“I'm also gonna tuck it in the sheets, ma. I need a little shut-eye, an' it'll take Amy half a day to straighten out my place.”
She slid from his lap and led the way into the bedroom. She turned down the bed while Johnny stood in the middle of the floor and shed clothes like a snake sheds skin. Sally sighed and picked up after him. He sat on the edge of the bed and tested the mobility of his corset. It wasn't too bad, he decided.
Sally sat down beside him, and he slipped an arm around her. “Johnny, you're not going to get into trouble over the man who searched you room, are you?”
“Divil a bit of it, ma. He's gonna get in trouble.” He gave her a one-armed hug.
“You know what I-mean!” she said breathlessly as her ribs contracted.
He was silent. He could have sworn he'd had only one use for the bed in his mind when he'd come in here, but the feel of Sally against him was rapidly changing his perspective.
She turned her head inquiringly at the more purposeful pressure of his arm. She saw his eyes. “Stop it!” she scolded lightly. “You know you don't feel-”
“The hell I don't. Shuck yourself on in here.” She stood up obediently, but her eyes remained doubtful. She paused with the pajama top half off. “You're sure that you feel like it?”
“It's only my ribs that're taped, ma.” He watched as she disposed of the pajamas and plumped herself down alongside him. “Get those bony knees out of the way.” “They're not bony,” she said placidly. “They're slender.” “So's a picket fence.” For a very short time he could hear Sally's breathing. After that the sound of his own filled his ears.
Johnny stood in warm noonday sunlight outside the Empire Freight Forwarding Corporation's stout wire fence. It was summer sure enough today, and he was not sure that he approved. He felt sluggish. He tried to flex mental muscles and gear himself up for the meeting with Stitt and its explosive possibilities. Based on Stitt's reaction the last time Johnny had been here, sluggishness was not a condition he could afford.
He set himself in motion finally and started up the narrow cement walk. He headed this time directly for the door marked Office. His first quick look around inside disclosed no one but the plain little receptionist at her desk. “I'd like to see-” Johnny began, but he never got to complete it.
The receptionist turned in her chair as a door at the rear of the office flew open. Carrying a huge wooden bucket in both hands, Max Stitt burst into view. There was no other word to describe it, Johnny thought. At a walk so rapid it was almost a run, the erect-looking man advanced to the desk nearest the front of the office and set down his bucket. “Helen!” It was like a bugle's blare, although the girl was less than a dozen feet away. The voice pulsed with excitement. “Come and have a drink!” The girl rose to her feet with an uncertain look outside the railing. Following the direction of her gaze, Stitt looked and saw Johnny. “Killain!” he trumpeted. “Come in and have a drink!”
Johnny stared. The usually dead-white, rigidly controlled features were flushed and animated. Each individual hair in the graying crew-cut seemed to bristle spikily. Max Stitt wore a business suit, a white shirt and a tie, the tie badly askew. A second before Stitt removed a champagne magnum from his bucket, Johnny realized suddenly that the man was half-seas over.
“Come in, come in!” Stitt urged Johnny. He poured liberally into a glass he dredged up from the depths of the ice-packed bucket and handed it to the receptionist, who accepted it with an embarrassed smile. “Drink up, Helen,” he told the girl. “Take the rest of the day off. Have a good dinner on me. Run the ticket through petty cash in the morning.” He disregarded the girl's murmured thanks to walk over and unlatch the gate in the wooden railing. “Come in,” he repeated. He saw Johnny's face. “That affair of last night,” he said dismissingly. “Send me the bill.”
“I brought you the bill, Stitt.”
For a second, at Johnny's tone, the cold eyes congealed and the features hardened to a rigid austerity. Just for a second, and then before Johnny's unbelieving eyes the Max Stitt he thought he knew was gone again. “Any other day of my life, Killain, I would accommodate you. I would accommodate you gladly. Any day prior to today. At ten o'clock this morning I became a half-owner of the business here. It is an event in a man's life. At ten o'clock this morning I was done with affairs such as that of last night.” He held up the magnum. “You will join me?”
“Too early for bubbly,” Johnny said cautiously. “You got any schnapps?”
“I do have schnapps.” Stitt walked to a green filing cabinet in a corner and removed a dark, squat bottle. He half filled a water glass he removed from a desk. He splashed champagne into a glass he took from the bucket, handed Johnny the water glass and raised his own aloft. “To ten o'clock this morning,” he toasted, and downed his champagne.
“Mr. Stitt-” the receptionist put in timidly from the side. “If you really don't need me any more today-”
“Run along,” he told her. “Draw the curtain on the door. I've packed off the warehouse crew, too. Anyone coming in that door this afternoon can have a drink, nothing else. Tomorrow business as usual, Helen.”
After pulling down the yellow curtain on the front door, the girl went out a door in the back, her bag under her arm. Max Stitt seated himself behind a desk, loosened his collar and produced a box of cigars, which he offered to Johnny. He elevated his feet to the top of the desk, slid down on his spine, stripped the cellophane from a cigar and sighed profoundly in the cloud of smoke from its lighted tip. “I have become legitimized,” Max Stitt proclaimed solemnly to Johnny. “I have no further interest in the disposition of Hegel's piece. I'm done with all that. In this life a man steals what he must to set himself up legitimately. After that a wise man steals only from the tax people.”
“I doubt that Dechant would have agreed with you.” Johnny was curious to see how far Stitt's mellow mood would take him.
“Claude Dechant was a fool,” Stitt said flatly. “To be more specific, a fool over women. They bled him. A pipeline to Fort Knox couldn't have kept him going. He lacked my perspective.” The corners of his mouth lifted around his cigar. “To me, women are an irritation ninety-eight per cent of the time. The other two per cent of the time they are merely slightly less of an irritation. I can't stand their gabble, or their grasping.”
Johnny took a swallow of the pungent, colorless liquor in his glass. “You knew Dechant a long time,” Johnny suggested.
Max Stitt nodded. “We were from Colmar. We'd never worked together, but we knew each other. In 'forty he went with the French, I with the Germans. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw him in an Italian lieutenant's uniform in a cantina in Florence in August of 'forty-four. Right away, when he saw me, he had a plan. Claude always thought big, give the devil his due. I was a captain in charge of two demolition squads. The one bridge out of six left standing in the general retreat from Florence had not been my assignment.” The natural arrogance was back in Stitt's voice, Johnny noted. “Claude was attached to a Canadian colonel as interpreter and liaison, and, of course, in that Italian uniform a spy. It would have been amusing to have gotten him hung, but I listened to Mm.”
Stitt puffed lengthily on his cigar. “He had detailed maps of three of the larger deposits of medieval and modern art that had been moved in around the city from all over Italy. There were over thirty of them altogether, I'm told. I could get trucks. It looked easy, but the Allied advance overran us. It turned out, too, that other people had the same idea we did. Some stuff was loaded and rushed off God knows where. It was never seen again. We were lucky finally to get out with a whole skin. It came down finally to Claude burying a few pieces himself. It took him three years to get back to get them. I was over here by that time. The pickings looked a little better on this side. I hooked on with Arends. He needed someone with my organizing ability who knew the back alleys of Europe like I did.” Max Stitt shrugged.
Johnny prompted him. “And at ten o'clock this morning-”
“I listened to the lawyer read Arends' will. He'd never paid me what the job I was doing for him was worth, but we had an agreement in writing that, if anything happened to him, half of this was mine. I couldn't be sure of him, though. He could have added a codicil to his will at any time. I had to hope he'd figure finally that his widow would be better off with me running the business, and that's the way-it went. I signed a contract with her at the lawyer's to continue as general manager at an increase, with half the profits.” He straightened up in his chair, refilled his champagne glass and raised it to Johnny. “To the end of the old road. No hard feelings. You'll have trouble disposing of that piece. Not many buyers for a thing like that. That's why Claude was a good man to have around: he had contacts.”
“With you comin' into a windfall like that, you're not afraid of the police tryin' to pin the tail on you for Arends?”
“They might think I hired it. They know I didn't do it.” Max Stitt looked down at his glass. “Arends wasn't
