carpet.”
“They know class, kid.”
“Shit.” He ducked his head against a blast of rain. “Now where’re we going?”
“Downtown to Barney’s. I’m going to pull a couple things off the racks for tonight. Might even get a raincoat if this weather gets any worse.”
“I wish I could figure you out, Dog.” Lee gave me a nervous, sidewise glance. “Frankly, I still think you’re crazy. You’re trouble on the hoof.”
“Don’t let your imagination run away with you.”
“Then why lay a trail as broad as the Hudson River behind you?”
“Why not?”
“Because you have too much to hide,” he said. “Like that money.” Lee paused a moment, then pushed me into the alcove of an office building. “Your French is perfect, buddy. How many other languages do you speak?”
I shrugged and looked at him curiously. “A few.” “Turkish?”
I nodded.
“Any Arabic?”
I nodded again. “Why?”
“Some interesting items have been showing in the newspapers lately. You know anything about narcotics, Dog?”
My face was cold and hard when I looked at him and he pulled back instinctively. “Never touch the stuff,” I said.
Lee squeezed his mouth shut until his lips were a thin line, but he wouldn’t let go of it. “There has to be a reason for somebody dropping out of sight like you did. For showing up the way you did too. I thought I knew you, and maybe I did back there during the war, but I sure as hell don’t know you now at all. Talk about enigmas, you’re the perfect example. What happened, Dog?”
“We all get a little older, kid.”
“Okay, let it go at that. You’re still the guy who saved my ass too many times, so I’m sticking with it. You got me shook, but the ride is wild. Maybe I’m as sappy as you are. Only don’t blame me if I get the shakes and suddenly cut out. I’m just not geared to this kind of living. Goose bumps come awfully easy and last a long time. You got me so I’m looking over my shoulder half the time. I’m beginning to think I’m back in the blue in a P-51D peering into the sun for bogeys.”
“Good thinking, then. Keep your head out of the cockpit and you won’t get it shot off.”
“That was the first thing you ever told me,” Lee said. “I get the chills hearing it said again. At least the last time you were talking about the war.”
“Everything’s a war,” I told him.
He looked into my eyes, shivered involuntarily, then turned his raincoat collar up around his neck. “Okay, buddy, so be it. I kind of have the feeling you really don’t need me bird-dogging you around, so I’m going to peel off and get back to work. The date still on for tonight?”
“Sure. I want to meet all your beautiful people.”
“Look a little decent, will you? They’re kind of important. You really going to get clothes off the rack at Barney’s?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
He grinned at me, spotted a cab coming and ran out to the curb to flag it down, then held the door open for me so I wouldn’t get any wetter. He stood there shaking his head in annoyance when I told the driver to take me to Barney’s.
They built New York’s first skyscraper downtown at Twenty-third Street and called it the Flatiron Building, an ornate, old-fashioned triangular antique that rose on the south side of Twenty-third at the juncture of Fifth Avenue and Broadway where it stared out majestically on a city about to explode into growth, and remained a couple of generations later, still staring, but with windowed eyes a little sad and clouded with the dirt the new age had thrown up. It was a wistful building, its orginal name and history almost forgotten now, but a building that had lived through many years and a multitude of experiences, yet still stood like a miniature fortress planted in the middle of an anthill.
On the seventeenth floor, in the pointed nose of the structure, Al DeVecchio had his office. The door had triple locks and the gold-leaf sign simply read L.D.V., Inc., beautifully ambiguous, not at all encouraging to solicitors, yet in certain areas well known and caustically respected.
Two secretaries and an old man wearing outdated sleeve garters and an archaic green eyeshade worked in compartments lined with modern business equipment, but Al’s private quarters were in the front end of the triangle where he could look out over his city like the master of a ship conning his vessel from the bridge. His coffee maker was still in the perpetual state of percolation, his small freezer still full of imported salamis and cheeses, one wall still full of books on mathematical formulas it took an Einstein to understand, and the same pair of rocking chairs he had had in the operations shack in England during the war. The arms were polished from use and the hardwood sweeps a little thinner now from the years of oscillating, but their gentle roll was still as damnably mesmerizing as ever. A lot of generals had cooled off in those chairs and a lot of command decisions arrived at in their easy motions.
“Nostalgic, isn’t it?” Al asked me.
“You were born too late, buddy.”
“I’ll buy that,” he grinned. “Coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
“Hunk of Genoa? Came in last week. Spicy as hell. You could stink up a place for hours with it.”
“Unh-uh. I can still remember the last one we split.”
“Tasted lousy when you burped into an oxygen mask, didn’t it?”
“Fierce. I don’t know how you guineas can eat all that stuff.”
“So you Irish live on corned beef and cabbage draped around a melted potato. Peasant food.”
“Only when we’re affluent.”
“You must be gorged by now,” Al said.
“Glad you did your research, Captain.”
“Oh, you were always a pet project of mine.” He held a cup under the coffee spigot, filled and sweetened it, then got back in his rocking chair. “You know, little Italiano from the poor end of Hell’s Kitchen wondering what made the rich kid from the big estate tick. We all looked alike in uniform, but the difference was still there.”
“Keep talking,” I said. “How does a prejudiced slob from an uptown penthouse feel going back to the old turf?”
“Great,” he told me. “I keep rubbing it in to any of the old gang who are still around. I like the envious look. They all think I belong to the Mafia.”
“Tell ’em any different?”
“Nope. It gets respect, especially from the young punks I use occasionally.”
“Let the mob get wise and you’ll be holding your head.”
“They already tried. Just once. I get respect from them too.”
“How?”
“Easy,” he said. “I used your name.”
“That must have gone over big.”
Al grinned slowly, mulling over the memory. “You’d be surprised, Dog. They sent their three best hatchet men out to chop you down and none were ever heard from again. They simply disappeared. No bodies. No rumors. Just sudden and total disappearance like they never even existed, and within three days after each one vanished somebody’s grand villa burned down or their seagoing yacht mysteriously blew up. Oh, and I almost forgot the one in Naples those old French Resistance boys nailed with new and damning evidence of being a Nazi collaborator and hung from the bell tower in the church he had financed.”
“You’re talking over my head, buddy,” I said.
“Sure I am.” His tone held mock sarcasm. “Let’s just say I’m a good guesser. Aren’t you taking a chance
