. My honeymoon was a mission”

When it was her turn, she leaned forward into the table and recalled the time when he served as the station chief in Saigon during the America’s war years there and how she received her baptism under fire during one of the country’s seemingly endless unsuccessful coups. “Bullets whined through the windows. I barricaded Doe and I in the kitchen with the help. I had a loaded pistol in my house coat pocket. Me. A pistol. Can you imagine?”

 They all nodded. They’d all been there in one way or another, in some third world banana republic or another. 

She widen her eyes in wonder and added “I was holding a loaded revolver. We kept it under the mattress in case anything ever happened. Can you imagine? Me? With a big loaded gun?” 

What she didn’t say was that he wasn’t home because he was directing a counter coup from his office at the embassy. Nor would be home for two nights after the coup was defeated, its leaders executed.

“He sent us home after that. At the airport he told me "You should have probably married a guy from Columbus, Ohio, instead of me. You’d be living in Columbus now. He'd be devoted to you. You would go to the dances and play golf on weekends.” And then he shook his head and said “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all of this” 

What she didn’t tell them was that he looked like a lost boy when he spoke those words so she held his chin in her hand and he looked around in embarrassment and she leaned in close to him and said "But then we wouldn't have had Saigon, or Rome, or Venice or Washington. Or our Doe and I would not be married to a good and decent man and I would not be part of his noble mission” 

She didn’t have to share that part of it with them. They knew. They’d all spoken words like at point or another. 

Nor did she tell them that he stayed on for two more years after that and that she and Doe were alone again as they almost always were alone because he was almost always away, someplace and she never knew where away was or how long he would be there. So she faced increasing difficulties of caring for Doe who declined more and more with every passing day. And then one day Doe died as they expected she would and he was away so she was alone for that too. 

He had mentioned to her once, on a beach up in Maine one summer, that his heroes…he used the word pantheon instead of heroes, as only he would….were Richard the Lionhearted, Joan of Arc, and St. George the Dragon Slayer. It pleased her then and now that one of them was a woman although she didn’t understand that. All of them were warriors. That she understood. He was a warrior, a cold warrior. And all of them, like him, were zealots and she attributed that to his Irishness and Catholic upbringing, another thing she never really understood. 

His Catholic faith also the reason why he viewed the company as a kind of priesthood. It made sense those who knew him. He was a Midwestern Catholic. In fact he was almost the definition of the Midwestern Catholic. He said little regarding his work and nothing, ever, of his considerable accomplishments. He came from a long line of WASP educators on his father’s side and garden variety second generation Irish Catholic on his mother side which is what brought him to Notre Dame. 

She was Midwestern too, but he often scoffed at that and said that she may have been Ohio she not of Ohio. Her father ran one of the largest pharmaceutical in the world from an office in Cleveland and her Manhattan born parents, sent east as a teen to be educated for ten years, four at Middlebury, four at Wesleyan and two at Vassar where she took a masters in humanities. 

He adored John F. Kennedy. She recalled how they had stood in the audience at the young Presidents inauguration with clenched teeth and applauded wildly at Kennedy’s words "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty." He repeated the words often. It was his mantra she thought. But for all his worldliness he was remarkably naïve about politics. 

He did that lot, repeating the words of other. She remember the one time he did that and it sent chills up her spine. By then he had risen high in the company, in part because he deserved it and the company rewards its own and in part because he had simply outlasted everyone else. But he was an unwise choice for anything above an intelligence officer because he both lacked the political sense and failed to understand the importance of social skills necessary to navigate the very dangerous marble halls of Washington and because of that it eventually crashed in around him with the fall of Viet Nam. Then his nation, the nation that had called him a hero warrior, now called him a war criminal for the company did.

He was called him to testify on the Hill a dozen times. She saw it as more of a grilling, and they called him in a dozen times in one year, always making sure the media got the transcript early. She saw it as punishment, a humiliation lesson than anything else. It ripped her apart to watch what they did to him.

“They have no right” she said “No right” 

“The ends justified the means” he said to her “And if we had won, if Saigon had not fallen, none of this would have been an issue. But it is an issue because Americans don’t like losing, we don’t accept failure and somebody has to pay. I’m the somebody this time. It’s nothing personal.” 

“They have no right” she said.

He was watching television, an old black and white film. He pointed to the screen and said “Ever see this? The Third Man, Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten. Great film”

She absentmindedly looked at the screen for a moment and then back to him and said “We should hire a lawyer. We should….”

‘Shh-shhh” he cut her off and pointed at the screen. Orson Welles character was sitting high atop a Ferris wheel with Joseph Cotton’s character. When Welles character spoke her husband spoke the lines aloud along with him and didn’t miss a single word "Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me—would you really feel any pity if one of these dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 for every dot that stopped, would you really tell me to keep my money—or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?"

Day by day the attacks from the Congress and the media grew worse and he was increasingly unable to defend himself against it. He started to drink more. Finally, almost mercifully, the President himself fired him.  There were no ceremonies, no gold watch, no speeches and no words of appreciation. A clerk from the Chief of Staff’s office called and told him the President wanted his resignation.

A month later he left her for another woman, the former wife of an ambassador. They’d all know each other, off and on, over the years. It was sudden thing, there had been no secret dalliances. He was always loyal to her. And he didn’t leave her because the other woman offered something more or better, he left her because he was very good at making war all that came with it. But now there were no more wars, no more missions. It was time to change. To become someone else. She was part of a life that had been and was gone.

He took his new wife and moved out of Washington and retired to the life of a country squire in St. Michaels, sailing town in Southern Maryland. She never saw him again after that although he called one night, late one night. She asked what was wrong and said “Nothing, nothing is wrong. I just wanted to talk to you”

The words surprised her. The call surprised her. At his best he was clipped both in his speech and in his emotions, everything really. He was more British than English. It was almost impossible to engage him in a phone conversation but that night he talked for hours about everything and anything. He told her he was losing his memory and she said that it was age and he said “No, no it more than that” and then he asked if he had done enough for her.

“When?” she asked

“Always” he answered.

“Yes” she said because true or not she sensed it was something he needed to hear.

“Did I do enough for Doe?” he asked. “I was gone so much”

He had never discussed it before. They never really talked about her death. It happened, there was a funeral, and that was it. She was forgotten after that, by him anyway. 

“We did what we could” she answered and that was true.

He died a week later. He suffered a sudden heart attack and died in his boat, on the water. She held a memorial service for him at the National Cathedral. It was part of the mission. It’s the way things were done. The new wife didn’t attend although she had sent her an invitation to speak. The White House sent an emissary.

He didn’t leave much when he died. His cash assets amount to just under $2,400 and his most valued possession, a first edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T.E. Lawrence that they had bought together during a Sunday afternoon walk on the Strand in London. He read it so many times in so many different places that he could recite that to from memory.

Noon approached and the ladies ordered a bottle of wine and a tea sandwich platter of Ham, Brie and apple spread, Cucumber and Dutch Butter with Watercress and grilled shrimp with Ham Puree. 

 

 

Short Story: The last story.

 


Surprise, Arizona, 1984.

   John Dillinger eyed the heavy set man walk into park and continued to watch him as he passed the swings and the broken water fountain and made his way to bleachers and took a seat two rows down and just to the left of Dillinger. He studied the man. He had seen him several times that week.  He was too old to an FBI agent or cop.

   After a few minutes of sitting in silence the man turned, looked up at Dillinger and smiled and nodded towards the Little League players on the field.

   “Follow the game?” he asked.

   Dillinger shook his head “No, not much” and then pointed at the boy on first base “My grandson”

   They watched the game in silence for several minutes before Dillinger spoke.

   “You’ve been following me for close to two weeks. You know who I am” Dillinger said without taking his eyes from the game and then added “So who are you?”

   “I’m Ray Brennan.”

   Dillinger turned and looked Brennan over and asked “FBI?”

   “No” Brennan answered with a smile. “Reporter.  Chicago Tribune”

   Dillinger sighed and then nodded his head in the direction of his grandson and said “He’s never heard of John Dillinger. Doesn’t know a damn thing about him. You know what he does know?”

   Brennan smiled softly and shook his head.

   “He knows that if you hurt someone, you apologize. He knows God is good. He knows that he should love his country, be respectful to his parents. That stealing is wrong. So is lying and cheating. He knows those things because I taught him those things. He knows his grandfather is a decent guy, a guy who would never harm a soul.”

   He stopped talking and looked down at the sun baked blue paint on the bleacher and said “I disappeared fifty years ago. I haven’t robbed a bank or broken a law since….”

   He stopped to recall the dates and then continued “since we knocked off the Merchants National Bank in…………..” he voice trailed off and he searched his memory for the banks location.

   “South Bend, Indiana, June 5, 1934” Brennan added.

    They fell silent for a moment and then Brennan asked “Did you pay the FBI to let you disappear? What was the agent’s name?”

   They both knew the agents name and they both knew that asking was a reporter’s trick.

   “Purvis” Dillinger added. It felt good to say the name out loud.  “Special Agent Melvin Purvis. Did I pay him? No, Melvin Purvis was the straightest arrow ever made by God or man.” And then he shook his head, smiled and said “Did you know that the only federal charge ever made against me was that I drove a stolen car across state lines? When I broke out of that jail at Crown Point, Indiana.

   “March of 1934” Brennen added “I covered that story. You took a sheriff’s car and drove into Illinois.”

   “Based on that” Dillinger said “and just that, the FBI decided me to be Public Enemy Number One” He smiled at the memory of it.

   “Well” Brennan added slowly “That and you robbed at least two dozen banks and four police stations. You shot it out with federal agents, kidnapped two cops during a getaway and killed a third cop”

     Dillinger’s turned away quickly “I am sorry about that policeman.” He said “That was never supposed to have happened. But it did and I’m sorry for it” 

     They booth watched a boy swing desperately at a low pitch.

    “So what’s the story?” Brennan asked. “How did handsome and daring John Dillinger, Public Enemy Number One end up on a grandfather on a set of bleacher’s in Surprise Arizona?  How is it the world say’s your dead, shot down in an alley in Chicago, and yet, here you are?”

     “I don’t know much about it” Dillinger said “What I heard was that in the summer of 1934, a dirty cop in Chicago named Martin Zarkovic approached Agent Purvis and told him that he knew a woman named Anna Sage who was running a brothel and that one of her girls was seeing me as a regular.  This Anna Sage woman, from what I heard, was an illegal from some place in Europe, and was getting booted out of the country after a morals conviction the year before. She told Purvis that she could set me up for arrest if Purvis would assure her the deportation was called off.

   “There also the matter of the $70,000 reward money for your arrest.” Brennan added  “You remember how much $70.000 was back then?”

   “Oh yeah” Dillinger said “Big money”

   “Were you?” Brennan asked “Were you involved with one of her girls?”

    “Hell” Dillinger said “I never heard of no Anna Sage or nobody who worked for her.”

   “So you didn’t know Zarkovic the cop was Anna Sage’s partner in the brothel?”

   Dillinger leaned back slowly, smiled and said “I’ll be damned”

   “Agent Purvis took the bait.” Brennan continued “Anna Sage said she would have you bring her to the films at the old Biograph Theater on Clark. She would wear a red dress so Purvis could spot her in the crowd.”

   “But who was the guy they set up in my place?” Dillinger asked. He had waited half a century to learn that the answer.

   “A farm boy from down state Illinois named Jimmy Lawrence.” Brennan answered  “He’d knocked off a couple of gas stations, strictly small potatoes. Not to bright a kid.  Threw his money around at Anna Sage’s brothel.”

 Brennan stopped and looked at Dillinger’s face lined with age and said “He did look something like you. There was a similarity”

   A bat cracked on the field, there was cheering. They paused, watched for a second and returned to the conversation.

   “Purvis had a small army of agents with him waiting outside the theater.” Brennan said.  “When the film was over, Sage would walk with Dillinger. Purvis had told his men that he would light a cigar when he spotted Dillinger and on that signal they would draw their weapons and move in.”

   “And that’s when his Jimmy Lawrence fellow saw the agents, figured they were cops and ran for it down the alley next to the theater” Dillinger added “And Purvis shot him”

   “Well that’s what we wrote in the papers” Brennan said “What happened was that Jimmy Lawrence and Anna  Sage started walking down the street when the cop, Zarkovic, walked up behind Jimmy Lawrence, fired two shots into the back of his head. Lawrence fell face down into the alley entrance and then Zarkovic disappeared into the crowd with Anna Sage.  Purvis and his men rushed in, guns drawn, so everyone who was there, a crowd of at least a hundred folks,  assumed the FBI fired the shots because Dillinger had tried to escape down the alley. People see what they want to see.

    You can image how I surprised I was” Dillinger said “When I opened the morning paper the day after to read that I was, shot and killed by Special Agent Melvin Purvis of the FBI outside the Biograph theater”

   “I went to the morgue that morning” Brennan said “Jimmy Lawrence might have looked like you alive but as a cadaver, you two had nothing in common”

   “Is that so?” Dillinger asked.

   “Yeah” Brennan continued “Purvis explained the differences away as plastic surgery.  Most reporters bought the story after all it made good print. Shoot out with the law, dead bank robber.  But I didn’t but it . I went to the autopsy. I saw two pathologists examine Jimmy Lawrence before twenty medical students with a recording nurse in attendance. She wrote down every word for the final report  

   “And where’s the final report?” Dillinger asked.

   “Agent Purvis took it. And it was never seen again” Brennan answered.  But I got my hands on a copy. The nurse kept it. I’ve had it for almost fifty years”

   He reached into his pant pocket and took out a couple of sheets of folded paper and handed it to Dillinger “You can see for yourself, it says right there, the corpse had brown eyes”

   “Mine are blue” Dillinger said, looking over the report as he spoke. 

   “The four inch scar on your abdomen from your surgery in the navy wasn’t on the corpse. The bullet wound scars on your arms were missing. They measured the corpse at six foot four, a full six inches taller than you and it just went on from there”    

   “Fingerprints?” Dillinger asked.

   “Provided to the Coroner’s report by the FBI” Brennan said.

    Dillinger shook his head in disbelief.

 “So how did you end up here?” Brennan asked.

   “I waited a few weeks, you know, laid low” Dillinger said “The story disappeared from the papers and I figured ‘Hell, I must be dead” so I high tailed out of Chicago.  The FBI was happier than a pig in mud that I was gone.  It was for the best. Desperadoes like me were a dying breed. I suppose it was just a matter of time before they got me like got everybody else Ma Baker and her boys, Charlie Floyd, Nelson, all of em. It was for the best I disappeared.      

   “You were always down here? In Arizona?” Brennan asked.

   “At first I lived on an Indian Reservation in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Was there for a while. Then over to California for a bit and then made my way down to here when the war started, got a job at airplane assembly plant near Tucson. That was in the winter of 43. Stayed there, work’n on the line until 1973, retired. Full pension. Union too.  Got married back in 1950, good women, God rest her. I never told her more than what she needed to know. Two kids, two girls. You?”

   “Divorced” Brennan said as he lit a filter less cigarette. “No kids”

   “What happened to the woman, Anna Sage?” Dillinger asked.

   “Purvis had her deported back to Romania. She died right after the war.” Brennan answered.

   “And Zarkovic? The cop?”

   “With Anna gone, he took over the brothel for himself. A couple of years later he appointed chief of the East Chicago Police Department” Brennan said. “The FBI sent letters of recommendation”

   “Purvis?” Dillinger asked.

   “He shot himself through the head in 1959” Brennan answered “I heard he had some peccadilloes. He was being blackmailed. Seems you were the only one leading a double life”

   “And you” Dillinger asked “What made you find your way down here?”

   “After I saw the autopsy on Jimmy Lawrence I knew you were still alive. And I told my editor as much. I said “I want to go find John Dillinger.” Well he had a good laugh about that and he said “Kid, if you want to go find John Dillinger, by God, you go find John Dillinger”. And every editor since then said the same thing. So I went out and found John Dillinger”

   “It took you fifty years?” Dillinger asked.

   “Well you’re not an easy man to find. Worlds only travelling dead man.” Brennan said as he stood to his feet with a slight moan “Besides, it isn’t the story that makes the reporter, it’s the tenacity”

   Brennan looked at his watch.

   “How the hell did you did you find me?” Dillinger asked.

  “Tenacity” Brennan answered.

   “So” Dillinger said “I don’t suppose there’s any way I can get you not to file this story”

   “Nope” Brennan said “Not for love or money. That is if I had a place to file it. By the time I get back to Chicago tomorrow, they will have retired me from the paper”

   “How do you know?” Dillinger asked.

   “I’m a reporter” Brennan said “I find stuff out”

   “Well I’m sorry” Dillinger said. “That’s not anyway to treat man”

   Brennan nodded his head in gratitude and stared out into the field, way back to the outfield.

   “So now what?” Dillinger asked. “What happens next?”

   “We watch the rest of the game and leave the past behind us” Brennan replied. 

Short Story: The Mistake

 


 Louie the peach, Peachy they called him, was a half-assed, knock-around wise guy who had lived in town his entire for the entire 72 years of his life. He had been Made into the mob decades ago, just in time for the federal government to finally snap itself out of its trance and start a war against the mob on a national level, destroying it within ten years.

As a young man, Louie the peach watched in awe as bosses, big bosses long thought to be untouchable, fell one by one, sent to prison for the remainder of their lives. He watched as others simply turned informant while droves of tough guys faded into the abyss. 

In the end, when it was over, Louie the Peach, was left with hacking out a living in low-level scams and running a chop shop out of the garage in his house, under the guise of a used car dealership. He never married. He vacationed in Florida once a year and he played the lottery daily. You never know.

It happened that one Monday evening Louie was having his dinner at the Valley Diner when he felt someone staring at him. He looked across the counter and saw Butch Rienno, a mob big shot out of New Haven, smiling at him. He knew Rienno from around, he was a boss and although Louie the Peach had seen him plenty of over the years, he never spoke to him nor had any dealings with him but only because Rienno worked out of New Haven. They were about the same age, in fact, they looked alike, both short, stocky, bald and wore their ill-fitting clothes with a sort of resentment.

Rienno locked eyes with Peachy and whispered, “You know who I am right?”

“Sure” the Peach answered “Of course”

Without looking up from his coffee, Rienno continued in his hushed voice “Lower your eyes, don’t look at me, just listen.”

“Okay,” the peach responded and lowered his gaze to the counter.

“You speak Italian?”

“Me?” the peach asked.

“Who in the hell would I be asking that too?”

“Um…I…I use to…when I was a kid….I”

“Never mind, never mind….just listen. There is a pair of car keys next to my cup. You see them? Okay. I’m gonna leave. When I do, you wait for an hour. Take the keys and go out to the blue caddy. Get in, drive to your place, your chop shop operation. Park in there. Once you are inside, open the trunk. There are some objects in there. Take em out and hide em. Then chop the car. We’ll contact you for them in six weeks, maybe more”

Then the portly hood pushed himself off of the stool and waddled out the door into the parking lot and climbed into the passenger side of a red caddie that then sped away”

So the Peach did what he was told. He sat at the counter waiting for an hour to pass. He didn’t want to, but he did. It was about a half an hour into the wait when the waitress turned up the volume on the television set that was attached to the wall over the cash register.

“We interrupt our regular programming to report this breaking story happening now in Birmingham. Connecticut State Police and agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigations have killed alleged New Haven-based Mafia Capo Butch Rienno in a gunfight which occurred roughly thirty minutes ago.

The melee started when a Birmingham police officer pulled the car that Rienno was riding in for having without dated plates. The Police have confirmed that the car’s driver, alleged organized crime member Robert “Bobby Boy” Donato drew a gun on the officer while attempting to speed away. Both Donato and Rienno were killed in the ensuing gun fight.

The FBI confirmed that Butch Rienno is their primary suspect in the Thayer Gallery art robbery. The FBI believes that Rienno had an overseas buyer for stolen high-end paintings through a fence in Europe who would sell the goods to buyers in France. Based on that, the bureau speculates, the Mob’s bosses had given Rienno permission to rob the Thayer Gallery in New Haven last month. The stolen works have a value of at least $500,000,000 making that robbery is the largest art heist in history. More on this later”

“Wow!” a voice bellowed out from directly behind the Peach who turned, startled. It was a cop staring up at the screen. The cop looked down at Peaches pale white face and realizing he had nearly given him a heart attack the cop placed his shoulder on Peaches shoulder and said 500 million! Imagine that? How’d you like to get your hands on some of those paintings?”

The Peach panicked. It was a set-up. They had been watching.

“I didn’t have nothing to do with it” he bellowed and threw up his hands.

“Yeah, me either”, said the cop with a wink and then turning his attention to a house painter who walked in the door said “O’Donnell!” and walked away to greet the man.

The Peach was rattled.

“Now what?” he mumbled. He looked out the window and across the parking lot to the Blue Caddy. It took him two seconds to decide that he wasn’t getting into that car. The feds were probably all over it, watching with binoculars from nearby rooftops. A sharpshooter would kill the second he placed the key in the ignition. Then he’d be standing in front of Satan with fire all over the place.

“I’ll go to hell” he whispered.

“We’ll still find you in hell” The Peach turned his head and look at Butch Rienno sitting in the stool next to him. There was a large bullet hole in his forehead. “You got your orders. From me. A Capo. Do what you're told. Because when we come to collect those object we entrusted to you and there not there….oh Mama Mia”

“Yeah, but your dead” Peach said.

“Yeah, I’m dead but not the hundred other guys in this operation we got here. You know how many of them are going to come out of the woodwork looking for those object we got stashed in that car?”

“No” the Peach shrugged.

“All of them. Plus a couple of hundred wise guys from down New York. And when you tell them “I don’t have what you want”….. oh Madone! You’re gonna wish you went to hell”

“What’s in the trunk?” he asked.

“Oh not much, about a half billion in artwork. It got misplaced into the trunk from the Thayer Gallery”

“How’d it get misplaced in the truck?”

“It leaped in on its own. It’s very motivated art I stole it, how do you think it got there? That cop and that guy are looking at you”

Peach moved his gaze from Butch Rienno, and his bullet wound and caught the cop and O’Donnell the painter looking over at him. He nodded, smiled and returned his gaze to Butch Rienno’s bullet wound.

“Does that hurt?”

“What’s that?”

Peach pointed a finger to the large bullet hole in Rienno’s forehead head.

Rienno narrowed his eyes and then felt around his face until he found the hole with his palm.

“Oh that!” he smiled “Naw, not really….a little bit, but, truthfully, it went in and out so fast, I didn’t feel anything. It doesn’t look so good though does it?”

“Well, you know” the Peach lied “As far as bullet holes go, it’s not bad. I seen worser”

“Look kiddo,” Rienno said in a fatherly tone “We brought that art stuff up here because New Haven is real hot right now. You got ten million thousand FBI looking around rocks for these painting because, and may I add unbeknownst to me, several of them were on loan from some country with like, Chinese people in it, something like that. So we brung it up here because it's too hot to take anywhere else and the cops would never think of coming to this one horse town to look for anything”

The hoodlum stopped speaking and looked across the counter at the pie display. “I wish I could have a piece of that”

“Go ahead” the Peach answered “I’ll buy it for you. Go ahead. I didn’t know ghosts could eat”

“They can’t. But I’m not a ghost. I’m your conscious. Big difference. Rienno replied tiredly “I’m here because your over-stressed. Ghosts show up because…..I don’t know why ghosts show up, anyways, look at the situation. If you go out there and get into the car and take off one of two things is gonna happen. One, nothing will happen. You go home stash the painting like I told you, few months, some very grateful New York guys show up hand you fortune in cash and you’re in the shade with them for the rest of your life. Or, two, you start to drive away, and the FBI nabs you before you could blink. But that’s not gonna happen and I’ll tell you why. They want the paintings, not you. Right now, as far as the feds are concerned they got their guy…..me…..now they paintings. What happens next is up to you.”

The Peach weighed both arguments, turned to dead Butch Rienno and asked: “You com’n with me?”

Rienno shrugged “What choice do I have?”

The ride to his grey ranch house at the end of Oak Lane was uneventful. No cops, no FBI, no problems. He pulled into his garage where he had torn apart hundreds of cars over the past and sold them for parts.

He climbed out of the blue caddie, waddled to the back of the car and before opening the trunk, he reconsidered and walked over to hidden drawer on his walk bench and took out a .38 revolver he kept hidden there and returned to the trunk.

Butch Rienno reappeared standing next to him, staring at the trunk.

“You gonna shot the trunk? Put it out of its misery?” he asked

Holding the pistol in his right hand and aiming dead ahead he opened the trunk with his right hand and when it popped open he took a giant step backward. Lying in the truck were a dozen or more painting, some rolled up, others lying flat. The Peach walked back to the car and looked over each painting. They were heavier than he thought they looked.

“Sirens.” he said

“Lots of them. Four at least, maybe six,” added Butch Rienno “Headed down a dead end street.

“It’s a raid.” The Peach said. His breath was short. His heart started to pound.

“The FBI.” Rienno “They are to you.”

“No!” the Peach screamed “They were on to you! They must have had a tail on you

when you was in the diner.”

The Peach did a quick calculation of the number of crimes committed in stealing the painting. It added u to a minimum 25 years in federal prison.

“Twenty-five years ain’t all that bad,” Rienno said.

“Not when your 72 years old” The Peach yelled back and then he really, really panicked.

He had two options. Become forty years young or destroy the evidence. He decided to destroy the evidence, 13 magnificent works of art that will never be replaced and when he lit the match the Gods gasped and then they cried.

What Louie the Peach learned that night was that 500-year-old art works burns very fast. In a matter of seconds, flames engulfed the pictures and destroyed them. One particularly hot spark flew

The city fire department gave Louie the Peach of commendation for gallantry in assisting them in fighting the fire that destroyed his house, garage and car. The fire chief made a solemn apology for not arriving to the scene early so they could have kept the electric power fire from burning his home. Someone, deeply moved that a man of Louie’s age should have to start over again, set up a go-fund me page that brought him $50,000.

The insurance companies representing the utility company, under intense public scrutiny, settled the case without an investigation and handed Louie several million dollars for the destruction of, as his lawyer put “His beloved and much bemoaned domicile” and the loss of six stolen cars that he was in the midst of chopping down for scrap and parts when the fire and a very good lawyer miraculously converted them into “irreplaceable used cars”.

 

 

 

 

Jean Tinguely

 

Jean Tinguely (22 May 1925 – 30 August 1991) was a Swiss sculptor best known for his kinetic art sculptural machines (“metamechanics”) that extended the Dada tradition into the later part of the 20th century. Tinguely's art satirized automation and the technological overproduction of material goods.

 





Holden and the Central Park Carousel

 

When JD Salinger (Who grew up in the 1930s across the street from Central Park) wrote about the parks Carousel in his 1951 novel Catcher in the Rye, the ride was relatively new to the park. That is to say, it was the latest installation of the ride. Four other carousels versions had stood exact on the site since 1871, although the 1951 version was the only one built within a covered structure.

Actually, Salinger was probably referring to the carousel, one of the largest in the US, of his childhood since he had started writing the novel in the late 1930s. That version of the ride burned down in 1950 as did the prior version in 1924.

Today’s version of the ride was made by Solomon Stein and Harry Goldstein in 1908. It was originally installed in the trolley terminal on Coney Island in Brooklyn, where it operated until the 1940s.

Over 250,000 people ride the carousel every year.

 








 

Excerpted from Catcher in the Rye

After we left the bears, we left the zoo and crossed over this little street in the park, and then we went through one of those little tunnels that always smell from somebody's taking a leak. It was on the way to the carrousel. Old Phoebe still wouldn't talk to me or anything, but she was sort of walking next to me now. I took a hold of the belt at the back of her coat, just for the hell of it, but she wouldn't let me. She said, "Keep your hands to yourself, if you don't mind." She was still sore at me. But not as sore as she was before. Anyway, we kept getting closer and closer to the carrousel and you could start to hear that nutty music it always plays. It was playing "Oh, Marie!" It played that same song about fifty years ago when I was a little kid. That's one nice thing about carrousels, they always play the same songs.

"I thought the carrousel was closed in the wintertime," old Phoebe said. It was the first time she practically said anything. She probably forgot she was supposed to be sore at me.

"Maybe because it's around Christmas," I said.

She didn't say anything when I said that. She probably remembered she was supposed to be sore at me.

"Do you want to go for a ride on it?" I said. I knew she probably did. When she was a tiny little kid, and Allie and D.B. and I used to go to the park with her, she was mad about the carrousel. You couldn't get her off the goddam thing.

"I'm too big." she said. I thought she wasn't going to answer me, but she did.

"No, you're not. Go on. I'll wait for ya. Go on," I said. We were right there then. There were a few kids riding on it, mostly very little kids, and a few parents were waiting around outside, sitting on the benches and all. What I did was, I went up to the window where they sell the tickets and bought old Phoebe a ticket. Then I gave it to her. She was standing right next to me. "Here," I said. "Wait a second--take the rest of your dough, too." I started giving her the rest of the dough she'd lent me.

"You keep it. Keep it for me," she said. Then she said right afterward--"Please."

That's depressing, when somebody says "please" to you. I mean if it's Phoebe or somebody. That depressed the hell out of me. But I put the dough back in my pocket.

"Aren't you gonna ride, too?" she asked me. She was looking at me sort of funny. You could tell she wasn't too sore at me anymore.

"Maybe I will the next time. I'll watch ya," I said. "Got your ticket?"

"Yes."

"Go ahead, then--I'll be on this bench right over here. I'll watch ya." I went over and sat down on this bench, and she went and got on the carrousel. She walked all around it. I mean she walked once all the way around it. Then she sat down on this big, brown, beat-up-looking old horse. Then the carrousel started, and I watched her go around and around. There were only about five or six other kids on the ride, and the song the carrousel was playing was "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." It was playing it very jazzy and funny. All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she'd fall off the goddam horse, but I didn't say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them.

When the ride was over she got off her horse and came over to me. "You ride once, too, this time," she said.

"No, I'll just watch ya. I think I'll just watch," I said. I gave her some more of her dough. "Here. Get some more tickets."