I thanked Gifford and broke up the party.
I turned south on Sixth, walking aimlessly back to the Enfield. Overhead a low rumble shook the night and I could smell the rain in the air. It started before I reached the end of the block and it felt good. Anything was better than that down-the-drain feeling of knowing your grand hopes had been washed right out of existence.
Damn that Rhino anyway, why the hell couldn't he have stayed alive! I would have choked him as he lay in that lung of his and laughed in his face when he died. I would have given anything to have been there the night the power blew out. Man, I could have watched him die by inches in his cell like I did in mine. I could have watched his face in that mirror over his head beg for me to do something and, while he kicked off inch by inch, I could have toasted his passing with a cold brew.
I stood there on the corner waiting for the light to change, and then just as suddenly as it had turned sour it turned sweet again. In a way it was reaching for straws, but it made me feel good and lightheaded like before when there was a purpose left in life yet, and this started with an assumption too.
Assuming that Terry's father was Rhino Massley, then somehow he did have a reason for playing dead.
And with that the big second assumption was laid right out in front of me. If Rhino was alive, then he had not only been assumed dead, but assumed sick too. No polio victim in a lung could hide out long anywhere, far less travel around!
I grinned at the night and held my face up to the rain. I was going against all logic and flying in the face of the classic objectiveness we had been taught to observe. It was a crazy Don Quixote move, only on the other end there might possibly be a real giant.
I opened the door of my flat and switched on the light. The two boys sitting together on the couch and pointing the cold round noses of the automatics at me stood up. They were different ones, these. Neither smiled.
The taller one said "Turn around and let's go."
"Where?"
"You talk too much," he told me. His hand gave an easy push, a hint, but it was enough. I turned around and headed outside again. The car was there at the curb, the back door open. I got in with one on either side.
In a way it was funny. Ten years of being alone, hating every minute of it. Now when I wanted it, what did I get . . . togetherness. I started to laugh and the hood on my right looked at me like I had spilled a few marbles.
On the East Side there's a steak house known as Ruby's and from the back room, across a platterful of T-bone, Mannie Waller did his business. His side was a private little niche with a phone, a walnut humidor of cigars and a shelf of light wine that was all he would drink. He was a big heavy pig of a guy who ate himself into obesity but in doing it kept out of the line of fire and inherited a fat hunk of the underworld business when the others knocked themselves off.
Nobody knew just where Mannie stood, but nobody was trying to push him out, either. Talk had it that Mannie was a Syndicate man, a paymaster for the uptown boys. He was part of a new quiet mob that had moved in and taken over after the Appalachian fiasco.
And now Mannie was looking up at me, wiping the grease from his chin. He said, "Sit down."
I took too long. The hood beside me gave me a cut in the gut with the edge of his hand and I folded into the chair.
Mannie said, "No hands, Joe. You know what he did to Jolly and Hal."
"That why you dragged me down here?"
He hunched his fat shoulders and grinned again. "Not entirely, but still I got to keep telling you little guys. One gets tough, the others try it, and then I got trouble. We like to keep things quiet. The boys were only doing a job." He belched and settled back in his chair. "They look for a girl. She ran in your place. You know something about this?"
"You know what I know. Them idiots bust in and looked around. They know what they saw."
"Sure. Nothing. They look all through that tenement and find the same thing. Only trouble is she don't get out on the roof or through the cellar and she don't have time to get any place else but to your joint."
"So?"
"So she knows where she's going."
"You're nuts."
Joe's gun muzzle slashed the top of my head open. It turned my skull into a white-hot sheet of flame that took too long to subside. Mannie was nodding approvingly, waiting.
Mannie said, "Maybe I'm wrong. Me, I got to be sure. You know where this dame is, you tell me. I got a C waiting. You want to hold out . . . so it's your funeral. Maybe later we find out we're wrong and you got to take a beating for no reason. I send you a C anyway. I'm a good guy. Meantime, you gotta hurt a little. You know how it is."
"Yeah," I said, "I know how it is, but since when are you playing it stupid?"
His brows twitched and rose in a slow gesture of surprise. "You think I am that, eh?"
"You're sure showing all the signs. What would anybody want with me?"
Mannie enjoyed his moment. He scraped his chair back from the table, folded his hands over his stomach, and smiled. "Now, that is something to think about, hey? So I'll tell you." He licked his lips with contentment and rumbled a laugh like Sidney Greenstreet used to in the Humphrey Bogart movies.
"The girl she runs in and don't come out. She don't have time to go anywhere but your place. Now, if you're a nothing, then she comes out. But if you're a something, then maybe not. So we ask around about you and find out some funny things. Used to be a big shot, hey? Reporter, and a hot one. You laid out Anthony Smith's bunch after the war and you was the guy who went to town on the Petersen snatch. You sure was a big one until you held out the wrong hand."
"So what?"
"So you're big two ways. This girl, when she runs she comes straight to the only big brain around who at the same time is muscle enough to take care of things the hard way. In all the block there's nobody but bums and punks and hookers. You're the only big one . . ." he pointed a finger at me to make his point ". . . and to you she goes."
"Look . . ."
"No," Mannie said. "You talk to me and I listen, but I won't look. Where is the girl?"
I spit on the floor in front of his feet. "Drop dead," I told him.
Mannie smiled indulgently again, his thick lips wetly red like fresh opened meat. "Take him upstairs, Joe," he said.
The rod went in my ribs again, a cold round rudder that showed me the way to the back, the iron staircase going to the third floor, the steel fire door, and the big room inside. It steered me toward the wall where the packing cases were and sensed when I was going to make my move because it beat me to the trick with a quick downward slash and I was all sobbing pain again, trying to yell out against the fire in my head and the insistent drumming of heavy feet on my ribs.
There were times when they would stop and ask about the girl and twice I almost told them but they didn't let me get my breath and after that I couldn't tell them. Then the feet and the hands and even the things they used stopped hurting and started to be nothing more than a nuisance and faraway sounds, and I drifted off into the deep black that's at the end of time.
They had used wire on my wrists and ankles and just left me there on the floor. I stared at the bare wood, tasted the dirt that had been ground into my mouth, and saw the dark red of the splotches my blood had made.
Any movement was pure torture and, when I managed to turn over, my breathing became a series of convulsive sobs that tried to tear my chest out. Somehow I got on my knees, my hands behind my back, fighting the terrible cramps that racked at pounded and beaten muscle tissue.
To one side, the heavily-barred window was showing a brighter gray now. Somewhere beyond the apartments and office buildings the sun was rising and soon the city would too.