here.”
“What time did you leave that last businessman?”
“About eleven, I believe. Despite your image of me as a kind of business gigolo, I work very hard. I need my sleep on most nights.”
“So you were alone after eleven P.M.? Or did you have an appointment with Eugene Marais at the pawn shop?”
“I was alone in my bed. Now you can-”
I heard a telephone receiver go down somewhere in the big apartment. Paul Manet wasn’t alone. There were footsteps in the next room. Light steps, and the door opened. Naturally, I wasn’t carrying my old gun. Luckily, I didn’t need it. I saw a bedroom through the opened door, and Danielle Marais came out.
“Mr. Manet was my father’s friend,” the heavy, petulant girl said. “You can’t accuse him.”
“Was he a friend?” I said. “Or maybe only of Claude’s, until they had a falling out?”
The long, dark hair of the dead Eugene’s daughter was coiled up in a chignon, and she wore a new, green cocktail dress that had not come off some rack in Macy’s. Her big, adolescent breasts stretched the sleek dress that was too old for her, too slim for her heavy body. But it did something for her, if you liked heavy, erotic nineteen- year-olds.
“You think Mr. Manet has to rob cheap pawn shops?” Danielle sneered. She wasn’t a pleasant girl, but she was still young.
“There wasn’t any robbery,” I said. “It was a cover for the murder. They let Jimmy Sung go. Now they’re looking for another motive. I think your father knew something Manet there didn’t want known. Or maybe it was something else. Where’d you get that dress, Danielle?”
“From Charlie Burgos, of course,” she snapped, and swung in a slow circle preening the new dress for me.
“Where did Charlie get that kind of money?”
“He works!”
“At his kind of pay that dress is a year’s savings.”
“What do you know?” she sneered, but she stopped giving me the show of her dress.
She stood in the room as if uneasy, a girl trying to be a woman and not making it. She seemed almost confused.
“What money does Charlie have, Danielle?” I said.
She chewed at her full lips, a habit she had probably found right after she stopped sucking her thumb. It was Paul Manet who answered me:
“I gave her the dress. Eugene Marais was a friend of mine, no matter what you think. I wanted to cheer Danielle up.”
“A dress for a friend of the family?” I watched Danielle. She was grinning. “How long have you two known each other? Did Eugene and Viviane Marais know you knew each other? Maybe they didn’t like it?”
“We only met after Dad was dead!” Danielle said hotly. “Mother thinks I’m a child, but I’m not a child anymore. See?”
She pulled her dress flat over her thighs and belly, outlined her body, and arched her back to show me her full breasts. It only showed what a child she was.
15
While I had the special veal cutlet at a diner on Sixteenth Street, I thought about the afternoon and Li Marais. I had tried not to think about her, or the afternoon, since I had left her asleep, and now I felt the hollow in the pit of my stomach. Was I in love with her? If I was, did it matter? Claude Marais had not gone into the river. He had probably done nothing, and she had been with him for eighteen hard years. I thought about something else. Not Marty.
I thought about how you checked the details of a man’s actions thirty years ago in a foreign city under the rule of an invading army. Whatever had to be done, I couldn’t do it. It was a police job. For all I knew, they might have done it, or be doing it, already. To be sure, when I finished my coffee, I walked to the precinct station. The hot spell was breaking. Masses of high black clouds moved in the last light over the city from New Jersey. We would get rain, and then it would cool for a time.
Lieutenant Marx was out of his office. Another detective said that Marx had contacted Paris about Paul Manet, but no word had come back yet. I left a message for Marx to call me-please.
Wind whipped up stray dust and a hail of paper in the street as I walked toward my office. The storm was blowing up fast. Thunder was rumbling across the now night sky as I reached my building on Twenty-eight Street, and the first heavy drops came down. By the time I got to my office door, the sky opened, and the torrent poured down the airshaft outside my open window. I hurried in to close my window, and the hands grabbed me.
At least four pairs of hands. A bag went over my head. I started to throw off the hands. Something poked into my back. A gun or a stick? I wasn’t about to find out the hard way. I stopped struggling. A voice whispered close:
“Get him down, quick!”
I was walked, hustled, out of my door and down the stairs toward the street and the torrent of rain. I heard a lot of feet, and a lot of low, hard whispering. There was something familiar about it all-the grim guerrilla band. Kidnapping the important official. The bag over my head, the urgings to speed, the pell-mell flight down the stairs into the rain-like an IRA unit in action, the Brazilian political rebels. Too many newspapers, too many old movies.
I was soaked when they shoved me into a car. We drove off, drove for some time with the rain pounding on the roof of the car. An old car, the engine wheezing and the chassis creaking. A lot of turns around corners, right and left, and after a time I began to sense that we were driving around in circles, going a few blocks, then doubling back. Under the wet bag, I couldn’t know whether they were circling to evade a tail, or just to try to confuse me, but I had a sudden hunch that when we stopped we would not be too far from my office.
We stopped. They pushed me out into the rain and an odd silence. All I could hear was the rain falling on something like thick grass or bushes, and cars hissing through the wet on some kind of highway. I was walked along some narrow path with an odor like hay, and down some narrow space between walls where the rain echoed in the night.
Then we were inside, the sound of the rain shut out and yet reverberating in a kind of emptiness. Footsteps on bare wood. Up stairs that creaked loosely. Two flights, and into a room on the third floor that smelled of stale cooking, musty plaster, and something burning. I was pushed down into a chair. The bag came off my head.
The first thing I saw were two candles burning in fruit-jar tops. They stood on orange crates, and were the only light in the long, dim-shadowed room. The windows of the room were covered by blankets, the heavy rain muffled outside in the night. I saw a long wooden table piled with empty cans, dirty dishes, and blackened Sterno cans. I saw mattresses on the bare floor, each mattress in a separated section with ragged clothes hanging on nails. The defined little areas like small rooms; one set of clean, sharp, gaudy dress clothes hanging in each section. I saw a television set all by itself along one bare wall like an idol on an altar. I saw four pale, unhealthy faces, and hungry, half-sane eyes, watching me from the candle-lit shadows. And I saw Charlie Burgos sitting on an orange crate in front of me.
“Why’d they let the Chinaman go, Fortune?” Charlie said.
“They found the stolen stuff, Jimmy Sung never had it. He’s clear. Why, Charlie? Where do you fit?”
“I ask the questions, Fortune.”
Too much TV, too many movies. The manner, the dialogue, of every tough guy who snarled his way through the cameras between commercials. With TV, anyone can know in an hour the way an FBI man, a Mafia soldier, or a Corsican bandit talks, looks, and acts. What no one can know from TV is why the Corsican acts as he does, how he got that way, what he feels inside. To know that is life, not television, and these kids did not know life beyond the slum streets and the hovels of their parents. An imitation, a surface ritual, that depended on the proper responses to maintain it. I wasn’t about to play.
