“If you know that, you know what she was doing in New York. You knew who she was, all about her. You were watching her.”
“I watch what concerns my business.”
“Like Mark Leland, Zaremba?”
“Commissioner to you,” he said. “Don’t talk too much.”
He leaned, and slapped me across the mouth. I jumped up, my one fist balled, ready to hit him. An automatic response. But I didn’t hit him. I just stood there. He was smiling.
“You want to hit me, Fortune?” he said. “Go ahead. Look, I don’t carry a weapon,” and he opened his elegant suit coat to show me. “I’m alone, right? Sure, I am. Go ahead.”
I didn’t move. Suddenly, there seemed to be doors all around me, open windows, other rooms where his men could be hidden and watching. My neck crawled. He almost purred, he was so pleased with himself, with his power.
“I’m no match for you, even with that one arm. You’ve got a gun in your pocket, right? What’s stopping you? Go on, take a chance, maybe I’m really alone. No one around.”
I was sure he was alone, but could I take the chance? No. His men could be behind any door, at any window. It’s how men like him win-the fear of what they might do, can do.
I said, “You don’t want me dead. Not yet.”
“That would be stupid,” he nodded. “But better silent and dead, than silent and alive to talk to someone else.”
“A warning, Zaremba?” I said, my throat very dry.
“I don’t warn,” he said, disgusted with me. “If one means business, a warning simply alerts the enemy. If one doesn’t mean business, the warning rarely has the desired effect. Men who are dangerous enough to need a warning rather than just a suggestion are usually much too intent on what they want to heed a warning. No, action counts, warnings dissipate force. If I intend to strike, Fortune, I don’t warn. I’m not warning you, I’m simply offering to pay for information. What I’ll do if you refuse, I haven’t considered yet. It would depend on what you really know, and that’s hard to assess.”
There was just enough cold calculation in the speech to make me shiver inside. Menace without threat-the possible dangers left for me to consider. Up to me to decide where the balance lay. Was he stating his case openly, or bluffing me?
“You won’t hurt me, not when I might know something,” I said. “That’s logical.”
He sighed at me. “Logical? Rational? I make my living because people are rarely rational, Fortune, or logical. What people think is rational is only making what they need to do and be seem right and true. Ever see the man who is furious at the way the Commies send writers to jail when the writers do what the Commies don’t like, turn around and favor, censoring all writers who don’t agree with him, picket un-American movies? Are you any better? Am I? No. Maybe I know what’s logical, but maybe my private irrationality makes me act against logic.”
“You should have gone into politics.”
“It’s easier to buy politicians. Do I get the name?”
“Maybe, if I get something, and not money,” I said. “You knew Francesca Crawford was in New York. She was making plays for older men. Did she make a play for you, Zaremba? Did you tell her too much about something? Or did you like her, and after teasing you she turned you down?”
“Don’t play guessing games, Fortune.”
“Maybe you killed Mark Leland, or knew who did, and Francesca knew that?”
He moved in his chair, restless, as if making up his mind about me. Reluctant to decide. But decide what?
“I’ll level, Fortune, this once. I’ve got a feeling that someone is using me. A private matter, okay?”
“Used you to kill Francesca?” I said.
He watched my face. “You know, I wonder if you do know anything? If you have a client after all? You’re pretty free with the accusations, maybe shooting wild, hoping for a hit.”
“But you don’t know, and until you do you won’t do anything to me, will you? No, you couldn’t. You’re stumped.”
“Are you so sure?” he said.
“I’m sure,” I said. I could bluff too.
“Then let’s have a drink, and talk man-to-man, okay?”
He went into Tabor’s kitchen, out of my sight. When he came back he had a bottle of cognac and two snifters. He poured the brandy where I could see him, but he had the glasses hidden in his fleshy hands. I couldn’t see if anything had been in the glasses before he poured. Smiling, he handed me a glass. I looked at the dark brown liquid, the pungent smell of brandy hiding almost any other odor.
“Drink up, Fortune,” Zaremba said, still smiling.
He knew what he was doing. Anything could be in my glass. If I refused to drink, his men could be in the room in seconds-if there were any of his men hidden and watching. I had to hope that I was right, that he was bluffing, putting a subtle pressure on me. I drank.
“You’re a brave man,” he said.
There was a taste to the brandy.
“Just relax,” he said, purred. “You’ll be fine soon. I really have to be sure, you see?”
I sat, and his face slowly began to dissolve like molten liquid. He became hazy. I tried to stand. I fell over. I was on the floor. I knew he was bluffing. Just a… drug.
I knew he was… bluffing.
… I knew…
11
I opened my eyes. There was muted light. Not in the room where I lay, in some other room. I had a headache.
A headache!
I was alive. It had been only a drug. Alive!
Drugged, why? To take me somewhere, of course. So where was I? I looked at my watch. Eleven o’clock? The darkness said it was night, so unless I’d been out over twenty-four hours, less than an hour had passed. Then I couldn’t have been moved far. I sat up.
I hadn’t been moved at all. The same TV set seemed to watch me like a cyclops’ eye. The same room, Abram Zaremba smiling at me from the same chair but with the lights out. The only light was from the kitchen. I stood up, swaying on rubber legs.
“Okay,” I said to Zaremba, “you slipped me a knockout. Why? To prove you could kill me if you wanted to?”
I think I hated Abram Zaremba at that moment as much as I had ever hated any man. The way he sat watching me shake with the effects of his power. He enjoyed it-making a man less than a man. There is nothing slimier on earth than one man making another less than a man out of very human fear. Fear is in all of us, can be used against all of us, and no one should enjoy that fear in another.
“Goddamn you, Zaremba,” I said. “You hear me?”
He just smiled-and I saw the blood.
I swayed against a table. His white shirt was dark with blood in the dim light. He didn’t hear me, no. He didn’t hear anything. Zaremba was dead. In that chair, bloody and dead with a rigid death smile.
I held onto the table. I breathed to clear the drug from my head, and stepped closer. I touched him. He was still limp. Less than half an hour. The blood had dripped from his chest onto the floor under the chair, and had dripped nowhere else. Someone he had known then? Killed in that chair facing his killer, unaware of the danger?
With me lying drugged on the floor not ten feet way? The killer unconcerned about me? Or maybe very concerned, hoping I’d be accused of Zaremba’s murder?
I began to search around the room, the floor, the furniture. My legs were steady now, the adrenalin pumping inside me. I found nothing that meant anything to me. No trace of blood, not a book out of place. There was nothing to do now but call the police. My hand was on the receiver when I heard the footsteps outside, and a key turned in the door. I had my gun out when George Tabor walked in. He stopped, blinked.
“Fortune? You’re still-”
“You expected me to be somewhere else by now?” I said.
Tabor stood in his coat. “Zaremba said he’d take you with him somewhere, talk to you.”
“Did you ask how he planned to ‘talk’ to me?”
“No,” he said.
He didn’t seem to care about my pistol. Still in his coat, he walked to the television set, turned it on, like a lemming obsessed only by the sea somewhere ahead. As if his whole consciousness was bound by the TV set and the simple world on the small, gray screen. No disappointments, no traumas, nothing to have to depend on for joy or happiness but the TV-a friend and lover that wouldn’t let him down.