River City (68 page)

“How much is there?”

“Doesn’t matter. You’ll lose it anyway. If you happen to win, don’t think you can keep it. I’ll frisk you when this operation ends.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Cinq-Mars didn’t like this guy so much. He seemed to be overcompensating for his life as an accountant and taking advantage of the fact that Touton wasn’t with them. He doubted that the guy would be so tough on him with the boss around.

“Get that money stuffed away.”

“I’m stuffing.”

“Now find the picture.”

“Excuse me?”

“The photograph in there. Take it out. Look at it.”

A separate pocket had its own zipper. Cinq-Mars fished out the snapshot and flicked on the overhead light slightly behind him. “This the guy?” he asked.

“That’s the mark. Memorize that face. He won’t be the only bald head standing around. I should have you go in there like a dumb-ass rookie and just screw it up, find the wrong guy. But we can’t afford to let that happen. We need this guy. We need you to make good contact, okay? This is our best opportunity, understand?”

They swung hard into a curve, and Cinq-Mars was thrown against the door, the tires squealing for mercy.

“Now find the map,” Fleury said. “We don’t have much time. Study the map.”

“Why didn’t you show me this weeks ago?” “Don’t get irritable with me, sap. Find the map!”

The schematic, which had been executed with a draftsman’s hand, detailed the rooms and their configurations. Superimposed on the sheet had been sketched the design for an escape hatch, ostensibly through a ventilation chamber that led to a modified laundry chute. Cinq-Mars was to make contact with their mark. When all hell broke loose in the room, he’d lead him through the crawl space and down the escape chute apparatus from the third-floor gambling den to the ground.

“What do I land on?” he asked.

“Cement, if I can arrange that on time. But the bad guys keep a bin with pillows and old mattresses in it. It’ll be mouldy smelling, but you shouldn’t break a leg. But go first. That way, if there’s a problem with the landing, you can fix it before the mark flies down.”

Cinq-Mars felt queasy about the arrangement. “Bit of an act of faith, don’t you think? Dropping down three floors?”

“Not faith. Balls. Either you got ‘em or you don’t. If you don’t, we’ll find that out tonight.”

“Fine for you to say. All you do is push a pencil.”

Fleury braked sharply again, for no reason, then sped up. “Do you have that map memorized? On account of your griping, we’re losing time. You’ve got to get out of the car, Cinq-Mars, find the right door, take the freight elevator up three flights, find the right door again—both doors have three red dots alongside the top hinge. That’s what you look for.”

“Three red dots.”

“Can you handle that? When you’re challenged, say that Merlin sent you—” “You’re kidding me.” Plenty about this operation seemed half-baked to him, although he’d not step away from it. Put him in charge—when that day came—and a great deal of police procedural guff would vanish.

“Merlin.
Stop interrupting. Make damn sure you don’t choose the wrong man.”

Fleury gave him the final details of the operation, then braked. “Get out,” he said.

“Good luck to you, too,” Cinq-Mars told him, and took a step out of the car.

“Come back here,” Fleury commanded.

“What now?”

“Leave your gun behind … your holster, your badge, your wallet. I want nothing in your pockets but cash.”

Cinq-Mars still had a ways to walk down the block, then he crossed the street. Other cars had peeled away without them, and now Fleury departed as well, to join the officers on the rooftop to prepare for their descent through a skylight. Cinq-Mars suddenly felt alone, somewhat fearful. He had to pretend to be someone he was not, to act a role and be convincing, or he’d botch the entire operation and, potentially, his career as a detective. Courage, he knew, was not the issue, but concealing his nervousness, feigning bravado, forgetting to be somebody else and suddenly reverting to his true nature—these things worried him. Thinking too much, that was an issue, too. Somehow he had to relax, and Émile Cinq-Mars took ten deep breaths to try to get himself under control.

By the ninth large inhalation, he was at the door.

The bottom exterior door was unlocked, but a bull of a man nodded with his chin, expecting a password. Cinq-Mars took his tenth deep breath.

“Mer—” He lost his voice, his breath, his nerve. He cleared his throat. “Merlin sent me,” he said, and the man looked him over from head to foot then nodded, and let him go ahead.

He found the freight elevator and pulled up the large garage-style door. A second, inner set of doors peeled back with a slight tug. He stepped inside. As he punched the button for the third floor, the doors closed and, noisily, painfully slowly, the elevator ascended, coming to a rest with a jolt. The inner doors parted easily, but he had to heave up the outer door on his own again, and this time it didn’t run smoothly. He smacked his hands together to shake the grit off them. Only people walking and touching things moved the dirt around in here—the place was never cleaned. Cinq-Mars carried on down the corridor, dark and drab with dusty air. Fortunately, the doors were painted white, and he easily spotted the one with three red dots by the upper hinge.

He knocked.

Nothing.

Knocked again.

Still nothing.

He tried the knob. Somebody opened the door from inside.

“Hold on to your dick,” a grizzled, wiry, short old-timer grumbled.

“Merlin sent me,” Cinq-Mars declared.

“Who asked you?” the man said back. Unshaven, with white whiskers.

“I was just saying—”

“Who sent you?” the clearly crotchety figure demanded.

“I told you. Merlin.”

“What does that make you, you think? Fucking King Kong?”

A subliminal reference, Cinq-Mars deduced, given that he was at least a foot and a half taller than the elfin, irascible doorman. Or perhaps he was expected to know a coded response. He froze.

“You got money? Show me. We’re not a fucking bank in here. You want a loan? No sweat. We take your dick as collateral.”

“In your dreams,” Cinq-Mars quipped, proud of himself. That sounded like a tough, raw response to him, words that wouldn’t normally come out of his mouth. Maybe he could get the hang of this detective racket after all.

He chose to be slow, pulling bills from one pocket, then another, and if a few fell on the floor, he left them there.

The doorman rushed him through a set of heavy, dark curtains before the fresh arrival noticed the denominations he’d dropped, and delivered a parting admonishment. “Next time, Prick Face—knock.”

Most voices in the room were pitched low—quiet demands to raise a stake, murmured announcements closing a table to further bets. One boisterous fellow let the room know whenever he won or lost, barking out his victories and cursing his defeats. Over the tables, the lights were as low as the gentle murmuring, the smoke intense. Ceiling fans blew warmer, smoky air down upon the gamblers, and Émile Cinq-Mars deliberately coughed.

Good move, he thought. He was coughing to conceal his survey of the room.

About twenty people were present, a quiet night. In the minds of the players, then, a safe night, for a police bust would be more dramatic when the place was packed. The croupiers, at first glance, were dressed for the part, wearing white shirts and black vests, but as Cinq-Mars sidled up to a table next to a bald-headed customer, he noticed that the croupier’s vest showed a few dark stains, probably from spaghetti sauce or something similar. His shirt had been due for a cleaning weeks ago. Cinq-Mars was pulling bills out of his inside jacket pockets and shuffling them into some kind of shape. He smacked his tongue over his thumb a few times to moisten it, and decided to put his bills into order by denomination. “I don’t know what I got here,” he said to no one in particular, then looked up at the bald man.

He was not the guy.

He looked around the room more carefully, and counted. All told, eight bald guys. As if a hair-growth convention was being held in the city.

He went by them all, ostensibly to check the action at the various tables while shooting a glance at each of the suspects. No luck. Then a ninth man, still doing up his fly as he emerged from a washroom, proved to be his mark. He looked exactly like the snapshot.

Cinq-Mars followed him to the roulette wheel and put his money down.

“I feel lucky,” Cinq-Mars declared. “You?”

The other man shrugged. He didn’t want to talk to the new arrival whose hands were full of cash.

“You’re right,” Cinq-Mars analyzed. “Luck’s got fuck-all to do with it. The wheel is scientific. The right scheme, you come away a fucking winner.”

“Everybody’s got a scheme,” the man philosophized. He was an accountant, Cinq-Mars guessed, and knew the odds on schemes. “Sooner or later, it’ll beat you.”

“If you let it, it will. Once your scheme goes cold, switch strategies. That’s my policy. Stay a step ahead of the game. You watch. Learn. I’ll fucking show you how.”

He put a hundred dollars down and said, “Red.” “You’ll need chips, sir,” the croupier told him. “I’m not hungry,” the cop told him.

“Very funny,” the man said. “How much do you want to change?” Cinq-Mars stood confused. “Merlin sent me,” he said. “Great, but you still got to buy your chips.”

“Come on, are we playing here or not?” another man called out from the table’s end.

“Take your money off the table, sir. I’ll sell you chips when you tell me how much you want.”

The cop turned to the bald guy beside him. “I’m superstitious. Tell me something. Have you had a lucky night so far?”

“Break-even,” the man said with a shrug. He had a dimple on the left side of his chin, and bright blue eyes that made him look like a dog of some kind, Cinq-Mars was thinking, a husky.

“How much did you start out with?”

The man shrugged. “That’s your business how?”

“Sir, don’t disturb the customers.”

“I want to order what he did. He’s doing okay. He’s break-even. I want some luck, that’s all.”

“Kid,” the bald guy said, “order a couple of grand in chips and stop slowing everything down, that’s my advice.”

“I appreciate that more than you know,” Cinq-Mars told him. He was weaving a little, to indicate that he’d had a few. He was wishing he could have a Scotch at that moment and regretted that the barmaid was on the other side of the room. He started counting out two thousand dollars. “You’re a gentleman and a fucking scholar, I can tell that. Maybe I can do you a favour some day.”

Not being aware of what the coloured chips were worth, Cinq-Mars raised a few eyebrows when he finally placed a bet, depositing eleven hundred dollars on the black.

He lost.

“That’s some system,” the bald guy said. “Change your mind and lose.”

“Hmm,” Cinq-Mars said, but he was concentrating on finding the trapdoor out of here. “I keep betting until I win.” He laughed. “That’s my system.”

“That’s the whole world’s system,” the man said, and he laughed a little, too, and a few others around the table chuckled, and then the skylight
overhead burst with a nerve-splitting shatter and glass showered down upon them.

The bald guy was scooping chips off the table—not only his own—but was looking around with a dazed expression, as though he could not believe it, but this might be the worst day of his life. Cinq-Mars grabbed the shoulder of his jacket. “Follow me,” he whispered in his ear. “I know the secret way out.”

“What secret way?”

“I owe you a favour, right? I pay my debts. Come on.”

While the croupiers were running for the back exits and the customers were scrambling to get out the front door, a police officer shouted through a bullhorn from the now-open skylight for everyone to stay in place. “We got the building surrounded!” Cinq-Mars got down on his hands and knees behind the roulette wheel and pulled a panel free from the lower wall. A tight crawl space. The owners had to be slim men. He crawled into the dark cavity, receiving a face full of spider web while experiencing the hands of the bald guy shoving his ass through the passage more quickly. He scrambled on his elbows and hips, the darkness severe, the air dank.

After travelling for some twenty feet—which, for all his hurrying, took a while—his eyes had adjusted and he could discern an escape from this purgatory. He fell through the space onto a floor, a drop of three feet, and turned to aid his mark to stand upright again as well.

“Now what?” the bald guy demanded, as though Cinq-Mars had delivered him out of a frying pan into a fire. This section of the building was bordered by floor-to-ceiling windows, and reflections of revolving police-car lights on the street below eerily lit up the space.

“This way,” Cinq-Mars told him. He was doing it. He had gotten his mark out of the gambling den and now would rescue them both. The plan was actually working, and he had managed to perform his part well.

They jogged down a corridor, and Cinq-Mars showed him the escape chute, which looked like a fast drop.

“You’re kidding me,” the mark said. “I’m not going down there.”

Cinq-Mars didn’t blame him. His own stomach was churning. “Take the chute or face the cops,” he warned him. “I’ll go first. That way, you’ll see it works.”

The bald man considered his options. He had none. “All right,” he conceded. “But I’m not going down there until I see for myself that you come out alive.”

“Tell you what. Once I’m down, I’ll bang the chute three times. That’ll tell you it’s safe to follow me down. If you don’t hear nothing, stay put.” “Go already. Let’s get out of here.”

The young officer on his first undercover operation hesitated at the brink of his descent. That was a long way down. Three floors, all of it steep, into the dark, and at the bottom, potentially, oblivion. He sat in the chamber. He straightened out his legs on the slick aluminum slide. He put his hands down by his sides and bent back at the waist. Straightening. The incline was steep enough that he didn’t need any help, but the bald man chose to give him a push.