Backup Men (12 page)

There was only a scattering of pedestrians on the sidewalk and traffic on Avenue A was light. Across the street the park looked ominous and forbidding, the way most city parks look now when the sun goes down.

A light blue two-door, the kind that they used to call a club coupe, rolled slowly down Avenue A from the left. It was one of those cars that have big engines, anywhere from 350 to 425 cubic inches, and are named after some reptile or fish, and are just the thing for heavy city traffic if you need the reassurance of a speedometer that goes all the way up to 160 miles per hour.

The car came slowly down the avenue as if its driver was looking for either a place to park or a girl to pick up. It was going to be a matter of timing and luck. “If he’s sober,” Padillo had said, “and if he’s got normal reactions and if he’s not daydreaming, it should work out okay.”

“That doesn’t leave much room for improvisation,” I’d said.

“Not much at all,” Padillo had said.

The car was about forty feet from the entrance of the apartment building and I judged its speed to be around twenty miles per hour. A dark figure, moving almost too fast to be human, darted into the street lamp’s pool of yellow light for less than a second, and then he was in the street directly in the path of the oncoming car. The driver was awake. He slammed on his brakes and the wheels grabbed at the asphalt and the front end dipped until the heavy chrome bumper was almost at the level of the man’s ankles.

The man was momentarily caught in the car’s lights, fully illuminated, unable to move until he was sure the car could stop without striking him. It must have been much less than a second, but it was long enough for whoever was in the park across the street to get off two shots, but by then Padillo was moving again, ducking low, as he scuttled around to the right-hand side of the car and jerked at its handle. The door was locked and the driver was starting off again slowly, apparently not yet quite sure what was happening, only that he wanted no part of it. Padillo smashed the right window with his automatic and I could see the driver’s hand come over and raise the catch. Then Padillo was inside and the car was frantically spinning its rear wheels when I said, “Let’s go,” to Kassim and Scales.

I heard two more shots, apparently from the park, but I didn’t look. Instead, I backed up twenty feet, paused and started my run. The eight feet of blackness that separated the two buildings assumed Olympic proportions and I kept trying to remember to take off with my right foot but by the time I got to the edge of the building it was too late and I had to use my left one and then I was in the air for a couple of hours and finally landed hard on the gritty roof with a good six feet to spare.

I turned and hurried back to the edge of the building, ready to grab for Kassim or Scales if their feet slipped and they started to teeter on the edge after they landed. There was just enough light so that I could make them out. But neither of them was down in a sprinter’s crouch. They were standing and one of them was whimpering. It was the king. He didn’t want to try the leap and he was telling Scales why in English, and when he got tired of that, in French. I saw Scales’s right arm go back and then the figures blurred together. But if I couldn’t see it, I could hear it all right. It was the sound of a hard slap and I wondered who was the more surprised, the king who got slapped or the royal adviser who delivered the blow.

The whimpering suddenly stopped and then a short, dumpy figure was trotting slowly across the opposite roof toward me, lumbering really, and I didn’t see how he could make it, but he picked up a little speed and then sailed off into the night, his arms and legs frantically in motion as if he were still running. Kassim landed heavily only six inches from the edge of the building and I caught his left arm just before his feet went out from under him. I dragged him a couple of feet and then let him go. He started whimpering again.

I turned and watched Scales. He ran all right but when he reached the edge of the building he got his feet confused and couldn’t decide which one he should use to give him the lift and by the time he got that straightened out it was too late. But he was in the air by then, flapping his arms as if he had decided to fly the rest of the way. He landed hard, with his elbows clutching the ledge of the building as he scrabbled for a hold. I caught him and pulled him up and over and then let him lie there for a moment.

I ran to the front of the building we’d jumped to and looked down at the street. A man had come out of the park and was running across the street toward the building we had just left. He ran easily and there was a nice spring to his step. Even at night from seven floors up I had no trouble recognizing Amos Gitner.

I hurried back to Kassim and Scales. The king had stopped whimpering, but he looked a little ashamed of himself and smiled at me nervously, as if he hoped that I’d have something complimentary to say about how nicely he had jumped. Instead I said, “Gitner’s on his way.”

That got Scales up off the roof where he’d sat picking at the torn elbow of his shiny blue suit. “It’s torn,” he said.

“When the king gets all that money, maybe he’ll buy you a new one. Let’s go.”

Scales turned toward Kassim. “I apologize for having struck you, your Majesty, but given the circumstances—” He didn’t finish the sentence, perhaps because there was nothing in his background and training that would provide him with an excuse for having struck a royal person. “You jumped very well,” he said in a lame tone.

Kassim brightened. “Thank you, Scales.”

“Let’s go,” I said again.

We moved over rooftops until we came to the building that formed the corner on Avenue A and Ninth Street. We started down the fire escape. At the second floor, I climbed on the ladder that screeched and howled as it slid slowly toward the sidewalk. The king and Scales followed.

I started trotting up Ninth, herding Scales and the king ahead of me. We cut left on First Avenue and then started walking rapidly up St. Mark’s Place, past the Polish Democratic Club and the Scorpiana Boutique, walking as quickly as we could toward Astor Place and Cooper Square.

I kept looking back but he didn’t show himself until we had nearly reached the square. Gitner was running toward us. He ran fast and I snapped, “Go!” at the king and Scales and they fairly bounded down the steps of the subway entrance, as if trying to compensate for their twin flops in the running broad jump event.

Gitner was just crossing the street as I jumped down the first three steps of the subway stairs. I dropped the tokens that Padillo had given me into the turnstile and shoved the king and Scales through. Then there was nothing to do but wait for the next train.

I heard it coming, and it seemed a long way off, but then it was there and we darted into it. I turned to watch the turnstiles. Gitner was racing toward them now and he had his token ready. He would. Then he was through the turnstile and running for the train as the doors began to close, ever so slowly. Gitner was at the doors, clawing at them now, but they had closed, and we stood there and stared at each other until the train began to move.

Neither of us waved good-bye.

It was on Sixty-fourth Street, a little east of Fifth Avenue, twenty stories or so of dark beige brick that had accumulated its fair share of the city’s soot and grime. There was not much to set it apart from other New York apartment buildings that had gone up in the late twenties or early thirties, not unless you counted the steel bars that had been twisted and painted to make them look like wrought iron. There probably wasn’t a second-story man alive who stood a chance against the bars and just to make sure the management had covered every window with them all the way up to the fourth floor.

The doorman was a little different, too, because there were three of them and they were far too young for their jobs, somewhere in their mid-twenties, and they seemed to do everything as a team, even opening the front door. One of them would actually do the work and the other two would stand back, one of them watching the street and the other watching whoever went in or came out. The ones who watched kept their right hands in the deep pockets of their long blue uniform coats that the tailor had done such a good job with that unless you looked closely you could scarcely tell that there was something else in the pockets besides hands. I guessed them to be small-caliber automatics, no larger than a .32, but I might have been wrong. They could just as easily have been .25’s.

It was the third taxi we’d taken since leaving the subway at Grand Central and when it rolled up in front of the apartment entrance, number one opened the door for us, number two quartered the street to make sure that nobody shot at us, and number three stood back and away, poised and ready, just in case we tried something funny.

“Mr. McCorkle?” said the one who’d opened the door.

“That’s me,” I said and bent down to pay off the driver.

“Mr. Padillo is waiting for you in the lobby.”

“Thank you.”

The one who’d spoken also opened the door to the apartment and the king went first, then Scales, and I was almost last, but not quite, because the two other doormen were right behind me and they stayed there until they saw Padillo nod twice.

He stood in the center of what I suppose could be called the lobby although it contained no chairs or couches or settees, not even a potted plant. But there were about seventy-five thousand dollars’ worth of Oriental rugs on the floor and four or five paintings on the walls that rightfully should have been in the Metropolitan, and there was also a desk. It was a plain walnut desk of contemporary design and just below its waxed, uncluttered top were six holes that could have been decorative, but which I also noticed were large enough to launch tear gas shells. I didn’t even bother to look for the closed-circuit television cameras.

There were two men behind the desk and they half rose when we came in, but kept their hands out of sight underneath the desk, probably on some trigger or other that could blow us all up. I’d once had occasion to go calling on a Vice-President in his office on the Senate side of the Capitol and there had been two men there who had risen in just that same way—attentive and polite, but so tightly coiled that I had the feeling that if I’d raised an eyebrow the wrong way they might have blown my head off. After the Kennedys and King, I couldn’t much blame them.

When the two men saw that Padillo recognized us, they settled back down behind the desk. But they watched us. My back was to them, but I didn’t have to turn to know that they were watching. I could feel it.

“You have any trouble?” Padillo said, motioning to the bank of elevators.

“Not much,” I said. “It was nearly a tie at the subway, but Gitner was five seconds late.”

“I figured that he’d be two minutes behind you,” Padillo said. “He must have learned a few things.”

“What about yourself?” I said.

“Kragstein followed me. I didn’t have time to lose him so he knows that we’re here.”

“What happened to the guy whose car you stopped?”

“I gave him a hundred which made him so happy that he wanted to know if I’d like to do it again next week. He’s out of a job and blames it all on Neville Chamberlain and Munich. I couldn’t quite follow his reasoning.”

Kassim turned from his inspection of the lobby and said, “Do you consider this building to be adequately secure, Mr. Padillo?”

“It’s been favorably compared with Fort Knox—and with reason.”

The elevator arrived then and I saw the validity in Padillo’s claim. It was the only elevator I ever rode that had a copilot.

They let us off on the nineteenth floor where a man waited for us in a small, richly furnished room that faced the elevator. The man had curly gray hair and wore a dark, almost black suit and a deferential maner. “Good evening, Mr. Padillo,” he said and there was a trace of the South in his voice. “Dinner will be ready shortly, but Mrs. Clarkmann thought that you might like to freshen up first.”

“Thank you, William,” Padillo said. He turned to the king and Scales. “Mr. Kassim and Mr. Scales would probably like to. Also, Mr. Scales has torn his coat. Could you do something about it?”

“I’m sure I can, sir.”

“Thank you. Mr. McCorkle and I will be at the bar. I know the way.”

“Of course, sir,” William said and turned to Kassim and Scales. “This way, gentlemen.”

He led them through a door at the left. Padillo and I went straight ahead, through another door, and down a hall that was big enough to successfully carry off the two-foot-square black and white marble tiles that covered its floor and the three huge chandeliers that hung from its ceiling and cast their glittering light on the Louis Quatorze chairs and lowboys that lined the walls on either side and which didn’t look as if they had been used for anything but decorative purposes for the past three hundred years.

“Is that Clarkmann with two n’s?” I said.

“Right.”

“Piston rings.”

“Right again.”

“Mr. Clarkmann died three years ago.”

“You keep up with things.”

“He left it all to her.”

“Everything.”

“She had a little to put in the pot herself, as I recall.”

“About twenty million or so.”

“Amanda Kent—the Kandy Kid, as a tabloid or two would have it.”

“Kent’s Candies, Incorporated,” Padillo said. “Her grandfather founded it in Chicago and his major contribution was in refusing to spell candy with a K. A wise old bird.”

We went through another door and into a room which was just what Padillo had said it would be, a bar. It was a dim place with all the bottles that one would need and an old bar that could have been rescued from a turn-of-the-century Third Avenue saloon. There were also some padded stools and some low tables surrounded by comfortable-looking leather chairs. It was a room designed for drinking and Padillo went behind the bar as if he knew the way.

“Scotch,” I said and he poured us both doubles and after I’d tasted mine I admired the room some more and then waved my drink at it a little. “I don’t like to be crass, but how much down would I have to have before I could move in?”