Strongarm (Prologue Crime)

by Dan J. Marlowe

  It should have been all over.

  It wasn’t.

  Three times Gussie bucked her way out of his arms, kicking like no bronco you ever saw, more than head high, raking everything in front of her with her high heels. There was surprisingly little noise, just scuffling feet and panting breath. Twice Gussie hung her heels in the mustache who was trying to help the man holding her. Her skirt was higher than her head half the time but they had no leisure to enjoy it. It wasn’t until they wrestled her off her feet to the floor and got her shoes off that they could save themselves from the punishment they were taking. And it wasn’t until the man with the blanket clawed a blackjack from his hip pocket and swung it hurriedly that the blanket stopped struggling and went limp.

  Anton was watching sourly, having regained his feet. “This is a decadent representative of the capitalistic way of life?” he croaked huskily.

  “Outside,” the mustache ordered him peremptorily. “Take the bag.”

  Anton limped out with the bag. The fourth man carried Gussie out, still wrapped in the blanket. I wondered how they could get away with it in broad daylight. In what seemed like seconds, Anton came back for Lynn. They must have been parked right outside the front door. All I could think of was that I didn’t have a car to follow them.

  When Anton went out, the mustache took a final look around as if to make sure he wasn’t forgetting anything. Then he went out himself, closing the door quietly. Despite a ripped shirt and a bloody shin showing through a torn trouser leg, he didn’t look unhappy.

  It was awfully quiet in the apartment when they were gone. I knew I’d done the right thing by staying under cover, but it didn’t help the way I felt. If I’d gone charging out there, I’d have been a big hero, for about fifteen seconds. I tried to slow down the hurry-hurry-hurry state of mind engendered by free-flowing adrenalin; I had no need to hurry. I didn’t need to follow them. I knew where they were going: back to the San Marco. Obviously, the mustache hadn’t known there was supposed to be anything in the bag but money. Pavel, the boy coming from Washington, was the one who would know.

  Lynn and Gussie were in no immediate danger until Pavel arrived at the San Marco. They’d be in plenty of danger then. I had to be there, preferably with reinforcements. If not — I walked out into the living room and ripped the oilskinned packet from the back of the picture on the rear wall — if not, I’d try to have something to trade.

  Back in the bedroom I got into my shirt. Despite telling myself there was no need to hurry, I was hurrying. Before buttoning the shirt, I slipped the oilskinned packet inside it and went and looked at myself in the bureau mirror. It didn’t make too much of a bulge, but it showed. What showed also were the scars of the previous night’s street fight with the mustache. Angry-looking cuts and scrapes adorned my unclassical features, and my nose had a definite cock to the left. I shifted the packet from my stomach to a spot over one hip. It still showed. I went to the closet and took down a cream-colored sport jacket. Heat or no heat, I’d have to wear it.

  I left the apartment after clamping down my lower plate and jamming my feet into my shoes. I slowed down when I saw people in the lobby bzz-bzzing at each other. Through the window I could see a white ambulance at the curb, a flashing red light rotating slowly in its roof. As I looked, Gregor, the telephone caller, lumbered up from across the street and jumped into the back. The ambulance rolled away.

  “Oh, Mr. Whelan,” a voice called, startling me. It was the apartment switchboard operator in her cubbyhole. “If there’s anything we can do just — ”

  “Be right back,” I cut her off. “Forgot something.” I went back down the corridor, past the apartment door, down a half flight of steps, and out the rear entrance. Sympathy I couldn’t use. Recognition by the people in the lobby I couldn’t risk. The ambulance was a nice touch: I had to admire the logistics of the mustache. When he got his chance, he was ready. It should be a lesson to me for when I got mine.

  Half-trotting down the rear walk at the beck of the apartment to the street beyond, it came to me that for the first day in a long time I hadn’t even thought of Charley Risko.

  chapter XI

  I had three ways I could go.

  I could go back to Bonigli’s and see if the manner in which we’d parted had removed the obligation he and his people felt for my staying with Tony Falcaro during the breakout.

  I could go to Frutig at the Congress Hotel and offer him a horse trade: the papers for the girls. But could he round up the firepower in time to deliver them?

  Or I could go to the police and lead them to the San Marco. But would they listen to me?

  On the law of probabilities, Bonigli had to be first.

  And I needed a car.

  I had a hip pocketful of money but no time. I couldn’t buy a car through regular channels, anyway; all my papers were in Pete Karma’s name. I’d chosen the name originally because of the half-forgotten tag end of memory of a college philosophy course. I’d never passed the course, and the name hadn’t brought me any luck recently, either.

  I needed a shortcut to an automobile.

  I came out on the street behind the apartment and walked down it, an eye on the parked cars. The way the soles of my feet felt I knew I didn’t want to walk far. The first car that looked as though it had engine enough to get me to Lake City in a hurry had no one in it. It also had no key. The next likely looking one had a woman sitting in it. I passed on. Women go by the book. Shortcuts they’ll listen to only when it’s their own idea. That much I’ve learned in thirty-five years.

  Ahead of me a car swung into an empty space half a dozen cars away. A bareheaded young fellow carrying an attaché case got out. He was neatly dressed in a business suit, and he was smoking a cigar. I quickened my pace. I stepped up to him where he’d set his case down on a fender and was scowling at a folder he’d taken out of it. I tapped him on the arm. “I need your car,” I said to him when he turned his head to look at me.

  He turned all the way around to see better. I could see him taking in the residue of last night’s imbroglio. He smiled tentatively as if he had decided to humor me. “I just happen to need it myself,” he said. “You know how it is.”

  I reached under the tail of my jacket and took out one of the packages of hundreds from my hip pocket. “I need it badly,” I said, handing him the package.

  His half-smile froze. He took his other hand off the folder to thumb the package backward and forward. “Is this stuff for real?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Take it to your bank and check it.”

  He looked up from the money in his hand into my face. “And?”

  “I take the car. If you don’t like what they tell you at the bank, you report it stolen.”

  He tapped the bills thoughtfully in his palm. “Is this some new kind of con game?”

  “What have you got to lose?”

  “I’m asking myself. I’m also asking myself, why me?”

  I pointed at his cigar. “For my money the cigar smokers are the chance takers of the world.”

  He eyed me up and down. “You sure you feel all right?”

  “Fine. Registration in the car?”

  “In the glove compartment. You can’t do this for a living, you know. There’s too much money here.”

  “If your conscience is still bothering you when I come back for a bill of sale, we’ll adjust it.”

  “You’d do better with me now than you would then, probably. Oh, well — ” he opened the attaché case and dropped the package of bills into it. “Penny-wise, pound-foolish.” He reached in his pocket and handed me his car keys.

  “Thanks,” I said. I was already walking around the front of the car to the driver’s side. “You’ll find that stuff spends well.”

  “It damn well better,” he answered. “Bon voyage.”

  “Bon voyage,” I echoed him.

  He was still standing on the sidewalk watching me when I drove away.

  I looked at my watch. Eleve
n o’clock. Was it possible that only twelve hours before I’d been standing in Joe Bonigli’s library? If this automobile held together, I’d be standing in it again in a lot less than twelve hours. If I was standing. I was under no illusion about my reception.

  I made it in three hours and ten minutes. I’d figured I had a margin of six hours before Pavel could get to the San Marco. In town I went out toward the heights on the same road Silvio had taken with me the previous night. I turned up the same crushed stone driveway, now bathed in sunlight. I pulled up short of the big garage door and got out of the car so the elevator man could see and identify me from his mid-floor aerie. The last thing I did before getting out of the car was to take out my lower plate, wrap it in a handkerchief and put it in my pocket. Nothing worse than a broken plate in the mouth. I stood in the bright sunlight for three or four minutes before the garage door lifted. I walked toward it. Silvio was standing fifteen or twenty feet inside it, and even at that distance I could see he was smiling. When I was clear inside the door, it came down again. Two shirt-sleeved men with open shoulder holsters converged on me from either side. They grabbed my arms, and Silvio, smiling, walked up and hit me three stiff right-hand shots to the face.

  I was surprised to find myself still on my feet, even with the supporting arms, when he stepped back. “Let’s go upstairs,” I mumbled.

  “Let’s,” he agreed. He was looking at me as though I was some different-colored animal.

  They slung me onto the elevator. Aboard it they frisked me good, but they missed the packet of money in my hip pocket, and my jacket helped to conceal the package on my ribs. They were looking for something a lot harder. When they were satisfied I was packing no iron, the greasy-haired one left-hooked me off the elevator wall. “That’s’ enough,” Silvio said from where he was standing to one side. He said it with no particular enthusiasm, but the action stopped.

  “Okay if I reach for a handkerchief?” I asked.

  Nobody said anything. I took out a spare handkerchief and mopped myself off. From the feel, either some of last night’s scars had reopened or I had a fresh crop. We stopped between floors as usual and the elevator man watched while someone wheeled my new car into the garage. Down came the door, and up we went again. I took out the handkerchief with my plate in it, unwrapped it, and reinserted it in my mouth. Silvio stood there shaking his head.

  The elevator doors opened and Silvio led the way down the hall. I followed, and the goons brought up the rear. Only Silvio and I entered the library. There was some kind of meeting going on. Bonigli sat behind his desk glowering at me, while facing him in a loose semicircle of easy chairs were seven or eight men ranging from lean to lardy, but facially all of a type.

  “Well, kill the fatted calf!” Bonigli snapped. “Here he is now, boys.”

  “Sorry about last night,” I said.

  “ ‘Sorry about last night!’ ” he mimicked me in a growl. “I s’pose you got a big fat story all fixed up why you blew out of here leavin’ me wonderin’ which way to go?” Curiosity struggled with anger in his hawk’s face, and curiosity, of course, won out. “So what the hell are you doin’ back here now?”

  “The San Marco crowd has the papers.”

  “You goddammed fool!” he said between his teeth. “Tryin’ to go it alone! Serves you damn — ”

  “They blitzed me right outside your front door last night,” I cut him off. “Two of them sitting in a parked cab.”

  There was a stir from the semicircled chairs. “I don’t think I like that, Joe,” a wide-chinned, flat-nosed man with iron gray hair rasped at Bonigli. “Who do they think they are, makin’ a move like that in our territory?”

  “How do we know it’s true?” Bonigli responded irritably. “Because this moron says so?” He slapped the top of his desk with an open palm. “I should’ve — ”

  “How do you think I got to look like this?” I countered, pointing at my face. I waited for Silvio, standing behind me, to claim his contribution. When he didn’t, I continued. “Let’s go and get it back.”

  Bonigli hit himself a jolting blow in the forehead with the heel of his hand; it made quite a noise. “Crazy!” he exclaimed. “Didn’t I say so las’ night, Silvio? Crazy!”

  “We’ve got about two hours,” I said.

  Bonigli jerked upright behind the desk, his previous glare upped considerably in horsepower. “Now you listen to me, man!” he barked at me. “You was brought in here as a privileged guest. After what you done I ought to turn you every way but loose, unnerstan’? We don’t need — ”

  “Joe.” He stood there with his mouth open at the interruption. I moved to my right so I could see the faces of the seated semicircle. “Am I right that some of you were in another room not too long ago when a promise was made about a favor due me?”

  “If it had been a written contract, you tore it up last night,” Bonigli said flatly. He sat down again. “What was actually said,” he continued in a milder tone, “was that if you asked us for somethin’ within reason, we’d probably feel obligated. But it gets put to a vote, an’ I ain’t heard nothin’ here gets any vote of mine.”

  “You haven’t heard the reason.”

  “I don’t need to hear any crackpot reasons of yours. You let that guy get to you. You tore out of here like a goddam little boy scout instead of actin’ like a man with good sense.”

  “If there’s going to be a vote, maybe the rest of you would be interested in hearing what you’ll be voting on?” I offered.

  “They’re not innerested!” Bonigli snapped. “They’re businessmen, see? You made your play wit’out us an’ crapped out. Now if you think — ”

  “Let him talk, Joe,” Silvio said unexpectedly from behind me. “I been tryin’ to put the pieces together on that guy Frutig ever since we heard him.”

  I didn’t need any second invitation, despite Bonigli’s sour look. “Last night Joe brought in a federal agent to talk to me here,” I said.

  There was a silence Bonigli rushed to fill. “If you don’t stop twistin’ things around — look, I done it to keep Washin’ton’s nose out of our business. They knew Karma here had been in the pen with Tony. They figgered he might show here. So they sent word they’d appreciate my cooperation.” He snorted. “Who needs that kind of attention? I set it up to get the guy off our back. I knew he couldn’t do himself no good — hell, he didn’t even offer a Canadian two-bit piece. I just didn’ want him goin’ back to Washin’ton an’ peddlin’ the idea we thought we were an independent kingdom or somethin’. I wanted him to hear it from the horse’s mouth he was in a dead-end street, an’ then he’d pack up his marbles an’ go back home.”

  “What’d he want?” someone asked.

  “He wanted the same papers the crowd down at the San Marco took from this idiot, but he was a guaranteed loser. He never made a price.”

  “What started all this?” the wide-chinned man rumbled. He was looking at me. “Where do you come into it?”

  “It started — ”

  “He’ll con you, Frank!” Bonigli warned. “He’s — ”

  “Will you for God’s sake let him talk?” a lean, saturnine-looking man in a corner chair demanded. “So far I ain’t heard nothin’ but you yammerin’.”

  “Okay, Sal,” Bonigli said resignedly. “Just remember this guy has his own axe to grind. Go ahead, you.”

  I spoke deliberately, trying to choose the right words. “By accident I got caught a while back in the middle of a power play between Russian and U.S. agents,” I told them. “I came up with something they both wanted badly. I figured to do some good with it myself before the man Joe brought in last night laid it on the line how important it was.”

  “You mean you changed your mind about promotin’ somethin’?” Sal wanted to know. “In the spot you’re in you were gonna give it away?”

  “I hadn’t had time to think it over,” I said carefully. “And before I did, the San Marco crowd tapped me out this morning.”

  “
This mornin’?” Bonigli said alertly. “I thought you said last night?”

  “Last night, next week, what’s the difference?” a fat man with short, curly hair exploded. “What the hell’s it to us?”

  “Now you’re talkin’ my language,” Bonigli approved.

  “Tell ’em what the federal said to you,” Silvio spoke up into the silence.

  Bonigli stared at him. “Whose side you on, Sil? I’m — ”

  I overrode him. “He said he or someone like him would be happy to kill me to make sure the papers were never recovered by anyone, if the government couldn’t get them. This was after I was a little slow responding to his plea of patriotism.”

  “Patriotism!” Bonigli snorted.

  “A government man said that?” the dark-complexioned Sal exclaimed incredulously.

  “Silvio heard him. Bonigli heard him.”

  “We couldn’t hear everything he said,” Bonigli explained to the chairs. He sounded defensive. “The federal moved Karma out from the desk an’ the bug to the middle of the room.”

  “But you heard him say that?” Frank demanded.

  “Hell, he’s only a kid,” Bonigli said. “He was just shootin’ off his mouth.”

  “One thing I don’t get, Joe,” a new voice said. It was a younger, harsher voice. “You say you had a sale made till Karma here done a bunk wit’out producin’ the goods. If this stuff is worth money, real money, the way you two make it sound, what the hell are we doin’ lettin’ this out-of-town mob move in on us an’ scrape off the gravy?”

  “That’s not the way it works — ” Bonigli began.

  “That’s exactly the way it works,” I broke in. I tapped the face of my wrist watch. “In two hours they’ll be gone, maybe less.”

  “Shut up, you!” Bonigli growled at me. “Carlo, listen a minute. Ask yourself this: what are we gonna do, go down there an’ take it away from them an’ then sell it back to them?”