"My furniture, automobile, some art objects."
"Inadequate, I'm afraid."
"I have some very good artwork."
"Art may be worth a fortune today, nothing tomorrow.
The critics and the connoisseurs are fickle in their approval of any talent."
"And the bank is involved in such unsound investments?" Tucker asked, feigning innocence, pointing at the Klee.
Mellio said nothing.
Tucker said, "These aren't paintings but primitive artifacts, valuable as antiquities and as art."
"I'd have to have them appraised," Mellio said. "That would take a week, maybe longer."
"I can send you to a reputable appraiser who would verify their value in half an hour."
"We'd prefer to use our own man, and we'd need a week."
"God," Tucker said, "I can't wait for the next stockholders' meeting so I can point out how you people are throwing money away on Klee paintings and other such claptrap. By your own admission-"
"You're being childish," Mellio said.
"And you are being dishonest, Mr. Mellio. I'm sure my father directed you to take every step to deny me this loan and to force me into signing the waiver. But you must see that if I don't get the ten thousand now, right now, I've got excellent grounds to level yet another suit against you, the bank and the administrator of the trust. No judge is going to believe that you seriously fear losing what you loan to me. It will be quite evident that your refusal is a spiteful tactic and nothing more."
Mellio sat up and reached for his intercom controls. To Tucker he said, "I'll want a signed note from you, at least."
Tucker said, "If I approve of the note's wording."
"Of course."
Mellio called for his secretary to bring the proper loan papers, though he was clearly unhappy about being forced into this.'
"I'll want it in cash," Tucker said. "I'll tell you the denominations of the bills."
"Cash?" Mellio asked, raising his eyebrows.
"Yes," Tucker said. "I'm afraid your check might bounce."
At nine-thirty, four blocks from the bank, with his ten thousand dollars packed into a slim briefcase, Michael Tucker made three short telephone calls from a public phone booth in a department store-one to a number in Queens, one to a number rather far out on Long Island and the third to Jimmy Shirillo in Pittsburgh. Satisfied that everything was moving along smoothly, he hailed a cab and rode to a point two blocks from the Queens address, got out, paid the driver, watched the taxi pull away and disappear in heavy traffic, then walked the rest of the way. That might have been an unnecessary precaution, even though the driver kept fare records that could be checked, but he had grown accustomed to his father's occasional private detectives padding in his wake, and he did not mind the slight inconvenience. No one followed him the rest of the way to Imrie's place.
Imrie's place was a ground-floor showroom of a three-story brick structure on a quiet side street in Queens. A sign outside, reproduced in gilt lettering on the cracked glass door, said: antiques and used furniture. When Tucker went inside, the opening door caused a buzzer to shrill loudly far back in the stacks of chairs, tables, scarred bookcases, lamps, hutches, beds and a considerable variety of bric-a-brac. A moment later, as if unwillingly propelled forward by that noise, Imrie waddled out of a shadowed aisle between stacks of chairs and picture frames both used and antique.
He said, "Just let me attend to the door, and I'll be with you." And he went to attend to it.
Imrie was in his early fifties, bald except for a fringe of curly gray hair that accentuated the smoothness of the top of his skull, almost like a medieval friar. He stood no taller than five feet six, but he weighed an even two hundred pounds. Though his store looked like the streets of a Florida town after a hurricane disaster, and though his own style of dress was no style at all except comfort, he was a tidy man when it came to his specialty. His specialty was guns.
"Upstairs," he said, passing Tucker on his way back into the maze of tarnished, tottering furnishings.
At the back of the store, through a yellow cloth curtain, they went up a set of narrow wooden stairs, passed the second floor where Imrie lived, climbed to the third and last level where he kept his gun collection. Here, as on the first floor, the partitions had been knocked out-to make one large room. Racked on the walls, shelved against wooden display lifts, nestled in velvet-lined cases and-in the case of new acquisitions not yet touched by Imrie-dumped unceremoniously in cardboard boxes, were more than two thousand rifles, shotguns and handguns, with the overwhelming emphasis on the last category. Also in the room, against the far wall, were a number of metal-working machines, including a complete miniature gas-fired forge and cooling pot where metals could be melted and shaped.
"I think I have exactly what you want," Imrie said. 'In the store downstairs he'd seemed bland, as gray as his fringe of hair, a little sleazy but not sleazy enough to be colorful. Here, among his weapons, he came alive like a puppet jerked up on strings and touched, magically, by some good fairy. His eyes, hooded and dull in the antique store, were wide, bright and shifted quickly from one thing to another-not ignoring, either, Tucker's reaction to everything he said and, in a few moments, to everything that he showed him.
They stopped at a bookcase that filled half the wall to the right of the door, and Imrie looked up over the bushy gray thatch of his eyebrows, embarrassed. He said, "Mr. Tucker, I hope you'll excuse the television dramatics here."
"Of course," Tucker said. He had been in contact with Imrie nine times before. Three times Imrie had opened the hidden closet in Tucker's presence-the sign of trust and respect he gave few customers-and every time he apologized for the melodrama.
"You can't be too careful these days," Imrie said, using both hands to remove several volumes of poetry from the fifth shelf. He handed the books to Tucker, who took them and waited patiently. "There was a time, not so many years ago, you could leave everything out in the open. If I was working on a gun-making special changes-and I got sleepy, I'd leave it on the workbench while I caught a few winks, you know?" Tucker said he knew. "But now you can't take any chances. All this public uproar about guns puts pressure on the cops and, directly, pressure on me too. You'd think, listening to these anti-gun nuts, that every handgun in existence is used in crime of some sort. Take a look around this workshop, though. I got maybe twelve hundred, thirteen hundred handguns. How many of them am I going to sell to special customers like you? Thirty? Forty? No more than that." He made a sound of disgust in the back of his throat, located the lock previously covered by the books, used a key on his chain to open it. He stepped aside and swung the bookcase out of the way, walked into a closet about four times his own size, pulled on a chain that lighted a forty-watt bulb, located a cardboard box he wanted, turned out the light and stepped into the main room again. He put the box down, closed and locked the bookcase door, took the poetry volumes from Tucker's hands and slipped them onto the shelf again. "Makes me feel like a criminal," he said, grunting in the back of his throat. He sounded as though he were looking for someone to spit on.
At the main workbench, Imrie showed Tucker what he had for him. "Three Portuguese National Guard contract Lügers, all in excellent shape."
"Fakes?"
Imrie looked hurt. "Genuine, I assure you. A good fake, of course, would be sufficient for anything you'd want to use it for. But these are the real article, 1906-type with four-and-three-quarter-inch barrels."