“Want to let me in?” the tail said. “Want to show me your credentials?”
The man was Detective First Grade Peter J. Samuelson, Narcotics Bureau. Which, come to think of it—Shank gave a mental shrug—wasn’t much of a surprise either.
“C’mon inside,” he said.
Detective Samuelson went through the motions then, but it was obvious he no longer expected to discover anything. The first look at Shank’s face had told him the place was clean. Samuelson bothered with a search only on the off chance he might strike uranium. He made Shank stand with his hands on the wall while he went through his pockets. All he found were two opened packs of cigarettes, a wallet with a few dollars and some uninteresting cards, and the knife.
“You expecting trouble?” the detective inquired.
Shank gave no reply.
“There’s a law against knives like this,” the detective pointed out softly. “Can’t buy ‘em, can’t sell ‘em, can’t own ‘em. I could haul you in on this and let you cool off in the Tombs.”
“That what they got you boys doing? Looking around for switchblades?”
And now the cop said nothing.
“You pick four kids off the street,” Shank delivered the brief lecture. “Pick up any four kids and three of them got knives like that one. Bigger, most of them.”
The cop laughed unpleasantly. He pressed the button and the blade of the knife shot out. The cop looked at the knife for several seconds, closed it and dropped it into Shank’s pocket.
“Here,” he said, “keep your toy.”
Shank fell silent.
The cop went ahead and checked the room. He knew all the right places—the toilet tank, the window sill, under the mattress, inside the shoes by the bed. Shank wore a pair of desert boots and the cop double-checked them because there was enough room in the toe to hold illegal merchandise.
The cop combed just about everything, and while he did he cursed softly to himself because he knew that the search would do no good. Somehow or other Shank had tumbled to him and ditched the stuff, and it was a cinch it was nowhere around the apartment. Well, it served Detective Samuelson right. He knew he should have collared the little bastard on the street instead of taking chances. Next time he would know better.
“Okay,” Samuelson said, finally. “I guess you’re clean.”
Shank smiled.
“When did you make me?” the detective asked casually.
Shank shrugged. His eyes said he could not possibly be familiar with what the cop was talking about but the cop knew better.
“When you turned around,” the cop said, reflecting aloud. “Sure. You already had cigarettes. I should have known—I saw you with one before you got on the subway. And you didn’t throw away an empty pack. I should have picked you up the minute you walked into the drugstore.”
Shank smiled again.
“I was working close,” the cop said, rubbing his nose ruefully. “I should have figured on you spotting me but I thought I was clear. How did you happen to notice me?”
“You were lousy,” Shank summed it up.
For a minute the cop looked as though he were ready to explode. Then his features relaxed.
“You won this round,” he said. “How many more do you think you’ll win?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The hell you don’t. You’ll know what I’m talking about when we get you, punk, and don’t think we’re not going to get you sooner or later. You were clean until today. We didn’t know you were alive. Now we know and we won’t forget until we nail the lid on.”
Shank kept silent.
“Sooner or later you’ll be holding and we’ll be on to you. Sooner or later you’ll slip and we’ll grab you. We’ll watch you so hard you won’t be able to hit the toilet without looking over your shoulder to see who’s there.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” the cop said.
“You try to watch every guy who’s selling and you’ll need more men than you got on the whole force. You got any idea how many guys are selling?”
“A fair idea.”
“Lots of them, aren’t there?”
“Too many.”
“Well, how are you gonna—”
“We won’t watch ‘em all,” the cop said. “Just the ones we know about. And we know about you.”
Shank said nothing for a moment. He was enjoying the conversation but at the same time he was annoyed the cops were on to him.
“What the hell,” Shank said. “I don’t know what you’re so burned about. I wasn’t holding anyway.”
The cop laughed again.
“I wasn’t,” Shank defended himself. “I—”
“You took a good three ounces off the Mau-Mau,” the cop said. “Probably more. And in case you’re wondering, we busted the Mau-Mau just after you left. It’s the third time for him, the third intent rap, and this means the Mau-Mau has a home for the rest of his life as a guest of the United States Government. You might want to think about that for a while.”
The cop left.
Two hours later Shank smashed Mrs. Herman Rodjinckszi’s mailbox with a hammer and reclaimed the envelope.
Chapter 5
The Hoi Polloi is a small Chinese restaurant one flight above the street on Eighth Street off Sixth Avenue. Anita Carbone had never been there before, but now she was eating pork with Chinese vegetables. Although the food was good, its taste was lost on her. Something very strange was happening to her and she was doing her best to keep up with it, to figure out what was going on.
Joe Milani sat opposite Anita and filled his mouth with chicken chow mein, washing it down with tea. Soon, she knew, the meal would be finished and the waiter would present her with the check. And she would pay it.
She had never bought dinner for a boy before. When she went out to dinner with a date, he paid for the meal. No young man had ever so much as asked her to pay her own way, let alone to swing the entire check.
But this was different, Anita felt. She had picked up Joe Milani all by herself. He had been sitting alone, and she had found him, and otherwise they would never have been sitting at the same table in the Hoi Polloi.
Of course, she argued with herself, she hadn’t exactly picked him up. She had gone to the Village again, admittedly, but not for the purpose of meeting Joe. He had been on her mind, of course. He had been rather interesting in The Palermo, naturally, and certainly not the type of fellow she had been used to—nothing run-of-the-mill about Joe Milani. But she hadn’t been consciously scouting him when she had wandered through Washington Square. Not really.
When she had seen him there, it had been only natural for her to stop and say hello. It would have been rude to walk right by him without a word.
So when you looked at it that way…Anita’s thoughts trailed off.
“Two cents,” Joe said.
She glanced up, startled.
“For your thoughts,” he explained. “You look real deep. Buried in thought. Wouldn’t be fair to offer you a penny for your thoughts, not when they’re so profound. So I’ll make it two cents.”
Anita smiled.
“What are you thinking about? Tell me.”
“Nothing,” she said. “I don’t know. Just thinking.”
He waited.
“Emptiness,” she said. “You know how somebody says his mind is a blank? Not like that exactly. Not that my mind is blank, but what I’m thinking about…well, everything. And everything I’m thinking about is blank.” Joe offered her a cigarette and she took it, put it between her lips and lit it. She thought that she could smoke in the restaurant, that it was all right, but that she should remember not to smoke outside on the street because her grandmother would be mad at her. She thought how funny her grandmother was about things like that and she wanted to laugh but didn’t. She remembered when Joe had offered her a cigarette in the park, and she had explained that it wasn’t right to smoke in the street if you were a girl.