Not that your route to Loui’s is without incident. You witness a murder for one thing. You’ve just stepped into an abandoned bicycle shed to get out of the downpour when you see two figures at the other end of the alley dragging a third, mere shadowy outlines as though the rain were a drawn blind between you with dim silhouettes playing on it. Through the rain’s rattle you can hear one of them giving orders, the other whining in reply in a squeaky voice. The guy giving the orders does not sound like a street mug. He turns to go, but Squeaky returns and pumps a round of bullets into the victim’s head. Psycho. The boss scolds him in a father-to-son way and leads him off. Sirens sound. Can’t stay. Who was it? Never know. One of life’s little mysteries.
ONE WET DAY’S END YOU WERE TAILING A GUY THROUGH here who you thought might be Mister Big. This was after you’d delivered your illustrated classified ad for the toy soldiers to the city newsrag. Through a friendly dealer, Blanche had learned of a private collector who owned a unique set of figures from the Battle of Agincourt with brigandines made out of mouse leather and bascinets of silver with hinged visors, stuffed and quilted gambesons on the French crossbowmen, knee-length hauberks of silver chain mail on the English archers, beards and horse tails of real hair with brass and leather trappings for the horses, honed steel swords, velvet surcoats, and silken jupons (see what you learn in this racket), and she was able to get permission to photograph some of the figures for a philosophical journal she claimed to edit, though insurance for the day cost half the widow’s roll. The ad promised a private showing to genuine collectors only, and the newspapers had not even hit the streets before the calls started coming in.
You left Blanche to fend off the queries, waiting for the one phone call that mattered, and went out for a beer. Several actually, ending up at Loui’s talking with Joe the bartender about the meaning of life, having by now switched to the hard stuff. Joe’s view in sum was that life was full of sickness, loneliness, corruption, cruelty, paranoia, betrayal, murder, cynicism, impotence, and fear, and then there was the dark side. Sometimes you gotta just dummy up and let your pants fall where they may, he said, somewhat enigmatically. You realized that what was wrong with Joe was that he was a teetotaler.
Across the room at a dining table sat a fat guy in a white linen suit with a napkin tucked into his shirt collar, delicately putting away the back half of a cow. Rings on all his fingers, even his thumbs. He looked familiar. Joe didn’t know who he was but said he was a loner who came in from time to time to eat a few dinners. Probably you’d seen him in here before. Joe thought he might be a thin guy disguised as a fat guy.
Maybe. But he sure eats like a fat guy. Everything but the tail and horns.
He sometimes has those with cheese and coffee, Joe said.
On a hunch (a hunch is to a gumshoe what a skirt is to a letch: a tease; pursuit; trouble), when he lit up a cigar, paid, donned his panama, and left, you decided to step out into the drizzle and follow him. You knew zip plus toy soldiers about Mister Big, but you figured it was likely his nickname was for more than power alone. Even if the guy was only a mock-Mister B, it might be interesting to see where he goes, and you’d have something to report to the widow the next time she turned up. At first you were on the street, watching in the classic surveillance manner his slow waddling movements in the reflections of shop windows, but then at some point you were in the alley. How that happens is almost always a mystery. You have privileged access to it down your back stairs, maybe everyone does, but if you step out the front door the alley is hard to find. You can’t see it and then, what do you know, you’re in it. The fat man in the panama and linen suit zigzagged along, never looking back, but you had the feeling he knew you were back there, paddling through the garbage, trying to pretend you were just out for your daily constitutional. It was probably time to forget it and turn around, but you weren’t sure where you were and were as likely to find your way out going forwards as backwards. And, besides, the more you followed him, the more convinced you were that this was the guy you were looking for. He was moving faster and faster, he maybe ate like a fat man but he moved like a thin man, maybe Joe was right, it was hard to keep up. Finally, he was running flat out, pivoting sharply around corners like a mechanical carnival target on ball bearings, hopping nimbly over obstacles, darting down narrow passageways, somehow skirting puddles that you splashed through, a pale luminosity flitting through the moist shadowy alley like a will-o’-the-wisp, and soon you were only catching fleeting glimpses of him in the distance and then you lost him altogether.
You leaned against a boarded-up door to get your breath, torch a fag. Where were you? No idea. But you could hear rustlings, knew you’d been had, knew your situation was dangerous. You’d pocketed what remained of the widow’s roll for operating expenses (Blanche on the phone rolled her eyes and shook her yellow curls) and though you’d blown some of it in Loui’s there was plenty left and you worried now about getting mugged, or worse. These guys could smell money like sniffer dogs, even in the rain, and they usually preferred to ice their victims rather than merely threaten them, as it gave them more undisturbed pocket-poking time. The alley branched out in five or six directions from here, mostly you supposed into rat-infested dead ends where killers lurked. Your.22 was back in the office; you had nothing to defend yourself with except your fists. Glancing around for a weapon of some sort, your eye fell on a big ivory coat button and, keeping your back to the wet wall, you snatched it up in case you ran into Mad Meg. Beyond it was an old yellow tennis ball soaking in a puddle, and beyond that a red plastic swizzle stick. The swizzle stick was in front of what looked at first glance like a back door, but turned out to be a low underpass into another dark tangle of alleyways. A brass button off a military coat, a knotted shoelace, another bald tennis ball, a green-and-gold candy wrapper. These objects might have fallen out of Meg’s bagged household effects as she passed through here, or she might have dropped them on purpose. Either way, following their trail was your only shot. At the very least, if you came upon her, you could maybe wrestle the kitchen knife away from her, use it to fight your way out of here. It was a kind of scavenger hunt, chased by muffled footsteps, tumbling ashcan lids, the squawk of a startled cat being kicked.