Bannion was silent a moment. “They’re taking a chance,” he said.
“They know what they’re doing. Look, Marg’s in the bedroom with the kids. Come on in and meet the boys.”
Bannion put his hat and coat on a chair and walked quietly down the hall after Al. Three men were at the table in the dining room, their coats on the backs of the chairs. They w-ere playing cards. It looked like a mild, friendly game. There were a half dozen bottles of beer on the table.
Al introduced them with a word or two of description; Bannion shook hands with Tom Bell, a stocky towhead who ran a garage; with a red-haired lawyer named Corcoran, and with Tony Myers, an insurance man who greeted him as warmly as if he were a prospective client.
Al poured a beer for him, and Bannion sat down slowly. He felt tired and slightly confused. The beer tasted good; it cleaned the dry taste of fear from his throat. He looked at the three men and shook his head. “You’re all nuts,” he said.
“Dave got past Mark,” Al said.
They regarded him with new respect. “That boy’s slipping,” Tom Bell said. “You know, Mr. Bannion, Mark got himself a DSC on Okinawa, and out there that wasn’t a theatre ribbon. But he just can’t take this civilian life, I guess.”
Myers stood up, and said, “I’ll go down and keep him company.”
“Wait a minute,” Bannion said. “You men mean well, but I can’t let you do it. If trouble comes it will be from hoodlums who know their business, and won’t be stopped by amateurs whose hearts happen to be in the right place. It’s my job, boys.”
Bell, the towhead, looked annoyed. “They’re real tough characters, eh?” he said. “Just like you see in comic books, with guns and everything. Well, we ain’t exactly the cast from a maypole dance, Bannion.” He hitched around in his chair, and tossed his cards onto the table. “Look, I been places those creeps wouldn’t go unless they were in a fifty-ton tank. And I went in on foot with nothing in me hand but a BAR. I—”
Corcoran regarded him with a pained expression. “Tommy, if this is the story of your single-handed occupation of the Philippines, remember most of us have heard it quite a few times.”
“All right, big wit,” Bell said, irritably. “I used to think it was for the birds. But in the back of my head I knew it had to be done. Keep our homes safe, all that soap-box stuff. Now you tell me some rough characters are going to walk in and knock off a four-year-old kid, and that I’m too soft to stand up to ’em. Well, I’ll tell you something. Anybody comes in tonight with that idea is going to wind up Goddamn dead. I tell you—”
Corcoran slapped him on the shoulder. “Ah, the patriot and poet is coming out now, eh my boy?”
“Ah, shove it,” Bell said with an uncomfortable grin.
Corcoran glanced at Bannion. “Seriously, Bell is right. Unfortunately he’s a Swede and lacks our fine Celtic sense of restraint and understatement. But he’s putting it accurately, if with considerable personal glorification. Your little girl is safe. Myers and Mark are in the vestibule, and out in the back yard is a character we used to call the Chief. The Chief is an Indian, and a damned unnerving thing to meet in the dark. Inside there’s Tommy, myself, and your balding brother-in-law, who distinguished himself as the only American soldier to go AWOL in a jungle consisting solely of coconuts, spiders and Nips.” Corcoran nodded slowly, and now his face was grimly serious. “Everything will be okay, Mr. Bannion. You can count on that.”
Bannion looked around at them all, and realized with a touch of wonder that these run-of-the-mill, law-abiding citizens had something that was probably more than a match for Stone, Lagana and their hard, brutal organizations. It was the power of simple, down-to-earth goodness.
“Well, you want to sit in, Mr. Bannion?” Tom Bell said, picking up the cards.
“No, thanks. I’ve got to go back downtown.”
“Well, things here are under control. Remember that.”
Al came with Bannion to the front door. “Don’t take too many chances, Dave.”
“I’m being careful. The break is coming. Look, tell Brigid I’ll be out tomorrow. Tell her, well, tell her I’ll bring her a surprise.”
“All right, I’ll tell her, Dave.”
Bannion went quietly down to the vestibule. As he opened the door he heard Myers saying, in an insistent, crowding voice, “Now, Mark, the thing about a twenty-year endowment is this. You get—” he stopped and said, “You leave things in our hands, Mr. Bannion. We got this end taped.”
“Thanks. Thanks very much.”
Bannion stepped into the cold darkness, and checked the street right and left before starting down to the sidewalk. There was a man standing across the street, he saw then, a tall old man with a square, weather-roughened face. The man was under a street lamp and the light gleamed on his gold-braided shoulders, on the brass buttons of his blue overcoat.
Bannion paused, hands in his pockets and then strolled slowly across the street.
“Hello, Inspector,” he said.
Inspector Cranston nodded, smiling. “Hello, Dave.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Just smoking a cigar. Habit of mine after dinner.”
“Oh, sure. And always outside under a street lamp.”
“I smoke it anywhere I please,” Inspector Cranston said. “Tonight I’m smoking it here.” He glanced at his cigar. “Might take some time to finish this one, too.”
“You heard the police detail was pulled off here, eh?”
“Yes, that news got up to the Hall,” Inspector Cranston said.
“And that’s why you’re here.”
“I’m just smoking a cigar, I told you.”
“Under the street lamp, and in uniform,” Bannion said. He shook his head slowly. “You’re a little old for a beat job, Inspector.”
Cranston smiled slightly, a hunter’s smile. “This was too raw to overlook, Dave. They might can a cop for butting into it, but not an Inspector. Go on with your work. Nothing’s going to happen here tonight. That’s a promise from—” he paused, and said bitterly, “from the Bureau of Police, Dave.”
Bannion paused, oddly touched by this stem, honest, sad old cop. “I believe that,” he said, at last. “Enjoy your smoke, Inspector.”
“Goodnight, Dave, I will.”
Bannion walked down the street to his car. There was another one parked behind his, and he saw the figure of a man sitting behind the wheel. He slid his hand under his coat to the butt of his gun and stopped. The man in the car cranked down the window, put his head out and called, “Hello, Dave.” Bannion saw the light glint on his reversed collar.
Bannion let out his breath then and walked along to the car. “Out on a sick call, Father?” he said.
Father Masterson had no flair for irony. “No, it’s nothing like that,” he said, in a worried voice. “Al called me an hour ago and said the police had taken their men away from the house. He was upset about it—”
“What the devil did he call you for?” Bannion said.
“I don’t quite know,” Father Masterson said. “It’s preposterous to think I could help, of course.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Bannion said irritably. “But Al shouldn’t be alerting the whole city.”
“Why not?”
Bannion had no answer to that, so he said, “Father, Al’s got friends of his inside, and Inspector Cranston is standing out in the open across the street. An armored division couldn’t crash into that apartment tonight. Why don’t you go back to the rectory and have a cup of tea?”
“Well, that’s a comfortable idea, but I think I’ll stick it out,” Father Masterson said. “You know, Dave, it’s a curious thing but priests don’t often get shot. Some may regard that as a great pity, but it doesn’t happen very frequently. A man will shoot policemen, unarmed bystanders, women and children, but something stops him from firing on a man who wears his collar backwards. That’s superstition, of course, a Medieval hangover, you might say, but that’s how it works. So if there’s trouble I might come in handy. By the way, there’s a radical element who might claim that the symbol of God, even a poor symbol like me, has a discouraging effect on evil. But we’re way off the point, aren’t we?”