“Let’s have it, Eddie.”
“Here about eight, nine months ago, Sergi Porkov came up with a new girlfriend a knockout of a blonde named Arleen Farmer. The similarity in initials could mean something.”
“You can bet on it,” I said. “Got an address on her?”
“She was living with Porkov at the Sixty-eighth Street address.”
“Nothing else?”
He sounded aggrieved. “My God, isn’t that enough? You only gave me half an hour.”
I cut him off, got out the list of addresses and phone numbers the girl at Eddie’s had given me, and looked up Porkov’s home phone. I stood there and listened to the buzz come back over the wire. No answer. I let it ring a dozen times before I decided that Anton & Porkov was the place to start.
I hung up and stopped at the cigar counter for cigarettes. Outside, the sun still baked the street. I walked slowly on down to 774, a loft building of battered red brick, four floors, with a hand laundry and a job printer flanking the entrance.
The lobby was narrow and had been swept out shortly before they built the Maginot Line. It smelled like toadstools in the rain, with a binder of soft-coal smoke held over from the previous winter.
A thin flat-faced kid with horn-rimmed glasses and a mop of black hair was propped up on a backless kitchen chair outside a freight elevator, buried to the eyebrows in a battered copy of Marx’s Das Kapital. I brought him out of it by kicking one of the chair legs.
“Fie on you,” I said. “You ought to know that stuffs rank bourgeois deviationism.”
He looked up at me like a pained owl. He couldn’t have been much past seventeen, if that. “I beg your pardon?”
“Now take Trotsky,” I said. “There was a boy you could learn something from. Yes, sir. He had the right slant, that boy.”
The kid’s expression said he was smelling something stronger than toadstools. “Such as?” he snapped coldly.
“Search me. I’m a States Rights man myself.” I indicated the cage. “How’s about cranking this thing up to the fourth floor?”
He closed the book, leaving a finger in to mark his place. “Whom did you wish to see?”
“You figure on announcing me?”
He sighed, registering patience. “No, sir. That’s the offices of Anton & Porkov. They’re closed.”
“This time of day? What will the stockholders say?”
He came close to saying what was on his mind, but changed it at the last moment. “Mr. Ritter hasn’t come back from lunch yet.”
“What about the rest of the help?”
“There is no one else, sir. Only Mr. Ritter.”
“Certainly no way to run a business. Where does Luke have lunch? At Chambord’s?”
“No, sir. At the Eagle Bar & Grill. Around the corner, on Twelfth Avenue.”
I was turning away when he added: “And for your information, sir, Leon Trotsky was a counter-revolutionary, a tool of Wall Street, a reactionary and a jerk. Good afternoon.”
I was halfway to Twelfth Avenue before I thought of an answer to that.
V
There was the smell of beer and steam-table cuisine, but not much light. I stepped inside and waited until my eyes adjusted to the dim interior. Four men were grouped at the bar discussing something with the man in the white apron, and further down the room another man in a crumpled seersucker suit sat at a small round table wolfing down a sandwich. A tired-looking blonde waitress was folding napkins in a booth at the rear of the room. I leaned across the bar and, during a sudden silence, beckoned to the apron. “I’m looking for Mr. Ritter.”
A thumb indicated the man at the table. The silence continued while I walked back there and swung a chair around and sat down across from him. His head snapped up and I was looked at out of a pair of narrow dark eyes set in an uneven face that seemed mostly jaw.
“Mr. Ritter?”
“...What about it?”
I said, “We can’t talk here. Let’s go up to your office.”
He said, “Hah!” and bit into his sandwich and put what was left of it down on the plate and leaned back and chewed slowly, with a kind of circular motion. “What we got to talk about?”
“Not here,” I said again. “You never know who’s listening.”
“I don’t know you. What’s your name?”
“My name wouldn’t mean a thing to you, Mr. Ritter. Let’s say I’m an old friend of Maurice Anton’s.”
His jaws ground to a halt and for a moment he seemed not to be breathing. Then he took a slow careful breath and his hands slid off the table and dropped to his knees. “Maurice, hunh?” he grunted. “Well, well. And how is Maurice these days?”
“He hasn’t been getting around much,” I said. “They buried him four months ago.”
He went on staring at me without expression. The waitress got out of the booth and carried the folded napkins over to the bar. Ritter brought up a hand and picked up the heavy water glass beside his plate and emptied it down his throat. When he set it down again he kept his stubby fingers around it.
“Like I said, mister,” he growled, “I don’t know you. You got something to say, say it here. Otherwise, beat it.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “That’s no way to talk to a customer, Luke. Let’s go up to your office.”
“Customer, hell! You smell like a cop to me!”
There was no point in wasting any more time. I moved my hand and the .45 was in it, down low, the muzzle resting on the edge of the table and pointed at him. “Your office, Ritter,” I said very quietly.
His whole body twitched spasmodically, then seemed to freeze. Behind me the voices went on at the bar. Ritter’s eyes were glued to the gun and his heavy jaw sagged slightly.
“You can stand up now,” I murmured. “Then you walk on out the door and straight to 774. I’ll be riding in your hip pocket all the way; one wrong move and you’ll have bullets for dessert. Get going!”
He wet his lips, still staring at the gun, and started to get up and an arm and a pair of female breasts came between us. That goddamn waitress.
She got as far as “Will that be—?” before Ritter grabbed her with one hand and threw the water glass at my head with the other. I ducked in time, but my gun was useless with the girl between us. Glass broke, somebody cursed, the blonde screamed and I moved.
I bent and grabbed Ritter’s ankle and yanked. He fell straight back, taking the girl with him in a flurry of suntan stockings and white thighs. I tried shoving her aside to ram the .45 against Ritter’s ribs, and he clawed out blindly, trying to hold her, caught the neckline of her apron and ripped it and the brassiere beneath completely away. This being July, she had dressed for comfort; and any lingering doubt over her being a true blonde was gone forever.
The blonde let out a screech that rattled the glassware and tried to get out from under. Somebody plowed into me from behind and I rammed against her, both of us crashing down on Ritter. I lost the .45 when my hand hit a chair leg, and a second later I was buried under an avalanche of humanity.
Fists, feet and knees banged into me from all angles. I managed to turn on my back and draw my knees up, then snapped my feet into the barman’s belly, like the handsome hero of a Western, and threw him halfway across the room into a pinball machine.
It let me get to my feet. Ritter was running for the door, the blonde was trying to crawl under a table, giving me a view of her I would never forget, and facing me were the four guys I had first seen at the bar.
No sound but heavy breathing. The screen door banged behind Ritter. The barman began slowly to untangle himself from the ruins of the pinball machine, like a fly pulling loose from a sheet of Tanglefoot.