Coward's Kiss (9 page)

“Don’t get mad, Billy,” the little one said.

“Aw, Ralph——”

“Don’t get mad. You know what happens when you get mad. You blow up, you hit too hard, you hurt somebody more than you should. You know what the boss said. You do that again, you go out on your ear.”

“He can’t call me that kind of thing.”

Ralph shrugged. “So his manners stink. It’s not like he was saying the truth. Your mother’s a wonderful woman.”

“I love her.”

“Of course you do,” Ralph said. “Don’t worry what this schmuck says. Forget about it.”

He turned to me again. His tone was conversational. “Don’t talk to Billy like that, London. He’s an ex-pug. In the ring when he heard somebody call him a name, he went off his nut. Lost his control every time, swinging like a maniac. When he connected he won a lot of fights. Sometimes he missed. You he wouldn’t miss, so don’t talk dirty to him.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You remember where that briefcase is?”

“I told you——”

“We got orders, London. Don’t try to sell us anything. Just give us the case.”

“And if I don’t? Are you going to beat me to death?”

He shook his head. “We search the place. The boss figures if you got the stuff it’s not here anyhow, but we look to make sure. Then we work you over so you know better. Just a light going-over. Not enough to put you in the hospital or anything. Just enough so next time the boss asks a favor you jump.”

They were a pair of fairly complex machines, primed to do a task and nothing more. Reasoning with them was like reasoning with IBM’s latest product. It couldn’t work.

“You could save yourself a beating,” Ralph said confidentially. “Billy works you over, it don’t loll you but it don’t do you any good either. It’s the same either way. You lose the briefcase whether you get hit or not. And the next hit might be in the head. The boss doesn’t like to hit people in the head if he can help it. Sometimes he can’t help it.”

I opened my mouth to tell him again that I didn’t have the damned thing. I changed my mind before the sentence got going. I was starting to feel like a broken record.

Ralph shrugged at me again. “You’re calling the shots,” he said. “You change your mind while Billy’s taking you apart, you tell me. He’ll stop if I tell him to. And I’ll tell him to when you cough up the briefcase.” He turned his head slightly in Billy’s direction. “Now take it easy on him, Billy. Go gentle. But let him feel it a little.”

Billy heard the command and answered it like an old pug answering the bell. He moved toward me and all I could think was, dammit, this son of a bitch isn’t going to hit me again. I stepped right at him and threw a right at his jaw.

He picked it off with his left, brushed it away like a cow’s tail brushing flies.

Then he hit me in the stomach.

I didn’t even have time to think about it. I went straight to my knees and used both hands to hold my guts together. This time I didn’t try to get up. Billy helped me. He lifted me with one hand on my shirt front, hit me with the other hand, and I went down again.

“Prop him against the wall,” Ralph suggested. “So he don’t keep falling down. And pull the punches a little more. You’re hitting a little too hard.”

“I ain’t hitting that hard, Ralph.”

“A little easier,” Ralph said. “His stomach’s soft. He can’t take too much punishment.”

Billy picked me up again and stood me up against one wall. He hit me three more times. He was supposed to be letting up on the punches. Maybe he was. I couldn’t tell.

My stomach was on fire. When I opened my eyes the room rocked like teen-ager’s music. When I closed them it didn’t help at all. He held me with one paw and slugged me with the other and I stood there like a sap and took it.

Ralph said: “Hold it.”

Billy let go of me and I started to slide down the wall. It was a scene out of a Chaplin movie with the humor left on the cutting-room floor. He caught me easily and propped me up again.

“You had enough, London? You want to open up?”

I told him to go to hell.

“A hero,” Ralph said.

I wasn’t being a hero. I would have given him a briefcase full of H-bomb secrets without giving a damn at that point. But I didn’t have it to give.

“Slap the hero, Billy. First take off your ring. We aren’t supposed to mark him up.”

Billy took a large signet ring from the third finger of his right hand. Then he held onto me with his left hand and started slapping me with the right one. He slapped forehand, then backhand, and between my head bounced off the wall. There was a regular pattern to it: slap, bump, slap, bump——

The pain stopped after a little while. I stopped feeling things, stopped seeing and stopped hearing. There was the blue-gray monotony of the slap bump slap bump, a deading rhythm that went on forever.

A voice came through a filter. “——just won’t talk,” it said. Then a few words were lost. Then: “——search the place. Won’t find anything but the boss said take a look. Dump the schmuck and we’ll look.”

I wondered what “dump the schmuck” was supposed to mean. I opened my eyes and watched Billy cock a fist as big as a cannon ball. Then the fist exploded against my jaw and the universe went from gray to black.

It wasn’t like waking up. The world came back into focus a little at a time, a broken series of short gray spasms in a world of black. A batch of disconnected scenes, vague and partially formed, breaking up long stretches of nothing in particular.

Someone talking in a low voice. The darkness again.

The phone ringing. I wanted to get up to answer it. Instead I stayed where I was and counted the rings. I kept losing count and starting over. Finally it stopped, or I didn’t hear it any more. Then the black curtain fell and I was out again.

And then, very suddenly, I was awake.

I was lying on the floor against one wall—the wall Billy had used to prop me up against. My head ached dully and my jaw ached sharply and my stomach had a hole in it. The hole was about the size of a large human fist. It took me two tries to get to my feet. I staggered into the bathroom and poured my stomach out. Then I took four aspirins from the bottle in the medicine chest, carried them back to the living room, washed them down with a glassful of cognac.

The cognac was more important than the aspirins. The aspirins took a minimum of two seconds to dissolve, according to the ads. The cognac went to work instantly to relieve aches and pains caused by headache, neuritis and neuralgia.

It helped. My eyes focused again and my knees worked and I didn’t notice my stomach as much as before. I took another belt from the bottle.

Then I saw what they had done to the apartment.

It didn’t look as though a cyclone had hit it. A cyclone isn’t selective. It hits a whole area and knocks the hell out of anything that gets in the way. They had been more selective.

But just as destructive.

The Bokhara was rolled up in one corner of the room and the floor was bare. But even with the rug rolled up you couldn’t see too much of the floor. It was covered with things.

It was covered with every book that had been in the bookcases. Maybe the bastards thought I hid the briefcase behind the books. Maybe they were just being thorough. I looked down at a collection of Stephen Crane first editions, picked up a copy of ‘The Little Regiment.’ The spine was broken.

The cushions of the two leather chairs leaked their stuffing onto the floor. Ralph—or Billy, it didn’t matter which one—had slashed them open with a knife. Two reproductions lay curling at the edges. The Miro had a footprint in the middle and the Tanguy was in shreds...They had been ripped from their frames.

I found a pack of cigarettes and got one going. There was more, plenty more, but I didn’t feel like looking at it. I went to the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. That room was a mess, too, but not quite as bad.

And the damnedest thing was that I knew they hadn’t ruined anything on purpose. They weren’t trying to do damage any more than they were trying to prevent it. They were machines, with a single job to do, and everything else was incidental. They were supposed to beat me up—not kill me, not send me to the hospital.

And they did just that. I was on my feet already, with nothing to show for it but a pain in the gut and an aching head. The headache would be gone in the morning, the rest wouldn’t last much longer.

I ground out the cigarette. Who was I supposed to hate? Bannister, of course. He was the man who gave the order, the leading bastard who gave the order that sent the two minor bastards on my neck. He killed a blonde and had the crap knocked out of a private detective and he was going to get his.

And Ralph and Billy. Now how the hell could I hate Billy? He was a mongoloid with muscles and he practiced the only trade he knew. When he was a fighter he got paid for beating other fighters senseless. Now he did the same work without ropes or gloves. Do you hate a machine?

Or Ralph. He was a company man to the core, a junior executive, and he’d be the same guy underneath if he worked for General Motors or Jimmy Hoffa or the CIA. He even tried his best to save me from a beating. Hate him?

I didn’t hate them, didn’t hate Ralph and didn’t hate Billy. They weren’t the kind of people you hated.

But I was in their debt and I’m the kind of slob who likes to mark his debts paid. I owed them for a beating and a wrecked apartment. It was a debt I was going to pay.

I was going to kill them.

I went back to the living room and looked at wreckage for a few long minutes. A little of that goes a long way. I picked up the telephone and called a girl named Cora Johnson. She’s a girl in her middle twenties, a very bright gal with a degree from City College. She is also a Negro, and she earns a small living doing housework. They do things strangely in the United States some of the time.

I asked her if she could come over in an hour or two and she said she could. I told her the place looked like hell with a hangover, that she should do whatever she could and not worry about it. “Just set the books in the bookcases,” I told her. “I can rearrange them later. Try to make the place livable again. I’ll leave a key under the mat for you.”

She didn’t ask what had happened. I knew she wouldn’t ask, and that she’d keep her mouth shut. She was that sort of person.

I was still standing around, wondering where to go next and who to see next, when the bell rang. The doorbell.

And I knew right away who it was. Ralph and Billy, coming back to give me another spin through the old slap bump circuit, another chance to be a good little boy and give them a briefcase that I didn’t have.

This time it was going to be different.

I must have been a little bit insane. I found the Beretta on the floor—they hadn’t even bothered to take it with them. I picked it up and curled my index finger around the trigger. I walked to the door and stood there with my hand on the knob, ready to give the trigger a squeeze the minute I saw them. Billy wasn’t going to knock the gun out of my hand this time, by George. I’d shoot him first.

I turned the knob. I gave the door a yank and stuck the gun in my visitor’s face.

And Maddy Parson let out a small scream.

It took a few minutes to calm her down. “You were joking,” she said uncertainly. “It was your idea of a gig. Well, it wasn’t very funny. I could have had a heart attack. Is that thing loaded, Ed?”

“I hope so.”

“You——”

“Come on inside,” I said. “Relax. Everything’s all right.”

She took a few steps inside, got a good look at the apartment, and let go of her jaw. It fell three inches. “Okay,” she said. “What happened?”

“I dropped my watch.”

“A cyclone hit it. Now open up, Ed. All of it.”

I didn’t tell her the difference between Billy and Ralph and a cyclone. She would have missed the point. It was easier to sit her down and explain the whole thing as quickly as I could, from Armin through Billy and Ralph. I left out the names and the descriptions but that was all I left out. By the time I was done she had a face the color of ashes.

She said: “Oh, Holy Christ. They could have killed you.”

“Not in a million years.”

“But——”

“Look at me,” I said. “I didn’t even get a bloody nose. Not even a sprained thumb. And right this minute I’m so full of cognac I can’t feel a damned thing. I’ll sit around aching tomorrow, maybe. And the day after that it’ll hurt once in a while. And nothing the day after that one. Nothing resembling a permanent injury. Those two are professionals, Maddy.”

“They’re animals.”

“Then they’re professional animals. An amateur could have killed me by accident, would have cracked a rib or two, anyway. But they were perfect. They knew just what to do and they did it.”

She shuddered. I put an arm around her and she turned to me and hugged me. I saw a drop of wet saltiness running down one cheek, wiped it up with a finger.

“Hell, you were right.” She looked at me. “When you said you could cry on cue,” I explained.

She looked away. “Just shut up,” she said. “Or I’ll hit you in the stomach. At least I get a chance to play nurse. You’re going to bed now, Ed.”

“Like hell I am.”

“Ed—”

“I couldn’t fall asleep if I wanted to. And I don’t want to. Things are coming to a head, Maddy. A whole slew of two-legged bombs are running around waiting to go off.”

“And you want to be blown up?”

“I want to be there. I want to watch the explosion, set off a bomb or two of my own.”

“You should go right to sleep.”

I shook my head, which was a mistake. It ached. “I wouldn’t stay here anyway. I was letting them come to me, Maddy. It made sense before. Now I’d rather be a moving target. I have to start things on my own.”

“Then go to a hotel. In the morning——”

“The morning’s too late.”

She sighed. It was a long and very female sigh. She really wanted to put me to bed and tuck me in and listen to my prayers. The mother instinct dies hard.

“All right,” she said sadly. “Where are you going to start?”

“Probably with Armin.”

“Armin?”

“The little man who was waiting for me last night. Mr. Neatness and Light. His name’s Peter Armin and he’s staying at a midtown hotel. I think he’ll be glad to see me.”