Shadow of a Tiger (11 page)

“We only met after Dad was dead!” Danielle said hotly. “Mother thinks I'm a child, but I'm not a child anymore. See?”

She pulled her dress flat over her thighs and belly, outlined her body, and arched her back to show me her full breasts. It only showed what a child she was.

15

While I had the special veal cutlet at a diner on Sixteenth Street, I thought about the afternoon and Li Marais. I had tried not to think about her, or the afternoon, since I had left her asleep, and now I felt the hollow in the pit of my stomach. Was I in love with her? If I was, did it matter? Claude Marais had not gone into the river. He had probably done nothing, and she had been with him for eighteen hard years. I thought about something else. Not Marty.

I thought about how you checked the details of a man's actions thirty years ago in a foreign city under the rule of an invading army. Whatever had to be done, I couldn't do it. It was a police job. For all I knew, they might have done it, or be doing it, already. To be sure, when I finished my coffee, I walked to the precinct station. The hot spell was breaking. Masses of high black clouds moved in the last light over the city from New Jersey. We would get rain, and then it would cool for a time.

Lieutenant Marx was out of his office. Another detective said that Marx
had
contacted Paris about Paul Manet, but no word had come back yet. I left a message for Marx to call me—please.

Wind whipped up stray dust and a hail of paper in the street as I walked toward my office. The storm was blowing up fast. Thunder was rumbling across the now night sky as I reached my building on Twenty-eight Street, and the first heavy drops came down. By the time I got to my office door, the sky opened, and the torrent poured down the airshaft outside my open window. I hurried in to close my window, and the hands grabbed me.

At least four pairs of hands. A bag went over my head. I started to throw off the hands. Something poked into my back. A gun or a stick? I wasn't about to find out the hard way. I stopped struggling. A voice whispered close:

“Get him down, quick!”

I was walked, hustled, out of my door and down the stairs toward the street and the torrent of rain. I heard a lot of feet, and a lot of low, hard whispering. There was something familiar about it all—the grim guerrilla band. Kidnapping the important official. The bag over my head, the urgings to speed, the pell-mell flight down the stairs into the rain—like an IRA unit in action, the Brazilian political rebels. Too many newspapers, too many old movies.

I was soaked when they shoved me into a car. We drove off, drove for some time with the rain pounding on the roof of the car. An old car, the engine wheezing and the chassis creaking. A lot of turns around corners, right and left, and after a time I began to sense that we were driving around in circles, going a few blocks, then doubling back. Under the wet bag, I couldn't know whether they were circling to evade a tail, or just to try to confuse me, but I had a sudden hunch that when we stopped we would not be too far from my office.

We stopped. They pushed me out into the rain and an odd silence. All I could hear was the rain falling on something like thick grass or bushes, and cars hissing through the wet on some kind of highway. I was walked along some narrow path with an odor like hay, and down some narrow space between walls where the rain echoed in the night.

Then we were inside, the sound of the rain shut out and yet reverberating in a kind of emptiness. Footsteps on bare wood. Up stairs that creaked loosely. Two flights, and into a room on the third floor that smelled of stale cooking, musty plaster, and something burning. I was pushed down into a chair. The bag came off my head.

The first thing I saw were two candles burning in fruit-jar tops. They stood on orange crates, and were the only light in the long, dim-shadowed room. The windows of the room were covered by blankets, the heavy rain muffled outside in the night. I saw a long wooden table piled with empty cans, dirty dishes, and blackened Sterno cans. I saw mattresses on the bare floor, each mattress in a separated section with ragged clothes hanging on nails. The defined little areas like small rooms; one set of clean, sharp, gaudy dress clothes hanging in each section. I saw a television set all by itself along one bare wall like an idol on an altar. I saw four pale, unhealthy faces, and hungry, half-sane eyes, watching me from the candle-lit shadows. And I saw Charlie Burgos sitting on an orange crate in front of me.

“Why'd they let the Chinaman go, Fortune?” Charlie said.

“They found the stolen stuff, Jimmy Sung never had it. He's clear. Why, Charlie? Where do you fit?”

“I ask the questions, Fortune.”

Too much TV, too many movies. The manner, the dialogue, of every tough guy who snarled his way through the cameras between commercials. With TV, anyone can know in an hour the way an FBI man, a Mafia soldier, or a Corsican bandit talks, looks, and acts. What no one can know from TV is why the Corsican acts as he does, how he got that way, what he feels inside. To know that is life, not television, and these kids did not know life beyond the slum streets and the hovels of their parents. An imitation, a surface ritual, that depended on the proper responses to maintain it. I wasn't about to play.

“Crap,” I said. “You didn't rob the shop, Charlie. You wouldn't have dumped the loot. But you were at the shop that night. Why? Money? Some scheme? Did you give Eugene Marais too much? He could have hurt you? So you killed him?”

Charlie Burgos was up. “No way! I swear—!”

Automatic. This was real, an accusation. He had been accused all his life, and he reacted—protesting. Weak, a zero in the real world, and the weak can only protest, plead their innocence before power. Forgetting for the moment that in the dim room he was supposed to be the power, that he had me. The ritual lost for an instant. Then remembered, the script back.

“Back off, Fortune. You got nothing. We got you.”

What else did the street kids know? What did they have to do with their time? A dreary past, a hungry present, and no future at all. Today would always be the same, unless it got worse, until they died. For one reason or another, for each of them this room was home. Parents who could give them nothing. Afraid of organizations, because, for them, all organizations turned into a man with a whip. Their only view of the bigger world from their depths was, like Gorky's bakers in their cellar, a single small window—the television set. They dealt with the bigger reality through the surface imitation of television, faced the tiger through its shadow.

I said, “Where do you fit, Charlie?”

“My business,” he said, sat down. “The cops got any leads?”

“Ask them.”

Another boy said, “We got you, we ask you, mister.”

“Shut up,” Charlie Burgos said, the boss. “The cops're nowhere. Maybe you got some ideas who killed the old man, Fortune?”

“You're worried, Charlie?”

“I got no worries. No problems at all.”

“Danielle?” I said. “Maybe you know something about her? Her own father, you know?”

Charlie Burgos laughed. “Man, you're sure crazy.”

“He didn't like you much, Charlie. Not for her.”

“Hell, the old man was Jell-O, you know? No problem.”

“How about Paul Manet?”

Charlie Burgos's face was bland. “What about him?”

“Manet and Danielle, maybe? Eugene Marais didn't like that? A fight, maybe? An accident? Maybe that's your interest in the thing, Danielle was dumping you for Paul Manet? You—”

“Danielle don't dump me for anyone. You're way off,” the youth said, leaned toward me in the dim room. “Look, the old man was knocked over in a two-bit grab-and-run. Happens all the time in hock shops, right? Danielle and me we got plans, okay? She got to get something now the old man's dead. Only everyone's nosing around, and Danielle don't like that. You got her old lady paying you through the nose. That's money out of our pockets. For nothing. Whyn't you let the fuzz handle it, okay?”

“You beat me up, grab me, just because Mrs. Marais is paying me and that's lost money to you?”

“You're gettin' in the way.” His voice was angry now. “Why the hell don't you leave town, take a vacation.”

Was he needling me about Marty?

“I've got a job, I need money to eat, too.”

“Okay, how much? How much to drop it, fade out?”

“I thought you figured I was taking money out of your pocket already.”

One of the others said, “He's a hardhead, Charlie. Let's get rid of him.”

“Yeh,” one said.

“Permanent,” a third added from the shadows.

It scared me. They were imitation tough guys, playing at an illusion, but they believed their own script, and if they followed it through all the way I'd be as dead as if they were a real gang of musclemen. They'd be caught, they weren't really strong, but that wouldn't help me. That they might kill me, I didn't doubt a second. They believed themselves. They had to. Alone in a big country that ignored their existence, alienated and forgotten, they had no chance and less hope. These boys had been given no hope, so they invented it—the hope of schemes, and plans, and big dreams of power and triumph.

I said, “Charlie, tell me what you know. I'll help you. Whatever you're doing, you'll get hurt unless—”

He broke in, cold. “I won't get hurt, mister. I'm on my way. Maybe you'll get hurt. Maybe the boys are—”

Only when I heard the car door slam below the dim room did I realize that the rain had stopped. The street boys heard the car door too. One of them went out of the room. He came back almost at once.

“Some guy parked in the alley. He's got a gun out!”

Charlie Burgos lifted the corner of the blanket covering a window, peered down. “It's that Kraut hanging around Danielle's uncle. What the hell does he want?”

They all crowded around Charlie Burgos at the window, whispering urgently. Like a pack of curious puppies. They were, after all, kids, most of them younger than Charlie Burgos. That had saved me in the alley when they attacked me, and it gave me my chance now. I walked to the door of the room, quick but softly, watching them. They didn't see me. I made the door and out.

I was almost down to the second floor when I heard them howl up in the room. Then I ran.

16

I came out of the building—an abandoned, crumbling, condemned brownstone, I saw now. I did not know where I was. The only unboarded door opened at the side of the brownstone into a narrow alley slick and cool with the rain. A narrow front yard was tall with brown weeds, wet in the night after the rain.

They would expect me to run to the street—the safety of a city man. So I ran left up the narrow alley and past a parked black car. At the rear corner of the condemned building I saw a shape, a face white in the night, a hand with a pistol.

“You, Fortune!”

I ran on into an open space behind the abandoned brownstone where two buildings had already been demolished leaving an emptiness in the city like a scar. I scrambled over the wet mounds of debris in the open space. The voice behind the pistol in the alley had been the ex-Legionnaire “associate” of Claude Marais—Gerd Exner.

I reached the far street. It was dark and deserted, the people not yet out again after the summer storm. I trotted left toward the wider avenue, no sound of running behind me. I didn't think they would come after me in the open when I was ready for them, but I watched the corner ahead in case they tried to head me off. There was no one at the corner. They probably didn't even know which way I had run. I looked back down the dark street toward the open space and the alley to be sure, and saw the black car turn out of the alley toward me.

I jumped into the cover of a doorway as the black car came to the corner, but the ex-Legionnaire, Gerd Exner, saw me. The car skidded to a stop, began to back up. Exner had a gun, I didn't, and I couldn't know what he wanted with me, or which side he was on. I ran up the wide avenue. The black car ground gears to come after me, the traffic on the avenue light in the dark after the storm.

I reached the next corner. The street sign high on its lamppost read: 10th Avenue—19th Street. I knew where I was. I ran left again down Nineteenth Street toward the condemned building where Charlie Burgos and his boys had taken me. Before the black car and Gerd Exner could follow, I jumped down into a sunken areaway in front of an Italian market. With any luck, Exner would think I was going back to the condemned building, and drive past me.

He did. The black car went on down the street toward the condemned building. It was all the break I needed. I knew where I was now, I'd gained a few moments, and Exner had lost sight of me.

I slipped along the dark streets back to my office.

This time no one was waiting for me in my office. I locked my door, just in case. Gerd Exner would know by now where my office was. All right, what did the ex-Legionnaire want? With me, or with Charlie Burgos, or both? What did Charlie Burgos want? With Charlie Burgos it was probably money. It was probably money with Gerd Exner too. Or was one of them a man who had killed, and who wanted me silent?

I heard the man coming up the stairs outside my office. He wasn't trying to be quiet. I got out my old cannon anyway, put it on my desk in plain sight. The man in the corridor could be going to some other office on my floor. A shuffling walk, like the furtive customers of the old men across the corridor with their funny pictures. But the old men wouldn't be open this late, so I watched my door.

The knob turned. I waited. A voice called out: “Mr. Fortune?”

Jimmy Sung's voice—sober, as far as I could tell. I got up and unlocked the door. Jimmy Sung came in. I checked the corridor. Jimmy seemed to be alone. I sat down at my desk. Jimmy Sung stood and looked at my big gun. He wasn't drunk the way he had been this morning, but he wasn't sober, either. A liquor shine to his eyes, a faint swagger to his stance, but not swaying or shaking. The alcoholic plateau, where, with a drink every so often, the alkie can function for hours as if perfectly sober. Maybe better.