One said: “Got it?”
Gay nodded.
“Get in.”
The driver leaned back and opened the door of the tonneau, Gay climbed in and sat between the two men. He could not see their faces in the darkness. One of them searched him swiftly.
The man on his left said: “Go on quick, Tony.” The car lurched forward. The other man was fumbling with the case; he opened it, a small flashlight flared. He growled:
“Say! — What the hell is this? It’s empty!”
Gay laughed. “Do you think anybody’d be sap enough to turn over the money before they saw that Miss Arno was all right?”
The man on his left said wearily: “Stop the car.”
The brakes screamed shrilly. The man jammed the muzzle of a big automatic against Gay’s side, hard. “We ain’t playing, Mister,” he said. “Where’s the money?”
“It’s where I can call for it as soon as I know she’s all right — as soon as you turn her over to me...”
The man snorted noisily. “An’ how are we supposed to get it?”
Gay said: “That’s simple. As soon as I see Miss Arno I’ll call and have the money sent any place you say. You can send a man to pick it up — or a hundred men if you want to. As soon as he gets it he can call and say it’s okay — you’ll have your dough and I’ll have Miss Arno.”
The driver spoke for the first time in a guttural stage-whisper: “That sounds all right...”
“Shut up!” The man with the automatic was silent a moment, then he put the gun between his knees and took out a heavy silk handkerchief and bound it tightly around Gay’s eyes.
He said, “Go on,” and then he leaned close to Gay and said: “One wrong move an’ you an’ the girl both get it — don’t forget it.”
Gay nodded. The car was moving forward swiftly. They turned a half-dozen corners, drove for almost ten minutes. They stopped twice to make sure they weren’t being followed; the first time, the driver jabbered about a bakery truck that he was sure he’d seen when they turned off Thirty-fourth Street but the truck passed and didn’t show up again.
They finally stopped, Gay was pulled out of the car and led through the rain for a hundred feet or so. Then they were out of the rain and someone pounded on a door and there was a great deal of whispering; they went down two short flights of stairs.
Pamela’s voice said, “Johnnie!” breathlessly.
Gay jerked his arm away from the man on his right and tore the handkerchief from his eyes.
She was sitting on a small rickety folding chair with her hands tied together behind the back of it, her ankles bound to the lower crosspiece. Her honey-colored hair hung in awry curlycues about her shoulders and her large delicately shadowed eyes were wide with excitement and a kind of exultation. Gay hadn’t seen her for nearly a year; he was sure she’d never been so beautiful.
He said: “Darling... Are you all right?”
She nodded. “I’m all right now... I’ve been practically scared to death...” Her lips curved to a smile. “But now — I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy...”
Gay looked about. They were in a fairly large basement. There was a worn pool table and there were four or five more folding chairs; against one wall, a neatly made-up cot with a drop light over it and a small table at its head loaded with magazines, bottles, and a telephone. There was one small dingy window high above the cot.
There were four men. All of them wore masks. The one who had done the talking in the car was a heavily built blond man in a neat blue serge suit. He said: “Get on the phone.”
Gay went over and sat down on the cot; he remembered Drovna’s number without looking at the envelope, picked up the phone and dialed it. The big blond man was leaning over his shoulder watching; the dial buzzed back from the fourth number and he reached over suddenly and knocked the phone out of Gay’s hands.
“That’s Drovna’s number,” he shouted. “What are you trying to do?”
Gay said gently: “My partner’s there, waiting for my call — with the money.”
“What about Drovna?”
“Drovna was dead when we got there.”
The blond man pursed his thick lips, looked at the others. “Okay,” he said. “Go on an’ call, but we’re not going to wait here for the call to be traced and the Law to move in on us. Tell your man to be at the top of Mitchell Place where it runs up from First Avenue in fifteen minutes. We’ve got two cars; two of us’ll go in one and two of us’ll take you and her nibs” — he jerked his head towards Pamela — “in the other. When your man pays off they can signal us from the first car and we’ll let you out. If he ain’t there, or if he don’t pay off, you’re both going to take a nice long ride...”
Gay felt like all of his insides had turned to water. He’d told Nagel not to pay any attention to what he said on the phone, to leave it and get to another phone and trace the call. Now it was no good tracing the call; there’d be no one there.
He picked up the phone. He’d have to make Nagel listen some way. He dialed the number again and waited. He could hear the phone ringing evenly but there was no answer.
He smiled as reassuringly as he could at Pamela, waited.
The phone buzzed on and on. He hung up and dialed again. It was the same as before; there was no one there.
With the receiver clamped tightly against his ear, he spoke suddenly into the transmitter as if there’d finally been an answer:
“Where you been? — the phone’s been ringing for two minutes! Listen — be at the end of Mitchell Place above First Avenue in fifteen minutes. Bring the money... Yeah, she’s all right...”
The phone buzzed rhythmically. He had to stall for time — to think.
“Yeah — we’ll be in another car,” he went on. “When you give ’em the money they’ll signal our car and we’ll be turned loose... Okay...”
He hung up, crossed and knelt beside Pamela.
She said: “It is all right?”
He nodded, smiled. “I hope so,” he whispered.
“Let’s get going.” The blond man, who had followed him across to Pamela, squatted and fumbled with the thin rope that bound her hands.
Gay untied her ankles. She stood up, stretched; then she turned and very simply, very quietly, went into his arms. They held each other tightly, did not speak.
The blond man said: “Never mind the love scenes — let’s go.”
A fifth man, without a mask, came swiftly down the stairs and advanced two or three paces into the light. He was holding his hands carefully above his head. He said:
“This guy” — he nodded at Gay — “didn’t call anybody. I was on the extension upstairs and there wasn’t any answer.” His face twisted to a hard smile.
No one moved for a moment; then the blond man took the big automatic out of a shoulder holster. “What the hell you holding your hands up for?”
The smiling man said: “Because there’s a copper behind me with a sawed-off shotgun pointed at the middle of my back.”
There was a crash and the tinkle of falling glass; Nagel’s voice piped up suddenly from the opposite side of the basement: “Hold it, everybody...”
There was a blinding flash. Gay saw Nagel’s head and shoulders framed in the squat window; he was holding a camera and a burnt-out flashlight bulb, grinning happily. There was a uniformed man beside him with a leveled automatic rifle.
Then everything happened at once. The blond man swung his gun towards the window and Gay aimed a blow at his jaw. The man slumped, his pistol dropping; the lights went out and the world was full of flailing arms and legs and blue flares and roar — and darkness.
He yelled, “Pamela!” and then something banged against his head and for a moment his mind seemed blank. He heard her calling him and fought his way free, staggered towards the sound of her voice. His outstretched hands touched her hair suddenly and he put his arm around her, they went together swiftly along the wall.