Hot Night in the City Read online

  Hot Night in the City

  Trevanian

  Wide-ranging in setting and tone, yet linked by their sense of irony and reverence for the past, these 13 short stories reflect in miniature the pseudonymous Trevanian's chameleonic career as a genre-defying author of popular fiction (Shibumi; Incident at Twenty-Mile). Most of the tales take place in pre- and post-WWII urban environments, most notably the title story, which features a lonely girl dressed up like June Allyson and a gentlemanly stalker who imitates Jimmy Stewart and W.C. Fields. Trevanian tells the story twice, the first version introducing the volume, the second ending it; each has a different denouement, but both are tragic. A similar period mustiness permeates "Snatch Off Your Cap, Kid!"Aan ode to the tramps and hobos of bygone days; "After Hours at Rick's," an evocation of the timeless, edgy ennui of last call at a pick-up bar; and "The Sacking of Miss Plimsoll," the story of an unusual relationship between a bestselling author and his literary secretary. Basque country serves as the backdrop for two of Trevanian's tales: a young couple come together in a light romantic farce entitled "The Engine of Fate," and a village idiot improves his lot in life by pretending that he has a fortune to bequeath in "That Fox-of-a-Be?at." The author ventures even farther afield with "Easter Story," set in ancient Rome and detailing Pontius Pilate's first meeting with Jesus, and with a retelling of the wise and witty Onondaga creation parable "How the Animals Got Their Voices." Though he employs a number of hoary devices to achieve his effects, Trevanian can be an engaging storyteller, with a knack for getting inside his characters' heads.

  Trevanian

  Hot Night In The City

  TO ALEXANDRA

  Without whose patience, faith, and inspired insights this book could not have been written

  CONTENTS

  Hot Night in the City

  Minutes of a Village Meeting

  Snatch Off Your Cap, Kid!

  The Sacking of Miss Plimsoll

  How the Animals Got Their Voices

  After Hours at Rick's

  That Fox-of-a-Beñat

  Mrs McGivney's Nickel

  Sir Gervais in the Enchanted Forest

  Easter Story

  The Engine of Fate

  The Apple Tree

  Hot Night in the City II

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  HOT NIGHT IN THE CITY

  There were only three passengers on the last bus from downtown: a man, a woman, and a bum. The slim young man sat alone at the back of the bus because he had an instinctive mistrust of men in uniform, even bus drivers. Unable to sleep because of the heat and a relentless gnawing in the pit of his stomach, he had left the flophouse and deposited his bindle in a bus station locker so he could wander the streets unencumbered. The young woman sat close up behind the driver clutching her handbag to her lap, her knees pressed together and her gaze fixed on the nippled rubber floormat to avoid making eye contact with the old bum who sat across from her, smelling of piss and sweat and waking up with a moist snort each time the bus hit a pothole or lurched to miss one.

  An oppressive heat wave had been sapping the city for over a week. Not until after midnight was it cool enough for people to go out and stroll the streets for a breath of air. In the stifling tenements that separated air-conditioned downtown from the breezy suburbs, kids were allowed to sleep out on fire escapes, sprawled on sofa cushions. On the brownstone stoops down below, women in loose cotton house dresses gossiped drowsily while men in damp undershirts sucked beers. At the beginning of the heat wave, people had complained about the weather to total strangers with a grumpy comradeship wrought of shared distress, like during wars or floods or hurricanes. But once the city's brick and steel had absorbed all the heat it could hold and began to exhale its stored-up warmth into the night, the public mood turned sullen and resentful.

  The bus crawled through tenement streets that were strangely dark because people left the lights off to keep their apartments cooler, and many streetlights had been broken by bands of kids made miserable and mutinous by the heat. But the interior of the bus was brightly lit, and it made the young man uncomfortable to be moving through dark streets in a glass specimen case with everyone looking at him from out there in the dark. All the bus windows were open to combat the heat, but the breeze was so laden with soot that it was gritty between his teeth, so he reached up and snapped shut the window in front of his seat. An advertising placard in the arch of the roof assured him that he could improve his chances of success by 25%, 50%, 75%... Even More... by Building a Powerful Vocabulary the Amazing Word-Wizard Way! Money Back If Not Totally Delighted! Let Words Unlock Your Buried Inner Potential! My inner potential must be buried pretty goddamn deep, he thought. He'd been on the drift for two years now, ever since he'd brought his participation in the Korean Police Action to an informal end.

  The girl at the front tugged the slack cord, and a deformed ding brought the bus to a lurching stop. The young man slipped out through the back accordion doors as the girl thanked the driver and stepped down from the front of the bus. With a swirl of dust and litter, the bus drove off, carrying the snorting drunk into the night.

  She walked towards the only unbroken streetlight on the block, tottering a little because she was unaccustomed to high heels. When her ankle buckled, she looked back at the sidewalk with an irritated, accusing frown, as though she had tripped over something. That was when she noticed him.

  It occurred to the young man that she might think he was following her, and the last thing he wanted was to frighten her, so he put his hands in his pockets and began to whistle to show that he wasn't trying to sneak up on anybody or anything. It was the theme from The Third Man, a film he had seen six times in one day when he'd gone into a narrow, fleabag movie house one rainy afternoon to get some sleep but, fascinated, had stayed until the theater closed after midnight. He could recite the whole 'cuckoo clock' speech by heart, and in Welles's voice, too.

  It was obvious from the rigidity of the girl's back as she increased her pace that his whistling wasn't putting her at ease. And why should it? he asked himself; she probably listened to the eerie tales of The Whistler on the radio. The boy got a real surprise when she reached the streetlight and turned on him. "You better not try anything!" Her voice was reedy with tension. "This is an Italian neighborhood!"

  The boy held up his palms in surrender. "Whoa there, ma'am," he said in his moistly toothless Gabby Hayes's voice. "You ain't got no just cause to go chucking a whole passel of I-talians at me." But she didn't find that funny. The streetlight directly overhead turned her eyes into gashes of shadow beneath vivid brows; only the tips of her lashes shone, mascara'd with light. He smiled and said in his stammering Jimmy Stewart voice, "Look, I'm... I'm just terribly sorry if I frightened you, Miss. But I want you to know that I wasn't following you. Well, yes, yes, I was following you, I suppose. But not on purpose! I was just, sort of, well... walking along. Lost in daydreams. Just... just lost in daydreams, that's what I was. Look, why don't I just... just... turn around and go the other way? It's all the same to me, 'cause I'm not going anywhere special. I'm just... you know... sort of drifting along through life."

  She still didn't smile, although it was a great Jimmy Stewart, if he did say so himself. She continued to stare at him, frightened, tense; so he made a comic little salute and walked up the street, away from her. Then he turned back. "Excuse me, my little chickadee, but you said something that tickled my cur-i-osity." He dragged out the syllables in the nasal, whining style of W. C. Fields. They were talking across a space of perhaps ten yards, but it was well after midnight and the background growl of downtown traffic was so distant that they could speak in normal tones. "Pray tell me, m'dear. Why did you warn me that this is an I-talian neighborhood. Just
what has that—as the ancient philosophers are wont to wonder—got to do with anything?" W. C. Fields tapped the ashes from his imaginary cigar and waited politely for her answer.

  She cleared her throat. "Italians aren't like most city people. They have family feelings. If a woman screams, they come running and beat up whoever's bothering her."

  "I see," W. C. drawled. "A most laudable custom, I'm sure. But one that would be pretty hard on a fellow unjustly accused of being a mugger, like yours truly." She smiled at the W. C. Fields, so he kept it up. "You are, I take it, a woman of I-talian lineage?"

  "No. I live here because it's safer. And cheap."

  He chuckled. "You've told me more than you meant to," he said in his own voice... well, the made-up voice he used for everyday.

  She frowned, and the steep-angled light filled her forehead wrinkles with shadow. "What do you mean?"

  "You've told me that you live alone, and that you don't have much money. Now I wonder if you'd be kind enough to tell me one other thing?"

  "What's that?" she asked suspiciously, but already the first spurt of adrenaline was draining away.

  "Is there someplace around here where I could get a cup of coffee?"

  "Well... there's a White Tower. Four blocks down and one over."

  "Thanks." His eyes crinkled into a smile. "You know, this is a strange scene. I mean... really strange. Just picture it. Our heroine descends from a bus, right? She is followed by a young man, lost in vague daydreams. She suddenly turns on him and threatens to Italian him to death. Surprised, bewildered, dumbfounded, nonplussed, and just plain scared, he decides to flee. But curiosity (that notorious cat killer) obliges him to stop, and they chat, separated by yards of sidewalk that he hopes will make her feel safe. While they're talking, he notices how the overhead street lamp glows in her hair and drapes over her shoulders like a shawl of light. ...A shawl of light. But her eyes... her eyes are lost in shadow, so he can't tell what she's thinking, what she feels. The young hero asks directions to a coffee shop, which she obligingly gives him. Now comes the tricky bit of the scene. Does he dare to invite her to have a cup of coffee with him? They could sit in the Whitest of all possible Towers and while away a few hours of this stifling hot night, talking about... well, whatever they want to talk about. Life, for instance, or love, or maybe—I don't know—baseball? Finally the drifter summons the courage to ask her. She hesitates. (Well, come on! What young heroine wouldn't hesitate?) He smiles his most boyish smile. (I'm afraid this is my most boyish smile.) Then the girl— Well, I'm not sure what our heroine would do. What do you think she would do?"

  She looked at him, mentally hefting his intent. Then she asked, "Are you an Englishman?"

  He smiled at the abrupt non sequitur. "Why do you ask?"

  "You sound like Englishmen in the movies."

  "No, I'm not English. But then, you're not Italian. So we're even. Well... I'm even. Even-tempered, even-handed, and even given to playing with words. But you? You're not even. You're most definitely odd."

  "What do you mean, odd?"

  "Oh, come on! Accepting an invitation for coffee with a total stranger is pretty goshdarned odd, if you ask me."

  "I didn't say I'd go for coffee with you."

  "Not in words maybe, but... say, which way is this White Tower of yours, anyway?"

  "Back the way we came."

  "Four blocks down and one over, I believe you said."

  They walked down the street side by side, but with plenty of space between them, and he kept up a light trickle of small talk, mostly questions about her. She soon warmed to his light, smiling tone because she was lonely and eager to talk to somebody. He learned that she had been in the city only six months, that she had come from a small town upstate, and that she had a job she didn't like all that much. No, she didn't wish she'd stayed in her hometown. Oh sure, she got the blues sometimes, but not bad enough to want to go back there. At the next corner, she turned unexpectedly in the direction of the all-night coffee joint, and their shoulders touched. They both said "Sorry," and they walked on, closer now, but she was careful not to let their shoulders touch again as they approached the White Tower, a block of icy white light in the hot night.

  It was pretty full, considering the late hour. The air-conditioning had attracted people driven off the street by the heat. In the booth next to theirs, a young couple fussed over three kids wearing pajamas and unlaced tennis shoes. The baby slept in the woman's arms, its mouth wetly pressed against her shoulder. The other two made slurping noises with straws stuck into glasses of pale tan crushed ice from which the last bit of cola taste had long ago been sucked. Among the refugees from the heat wave, the boy recognized several night people by the way they hunched defensively over the cups of coffee that represented their right to stay there. They were his sort of people: the flotsam that collects in all-night joints; the losers and the lost; those on the drift, and those who'd been beached; nature's predators, nature's prey.

  Mugs of coffee between them, the boy and the girl talked; and when their talk waned or their thoughts wandered inward, as sometimes they did, they gazed out onto the empty street lit only by the bright splash from their window. Once he caught her examining his reflection in the glass. Her eyes saw his looking back at her and they flinched away. He hadn't had a real chance to see what she looked like out in the darkness, so he made a quick appraisal of her reflection. She was young and slim, but not pretty. Her face had a bland, peeled look. But her eyes were kind and expressive, and they were set off by long, soft lashes that were her only natural ornament. He was careful not to compliment her on her eyes, however, because saying a girl has nice eyes is an admission she isn't good-looking; it's something like describing a person with no sense of humor as 'sincere', or saying a really dull girl is a 'good listener'. Her shoulder-length hair was curled in at the ends and, with her short bangs, it made a frame that emphasized the blandness of her face. She had gone out that night in a stiff cotton frock with little bows at the shoulders, a full skirt held out by a rustling crinoline, and a matching bolero jacket. There was something odd about her clothes... like she had borrowed them from someone who was not quite her size.

  Then it hit him: June Allyson!

  Every major film actress had her characteristic makeup, hairdo, and wardrobe that girls imitated, each following the style of her 'favorite movie star': meaning the actress she thought she most closely resembled. For girls with too much face, there was the 'Loretta Young look'; for hard-faced girls, the 'Joan Crawford look'; for skinny-faced girls, there was Ida Lupino; for chubby-faced girls, Mitzi Gaynor or Doris Day; and for terminally plain girls there was always Judy Garland, who had to rely on her cornball, moist-eyed, hitch-in-the-voice earnestness.

  This girl's scanty bangs and under-roll hairdo, together with her girl-next-door cotton dress and matching jacket, told him that she had chosen June Allyson as her 'favorite'. He thought it was sad that she'd settled for June Allyson who, with her flat face, shallow eyes, and lisping overbite, was among the plainest of the popular actresses. A real girl-next-door, for crying out loud.

  "That's a lovely dress," he said with gravity.

  She smiled down at it. "I got all dressed up and went to the movies tonight. I don't know why. I just..." She shrugged.

  "A June Allyson movie?" he asked.

  "Yes. I'd been waiting to see—" Her eyes widened. "How did you know?"

  He slipped into his Bela Lugosi voice. "I know many things, my dear. I have powers beyond those of your ordinary, everyday, run-of-the-mill, ready-to-wear, off-the-shelf human being."

  "No, come on, really. How did you know I went to a June Allyson movie?"

  He smiled. "Just a lucky guess." Then he popped back into the Lugosi voice, "Or maybe not! Maybe I was lurking outside the movie house, and I followed you onto the bus, stalking my prey!" He shifted to Lionel Barrymore, all wheezy and avuncular, "Now just you listen to me, young lady! You've got to be careful about letting bad boys pick you up
and carry you off to well-lit dens, where they ply you with stimulants... like caffeine."

  She laughed. "Well, you're right, anyway. I did go to a June Allyson movie. She's my favorite."

  "No kidding?"

  "It was Woman's World. Have you seen it?"

  "Afraid not."

  "Well, there's these three men who are after this swell job, but only one of them can have it. And their wives are trying to help them get it, and..."

  "...and June Allyson is the nicest of the wives? A smalltown girl?"

  "That's right, and she— Wait a minute! You said you haven't seen it."

  "Another lucky guess." Then back into the Lugosi voice. "Or was it? You must never trust bad boys, my dear. They may smile and seem harmless, but underneath...? Churning cauldrons of passion!"

  She waved his nonsense away with a flapping motion of her hand: an old-fashioned, small-town, June Allyson gesture. "Why do you call yourself a bad boy?"

  "I never said that," he said, suddenly severe.

  "Sure, you did. You said it twice."

  He stared at her for a moment... then smiled. "Did I really? Well, I guess that makes us a team. I'm the bad one, and you're the odd one. Riffraff, that's what we are. Tell you what: you be riff, and I'll be raff, okay?" Then Amos of Amos 'n' Andy said, "So elucidate me, Missus Riff. What am yo' daily occupational work like?"

  She described her work at a JC Penney's where Weaver Overhead Cash Carriers zinged on wires, bringing money and sales slips up to a central nest suspended from the ceiling, and the change came zinging back down to clerks whom the company didn't trust to handle money. She worked up in the cashier's cage, making change and zinging it back down. "...but most of the stores have modernized and gotten rid of their cash carriers."

  "And what if your store modernizes and gives up Mr Weaver's thingamajig—"

  "Overhead Cash Carrier."

  "...Overhead Cash Carrier. What happens to your job then?"