“Roger, Martin. As far as anybody’s concerned, I’m dead, so get some light publicity in that department.”
“Already done.”
“Europe too?”
“The word was over there before it made the papers here. I don’t doubt but that there is rejoicing in Red Square.”
“Great,” I said sourly. “Let’s hope it gives us a little extra time.”
I hung up and sat in the sofa, propping my feet on the window sill so I could look out at the rain. Someplace out there was the answer, the cause and the effect. Someplace out there Louis Agrounsky was still trying to make up his mind.
I felt Rondine sit beside me, her fingers slide up my shoulder and massage my neck. “Can it wait?” she asked.
“No.”
Her lips brushed my cheek and she turned my head around gently. While I was watching the night she had changed into a cobwebby thing that was almost transparent. “But it’ll have to,” I said.
Chapter 6
Virgil Adams awoke me at six A.M. with his call, a brief message to make contact with Dave Elroy at a roominghouse so far downtown the river was in the back yard. He coded it urgent and didn’t give me any more details, so I knew Dave had buzzed him from an open phone somewhere and didn’t want to lay any explanations on the line at that point.
Rondine’s eyes came open, still hazy with sleep, saw me perched on the edge of the bed and smiled in that pleased way women have after a perfect night and she squirmed under the covers so that the sheet outlined the full sweep of her hips and the lazy curve of her legs. “Who was it, darling?”
“Business, kid.”
The hazy look faded and her eyes became bright with sudden anxiety. “Something wrong?”
“I don’t know.” I climbed into my clothes as quickly as I could, looked at myself in the mirror before deciding I could do without a shave for a while, then dropped the .45 into the speed rig on my belt and pulled on my coat.
“Will you be long?”
I bent over and kissed her lightly. Anything else and it would be too hard to tear myself away from her. “I’ll make it quickly as I can. You just stay put, baby. Don’t answer the door unless you get a ‘V’ rap. If I call I’ll let it ring once, hang up, then ring again. Anything else, ignore. Got it?”
She half sat up in the bed, the covers clutched at her throat. “Be careful, Tiger.”
“You know me.”
“That’s what I mean.”
Downstairs, the city was beginning to come back to life again. The early morning smells from the restaurants had seeped out into the canyons between the buildings to lure in the sidewalk marchers going to work. Two city trucks had already disgorged a dozen men near the corner where they were ready to finish a huge excavation in the street. New York, I thought, a self-perpetuating machine that never stopped. No matter where you looked, skeletal steel towered into the sky and gigantic troughs were gouged into the bedrock below. No place to build but up, and up they were going. I wondered what they’d do if they thought it could all come tumbling down in a single second.
Rather than take a cab, I let myself be fed into the maw of a subway entrance and boarded a downtown local. When I got off I spotted the house numbers, turned east and walked two blocks to the last remaining brownstones that had once lined the street and went up the steps to the vestibule and pushed the door open.
The greasy smell of cooking cut through the musty odor that was part of the building, coming from the apartment on the far end of the hall. Underfoot were a half dozen empty whiskey bottles, and the stairway to one side was packed with empty cartons and accumulated debris that would make a fire inspector turn green.
When my eyes were adjusted to the semi-gloom I snaked the gun out and went down the hall, staying close to the wall so the floorboards wouldn’t creak under my weight. The signal I tapped on the door had been prearranged, but I still didn’t take any chances. I stayed to one side ready to cut loose if anything was wrong at all.
Dave didn’t forget his manners either. He tapped back the right answer to get me at ease, opened the door on a chain, made sure of the identification, then swung it open all the way.
“Greetings, Tiger.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Come on in. We have a little party going.”
I stepped in with the .45 still ready, cut to one side as I swept the room with my eyes, then stuck the rod back in my belt when I got the picture. There was only one other in the room aside from Dave, a scrawny little guy with a scared face who kept gulping rapidly even though he was dry as a bone.
“Couldn’t you pick a better hotel?”
Dave grinned at me as he double locked the door. “His digs,” he said. “Meet Earl Mossky. They call him The Creeper. That right, Earl?”
The guy’s head bobbed and in a surprisingly deep voice he said, “Yeah, that’s me.”
Dave waved a thumb at me. “He’s the one I told you about, Earl. Tiger Mann.”
Earl Mossky’s eyes narrowed and he gulped again. “I know about him.”
“How?” I asked.
“Word gets around.” He fidgeted in his chair and picked up the stump of a chewed cigar and lit it, never taking his eyes off me.
“What’s the pitch, Dave?”
“Earl here is a pusher. Small time, but he’s been at it a long time.”
“Never picked up neither,” the guy added.
“Deals strictly in H,” Dave told me. “Poolroom trade, mostly, but it keeps him in bread and he doesn’t have any big ideas about expanding.”
“It ain’t healthy,” Earl muttered.
“So he’s got a story to tell.”
“Let’s hear yours first,” I said to Dave.
He pointed to a sway backed chair and pulled one up for himself. “I’ll skip the details, but I picked up word of the buy Vito Salvi made. What Don Lavois found in the crapper in the guy’s room wasn’t the whole catch. That was only part of it. That right, Earl?”
“Hell, he went for a kilo. That’s two-point-two pounds of junk and he got in at base rates. Paid five hundred an ounce off the ship.”
I sat back and stared at the guy. “How do you know?”
The little guy puffed on the cigar, took it out of his mouth with distaste and stubbed it out under his foot. “You stick in this racket long enough and you get to know everything. Those guys transporting the stuff are like friends of mine, see? So they’re footing the bill one night for a smash down at Pecky’s Place and they let me in on this laugh how I should be on their side of the fence. They got two grand apiece for bringing the stuff in while I’m still hustling pennies.”
Dave said, “Pure stuff. By the time they make the final cut a kilo of H is worth a few million.”
“This guy who bought it,” I said.
Earl shrugged. “I keep my nose long, buddy. I wanted a look at this character because he wasn’t local. It was some kind of a special deal set up ahead of time. It was the same one this guy showed me the picture of.”
“Salvi,” Dave added.
“Go on.”
“That’s all. He took the can and bugged out. You think I’m gonna poke around?”
“How’d he pay for it?”
“Clean cash, buddy. Ninety G’s and no arguing.”
“Where did the split go?”
Earl Mossky shrugged again and squirmed in the chair. “I don’t ask that either. The boys already left on another trip to the Persian Gulf and if you want you can find out from them. You won’t get nothing though. The big ones don’t leave no holes to look through. Someplace they just passed over the dough, got theirs and forgot about it.”
“One more question, Earl,” I said.
“Go ahead, you’re giving the party.”
“Where do you fit in?”
“I hear somebody’s paying off big for some nice quiet talk, the kind that don’t backfire. I want a trip to Miami for my health.”