Vince and Terry had to go underground after they'd iced the fink. They had been hired in from Detroit to help Gongo and the outfit. Hired to put the silence on a creep named Robbison; they'd done it; smooth, nice, like always.
Two days after they'd left the 707 at JFK, they'd bushwhacked Robbison in a midtown parking lot and blown him all over a brick wall with .357 Magnum efficiency.
The job was done, but the payment was forthcoming. It wasn't a matter of doublecross—Gongo knew better than that and he always paid off promptly for a job properly done—but Vince and Terry had gotten word the D.A. was really pissed-off about this one: Robbison had been ready to spill. So ... underground.
Vince and Terry were professionals, they could see the big picture: hot cop breath down Gongo's neck from an anxious D.A. and the cooling had come just in time. So much in time, perhaps, that the D.A. saw a beautiful indictment going up in smoke. So the heat was on.
Gongo couldn't take a chance on sending someone over with the payoff, and they couldn't telephone him because the line was probably spooked. So it was a matter of staying here in this greasy Broadway furnished room till the word came through that the heat was off.
It wouldn't be much longer, they knew, but still, being cooped up with just each other — meals being sent in with the papers — was making Vince and Terry jumpy.
“How far'd you get with that MacElhone girl?” Vince said, from the broken-down armchair.
“Far? She wouldn't know from far. A real dummy, that one,” Terry answered from the bed. He grinned and waved all thoughts of the girl from his head.
“Far, schmar, I couldn't wish any harder that she was here, locked up with us for a week or so. It'd kill the time a little better than two-handed poker, which is abysmal, and reading these miserable paperbacked novels.” He kicked at a stack of badly-thumbed books on the floor.
They looked alike, in the smooth, efficient way all syndicate assassins looked smooth and efficient.
Vince was tall and slim; dark, wavy hair and an unlined, almost adolescent face. He looked more like a college senior than a hired killer. He wore a charcoal-gray, single-breasted Brooks Brothers suit, with a white button-down shirt, conservative gray rep tie and black shoes.
Terry was darker-complexioned, but his hair was almost blond. He wore turtle-shell glasses, and had a tiny white scar at the corner of his mouth. He had gotten it in Nam, shortly before he'd cut away seven men in a bunker with a flame thrower. He had won a medal for that. He wore a charcoal-gray, single-breasted Brooks Brothers suit, with a white button-down shirt, conservative blue challis tie, and black shoes.
Neither one looked like what he was. A paid killer. But they earned their money, and had been doing so, in Vince's case for eight years, and in Terry's for five. They were the top rough boys in the syndicate's stable, and they knew it.
There wasn't anyone in the organization who would dispute it. For this reason, they wore their handsome composures as they wore their suits: almost as if they had been born with them; pressed, sharp, and casual.
Vince sighed deeply, smacked his lips loudly. “Want to take a chance on seeing a movie?” He looked over at Terry on the bed.
Terry bit the inside of his cheek, swung his legs off the bed and sat up. “Don't know,” he said slowly, thoughtfully. “Might not be a bad idea. Take the edge off us, at any rate. Anything good in the neighborhood?”
“We can always hop the subway to Times Square if there isn't,” Vince reminded, turning to the movie pages of the Daily News. He caught Terry's shake of the head with the corner of his eye.
“Uh-uh,” said Terry, reaching over to the bureau for his cigarettes. “No sense fouling it up now. We can wait. If there's anything good up the block, we'll take it in. If not—” he waved his hand in resignation, “—then it's another night of playing ostrich.”
Vince agreed in silence. “Here's a Wayne flick at Loew's 83rd. That's just up in the next block. Supposed to be a pretty fair piece of work, cops and robbers thing, not a Western.”
Terry shook his head, blowing a thin plume of smoke at the floor between his feet. “Saw it in Detroit. Lousy picture.”
Vince nodded understanding, turned his attention back to the newspaper. A minute later he said, “Place called the Thalia on 95th off Broadway. They've got Fernandel in "The Sheep Has Five Legs" and something else with Trintignant. I suppose this is one of those little art theaters where they serve black coffee in the lobby.
“I'd like to take those in. I'm getting sick of shoot-'em-ups.”
Terry looked up with frank amusement on his face. “Violence doesn't agree with you, right?”
Vince smiled, tossing a mock blow at his companion. “Don't push me, friend. You want to go or not? If you're too lowbrow, say so now and I'll go edjakate myself alone.”
Terry chuckled deep in his throat, got off the bed.
They were very literate, these ex-college boys turned professional. Their tastes were very refined.
“Sounds okay to me,” said Terry. He walked over to the mirror, began tightening his tie. “What if we get spotted?”
He asked the question absently, bending over to get a clear spot in the mirror. The quicksilver had worn off its back, and leprous spots covered most of the glass.
“What if we get spotted?” he heard Vince repeat. He saw Vince's reflection in the mirror as it dipped a hand to its belt. The reflection came up with a .32 with smoked sights. “Then we get unspotted. Like Gongo said the other night, we're real rough boys.” He smiled boyishly.
“That clod,” Terry replied, grinning back, pulling the knot high between the points of his collar.
“He's not far wrong though. We are rough,” Vince persisted, carrying the gag a bit.
“Well, bang bang!” joked Terry, making a gun with his left hand, straightening the tie with his right. “Yeah. Rough. Now will you please get your goddamn coat on so we can go see some Fernandel?”
On a slab downtown, a guy named Robbison lay caked with his own blood — let out through eight direct hits in his chest and face.
* * * *
They walked slowly down Broadway, back toward 82nd Street. Keeping to the shadows, smoking carelessly, their nubby tweed topcoats collared-up, their heads bare, conversing casually. Typical. Two typical men walking on Broadway.
“Good show,” said Terry, lighting a cigarette.
“Mmm,” Vince agreed. Then he changed the subject quickly: “Lord, but I'm hungry. Want to stop in at Schrafft's?”
Terry shot him a quick glance, the smoke from his cigarette blowing back in a fine, vaporous trail. “You must be losing your mind. That's the second time tonight you've suggested something as ridiculous as that. Why don't we just walk into the 20th precinct station and turn ourselves—”
“Okay, okay!” Vince cut him off with a smile. “Sorry, my stomach blocks off my brain sometimes.
“But listen, it's too late for anyone at that flea circus to go out for us. They all go off at ten. We'll have to wait till tomorrow morning, and frankly, friend, you know what a splitting headache I get when I'm hungry. In fact,” he said, licking his lips in seriousness, “I'm starting to throb a little right now.”
They turned into a crosstown street—88th, it was—toward Amsterdam. As if the talk about being spotted had driven them off the main artery.
The streets were almost pitch-black, with the feeble yellow of a distant lamppost casting a watery pool of light on the front of a tenement halfway up the block.
The wind had risen off the Hudson, was whispering up the hill into the crosstown streets. Vince and Terry hunched lower in their topcoats. A young boy was sitting on the tenement's steps, hunched forward, toying with an identification bracelet on his right wrist, his hands down between his legs.
The boy looked in their direction, and his head came up abruptly. He stared at the two men as they approached. Terry nudged Vince with an elbow. “There's our bus boy,” he said.