“Nothing gets through? What about the walls?”
“The steel is in the walls, right down through the middle of the house. These steel panels are in every door that passes through. Like I said, two houses.” One house and one fortress, I thought to myself. Silvio reached behind him and pressed something I couldn’t see. The steel panel in the doorway rose silently. I could see an unoccupied room beyond. “Neat, huh?” Silvio asked proudly. “There’s another door through from the big bedroom yonder,” he said, turning to point.
I came up on my toes as he turned. I laid the knuckles of my left hand against the angled point of his jaw. The shock ran back up my arm. I caught him as he fell. I stretched him out on the floor and ducked under the steel panel already starting to descend once his hand was jarred off the switch. I ran through the empty room beyond and through the front of the house. I ran as quietly as I could. There didn’t seem to be anyone around.
I sprinted out the ornate front door, down the brightly lighted stone stairway and across the pebbled driveway. There was no noise from behind me. The driveway was empty. Fifty yards down the road I could see a parked car. I started across the street for the backyards and fields beyond the houses, intending to circle the car. I was in the middle of the road when a light came on in its roof. I made a ninety-degree turn, kicking myself in the ankle, and ran full bore for this providential taxicab.
“Governor Street in Columbus!” I wheezed at the chauffeur-capped driver as I snatched open the rear door. “I’ll bonus you! Get rolling! Get — ”
A dark shadow uncoiled from the far corner of the back seat of the cab, and a time bomb went off in my head.
• • •
When I came to it was fortunately without sound or movement. I was on my back, half doubled up, on the floor of the moving cab. I had expected to be back at Bonigli’s. I felt nauseated, sick and dizzy. I could feel the shin of the guy who’d clocked me pressed against the top of my head; I concentrated on not moving a muscle. The second I did he’d feel it, and on the next head-shot I might not be so lucky.
As my head began to feel better the rest of me felt worse. The dizziness departed, but aches and pains from my cramped position took over. I remembered to roll loosely with the movement of the cab, and a thirty-second of an inch at a time I got my feet up against the door. The first time the man in the back seat spoke to the driver I thought my hearing had been affected when I couldn’t understand them. The second or third interchange it came to me they weren’t speaking English. The dialogue was quietly conversational. I was evidently not an unusual problem.
This had to be the crowd from the San Marco, the picture-takers from the filling station. While waiting to do business with Bonigli, they were keeping an eye on him. Had they recognized me on Bonigli’s outside stairway under the portico light? The answer wasn’t long in coming: why else would they risk jeopardizing a deal they were eager to consummate? They hadn’t been waiting for me to show up there, probably, but they weren’t about to pass up the presented opportunity, either.
We rode for miles. My aches multiplied. I had no idea where we were. When I felt the cab slow down, I opened my eyes a slit. I could see lights; we were driving through a town, a good-sized town from the look of it. There was no conversation now between the back seat and the front seat. I could picture the blackjack marksman sitting above me with his sap in his hand, poised against my first movement I knew it had better be a good one when I made it.
And then the cab stopped.
I didn’t wait. I unleashed my doubled up legs against the door, which flew open. At the same time I flung my upper body up and over, as hard as I could, clawing with my hands for momentum to roll and squirm out onto the street. My friend in the back seat must have missed his first swing at my head; it seemed ages before a glancing blow half-stunned me again.
He didn’t have time to swing again; he had to grab for my shoulders to hold me partway in the cab. From the waist down I was out. My knees were on the macadam. The driver started up the cab with a jerk, and my knees began to burn. The blackjack marksman, who was down on his knees practically head to head with me, barked something guttural at the driver; he was losing his grip on me. The driver jumped on the brake. I gave a final lunge and the back seat passengers landed in the street.
He was all over me like a tent. I took half a dozen solid punches getting to my feet. I landed a couple on a face I hadn’t seen before. This one had a lean, sallow look and a pencil-thin mustache. With my first good right-hand swing I split the mustache for him. Blood dribbled down onto his chin.
He landed three to my one, but I landed the good ones. He got me one on the nose that rocked me, but I drew blood again from his right cheekbone. Horns were blowing all around us, and the cab driver was screaming something at my assault-and-battery partner in a high-pitched voice. My man broke off the fight suddenly and dived back into the cab. It roared away with the back door flapping open.
When I looked around, I was standing in the center of an intersection, directly beneath an overhead stoplight. Drivers were leaning out the windows of their cars, adding their voices to their horns. I wobbled to the sidewalk and limped into the shelter of the darkest doorway available. When I began to get my breath I realized how much I was hurting. I got out of the doorway and turned up the street with the least lights. All I wanted to do was lie down somewhere, but I made myself keep moving. My slacks were just ragged tatters at the knees and all my clothes were sweaty, dirty, and bloodstained. My knees were bleeding and there was something the matter with my nose.
I stopped in another doorway and cleaned myself up with a handkerchief as best I could. I started down the street again, keeping to the shadows. A store window clock said one o’clock. A sign in another window a few yards farther along said Booster Club, Wooster Chamber of Commerce. That helped; I was in Wooster, a third of the way back to Columbus. I knew where I was, and where to go from there.
But how? Steal a car? Get myself nabbed on that kind of caper and I was all racked up. Buy a car? Not at one o’clock in the morning, the way I looked. And I only had a couple hundred dollars left from the package of bills I’d broken into on the ferry. A cab? Too easy to trace me from my appearance. Hitchhike? I never stopped for hitchhikers myself.
I hitchhiked, and not many stopped for me. The appearance probably had something to do with that, too. I gimped my way to the southern outskirts via side streets, and set up shop. It took me an hour to stop an A & P truck that carried me to Loudonville. For four hours after that nothing stopped. I didn’t wait the four hours; I must have walked three-quarters of the way from Loudonville to Mt. Vernon. I had a terrible driving need to get to Columbus: In that goddammed sucker-bait taxicab outside Bonigli’s I’d blurted out not only Columbus but Governor Street.
Twice I had to stop and rest for twenty minutes. My nose not only hurt, it was interfering with my breathing. Beyond Mt. Vernon a drunk took me to Mt. Liberty, and I started to walk again. Shuffling along the shoulder of the highway, I kept seeing the blunt, exasperated features of the government agent, Frutig. I couldn’t get his face out of my mind.
Finally a farm boy with a half-loaded pickup truck stopped for me outside Centerburg. He was on his way in to market, and he dropped me off in the outskirts of Columbus. It was nine o’clock in the morning, sunny and already hot. The people I passed kept turning to look at me. I knew I looked like the tail end of a two-week drunk.
I limped toward the north side of town, away from the business district. The soles of my feet felt red hot. I needed to think, and my brain just wouldn’t turn over. Governor Street wasn’t a short street, but it wasn’t a long one, either. The San Marco crowd didn’t know the street number to go to, but if they had the street staked out, how was I going to get into the apartment without their seeing me?
I passed a gas station, hesitated, and decided against it. If any of the filling station mob from Jackson were on the scene, they might remember the coveralls bit. But the id
ea had planted its own germ; when a bread truck turned a corner in front of me and pulled up in front of a grocery, I was ready. The truck had a walk-in van-type body and both sliding front doors were open. The driver, a stocky redhead in a tan uniform, darted into the grocery. When he came out with yesterday’s stale bread on a tray, I was in the body of the truck. “If you ever took a drink in your life, pal,” I said before he could start in on me, “listen a minute. I’ve got to go home, but I can’t go looking like this.” I handed him two twenty-dollar bills. “I’ll swap you this for the uniform and cap. You drive back to the garage and tell them you fought off a stickup man after your collection money.”
“Drive back in my skivvies?” he asked indignantly.
“So you’ll be a hero.”
He looked down at the money in his hand and grinned suddenly. He had a chipped front tooth. “Step further into the back,” he said. He got under the wheel and rolled up around a couple of corners till we came to a quiet-looking street. He parked, closed both doors, and came into the back with me and shed the uniform. I shucked my rags at the same time. There was too much ass and not enough chest in his uniform, but I got into it.
“Okay, pal,” I said when I was zippered in. “You’re a hero to me, anyway.”
“Drop you off somewhere?” he asked me.
I had been about to get out of the truck and walk the short distance remaining. “You sure can,” I told him. “Governor Street.” What could be better? “Throw away this stuff of mine before you get back to the garage,” I added.
“Don’t worry,” he said, and started up.
I held onto a shelf rack as we rumbled along. When we turned into Governor Street, I looked it over closely. I couldn’t see anything suspicious in the way of parked cars or stationary pedestrians, but of course that didn’t prove a thing. I pointed out the apartment to the bread man. When he drew up in front of it, I slid open the door and swung down with a big wave. The last glimpse I had of the driver was of his hairy bare legs. I went up the front walk at a fast clip. I was inside the front door, through the lobby, down the hall and turning my keys in the lock in what felt like one long breath.
There wasn’t a sound in the apartment. I walked from room to room, calling for Lynn. When there was no answer, my mind started to seize up. There was a hot coal in my stomach by the time I reached the kitchen and saw the note propped up by the sugar bowl. “Back in twenty minutes, darling,” the note said. I sagged into a chair. Never in my life had five words tossed me from the bottom rung to the top of the ladder so quickly. We’d beat this goddam thing yet.
I bounced up out of the chair. I could just get in a shower before the girls got back. I laid out shirt, slacks, underwear, socks, and shoes. The shoes I had on had seen better days. Then I remembered I’d run down on money, and I opened the closet door to drag out the bag for a fresh supply. As I bent to open it, I thought I saw scratches on the lock. I took it over into a patch of sunlight and looked again. Sure enough, the entire surface looked like it had been worked over. When my key opened it only with difficulty, I was positive someone had been tampering. I yanked the bag open, expecting I don’t know what. It was still packed to the brim. Nothing looked different. I doubted even a package was missing.
Gussie’s curiosity, I decided; she’d had to see what was in the bag, but she hadn’t taken anything. It wouldn’t help her when I got my hands on her. I’d frazzle her chubby butt till she prayed for a better world. And afterwards I’d buy a muzzle for her. I unwrapped two packages of hundreds from their toilet paper sheaths and stuck them in the hip pocket of the slacks on the bed. I had to unwrap about fifteen packages to find two with denominations as small as a hundred. They were the smallest in the bag, and there were not very many of them.
While I was at it I transferred my wallet, change, and keys from the bread man’s uniform to the slacks, stripped off the uniform, and stuffed it down at the bottom of the laundry hamper in the bathroom. I closed up the bag and put it back in the closet. Item number two — after an interview with Miss Gussie — was a new bag with a better lock.
I stood under the shower and soaked some of the tiredness and the soreness from my muscles. Back in the bedroom, I powdered the soles of my feet before I put on my socks. I tried the shoes, and decided to wait; they seemed to have shrunk. I had just pulled on my shorts when I heard Lynn and Gussie at the door. “ — hope he’s home,” Lynn was saying as they came in. I retreated to the bed for my slacks. I had one leg in them when there was a knock at the door. “That must be him now,” Lynn continued. “What can have happened to his key?”
God forgive me, I was five seconds slow in getting the play. The San Marco crowd had Lynn’s picture. If they had put a man at each end of the street —
I opened my mouth and nothing came out. There was an iron band around my chest. I’d never felt such fear in my life, not even in Korea. Frantically I hopped over behind the bedroom door with one leg in the slacks. Through the hinge crack I could see Gussie standing with a bag of groceries in her arms. Lynn was turning the doorknob. The door burst inward, wrenched from her hand. It struck her in the forehead with a sodden sound. She staggered backward, fell to her knees, and slumped sideways, unconscious, her skirt riding up the backs of her thighs. Men poured into the room, big men in dark clothing. I stood there with a sword in my throat, struck dumb.
“Keep that other one quiet,” the lead man snapped. The lead man was my sparring partner with the mustache. His words were muffled because of a piece of tape on his upper lip.
“Here, what do you think you’re doing!” Gussie exclaimed indignantly. She set down her groceries and went and knelt beside Lynn, pulling down her skirt. “You don’t need to be so rough about it. We’ll come peaceably.”
The mustache looked at her as though he thought there was something the matter with his ears. “Knock her out, Anton,” he ordered.
Gussie got to her substantial feet. “You come near me, Anton, and you’re buckin’ for bridgework,” she warned grimly.
The mustache threw an arm in front of the behemoth who had started for Gussie. “Wait!” he said sharply, and wheeled again on Gussie. “Where is it?”
“In the bedroom closet,” Gussie said, nodding at my door. I one-legged it away from there into the bathroom, cursing mentally. In the whole of the bedroom and bathroom I couldn’t see a single thing that would fit my hand comfortably as a weapon.
“The closet, Gregor,” I could hear the mustache saying. “In that room over there.”
Footsteps came into the bedroom, hesitated, and went straight to the closet. Shoving my other leg into the slacks, I could hear Gregor’s satisfied grunt as he picked up the bag. When his footsteps died out, I eased back behind the bedroom door. Gregor was trying to open the bag, working over it with no more expression on his broad, pale face than on the top of a stove.
“Stand aside,” the mustache snapped at him. He made about three jabs at the lock with something he held in his hand that I couldn’t see, and the bag opened. He went down on his knees on the floor beside it. Too late I remembered the .38 special tucked away in one corner of it; why the hell hadn’t I thought of it sooner? Probably because it wasn’t my gun in the first place. I stood there raging at myself and listening to Gussie. “You’d better be nice to us,” she was saying to the mustache. “You may have us, but you don’t have my Uncle Pete. You give us a hard time and he’ll come back and shoot you full of holes.”
On his knees he turned to look at her, as if wondering what breed of animal this was. “So?” he said almost absently, and returned to the bag. He unwrapped a couple of the toilet paper wrapped packages, thumbed them, and got to his feet looking pleased with himself. “And just who is this Uncle Pete?” he asked Gussie.
“He’s a bank robber, of course,” Gussie said proudly. “Where do you think all that came from?” She said it with so much conviction he stared at her for a second before dropping down again beside the bag and scuffling around in the wrapped
packets until he found one of an odd shape, either pounds or francs. He ripped the paper from it and studied it closely a moment before again regaining his feet.
“Your uncle should have had the good sense to keep on robbing American banks,” he said to Gussie. He turned to the silently watching trio of big men. “Go outside to a phone, Gregor. Call Pavel in Washington and tell him we have the merchandise and he is to return to the San Marco immediately.” The hulking Gregor left the apartment.
Gussie had been listening with a frown. “Say, I don’t think you phonies are cops at all!” she declared. “Let’s see your badge, little man.”
He paid no attention to her. He pointed at Lynn on the floor. “Get her outside, Anton,” he said.
Gussie swiftly took up a position alongside Lynn. “You put a hand on her, brother,” she announced to the advancing Anton, “and I’ll kick you right where it hurts.”
Anton came up on the other side of Lynn and started to reach down to pick her up.
Gussie gave a little hitch to her skirt and kicked him right where it hurts.
Anton went over backward with an agonized squawk and rolled over and over on the floor. Gussie flipped down her skirt and advanced on the mustache behind a roundhouse right-hand swing that landed an inch above his belt buckle. I could see his knees sag. He cuffed her backward, but he was half doubled over. I had to clamp down on my tongue to keep from yelling “Behind you! Behind you!” to Gussie. I couldn’t do them any good now. Behind her back the fourth man trotted out of Gussie’s bedroom carrying an opened blanket. He trotted up and threw it over her head, clamping his arms around her.
Strongarm (Prologue Crime) Page 14
