weighing how important it was that he see Claude Marais. He decided.
“I wish no trouble,” he said again as if his mind could hold only limited thoughts in English. “Claude is not important to me that much. Bitte.”
He backed away, didn’t turn until he was past the desk. Then he strode out of the lobby. I wiped the sweat from my face. Killer or not, he was a man I wouldn’t want to cross where he had the advantage. I followed him out. Across the street I saw him climb into a blue Ford and drive away.
I waited an hour hidden outside the hotel entrance. The German didn’t return. I had a pretty good certainty that he wouldn’t, not tonight, at least. It was twelve-ten, I had done my job, and I was tired. I went home to bed.
I didn’t sleep much, not in the oven of my five shabby rooms. Not until just before dawn when a faint coolness seemed to wash in through the open windows. A gray dawn light, cooler…
Then he was there. He had a gun.
“Who are you, Mr. Fortune?” he said, a shape beside my bed in the dawn. “What do you want with me? With Exner?”
I rolled onto my back under the sheet, blinked at him. He stood over the bed: Claude Marais.
“How’d you get in here, Marais?” I said.
He waved the pistol. I was changing the subject. “A man learns to open doors. I want to know who you really are, what you were doing at my hotel last night?”
His pistol was steady-an odd pistol. An unusually long barrel for a light gun-7.65-mm. A French Starr.
“Can I get a cigarette?” I said.
He hesitated. I realized that my empty sleeve was hidden under the sheet. Last night he hadn’t even noticed I had only one arm. A man busy with his own thoughts.
“I’ve only got one arm,” I said, showed him.
“All right, get a cigarette,” he said. “A war injury?”
“No.” I smoked. “You know who I am. Your brother-”
“My brother said you are a detective. That doesn’t tell me of your past, of who you work for, or why you are mixed in my affairs. It doesn’t tell me why you were waiting for Gerd Exner, or how you knew Exner was coming to me last night.”
“Why was Exner coming to you?” I said.
“My business,” Claude snapped. “Did my brother send you?”
“Eugene? Why would Eugene send me? Does he know-”
“Do not answer me with questions, Fortune. Gerd Exner says you claimed to be a policeman. That has alarmed him. Why did you scare him? For whom? What did you think you were doing?”
“Why does Exner want to kill you, Claude?”
“Kill me?” The surprise was genuine. Damn the woman.
“Your wife said Exner wanted to kill you.”
“My wife?” He stopped. “Ah, I see. Yes.” He lowered the pistol. “I have not given her very much. No home, no life, no rest. I understand now. Has she paid you?”
“Yes.” Too much. I hoped he wouldn’t ask.
He pocketed the pistol. “All right, but I am in no danger. My wife made a mistake. I will explain to her. Finished, yes?”
He walked out. I lay back. I was home free. No more job, and I kept the money. I had some curiosity about Claude Marais and the German, but not enough to think about it very hard.
I decided to surprise Marty with the ring. I went out and ate a slow breakfast, and then walked to the pawn shop. It was open. Inside, I saw Eugene Marais sitting in the back room.
“Dig out my ring, Marais,” I said. “I got lucky.”
Then I saw the chessmen. A bishop, two pawns, and a knight on the floor in the back room doorway. I went into the back room. Eugene Marais was tied to his chair by a single strand of rope. Blood had trickled from his nose and right ear-black, dried blood. The crusted wound was on the back of his head. He had been hit hard once. I felt him. He was rigid as steel.
Dead at least four hours, at most twelve. Probably somewhere in between.
3
By 11:00 A.M. it was ninety-two on Ninth Avenue, and Lieutenant Marx had rounded up Claude Marais and his wife, Li; the dead pawn shop owner’s daughter Danielle; and Jimmy Sung. One of Marx’s men had been sent to Brooklyn for Eugene Marais’s wife, the others had been going over the shop for two hours.
The shop had been half ransacked-parts a jumble of debris, other parts not touched. As if someone had made a selective search-looking for something specific-or as if the job had been only half done. The cash drawer inside the broken cage was on the floor, but some three hundred dollars had been left, overlooked, and the safe hadn’t been opened. A chess board was set up on the table, but the men had been scattered. The rope bound the dead man to the chair by only the one strand, as if the killer had realized he didn’t have to tie the dead man after all.
I said, “He didn’t know Marais was dead at first.”
“Maybe, Dan,” Lieutenant Marx said.
The assistant Medical Examiner talked as he washed his hands. A small, neat, nervous doctor.
“Complete rigor. So four to twelve hours, except that in this heat it gets speeded up. From other signs, I’d say anywhere from five this morning, to eleven last night. Maybe earlier, maybe later, but I’d have to doubt it in court. The autopsy may give us a closer guess.”
“What killed him, Doc?” Marx said.
“Fractured skull, pieces in the brain. That iron rod on the floor has blood on it. One blow. I’ll tell you in detail after autopsy, but it looks simple to me.”
“Hit from behind,” Marx decided. “In this room, from that blood near the door. Any prints on the iron bar?”
“Nothing we could identify,” a detective said.
The M.E. signaled his men to put Eugene Marais into the morgue basket. For an instant everything stopped, all silent, as if the world was standing still. We all looked at the body and the basket. Then it was gone, and we all began to move. Life and work goes on, death forgotten after that one instant because it has to be.
The daughter, Danielle, looked at the basket as it went out, but her eyes were stiff, unseeing. It was the only time she had looked at her father since the police had brought her in. Her eyes dull, without tears, where she stood out in the shop out of sight of the body. Her whole young, ripe body oddly stiff in the same blouse and shorts she had worn last night. Her surly, adolescent face closed up like someone who waited for a blow.
Claude Marais had stood over the body since the moment he had arrived, his hand touching his dead brother as if to offer comfort, to sustain the dead man. He watched us all with a bruised, baleful glance. Intense and defiant, angry with death. Yet behind his eyes there was something like a question, as if he were trying to understand something only he knew.
“What did he do? Eugene?” the stocky brother had said to everyone and to no one, to the ransacked shop itself. “Nothing. He used to say that himself. He had done nothing, hurt no one, helped no one. No enemies, no comrades. Never accused, never honored. He never risked, and he’s dead anyway. Stupid!”
The brother hunched over as if cold even in his tweed jacket and heavy trousers in the heat. Cold while we all sweated, like a man who lived with a perpetual chill, an icy wind blowing always through his mind. He watched the morgue basket go out not with sorrow, but with a kind of rage.
His wife, Li Marais, sat silent in a corner, as still as a stone cat from some Egyptian tomb, only her onyx eyes alive. Cat eyes, bright and fixed. Looking at no one, and everyone.
Under the single, barred, back room window, Jimmy Sung squatted on his heels. The inscrutable Oriental- with a very American cigarette dangling from his full lips, and a very American scowl. The watery red eyes of the drunk, annoyed at being bothered on the morning after. He had said nothing since being brought to the shop, sure,
