“You put this up there yourself?” I asked and then grunted, lowering the bag to the floor.
“Two young men helped me,” she said.
It has always amazed me how a woman’s eyes and her words can find a direct line to my animal heart.
I wrangled the festive bag out onto the platform, then rolled it with Marella at my side. We rode up a half-stage escalator into the middle aisles of Penn Station. She was looking around nervously but I stared straight ahead. I had already seen the man-knife in the reflection of a window on our train. He was close behind us but nearly hidden behind a redcap’s overfull cart.
Even when I lost sight of him I knew he was near us somewhere.
I made a turn down a fairly empty corridor and Marella asked, “Where are we going?” There was fear in her voice, but whether it was due to her pursuer or maybe to some danger I represented, I could not tell.
“Baggage elevator,” I said. “This sucker is too heavy to lug up the stairs. What you got in here anyway?”
“My whole life.”
“That’s either way too little or far too much,” I said as we reached the dull and pitted chrome doors of the elevator car.
I pressed the Up button but the light was out. I couldn’t remember a time when it worked.
“You’re different than you were on the train,” she said as we stood there.
“Then I was on the train,” I said, “now I’m on the job.”
“That reminds me, what are you charging to carry my bag?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“Well... if all I have to do is walk you to a taxi I’ll accept a handshake and a kiss on the cheek. But if I have to play bodyguard and make sure that you’re unharmed then the going rate is fifteen hundred dollars.”
“Fifteen hundred!” she exclaimed with a broad smile on her lovely mouth.
“I couldn’t be trusted for less.”
Her nostrils flared and I wondered if I had paid my latest life insurance premium.
“Are you really as tough as you act, Mr. McGill?”
“I truly hope that neither one of us has to find that out today.”
The elevator doors opened and people began to disgorge; five travelers and a bright-eyed redcap whom I’d run into over the years ferrying first-class and infirm passengers along the uncharted routes of the station. His name was Freddy Mason, and his wife I thought might have been Yee.
Marella and I stood aside as the crowd moved past. Then Freddy came out pushing his cart. When he saw me he nodded and frowned. Then, seeing my pickup client, he smiled.
There was no one else waiting for the elevator, which I regretted, and there seemed to be no one else around. So I ushered Marella Herzog into the empty chamber and girded myself for what I knew was coming.
When she was against the corrugated back wall of the metal car I set the suitcase up in front of her — to create an extra buffer. I looked up at the polished metal reflector in the left corner and saw him coming even before Marella yelled, “Watch out!”
He timed it almost perfectly. The doors were already closing when he lunged through. There was something in his left hand. It could have been a pistol but I suspected a more intimate weapon. Either way I’d have to turn before he could expect me to cower in fear.
All those years working out in Gordo’s boxing gym had honed my reflexes until they almost had minds of their own. I couldn’t go ten rounds anymore but in a profession like mine survival was rarely about endurance.
Already low to the ground, I crouched down and spun on my left heel. I grabbed his left wrist and broke it with one fast torquing motion but I had no intention of stopping there. I raised up and delivered a left uppercut to the tall man’s jaw before seeing the hunting knife he had dropped when his wristbone broke. I grabbed his head with my right hand and slammed it against the wall. It bounced very nicely and my client’s stalker, whoever he was, fell unconscious to the floor.
I glanced up at Marella. If she had any response it was not in her face.
Moving quickly, I set the olive-skinned man in the back corner to the right so that it looked as if he was sitting there, grabbing some sleep where he could. That way the first thing an unsuspecting passenger might have thought was that he was a drunk using a public conveyance as his bedroom.
I noticed that he was still breathing.
That was fortunate.
Our luck held, because there was no one waiting for the baggage elevator. We had taken nineteen steps before someone yelled for help.
Twenty-eight steps later we were taking the escalator up to the Eighth Avenue exit. It was there we saw four uniformed cops come barreling down the stairs.
“Should we try to run?” Marella whispered in my ear. Those were the first words she’d spoken since the encounter.
“Only if we want to get caught.”
There was a long line waiting for cabs at that time in the afternoon. The sirens of two police cars and one ambulance wailed to a stop not half a block away from us. While policemen and paramedics hurried into the station, Marella and I attached ourselves to the end of the taxi line.
“I guess I owe you some money,” she said after a few minutes’ wait.
“Fifteen hundred.”
“Will you take a check?”
“No.”
She put a hand on my shoulder. She wasn’t more than half an inch taller than I but her caramel heels added an inch to that.
“I like strong men,” she said.
“Why? So they can protect you?”
“I like to watch them come.”
A woman standing in front of us turned slightly, cocking her ear in our direction.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Underneath, on top, or looking over his belly button,” she said. “Strong men who know their strength give it up because they don’t have to pretend.”
The woman in front of us on line touched the shoulder of the guy she was with. They were both white and in their twenties. She leaned over to whisper something and he turned to look.
“Is that offer in lieu of my fee?” I asked.
“Next!” the cab controller shouted. He might have said it more than once.
The nosy couple realized that he was calling to them and reluctantly returned to their lives.
“I’m staying at the Hotel Brown in the East Sixties,” she said.
“I know the place.”
“I should have the money in the next hour or so.”
I took out a business card and handed it to her.
“Call me when you’re ready to pay up,” I said, and she smiled.
“I guess you are as tough as you think,” she said.
“Next!”
4
Marella Herzog’s cab pulled away leaving me a little stunned. My heart was beating like it was being played by a one-armed Japanese Ondekoza drummer pounding slowly on his seven-hundred-pound drum with a caveman’s club at twilight. It was this unusually calm and yet powerful beat that allowed me to go back into Penn Station. I guess I felt somewhat invulnerable and unconcerned with consequences or danger.
The main hall of the transportation hub was a little more frenetic than usual; like an ant colony that had just perceived some kind of physical threat. I counted nine police uniforms and actually saw the wheeled gurney that carried our unconscious attacker toward the front exit.
I was taking a greater chance than most civilians because half the NYPD had at least passing familiarity with my face. In my younger days I had been the danger. I was a private investigator who only worked for underworld figures setting up other crooks for their crimes. I had relinquished my evil ways but the police never forget and rarely forgive, so cops who weren’t even out of high school when I was active knew my mug shot.