It was the same magic for me. I forgot Maxim and his brutal playmates, forgot Roland Ritz and his clock and what had happened to Alex. Because with a sudden rush that had no form of intelligence at all behind it, Alma was in my arms, burying her blonde head in my lapels, entwining my shoulders with aching arms that matched my own.
Love. The greatest, the most wonderful, the most soaring, the most electrifyingly—stupid emotion in the world. Things crashed inside of me, flipped skyward, my lips found hers and nothing in the world mattered except that she had come back. My Alma. She was murmuring softly in my ear as her lips burned my neck.
“Welcome home, Wheeler—” I said. And then Maxim’s steely purr broke up a gorgeous romance.
“Pity. She is most attractive. But end this circus now. We are wasting valuable time—”
Alma struggled free of me with a warm laugh, her eyes still on my face. She hadn’t even seen Max and his three little boy brutes.
“Sorry, men. But I kinda go for this dashing young man.” She laughed happily and turned to them. “I hope I didn’t embarrass anybody—” She stopped laughing when she really saw them for the first time. “Oh,” she said. Alma was no dope. It had only taken her one look to decide that nothing would ever embarrass Maxim and his men.
But I was wrong. Dead wrong. It was worse than that. Maxim’s eyes had lighted up like beacons at a close-up of her.
“Of course. Miss Wheeler. Roland Ritz’s helpful associate. A pleasure to see you again, my dear.”
Her eyes flew to mine. “Ed—you’re in trouble—did you see Ritz—?”
As flabbergasted as I was, I groaned. “Now she tells me. You mean you know these guys?”
Women!
“Hold on. Are you the mutual friend that put this Ritz guy on my neck with his screwy clock—?”
“Ed—I wanted to surprise you—”
I smiled for her even if I didn’t feel like smiling. “You surprised me all right. You get the brass ring hands down. But don’t say another word.”
The damage had already been done. Maxim’s polished heels clicked smartly in an ever so slight bow. Training is hard to break, I guess. His cold smile was colder than ever.
“You will accompany us, my dear. No outcries, I beg of you. Step into the car ahead of us, please.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were still as blue as I remembered them. I could see she was feeling pretty low about the backfire of her surprise homecoming.
“Go ahead, Wheeler. Into the car. Do like the man says.”
I urged her gently in ahead of me. Maxim and his crew crowded behind us. The doors hummed shut. Maxim poked a black button and the cage fell. The car greased to a stop three floors down.
Maxim showed me the ridiculously long barrel of a Luger before we stepped into the lobby.
“Need I say more, Mr. Noon?” His purr was back now but his eyes were still two steel marbles of menace. I looked at the rest of his crew. Their faces reassured me that they also carried Lugers.
“I get the point, Max,” I said. “My arm, Wheeler. Let’s march out in style.”
Obediently, she tucked her arm around the crook of my elbow. She shrugged. “You’re the boss, Ed.”
We headed out into the lobby. My building is famous with me for nobody being around when I need help. This time was no exception. The same old cracked plaster walls and badly tiled floor mocked me as we hit out for the street with the left-over unit from the Elite Guard behind us. Even Tiger, my favourite alley cat, was nowhere in sight this time. I had the notion he was out somewhere on a romantic prowl or talking things over with one of the garbage pails in the alley behind the building.
On the sidewalk, Maxim got things going in a hurry. I could understand why. We weren’t exactly a nondescript group. What with Maxim and his war-dogs, the striking-looking Alma Wheeler and the well-dressed bum that the world of the West Fifties knows as Ed Noon. Maxim flung out an autocratic arm and a long, Walter B. Cooke-like car shot up the block from around the corner and came to a brake-lurching halt in front of us.
Maxim growled in his throat and his crew spread out like a football play in action and the four doors of the car flew open on all sides. We got in the back by mutual consent.
The show was really organized. The car, I pegged it for a foreign make, whisked away from the kerb and lost itself in West bound traffic until it found a home on the Drive going North.
I had stopped thinking about Alma Wheeler and why she had come back after all these years. I had to. Trouble and maybe sudden death was sitting right in front of me. There were three of them up front, behind the wheel. Sitting facing us, on two folded down chairs like you find in taxis was another storm trooper and the one and only Maxim.
I eyed him up and down, took in his cold face with its converging straight lines and shook my head. He said nothing but dug out a box of cigarettes, extracted one and lit it. He was about to bury the box in his pocket when he remembered his manners. He extended it to Alma and me. She looked at me with a bewitching perk to her mouth.
“Is it bad manners to take one, Ed? Seeing that we’re never going to be friends?”
That’s just one of the reasons I had fallen for her so hard. She had my line of patter, my kind of thinking. I like people who laugh when they’re facing a firing squad.
“Sure. Take one. Cigarettes have nothing to do with the foreign policy. Besides, Max isn’t such a bad egg. He was just born that way.”
Maxim could afford to be lenient. He thumbed a lighter for us and even smiled. Alma said “Thanks” and I just nodded. I looked out the window. We were making good time. I picked some spots out on the Palisades that I knew very well. The afternoon sun was washing over the Bluffs real pretty.
Maxim purred in preamble.
“Your false American courage never fails to amuse me. A national characteristic, I suppose. Foolish remarks in the face of danger.”
“What about your national characteristics, Max?” I showed him my teeth. “You look exactly like a loan-out from MGM to Warner Brothers for Gestapo movie.”
He just wouldn’t or didn’t want to get mad. He didn’t bite one way or the other. He surprised me with a smile that was a shade less cold than his normal one.
“The movies. Of course. That’s where I have seen you before, Mr. Noon. The wise-cracking American with the gun in his ribs. So many of your movies I have seen. We studied you. Your prototype, in any case. And the way you people picture the Nazi—cold, imperial. Machines. Not men. That too was amusing, I can tell you.”
“Nazi. That’s it. I’ve been waiting for that word. But you can save your bleeding heart, Max. I’ve been there. You’re not the first SS man in my life. Not by a jugful. I’ve had the doubtful pleasure of a long, bad war in Europe.”
That seemed to please Maxim more than anything else. His tongue licked his lips.
“Superb, Mr. Noon. When we liquidate you, we may possibly be evening up old scores. I lost two brothers in the fall of München.”
He meant Munich and I knew what he meant. Maybe he’d be nailing down the lid on a guy who had killed some fine SS men. Suddenly, I didn’t want my cigarette any more. Unremembered things were starting to come back to me. Like Dachau, Belsen and the wholesale butchering of human dignity. I fought the hornets off because the fever of outrage always makes you a bad performer. No matter how you look at it, it clouds your thinking.
“Max.”
“Yes, Mr. Noon?”
“What the hell is all this magoo about the clock? I can’t believe the Fourth Reich is in full swing again.”
“I don’t follow you, Mr. Noon.”
“Not half as bad as me trying to keep up with this rat-go-round. Who is Roland Ritz? And what’s so all-fired special about this crummy alarm clock that you want it so badly? And why did you give that poor kid such a going over? Look—”
His purr lost some of its velvet.
“I’m sure Miss Wheeler can answer some of your questions for you. As you h
ave ascertained, it was she who arranged to have Roland Ritz bring the clock to you.”
That was still bothering me deep down. If Alma was mixed up in something subversive, against the government, it would hurt like hell. Not just the government. I turned to her.
“Alma, tell me straight up and down. Was this Ritz pitch on the level?”
She tried to show me with her eyes past the blocky bulk of Maxim’s man.
“Honest, Ed. I can explain—”
But Maxim was bored with my questions. After all, he had his damned clock.
“You ask too many questions, Mr. Noon. I can assure you that answering them in any regard at all will in no way influence your own personal safety. You are alive now only because there is some doubt. We have two clocks found in your office. You seem a clever person however and you may possibly have managed to place the genuine article elsewhere in spite of our precautions. Once we determine the identity of your two clocks and one of them does prove to be the piece that Mr. Ritz left with you, you will die swiftly and easily. You and of course, Miss Wheeler here.”
Knowing Alma I knew she was scared. But she said, “Thanks loads for including me in your small talk.”
Even though sitting, he managed a bow. I frowned. “Okay, Max. There must be more. I’m still listening.”
“If neither of the two clocks are what we seek—” he paused to slip some ice into his tone, “—then we will ask you where the genuine clock is. A true and rapid answer will save you much pain. We have no time for the niceties of formal inquiry.” He leaned forward now. The purr was gone, the velvet was gone. He didn’t seem like a Grade B movie menace any more. He was almost pleading in his sincerity. “Tell me now. Have you managed to remove the real clock? Or is it one of these two in my pockets? Answer me, please.”
I smiled at him. I squeezed Alma’s firm hand in my own.
“You leave me swell alternatives, Max. Yes to the first question and you’ll torture the truth out of me. Yes to the second and I die without jazz and the rack. Well, another grand old American custom is stalling. So let me stall while you fret and fume. You’re waiting to find out now which is which. Well, I can wait too. So will you.”
He cursed. His hand flicked twice across my face. One for each cheek. Rage had set up business in his eyes and face. He was nearly livid with anger.
“Slapping men is a woman’s trick, Max,” I gritted. “It’s very unbecoming in a man.”
I would have slapped him too but his cohort alongside had been showing me the business end of his Luger since we had got in the car.
“You fool!” Maxim hissed. “Have you no sense at all? Is dying such a comedy as all that?”
I eyed him as evenly as I could considering the amount of blood that was rushing around behind my smacked face.
“There’s an old saying, Max. Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone. Well, I like crowds.”
Nobody said anything else for awhile. A fast, hard silence fell over the car. Alma’s blonde head inclined towards my shoulder. Her warm, lively smell got in my nostrils and for a long painfully sweet second I wished we were alone so we could ask and answer those million questions that had been needling me ever since she had dropped out of my world without a word.
And that other big question too. What was the connection between her and the mysterious Roland Ritz? That guy was really beginning to bother me and we hadn’t even been introduced yet.
But there was no time for that now. The car was slowing down, easing to a sly halt beneath the very base of the Harlem River bridge. We were stopping in the very heart of those muddled, messy buildings that huddle like poor people within the environs of one of the City’s dirtiest back alleys. The section was like something that New York might be ashamed of, a part of town talked about in whispers by the City boards of Health, Education and Housing. I’d never liked it. I liked it less now.
A squat, ugly no-kind-of-stone building stared us in the face as we were ushered out of the car in a deadly silence. Max hissed again. For my benefit alone.
“You will be quiet and try nothing.”
“Trust me, Max. I’ll be as quiet as a grave.”
Maybe, he should have hissed at Alma too. Either that or she was so damn glad to see me that she had to shout it to the roof tops. Or maybe she just wanted to make up for her bonehead play about keeping me in the dark about Ritz and the clock.
Because shout was exactly what she did. It’s a pretty deserted neighbourhood at any time of the day or year but Alma’s a game gal.
She screamed. It started from somewhere beneath her toes, worked its way up and sirened out of her lovely throat like the coming of the banshees. Things went nuts in a hurry.
Maxim barked something frantic and the big, black car shot away from the curb like a released cannonball, leaving us standing on the sidewalk as though we had missed a train or something just like that.
Alma had got out three never-to-be-topped screams when one of the storm troopers reversed a Luger in his hands and jumped at her bringing the butt-end down like a pile driver. I’d been much too glad to see her again to want her head cracked open on such short notice.
I drove my fist full into his oncoming face and got the sickening satisfaction of hearing something go pop in his nose. Everybody was starting to dance around picking out sides when it was all over for me.
Maxim was cutting Alma down to a whisper by bending her arm behind her in the wrong direction when somebody decided that the back of my head was an ideal spot to drop a grand piano.
My head exploded on my shoulders as the sidewalk flew up into my face.
Chapter Five
Somebody was crooning in my ear. It wasn’t anything from the Hit Parade or any kind of music at all. Just a low moaning sort of something that a mother might sing to a baby that she’s rocking to sleep.
I was no baby although I’d been rocked to sleep all right. Some rock. The Luger barrel that had nearly parted my hair permanently in the middle could stand up to the comparison.
It had happened so many times before this, unconsciousness I mean, that I was getting to be an old hand at coming out of the fog. It used to be that my mind would fight for something familiar, try to latch on to something positive so I wouldn’t think I was dead or go off the deep end into hysteria. But not any more. I was getting as veteran as the punchy fighter who comes to automatically, still swinging the way he was just before he took the full count.
“Ed—Ed—easy, honey. You’re all right. It’s me—Alma.”
I tried to move and became aware of a couple of things. My head was still on my shoulders where it belonged. But the light was bad and I was lying on my back with the upper half of me planted on something deliciously soft and comfortable. I tingled inside. The crooning sound hadn’t given me the wrong steer. Alma had my head and shoulders cradled in her lap, her strong, slender arms cushioning me. She’d been humming low in my ear, kind of lovely-like and suddenly I wasn’t in a hurry anymore to get anywhere. And worry about Maxim and all this clock nonsense was a million miles away. Alma was back. She was here. With me. Like the last time I remembered her.
I twisted my head towards her.
“Alma—”
Her lips came down on mine, knocking everything else out of the way, burying death and taxes and a world full of grief along with it. The hunger inside me that had never really left came roaring back for her. I forgot all about the bad feeling in my head.
Several eternities reeled and our lips pushed apart. I didn’t even know where we were. I cared less.
“I missed you, you displaced person,” she said simply. Alma had always wanted me to chuck the private eye game. She had said once that I’d make a swell vacuum-cleaner salesman.
“Why did you run away, Alma? I played smart about it first, pretended it didn’t mean a thing. Boy loses girl. Same old merry-go-round. But I woke up weeks later. It felt like hell.” I stopped running on. “I missed you too, Wheeler.”
The sarcastic gods inside of me took over. My defense in a world of cockeyed half-truths and bad lies.
“Cut it out,” I growled. I felt like a private detective again. “You’ve bought me trouble. Lots of it. And you’ve got a lot of explaining to do. We’ll save the billing and cooing for later.”
“Ed!” The hurt look in her eyes hurt me too but I had to keep things squared away for the time being. “I’m back for keeps this time. For keeps. I did a lot of thinking. It wasn’t your fault that Dolores died. Even if she was my sister, she was a killer. And you killed her. Like you said. Line of duty. Ed, these two years away from you have been hell for me.”
“Haven’t they though?” I conceded dryly. There were a million questions to ask her, like where had she been, what had she been doing. Or was she still a dame who sold her body for the right price? I cared all right but I wasn’t going to show her how much I did.
It would all have to wait. That kind of question anyway. We were in the soup but good. Thick bad soup and unless we made some fast plans about spooning out of it altogether, we’d be together forever anyway. But in a way I wouldn’t like.
“Ed!” she said again, the hurt look making her eyes squint. “Don’t clown around with me. Please. I’m trying to tell you I’m all cured now—”
“Help me up,” I said. “We’ll save the reunion scene till later. I just remembered Maxim. We better take a look around.”
She buttoned her lips on a thin line and helped me erect. Surprisingly, banged head and all, I was in pretty good shape. I looked at Alma. The top of her blonde head just reached my eyes. She was a little thinner than I remembered her but she still had more vitamins than any dame since my first crush. She was always good medicine for me. But she was medicine I couldn’t afford to take right now.
“While I’m looking around, how about starting from the beginning, Alma? Like about this Roland Ritz guy, this clock and your connection. Maxim will be coming back and I’d like to know some of the details about what might be costing me my neck.”
The Alarming Clock Page 3