It was wide enough so he could lean his back against one side wall and stretch his feet out to the other, and that was the way he slept, until midafternoon. At any rate, he thought it was probably midafternoon, since there hadn’t been any direct sunlight on the closed drapes in the morning but there was when Parker unlocked the closet door and let him out.
Parker had obviously slept in the bed, and looked rested and hard. Faran felt cramped, stiff, and logy, and his stomach was acting up again. He couldn’t keep from breaking wind all over the place, even after Parker untied his wrists and let him use the John. For the next hour or so Faran remained untied, but the way Parker looked at him, he knew better than to try anything. The two of them had a silent meal together, made out of cans from the kitchen closet, and then Parker let him sit in the living room for an hour or so. They watched television, and it seemed to Faran that Parker didn’t care what program he watched. It was as though he wasn’t really watching television at all, but was concentrating on things inside his own head and found it restful to fill the time with the flittering shadows and piping voices from the TV set.
Then the doorbell rang, and at once Parker turned off the TV, tied Faran’s wrists again, and marched him to the bedroom. In the bedroom he pointed at Faran’s face and said, “Those teeth in the front. They caps?”
“On the top, yeah.”
Parker nodded toward the window. “If I come back in and that shade is up,” he said, “I’ll take those caps out of your head.”
Faran just nodded. He didn’t want to open his mouth to say anything.
Then Parker left him, and he sat on the bed, and gradually the light against the window shade dimmed. From time to time he heard the doorbell ring again, and after a while he could make out several male voices. He was having trouble believing it, but it had to be true: Parker was going to start a war. He was supposed to be a loner, an orphan without true connections, but he was bringing in people from somewhere, and he was honest to God going to start a war against Dutch and Calesian and Ernie Dulare. Especially Ernie Dulare, who was the most vulnerable to the kind of war Parker apparently intended to wage.
If they found out, if Ernie and Dutch and Calesian ever found out where Parker had gotten his information, Faran knew they would kill him. No question, no bullshit about this being the bloodless new order, they would flat kill him.
Unless Parker killed them first.
And after a while he was no longer entirely sure which side he wanted to root for.
Somewhere in through that space of time, his mind full of muddled thoughts, he had fallen asleep again, curled up awkwardly on the bed with his wrists tied behind him, and now he was awake once more, listening to the sound of voices in the living room, wondering what was going to happen next and what Parker would be doing with him when it was all over.
Then the bedroom door opened, letting in yellow light that made him squint, and he suddenly realized that the scraping metallic noise of the key in the lock was what had brought him up from a fuzzy, shallow, unsatisfying sleep to a fuzzy, headachy, unsatisfying wakefulness. Sitting up, blinking fast, trying to accustom his eyes quickly to the light, he made out the black silhouette of somebody entering the room, and he thought,
Then the overhead light switched on, and Parker crossed the room to lift him up with a hand clutching his upper arm, saying, “Come on, Faran. Some people for you to see.”
“What? What?”
“Walk.”
“I was asleep, I—” He cleared his throat, coughed, cleared his throat again. He was waking up now, at least a little. He put one foot in front of the other, urged on by Parker’s hand holding his arm, and walked shakily out of the bedroom and around the short hall to the living room.
The people there woke him up for good. There must have been a dozen of them, ranging in age from mid- twenties to late forties and in size from small and narrow to huge and heavily muscled, but every one of them had the same tough cold self-sufficient look as Parker. They gave him those flat emotionless stares, classifying him, deciding about him, and he stood there blinking and licking his lips, terrified beyond the call of rational argument, as frightened as a bird in a den of snakes.
And the pile of pistols on the big table by the front door didn’t help either.
Parker stayed beside him, and he had to give his order twice before Faran heard it: “Tell them your name.”
“My n— What? My name.” He hurried to obey. “Frank Faran.”
“What do you do for a living, Frank?”
The use of his first name might have been meant to reassure him, but the cold impersonality in the sound of it had just the opposite effect. Striving to be calm, trying to be capable of instant accurate response to any question that might be put him, he said, “I manage the New York Room. It’s a—it’s a local nightspot.” The word “nightspot” echoed in his ears, sounding foolish and limp, and he was horrified to feel himself blushing.
Parker had more questions. “What else do you do, Frank?”
”Well, I’ve still got— I used to be heavily in union management, I’ve still got a few posts, minor, uh—”
“Local union executive?”
“Yeah, uh— Yeah, that’s right.”
“Sweetheart unions?”
“Well, we, uh, mostly have, uh, good understandings with the employers.”
“What else are you connected with, Frank?”
Faran tried to think of anything else, but there wasn’t any more. “Nothing,” he said. “That’s all.”
“You’re not thinking, Frank.” There was a small threat shimmering in the words. The dozen men sitting on sofa and chairs, standing leaning against walls, continued to watch him. Parker said, “Who do you work for, Frank?”
