Vivien had seen what had happened, she hadn’t had time to intervene. She might be following them. But he hadn’t seen any other car move out from the kerb on the other side of Park Avenue.
He turned to LaMarr again. ‘What’s bothering me is that you’re still using the wrong deodorant. Sitting next to you would make anybody’s eyes water.’
‘Good joke. Give the man a great big hand.’
LaMarr was still smiling. He signalled to the man in the front, who leaned over and punched Russell in the face. For a moment, the noise of flesh on flesh was the only sound inside the car.
Russell felt a thousand hot little needles puncture his cheek. A yellow bulb danced in front of his eyes.
Nonchalantly, LaMarr put a hand on his shoulder. ‘As you can see, my boys have kind of a strange way of showing their appreciation of humour. Got any more jokes like that?’
Russell sank resignedly into his seat. In the meantime, the car had turned onto Madison and was now heading uptown. At the wheel was a guy with a bald head and the same build, Russell estimated, as the man who had just given him such tender loving care.
‘What do you want, LaMarr?’
‘I told you. Money. I’m not usually involved in collecting, but with you I want to make an exception. It’s not every day I get to rub shoulders with a celebrity, which is what you are. Not to mention the fact that you’re really pissing me off.’
With a nod of the head, he indicated the man who had just hit Russell.
‘It’d be a pleasure for me to sit in the front row and see you go a few rounds with Jimbo.’
‘There’s no point. Right now I don’t have your fifty thousand dollars.’
LaMarr shook his large head. His double chin wobbled slightly, shiny with sweat in the light from outside. ‘Wrong. You don’t seem any better at math than poker. It’s sixty thousand, remember?’
Russell was about to reply but held back. He preferred to avoid another encounter with Jimbo’s hand. His first experience of that hadn’t been one that left him feeling nostalgic.
‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll see. Somewhere quiet, where we can have a man-to-man talk.’
Silence fell in the car. LaMarr didn’t seem inclined to give any further explanation. Russell didn’t need any. He knew perfectly well what was going to happen when they got to their destination, wherever that destination was.
In a short time, carried on the stream of lights and automobiles, the car reached an area of Harlem that Russell knew well. There were a couple of places here that he visited when he wanted to hear great jazz, and another couple of places, much less well publicized, that he visited when he had a bit of money in his pocket and felt like shooting craps.
The car stopped in a dimly lit street, in front of a closed shutter. Jimbo got out, opened the padlock and pulled the handle up. Lit by the car’s headlights, the metal wall rose to reveal a large, bare space, an L-shaped warehouse with a line of concrete pillars in the middle.
The car glided in through the entrance and the shutter came down again behind them. The car turned left round the corner and stopped at a slanting angle. A few moments later, a couple of bare dirt- encrusted bulbs hanging from the ceiling came on, spreading a dim light.
Jimbo opened the door on Russell’s side. ‘Get out.’
He took Russell’s arm in his iron grip and made him walk around to the other side. Russell had the pleasure of seeing LaMarr struggling to get out through the door. He avoided making any comment that would simply have earned him more of Jimbo’s brand of applause.
To their left was a desk with a chair. In front of it, another chair, a wooden one with a straw bottom. Despite the precariousness of the situation, Russell found the setting quite traditional. Clearly, LaMarr was a nostalgic.
Jimbo pushed him towards the desk and pointed at the top of it. ‘Empty your pockets. All of them. Don’t force me to do it myself.’
With a sigh, Russell put everything he had in his pockets on the desk. A wallet with the documents and letters, the five hundred dollars Zef had just given him, and a pack of cinnamon-flavoured chewing- gum.
The fat man walked to the chair behind the desk. He smoothed the collar of his jacket, took off his hat, sat down, and placed his fat forearms on the table. The rings on his fingers glittered as he moved. It struck Russell that he looked like a version of Jabba the Hutt.
‘All right, Mr Russell Wade. Let’s see what we have here.’
He pulled Russell’s things towards him. He opened the wallet, and threw it straight back down again as soon as he saw it was empty. Ignoring the envelopes, he picked up the banknotes and counted them.
‘Just look at that. Five hundred dollars.’
He leaned back in his chair, as if trying to recall something he remembered perfectly well.
‘So now you owe me sixty-five thousand.’
Russell didn’t think it wise to point out that only a little while earlier LaMarr had been demanding sixty thousand. In the meantime, his guardian angel had made him sit down on the chair in front of the desk and had taken up a standing position next to him. Seen from below, he looked even bigger and more threatening. The driver had got out of the car as soon as they had arrived and vanished through a door behind them, into what was probably a bathroom.
LaMarr ran his thick fingers through his short curly hair. ‘Now how do we go about paying the rest?’ He pretended to think.
It was clear to Russell that LaMarr was playing with him like a cat with a mouse, and savouring yet another demonstration of his own power.
‘I’m going to be generous. Seeing as how I’ve just collected, I’ll let you off another five hundred.’
He nodded toward Jimbo. The punch in the stomach arrived with impressive speed and a force that knocked the air out of Russell’s lungs, maybe out of the entire atmosphere. He felt acid rising in his throat, and bent forward, retching. A thread of saliva dropped from his mouth onto the dusty floor. LaMarr looked at him with a self-satisfied expression, the way you look at a child who’s done his homework properly.
‘So now there’s sixty-four thousand left.’
‘Right now, I’d say that should be enough.’
These words of Vivien’s, firm and confident, came from somewhere behind Russell. Three heads turned simultaneously in that direction, only to see a young woman emerge from the shadows into the pool of light cast by the bulbs. As if some spell had been broken, Russell started breathing again.
The fat man turned incredulously to Jimbo. ‘Who’s this fucking whore?’
Vivien raised her hand and aimed her gun at LaMarr’s head. ‘This whore is armed, and if the two of you don’t go stand against the wall with your legs wide apart, she might decide to show you how offended she is by your insinuations.’
The rest happened before Russell had time to warn Vivien. The door to the bathroom burst open and the man who’d been in there ran out and flung his arms around her chest, immobilizing her. Vivien’s reaction was instant.
Instead of trying to wriggle free, Vivien pressed her body against his, raised her legs and brought the heels of her heavy boots down on the tips of her attacker’s shoes. Russell distinctly heard the sound of his toes cracking. A strangulated cry, and the arms surrounding Vivien loosened their grip as if by magic. The man collapsed to the floor and lay on his side, cursing, his legs pulled up to his chest.
Vivien aimed the gun at him and looked defiantly at the other two men. ‘OK. Now who else wants to try?’ She gestured to Jimbo. ‘Are you armed?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK. Take out your gun with two fingers, lay it on the ground, and kick it towards me. Nice
