“Greensleeves,” I said. It had been the password back at the organizational meeting, and maybe it would spur his recollection of me.
It didn’t. He said, more strongly, “What you talking about? Are you drunk?”
“No,” I whispered. “I’m Raxford.”
His eyes widened, and his whisper got shrilclass="underline" “What are you doin’ here? Are you crazy?”
“I want to get in touch with Eustaly and — Leon Eyck,” I told him. “I want you to send me to them.”
“Why me?”
“You were in the phone book.”
“Listen,” he whispered, “I have enough trouble with my folks as it is. They’re upstairs asleep, and if they find out you been around here—”
“They won’t find out,” I promised. “You just get in touch with Eustaly and Eyck, let them know I’m here.” Then, being a little harsher, I said, “Are you a member of this group or aren’t you?”
“Well, sure I am. Naturally I am.”
“Well, then.”
“Just so my old man doesn’t find out,” he pled. “He’s always threatening to throw all this stuff out anyway. If he found out I was hanging around with guys wanted for murder—”
“I been quiet for five days,” I said, trying to sound menacing. “I know how to be quiet, don’t worry about it.”
“Okay,” he whispered, still reluctant but resigned. “Come on around to the side door, I’ll let you in. And for Christ’s sake be quiet.”
“Right.”
Being very quiet, I walked around the house to the other side, up the blacktop driveway to the inevitable side door, which inevitably squeaked when Armstrong opened it. Wincing in time to the squeak, he whispered, “Go down cellar.”
I went down cellar, where the Hitler portrait looked me over and decided I might as well be liquidated, and Armstrong, nervously aclatter, came after me.
“Just sit down someplace,” he said, still whispering. “I’ll call Eustaly.”
“Good.”
Beside the mimeograph machine was an old desk, and on it a telephone. This, I assumed, was the one listed in the phone book for the NFRC. Upstairs would be Armstrong’s old man’s phone, on which seditious calls were presumably not to be made.
While Armstrong made his low-voiced phone call — a call that took quite a long time — I wandered around the basement, looking at things. I glanced at the sheet he’d been running off in the mimeograph, and it was hardly anything I might have been cranking out, which was so much for what Armstrong and I had in common. I glanced at a small tag on one of the Nazi flags and noted it had been made by a firm in Savannah, Georgia. I sat on a bar stool, glanced casually over the top of the bar, and on the floor behind it was an open-topped wooden box not entirely full of hand grenades.
All at once, I felt very unhappy.
15
Two-twenty A.M. I sat in a booth in an all-night diner on Queens Boulevard, a dozen blocks from Jack Armstrong’s world headquarters, and watched the empty street. Out there, a battery of traffic lights, eight of them at various heights across the boulevard, went through their snail-paced close-order drilclass="underline" all green, and then in unison both green and red, and then red alone, and finally finishing in perfect symmetry back once more at green, like an incredibly slow-paced Rockettes routine. Very dull.
Inside, employees and customers were tied, two each. One employee, in clothing of dirty white, commanded the counter, behind which he stood now, face contorted as he worked the inside of his mouth with a toothpick. The other employee, much filthier than the first, appeared to be an alcoholic five days from his last drink, and his job was to daub ammonia on the floor around the customers. Customer number one was a stocky fortyish guy in a leather jacket who sat at the counter with coffee and doughnuts, noisily dunking the latter in the former and then more noisily eating both. The other customer, sitting at a booth with yesterday’s coffee and last week’s Danish pastry, was me.
My left wrist tingled. I stared with mingled surprise and irritation at the watch I was wearing there, then put it to my ear and heard a tiny voice say, “What’s happening?”
“Nothing’s happening,” I said, disgusted. The alcoholic with the mop looked at me and blinked several times. I coughed artificially, put my arm down, gazed out the window, and pretended I hadn’t said a word.
What’s happening? they’d wanted to know. What did they suppose was happening? As per the instructions Jack Armstrong had received on the phone and passed on to me, I’d walked the dozen blocks here from his house, positioned myself in this diner booth by two o’clock — a few minutes before two, in fact — and here I’d been sitting ever since. What’s happening indeed!
I was just promising myself that if no one showed up by two-thirty I’d quit and the hell with everybody, when a black General Motors car — as I’d told Angela, they all look alike — pulled to the curb in front of the diner and switched its lights off; on; off; on; off; on. The signal.
I swallowed something lumpier than the Danish pastry. Now that they were here, I was suddenly more than willing to wait. Take your time, take your time, I’m in no hurry.
Nothing for it. Mine not to reason why, etc. I got up from the booth, leaving most of my coffee and Danish, walked through the wet ammonia to the exit, and in the small space between the inner and outer doors, alone except for the cigarette machine, I paused and muttered, “They’re here. I’m going out to the car now.”
Outside, I saw by the grille and the length that the car was a Cadillac, and that it was equipped with black side curtains. The driver was a featureless mound inside there; I made out his movements as he reached over and back, opening the rear door on the curb side. No interior light went on as the door opened.
I slid into the blackness within the car, shut the door behind me, and we moved off at once, making a U-turn beneath the octet of traffic lights and heading down Queens Boulevard toward Manhattan.
I sat forward on the edge of the seat, trying unsuccessfully to get some glimpse of my driver’s features — he was bundled up in hat and topcoat, with upturned collar — and finally I said, “Are you anybody I know?”
There was no answer.
“Don’t you talk?”
Apparently not.
Rebuffed, I sat back in the seat, folded my arms, and waited to see what would happen next.
This was the first time I had ever traveled in a car with curtains over all the windows except at the front, and the sensation was an odd one. Except for the jouncing — Cadillac has a fine suspension system, but Queens Boulevard is shameful — it was not like being in motion at all, but instead as though I sat in a small confined dark room and watched a Cinemascope movie of a wide and empty nighttime street. Or, perhaps, since my own motion was apparent, it was more like hurtling down that nighttime street in an open-ended box. Whatever it was like, we were traveling well above the legal speed limit and I considered pointing out to the driver the extra reasons why I didn’t want us stopped by the police, but kept my thoughts to myself.
We traveled Queens Boulevard to the end, crossed the Queensboro Bridge on the outside lane, circled onto FDR Drive southbound, passed beneath the UN Building, exited far downtown at Houston Street (pronounced, by the way, house-ton, not heus-ton like the place in Texas), turned briefly this way and that, and slowed as we entered a block of the most decrepit tenements, ramshackle festering slum properties, amid which rose up an impressive broad vaguely churchlike building in pink brick with a gilded roof. Before this building we slid silently to a stop; now I could see Asiatic lettering across its façade, above its gilded double doors, and on a large sign mounted on the wall before the broad entrance steps.