10: The River

It occurred to me to wonder what would happen if Polly did not have the key. Each step Alice took was an improvisation upon the moment, and where I would have been paralyzed by the implications of the future, she was content to postpone disaster.

Looking back, it must appear that we were operating without any plan or purpose, devising a hasty step for each contingency, and to some extent that was true. At the same time, in each crisis we did the only thing we could do, and we acted wisely at least to the extent that we preserved our ability to function. That fact, the preservation of our ability to function, was of paramount importance; for we had arrived at a point where three lives were linked—mine, Alice’s, and Polly’s—and these three lives existed so precariously that one misstep would have begun the process of snuffing them out. In all our improvisation, we at least achieved the purpose of staying alive.

We were concerned with a question of time. Since that night, I have thought a good deal about time and have come to realize that its only real validity is subjective. Exactly twenty-six hours had elapsed between the time I met Shlakmann on a subway platform and the time Alice and I left our house with his son; but that was chronological time. Subjectively, I had lived through a great deal more than any day could hold. I had experienced craven fear, total terror, utter despair, and malignant hatred—and I had learned, at least to some degree, how to cope with each of these manifestations. I had gone through an extraordinary experience with two women—one of them my wife for a good many years—and now I had allied myself with a psychopath who admired the SS and whose father had been the commanding officer of a concentration camp under Hitler.

I did this knowing that generous odds existed for the presumption that he would kill me, and perhaps my wife and child as well, before the evening and night were over. There was no way I could fight him or resist him, yet knowing all this and accepting it, I was still able to function. This would not have been the case twenty-four hours in the past. I didn’t preen myself or even think about it very much, but the fact was there. Even John Camber was capable of change.

Shlakmann had parked his car a few blocks away. We left our car in the driveway, slipped out of the back door with him, went through our hedge into the yard of the Mcauleys, whose house backed ours, and then down the street to Shlakmann’s car. We left all the lights burning in our house, and we managed the escape with no particular trouble. The Mcauleys had a poodle, who set up a squeaky racket, but I imagine they were out this evening. Anyway, no doors or windows opened and no one shouted after us.

In Shlakmann’s car, we drove to the Hackensack River; and it was then that I asked him about his father and the two keys.

“Who was after him?” I asked. “Was it Angie?”

“I guess so. Angie followed you out of the subway.”

“Why did your father have two keys, Shlakmann?”

“For Christ’s sake, grow up, Camber. He had one, the fat man had the other. He stole the fat man’s key. The old bastard was going to clean out the box and clear out. Leave me and Montez both out in the cold. After all I did for that lousy old crumb. You just won’t believe it. I tell you something, we come out of Germany after the war and get to Montez’s country, I’m twelve years old. You think the old man takes me along for love? Like hell he does. He takes my mother and puts her out for hire as a whore, and that’s how he lives the first year in the fat man’s country. But my mother don’t go if I don’t go, and then she ends up dead with a knife in her back, and the old man gets two more girls, and I’m out on the street pushing the pimp end of it. I say to myself right there, I kill him some day—but not until he gets some money, not until he’s loaded, not until there’s something to make it worth my while. Then he get together with the fat man, and they begin to build up this business—”

“What business?” Alice asked, trying to keep the horror out of her voice and make the question casual.

“What’s in the box, lady.”

“Shlakmann,” I said, “we don’t know what’s in the box.”

“What?”

“That’s the truth. We don’t know.”

“I’ll be damned,” Shlakmann said, beginning to giggle again.

“What’s in the box, Mr. Shlakmann?” Alice asked.

“Peanuts,” said Shlakmann, shaking with laughter. “Peanuts.”

The moon was rising as we drove up to the Livery on the riverbank, the lip of the moon over the horizon, a fat, bloated orange moon, more a summer moon than the moon one gets at the end of March, a harvest moon, a moon for endings and not for beginnings. The light was out in Mulligan’s shack, but true to his word, the boat was waiting for us at the end of the dock.

Shlakmann put his car in the parking place up above the Livery, and then the three of us went down to the dock. It was a good boat that Mulligan had left for me, a sixteen-foot aluminum hull, light and fast, with the powerful Johnson twenty-horsepower hung onto the stern. In it was a set of oars, a boat hook, and a coil of light rope attached to a ring at the bow—and a ten-gallon auxiliary gas tank attached with a vacuum line to the motor. Mulligan had not merely given me a boat; he had chosen it thoughtfully and outfitted it thoughtfully, and silently I thanked him and took a pledge that someday I would repay his kindness.

When we were out on the dock, I said, “I want to know where we’re going, Shlakmann? I want to know where my daughter is?”

“She’s on the fat man’s boat.”

“Where’s the boat?”

“Just take it easy, Camber. When the time comes, I show you the boat.”

“What kind of a boat?”

“A cabin cruiser. Now what the hell are all the questions for? We made a deal—you get the kid, I get the key.”

“I want to know where I’m going.”

“All you got to know is to run this lousy boat. Can you do that?”

“I can run it.”

“Then get in and stop the yak, yak.”

“Don’t argue, Johnny,” Alice said. “We’re in this now, and there’s no turning back.”

I held up my wrist to catch a reflection of the moonlight. It was eighteen minutes to ten o’clock. The night was still and windless, the river high with the tide and like glass, the black water threaded with orange moonlight. To the north of us, I could see the bright jets of headlights as the traffic rolled over the highway bridge; to the south, a dark sky with here and there a glow where the lights of a town brightened the sky.

Shlakmann got into the front of the boat and sat half facing us. Alice and I sat in the back. Shlakmann cast off, and I drew the cord to start the motor. It required only one tug—and then the engine roared into life. It was a beautiful motor, finely tuned and responsive. I throttled it down and we slid out into the river. Now I cursed the stupidity that had allowed me to come away without a flashlight, but as long as the sky was unclouded and the moon overhead, I could do without one. The visibility was nothing to boast about, but I could easily see the outlines of the riverbanks and I had fair warning as we slid through the piers of the bridges.

The Hackensack is not a wide river. Making its beginning as a placid country brook, some twenty miles north of where we were, it runs down onto the flat and becomes tidewater almost immediately. For a few miles, the tidewater holds the shape of a river, twisting and turning, its banks almost solid with factories that pour filth and chemicals into the turgid water and connected by a succession of ancient railroad and highway bridges; then it merges with the Meadows, the great expanse of waste and swampland, a trackless wilderness as large as Manhattan and a stone’s throw west of Manhattan. Once in the Meadows, the river loses it banks. There are a few markers and buoys—but for the most part, one must sense its course, feel it, and anticipate it.

Here where we were, however, it was still river, and I took my course in the center of the channel and ran slowly southward. Shlakmann wanted more speed, and God knows, I could not have been more anxious myself, but I made him understand that it was senseless to roar down a black river through the night.

“Anyway,” I said, “we don’t want to attract any attention. The motor makes enough noise as it is. If I open it up, it’ll sound like a plane.”

“You know this river?”

“I know it well enough to get out onto the Meadows,” I said.

The three of us remained silent then as we moved down the river to the Meadows. I sat on one side of the stern seat, my hand on the throbbing control lever, and Alice on the other side. She put her hand on mine once, so that they pressed together. I could not say how grateful I was for this gesture of partial forgiveness, and I said nothing. Shlakmann sat in front of the boat, a grotesquely large and shapeless hulk. I was glad that the darkness dulled his features; I didn’t enjoy looking at him.

The bridges had a movement of their own as we passed under them. Some of them rumbled with auto traffic. Once a train roared overhead, an endless line of dark, empty, clacking freight cars. Once someone shouted at us.

But mostly, we moved in a world of our own, a world separated from the swarming cluster of houses, people and shops and roads that constituted the area of the land. They were away from us and blocked from us by the curious reverse of modern civilization that is a riverbank.

Even by day, an off-track river such as the Hackensack is a separate and special place. By night, it is its own world, and as the moon rose, changing from orange to silver-blue, the river became even more remote from the world. At first the moon lit the factories on the west bank of the river, but as we slid down to the Meadows, its silver light touched the water and thinned the darkness with a ghostly illumination. We slid out of the river into the northern edge of the Meadows, and Shlakmann said:

“Camber—you know Berry’s Creek Canal?”

We were now in a bay of sorts, large enough in the daytime and giving the impression of a vast body of water now in the moonlight, rimmed by banks of tall dry reeds, which stretched away endlessly and remotely to the west, and eastward made a barrier between us and the Jersey Turnpike. There, in the distance, we could see the lights of the cars that raced along the great highway, and beyond that, in the further distance over the bridge, the needle of light that was the tower of the Empire State Building.

“I think I could find Berry’s Creek—in the daytime,” I added.

“Don’t give me daytime.”

“I’ll try to find it—my God, don’t you think I’ll try to find it?”

“How far would Berry’s Creek be from here?”

“I’m not sure.” I picked up the first buoy marker, and I drew Shlakmann’s attention to it. “There’s the marker. The river runs through the Meadows, but it has no banks. If the tide were out, it would be easier, but the tide’s in now, and there’s no way to know what’s river and what’s meadow. If we can keep to the channel, I would guess that we’re no more than three or three and a half miles from Berry’s Creek. We go through this bay and there’s a neck out of it, and then another bay. There’s the trouble.”

“We want the Creek Canal.”

“I don’t know about the canal,” I said uneasily.

“Is it to this side of the creek or beyond it?” Alice asked.

“North of the creek, maybe half a mile.”

“I’ll try,” I said. “Is that where the boat’s anchored?”

“If it’s there,” Shlakmann said, “then that’s where it’s anchored.”

I opened the motor a little, and even with the great weight of Shlakmann, the bow lifted and we raced across the water, toward the buoy and past it, the water curling away from the boat and turning into silver, moon-rinsed foam. I steered south and we fled across the surface of the bay.

“This is more like it!” Shlakmann yelled.

I told him that I knew the bay, but that soon I would have to throttle down. “We don’t draw much,” I shouted over the noise of the motor, “but here at night an inch of water looks the same as a foot. I don’t want to hang up on the mud. The tide is turning, and there’s no foothold in this mud. If we got hung up on a mudbar, we could be there for a week before anyone found us. There’s not much traffic here in March.”

“Suppose the police hear us?” Alice asked me.

“Well, what could they do? They’d be off on shore, and they can’t see us in the night. We’re covered by the reeds. If they had any reason to be suspicious, they might call the harbor patrol from Newark Bay, but why should they? They’ll just pass us off as a bunch of kids out for a night ride.”

I had been speaking into her ear, and Shlakmann yelled, “None of that! God-damn you, Camber, no secrets!”

I throttled down the motor. We were close to the southern end of the bay anyway, and I had to search for the buoy that marked the exit channel.

“We haven’t any secrets,” I said.

“Then talk up. Play footsie and I take both of you apart.”

“I’m so tired of that kind of talk,” Alice sighed. “Don’t you have any sense, Mr. Shlakmann?”

“Now listen, sister,” he said, “just who the hell do you think you are?”

“I know who I am and I know who you are, Mr. Shlakmann. I don’t like you any better than you like me, but we’re all in this together. Why don’t you stop threatening us and try to help? Do you think it’s easy to get us through this wilderness at night? My husband is doing the best he can.”

“Yakety-yak!” he yelled. “I tell you, Camber, I going to sew up her lip for good, you don’t shut her up. I tell you that.”

“He’s not very stable,” I whispered out of the side of my mouth. “Please—lay off him, Alice.”

“Speak up!”

“I’m shutting her up. You wanted me to, didn’t you?”

Then I saw the next buoy and pointed to it. “There’s our way—”

We crept down through the Meadows. Once out of the bay, I didn’t dare to open the throttle again. Not only was I unsure of the channel, but I could make no estimate of the actual distance we had come, and thereby no guess as to where Montez’s boat might be anchored. So we crept through the night, from buoy to buoy, my mind and my sight reaching out for the channel until every muscle in my body ached with the tension.

Once we lost it entirely, and I had to circle around and around to pick up a buoy again. It was a maze of marsh grass and twisting waterways, but at least it was delineated, and I could not actually end up in the wrong direction. I had only to stand up in the boat and sight the Empire State tower to find east, and from that, north and south. The river had disappeared entirely, and occasionally the channel was no more than a thirty-foot passage among the reeds, yet I managed to creep from buoy to buoy on my way downstream.

For the first time since my own nightmare had begun, I had the sense of taking positive action and doing it well, of keeping my head and moving toward a desired destination. I became more tense as midnight approached, for I knew that they would be calling the house, and I could not guess what might happen when the telephone was not answered. Would they be in touch with the boat? Would they tell it to hoist anchor and be down-river and out through Newark Bay. As I understood it, Montez took no risks. Once he gave up the hope of the key, he could dispose of Polly and be in the clear, and all the wild and pain-stricken complaints Alice and I might make to the police would be of no avail. We had no proof, and Montez had his diplomatic immunity to wrap around him as a protective sheath.

When Alice pleaded with Shlakmann, “How much further? Where is it?” he pointed to me.

“Our speed is only five or six miles an hour. And we’re not moving in a straight line—not by a long shot.”

“Can’t you hurry?” Alice begged me.

“I can’t hurry,” I replied desperately. “The last thing in the world I should do at this point is to hurry.”

I was searching for a buoy again. I crept through the water, casting from side to side, winding back and forth. Here there was no preferable channel, but rather a series of little rivers through the six-foot high reeds, and I cast from one to the next, feeling trapped and frustrated, like a man in a maze who keeps turning back on his path until he is wild with anger and disappointment.

It was not simply a matter of proceeding southward with sufficient water under my bottom. If it were only that, it would have been simple, and I could have opened the throttle and been in Newark Bay in less than an hour. But I had to find the main channel—always find it and keep with it. Otherwise, I could slide past the fat man’s boat, with only a screen of reeds separating us—and never know it was there.

The incoming tide had fulfilled itself. For the long moment of equilibrium, it had stood still, the thousands of acres of water that covered the Meadows in suspension, like a vast sheet of moonlit glass. Then it turned and began the ebb. I watched bits of straw and litter begin the southward flow, and I chose a channel that matched the direction. I was fortunate because a buoy loomed out of the darkness, and then I noticed a slight eddy where the even motion of the tide was being interrupted. I cut off the motor.

“What’s that for?” Shlakmann demanded, his guttural voice echoing through the night.

“Quiet,” I whispered, pointing to the eddy.

“Johnny, what is it?”

“There’s nothing here,” Shlakmann said. We were walled in with reeds on either side.

“Maybe not right here,” I told him, “but something’s flowing into the river and interrupting the tide. It’s a current of some kind. Does this canal of yours have a current?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“The boat could be anywhere,” I whispered, “so keep your voice down, Shlakmann. The boat could be twenty yards from us and the reeds would hide it.”

“Please, Mr. Shlakmann,” Alice joined in gently. “Johnny knows the Meadows.”

“All right,” he whispered hoarsely. “How do we find it?”

I unshipped the oars and handed him one. “Use it as a paddle—from where you are. I’ll paddle and steer from the back.”

We moved slowly down the channel, and suddenly a side-passage opened. The eddy came from there. We slid into it, and it broadened into a forty-foot passageway among the reeds, leading due west. About eighty or ninety yards ahead of us, anchored in midstream and showing as a dark blur in the moonlight, lay a big cabin cruiser.

“Is that it?” I whispered to Shlakmann.

“It could be.”

“No way to know?”

“Maybe, if we come up closer. It looks about the right size.

“Who would be on it, Shlakmann?” I whispered.

He knelt in the bottom of the boat, and leaned toward me, whispering hoarsely, “Maybe the fat man—but more odds only Angie, Lenny, and the kid. I take care of Angie—you take care of Lenny, just in case she got a gun. But you listen to me, Camber—once I get that key, I have me a little fun with that Lenny.” He licked the slit where his lips should have been. “You read me, huh? Understand? I have me a little fun. I got an itch for that pig—Jesus Christ, I got an itch right down to my ankles. That pig’s going to play games like she never play before, and she ain’t no novice. No, sir. So you just keep hands off and don’t make no trouble for yourself—understand, Camber?”

“He understands, Mr. Shlakmann,” Alice replied softly.