Derring-Duo in "They Went Attaway"

Violet Cuesta was already having a rotten day — and in danger of it becoming her final day — even before a crazy pair of rich "swells" tried their best to run her off the road!

The day had not suffered, by comparison with much finer days, for the trivial reasons that she could have cited, on almost any prior day of the year — 1935, in Western terms. Despite the lack of much higher education, the daughter of a black father and brown mother from Puerto Rico had grown up to become a working adult in the most dazzling and intimidating city of all: New York, the Big Apple. Her job, as one of the kitchen staff at the oh-so-exclusive and racially restricted Dappled Diamond country club, allowed her to toil amidst a group of movers and shakers, with whom she could have never expected to rub shoulders if she had worked as a domestic in her own neighborhood, or as the newest member of some typing pool. She had a nice young fella, who seemed sweet on her, coming to call on her almost every night. She felt good, and she looked it, too; her fella told her so.

At twenty years of age, Violet thought of herself as someone who was well on her way…

But to where? Not to an early grave, which was never her ambition, but which seemed like a surefire destination, when the men burst into the kitchen, quite uninvited, and without the approval of either the staff workers or the wealthy club patrons. One of them clutched what seemed to be a bundle, wrapped up in a blanket. A baby? These goons were shouting and carrying on, with some newborn in their clutches? This was about the last place she had expected to be menaced by these street-level hooligans; members of Congress had belonged to this club, including at least one who claimed to be on a first-name basis with Franklin Delano himself —

The Dappled Diamond was hosting some movie stars, and it was located out here, in Long Island. The riot in Harlem had left a neighborhood smashed, and shaken; even a few months later, her parents feared for her safety, when she left for work, by first light in the morning. Violet had not even been in Harlem, let alone, West 125th Street, when the protest outside of the Kress Five and Ten store had boiled over into violence. Loaded snobs would never stand for that sort of thing happening in their own club! Her job, working for rich bigots, shielded her from street-corner violence…

It wasn’t the outrage of their entrance, or the brutality of their conduct after, that had so damaged Violet’s day. It was the road trip, putting her life into jeopardy, that spoiled her sunny outlook. The two thugs had swept past two dish-washing young men, from Yugoslavia; seized one of her slender wrists, and wrenched her through a door, across the parking lot, into the… well, getaway car — a 1931 Duesenberg Model SJ convertible (“supercharged”), gunmetal-gray, with a disappearing top, and a trunk of severe limitations.

She found that part out the hard way; they stuffed her into it, slammed the door shut and, snarling insults at each other, boarded the car to roar off.

Violet wanted to cry out from the pain of the trunk’s lid having slammed into her head; the thugs had failed to shut it. She was able to catch an uneviable glimpse of the scenery passing behind the vehicle. A well-muscled fellow with dark hair, Greek or Italian, was driving her, and having a real rough time of it, too. The gearbox had three speeds, not four; because of the sheer power of its engine, the car’s designers had removed one. The thug did not find this made it easier to pilot the vehicle. He struggled with the beast, swearing in multiple languages — the car’s progress was halting, fits and starts.

^^^^

Which proved most fortunate for its unwilling passenger, Violet. Though she was gagged so she couldn’t speak or shout, and her wrists were tied together, she could still see an astonishing sight. Taking a hairpin turn on the road just behind the convertible, a green-apple two-seater coupe — a convertible and a sports car, like the vehicle it followed — careened into view. She did not know it on sight as an MG P-type roadster, rolled out in 1934, but to her, one type of car was very much like another: it got you someplace, that was all she needed to know. She preferred not to be going anywhere with mysterious abductors!

The driver and passenger of the car, though, were familiar to her. Violet would have liked to faint, so dizzied was she by the winding progress of the car down the road, but even more by the identities of the pursuers. She had seen them a number of times in the Diamond’s dining hall: an elegant, much-admired pair of sweethearts, with an almost magnetic aura. He was in his mid-thirties, built like a circus acrobat, with a ready smile; he was laughing as his car bore down upon hers. His driver was a determined-looking woman, late twenties at most, whose aviator goggles did little to conceal her freckles, or that mop of auburn hair that seemed to erupt out of her head, like fashionable lava.

And she drove like a woman possessed — as if wanting to crack up, to kill both her passenger and herself. Violet’s only thought, at that moment, was to hope, and to expect, that they would at least draw a police car into this pursuit, with them. Perhaps even the cops would know them on sight, if only from the wild tales of their exploits presented by the newspapers, for he was Robert Attaway and she was Addie Fairclough — those wealthy adventurers dubbed the Derring-Duo!

Apart from almost colliding with an innocent milk truck, which teetered for a second on the edge of rolling onto its right side, they did not encounter a vehicle opposing them on this undulating road. Had someone blocked off the road, just to allow this irrational chase to continue? Couldn’t be, she thought, even as the green chaser zoomed around the left side of the Model SJ convertible.

More swearing from the front-seat passenger, Spyros; more grinding from the Duesenberg’s gearbox. The driver wasn’t swearing at his own vehicle’s problematical design quirks, for once, but at the antics of the man in the green car. He stood upright, in the right seat of the MG roadster, and with a quick grin, he leapt from the car, just about the length of a grown man lying down, and crashed.

The impact did not kill him, though at their highway speeds, this was the most likely result of such an act. The free-spirited fool had launched himself toward the Duesenberg’s interior, not onto the merciless road beneath them. With an irritating grin, he quipped, “Going my way, boys?” — and seized the driver in a two-handed vise grip.

The thug all but stood on the brake, which threw the car forward, with a force that sent it into a shuddering, half-circle spin. Jumping to a standing position, Attaway opened the driver’s side door, and yanked the brute out from behind the steering wheel. “Funny, I don’t recall anyone inviting you two gents to our club,” he joked. “I’m going to have to see your printed invitations —”

Then it was the expected dance of two men, trying to batter each other into a state of collapse, with their fists. Despite lacking both size and sheer mass as natural advantages, Attaway was both lighter on his feet, and more practiced at the manly art of fisticuffs, than was his craggy opponent.

Fairclough burst out of her parked roadster, a pistol in one hand, to fling open the trunk of the Duesenberg. She leaned over Violet to yank the handkerchief out of Violet’s mouth and asked her, “Bet you never expected the lunch shift to be this exciting! Did they hurt you, Miss…?”

“Violet,” the young woman sputtered, once she could stop to catch her breath. “That’s my name. Help me up, please, Miss Fairclough?” She winced slightly; her use of the rich white lady’s name might seem overly familiar to the latter, but if it did, Addie made no mention of it. She preferred to help Violet stand up —

Her rugged swain, Attaway, landed a roundabout punch that sent the brute he was fighting to crash into the waist-high, unmown grass on the roadside — and that was that. “Did you get her, Red?” he asked, without looking over to see a frowning Fairclough watching, helpless, as Violet was now the target of a new threat.

^^^^

The passenger of the Duesenberg had gotten the drop on the ladies, aiming so squarely at Attaway that Fairclough did not dare to fire.

“I think, under the circumstances,” said the gunman, “you three will have to excuse me while I take a powder.” He leered at the other three; it did nothing for his unpleasant countenance, except perhaps underscore how nasty he was.

Attaway and Violet threw up their hands, not making a move to either run or combat the thug. Fairclough took a step forward, lowering her weapon even as she met his gaze. “You feel like you got something to add, toots?” the thuggish Spyros sneered, rhetorically — for he did not care to hear any answer she might give.

Fairclough placed her left palm flat upon the side of the car which heaved, as if someone had stepped on the gas pedal, hard.

The crook shot a startled look at the steering wheel, but did not lower his gun, which left Attaway in mortal peril. The thug dove behind the wheel of his car and floored the accelerator, as it spun out onto the open road. And vanished.

“We’ve got to catch him!” Fairclough yelped. “I know which hangar he’ll likely use, Bobby — ours! It’s the nearest.”

“Then, he should be easy to find,” he speculated. Attaway shrugged as he approached Violet. At her quizzical glance he directed, “He’s planning to leave New York by air. Not an airplane, mind you. A balloon. You were to be his very special guest, at least until he got out into international waters. And then… an unexpected departure was on the boards. Yours, from a great height.”

“He has a baby,” Violet said, as this grim detail came back to her calming mind. “You have to catch him, Mister Attaway.”

“We will,” said Fairclough. “And, it isn’t a baby, Miss Violet. It’s a rare vase. We think it contains some industrial information that could well put some of our friends out of business if it were to fall into the hands of their competitors — I have that on good authority: Professor Pritchard, who’s a chemist.”

“What if the vase… breaks?” Violet puzzled.

“That’s not a problem,” Attaway claimed. “It’s a fake. Most of the pieces of art on display, at the Diamond, are fakes, in case of theft. This vase has the vital info written on a strip of paper, concealed by a last coat of paint, outside the vase. We’ll meet up with your ‘cab driver’, and… convince him it’s in his best interest to give it back.”

Violet hugged herself and frowned. “I left the kitchen, without permission.” “I could lose my job for this,” she moaned.

“Really? That is too bad,” said Attaway. “If only we knew someone who... needed a domestic for their own home, at twice the salary you’re making now.”

“Actually, we know two people like that,” Fairclough smiled. “They’re us. What do you say, Violet? Care to work someplace a bit less dull than the Diamond?”

Violet could not believe what she was hearing. Her rescuers were offering her a job, for more money? She shook her head and grinned, a beautiful sight, but something troubled her. “If that car hadn’t jumped,” she mused, “I don’t know what woulda happened to us.”

“It didn’t jump by itself,” Attaway explained. “My Adeline has her special touch with all sorts of machines: automobiles, typewriters, dumbwaiters, you name it — she plays it, like Django Reinhardt.” The pride he felt for his lady love was audible in his voice.

“I’m not the only talented one, mind you,” Fairclough added. “My Bobby has a physical genius. Never loses his balance, he can outbox, and outdance, almost anyone. It’s a lucky thing, too, because we’re going to need it — right away!”

^^^^

The balloon soared high above the foam of the Atlantic Ocean, as the wind carried it away from the mainland. Spyros hugged the vase to his chest, an awakening satisfaction and relief swelling within him. He would soon make more money, for a morning’s rough business, than a year of the same bagged him in any occupation, legal or otherwise. All he had to do was rendezvous with the tramp steamer outside of the harbor to make the switch and collect his payoff…

The biplane soared up from the airfield as if it had no idea that it was on what seemed like a collision course with the balloon. It circled the balloon twice, as the thief struggled to make sense of what he saw. The red-haired maniac who had almost run him off of the road was flying the plane, and what mad vision should appear to be standing, upon the lower wing of the plane, but: her two-fisted companion?

Spyros would never have believed that any man could leap from a biplane into a balloon, in the sky, and survive the attempt, until that day.

© Eric Wolf 2022.

[Smash crime with the Convincers: https://vocal.media/fiction/lee-jin-in-orange-peeling.]