really are desperate, aren’t you?”
Griffith didn’t know what it was Renard had seen or supposed, but he was quick enough to take advantage of it. “Yes,” he said. “I need the money.”
Renard seemed to consider. Resting a forearm on the brick railing, he mused out at the park. Finally, still looking out that way, he said, “You could borrow it, of course.”
“I’ve borrowed everything I could. There’s nobody left to loan to me.”Renard cocked an eye at him. “Well, that isn’t precisely true,” he said.
Griffith shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I do know some people who would loan to you. But they’re somewhat dangerous to deal with.”
“Who?”
Renard looked out at the park again, frowning slightly. “Well, I don’t quite know what to call them. I suppose they’re connected with the Mafia somehow.”
“They loan money?”
“Yes. All you want.”
Griffith wasn’t following. He knew there was something that hadn’t yet been said, but he didn’t know what it was. He said, “What’s the hook? What’s the problem?”
“Their interest,” Renard said thoughtfully. He gave Griffith a frank look and said, “They charge two percent a month.”
“My God!”
Renard nodded judiciously. “Yes, that is too steep,” he said. “Forget it.”
“No, wait.” Griffith was thinking hard; two percent of seventy thousand dollars was fourteen hundred dollars. One month was all he’d need the money for. Fourteen hundred dollars wasn’t a terrible price to pay. “I could do it,” he said. “I have to do it.”
Renard studied him again. “Are you sure?”
“I don’t have any choice.”
“You want me to call them.”
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s up to you, of course.”
Griffith said nothing. Renard considered him for a few seconds more, then sighed and hoisted himself to his feet. “I’ll be a few minutes,” he said. “Enjoy the view.”
Griffith didn’t enjoy anything. He stood there on the terrace, breathing as though he’d run up the twelve floors from the street. He stared out at the park, but didn’t really see it; all he saw was the numbers he owed, the numbers he needed, the numbers he was surrounded by.
When Renard came back, he had a piece of paper with him. He also had his normal style back, without that moment of seeming gentleness and concern. “You go on and see these people,” he said. “They’re waiting for you.”
For some reason, it was important to Griffith that he not open the paper and read what it said in Renard’s presence. He took it, stuffed it away in his trouser pocket as though it had no particular importance, and said, “Then I’ll let you know when I have the paintings.”
“Yes, you do that,” Renard said, and glanced toward his plants.
“I’ll let myself out.”
“Mm-hm.”
Griffith felt a sudden moment of rage, so strong that he actually did see red at the corners of his vision. Without another word, he turned away, stumbled slightly on the threshold going into the apartment, and hurried through the soothing rooms and out.
He was down on the street before he took out the paper again and read what was written on it, in Renard’s unnecessarily curlicued hand: “Boro Hall Realty, 299 Atlantic Ave. Bklyn.”
Brooklyn. Griffith was disgusted, and so was the cabdriver he got. “That’s wonderful,” the driver said, and slapped down his meter bar as though he’d like to thump Griffith down through the pavement into the ground.
It was a silent miserable nerve-racking half-hour trip, the cabby trying to make time through heavy traffic, Griffith tense and nervous anyway at the idea of whom he was to be borrowing money from. And at the end of the trip, it was almost anticlimactic to have Boro Hall Realty be a flyblown shabby little storefront outfit on a grubby fourth-rate block. Was this where Griffith would be given seventy thousand dollars, in this hole-in-the-wall with the ads for cheap apartments Scotch-taped to its dusty windows?
Half afraid this whole trip was a cruel joke on Renard’s part, Griffith paid the driver and went inside, where a heavy-set middle-aged woman with a bust you could have set a checkerboard on gave him a pseudo-bright look and said, “May I help you?”
Hesitantly, his mind full of the practical-joke idea, he said, “My name is Leon Griffith. I believe I’m supposed to see somebody here?” And he couldn’t help making it a question at the very end.
But she said, “Oh, yes, we’ve been expecting you. Mr. Smith will see you. Through that door there.”
He went past half a dozen empty scarred desks to the door at the rear of the room, and through it into a small crowded seedy office reeking with the aura of poverty. The thin fiftyish man at the desk had the look of a failed lawyer: shiny suit, wrinkled tie, dandruff on his shoulders, watery eyes behind bent-rimmed glasses. And yet, when he glanced over at Griffith in the doorway, there was something unexpected in his face, some assurance or confidence that didn’t go with his appearance or his surroundings.
