WAREHOUSE
Wholesale-Retail
OFFICE FURNITURE
Broad Street Showrooms
NEW YORK—MIAMI—
LOS ANGELES
The entire area smelled of fish.
“We’re just a few blocks from the market,” Connie said.
The metal entrance door was locked.
“It was open earlier tonight,” she said. “It’s on the fifth floor. I watched the needle.”
They were both getting very good at using fire escapes. Michael figured that if ever they were trapped in a burning building together, they’d know how to get out of it in a minute. He supposed it was good to know such things. On the fifth floor, they found the window Gregory had earlier jimmied open. It was closed now. Michael guessed the three pizza-eaters had closed it after they’d come into the room and found only Ju Ju’s bed with no one in it. He hoped the pizza-eaters were not still here. He did not think they were; not a light was burning anywhere inside. But you never could tell; in Vietnam, Charlie could see in the dark.
He eased the window open.
Listened.
Not a sound.
He climbed in over the sill, and then helped Connie into the room.
They waited, eyes adjusting to the darkness, moonlight slowly giving shapes to objects …
First the bed with its white wrought-iron headboard and footboard …
Then the bundle of clothes in the corner …
And then the Indian sitting his spotted pony. Nothing else.
“I think somebody peed in this room,” Connie whispered.
It was not truly a room, Michael now realized, but merely a space defined by a partition. The door to the other side of the partition was slightly ajar. No light beyond it. He went to the door and listened. He heard nothing. He nodded to Connie and opened the door wider. Together they moved into the space beyond the partition. And waited again while their eyes adjusted to what seemed a deeper blackness but only because of its vastness. When Michael felt certain they were alone, he groped along the wall for a switch, found one, and turned on the lights.
If he’d expected a cocaine factory, he was disappointed.
From the evidence here on this side of the partition, you would never have guessed that Ju Ju Rainey was a drug dealer. For here was a department store of the first order, stocked with television sets and cameras, record players and home computers, typewriters and silverware, fur coats and jewelry, cellular telephones—
“A fence,” Connie said. “Lots of dealers accept goods in exchange for dope.”
A drug plot after all, Michael thought.
There were windows on the wall facing the street. Distant traffic lights below tinted the glass alternately red and green. It was still Christmas, but just barely. The wall opposite the windows was lined with clocks. They ticked in concert like a conglomerate time bomb about to explode. Grandfather clocks ticking and tocking and swinging their pendulums, smaller clocks on shelves whispering their ticks into the vast silent room.
On a table near the metal entrance door on the right-angled wall, there was a tomato-stained and empty pizza carton and three empty Coke bottles. A green metal file cabinet was on the wall near an open door that led to the toilet. On the other side of the door, there was a huge black safe with the word MOSLER stamped on its front.
Michael went to the file cabinet and pulled open the top drawer. A glance at one of the folders told him that this was where Ju Ju Rainey kept his inventory records. A methodical receiver of stolen goods. The bottom drawer was locked.
“Do you know how to do something like that?” Connie asked.
“Like what?”
“Like pick a lock?”
“No,” Michael said.
“Let’s see if anybody brought in a set of tools,” Connie said.
They began rummaging through the stolen goods as if they were at a tag sale. It was sort of nice.
Shopping this way, you could forget that dead bodies were involved. Like that day in the jungle. With the baby. Not a thought of danger, Charlie was miles and miles away. Just strolling in the jungle. Birds twittering in the treetops. Andrew smoking a cigarette, the baby suddenly— He turned off all thoughts of the baby.
Click.
Snapped them off.
Connie had stopped at a pipe rack from which hung at least a hundred fur coats.
The baby crying.
Click.
“This is gorgeous,” Connie said.
She was looking at a long red fox coat.
Michael moved away from her, deeper into what looked like a smaller version of the Citizen Kane storehouse. There was a makeshift counter —sawhorses and planks—covered entirely with Walkman radios. There had to be at least a thousand Walkman radios on that counter. All sizes and all colors. Michael wondered if all those radios had come from a single industrious thief. Or had a thousand less ambitious thieves each stolen one radio?
Another counter was covered entirely with books. It looked like a counter in a bookshop. Very big and important books like Warday and Women’s Work and Whirlwind were piled high on the counter. Michael could easily understand why someone would want to steal these precious books and why Ju Ju had been willing to take them in trade for dope. He’d probably planned to resell them later to a bookseller who had a blanket on the sidewalk outside Saks Fifth Avenue.
Connie was lingering at the fur-coat rack. In fact, she was now trying on one of the coats, which he hoped she didn’t plan to steal. The temptation to steal something from a thief was, in fact, overwhelming. The goods, after all, were not the thief’s. The thief, therefore, could not rightfully or even righteously claim that anything of his had been stolen, since the stolen goods had already been stolen from someone else. Moreover, the transaction by which the thief had come into possession of the property was in itself an illegal one, the barter of stolen goods for controlled substances, and the thief could expect no mercy on that count. Especially if he was dead, which Ju Ju Rainey happened to be. On the other hand, if it was okay to steal stolen goods from a dead thief, then maybe it was also okay to have caused that thief’s death, and to have put another man’s identification on his corpse, and to have laid the blame on a third person entirely, which third person happened to be Michael himself. It was all a matter of morality, he guessed.
The coat Connie was trying on happened to be a very dark and luxuriant ankle-length sable.
The coat was screaming, “Steal Me, Steal Me!”
He hoped she wouldn’t.
The baby screaming.
Click.
“I would love a coat like this,” Connie said.
Michael was at a counter covered with musical instruments now. There were violins and violas and cellos and bass fiddles and even lyres. There were piccolos and oboes and saxophones and clarinets and English horns and bassoons and flutes. There was an organ. There were acoustic guitars and electric guitars and banjos and mandolins and a pedal steel guitar and a synthesizer and a sitar and an Appalachian dulcimer. There was a set of drums. And three bagpipes. And fourteen harmonicas and a book called How to Play Jazz Harp, which had wandered over from the book display across the room. There were trumpets and Sousaphones and tubas and French horns and cornets and bugles and seventy-six trombones. Michael guessed it was profitable to steal musical instruments.
The next counter was covered with tools. More tools than he had ever seen in one place in his entire lifetime. He guessed it was profitable to steal tools, too. On the other hand, maybe it was profitable to steal anything. There were hammers and hatchets and mallets and mauls. There were pliers and wrenches and handsaws and drills. There were planes and rasps and chisels and files. There were circular saws and scroll saws and electric sanders and electric chain saws. Michael picked up one of the electric hand drills and a small plastic case with bits in it, and carried them to where Connie was now standing at a table covered with weapons.