All along that dark street my head felt light and my legs were still like stiff boards. I was a marked man now. Unless I could stop Roth, find Jo-Jo, and get some proof, I was a dead man.
And I did not even know where Jo-Jo could be.
Chapter 15
In the hotel room I lay on the bed in the dark. The bottle was on the table beside the bed. A shot glass was full beside it. I had poured it, but I had not drunk it. Whiskey was not what would help now. I lay there with my hand behind my back and tried to think of what I could do next.
I had made it back to the hotel without being followed, as far as I knew. I had been careful. Dark alleys and the shadows close to the buildings. I had walked as fast as my stiff legs would let me. The light was an enemy. Every street I crossed had been like a glaring stage with me naked across it. And all the way I had thought about the Olsens. On the hot slum streets where the victims of this world sat on chairs and drank beer and tried to find some air to breathe. The slum-streets that had shaped the Olsens and was the world they knew. Streets where, on nights like this, the people of the slums know for sure that they are the victims. They are the people the TV commercials do not speak to. They are the people who never appear in the American Dream, or any other dream. All their dreams are nightmares. There is no escape, and nothing will ever change. They were born in a stacked deck, they will die to the roll of loaded dice. And on nights like this, or when the snow winds blow in winter, they know for a moment who and what they are. They know that all their cunning schemes fool no one but themselves. All their long-planned deals are so many useless motions in a game someone else invented and made the rules for. They know that only self-deception gives them the illusion of life. They are Olsens without the strength of Magda or the luck of Swede.
And they know, on hot nights like this, that they are not of the very few with the luck or the strength or the strange and unexplained psychological quirk to escape. They are not special, and how should they be? How many of us escape what we were born to, who we are, what we have? How many in the bigger, richer, happier world are asked to be better than they were born? Or even different? Here, in the slums of the Olsens, they know that what the people above them get without effort they can have only if they are very strong, or very lucky, or very special. There are no more special people in the slums than in the suburbs, and just as few can move out of the slums into the suburbs as can move out of the suburbs on to the estates. So what do you tell the Olsens? That they must fall back because they have climbed to where they are by false means? That they must go down again because to stay even as far up as they have come now requires a method that sickens the fastidious who have never been down? Do you tell them that in a dirty world, some dirt is good and some dirt is bad? They know better. They know that they have only learned what their betters above them have taught them, not by word but by deed. They know that they did not create Jake Roth and Andy Pappas, they only have to live with them. They know that there is only one man in a thousand who can be different, who escapes where he was born.
That was when, on my back in the dark hotel room where I was even afraid to light a light now, I thought about Jo-Jo Olsen. Because it looked like Jo-Jo was one of the few. (I suppose I had somehow sensed this all along. I know I had sensed this. It was why I had kept going.) Jo-Jo was the one in a thousand. He could be different. He had been on his way out. Only now the slum, the world of all the victims, had reached up to pull him back. The world that he rejected had him by the ankle, if not the throat, and was dragging him down. He needed help if he was not to sink, quietly and unnoticed, out of sight into the slime of his birth. He needed help, because he was one of the special, the different. That Roth could not trust him, ever, proved in one way how different Jo-Jo was. Jo-Jo himself had proved it in another way.
A regular in Chelsea, or perhaps anywhere in this world, high or low, had two choices when he was in the position Jo-Jo found himself in the moment he had that parking ticket. He could keep quiet and be trusted, or he could stay and turn that ticket over to Andy Pappas. He could have risked his family and turned that ticket over to Pappas. He could have thought of himself. Andy Pappas could make life good for a man who did him a favour. Pappas could keep him safe. As safe as a man could ever be when he chose sides in a hard game. To be safe, maybe rich, all Jo-Jo had had to do was betray Jake Roth and his own family. In Chelsea I know how that decision would go most of the time. (I know how it would go in the rest of the world, too, and the decision would be the same.) But Jo-Jo had taken the hard way. He had run out on it all. He had run with no safety from Roth, no protection from Pappas, no help from the police, and no shelter from his family. He had refused to join any side. That is the real path of danger.
In the dark of the hotel room where I lay on the bed like some small animal afraid of the light, I laughed aloud. I laughed, but I did not feel amused. Jo-Jo had taken the way of real danger, and he might have made it. After a time, if Jo-Jo did not appear to finger him, Roth might have decided to give up. But Jo-Jo had a friend, and the friend had come to me, and I had brought in the police, and now Roth would not give up. Now Roth would be sure. He would have to kill Jo-Jo. He would have to kill me. Before either of us got to the police or to Pappas.
So I knew I had to get to the police. I had known that since I walked down those stairs from the Olsens’ apartment. There was nothing else I could do. Instead, I lay on the bed in the dark with the untouched whiskey beside me. Because what could I tell the police? Roth would kill me before I got to the police, if he could, and yet what could I tell them? But I had to get to the police, because once I reached them I would be safe. I would be safe, and, the way it was, it was all I could do to help Jo-Jo.
A telephone call to Gazzo, and I would be safe once they got here. If Roth or his boys didn’t find me before the police arrived, I was safe. Because once I had told my theory, Roth would have no more reason to kill me. All he would have would be a greater need to kill Jo-Jo. Because what I had was no more than a theory. The police would need much more. Even Andy Pappas would want some proof. For Andy it would not have to be much, but a little more than my hunch. Roth would deny it all. The Olsens would not back me. No one else alive knew anything. Except Jo-Jo.
Jo-Jo would be on the spot, because Roth would be on the spot. He would not care about me any more, but he would care a lot more about Jo-Jo than he did now. The police, and Pappas, would check out my story. They would look harder for Jo-Jo. Roth could not let them find him. A dead Jo-Jo would prove nothing. More than ever, Roth would have to kill Jo-Jo before he could tell anything to anyone. And yet it was all I could do now to help Jo-Jo. At least it would make Pappas look for Jo-Jo and make the police really look. There would be some chance that they would get to Jo-Jo before Roth or his killers. And I would be safe.
I had the telephone in my hand when I heard the scratching.
I looked around. The only weapon was the whiskey bottle. I picked it up by the neck.
The scratching came again. Someone was scratching lightly on my door. I got off the bed as quietly as possible. Maybe whoever it was would go away. I reached the door and stood there in the dark trying not to breathe. I saw a faint shadow in the line of light that came under the door from the corridor.
The scratching came again. Small scratching, feeble, like an insect or some small mouse. There was an urgency to it and a lot of nervousness. Whoever was out there was becoming more desperate. It occurred to me that gunmen do not scratch on doors. I didn’t think they did.