'Who's writing your scripts these days, Karl? No jail for me.'
'It makes sense,' McLaren argued.
'From your point of view, maybe. Not from mine. I'm not about to become the cheese in your trap. Get one of your own men.'
'We haven't time to work someone in from the outside,' Erikson said patiently. 'You're already inside, or almost.'
'That's right,' McLaren chimed in. 'And we'd back you up all the way.'
'From a thousand yards in the rear. What help would you be when the bullets really start flying?'
But they wouldn't let it alone.
We went round and round for a good half hour. Both men pressed me insistently to take on the job. 'Why are you two so interested in intercepting a dope shipment?' I asked when I couldn't think of anything else to ask. 'Why not let the narcotics boys take over?'
'I've got a hunch it isn't drugs,' Erikson replied.
'What else could it be?'
'How many things can a trailer truck carry? It could be anything.'
And we went at it again.
I kept saying no, but not as emphatically. For one thing, I kept thinking of the envelopes of money I'd seen Bayak remove from his safe. 'Suppose I said yes and we knocked the guy off on whatever job he's planning?' I said finally. 'What's in it for me?'
Erikson and McLaren looked at each other. 'The government is hardly in a position to pay-' Erikson began.
'Not the government,' I cut him off. I explained about the cash in the Turk's safe. 'He's got a bunch of it there. For the sake of argument, suppose we land this fish. Could I get Hazel's seventy-five thousand out of his safe?'
There was a moment's silence.
'I could say yes,' Erikson said finally, 'but it might not mean anything. This man has one thing going for him that I can't touch. As a UN member, he has diplomatic immunity. He has only to invoke it to any official, even as lowly as a police officer on the street, and we can't lay a finger on him even though we've caught him in the act of hijacking the truck.'
'Let me worry about the diplomatic immunity,' I suggested. 'I want that seventy-five thousand back.'
'I'll go for it,' Erikson said.
'Then put it in writing. I found out when I was with you in Cuba that you straight arrows take the shortsighted attitude that all recovered cash in an operation is government money.'
Erikson sat down at his desk and began to write. 'Minus the ten thousand Bayak just paid you for the envelope we gave you to return to him,' he said, looking up at me.
'Man, you drive a hard bargain,' I complained. 'Where the hell do you think you got that envelope in the first place?'
It didn't faze him a bit. I read over his shoulder as he resumed writing. 'This-ah-promissory note isn't worth a thing if we don't short-circuit Bayak,' he said as he signed his name. 'And not then either, if we can't get into the safe.'
'Don't worry about getting into the safe.' I looked at McLaren. 'If I ever ask you on the phone to bring a tool kit, I'll mean the one you had here earlier tonight.'
Erikson was rereading what he had written. 'What are you going to do with this?'
'Mail it. To Hazel.'
He raised an eyebrow. 'To Hazel?'
'Correct. You might stand me off afterward, but you'll pay hell trying to stand her off.'
Erikson found an envelope in his desk and gave it to me. McLaren handed me a stamp. 'You can drop it in the mail chute down the hall before we get going,' McLaren suggested.
'I'll find my own mailbox, thanks. You boys can pull entirely too many strings. And where is it that we're going?'
'To find you a nice comfortable jail.'
We all left the office together after McLaren put in a busy half hour on the telephone, packaging a deal. It included a detention cell for me plus a phony yellow sheet with a background that added up to exactly what the Turk should be looking for in me: mobster, heist artist, and suspected killer.
So I found myself listening to a sound I'd sworn thirteen years before never to listen to again, the clanging shut of a steel door behind me. I'd been in prison once in the interim, but more dead than alive after the automobile gas-tank explosion which necessitated rebuilding my face. And once I had the new face, I hadn't lingered in the prison hospital. There were still a few people around who would never forget the manner of my going.
I called Talia at her apartment before Erikson and McLaren put me into the cell. 'Say, I'm at the Fifty- seventh-street precinct,' I began. 'It's just a harassment; they got nothing on me, but I need bail money. Call your boss and get me out of here, will you?'
I had wakened her from sleep but Talia seemed alert enough. 'What's the charge?'
'Suspicion of being near the scene of a crime. The equivalent of spitting on the sidewalk.'
'Why don't you call your lawyer? Or make bond from the money you were paid tonight?'
'I don't spend money when I can use someone else's, sweetheart. I'm testing to see if your boss was serious about that job offer.'
'I see. I'll call him.'
'You do that.' I hung up the phone.
'Very good,' Erikson said. 'That should draw him into our orbit if he's as tightly pressed for time as I think. I'll stay outside here and play detective for Talia when she shows up. That way I can feed her a few gory details about your fictional past while I give her the old what's-a-nice- girl-like — you- doing- springing- a- hood-like-this routine.'
The march of progress had overlooked detention cells. They still contained an iron cot surrounded by steel bars and a cotton blanket. I took off my shoes and stretched out on the cot. It reminded me a little too strongly of my first such experience at the age of seventeen. I'd been picked up by a small-town cop. I had nothing to do with what they were questioning me about, but the cop had an ego to feed. He came into the cell to roust me, and I wound up slamming him on the nose with the heel of my removed shoe. They hospitalized me after he finished with me. It took me six months to get the bastard afterward. They couldn't pin it on me, but my family got so much static from the police that I left town. I'd never been back. Sure, I was a hardheaded kid, used to doing things my way, not someone else's, but it didn't have to happen that way.
Iron cot notwithstanding, I dozed off. The clinking of the turnkey's brass ring on the metal of the cell door awakened me. 'Someone to see you at the desk,' he informed me.
Talia was waiting. The formalities had been complied with, and my money, watch, ring, and wallet were handed over to me. 'We'll be watching you, Drake,' the desk sergeant said in a sneering tone as Talia and I prepared to leave. I gave him the finger, and he started to rise from behind his desk, then sank back as if he'd thought better of it.
'It's not clever to antagonize the police,' Talia said disapprovingly as we went outside to a car parked at the curb. Abdel was at the wheel. Two slugs in his ugly carcass seemed to be all in the day's work to him. It certainly hadn't slowed him from his appointed rounds.
'They antagonize me, don't they?' I replied to Talia's remark.
'In my country you would be bastinadoed for such insolence,' she continued as the car pulled away from the curb. 'You wouldn't be able to walk for ten days whether you were guilty of the charge or not.'
'Forget it. Where are we going?'
'To Iskir's.'
There was no further conversation the rest of the way. Abdel parked the car in a garage under the apartment building and accompanied us to the elevator that carried us to the penthouse. Nothing seemed changed despite the lapse of time except that Iskir Bayak met us at the elevator doors floridly attired in a maroon silk dressing gown and gold-colored slippers with turned-up toes. 'Come in, come in,' he said in his high, squeaky voice. His grossly obese
