What the hell could I say to that?
He leaned forward, his expression laughably earnest. "Mr. Hammer, you stumbled into my business at a most inopportune moment, and I reacted badly. What I am trying to do is see if we can negotiate a truce, and perhaps a peace. I believe we may have mutual interests."
"This I gotta hear."
"As I said, you have long been a thorn in the side of the Evello Family, and they have caused you a certain amount of grief over the years, themselves. Weren't you until recently in Florida, recuperating from one such attack?"
"Yeah. We must have been down there at the same time." I grinned at Shirley, whose big brown eyes couldn't seem to meet mine. "Too bad we couldn't have got together, and started our friendship sooner."
Forcing herself, Shirley looked at me. "Mike, you don't understand—this situation is a delicate one, and very dangerous."
"I kind of think I do understand." I grinned some more, but nastier. "It's delicate, because you're the Snowbird here's girlfriend, and you work for Mr. Elmain, who is in Evello's pocket. That makes you a kind of spy, right? And as for dangerous, I'm going to cite the corpses piling up, as evidence."
She was avoiding my gaze again, pouring herself some coffee. She stirred cream in.
"Mr. Hammer," Wren said, "we are at the birth of a new era, a new golden age of entertainment. My club here is a harbinger of things to come. The pharmaceuticals I dispense, without a prescription I grant you, are merely one wing of that entertainment."
I gaped at him. "Heroin is entertainment?"
He winced, as if I shouldn't bring up such unpleasantness. "That's at the far extreme of things, and I engage in that business only because there's a market, a market well established before I came onto the scene. But the world of drugs is changing—marijuana is already commonplace among the young, and cocaine is a favorite among well-moneyed grownups."
I turned to Shirley. "That's where you fit in, isn't it, baby? You didn't get your inheritance, did you? But you still have friends among the jet set, and you became Evello's connection to that market, and now the Snowbird's. Right?"
She gave Wren a nervous glance, but he only smiled and raised a palm in stop fashion. "As I've gathered, Mr. Hammer, you are very astute. You understand. As a small businessman yourself, and man of unconventional tastes, you grasp that I am merely another capitalist, serving willing, even eager customers. After all, one cannot legislate morality."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
He frowned, waved as if to a departing child. "I'm not talking thievery or murder. I'm talking about adultery, and sex acts considered perverse by some, and obviously recreational drugs—hallucinogens are already the rage on college campuses—and such old standbys as gambling and prostitution."
"You're saying gambling and prostitution aren't illegal? What planet do you live on?"
"I'm a neighborhood boy, Mr. Hammer, raised in and around the Village—and my earliest memories are of whores, junkies, and queers ... don't misunderstand, many of my best friends and certainly business associates fall into one or more of those unflattering categories ... and among those early memories are the tourists and New Yorkers from beyond the neighborhood, who came to the Village for some naughty good fun."
I suppose I could have asked how a neighborhood kid got the British accent, but I just didn't give a shit.
"No, Mr. Hammer, I'm saying making things illegal that people want and crave does no one any good, not individuals or society at large. It doesn't stop a single customer from wanting to buy, and in fact creates a nicely wicked atmosphere in which customers are not only willing to buy forbidden goods, but to pay premium prices."
"Yeah, all right. I get that."
"You do, but the Evellos of the world do not. They are locked in Old World ways, antiquated thinking. It will take a visionary to take full advantage of the opportunities of the new freedom."
"And you're the guy. You're the visionary."
"With no false modesty, I would have to say yes." He sat forward. "I am making alliances that the old Mafia families, with their inbreeding and prejudice, could never conceive, much less execute. I have business associations overseas that will transform conventional drug trafficking—forget France, Mr. Hammer. How about South America? What about Vietnam? New sources, rich sources, new alliances, lasting alliances."
"I don't know. I never was much of a United Nations guy myself."
"Diplomacy has its place." He gestured with an open hand, a fey gesture considering the lacy cuff. "If you and I can sit down, as representatives of our warring nations, and come to terms of peace ... we can do business together."
"What can I do for you?"
"I need a chief of security. I need a man who understands law enforcement but who has no hesitation to do whatever is necessary to make a point, or gain an advantage. I need someone terrible. Someone ruthless. I need you, Mr. Hammer."
While all this talk was going on, I'd been thinking about how I was going to make my exit. The coffee pot was both metal and filled with steaming liquid, so that alone could incapacitate the muscle-bound Frick and Frack behind me. Shirley wasn't armed, except for her natural thirty-eights, and they'd already done all the damage to me they were going to. And I didn't think Wren was even armed, certainly the tight cut of his suit didn't allow for it, and that was when Shirley's face started melting.
I tried to blink it away, and looked toward Wren and he was melting, too, like one of those Dali clocks, and not just his face but all of him, mod suit, lace cuffs and all, and the plastic table between us was pulsing, as if taking breaths. I tried to stand, but the floor was rubbery, and before I could flop back down in the chair, hands were gripping me, and pulling me away from there, dragging me bodily, and my feet and legs were as long as a stilt-walking man's, but useless. The guys who were hauling me were tall and then short and then tall again, as they towed me through those tables with the chairs on top, the silver legs wiggling like Busby Berkeley gals on their backs, and for the big finish, the inside of my head exploded, splintering into a thousand multicolored fragments.
Someone said, "Hit the lights. Sound system, too. And get the projector started."
I was shoved into a hard chair and it, at least, felt solid under me. The hands on my arms turned into tentacles, tight, clutching, only they weren't tentacles but ropes, clothesline I think, and for a while the room, the world, settled down, and I knew who I was and where I was—roped into a chair on the dance floor of the discotheque.
"Settle down, Mr. Hammer," Wren said. His coat was open now and I could see my .45 stuffed in his waistband. Had it been there all along? Was it there at all?
"What the hell..."
The black muscle man and the maybe Marine came from behind me and fell in on either side of Wren—they both had guns stuck in their waistbands, too, the black guy a .38 revolver, the one in camouflage trousers a nine millimeter. From somewhere on the sidelines, two more bodyguard types fell in with Wren, one on either side—a big Oriental guy with a Fu Manchu beard and a red shirt and brown chinos, sporting an automatic of some kind in a shoulder rig; and a short, stocky character with shoulder-length brown hair, a yellow and orange and green geometric shirt and green bell-bottoms, a sawed-off shotgun in his hands.
"It's called LSD," Wren was saying. "Lysergic acid diethylamide. Maybe you've heard of it? Very big on campus."
"You... you drank the coffee, too.... And the bitch had the cream. ..."
"But you dropped the sugar cubes, Mr. Hammer. Miss Vought told me when you took her to dinner how the big tough guy took sugar with his coffee."