At the Point of a. 38

8

Murray Gold had always been a compulsive planner, overdoing it at times. He thought everything out in advance, and went back over it again and again, imagining the worst and working out countermoves. Today he called all the funeral directors listed in heavy type in the classified pages, and found three with no funerals scheduled. Gold gave a Gentile name and told them he was from New York. He was here in Miami with his sister. She had been stricken suddenly with chest-pains, and had died in the night. Each telephone voice was sorry to hear it, and hoped he could be of service.

Gold started in Miami Beach, with Everett and Wilkins, on Alton Road. There was ample parking space for the funeral vehicles. He saw a hearse and two limousines and no drivers. Gold himself was using a stolen Dodge, with New York plates. Helen’s loony friend, Artie Constable, was at the wheel. Gold had him drive past without stopping, and then come back slowly. If he had seen anything to put him off, they would have continued on and tried the next place on his list.

“Seems O.K.?”

Constable pulled into the driveway. He was wearing jeans and a smelly T-shirt, and he had been barefoot when they started out from Homestead Beach. Gold took him to a clothing store and bought him a dark lightweight raincoat and a pair of shoes, on the grounds that it would be considered funny to be calling on funeral directors barefooted. Artie was a tall boy, two inches or so over six feet, and his neck was a tremendous column, nearly as wide as his head. He looked as though he could tuck in that chin and bulldoze a hole in a brick wall. Gold had been testing him for intelligence, but if he had any, he didn’t see any point in displaying it. He looked angry most of the time, particularly so this morning because he and Helen had stayed up late drinking muscatel. He had a. 38 in each raincoat pocket, which was a joke in a way because he had never fired a gun of any kind in his life.

“Remember we don’t want to hurt this man unless we have to,” Gold said. “Just watch me and do what I do.”

Skinny enough before, Gold had wasted away in that miserable Israeli prison. He could take the flesh on his belly and fold it over like the flap on an envelope. He had been semi-bald for years, and had always shaved clean. Now, with a scraggly beard and a hairpiece, with sun glasses blotting out most of the space between, he was a totally different man, he hoped. Nevertheless, he hated to be out in the open in a town where so many people were dying to get their fingernails in his eyes. He entered the funeral parlor with his head down, clearly bereaved.

The funeral director, Mr. Everett, had been watching at the front window to see what kind of car he came in, as that would have an effect on the price. A plump man, Mr. Everett had the silkiness and perennial low spirits that went with his profession. He took Gold’s hand in both of his own, and gave it an extra squeeze before letting go, to show how much he sympathized in the loss of the dear one. There was only one girl in the front room; Gold had decided that the maximum number he and Artie could handle comfortably would be three. After introducing Artie as a young cousin who had been kind enough to drive him, he and the funeral director withdrew to discuss options and prices.

Embalming, he learned, was done on the premises, by Everett himself, with the help of an assistant who came in afternoons. Apologizing for being so picky, Gold asked to be shown the complete range of coffins. His sister had been a particular person, and he wanted everything exactly as she would have wished.

Alone with Everett and his coffins, Gold produced a pistol and showed it to the undertaker, who had been in business long enough to see almost everything. His jaw dropped into a nest of double chins.

Gold said mildly, “You’ve been helpful, but I’m sorry to say I don’t have a sister.”

“A robbery,” Everett breathed.

“That’s what it looks like. I don’t suppose you carry a gun.”

“Why, no.”

“I think I’ll believe you. Being frisked is so unpleasant. I hate it when it happens to me. Back up over there and be good, unless you want to end up being embalmed by the competition.”

“I never keep much cash.”

Gold decided he had been friendly enough. He snarled and stabbed the fat little businessman with the pistol barrel.

“No noise. Back up. Here.” He pulled the lining out of one of the coffins. “Tear this up.”

The undertaker, very scared and confused, managed to rip off several long strips. Gold ordered him to climb into one of the expensive coffins, rust-resistant steel lined with cedar lined with lavender-colored silk, with a pillow for the corpse’s head. He wasn’t coordinating well, and he had to be helped with a succession of light slaps with the gun.

“It’s airtight,” Everett whispered.

“You won’t suffocate,” Gold told him. “I’m not completely out of my mind.”

Everett seemed to doubt that statement, but he clambered in and lay back. Gold tied his ankles and wrists.

“Promise you won’t close the lid?” Everett said. “I’ll hold you to it. Because they really make it so no air can get in-”

Gold had never liked complainers. He reversed the pistol and gave Everett a really good rap with the butt-plate. Then he gagged him, and went back to the reception room and told the girl that Mr. Everett wanted her. She walked in briskly, with Artie a step behind. She was only a year or so out of high school, and Gold really dug her freshness and the way she moved, though her face was marred by too many pimples. He snaked an arm around her from behind and kept her from yelling when she saw her employer trussed up in one of the firm’s best coffins.

Gold’s second hand went naturally to her breast, and the nipple stood up between his fingers. Artie grabbed her ankles and tied them. She twisted in Gold’s grip, trying to buck loose, and her soft backside jolted against his midsection, arousing him to the point where he nearly forgot that the ticklish part of the morning was just beginning. Then she went limp.

“That’s right, dear,” he said, panting. “Relax and enjoy it.”

She was completely out. They lifted her into another coffin. Gold kept his word, and when he lowered the coffin lids, he remembered to leave several thicknesses of fabric so the seal was less than complete.

Artie went out for the Dodge and brought it around.

Gold chose a child’s coffin, lined with white satin dotted with rosebuds. It was surprisingly heavy. Artie used a two-wheeled dolly to load it into the hearse. Then he opened the Dodge’s trunk. The Thompsons from Homestead Air Base were piled up inside, wrapped in rags. Gold passed them in, one by one, then the loaded clips and the boxes of ammunition. Artie stowed everything in the coffin. He backed out and they closed the double doors.

“I almost forgot something,” Gold said.

Using the point of a screwdriver, he chewed up the lock so the latch wouldn’t hold, and fastened the doors with tape.

“Did you happen to notice she wasn’t wearing pants?” Artie said.

“What?”

“The chick. How about that, in a funeral parlor? If you don’t believe me, go and look.”

“Thanks,” Gold said chillily. “What kind of a zombie do you think I am?”

Artie chuckled and faked a punch. “Didn’t it all go easy, though? Like you said.”

“The day’s just getting underway.”

Artie had taken three Dexies before they left, a dose Gold had considered about right. But after tying up the girl and laying her out in the coffin, without underpants, he was so high that Gold considered feeding him something different now to take off the edge. No, he decided. He wanted the boy to seem dangerously excited when they met the Arabs. Of course it was a gamble. He would have preferred to use somebody from his old world, whose behavior could be predicted exactly, but what the hell! This whole thing was out of character for him. He might as well go all the way.

Artie did an impromptu shuffle on the blacktop while Gold tended to one other matter. He had a paper bag containing two timing devices, two lumps of plastic explosive, two ping-pong balls and a hypodermic needle. Each assembly had cost him twenty dollars. He had placed the order by phone, refusing to give his name, and Helen had driven in to pick them up. The ping-pong balls were partly filled with some mysterious fluid. Gold had never inquired into the chemistry of it; all he knew was that it worked. He injected each ball with a spurt from the hypodermic needle, and sealed the puncture with a drop of quick-setting adhesive. He set one timer for 11:40, the other for thirty seconds later, wired each package, and then installed one in a limousine, the other in the hearse. At 11:40, when the plastic material blew, the ruptured ball would scatter its contents over the motor, burning with an intense heat. And if for any reason the timing mechanism failed, the ping-pong balls would catch on fire themselves, sometime within a twenty-minute range, between 11:30 and 11:50.

“I know you’re going to explain all this to me sometime,” Artie said, watching.

“When we get to Uruguay.”

“I wanted to look that up on the map, where it is.”

“Their winter is our summer,” Gold said. “Otherwise it’s about the same. Now throttle down, Artie. I want you to look like Bogart, in those early movies. Dumb. Deadly.”

“Like this?” Artie said, making a face.

Gold gave a half snort and waved him into the hearse. The black raincoat helped, but no funeral director in his senses would hire a driver with that tangle of hair. But it wouldn’t matter. They would only be travelling a few blocks.

Gold got into the limousine and moved the seat forward a notch. After checking the gas and working his way through the shifting system, he gave Artie the signal to move out.

He went first. Their destination was a parking garage between Dade Boulevard and Collins-a many-tiered concrete structure with a spiralling outside ramp. They picked up their tickets and began the climb. Ignoring open spaces along the way, they went all the way to the top, and found the Arabs waiting.

At this hour-it was 10:42-the tide of parked cars hadn’t risen this high, and they had the level to themselves. Artie parked at a slant, blocking the ramp. Bringing the keys with him, Gold got out of the limousine.

He counted Rashid Abd El-Din, the leader, and three others. Three more were somewhere out of sight. Unlike Artie, the Arabs were dressed for their role as undertaker’s helpers, in jackets and ties. It was only when they were clumped together that it could be seen how much they resembled each other. They were all in the same age bracket, mustached, equally dark and lean. Gold knew, however, that they were not all equally foolhardy or equally anxious to die.

But God, they looked serious.

Rashid gave him a tight smile and went to the rear of the hearse. “One limousine, one hearse. As ordered, Murray.”

“Something wrong with the doors. You’ll have to hold them shut from inside. You’ll find the guns in the coffin.”

Rashid stepped inside. Artie had drifted over to the elevators and leaned back, his hands deep in his side pockets. The outline of the guns showed clearly. After all Gold’s worrying, he couldn’t have been better. His eyelids were partly down. His demeanor showed that whatever he was called upon to do here, his conscience would give him no trouble later, because he didn’t possess one. He looked like the one thing he was not, a professional killer. He was the one the Arabs watched, not Gold, who had killed someone as recently as the previous evening.

The Arabs had come in a rented Pinto. Looking into the back seat, Gold saw the suitcase. The young Sayyid was beside it, forcing himself to smile.

“A warm morning, Mr. Gold! Here it is, heroin, from the other side of the ocean, successfully.”

Gold got in and moved the suitcase to his lap. It was locked, but it was his own suitcase, bought in Beirut, and he had the key. He opened it. Moving shirts and pajamas aside, he saw the four tightly packed bags.

“Now that’s a beautiful sight.”

“The keys to the other cars, Mr. Gold. We must separate now, and good luck.”

“This is going to take about thirty seconds.”

He had a 200-tablet aspirin bottle, containing a colorless, slightly oily liquid. He slit the tape on one bag with the limousine’s key, and pinched out an approximate double-dose.

Sayyid murmured, “We didn’t expect any delay. We should move.”

“Don’t rush me.”

He unscrewed the cap with one hand. Heroin dropped into this bottle would turn the liquid deep blue. It was the same crude test used by narcotics agents, not for heroin’s purity but for its presence in a mixture after a cut. Rashid jumped down from the hearse.

“Sayyid,” he said sharply, and added something in Arabic.

“We can’t wait here, it’s dangerous,” Sayyid announced, and snatched the car key from Gold.

Gold was trying to do too much at one time with only two hands, and he dropped the damn bottle. As he went down to retrieve it before the liquid could gurgle out, Sayyid gave him a push.

And the door opened.

From a cramped position partly on the seat, partly on the floor, Gold looked into the hole at the end of a pistol barrel. The pistol was no larger than normal, but the hole looked huge. Gold had already begun to wonder if it had been smart to trust these enemies of the Jewish homeland. His pleasure at seeing the suitcase again had caused him to slack off, and his reactions were slow. He blinked up at a face he vaguely recognized. This was one of those people who do the small, dirty, high-risk jobs, and as a result spend most of their lives in jail. His face said that he had stopped caring. Gold had never had much contact with these men, and here he was, at the age of sixty-four, being stared at by one from the other side of a cocked pistol.

A second man of the same type got into the driver’s seat. No new car had arrived. They had been waiting for him, and it was apparent that they had known where to wait as a result of being tipped by the Arabs. The unnatural alliance was definitely over.

Sayyid said nervously, “All right? All right?”

He slipped away. The gunman came in and slammed the door.

“Barney’s going to scream when he sees that suitcase. Junk, Murray? And you were always such a big man.”

The name Barney explained something. Barney was head of a loosely-organized group of investors who wrote most of the organization bonds. Sale of the confiscated heroin would go a long way toward covering the losses they had incurred when Gold absconded to Israel.

The limousine and the hearse, with the Arabs inside, moved toward the exit ramp and disappeared. Artie Constable, as Gold could have predicted, had faded from view.

“In fact,” Gold said, “Barney’s going to be so glad he’ll give me a big hug and a kiss and put me on an airplane.”

The man seemed to doubt this. “But everybody’s been so pissed off at you, Murray.”

Artie, approaching the car from behind, didn’t try anything fancy. He fired through the window, hitting the gunman in the head and killing him instantly. Gold grabbed the pistol. The driver gave one backward glance, and his hands went up as though trying to catch a fly ball. Artie opened the door for him and he got out, his hands still high. Artie disarmed him, and Gold dumped the dead man at his feet. Artie contorted himself into the narrow space behind the wheel and they drove away, winding down to the exit, where they had to pay to return to the street.