The elevator came to a silky stop and the doors opened with a whisper of sound.
Welliver moved out into a hall where two bouncers filled up most of the space, flexing their muscles. They looked as if they could have handled Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano in their prime without having to exert themselves into more than a light sweat.
They gave Welliver a hard stare, then their eyes moved to me.
They stared at me the way a Masonic gathering would stare if a bubble dancer had dropped into the middle of one of their most mystic rituals.
Welliver was walking briskly towards double doors that faced us across the hall, and I kept pace with him. I managed to look as unconcerned as anyone out for a Sunday airing.
The bouncers were so taken out of their stride, we very nearly made the double doors: very nearly, but not quite.
One of them said in a voice that could have loosened a rusty nut off the propeller of a liner: ‘Hey! You! Where do you think you’re going?’
The voice hit us at the back of our necks and brought us to an abrupt stop.
Welliver turned and scowled. The voice had shaken him, but, after all, he was a member of the club and he didn’t expect to get that kind of treatment.
‘You talking to me?’ he asked, but beside the bouncer’s effort, he sounded as harmless as a kitten.
‘No—him!’ The bigger of the two moved up to me, making me feel as if I were being crowded by a bulldozer. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘He’s a friend of mine,’ Welliver said with as much dignity as he could muster, which wasn’t much. ‘I’m taking him in. Any objections?’
‘Mr. Claude okayed him?’ the bouncer asked.
‘Of course he has,’ Welliver said, and taking me by the arm, he shoved me towards the double doors, leaving the two bouncers staring suspiciously after us.
We moved into a big room full of men and women, soft lights, cigarette smoke and a buzz of excited conversation.
In the middle of the room was a roulette table. Clustered around it was a bunch of the upper strata of Palm City’s social register. Welliver had said the stakes were high. I had only to; look at the piles of chips out on the table to see he hadn’t been letting his imagination run riot. There could have been around forty to fifty thousand dollars out on the table for this one throw.
‘Let this one ride,’ Welliver muttered to me after casting an expert eye over the stakes. ‘We don’t want to tangle with crazy men.’
Everyone’s attention was rooted on a fat, elderly man with a vast pile of chips in front of him. As I moved closer, he leaned forward and pushed a stack of chips on number five black.
A number of people, betting small, followed his example, then the wheel began to spin, the ball was tossed in, and after a while it made up its mind and settled in five black.
There was a soft sigh around the table as the croupier, a dark, poker-faced Mexican, scooped in the losers’ chips and then shovelled more chips towards the fat man.
I found myself behind a blonde woman who smelt a little too strongly of Chanel No. 5. I edged my way forward until I was against the back of her chair. From there I had an uninterrupted view of the whole table. The lights were strong, and lit up the mass of chips before the big gamblers. It was the perfect angle for a picture.
Buckley had told me all I had to do was to stand square to the table and press the shutter release I had in my pocket. The lens was so fast and the film compensated to such a degree, I couldn’t go wrong.
I saw Welliver had moved away from me, hunting for a seat. I got myself in the right position and my fingers closed over the push button of the shutter release. I held my breath and myself steady, as Buckley had told me to do, then I gently squeezed. I was vaguely aware of hearing a very faint click that told me the shutter had operated.
Then things happened.
I’ll never know if the guys who were watching the players, keeping check on the bets, spotted me or if I gave myself away by my tense expression or if the croupier had spotted the tiny lens in my buttonhole. Anyway, that is neither here nor there: what mattered was I suddenly felt two hard bodies move against mine. Hands that felt like steel braces caught and held my wrists: a man on each side of me.
With my heart doing a rock ’n’ roll, I looked first to the right and then to the left.
These two guys weren’t bouncers: they were professionals. Two thin-faced men, almost twins in their cold, remote professionalism. One was a little taller than the other: one was fair and the other dark; both had hatchet-shaped faces; bleak eyes; flat and expressionless; both had lipless mouths and square jaws.
They both looked hard, tough and ruthless, and they both looked very, very lethal.
‘Okay, buster,’ the fair one said softly. ‘Don’t let’s have any trouble. The boss wants a word with you.’
There was a professional method in which they gently eased me out of the crowd. Both my arms were paralysed in their grips. I suppose I could have kicked and screamed, but the idea didn’t occur to me.
Welliver, who had just found a seat at the table, glanced over at me, his face showing surprise, but he had found a seat and he wasn’t going to lose it, so he smiled drunkenly at me and said something about seeing me later.
As the two men moved me out of the crowd, I had an unpleasant feeling deep down inside me that I would be lucky if I saw anyone later.
The fair one said: ‘Take it easy, buster, let the legs walk. We can handle it if you want to get rough.’
They released my wrists but, like two expert sheep dogs, they managed to keep me moving by jostling me gently forward with their shoulders.
No one in the crowded room paid any attention to us.
I suppose I could have started to sling punches and yell for help, but I was sure it wouldn’t get me anything except a blackjack behind the ear while the fair one or the dark one explained to the crowd I was just another tiresome drunk.
So I walked with them across the room to a door which the dark one opened. They eased me through as if I were a millionaire invalid with four days to live and who hadn’t as yet paid his doctor’s bill.
We went down a short passage to another door.
The fair one knocked while the dark one breathed gently down the back of my neck.
A voice said: ‘Come in,’ and the fair one turned the handle and pushed open the door.
The dark one nudged me into a room that didn’t seem to know quite whether it was an office or a sitting-room. It had a desk by a big window hidden by flame-coloured drapes. There was an executive chair behind the desk and to the right was a steel filing cabinet. The rest of the room was full of lounging chairs, a radio set with a separate corner horn, a small bar and a divan covered with a Spanish shawl.
Behind the desk, in the executive chair, sat a fat, big man in a tuxedo. His hair was a mixture of grey and red; his fleshy face was set in one of those bland expressions that mean nothing; his small, ice-grey eyes were motionless and slightly out of focus as if he were thinking of something pretty important when we interrupted him by coming in.
At a guess, he was around fifty-five to sixty, still in good physical shape in spite of his fat. His hands, slightly freckled and covered with fine red hair, lay relaxed on the snowy white blotter on his desk.
The dark one edged up to the desk while his companion shut the door. I could have been mistaken, but I was pretty sure I heard the key turn in the lock.
I was feeling uneasy by now. If they found the camera on me, I would be in trouble.
The man at the desk stared at me, then looked inquiringly at the dark one and lifted his eyebrows.