“I see you’ve been watching him closely,” the voice said with a laugh.
“Yes, it was necessary that I do so. I have had to be careful with him. I will tell you about it later. I was in danger for a time. America! Never again, thank you. But I found that the danger stimulated the sexual responses to a surprising extent. Interesting. But I would dislike to have it happen again in just that way.”
“Ah.”
“Yes. He is desirable, this man, and I am wondering if I should take him to Europe with me. Perhaps not. But meanwhile, to be sure of him, I need a passport.”
“That can be arranged.”
“I have never met this precise type, you see, and at times I think he is not so simple. So you should know this. He shot a policeman during a robbery. His name is Francis McQuade. He is also wanted for a robbery in Brooklyn. Are you taking this down?”
“Yes’.”
“And all this gives us a lever. He must do as we say, to leave the country under our auspices.”
There was a doubtful quality about the silence at the other end of the line. She said, “Don’t you agree?”
“It could have that effect,” the man said. “Or it could impair his judgment. There is a time to be reckless, a time to be prudent.”
“Have confidence. If shooting becomes necessary, I want someone who will not hesitate. No shooting at all would be better, I quite agree. I have undertaken to pay him twenty-five thousand.”
“Dollars, not francs, I suppose,” the man said without enthusiasm. “This is becoming expensive. I don’t say that in the way of criticism. The passport should be ready tomorrow at ten.”
“Do you notice a noise on the line?”
“Nothing unusual. Except for those in the USSR, American phones are the noisiest in the world. Till tomorrow.” They hung up. Shayne chuckled to himself. His deal with the girl was for fifteen thousand, not twenty-five. Apparently her moneymaking instincts were as well developed as her sexual ones.
He disconnected the battery case. At the window he tugged at the wire until it pulled out of the telephone box below. He rewound it carefully. In a matter of minutes he was asleep.
Michele awakened him. He blinked up at her, wondering what he had done to deserve the attentions of this cool, elegant girl. Remembering where be was and what was expected of him, he reached out for her. She moved away quickly.
“Not now, darling. Not here. Those bedsprings would wake up everybody within miles.”
“What’s the matter with the floor?” Shayne suggested.
Her nose wrinkled. “I doubt that it has been cleaned since 1910. Put on some clothes and I’ll see about breakfast.”
She was wearing a straight up-and-down white linen dress, put together in a way that called the viewer’s attention to the fact that Michele, inside it, was not straight up-and-down at all. It was no effort for Shayne to look at her with admiring lust.
“I mean it,” she said. “I have an appointment at ten. Meanwhile, we have much to prepare. But sometime today, I promise you! In the bathroom at the end of the corridor you will find shaving things.”
Shayne shaved and dressed. As he left the bedroom he had a feeling that his preparations were incomplete, and he went back for the dummy hearing aid. In the kitchen he found Michele preparing an omelet. She made a face from the stove.
“Orange juice from a can. Coffee in the form of powder. Margarine. How do people live this way?”
“We get used to it.”
“Darling, after this is finished I cook for you. Cooking is an art all French girls are required to know.”
The omelet was light and excellent, and Shayne had it to himself, Michele contenting herself with a half cup of coffee and a bite of roll. Brownie appeared as they were leaving. He regarded them with sad, bloodshot eyes.
“I can’t find the aspirin,” he said accusingly.
“Billy will drive down and get you some,” Michele said. “Tell everyone else to stay inside, and please not to drink so much. It will be nice if no one has a headache tomorrow.”
Brownie mumbled something and watched them go.
Shayne said, “I’d better drive. That’s the way we do it in this country.”
In the car, heading down the long bumpy driveway, he went on, “To get something off my chest right away-this Szigetti is supposed to cover me, the way I understand it. I don’t trust the guy. I know it’s too late to work in anybody else, but I want him over on the other side of the truck so I can keep an eye on him. If he quits on me, I want to know it.”
“Yes-s,” she said doubtfully. “See what you think when we get there.”
Shayne drove through the electric eye at the gate and turned left. New houses were going up everywhere. At the first crossroads, there were a few stores, a bar and grill, a gas station.
“Left again,” she said.
“I want a paper.”
“We’re in a hurry, darling. Get one in the city.”
“I want to see what kind of story they gave me.”
He swung onto the asphalt apron in front of the grocery store. There was a rack of New York newspapers on the front step.
“Give me a News,” he called.
A woman tending the stand whipped a Daily News out of her stack and brought it to him. He tossed it in Michele’s lap and drove on.
A jet had crashed near Kennedy Airport, killing 83, so Shayne’s small-scale act of violence hadn’t been given a page-one headline. Michele found the story on page three and read it in silence. Shayne, of course, already knew what it said. Rourke had written the story and Power had persuaded the editor of the News to plant it in one copy of one edition, in return for a promise of an inside track on later developments. And then the single doctored copy had been planted on the Staten Island rack and the woman had been told to sell it to no one but a big black-haired man driving a green Chevrolet convertible.
“But he wasn’t a policeman at all!” Michele exclaimed.
“What?”
“For twenty years he was a policeman, then he had to resign because of a gambling scandal. Edward Farrell, fifty-six. The last two years, he has been wandering about the city hoping to see some criminal to arrest, so the police would take him back. It is a de Maupassant story!”
“My heart bleeds,” Shayne said. “What’s it say about Melnick?”
“In a coma still.”
“He better stay in a coma.”
“Condition critical,” she said, reading. “That means serious? Perhaps by the time he comes round you and I will be in a country where few people can speak English.”
“Knock on wood,” Shayne said.
On the plane between Miami and New York, he had studied New York and Long Island road maps, and he knew that there were four possible ways for a car to get off Staten Island. When Michele gave him another left, in the direction of Port Richmond, he knew they were going by ferry. Victory Boulevard took them into St. George. This was a bad time of the day for automobiles. They inched down to the ferry slip. After a ten-minute wait they were permitted to crawl aboard a Manhattan ferry. They stayed in the car, and Shayne read the Daily News story.
“The things they always get wrong,” he said, and paged through the paper until he came to Dick Tracy, the world’s most preposterous sleuth. He snorted again a moment later, wadded the paper up and threw it in a trash basket as they arrived at the Battery. From here he was expected to know the way by himself. Concentrating hard, he pulled an imaginary map into focus, with its tiny street designations and little blue arrows. “What do we want, the West Side Highway?”
“I think so. The quickest way to Sixth Avenue and Twenty-seventh.”
Most of the traffic was moving north on Whitehall Street, and Shayne moved with it. In addition to street signs and traffic signals, he watched for illegally parked cars. He saw what he was looking for, an unmarked black Ford at a bus stop, where it could swing left on Whitehall or take the East Side elevated highway. Two men were in the front seat, and one of them was Jake Melnick, no longer in a coma, the blood washed off his face, and changed back into Shayne’s friend Tim Rourke.