“Yeah,” said Recevo. “And there’s Basil Rathbone. He’s up there, thread-in’ an arrow’s got your name on it.”
Karras laughed. While he was laughing, he looked down at Recevo’s feet.
“New brogues?”
“Flagg Brothers, four dollars and ninety-five. You like?”
“Yeah,” said Karras. “They’ll do.”
Recevo knocked on the front door. He took off his hat, smoothed back his hair, flicked at the dent of the fedora, replaced it on his head. He ran a thumb and forefinger along the brim. A shutter opened on the door, a large pair of blood-rimmed eyes appearing in the space.
Recevo moved his face into the light. “Karras and Recevo, here to see Mr. Burke.”
“Hold on.”
The shutter closed, and then the door swung open to a huge ugly man standing in the frame. Karras looked him over, thinking, the only way to drop him is to hit him low. Cut him down like a big tree.
“Come on,” said the man, who everyone called Face.
They went into a small foyer which introduced a banistered staircase on the left. To the right, an open set of French doors gave to a large living room where three men in suits and a woman in a bolero jacket and slacks sat around in cushioned furniture sipping highballs and huffing cigarettes. The woman looked brittle and cheap; Karras smiled at her anyway, from habit. Her shoeless, stockinged feet rested on top of a kidney-shaped marble table. Next to her feet, a blue-black revolver lay on its side.
“Hey, Face,” said Karras, “how’s the family?”
“They’re good, Karras. Thanks for askin’.”
Recevo said, “Your kids look like you or your wife?”
Face thought it over. “My wife, I guess.”
Recevo grinned. “They oughta thank God.”
“Go on up,” said Face, jerking a thumb thick as a divot toward the ceiling.
Recevo and Karras took the stairs. Karras ran his hand along the stained oak of the banister.
“Face just called you a pussy behind your back,” said Karras. “I heard him clear as day. You gonna take him on when we’re done with Burke?”
“Yeah,” said Recevo. “And right after that, I’m gonna wrastle Mighty Joe Young.”
They reached the landing at the top of the stairs, turned right and went through an open door into a large area that had been a couple of bedrooms before Burke’s men had knocked out the walls. Burke, sitting behind a clean oak desk, did not look up as they entered. Karras noted the locked gun case against the wall, a Thompson gun racked behind the glass.
A woman, an unremarkable brunette, sat at the end of a divan pushed against the wall. The wood of the divan was scraped and chipped — Face had knocked it around, most likely, carrying it up the stairs on his back. The rest of the divan was taken up by Gearhart, Burke’s brain and counsel, all three hundred hawk-nosed pounds of him. He strained a smile at Recevo, showing more gum than teeth, his fingers playing with a watch chain that ran from vest to trouser pocket, pushed out in the middle at the bulge of his lap. Karras could see the usual two-toned, brown and white gibsons on Gearhart’s pudgy feet. A dandy all the way, and a fat one at that — the worst kind.
A plain, heavy dining table stood in the middle of the room, four high-backed chairs grouped around it. Reed, Burke’s top muscle, sat at the head of the table, rolling an unlit Fatima around in his fingers, sizing up Karras as he crossed the room. Recevo and Karras each took a chair away from the table, pulled them over to in front of Burke’s desk. They had their seats. Recevo removed his hat, smoothed back his hair, placed the hat in his lap.
Burke laced his fingers together, rested his hands on the desk. “How’s it going, Joe?”
“Things are all right, I guess.”
“Karras,” said Burke. “Glad you could come.”
Karras nodded and smiled. He forgot which one he had agreed to do first.
“You boys going to the fights tonight?”
“Uh-huh,” said Recevo, glancing at his watch.
“Got money on Moore?”
“Not worth the time it takes to place the bet,” said Recevo. “I just don’t think Parks is gonna give him much of an argument. I got a little cash on the undercard, though. Morales against Russell.”
“You took Morales, I hope.”
“Yeah.”
Burke said, “Smart boy.”
Karras, fidgety as a kid in church, looked around the room. His eyes landed on the brunette. He followed her legs down to her shoes, platform slingbacks with silver nailheads along the sides of the soles. He had seen them in the window at I. Miller’s on F, when he was looking around for a little something for Eleni. He wondered idly who the woman was with, if anyone, or if she was just around for decoration. Twelve dollars and ninety-five cents for those shoes. He wondered if she was worth the price.
“We gonna talk business, or what?” said Reed, in that too-loud way of his, like talking loud would make someone care about what he had to say. Karras had known guys like him in the service. Not that Reed had ever been in uniform; the word was that he had flunked the psychiatric. He was just a mean one, with the small eyes of a pig and the shoulders of a fullback. As a kid, he had done reform time for pouring gasoline on a neighbor’s cat. Later, as an adult, he had pulled a year’s stretch for slapping a girl on a bus.
“Yes,” said Burke, “we need to talk. Don’t want you two to be late for the main event.”
“If it’s business,” Reed said, “then maybe the twist ought to leave the room.”
The twist. Karras grinned. Reed hadn’t gone to the pictures since 1939. The Roaring Twenties had been the last one he’d seen.
Burke nodded at the woman, who rose quickly but with some dignity. She threw a hurt look at Burke and flicked her eyes over Karras as she walked across the room. The slingbacks made a clapping sound on the hardwood floor, then were muted as she hit the carpet of the stairs.
“So,” said Recevo, “what’ve we got?”
“A fellow named George Georgakos owes me a few bucks. Old bird paid me the principle, but we’re having a little disagreement over the interest. He claims he’s going to get around to it, but so far, nothing. I thought you and Karras would go see him tonight, collect some of my money. It might convince me that he’s sincere.”
George Georgakos — a gypsy type from the ghettos of Athens via Smyrna. Karras knew him vaguely as a guy who hung out late at night at the Greek clubs in Southeast, playing cards and drinking mastica with his old man. Hanging out at the clubs, after his bus shift at the Hotel Washington, where he took home fifteen, maybe twenty bucks a week. Karras looked at Burke’s hands, tented on the desk. On the outside, Burke seemed fit, his posture always ramrod straight, his stomach flat beneath the vest of his suit. But the hands were soft, the grip lazy and without character. Karras remembered wanting to wash off, the last time he shook Burke’s hand.
“How much do you want us to collect?” said Recevo.
“Forty ought to do it for now. We had a little communication problem in the past. Maybe he was kidding me, but I couldn’t understand much of what the old guy said. Typical, with these immigrants — they don’t even bother to learn the language.”
That’s because they’ve been too busy workin’, tryin’ to feed their families. Workin’ like dogs, as if a dog could ever work that hard. Not that any of you snow-white bastards would understand the meaning of the word—
“...That’s why I thought it might be a good idea for Karras here to go along. That sound good to you, Karras?”
Karras smiled and nodded. He thought he’d mix things up this time.
“Yeah,” said Reed. “Karras and this Georgakos bird, they speak the same language. The two of them can just sit around together all night and grunt.”