thrust through his belt, looked down at him inquiringly from the cab of a rubber-tired fork-lift truck stacking crates against a wall. Johnny could see, stenciled on the crates in bold black, the letters CB A1448 on 10, and directly beneath it via Akama Maru, Yokohama, Japan. In the background a series of crashes and bangs added to the dissonant symphony of noise. The volume of sound was unbelievable.
“I'm lookin' for Max.” Johnny had to yell it twice, and even thought the man on the truck must be reading his lips.
“Office, I think,” the man shouted down above the bedlam, and reached for a lever to elevate the crate checked on the lift at Johnny's entrance.
Johnny raised an arm to stay him. “Jack around?”
“Mr. Arends? He was in earlier,” the man roared down powerfully. “If the blue Caddie's still in the parkin' lot, he's around somewheres.”
“Thanks,” Johnny mouthed, not expecting to be heard. He backed to the door. On the floor a crate with three broken slats was marked Amsterdam, Netherlands, and against the other wall a neat pile of heavy-looking boxes were labeled Oberon, Suisse. It figured, Johnny thought as he closed the door. Dechant was an importer. Somebody had to get the stuff over here for him.
The parking lot disclosed the tail fins of a blue Cadillac projecting six feet beyond everything else. Johnny looked at it on his way to the door marked office. He hadn't wanted to ask Gloria Philips a direct question. There were a lot of “Jacks” in the world, perhaps several in this building, but a Jack Arends with a big blue Cadillac looked promising.
Inside, Johnny looked from a mousy receptionist behind a low wooden railing to a man half hidden by an old- fashioned roll-top desk. “I'd like to see Max Stitt, miss,” he told the girl.
“It may take a few moments,” she said pleasantly. “I'll see if I can locate him for you.” She flipped a switch on the intercom on her desk. She tried a station, and another, and another. As her voice continued patiently to page Max Stitt the man behind the desk first raised his head, then pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. He waddled toward Johnny, hand extended. “Never like to keep a potential customer waiting,” he said jovially. “Anything I can do for you until Helen finds Max? I'm Jack Arends,” he added as an afterthought. “Max lets me sign a few papers around here.” He chuckled deeply.
Arends was short and almost grossly fat. He wasn't young, but the overlarge head surmounting the squat body was capped with surprisingly youthful dark hair. His nose and mouth would have been grotesque on a face less strong, Johnny felt. The lips were unattractively thick, but creased in a genial grin. Above the blob of a body his huge head suggested a nervous lion.
“Killain,” Johnny said, taking the hand briefly. “Dechant sent me over.”
Jack Arends' geniality vanished as though it had never been. “Where you gettin' your messages from these days?” he growled.
“Before he did the samurai bit,” Johnny explained. “He said if anything happened I should look up Stitt.”
“Yeah?” The fat man pulled at a pendulous lower lip. “Why?” His shrewd little eyes, embedded in puffy rolls of fat, were warily apprehensive.
“I'll tell that to Stitt. It's not about the symbol markings.”
Jack Arends appeared to swell internally. “Who the hell are you? Does every sonofabitch in this town know my business?” He rushed right on without waiting for a reply. “Let me tell you something, Mr. Whatever-your-name- is, I'll bust-” He whirled on short legs at the sound of a closing door to confront an alert-looking, ramrod-straight man walking toward them. “Max!” Jack Arends' voice soared nearly to a screech. “Did you have some kind of a deal going with Dechant? Just because you grew up in the same town with that thief-”
“What the hell are you yapping about, Jack?” A thinly veiled note of contempt edged Max Stitt's hard tone. He was tall and solidly lean, with a pale face and a jutting hawk's nose beneath a pepper-and-salt crewcut. Johnny judged him to be about forty-five. His eyes were almost completely colorless, making them the coldest-looking Johnny had ever seen. Stitt was wearing a short leather jacket with a pushed-back, fleece-lined hood, heavy stagged-top trousers and bronze-toecapped boots.
The fat man waved his hands wildly in the air. “Don't you get gay with me, Max. This guy comes looking for you because Dechant sent him. It's not about the symbol markings, he says. How in the goddam hell does he know about the symbol markings? Are we running ads in the papers? And what were you and Dechant-”
“Will you dry up and blow away, Arends?” Max Stitt cut in. “You make me sick.”
“I make you sick!” The fat man's voice rose shrilly. “Don't you talk like that to me! You may run this business, but I own it, and don't you forget it!”
“Maybe you'd like to try running it yourself?” Stitt's cold eyes shifted from the momentarily silenced Arends to Johnny. “What's your story?”
The question revived Arends. “I already told you his story!” In his anger the fat man bounced up and down on his toes. “If you think I'm holding still for-”
“Shut your mouth, Jack,” Max Stitt said forcefully. “Let's go inside.” He turned and walked to a door in the rear of the office. Johnny followed promptly. He noticed that Jack Arends was more hesitant, although the fat man was still sputtering.
The room beyond the door was small and cold and boxlike, illuminated by a single overhead bulb. The floor was springily latticed for drainage, and higher than the office level they'd just left. It was a storage room, not meat-icebox-cold, but chilly enough.
“Throw that bar over on the door,” Stitt said to Arends as the fat man stepped inside.
“Now look, Max-” Arends began uneasily, but followed instructions. The tall man's strange eyes brushed Arends off as something inconsequential and returned to Johnny. Stitt slid easily from the leather jacket, reached in his hip pocket for a heavy pair of gloves and jerked them on. His movements were briskly efficient.
“Arends is getting as fat in the head as he is in the ass,” he said tonelessly to Johnny. “Claude Dechant never sent you anywhere. Jack doesn't know blackmail when he sees it any more. I'm not going to ask you anything and have you lie to me, friend. In about eight minutes you'll tell me what you know about Claude Dechant, mismarked symbols and anything else I ask you.” He moved away from the wall, and in the harsh glare of the light Johnny appraised the shoulders that were broader than he would have expected and the attitude that was something more than cold-bloodedly professional. Max Stitt looked and sounded like a man who planned to enjoy himself.
“Let-let me out of here!” Jack Arends bleated from behind Johnny. Neither Stitt nor Johnny looked at him. Johnny inched away from the door at his back, still not sure. Stitt's reaction, as well as the man himself, had surprised him.
Stitt made up his mind for him in a hurry. The tall man charged, hopped into the air from the springy flooring like a lumberjack from a birling log and slashed a heavy boot at Johnny's groin. Instinctively Johnny avoided the boot, but not the gloved left hand that thudded solidly into his side. Cat-quick, Max Stitt's right hand ripped at Johnny's jacket and sport shirt, and buttons flew in all directions. The tall man laughed derisively.
“You'll eat those,” Johnny promised him grimly, and waded in. A right hand bruised his forehead, a left stung the back of his neck in a vicious rabbit punch, another left knocked him a step off stride. Max Stitt's hands were lightning fast. In close finally, Johnny barely diverted a jerked-up knee outside his own thigh as he smashed with his left hand at the lithe, hard body. He moved it backward, but the left caught him again, on the bridge of the nose. He grunted, and his eyes watered. The right stung his cheekbone.
Johnny lowered his head angrily and bulled toward the toe-dancing Stitt, crowding the tall man cornerward although a ripping punch savaged his right ear. “You'll- carry boot marks-for a month-when I'm finished with you,” Stitt panted as he drove both hands to the body. As though to punctuate the remark, a bronze-capped boot crashed against Johnny's right shin.
Red spots swirled before Johnny's eyes. Heedless of everything, he rushed Stitt to the wall. Furiously he closed down his straining hands on the muscular figure, lifted it and slammed it heavily into the wall three times without releasing his grip. The third time Stitt came off the wall limply, head lolling. Johnny relaxed his hold, and Stitt, by sheer strength, raised himself in Johnny's arms and drove his clasped hands down upon the back of Johnny's neck. Anything less than that twenty-and-a-half inch expanse might not have weathered it. Ragingly, Johnny heaved Stitt aloft and slammed him floorward. He dropped on him heavily and pinned the still struggling man with his weight.
“Now, damn you-” Johnny looked over his shoulder to locate the babbling sounds coming from Jack Arends. “Pick up-those buttons,” he ordered. “All of 'em.” He had to repeat it between harsh breaths before he got through
