In the washroom in the eerie Victorian house on Staten Island, Shayne unfastened the wire from his battery case after reporting in to Inspector Power, opened the window and tacked the wire to the outer sill. Then he washed his face in rusty water. Dying his hair and eyebrows had changed his appearance more than he had thought possible. Everything had gone as Power had predicted until the moment when Szigetti said he thought he had seen Shayne somewhere.
Quickly Shayne reviewed what he knew about Szigetti. Power had had little information about the man. His arrest record was short and unimportant. He had been a Marine for four years. He had been court-martialed for selling supplies but acquitted for lack of evidence. His discharge had been honorable.
A transistor radio, tuned to a disc-jockey program, was playing when Shayne entered the living room. Irene danced toward him with thin arms extended. He embraced her. Without a partner, her entire skinny body had been in active motion, but this was not Shayne’s style of dancing at all.
“You’re creaky, Dad,” she said.
Shayne let her go with a disgusted wave. “Where do they keep the liquor?”
She tried to hold him. “I didn’t mean anything. I like to dance that cornball way. It’s a change.”
“I want a drink. Where’s Billy? He’ll dance with you.”
“He had to go back on guard. And who’s going to drive in here in the middle of the night? I mean, it’s nuts.”
“There you are,” Shayne said, spotting a bottle. “I don’t suppose we have ice.”
“Sure we have ice.”
She went to the kitchen. Shayne emptied somebody else’s watery drink out of a jelly glass and filled it from a bottle of blended rye. Irene came back with a handful of ice cubes.
“Where did Michele find you, anyway?” she said, putting one in his glass. “I really thought we were raided when you walked in.”
“I like to see a girl put up a fight,” Shayne said irritably.
She laughed. “It only took five of us to slow you down. You know what I was thinking when I had you around the waist?”
“Don’t tell me.”
She was standing close to him, drinking. She was older than he had thought at first-twenty, perhaps. Her torn blouse was held together with a straight pin. There was a prominent horizontal bone at the top of her ribcage. Her skinniness was charged with vitality, like a naked wire. Her hair was long and messy, and not much face showed. From across the room she had merely looked eccentric, but at a distance of less than a foot she was an arresting and unsettling girl. She idly slid her fingertips inside the waistband of his pants and gave him a small tug.
“Later?” she said.
“Who knows?”
“Not that it matters,” she said, “except to me, but I had an off-Broadway part last year. Just a walk-on. You didn’t see it-it only lasted nineteen performances. That’s the way I look at this-a part. But God, I’m nervous.”
She touched the outside of his jacket, feeling the hard bulge of his. 45. “I had a vague suspicion.”
Across the room, Michele was talking to Szigetti, her eyes on Shayne. Brownie was slumped in a leather-covered Morris chair, his dark face as uncommunicative as a wall. All were holding drinks. Shayne walked over to Michele and asked if there were any cigarettes.
“You have some, Ziggy,” she said.
He unwillingly offered his pack to Shayne. “I was just saying,” he said. “Basically the idea is good, but I got a couple of minor suggestions. The one thing I don’t want to touch is that act of Irene’s. The big black buck and the Greenwich Village beatnik. That’s going over big.”
Shayne looked down bleakly. “Do you and Brownie get the same cut?”
Szigetti’s eyes jumped away from Shayne, not quite reaching the Negro, who regarded them impassively.
“As far as that goes.”
“Then let’s have less of this color crap,” Shayne said.
Szigetti looked at Michele for support. “What did I say wrong?” he asked on a high note.
“We change the subject,” she said firmly. “I have told Frank about your shooting. Perhaps you will show him the gallery.”
“Well,” Szigetti said grudgingly, “I’ve been sopping up booze all day. I could be a little off.”
He finished his drink and started for the kitchen, saying carelessly, “Brownie, let’s do some shooting.”
Without change of expression, the big Negro followed. Only Irene stayed upstairs.
“Exhibitionist,” she said with a look at Szigetti’s back.
The others, waving cobwebs out of their eyes, went single file down a narrow flight of steps to the basement. It was a spooky place, lit only by two dim bulbs. Rust had eaten holes in the furnace, but the bin beyond was still half-filled with dusty coal.
Szigetti faced into the shadows. “What’s the matter with that light down there? See if it’s loose or what, will you, Brownie?”
Brownie sloped off, keeping his head low to avoid the obstructions on the ceiling. A bright light came on, showing a pocked target nailed to a plywood panel. The distance, Shayne judged, was about twenty-five yards.
“Be careful,” Michele told Szigetti.
He squinted at the target, holding a short-barreled. 38 loosely at his side. “I won’t plug anybody.” He risked a quick look at Shayne. “They knew how to build houses in the old days. I had Billy stand halfway to the road while I did some shooting, and he thought it was crickets, for Christ’s sake.”
Brownie called, “OK?”
“OK.”
Brownie was concealed from view behind a hot-water tank. Suddenly a beer can flew into the light. Szigetti fired, sending the can spinning back with a clank against the masonry wall.
“You bastard,” he said, laughing. “You almost tricked me that time.”
Suddenly a rat scuttled across the concrete floor, heading straight at them. Michele screamed and seized Shayne’s arm. A shot from Szigetti’s. 38 checked the rat briefly, knocking it off stride, but it kept coming. Michele tightened her grip convulsively and went on screaming as the rat scuttled up to her feet. It had been put together out of brown cloth and darning thread, and stuffed with cotton. At close range it didn’t look much like a rat. Some of the cotton stuck out through the rip made by the bullet.
“Ziggy, you monster,” she said, her hand to her breast.
“And I don’t know what angle it’s coming from,” Szigetti said, pleased. “That’s the beauty of it. Depends on what string he pulls.”
While he was talking, a cardboard head poked out abruptly from behind the water tank, disappearing the same instant that Szigetti fired.
“Missed!” Brownie called. He added in a lower voice, “No, you didn’t. Nicked his ear.”
Szigetti gave a complacent laugh. “Take a shot,” he told Shayne. “I noticed you carry a. 45. A. 45 slug would really blow a hole in that rat.”
Shayne’s. 45, of course, was loaded with blanks, which made a noise but wouldn’t knock any stuffing out of a stuffed rat. “No, thanks,” he said. “I stopped practicing years ago.”
“Go ahead,” Szigetti urged him. “Take a couple of cracks at the target anyway, if the rat scares you. I’d like to see what you’ve got in the way of a draw.”
Shayne smiled. “What are we doing, rehearsing for television? No, you’re too hot for me, Szigetti. After that much sauce I might not even hit the target.”
Szigetti sneered. Suddenly Shayne said, “Now I know where I saw you. You were in the Corps.”
The other man looked at him with slow surprise and put away his.
“Four long years. What outfit?”
“I was a D.I. at Parris Island,” Shayne said. “I forget what year you were there.”
When Szigetti told him, Shayne said, “The mustache makes the difference. I keep running into guys, but it always takes a minute. After the first half-dozen cycles all the boots begin to look alike.”
Szigetti, in good humor again, thought this called for a drink. They trooped back upstairs and finished the bottle. Another bottle appeared, the same harsh blend, Shayne was sorry to see. Szigetti was no less ready to reminisce than any other former Marine, and he stayed in a good mood as long as the others were willing to listen. All his officers, for one reason or another, had had it in for him, but just the same, he had generally managed to fix their wagon.
When Billy was called in off guard, he suggested a game of poker. Michele had never played, but she was willing to learn. She sat beside Shayne, her knee touching his leg. Between them, they collected most of the money at the table. Szigetti believed himself to be an expert but lost steadily. He crouched suspiciously over his cards, smoldering.
“Of all the goddamned luck!” he said, slamming down aces and queens after Shayne took the last pot with a low flush.
“Luck?” Brownie said. “That’s poker-playing, man.”
Michele stood up quickly and told Shayne to come with her while she found him a place to sleep.
“I know what,” Irene put in from across the table. “No, that would be unmoral.”
Shayne gave her a half shrug and followed the French girl.
“You can use Tug’s room,” Michele said when they were upstairs. “A toothbrush and so forth will have to wait till tomorrow.”
She turned on the overhead light in an empty bedroom. There was a mattress and pillow on the big iron bedstead, but only one rumpled sheet.
“Primitive,” she admitted, “but can you manage for two nights?”
“It’s better than jail,” Shayne said. “No women in jails.”
She listened at the door, then closed it and came into Shayne’s arms. She kissed him hungrily.
“I would love to stay with you,” she whispered. “But Ziggy is so wild, it would make him worse. Tomorrow we make love. Do not forget. I take you to New York. When we are alone, let me suggest ways, darling.”
Shayne’s role didn’t require him to make an answer. His arms tightened and he let one hand slide down her back. She broke away.
“Tomorrow will be a sensational success, I promise you. Even better will be the day after, then the day after that Wait. I want you to try on the uniform.”
She went to the closet and took out the green, one-piece overall worn by workers in the New York Department of Sanitation. “He was as tall as you, but without your shoulders. It was loose on him. We can get another tomorrow if this one is too bad.”
Shayne undressed and put on the uniform. It was too tight across the chest. The bulge of his. 45 showed clearly. She gave him a critical looking over.
“Leave one more button open. No, I think you must carry the pistol in a bag.”
Shayne grinned. “Between two slices of bread?”
“It will only be for a moment. Darling, that was clever of you, not to shoot for Ziggy. It pleased him. I have seen you with a pistol. I do not need to be shown.”
“That’s the way people get in the Marines-gun-happy.”
“He is not so bad, after all,” she said, trying to talk herself into it. “Perhaps tomorrow you must frighten him a little. He was frightened of Tug. Today they are all on edge about Tug’s arrest, they drank too much. But what each one has to do is very simple indeed. There will be no trouble. We will arrive in Portugal, you and I, with no one the wiser and much money in our luggage.”
“Maybe, Michele,” Shayne said, his tone suddenly weary. “You don’t know how it is, kid. It’s never simple. There’s always a place where you’ve got to hang tough or let them take you. Too goddamn many thieves really want to make mistakes so they’ll be put away in a nice safe cell with three sure meals a day. This Tug character who let himself get picked up-after a couple of days with these oddballs maybe he was looking for a way out. He took the small pinch instead of the big one. And that’s what these characters are thinking. They think he knew something.”
“Stop it.”
“It could work,” he said. “So long as you remember it’s going to take luck. And I have a feeling that the minute that cop recognized me in the subway, my luck changed. I may jinx this for you.”
“Nonsense!” she said sharply. “We go over it and over it, if necessary a hundred times, and cut down the possibilities. Then if something unlucky happens, you will move quickly and decisively and overcome it. That is my feeling.”
“I hope you’re right.”
She peered up at him. “Darling, that one policeman recognized you. What if there should be others? I believe we should at least dye your hair. Red, perhaps.”
Startled, Shayne let out a snort of laughter. “And maybe we can talk Ziggy into loaning me his mustache. No, baby. If something happens, it happens. That’s my philosophy.” He picked up his jacket, which he had thrown on the bed, and felt in the side pocket. “I want to give you back your watch and bracelet.”