That stopped them totally. The big one rubbed his jaw with one ham-hand. The fight had gone out of his stance. “You mean you’re—”
“I mean you don’t want my kind of trouble.”
He made a perplexed gesture. “But, man...”
Docker shot a quick glance at the fallen Rowlands without giving them a chance to come at him. The little rotund grifter lay sideways in his own mess, making agonized noises as he tried to get his breath back. Docker nodded to the blacks. He chuckled.
“I guess I made my point, at that. But just in case...”
Before either of them could move, he drove the toe of his right shoe against the side of the fallen man’s face. Rowlands cried out softly, like a bird caught by a tomcat.
Docker picked up his attaché case, nodded pleasantly to the two outraged and confused Samaritans, and limped calmly between them and down the passageway toward Mission Street. Unmoving, they watched him go, the smaller one with a half-eaten sandwich still in one hand and his mouth hanging open as if for the next bite.
When Docker reached Mission he turned left, out of their sight. He began to whistle jauntily, swinging the attaché case like a kid on his way to school with a tin lunchpail.
Seven
Going past the tellers’ windows from the back of the bank, where the loan payments were made and the safe deposit boxes were kept, Neil Fargo checked his long stride. He rooted in his nearly empty briefcase for his checkbook. At one of the chest-high counters he wrote out a check for pocket money, then let two other patrons go ahead so he could get a big blond teller who carried abundant, beautifully shaped muscle and flesh over her heavy Scandinavian frame. Her placid face lit up with a display of very white teeth when she saw Neil Fargo in front of her.
“First time you’ve been able to find my window for months,” she said.
“That’s because you’re so popular I can never get near you.”
She made a small derisive noise in her throat. She had a lovely throat, and very clear, healthy skin. She reached for his check. He put a hand over hers, imprisoned it. She looked at him with clear blue eyes. His face wore a smile that looked insincere but at least softened his features and made them slightly vulnerable.
“You going with anyone these days, Rhoda?”
“You mean you’d care, after ignoring me for—”
He shook his head almost impatiently, but didn’t remove his hand. “I’m working. I might need to have slept with you last night. Possible?”
“Hair-wash night so I was alone — you’d remember that. That’s probably why you’ve picked me.” Her wholesome expression had thinned. She said in soft bitterness, “You bastard! How long has it been? Six months? Seven?”
“You won’t have to swear to it in court, might not even get asked, but if you are asked, it’ll be by cops.”
She pulled her hand out from under his, carried the check away to the big square sheaf of computer printouts which told whether it would clear or not. Neil Fargo still leaned one elbow on the counter so his heavy shoulders and broad tapering back effectively shut out anyone behind him from their conversation without seeming other than casual. The polite smile remained fixed on his face.
Rhoda returned, rubber-stamped the check, counted out a twenty, two tens, and two fives from her cash drawer. Her face was once more placid, like a dust jacket for Heidi. She smiled brilliantly at him across the money. She was such a big girl that her eyes were only a couple of inches below his own.
“You bastard,” she said again. This time there was a hint of caress in her voice.
Neil Fargo picked up the bills, nodded, smiled, backed away from the window.
“You’re a love,” he said.
Ten minutes later the express elevator deposited him on one of the topmost floors of the gleaming white Transamerica pyramid which thrusts its graceful spire up from the foot of Columbus Avenue. The panorama caught Neil Fargo, held him for perhaps two minutes. It was truly amazing. From the Farallone Islands thirty miles toward Hawaii to the East Bay hills which cupped Oakland and Berkeley, from the Golden Gate to San Mateo’s Dumbarton Bridge twenty miles to the south. People were mites, cars beetles, Coit Tower the end of a wooden matchstick stuck upright into an insignificant mound covered with toy houses. Only the ugly dark monolith of the Bank of America headquarters, like a stake driven into the city’s heart, challenged his view.
He turned from it, pushed the button beside Maxwell Stayton’s office door. Stayton Industries had the entire floor. The voice of Miss Laurence came over the speaker, tart as vinegar.
“Yes?”
“Neil Fargo. By appointment.”
There was a faint click, the smooth round brass knob turned under his hand and the superbly balanced oak door, twelve feet high and three inches thick and inlaid with Tanzanian ebony, swung open. He went in. He already would have been examined on the closed-circuit TV at the reception desk, which was what would have put the asperity into Miss Laurence’s voice.
“Mr Stayton expected you at ten o’clock,” she informed him in her frosty BBC accent.
“I was delayed.”
“It is well after eleven o’clock. Have you any idea how much Mr Stayton’s time is—”
“Just push the goddam button, mate.”
Miss Laurence paled. She had mousy brown hair and close-set eyes the approximate color and toughness of manganese. She also had a walker’s bulbous calves, wore sensible shoes to the office, and made forty thousand a year plus stock options. When Miss Laurence had the flu, it was reflected in that quarter’s corporate earnings.
Miss Laurence pushed the button. Neil Fargo touched her under the chin with a forefinger, went through the inner door with her furious expression sticking out of his back like a hurled icicle.
Maxwell Stayton’s personal office was a den with the fireplace missing. The walls were of walnut panelling that was not veneer, and were covered with framed and signed photographs of sports greats, most of them from the mid-thirties. One of the pictures was of Stayton himself, wearing a Stanford football uniform and old-style leather helmet. He was cutting, high-stepping in the photo, clutching the ball fiercely in one hand and holding off an imaginary tackler with the other.
Neil Fargo paused in front of a photo of himself, also in a Stanford uniform, bare-headed, grinning at the camera. He snapped the picture with the same fingernail he had used to chuck Miss Laurence under the chin.
As if this action reminded him of the other, Maxwell Stayton demanded sourly, “Do you have to do that to her?”
“She expects me to,” said Neil Fargo. He ran his hand along the bookshelves, over leather-bound volumes patinaed by age and handling. “It confirms her view of the colonies.”
Stayton merely grunted. The room, not large, was made to seem even smaller by his size. Age had distended his belly, thinned and grizzled his hair, but had not ravaged him. Behind him was a beautifully-detailed model of the Feather River, a 600,000-ton supertanker being built for Stayton Marine in Japan. If the ecologists could be bought or mollified, it would eventually unload crude at the Farallone Islands.
“Those football pictures stir memories?” said Stayton abruptly.
Neil Fargo crossed a rug that cost as much as a Cadillac. He looked out the fourth wall, which was tinted plate glass and echoed the reception area’s views of the city.
“They’re hanging on your wall, not mine.”
“What do you hang on your walls?”
“Scalps.”
Stayton gave a short burst of heavy laughter. He had removed a Churchill-length cigar from his mouth to speak, didn’t offer a hand to shake, not even after putting the cigar down in an ashtray. The ashtray was a solid four-pound clump of polished stainless steel that a sculptor had taken a swipe at to make it a work of art. Stayton sat down behind the desk.