TIME PASSED, I COULDN’T TELL HOW MUCH. Hours, maybe. I dozed on and off. At one point, I heard a knock on the door upstairs and a lot of feet stamping around overhead. There was some talking. I couldn’t make out the words.
I heard the next thing all right: a gun went off from a place that seemed right over my bed. My heart took a giant leap. Upstairs in the kitchen, someone swore and another shot let loose. I heard a body fall down, then a bunch of grunts and crashing furniture. A fight was going on. A few minutes later, it stopped, and footsteps came thudding down the stairs to my cellar. The door blasted open. A couple of brand-new characters walked in.
“Found him!” one yelled. He came over and started trying to yank me off the bed.
“He’s tied down,” the other guy said.
“Well, cut him loose.”
The second man flicked open a jackknife and cut me free. They both started trying to drag me up the stairs.
“C’mon, kid. Walk!” they were telling me, but my legs had gone dead. I couldn’t make them work. Finally, one of them hauled me over his shoulder like a sack of flour and we went up.
“Where am I going?” I asked.
“Shut up,” he said.
We came to the top of the stairs and turned down a hall that led to the front door. On the way, I saw Harry and Ernie standing in the kitchen with their hands in the air. Somebody was holding a gun on them and they didn’t look happy about it. John Appleby had a gun on two others. The little squealer had switched sides.
A man was lying on the floor. Whether he was shot dead or just wounded, I couldn’t tell because I was traveling sort of upside down and backward. I caught a glimpse of Harry turning around to watch me as I went by.
“Who are you guys?” I heard him say to one of the boys holding the guns. “Hey, we can cut a deal. You want in on the freighter? Tell the badge we got no problem with that. We didn’t know he wanted to go that way. We got no problem at all.”
Nobody answered. Harry looked as if he couldn’t believe what was happening. I couldn’t believe it, either. I was being kidnapped again.
My head slammed into a hard edge. I saw a fountain of sparks and then a warm, wet curtain came down over my eyes. I’d been thrown into the backseat of a big roadster and now a bunch of guys were piling in after me. The engine cranked up and we started away down the road. The man sitting next to me was angry.
“Idiot! He’s bleeding like crazy. Why’d you dump him like that?”
“I didn’t!”
“Can you stop it?”
“Get that blanket outta the trunk.”
My head was feeling strange, woozing in and woozing out. They tried sitting me up, laying me down, wrapping handkerchiefs around my head and covering me up with the blanket. Nothing would stop me. I was bleeding all over the place.
“He’s going to need a docter,” somebody said. “We can’t deliver him this way. Take the gag off.”
When they got it off me, another voice in the front seat said: “We ain’t got time for no docter. Listen, kid, we didn’t mean to hurt you. Can you breathe better now?”
I nodded. There was something familiar about that voice. I’d heard it before.
“Cripes, he’s a mess. Farino, what were you thinking, throwing him in like that? You know he’s gotta talk!”
“Well, he weighed a ton.”
“What’d he hit?”
“A case of booze.”
“Cripes!”
The car went very fast at times and slowed down to a crawl at others. There were a number of turns and swerves. They’d laid me down on my back on the seat, my legs stretched across two or three laps. Whenever I opened my eyes, I could see stars shining in the dark sky through the car window. I recognized a couple of constellations Jeddy and I used to point out to each other: Orion’s Belt and Scorpio. I saw the Big Dipper. After a while, we must have been driving in more or less one direction because the same constellations stayed there, inside the window frame. I’d get dizzy and close my eyes, and when I opened them, Orion would still be riding along with me. I didn’t know where I was going but even in my bad state, I knew who I was going with. Somewhere along the way, I figured out who that voice in the front seat belonged to.
Stanley Culp.
I was traveling with the New York mobsters.
“Hello, Mr. Culp. It’s me, Ruben Hart,” I remember saying once. I was dumb enough to think he’d somehow missed this fact.
He glanced at me over a shoulder in his lazy way. “Sorry about this, kid,” he said, and turned back around.
I must have passed out because the next thing I knew, I was being carried from the car and taken inside another house. The room I was put in this time was upstairs, a kind of attic. I was still bleeding, going in and out of consciousness. At some point, a man with a face that sagged like a old sack down one side came to look at me. I figured he was one of the kingpins because everyone was kowtowing to him, holding his coat and backing up to give him room. He leaned over and gave me a hard stare.
“Poor kid. You messed him up good,” he said.
That was it. He left. He’d decided I was beyond talking at that moment, and he was probably right. The funny thing was, I was ready to talk if only I could have. I was scared sick. These New York gangsters struck me as real efficient professionals, the kind that don’t play around with dumping bodies at sea that might wash up on shore later. If they wanted to get rid of someone, they’d know how to do it. Like Danny Walsh in Providence, there’d be nothing left behind and no one to tell why.
Later, when I found out that the man with the sagging face was probably Lucky Luciano himself, come out from New York City for the very purpose of directing operations in our area, I wasn’t surprised. A face like that you don’t forget. A face like that could’ve asked me and I would’ve told him: “Under the mattress, in the tobacco pouch.” My mother and Aunt Grace would’ve had to take their chances.
After a few hours, one of the New York gang brought me up a bowl of soup and stood around while I tried to eat it.
“If I were you, I’d get better fast and talk,” the guy said. He had a sort of deadpan face. There was no telling what he was thinking.
“I will,” I croaked.
“They don’t want you around here. They’ll get rid of you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Even if you talk, they’ll probably get rid of you,” he went on. “It’s cleaner that way. Nobody to squeal on us.”
After that, I couldn’t eat anymore. He took the soup bowl, tied me up and put the gag over my mouth. He turned out the lights on me the way the Boston gang had done, closed the door and went downstairs. The only window in the room had a shade pulled over it. I was alone in the dark, and this time there were no fingers of light to hang on to. I began to drift.
At times I seemed to be on a rolling sea, and at other times I lay in a dark forest, trees waving over my head. I imagined myself floating up toward a ceiling, which I expected to bump into at any moment, though I never did because it always lifted higher in the nick of time to make room for me. What I found out was, there’s a point beyond which you can’t bring up enough energy even to be afraid anymore. What was happening was happening, and I wasn’t me but a spectator to myself, waiting and watching and, in an oddly distant way, curious to see how it would end.
Sometime later, a loud creak woke me up. I thought a piece of roof was being pried off right over my head. I waited but nothing else happened. I’d decided I’d been imagining things again when a quieter sound started, a sort of gnawing or jimmying. It came from the window in my room. I heard whispering. Someone was trying to get in.
Suddenly, the window was raised. A wave of cold air blew in from outside. The shade buckled and was pushed aside, and a leg came in over the sill. Somebody was in the room with me. A black shape stood just inside the window, looking around, trying to get its bearings. I held my breath. After everything that had happened, I didn’t know if it was a friend or someone else out to get me.
At last, a voice whispered: “Ruben? Are you in here?”
“Mm-mm-mm,” I said through my gag.
The dark shape came forward and stooped over me. A cigarette lighter came on in my face. In its flash, I saw Billy Brady, and he saw me.
“Gotcha!” he whispered, and squeezed my arm. “Here, hang on to to this.”
He put the burning lighter into one of my hands that was tied to the bedpost, then set to work with a knife to cut through my ropes. One by one, he sliced them off. He pulled me up and unknotted the gag over my mouth. I was never so happy to see anyone in my life.
“How did you know I was here?” I said. I was groggy, still not sure if this was a dream or real life.
“Shh-shh!” Billy leaned close and said in my ear: “Don’t talk now. There’s a ladder set up outside the window. I’ll be right behind you. Move real slow.”
Slow was the only way I could move after being tied up for so long. I inched across the room, climbed out the window and went down that ladder one shivery leg at a time. It seemed an age before my foot hit the ground. Then Billy came down beside me and, hardly breathing, we went across the dark yard to the road. We were almost there when someone rushed at me from behind a bush and two arms went around my neck. A voice said, “Thank God!” in my ear.
I didn’t have to look to know who it was. Marina McKenzie. When she’d finished hugging me, she started up shaking me.
“Next time listen when someone tells you to watch out,” she hissed. “You could’ve ended up dead.”
“I know,” I whispered. “I think John Appleby set me up. He was playing both sides.”
“That skunk. No wonder his family was getting rich. Anyhow, we’ve got you back, so it’s all right.”
There was no more time to talk. We began sneaking away down the road behind the tall, dark form of Billy Brady. He wasn’t alone. Two men came up behind us carrying the ladder. Around the bend, two cars were waiting, idling with their headlights off.
Billy went over and talked to the driver of one and sent him off on some errand. Then we all piled into the other car, an old station wagon. Marina, Billy and I were in the backseat while the others sat up front with the driver.
“No talking till we get past these crooks,” Billy warned. The driver nudged the accelerator and started off coasting to keep the engine quiet. We drifted past the house where the New York mobsters had held me. Not a sign of movement came from inside.
“Out cold from celebrating too hard, most likely,” one of Billy’s friends snickered after a minute.
“Those New York goons thought they’d pulled a double whammy on the College Boys,” a second one said. “Ruben here wasn’t the only thing they hijacked. While the one bunch was holding everybody at gunpoint in the kitchen, the rest of the gang was out back with a truck, helping themselves to a shedful of the College Boys’ whiskey. Must be a hundred cases they brought back with them, stacked behind the house.”
“There was a hundred cases, you mean,” the first man said. “Rick, tell Billy what we did.”
“Alfred and I laid claim to a few while you were springing Ruben. We’ve got ’em in the back with the ladder.”
They all let loose and whooped at that.
“You fellas’ve got the stickiest rum-running fingers I ever saw!” Billy said. Turning to me, he added, “I hope you don’t mind a bunch of renegade smugglers being your angels of mercy.”
I grinned and said it was all right by me.
“Then I’d like to introduce you to the crew of the Black Duck. It’s thanks to them we could pull off this stunt.”
As the car picked up speed, hands started coming out to me in the dark, and though I couldn’t see their faces very well, I tried to thank each one for coming to my rescue. There was Alfred Biggs, ship’s mechanic, with forearms the size of tree stumps. There was Rick Delucca, Billy’s partner and navigator on the Duck, who’d known Billy at Harveston High School and brought him in on the Black Duck’s operations after Billy’s dad was killed. Behind the wheel was Bernardo Rosario, the Black Duck’s radio man, even younger than Billy, though he had a wife and two kids at home.
“How did you find me?” I asked him. “I thought I was a goner.”
“You never were, Marina had you under surveillance,” Billy answered. “In case you don’t know, she’s our trusty watchdog on land,” he added, no doubt thinking he was paying her a compliment, much as he prized his friendship with those animals.
“Trusty watchdog!” she protested. “I certainly hope not!”
“Secret agent, then, or how about Director of Intelligence? We had a notion you were about to get snatched by those Boston foxes, Ruben, and were keeping an eye out. We would’ve rescued you quicker, except the New York gang beat us to it. I hadn’t figured on them. We were trailing you all over.”
I looked at Marina then, wondering if she had any idea of the part her father had played in my abduction. I suspected she didn’t, and kept quiet on that subject. The truth is, I wasn’t sure about the chief myself. He was into the racket so deep, on so many levels, it was impossible to guess what his game plan was. I could bet my safety wasn’t high on his scoreboard, though.
“So, you’re working for the Black Duck now?” I asked Marina. I knew she had a mind of her own, but that was the first I’d had an inkling she’d take it so far.
“Not at all,” she said. “I’m trying to keep them out of trouble.”
Everybody roared with laughter at that. (“Fat chance,” Alfred Biggs told her.) I was glad we’d gone a piece down the road or the New York gang might have been woken up and come after us. The Black Duck’s crew was a cheerful, wisecracking bunch. As for Captain Billy Brady, whatever I’d thought of him before, I changed my mind that night. I knew he’d risked his skin for me, and asked his friends to do the same. There’d never be a way I could properly thank him, even if his motives weren’t completely pure. Which they weren’t, as I found out a moment later.
“Now, Ruben,” Billy said, leaning toward me in the car. “Where is this ticket you’ve got? The word going around is it’s half a fifty-dollar bill, ready to match with the captain of the Firefly’s. You know that boat’s carrying over half a million dollars’ worth of goods.”
I was opening my mouth to announce exactly where it was, thinking it was the least I could do for him, when I felt a hand take mine under cover of dark.
“Ruben threw it out, didn’t you?” Marina said softly, looking straight ahead.
I didn’t know what was going on, so I kept quiet.
“You wouldn’t toss it!” Billy said. “Come on, Ruben, you didn’t do that.”
“He did. He told me,” Marina went on, keeping my hand deep in hers. “About a month ago, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“He didn’t know what it was,” Marina went on.
I nodded. “That’s what I told the Boston gang, too. What good’s half a fifty-dollar bill?”
“Wait a minute!” Billy yelled at Marina. “If you knew he’d tossed it, why didn’t you say so? You could’ve let me know before we went to all this trouble to snatch him.”
She locked eyes on him with that level gaze of hers. “Billy Brady, I’m astonished. What were you intending to rescue, Ruben or the ticket?”
Billy sagged back against the seat, shaking his head.
“That beats all,” he groaned. “The Firefly’s finally coming in after all these months and now there’s no one to claim her cargo. Her captain will see there’s been a misfire and probably turn tail and head to Canada. Tony Mordello would have a good laugh over that. All his liquor going back out to sea. I guess he won the last round at that poker game after all.”
“I guess he did,” Marina answered, giving me a knowing smile. She squeezed my hand and let it go.
I never asked Marina why she made me tell that lie, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. Anyone could see that the Firefly’s shipment was too big and too hot for a small smuggling operation like the Black Duck’s. Billy Brady’s interest in profit had begun to get the better of his good sense. Marina was doing exactly what she’d said, trying to keep the Duck out of trouble, though even then she must have known she was playing against the odds.
All the time we were driving the dark roads back to town, I’d assumed I was headed home. Not until the car took a sharp turn and began to bump over a surface that was obviously not the road into my house did I look out. There, just visible in the faint light of what was now early dawn, I saw a span of choppy ocean that could only be the water off Coulter’s Point.
“Aren’t you taking me home?”
The car went silent.
“Not right away,” Billy said after a pause. “Your name’s out and around about this ticket. We think it’s best if you lay over with a friend of the family until things settle down. Your parents know you’re safe. I sent word by Doc Washburn in the car back there.”
“Doc Washburn! Was he in on this?”
“He was. The doc knows this town inside out. He’s no rumrunner, but we call on him if we need him. Your father’s been worried sick about you. I’ve been in touch about tonight. Our plan was, if we got you back, you’d be safer away from home. He said he’d spread a story you’ve gone to visit your brother in Providence. That should cover you for now.”
I tried to imagine my father being worried sick about me, but couldn’t bring up that picture. More likely, he’d be worrying about who he’d find on such short notice to do my work at the store.
At this point, the car slowed and rocked even more crazily over the ground, and a dog started barking.
“Sadie! Stop that racket!” Billy shouted out the window.
A second later, we came up on two chicken coops leaning together at an angle that looked as if a hurricane had been through. I knew what friend of the family he’d been talking about.