"In 7.65 mm?"
"Yes."
Tucker worked the unloaded pistol.
"See?" Imrie asked.
"What about the silencers?" Tucker ran his thumb over the threads that had been cut into the outer circumference of the Lüger's barrel.
Imrie lifted three bright tubes from the box, handed one of them over. "I guarantee the continuity of the barrel."
"Of course."
Tucker fitted the silencer to the Lüger and had almost eleven inches of barrel. The effect was at once silly and deadly.
"Ammunition? Clips?"
Imrie took those out of the box and placed them neatly on the table. He watched while Tucker fitted the silencers to each of the weapons, loaded them, held them, did everything but shoot them. He was not offended by the thoroughness of the examination, for he knew that Tucker was making no comment on his own trustworthiness but was merely taking as many precautions as he could. Indeed, he admired the other man's professionalism.
Tucker broke the guns down and said, "How much?"
"You understand that a genuine Portuguese National Guard Lĺuger is a collector's item?"
"Even modified with a silencer?" Tucker asked.
"Still, yes."
"How much?"
"I paid four hundred and fifty dollars for each gun, thirteen hundred and fifty altogether, the going market price." Tucker knew that Imrie had not purchased the weapons from another collector but from various uninformed sources, probably for as little as fifty or a hundred dollars each. He did not say anything. Imrie was good enough to be permitted as much chiseling as he could reasonably expect was his due. "I restored them to full functional status, supplied the ammunition-considerable ammunition-machined the silencers, a delicate operation that takes no little amount of time-"
"How much?" Tucker interrupted.
Bright eyes flickering over his face, down at the guns, up at his face again, Imrie realized Tucker was in a hurry, perhaps pushed the price up a little because of that. "Twenty-two hundred for the three."
"Two thousand," Tucker said.
"There is the added problem that these particular weapons were originally prepared for another gentleman, as an advance order. He'll be around to collect them in two days. To fill that order, I'm going to have to close the store and stay up eighteen hours a day-"
Tucker cut the fat man short. "Hardly likely," he said. "We both know that you always keep a bit ahead of the demand. That's one reason you keep the hidden closet. You've probably got two more like this-maybe not Lügers but something as sufficient-ready to hand behind the bookcase."
"Really-" Imrie began.
"Two thousand."
"You'll want a case to carry them out of here?" Imrie asked, folding thick fingers together.
"Yes."
"Two thousand for the guns, twenty-five dollars for the attaché case."
Tucker smiled. "You're unbelievable."
"The antique business has suffered through a recent economic recession you might have read about in the papers," Imrie said. He took his hands apart and put them palms up as if to ask, "What can I do?"
Tucker counted out the money while Imrie put the guns, silencers and ammunition into a pearl-gray attaché case with a silvery stainless-steel handle. He snapped it shut, locked it and gave two keys to Tucker, in exchange for the proper cash compensation.
"I think you'll be pleased," Imrie said.
"I hope I will be."
"Goodbye, then."
"Goodbye," Tucker said.
The fat man led him down the stairs again, into the darkened furniture store, past a row of old floor cabinet radios and a Gramophone on a maple stand. The Gramophone trumpet, once gilded and now tarnished, made Tucker think of Elise Ramsey. She had appeared in a cigar commercial seated on a divan beside an ancient Gramophone. That was one of his favorite commercials, perhaps because she had been wearing a plunging, lacy-necked dressing gown; he had always had the feeling that, as in a cartoon, the Gramophone trumpet was alive and that its gaping mouth was opened in awe of her formidable cleavage.
Imrie unlocked the front door.
Tucker went out and away without saying anything more.
The time was 11:06 on Wednesday morning.
The small Long Island airport out of which Paul Norton and Nick Simonsen operated their catch-all air service had two macadamed runways, one new and even, the other cracked and eroding and hoved up at the center like the back of an angry cat. Both runways were in use. Three buildings-one a warehouse, the second a hangar and the third a combination office suite and three-plane berth-had all seen better days. The corrugated roofing was badly rusted, and the wooden walls needed painting. Tucker paid the taxi driver, tipped him well for running out to such an unlikely spot from which he'd hardly obtain a return fare, and went inside the nearest structure, which contained Norton's office.
Norton was there, behind a scarred desk that looked ready to collapse, leaning way back in a rickety spring-backed chair, his booted feet propped on the stained, notation-cluttered blotter. He was a big man, five inches taller and sixty pounds heavier than Tucker. His face was broad and flat, since his nose had been squashed and his cheeks scarred during his tour in Vietnam. He'd never told Tucker how or why that had happened, or even if the two injuries were from the same source. Perhaps, with unlimited resources and several major operations, a very good plastic surgeon could have rebuilt that ruined nose so it would look as good as new, though no improvement in his appearance would have been noticeable until something was done with the white scars on both cheeks. Looking at him, Tucker had the eerie feeling that some enormous cat had sneaked up behind Norton, dug its claws into his face and shredded the flesh backward in one powerful jerk. Despite the disfiguration, he was not a particularly ugly man-just damned mean-looking.
When he spoke, however, your impression of him shifted like the colored glass in the bottom of a kaleidoscope. The voice was soft, the tone even, the words measured and warm. His was the voice of a man who had seen too much and gone through more than his share of agony, the voice of a man who never wanted to have to kill or hurt anything again. "A beer?" he asked.
"This time of day?"
"It's after noon," Norton observed, taking his feet off the desk and rising. He moved smoothly, gracefully. From an old refrigerator in the corner of the room he got two chilled beers, opened them and put them on the desk without offering any glasses.
Tucker sat down in the client's chair, both briefcases beside him.
Norton did not give either of the satchels a glance. He knew that if they were any of his business, Tucker would tell him so. Vietnam had not only made him a gentle man but an extraordinarily wary one as well.
"Ballantine's India Pale Ale," Norton said, lifting his own bottle. "I've tried everything, and this is the only one that makes me happy." He drank a third of his beer in one long swallow that set his Adam's apple bobbing like a dinghy in a typhoon.
Tucker sipped his beer, agreed with the judgment and said, "I need a chauffeur."
"So you said on the phone."
"You have the copter ready?"
"It only took a few minutes."
"Efficiency."
"My trademark."
Tucker swallowed some beer, sighed, put the bottle down, lifted the lighter of the two briefcases, unsnapped the latches and opened the top. He said, "All you have to know to set your price is the destination. Pittsburgh. And the length of time I'll need you-perhaps it'll be as late as tomorrow noon before we get back here. Maybe it'll be some time tonight. Your own complicity involves nothing more than the alteration of the markings on the copter. It's damn unlikely that the FAA will find out about that, and, besides, you're accustomed to risking as much."
"Quite accustomed," Norton agreed. "But you forget that, according to the law, I'll be aiding and abetting you with whatever you have in mind. Understand me, Mike, I don't want to know what that is. I just want to point out that I'll be liable for criminal charges."