Still not a giggle. He couldn’t blame them. It was the wrong time and the wrong energy. Especially on his part. He was thinking of Mutzie, worrying now that a light might go on in Irish’s unscrupulous head.
“Play some games, tumler,” someone shouted from the unruly and restless group. He consented, but organizing games was nearly impossible. He tried a “Pass the Orange” game in which participants pass oranges from one to another using their chins and not their hands.
A woman participant got a crick in her neck and had to be
taken to her room. One of the children stepped on a fallen orange, squashed it and slid across the floor. He searched his mind for anything to hold their attention. But he could barely hold his own.
During lunch, he felt himself under continuous surveillance. The dining room, as always at Sunday lunch, was half empty. Pep seemed to glare at him. Irish shot him menacing glances. Mrs. Reles looked at him strangely. He felt persecuted. Most of all, he worried about Mutzie alone upstairs and he plotted getting hold of one of the box lunches the kitchen prepared for homeward bound guests.
“Go tumel them,” Gorlick told him. He was in a bad mood. The weather prediction was for rain all week. Mickey didn’t feel like tumeling. But he made his rounds of the dining room, cracking whatever jokes were not stifled by his nervousness. He tried to skip the gangster table, but Kid Twist called him over.
“My wop friend’s a good tipper, eh, tumler?” Reles said.
“Mr. Anastasia was very generous,” Mickey said. Pep still groused at him, but seemed less interested as he ladled sour cream over blintzes.
“Ya wanna piece of his action, Abie,” Bugsy Goldstein chimed in.
Reles laughed.
“Yeah, protection for tumlers,” Reles said. He looked at Pep and pointed.
“Especially from him.”
It was meant, Mickey supposed, as good-natured joshing. Pep didn’t crack a smile.
“Ya find her, tumler, ya keep her,” Reles said.
“I find her I twist her tits off,” Pep said, looking up from his sour cream and blintzes.
Reles clicked his tongue and shook his head.
“Comes ta love, Pep got no heart,” Reles said sarcastically. “No heart.”
Mickey hated hearing Mutzie disparaged, but he kept a smile pasted on his face and moved to the next table.
He made his announcements amid his usual patter of jokes. Luckily Sunday afternoons were absorbed with registering guests. Mr. Gorlick liked him to hang out in the lobby to tumel with them as they arrived. He also arranged for a movie showing in the social hall, taking care of the kids while the women who were left behind played cards.
His objective now was to arouse no suspicion, to carry on with business as usual, even knowing that he and Mutzie would not be coming back to the hotel once they had gotten out safely. His plan was still in embryo stage, but the outlines were coming into focus. He and Mutz would drive the stolen car to Bernstein’s apple orchard, then get to a spot near Swan Lake that would give them a good vantage point to witness the deed.
Of course, it was an awful and dangerous prospect. He decided not to focus on that part just yet. He hadn’t any idea what would happen after they witnessed Gagie’s killing. He had it in his mind to tell someone, someone who could act against these fiends. Surely there must be some government authority in the state that might prosecute these killers on the strength of his and Mutzie’s testimony. There had to be someone. They couldn’t control everything. Or could they?
As the plan grew in his mind, his began to focus on his sense of mission. He would be the righteous avenger for his father’s beating, the savior of the woman he loved. The thoughts energized him. There was one more thing he had to do. He had to get himself fired.
He got up and addressed the dining room crowd with a
string of jokes that got a good laugh. Then he launched what he hoped would be the clincher.
“Now let me tell you about Garlic.” He looked toward Gorlick, who was eating vegetables and sour cream at his regular table. At the mention of the hated word, he seemed to misfire, getting his spoon to his mouth. Sour cream covered his chin.
“He hates me to call him Garlic. But when a man stinks, what do you call him? Mr. Fart?”
The audience roared, the joke enhanced by Gorlick’s dripping chin and beet red complexion.
“When it comes to money, you’ve got to hand it to Garlic. He’ll get it anyway.” The audience roared, encouraging him. “Garlic has so much money he doesn’t know which building to burn next.” More laughter. “But I can tell Garlic wants me around. He keeps giving me postdated checks.” The audience howled. “If he can’t take it with him, Garlic will send his creditors. After all, he has something the creditors like, but he won’t spend it. But he gives me plenty of exercise. Every time he gives me a check I have to run to the bank.” He looked at Gorlick, whose face had gone from beet red to ashen. His eyes glared hatred.
What surprised him was that even Pep howled. Maybe, just maybe he was taking his mind off Mutzie. He knew he had succeeded in making Gorlick the laughingstock. The fact was that he, Mickey Fine, also enjoyed it immensely.
“Sorry, Mr. Garlic,” Mickey said. “You wanted I should make them forget about the rain. Keep the checkouts down.”
After the usual announcements about the evening’s activities, none of which he would attend, he stepped down to some enthusiastic applause. When he looked around, he noticed that Gorlick had gone. But he had barely started to drink his coffee
when Mildred Feinstein, Mr. Gorlick’s cross-eyed assistant came to the table.
“He wants to see you in his office now,” Mildred said.
“
Now
now? Or now later?”
“Now now. He’s having a conniption.”
Mickey strode out of the dining room, feeling jaunty and exhilarated. In his office, Gorlick sat slumped in his chair.
“An ungrateful mamzer I hired,” Gorlick said.
“All right, then, we’re even. A mamzer hired a mamzer.”
“You remember our verbal agreement. No boss jokes.”
“A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on,” Mickey shot back.
“This schmuck will kill me,” Gorlick said. He handed Mickey a check. “Go. Go. As fast as your legs will take you. I want to fumi-gate your room.”
Mickey, hiding his elation, looked at the check.
“You deducted for room and board?”
“You didn’t eat? You didn’t sleep?”
“That’s not very fair, Garlic,” Mickey said. He knew he was gilding the lily and had expected the deduction.
“Mildred, throw this man out,” he screamed. “And call around the other hotels. I need a new tumler fast. I’ll pay double.” He turned to Mickey. “Double. You hear me. Double.”
“Easy, Mr. G, your heart,” Mildred cautioned.
“If I die, he’ll have it on his head for the rest of his life.”
“And what will you have on your head, Garlic? A tombstone.”
Mickey quickly about-faced and left the man’s office, having accomplished his objective. He wasn’t sorry and he could not deny the enjoyment he had had.
With surprising boldness he went back into the dining room, then strode into the kitchen and picked up a box lunch and went
out through the storage area and up the back stairs to Marsha’s room. Irish, he had noted, was busy in the dining room.
Mutzie looked pale and frightened and seemed to be losing heart.
“As my mother always said: Eat. Eat,” he said. She appeared puzzled by his ebullience.
“Why are you so cheerful?” she asked.
“I just got a lot of laughs,” he replied. “Best of all, I got fired.” He explained how he had done it. “All part of the master plan. You see the logic? Now they won’t suspect we left together.”
“But you lost your job,” she shook her head and clucked her tongue. “You put yourself in danger. You lost a job that meant something to you. You should check yourself into the nearest asylum.”
“Actually, I’m more certain than ever that we’re doing the right thing.”
“The right thing, maybe. The dumb thing, for sure.” She bit into an egg salad sandwich without apparent appetite.
“When you’re on the side of the angels, why worry?”
“I don’t mind being on their side. I just don’t want to be an angel,” she said.
“I need this competition,” he laughed.
“I also don’t feel too good about Gagie,” Mutzie said. “He was always nice to me. A perfect gentlemen.”
“Another killer. You said so yourself.”
“I know,” she agreed. “They just … it’s all so strange. Their meanness. They have no conscience. I don’t understand it. How can people kill other people?”
“Happens all the time.”
“Yeah,” she shrugged. “Like in the movies.”
“Like in real life,” Mickey said.
He had never really seen violence, except that terrible scene in his father’s store. He did have a few scrapes as a kid, but nothing even approaching a fatality. These people seemed like beings from an alien land, engaged in conduct outside of the value system he had been taught. Considering the heinous crimes that they were to have committed, it seemed almost a civic duty to thwart them, even beyond the broader reason of helping to save Mutzie from a life of sexual enslavement. He reveled in such noble and heroic thoughts, remembering King Edward the Eighth’s abdication speech in which he said he was giving up the throne of England for the woman he loved.
“If you don’t stand up and be counted,” Mickey said, “the bad guys win.”
“Such a hero,” Mutzie said, putting aside her sandwich. She sounded depressed, but he ignored it. Instead he told her about his plan, as far as it had developed.
“If they catch us, you know, we’re gone,” she said.
“A real gloomy Gus.”
“Better a miserable life than none at all,” she said. It was, of course, the nub of her depressive state and he let it pass. If she was having second thoughts there was no way to force her to go along with his plan. This had to be her decision. He had made his.
“Now I want you to try on some of my clothes and fiddle with them to make them fit. There’s no way you can go back to your old room. And we’ve got to get the hell out of here.”
He went back to his room and quickly picked out some of his clothes and threw them in his battered suitcase. Above all, he needed to find a car and make a safe exit for both of them. Like some of his comedy routines, he was obliged to make it up as he went along. The important thing for him was not to show her any indecision on his part. He came back to Marsha’s room.
“I feel like I’m in a Marx Brothers comedy.”
He gave her the clothes he had chosen and turned his back while she put them on.
Finally she told him it was okay to see her and he turned and saw a good imitation of a boy wearing his big brother’s clothes. She had tucked up her bleached, Jean Harlow hair under a beret that he used as a costume for French imitations. He looked down at her feet and noted that the pants covered her tennis sneakers.
“Sam, you made the pants too long,” he sang. She smiled and he felt that the song had lifted her spirits.
“Fact is you look beautiful as a boy,” he said and meant it. She blushed. “A girl, too.”
Their eyes locked for a long moment. Hers moistened.
“You think I’m worth all this, Mickey?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I’ve been such an idiot.” She hesitated. “I’ve soiled myself.” A sob shook her chest and she turned away from him.
He wanted to reach out and comfort her, but held back. His mind was absorbed by his plan. He would station himself near the driveway and observe the guests arriving by car and make his move at the most propitious moment. He would drive the car to the road and park next to a stand of trees that would screen it from the hotel. He would wait there until Mutzie joined him and they would take off to scout the Swan Lake area in preparation for their nocturnal observations.
Mutzie listened intently as he explained the plan. Admittedly there were risks and he tried to calm her fears. Above all, she must appear natural, certainly not furtive or uncertain. She would use the back stairs, then make her way to a corridor near the lobby and duck out onto the porch. From there she would descend a side
stairway to the lawn and make her way on foot to the road. He told her exactly where he had planned to park the car. He looked at his watch.
“Give me about fifteen minutes.”
“I’m scared, Mickey,” Mutzie said.
“Worse things have happened,” Mickey replied, smiling.
Her face brightened. She apparently sensed he was throwing her a straight line.
“Like what?”
“Like the farmer who tried to milk a bull.”
She clicked her tongue and shook her head, but it brought out a smile. Then he got serious again.
“Above all, talk to no one, keep moving and do not make eye contact,” he warned.
She pursed her lips and nodded.
“I hope I can handle it,” she said.
“You can.”
He picked up his mostly empty suitcase, moved toward the door and turned.
“Such a pretty boychick,” he said, then he let himself out.
The lobby was less crowded than earlier and he strode through it, heading for the driveway. He carried his suitcase, proof of his departure.
“I’m really sorry about this,” a woman’s voice called from behind him. He turned quickly. It was Helen Reles.
“Not your fault,” he said curtly. “Garlic had a right.”
“Screw him,” Helen said. “Abie will talk to him.”
“It’s all right,” he said quickly. Her hand touched his arm and squeezed.
“No, it’s not,” she said, putting on what she must have
thought was her most compassionate look. “I hope it wasn’t me that made this trouble for you.”
“Nothing to do with you, Mrs. Reles,” Mickey said.
“I’ve given you a bad time. And I’d like to make it up to you.” She bent closer to him. “Give me a chance to be nice to you.”
“It’s not your fault,” Mickey protested.
“What can I do? I’m Jewish. I feel guilty.”
Her eyes opened liked puddles and her lips seemed to have mysteriously moistened. Nor did he have any doubt about her intentions.
“I’m resigned to it,” he sighed, searching in his mind for some way to dismiss her.