You got more scruples maybe, but we alike. Except one thing. You never been black. That’s something I know that you won’t ever know.”
“So you do think about it. How is it?”
“I used to think about it, when I had to. I don’t have to no more. Now I ain’t nigger any more than you honkie. Now I drink the wine and screw the broads and take the money and nobody shoves me. Now I just play all the time. And the games I play nobody can play as good.” He drank some more champagne, his movements clean and sure and delicate. He was eating with no shirt on and the overhead light made the planes of muscle cast fluid and intricate highlights on the black skin. He put the champagne glass back on the table, cut another slice of salmon and stopped with the portion halfway to his mouth. He looked at me again and his face opened into a brilliant, oddly mirthless grin. “ ‘Cept maybe you, babe,” he said. “Yeah,” I said, “but the game’s not the same.” Hawk shrugged. “Same game, different rules.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I never been sure you had any rules.”
“You know better. I just got fewer than you. And I ain’t softhearted. But you know, I say I gonna do something I do it. It gets done. I hire on for something, I stay hired. I do what I take the bread for.”
“I remember a time you didn’t stay hired for King Powers.”
“That’s different,” Hawk said. “King Powers is a douche bag. He got no rules, he don’t count. I mean you, or Henry Cimoli. I tell you something, you can put it in the bank.”
“Yeah. That’s so,” I said. “Who else?” Hawk had drunk a lot of Taittinger and I had drunk a lot of Amstel. “Who else what?”
“Who else can trust you?”
“Quirk,” Hawk said. “Martin Quirk,” I said. “Detective Lieutenant Martin Quirk?”
“Yeah.”
“Quirk wants to put you in the joint.”
“Sure he does,” Hawk said. “But he knows how a man acts. He knows how to treat a man.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Anyone else?”
“That’s enough. You, Henry, Quirk. That’s more than a lot of people ever know.”
“I don’t guess Henry will give you trouble,” I said. “But Quirk or I may shoot you someday.” Hawk finished his salmon and turned the big bright grin at me again. “If you can, man. If you can.” Hawk pushed the plate away, and stood up. “Got something to show you,” he said. I sipped at my beer while he went to the closet and brought out something that looked like a cross between a shoulder holster and a backpack. He slipped his arms through the loops and stepped back from the closet. “What do you think?” The rig was a shoulder holster for a sawed-off shotgun. The straps went around each shoulder and the gun hung, butt down along his spine. “Watch this,” he said. He slipped his coat on over his naked skin. The coat covered the gun entirely. Unless you were looking you didn’t even see a bulge. With his right hand he reached behind him under the skirt of his suit jacket, gave a brief twisting movement and brought the shotgun out. “Can you dig it?”
“Lemme see,” I said. And Hawk put the shotgun in my hand. It was an Ithaca double-barreled 12 gauge. The stock had been cut off and both barrels were cut back. The whole thing was no more than eighteen inches long. “Do a lot more damage than a target pistol,” I said. “And it’s no problem. Just go buy a shotgun and cut it down. If we have to go to another country I ditch this and buy a new one where we going. Take me an hour maybe to modify the mother.”
“Got a hack saw?” Hawk nodded. “And a couple of C clamps. That’s all I need.”
“Not bad,” I said. “What you going to do next, modify an Atlas missile and walk around with it tucked in your sock?”
“No harm,” Hawk said, “to fire power.” The next morning I got up early and went up and burgled Kathie’s apartment while she was at the laundromat. I was neat about it, but sloppy enough to let her know someone had been there. I wasn’t looking for anything, I just wanted her to know someone had been there. I was in and out in about five minutes. When she came back I was leaning in the doorway of the next apartment house wearing sunglasses. As she passed I turned away so she wouldn’t see my face. I wanted her to spot me but I didn’t want to overact.
I used to know a guy named Shelley Walden when I was with the cops who would get spotted tailing a guy through a rock concert. I never knew why he was so bad at it. He had a small, innocuous look about him and he wasn’t clumsy, but he couldn’t keep out of sight. I tried to run this stakeout like Shelley would have. If she spotted me when she went by she didn’t let on. I knew Hawk was somewhere behind her but I didn’t see him. When she went into her apartment I walked casually across the street and leaned on a lamppost and took out a newspaper and started to read it. That would have been Shelley’s style. The old Bogart movies where he pulls back the curtain and there’s a guy under a lamppost reading a newspaper.
I figured she’d see that someone had been rummaging in her apartment and that would get her nervous. It did. About two minutes after she went in, I saw her looking out her window. I was looking surreptitiously over my newspaper and for a moment our eyes met. I looked back down at the newspaper. She knew I was there. She should recognize me. It was sunny and I wasn’t wearing my Irish walking hat. No mistaking me for Rex Harrison. She had reason to be nervous about being spotted. She had phony passports and stolen guns in her bedroom. That would be enough to bust her. But I wanted them all. She was the string and they were the balloon. If I cut her off I lost the balloon. She was all the handle I had. What she should have done was sit tight, but she didn’t know that. She would either call out the shooters again, or she’d run. She sat in her apartment and looked at me looking at her for nearly four hours, and then she ran. Hawk had been right. The shooters must be getting wary of me. Or maybe I’d cleaned them out. Maybe all the shooters the organization had had been used up, except the one guy that got away. I wasn’t dealing here with the KGB. Liberty’s resources were probably limited. She came out of her apartment at about two in the afternoon. She was wearing a tan safari jacket and matching pants and carrying a very large shoulder bag. The same one she’d had at the zoo. She was careful not to pay me any attention as she went past me on Cleveland and headed up Goodge Street toward Bloomsbury.
For a half hour it was hare and hounds with Kathie dekeing and diving the side streets of Bloomsbury with me behind her and Hawk behind me. At every turn I kept before me the clear image of Shelley Walden. When in doubt I asked myself, “What would Shelley, do?” Everywhere she went, she saw me behind her. Only once in all of this did I catch sight of Hawk. He was in Levis and a corduroy sport coat, surprisingly innocuous, on the opposite side of the street going the other way. I let her lose me in the Russell Square Underground. She got on and I got on. At the last minute she got off and I let her go. As the train pulled out she was heading back out of the station and, behind her, Hawk, with his hands in his hip pockets and the faint bulge of the shotgun along his spine.
