when Tucker had first come into the apartment. He wanted badly to get on with the job, wanted to set it up and knock it off as fast as possible. Apparently he needed money even worse than Tucker did. However, he looked as if he required it for something more essential than food, a new apartment, and a new woman. 'What kind of split would you want?'
'A third,' Tucker said.
Meyers winced, turned away, wheeled back again, rubbing his hands together incessantly. 'Hey, that's steep.'
'It's the same thing that you'll be getting.' Tucker gave him the folded diagram, chiefly to keep him from lathering his hands. 'We'll need only one more man for this, and we'll divide the take three ways, even shares for everybody.'
'One more man?'
'Someone to break the safe, two safes if necessary,' Tucker said.
'But we can't pull this off with less than four or five men,' Meyers insisted.
Tucker smiled. 'Just watch us.'
Imrie's place did not look like an illicit gun shop. It was a three-story brick building on a quiet lower-middle- class street in Queens. Weathered and somewhat soiled, it was also solid and dignified, a respectable neo-Colonial structure from the turn of the century. It shared the block with a neighborhood grocery, a pharmacy, a dry cleaner's, and many narrow well-kept apartment buildings. To add to the image of serenity there were even a few large battered elms shadowing pieces of the street and sidewalks. On the glass door to Imrie's first-floor showroom, gilt lettering read: antiques and used furniture. The antique dealership was mostly a front for the more lucrative gun business.
Tucker pulled open the heavy door and went inside. A loud buzzer, like the shrill call of a jungle bird, sounded at the rear of the store, softened a bit by the intervening forest of old cane-back chairs, tables, table lamps, sideboards, gramophones, dry sinks, and teetering stacks of other valuable and worthless paraphernalia that Imrie had accumulated.
Sudden shadows, dark corners, dust, and bare lightbulbs contributed to the decor. Imrie was sitting in an ancient maroon brocade chair in one of the few patches of light, just inside the door.
'Sorry I took so long,' Tucker said. 'I had trouble catching a cab, and then the traffic was terrible.'
'It's always terrible,' Imrie said, struggling to his feet with a deep groan of real physical distress. He was only five feet six, but he weighed more than two hundred pounds. His physique, his baby-smooth but sly and knowing face, and the crinkly fringe of gray hair that ringed his bald head all made him look like a philandering, vow-breaking medieval friar. He put down a pornographic novel that he had been reading and hitched up his baggy trousers, which tended to settle too far down over his gut. He had been eating cookies, and now he had crumbs on his shirt. Sighing with distaste at his own slovenliness, he brushed away the tiny bits. 'Be with you in a minute, Tucker.'
He locked the door and put up the closed sign.
'How you been?' Tucker asked.
'Not too good.' Imrie drew the blind down behind the front door. 'I've got stomach problems.' He turned around and slapped his ample belly. 'It's this business. Anybody'd get ulcers from it. Too damned many worries.' He put his hands on his stomach as if to reassure himself that it was still there. 'There was a time not very long ago,' he said wistfully, 'when a man in my line could go about his work unhampered, when he could be certain of his place in things.' This was Imrie's favorite topic for conversation, or rather for monologue. 'These days, you have to worry about the anti-gun nuts, the bleeding-heart liberals, the peace fanatics, these mixed-up pacifist kids? They make me feel like a criminal, for Christ's sake.'
If you wanted to do business with Imrie, you were obliged to spend some time listening to his complaints. Trying to sound sympathetic, Tucker said, 'I can see where it would ruin your digestion.'
'To say the least.' Imrie rubbed his stomach, consoling it. 'Thank God the majority of decent Americans understand that we have to have guns to keep this country free. If we didn't have guns, how would we keep the Communists out?' He burped on his cookies, excused himself. 'Most people realize that there's nothing foul and fiendish about a man who deals in guns. Look, I'm no degenerate. Most people know that a gun dealer is no more a villain than your local Ford salesman or the friendly neighborhood Good Humor man.' He burped again, patted his lips. 'Now, Tucker, what can I do for you?'
'I want three guns. Something ugly enough to terrorize the average citizen. Something that would intimidate a man and keep him from behaving foolishly.'
'Sure,' Imrie said, smiling. 'I know just what you mean. I can fix you up.'
'I thought you could,' Tucker said.
They walked to the rear of the store along a tight aisle of cupboards, corner desks, bookcases, china closets, and other furniture, all stacked on top of one another, all graced with nearly perfectly preserved isinglass doors. At the back of the room, they went through a tattered yellow curtain, up dimly lighted stairs past the second floor where Imrie lived, and on up to the third level where the fat man kept his guns.
'I couldn't deliver these today, if that's what you have in mind,' Imrie said as they came off the stairs. 'They need work done on them.'
'I don't need them today,' Tucker said.
On the third floor, as on the first, the partitions had been knocked out to form one enormous room. But while the first floor contained old furniture, curiosities and antiques, this place housed more deadly merchandise: in excess of two thousand rifles, shotguns, handguns, machine and submachine guns. They were hooked on the white pegboard walls, crammed on wooden and metal wall shelves, tilted against wooden display lifts, laid gently in velvet-lined collector's cases, scattered about the floor, jammed into paper bags. The room also contained metal- working machines, lathes and a small gas-fired forge and cooking pots where metals could be melted down and shaped. Despite the disarray there was no dust up here as there was on the first floor. And all the corners were well lighted. There was an open, airy feeling that the lower level did not have. Quite obviously, it was here at the top of the building where Imrie's heart would remain even if the improbable should come to pass and his antique business should become more profitable than gun dealing.
'I take it you don't want machine guns,' Imrie said. 'If you did, you'd have said.'
'Something ugly and impressive-but concealed,' Tucker said, measuring an imaginary weapon with his slim hands.
'Three of them?'
'That would be best.'
The fat man scratched his shiny skull, ruffled the fringe of gray hair, pursed and unpursed his lips, smiled with sudden inspiration. 'Give me a minute or two.' He went off to prowl through his haphazardly stored collection. Five minutes later he called Tucker over to the main workbench. 'Here's what I can let you have,' he said, carefully aligning three guns on the top of the bench.
They were fairly well matched heavy black automatic pistols with folding wire stocks that could be swung back to transform them into moderately efficient submachine guns. At the moment, all the stocks were clamped forward over the barrels; however, the pistols looked nonetheless deadly in this compacted shape.
'These are perfect,' Tucker said, lifting one of the guns, testing its weight on his flat palm. 'I've never seen anything like this before.'
'It's a Czech Skorpion,' Imrie said fondly.
'World War Two?'
'Sure.'
'Looks like a thirty-eight,' Tucker said.
'No. Just a thirty-two.' Imrie picked up one of the others. 'But it isn't a lady's weapon, believe you me. It packs more wallop than any other thirty-two-caliber piece ever made.'
As gently as if he were handling a mean-tempered poisonous snake, Tucker turned the pistol over in his hands, examining it from every angle. Heavy, well defined, cast with many rich planes, the piece looked especially wicked and even alien, almost like something from the lurid cover of an old science-fiction magazine. Though inanimate, it radiated a chilling animal malevolence, a tangible and exciting evil. Because he was basically a non- violent man who operated in a violent business, Tucker was able to assess the weapon from the viewpoints of both
