“The mission.”
“Right.”
They all got back in the car, Engel behind the wheel this time, and once more headed north. Engel by this time was somewhat used to the car, and all the way uptown he only stalled it twice.
The mission was on East 107th Street, in an old store front that had housed a tiny Jewish tailor until some of the neighborhood children had set fire to him. The owner had had a tough time finding another businessman to take the place over, and had been glad finally to rent it to the Jesus Loves You Mission, Incorporated, one of those fringe organizations that specialize in giving hot soup and mismatched shoes to alcoholics. Since this was one of the blocks where people started throwing bottles, garbage, furniture and each other out the windows at the mere sight of a cop, one of the blocks where the rat population exceeded the human and the rats kept it that way by constantly biting babies, one of the blocks the social workers just didn’t want to discuss, there was nothing unusual about a store-front mission opening up there. In fact, not even the owner of the building knew the Jesus Loves You Mission, Incorporated, was a front for the organization.
What safer place could there be in a slum for the neighborhood narcotics peddler than the hot-soup counter at a mission? Customers didn’t even have to go home to shoot up. And since the mission had a dormitory upstairs like any other mission, the customers didn’t have to go home after they shot up either.
Engel parked across the street from this mission now, and he and Gittel and Fox got out of the car. They crossed the rubbish-strewn street, Engel in the middle, and went into the mission.
The front windows of the mission had been whitewashed, and the name of the joint had been put on them in red-painted and very shaky lettering. A notice on the front door — grease pencil on a shirt cardboard — informed the public, with many misspellings, that organ recitals and hymn-singings took place every Friday and Saturday evening at ten o’clock. All welcome.
A half-dozen tottering brittle-boned winos had been clustered outside the door, looking like those who’d been called but not chosen, and at least two dozen more of the same were sprawled around on folding chairs within, in the long main meeting room just inside the door. Religious mottoes were everywhere along the walls, and at the far end, on a slightly raised platform, stood a podium and a small electric organ.
Aside from being an organization front, this place was also a legitimate mission, having as much hot soup and as many mismatched shoes as any other mission in New York, and counters to dispense these items were along the left wall. Juvenile delinquents, looking dangerously bored, manned these posts with less than apparent devotion.
At the far end of the room, near the organ, was a battered brown door with gold lettering on it seemingly done by the same shaky hand that had identified the front windows in red. The lettering announced:
Gittel pushed this door open and entered without knocking. Engel followed him and Fox brought up the rear. Their passage through the meeting room had caused no stir of interest or curiosity, the clientele of missions not normally being of the nosy-parker type.
The office they now entered was a cramped and sloppy room full of second-hand office furniture, on nearly all of which were cardboard cartons stuffed with double-breasted blue pin-stripe suits of a style that even Dennis O’Keefe has stopped wearing. A flabby scabby sloppy type in white religious collar, black clerical suit and red alcoholic nose sat at the desk, adding up numbers on a sheet of yellow paper, doing his work with a thick blunt stub of pencil. He had mud on his shoes, dust on his suit, dandruff on his shoulders, and he ran this joint. “It doesn’t matter,” he’d been heard to say, “where the support of my mission comes from, or what other uses it may be put to. Crime may produce the money, but the money is used for the Lord’s work, and nothing else can have meaning.” Most of the time, except for those rare intervals when he was cold sober, he believed what he said, and he made a far better operator of the mission than any cynic from the organization could have done. Nothing cons like sincerity. This fool’s name was Clabber, and he liked to be called Reverend.
Not Engel nor either of the other two called him Reverend or anything else at the moment. He looked up from his figuring, bleary-eyed, and watched them pass through, across his cluttered sanctum and through the door on the other side into a room painted black.
All black. Walls and ceiling, black paint on soundproofing. Floor, black linoleum. A black wooden kitchen table and four black kitchen chairs stood in the middle of the room, under a ceiling fixture with three bare twenty-five-watt bulbs in it. A man could scream at the walls and bleed on the floor in here, and none of it would make any difference.
Nick Rovito was sitting at the table, and so was another guy, a humble, hangdog, fiftyish loser with a worried face and bad posture. He looked up at Engel, and then quickly away again. He looked like the kind of natural loser who runs a business, goes bankrupt, sets fire to the store for the insurance and manages only to burn himself up.
Nick Rovito pointed at Engel. “Is that him?”
“Yuh.”
“Look at him. Be sure.”
The little guy looked at Engel, his eyes pleading as though he and not Engel were the one on the spot. Looking at him, thinking of business and fires, Engel wondered if Murray Kane could possibly have looked like this, but the answer had to be no. Something like this attached to a woman like Margo Kane? Impossible.
Also irrelevant. There were more immediate things to think about, like Nick Rovito saying, “Look at him. Look at his face. Is it him, or are you wasting my time?”
“It’s him.”
“All right.”
Engel said, “What is this, Nick?”
Nick Rovito got up from his seat at the table, came around, and slapped Engel across the face. “I treated you,” he said, “like my own son. Better.”
“I don’t rate this,” Engel told him. He knew he was in deeper trouble than he’d ever been in his life before, and he didn’t know why, but he had sense enough to keep his head and try for the reasonable approach. Nick Rovito’s slap had stung, but that was nothing.
Nick Rovito was saying to the little guy, “All right, that’s all. Go home. Tell your friends it’s taken care of, and other than that keep your trap shut.”
The little guy seemed to get down from the chair. He was closed in on himself like a spider that’s been poked with a pencil. He scuttled toward the door, blinking, licking his lips, not looking at Engel or anyone.
When he was gone, Engel said, “I don’t know what your grievance is, Nick. And I never saw that guy before in my life.”
“You will never mention my name again,” Nick Rovito said. “I will never mention yours. I wanted you brought here, you greedy little punk, because I wanted to say good-bye. Good-bye.”
“You got to tell me what you think I did,” Engel said. “I been a help to you for four years, I rate a fair shake from you now.”
Nick Rovito stepped back, frowning, squinting. “You never give up,” he said. “Or is there more than one thing I could have you on, and you don’t know which it is? Is that it?”
“I never did anything to you, Nick,” Engel said. “Not once.”
The second slap was harder than the first, because it was backhand. “I told you never to mention my name again.”
Engel sucked blood in from the corner of his mouth. “I been square with you,” he said.
“Tell me one thing,” Nick Rovito said. “Did you find the suit? Did you find it and keep it to yourself? That’s the kind of thing you’d do, isn’t it?”