The door buzzed to let me in, and I whipped through the downstairs hall fast. I waited out of sight on the first landing until the irate woman I’d buzzed on the first floor finished muttering a few obscene remarks on the ancestry and occupations of what she supposed had been the kids of the neighbourhood. When her door finally closed I started up the stairs. Not as quietly as a cat, but quiet.
Whatever else he was, Swede Olsen was not worried enough or cautious enough to wonder how come his upstairs bell rang without the downstairs bell. You can usually count on that in New York, because I never saw a building where the downstairs bells always worked or where the downstairs door wasn’t either broken half the time or left open to air out the hallways.
Swede opened the door himself and right away. He was my man. The suit had been changed, but the shoes were there on the small feet. The white of the shoes was stained with a mixture of coffee grounds and soggy orange peels. He was a big man, the face was square, and the blond hair was four-fifths grey. His hands were big and fleshy. There was discoloration on the knuckles of his right hand that would be a bruise tomorrow. His complexion was pale from too much time in places with dim light and no air. He was surprised. Even shocked. Me he hadn’t expected.
‘Dan Fortune, remember?’ I said. ‘Coffee looks good on the shoes.’
His jowled face went a bright shade of magenta. He clenched his bruised fist. I opened my suit jacket and displayed the police special. He took a step in my direction. I dangled the gun. I didn’t point it, you understand, I waved it lightly around under his nose, which was six inches above mine. He was a slow thinker. The danger was that he would start swinging before he thought it out. A smarter type would maybe have guessed that the last thing I would do was use the gun. With Swede the risk was that he would figure he could hit me before I used the gun. But the danger passed. His small eyes blinked at the gun and he stepped back. My diaphragm relaxed. He let me walk into the apartment.
‘What the hell do you want, Fortune?’
‘Some talk,’ I said. ‘It was too dark where we met last. Besides, we were both too busy in the alley.’
The apartment was big and ugly, just like Swede Olsen himself. Walls had been knocked down to make one large apartment out of the four small ones, but all they had accomplished was to make a big box out of small boxes. The place was not lack-of-money ugly; it was plain rotten-taste ugly. The whole place shouted of money made too late to know how to spend it. The living-room had cost a lot to furnish, but it still looked like the cheap room it was. The decoration was the kind they used to ship out to Africa to cheat the natives out of their ivory and gold. The couch and two chairs were purple-red velvet with gargoyle wooden legs. All covered with plastic to protect the beauty.
‘You crazy?’ Swede said. ‘I never saw you before.’
He was a terrible liar. He had known me on sight.
‘Then you don’t mind telling me about Jo-Jo,’ I said.
It confused him. His fists began to clench again. I guess that every problem that ever faced Swede Olsen had been met with his only argument — clenched fists. This time even he seemed to sense that he was not reacting very consistently.
‘What about Jo-Jo,’ he said cautiously.
‘Where is he, Swede?’
It was too much for him. ‘I told you to lay off!’
‘I thought you never saw me before?’
He blinked like a moth in a sudden light. His confusion was complete. I had a good chance of getting something out of him. The woman who spoke behind me must have thought the same.
‘Get out of here, mister.’
She looked like one of those Okie women you see in the pictures of the Dust Bowl in the Depression standing beside a grey and battered flivver piled with the junk that was all she owned. Her face looked like a ploughed field that had baked as hard and dry as stone in the sun. Her hair had started out blonde, and her eyes were washed-out blue. The eyes were now glacier blue, and the hair was grey and hung like limp string. Her hands were cracked like a dried-out mud puddle. But her clothes had cost a fair bundle, and the hands were clean. Her black sheath dress even had some style and taste, except that on her it looked like the shroud of a scarecrow. On her the triple strand of real pearls looked like rope. The years had left her nothing to hang clothes on but a bag of old bones and a leather skin.
‘I’ll handle it, Magda,’ Swede said.
His voice would not have convinced even me. The woman ignored him. I knew who was the real muscle in this house. Magda Olsen. The wife. She looked like Swede’s mother, but she was his wife, the mother of Jo-Jo. Magda had not had a rosy youth. She looked at me as if I were a cockroach she knew too well.
‘Forget my boy, you hear?’ Magda Olsen said.
‘What’s his trouble, Magda? Maybe he needs help.’
‘Get lost.’
‘You don’t want him found?’
‘Who says he’s lost,’ the woman said.
‘I say he’s lost,’ I said. ‘What I can’t say is if it’s voluntary or with some persuasion.’
‘Beat it,’ Magda Olsen said. She had a one-track mind, and she was brighter and quicker than her man. She knew that I knew nothing. She was not about to tell me anything. I decided to shoot in the dark. One thing was sure: if they knew anything, they knew more than I did. The dark was all I had to shoot in. But I knew now that something was not right with Jo-Jo. I thought about the most probable reason for Jo-Jo to run — that he had seen who mugged Stettin. In which case, someone else would be after him.
‘The other guy looking for Jo-Jo will play a lot rougher,’ I said. ‘If I found him, I could help.’
It was at this exact moment that I knew I had a real case on my hands. I was not just wasting time on a boy’s bad hunch, and Jo-Jo Olsen was not sunning himself on a cosy beach. My wild shot hit home.
Swede looked like he’d been kicked in a tender place. Magda Olsen froze into stone. Swede sweated through the fresh suit jacket. Swede was worried wet. Magda was worried, too, but she was also determined. She was determined to follow the course of action they were on, whatever that was. And I had a strange feeling about Magda and Swede Olsen. Call it a sensation. Call it an opinion. They were worried, yes. But they were not worried about Jo-Jo. They were worried about themselves.
‘Tell me about the other guy,’ I said.
‘Beat it,’ Magda Olsen said.
‘Did Jo-Jo see that cop mugged?’
‘Get lost, mister!’ Magda said.
If I had had Swede alone, I think I could have made some progress. As it was, I was ready to go on with the dance. I did not have the chance. Two men entered from some other room, and the music stopped. They were boys, not men, but they were big boys. They looked enough like Swede to tell me that I was looking at two of Jo-Jo’s brothers. There was a girl behind them. The girl was pretty. The boys were not.
‘Take off,’ one of the blond boys said.
‘My mother said get lost,’ the second giant said.
I had the pistol in my belt. I did not even show it this time. The two boys looked about as dumb as Swede, and they did not have his forty-odd years of learning that caution pays. They had not had all the long, hard years to develop doubts. They would not hesitate. I turned without a word and went.
I left them all there in that gaudy sewer of a living room, standing in a line like a firing squad. The boys and Swede were all broad grins. My back going away without a fight made them feel big and strong. The women were not grinning. The ruined face of the mother was as stony as ever above that expensive black dress. As I reached the door I glanced back and saw the old woman already talking hard to Swede.
Then I saw the girl. She had to be Jo-Jo’s sister. I saw her eyes watching me. I had the sudden impression that she was the only one of them who was not completely happy to see my back.