The address on Avenue A that Padillo had given me was in a grimy seven-story apartment building which was located across the street from a dusty-looking park. It was a block of small, sour businesses that looked as if they could provide their owners a bare living, if the owners didn’t eat too much and too often. There were two candy stores, a dry cleaner’s, a small grocery, and a liquor store. None of them looked solvent and the liquor store for some reason appeared to be on the verge of bankruptcy. It may have been because of the defeated look in the eyes of its owner as he stood in the doorway, searching for whatever signs of Spring he could find in the dusty park across the street.
I glanced around before ducking through the dirty glass entrance door of the apartment house. No one on the street seemed interested in me. Not the dark young woman with the baby stroller that was stacked with old newspapers. Not the old man in the limp gray suit who used a cane to help him edge along the sidewalk. The liquor store owner had looked at me once, as if recognizing someone who could turn into an excellent customer. But he also seemed to know that I was a stranger in the neighborhood, the kind who would buy his liquor farther uptown.
The elevator in the tiled vestibule was large enough to carry two persons if one of them held his breath. I got in and studied the ancient controls and pushed enough buttons and slammed enough doors until the elevator finally gave a moan and grunt and started up to the seventh floor. It seemed like a long trip.
I was looking for 7-C and it was at the end of a hall, guarded by a sturdy wooden door that had a sheet of heavy-gauge steel bolted onto it, a decorative touch peculiar to New York. I knocked and glanced at my watch. It was five minutes past seven. Before I could knock again, there was the sound of a bolt being drawn back and of some sturdy locks being disengaged. The door opened three inches and Padillo looked at me over the chain of the final lock.
“The plumber couldn’t make it,” I said.
“Jesus,” he said and closed the door to undo the chain. He opened it and I went in and found myself in the living room of someone who was crazy about maple. A few of the pieces were new, but most of them were old, at least a hundred years or so, and all of them were maple and looked as if they were waxed every other day whether they needed it or not. What wasn’t maple was giddy chintz if it were on a chair or a sofa or partially covering the windows. On the floor was hooked wool. It was all very quaint and just escaped being comfortable.
“Plomondon said no,” Padillo said.
“He said he wasn’t good enough anymore. Not good enough for Gitner anyway. He also said that he hopes you are.”
“What are you puffing about? Doesn’t the elevator work?”
“You can put the gun away,” I said.
Padillo looked down at his right hand which was holding an automatic, a foreign make that I didn’t recognize. He stuck it in his waistband, a little to the left of his navel. It had always seemed like an uncomfortable spot to me, but he liked it and I had seen it jump into his hand from there in less than four-tenths of a second, so I no longer felt qualified to comment on its inconvenience.
“I’m puffing, if you want to call it that, because I ran into a couple of guys down the street who wanted to beat up on me.”
“Was it impulse or did they know you?”
“They knew who I was. They picked me up in Washington at the airport. I thought I’d lost them, but they’re either smarter than I thought or I’m not as clever as well-meaning friends have led me to believe.”
“Probably the latter,” Padillo said. “If you were even half smart, you wouldn’t be here. You’d be holding down your regular spot at the far end of the bar.”
“Now that you’ve brought it up—”
“Scotch or bourbon?”
“Scotch.”
Padillo disappeared into the kitchen that was just off the living room. I looked around some more. There were two closed doors and an open one that led to the bath. I assumed that the flat had two bedrooms. Padillo came back with the drinks and handed me one.
“Where’s the king and the royal adviser?” I said.
He nodded toward one of the closed doors. “In there. It’s got a one-inch iron bar across the door plus three other kinds of locks.”
“Who lives here?”
“A forty-year-old spinster who’s determined to maintain her virginity,” Padillo said. “She’s in Europe for a month or two. Wanda arranged for the place. I think the spinster is a distant cousin or something.”
“Well, now that I’m here, what do you want me to do?”
“Go home.”
“I thought you needed a fair hand.”
“I need a pro, not an amateur. Not even a gifted one.”
“Offer me money and I can leave the amateur ranks.”
“Look at you,” he said, shaking his head.
“That’s a little hard to do without a mirror.”
“You’re ten pounds overweight and most of it’s in your gut. You should’ve got glasses three years ago but you’re afraid that they’ll spoil your aquiline profile. You think hard exercise is the five blocks that you walk home each night if the weather’s just right. You’re up to nearly three packs a day, you’ve got a cough that sounds like the second cousin to emphysema, and if the booze hasn’t given you a hobnailed liver, it’s not because you didn’t go out for it. You’re a mess.”
“You forgot to mention my gums,” I said. “I’m having a little trouble with them, too.”
Padillo took a swallow of his drink. “What would you do with Amos Gitner?” he said. “He’s faster than I am and I doubt that he’s ever felt compunction and probably doesn’t even know what the word means. I’m not going to be the one who tells Fredl that it all happened so fast that you couldn’t possibly have suffered.”
“I could sit on him,” I said. “Squash him flat.”
“There’s that.”
“Well, you need somebody and there aren’t many that you can call on anymore, are there?”
He shook his head. “Not many. There never were really and most of them are dead now.”
“Or scared.”
“Not scared,” he said. “Just sensible. That’s something that no one could ever accuse you of.”
“Do I go or stay?” I said. “You call it.”
Padillo’s dark Spanish eyes appraised me for several moments and then he shook his head again, a little sadly, I thought, as if only sentiment prevented him from dispatching the faithful old spaniel now that his teeth were gone. “Well, Christ,” he said, “since you’re already here.”
“You don’t know what this chance means to me.”
“If it presents the opportunity to turn coward, take it.”
“Your advice was always sound, if a little self-righteous.”
“Cheap though,” Padillo said, put his drink down, and turned toward one of the closed doors. “You might as well meet the king.”
“What do I call him, King, your Excellency, or just Peter Paul?”
“Try Mr. Kassim, if ‘you’ doesn’t seem to fit. He’s supposed to be incognito.”
“How does he like being king?”
“If we can keep him alive, he may like it just fine.”
11
THE KING came out first. I didn’t think that he looked much like a king, but that’s another field in which my expertise is limited. He shook hands with me after Padillo introduced him as Mr. Kassim which I thought was a nice egalitarian touch. He said, “I am very pleased to make your acquaintance,” pronouncing each word without accent, other than the kind that you would pick up from an English tutor. He spoke as if he hadn’t used the language in quite a while and was trying it on again with some trepidation, like last summer’s suit.