A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The Clean Fight

He got out of a taxi anti went into the hotel, about ten on the evening this thing starts. He went up to the desk and asked: “What room’s Mike in?”

“Mike who?” the clerk answered evasively.

Terry showed him 2941. “This Mike.”

“He’s in the corner-suite up on the fifth,” the clerk said then. He knew all about what was going on, but he figured it wasn’t any of his business. He wasn’t the one it was all about; that made the difference.

Terry rode up there and rapped respectfully on the door. Affectionately, almost. Not like he rapped on other doors sometimes.

Another detective opened it immediately, as if he’d been waiting for him to show up and take over. They simply nodded, like men so used to working together they don’t waste time on spoken greetings.

“How’s he doing?” Terry asked, the way you would ask about God.

“He slept a little. Then we watched the games on t. v. He sent down for another bottle.” He looked down and gave a remorseful head-shake. “Try to hold him down on it a little if you ran.”

When men are tender, no tenderness of women can match theirs. The tenderness of women is in small things, in their fingers, in their hands. The tenderness of men is more like a flame of devotion, burning fiercely toward some leader, some idol, some chief. It occurs mostly in groups, such as armies in wartime, and in that other war-just as much a war as any — between the police and their eternal adversaries.

“It can’t be done, you ought to know that by now,” Terry grunted, irritable at what he took to be the other’s obtuseness.

“But how long can he last, the rate he’s going? Day and night, night and day. Even the doctors can’t do anything with him when he goes into the hospital for his check-ups. He sends out for bottles, and lies awake all night cursing and banging his fist against the bed in his frustration and his fury.”

“You know what he wants as well as I do. That’s what’s eating him. When he gets it, he’ll quit drinking and cut out raging, and be a different man.” Terry’s jaw was stony with hate. Second-hand hate at the start, but now his own fully as much as Mike’s and all the rest of them. The thwarted hate of the pack when the rabbit has eluded them and yet stays there in full sight, unreachable and immune. And when the pack happens to be the police, unaccustomed to such defiance, this can be a terrible thing. Far better to lose the game than to win it. For it can’t be won anyway. One thousand years of human cleverness and ingenuity, the best brains of the race, have gone into the making of the police, the punishers, the avengers, and one man alone cannot stand against them, no matter how wealthy he is, no matter how adroit or basically non-criminal or legalistically unpunishable. “No, he won’t die. Not until this is taken care of for him. This is what’s keeping him alive.”

“I want to see him get it,” the other man said, looking down. “I want to see him die in peace, die happy, if he has to die.”

“We all do,” Terry said reverently. “He was the greatest one of them all, in his day. They don’t come like him any more. I love him like a father. I love him better than a father. I want him to get what he wants. I want to give it to him. I want to be the one.” He pushed his thumb backward against his chest. “Me.” There was a light almost of fanaticism in his eyes, of dumb devotion to a chieftain.

The bedroom-door suddenly gave an audio-illusion of buckling outward toward them along its middle, as when a flattening blast takes place inside a shut-up room. Then the shattering cause of it roared through. A voice, human but like that of twenty bulls.

“Will you stop standing there gossiping like a pair of washwomen the two of you! Terrance the Cleary! I want you in here with me!”

The other detective quietly closed the door after him and left. Terry went into the bedroom and stood just inside the doorway, at a sort of semi-attention.

The man sitting up in the bed was a large man, huge, in his sixties. One side of his face had been marked by a stroke, but it was not paralyzed, just distorted a little out of its normal contour. He could move it freely when he spoke, or used his jaw, or did anything with his eyes. It looked about as skin does when a barber pulls it back behind the ears so that he can get a tight surface on which to shave. His over-all color was a high-blooded maroon, that spoke of the stroke, and of pent-up hatred, and of whiskey. The hatred was in his eyes too. They were terrible to see. They were sick with it, worried with it, crazy with it. They were so loaded with it they seemed to hate everything they rested on — even a table, even a chair — but this was only because they were so saturated; actually they didn’t, they only hated one thing in the entire world. One thing: one man.

“You can lay off that,” he glowered, taking in the semi-attention. “I’m not on active duty any more, and you know it.”

“You always will be to me, Mike,” Terry said devoutly. “Always and always, no matter what the roster says. And always to the captain too.”

“Yeah,” Mike said drily, in one of his rare calms for a moment. “He sends you men over here, by turns, on regular shift-detail, all to make me feel good, I guess.” His voice roared up again, like the suddenly released flame of a blow-torch. “I don’t need that! I don’t need somebody to play nursemaid, sit by my bed and play gin-rummy with me! Give me what I want. Get that man in there!” He tangled on his own hot breath, and had to stop and wait for his throat- and mouth-passages to clear, and then go slower and lower, but only by sheer self-enforcement. “Down that hall outside — three doors, four doors away from where we’re talking—”

“I know,” Terry said patiently.

“Well then hear it once more!” Mike exploded. Behind that door, facing the one outside here, you can see it from here when you look out. is a man moving around, standing, sitting, free and easy, taking it free and easy, and laughing to himself, laughing all the while, not only at me, but at you, at every one of us!”

“He’s not taking it easy,” Terry said vengefully. “Every minute of his life is hell. Every breath he draws is fear. Never knowing, never knowing. I bet sometimes he wishes that he was already in, just so it would be over with. I bet sometimes he’d like to change places with the lousiest con in stir, just so he’d be safely past us on the other side.”

“That’s not enough,” Mike said, almost in anguish, throwing his head upward and back and clenching an aching fist at each side of his throbbing body. “I want to see him lying on the floor, beaten until he can’t feel it any more. Then brought back, and beaten some more, and some more, and some more. I want to stamp down on him with my foot, myself. I want to spit into his open, speechless mouth.”

They stopped, silent and spent. The fumes of their hate filled the air of the room, odorless but just as present, just as toxic as carbon monoxide.

“The try with the ghost-taxi fell through,” Terry remarked glumly after a minute or so.

“Frank called up and told me, while you were on the way over. Everything does, everything we try. It’s uncanny; he must have a sixth sense, he must be spooked.”

“He is very quick on the pick-up,” Terry admitted. “But that’s all it is. And why wouldn’t he be? He’s had three-and-a-half years to develop it. What happened was, a fluke developed that couldn’t have been foreseen, one of those fifty-to-one shots. We were parked about half a block below, keeping our eyes on the hotel-entrance, with the cab standing by alongside us, when he came out, walked over to the edge of the curb, and started sticking his neck out. We pointed the cab at him and started it off. Everything ideal; no other cabs around, very scarce, that particular hour, that particular part of New York. In-between, there’s just this one apartment building. Get this, just this one apartment building. Suddenly a doll comes hustling out of it, in a hurry to get somewhere. She runs out toward the cab, wig-wagging and squealing, in fact gets so close he almost knocks her over. She’s between him and the guy, in other words. Is that a fluke? He cuts past her and keeps aiming at the guy, like we told him. It doesn’t sink in right away, I guess he’s so glad to get a cab. He gets in. Two blocks away the cab gets held up for a light. He must have thought it over in the meantime, sitting there. And I guess the driver’s jitteriness helped to tip him off too. A lot of people are afraid like that. They’ll stand up to a strong-arm man with a gun, but mention dangerous mental disturbance and it unnerves them. It’s a superstitious fear of the unknown, coming down from olden times, that a lot of people still have even today. Anyway, a dollar-bill comes floating down onto the front seat, the door opens and slams, and the guy’s on the outside. There’s nothing the driver can do to hold him; the dollar’s much larger than just the two-block fare. And he’s afraid to try it, anyway. So we have to sit there cursing through our teeth and watch him walk the two blocks back to the hotel and get safely inside it again.”

“You figure he knew?” Mike questioned.

“Sure he knew. He never came out any more. He sat with a bottle drowning the close shave he’d had. We could hear the glass going up and down all the time.”

“He’s smart,” Mike brooded. “He can almost read thoughts. He can see you in the dark like a cat.”

“We’re smart too,” Terry said vengefully. “We can see in the dark too, like bigger cats, like tigers. There are more of us than there are of him.”

“He’s had three-and-a-half years to sharpen up his wits.”

“We’ve had thirty, sixty, a hundred-and-twenty,” Terry reminded him. He turned away suddenly from the window he’d been glooming out of. “We’ll get him with a girl. I’m going to try a girl.”

“That’s been tried.”

“How? By an anonymous phone-call from some cheesy woman’s voice, that he wouldn’t come out and meet? By some slob pretending she knocked on the wrong door by mistake, that he wouldn’t let into his room? Not this way. Not this girl. You never saw anything like this girl.”

He asked for a number on the phone. When he got it, he said: “Come on over, we’re ready for you.” Nothing else.

Mike kept breathing hard. Breathing harshly like a horse.

“Take it easy, Mike,” Terry said. “She’ll be here soon.”

“I can’t wait,” Mike lamented. “I’m suffering. Hate is like a pain inside you.” He emptied off half a water-tumbler of whiskey straight down. His brow was red, and all spangled with sweat. He wiped it off along his sleeve.

Terry sat down suddenly, bent one leg up, look off his shoe, turned it over, and shook out a tiny speck of stone or grit. “That’s been bothering me all day,” he remarked. “I haven’t had a chance to get it out until now.” Then he put the shoe back on, but not before a small whiff of mustiness had crossed the room.

The girl came. She was spectacular. But even more important than her looks was her quality. There wasn’t a trace of cheapness about her in anything: not the way she spoke, the way she walked, the way she dressed. Any man would have been proud to have her on his arm and walk her down the street, for everyone to see he had her with him. She had on a plain black dress of some smoky, gauzy stuff, without sleeves and scooped low in front and back, but not to the point of double-exposure. The only piece of ornamentation she wore was a watch the size of a nail-head, on a black cord around one wrist. Even her make-up was toned-down: no charred-eyes and bleeding-lips effect. You couldn’t be sure she had any on. As for her perfume, it was the kind you only noticed after she’d left a room, not while she was still in it. Even then you didn’t realize it was perfume, you only wondered what had made you think of her just then.

She was classy, she had it down to a science. Whether it was just knack, or she had trained hard for it, it came out just right.

A special kind of girl, for a special kind of man. A marked kind of man.

“Turn around,” Terry said impersonally.

“Now turn around the other way.”

“Now walk over there.”

“Now come on back.”

He looked over at Mike.

Mike just shook his head. “He can’t get past that.”

The girl didn’t smile or react in any way. They weren’t paying compliments, they were just stating facts.

“Careful, now—” Terry warned her.

“I’m always careful,” the girl said, with a touch of feminine disdain.

“One wrong move, and you’re liable to tip the whole thing off—”

"I never make a wrong move — where a man is involved.”

“—you’re not up against just some ordinary john. This man is educated, he’s stacked with enough money to make the hotel think twice before they’ll let us remove him by force from their premises, in order to avoid risking a big, hefty damage-suit. They’re a forty-million-dollar chain, and they can’t take the chance. The bad publicity alone would hurt their public relations. So he lives on here in a kind of immunity, always barring some infraction. And that’s where the whole problem comes in. He don’t infract. Three-and-a-half years of walking a tightrope have taught him that.”

“I was watching him from an unmarked car once,” Mike put in rancorously, “when he still used to go around outside the hotel sometimes, and I saw him cross the whole width of the sidewalk just to drop a tiny rolled-up ball of foil from his cigarette-pack into a litter-basket, instead of letting it fall on the ground.”

“We have a complete dossier on him, starting with the original charge that triggered the whole case—”

“Why couldn’t you use that?”

“Lack of corroboration and too circumstantial. Like I said, we have it all down in the dossier, that and lots more, but what good is a dossier without an act? We need an act. A clear-cut, definite, exposed act, punishable by statute. It doesn’t have to be sex, it can be anything. Just so we can get our hands on him, and hold onto him, nail him clown once and for all and give him the business.” The sound of Mike’s teeth grinding together could be heard clearly all around the room.

“The way it stands now, he can’t get out and away, and we can’t get in and at him. It’s a stalemate. The way it stands now, we’re on one side of the door, he’s on the other. We have to get somebody inside it with him on his side, but working for us. That’s the only thing that’ll break up the deadlock. Follow?”

“I follow,” the girl said quietly.

“So now you have an idea what you’ll be up against. An intelligent mind — very wary, very alert, very cagey — but an unbalanced one, all the signs point to that.”

Mike roared angrily. “Why beat around the bush? He’s criminally insane!”

“I didn’t want to frighten her too much,” Terry temporized.

“She may have to tangle with a guy who’s nuts with fear, and she better know about it!” Mike lashed out relentlessly.

The girl widened her eyes momentarily. That was the only sign of fear she gave. Then she dropped her lids over them calmingly. “All men are nuts, more or less — when you get too close to them,” she said thoughtfully.

“Don’t be afraid. We’ll be covering you. We’ll be all around. Just a call-for-help away.”

“That can be awfully far sometimes,” she said reflectively.

“He’s committed acts that would have gotten him stoned to death in the old Bible days,” Mike snarled.

“Don’t take her nerve away,” Terry pleaded with him.

“I’ll be all right,” the girl said. “And if I do get into the room with him?”

“You’ll have to play it by ear. The main thing is to win his confidence. Then it’ll unroll by itself.”

“Oh, my darlin’,” Mike mourned with typical Gaelic sentimentality, “I’ll give you a bonus out of my own pocket. I’ll buy you a string of pearls.”

“I don’t use jewelry,” the girl said gravely. “The life I lead, it’s only a hazard.”

She opened the door. “I better get under way,” she said briskly. Then she turned to them. “Pray for me,” she said, and closed it and went out.

She said it with a smile, but she wasn’t joking.

She came up to the door with a free-swinging stride, and rapped loosely and almost casually on it, just as you would when you drop in on a friend informally.

The man who opened it wasn’t old, but he looked it. His hair was cut short to the point of travesty, about the height of worn-down toothbrush-bristles. The deep circles of sleepless nights were under his eyes. He looked strained and haggard. Not just at the moment, permanently so.

“Yes?” was all he said. And even that one short word managed to crowd uneasiness into it.

From that point on the thing moved fast, staccato. Like the quick-beats of a drum climbing up to a climax and a crash.

“Had a hard time finding your room—” she tossed off, and swung the door back before the man could catch it and hold onto it, and somehow side-stepped past him and was already in the room before the man could grasp the fact of what had happened.

The man had to turn his head now, because she was behind him.

“You must have the wrong—”

“Don’t you remember? Down in the bar a little while ago? You said, “Come on up have a drink, let’s get better acquainted—’ ” “Pour something,” she encouraged. “Let’s make it friendly.”

The bathroom door opened unexpectedly. It had a full-length mirror set into it. As this swung around, blurring perspective, the lights reflected on it came to a head and produced a bright but soundless flash, like sheet-lightning or the flash-bulb of a camera.

A woman stepped out into the middle of the incipient crisis, cool and casual. She wasn’t a girl, she wasn’t that young any more, but she still looked satisfactorily young. She had that innate something about her that spells good breeding and demands consideration. Not just a cheap stray to be disregarded.

She was looking only at the man.

“What is it?” she said evenly. “What does she want?”

“She’s got me mixed up with somebody she claims she met in the bar—”

“How could you have been down there? The two of us have been light here in the room since eight o’clock—”

There was a body-turn swift as a bolero dancer’s, and the girl was gone again, just as springy and sudden as she’d come in.

The little splash of spread-out sparks from the cigarette she’d flung down headlong slowly soaked into the carpet and glimmered out.

The man stood there frozen, as if a snake had just fallen unexpectedly onto his shoulder from somewhere and then dropped harmlessly off again.

Terry had to call down for help and have a bellboy come up and give him a hand, before he could wrestle the heaving, forward-straining Mike away from the door and back toward the bed out of which he’d cannoned when he first learned of what had happened. At that, the call, brief as it was, had cost him considerable ground, because he’d had to hang onto Mike with only one arm hooked around and under Mike’s arm while making it with the other. When the auxiliary, actually a stocky man of fifty, arrived, they managed between the two of them to establish sufficient counterweight to stall and reverse Mike’s impetus. But in a respectfully passive way, not actively using their arms to oppose or push him at all. Terry in fact simply used the backs of his own shoulders as an impediment, and gained leverage by digging his heels in front of him and pumping backward. The tripartite mass of figures they made somewhat resembled the classical Laocoon statuary-group, except that they weren’t marble, weren’t motionless, and had clothes on. Finally by a series of lurching drags, first on one side then on the other, they got him back within orbit of the bed, much as men move a frigidaire or some other equally ponderous object without casters. Then he suddenly stopped straining, went spent, and sank down heavily onto the edge of the bed.

“No, Mike, don’t,” Terry lamented. “You’ll give yourself another stroke.”

“It’s you that’ll be giving it to me,” Mike accused. “And the likes of all the rest of you.”

Terry held out a drink and Mike promptly gave it back to him, all over the face.

Terry wiped himself off on his sleeve. The droplets clinging to his jawline had made him look for a moment as though he had a curious, beaded beard. He had the uncomplaining look on his face of a dutiful son who has just been buffeted and accepts the justice of it, even though he may not be sure just exactly what it was for.

The mature bellboy had retired by now.

Terry waited a tactful moment or two until Mike’s breathing had subsided still further, then took a chance on pouring out another.

This time Mike put it where it belonged, down his own gullet. His face slowly went back to red again, from the almost-black it had been before.

“Who is she?” he demanded, clapping the glass down. “How’d she get in there? I thought you had every way in and out spotted. How’d she get through?”

“We have, we have. It was just a blind coincidence, one of those things that happen every now and then; that there’s no way of preventing because they’re completely unforeseeable, unguessable beforehand. I did some checking after she left. They’re old friends, from years back. She didn’t come to see him, didn’t even know he lived here. She came in to see someone else, a woman friend. He and she must have come face-to-face in one of the little lounges or passageways that weren’t being spot-covered by us — the ground floor is honey-combed with them — and he gave her his room-number. Then later on, after she left her other friend, she looked him up to talk over old times. No sex, she’s not that type. There was no particular reason to single her out; she might have ridden the elevator along with other people, and been thought to be accompanying them.

“It was just one of those flukes, Mike,” he said. “Like that bit with the taxi.”

“It’s always just one of those flukes, with him,” Mike brooded darkly. “For three and a half years now, it’s been just one of those flukes, over and over and time after time. Till I ask myself: which is the punisher and which him that’s punished? Who’s on the right side and who on the wrong?”

His face screwed up blindly for a minute, and he acted as if he were going to cry. But didn’t.

“He’s spooked. He’s got the luck of the damned. He’s got a sixth sense of some kind that protects him.”

“No he hasn’t, Mike. And even the luck of the damned finally runs out one day.”

“I want him,” Mike whispered, with the awful irrevocability of a last sacrament.

“You’ll have him, Mike,” Terry said softly, and put his arm out and let his hand come to rest on Mike’s shoulder, as in an accolade of transposed filial promise. “You’ll have him.”

Mike left for his bi-monthly check-up at French Hospital early Monday morning in a glossy black departmental limousine, toiling along from hotel to car like a big Alaskan bear held upright, Terry under one arm, a team-mate under the other, fanging imprecations against the enemy he was temporarily turning his back upon, growling admonitions to the two supporting him. At the last moment, perhaps recalling happier days, he gave an impatient combination fling-and-wrench that sent them both staggering clear of him, and climbed in the rest of the way alone, with a morose “I was walking by myself before the two of you ever saw the light of day, and I’ll still be walking by myself when the two of you are resting in the ground where all good men go.”

The car-door gave a curt crack of dismissal after him.

“There goes a man,” said Terry’s companion admiringly.

“We’ll never see his like again,” Terry agreed.

The car gave a U-turn around the tulip-beds in the middle of lower-section Park Avenue, coursed the downtown lane for a couple of blocks, and then turned off and slipped from sight. The hospital was almost on a direct line with the hotel but the width of the island away, over on the West Side.

Mike was coming out again Wednesday at nine, which was exactly when the hospital raised the boom on him, and not a minute sooner (but not a minute later either, no hospital could hold him longer than that). Which gave Terry forty-eight hours on his own. Twenty-four to be exact, for he had to split shifts.

He had twenty-four hours on his own. He turned and went back into the hotel alone.

He waited until ten, as if for some private time-signal to strike, unheard by others. When it had, he got up abruptly, walked out and went down the hall toward that other door.

A tray with a coffee-pot and used cup was standing on the floor to one side of the door. There was a sound like a fly buzzing against a window-screen. An electric shaver.

Terry turned and walked back the other way again, more slowly this time, killing time.

A waiter got oil the service-elevator and carried the tray down. When Terry walked back to the door again, the buzzing had slopped.

This time he knocked.

There was a special way he knocked. It wasn’t aggressive. It wasn’t timid either. It was matter-of-fact, normal. Like a man calling on somebody he knows, no more, no less.

A voice said “Yes?”

“Talk to you a minute,” Terry said.

“What about?”

“About you.”

Nothing happened.

“Me and you — both,” Terry changed it.

Still nothing happened.

“Mutual benefit,” Terry said.

Nothing yet. But the mere fact that there was no answer showed that his mind was working on it.

“I’m not kidding, it’s to our mutual advantage,” Terry reiterated. “But I can’t say anything more from out here.”

Finally the door opened, not to let him in, but to get a look at him.

He’d left the chain on. The incident with the girl had taught him that much.

Terry did it very carefully. Like you move slowly, not to frighten away a bird or a butterfly, or something volatile like that. Slipped out his wallet with his identification-badge, and turned it around, and let him look at it. But kept it well back, didn’t thrust it sharply forward as in an arrest.

Then he spoke very quickly, because the man’s face was already turning ghastly ill. “I’m not ordering you to let me in. It’s up to you to let me in or not. It’s got to be of your own free will.”

And then he added, very low and under-breath, “I promise not to touch you.”

Maybe that did it. Who knows what did it? Terry didn’t know. The man himself probably didn’t know what did it.

“But you are a cop.”

“A hungry one,” Terry admitted. “I’d also like something newer than a sixty-one Dodge.”

The door closed. The chain fell. The door reopened unchained. Terry was in. Step one.

Terry pointed to a side-table halfway down the room. “Can I go over by that table?”

The man nodded, but didn’t appear to understand what he was nodding about.

Terry went over to it, kept his back turned so the sight of the gun wouldn’t panic the man. Took it out, put it down on the table, walked away from it backwards, and then turned.

He held tip his elbows at shoulder-height. “This is so you’ll trust me. That’s the only one I have, over there. Now frisk me.”

The man hesitated.

“I insist.”

The man touched him in the various places a gun might be.

“Now go over there and stand by it. I’ll stay here. You’re at least six times closer to it than I am. Now we can talk.”

The man glanced at the door.

Terry caught his implied meaning and went over to it. He chained it and he double-locked it. Then he turned around and faced him again.

“This way we’re safe from sudden outside interruption,” he said. “Could be anybody; and I can’t chance being caught in here with you.

“You have to learn to trust me,” he said. “Until you do, what I say won’t make any sense. Once you do, it’ll make plenty.”

The man still didn’t, obviously. His eyes were oscillating like two little metronomes, back and forth, back and forth, ready to spring wide in alarm at the first suspect move.

“You know what you’ve done,” Terry said. “For years you were on the payroll of one of the crookedest big-time operators that this town has ever known and right while you were on the force. When a raid was building, somebody tipped him off. Who could that have been? Whoever it was figured it could never be proved, and it never was. But whoever it was didn’t figure Mike’s son was going to be in the raiding detail. And get a bullet, and get killed. The guy that shot him went to the chair years ago. But the guy that was really the cause of it, all he got was a dismissal from the force, exact charges never specified. And with all that nice dirty money piled up waiting for him.”

He spat on the floor with compassion.

“Mike has no son now.

“Mike’ll never forget that.

“You can’t win, except my way.”

The eyes had stopped their wary flickering now. They were suddenly still. Dead-still, as if reflecting back the very thing that they were looking at: the face of death. Then he covered them briefly with both hands, palms against sockets, with a fling of hopelessness. Then lie dropped his hands again as quickly, as if to symbolize mutely the very hopelessness even of hopelessness itself.

Terry said, speaking low and very slow: “I don’t have to tell you what your situation is, but I will anyway, so we can go on from there. You can’t get out of here. You’re barricaded, like in the Middle Ages when a guy took refuge in a church — a sanctuary — and they couldn’t come in there after him and get him because that would have meant desecrating the church. So they waited outside and finally cut him clown when hunger or something else drove him out again. This is like that pretty much, except that the church is now a hotel. The hotel-chain that owns it has considerable influence in the right places, and it doesn’t want you removed by force from its premises — unless you have been first charged with some crime on the books, and you haven’t been — not only because of the bad publicity it would give them, but also because of the risk of an eventual damage-suit. Since there is no outright crime of violence against you down on our books — it’s more a case of alleged moral turpitude — the powers-that-be have agreed to go along with them on this, and wear you out by waiting just outside for you. As long as you don’t commit any violations (and you’re very careful not to, from what we can see), the hotel likes having things just the way they are: they’re milking the situation for all it’s worth. Where else can they get five-hundred dollars a month for one of their rooms, and from a tenant who’s practically handcuffed to them for the rest of his natural life?”

Terry looked at him almost curiously.

“It’s the most unusual case that’s come along in years, there’s nothing else like it to be found in our files.”

Without saying a word, the man broke a fifth of Courvoisier out of a Louis XV liquor-cabinet and swallowed a jigger of it neat, as if he couldn’t get it down fast enough. He forgot to offer any to Terry, only he didn’t know it, but that was one thing Terry wouldn’t have mooched from him right then. Terry wanted to keep his head with him.

“The way it stands right now, it’s what you might call — stabilized. But it won’t stay that way long, it’ll start going downgrade on you. Within a few months, or a year, human nature being what it is, you’ll find yourself at the mercy of every conniving employee in the hotel, because they’ll know they have you over a barrel and you can’t fight back. You’ll be disrespected, things’ll be stolen from you — who you going to complain to, us? Until one fine clay some good-looking chambermaid with a shifty boyfriend will let him put her up to the idea of walking into your room with her hand stretched out in front of her and calmly saying ‘Five hundred dollars, please, or else I’ll scream and say you made a pass at me.’ You’ll have to pay, you can’t afford not to. Then somebody else will see how easy it was, and they’ll try it too, only the second time it’ll be a thousand. You’ll be bled white by the time they’re through with you. Then the hotel will throw you to the wolves anyway.”

The man squeezed his eyes tightly shut with one hand held over them, and pounded his fist against the top of a chair in helpless frustration.

Terry watched him closely, carefully, to see how he was doing. He, Terry.

“Now here’s the other side of the picture, let me give you that. You’ve got money enough to live like a king the rest of your life, anywhere in the world, Paris, Rome, Rio, name it. Once you’re there you’re safe up to a point. You’re not a wanted criminal, so no extradition would be involved. The most we could do would be to tip off the authorities over there that you’re a person of doubtful moral character and to keep an eye on you. If they start crowding you too close, all you would have to do is move on again to the next place. At least you wouldn’t be cooped up in a single hotel, like here. And there are some places where you would be out of reach entirely. Tangier used to be one of them, I don’t know if it still is. That Arabian kingdom where Eichmann holed up before he went to Buenos Aires — Kuwait. Andorra, in the Pyrenees. But even if you just keep moving on without stopping anywhere, always just one step ahead of your reputation, roaming the world like a man without a country, that isn’t so bad if you have the money. In today’s world, the champagne is just as good one place as the next, the girls are just as pretty one place as the next, the little sport-cars race just as fast one place as the next.”

He stopped and looked at him keenly. “Have I told you any lies? Have I told you the truth of it, or haven’t I?”

The man lowered his head in unspoken admission.

“Now here’s the one catch there is to the whole thing. There’s just one little stretch you can’t navigate, you can’t manage on your own. And that’s the short haul from here to Kennedy. Or to one of the piers along the Hudson. Whichever way out you try to make it. You’ll be picked up just as you get there. There have been standing orders out to that effect for over a year and a half now.”

The man nodded somberly as though he already knew all about that. Now he was the one to light a cigarette, or try to. It vibrated like a triphammer between his lips. Finally he had to throw it away.

“I can help you across that one little hurdle, which is all that stands in your way.”

There was a long-time silence. Two minds measuring each other. Two pairs of eyes shadow-boxing. Two pulses beating with the same emotion: strained hope. But hope that came from two different directions.

“What for?”

“Good question. Twenty thousand dollars.”

Another long-time silence.

Terry had been in the room with him now about fifteen or twenty minutes. In those fifteen or twenty minutes he’d only said two things so far: “But you are a cop” and “What for?” Now at last he said some more, quite a lot more. He started to thaw out.

“I give it to you. Then I’m stopped at the airport anyway. What come-back do I have? You’re in twenty thousand, I’m in custody.”

“You don’t give it at this end. You give it at the other. After you get out there. After you’re on the plane, even, if you want it that way. You can pass it clown to me from the top of the ramp.”

“That’s no guarantee. You’ll be riding out there alongside me. I’ll have it on me. You can take it away from me by force anytime you feel like it, from one minute to the next. You have a gun on you.”

“I can get you one too. That’ll equalize us.”

“Then they can get me on the Sullivan law.”

“The gun doesn’t increase your risk. There’s only one risk, and it’s there already: that of being stopped. And the deal is, I see you past that. You can’t run two risks, you can only run one. Do you follow me?”

The man shook his head troubledly. “I can’t believe the whole thing. Just like there’s an old saying, ‘All’s fair in love and war,’ there ought to be another one, ‘All’s fair between a cop and the man he’s tracking.’ ”

Terry sighed patiently. “Look,” he pointed out, “I’m the one taking all the chances, much more than you are. If this ever comes out, demotion is the very least I can expect. There’s a good chance I’d be kicked off the force altogether. And let me tell you, twenty thousand bucks may be nice in a lump sum when you still have your promotions and your pension ahead of you, but stretched out thin to cover all the rest of your life, with a black mark against you and no chance of getting a decent job any more, it can come down to pretty measly nickels and dimes, by the month and by the year.”

He took a restless turn around the room, came back again.

“Once you get on that plane, your troubles are over. Once you get on that plane, my troubles begin.”

“I still can be taken off at the last minute, even after the money s changed hands, even after I have my seatbelt on.”

“You’re protected twice over. First-off, other members of the force would have to know you’re on it, to do that. The tip-off would have to come from me, at the hotel, as I spot you leaving. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. They don’t get the tip-off, they won’t know. I’ll be the only one that knows. Now secondly, if I should turn on you and haul you off, you can pull me down right with you. I still have the twenty thousand on me, don’t forget. All you have to do is accuse me, they find it right on me then and there. How am I going to explain that much money? Or failing to tip them off from the beginning? It’ll make it sound like you’re telling the truth. That may not help you any, but it sure won’t do me too much good either.”

And he concluded: “Don’t you see? We’ve got each other backed up, we’ve got each other neutralized.”

The man didn’t answer any of it. He seemed to be thinking it out.

Finally Terry had to break the silence again himself. “We keep waltzing around and waltzing around, and we don’t get anywhere. What it boils down to is this. There’s one short stretch, one last step, that you’ll have to take on faith alone, where you’ll have to trust me. It’s that last couple minutes between the cab and the plane, those last few steps as you go up the ramp. You’re covered everywhere else but there. But if you don’t trust me there, then the whole thing goes to pieces, like I told you when I first came in the room.”

He let that sink in.

“This is your one and only chance. You better think about it. You can’t stay on here indefinitely, I’ve already explained why. That can only end one way. Like in the old Western movies, you’ll either come out shooting, or with your hands up. Or else with your arms half-nelsoned behind you in a straitjacket.

“One more thing. If you turn me down now, then change your mind and try to reach me later and take me up on it, you can’t, it’ll be too late by then. Mi — The man over me will be coming out of the hospital Wednesday morning at nine sharp, and the minute he does, the thing’ll close down tighter than a drum again. You won’t have a prayer from then on.”

He sat down slantwise on the arm of a chair, hands in pockets, one leg overslung, foot dangling idly and bobbing a little, as if keeping time to the hidden tick of the passing seconds, waiting for his answer. Debonnair, casual, sure of himself, holding the upper hand, waiting for his answer.

The man started to move toward him slowly, one step at a time, like someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing, like someone walking in his sleep, like someone in the grip of a compulsion so strong he can’t break it. It was a terrible thing to watch. Moving one foot out, and then trying to hold back. Moving the other foot out, and then trying to hold back. Moving the first foot out again—

Finally, to hurry it up, Terry quirked his head and said, “Well how about it? Are you going to trust me? Or aren’t you going to trust me?”

He thought the man was never going to answer. Anyone else would have thought so too. He didn’t ask him a second time. He’d asked him once. Once was enough.

The man shot his hand out suddenly, so suddenly it almost took Terry by surprise. He looked at it first. Then he shook it.

“What’s your name?” the man asked him. Standing for yes, I’m going to trust you, God help me.

Now it was Tuesday, the last day of grace. About eight in the evening, Terry’s shift rapidly winding up.

The man was in the room, but he had his back to it. He was standing there with his nose pressed flat against the blinds on one of the windows. The interstices of the blinds, which were drawn closed, made straight lines across, all the way up and down. All except one, the one that ran past directly on a level with his eyes. That opened into an ellipse in the middle. At each end of it his thumb and index-finger were holding it spread open a little. The slats were flexible and could be bent.

He was as motionless as an upright corpse, and the room was completely static at the moment, completely still, and yet there was an air of excitement, of crackling electrical tension, overhanging everything. You just had to look around to tell something was up, or something was coming up. Fast and soon.

The overworked bottle of Courvoisier stood on a table. Next to it a hotel-bill stamped “Paid” in violet ink.

The closet-door was open, but the racks inside hung bare. The clothes were all on the outside of it, slung over chairs, with the hangers still left in them. A valise gaped open-mouthed on the bed, with heaps of inner linen piled all around it, shirts, shorts, pyjamas. The t. v. screen was alight in its bluish splendor, but the sound had been cut off. A girl kept silently spraying her hair, first on one side, then on the other. Then a man came up and kissed her, as a direct result of the spray-job.

(Terry’s admonition had been: “Leave your set turned on when you’re ready to leave. It shows up down in the street. I know, because I’ve seen it myself. Then if some cruise-car happens to go by, it’ll make it look like you’re still up there. It might be good for an extra hour or two, before they get wise.”)

The knock came on the door, and the charged tension in the room exploded once and for all; the build-up was over and the climax was on. He turned at the sound, and his face was the color of silver, both because it was so glistening and because it was so gray. He almost died a little right then and there. You could see his knees start to dip down, and his Adam’s apple to go up, like when the blood-supply has been cut off at both ends.

Then he pulled himself together and went over to it.

“Cleary,” a confidential voice said on the other side.

He opened it and he let him in.

Terry was the one to close it and to chain it up again. The man’s fingers were too discoordinated to be much good right then.

“I thought you ran out on me,” he said in a panting voice.

“When I make a deal, I deliver,” Terry said grimly.

He took a brown-paper bag out from inside his coat. It looked by its shape as though it had some kind of medium-sized bottle in it, Coke or club soda. He had the paper up by the open end twisted around to close it off. He held it slanted over the table, untwisted the paper, and shook a gun out of it.

The man recoiled in aversion, as if there were some huge black tarantula there on the table.

“This is what I told you I’d get for you.”

The man just looked the question at Terry, without voicing it.

“Never mind how I got it. I have ways of getting things I want. Maybe I took it off someone who had no right to have it in the first place — and then I didn’t turn it in. He’s not going to report it was taken away from him, you can make book on that. Just drop it in the drink on the way over — and nobody’ll be any the wiser.

“Pick it up,” he encouraged. “Get the feel of it.”

The man kept looking at it fixedly, almost as if he’d never seen one before that close.

“Do like I tell you,” Terry insisted. “Try it for size. Only, don’t touch the trigger, it’s loaded.”

The man took hold of it, timidly at first, then closed his fingers around it more firmly, angled it this way and that. He acted relieved when he’d put it down again, though.

Terry just nodded slightly; what that signified, only he could have said.

He took out a little unsealed envelope, about the size used to carry theatre-tickets in. “Here’s the plane seat you had them hold for you. I stopped by and picked it up on my way over just now. One-way to Zurich, non-stop. The night-flight, tonight. We got about an hour-twenty minutes yet—”

“You mean you went in for it yourself?” the man asked, widening his eyes in surprise.

“Too risky that way, they might identify me later. I waited outside the door, and when I saw a Western Union messenger go by, I handed him the money for it, told him what name to give, and had him bring it out to me. Then I slipped him a buck. They probably figured he was sent down after it special. A lot safer all around.”

The man looked at the ticket like you do the key to a jail-cell when it’s put into your hand. Then he laid it down on the table, outside its envelope.

“Is your passport in shape?” Terry asked, businesslike.

“I had it renewed a year and a half ago, before the net closed up as tight as it is now. It’s good for another six months yet.”

“You just have to turn it in at any American consulate wherever you are, when you want it renewed,” Terry reminded him. “It won’t be held out on you, there’s no Federal rap against you.” He gave him a look sharp as a gimlet, that brought the conversation up short. “Now let’s forget all that and get down to the main thing. What about the money? Didj’ do what I told you about that?”

“I did just what you told me.”

“Keep on,” Terry prodded.

“I told them I couldn’t come up there for it. I had them send a teller down with it. He came accompanied by an armed guard.”

“I watched them come and I watched them go,” Terry said contemptuously. “That guard couldn’t have shot his way out of a plastic garment-bag.”

“The minute I’d closed the door behind them, I split it two ways. There’s twenty thousand in my inside coat-pocket, in an unmarked sealed folder. The rest is in this locked attach£-case; I have the key to it around my neck on a metal chain.”

“But you only signed one withdrawal-slip for the whole amount, right?” Terry prodded, narrowing his eyes. “The twenty thousand isn’t set apart from the rest, separated in any way?”

“Only one, that’s right.”

“That leaves a hole there the twenty thousand can drop into nicely. The bank on this side doesn’t know how much you put into the bank on the other. The bank on the other side doesn’t know how much you took out of this one. The two can’t even be linked, because under Swiss banking law, the names of depositors are never given, only the numbers on the accounts. That covers up the hole again, see?” He reached out suddenly.

“What are you doing that for?” the man asked tautly. “I’m not ready yet.”

“I only want to see if the coast is clear out in the hall.”

He did just that and nothing more. Partly opened the door, stuck his head and one shoulder out at a lean, and scanned the hall.

The hall was clear. Good and clear.

He rechained the door. Then, still facing it, so that his own body hid the act from view, he took out his gun, looked down at it in reflex sight-identification, and turned around with it. Unexpectedly, but without the slightest sign of excitement. Just about like you’d turn when you want to say something to someone behind you.

The man was starting a diagonal trip from bureau-drawer across to valise, a tier of shirts stacked in his arms. Terry stepped out into his path so that he cut him off. Then he sighted at him, fired without the twitch of a muscle showing on his face, and hit him straight between the eyes.

The shirts slid forward one after the other, like they do coming down off a shelf, but the punch of the bullet knocked the man back the other way. He hit the bureau first, and then went coasting down that, and hit the floor and lay there, already dead since up above when he was still on his feet. But the outthrust bottom bureau-drawer caught one of his wrists, and his hand stayed hooked up over that instead of going all the way down with the rest of him.

He didn’t even have a death-expression on his face, it had been so quick. He just looked like he was asleep and breathing through his mouth.

He’d found peace at last. He’d found rest at last. He’d found where no cop could go after him any more at last.

Terry moved quickly, with the smooth suppleness of the young animal he was. The young human animal that kills. Not a move wasted, not a move left out. Not a move too many, but not a move too few. What the auto-advertisers used to refer to as fluid drive, no comic inference intended. Like the rhythm of a metronome, the rhythm of the macabre.

He put down his gun, and he shrugged off his coat.

He pulled the hanger out of one of the garments slung over a chair, and he draped his own coat over it.

He suspended the hanger from the edge of a framed picture that hung on the wall, at about shoulder-height. The coat overlapped the picture a good deal, but that didn’t matter.

He stepped in and pulled and tugged at one shoulder of the coat, so that it stood up above the hanger in a little bulge or puff instead of clinging to it snugly.

He picked up the other gun, the one he’d brought in, and he sighted at the bulge and fired at it and hit it. It was a tough target but not an impossible one. He’d been to police training-school. The coat jerked wildly, and there was a chalky crunch as the bullet went into the wall in back of it.

He threw the gun, still salivating smoke, over at the dead man; it didn’t matter where it fell.

He picked up a nail-file from the bureau, and dug it once across his own shoulder. It slit his shirt and maybe unraveled the top layer of his skin a little.

He flicked off the five little flesh-colored rubber finger-caps he’d worn topping each finger, and crammed them into his pocket. Doctors use them to carry out certain probing operations, but they usually only wear one, on the index-finger; he’d had them on all five. They’re easy enough to obtain.

By now the phone was already ringing in frightened inquiry, and voices were starting to bubble up in the hall outside.

He took down his coat, chucked the hanger aside, and then writhed into it.

Then he went over and unchained the door and threw it open, with the same hand he was holding the gun in.

They were all back at a safe distance, afraid to come any closer, not knowing what it was or who was in there. When they saw him come out and stand there, the protector, the upholder of law, a great sigh of undisguised relief went up. You could sense it rather than hear it. You could see it in all their faces. You could see the confidence come back and chase the fear away.

Then he spotted his partner, his relief, just come on-shift, muscling his way through them from the very rear, and he shouted out to him for all he was worth, in the ringing tones of a long-overdue reckoning, the crow of the battle-cock flapping his wings atop his fallen foe:

“I got him! Call Mike at the hospital, and tell him I got him! Tell him it was me, Cleary! Tell him I got him for him!”

And long after his partner was on the phone breaking the news, and long after his partner was off the phone again and all the wheels of procedure had started to turn, he kept walking back and forth in there shouting “I got him! I got him!” High on victory, souped-up with the lovely, the lovable end to a bitter and deadly hate.

Until they had to sit him down in a chair and slip him a nip of the dead man’s Courvoisier to help him to unwind. And even then—

“I got him!...

“I got him for him!...

“I got him!”