Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [77]
figured, if your mother was a bitch, if you were a bastard, what was the use of fighting about it? And if she wasn t, you could easily prove it. What was the use fighting about it? But this was different, what Ed Charney had said: Listen you God damn dirty little guinny bastard, I sent you up there last night to keep an eye on Helene. You didn’t have to go if you didn’t want to. But what do you do? You double-cross me, you son of a bitch. I bet English gave you a sawbuck so he could take her out and give her a jump, and you sit back there collecting fifty bucks from me becuss I m sap enough to think you’re on the up-and-up with me. But no. Not you. Not you. Why, you small-time chiseling bastard, you. You dirty lousy mother bastard. And more like that. Automatically Al had tried to explain: all she did was dance with him; she wasn’t outside long enough to do anything with English ( You’re a dirty liar. Foxie told me she was out a half an hour. ); English was stewed and not on the make ( Don t tell me about English. I m not blaming him. I m blaming you. You knew she was my girl. English didn t. ), and so on. In his heart Al wanted to tell Ed the real truth; that he could have made Helene himself if he hadn t been on the up-and-up. But that wouldn’t do any good now. Or it wouldn’t do enough harm. Ed was crazy mad. He was so crazy mad that he said all these things to Al over the telephone from his own house, most likely in front of his wife. Oh, positively in front of his wife. If she was in the same house she couldn’t help hearing him, the way he was yelling into the telephone. So Al just stood there at the phone and took it without making any real comeback. At first he had been stunned by the accusation of being a double-crosser. But in Al s and Ed s line of work it is never wise to call an associate a double-crosser; if the associate is guilty, the thing to do is punish him; if he isn’t guilty, it puts the idea into his head. And then when he remembered the bad thing that Ed had called him, that began to put the idea into Al s head. He hadn t made any plans about what he was going to do. Not yet. But something would have to be done. I guess it ll be me or him, he said, thinking of that wall. But meanwhile he had his work to do. Little jobs here and there. Odds and ends, daily routine work. Ed had been in such a rage, so burnt up, that he had forgot to fire Al, and despite everything he had said, he had not indicated that he intended to fire Al. In their line of work it was one thing to have a scrap, a mouth fight, or to be angry for a day or two at an associate. But to fire a man was something else again. You didn’t just fire a guy like that (finger-snap). Not even in Gibbsville, which was not Chicago. That was the trouble, in a way. In a way maybe it was a break that it wasn’t Chicago, because out there they knocked each other off with less excuse than a fight over a dame. But in another way Al was sorry it wasn’t Chi. In Gibbsville they never had a gang war, because Ed Charney simply didn’t have any competition. Whereas on the other hand, in Chi they did. They had gang wars all the time. They were used to it. In Chi you could get away with it. In Gibbsville it would be just a murder, and they would have to make a pinch and have a court trial and all that, and the juries around here were so screwy, they might even send you to the chair. That Rock View, I don t want any part of that, said Al. So now he had a nice little job to do. A little odds and ends. He had to take this champagne and this Scotch out to where English lived. English, the mugg that caused all the trouble in the first place. Although as he drove along he could not stir up any very strong hatred of English, because the truth of the matter was, if you wanted to know who was responsible, it wasn’t English or it wasn’t even Helene with her hot pants. It was Ed Charney himself. A married man with a kid, and absolutely haywire on the subject of another woman not his wife. That was where the trouble was. He wanted everything, Ed did. Well, that remains to be seen,