They look funny when you do things like that. Their little brains don’t get it right away and it stuns them or something. I let him get right in the middle of that surprised look before I slammed my fist into his face and felt his teeth rip loose under my knuckles.
Helen went down on her knees for the gun and I yelled for her to let it alone, then Johnny was on me. At least he thought he was on me. I had his arm over my shoulder, laid him into a hip roll and tumbled him easy. I didn’t want too much noise.
I walked up. I took my time. He started to get up and I chopped down on his neck and watched his head bob. I got him twice more in the same place and Johnny simply fell back. His eyes were seeing, his brain thinking and feeling but he couldn’t move. While he lay there, I chopped twice again and Johnny’s face became blotched and swollen while his eyes screamed in agony.
I put him in a cab downstairs. I told the driver he was drunk and fell and gave him a ten spot from Johnny’s own wallet with instructions to take him out to the Hideaway and deliver same to Mr. Renzo. The driver was very sympathetic and took him away.
Then I went back for Helen. She was sitting on the couch waiting for me, the strangeness back in her eyes. She said, “When he finished with you, he would have started on me.”
“I know.”
“Joe, you did pretty good for a kid.”
“I was brought up tough.”
“I’ve seen Johnny take some pretty big guys. He’s awfully strong.”
“You know what I do for a living, Helen? I push a junk car, loaded with iron. There’s competition and pretty soon you learn things. Those iron loaders are strong gees too. If they can tumble you, they lift your pay.”
“You had a gun, Joe,” she reminded me.
And her eyes mellowed into a strange softness that sent chills right through me. They were eyes that called me closer and I couldn’t say no to them. I stood there looking at her, wondering what she saw under the bandages.
“Renzo’s going after us for that,” I said.
“That’s right, Joe.”
“We’ll have to get out of here. You, anyway.”
“Later we’ll think about it.”
“Now, damn it.”
Her face seemed to laugh at me. A curious laugh. A strange laugh. A bewildered laugh. There was a sparkling dance to her eyes she kept half veiled and her mouth parted just a little bit. Her tongue touched the tip of her teeth, withdrew and she said, “Now is for something else, Joe. Now is for a woman going back a long time who sees somebody she could have loved then.”
I looked at her and held my breath. She was so completely beautiful I ached and I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. Not yet.
“Now is for you to kiss me, Joe,” she said.
I tasted her.
Chapter 2
I waited until midnight before I left. I looked in her room and saw her bathed in moonlight, her features. softly relaxed into the faintest trace of a smile, a soft, golden halo around her head.
They should take your picture like you are now, Helen, I thought. It wouldn’t need a retoucher and there would never be a man who saw it who would forget it. You’re beautiful, baby. You’re lovely as a woman could ever be and you don’t know it. You’ve had it so rough you can’t think of anything else and thinking of it puts the lines in your face and that chiseled granite in your eyes. But you’ve been around and so have I. There have been dozens of dames I’ve thought things about but not things like I’m thinking now. You don’t care what or who a guy is; just give him part of yourself as a favor and ask for nothing back.
Sorry, Helen, you have to take something back. Or at least keep what you have. For you I’ll let Renzo push me around. For you I’ll let him make me finger a guy. Maybe at the end I’ll have a chance to make a break. Maybe not. At least it’s for you and you’ll know that much. If I stay around, Renzo’ll squeeze you and do it so hard you’ll never be the same. I’ll leave, beautiful. I’m not much. You’re not much either. It was a wonderful day.
I lay the note by the lamp on the night table where she couldn’t miss it. I leaned over and blew a kiss into her hair, then turned and got out of there.
Nobody had to tell me to be careful. I made sure nobody saw me leave the building and double-checked on it when I got to the corner. The trip over the back fences wasn’t easy, but it was quiet and dark and if anybody so much as breathed near me I would have heard it. Then when I stood in the shadows of the store at the intersection I was glad I had made the trip the hard way. Buried between the parked cars along the curb was a police cruiser. There were no markings. Just a trunk aerial and the red glow of a cigarette behind the wheel.
Captain Gerot wasn’t taking any chances. It made me feel a little better. Upstairs there Helen could go on sleeping and always be sure of waking up. I waited a few minutes longer then drifted back into the shadows toward the rooming house.
That’s where they were waiting for me. I knew it a long time before I got there because I had seen them wait for other guys before. Things like that you don’t miss when you live around the factories and near the waterfronts. Things like that you watch and remember so that when it happens to you, it’s no surprise and you figure things out beforehand.
They saw me and as long as I kept on going in the right direction they didn’t say anything. I knew they were where couldn’t see them and even if made a break for it, it wouldn’t do me any good at all.
You get a funny feeling after a while. Like a rabbit walking between rows of guns wondering which one is going to go off. Hoping that if it does you don’t get to see it or feel it. Your stomach seems to get all loose inside you and your heart makes too much noise against your ribs. You try not to, but you sweat and the little muscles in your hands and thighs start to jump and twitch and all the while there’s no sound at all, just a deep, startling silence with a voice that’s there just the same. A statue, laughing with its mouth open. No sound, but you can hear the voice. You keep walking, and the breathing keeps time with your footsteps, sometimes trying to get ahead of them. You find yourself chewing on your lips because you already know the horrible impact of a fist against your flesh and the uncontrollable spasms that come after a pointed shoe bites into the muscle and bone of your side.
So much so that when you’re almost there and a hand grabs your arm you don’t do anything except look at the face above it and wait until it says, “Where you been, kid?”
I felt the hand tighten with a gentle pressure, pulling me in close. “Lay off me. I’m minding my…”
“I said something, sonny.”
“So I was out. What’s it to you?”
His expression said he didn’t give hang at all. “Somebody wants to know. Feel like taking a little ride?”
“You asking?”
“I’m telling.” The hand tightened again. “The car’s over there, bud. Let’s go get in it, huh?”
For a second I wondered if I could take him or not and knew I couldn’t. He was too big and too relaxed. He’d known trouble all his life, from little guys to big guys and he didn’t fool easily. You can tell after you’ve seen a lot of them.They knew that some day they’d wind up holding their hands over a bullet hole or screaming through the bars of a cell, but until then they were trouble and too big to buck.
I got in the car and sat next to the guy in the back seat. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes open and when we started to head the wrong way, I looked at the guy next to me. “Where we going?”
He grinned on one side of his face and looked out the window again.
“Come on, come on, quit messing around! Where we going?”
“Shut up.”
“Nuts, brother. If I’m getting knocked off I’m doing a lot of yelling first, starting right now. Where…”
“Shut up. You ain’t getting knocked off.” He rolled the window down, flipped the dead cigar butt out and cranked it back up again. He said it too easily not to mean it and the jumps in my hands quieted down a litt
le.
No, they weren’t going to bump me. Not with all the trouble they went to in finding me. You don’t put a couple dozen men on a mug like me if all you wanted was a simple kill. One hopped up punk would do that for a week’s supply of snow.
We went back through town, turned west into the suburbs and kept right on going to where the suburbs turned into estates and when we came to the right one the car turned into a surfaced driveway that wound past a dozen flashy heaps parked bumper to bumper and stopped in front of the fieldstone mansion.
The guy beside me got out first. He jerked his head at me and stayed at my back when I got out too. The driver grinned, but it was the kind of face a dog makes when he sees you with a chunk of meat in your fist.
A flunky met us at the door. He didn’t look comfortable in his monkey suit and his face had scar tissue it took a lot of leather-covered punches to produce. He waved us in, shut the door and led the way down the hall to a room cloudy with smoke, rumbling with the voices of a dozen men.
When we came in the rumble stopped and I could feel the eyes crawl over me. The guy who drove the car looked across the room at the one in the tux, said, “Here he is, boss,” and gave me a gentle push into the middle of the room.
“Hi, kid.” He finished pouring out of the decanter, stopped it and picked up his glass. He wasn’t an inch bigger than me, but he had the walk of a cat and the eyes of something dead. He got up close to me, faked a smile and held out the glass. “In case the boys had you worried.”
“I’m not worried.”
He shrugged and sipped the top off the drink himself. “Sit down, kid. You’re among friends here.” He looked over my shoulder. “Haul a chair up, Rocco.”
All over the room the others settled down and shifted into position. A chair seat hit the back of my legs and I sat. When I looked around everybody was sitting, which was the way the little guy wanted it. He didn’t like to have to look up to anybody.
He made it real casual. He introduced the boys when they didn’t have to be introduced because they were always in the papers and the kind of guys people point out when they go by in their cars. You heard their names mentioned even in the junk business and among the punks in the streets. These were the big boys. Top dogs. Fat fingers. Big rings. The little guy was biggest of all. He was Phil Carboy and he ran the West Side the way he wanted it run.
When everything quieted down just right, Carboy leaned on the back of a chair and said, “In case you’re wondering why you’re here, kid, I’m going to tell you.”
“I got my own ideas,” I said.
“Fine. That’s just fine. Let’s check your ideas with mine, okay? Now we hear a lot of things around here. Things like that note you delivered to Renzo and who gave it to you and what Renzo did to you.” He finished his drink and smiled. “Like what you did to Johnny, too. That’s all straight now, isn’t it?”
“So far.”
“Swell. Tell you what I want now. I want to give you a job. How’d you like to make a cool hundred a week, kid?”
“Peanuts.”
Somebody grunted. Carboy smiled again, a little thinner. “The kid’s in the know,” he said. “That’s what I like. Okay, kid. We’ll make it five hundred per for a month. If it don’t run a month you get it anyway. That’s better than having Renzo slap you around, right?”
“Anything’s better than that.” My voice started getting chalky. Carboy held out his hand and said, “Rocco…” Another hand slid a sheaf of bills into his. He counted it out, reached two thousand and tossed it into my lap. “Yours, kid.”
“For what?”
His lips were a narrow gash between his cheekbones. “For a guy named Vetter. The guy who gave you a note. Describe him.”
“Tall,” I said. “Big shoulders. I didn’t see his face. Deep voice that sounded tough. He had on a trench coat and a hat.”
“That’s not enough.”
“A funny way of standing,” I told him. “I saw Sling Herman when I was a kid before the cops got him. He stood like that. Always ready to go for something in his pocket the cops said.”
“You saw more than that, kid.”
The room was too quiet now. They were all hanging on, waiting for the word. They were sitting there without smoking, beady little eyes waiting for the finger to swing until it stopped and I was the one who could stop it.
My throat squeezed out the words. I went back into the night to remember a guy and drag up the little things that would bring him into the light. I said, “I’d know him again. He was a guy to be scared of. When he talks you get a cold feeling and you know what he’s like.” My tongue ran over my lips and I lifted my eyes up to Carboy. “I wouldn’t want to mess with a guy like that. Nobody’s ever going to be tougher.”
“You’ll know him again. You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” I looked around the room at the faces. Any one of them a guy who could say a word and have me dead the next day. “He’s tougher than any of you.”
Carboy grinned and let his tiny white teeth show through. “Nobody’s that tough, kid.”
“He’ll kill me,” I said. “Maybe you too. I don’t like this.”
“You don’t have to like it. You just do it. In a way you’re lucky. I’m paying you cash. If I wanted I could just tell you and you’d do it. You know that?”
I nodded.
“Tonight starts it. From now on you’ll have somebody close by, see? In one pocket you’ll carry a white handkerchief. If you gotta blow, use it. In the other one there’ll be a red wiper. When you see him blow into that.”
“That’s all?”
“Just duck about then, kid,” Phil Carboy said softly, “and maybe you’ll get to spend that two grand. Try to use it for run-out money and you won’t get past the bus station.” He stared into his glass, looked up at Rocco expectantly and held it out for a refill. “Kid, let me tell you something. I’m an old hand in this racket. I can tell what a guy or a dame is like from a block away. You’ve been around. I can tell that. I’m giving you a break because you’re the type who knows the score and will play on the right side. I don’t have to warn you about anything, do I?”
“No. I got the pitch.”
“Any questions?”
“Just one,” I said. “Renzo wants me to finger Vetter too. He isn’t putting out any two grand for it. He just wants it, see? Suppose he catches up with me? What then?”
Carboy shouldn’t’ve hesitated. He shouldn’t have let that momentary look come into his eyes because it told me everything I wanted to know. Renzo was bigger than the whole pack of them and they got the jumps just thinking about it. All by himself he held a fifty-one percent interest and they were moving slowly when they bucked him. The little guy threw down the fresh drink with a quick motion of his hand and brought the smile back again. In that second he had done a lot of thinking and spilled the answer straight out. “We’ll take care of Mark Renzo,” he said. “Rocco, you and Lou take the kid home.”
So I went out to the car and we drove back to the slums again. In the rear the reflections from the headlights of another car showed and the killers in it would be waiting for me to show the red handkerchief Carboy had handed me. I didn’t know them and unless I was on the ball every minute I’d never get to know them. But they’d always be there, shadows that had no substance until the red showed, then the ground would get sticky with an even brighter red and maybe some of it would be mine,
They let me out two blocks away. The other car didn’t show at all and I didn’t look for it. My feet made hollow sounds on the sidewalk, going faster and faster until I was running up the steps of the house and when I was inside I slammed the door and leaned against it, trying hard to stop the pain in my chest.
Three-fifteen, the clock said. It ticked monotonously in the stillness, trailing me upstairs to my room. I eased inside, shut the door and locked-it, standing there in the darkness until my eyes could see things. Outside a truck clashed its gears as it pulled up the hill and o
ff in the distance a horn sounded.
I listened to them; familiar sounds, my face tightening as a not-so-familiar sound echoed behind them. It was a soft thing, a whisper that came at regular intervals in a choked-up way. Then I knew it was a sob coming from the other room and I went back to the hall and knocked on Nick’s door.
His feet hit the floor, stayed there and I could hear his breathing coming hard. “It’s Joe—open up.”
I heard the wheeze his breath made as he let it out. The bed springs creaked, he fell once getting to the door and the bolt snapped back. I looked at the purple blotches on his face and the open cuts over his eyes and grabbed him before he fell again, “Nick! What happened to you?”
“I’m…okay.” He steadied himself on me and I led him back to the bed. “You got…some friends, pal.”
“Cut it out. What happened? Who ran you through? Damn it, who did it?”
Nick managed to show a smile. It wasn’t much and it hurt, but he made it. “You…in pretty big trouble, Joe.”
“Pretty big.”
“I didn’t say nothing. They were here…asking questions. They didn’t…believe what I told them, I guess. They sure laced me.”
“The miserable slobs! You recognize them?”
His smile got sort of twisted and he nodded his head. “Sure, Joe…I know ‘em. The fat one sat in…the car while they did it.” His mouth clamped together hard. “It hurt…brother, it hurt!”
“Look,” I said. “We’re…”
“Nothing doing. I got enough. I don’t want no more. Maybe they figured it’s enough. That Renzo feller…he got hard boys around. See what they did, Joe? One…used a gun on me. You shoulda stood with Gordon, Joe. What the hell got into you to mess with them guys?”
“It wasn’t me, Nick. Something came up. We can square it. I’ll nail that fat slob if it’s the last thing I do.”
“It’ll be the last thing. They gimme a message for you, pal. You’re to stick around, see? You get seen with any other big boys in this town…and that’s all. You know?”
“I know. Renzo told me that himself. He didn’t have to go through you,”
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