The Screaming Mimi Page 3

  He took the ten out and put it in his own pocket and tossed the wallet toward the dresser. He said. “What’s the matter with the pool ticket racket, Goetz? That bad?” The bald man’s face wasn’t pretty. He said, “I told you; the heat’s on. You got your money. Now get out.”

  “I got ten,” Sweeney said. “I wouldn’t take a man’s last fin, pally. I’ll take the other ten in trade. A bath and a shave and a shirt and socks.”

  Sweeney peeled off his coat and stepped out of his trousers. He sat down on the edge of the mussed-up bed and took off his shoes. He went into the bathroom and turned on the water to run in the tub.

  He came out stark naked, holding a wadded-up ball that had been his shirt, socks and underwear and put it in the wastebasket.

  The bald man was still standing by the door, but he’d put tile little automatic back into the pocket of the bathrobe.

  Sweeney grinned at him. Over the roar of water running into the tub, he said, “Don’t call coppers now, Goetz. With me dressed this way, they might get the wrong idea.” He went into the bathroom and shut the door.

  He soaked a long time in the tub, and then shaved leisurely with Goetz’s razor – providentially an electric one.

  Sweeney’s hands were still shaking.

  When he came out, the bald man was back in bed, his back to the room.

  “Asleep, darling?” Sweeney asked.

  There wasn’t any answer.

  Sweeney opened a drawer of the dresser and chose a white sport shirt with a soft collar. It was tight across the shoulders and the collar wouldn’t button, but it was a shirt and it was clean and white. A pair of Goetz’s socks proved a bit small, but they went on.

  He eyed his own shoes and suit with disgust, but they’d have to do. Goetz’s wouldn’t fit. Sweeney did the best he could with a shoebrush and a clothes brush. He made sure the ten-dollar bill was still in the pocket of his trousers when he put them on.

  He brushed his hat and put that on, and then stopped at the door.

  He said, “Nighty-night, pally, and thanks for everything. We’re even now.” He closed the door quietly and went downstairs and outside into the hot sunlight. He walked north on Dearborn, past the Dearborn Station. In a little restaurant opposite the front of it, he had three cups of black coffee and managed to eat one doughnut of two he ordered.

  It tasted like library paste, but he got it down.

  Under the shadow of the El, two blocks north, he got his shoes shined and then waited, shaking a little, in a tiny cubbyhole in the back of the shop while his suit was sponged and pressed. It needed more than sponging, but it didn’t look too bad when he put it back on.

  He took a look at himself in the long mirror and decided he looked fair enough by now. There were circles under his eyes and the eyes themselves – well, he wasn’t a thing of beauty and a joy forever, and he had to remember to keep his hands in his pockets until he got over the trembling, but he looked human.

  He spread the collar of the white sport shirt on the outside of the collar of his coat, and that looked better, too.

  He kept to the shady side of the street, walking north across the Loop. He was starting to sweat again, and felt dirty already. He had a hunch he’d feel dirty for a a long time, no matter how many baths he took. Why did anyone in his right mind live in Chicago in a summer heat wave? Why did anyone live in Chicago at all? Why, for that matter, did anyone live?

  Sweeney’s headache had quit being dull, now. It was a rhythmic, persistent throbbing in his forehead and behind his eyeballs. And the palms of his hands were wet and felt clammy, despite how hot the rest of him was; and no matter how often he wiped them on the side of his trousers, they were wet and clammy again immediately.

  Sweeney Walking Across the Loop. At Lake Street, under the El again, he stopped in at a drugstore for a double bromo and another cup of coffee. He felt like a coiled spring that was tied down too tightly; he felt like a claustrophobiac locked in a tiny room; he felt lousy. The coffee seemed to be swishing around in his guts like bilgewater inside a leaky ship – tepid, brackish bilgewater filled with little green algae, if algae are green. Sweeney’s were, and they wriggled, too.

  He crossed Wacker Drive, hoping that a car would hit him, but none did; he walked across the bridge in the bright hot glare of sunshine and he lifted one foot and put it down and lifted the other and put that down, for six blocks to Erie Street; he walked east past Rush and then – not daring to stop – he put his clammy hands into his pockets and went into the areaway between two buildings and through an open doorway.

  This was home, if it still was. This was the biggest hurdle, for today. He took his right hand out of a pocket. and rapped gently on a door off the downstairs hallway. He put his hand back quickly.

  Heavy footsteps came slowly, and the door opened.

  Sweeney said, “Hello, Mrs. Randall. Uh–” Her sniff cut off whatever he’d been going to say. She said, “No, Mr. Sweeney.”

  “Uh – you mean you’ve rented my room?”

  “I mean – no, you can’t get in it to get something to hock to keep on drinking. I told you that last week, twice.”

  “Did you?” asked Sweeney vaguely. He didn’t remember, or did he? Now that she spoke of it, one of the two times came back to him dimly. “Guess I was pretty drunk.” He took a deep breath. “But it’s over now. I’m sober.” She sniffed again. “How about the three weeks you owe me? Thirty-six dollars.”

  Sweeney fumbled out the bills in his pockets, a five and three singles. “All I got,” he said. “I can give you eight dollars on account.”

  The landlady looked from the bills up to Sweeney’s face. “I guess you’re on the level, Sweeney, about sobering up. If you’ve got money, you aren’t after stuff to hock. You could do a lot of drinking on eight dollars.”

  “Yes,” Sweeney said.

  She stepped back from the door. “Come on in.” And, after he had followed her in: “Sit down. Put your money back in your pocket. You’ll need it worse than I do, till you get started again. How long’ll that be?”

  Sweeney sat down. “A few days,” he said. “I can raise some money, when I’m okay again.”

  He put his hands, and the bills, back in his pocket.

  “Uh – I’m afraid I lost my key. Do you have–”

  “You didn’t lose it. I took it away from you a week ago Friday. You were trying to carry out your phonograph to hock it.”

  Sweeney dropped his head into his hands. “Lord, did I?”

  “You didn’t. I made you take it back. And I made you give me the key. Your clothes are all there, too, except your topcoat and overcoat. You must have taken them before that. And your typewriter. And your watch – unless you got it on.”

  Sweeney shook his head slowly. “Nope. It’s gone. But thanks for saving the other stuff.”

  “You look like hell. Want a cup of coffee? I got some on.”

  “It’s running out of my ears,” Sweeney told her. “But – yes, I’ll have another cup. Black.”

  He studied her as she got up and waddled over to the stove. There ought to be more landladies like Mrs. Randall, he thought. Tough as nails on the outside (they had to be to run a rooming house) and soft as butter inside. Most of them were tough all the way through.

  She came back with the coffee and he drank it. He got his key and went up the stairs. He got inside and got the door closed before he started to shake, and he stood there, leaning against the inside of the door until the worst of it was over.

  Then he made it to, the washbasin and was sick at his stomach, and that helped, although the sound of the water running made his head hurt worse.

  When that was over, he wanted to lie down and sleep, but instead he stripped off his clothes, put on a bathrobe, and went down the hall to the bathroom. He drew himself a hot tub and soaked in it for a long time before he went back to his room.

  Before he dressed again, he rolled up the spotted and worn suit he’d been wearing and the too-small sh
irt and socks he’d taken from the man named Goetz and put them into the wastebasket. He put on all clean clothes, including his best summer-weight suit. He put on a silk tie that had cost him five bucks and his best pair of shoes.

  He straightened up the room carefully, even meticulously. He turned on the radio side of his radio-phono combination until he got a time announcement between programs and set the clock on his dresser and wound it. It was half-past eleven.

  Then he got his Panama hat out of the closet and went out. Mrs. Randall’s door opened as he started down the stairs.

  She called out, “Mr. Sweeney?” and he leaned over the railing to look toward her. “Yes?”

  “Forgot to tell you there was a phone call for you this morning, early, about eight o’clock. A Walter Krieg, from the paper you work for – or used to work for. Which is it?”

  “Used to work for, I guess,” Sweeney said. “What’d he say? What’d you say?”

  “He asked for you and I said you weren’t in. He said if you came back before nine to have you call him. You didn’t – not that I was expecting you to – so I kinda forgot it. That’s all that was said.”

  Sweeney thanked her and went on out. At the corner drugstore he bought a half pint of whiskey and put it in his hip pocket. Then he went into the phone booth, dialed the Blade, and asked for the managing editor by name.

  “Krieg?” he said. “This is Sweeney. Just got home. Got your message. Sober. What you want?”

  “Nothing now. It’s too late, Sweeney. Sorry.”

  “All right, it’s too late and you’re sorry. But what did you want?”

  “Eye-witness story, if you’re sober enough to remember what you saw last night. A beat copper said you were around when the lid came off that Yolanda Lang business. Remember it?”

  “More than the lid came off, and I damn well remember it. Why’s it too late? You got one edition on the street but the main one coming up and two others. The home edition’s not in, is it?”

  “Going in in fifteen minutes. Take you longer’n that to–”

  “Quit wasting time,” Sweeney said. “Put a rewrite man on the phone now. I can give him half a column in five minutes. Gimme Joe Carey; he can take it fast.”

  “Okay, Sweeney. Hang on.”

  Sweeney hung on, getting his thoughts organized, until he heard Joe’s voice. Then he started talking, fast.

  When he was through, he put the receiver back on the hook and leaned weakly against the wall of the phone booth.

  He hadn’t asked to have Walter Krieg put back on the line; that could wait. He’d do better going in and seeing Walter personally.

  But not yet, not just yet.

  He went back to his room and put the little half pint bottle of whiskey on the arm of the comfortable Morris chair and a shot glass beside it. He hung up his suit coat and Panama, and loosened his collar and tie.

  Then he went over to the phonograph and squatted down on his haunches in front of the shelf of albums. He studied the titles. Not that it mattered; he knew which one he was going to hear: the Mozart 40.

  No, you wouldn’t have thought it to look at him, maybe, but that was Sweeney’s favorite – the Symphony No. 40, in G Minor, K. 550. He stacked the three records on the phonograph, flicked the switch to start the first one, and went over to the Morris chair to sit and listen.

  The first movement, allegro molto.

  Why should I tell you anything about Sweeney? If you know the Mozart 40, the dark restlessness of it, the macabre drive behind its graceful counterpoint, then you know Sweeney. And if the Mozart 40 sounds to you like a gay but slightly boring minuet, background for a conversation, then to you Sweeney is just another damn reporter who happens, too, to be a periodic drunk.

  But let it pass; what you think and what I think have no bearing on this; on Sweeney unscrewing the top of the half pint bottle and pouring himself a drink. Drinking it.

  There are strange things and there are stranger ones.

  And one of the strangest? A wooden box containing oddments of copper wire and metal plates, a half-dozen spaces of the nothingness called a vacuum, and a black wire which plugs into a hole in the wall from whence cometh our help, whence flows a thing which we call electricity because we do not know what it is. But it flows and inorganic matter lives; a table is prepared before you and revolves, bearing a disk; a needle scrapes in a groove.

  A needle dances in a groove and a diaphragm vibrates, and the air about you vibrates. And the thoughts of a man a century and a half dead press upon you; you sit in light and the shadow of the soul of a man long dead. You share the troubled thoughts of a dapper little court musician in a horrible financial mess, perhaps feeling the end of his life was near and working at prodigious speed, turning out in a few weeks the greatest symphony he ever wrote.

  Yes, there are strange things. And there was Sweeney, pouring his second drink as the third disk dropped and the second movement started, the lighter andante.

  He drank them neat, the third side of the album and the second drink. He sighed and pushed himself up out of the chair; the pain in his head was still there and the pain in his soul, but the shaking of his hands was gone.

  He rinsed out the glass and put away the little half pint bottle, still more than half full. He turned over the three records on the phonograph, started it again and sat back down to listen to the rest of the 40.

  He closed his eyes and just listened as the second movement ended and the dark-bright minuetto-and-trio of the third movement lived all too briefly and died and gave birth to what he had been waiting for; the bitter final movement, the allegro assai, the power and the melancholy glory.

  And then Sweeney sat listening to the silence, and after a while he began to chuckle almost inaudibly to himself.

  He was out of it now, off the binge, sober. Until the next time, which might be months, might be a couple of years. However long until enough hell accumulated inside him that he’d have to soak it out; until then he could be normal and drink normally. Yes, I know, alcoholics can’t do that, but Sweeney wasn’t an alcoholic; he could and did drink regularly and normally and only once in a while dive off the deep end into a protracted drunk. There’s that type of drinker, too, although of late the alcoholics have been getting most of the ink.

  But Sweeney was out of it now, shaken but not shaking, sober. He could even get his job back, he felt sure, if he ate a little crow. He could climb out of debt in a few weeks and be back where he was, wherever that was.

  Or–

  Yes, he was sober. But that utterly absurd decision or resolution or whatever it had been–

  What if? Why not? Anything you want. Didn’t God have something there: anything you want if you want it badly enough to concentrate on getting it. Any little thing like a million dollars or any big thing like spending a night with – what was her name? – Yolanda Lang.

  He chuckled again, and he closed his eyes and thought back and remembered and saw again that incredible scene behind glass in the State Street hallway.

  After a few seconds he quit chuckling. He told himself: Sweeney, you’re asking for trouble. You’ll need money, for one thing. A dime-a-dozen reporter couldn’t make the grade with that babe. And for an in, you’ll have to hunt a ripper. And you might find him.

  And that would be bad, Sweeney knew, because Sweeney had a horror – almost a phobia – of cold steel, cold sharp steel. Razor-edged steel in the hands of a madman, a homicidal maniac. A razor-like knife that can slash across your abdomen and spill your guts out on the sidewalk where they won’t be a bit of use to you, Sweeney.

  Sure, he told himself: You’re a God damned fool, Sweeney.

  But he’d known that for a long time.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sweeney headed for the Blade.

  There’s a nice pun in that, if you don’t mind your puns obvious. The Blade. If you saw that pun yourself, forgive me for pointing it out. You got it, yes, but somebody else would have missed it. It takes all ki
nds of people to read a book.

  Some people, for instance, see with their eyes; they want descriptions. So, if it interests you (it doesn’t interest me) William Sweeney was five feet eleven inches tall and weighed a hundred and sixty-three pounds. He had sandy hair that was receding at the front and getting a little thin on top, but was mostly still there. He had a long thin face, vaguely horselike but not, on the whole, unpleasing to the uncritical eye. He looked to be about forty-three, which is not strange because that is how old he really was. He wore glasses with light-colored shell rims for reading and working; he could see all right without them for any distance over four or five feet. For that matter, he could work without them if he had to, although he’d get headaches if he did it too long. But it was well that he could do without them for a while, because he was going to have to. They’d been in his pocket two weeks ago when he’d started his serious drinking and only God (I don’t mean Godfrey) knew where they were now.

  He threaded his way across the city room and into the office of the managing editor. He sat down on the arm of the chair across the desk from Krieg. He said, “Hi, Walter.” Krieg looked up and grunted, then finished the letter in hand and put it down. He opened his mouth and closed it again.

  Sweeney said, “I’ll say it for you, Walter. First, I’m a son of a bitch to have let you down and gone on a binge without giving you notice. I’m through. You can’t mess with guys like me. I’m an anachronism. The days of the drunken reporter are over and a modem newspaper is a business institution run on business lines and not a Front Page out of Hecht by MacArthur. You want men you can count on. Right?”

  “Yes, you son of–”

  “Hold it, Walter. I said it for you, all of it. And anyway, I wouldn’t work on your damn paper unless you hired me to. How was the eyewitness story?”

  “It was good, Sweeney, damn good. That was a break in a million, your being there.”