“Look in the mirror, kid.”
“Man, I’m straight! A working stiff! You think I’d go this route if it didn’t pay off! Twice a week I take acting classes and already I got a future lined up. You see me on TV the other night?”
“Great show.” Last Tuesday they did a special on the hippies in town and managed to round up a few of the real pros like Caesar. Twenty-seven runaway kids in Greenwich Village were recognized and picked up by their parents, four narcotics pushers were spotted by sharp-eyed detectives and hauled in on possession charges, and the public had a good idea of what the city was coming to.
“Pig’s ass it was a good show,” Caesar said sullenly.
“Practically everybody spots me. I even got a call from the Internal Revenue Service. Making it ain’t so easy now.”
“So act.”
“What do ya think I’m doing? It ain’t Shakespeare, but it sure takes talent.”
“And nerve.” Renée smiled.
“Lady, come on. It’s all part of the game.” He rattled his beads and stepped back into his doorway shelter again. “What you doing out, Mike?”
“Trying to find somebody. Tall, skinny, in his forties and boosting wallets in the theater district. Got anything?”
He cocked his head and peered at me, eyes squinting. “Hey, some hustler was asking the same thing. Big chick, long dark hair, real knockout. Don’t know why she was hustling, but I tried to make out and she brushed me off. Me! How about that? I wanted to give her a twenty...”
“You would have had your head handed to you,” I said, grinning again. Caesar boy had run into Velda.
“Fuzz?” he asked, incredulously.
I nodded, not explaining all of it.
“Man, they sure make them real these days. She coulda busted me for panhandling. Awful pretty for fuzz though, even under that face crap.”
“The guy I mentioned, Caesar?”
“Hell, I don’t butt in to somebody else’s ...”
“You buck the theater crowds, Caesar. He would have been in the same area.”
He shrugged, giving a small negative shake to his long hair, but his eyes didn’t want to look at me. I stepped out from under the umbrella and got up close to him. “Compared to withholding information, panhandling is a chintzy rap.”
“Mike ... you ain’t the fuzz. You...”
“My license makes me responsible to turn certain facts over to them, buddy.”
“Hey, I thought we was pals.”
“After office hours.”
Caesar Tulley made a resigned gesture and ran his fingers through his hair. “There was some talk. Wooster Sal saw this guy hit a couple of joes and tried to cut himself a chunk. He got a busted lip for it.”
“You see him?”
“I saw him pop Wooster Sal. Like a sneak punch. Wooster shoulda kept to his own racket.”
“Anything special about him ... facial characteristics ... you know?”
Another shrug. “Just a guy. I didn’t get a real good look. Anyway, I didn’t want one. I’m opposed to violence.”
“What about this Wooster Sal?”
“Hell, after that he dug out for the West Coast. Gone like two weeks now.”
“Keep looking, okay? I’m in the phone book.”
I flipped him a wave and started to walk away when he called me back. “Hey, Mike, there was one thing.”
I turned and waited.
“He wore a red vest. Pretty dumb in his business.”
One more little piece to add to the pile. In time it would mount up to a face and a body. One red vest, and it probably wasn’t dumb. It was a good luck charm, vanity or any other of a dozen reasons a petty crook could consider imperative.
I hooked my arm through Renée’s and pushed the edge of her umbrella out of my face. “You have odd friends, Mike. Those newsstand dealers, the pair at the hamburger stand ... who else do you know?”
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “Still feel like prowling?”
Renée glanced at her watch and tightened her hold on my arm. “It’s almost ten, my big friend. I told you I had to meet William at that reception in a half hour.”
It was the same one Pat had mentioned to me, the opening of the new Soviet delegation buildings. “Since when are you people messed up in politics?”
“Since Teddy Finlay from the State Department invited us. One of the new delegates was a foreign supplier for our Anco Electronics before we bought him out. Finlay thought it would be beneficial to have a less formal introduction to him.”
“And where do you come in?”
“I pick up William’s memos he made at the meeting today, give him his tickets for his Chicago trip tomorrow, murmur a few pleasantries and leave.” Impulsively, she added, “Why don’t you come along?”
“We aren’t exactly in evening clothes, baby.”
“But we won’t be going to the reception proper. I’m to meet him in office A-3 in the west annex, not where the crowd will be. Please, Mike?” She nudged me expectantly, her leg touching mine in a long-legged stride. The wind gusted and blew the rain under the umbrella into my face. Hell, it would be good to get out of it for a few minutes.
“Why not?” I said.
The two uniformed cops covering the annex entrance scanned Renée’s admittance card and checked our ID’s. The older one, sweating under his rubber raincoat said, “Hold a second,” then walked across the street to a squad car, talked through the window and stepped back when the door opened. I let out a grunt of amusement when Pat got out, hunched against the rain, his hands in his pockets.
When he saw me his face finally registered something besides tired boredom. “Now what are you doing here?” he asked me.
“Personal invitation, old buddy.”
“His name isn’t on the card,” the cop told him. “What do you think, Captain? The dame’s okay.”
Pat flipped the rain from the brim of his hat and stepped away, nodding for me to follow him. He swung around, his voice a low growl. “This stinks. No matter what you tell me, it plain stinks. What are you building?”
“Not a thing, Pat. Miss Talmage has a business appointment with her employer there and invited me along. Can anything be simpler?”
“With you, nothing’s simple,” Pat said. “Look, if you pull anything...”
“Unwind, will you buddy? Can’t I talk to you any more?”
For a long few seconds he studied my face, then let a smile crack the corners of his mouth. “Sorry, Mike. I guess I got too much bugging me. There’s more than one meeting going on in there.”
“So the Soviets really are cooperating on that C.B. deal?”
“You called it. And they’re scared stiff. All the top brass from Fort Detrick arrived at seven with a limousine of Russkies straight off a chartered nonstop plane from Moscow right behind them.”
“Military types?”
“Hardly. Some were too old for that.”
“Specialists in chemical-biological warefare,” I suggested.
“Could be.”
“Any newspapers covering it?”
“Only the social end. They missed the first batch. That’s why you spook me. Nothing better interrupt that meeting.”
“Quit worrying about me. Anything turn up yet?”
“One lonely probability. A couple on a honeymoon camping trip spotted a guy wandering around the Ashokan watershed area. He seemed to be sick... kind of stumbling, fell a couple of times. They were going to go over to him but he wandered up to the road and must have thumbed a ride. The rough description they gave was similar to the guy we found in the subway.”
“The Guard in the area?”
“Like a blanket. Boats, divers, foot by foot search. They cut off the water flow from that district and that they can’t keep a secret, so they’d better come up with some imaginative excuse before morning.”
“Oh, they will,” I said casually.
Pat jammed his hands back into his pockets and grimaced in
my direction. “They better do better than that. Right now you can realize what it’s like to be in death row with no reprieve in sight.”
“Yeah, great,” I said. “By the way, you ever get tipped to a pickpocket who works in a red vest?”
“Go screw your pickpocket in a red vest,” Pat said sourly. He waved an okay sign to the two cops and headed back toward his car.
The ramrod-stiff butler with the bristly gray hair scrutinized the admission card, verified Renée with an inaudible phone call and apparently described me after giving my name. The reply was favorable, because he took our wet clothes, hung them in a closet in the small foyer and led us to the office door in the rear. Unlike my coat, his hadn’t been tailored to conceal a heavy gun and it bulged over his left hip. For him, butlering was a secondary sideline. He had been plucked right off an army parade ground.
William Dorn introduced me to the five of them as a friend of his, his eyes twinkling with amusement. They all gave me a solemn handshake, the one-jerk European variety with accented “How-do-you-do’s” except Teddy Finlay. He waited until Dorn and Renée were exchanging papers and the others talking animatedly over drinks, then pulled me aside to the wall bar and poured a couple of highballs.
He handed me one, let me taste it, then: “How long have you been a ‘friend’ of William, Mike?” He laid it heavy on “friend” so I’d know he made me.
“Not long,” I said.
“Isn’t being here an imposition?”
“Why should it bother you? The State Depatment doesn’t work on my level.”
“Mr. Robert Crane is my superior. It seems that you were trying to work on his. Nobody is pleased having you know what we do.”
“Tough titty, feller. Crane didn’t like it because I wouldn’t take his crap. I won’t take yours either, so knock it off.”
“You still didn’t answer my question.” There was a hard edge in his voice.
“I have a contract to bump the Russian Ambassador. That sound like reason enough?”
“One phone call and you can be where Eddie Dandy is, Mr. Hammer.”
I took another pull of my drink, not letting him see how tight my fingers were around the glass. “Oh? Where’s that?”
“On vacation ... in protective custody. He was getting a little unruly too.”
When I finished the drink I put the glass back on the bar and turned around to face him, the words coming quietly from between my teeth. “Try it, stupid. I’ll blast a couple of .45’s into the ceiling and bring every damn cop and reporter around in this joint. Then just for fun I’ll run off nice and fat at the mouth and really start that panic you’re working your ass off to avoid. That loud and clear?”
Finlay didn’t answer me. He just stood there with white lines showing around his mouth and his forehead curled in an angry frown. Two of the Czech representatives had been looking curiously in our direction, but when I turned, faking a smile, they stopped watching and went back to their conversation. Dorn and Renée had finished their business and were laughing at some remark Josef Kudak had made and waved me over to join them. Kudak was the new member of the Soviet satellite team, but it was evident that the three of them were old friends despite political differences.
“Good joke?” I asked.
William Dorn chuckled and held a match to a long, thin cigar. “My friend Josef thinks I’m a filthy rich, decadent capitalist and wants to know how he can get that way too.”
“Tell him?”
“Certainly not. I bought him out for three million dollars and I’d wager he hasn’t spent a penny of it yet.”
“You don’t know my wife or our tax structure, friend William,” the Czech said. He was a small, pudgy man with a wide Slavic face and bright blue eyes. “Between them they have reduced me to poverty.”
“There are no poor politicians,” I put in.
Renée looked startled, but Dorn laughed again and Kudak’s face widened in a broad smile. “Ah,” he said, “at last a candid man. You are right, Mr. Hammer. It is all a very profitable business, no? Should it be otherwise? Money belongs to those who can get it.”
“Or take it,” I said.
“Certainly, otherwise it would rot. The peasants put their gold into little jars and bury it. They die of old age without revealing where they have hidden it, so afraid are they of having it stolen. With it they buy nothing, do nothing. It is for the businessmen, the politicians to see that money is kept circulating.”
It was hard to tell if he was joking or serious, so I just grinned back and lit up a smoke. “I wish some of it would circulate my way.”
Kudak’s eyebrows went up a little in surprise. “You are not a politician?”
“Nor a good businessman,” I added.
“But you must have a profitable specialty ...” He looked from me to Dorn and back again.
“Sometimes I kill people,” I said.
Dorn let out a long laugh at the expression on Kudak’s face and the way Renée grabbed me to make a hurried exit after a quick handshake with everybody I’d met. When she got me outside in the rain she popped her umbrella open with typical feminine pique and said, “Men. They’re all crazy!” She stretched her arm up so I could get in beside her. “What a thing to say to a man in high office. Doesn’t anything ever embarrass you?” “Wait till he finds out it’s true,” I said.
“I’ll never take you with me again.”
“Never?”
“Well, at least not where there’s people. Now, where are we off to?”
I looked at my watch. It was twenty after eleven and raining. Inside the main building the reception was going full force and the sound of a string quartet was almost drowned out by the steady hum of voices. On the street at least fifty uniformed cops stood uncomfortably in assigned positions waiting for their shift to end. Pat’s car was gone, but the pair of harness bulls still stood at the fenced entrance. It was the kind of night when New York slept for a change. At least those who knew nothing of the man in the subway.
And maybe the guy in the red vest.
I turned my coat collar up and threw my cigarette into a puddle where it fizzled out. “Suppose I check my office, then we go out for supper.”
“No more prowling?”
“I’ve had enough for one day.”
I signed us in at the night desk and steered Renée to the open elevator on the end of the bank, got in and pushed the button for my floor. She had that impish grin back, remembering the look the night man had given us downstairs, and said, “The direct approach is very fascinating, Mike. Do you have a couch and champagne all ready?”
“No champagne. Might be a six-pack of Pabst beer in the cooler though.”
“How about a bathroom? I have to piddle.”
“And so ends a romantic conversation,” I said as the door slid open noiselessly.
“Well, I really have to,” she insisted.
“So go,” I told her.
She was taking little mincing steps walking down the corridor to my office, and to make sure nothing would stay between her and the john, I got ahead, stuck my key in the lock and pushed the door open.
Not really pushed. It was jerked open with me leaning on the knob and I tumbled inside knowing that the world would be coming down on my head if all the reflexes hadn’t been triggered in time. But there are some things you never seem to lose. They drilled them into you in the training camps, and made you use them on the firing line and what they didn’t teach you, you learned the hard way all at once or you never lived to know about anything at all. I was in a half roll, tucking my head down, one hand cushioning my fall and the other automatically scrabbling for the .45 when heavy metal whipped down the back of my head into my shoulders with a sickening smash. Then you know there’s still time because the pain is hot and wet without deadening numbness and the secondary impulses take over immediately and whip you away from the force of the second strike.
I was on my back, the flat of my hand braced for leverage, bringing my
foot up and around into flesh and pelvic bone in a high, arching kick that gouged testicles from their baggy sockets with a yell choked off as it was sucked down a throat in wild, fiery agony. I could see the shadowy figure, still poised for another smash at my head, the bulk of a gun in his hand, then it jerked toward me convulsively and the flat of my .45 automatic met frontal bone with all the power I could put behind it. Time was measured in tenths of a second that seemed to take minutes, but it was enough to buy me time. Two blasts of flame went off in my face, pounding into the back of the one on top of me and something tore along the skin of my side, then Renée was screaming in the doorway until another shot rocketed off and cut it off abruptly. I saw the other one run, saw her fall, but couldn’t get out from under the tangle of limp arms and legs that smothered my movements in time. Crazy words spilled from my mouth, then I got the body off me, pushed to my feet with the .45 still cocked and staggered into the corridor.
Down the hall the blinking lights of the elevator showed it was almost halfway to the ground floor. None of the others were operating and I could never beat it down the stairway. I shoved the gun back in the speed rig under my coat and knelt down beside Renée. She was unconscious, her eyes half open, a heavy red welt along her temple, oozing blood where the bullet had torn away hair and skin. She was lucky. In her fright she had raised her hands and the heavy ornamental knob of the umbrella handle had deflected the slug aimed for her face and turned sudden death into a minor superficial scratch. I let her lie there for a minute, went back into my office and switched on the light.
The body on the floor was still leaking blood that soaked into the carpet and all I could think of was that the next time I’d get a rug to match the stains and save cleaning costs. I put my toe under the ribs and turned it over. The two exit wounds had punched gaping holes in the chest and the slash from my rod had nearly destroyed his face, but there was enough left to recognize.
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