One

If I shoot off my mouth to the wrong guy, I’m a goner.

And besides, who’d believe me?

But the whole thing doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make any sense at all. I been thinking about it and talking it over with myself. And then on top of that I get dreams. And it still doesn’t add up. I can’t understand why it happened. I go over the whole thing, step by step, and then after a while it gets hazy. It’s like trying to paint a picture with a bucketful of smoke.

At first the picture of Krassy starts out clear and distinct. Then the edges move a little and it starts to get fuzzy. Then all the lines overlap and the edges curl up and start forming crazy whirls and swirls... and you don’t have a picture anymore. I try to take my mind and grab the lines and pull them back straight, but the lines are really smoke and they slip away. And then all I have is hazy blue smoke which stretches all over the picture.

That’s the way it is, and maybe I’m making it up in my mind. About the smoke part, I mean, because the day it started was a smoky, hazy Chicago day. Smoke from the factories sifts in and mixes with the damp lake air, and it lies in soggy, gray felt blankets all over the city. Then the damp air turns into a fog, and the smoke mixes with it, and then the mixture hangs suspended and motionless and everybody goes around saying, “Christ, what a day!”

The smoke and fog cuts off the tops of the great big beautiful buildings down in the Loop... but it doesn’t touch the real Chicago. Not the dirty, little two-and three-story buildings which straggle along as far as you can see. And the smoke doesn’t make any difference to the stinking little shops with hand-drawn cardboard signs in their windows advertising bicycles repaired, men’s clothing slightly used—50 percent off, dresses cleaned while-U-wait, swap your old furniture here. Or all the neon signs advertising billiards, taverns with beer on tap, girl shows... the most beautiful girls in town, hotel rooms walk up two flights to the lobby.

Sometimes the smoke hangs from rusty iron fire escapes which stick out from the second stories over the street. Their end steps balance in the air, and when the signs are turned on, they throw crazy patterns and shadows on the patched sidewalks. The smoke covers a lot of things, but it doesn’t cover it all.

Anyway, it was that kind of a day when I got a message that my grandfather, old Charlie April, had died and left me twenty-five hundred bucks. I went into a little bar down the street and put a couple drinks inside me and thought about the old man and tried to feel sad. But I couldn’t feel too bad. I’d always sort of hated his guts because he was a mean old bastard.

He was the only living relative I had, and when I was a kid I’d lived with him. He’d worked as a fireman on the Erie Railroad and every so often he’d get liquored up and get into a fight at the end of his run. Sometimes he’d still be mad when he came home. Maybe just pounding things with his fists made him feel better. I don’t know. Anyway, one night he came home, drunker than hell, and knocked my brains half out. I left home.

I was fifteen.

I came to Chicago and started working around. Finally, I landed a job with the International Collection Agency; it wasn’t much of a place to work but I stayed on. Mostly I wrote threatening letters to deadbeats who wouldn’t pay their bills and traced skippers and dunned suckers.

It didn’t add up to more than forty or fifty bucks a week, which meant a room on the third floor of a walk-up. There was a cheap dresser and a brass bed with a faded, old linoleum rug on the floor. In one corner there was a beat-up bridge lamp, and a sagging overstuffed chair. In another corner, I had me a washbowl, bolted to the wall. It had only one tap that worked and petered out a weak stream of water. Down at the end of the hall was a can which ten people all tried to use at the same time.

I used to lie on my bed and trace pictures in the designs caused by the tears in the rotten old green shade at the window. The dusty sunlight coming through the holes made all kinds of different patterns which you could change by shutting one eye and then the other. Sometimes you could do it by moving your head just a little bit. The walls to all the rooms were so thin that the only privacy you had was sitting around with your own thoughts. But I didn’t have much choice, so I kept on living there and working with International Collections.

Then I got word about Grandpa April’s insurance, and for the first time I felt maybe I had a chance to make a break.

The union buried the old man, and I went over to Indiana for his funeral. I didn’t feel sad or unhappy because it’d been ten years or longer since I’d seen him. Nobody was at the funeral except the undertaker and me. He was there because he’d been paid, and I was there because I was the only one left.

All the way back on the train I kept thinking about that twenty-five hundred bucks and what the hell I could do with it. I knew damned good and well I’d shoot all the dough if I kept it around where I could get my hands on it.

So I decided I’d try to buy some kind of a business with it.

But for twenty-five hundred bucks you don’t buy much. When I got back to Chicago, I started nosing around and heard of an old guy by the name of Clarence Moon who wanted to sell his collection agency. I figured it was better than a hamburger stand, or a leased gas station, because it was at least the kind of a business I knew something about. I went to see him.

Clarence Moon was a big, fat slob of a man about seventy years old. He was completely bald except for a fringe of long white hair which hung just in front and in back of his ears. The top of his head was so dirty you could see white streaks on the skin where he’d scratched with his fingernails. He had a little two-room office located in an old loft building down by the Civic Opera building.

There wasn’t anything in the front office except a decrepit old desk, covered on top by a cracked piece of glass; a swivel-backed desk chair, and one straight wooden chair for clients. An aged 1929 Underwood typewriter stood on a small table by the side of his desk. In the back room were a dozen green filing cabinets, each with three drawers. Stacked on top of the cabinets and in the corners were old clippings, magazines, and correspondence. I sat down on the straight-backed chair while the old man sized me up. I sized him up back. He was a rummy... if I ever saw, or smelled, one.

“My name is Dan April,” I finally said. “I understand you want to sell out.”

The old man pawed at his vest and tried to button it. There were only three buttons on it, and beneath, his belly bubbled and rolled. “I’ve considered the possibility,” he said. “That is, if I find the right party.”

“Nuts,” I said, “you’ll be lucky to sell out to anybody. How much you asking?”

“I want thirty-six hundred dollars,” he replied. He shot a quick glance at me, then dropped his eyes and started fiddling with his vest buttons again.

I thought it over. A collection business is a funny thing. You get paid just for the bills you collect. But even so, if no one gives you overdue bills, you don’t have a business. Once you get a company sending you their bills to collect, if you do a pretty good job, you keep getting their business year after year. There’s nothing to buy like machinery or merchandise; you don’t have to worry about dealers, or outlets, or any other damn thing. You just get the chance of doing business for the same old accounts.

“How long you been in business?” I asked Moon.

“I’ve been here for thirty-five years,” he said proudly. Again he started fumbling with his vest and I could see he had the shakes bad.

“Go ahead and have a drink,” I told him.

“I don’t drink during office hours,” he said with pride. Then his pride punctured and ran out of him like dirty water. “However, my arthritis has been bothering me lately, and I think I’d better have a short one.” He made a grab for his desk drawer and hauled out a bottle of Old Culpepper. He twisted the cork out and dropped it to the floor and took a long haul. Then he reached down, picked up the cork and handed the bottle to me.

“No, thanks,” I said and watched him put the bottle away. “How many accounts you got?” I asked.

He started to answer me a couple of times and stopped before a word got out. He wanted to lie to me, but he didn’t have enough nerve left to try it. Finally he said, “Six. Six steady ones that is. I used to have thirty-six. But since I’ve been... ill, I’ve only been able to handle six.”

I knew what that meant. Moon had lost thirty accounts because he’d been too damned drunk to handle them. But if six accounts still stuck around with him, that meant they’d probably stick with me, too.

“How about letting me see your books?” I asked him. He pulled out the middle drawer and handed me an old, dog-eared ledger. All it contained was a column of figures with dates of collection. At the end of each month was a gross total. I looked in the back of the book and for the year before he’d done enough to gross himself three thousand dollars. Leafing back through, I saw he’d made fairly regular entries for half a dozen small firms, which made up the bulk of his business.

We sat around and I asked him some more questions. His business wasn’t worth very much and he knew it. Finally, I got up and started to leave. “Look,” I said, “I’ll give you two thousand bucks for what you got left.”

He started to protest.

“Skip it,” I told him. “I’ll call you tomorrow and you tell me then. Take it or leave it.” I went out the door just as he made a dive for the drawer with the bottle of liquor.

I knew then... he’d take it.

That night I went to bed and did some figuring. I figured that with plenty of work, I could build the business back up to making a few bucks. Even if I didn’t do any better than the old man, I’d still break even. When I finally went to sleep, I dreamed most of the night and got my dreams all mixed up between old Charlie April and Clarence Moon. In the morning I’d quit hating old Charlie and I felt sorry for Moon the rummy.

I had breakfast and went to a phone and called Moon’s office. I knew I was a sucker, but I felt sorry for the old guy, and I couldn’t help myself. “Look, Moon,” I said, “I been thinking it over and this is my last offer. I’ll pay you two thousand cash now... and another thousand in one year.”

The old man swallowed on the other end of the line. “All right, my boy,” he said, “the Clarence Moon Collection Agency is yours.”

Two: Part I

I walked down to State and Van Buren where International Collections is located. I got in the office an hour and a half late. The girl at the switchboard said, “Jeez, Danny, you’re going to catch it! Crenshaw’s been looking all over for you.” I took off my coat and hat and left them in the reception room.

Sitting down at my desk in the main office where five other collectors were all busy, I started cleaning the desk out. It didn’t have much in it, but I wanted to clear out of the place completely. Crenshaw, the office manager, saw me and came barreling up.

“Where the hell you been, April?” he shouted.

“Around,” I told him.

“Around!” and he laughed through his nose. “You better be around here more, if you expect to be around here!” He waited for a laugh. It didn’t come.

“Very funny, Crenshaw,” I told him. “But personally you give me the creeps.”

He stopped like he’d been shot and turned red. He opened his big, ugly mouth to bellow.

“Shut up!” I said. “For five years I’ve wanted to kick you in the middle of your big, fat lardass. Now’s a good time to do it.”

The office was still. Crenshaw backed away with his butt up against a desk. I pushed my personal belongings into my pockets and walked out to the reception desk. In the doorway, I turned around and looked back. No one had moved. I waved to Bud Glasgow, whose desk had been next to mine, and went out.

When I got to the Clarence Moon Collection Agency, the old man was gone. He hadn’t taken anything out of his desk except the bottle. On top of the desk was the door key and a note typed on the Underwood:

Dear Mr. April:

I’ll be in for my money tomorrow. Good luck.

Sincerely, Clarence Moon

In one of the side drawers of the desk, I found a stack of correspondence going back maybe three months. I sat down at the old typewriter and started answering it.

That night, after dinner, I went back to the office and began going through the old green file cabinets in the back room. They were jammed with years-old correspondence and data cards. For each collection that comes up, a card is filled out containing as much information as is known about the person you’re trying to collect the dough from. Where he lives, if he’s married, his age, where he works, how much salary he makes, what his reputation is, credit rating if any, the kind of merchandise he usually owes money for, and stuff like that. If a guy is constantly back in paying his bills, the cards are kept up to date for each collection.

From the data cards, a collector can usually tell how rough it’s going to be to collect his dough. Also they save a hell of a lot of time digging up information.

Old man Moon had saved every damned data card since he’d been in business. Most of them were out of date, and in the last few years his information had been skimpy and his writing more shaky. The cards weren’t filed in any particular order, but they were roughly grouped together by years. It was a long, tough job going through those files, trying to pull them together and throwing out all the trash. Every night for a month I went back and worked for hours on the files.

One evening I started working on a file which was ten years old. A couple hours later, I pulled out a data card which had the name “Krassy Almauniski” on it. Clipped to the card was a faded newspaper story, with the picture of a young gal in it.

She looked out from the picture with a special, proud smile on her lips. I laid the picture to one side, then picked it up again and studied it closely. Her eyes were light, either gray or blue, but heavily lashed and her blond hair was in thick braids around her head. There was a certain dignity to her I can’t explain. She was very young and without a doubt one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen.

Under the picture was the story. It read:

Miss Krassy Almauniski, 4120½ South Hempstead, today was announced the winner of the Stockyard Weekly News beauty contest. Miss Almauniski, who was selected from over thirty entries, will receive one hundred dollars from the Stockyard Weekly News, a beautiful, fitted leather traveling case from Browser’s Trunk and Leather Company, a new suit from Solomon’s Dress Shoppe, a stunning hat and coat from Edna Mae’s Thrifty Shoppers Mart, a permanent wave and manicure from the Glamour Beauty Salon, a five-dollar book of taxi coupons from the Red-Top Taxi Company, and a case of beer from the Deep Well Brewing Company.

Something about that picture started a memory clawing and scratching around in the back of my mind. There was something sad about it... something unhappy... and I couldn’t place it at first. And then in a rush I had it! The memory, that is. It went back to the first summer I’d arrived in Chicago and I was still just a kid, plenty broke and plenty lonesome in the big city, but I was growing up fast. For the first time I was becoming conscious there were girls in this world, and it would be nice to know some of them. But I didn’t know anybody yet who could introduce me to them, and I was still too shy of them to try to pick one up on my own.

But a guy can dream.

Well, it was in the summer... a blistering, hot Illinois night. There wasn’t the stirring of a breeze, a breath of wind except along the lake front. The beaches were jammed with families, and kids, and couples just sitting in the sand. Waiting for a cool breath of air to come in across the lake, or waiting for the night to end, or just waiting to fall asleep. A lot of the older women had taken off their dresses and were waiting, quietly, in their slips and thinking about going back to their walk-up, oven flats and the washings and things they had to do the next day. Their husbands were stripped to the waist, and maybe they were thinking about their factories and benches. I don’t know.

But I couldn’t sleep, either, that night in my two-by-four room. So I’d walked up to the North Avenue beach, and along the concrete breakwater which sticks out like a crooked arm. I sat down, and swung my feet over the side and sat there hot and uncomfortable and lonesome. I looked out across the lake, and occasionally the lights of an excursion steamer would show far out. And dotted as if they were fireflies, would be the lights of the small, private boats and occasionally I’d hear some music from a radio coming across the water from a boat, and once in a while voices and laughter.

And as I sat there, I began to hate the boats, and the guys who could afford to have them, and the beautiful dames riding on them. And I thought about shagging errands for two bits, and delivering telegrams for a dime, and unloading vegetables for trucks at thirty-five cents, and all the things I’d been doing to try to keep alive.

Little by little, my eyes got accustomed to the darkness, and I noticed a girl sitting on the breakwater... maybe ten feet away from me. She had her legs drawn up in front of her, with her arms clasped around them, and her chin resting on her knees. She was staring off across the water, too, as if she were waiting for something... or seeing something. She was absolutely motionless. I don’t know if she’d been there when I walked by; maybe she had, and in the darkness I hadn’t seen her. Or perhaps, she’d come along afterward, and had been so quiet I hadn’t heard her. But when I first saw her, it gave me a start.

I couldn’t see her features distinctly, but even in the darkness, I knew she was young and pretty, and probably about my age. I kept glancing over at her and I wanted to say something, but she didn’t even seem to know I was sitting there, and she kept staring out over the lake. I tried to think of something clever to say... of introducing myself... of striking up a conversation. But not only could I think of nothing to say, I was embarrassed by the prospect of her scorning my clumsy advances, and perhaps calling the park police.

So I sat there, more conscious of her by the minute, and wondering what to do about it. Then silently, and in one swift, easy motion, she swung to her feet and started slowly to walk down the breakwater to the beach. Without hesitation, I was on my feet and following her... at a respectable distance. She walked down the breakwater to the beach, and followed the winding, crowded walk to the underpass across the Outer Drive. As I followed her, crazy thoughts ran through my mind... like walking up beside her, taking her arm without saying a word. Or asking her if I could drive her home... but I didn’t have a car. I could see her naked back, white in the darkness ahead of me, and even then I was conscious of the swing in her walk as she went down the hollow, vibrating underpass. She came up on North Avenue, and continued west toward Clark Street. Two blocks away, on the corner of Clark and North Avenue, is a big, cheap drugstore, and she turned into it. I stopped outside the door, while she climbed on a stool at the soda fountain and ordered a Coke. In the light of the store, I really saw her for the first time. Around sixteen, and beautiful as hell, with long, braided golden hair. She was wearing a cheap, faded blue cotton dress, with no back; the dress had been washed so many times, it had reached a light, delicate blue color... lovely with her hair. I knew that color of blue, all poor families know it too well. And I could tell that she didn’t live near the beach, either, because her arms and back wore only a soft tan, the kind of a tan you pick up just going outdoors, and not living on the beach.

As I stood there watching her, I could see the soda jerk talking with her, and she smiled back at him. I was jealous of the guy, and would have given anything to be able to talk to her and receive a smile. He didn’t ring up the sale of the Coke, and when the girl offered him the money, he grinned and waved it away. She got down off the stool, and headed toward the door. Quickly I turned my back, and stared into a window while she passed behind me. Then I heard her feet break into a quick, little run and as I swung around, I saw her scrambling aboard a streetcar headed for the Loop. For just a second, the possibility of catching the car, too, flashed through my mind. And then I let it die. I couldn’t afford to waste the carfare. Tomorrow, I still had to find a job.

Well, that was the one and only time I ever saw her. But for a long time afterward, I thought of her many times. Who was she? Where did she live? How could I meet her? I never found out. I never saw her at the beach again. Lots of times, I built up ideas in my mind, and I worked out what I’d do if I ever saw her. And sometimes I’d make up the fact that I had a lot of dough, and I’d see myself dancing with her, and I was dressed in a pair of white flannel pants, with a double-breasted blue coat, and was wearing black and white shoes... and she had on a long evening gown, and we were somewhere very fancy... and stuff like that.

Dreams die hard when you’re just a young punk, and I kept remembering that girl for a long time afterward. Even after I’d met other gals and found that lots of things can just rub off. After a while, I maybe thought back on me, and my actions and what a jerk I’d been about being afraid to meet her. And finally I forgot about it completely. I hadn’t thought of her in years.

Until I saw that newspaper clipping!

Even then, I couldn’t be sure it was the same gal. I’d only seen her once, and the details and memory had faded. But there was something about Krassy Almauniski, and the girl at the beach, which brought back the old memory. And then suddenly, I found that I hadn’t forgotten it at all. I picked up the clipping again.

The story was dated March 31, 1940. I picked up the data card attached to the clipping and read the date the card had been filled out; it was September, 1940, nearly six months after the story. On the data card was a list of merchandise which she had bought, including irons, radios, traveling bags, watches, jewelry... not expensive... and clothes. The total was over $1,200, which is a good pile of bucks. I whistled to myself when I saw the amount, but I whistled more when I saw the card had been marked “paid in full.” Maybe it was a hunch, or maybe it was just damned curiosity, but something made me look for the old 1940 ledger.

I finally found it jammed away in the bottom of the lower drawer in a file cabinet. I turned to September and looked down the list of payments received in that month. There was no payment listed for Krassy Almauniski, and she wasn’t listed in October, November, or December. But the card said she’d paid in full.

I shrugged. What the hell. The bills were outlawed now, and I set her card to one side, but I put her picture in my pocket. The rest of the evening I spent on other cards, but I couldn’t get Krassy Almauniski out of my mind. I decided the next day I’d call Moon and find out what he knew about it.

When I opened my eyes the next morning, she leaped immediately into my mind. Old man Moon had been in a month before to pick up his dough, and had left a phone number at his rooming house to call in case I wanted to reach him. I called his number, and a surly, bitchy voice told me the old man hadn’t been home in weeks. I hung up the phone and went down to the office. Several times during the day I pulled the clipping out of my pocket and looked at her picture. Always, her calm eyes smiled back at me, and I found myself trying to read thoughts into them. I cussed my curiosity up and down and then decided I’d go out to 4120½ and see her. I could always pretend I was on some kind of business.

Forty-one twenty and a half South Hempstead was a stinking, narrow little house sandwiched in between two larger but equally crummy houses. Ramshackle wooden steps ran from the sidewalk to a little porch high up on the face of the house. A rusty iron pipe railing followed the stairs. The windows facing the street, under the steps, had been boarded up and stared blankly. The entrance to the house was through a battered doorway on the perching porch. Once the house had been painted, but years of smoke and soot had rotted its complexion like smallpox. A red brick chimney poked weakly through the middle of the roof, and rusty, corroded troughs clung scablike under the eaves.

I climbed the stairs and knocked at the door. The windows, on each side of it, were smeared and greasy. Then I saw a curtain twitch for a moment. Finally the door opened and a woman with tremendous bulging hips and thickly knotted ankles looked at me suspiciously. She had on an old housecoat wrapped loosely about her, and you could see her huge, deflated balloon busts bounce against her belly.

“I no want,” she said and started to close the door.

“Hold it,” I told her. “I want to talk to you.”

“I no want. I no buy,” she replied and shoved the door against my hand.

I kept it open. “I want to talk to Krassy Almauniski,” I told her. Her tiny, suspicious pig eyes regarded me sullenly. She raised a red, chapped hand, with big purple veins on the back of it, and pushed her dirty gray hairs over her ears.

“No Almauniski here,” she said.

I reached in my pocket and pulled out a dollar bill. Five bucks would’ve made her suspicious. I handed her the dollar and said, “I want to talk to Krassy Almauniski. I want to give her a job.”

The old hag took the buck and shook her head.

“Is her father and mother here?”

“No Almauniski here,” she repeated. “Almauniski die back ago.”

“Her father died?” I asked.

She nodded her head.

“Where’s her mother?”

“No mother,” flatly.

“What happened to Krassy?”

The woman shook her head, and shrugged. “No Almauniski here,” she repeated.

I gave up and walked down the stairs to the street. I hauled out Krassy’s picture and looked at it again. It seemed impossible that anything as beautiful could have come out of a cesspool like the house above me. My next move was obvious. I walked down Hempstead and stopped at the first dive I came to; going up to the bar, I ordered a beer and took the glass back to the phone booth with me. There I looked through the classified telephone directory under “Publishers—Newspapers.” I found the Stockyard Weekly News listed and tucked the address away in my mind. Finishing the beer, I hiked over to the newspaper office. It was about five blocks away.

The Stockyard Weekly News was located in a small, two-story brick building. The building was split into two parts by a concrete dividing wall straight through the middle. On the ground floor, the right side of the building was occupied by a barbershop, with a take-out liquor store in back of it. Separated by the concrete partition, the newspaper was located in the left side of the building. Upstairs, on the second floor, it looked like there might be a few ratty rooms and apartments.

I walked in the door of the paper, and about six feet inside it there was a dirty, scarred counter running the width of the narrow office. Hanging on one end of the counter was a swinging gate on sagging hinges. Back of it was a roll-top desk, a long battered office table piled high with bound copies of the paper. A shoulder-high partition of clapboard partly concealed an ancient flatbed press, and several type cabinets.

A young guy maybe twenty-seven or -eight was seated at the desk clipping stories from exchange papers. I walked up to the counter and he looked up at me.

“Is the editor in?” I asked.

“I’m the editor,” he said. Slowly he got to his feet and slouched over toward me. When he got up next to me I could see he was tough. Plenty tough. He had a swarthy skin and a nose that had been broken and never set. His hair was slicked back and heavily oiled and I could smell lilac water in it. He placed his hands, palms down, on the counter and hunched his shoulders over it. “Anything you want?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “I want some information. The best place to get information is from an editor. That’s why I’m asking you.”

I could see him relax a little under the blarney. “What you want to know?”

“I’m trying to locate a girl named Krassy Almauniski,” I told him. “Do you know her?”

“What you want to find her for?” he asked.

“She took out an insurance policy about ten years ago,” I said, “and dropped it after a couple years. Anyway, she’s got a small refund coming and we’d like to get it off our books. So far we’ve been unable to find her.”

Finally he said, “I haven’t seen her in ten years.”

“Did you know her?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “I knew her.”

“She won some kind of a beauty contest with this paper, didn’t she?”

He laughed shortly. “Sure,” he agreed, “she won a beauty contest. My old man was editor of the paper then. Me? I worked around the shop here after school. I knew her.” He picked his hands up from off the counter and shoved them in his pockets. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“April,” I told him. “Danny April. What’s yours?”

“Mike Manola,” he told me.

“Does she have any relatives living?”

“No. Her old man was a crazy Pole who was living with some dago bag. He got killed out in the Gary mills a couple years after she disappeared. The old bag is still living at the same place, but there’s no other family I know about.”

“When was the last time you saw Krassy?”

“The day she won the beauty contest, here. She came to the office, collected her... prizes and left. I haven’t heard of her since.”

“She win some good prizes?” I asked.

He dropped his eyes to the counter and studied it a moment before replying. “Yeah,” he said flatly, “she won some good prizes.” He turned around and walked back to his desk.

He was through talking. I left the office. Down the street, I resisted the temptation to take another look at Krassy’s picture. By now, I could see her face each time I closed my eyes.

Contents

One

Two: Part I