“You’re gettin’ in the way.” His voice was angry now. “Why the hell don’t you leave town, take a vacation.”
Was he needling me about Marty?
“I’ve got a job, I need money to eat, too.”
“Okay, how much? How much to drop it, fade out?”
“I thought you figured I was taking money out of your pocket already.”
One of the others said, “He’s a hardhead, Charlie. Let’s get rid of him.”
“Yeh,” one said.
“Permanent,” a third added from the shadows.
It scared me. They were imitation tough guys, playing at an illusion, but they believed their own script, and if they followed it through all the way I’d be as dead as if they were a real gang of musclemen. They’d be caught, they weren’t really strong, but that wouldn’t help me. That they might kill me, I didn’t doubt a second. They believed themselves. They had to. Alone in a big country that ignored their existence, alienated and forgotten, they had no chance and less hope. These boys had been given no hope, so they invented it-the hope of schemes, and plans, and big dreams of power and triumph.
I said, “Charlie, tell me what you know. I’ll help you. Whatever you’re doing, you’ll get hurt unless-”
He broke in, cold. “I won’t get hurt, mister. I’m on my way. Maybe you’ll get hurt. Maybe the boys are-”
Only when I heard the car door slam below the dim room did I realize that the rain had stopped. The street boys heard the car door too. One of them went out of the room. He came back almost at once.
“Some guy parked in the alley. He’s got a gun out!”
Charlie Burgos lifted the corner of the blanket covering a window, peered down. “It’s that Kraut hanging around Danielle’s uncle. What the hell does he want?”
They all crowded around Charlie Burgos at the window, whispering urgently. Like a pack of curious puppies. They were, after all, kids, most of them younger than Charlie Burgos. That had saved me in the alley when they attacked me, and it gave me my chance now. I walked to the door of the room, quick but softly, watching them. They didn’t see me. I made the door and out.
I was almost down to the second floor when I heard them howl up in the room. Then I ran.
16
I came out of the building-an abandoned, crumbling, condemned brownstone, I saw now. I did not know where I was. The only unboarded door opened at the side of the brownstone into a narrow alley slick and cool with the rain. A narrow front yard was tall with brown weeds, wet in the night after the rain.
They would expect me to run to the street-the safety of a city man. So I ran left up the narrow alley and past a parked black car. At the rear corner of the condemned building I saw a shape, a face white in the night, a hand with a pistol.
“You, Fortune!”
I ran on into an open space behind the abandoned brownstone where two buildings had already been demolished leaving an emptiness in the city like a scar. I scrambled over the wet mounds of debris in the open space. The voice behind the pistol in the alley had been the ex-Legionnaire “associate” of Claude Marais-Gerd Exner.
I reached the far street. It was dark and deserted, the people not yet out again after the summer storm. I trotted left toward the wider avenue, no sound of running behind me. I didn’t think they would come after me in the open when I was ready for them, but I watched the corner ahead in case they tried to head me off. There was no one at the corner. They probably didn’t even know which way I had run. I looked back down the dark street toward the open space and the alley to be sure, and saw the black car turn out of the alley toward me.
I jumped into the cover of a doorway as the black car came to the corner, but the ex-Legionnaire, Gerd Exner, saw me. The car skidded to a stop, began to back up. Exner had a gun, I didn’t, and I couldn’t know what he wanted with me, or which side he was on. I ran up the wide avenue. The black car ground gears to come after me, the traffic on the avenue light in the dark after the storm.
I reached the next corner. The street sign high on its lamppost read: 10th Avenue-19th Street. I knew where I was. I ran left again down Nineteenth Street toward the condemned building where Charlie Burgos and his boys had taken me. Before the black car and Gerd Exner could follow, I jumped down into a sunken areaway in front of an Italian market. With any luck, Exner would think I was going back to the condemned building, and drive past me.
He did. The black car went on down the street toward the condemned building. It was all the break I needed. I knew where I was now, I’d gained a few moments, and Exner had lost sight of me.
I slipped along the dark streets back to my office.
This time no one was waiting for me in my office. I locked my door, just in case. Gerd Exner would know by now where my office was. All right, what did the ex-Legionnaire want? With me, or with Charlie Burgos, or both? What did Charlie Burgos want? With Charlie Burgos it was probably money. It was probably money with Gerd Exner too. Or was one of them a man who had killed, and who wanted me silent?
I heard the man coming up the stairs outside my office. He wasn’t trying to be quiet. I got out my old cannon anyway, put it on my desk in plain sight. The man in the corridor could be going to some other office on my floor. A shuffling walk, like the furtive customers of the old men across the corridor with their funny pictures. But the old men wouldn’t be open this late, so I watched my door.
The knob turned. I waited. A voice called out: “Mr. Fortune?”
Jimmy Sung’s voice-sober, as far as I could tell. I got up and unlocked the door. Jimmy Sung came in. I checked the corridor. Jimmy seemed to be alone. I sat down at my desk. Jimmy Sung stood and looked at my big gun. He wasn’t drunk the way he had been this morning, but he wasn’t sober, either. A liquor shine to his eyes, a faint swagger to his stance, but not swaying or shaking. The alcoholic plateau, where, with a drink every so often, the alkie can function for hours as if perfectly sober. Maybe better.
“I went to the shop,” Jimmy said, not slurring. “There was a package, you know? Like I said, maybe Mr. Marais was holding something for that Claude, and I remembered the package. In the safe. I remembered seeing it out the night Mr. Marais got killed. On a shelf in the back room.”
“As if he was planning to give it to someone that night?”
“I don’t know, but it ain’t around the shop now.”
“It wasn’t on the list of what the robber took.”
“It wasn’t on no inventory, see? Just holding it.”
“No idea what might have been in it, Jimmy?”
“Mr. Marais never said. I ain’t even sure it was Claude’s.”
“Can you describe it?”
“Brown paper, waxed black string, about the shape of a shoe box. Mr. Marais’s name was on the outside in black ink.”
“It was addressed? You mean someone had mailed it to Mr. Marais? From where?”
“No, not mailed. No stamps. Hand-delivered, I guess. Kind of a label on it from some place in Africa, I think.”
I reached for my telephone, dialed the number of the Hotel Stratford, asked for room 427. Li Marais’s soft voice answered.
“Li? It’s Dan.”
A silence. Then her voice again, low, “Dan, no. I’ll-”
“I have to talk to you now, Li.”
“No, Dan, I cannot. Later, I will call you.”
“Sorry, it’s business, you understand. I’ll come there.”
“Claude is here!”
“Yeh,” I said. “Don’t run away on me, Li.”
I hung up. “Let’s go, Jimmy.”
I didn’t wait for the elevator. My clerk-friend said something I didn’t hear as I went past, and Jimmy Sung was puffing when we reached the fourth floor and room 427. Claude Marais opened the suite door.
“Mr. Fortune?”
I went in past him, with Jimmy silent behind me. Claude Marais looked at Jimmy, then at me. Those slow, deliberate movements of his, as if even to bother to breathe was a wearying effort. For a moment, I wondered if he knew-about me, and Li, and the afternoon. There was something about his eyes. He said nothing, and I had more important matters to worry about.