“I’d like to help,” he said weakly.
“No.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Finish it.”
="1em" width="0em" align="center"›***
McGinnes watched me enter Nathan’s on the Avenue, and kept watching, his arms folded as he leaned against a microwave oven display.
Lee was behind the counter to my right. She was wearing a jade green shirt, buttoned to the top, and a jean skirt, out of which came her stout little wheels. First she smiled, then her brow wrinkled.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“So I’ve been told.”
“Sorry about your job.”
“Don’t worry about it, Lee. Listen, I’ve been awful busy.”
“You don’t have to explain,” she said.
I glanced back at McGinnes. “Lee, I don’t mean to cut you short, but I’ve got to talk to Johnny.”
“Go ahead,” she said. “We’ll talk later.”
I head-motioned McGinnes. We walked the length of the store through the back to the radio room.
“You want a beer?” he asked.
“No.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, and pulled a malt liquor from his usual spot. He popped the tab and drank.
“Where’s Andre and Louie?”
“Andre’s off. Louie’s out making a deposit. What’s up?”
“Can we talk for a few minutes?”
“Yeah, the floor is dead. If this is about the Broda thing, I can tell you that I’ve been keeping an eye on the news, and that Shultz boy was never found.”
“I know. But there’s more.”
I told him everything that I was certain of, and some of my guesses. He whistled softly when I was finished and then stared at his feet. Some color had gone out of his face.
“What do we do now?” he said.
“I only wanted you to be aware of the situation, in case they think you’re involved. They haven’t made any kind of play on me yet. Maybe they think the Shultz murder scared us off.”
“What happened to the girl?”
“She’s gone,” I said. “Listen, Johnny, I need one more favor of you, man, then it’s over for you.”
“What is it?”
“I know you keep a few pieces that you collect, the unregistered kind. I’ll be needing to borrow one.” ‹"0et="0em" p height="0em" width="27"› He looked at me as he finished his beer. He moved the can around in his hand and then crushed it.
“You come in here,” he said, “and tell me all this shit, and I haven’t even got it all digested yet, and now you want a gun? You’re fuckin’ nuts, man. Why don’t you just ask me to put one to your head and pull the trigger?”
“Listen,” I said. “I’m going on with this thing. I don’t have any options, Johnny. And I need something behind me if I’m going to get this kid.”
“I don’t think so, Nick,” he said, and shook his head as he walked away. “I gotta get back out on the floor.”
“Think about it,” I yelled to his back. But he was already out the door.
Late in the afternoon I stopped in the Good Times Lunch and had a seat at the counter. Kim came over with a pad in his hand.
“The special, Kim,” I said sheepishly, “and a coffee, black.”
He nodded and returned shortly with a fried-fish platter. I shoveled it in and had a cigarette with my coffee. After that I paid the check that Kim laid in front of me.
“Kim,” I said, and he turned back around. “I’m sorry about yesterday. I was out of control. It won’t happen again.”
“No problem, Nick,” he said. “But you should get rest. You don’t look so good.”
The red light on my answering machine was blinking when I entered my apartment. I pushed down on the bar.
The first message, from McGinnes, told me to meet him at the store tomorrow. He would have what I wanted. The second message was from Joe Dane. I called him at home, and he picked up on the third ring.
“Hello?”
“Joe, it’s Nick, calling you back.”
“Nick, we need to talk.”
“I think it’s time. How about right now?”
“No, not now. I’m busy tonight. Tomorrow morning in the park.”
“Tomorrow’s fine, but not in the park. Someplace more public.” He hesitated. “So it’s like that.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Tomorrow morning at ten, in the bell tower at the Old Post Office downtown.”
“Okay, Nick,” he said. “Ten o’clock.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
To get into the tower"0et=p height of the Old Post Office at Twelfth and Penn, one has to take the tour. I stood amid a group of eight tourists on the ground level, around a brightly lit, U-shaped counter.
A gangly Park Service employee was giving us a brief history of the Post Office. He mumbled into a microphone in a barely intelligible, nasal voice. The man next to me was taping him with a video camera.
After his speech we were ushered into a glass elevator and began our ascent to the tower base. The checkerboard floor of the Pavilion fell away rapidly as we rose higher. A little girl near me said to her father, “Daddy, if we fell now, we’d be dead, right?” An older woman who already looked a little frightened touched her collar and laughed nervously.
The doors opened and we walked out to a circle of white and red ropes that rang the Congress Bells. A rotund guide informed us that the bells, a gift from Great Britain, were rung on the opening and closing days of Congress, and on all national holidays. The only other instances when they were rung, she said, were in honor of the Challenger’s crew, and “when the Redskins won the Super Bowl.”
Then the guide herded us into another elevator. She reached in and pushed the floor button from the outside. “You picked a great day for the tower,” she said, as the doors closed and her fat, bespectacled face disappeared.
When the doors opened again, the group walked out into the openair tower and scattered. The clock mechanism was housed in a raised platform in the center. A Park Ranger sat on the platform and looked through binoculars.
A circular walkway afforded a view of the city in all directions. Three of the sides were strung with narrowly spaced wire to discourage jumpers. The south side had a Plexiglas shield. Joe Dane was standing on the east side, looking out. I tapped his shoulder.
He turned without surprise. Though his clothes were clean, he looked as disheveled as always. There was a dead look to his watery brown eyes.
“I don’t really like this view,” he said, turning his head towards the expanse of Pennsylvania, Constitution, and the Capitol.
“We can move,” I said.
We walked past the southern view of the Potomac and the Jefferson Memorial, and over to the west wall. Dane stared through the wires. The curving lines of the Federal Building below were like a horseshoe framing the Mall and the Lincoln Memorial.
“All those tourists,” he said. “They waste their time standing in line to get up the Washington Monument, when the best view of D.C. is right here.” He smiled. “Remember when you and me and Sarah and Karen used to come down here on Sundays? Smoke a joint out in the car, then come up and take pictures with our heads through the wires and shit like that? After that spend a couple of hours munching our way through the eatery downstairs.”
“Joe,” I said. “Let’s just get down to it, all right?”
“All right, Nick,” he said softly. His smile faded, and he buried his hands in his pockets. m" "27"›‹ “Give it to me straight up. Did they get Jimmy Broda?”
“Yes.”
“Is he alive?”
“Yes.”
I smiled and slapped the wall. The ranger and a couple of tourists looked my way. I wanted to hug Dane but didn’t show it. I wasn’t finished with him.
“Why are you here, Joe?”
“Last shot at redemption, I guess.” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Are you still with them?”
“No. But they don’t know that.”
“Tell me about it.”
He shrugged. “It’s not all that complicated. It’s a small operation, smaller than you think. Only a few people involved. And this was their first time at this sort of thing. At least it was for Rosen.”