I Come as a Theif Read online

  He now found himself in the habit of accumulating small objects at the rate of one a week: figurines, vases, beads, tiny toys, spoons—the world seemed replete with useless, decorative, unmissed chattels. He kept them in the back of his closet and in the bottom of the grandfather clock in the front hall that had never worked. Just why he was turning himself into such a magpie remained a mystery. At times he thought that he must like the feeling that he was doing things, rather than having things done to him. At others he felt that there might be an element of daring in these acts, a kind of challenge to the capricious deity that had made his family’s life seem such a dreary one. But all he could be sure of was that he felt a bigger, braver being when his fingers surreptitiously closed around a coveted object.

  There might have been a lesson taught by the fact that when detection came, it came after a gross risk quite unnecessarily and uncharacteristically taken. It was on the Lowders’ annual summer visit to Grandpa Daly in the big white house in Larchmont. Tony hated this visit. He hated the airs of superiority of the Daly cousins and the bray of the big Irish gathering. He hated his mother’s enthusiasm and his father’s discomfort. But above all he hated Grandpa Daly.

  Grandpa Daly was a small, wiry widower with thick long hair, still brown at eighty, that fell over his forehead in the manner of Will Rogers. But there was little benignity in the sharp-nosed, thin-lipped brown face under that tumbling lock or in the discourse that flowed so relentlessly from that gnarled throat. Tony had never known a human being to talk as much as Grandpa Daly. He seemed to be engaged in a kind of permanent, oral autobiography, a monument of words to the glory of Patrick Daly, varied only by individual paragraphs directed at particular members of his listening family to show them how best to derive profit from his example. Ordinarily, at least at Larchmont, the respectful silence of his descendants was broken only by appropriate laughs or exclamations of assent, but occasionally a querulous grandchild or bibulous son-in-law might attempt a longer interruption or even take the floor, in which event the ancestral voice would rise in pitch and by the exact number of decibels needed to dominate the rival sound, immediately dropping to its former level when the latter was quelled.

  It was noted by all, however, that if little knowledge of his relatives could have come in by his ears, enough must have entered through his wandering, shrewd little eyes, for he seemed entirely up to date with the collective and individual failings of his clan. He also seemed to have antennae that picked up the least failure of reverence, for he showed an overt hostility to Tony and directed some of his sharpest comments in the boy’s direction. Tony’s indifferent marks at school, Tony’s preoccupying love of sports, Tony’s espousal of the causes of delinquent servants, all came in for grandpaternal comminations. Even at fourteen Tony could sense insecurity in the tyrant who could not endure the smallest sign of independence in his court.

  Sometimes at table, the sage of County Cork would pare his fingernails with a tiny scissors that could be pulled out of the interior of a mother-of-pearl pocket knife. This knife intrigued Tony. It was the symbol of his grandfather’s immunity from the law that governed others. For anyone else to have pared his nails at table would have been unthinkable. Grandpa himself would have been the first to pounce on him. He was like Louis XIV, who had the lonely privilege of defecating in public. One morning when Tony passed the open doorway of his grandfather’s empty bedroom, he spied the knife on the bureau, and, almost before he knew what he was doing, he had entered quickly and seized it. But as he returned to the doorway, he confronted his grandfather coming in. Never was he to forget the expression on that brown, cunning face. It was delight!

  “What are you doing in my room, Tony Lowder? What have you got there in your hand? Open your hand at once, sir I At once, I tell you, or I’ll call the police! By God, Tony Lowder, if you don’t open your hand this second…”

  Tony dropped the knife and fled.

  All morning he waited for retribution. He speculated that his grandfather would select the high publicity of the noontime meal, and he was right. When all were at table, Daly produced his ivory knife and placed it solemnly on the table before him.

  “It is my sorry duty, ladies and gentlemen, to have to tell you that our kinsman, Tony Lowder, is a thief!”

  Tony’s mother gave a cry of alarm; there were gasps of dismay, but Daly raised his arms in the air.

  “I caught him red-handed this very morning! Leaving my room with this valuable instrument clutched in his grasping fist! Deny it if you can, Tony Lowder!”

  Tony was silent.

  “Of course, he can’t,” the old man continued. “Any more than I, alack the day, can deny he’s my own flesh and blood. When I was a boy, in Ireland, my grandfather told me that he could remember the day when a lad was hanged in Galway for the theft of a silver pitcher. It’s not my opinion that we have altogether gained from the leniency that has taken the place of the old values.”

  Daly discoursed throughout the meal on the nefariousness of Tony’s crime. There were no interruptions except for Dorothy’s occasional gentle sobbing. But Tony knew that this was a necessary demonstration put on for her father’s benefit. He found that he fiercely welcomed the break between himself and the old man. There was an end of the hypocrisy of blood love or even blood civility. In the cleaner, airier world that was opening up around him, Patrick Daly, if still a god, was a superseded god. He could rule the Dalys, but he no longer ruled Tony Lowder. The latter was as free and lofty as a Roman citizen who allows a temple in his forum to be dedicated to Jehovah as a gesture of tolerance to an unreasonable little nation that his legions have subdued.

  When the meal was over, and the Daly cousins had trooped out of the dining room without speaking to him, Tony went out to the lawn alone. He could not quite analyze his bursting emotion, but he wondered if it might not be happiness.

  ***

  Later that afternoon his real retribution fell, in a totally unexpected way. His father took him up to his room, closed the door and asked him gravely if his grandfather’s accusation was true.

  “But I admitted it!” Tony exclaimed in surprise.

  “You weren’t just borrowing the knife, to use it for something?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “You really meant to keep it?”

  “Certainly.”

  “And never return it?”

  “Never.”

  And then, to Tony’s horror, George Lowder burst into tears. Never could the boy have imagined that this smiling, taciturn, indifferent parent could have crumpled so completely. It was appalling to discover that a man who had always been so incapable of heights should not be immune to depths.

  “Please, Dad.” He placed a timid hand on his father’s shaking shoulder. “Please, Dad, I can’t bear it.”

  “What’s there for you to bear?” George spoke in sudden petulance, as if no blood relationship now existed between them. “You’re perfectly self-sufficient. You steal when you want, lie when you want, take everything out of life you want. You’re a Daly through and through, despite your grandfather’s ranting. He’s secretly delighted, of course. Not because you’re a thief, but because I always rated you above the Dalys. Oh, I never said it. I didn’t have to. He knew I thought it, the old devil. He knew from the beginning. And he hates me for it. It’s not enough that he and your mother have sucked the blood out of me. They had to take my children, too. Make them pure Daly, so I didn’t even have stud value. Well, I never had much hope for Susan or Philip, but I had some for you. And now that’s gone.”

  Tony’s eyes, too, were filled with tears. The world in his mind stretched out to an infinite plane of scorched grass. There seemed no end to desolation. “Why didn’t you tell me, Dad?”

  George seemed surprised at the agony in his tone. “Tell you what?”

  “Tell me you believed in me. Tell me what was at stake.”

  “Oh, Tony, when did any of you ever listen to me?”

  “I did. I want
ed to, anyway.”

  George’s surprise turned to distrust. He was retentive of grievances. “Well, even if you would have, it’s too late now. What’s done is done.”

  “But I don’t have to stay a thief.”

  “Would you swear to stop?” George looked at him doubtfully. “On your word of honor? If you have one?”

  “Of course, I will.”

  George shook his head. “Your grandfather will never believe it. He’ll always suspect you.”

  “Well, who cares about Grandpa? You and I will believe it. Oh, Dad, you’ll see. I’ll be all the things you want.”

  The blankness on George Lowder’s face might have been something like shame, as if he had conceived a sudden suspicion of what had been sacrificed in his private war with Patrick Daly. But if he had built his life on hate, could it be suddenly switched to love? “Please, Dad,” Tony cried in a sudden passion of sincerity. “Please.”

  “Then tell me. Have you stolen any other things?”

  “No.”

  “This was your first time?”

  “My very first.”

  “Then maybe it’s not too late.”

  Tony hugged his father, and when the latter had left, he immediately sat down to draw up a list of the stolen objects that had now to be returned. For it was at once perfectly clear to him that thus and only thus could he even hope to convert his egregious lie into a necessary truth.

  The weeks that followed the Lowders’ return to the city were full ones for Tony. Each stolen chattel had to be the subject of a separate campaign. Some of the campaigns were simple enough. The toys that had been taken from the homes of friends could be easily and secretly restored. But the ornaments and bric-a-brac taken from the homes of grown-ups proved much harder. He had to wait until his mother proposed a visit to the owner and then persuade her to take him along. In one case he had to pretend an interest in a thirteen-year-old daughter of the house that he was far from feeling, which resulted in more sticky kisses in the library while their mothers gossiped in the parlor. Yet there was ecstasy in the moment when he dropped a silver ashtray, shaped like a heart, on the table from which it had been ravished, just as his precocious little hostess slid her impertinent and unwelcome tongue between his lips.

  His mother had quarreled with a Daly aunt who had been particularly nasty about the episode of Grandpa’s scissors-knife, and Tony was beginning to despair about ever being able to return the ivory seal that belonged with the hunting eskimo on her mantelpiece. His despair was real, for he had got it firmly into his head that a single failure would be enough to invalidate his redemption and to leave him enmeshed forever in the dirty net of his lie. One Sunday morning, however, after a night when he had prayed very hard to a deity whom he was beginning to conceive of as an entity distinct from Grandpa Daly, an entity no longer necessarily disassociated from sympathy, the Daly aunt, Genevieve, called at the apartment after church to make up with her sister. In the flush of their reconciliation Dorothy gave her an azalea plant and Tony, leaping to his feet as he recognized the miracle, cried out to Aunt Genevieve that he would carry it home for her. When he got to her apartment she could not fail to offer him a glass of orangeade, and while she was in her pantry, he restored the little seal to its still empty place. As he did so he saw his glittering eyes in the mirror over the mantel and made the sign of the cross on his chest.

  Finally there was only a single trinket left to restore: a tiny doll’s flower vase, with yellow and purple latitudinal lines. He had filched it from a notions store while the proprietor and his mother had been discussing the deterioration of the neighborhood, and he had left it to the last because he had thought it would be the easiest to put back. But when he went to the store, he stared in dismay at a show window filled with shiny plumbing fixtures. The notions shop had gone out of business, and inquiry within revealed that the proprietor was dead.

  Tony turned back toward home in dazed, solid misery and walked several blocks before he realized that the funny little throb that seemed to be accelerating in his chest was anger. Somebody was making fun of him, somebody even meaner than Grandpa Daly! And taking the little vase out of his pocket, he hurled it on the pavement and ground it under his heel, turning around and around until, looking down, he could distinguish none of the particles. If God would not free him, he would free himself!

  But as he resumed his walk, he was conscious of a curious feeling of emptiness. He felt very light, as if with each step he might rise several feet in the air, so that his shoes and clothes acted as weights to keep him down. And then, suddenly, he realized that his anger was quite gone. He stopped again, as if waiting for nature to fill the vacuum, and, surely enough, something seemed to be being pumped into him. His body and mind, his very soul, appeared to be taking the joint shape of a tank, of some kind of receptacle anyway, into which a soft, warm foaming liquid was rapidly flowing. He stood very still in fear of losing the illusion which grew more and more agreeable as his realization of it intensified. Now he was almost flooded to the brim with a sense of unutterable ecstasy, yet the fuller he was, the lighter he became. He might have been a balloon that would float straight up to heaven! He cried aloud in his joy. What could it be but the promised redemption? What could he do but run home, as fast as he could, and fall on his knees to thank God?

  Part II

  1

  Tony had rather taken it for granted that payment by the underworld would be quick and efficient. He had vaguely pictured Max, on a park bench at lunch hour, being joined by a man in dark glasses. No greeting would pass between them, but when the man rose, an envelope with crisp new bills in the exact amount would be left at Max’s side. He had to be indoctrinated into the elaborate and clumsy ritual of crime.

  “Have our margin gaps been covered?” he asked confidently, when he and Max next met for lunch.

  “They’ve been covered to the extent of eight thousand bucks.”

  “Eight thousand! What happened to the other thirty-two?”

  Max glanced evasively about at the neighboring tables. “The first payment was only to be for fifteen.”

  “Then where’s the other seven?”

  “Look, Tony, can’t you leave that to me? These guys are tricky to deal with.”

  “So I’m beginning to see.”

  “All I ask is that you take care of your side. That should be simple enough.”

  “Not as simple as you so lightly assume. The Regional Director has already asked me what I’m doing in the Menzies case.”

  “No kidding?”

  “None whatsoever, I assure you. In his own very special brand of bureaucratise he managed to convey the distinct suggestion that I get off my ass.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Precisely. Jesus. I have plenty of little tricks up my sleeve as to how I can stall him, but in the meantime I expect to be compensated. And compensated according to the precise terms of our agreement. So I repeat: where is the other seven?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come, Max.”

  Max looked at him now with a desperate, sullen defiance. “Lassatta says he has to pay someone called Rubin. He says it was understood from the start that Rubin’s share was to come out of ours.”

  “And who the hell is Rubin?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Somebody in Lassatta’s union who originally brought him to Menzies.”

  “But why does he get paid out of our share? And for doing what?”

  “I guess because he always does.”

  “Always does what?”

  “Always gets a percentage of every Menzies deal.”

  “Max, you’re making no sense. Why should we risk our necks for forty grand and then have it chiseled down by some guy you’ve never even heard of? Tell Lassatta a deal’s a deal. If we don’t get every penny of that money, I’m not going to play ball. Menzies, Lippard and Co. can close shop.”

  “You’d better go easy with that kind of talk. You’re playing in a different leag
ue now.”

  Tony stared at his friend with an exasperation that turned to astonishment. For Max’s cheeks were as yellow as the table cover. And why, Tony wondered, should fear, simple animal fear, instantly raise such quivering contempt in himself? “Maybe this is what they mean by crime not paying,” he observed sarcastically. “And I thought we had figured this out with such masterly precision! The price, you will recall, was the bare minimum that would justify the risk. Even a couple of thousand less, and we would have stayed honest. And now you’re talking about cutting it in half.”

  “I still don’t see what else we could have done.”

  “Could have done? You mean you plan to take this lying down?”

  “What can I do, Tony?”

  “Tell Lassatta what I said. Is it a deal or no deal?”

  “You’d better see him yourself.”

  “I guess I’ll have to.”

  It was finally arranged that Tony and Max and Lassatta should meet in the back of a parked Buick sedan at Broadway and 110th Street on a Saturday afternoon at two. Tony took an immediate dislike to Lassatta, in whose fixed, stale little smile he read the desire to humiliate and bring down to his own level the political candidate.

  “Look, Lassatta,” he said after some minutes of pointless discussion. “I’m not pretending to be any bigger or any grander than you or any of your crowd. As far as I’m concerned, we’re all crooks together. But if I’m not going to get what I was promised, you’re not either. Is that clear? If I get a penny less than forty grand the Menzies case goes straight to the Regional Director.”

  Lassatta’s smile became the least bit staler, but his voice was soft. “What about Max’s back interest due? Aren’t I to take that out?”

  “What does that come to?”

  “Twelve g’s.”

  Tony turned indignantly to Max. “Is that right?”