Выбрать главу

“Inside,” he said. “Move.”

I didn’t move. The big one gave me a shove, his arm hardly moving, and I moved. I backed up fast and damn near fell over. The big one reached out a paw and scooped up the Beretta. He pitched it at a chair. He seemed contemptuous of it, as if it was some kind of silly toy.

The small one turned, closed the door, slid the bolt across. He turned again, his eyes showing the same contempt for me that the big one had shown for the gun.

“Now,” he said, “we talk. That briefcase.”

Seven

The big one held his hands in front of his chest and flexed his fingers. The small one had a bulge under his jacket that was either a gun or a lonely left breast. I remembered Peter Armin and thought about reasonable men. These two didn’t look reasonable at all.

They didn’t talk now. They were waiting me out, waiting for me to say something or do something. I wondered if I was supposed to offer them a drink.

“You’re out in left field,” I said finally. “I don’t have the briefcase.”

“The boss said you’d say that.”

“It’s the truth.”

Their faces told me nothing. “The boss said to ask you nice,” the smaller one said. “He said ask you nice, and if you didn’t come up with the briefcase, then work you over.”

“He had to send two of you?”

They didn’t get angry. “Two of us,” the talker said. “One to ask nice, the other to work you over. I’m asking nice. Billy takes care of the rest.”

“I don’t have the briefcase.”

The little one considered that. He pursed his lips, narrowed his eyes, then made a small clucking sound with his tongue. “Billy,” he said softly, “hit him.”

Billy hit me in the stomach.

He wound up like a bush-league pitcher and telegraphed the punch all over the place. He had all the subtlety of a pneumatic hammer and I was too dumb to get out of the way. My legs turned to gelatin and I wound up on the floor. I opened my eyes, saw little black circles. I blinked the circles away and looked at Billy. His hands were in front of his chest again. He flexed them, smiling the smile of a competent workman who is proud of his craft.

Something made me get up. I wobbled around and wondered if he was going to hit me again. He didn’t. I looked at him and watched his smile spread. I said a few words about Billy, and a few more about his mother, and still more about the probable relationship between the two of them.

He couldn’t help understanding them. They were all about four letters long. He growled and moved at me.

“Billy!”

He grunted, stopped in his tracks. The hands that were balled into fist now unwound. He flexed his fingers.

“Don’t get mad, Billy,” the little one said.

“Aw, Ralph—”

“Don’t get mad. You know what happens when you get mad. You blow up, you hit too hard, you hurt somebody more than you should. You know what the boss said. You do that again, you go out on your ear.”

“He can’t call me that kind of thing.”

Ralph shrugged. “So his manners stink. It’s not like he was saying the truth. Your mother’s a wonderful woman.”

“I love her.”

“Of course you do,” Ralph said. “Don’t worry what this schmuck says. Forget about it.”

He turned to me again. His tone was conversational. “Don’t talk to Billy like that, London. He’s an ex-pug. In the ring when he heard somebody call him a name, he went off his nut. Lost his control every time, swinging like a maniac. When he connected he won a lot of fights. Sometimes he missed. You he wouldn’t miss, so don’t talk dirty to him.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You remember where that briefcase is?”

“I told you—”

“We got orders, London. Don’t try to sell us anything. Just give us the case.”

“And if I don’t? Are you going to beat me to death?”

He shook his head. “We search the place. The boss figures if you got the stuff it’s not here anyhow, but we look to make sure. Then we work you over so you know better. Just a light going-over. Not enough to put you in the hospital or anything. Just enough so next time the boss asks a favor you jump.”

They were a pair of fairly complex machines, primed to do a task and nothing more. Reasoning with them was like reasoning with IBM’s latest product. It couldn’t work.

“You could save yourself a beating,” Ralph said confidentially. “Billy works you over, it don’t loll you but it don’t do you any good either. It’s the same either way. You lose the briefcase whether you get hit or not. And the next hit might be in the head. The boss doesn’t like to hit people in the head if he can help it. Sometimes he can’t help it.”

I opened my mouth to tell him again that I didn’t have the damned thing. I changed my mind before the sentence got going. I was starting to feel like a broken record.

Ralph shrugged at me again. “You’re calling the shots,” he said. “You change your mind while Billy’s taking you apart, you tell me. He’ll stop if I tell him to. And I’ll tell him to when you cough up the briefcase.” He turned his head slightly in Billy’s direction. “Now take it easy on him, Billy. Go gentle. But let him feel it a little.”

Billy heard the command and answered it like an old pug answering the bell. He moved toward me and all I could think was, dammit, this son of a bitch isn’t going to hit me again. I stepped right at him and threw a right at his jaw.

He picked it off with his left, brushed it away like a cow’s tail brushing flies.

Then he hit me in the stomach.

I didn’t even have time to think about it. I went straight to my knees and used both hands to hold my guts together. This time I didn’t try to get up. Billy helped me. He lifted me with one hand on my shirt front, hit me with the other hand, and I went down again.

“Prop him against the wall,” Ralph suggested. “So he don’t keep falling down. And pull the punches a little more. You’re hitting a little too hard.”

“I ain’t hitting that hard, Ralph.”

“A little easier,” Ralph said. “His stomach’s soft. He can’t take too much punishment.”

Billy picked me up again and stood me up against one wall. He hit me three more times. He was supposed to be letting up on the punches. Maybe he was. I couldn’t tell.

My stomach was on fire. When I opened my eyes the room rocked like teen-ager’s music. When I closed them it didn’t help at all. He held me with one paw and slugged me with the other and I stood there like a sap and took it.

Ralph said: “Hold it.”

Billy let go of me and I started to slide down the wall. It was a scene out of a Chaplin movie with the humor left on the cutting-room floor. He caught me easily and propped me up again.

“You had enough, London? You want to open up?”

I told him to go to hell.

“A hero,” Ralph said.

I wasn’t being a hero. I would have given him a briefcase full of H-bomb secrets without giving a damn at that point. But I didn’t have it to give.

“Slap the hero, Billy. First take off your ring. We aren’t supposed to mark him up.”

Billy took a large signet ring from the third finger of his right hand. Then he held onto me with his left hand and started slapping me with the right one. He slapped forehand, then backhand, and between my head bounced off the wall. There was a regular pattern to it: slap, bump, slap, bump—

The pain stopped after a little while. I stopped feeling things, stopped seeing and stopped hearing. There was the blue-gray monotony of the slap bump slap bump, a deading rhythm that went on forever.

A voice came through a filter. “—just won’t talk,” it said. Then a few words were lost. Then: “—search the place. Won’t find anything but the boss said take a look. Dump the schmuck and we’ll look.”