Sweeney paused again, awaiting comments, but Farnese had none to make. He unlaced his fingers, flexed them, replaced them.
“That’s enough,” he said.
“What?” Sweeney said.
“I said that’s enough. The rest of your report would be superfluous.”
Sweeney folded his notebook slowly, leaving a fat index finger between the pages as a marker. He felt as if he had been slapped in the face, and his resentment was commensurate.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“I’m quite easily understood, I believe. I already know how my wife spent the weekend. Do you find it incredible that I should learn something about my wife without your professional assistance? I’ll tell you how I know. I know because my wife has the obvious mind of a perverted child. Her deceptions, even when she elaborates on them, are transparent. Friday she informed me that she was spending the weekend at the Fairfield County house of Samantha Cox. She went there, all right, but not with Miss Cox. She went with this Joe Doyle. Isn’t that true?”
“She sure as hell went to Fairfield County. As you say, with Joe Doyle. I don’t know what particular place in the county they went to, because I left them at the line.”
“I know. Your area of operation is only the City. All right, Sweeney. Your devotion to orders has been sufficiently established. When you’re speaking to me, however, please avoid profanity. I don’t like profanity. I think I’ve told you this before.”
Sweeney didn’t reply. He lowered his eyes and removed his index finger from the notebook in a sign of complete capitulation. His report and his pride were now thoroughly mutilated, and he sought expression for his feelings in the deepest and vilest cavity of his brain. Farnese, after silence, spoke again. His voice was soft and measured, as if he were weighing his thoughts and words with special care.
“Mr. Doyle has become a fixture,” he said.
“He hangs on,” Sweeney said with concealed relish.
“Yes.” Farnese unlaced his fingers and made a tent of them, placing their tips together with a careful exactness that seemed to reflect the quality of his thinking. “It’s unfortunate. As you have reason to know, I am, for reasons of my own, exceedingly tolerant of my wife’s social activities. There are times, however, when it becomes advisable to interfere, and I’m inclined to believe that now is one of the times.”
Sweeney was offended by Farnese’s oblique approach to brutality. It made him sick. He had no such reaction to brutality in itself, however. In the pustule world, he had suffered and administered it far too often himself to make of it a particular issue. It was only the indirection, the tone and posture of sadistic piety, that offended him. There was a kind of minor salvation from the worst of hell, he thought, in calling a spade a spade.
“The same as before?” he said.
“Yes. Do you still have your contact with Mr. Chalk.”
“Sure. Chalk’s always available.”
“Arrange it.”
Sweeney put his notebook away in his pocket. He sighed and coughed and wiped his thick lips with a soiled handkerchief. He sat staring intently at the handkerchief as if he expected to find it stained with blood.
“The price will be up,” he said.
“It was up last time.”
“I know. From five hundred to seven-fifty. This time it’ll be a thousand. That’s Chalk’s schedule.”
“Very well. A thousand.”
“When do you want it?”
“As soon as possible. Tonight?”
“I don’t think so. Chalk’s a careful organizer. He doesn’t like to be pressed. Maybe tomorrow night.”
“All right. Take care of it and let me know.”
“Sure. You want to be there?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll talk with Chalk.”
He heaved himself to his feet and stood waiting for a few seconds to give Farnese a chance to say anything more that he might want to say. Apparently Farnese wanted to say nothing, for he remained silent, and Sweeney walked out of the office and past Miss Carling in the outer office and down ten floors to the street. It was a long descent that taxed the endurance of his obese body, and he did not ignore the elevator because he enjoyed the exercise. It was rather because the small steel box in its deep shaft was suddenly the fearful instrument of a developing encroachment. Cornered and confined in his own gross self by what he had become and was and could expect to be, he was aware of a claustrophobic fear that he didn’t understand and refused to admit.
In his car, a plain black Ford, not new, he drove to lower Broadway and was lucky enough to find a spot to park. He was compelled to walk two blocks, however, to reach his destination, which was a small cigar and tobacco shop. This shop was operated by the man named Chalk, and Chalk himself, in a continuation of Sweeney’s luck, was sitting on a high stool behind a high glass counter. He was a thin man with a curiously flat face, plastered hair so glossily black that it was plainly dyed, and skin that looked burned out by some former terrible fever of the flesh, brittle and checked and gray-white, the color that his name denoted.
In Chalk’s shop you could actually buy cigars and tobacco and cigarettes and numerous items essential or incidental to smoking, but the sale of this merchandise, although he made a profit from it, was not Chalk’s principal source of revenue. Most of his income came from the sale of marijuana, which was distributed in cigar boxes by half a dozen pushers operating from his rear room. Besides this, he was usually prepared to contract various lucrative odd jobs. Like, for instance, the odd jobs he had done for Bertram Sweeney acting as the agent of Oliver Alton Farnese.
“Hello, Chalk,” Sweeney said now, placing one elbow on the metal frame of the glass counter and leaning heavily.
Chalk nodded.
“Hello, Sweeney,” he said. “Watch the glass.”
“Sure,” Sweeney said.
He shifted his weight a little as a concession to Chalk’s concern, but he didn’t remove the elbow. Chalk watched him with a worried expression until it became apparent that the glass was safe, at least for the present, and then he relaxed and sucked noisily at the sodden end of a dead cigar.
“What’s on your mind, Sweeney?” he said.
“I was wondering if Cupid’s around.”
“Not now. Couple days since I’ve seen him.”
“I didn’t mean that. I mean, is he available?”
“Could be. He usually is. You got a job for Cupid?”
“For someone. Client of mine wants a guy taken care of.”
“How much care of?”
“Nothing final. Just a good lesson he’ll remember.”
“Oh. I see. Just dressed up a little.”
“That’s right. You interested?”
“Depends. What client, for instance?”
“Same as last time. Same as time before last. Farnese.”
“Jesus! That guy must hate a lot of people.”
“He hates the ones his wife likes. That’s a lot.”
“This would be the third job. It’d run to a grand.”
“I know.”
“You better tell him.”
“I already told him.”
“Okay. Who’s the guy he wants handled?”
“Name’s Joe Doyle. You know Duo’s? It’s a little joint down in the Village near Sheridan Square. Doyle plays the piano there. A young guy. Ugly. Real thin. Looks like he doesn’t eat regular.”
“A lousy piano thumper? Honest to God? How’d a guy like that ever make Park Avenue?”
Sweeney shifted his weight again, and the frame of the glass counter creaked beneath it. He felt angry, filled with a tepid and sluggish resentment, as if Chalk were referring facetiously to the betrayal of Sweeney himself. Which he was, of course, in the crossing of Sweeney’s worlds.