Killing Orders

XXVI

ROGER MET ME at Grillon’s, an old Chicago tradition where waiters leave you alone instead of popping up every five minutes to ask if everything is to your satisfaction. They rolled a huge joint of beef up to the table and cut off rare slices for us. Stilton, flown in from Melton Mowbray just for the restaurant, went well with a ‘64 port. Despite my worries and the ugly scene I’d been through with O’Faolin, I felt good.

Roger was bouyant. “You’ve given me something to look forward to, V.I. I told the board that I had a private-inquiry agent looking into the matter and that he thought he had a way out. They were most keen, but since I didn’t have any information, I couldn’t give them any.”

I smiled tiredly and clasped his hand. It was midnight when we finished the port and the waiter brought our check. Roger asked hesitantly if he could come home with me. I shook my head regretfully.

“Not that I wouldn’t like it-the company would be most welcome. But it’s not much of a place and right now what’s there is a shambles. Someone was pawing through it looking for a document and I just don’t feel like sharing the mess.”

“Is that the way an American girl tells someone to go to hell?”

I leaned across the table and kissed him. “When I tell you to go to hell, you won’t have any doubts at all that that’s what you heard… I guess what I’m telling you is that I’m homeless and don’t like it. I feel disoriented and I need to be alone with it.”

He nodded soberly. “People on my staff are always telling me, ‘I can deal with that.’ I guess that’s an Americanism. Anyway, I can deal with that.”

When he offered to drive me, I gratefully accepted, abandoning the Toyota in the underground garage. If it wasn’t still there in the morning, no big loss.

It was after one-thirty when he deposited me in front of the

Bellerophon. Courteously waiting until I was safely inside, he waved and drove off.

Mrs. Climzak had sat up for me. As soon as I came in the door she came huffing over, her face resembling an angry peony.

“You’re going to have to leave, Miss Warshawski, or whatever your name really is.”

“I want to, Mrs. Climzak. I don’t like the Bellerophon any better than it likes me. But we’ll both have to stick it out until the end of the week.”

“This isn’t funny!” She stamped her foot. I was afraid some of the petals might start falling off. “You have disrupted your apartment. You have strange men in at all hours of the night.”

“Not disrupted, Mrs. Climzak. You mean there’s been an irruption in the apartment. I don’t think you disrupt apartments, only meetings.”

“Don’t try to change the subject. Now, tonight, two men burst in and almost frightened my husband to death.”

“What did they do-show him a job application?”

“You get out of here by eight tomorrow morning. And take those men with you.”

“What men?” I started to say, then realized what she was talking about. My heart began beating faster. I wished I hadn’t drunk so much at dinner, but the Smith & Wesson gently pushing into my side brought some comfort. “They’re still in the apartment? You didn’t call the police?”

“Why should I?” she said in thin triumph. “I figured they were your problem, not mine.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Climzak. Don’t call the mayor’s office for your good-citizen medal-they’ll call you.”

Pushing my way past her I went behind the lobby desk, picked up the phone and dialed my room. She was squawking and pulling at my arm but I ignored her-I’d beaten up an archbishop today. An old lady wasn’t going to trouble me any.

After fifteen rings, a gravelly voice I knew well answered. “Ernesto. It’s V. I. Warshawski. You going to shoot me if I come up to my room?”

“Where are you, Warshawski? We’ve been waiting here since eight o’clock.”

“Sorry. I got carried away by religion.”

He asked again where I was and told me to wait for him in the lobby. When I’d hung up, Mrs. Climzak was shrieking that she was going to get her husband to call the cops if I touched that phone again.

I leaned over and kissed her. “Would you really? There are a couple of gangsters waiting to cart me off. If you call the cops, you might be in time to rescue me.”

She gazed at me in horror and dashed off to the nether regions. Ernesto, looking the picture of a corporate executive, came through the stairwell door, a seedy, thin man in an ill-fitting chauffeur’s uniform at his heels.

Surely, if they meant to shoot me, they would have hidden outside and not broadcast their faces to the world like this. Surely. Yet my hands didn’t believe me. They started sweating and I was afraid they might be trembling so I stuck them into my pockets.

“Your room’s a mess, Warshawski.”

“If I’d known you were coming, I would’ve cleaned up.”

He ignored the sarcasm. “Someone’s been searching it. Sloppy job. You know that?”

I told him I knew it and followed him into the cold night. The limousine was parked around the corner. Ernesto and I sat in the backseat, me not blindfolded this time. I lay against the comfortable upholstery, but couldn’t sleep. This has to work, I told myself. Has to. This can’t be a summons to shoot me in revenge for wounding Walter Novick. For that they’d just gun me down on the street.

Jumbled with these thoughts was O’Faolin’s contemptuous face as he left me tonight, Paciorek’s despair. And somewhere in the city, a furious Lotty, hearing that Uncle Stefan was going home with Murray, was going to play the tethered goat for me.

On North Avenue we turned into the parking lot of an enormous restaurant. No wonder they hadn’t blindfolded me- nothing secret about this place. A huge neon sign with a champagne glass bubbling over perched on top of the marquee. Underneath it, flashing lights proclaimed this as Torfino’s Restaurant, Italian food and wine.

When the limousine pulled up in front of the entrance, a doorman sprang from nowhere to open the car for Ernesto and me. The driver took off, whispering hoarsely the first sound I’d heard from him. “Call when you’re ready.”

I followed Ernesto through the restaurant, empty of customers, to a hallway behind the kitchen. Spare linoleum and green, grease-spattered walls gave it a common institutional look. A bored young man stood guard at a closed door. He moved to one side as Ernesto approached. Behind the door lay a private office where the don sat talking on a phone, gently smoking a large cigar. He nodded at Ernesto and waved a hand at me, signaling me to come in.

Like the don’s library, this office was decorated in red. Here the effect was cheap. The curtains were rayon, the seat covers vinyl, the desk a mere box on four legs.

Pasquale hung up and asked Ernesto what had taken him so long. In Italian Ernesto explained my long absence. “Further, someone else is interested in Signorina Warshawski. Her room has been carelessly searched.”

“And who would that be, Miss Warshawski?” Pasquale asked with grave courtesy.

I blinked a few times, trying to readjust myself to the imaginary world of honor. “I thought you might know, Don Pasquale. I assumed it was done by your henchman, Walter Novick, at the request of Mrs. Paciorek.”

The don looked at his cigar, measuring the ash, then turned to Ernesto. “Do we know a Walter Novick, Ernesto?”

Ernesto gave a disdainful shrug. “He has run a few errands for you, Don. He is the type who likes to grab at the coattails of the powerful.”

Pasquale nodded regally. “I regret that Novick gave the appearance of being under my protection. As Ernesto said, he had illusions above his abilities. These illusions led him to use my name in a compromising way.” Again he examined the ash. Still not ripe. “This Novick is acquainted with many petty criminals. A man like that frequently engages in foolish or dangerous exploits with such criminals in order to impress a man such as myself.” He gave a world-weary shrug. I knew, and he knew that such exploits were the acts of the childish, but-what would you? The ash now proved ready for a gentle tapping.

“Among these criminals were some forgers. Novick conceived an act of staggering folly: to engage these forgers to make fake stock certificates and put them in the safe of a religious house.”

He paused to invite my comment on this staggering folly. “How, Don, did these forgers know for which companies and in which denominations to make the fakes?”

Pasquale hunched a shoulder impatiently. “Priests are guileless men. They talk indiscreetly. Someone no doubt overheard them. Such things have happened before.”

“You would have no objection to my bringing this tale to Derek Hatfield?”

He smiled blandly. “None whatsoever. Although it is merely hearsay-I can see no benefit to my talking to Hatfield myself.”

“And you wouldn’t know the names of these forgers, would you?”

“Regrettably, no, my dear Miss Warshawski.”

“And you wouldn’t know why these forgers used the priory, would you?”

“One presumes, Miss Warshawski, because it was easy for them. It is not of great interest to me.”

I could feel sweat prickling on the palms of my hands. My mouth was dry. This was my chance; I just hoped Pasquale, student of human terror that he was, couldn’t detect my nervousness. “Unfortunately, Don, you may have to take an interest.”

Pasquale didn’t change position, nor did he alter his look of polite attention. But his expression somehow froze and the eyes glittered in a way that made cold sweat break out on my forehead. His voice, when he spoke, chilled my marrow. “Is that a threat, Miss Warshawski?”

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see Ernesto, who’d been slouching in a vinyl chair, come to attention. “Not a threat, Don Pasquale. Just for your information. Novick’s in the hospital, and he’s going to talk. And Archbishop O’Faolin’s going to say it was all your idea about the forgeries, and attacking me, and all that stuff. He isn’t going to know anything about it.”

Pasquale had relaxed slightly. I was breathing more easily.

Ernesto sank back in his chair and started looking at his pocket diary.

“As you may know, Don, the SEC will not allow anyone with known Mafia connections to own an insurance company or a bank. So O’Faolin is going to back away from Novick as fast as he can. He’ll leave on a ten o’clock flight tomorrow night and let you handle the situation as best you can.”

The don nodded with a return of his grave courtesy. “As always, your comments are fascinating, Miss Warshawski. If I knew this O’Faolin”-he spread his hands deprecatingly. “Meanwhile, I am desolated by the discomfort Walter Novick has brought into your life.” He looked at Ernesto; a red-leather checkbook materialized. The don wrote in it. “Would twenty-five thousand cover the loss to your apartment?”

I swallowed a few times. Twenty-five thousand would get me a co-op, replace my mother’s piano, or enable me to spend the rest of the winter in the Caribbean. What did I want with such things, however? “Your generosity is fabled, Don Pasquale. Yet I have done nothing to deserve it.”

He persisted, politely. Keeping my eyes on a poor reproduction of Garibaldi over the pressed-wood desk, I steadfastly resisted. Pasquale finally gave me a measuring look and told Ernesto to see that I got home safely.