“Let us worry about that.”
“You’ll worry about it. There’s a house in Bethesda, on Bradley Boulevard. Menlo’s got the borrow of it from the Outfit till the job’s done. We were supposed to call him there after we found out what your partner was up to. Go on out there, get your heads blown off. I only wish I could be there to watch.”
They had him write the address down, and then they tied him and left him in a closet. They never did remember to go back.
2
On that block was a row of two-family houses, built before the war. The one they wanted was on the corner. What the Outfit used it for normally they didn’t know, but right now Menlo was living in the downstairs flat, and the upstairs flat, according to Ambridge, was empty.
They’d stopped off on the way to get rid of the truck and pick up their own car, where Handy had left it earlier in the evening. The car was a Pontiac, two years old. It was hot, but not on the East coast, and the papers on it were a good imitation of the real thing.
Handy was driving, and a block from the address he took his foot off the accelerator. The car slowed. There were taillights ahead. A car was double-parked in front of the house they wanted, lights on and motor running.
“Go on past,” Parker said. “Then around the block.”
Parker looked the car over on the way by. It was a black Continental. The man at the wheel wore a chauffeur’s cap and was reading the Star. The car carried New York plates, and they started DPL. Diplomat. Beyond the car was the house, the ground floor all lit up, the upper story dark.
It was almost three o’clock in the morning. The Continental out front with diplomat plates at three in the morning wasn’t a good sign. Parker said, “Hurry around the block. Park on the cross street.”
“I’m ahead of you,” Handy answer. “What did that guy say Menlo was? A defector?”
“Yeah.”
They left the Pontiac half a block from Bradley, on the side street that flanked the house they wanted. This way they could get to the back door without tipping the chauffeur in the Continental.
There was a white picket fence separating the back yard from the sidewalk, with a white picket gate. The gate opened with no trouble and no squeaking, and they went across the slate walk to the stoop and up onto the back porch. The kitchen door stood wide open, and the storm door was closed but not locked. The kitchen was empty, but casting bright, wide swatches of light out through the window and doorway.
Handy’s touch with doors was the lightest. The storm door never made a sound. They stood on linoleum with a black-and-white diamond design, and listened. The refrigerator hummed, and on a different note the circular fluorescent light in the ceiling also hummed. The rest of the house was silent. Bright and silent.
An open door to the right led to a bedroom, but with no bed in it. The ceiling light was on — two seventy-five-watt-bulbs unshielded — and in the glare the bedroom was a bleak cubicle full of unmarked cardboard cartons, stacked along the walls. The Venetian blinds were down across both windows.
A hall led off the kitchen. Midway along it was a brace of doorways facing each other. The one on the left opened onto the bathroom, gleaming with white tile and white porcelain and white enamel, with a brightly burning white fluorescent tube over the mirror above the sink. The doorway on the right led to another bedroom, this one containing a bed. This too was garishly lit, and looked like a whore’s crib. A double bed dominated the room, covered by a cheap tan spread, and without pillows. A scarred dresser stood on the opposite wall, and the bed was flanked on one side by a black kitchen chair and on the other by a small wooden table containing nothing but a chipped ashtray.
At the end of the hall was a dining room, lit by a rococo ceiling fixture of rose-tinted glass. The cream-and-tan wallpaper was a faded pattern of ivy and Grecian columns. Centered beneath the light was a poker table, round and covered with green felt, with eight wells around the outer edge for the players’ money and drinks. Eight chairs crouched around the table, on a faded Oriental rug. There was no other furniture in the room.
The third bedroom, off the dining room, was apparently the one Menlo was using, for there was clothing draped on the chair, hairbrush and cufflinks and other things on the dresser, and an expensive-looking alarm clock on the night table.
A wide archway led from dining room to living room, which was furnished in an old-fashioned way, in dark colors and heavy overstuffed furniture.
Every light in the house was on, and the Continental still waited out front, though all the rooms were empty.
Handy caught Parker’s eye, and pointed at the floor. Parker nodded. Still moving cautiously and silently, they went back to the kitchen. The first door they tried opened onto the pantry, but the second showed cellar stairs angling away to the left. Light came up from below, and the sound of someone talking, softly and conversationally. And there was another sound, a steady scraping and chuffing, slow and rhythmic.
Handy already had the .380 out. Parker unlimbered the Terrier, and led the way down. The stairs angled sharply to the left, and then went straight down the rest of the way, toward the rear wall of the house, so that most of the basement was behind Parker as he came down. He came halfway, then crouching on the stairs, ducked his head under the banister and looked back at the rest of the cellar.
Three hundred-watt bulbs were spaced along under the I-beam that ran down the middle of the ceiling. All were unshielded, and all were lit, throwing the dirt-floored cellar in stark, almost shadowless, relief. An old coal furnace hulked on one side, with its squat oil converter crouched in front of it. Several barrels of trash were standing alongside two deep metal sinks.
Down at the other end, the fat man was digging his own grave, while three men surrounded him, watching. Two of the three stood silently, pistols in their hands. The third had brought a kitchen chair down with him — or had someone bring it down for him — and was sitting comfortably on it, his back to Parker. He seemed nattily dressed, and he was the one doing the talking, a steady soft flow of easy conversation, a monologue almost, in a language Parker didn’t recognize. It was guttural, but not in a Germanic way.
Handy had seen too. He grinned and motioned for them to go back upstairs, but Parker shook his head. Handy looked puzzled and leaned forward to whisper. “They’re getting rid of the competition. Why not let them?”
Parker whispered back, “If there’s more than a statue in Kapor’s house, I want to know what it is and where to find it. The fat man knows.”
Handy shrugged. “I’ll take the one on the left.”
They leaned out on different sides of the staircase, showing only their heads and gun hands. The shots roared out in that confined space like cauvette blowing up.
Before the two gunmen had hit the ground, the talkative one was out his chair, spinning around, a flat white automatic coming out from under his coat. Parker and Handy both fired again, and the automatic sailed into the air as he toppled backward into the grave Menlo had only half dug.
Menlo, again moving faster than any fat man should, threw himself off to the side and rolled over against the side wall. But when there weren’t any more shots, he got to his feet cautiously. His white shirt was a sweaty, dirty mess, his black trousers rumpled and baggy. He was barefoot, and his face and hands were also covered with dirt. He stood peering toward the stairs until Parker and Handy moved toward him, and then suddenly he smiled. “Ah!” he said. “How glad I am I did not pause to kill you at poor Clara’s.”
“Let’s go,” Parker said.
“So soon? But I have not yet expressed my appreciation. You have saved my life!”