The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

Norvell (Wooten) Page (1904–1961) was raised in Richmond, Virginia, in a moderately wealthy family. He attended the College of William & Mary but at the age of eighteen was already working as a journalist, first for the Cincinnati Post, then the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, before moving to New York to work for the Herald Tribune, the Times, and the World Telegram. His family had been ruined in the stock market crash of 1929, so he began to supplement his newspaper income by writing stories for the pulps, mainly mysteries for Black Mask, Dime Mystery, Ten Detective Stories, and others. In 1933, he began to write novels for the hero pulp The Spider, under the house name Grant Stockbridge. The Spider was created by Harry Steeger for his Popular Publications to compete with The Shadow. The first two issues of the magazine were written by R. T. M. Scott, then it was turned over to the twenty-seven-year-old Page, who gave the ruthless and fearless vigilante a mask and a disguise (as a fang-toothed hunchback named Richard Wentworth). The first issue appeared in October 1933; Page’s first novel, Wings of the Black Death, ran in December. A series of horrific villains were hunted down and killed by Wentworth, who then branded his prey on the forehead with a seal of a spider. There were 118 Spider novels in all, as well as two movie serials starring Warren Hull, The Spider’s Web (1938) and The Spider Returns (1941). At his most prolific, Page wrote more than one hundred thousand words a month, half for the Spider novels and the rest for a wide range of fiction.

“Those Catrini” was published in the February 1933 issue.

Jules Tremaine promises to be a notable addition to the Black Mask character group. Himself, his mission, are both a little mysterious. He walks boldly where one without courage would scarcely venture. He appears at odds with an established order of ruthless political power and of wealth drawn from such sordid source. At times he is as soft-spoken and sympathetic as a woman; at others, he is dynamite unleashed.

Jules Tremaine stood erectly on the curb of Mulberry Street, facing a row of dirty red tenements, and plucked three preliminary chords from his black guitar. He began to sing M’appari.

Before and behind him carnival crowds pushed and gabbled. To each side stood a pushcart odorous with high stacks of clams. It was the festa of Santo Gennaro and the September night was soft. Women leaned from windows shouting at children who scrambled in the street under the arches of blue and red and yellow lights.

Jules threw back his head and his full voice soared. Before him a girl stopped. She was fifteen. Her breasts pressed roundly against the flamboyant pink of her dress. Her eyes were dark and liquid and they regarded the street singer somberly.

Jules sent the last note of the aria vaulting above the babble of the street, plucked an ultimate vibrant chord and bowed to her, a vital figure of a man just over five feet five and dapper in a modeled suit of dark gray. He swept off a black felt hat.

“Ah, bella mia,” he said, laughter behind his eyes. “You have tonight the face of a very, very tired madonna.”

The girl’s lips parted slightly, showing white teeth.

“Every time I try to sit down the floorwalker gets nasty,” she explained.

Jules clapped his hat back on his head and made a wringing motion with his two hands. His voice threatened. “If I ever get my hands on that floorwalker, I’ll...”

His wide teeth flashed beneath the black of his small mustache. Angela’s lips curved. She threw back her head so that her throat was a sweet white line and laughed three contralto bell notes.

“That is better,” said Jules. “Now what is it that makes these dark shadows under your pretty eyes?”

The girl’s smile diminished but still quivered at her mouth corners. She nodded her head gravely.

“I’m worried, Mr. Tremaine,” she said.

Jules pursed his lips. When he did that the militant points of his mustache moved forward slightly. His blue eyes stared beyond the girl into the dingy bricks of a tenement front.

“I suppose it’s that lazy Antonio again,” he said, his syllables short.

Angela clasped her hands and watched her long, tapered fingers as she moved them slowly.

“What’s your brother up to now?” Jules demanded.

The girl drew a deep breath so that her breasts strained against the sleazy silk. Her eyes remained stubbornly on her hands.

“He has not done anything, Mr. Tremaine,” she protested. “It is those Catrini. They say they will do something because Tony drives his beer truck into their part of town...”

Her words accelerated. She unclasped her hands and gestured with them. Her wide eyes, dark and frightened, met Tremaine’s directly.

“—if Antonio works he must drive where his boss tells him. If he does not work we cannot eat. Ah, those Catrini...”

She raised her right hand with the thumb uppermost, the fingers spread, and clicked the nail of the thumb on her upper teeth with an outward gesture. For the moment her eyes were bright and narrow.

“I know those Catrini,” said Jules softly.

The girl’s body lost its tension and became supplicant. Her hands, palms upward, the slim, tapering fingers bent outward, pleaded with Tremaine. There was a pucker between the black, straight brows, between the dark, questioning eyes.

“What can I do?” she asked. “What can I do!”

Tremaine looked down at his guitar and plucked the G string, turned a white ivory peg, cocked his head to the side and touched the string again. He looked up at the girl.

“Go home, Angela,” he said. “I will sing three more songs, then come to talk with you and Antonio.”

Angela spun on her heel, whirling out the thin silk of her skirt. A boy with a laughing mouth showered confetti over her and she threw back her head and laughed and snatched at the colored snow with quick hands. Three white pieces of paper and a star-shaped pink one settled on her black hair. She turned and looked gravely into Tremaine’s round blue eyes.

“I know you will make everything all right,” she said. “I am so happy I could dance.”

She spun completely around on her heel and walked with little skipping steps three doors down the street. She waved to Jules before she went into the darkness of the tenement.

Those Catrini! Jules Tremaine looked down at his guitar and his lips smiled with little mirth. His fingers touched the strings soundlessly, then twanged a chord and two more and he threw back his head and began to sing La donna e mobile. His fingers were lean and white. They had squared ends.

Behind him in a vacant lot across the street, a fireworks cannon made a muffled concussion. Children screamed and squirmed between the pushcarts, hurrying to get nearer. A whirling spark soared, hesitated and burst into a jagged splotch of yellow fire. Spider legs of light spanned out from it and at their ends bombs burst in dazzling streaks of white. The explosions tortured the ear drums.

Jules shrugged and stopped singing. He drew the black guitar down under his arm and up on his back so that it hung suspended from his shoulder by a crimson braided cord. He looked over the crowd and laden pushcarts and moved slowly down the street, a short man but with power in the square set of his shoulders, the erect poised arrogance of the head.

The pyrotechnic display faded momentarily; there was another muffled concussion, then clear and high a girl’s scream tore the night. Jules whirled, staring up at the third-floor windows where Angela and her brother had rooms. A succession of deadened explosions that were not fireworks beat on the air, then every sound was drowned in the ripping burst of more bombs.

On the walk where Jules stood people no longer stared at the colored fire in the sky. They faced the door of the tenement where that scream had sounded. A handful of children gathered silently. A fat man with wide red silk bands holding up too long sleeves waded through them. He entered the door. He staggered back, fell down the one step and sprawled supine. His feet jerked up and his heels thumped on the pavement.

Three men boiled out of the doorway. They had guns in their hands. Two raced down the street and separated. The third ran past Jules. He was a short and broad man. As he lifted and flung down his feet heavily Jules saw that the right shoulder was twisted so that it was at least three inches higher than the left. The man whirled about the corner.

Jules strode towards the door from which the three had come. The fat man who had been hurled to the street sat up and held his head in his hands. For five seconds he sat there, then reeled to his feet. His fat quivered with the speed of his flight. A boy bounded out of his way, staggering blindly towards Tremaine. Jules caught the boy with one arm and set him gently aside. He did not stop. His lips were pressed in a thin hard line, and a path opened before him among the thickening crowd. He entered the dark doorway.

Halfway to the second floor he was taking the steps two at a time. On the third floor he thrust through an open door and stopped and stood, his right hand gripping the end of the keyboard and holding in place the guitar on his back. The air was acrid with burned gunpowder. A single yellow light bulb dangled from the center of the ceiling by a twisted wire. It threw a glare on walls that had been scrubbed until they were streaked gray. Jules kept his eyes on them for a moment; then he looked down.

There were two bodies on the floor. One had crumpled near him, a knee drawn up towards its belly. That was Antonio. From under him a dark liquid pool spread. Angela lay over by a door beyond which the kitchen gleamed. She lay on her back, hurled close against the wall by the six-hundred-foot-pound impact of .45-calibre bullets. Her head was thrown back and her throat was a white sweet line and there was a blue hole between her wide, frightened eyes. Jules saw there were two pieces of confetti in her hair, one white and square, the other a pink star shape.

Jules’ right hand was on the keyboard of his guitar. There was a snap as a white ivory peg broke and he stooped slowly and picked it up and looked at it. The peg was smooth and cold in his fingers and it had broken off just under the head. In the street a brassy whistle skirled. Jules dropped the peg in his pocket and the right corner of his mouth twisted so that a single sharp incisor showed. Heavy feet pounded on the stairs and mounted swiftly. Jules shook his head sharply, glanced once around the room, then plunged through the door. He saw the policeman at the head of the stairs, and ran for the dark back hall.

“Halt!” the policeman shouted. “I’ll shoot!”

A pistol glinted in the dim light.

Jules moved slowly towards the policeman, his hands raised well above his head and the guitar bumping against his right side. His eyes were narrowed, watchful.

“I’m just a street singer,” he said. “I heard the shooting and came to see if Angela and Antonio were all right. They were friends of mine, and—”

“Shut up!” the cop ordered.

His heavy fingers clamped on Jules’ shoulder and whirled him about and he patted his hips and sides and under his arms.

“Threw your gun away, did you?” he said. “That won’t do you no good.”

Jules allowed himself to be shoved back into the room where Angela and Antonio lay.

“You louse!” the cop rasped. “You shot the girl, too!”

Lights blazed before Jules’ eyes and blackness followed.

Tremaine had only partly recovered his senses when he was roughed into the patrol wagon. The rush of air as it sped with a softly whining siren back to the station-house largely restored him, but he staggered as he was booted into the white square office of the captain. The breath of his captor was harsh and fingers vised on his shoulder.

Jules measured the captain under heavy lids. The man was fat and his white hair was pomaded into a smooth pompadour. He ran a hand over it.

“Well, well, what have we here?” he asked, and his voice was fat and oily.

“O’Reilly caught him running away after them two was bumped,” said the patrolman, his hand still on Jules’ shoulder. “He’d throwed his gun away.”

“Running away, eh?”

The captain was seated in a swivel-chair tilted back before his desk. He leaned forward and rubbed white, puffy hands up and down his thighs. Then his mouth opened in a little pink “O” of surprise; his small black eyes went flat.

“—!” he said. “It’s Jules Tremaine!”

The captain straightened, stumbled to his feet and slid a chair out from the wall.

“Sit down, Mr. Tremaine,” he said. “I’m sorry about this. O’Reilly didn’t know you.”

Jules heard the patrolman behind him gulp and the hand flinched away from his shoulder.

“Jeeze, Cap’n, did we pull a boner?” the man asked.

“Get out!” the captain yelled, and the door opened and closed quickly. The fat man in the dark blue suit looked at Tremaine and smoothed his pomaded hair and blinked.

“I’m sorry about this,” he said.

Jules continued to stand. He balanced his guitar carefully on the chair, eased off his black felt hat and fingered the back of his head. He winced and his lips pressed hard together.

“I think you said O’Reilly was the cop’s name?” he asked softly.

“He’s just a dumb flatfoot,” the captain spoke hurriedly. “He don’t know no better. I’ll take it out of him.”

“Don’t bother, Captain,” said Jules gently. “Don’t you bother at all.”

He placed his hat on the chair beside his guitar and looked about the office slowly.

“I want to wash up a bit,” he said.

The captain skipped his fat sides across the room, swung open a door with a flourish and revealed gleaming white tile. Jules doffed his coat and doused his face and head with cold water. The welt left by the cop’s gun on his scalp stung. Jules cursed softly as he stroked his black hair to smoothness with a thin comb from his pocket. He pointed his mustache, shrugged into his coat and strolled back into the office. He adjusted his hat jauntily and slung the guitar over his shoulder.

The captain regarded him with troubled eyes. He opened his mouth and closed it again like a goldfish drinking air. He said: “You didn’t see anything up there, did you, Mr. Tremaine?”

Jules revolved on his heel and looked up into the small black eyes. The captain shoved a puffy hand over his hair.

“I saw a boy and a girl had been murdered,” he said, biting off the words. “Then O’Reilly slammed me over the head with his gun.”

The captain frowned at his fingernails, though they were perfectly polished.

“You know how these young cops are,” he murmured.

“Yes, I know,” said Jules, and left.

A taxi weaved uptown with him and stopped at an address in the East Fifties where a dead-pan butler opened the door. Tremaine surrendered a gingerly removed hat but held on to the guitar, padding deliberately up the deep carpeted steps.

“That you, Jules?” a resonant voice boomed.

Jules retraced his way without answering, walked back through the dim, dusty-smelling hall and at its end entered a door to the right. The room was ten feet square and its walls were shelves of brown-backed law books. In its center was a desk, a reading lamp and a face that had the curious effect of floating disembodied in the air. Presently Jules could make out the spread shoulders of the man seated at the desk.

“Ah, it is you, Jules,” came the resonant, slightly mocking voice.

Jules’ face was expressionless as he studied the cadaverous countenance. A few strands of black hair had been oiled and laid carefully side by side across a bald dome-like forehead that lengthened the thin face extraordinarily.

“Who’s the captain at the Houston Street station?” Jules asked.

The mouth corners of the man’s face made creases like parentheses and strong white teeth showed momentarily.

“Going to use my influence at last?”

“No. The louse recognized me as a Tremaine. I was afraid I was beginning to look like you. My fears, I see, were groundless.”

The creases about the mouth deepened; the head tilted back so that black smudges of shadow from the low desk lamp erased all the upper part of the face and made teeth gleam. The laughter was a faint roughened breathing, nearly soundless. When it stopped the face looked down again.

“My charming brother!” the man articulated. The creases smoothed themselves and the lips pursed. “The captain’s name is Jimson.”

The man stood and the shadows smudged his face again; the light revealed his length and the powerful sweep of his shoulders. Jules had to look up to meet his eyes. He smiled slightly and his mustache pointed forward a fraction of an inch. He bowed ceremoniously.

“My dear brother,” he said, then swung about. The hall echoed the regular beat of his feet.

The room he entered was all gray and nearly barren. He laid his guitar face down on a couch bed and took a screwdriver from the top drawer of a Sheraton chest. He looked across at his guitar and smiled.

It was after ten the next morning when Jules slid out of white silk pajamas and stepped into his shower. His stomach sucked in and the muscles of his chest and upper arms flexed and jumped under its cold pelting; then he dodged out from under and punished his tight lean body with a rough towel. As he bent forward his abdomen tensed into six ridges of muscle. He dusted himself with bath powder and hummed M’appari. He cut it short in the middle with a small tightening of mouth corners. A pulse throbbed in his throat.

A polite tap at the door caught Jules with his trousers just belted. He grunted: “Come in.”

His brother, in striped morning trousers and cutaway, bowed himself in, clicked the door shut. Jules glanced at the domed forehead.

“I keep hoping those six hairs won’t be exactly parallel.” He sighed.

The mouth corner creases deepened in his brother’s cadaverous face but the thin lips did not part. Blue eyes were sardonic. Jules drew on a linen shirt, thrust the tails into his dark gray trousers and plucked a heavy silk tie, gray, too, from a rack on the closet door. The taller man continued silent and Jules eventually toed about and faced him, his eyes half shut.

“Yes, my dear brother?” he queried.

“You aren’t going back to Little Italy today, Jules?”

Jules brushed his left mustache with his right thumbnail. His still veiled eyes were amused. His voice was gentle.

“Surely, Andrew, you aren’t at some thirty-and-six years of age beginning to worry about your younger brother?”

Andrew cursed in mild tones. He said with relish: “Some day you are going to get your well-muscled abdomen shot full of messy holes. Those Catrini—”

Jules lifted his right shoulder fractionally, moved deliberately to the closet. He tipped a vest off a hanger and drew it on. Buttoning it with lean, square-tipped fingers, he opened his eyes wide and focused their round blue gaze on his brother.

“Catrini?” he mouthed slowly. “Catrini? No, I don’t believe I know anyone by that name.”

Andrew smiled like a politician about to kiss a baby.

“I think I’ll tell Captain Jimson I don’t mind if you are picked up for those murders,” he said, and added as an afterthought: “You louse.”

Jules’ lids drooped over his eyes again.

“Tell my dear friend Jimson,” he said, “to have O’Reilly do the picking up, will you, Andrew?”

The eyes of the two brothers locked like slithering rapiers. The elder’s tone was like May.

“Dear Jules! Don’t tell me you’re up to something?”

Jules laid the spread fingers of both hands on his chest, his eyebrows crawling up.

“I? My charming brother!” he exclaimed, shocked surprise vibrant in his words. “You can’t mean your younger brother?”

Andrew’s right hand, tense and straight as a knife, sliced across the air before him. He rasped a single monosyllabic obscenity and followed it with the word “you” and jerked open the door and slammed it shut behind him. Jules threw back his head and laughed with little sound. He shrugged into his coat, adjusting his black hat jauntily on his head, and turned towards his guitar. The door again swept open. Jules continued towards his guitar.

“Jules” — Andrew’s voice was incisive — “you’re probably as hard up for money as usual. I’ll pay you to quit this stuff.”

Jules lifted the guitar with both hands, then with one passed the red cord over his head, shoved his right arm through the loop. He turned slowly, eyes on his brother’s lean, hollow-cheeked face, and said nothing.

Andrew thrust a bony hand into an inner pocket of his coat and drew out a black leather wallet with gold corner pieces. He fingered out five yellow-backed bills with 1000 in each corner and spread them out like a poker hand and held them towards Jules. “Lay off this comic opera stuff, will you? You’re hunting trouble and I can’t afford to have the name mixed up in anything so near election.”

Jules eased the guitar under his right arm and up against his back, where he held it with a hand pressed against the end of the keyboard. The red cord was across his chest like an ambassador’s riband. He bowed, his mouth corners depressed.

“My dear brother, you ask too much. Always I have long’ to seeng een the streets. I make of eet my buseeness.”

“Horsefeathers!” said Andrew. He put the money carefully back into the black wallet and restored that to his pocket. “You began this street singing to queer me with the party. You’ve always hated me. When you first started I figured you’d get tired of it. But you are a persistent louse. It may be that I shall have to take steps.”

His face was wooden, but there were malevolent sparks in the depths of his eyes. Jules’ face did not lose its mocking smile, but his eyes went flat and hard. He strode forward three paces until he stood within two feet of the taller brother, looking up into the cadaverous mask. A pulse throbbed in his throat.

“The truth is, Andrew,” he said softly, “that I first sang in the streets for a lark. I was half tight and somebody made a bet. The wops were decent to me. They cheered when I sang. If it was sad, they wept. I like people like that, people who aren’t afraid to have emotions. You and your politicians, friends and hirelings, can’t figure that any man does a thing for the obvious reason. You always see intrigue.

“That’s the truth of the matter, but if my street singing annoys you, I’m glad. I won’t stop. Now get the hell out of my way.”

A pall of white roses ornamented the weathered doorway of the tenement where Angela had lived. A baby of three stood and stared at it with grave eyes. As Jules walked slowly by he caught the faint sweetish odor of the flowers. Children scampered and cried. Tremaine stopped a half square away and stood on the curb with his back to Mulberry Street. His black hat sat at an angle. He touched his mustache with his thumbnail, considered a moment and struck a chord from his guitar that had curiously little resonance.

A fat man, his sleeves held up by red bands, sat on a chair on the walk. He heaved up and padded across to Jules.

“A man was here looking for you,” he said.

Tremaine struck another slow chord.

“He say you come to Joe’s place on Tenth Street he get you a job regular.”

Jules showed his white teeth under the black militant points of his mustache. He said nothing, began to sing softly, plucking out a twanging bass accompaniment. He stopped and put his hand flat on the strings.

“What did this man look like?” he asked. “He was short and broad, eh? His right shoulder” — Jules hunched his own forward and upward three inches — “it rides like this, eh?”

The fat man blinked and regarded Jules’ hunched shoulder and looked back to his round blue eyes.

“I give you the message,” he said.

He eased back into his chair. Jules’ head went back and he laughed almost soundlessly. The fat man sat and blinked at him. He looked up and down the street, then blinked again, put his hands on his knees, leaned far forward and levered himself to his feet. He picked up the chair and carried it into the tenement. Jules laughed again.

Militant chords leaped from the strident strings and he swung into the Soldiers’ Chorus. A man in a rust-brown suit and with broad-toed black shoes and a derby jammed forward over his eyes halted before Tremaine. The street singer finished his song.

“What would you like me to sing?” he asked, his fingers walking over the strings.

The man growled in his throat. He was young and blond and weighed about two hundred and twenty pounds. His blue eyes glowered from a florid face.

“My name’s O’Reilly,” he said.

Jules bowed gracefully.

“I have heard the name before,” he said, “but there seems to be some Freudian obstruction in my cerebration.”

The young man frowned.

“Don’t crack wise,” he warned, “or I’ll bang you over the head again.”

“Ah, now I recall!” Happiness shone on Jules’ face. “You are the gallant young policeman who last night apprehended me as I was calling on some recently demised friends. I am so glad to renew the acquaintance, Mr. O’Reilly.”

The cop’s scowl deepened. He grunted: “What was you telling the fat wop in the chair?”

Jules moved his right hand from left to right, palm upward, fingers spread, and shrugged his right shoulder.

“I tell him the day is lovely. I tell him it is too bad Angela and Antonio cannot see it. I tell him—” Jules shrugged delicately again, his hand completing the gesture. “I talk with him.”

“Then why’d he go inside?”

“He, perhaps, do not like the song I sing.”

“Huhn!”

O’Reilly stood with straddled legs, his head thrust forward. His hands swung at his sides, a slight rigidity in his arms.

“You bumped that girl because you couldn’t get gay with her, then put the heat on the brother when he walked in on you.”

Jules stopped smiling and his fingers stopped their soundless wandering over the strings.

“You fool!” he snapped. “I liked Angela. She was a nice kid, a clean hard-working little wop. The men who killed her were lice, and I’m going—”

“You’re going to do what?”

Jules looked at O’Reilly from under half-lowered lids. He said softly: “It took you two minutes to get from the lot across the street to the door of the tenement where Angela was shot. I wonder why that was, Mr. O’Reilly?”

The policeman advanced his right foot a half pace, his left hand clenched into a fist. His eyes were bright and small.

“I’ve a good mind to run you in,” he said, his words rasping.

“I wish you would,” said Jules gently.

The florid color of the policeman’s face deepened.

“I know your name is Tremaine,” he said, “and I know you got off last night, but it won’t work today. The captain said—”

Jules raised polite eyebrows as the man broke off. So there was another score against Andrew to be settled. Jules pursed his lips, the amusement in his eyes shaded by anger.

“Nevertheless,” he said, “I wish you would run me in. There are a few other things I’d like to tell Captain Jimson, such as why it took you two minutes—”

“That’s enough of that!” O’Reilly was tense, his voice hoarse. “If you know what’s good for you, keep your mouth shut!”

Jules sighed deeply, with a theatrical lift and fall of his chest.

“I’m afraid, my dear O’Reilly, that it’s too late to do that. I told the dear captain—”

“You told him what?”

“My dear fellow, you are so precipitate! This continual interruption grows irksome.”

“You told him what?” O’Reilly’s eyes were flat and menacing.

Jules returned the man’s glare from under sleepy lids, his hands motionless on the guitar. The policeman’s gaze flickered finally.

“That is much, much better, Mr. O’Reilly,” said Jules softly. “As I was about to say, I told Jimson that I could identify the man who shot Angela and Antonio and that I would testify when they were arrested.”

“You’re lying,” O’Reilly said hoarsely. “Jimson didn’t tell me that!”

Jules shrugged, swung half about so that his left shoulder was towards the policeman, strolled up the street, plucking soft chords. O’Reilly’s heavy stride kept pace with him.

“You’re rough on a guy that’s trying to do you a favor,” he said, placatingly. “I came to tell you that Joe — he’s got a place up on Tenth Street — says he’s got a job for you.”

“My dear fellow!” Jules exclaimed. “That is charming of you!”

He swept a lean forefinger across the five strings but the catgut gave forth a tinny sound as if the resonance of the wood were damped.

“But just why am I so honored, and why has not my good brother’s suggestion that I be arrested not been carried out?”

O’Reilly walked stolidly along beside him.

“Jimson said you had an alibi. Said somebody saw you in the street at the same time they heard the shots. And the chief told me to tell you about the job.”

Jules pursed his lips so that the black mustache thrust forward. A frown drew his brows together.

“You’ll be glad to get the job, eh?” O’Reilly suggested.

“Perhaps,” Jules said. “I do not know. If you see this Joe tell him he can find me here.”

“He can find you here, eh?” O’Reilly was carefully casual.

Jules threw back his head; his mouth opened but only small laughing sounds emerged. He said: “Yes.”

O’Reilly said, “Okey,” and marched off.

Half an hour later, at the corner of Mulberry and Spring streets, Jules Tremaine was singing. For the moment the street was clear of festa crowds. Two children, the younger barely two with a meditative thumb thrust into his mouth, regarded him seriously. Something hard nudged into Jules’ back. His eyes half closed and he moved a half pace forward and continued to sing. The nudge was repeated. He ended his song, swept his whole hand across the five strings, then turned slowly.

The man behind him was about his own height, but much broader. His eyes were black buttons under the edge of a gray fedora. His right shoulder was at least three inches higher than the left.

“Joe sent me around to see you about taking that job,” he said.

His right hand was in his pocket. Apparently he had nudged Jules with whatever was in that pocket. Jules looked at it. He said: “But I do not think I want a job. I want to sing out of doors.”

The left corner of the man’s mouth lifted slightly, but he was not smiling.

“This job would be out of doors,” he said.

Jules shrugged. “I do not know this Joe.”

“Well, he knows you. Come on.”

Jules began a protest he did not finish. The man stared into his eyes. His right hand was in his pocket and he thrust it forward a half inch. He said: “Come on.”

Jules looked into the button eyes and at the man’s pocket. Very carefully he maneuvered the guitar under his arm and up on his back, held it in place with his right hand pressed against the end of the keyboard. He cleared his throat. He said: “All right, I’ll come.”

The man jerked his head to the right and Jules walked that way, across Mulberry Street, the man moving stiffly at his left side, his hand still in his pocket. They walked one square east, then two north and turned to the left. Near the corner a large closed car was parked. The sedan looked very heavy. There were two men in it. When Jules was opposite the car, the back door swung open.

“Get in,” said the man beside him.

Tremaine cast a furtive over-the-shoulder glance back down the street; then he looked the other way. A man in a rust-brown suit and a derby stood on the far corner. When Jules looked at him he walked slowly away, the heavy, studied tread of a policeman. Jules swallowed audibly.

“Get in,” the man said again.

Jules removed his hand from the keyboard of his guitar and it swung around under his right arm. He held it with both hands and thrust it ahead of him and put his foot on the running-board. He looked about again with a panic-stricken face. The man in the rust-brown suit had disappeared. There was no one else in sight. Tremaine saw that the glass of the car door was thick and had a slightly yellowish tint. Bullet-proof glass. The man with the twisted shoulder jostled him and thrust something hard into his back.

Slowly Jules climbed in. The two men already in the car said nothing. The driver had a dead-white face in which were dry, feverish eyes. The man in the back was bony. Bunches of muscle knotted on his thin jaws. Jules sank down into the deep upholstery of the rear seat beside him and carefully placed his guitar between his knees. The man with the twisted shoulder got in and clicked the door shut. The car lunged forward. Still no one spoke. Jules watched the dingy buildings slide past as they jounced the length of the block, crossed Mulberry and swung right on Lafayette and picked up speed. Jules caught a flash of a street sign at a corner. It read E. 10 St.

When they sped past Twelfth Street, Jules spoke timidly: “I thought Joe’s was on Tenth Street.”

The man with the twisted shoulder snorted a laugh. He said: “It is.”

The car swung around Union Square, beating a red light, and jockeyed through Broadway traffic.

“What’s Joe’s last name?” Jules asked.

The man’s button eyes looked at him with no expression. “It won’t do no harm to tell you. It’s Catrini.”

Jules screwed down in his seat. The car slewed to a stop on a red light, the brakes snubbing its nose down. The motor purred and a faint odor of exhaust gas crept into the tonneau.

“Couldn’t we have a little more air?” Jules asked.

The man on his right leaned forward and cranked the door window tight shut. The left corner of his mouth lifted slightly. He put his right hand in his coat pocket. When the car sprang forward again he took it out with a snub-nosed revolver in it.

“I’m afraid you can’t have any more air,” he said.

He rested the gun across his left forearm so that the muzzle gaped at Jules’ stomach, and he cringed away from it, raising his right hand so that the palm interposed between the revolver and his abdomen.

“Don’t,” he whispered. “It might go off!”

The man snorted another monosyllabic laugh. He said: “It might.”

Traffic streaked past the windows and more buildings, flossier and expensive now. They swung east, then north, then swept up the ramp of Queensborough Bridge. The air sweetened, freshened by the water of the East River. It was filtering in from a ventilator in the car’s roof.

Jules’ eyes kept swinging back to the gun that was held carelessly cocked, the man’s finger on the trigger. He pressed his body back in the deep softness of the cushion, shoving his feet against the floor. The snout still was leveled at his belly. He leaned forward, his hands clasped about the neck of his guitar. In this way he interposed his elbow between the gun and his body.

His left hand slid down the strings; his fingers inveigled themselves into the round sounding hole just below them. His lips trembled still. His sidelong glances at the gun were furtive and frightened but there was hardness at the back of his eyes. The car slid off the bridge, turned south, then east again. Jules saw that the continuous backward glide of buildings was interspersed now with trees. Traffic thinned. The car’s speed picked up. Tremaine hunched forward over the guitar, fondling it. He swayed forward a little as the car slackened speed, but he was tensely braced when it swung around a corner and began to jounce over a rough road with long, heaving dives.

“Please uncock that gun,” Jules quavered, glancing again at the black mouth of the snub-nosed revolver. “This bouncing might make it go off!”

The man with the twisted shoulder lounged back in the seat and said nothing. He allowed his eyes to slide about and looked at Jules out of their corners. Tremaine caught a flash of the chauffeur’s white face in the small rear vision mirror above the windshield. He was grinning. The man beside Jules laughed outright, the knots of muscles on his jaws rippling.

The car swerved again and shoved its long snout up a narrow lane among trees. In fifty feet it was completely out of sight of the main road. The machine stopped and slowly turned around. The car was long. It took a lot of maneuvering. Jules’ hands gripped the guitar until they ached. He could feel the bite of the strings across his fingers. When the car pointed back the way it had come, the driver, a sly grin on his white face, leaned back and opened the right rear door.

“What... what are you going to do?” Jules babbled. His legs were tense under him. He lifted the guitar slightly from the floor, his left hand sliding down to the sound opening. His lips trembled and his shoulders cringed.

The man with the twisted shoulder swung his head slowly about. The corner of his mouth lifted. He spoke gently, unpleasant laughter lurking in his voice. “We think we’ve got a flat tire. We want you to get out and look at it.”

The chauffeur laughed aloud. Jules looked at him. The feverish eyes were mocking. He looked into the bony, grinning face of the man at his left. Neither of these two had a gun but both were looking at the gun in the hands of the man with the twisted shoulder. Jules looked at it, too.

“I don’t think the tire’s flat,” he said, in a pleading tone. “I didn’t hear anything like a flat tire.”

The man leaned towards him slightly, his button eyes flat, and the gun pointed unwaveringly at his stomach.

“This is a good car,” he said. “You wouldn’t be able to hear anything like a flat tire.”

Jules looked wide-eyed at the gun and opened his mouth and closed it again. He gulped and said: “All right.”

He got to his feet, crouching with his head against the low roof. He did not turn his back to the man but kept his eyes on the gun and lifted the guitar so that he held it crossways in his hands, the big end to his left. His left hand slipped the cord loose from its button at the base, then slid to the sound opening again and the first finger inserted itself in a ring there which could not be seen.

“All right,” he said again

He struck down with the guitar. Its base bonged on the wrist of the hand that held the gun. It discharged and the bullet tugged at Jules’ left trouser leg. In the same instant he leaped from the car and his right hand seized the inner handle of the door and slammed it shut as he whirled behind it.

Shouts and hoarse curses burst out in the car, slightly muffled by its heavy doors and the thick glass. Jules was sprinting on his toes at a diagonal from the back of the car, sprinting with his head back and his chest out. As he ran he counted slowly to himself: “Three — four — fi—”

Wind struck him from behind and hurled him face down on the earth. A twig jabbed his cheek and a muffled ripping concussion burst in his ears. For nearly five minutes Jules lay as he had fallen, the earth cold against his face; then slowly he thrust himself up from the ground, gravel biting his palms, his shoulders humped, his head sagging. He heaved to his knees, then reeled to his feet, steadied himself with one hand on a tree. He breathed deeply a half dozen times, shaking his head sharply; and then he stood erect and moved heavily around towards the car.

The sedan was not quite where he had left it. It seemed to have been lifted off the ground and dropped about four feet to the right. It listed to that side. The top was blown out and jagged ends of metal thrust spear points up into the air. One door sagged crazily and another was missing. The bullet-proof glass had vanished. Something red dripped on the right running-board, dripped and formed a sluggishly widening puddle. Jules’ lips were pressed together in a thin hard line. Three men had been in that car. That left only O’Reilly to pay for Angela’s death. And there was that score against dear brother Andrew...

Jules looked down at his left hand. A steel ring an inch across was on the forefinger and from that ring dangled a steel pin.

“Well, well,” he said, and threw back his head and laughed with little sound. “That grenade must have ruined my guitar. I’ll have to buy a new one.”