Neither of us waved good-bye.
It was on Sixty-fourth Street, a little east of Fifth Avenue, twenty stories or so of dark beige brick that had accumulated its fair share of the city’s soot and grime. There was not much to set it apart from other New York apartment buildings that had gone up in the late twenties or early thirties, not unless you counted the steel bars that had been twisted and painted to make them look like wrought iron. There probably wasn’t a second-story man alive who stood a chance against the bars and just to make sure the management had covered every window with them all the way up to the fourth floor.
The doorman was a little different, too, because there were three of them and they were far too young for their jobs, somewhere in their mid-twenties, and they seemed to do everything as a team, even opening the front door. One of them would actually do the work and the other two would stand back, one of them watching the street and the other watching whoever went in or came out. The ones who watched kept their right hands in the deep pockets of their long blue uniform coats that the tailor had done such a good job with that unless you looked closely you could scarcely tell that there was something else in the pockets besides hands. I guessed them to be small-caliber automatics, no larger than a .32, but I might have been wrong. They could just as easily have been .25’s.
It was the third taxi we’d taken since leaving the subway at Grand Central and when it rolled up in front of the apartment entrance, number one opened the door for us, number two quartered the street to make sure that nobody shot at us, and number three stood back and away, poised and ready, just in case we tried something funny.
“Mr. McCorkle?” said the one who’d opened the door.
“That’s me,” I said and bent down to pay off the driver.
“Mr. Padillo is waiting for you in the lobby.”
“Thank you.”
The one who’d spoken also opened the door to the apartment and the king went first, then Scales, and I was almost last, but not quite, because the two other doormen were right behind me and they stayed there until they saw Padillo nod twice.
He stood in the center of what I suppose could be called the lobby although it contained no chairs or couches or settees, not even a potted plant. But there were about seventy-five thousand dollars’ worth of Oriental rugs on the floor and four or five paintings on the walls that rightfully should have been in the Metropolitan, and there was also a desk. It was a plain walnut desk of contemporary design and just below its waxed, uncluttered top were six holes that could have been decorative, but which I also noticed were large enough to launch tear gas shells. I didn’t even bother to look for the closed-circuit television cameras.
There were two men behind the desk and they half rose when we came in, but kept their hands out of sight underneath the desk, probably on some trigger or other that could blow us all up. I’d once had occasion to go calling on a Vice-President in his office on the Senate side of the Capitol and there had been two men there who had risen in just that same way—attentive and polite, but so tightly coiled that I had the feeling that if I’d raised an eyebrow the wrong way they might have blown my head off. After the Kennedys and King, I couldn’t much blame them.
When the two men saw that Padillo recognized us, they settled back down behind the desk. But they watched us. My back was to them, but I didn’t have to turn to know that they were watching. I could feel it.
“You have any trouble?” Padillo said, motioning to the bank of elevators.
“Not much,” I said. “It was nearly a tie at the subway, but Gitner was five seconds late.”
“I figured that he’d be two minutes behind you,” Padillo said. “He must have learned a few things.”
“What about yourself?” I said.
“Kragstein followed me. I didn’t have time to lose him so he knows that we’re here.”
“What happened to the guy whose car you stopped?”
“I gave him a hundred which made him so happy that he wanted to know if I’d like to do it again next week. He’s out of a job and blames it all on Neville Chamberlain and Munich. I couldn’t quite follow his reasoning.”
Kassim turned from his inspection of the lobby and said, “Do you consider this building to be adequately secure, Mr. Padillo?”
“It’s been favorably compared with Fort Knox—and with reason.”
The elevator arrived then and I saw the validity in Padillo’s claim. It was the only elevator I ever rode that had a copilot.
They let us off on the nineteenth floor where a man waited for us in a small, richly furnished room that faced the elevator. The man had curly gray hair and wore a dark, almost black suit and a deferential maner. “Good evening, Mr. Padillo,” he said and there was a trace of the South in his voice. “Dinner will be ready shortly, but Mrs. Clarkmann thought that you might like to freshen up first.”
“Thank you, William,” Padillo said. He turned to the king and Scales. “Mr. Kassim and Mr. Scales would probably like to. Also, Mr. Scales has torn his coat. Could you do something about it?”
“I’m sure I can, sir.”
“Thank you. Mr. McCorkle and I will be at the bar. I know the way.”
“Of course, sir,” William said and turned to Kassim and Scales. “This way, gentlemen.”
He led them through a door at the left. Padillo and I went straight ahead, through another door, and down a hall that was big enough to successfully carry off the two-foot-square black and white marble tiles that covered its floor and the three huge chandeliers that hung from its ceiling and cast their glittering light on the Louis Quatorze chairs and lowboys that lined the walls on either side and which didn’t look as if they had been used for anything but decorative purposes for the past three hundred years.
“Is that Clarkmann with two n’s?” I said.
“Right.”
“Piston rings.”
“Right again.”
“Mr. Clarkmann died three years ago.”
“You keep up with things.”
“He left it all to her.”
“Everything.”
“She had a little to put in the pot herself, as I recall.”
“About twenty million or so.”
“Amanda Kent—the Kandy Kid, as a tabloid or two would have it.”
“Kent’s Candies, Incorporated,” Padillo said. “Her grandfather founded it in Chicago and his major contribution was in refusing to spell candy with a K. A wise old bird.”
We went through another door and into a room which was just what Padillo had said it would be, a bar. It was a dim place with all the bottles that one would need and an old bar that could have been rescued from a turn-of-the-century Third Avenue saloon. There were also some padded stools and some low tables surrounded by comfortable-looking leather chairs. It was a room designed for drinking and Padillo went behind the bar as if he knew the way.
“Scotch,” I said and he poured us both doubles and after I’d tasted mine I admired the room some more and then waved my drink at it a little. “I don’t like to be crass, but how much down would I have to have before I could move in?”
“As I said, it’s a cooperative.”
“Sort of a people’s movement, huh?”
“You buy shares. One share equals one floor. One floor goes for one million.”
“Isn’t there what they call a maintenance charge?”
“I think it’s twenty thousand a month, but I may be low.”