Hot Night in the City Read online

  It was widely accepted that old Beñat was a distant and maybe oblique member of the snooty Hastoy clan, their overweening pride being the reason they had cast him out and now denied him. After all, what family likes to admit being related to an idiot, even a rich one? To be sure, whenever anyone suggested to Beñat that he was a Hastoy, he denied it with a grin. But what credence is to be given to the word of an idiot? And what significance must one give to that grin? Eh? Eh? And whenever a Hastoy was confronted with the question of relationship, he denied it with an angry vehemence that would make anyone suspicious. Obviously a sore point.

  One afternoon, some men giving themselves a little rest from life's cares at Mayor Aramburu's café/bar saw old Beñat pass the window with his jerky, uncoordinated stride.

  "Eh-ho!" the witty and teasing Zabala-One-Leg called out. "Come join us for a drink, Beñat!" And everybody laughed.

  "No thank you, sir," old Beñat responded, grinning and nodding as idiots do on such occasions.

  "Don't you like wine?" another wag asked, winking at his fellows.

  "It is too expensive for me, sir," the idiot answered, standing at the entrance but not entering, for he was shy of the company of gentlemen with fine work clothes.

  Everyone laughed and several eyelids were tugged down at this well-known bit of cupidity.

  "Say, where have you been, Beñat?" a young shepherd asked. "I've not seen you for a week."

  "Ah, sir, as for that, I have been walking."

  "Oh? Whither?"

  "As the road took me, sir. From stone wall to stone wall."

  "All the way to Paris?"

  "Paris? Paris? Well... I suppose that's possible, sir."

  "On business, were you?"

  "Business, sir?"

  "Harken, old man. Don't make too many sous. They will only end up in Hastoy pockets."

  "My sous? In the pockets of the Hastoys? But I don't understand. Why will that be so, sirs?"

  "It is ever so. The family inherits. Unless you make a will with Maître Etchecopar to the contrary. What's wrong, Beñat? Don't you want your money to go to the Hastoys?"

  "Well... no. No, I need my few sous."

  "For what?" the young wit cried. "To buy onions?"

  Everyone laughed when old Beñat said, "Just so, sir. To buy onions."

  "Well, Beñat," Mayor Aramburu said from his throne behind the bar, "if you don't want your money to go to the Hastoys, you'd better make your will with Maître Etchecopar next Thursday."

  "If you say so, sir. But... what is a will?"

  "A will is a thing you make with a lawyer when you think you are going to die," informed the mayor, who not only had a telephone, but who also read the newspaper all day long behind his bar and therefore was—after our priest, of course—the most knowledgeable man in the village.

  Old Beñat's face twisted with the effort to comprehend this. At last he said, "Then, yes, I must make a will. For I have a feeling I shall die soon. Well, thank you, sirs. I must be off."

  "I'll say you're off! 'Way, 'way off!" cried Zabala-One-Leg as Beñat left the doorway and departed for his nest in the barn of the late Widow Jaureguiberry—God comfort and reward her.

  The ambience in the mayor's bar became suddenly heavy and morose, and men sat staring into their glasses. It is not wise to speak of death, for it is widely known that mentioning bad things beckons them.

  "Hm-m-m. Could it be that he is going to die soon?" the mayor wondered aloud. "It is possible, my friends, that idiots know things that others do not, for idiocy is largely a matter of the mind."

  The men nodded gravely as they silently hefted this morsel of insight.

  Now, those envious, backbiting Licquois always try to make much of the fact that our village does not have a full-time lawyer, and that Maître Etchecopar comes over from Licq only one Thursday a month to attend to our legal business. The truth be known, we are a peace-loving village and our men are brave, so the few disputes we have are settled honorably with fists, unlike those thieving cowards from Licq who are forever at one another's throats in the safe, cowardly way of litigation and are therefore obliged to have a full-time lawyer.

  Thus it was that old Beñat had to wait until Thursday to consult Maître Etchecopar in his ad hoc office in the sitting room of the priest's house. And when the idiot shambled out of that office, grinning and muttering to himself, all the men at the window of the bar and all the women watching from behind their curtains experienced a satisfying sense of justice done, and the pleasure of knowing that those haughty Hastoys had been cut out of his will. Now the new Hastoy wife, that strumpet of a Licquoise, would not be lording it over us with money that belonged to the village in which it had been hoarded for more years than there are loafers in the government!

  That afternoon the men giving themselves a little rest from life's rigors in Mayor Aramburu's café/bar were more than usually silent as they sat over their glasses of strong emerald green Izarra. (The weaklings in Licq drink the milder urine yellow Izarra.) After a time, one of them drew a sigh and gave voice to what everyone was thinking, "But then... if not the Hastoys, who?"

  The mayor stopped wiping his glass and scowled at the bigmouth, for he had been considering that very thing for several hours, and he could see no advantage in everyone in the village troubling themselves over the issue of Beñat's inheritance.

  "Ah-ha. I think I know who'll get it," said a man standing by the window. "Regard." He gestured to the church across the square where Beñat was walking down the stone steps with the village priest. All the men gathered at the window and looked across the square with fatalistic shakes of their heads. To be sure, it was the priest's duty to grab for the Church as much as he could from old people who, approaching death, seek to assure their places in heaven through acts of charity. And we were proud to know that our priest, who had studied both at Pau and Bayonne, could grab more in a day than the bungling old fool of a priest at Licq could grab in a year. But there were so many things a man could do with those piles of buried gold. Useful things. Enjoyable things. Perhaps... who knows?... even good deeds.

  The men shrugged and sighed, then returned to their tables and conversations. It was evident that the Church would have old Beñat's gold, and there was no point in weeping over a stillborn lamb. But our mayor pondered the matter at greater depth, for people with telephones listen and learn things, and they become craftier than others. The mayor reasoned that old Beñat had seen the priest after he had visited the lawyer. Therefore, it was not necessarily true that the Church had the old idiot's gold firmly in its holy fist. And while there is time, there is opportunity.

  A week later, the men who gathered at the mayor's café/bar to discuss plans for the fête of the village's patron saint were surprised to find old Beñat installed at the table by the window, drinking a pressed lemon as he listened to our long arguments and debates with his vague grins and friendly nods. We learned that the mayor had employed the idiot to do light chores about the café, and in return for this labor he received a nice little room overlooking the mountain stream that runs through our village. Also, Beñat took his meals with the mayor's family, sitting between his host's two plump and pretty daughters, who were solicitous of his comfort and often put the choicest morsels on his plate. The work required of Beñat was minimal, so he passed most of his days sunning himself on the bench in front of the café/bar, or sitting in the shade of the plane trees, and he was grateful to the benevolent God who had brought him to such ease and comfort in his last months on this earth. The mayor told him it was right and just to be grateful to God—even a little dangerous not to be—but he should not be too grateful, and not only to God. From time to time, Beñat would disappear from the village, off on one of his mysterious walks, and during such times his new family would worry and fret over his safety, as he had not visited the lawyer since their first meeting, so his affairs were still unsettled.

  In every way, the old idiot's life was gentle and pleasant, save that h
e sometimes missed his raw onions, for the mayor's plump and pretty daughters had insisted that the raw onions must go if he were to sit between them at table. To mitigate his disappointment, they sometimes brought him one of his favorite blood-of-Christ apples, those crisp juicy ones with little flecks of red in the white meat.

  While it is true that a village innocent is given to understand things that are hidden from those whose vision is confused by intelligence, and may therefore feel the approaching shadow of death, it is also true that Beñat was an idiot, so it is not surprising that he misread the signs of his end by a little.

  In fact, he misread them by a bit over eight years.

  After Beñat's burial in the mayor's family plot (his headstone boldly carrying the name Hastoy, to the great chagrin of those haughty merchants), a decent respect for the dead required the mayor to let some time pass before he looked into the matter of Beñat's will. It was not, in fact, until later that afternoon that he found himself sitting in the once-a-month office of the lawyer from Licq, discussing the subject.

  "But of what money do you speak?" Maître Etchecopar asked.

  The mayor eyed him narrowly. There is no trusting these Licquois in matters of honor. "What money? Beñat's fortune, of course."

  "I don't know what you're talking about, Monsieur Aramburu."

  "But the old idi—the Departed One—visited you to arrange his will. Don't you remember?"

  "Ah, yes! I recall now. But that was years ago. He came to see me because he felt he was dying, and a friend had told him he must make a will."

  "Exactly. I was that friend. And...?"

  "And?" The maître laughed. "Well, I had to explain to him that there is no point in making a will if one has no money."

  "No money?"

  "Not a sou."

  "But... but all those years! He lived to be a hundred at least! And had a vigorous appetite to the very end, I can assure you! Surely he saved something."

  "The little money he earned repairing stone walls around the countryside was spent in buying his bread and onions. He died with nothing."

  "Nothing?"

  "Nothing."

  That evening found the mayor in close conversation with our village priest.

  "And you say he visited you only to make his confession?"

  "Just so. He wanted to cleanse his soul because, he said, he could see his death coming. It appears he was a bit farsighted. Ha-ha."

  "Some things are funny, Father. Others are not."

  "Ah, to be sure, to be sure." The priest dried his eyes on the sleeve of his cassock. "The kindness of your family to our departed brother has been a lesson to all the village."

  "Hm!"

  "Without breaking the confidence of the confessional, I can tell you that he had fewer sins on his soul than a little girl at her first Holy Communion. I am sure that at this moment he is sitting joyfully in the blessed presence of God, if that makes your grief easier to bear."

  "Oh, yes. Much, much easier. But... but what of his long walks to Paris and beyond!? If he was not attending to his riches, what was he doing?"

  "I too was curious, so I asked him about that."

  "And...?"

  "He told me he took long walks because he liked to see things."

  "Liked to see things? See things! What kind of a reason is that, I ask you?"

  The priest lifted his shoulders. "An idiot's reason, I suppose. After all, dear Beñat was... well, innocent."

  "Innocent? Innocent! Like a fox he was innocent!"

  Our mayor never completely lived down the little chuckles and casual comments made by his customers on the subjects of Christian charity and how some people's sly and subtle tactics sometimes misfired. And it was widely shared throughout the village that one of the great dangers of having a telephone was that electricity harms a man's brain and makes him so dense that even the village idiot can trick him out of eight years' bed and board. But although he winced beneath the jibes, even Mayor Aramburu felt a grudging pride that our village had produced this Fox-of-a-Beñat who, idiot though he might be, was still slyer than the most intelligent of those dolts from Licq.

  MRS McGIVNEY'S NICKEL

  I passed the greater part of each day incognito. It used to make me laugh inside to realize that bypassers seeing me on my way home, dressed in worn-out sneakers with many-knotted laces, last year's school knickers patched at knee and butt, no socks to cover skinny, bruised shins, my cap skewed around to the side, mistook me for an ordinary kid, little suspecting that in fact I was a daring and resourceful leader of a team of hardened mercenaries.

  It was our assignment to defend North Pearl Street from the Germans who, having gobbled up Czechoslovakia that March, now set their sights on Albany, which they planned to infiltrate by way of North Pearl. The U.S. high commander in chief of everything had called me into his lavish secret office to explain that if North Pearl fell, Albany was doomed, and if Albany was lost, what hope was there for America? So the fate of the country was in my hands and those of my band of loyal followers. Ranged against us were several thousand heartless, highly trained Nazi Strong Troopers.

  Like many children, I lived an intense and secret play-life, and thought I was unique in this. So complex, so theatrical, so absorbing were my story games that I remember each summer between the ages of six and ten in terms of the game that dominated it. With Europe's slide into war a constant theme on radio news broadcasts, it was inevitable that the story game of the summer of 1939 would have to do with Nazis.

  My scalded lungs rasping for air, I pressed back against the weathered siding of a boarded-up stable that dated from the era of horse-drawn wagons. Slowly... slowly... I eased my eye around the corner of the stable to locate the snipers concealed in the—they spotted me, and a bullet splintered the wood near my cheek! I drew back and hissed at my followers, "We'll make a dash for the shed. It's our only chance!" Uncle Jim exchanged a worried glance with Gabby Hayes, who raged, "Gosh-darn those dang-nabbed, lop-eared, low-down, pigeon-toed, no-account..." He sputtered off into mutters of indignation. I used to let my followers blow off steam now and then, knowing that when the chips were down they would obey my instructions because I knew best how to avoid being picked off by those dirty Nazi Strong Troopers with their itchy fingers curled around the triggers of high-powered automatic shooting devices. Gail looked at me, her eyes glowing with admiration, while Reggie nodded crisply in his stiff-upper-lip British way. I kept up a spitty covering fire with my Thompson submachine stick as my band dashed across the alley one by one and dove for the shelter of the shed. Both Reggie and Doc got hit on their way across, and Kato, my faithful Japanese valet, had to drag them the rest of the way. Then it was my turn. After emptying my last five-hundred-round magazine into the German trench-bunker-wall-fortification, I scrabbled across the alley on all fours, getting a slug in one shoulder and another in my leg and another in my other shoulder and scratching my knee on a broken bottle as I skidded into the shelter of the doorway and gathered my team around me. Gritting my teeth to conceal the pain, I drew a situation map on the ground with the map-making stick that also served as a pistol with an inexhaustible clip, a telescope that could read the enemy's plans at half a block, a radio that translated German into American, and a stick of dynamite that you lit with your snapped-up-thumb cigarette lighter and threw at the enemy, or rather, at the base of a huge rock outcropping that overhung the enemy's position and came crashing down on them, crushing them to a pulpy mass that your eyes flinched away from, but you told your followers that sometimes war wasn't a pretty sight, but you had to do what had to be done and that was that. Throwing your dynamite was a desperate last resort, considering the huge expenditure of war material the loss of this versatile stick constituted... or would have constituted, if you didn't always have the remarkable good luck to find another such stick lying close to the body of a fallen (or crushed) Strong Trooper. (All right, so I mis-heard 'Storm Troopers' on the radio. Is that a crime? Jeez!)

 
My band of intrepid followers included Uncle Jim from the week-day radio adventure Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy!, which also provided my admiring tomboy of a cousin, Gail, who mostly said, 'Wow!' or 'Whatever you say, Chief.' In addition, there was Gabby Hayes, toothless, bearded sidekick in innumerable grade-Z cowboy movies; then there were Jack, Doc, and Reggie from I Love a Mystery. Since Reggie was British, I had to use my 'English accent' so he could understand my instructions. Finally there was Kato, my faithful valet. This last character I borrowed from The Green Hornet, without being exactly sure what a valet was, but if Kato was Britt Reid's 'faithful Japanese valet', he'd do for me. (A couple of years later, right after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kato became overnight a 'faithful Filipino valet', but by then I was no longer playing story games.) Each of my seven followers, Gail, Gabby, Jack, Doc, Reggie, Kato, and Uncle Jim, had a distinct personality and role that I remember clearly to this day: Gail was always astonished and admiring, Gabby was full of folksy wisdom and given to long strings of curses, Reggie always knew the polite thing to do, Jack and Doc were brave but headstrong and rash, Kato was faithful, and Uncle Jim was always worried that I was taking on tasks harder than any one man could hope to accomplish. This mixed bag of followers might fret and squabble and occasionally let their hot heads carry them too far, but when the chips were down they were all courageous and, what was more important, obedient. Oh, it's true they often got into trouble that called for quick reactions on my part, but I was fond of them, even if they sometimes tried my patience.