“What do you want now?” His voice was old chalk on a blackboard.
“I just wanted to talk to you.” I eyed the cannon. “That’s kind of a hard sell, isn’t it?”
“High pressure.” His voice was firmer now. “You think you can come in here and pressure me any time you want? I’m ready for you this time. No sale! Now beat it!”
“That’s no way to treat a good customer.”
“Customer? Peddler, you mean! And I don’t like the merchandise!” Velvet touched one of the lumps on his cheek meaningfully and pushed the cannon forward an inch or so. “I oughta blast you for this,” he said bitterly. “But I can do without the cops coming around and asking questions. So just beat it and don’t come back.”
“Did I do that?” I asked. “Did I give you a going-over?”
“Are you nuts?” The expression on his face answered his own question affirmatively. “You think you can come in here and work me over and then act like it never happened? I oughta blast you just for kicks. Just the way you fell on me just for kicks.”
“What did I want?” I asked.
“You really are a loony! First I sell you a contact. Then you come back here and push me around because you lost the address and you don’t want to pay a small fee to get it again. And now you come back like it never happened. You’re nuts! Really nuts!”
I gave what he said a quick ponder. It came up snake-eyes-—double trouble. My Russky twin had really been earning his rubles. He must have gotten the Quentins’ address from Velvet and picked up from there. He’d stolen Velvet’s address from me, and now he’d not only caught up with me, but was one step ahead. And Velvet was the only one who might be able to help me catch up to him.
“Now look, Velvet—” I started to say in a conciliatory one.
“Look nothing!” He clicked the safety off the gun, “just get the hell out of here! Fast! ”
“Can’t we just—” I took half a step toward him,
“One more step and I shoot. I mean it.”
I didn’t believe him. I should have. I took a step. His finger tightened on the trigger.
I threw myself to one side. The bullet whizzed past my hip-bone. In its wake there was a neat little hole in my best sport jacket. I didn’t wait for Velvet to fire again. I jumped the counter and made a grab for the gun.
I missed, but I managed to get a hold on the wrist of the hand grasping it. We wrestled. Fear lent Velvet a wiry strength. But then loaded guns make me pretty chicken, too. I matched him grunt for groan as we wrestled for the pistol.
Almost, I succeeded in wrenching it away from him, But he was too fast for me. Just as I out-muscled him, he managed to pull his wrist free and fling the gun away from both of us. It went hurtling out of sight somewhere among the bookshelves.
Its flight relaxed me. That was a mistake, too. Velvet may not have been out for blood with the gun gone, but he was still bent on getting away from me. Now he scrambled free and dived through a door to the rear of the store. I had no choice but to follow.
There was a large, gloomy storeroom lined with bins. The bins were overflowing with books. I couldn’t spot Velvet as I entered. I knew he was still there right away, though. I knew it because a book came flying out of the shadows and conked me square on the noggin.
Momentarily dazed, I picked it up. Games People Play by Eric Beme, M. D. “Apropos”, I muttered to myself. I ducked my head as a second book followed the trajectory of the first. Handbook of Non-Violence, I noticed as it just missed the of my nose. “Hypocrite!” A third literary missile followed. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Friend Velvet evidently wasn’t very consistent in his literary selections.
Retaliation was in order. I grabbed up a copy of Philip Roth’s Letting Go from one of the bins and let go. Velvet avoided it and fired back Das Kapital. I responded with Atlas Shrugged. Copies of Mission to Moscow and Mein Kampf passed each other in mid-air. Conscience of a Conservative and The Affluent Society didn’t pass each other; they collided.
I fired off Sandburg’s Lincoln, Wright’s Black Boy and Manchild in the Promised Land in quick succession. Velvet responded with God and Man at Yale and Up from Liberalism. I found myself ducking like crazy to get out of Buckley’s10 way. Then he shot Your F. B. I. in Peace and War at me, and I really got mad.
“Take that!” I launched volumes by Sartre, Kierkegaard and Camus in rapid-fire order. His return barrage was the last straw. It started with The Man from O. R. G. Y. and went right through the collected works of Ted Mark all the way up to Dr. N yet.
“Fiend!” I yelled. “Sacrilege!” I was beside myself. “What are these doing in the storeroom anyway? Why aren’t they displayed in the window?” I didn’t wait for an answer. I picked up a thick, bound volume of The Compleat Works of Shakespeare as Edited by Bowdler and bounced it solidly off Velvet’s cranium. He went down to the floor in a pile of books and stayed there.
I went over to him. He was out like a light. I dragged him to the back of the storeroom. There was a door leading to a small office there. I pulled Velvet through the doorway and deposited him on a rickety couch in the office.
There was a desk there with an old filing cabinet standing beside it. I began opening the drawers of the cabinet. The top three drawers opened easily to reveal various records and bills and correspondence having to do with the bookstore. The bottom drawer was locked.
I went through Velvet’s pockets and came up with a key-ring. The third key I tried unlocked the file drawer. I pulled it open. It was filled with folders arranged in alphabetical order. Not knowing where else to begin, I tried “Q” for Quentin.
The entries on the card under that designation were pretty confusing to me. Velvet must have had some way of coding them known only to him. There were dates and first names-—usually by couple—and some figures with dollar signs beside them. The last entry on the card had yesterday’s date, my first name, and “$150” alongside it. The top of the card, under the names “George and Helen Quentin” had a series of letters which would probably be meaningful only to Velvet himself.
I studied the list of names a second time. Some of them I recognized. “Barry and Elsa” appeared several times, as did “Phil and Ingrid.” But then I noticed some variations. There were two notations of “Barry and Carrie” with two different dates. Next to the second week was an asterisk with the abbreviation “get.” beside it. I guessed that it might stand for “German” and have something to do with the discipline club Barry had taken Carrie to visit. And that was probably the same one friend Barry had taken my double and Hortense to tonight.
Farther down the card there was another discrepancy. The names “Ingrid and Phil” appeared together quite a few times, but here was the entry “Ingrid and Knute," with another asterisk followed by “sw.” in very small letters.
Knute! It clicked. It was an uncommon name. It was also the name of the Swedish engineer that Putnam had said was the man who’d alerted the Pentagon to the value of Cromwell’s invention. Could it be the same man?
Could be, I decided. And if so, there was something very rotten in the state next door to Denmark. I decided to revive friend Velvet and see what light he might shed on this smorgasbord.