Crouching behind the bar, Jimmy heard the hall door thrown wide with a suddenness intended to imply command. That told him it wasn’t the boss standing there.
Then came the footfalls, with no effort at stealth. That told Jimmy that it was only one man, that two of them had got it in there. The survivor had seen the smashed Collins and heard the fat man’s toboganning descent.
But Jimmy wasn’t chicken-hearted. He might be short on conscience and a schemer, but he was a deserving lad on the whole. He was a rugged individualist, and he wasn’t going to stay poor all his life like his father and mother. So he popped his head up, gripping the revolver Polumbo kept under the bar, just as the astonished Luette came abreast.
Firing point-blank he couldn’t miss, but besides being excited he wasn’t the best shot in the world, knowing nothing more about a gun than that you held onto it and kept on beckoning with the trigger.
The first slug only laid a red three-inch groove down the center of Luette’s bald spot, but the second socked him through the pan, alongside the nose.
That did the trick all right.
Shaken and wiping the sweat from his face on his sleeve. Jimmy issued from the bar. Luette had gotten his gun out and it lay on the floor with the cashbox. The box had burst open with the weight of the two bags of silver. There was no point in giving the police the idea that a hole-in-the-wall like the Lisbon was a money-making proposition, so Jimmy appropriated better than ninety per cent of the currency and concealed it well in the refrigerator, in an enameled box under lettuce, celery, radishes and stuff.
With no waste motion he paid a visit to the back room, and saw that things spoke for themselves in that welter. Next he used the phone, dialing the number of Audrey Starr to give her the bad news. The call awakened her, since she never got up until mid-afternoon, and her voice was as mean as snarled wire.
It turned to honey with bubbles of true love in it when Jimmy gave her a brief outline of the slaughter. He said, “I don’t know where that lousy spic kept it all the time, but he must have been counting it when those guys busted in. Baby, we’re all set! We’re going places!”
Before he called the police he swallowed down one stray crumb of conscience. The door to the rear quarters of the Lisbon was pretty solid and equipped with an electric lock, worked by a push button under the bar shelf. Jimmy disconnected the batteries and disposed of them simply by dropping them down the chute into the barrel used for broken bottles. He then knocked the lock itself out of commission with a mallet and screw driver.
Lastly he spoiled all his carefulness by getting himself paralyzed on the best in the house, because after all he was only a young fellow with his nerves shattered by his experience.
Fiddlemarch entered a telephone booth near the escalators in Macy’s and closed the door, and turned his back on it. He took the receiver off the hook and held it to his ear; with his right hand he spread the thousand dollar bill out fiat, holding it close to his chest to conceal it. It was a handsome thing, a thousand bucks and no doubt about it. Not queer; back and front, green and black, the engraving was strictly governmental. There was some writing on the back — some guy’s name and address. The previous owner’s, maybe.
He hung up, wiped his face with a handkerchief, surreptitiously folded the banknote into it and crammed it back in his pocket. He looked around on the floor to make sure that it hadn’t dropped. There was a whole cigarette there, which he nonchalantly sniped and lighted with a paper of matches advertising free admission to a burlesque house where the gals stripped no more, nor teased, nor ground, nor anything. There was one he remembered in particular, that Audrey Starr. He stuck his finger into the return slot of the phone before leaving, but there were no forgotten coins, no wadding.
He walked around the store for a few minutes while he smoked the cigarette, returned to the telephone booth and fished out his gray handkerchief. The bill was still there. He spread it flat, folded it very neatly and tucked it in behind the matches with the busted theater ad.
On his way down Seventh Avenue he considered the fact that he was going to have a time breaking the grand. Not only that, but he was harried by the fear that the word about him had been passed around. Luette and Terrin would have been asking for him, and he might be spotted at any time.
In one drugstore after another, down the line, he made the telephone booths, and by the time he had penetrated the Village he had collected two dollars and forty-five cents. Unusually good pickings from the return slots. That made close to ten dollars that he had on his person, not counting the thousand brave soldiers. He couldn’t include the grand until he cracked it.
Before he became a moocher, in the past, Emil had been much better off, starting with the time he found the emerald ring in the hack and held out for six hundred bucks reward. Four hundred had been offered in the Lost & Found. The woman who paid him the money acted as though he was a maggot or something, but it wasn’t his fault if the ring had a sentimental value. Even in the palmy days he never did much hack-riding, but the girl was plastered that time, and if she said, “Please,” when he asked her if she wanted a hack, and let him get in with her, she was asking for it. He always wondered what happened about that. And he had found the ring right there on the seat, besides.
He used to hang around subways late at night and roll lushes when he got the chance. He never would forget the time he found the guy snoring on the bench and took his watch and wallet, and then just as fast as the tick of a clock the guy’s mitts were wrapped around his throat and Emil’s eyes were bugging out. The guy was a detective.
That was the only time Emil went up the river, and it would be the last time; because even if he found a lush lying in the gutter and nobody in sight he wouldn’t take the guy’s watch out to see what time it was. That had been the reason why he took the detective’s gold watch; he just wanted to know the right time, and then of course he took the wallet to see whether some lush-worker had already found the man and rolled him. The judge and everybody else in the court laughed like fools.
Anyhow, he knew it was going to be tough breaking the grand. The bill would be on record. Every time it went through a bank, the cashier had to take down the serial number, and there weren’t so many grands floating around, either. Privately, every owner would make a note of the number, if he had any brains, because it was a lot of money in one piece. Emil figured that he wasn’t a thief until he spent a piece of the grand. That might happen if he walked into just any bank to get it changed. The number might be on record in just that bank already, for either Terrin or the owner must have phoned the number around.
In the first place, any cashier would wonder how a seedy individual like Emil Fiddlemarch happened to have a piece of jack that long. Passing the grand was worse than trying to get a check cashed, and people have starved to death trying to cash perfectly good checks in Manhattan.
And the can. Back up the river for a double stretch. He couldn’t do another stretch; he’d get T.B. or something in those cells. Or stir-crazy.
He switched the grand from the paper of matches to his watch-pocket, then to another pocket. There were fourteen pockets in his suit, and in no time at all he reached the conclusion that it wasn’t safe in any of them.
Knocking off for lunch, he went up Lexington to a bar above 42nd, and nursed a ten-cent beer long enough to snitch about eighty-seven cents worth of pretzels, potato chips, little kamoojies of bread spread with ground meat, cheese, and other delicacies. He inspected with curiosity only some oily, curled-up strips of meat, since it was the first time he knew that red angle-worms had bones.