Shadow of a Tiger

by Michael Collins

  The youth at the desk wasn’t middle-aged, scarred or German, but he had asked for Claude Marais or his room, and I cornered him at the elevator. I knew him—a twenty-year-old street kid from south of Houston Street: Charlie Burgos.

  “Visiting friends, Charlie?”

  He curled his lip. “What’s it to you, Fortune?”

  Defensive and aggressive—both together, and immediately. Defensive, because like all street kids of the slums he knew his powerlessness. Aggressive, because aggression, immediate and animal, was the only hope of power any street kid had. Strike before you’re struck. The street kids of poor, dirty, tough, abandoned streets that didn’t exist to the daylight world of affluent America.

  “I’m going to check you out, Charlie,” I said.

  He had been checked for weapons all his young life, Charlie Burgos, whenever he ventured beyond his own streets and alleys. Guilty, until reluctantly found innocent by cops who knew that crime did live in the slums.

  “Check,” Charlie Burgos said, indifferent.

  My right to check him was power, nothing more. Physical power because I was older, social power because I had at least some standing in the proper community. Not like Charlie Burgos or his parents—they had no power, so no rights. Parents who had never escaped the same streets—uneducated, unskilled, without hope of a human joy beyond the bottle, the needle, the bookie, the street woman, and some joyless job with nowhere to go except down. No today, no tomorrow, beyond what they could steal, for a moment, from each other’s flesh.

  He had no weapon. “Okay, Charlie. What’s up?”

  He showed no resentment to being searched. Abstract anger and pride was a luxury street kids don’t have. Kids put down and ignored forever because they were young, and poor, and powerless. Lost to disease and drugs, but lost mostly to defeat. There are few fair ways out of the defeat of the slums, so they learn early to lie, cheat, steal, mug and scheme every minute. An angle, a scheme of profit, that is what they live with, and that was what was on Charlie Burgos’s mind.

  “You on a job, Fortune? Stake out? Buck an hour, I’ll help, okay?”

  “What’s your business with Claude Marais, Charlie?”

  “Nothin’. It’s hot, take a break. I’ll spell you.”

  “Never mind, Charlie.”

  “I’ll go for a beer. Buck for goin’ to the store.”

  I went back to my chair behind the rubber plant. The third beer was hot, damn! At the elevator, Charlie Burgos was gone. The wife, Li Marais, had said others might be involved, but Charlie wasn’t armed, and if he had anything on his mind he wasn’t going to tell me without more pressure.

  I got my answer anyway. At ten-forty, my last beer gone, Charlie Burgos came out of the elevator—with Danielle Marais. The ripe pawn-shop owner’s daughter held the tall, skinny street kid’s arm. In his dark-eyed animal way, Charlie Burgos was handsome enough. He gave me a wink as they passed—“Look what I’m going to get, mister. I howl tonight!” the wink said. It’s the only relation to a woman a street kid knows.

  He came into the lobby at 11:02 P.M. Taller than I had expected, the limp barely noticeable, but the scars clear on his left cheek.

  He walked straight through the lobby to the desk, seemed to look at nothing and no one. Yet he saw everything and everyone. He seemed to look straight ahead, intent on where he was going, yet I saw his eyes on me. German eyes under thin blond hair—pale blue, smooth, self-contained.

  Forty-plus, I guessed, but the stride of an athlete in shape. Not furtive, but calling no attention, either. Polite and reserved in a brown tropical suit he wasn’t quite at home in. He wore the suit casually, but somehow seemed restricted by it. He belonged in safari clothes in some jungle, or running guns in a fast boat. The kind of man who would sell both sides if he could, and would be wanted in many countries for a little official talk. A man who would live high, hard and well, until he ended in front of a firing squad in some remote capital, or, worse, slowly ran out of countries where he could go, people he could live off.

  The clerk gave me the high sign, but I was already on my way to the elevator. When he came, I was in his path. I could see the gun under his right arm. He stopped. Surprised to see me in his path, but not scared.

  “You’re looking for Claude Marais?” I said.

  He thought about it. “Yes, I visit Claude.”

  “For what reason?”

  He thought about me. He considered my one arm. I sounded tough, and he had no way of knowing if I was or wasn’t.

  “It is your affair?”

  “It is now,” I said, and flashed an old private guard badge.

  His blond eyebrows went up an inch. He looked at my arm.

  “Special detective,” I said, before he could ask about a cop with one arm. “You’re an alien, you have a permit for that gun you’re carrying?”

  His left hand moved to his thin blond hair, combed through. A mannerism. I imagined him doing that when deciding if he should shoot a prisoner or not.

  “Claude, he is in some trouble?” he said.

  “Let’s say I’m watching him. I want to know your business.”

  “A private matter. Personal. I wish no trouble.”

  “Good,” I said. “Maybe I better take the gun.”

  I held out my hand, and he reacted. Like a snake. He jerked back, took two steps away. I could see him thinking. Somehow, though, he wasn’t acting like a man out to kill anyone. More like a man with a plan on his mind, weighing how important it was that he see Claude Marais. He decided.

  “I wish no trouble,” he said again as if his mind could hold only limited thoughts in English. “Claude is not important to me that much. Bitte.”

  He backed away, didn’t turn until he was past the desk. Then he strode out of the lobby. I wiped the sweat from my face. Killer or not, he was a man I wouldn’t want to cross where he had the advantage. I followed him out. Across the street I saw him climb into a blue Ford and drive away.

  I waited an hour hidden outside the hotel entrance. The German didn’t return. I had a pretty good certainty that he wouldn’t, not tonight, at least. It was twelve-ten, I had done my job, and I was tired. I went home to bed.

  I didn’t sleep much, not in the oven of my five shabby rooms. Not until just before dawn when a faint coolness seemed to wash in through the open windows. A gray dawn light, cooler …

  Then he was there. He had a gun.

  “Who are you, Mr. Fortune?” he said, a shape beside my bed in the dawn. “What do you want with me? With Exner?”

  I rolled onto my back under the sheet, blinked at him. He stood over the bed: Claude Marais.

  “How’d you get in here, Marais?” I said.

  He waved the pistol. I was changing the subject. “A man learns to open doors. I want to know who you really are, what you were doing at my hotel last night?”

  His pistol was steady—an odd pistol. An unusually long barrel for a light gun—7.65-mm. A French Starr.

  “Can I get a cigarette?” I said.

  He hesitated. I realized that my empty sleeve was hidden under the sheet. Last night he hadn’t even noticed I had only one arm. A man busy with his own thoughts.

  “I’ve only got one arm,” I said, showed him.

  “All right, get a cigarette,” he said. “A war injury?”

  “No.” I smoked. “You know who I am. Your brother—”

  “My brother said you are a detective. That doesn’t tell me of your past, of who you work for, or why you are mixed in my affairs. It doesn’t tell me why you were waiting for Gerd Exner, or how you knew Exner was coming to me last night.”

  “Why was Exner coming to you?” I said.

  “My business,” Claude snapped. “Did my brother send you?”

  “Eugene? Why would Eugene send me? Does he know—”

  “Do not answer me with questions, Fortune. Gerd Exner says you claimed to be a policeman. That has alarmed him. Why did you scare him? For whom? What did you think you w
ere doing?”

  “Why does Exner want to kill you, Claude?”

  “Kill me?” The surprise was genuine. Damn the woman.

  “Your wife said Exner wanted to kill you.”

  “My wife?” He stopped. “Ah, I see. Yes.” He lowered the pistol. “I have not given her very much. No home, no life, no rest. I understand now. Has she paid you?”

  “Yes.” Too much. I hoped he wouldn’t ask.

  He pocketed the pistol. “All right, but I am in no danger. My wife made a mistake. I will explain to her. Finished, yes?”

  He walked out. I lay back. I was home free. No more job, and I kept the money. I had some curiosity about Claude Marais and the German, but not enough to think about it very hard.

  I decided to surprise Marty with the ring. I went out and ate a slow breakfast, and then walked to the pawn shop. It was open. Inside, I saw Eugene Marais sitting in the back room.

  “Dig out my ring, Marais,” I said. “I got lucky.”

  Then I saw the chessmen. A bishop, two pawns, and a knight on the floor in the back room doorway. I went into the back room. Eugene Marais was tied to his chair by a single strand of rope. Blood had trickled from his nose and right ear—black, dried blood. The crusted wound was on the back of his head. He had been hit hard once. I felt him. He was rigid as steel.

  Dead at least four hours, at most twelve. Probably somewhere in between.

  3

  By 11:00 A.M. it was ninety-two on Ninth Avenue, and Lieutenant Marx had rounded up Claude Marais and his wife, Li; the dead pawn shop owner’s daughter Danielle; and Jimmy Sung. One of Marx’s men had been sent to Brooklyn for Eugene Marais’s wife, the others had been going over the shop for two hours.

  The shop had been half ransacked—parts a jumble of debris, other parts not touched. As if someone had made a selective search—looking for something specific—or as if the job had been only half done. The cash drawer inside the broken cage was on the floor, but some three hundred dollars had been left, overlooked, and the safe hadn’t been opened. A chess board was set up on the table, but the men had been scattered. The rope bound the dead man to the chair by only the one strand, as if the killer had realized he didn’t have to tie the dead man after all.

  I said, “He didn’t know Marais was dead at first.”

  “Maybe, Dan,” Lieutenant Marx said.

  The assistant Medical Examiner talked as he washed his hands. A small, neat, nervous doctor.

  “Complete rigor. So four to twelve hours, except that in this heat it gets speeded up. From other signs, I’d say anywhere from five this morning, to eleven last night. Maybe earlier, maybe later, but I’d have to doubt it in court. The autopsy may give us a closer guess.”

  “What killed him, Doc?” Marx said.

  “Fractured skull, pieces in the brain. That iron rod on the floor has blood on it. One blow. I’ll tell you in detail after autopsy, but it looks simple to me.”

  “Hit from behind,” Marx decided. “In this room, from that blood near the door. Any prints on the iron bar?”

  “Nothing we could identify,” a detective said.

  The M.E. signaled his men to put Eugene Marais into the morgue basket. For an instant everything stopped, all silent, as if the world was standing still. We all looked at the body and the basket. Then it was gone, and we all began to move. Life and work goes on, death forgotten after that one instant because it has to be.

  The daughter, Danielle, looked at the basket as it went out, but her eyes were stiff, unseeing. It was the only time she had looked at her father since the police had brought her in. Her eyes dull, without tears, where she stood out in the shop out of sight of the body. Her whole young, ripe body oddly stiff in the same blouse and shorts she had worn last night. Her surly, adolescent face closed up like someone who waited for a blow.

  Claude Marais had stood over the body since the moment he had arrived, his hand touching his dead brother as if to offer comfort, to sustain the dead man. He watched us all with a bruised, baleful glance. Intense and defiant, angry with death. Yet behind his eyes there was something like a question, as if he were trying to understand something only he knew.

  “What did he do? Eugene?” the stocky brother had said to everyone and to no one, to the ransacked shop itself. “Nothing. He used to say that himself. He had done nothing, hurt no one, helped no one. No enemies, no comrades. Never accused, never honored. He never risked, and he’s dead anyway. Stupid!”

  The brother hunched over as if cold even in his tweed jacket and heavy trousers in the heat. Cold while we all sweated, like a man who lived with a perpetual chill, an icy wind blowing always through his mind. He watched the morgue basket go out not with sorrow, but with a kind of rage.

  His wife, Li Marais, sat silent in a corner, as still as a stone cat from some Egyptian tomb, only her onyx eyes alive. Cat eyes, bright and fixed. Looking at no one, and everyone.

  Under the single, barred, back room window, Jimmy Sung squatted on his heels. The inscrutable Oriental—with a very American cigarette dangling from his full lips, and a very American scowl. The watery red eyes of the drunk, annoyed at being bothered on the morning after. He had said nothing since being brought to the shop, sure, like all alcoholics, that if he kept quiet he would look normal, and his secret would be hidden from everyone.

  While Marx’s men went on working over the shop, the Lieutenant began to question them all about the time element. After a few moments I stopped listening—none of them could really prove where they had been for most of the night. That was normal, so I let their voices fade to a drone in my mind, and began to check all the windows and the two doors. I studied the odd way the shop had been searched—almost at random.

  I was still thinking about the search, when Marx told us all to come to the precinct station with him.

  In the Lieutenant’s cubicle command office off the squad room, I told him my story again. In murder, I don’t often hold back from the police. It doesn’t pay in the long run. Then Marx took them one at a time. Jimmy Sung was first.

  The gray-haired Chinese shrugged. “I don’t know nothing about Mr. Marais. I work in the shop six months—noon to five. We get along fine, ask anyone. Some punk robber, I figure.”

  He had no accent. Only an odd order of words showed that English had not been his first language. The words were pure American, a colloquial slum vocabulary; the manner flip, direct.

  “You left about five last night?”

  “Sure. Fortune saw me.”

  “You didn’t go back to the shop?”

  “Noon to five, that’s all I work.”

  “Did Mr. Marais stay late often?”

  “Not on your life. He ran home fast to Brooklyn.”

  “Why did he stay last night?”

  “Who knows, Lieutenant?”

  “You can’t tell us anything, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy Sung shrugged. “I think he got something on his mind, he don’t tell me what. Five o’clock, I go home.”

  I said, “You play chess, Jimmy?”

  His watery eyes looked at me, solemn. “Sometimes. Not last night, no sir.”

  Claude Marais still looked cold in his heavy jacket. His wife, Li, still looked like a small, silent cat in her chair that faced Marx behind his littered desk.

  “What was bothering your brother, Mr. Marais?” Marx said.

  “Nothing that I know,” Claude Marais said.

  I said, “What about that Gerd Exner? You seemed to think that Eugene might have hired me to stop Exner reaching you.”

  “Who else would be interested in my affairs? A mistake.”

  “You came back to the shop about eight-thirty last night?” Marx said.

  “Eugene called me. Plans for a family weekend.”

  “He called you?” Marx said. “Why was he at the store?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did your wife hire Fortune? Who is Gerd Exner?”

  “An old business associate.”

&n
bsp; “What business?”

  “Buying and selling.” Claude Marais shrugged. “Trading, you see? Mostly in the Orient and Africa. It is past for me.”

  “You usually carry guns? You and your associates?”

  “I have not lived in a peaceful world, Lieutenant. Mostly remote areas, unsettled countries. I have a valid permit.”

  “Why did your wife hire Fortune to stop this Exner?”

  “A misunderstanding. She thought I was afraid of Exner. A simple error, that is all.”

  Li Marais said nothing, but she gave a slow nod as if to agree. I wasn’t sure I believed the nod.

  I said, “You play chess, Claude?”

  “I never learned peaceful games.”

  “Was the chess game set up when you were there at nine?”

  Claude thought. “I think it was. It often was.”

  “It wasn’t when I was there about five,” I said.

  Lieutenant Marx said, “You left your brother alive about nine o’clock, Marais. You went back to your hotel with Danielle. About six A.M. you were in Fortune’s apartment. Where were you in between those times?”

  “In my room with my wife,” Claude Marais said.

  “Anyone who can prove that?”

  “Only my wife.”

  Marx didn’t even bother to ask Li Marais.

  Danielle Marais didn’t sit down. The heavy girl stood defiant in front of Lieutenant Marx’s desk, glared at me, her oversize breasts like jelly under the tight blouse.

  “I went to my father’s store to borrow some money, that’s all. I don’t know why my father was working late. I left with Uncle Claude. My boy friend picked me up at Uncle Claude’s hotel. We were together all night. I never saw my dad again. I don’t know anything. Nothing!”

  The words poured out, a torrent. Ready, as if she had a tape recording in her mind she only had to turn on. Memorized, defensive, defying before Marx had attacked.

  “Did you get the money?” Marx said dryly.

  “What?” she said, deflated. “No. He didn’t have it.”