Stronghold

  Stronghold

  A Novel

  Stanley Ellin

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  for Stacey, with love

  Articles of Agreement

  The Company’s project will be carried out in three phases.

  Phase one:

  To reconnoiter the target area at Scammons Landing, Lake George, New York.

  To obtain in the Miami, Florida, area sufficient small arms to seize the target area.

  To obtain in the Miami area sufficient automatic weapons and ammunition to maintain a defense of the target area should it be put under assault. Also to obtain gas masks, since tear gas may be used by an assaulting force.

  To obtain in the Miami area a car for transport of the Company and its weapons to the target area.

  Phase two:

  To seize and occupy the target area in Scammons Landing, and to take the necessary hostages.

  To arrange for the delivery to the Company of four million dollars in cash.

  To negotiate for the transport of the Company and its hostages by bus to the airport at Glens Falls, New York, then by turboprop to Logan Airport, Boston, then by jet to St. Hilary, Windward Islands, West Indies.

  Phase three:

  To make the necessary payment to those officials of St. Hilary who will act as intermediaries for the Company and will arrange for air transport of the Company and its hostages to whatever area in South America or Africa will receive them and offer them refuge.

  Read and agreed to by all members of the Company.

  Raiford Prison, Florida, December 25th, 1972

  James Flood

  Came April, I was the first of the Company to wind up my time at Raiford Prison, then a month later the Shanklin brothers were let out, and two months and three weeks after them Coco got his papers. He went direct from Florida to St. Hilary out in the Islands to set up phase three of the Company project and came back to Miami from there. The day he finally showed up in Miami was the first time the Company held a meeting outside those Raiford walls.

  Which, despite poetic license, do a very effective prison make.

  So here we are in this Cuban restaurant in Miami—James Flood, manslaughter; brothers Harvey and Lester Shanklin, conspiracy to commit grand theft; Hubert (Coco) Digby, assault with a deadly weapon—all with our sins against the state of Florida redeemed, all waiting itchy-assed for somebody named Santiago. At least, says Harvey Shanklin, who had made the contact with Santiago, that is his name this week. It is Santiago This Week who is going to redeem us from the greatest sin of all. No money.

  For me, the hardest part of that time waiting for Coco to finish off his Raiford count had been the no money. The Shanklins had gone back to their mamma and daddy in South Miami, helped try to keep the family gas station out of bankruptcy—not likely, the way the little independents were getting a classical reaming from the big boys—mowed the lawn, made it to church Sundays, where everybody looked at them slant-eyed the first Sunday, then next Sunday welcomed them joyously as lost lambs returned to the fold. There is much to be said for the Pentecostal pissworks, as Harvey pointed out. Four times the elders rattled the contribution plates that first Sunday, and at each rattle daddy, tears streaming from his eyes at the return of his prodigals, shelled out five dollars per prodigal. And with the last handout, a flock of angels, their wondrous tits plumping out their diaphanous gowns, descended from heaven right into the church and kissed Harvey and Lester on the brow. Kissed them tenderly and whispered: “Play it cool, boys. No tapping the till at the gas station, no humping thy neighbor’s lusty wife, because help is on the way. It is getting close to big money time.”

  Since they had the oxlike patience of all dedicated weight lifters, it wasn’t too bad for them, marking the days until Coco showed up. Before Raiford, they had worked the beachboy line, dazzling Gold Coast hotel guests with their musclebound charms, servicing mink-coated and mink-spirited matrons and occasionally handling blow jobs for carpetbagging patrons, all the while in those high-priced hotel beds sizing up the available cash, jewelry, and furs, calculating the safest time and means of entry, and then turning over the job to the Mob for the heist itself. If Harvey and Lester had any resentments, it was because they had to take the Mob’s word about what the goods brought on the market, and there was always a large discrepancy between the Mob’s word and the newspaper account of the merchandise’s valuation. It was different with me. I told them in Raiford that we were setting up our Company with four equal shareholders, each getting an equal cut of the profits. And if they doubted it, they would be the ones to make the division when the time came. Half their size, I was Big Daddy after that. I have my own form of genius. The ability to turn on sincerity when it is needed is not the smallest part of it.

  Meanwhile, marking my own calendar until Coco showed up, I landed a job on a charter fishing boat run by a beery bastard named Sharpless who was happy to put me on as live-in crew, no questions asked, as long as I was ready to work for just tips. This gave me stake enough after a month to take off on Company business and make my reconnaissance of the old home territory up in Warren County, New York, after which I headed right back to Dade County, Florida, only nickels and dimes left in my pocket. So it was Cap’n Sharpless and the bait buckets again, but I had bed and board this way, and that was the name of the game until Coco showed up.

  For a while Sharpless itched with curiosity about this man of mystery scrubbing down his decks, and I gathered from his unsubtle questions that he had me figured either as a fugitive from the law or a reformed lush. But when I didn’t turn a hair if the law showed up on the dock sometimes, he finally settled on me as someone on the cure, some laddie of good family and good breeding—what the hell, I actually read books; he could see them all around my bunk—who was sparing his high-toned folks the shame of his downfall, and he let it go at that. He never asked my last name, glad enough not to have to tend to employment papers and social security red tape, and after a while even stopped checking the level penciled off on the liquor bottles stowed in his locker. In the end I was as much a natural, inobtrusive part of the boat to him as a can of bait. If he didn’t see me around, he probably noted my absence. When I was around he took no notice. I became the invisible man, neutral in size, shape, and coloring, blank of face, characterless as a glass of tap water.

  For the superior man, the controlling agent, who, whatever his reason, takes orders from his inferior, there is a perverse sense of power in such a relationship. The dog, tugging at its leash, thinks he is leading the master. The master, going along with the joke, is amused by his own forbearance in not slitting the hound’s throat and ending the comedy right there. Do you know, doggie, that you are always only one breath away from having that hairy throat slit?

  For three months I scrubbed down the deck of the good ship Ballbreaker and considered Captain Sharpless’ hairy throat. Even on that day when Harvey Shanklin strolled along the dock as the signal Coco was finally in town, I did nothing memorable in saying goodbye to doggie. Now my captain took surprised and unhappy notice. There would be a large empty space on the boat tomorrow. “If it’s a matter of money, Jimmy boy,” he said hopefully, “since you worked out all right, I been kind of thinking—”

  “No,” I said, “I have to be moving on.”

  And move on I did, along Biscayne Boulevard by bus and into the Cuban restaurant for my class reunion.

  Raiford, 1973.

  Coco.

  Hubert Digby, out of St. Hilary, the Windward Islands. Blacksnake beautiful, Watusi graceful, making even a walk around the Raiford yard a slow dance, as if the yard were Port St. Hilary on carnival day and he was leading the steel-drum parade. Talked the Island talk, a turkey gobble when he turned it on fast, a sad, sweet Windward mu
sic when he slowed it down. Oh, mon, when I ahm oat it is bock to thee Eye-londs foh me.

  He comes floating toward us where we sit at our table in a corner, and while the restaurant manager leading the way squeezes between the tables where overstuffed Latins are further stuffing themselves with black beans, chicken stew, and fried plantains, Coco, following along, oozes his way through the tight spaces, dances that slow dance of his, the King of Spades stepping up to the throne. He takes the chair beside me, and the first thing he says to us after three months and three weeks is, “Who picked this place?”

  “Santiago,” says Harvey Shanklin. Harvey is the older brother and does most of the talking for the Shanklins. “I didn’t like it, but he said this was it and no place else.”

  “That manager knows him,” Coco says. “When I came in the door he was very lofty. But when I said I was a guest of Mr. Santiago he did everything but kiss my shiny ass.” Coco looks around. “There is a good chance others here know him too. This is not good.”

  “It’s a seller’s market,” I point out.

  “True,” Coco says. “But there are people to be disposed of. Afterward, when the authorities say, ‘Well now, what company has this Mr. Santiago been keeping lately?’ his friends will not have taken notice of you, man, because you are not noticeable. But I cut an outstanding figure, man. And Harvey and Lester are conspicuous in any company.”

  Harvey says, “Yeah, but the only other contact I could make wants cash in advance. Fifty percent of the payment in his hand before delivery.”

  “That one is a good businessman,” says Coco.

  I say to him, “Talk straight. Do you want to call it off right now?”

  “I am considering a postponement. After phase one, we will be on the road several days. Each day we will be more vulnerable. This is a three-phase operation. I would dislike to see it exploded before we even arrive at phase two.”

  “Forget it,” I say. “No delays, Coco. God did not intend me to spend my life hosing the fish stink off a Miami charter boat.”

  That is it. The master’s voice. They have equal shares in the Company, but not equal voice. The Shanklins are in charge of phase one, I am responsible for phase two, phase three will be all Coco’s—but the whole conception is mine, the fitting together of the parts is mine. I was the one in Raiford who realized that if you fit together these particular parts—Harvey and Lester Shanklin of South Miami; Hubert Digby of St. Hilary, the West Indies; and James Flood of Scammons Landing, New York—you have, so to speak, compounded nitroglycerin. And as head chemist, I am Numero Uno, the policy-making echelon.

  It has worked well so far, it will continue to work because the other shareholders understand that I am the necessary balance to their opposing extremes. The Shanklins, strong as oxen, are as stolidly patient as oxen. Coco, on the other hand, is an exposed nerve, a born worrier. He wants guarantees. At any given moment he likes to know where he will be a week from now and why he will be there. Blacks, of course, are not generally of this disposition. For sure, the blacks I knew in the Movement and then at Raiford weren’t. Animal-indifferent to the next moment, they threw a rock or wielded sharpened steel with a sense of explosive release, and the whole future as far as they could see it would be only that instant when the rock smashed through the window or the steel drove into the flesh of the victim. Coco despised them for this. The one Island man in our cellblock, he called the conglomerate of dark skins around him the A.A.A., the Afro-American Apes. And survived it, because pressed to the wall, he could wield sharpened steel even more efficiently and much more guilefully than they could. The pig-poker, the prettily tooled, needlepointed piece of bedspring, was his baby. Twice he used it there, and each time he was away so smoothly after the sudden, perfectly camouflaged thrust that by the time the crowd gathered around the victim, Coco was on its outskirts, peering over heads to see what had happened, shocked at what he was seeing, a halo twinkling over his head. They smelled him out, all right, which was what he wanted. Blacksnake, they called him, Snakey, baffled by his independence, not only of them, but of the turnkeys, of everyone, in fact, but of the little whitey, James Flood.

  Emotional balance. The Shanklins, too stolid, and Coco, too volatile, needed an agent to weld them together and extract the best from them, and that was James Flood. That was the founding of the Company.

  Assets? Almost zero.

  Anticipated profits? Four million dollars.

  Divided four ways, one million dollars each.

  Correction.

  Assets in cash almost zero.

  Assets in human resources unlimited.

  A million dollars per partner had been an arbitrary figure. It had become an obsessive figure with the Shanklins. Out of the family’s broken-down gas station on a back road in South Miami, they had never seen more than pocket money. The most profitable hotel heist they had set up paid them together four thousand dollars. The most urgent strong-arm job they had performed for the Mob—a rib-breaking, stomping instructional session with a grudging debtor—was for two thousand dollars. These and other thousands spaced far apart were enough to give them a passionate taste for the good life, and more important, a passionate conviction that they were entitled to it. They were bigger, stronger, better-looking, and even meaner than the Miami Beach big spenders they catered to, so what the hell law of nature or Congress said they had to be the ones sullenly grubbing for tips while they were beachboying it instead of being the ones handing out the tips?

  Coco bought this. He understood the power generated by a proper, soul-consuming motivation. The Crown Colony of St. Hilary had gone for independence. Hubert Digby, prize-winning scholarship boy, tossed out of London University in England for taking his Negritude too violently, had come back to his Eye-lond home to help extract it from the maw of the British Empire. Independence had come. It was coming anyhow, the British only too happy to dump this Caribbean sand spit—population fifty very rich whites, five hundred medium-rich browns, and fifty thousand very poor blacks—and at last it did come. And what happened to Hubert, who had expected a slice of the action for his noisy part in the great event? Expected, at least, a piece of the gambling casino when it was built and licensed; possibly a piece of the hotel construction getting under way? Nothing happened. At least, nothing more than a chance to be a stickman in the casino or a clerk in one of the new hotels, because all the action went to the medium-rich browns, who didn’t quite see Coco as one of them. They liked him, they admired him as one of their loudest Freedom Fighters, they would have been pleased to offer him that job as stickman or clerk, but all the gaudy new institutions in St. Hilary which would win it its place in the sun were the products of their own cash investment, along with what money came from anonymous investors in Miami and Las Vegas. All cashless Coco would do was stand outside the kitchen window and look at the pie on the table inside. Look hard, drooling from the mouth, but hung up outside that window.

  He kissed off St. Hilary, but the drool still dripped, the hunger was there more than ever.

  For myself, out of Scammons Landing on Lake George, New York, I had toiled in the vineyards of the rich as a youth, had lived on crumbs from the tables of the rich, and so determined very young what my portion would have to be some day, although it was not until the Company was founded in Raiford that I knew how I would hit the jackpot.

  I made mistakes along the way, the SDS and Weatherman ventures among the most instructive of them. The ventures may have paid off in headlines, but—except for some brilliant opportunists among us, not to mention our collection of FBI informers—never in cash. It was my childish impression at the outset that you could fire-bomb the rich out of their fortress and occupy it in their place. I was also under the mistaken impression that my companions were led to the struggle by high ideals. It took me a while to understand that every human being on earth is out for a slice of the action, and that born losers are only rationalizing their failures by playing up idealism. Unable to make it, they point o
ut that battling for a slice of the action is a defiling way of life and crawl off the battlefield claiming to have won the war.

  It took me almost too long to comprehend the point of the whole joke. We are hauled out of mamma’s belly, given a whack on the butt, and set to crawling through a maze for the rest of our lives, trying to reach the jackpot planted in the middle of it. A few lucky crawlers make it. A few, smarter and tougher but not so lucky, begin to wonder after a while why they are crawling. So they get up on their feet and smash down the impeding walls and march straight to the goal.

  A million dollars? To that extent I agree with the Shanklins. One million is a magic number.

  Santiago, who should come on like a Latin Humphrey Bogart, turns out to be a Latin Porky Pig, about my middling height but padded with a hundred pounds of excess blubber. He stands there at our table in a corner of the restaurant, taking us in, and then he says to nobody in particular, “Santiago.”

  “Harvey,” Harvey says to him. “I’m the one was on the phone with you,” and Santiago sits down and pulls his chair up to the table until his belly presses into it, which still leaves the rest of him a long distance from his cutlery. He tucks a napkin into his collar. “Flan,” he says to the waiter. “The large portion. And coffee.”

  “Flan,” Lester, the body-builder, says disapprovingly. He eyes Santiago’s blubber. “Sugar pudding. Hay moros en la costa.”

  “Caballo grande ande o no ande,” says Santiago.

  “Speak English,” I tell him, “and stick to business.”

  The piggy eyes examine me, trying to make out what instrument I play in this quartet. “Yes. Sure. Business. Well, I have the goods. That’s half the business. The other half is, do you have the money?”

  I gesture at Harvey. He pulls a manila envelope from his pocket, opens the flap to flash a subliminal view of a sheaf of bills. The sheaf is play money, each banknote nicely imprinted One Happyland Dollar. Santiago reaches for the envelope, but Harvey tucks it back into his pocket.