For a moment, Mullaney thought he had also somehow injured his hearing on the trip down from the poolhall, but the bearded gentleman repeated the words again, “Get in the car,” with a foreign accent Mullaney could not place. Only this time he pushed something into Mullaney’s side, and Mullaney knew it wasn’t a pipe. He had once been held up in Harlem after a crap game, and he knew the feel of a revolver against his ribs, and whereas this probably wasn’t an American-make gun, considering who was holding it, it nonetheless had the feel of a very hefty weapon that could put several holes in a fellow if he wasn’t too careful. So Mullaney said, “As a matter of fact, I was just thinking about getting into that car, sir,” and immediately got in. The man with the beard got in after him and closed the door. The driver pulled the big machine away from the curb.
“Take me out to Aqueduct,” Mullaney said jokingly, “and then you may have the rest of the afternoon off,” but no one laughed.
“What kind of pistol is that?” Mullaney asked conversationally.
“It’s a Luger. Shut up.”
“Are you a spy?”
“Shut up.”
“I’d like to know where we’re going,” Mullaney demanded.
“We’re going to Kennedy International Airport,” the man with the beard said.
“I’d rather go to Aqueduct,” Mullaney said. “In fact, if you’re interested in parlaying fifty bucks into a small fortune...”
“Shut up,” the man said.
“You speak English very well for a spy,” Mullaney said.
“He thinks we’re spies,” the man with the beard said to the driver, who was bald.
“Ha!” the driver said.
“Everyone thinks everyone is a spy,” the man with the beard said.
“Ha!” the driver said again.
“Why are we going to Kennedy?” Mullaney asked.
“To put you on a plane to Rome,” the man with the beard said.
They were heading through the Midtown Tunnel now, certainly enough on their way to the Long Island parkways and Kennedy Airport. First you, Hijo, you dirty rat, Mullaney thought, and then your two friends. This is Andrew Mullaney you’re fooling around with here, what do you think?
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
“No.”
“I mean, you don’t think I’m somebody else, do you?”
“We don’t know who you are, and we don’t think you’re somebody else.”
“My point is, I think you gentlemen are making a mistake of some kind...”
“There is no mistake.”
“... in that I’m Andrew Mullaney, and not whoever you think I am.”
“We don’t care who you are.”
“My uncle is a judge,” Mullaney lied.
“Ha!” the driver said.
It occurred to Mullaney that perhaps this was all some sort of elaborate joke perpetrated by one of his many friends about town. Knowing he was desperate for a little cash, they had got together to pretend they would not lend him the money, and then had hired a pair of Actors Equity members and a Carey Cadillac to take him out to Aqueduct (wasn’t the race track, after all, on the way to Kennedy?), whereupon they would let him out of the car, shout April Fool! and present him with perhaps five hundred dollars in crisp new bills to lay on Jawbones nose. The theory had possibilities, in spite of the fact that this was April fourteenth, some two weeks past All Fools’ Day. But then, some of his friends couldn’t even give you the right time of day, so how were they to know the exact date? He was beginning to enjoy the joke. He sat back against the cushioned seat.
“I think you guys should know,” he said, going along with the gag, “that I don’t have a passport with me.”
“You don’t?” the driver said.
“That’s right,” he said, thinking Got you, hull, Baldy? “Not only don’t I have one with me, but I don’t have one at all because I’ve never been outside of these United States.”
“You won’t need a passport,” the man with the beard said.
“Then suppose you tell me how I’m going to get into Italy without a passport?”
“In a coffin,” the man with the beard said, and somehow all the fun went out of everything right then.
The stonecutter’s establishment was adjacent to the cemetery.
An angry April wind, absent in Manhattan, sent eddies of lingering fallen leaves across a gravel path leading to a clapboard building. The path was lined with marble headpieces, some of them blank, some of them chiseled, one of them announcing in large letters across its black marble face IN LOVING MEMORY OF MARTIN CALLAHAN, LOVING HUSBAND, FATHER, GRANDFATHER, 1896–1967, Mullaney shuddered at the thought.
They had parked the limousine behind what appeared to be a bigger black hearse than Abraham Feinstein had been blessed with at his funeral. Feinstein had been the king of the Bronx blackjack players; Mullaney would always remember his funeral fondly. He wanted to tell the bearded gentleman that it wasn’t really necessary to provide anything as ostentatious as Feinstein’s funeral had been; Mullaney was, after all, just a simple horse-player. A plain pine box would suffice, a small headstone stating simply: MULLANEY. But the bearded gentleman again prodded him with the Luger and urged him along the gravel path to the cottage that was the stonecutter’s office. Three men were waiting inside. One was obviously the owner of the establishment because he asked, as soon as they entered, whether any of them would care for a bit of schnapps. The bearded gentleman said No, they had business to attend to, there was no time for schnapps when business was at hand. The other two men who had been in the office when they arrived looked at Mullaney and one of them said, “Gouda, this is not the corpse.”
“I know,” the bearded gentleman answered. So he is Gouda, Mullaney thought, and winced when Gouda said, “But he will make a fine substitute corpse.”
“Where is the original corpse?” the other man said. He was wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches on the sleeves. He looked very much like a country squire from Wales.
“The original corpse jumped out of the car on Fourteenth Street,” Gouda said. He was a man of excellent wit, Mullaney decided, even though his brown eyes were set rather too close to his nose. “O’Brien, there is no problem,” he continued. “This gentleman will make a fine corpse.”
O’Brien, who was the man with the leather elbow patches, studied Mullaney with too morbid interest. Mullaney, deciding this was the time to voice his own sentiments on the subject, said, “Gentlemen, I don’t think I will make a fine corpse.”
“You will make a fine corpse,” Gouda insisted.
“Seriously, gentlemen,” he said, “I can think of a hundred other people who would make finer corpses. I can, in fact, think of three people I contacted only today on a small financial matter who would make excellent corpses indeed.”
“He’s too tall,” O’Brien said.
“That’s right, I’m too tall,” Mullaney agreed. “Besides, my uncle is a judge.”
“Would anyone care for some schnapps?” the stonecutter said.
The third man who had been present when they arrived had so far said nothing. He sat on a corner of the stonecutter’s desk, nattily dressed in a dark-blue suit, his silk-rep tie held by a tiny tietack, the letter K in gold. He kept staring at Mullaney, but he said nothing. Mullaney reasoned immediately that he was the Boss.