Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (67 page)

Fortunately, we had no doorman. I let myself in with the common key, used the self-service elevator, and entered the four-room apartment that I called home. She wasn't there. I got out of my clothes, crawled under the covers and slept. It was a rotten sleep, filled with bad dreams, but I slept.

And then the phone rang. I heard Liz's voice. “Monte—for Christ's sake, will you get that phone!”

I looked at my watch: it said four o'clock, and since the room was filled with daylight, it was obviously four o'clock in the afternoon. I tried to fix the day, while the phone rang a third and fourth time.

“Will you get that son-of-a-bitch phone!”

Andy had come in on Friday—two o'clock in the afternoon on Friday—so this was Saturday.

“God damn you!”

Usually a phone will stop after three or four rings. I picked this up on the seventh ring. I was still half asleep, but when I heard Andy's voice, I became alert. His voice was tense and hard, and he apologized for waking me, but only to get that aside.

“What is it, Andy?”

“I'm in trouble,” he said. “I am in damn big trouble, Monte.”

“Where are you?”

“In the phone booth at the St. Regis. In the King Cole Room. You know the booth at the far end of the room?”

I couldn't see how it mattered where the phone booth was, but I told him I knew.

“That's where I am. In the phone booth.”

“All right. Just take it easy.” I could not have seen myself telling Andy Bell to take it easy, but neither could I have anticipated that a time would come when I would hear this kind of tension and anxiety in Andy Bell's voice.

“Monte, I'm being hunted.”

“What?”

Suddenly, his voice became quiet and controlled. “You heard me, Monte. I am being hunted.”

“How do you know?”

“Monte, goddamn it, I am a hunter. I know.”

“When did it start?”

“Two hours ago—when I left the Carlyle.”

“Are you all right where you are?”

“I think so. I think I broke clear. But I have to talk to you about this. I have to talk to someone I can trust. I can trust you.”

“Anyone recognize you there—at the bar, I mean?”

“No. I suppose that's a blow. Funny, I sit here, and under everything else I am scared shitless the way I was never scared before, and still I can feel the bruises on my ego because no one recognized me.”

“You've been away a long time.”

“Yeah. The bartender looked at me twice. I didn't want anybody to spot me—not now. Then he apologized. He thought I was Burt Lancaster. Can you imagine, Burt Lancaster.”

“Well, that's flattering.”

“I don't want flattery, believe me, Monte. How soon can you get here?”

“I got to wash and shave—say a half hour.”

“Pare it a bit. I'll stay at the bar. God bless.”

I put down the phone and there was Liz at the door, not looking her best, with the day blinders around her throat like some kind of pop art necklace.

“Who the hell was that?” she asked me.

“Andy.”

“Buddy-boy. What did he want?”

I never could feel hostile enough to say that it was none of her damn business. I told her that Andy was in trouble, and then I went into the bathroom and began to shave. She followed me.

“Trouble. What kind of trouble is big enough for golden boy to wake us up like this?”

“He's being hunted.”

“What? Who?”

“Andy.”

“Andy's being hunted? Oh, no—no, I don't believe it.”

“Well, that's what it is.”

“You're not pulling my leg, Monte?” I didn't reply, and after a moment, she said, “What about you?”

“He wants me. He needs me.”

“He's being hunted, and you're going to him?”

“That's right.”

“You're not scared?”

“I'm so scared I can't hold this razor. I've cut myself twice already.”

“Schmuck,” she said. It was pretty ethnic for a woman who was part Irish, part Polish and a little Presbyterian. She could come up with the right word. I could not.

10

I found Andy at the bar in the St. Regis, and he took his drink to a table. He was holding a brandy, and mostly he was holding it and not tasting it.

“I can't drink,” he said. “Do you want something?”

The waiter was hovering over us, so I sent him away for a dry vermouth on the rocks.

“The thing is,” Andy said, “that I can't bear to have it on my tongue or my stomach. I tried. I figured I would get drunk.”

“That's not easy for you.”

“No, it's not.”

“I've been thinking about it,” I said. “I've been trying to work something out. I even thought of calling Jose and telling him to meet us here with one of your guns—or maybe that pistol you talked about.”

“That would be stupid!” he snapped.

“I didn't do it.”

“All right. I'm sorry. I'm tense and as I said, I am scared shitless. I wouldn't have said anything like that to you otherwise, Monte. You know that.”

“I know that.”

The waiter came with my drink. We were silent until he was gone, and then Andy said gently, “You see, Monte, it's no damn good to have a gun or anything like that. That's for the hunter. I'm the hunted.”

“You're sure, Andy?”

“Oh, so right, Mr. Bell.”

He nodded.

“I thought of something else.”

“Oh?”

“Obvious. Not like some stupid notion about a gun, but just obvious.”

Andy waited.

“Get away,” I said. “You make a run for it. Out of the city. A long, clean run.”

He was silent for a while, and then he shook his head.

“You said you were clear—you said you broke clean. This may be the only moment.”

“I know.”

“I got six hundred and change in my pocket. They know me at the desk. I could cash another two—three hundred there. It's no great stake, but along with a couple of charge cards, it can take you a long way.”

He shook his head again. “Thanks.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. Pride.”

“You're going to be brave,” I said. “Jesus Christ. Andy, you're being hunted and you're going to be brave. You got to make a big score in opinion. For what?”

“It's hard to explain, Monte.”

“You have to prove you're brave. I'm scared. I don't want to prove anything.”

“I'm scared, Monte.”

“And you won't run. My God, Andy,” I begged him, “what else is there? What's the alternative?”

“I don't know. Maybe it was just too much for me alone. Maybe I don't know how to be alone. Maybe I don't know how to be hunted. Maybe it's something you have to learn. You don't have to stay with me, Monte.”

“Go to hell.”

A slim kid with heavy black glasses came over to the table and said, “I recognized you, Mr. Bell.” He was so nervous from his own presumption that he could hardly speak. “I'm a researcher for
Life
. If I could get some kind of exclusive interview with you, it might be the turning point in my career. I know I got no call coming over and barging in on you like this. My name is Harry Belton. I guess you can see how scared I am—”

“I can see.” Andy nodded, smiling slightly.

“But, you know—”

“I hate to send you away,” Andy said.

“It's just a set of circumstances,” I told the kid. “It's impossible now.”

“I understand.”

“Some other time. Not now.”

“I understand,” the kid repeated. “I just want to say that I am a great admirer of yours, Mr. Bell. I read one of your books when I was nine years old. I don't know whether I understood everything in it, but I read it through. I was only nine.”

11

About Andy and myself—I met him in 1938 in Spain—I mean the first time that I ever met him and knew him, although I had heard about him. Moving back from a tour of the front lines, I was in a car with five other correspondents and one of them was Andrew Bell. The car was a big, yellow Buick touring car, a 1934, which was one of the best and most enduring Buicks ever built, and it took us east from the front over some of the worst roads I ever traveled. At one point, where the road was too narrow and too curved to pass another car, we found ourselves tailgating an old truck loaded with Republican soldiers back for leave. The truck appeared to have no springs left; it was a platform truck with gate sides and a couple of pieces of old rope backing it, and possibly good for two tons when new. Now there must have been thirty-five or forty soldiers packed into it—men full of laughter and pleasure at being alive and returning from the front, standing, most of them, swaying gaily with the truck's motion and singing the Spanish round about the farmer, the sheep and sodomy.

And then the truck driver, trying to demonstrate he could go along as briskly as we in the touring car, took a curve too fast and the truck went over. One moment a truckload of singing, happy soldiers on leave, and the next moment a hillside covered with broken, bleeding bodies, a burning truck, and the kind of horror that you do not want to witness twice.

The correspondent driving the Buick came down on the brakes very hard, and we skidded to a stop; and then we tumbled out of the car, and Andy raced to the scene of horror, myself behind him. He went to work with his first-aid kit, with torn shirts for bandages and tourniquets, with whatever he could put to use in stopping bleeding or holding a broken bone in place. I was behind him, and then I found myself assisting him and responding to his instructions; but when we turned back to the touring car for a moment, we discovered that the four other correspondents were standing at the edge of the road, watching, and preserving their bright, expensive Abercrombie uniforms in pristine spotlessness, free of nasty bloodstains and soot stains.

“Lousy bastards,” Andy said. Those were the first words he ever addressed to me. That was how I met him.

Now he was still talking to the kid, because he didn't know how exactly to brush him off, and he couldn't say to the kid, “Look, kid, I'm being hunted. I'm not the hunter any more. I'm the quarry. I'm the game. Have you ever seen a fox run? Have you ever watched them beat the brush for hares? Have you ever watched a line of naked black men with drums run the lions? I'm being run—that way, and now I have gone to earth, and I am hiding for a little while.” No, he could not say that or anything like that, so he continued to answer the kid's questions.

I got up and went to the phone. Andy hardly noticed. “Phone call,” I said. He nodded. I closed the door of the booth behind me and then I dialed Pete's number. The bartender answered. I asked for Pete and then waited and cracked my knuckles and tried to get more control of myself and watched Andy talk to the kid. Finally, Pete's voice came through the phone, and I said to him:

“Pete, this is Monte—Monte Case. Andy's friend.”

“Sure. Check. That was one hell of a party! Oh, Lord, that was a party! Where is my buddy-boy, sleeping?”

“No, he's awake.”

“Oh, Jesus, he's nursing a head. Right?”

“No—not exactly.”

“There's a man who can hold his liquor.”

“Pete—he's in trouble.”

“Who? Andy? Balls. If Andy wants the city, the mayor will give it to him. What kind of trouble can Andy have? He ain't sick, is he?”

“He's not sick. Pete, this is confidential, between us. You and me. I'm swearing you to a confidence.”

“Horse-shit! Andy knows me. He can trust me with his last dollar. Tell me he's a Russian spy. It dies with me.”

“Listen to me, Pete,” I begged him, feeling how enthralled he was becoming with the sound of his own voice. Pete was a man who loved best to listen to himself. He was talking to himself now and listening to himself. He had no idea what I was trying to say to him, until I put it flatly.

“Pete—Andy is being hunted.”

“I say you can trust me with anything. With his life. I say Andy can trust me with his life, if it comes to that.”

“Pete, did you hear me?”

“I heard you.”

“I said that Andy is being hunted.”

“Hunted? Who, Andy?”

“That's right.”

“Crazy. It's crazy. You putting me on?”

“I am trying to make you understand that Andy is being hunted.”

“But he's the hunter.”

“Not now. Now he's the game.”

“Andy? Andy Bell can take care of himself.”

“No! Why don't you listen to me, Pete? Why don't you stop being a goddamn fool.”

“Who the hell are you to—”

“All right, all right. I apologize. But, my God, I'm here with Andy and we've gone to ground, and maybe we've shaken loose and maybe we haven't, but we have to have a place to lay in and someone to cover us—”

“What are you suggesting, Monte?” He understood me now. His voice was suddenly cold and flat.

“Give us cover.”

“Here?” Pete asked evenly.

“That's right. You have an apartment there. You got food and liquor—”

“Why don't Andy get out of town?” he interrupted.

“You know Andy. Andy can't run.”

“Why don't he get it through his head that he's not the hunter any more?”

“Will you give us cover, Pete?”

“What is this
us?”

“I'm staying with him.”

“You're a big hero, Monte. I am no hero. You know how much it cost to run up this little shack of mine. Two and a half long miles. Two million, five hundred thousand dollars—American. And not my dough. I never saw that kind of dough. This is stockholders' money. I'm a public corporation—listed on the American Stock Exchange. Look me up some day if you want to buy a nice investment. Suppose you do—so I got a responsibility to you same as I got to my other investors. It's not my place. It's a public responsibility. I'm not some kind of stinking louse that's pulling any rug from under you. I got responsibility—.”