” Ambridge wiped bis palm across his forehead, and it came away wet. He looked at his wet hand with a sort of dull surprise. “I’m a coward. I’m nothing but a coward.”
Handy took pity on him. “The information didn’t come from you. It’ll never get back to your boss.”
“What good am I?” Ambridge asked himself.
It was dangerous. They’d had to push him, but there was always the chance with somebody like Ambridge, a bluffer, that you’d push him too hard and he’d be forced to look at himself and see the truth. You take a coward, and you force him to look at himself and see that he isa coward, he’s liable all of a sudden to not give a damn any more, to get fatalistic and despairing. If he gets to that point, all of a sudden nothing will work on him any more, no threats, no punishment. He’ll just sit there and take it, thinking he deserves it anyway, thinking he’s dead anyway so what difference does it make?
Ambridge was on the edge of that, and Parker could see it. A few more seconds, and Ambridge would be unreachable. Parker reached out and slapped him across the face, open-handed, a contemptuous slap, and said with scorn, “Hurry it up, punk. You’re wasting my time.”
It was enough. The slap didn’t hurt, but it stung. So did the words, and the tone behind them. It was enough to snap Ambridge out of his introspection. He threw up the old defences again, came back with the bluff as strong as ever. He glared at Parker and started up out of the chair. Parker and Handy had to work a little to get him to sit down again, then Parker said, “You started to give us the address. Now give.”
It was the old Ambridge who answered. “You think it makes any difference? You think you can just walk in and take him? You think he’s alone? You go after him and you’re both dead.”
“Let us worry about that.”
“You’ll worry about it. There’s a house in Bethesda, on Bradley Boulevard. Menlo’s got the borrow of it from the Outfit till the job’s done. We were supposed to call him there after we found out what your partner was up to. Go on out there, get your heads blown off. I only wish I could be there to watch.”
They had him write the address down, and then they tied him and left him in a closet. They never did remember to go back.
2
ON THAT block was a row of two-family houses, built before the war. The one they wanted was on the corner. What the Outfit used it for normally they didn’t know, but right now Menlo was living in the downstairs flat, and the upstairs flat, according to Ambridge, was empty.
They’d stopped off on the way to get rid of the truck and pick up their own car, where Handy had left it earlier in the evening. The car was a Pontiac, two years old. It was hot, but not on the East coast, and the papers on it were a good imitation of the real thing.
Handy was driving, and a block from the address he took his foot off the accelerator. The car slowed. There were tail-lights ahead. A car was double-parked in front of the house they wanted, lights on and motor running.
“Go on past,” Parker said. “Then around the block.”
Parker looked the car over on the way by. It was a black Continental. The man at the wheel wore a chauffeur’s cap and was reading the Star.The car carried New York plates, and they started DPL. Diplomat. Beyond the car was the house, the ground floor all lit up, the upper story dark.
It was almost three o’clock in the morning. The Continental out front with diplomat plates at three in the morning wasn’t a good sign. Parker said, “Hurry around the block. Park on the cross street.”
“I’m ahead of you,” Handy answered. “What did that guy say Manlo was? A defector?”
“Yeah.”
They left the Pontiac half a block from Bradley, on the side street that flanked the house they wanted. This way they could get to the back door without tipping the chauffeur in the Continental.
There was a white picket fence separating the back yard from the sidewalk, with a white picket gate. The gate opened with no trouble and no squeaking, and they went across the slate walk to the stoop and up on to the back porch. The kitchen door stood wide open, and the storm door was closed but not locked. The kitchen was empty, but casting bright, wide swatches of light out through the window and doorway.
Handy’s touch with doors was the lightest. The storm door never made a sound. They stood on linoleum with a black-and-white diamond design, and listened. The refrigerator hummed, and on a different note the circular fluorescent light in the ceiling also hummed. The rest of the house was silent. Bright and silent.
An open door to the right led to the bedroom, but with no bed in it. The ceiling light was on two seventy-five- watt-bulbs unshielded and in the glare the bedroom was a bleak cubicle full of unmarked cardboard cartons, stacked along the walls. The Venetian blinds were down across both windows.
A hall led off the kitchen. Midway along it was a brace of doorways facing each other. The one on the left opened on to the bathroom, gleaming with white tile and white porcelain and white enamel, with a brightly burning white fluorescent tube over the mirror above the sink. The doorway on the right led to another bedroom, this one containing a bed. This too was garishly lit, and looked like a whore’s crib. A double bed dominated the room, covered by a cheap tan spread, and without pillows. A scarred dresser stood on the opposite wall, and the bed was flanked on one side by a black kitchen chair and on the other by a small wooden table containing nothing but a chipped ashtray.
At the end of the hall was a dining-room, lit by a rococo ceiling fixture of rose-tinted-glass. The cream-and-tan wallpaper was a faded pattern of ivy and Grecian columns. Centred beneath the light was a poker table, round and covered with green felt, with eight wells around the outer edge for the player’s money and drinks. Eight chairs crouched around the table, on a faded Oriental rug. There was no other furniture in the room.
The third bedroom, off the dining-room, was apparently the one Menlo was using, for there was clothing draped on the chair, hairbrush and cuff-links and other things on the dresser, and an expensive-looking alarm clock on the night table.
A wide archway led from dining-room to living-room, which was furnished in an old-fashioned way, in dark colours and heavy overstuffed furniture.
Every light in the house was on, and the Continental still waited out front, though all the rooms were
