“Right as rain, Fred.” Engel leaned down over the desk, looking in Fred’s eyes. “You look tired, Fred,” he said, and his right fist came around very fast and clipped Fred on the side of the jaw. Fred’s head snapped back and forward, and Fred was asleep.
Engel was sorry he’d had to do it, but it would give him an extra few minutes, and he needed every spare second he could get. He went to the door, opened it and stepped out, said back into the office, “See you, Fred,” and shut the door. To Fancy he said, “Fred don’t want to be disturbed for a while.”
“Yeah,” Fancy said, disgruntled. “That’s the standing order around here.”
Engel hurried down the stairs to the street, and intercepted one of the odd cabs that had wound up this far over from the center of town. “Thirty-seventh Street and Eleventh Avenue,” he said.
The cabby made a face. “Don’t anybody go to midtown no more? I been over here the last hour and a half.”
“What do you want to go to midtown for? Get in that traffic jam?”
The cabby said, “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I didn’t look at it that way.”
They went over 47th Street and down Eleventh Avenue. The cabby had a transistor radio propped up on the dashboard in the left corner, playing rock and roll music. Then, as they rolled down Eleventh Avenue, it played news instead. They reached 37th Street, and as the cabby was making change for a five-dollar bill, the smallest Engel had on him, the radio said Aloysius Engel and began giving his description.
The cabby gave him change and a funny look. And another funny look. And a sort of squint.
Engel got out of the cab and walked away down 37th Street, looking for Rose Cartage Company. Behind him, the damn cabby kept looking and squinting, squinting and looking, and all of a sudden drove very fast away from there.
So how much time did he have? Five minutes? Maybe less.
And who’d get there first, the organization or the cops?
Engel hurried into the open garage door of the building labeled Rose Cartage Company, Herbert Rose, Incorporated.
20
“Mr. Rose?” The trucker pointed a thumb. “Up them stairs over there and through the door at the end.”
“Thanks.”
Engel hurried. All around him in the big echoing interior of the building men were working in, on and under trucks. None of them paid him any attention as he strode across the concrete floor and up the wooden stairs at the back.
The door at the end said Private, which at the moment meant less than nothing to Engel. He pushed open the door, went in, and there was Rose himself, standing behind a long table completely full of pink and white and yellow slips of paper.
Rose looked up, and blinked, and said, “Oh, my God.” Then he fainted. He fell on the table, and slid down off it, followed by all those slips of pink and white and yellow paper, and they settled to the floor around him like snow.
“I got no time for that,” said Engel. “No time.” He looked around, and in the corner there was a water cooler. He went over, grabbed a paper cup, filled it, and emptied it on Rose’s face.
Rose came up sputtering and sneezing and coughing and hacking and smacking himself on the chest.
Engel didn’t wait for him to stand. Instead, he squatted down in front of him and said, “Rose.”
Rose looked at him, through eyes reddened by coughing and sneezing. Comprehension came into them, and he ducked his head down, putting his arms up, crossed over his head to protect himself. “Please,” he said, the word muffled by the fact he was talking into his chest. “Please don’t.”
Engel slapped his forearms. “Look at me, you moron,” he said.
Rose peeked at Engel through his arms.
“You got one minute,” Engel told him. “One minute to tell me who sent you to frame me. If I don’t get the name in one minute, you’re a casualty.”
“I’ll tell,” squeaked Rose. “You don’t have to threaten me, I’ll tell.”
“Fine,” said Engel.
Cautiously Rose lowered his arms. “I didn’t want to do it at all,” he said, “but what choice did I have? I even said if they hurt me I’ll tell the truth, I’m no hero for somebody else, why should I? A man can be pushed so far only and that’s enough.”
“You’re right. That’s enough. Just the name.”
Rose made a motion with his hands as though throwing away the whole thing, washing his hands of it, leaving it behind him. “Mrs. Kane,” he said. “Murray Kane’s widow, she should have burned up with her husband.”
“Margo Kane?”
“Didn’t I say it?”
“How?” Engel wanted to know. “How’d she get you to do it?”
“I’m a businessman. A businessman is in business only if other businessmen give him business. Murray Kane was a very important and a very vicious man, Mr. Engel, believe me. With his two brothers also in business, with what he had on this one and that one, he wanted from you a little favor you didn’t say no. And the wife the same. Do I want half my customers all of a sudden in somebody else’s trucks? So me she calls, and half a dozen others the same way, and what choice we got?”
“You were killing me,” Engel told him. “You know that, you bastard?”
“I swear I didn’t. ‘It’ll get him fired,’ she said. That’s all she wanted, she said, was get you fired.”
Could it be? Somebody outside the organization, who didn’t exactly know the ethics or the values in the organization; it was possibly so. Maybe Mrs. Kane really hadn’t wanted any more than to get Engel fired.
As though you could get fired from the organization! If Nick Rovito gave out a pink slip, the color came from blood.
Engel got to his feet. “All right,” he said. It was obvious Rose didn’t know anything else. The one to see now was Margo Kane.
But even while he was thinking that, it still failed to make sense. Had Margo Kane stolen Charlie Brody? Had Margo Kane killed Merriweather? If so, why, and why? Knowing who — even assuming he had the who absolutely right this time — still didn’t tell him a damn thing about why.
Well. Later. This was neither the time nor the place to be reflective. Engel hurried out of the room again, leaving Rose soggy and scared amid the wet scramble of his papers. Engel hurried down the stairs, across the concrete floor, and out to the street, getting there just as two cars squealed to a stop in front of him.
The one on the left was a pink and white Pontiac, and out of it climbed Gittel and Fox.
The one on the right was a green and white patrol car, and out of it climbed two cops.
Engel turned and ran.
Behind him there were shouts of “Hi!” and “Ho!” and “Halt!” It was the beginning of things all over again, with him running from the grief parlor, except that this time the cast of cops was smaller and there was the added element of Gittel and Fox.
At Eleventh Avenue he turned left, at West 38th Street he turned right. Looking over his shoulder, he saw, half a block back and coming strong, one of the cops and Fox. Which meant the other cop was on the patrol-car radio and Gittel was on the nearest phone.
Escaping on foot was no good, he couldn’t distance the two directly behind him, and any minute there’d be a whole double army looming up in front of him.
He ran across Tenth Avenue, snarling traffic.
Between Ninth and Tenth there was one of those trucks with the ride on the back. The operator was standing beside the open door of the cab, a line of children was waiting by the curb, a group of children was in the little cars of the ride — these shaped like flying saucers — and the radio was blaring a song of teen-age love. The truck was fire-engine red and explosion-orange and Atlantic Ocean blue and banana-yellow and Central Park green, and had just recently been washed and polished all over. It shone like a real flying saucer, that had just landed from Mars.