Death Wish (9 page)

Well, to hell with them
. He disembarked from the elevator and crossed the lobby, noticing that their doorman was nowhere in sight.
Anybody could just walk in
. His jaw crept forward. He went out onto Forty-fifth and searched the street for a cab but there was nothing in sight; the Kreutzers lived far over on the East Side near the U.N. complex and it wasn't a busy night-traffic area.

The air was clouded with a fine drizzle. He turned up his jacket collar and put his hands in his pockets and walked up toward Second Avenue, avoiding puddles and refuse. He stayed to the curb edge of the sidewalk because the buildings—parking lots, loading bays—were filled with deep shadows where anyone could be lurking. Only half a block from the lights and traffic of the avenue; but places like this seethed with muggers, he knew. Sour spirals came up from his stomach. His shoulders lifted, his gut hardened. One pace at a time up the gray street, raindrops chilling the back of his neck. His heels echoed on the wet pavement.

It was like running a gauntlet. When he reached the corner he felt he had achieved something.

Reflected neon colors melted and ran along the wet avenue. He crossed it and stood waiting for the roof-light of a free cab to come in sight. Waited several minutes but by then he knew it was going to be one of those nights when there wasn't a taxi anywhere in the world. He turned a full circle on his heels, making a sweep—nothing. Trucks, the occasional green bus headed downtown, big sedans rushing past with pneumatic hissings, occupied taxis.

A half block north of him a figure staggered into sight under the lights of a storefront: a drunk trying to avoid stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk. Coming right toward Paul. In fear he turned quickly and began to walk west along Forty-fifth Street.

It was early but the neighborhood had a four-o'clock-in-the-morning feeling. He didn't see anyone at all until he got near the corner of Third Avenue. A young couple came in sight, walking uptown, a pudgy fluffy young man in a flared jacket and a girl in belled slacks with straight hair down to her waist: liberated singles, carefully not touching each other, talking animatedly about something fashionable and banal. Perhaps they were deciding whether to go to her apartment or his; perhaps they had already reached the stage of sharing an apartment, their surnames connected by hyphenation on the mailbox. They looked as if they didn't like each other very much.

Paul waved at an approaching taxi. Its cruise-light was illuminated but it swished past him without slowing. He fought the impulse to yell at it.

He waited through four red lights before a taxi stopped by him. “Seventieth and West End,” he said through his teeth; sat back and banged the top of his head against the car's fiberboard ceiling. Was it just taxicabs or were the rear seats of all modern cars impossible to sit in without slouching and cringing? Paul hadn't owned a car since they had returned to the city from their brief fling at suburban life; other than taxis the only car he had been inside in the past year had been the mortuary limousine.

Through the Plexiglas screen that sealed off the rear compartment he had a bad view of the driver; he had an impression of a huge Negro head, a hard roll of dark flesh at the back of the neck. Neither of them said a word.

A red light ahead was out of synch and the driver avoided it by swinging left on Forty-seventh and heading across town. All along the block west of Eighth Avenue there were girls leaning against the walk in dark doorways. On Ninth Avenue there was a troubleseeking cluster of teenage kids with their hands inevitably in their pockets, faces closed up into an unbreakable apathy. Addicts? Perhaps it was just that nothing short of the most violent brutality excited them any more. They looked as if they were waiting to kill someone.

Would he have had the same thought two weeks ago? Probably not, he thought; probably he would have sensed their boredom and resolved to dedicate more time to the neighborhood athletic league: “What these kids need is an interest. We need to set up some ball teams. Now let's get a committee together and raise a little money for equipment.”

It was no longer the answer. Why should play-at-war games attract them when they had real wars to go to?

These were new thoughts for him and he wasn't comfortable with them but they kept crowding everything else out of his mind. By the time they passed Lincoln Towers he was deep into a fanciful daydream about a ball-team of vicious teenagers to whom Paul was supplying high-explosive shrapnel grenades, disguised as baseballs, designed to annihilate teenage gangs.

He paid through the little tilt-slot in the plexiglass and got out on the corner. He was about to cross the street when his eye fell on a convertible parked in front of the supermarket. Part of the roof had been slashed open; it hung in gaping shreds. Probably there had been some item of minuscule value visible on the back seat; someone had pulled a knife, ripped the car open, reached in and stolen the object. People ought to know better than to park canvas-topped cars on the streets.…

He stopped, drew himself up.
What the hell kind of thinking is that?

Do we have to give up every God damned right we have? Do we have to let them scare us into giving up everything?

Fallen rain gleamed on the street like precious gems. He looked over toward the river—along the block, under the concrete of the West Side Highway. The lights of a boat were sliding past. Out there on the filthy river in a boat you'd be safe.

Safe
, he thought.
And that's all we have left to shoot for?

The light changed and he had crossed the street and stepped up onto the sidewalk before he saw the man standing in the shadows right by the corner of the building. Standing against the wall, shoulder tilted, arms folded, smiling slightly. A black man in a tight jacket and a cowboy hat. As lean and efficiently designed as a bayonet.

Paul's toes curled inside his shoes. His hair rose; the adrenalin pumped through his body and made his hands shake. They stood face to face with a yard of drizzling rain between them. The black man never stirred. Paul turned very slowly and put his foot forward and walked up the street with the sound of his heart in his ears.

A panel truck was parked in front of his apartment house, facing the wrong direction for the traffic; there was a police parking ticket on its windshield but it hadn't been towed away: someone had slipped a few dollars to someone. Paul stopped beside the truck and used its big outside mirror to look back along the street. The black man stood where he had been, indistinct in the shadows. Streaming sweat, Paul went into the building.

The man's smile: did he know who Paul was? Was he one of the ones who had killed Esther?

He was letting his imagination run away with him.
Come on, get a grip on yourself
. Kids, Carol had said. Teenagers. This guy was full-grown—he wasn't one of them. Probably his amusement had been purely the result of Paul's all-too-obvious fear; probably he was an intellectual, a playwright or a musician who'd just decided to post himself on that corner and see how long it would take the cops to roust him along—some sort of experiment to prove something about white bigotry.

Paul thought about going back outside and telling the guy it wasn't a very wise experiment.
If I'd had a gun in my pocket and you'd looked at me like that you might have been in a lot of trouble, fella
. It was only a fantasy; there was no possibility of his going back outside. He nodded to the doorman and went back to the elevator.

A common enough fantasy though, I'll bet. If I'd been there when that guy slashed that roof—if I'd seen it happen, and I'd been armed at the time…
.

8

“You wanted to see me, Mr. Ives?”

“Have a seat, Paul.”

Ives was the remaining survivor of the three nimble-penciled accountants who had founded the firm in 1926. It had moved uptown in stages from Beaver Street to Forty-third. The old man's office was a repository for oddments of decor from each of the firm's stopping places. An antique stock-ticker, a pair of grandmother clocks and four hideous gilt cherubs as wall decorations. The furnishings were pleasantly mismatched, the products of several different decades and levels of company prosperity: in one corner sat a modern Danish chair, a mock-Victorian step-end table, and a brass floorlamp from the ‘Twenties with a plain, cheap shade.

It was a huge office, plushly carpeted, occupying five hundred square feet of corner space with enormous windows on both exterior walls—a good view of the U.N. Building and the East River.

Paul pulled a chair forward and sat. Ives said, “How's your daughter getting along?”

“Not much change from last week, I'm afraid.”

“A crying shame,” the old man said. “I certainly hope she pulls out of it.”

“The doctors have every confidence she will.”

“Yes. Well. Still I expect you're very worried and anxious about her.”

“Yes, naturally.”

“There
is
something I can do to help—or to be exact, to help you to help yourself. That's why I asked you to come by. It's a job for you, and there ought to be a sizable bonus in it if everything works out as it should. I'm sure the hospital expenses are quite heavy for you—I realize you've got that major-medical policy, but all the same there are always considerable expenses the insurance won't cover.”

“Yes sir, that's quite true. I've had to dip into our little securities portfolio.”

“Then this ought to help handily.”

“I appreciate your consideration, Mr. Ives, but I'd prefer not to accept charity.”

“Nothing of the kind, Paul. You'll earn it.” Ives had his elbows on the leather arms of his high-backed swivel chair. He steepled his fingers and squinted, making it clear he was going to be strictly business about it. “Of course it's this Amercon situation. I had a call from George Eng this morning. Their board of directors wants to proceed in the direction he outlined to you a few weeks ago.”

“A merger with Jainchill Industries, you mean.”

“Yes. Howard Jainchill was here in the city last week and George Eng had several meetings with him. Everything seemed to go reasonably well, but of course they can't sit down to do any serious dickering until the two companies have examined each other's books. Naturally that's where we come in, as Amercon's accountants.”

“We're to go over the Jainchill figures.”

“Yes, quite. Of course the Jainchill home-office is out in Arizona.”

Paul got a very straight look; Ives went on: “I thought, frankly, a trip away from the city might be good for you at this juncture.”

“Well, I hadn't thought about it but it might be a good idea,” Paul said uncertainly.

Ives seemed to be waiting for a rider to the statement. When Paul added nothing the old man said, “Well then, that's settled, you'll fly out with George Eng the end of next week.”

“It's very kind of you, Mr. Ives, but on a matter this big, shouldn't one of the senior members handle it?”

“Not necessarily. It's your kind of job.”

“Well, I'd like to be sure it's not going to—cause friction.”

“Paul, I'm not concerned with doing a favor for you, except tangentially. You have a keen eye for other bookkeepers' elastic accounting methods, you've always been willing to call a spade a spade. You handled the Masting case last year, so you're a bit more up-to-date on this particular variety of merger than most of the rest of the members. And you——”

“Excuse me, Mr. Ives, but in the Masting case we knew they were cooking the books and it couldn't help give us an edge—we knew what to look for. Are you suggesting the Jainchill people are doing the same thing?”

“I wouldn't put it past them.” Ives said it with a tiny smile on his strict mouth. “I don't know Jainchill personally but he's got a reputation for being a man with the business ethics of a bankrupt car dealer.”

“Do the people at Amercon suspect anything specific?”

“Not according to George Eng. But Jainchill knows Amercon's been sniffing around his company for quite some time. He'd be a fool if he hadn't done a bit of juggling to inflate his profit picture. Everyone does it when he's trying to promote a merger.

“Now we do know, for example, that for the past year Jainchill has been reducing the rate at which he's been writing off the cost of new plant facilities—he switched from rapid to straight-line depreciation. Naturally it reduced the amount he had to set aside on his books to reflect the deterioration of plant and equipment. You'll want to look into that to ascertain the real figures and find out how much it increased their reported profits.

“When it comes to deciphering the footnotes that clutter up corporate reports, there isn't a man in this office any better than you. It's a sure bet Jainchill's earnings reports look fatter than they really are. The question is, how much fatter? Basically that's up to you to ascertain, but you'll also want to look for all the other likely possibilities. Amercon has to have a clear picture of what they're buying before they'll make an offer for it.”