The Great Wash Read online

  I avoided Sparrow’s eye as I ran out of the Hop Pole, with Oaks at my heels. We walked very fast until we reached the Strand, and stopped for a drink at the Wellington.

  “Poor old Conker,” said George Oaks. “. . . Right or wrong, they don’t know how to start, or which direction to take, or when to stop . . .”

  I asked: “What do you mean by ‘right or wrong’ and who do you mean by ‘they’?”

  He said: “Skip it. Look, Dr. Monacelli was due in from New York this afternoon: he’s stopping at the Savoy, Nicks told me. I must go and say hello to him, after all these years. Come with me, for half an hour, and after that we’ll make a night of it.”

  “Monacelli, the philosopher?” I asked.

  “Yes, the great Monacelli. It will do you good to meet him,” said George Oaks.

  The lobby of the hotel was crowded, and somewhat noisy. George Oaks had to repeat the name of Monacelli twice before the man at the desk, begging his pardon, called a room number, and said: “He says he will be right down, sir.”

  “That’s odd,” said George Oaks. “I thought he couldn’t walk. Are you sure he said that?”

  “That is what he said, sir,” said the clerk.

  I observed then that the clerk’s right ear was discreetly tamped with cotton-wool. And so it comes to pass that I am alive to tell my story, and you are alive to read it, because a clerk at a desk in the Savoy Hotel in London happened to have something wrong with his right ear. Therefore, instead of calling Dr. Monacelli after whom George Oaks was inquiring, he rang a Mr. Monty Cello. . . .

  Upon such things hang our destinies: some tiny current of cold air, or some blob of wax that made necessary a plug of wadding in the ear-hole of a reception clerk—that draught, that pinch of cotton, saved the world. If it had not come between us and that young man’s tympanum, the three hundred and sixty-five bones of your body would by now be scattered to the thirty-two points of the compass, and everything you ever loved would be washed away! One mote of dust, in its proper place, can shatter a cosmos. The scent of a rosebud can stop a clock. . . . Now where the devil did I pick that up? George Oaks must have said it.

  If you love and admire a man you find that after a while you talk as he talks. And God knows, I loved and admired George Oaks. “The God knows,” Oaks would say: he is very particular about this.

  Then a lift stopped and opened, and several men came out and went away. Only one passenger remained, standing by the gate.

  “Look at that one,” said George Oaks. “What the devil is he afraid of, in the Savoy Hotel, at this hour of the day? He looks just like a man I saw—was it twenty years ago?—in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City, in the small hours of the morning, just before Mike Duffy was shot in bed. . . . It can’t possibly be the same man, but he has exactly the same air. He’s waiting for something, that one. He’s expecting something. I bet you an even pound note that if someone fired a pistol in the grill room he wouldn’t budge an inch—whereas if that lift-man touched him in the back with a fingertip, his hands would come slowly out of his pockets and go up empty to shoulder level.”

  “Why wouldn’t he budge an inch?” I asked.

  “He’d be all primed and ready for the bang-bang-bang, don’t you see? But the touch between the shoulder-blades would be the last thing in the world he’d be expecting, because everything would have been planned and arranged for him. His objective, Albert, would be that open door, outside which there’d be a car. He would be one of those pathetic little fellows who pin their faith in an Unseen Fixer who can get them away with bloody murder, Albert. He would have had his orders, exact: to cover such-and-such a number of yards from the gate of the lift to the gutter where the car would be waiting. Strong in his faith in his Unseen Fixer, he would turn his back on everything that lay behind him, and fix his eyes on the gutter and the night . . . on the dark streets, Albert, guarded for him by officers bought and sold. No doubt he’d keep his courage up with a sniff of white powder. Still, I tell you, one gentle prod in the back—like this—and I tell you that poor little man’s blood would turn to ice.”

  “Keep your damned fingers out of my ribs, will you?”

  “I beg pardon, Albert. Watch his eyes, watch his eyes while he fiddles with that cigar—trying to be unostentatious—playing for time while he takes a good look around. Oh, there is a very frightened fellow!”

  “Unostentatious in those clothes, George?”

  “Only clothes he ever learned to wear, you silly cow. Imagine you could disguise that one in a bowler hat and a rolled umbrella?”

  The man by the lift was dressed in a light camel’s-hair jacket without lapels, dark tan trousers, and tan and white buckskin shoes. His shirt was ruddy brown, heavily hand-stitched in yellow about the collar, and in place of a tie he had knotted about his throat with a deliberate nonchalance (that must have taken a good half-hour of his time) a yellow silk scarf. But it was not his dress that drew your attention to him. For the past fifteen years every gents’ outfitter in the Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue had been selling Genuine Hollywood-Styled Men’s Wear—Humphrey Bogart hats, Pat O’Brien suspenders, Lloyd Nolan socks, Victor Mature dressing-gowns, and so forth. Even George Oaks, as I was to observe later, was wearing a pair of underpants printed with crimson stags as worn by Richard Widmark or somebody.

  No, it took more than outlandish clothes to catch the eye even in the lobby of a first-rate West End hotel like the Savoy. (From where I was standing I could see a Sikh in a rose-coloured turban, and a portly man in a ten-gallon hat and Texas boots, the trousers of whose sober black suit were cut so that the waistline fitted a good six inches below his middle.) No, it was the face that made that man.

  Now how is it possible to tell of such a face? Considered feature by feature, it was nondescript; neither long nor round, neither fat nor thin, neither fair nor dark—a difficult face to describe in, say, a police bulletin, for it was quite devoid of what they call “distinguishing marks and characteristics.” You could draw it on paper with a letter “O” filled in with a few punctuation marks: eyes like full stops, eyebrows like commas, nostrils like the dots of a diæresis, a smudge, as if you had drawn the mouth in the wrong place and imperfectly erased it: call that a moustache. It was so much like a child’s scribble on scrap paper that as he moved the cigar in his mouth you almost expected the whole face to disappear with a crackle into the folds of a crumpled ball.

  Ah, yes—that was it—that queer, crumpled-papery texture of the skin: his was, as you might say, a child’s rough copy of a face, retrieved from the nursery waste-basket as an afterthought, and painstakingly smoothed out with a grubby fist. And when he came towards us with slow, short, measured steps, with an outstretched hand, I could almost see a long gallery of barred cells, and, under that right hand, the shoulder of the convict in front. I knew then in what dress that man would be comfortably inconspicuous—grey denim stencilled with a number, topped off by a peaked cotton cap. For the man had a jailbird’s face; he was distinguishable from free men by a certain air, which old, experienced criminals call The Smell of the Bucket.

  He said: “I’m Monty Cello. You fellows looking for me?”

  “There’s some mistake,” I said. “We asked for Dr. Monacelli. He was due here from Southampton this afternoon.”

  “Excuse me,” said Oaks, turning to the desk. I heard his voice spelling out the name of Monacelli in polite inquiry, while Monty Cello was saying:

  “Is that right? Well, what d’you know? I got in five days ago on the Queen Annie. Monacelli, eh? I heard about him. Didn’t I read a piece——”

  “—It’s that idiot Nicks again, Albert. . . . One of our lesser mines of misinformation, Mr. Cello. . . . Monacelli was on the passenger list, Albert, but at the last moment couldn’t make the boat: secretary cabled hotel cancelling reservation. . . . All the same
, Mr. Cello, this is a happy accident since it gives us the pleasure of your acquaintance. Let me introduce myself. My name is George Oaks, of the Sunday Special. This is Albert Kemp, the author.”

  “Glad to know you.”

  “Why not join us in a drink?” Oaks suggested.

  Monty Cello said: “Be glad to—lemme buy it——” He got between us and led us to the cocktail lounge, talking eagerly, nervously, like a man who is hungry for conversation but does not know what to say. “Sure am glad to see you fellows. Say, what d’you do in London? Five days I been here. Who d’you talk to? I mean, where d’you go? Well, I sure am glad that fellow got the name wrong, I mean the clerk. Only you call it ‘clark’. Isn’t that so? ‘Clark!’ . . .”

  So he ran on. When we were seated in one of the big settees facing the door, Monty Cello relaxed a little. “I just come from Hollywood,” he said. “I was with Sam Feinlight—you heard of him? Sam Feinlight?——”

  “—Born: Mlava, Poland, 1878. Brought to America, 1890. Went to work for furrier, 1891. Formed partnership, 1900, with Goldfarb. 1905, bankrupt. 1911, head of Feinlight Films. Multi-millionaire. Present salary, $600,000 a year. His private address I forget. What were you doing with Feinlight, Mr. Cello?” said George Oaks.

  “Say, I wish you’d call me Monty.”

  “Monty. Call me George. You were on the production side?”

  “. . . Look, your glasses are empty. Hey there! Fill ’em up, willya? . . . Come on, Albert. It’s a funny thing I noticed, how they never put ice in their drinks in England. If you want ice, you gotta say ‘Ice!’ I wonder what’s the cause of that.”

  “The production side?” asked Oaks.

  “Ah, it’s swell finding a coupla guys like you to talk to. Par’me, what was you saying?”

  “Or were you directing?”

  “Uh? Hell, no. I was . . . well, connected with the writing side. Yes, the writing side. And say, d’you know what? You’d ’a laughed. I was there two years at six hundred bucks a week, brother, and I never did a lick o’ work.”

  “Cher collègue!” cried George Oaks, gripping Monty’s hand, “you are a man after my own heart.”

  As Oaks tightened his grip, Monty’s face twitched, and I saw his mouth close and elongate—he was sucking in his lips and clamping them shut between his teeth. What was wrong with this picture? It lacked a glaring light overhead and a relay of perspiring detectives with lengths of rubber hose. At last the mouth loosened, and Monty said: “You gotta grip like a man I knew called Lefty the Monk.”

  “Not Monk Eastman?” Oaks asked, as one who inquired after a lost friend.

  “No, not Monk Eastman. This fellow, Lefty the Monk, came from Tacoma. Monk Eastman was before his time. We called him Lefty the Monk because he was left-handed, and he hadda grip on him like a left-handed monkey wrench. Do they have monkey wrenches here?”

  “Here to stay, Monty, until the real thing comes along. What did they ask you to write in the first place? What—if you will excuse my asking, as craftsman to fellow craftsman—was your literary background, so to speak?”

  “First things first, George: lemme finish. Lefty the Monk could turn a key from the outside of the door—an old-fashioned iron key, see?—with his fingers. Ever hear of anything like that, Albert?”

  Oaks did not let me speak. He said: “Of course he did, Monty. Our own Charles Peace was supposed to be able to do that—a very cunning and desperate burglar in the 1880s. We hanged him for a very stupid murder. He was game to the last, old Charley Peace. His trial was a perfect treat: even in the condemned cell he argued it out, with the utmost calm, with the warders and the chaplain. Couldn’t scare Charley Peace. Gave no quarter and asked for none. Game to the last——”

  “—So was Lefty the Monk,” said Monty Cello, nodding.

  “—Game to the last,” said Oaks, “but at the last? Aha! The world waited eagerly for a few defiant last words. And what were Charles Peace’s last words to the hangman? ‘Please don’t hurt me!’ So ends the criminal world, not with a bang but a whimper, Monty. . . . Touching the matter of your friend, Lefty the Monk: he would have worked the brownstone houses in New York between the Seventies and Morningside Heights, around West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, about 1917, I believe——”

  “—You heard all about Lefty the Monk, eh, Georgie?” said Monty Cello.

  “No! You just told me all about him. It wasn’t until after the First War that the genteel old brownstone houses on West End and Riverside became blocks of flats, apartment houses for every Tom, Dick and Harry. When you take an apartment in a house full of strangers, naturally you want a lock and key of your own, so you put in a Yale lock, which requires quite a different sort of technique when it comes to illegal entry. Your Lefty the Monk couldn’t have been up to the innovations called for by the Yale lock—for instance, that trick with a sheet of thick celluloid. . . . Therefore, Lefty the Monk’s theatre of operations in the brownstones would have become more and more circumscribed, until he found himself in a very narrow ring. He must have left his autograph on every job, so that it took only one honest detective to pinch him just about the time when you were whistling ‘K-K-K-Katy’ instead of ‘Over There’——”

  “You’re right. It was a cop they called Seagreen Dooley that got Lefty the Monk,” said Monty Cello. “They called him Seagreen——”

  “—Because he was incorruptible. ‘Seagreen incorruptible’ was still in use in America then. A little later he might have been called ‘Honest Mike’ or ‘Clean Dooley’. . . . Lefty the Monk shot it out with the police, didn’t he?”

  “I thought you said you never heard of the guy.”

  “Calm! Calm, Monty. You don’t die for burglary. If Lefty the Monk died, it must have been for murder. He must have shot somebody, probably a policeman. Again, he was your boyhood hero. What boy of your generation around—say, Sullivan Street—would make a hero of a thief who consented to be led away to imprisonment for life? Or even the Chair? No, a boy’s hero has to die in battle.”

  “Where’d you get that ‘Sullivan Street’?”

  “Your parents were hungry New York Italians, weren’t they? Where would they have lived if not among their own people, in or near Sullivan Street?”

  “Well, we lived on Prince.”

  “—Which is just off Sullivan. The same thing, only more so. . . . Excuse me,” said Oaks, getting up, “I must telephone.”

  Monty Cello was quiet for a few moments, then he said: “Is that guy psychic? What gets me is this—how did he know us kids was singing ‘K-K-K-Katy’ then? Tell you something—I’ll never forget that number. I used to stutter a little bit, myself, when I was a kid, and every time somebody sung ‘K-K-K-Katy’ I got so mad I’d——” He stopped. My friend was coming back, making signs to the waiter in passing. When he was seated, Monty Cello said: “Honest to God, it beats me how you know——”

  “—You talk too much, Monty; you don’t let a man get a word in edgeways.”

  “Say, listen——”

  “—Never mind your Lefty the Monk. Forget him for a minute. You and your Lefty the Monk! You call him tough? He would not have lasted five minutes with Scott in the Antarctic. Tell me instead how you came from the Carnival business down to Hollywood.”

  At this Monty Cello sucked in his lips and chewed them again. “What Carnival business?” he said. “Who said I was in Carny?”

  “You did. You do nothing but chatter and chatter about yourself. ‘In Carny’—the way you said it! Anyway, your accent.”

  “What accent? I never had much education but——”

  “No accent—that’s the point, man! And who said anything about education? Accent and education! Why, one of my best friends was a Doctor of Philosophy of Oxford, Monty, and for such a degree I can assure you that you have to do something more than
clip a coupon out of NAUGHTY STORIES and rush it with five cents in stamps to Box P X, Sardanapolis Post Office, Delaware, to cover the cost of postage and packing of a free prospectus and one trial lesson. You cannot do it through the mails, as you can learn horse-breaking in the U.S. You cannot get an Oxford doctorate by playing Rounders—of which your baseball is a primitive form—on an athletic scholarship. You must read for it. This friend of mine did so, proposing to devote himself to ornithology, or the study of birds. He was all set for a Chair in a northern university, when he fell madly in love with a girl who did an Oriental snake dance in a beaver-board booth in ‘Lord’ Baron Rivers’s Fun Fair.

  “He visited the Fair, Monty—eh, Albert?—when it was performing in Durham City, having heard that one of the sideshows was exhibiting what was called the Beast of Revelations: a stuffed calf to which some clever taxidermist had added the wings of a condor and a leopard’s teeth. Between the graminivorous hoofs, the carnivorous teeth, and the nonexistent wing-musculature, my friend tore this fake freak to pieces. Old Man Rivers prevailed upon the snake dancer to woo him into keeping his mouth shut. My friend fell in love with her, tossed aside a most respectable career, and followed her from pitch to pitch all over England, working for the Fun Fair. Doing what? Lecturing on the Beast of Revelations, proving that it was a hundred per cent genuine. It was something like Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel: only my friend’s end was happier; he died in a zoo in Buenos Aires, or Rio, as keeper of the bird house.”

  “We had a Professor——” Monty Cello began.

  George Oaks gave him a look. “—Only one word, Monty!”

  “—Par’me, George.”

  “Granted, Monty; thank you. This friend of mine, originally, and by habit, spoke Oxford English. After ten years of life in the Fun Fair, his accent became indefinable; don’t you see? He was what is popularly known as a ‘spieler’, but more accurately classed as a ‘talker’. Apart from the Beast of Revelations he was remarkable on Worms——”