He pursed his lips. They were white from chewing antacid tablets. On top of everything else he had ulcers. “I might go five for it.”
“Hundred?” He nodded. “The party I got it from said I could get seven-fifty.”
“Good luck.” He extended it for me to take back. I kept my hands in my pockets.
“I’m not selling it. I just want to know what the ring is worth.”
“The ring is worth two thousand.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Is this a multiple-choice question? I get to pick which one is right?”
“The diamond is worth five hundred to me. If it’s hot I’ll have to pry it out of its setting. As a piece it’d bring four times that.”
“The setting is that valuable? What’s the price of gold today?”
“It’s not the gold, it’s the workmanship. Look at that tooling. He never did better.”
“You know who mounted it?”
He settled back on the stool and cupped his knees in his small, sinewy hands. His gaze was steady. “It’s highly possible.”
“How high?”
“Fifty.”
I whistled. “That’s stiff for just a name.”
“It’s a stiff name.”
“I don’t have that much on me. I’ll mail it to you if I think it’s worth it.”
“Fine. I’ll mail you the name.”
I made a face and separated twenties and a ten from my wallet. In the three years since we’d met—never mind how or why—neither the method nor the outcome of our negotiations ever varied. I always ended up paying what he asked. He folded the bills and put them away without ceremony in the pocket of his noisy vest.
“Chester Wright,” he said. “Made and sold jewelry in Madison Heights until he retired a couple of years back. But he keeps his hand in.
“That’s worth maybe twenty. Give me change.”
“I’m not finished. His work is exclusive. One customer only.”
I waited.
“Phil Montana.”
I thanked him and accepted the return of the ring.
A
GUY WAS READING
the directory in the lobby when I got back to my building. I was in too much hurry to tell him that half the businesses listed there were no longer operating, but as I mounted the sneering old stairs I admired his sharp tailored suit and topcoat with a quiet check. He was young and tan and his blond hair had that natural windblown look that only professional hands can achieve. He looked like Troy Donahue. No one looks like Troy Donahue. I was still in shock.
I got a box of paper clips out of my desk and emptied it into an envelope. Then I folded my handkerchief small, inserted it in the box, placed the ring on top of that, and replaced the lid. Somehow it seemed more respectful. I snapped a rubber band around the box, tucked one of my cards beneath that, and slipped it into my overcoat pocket. Troy wasn’t there when I descended. I levered my crate out of the loading zone in front of the building and highballed it to the riverfront.
The brown-and-silver towers of the Renaissance Center rose from the construction surrounding them like feudal ruins, afternoon sun striping the 740-foot central turret of the Detroit Plaza, the world’s tallest failing hotel. Near that site in the year 1701, Cadillac erected a village of stout logs designed to withstand an Indian siege, and in 1974 history swung full circle when the city he had founded began work on a structure impressive enough to discourage rioters and second-story men. The result is a Xanadu overlooking some of the poorest real estate in the Northwest Territory. The hotel received its baptism of blood shortly before it opened, when a young woman hurled herself from its summit. It was a bad omen. But while the hotel languishes because the city has no tourist trade, the office complex and shopping center prosper, those who can afford the rates flocking to the security of the Center’s glass walls like fugitives from Poe’s Red Death. Like Ann Maringer’s diamond ring, it’s a pretty piece of work, and about as necessary as a Tiffany lamp in a home for the blind.
The air was stuffy and moist with false summer, but sunlight bounced hot and dry off the asphalt of the parking lot while starlings scampered this way and that in a frustrated search for grass. Sawhorses shunted off to one side near the staircase to the entrance and a couple of broken bottles were all that remained of that morning’s labor disturbance. A black cop whose afro bulged from under both sides of his uniform cap like Mickey Mouse ears eyed me suspiciously as I passed him.
The tower lobby, indirectly lit and smelling like new lobbies everywhere, of fresh wax and filtered air and plastic shoes on a hot day, was nearly deserted, or it looked that way because it was so big. I took one of the exposed elevators that travel up the outside of the building in glass tubes like mercury in July. Riding in it made me feel like a target. Glancing down toward the parking lot, I noticed a man in a topcoat with a quiet check walking rapidly across the asphalt, scattering starlings before him. Then he disappeared inside the building.
It could have been coincidence. In a city this size there were thousands of topcoats like that. And blond men to wear them. I directed my attention to the cityscape, going gray under an approaching cloudbank, and thought.
The entire thirty-eighth floor was leased by United Steelhaulers. They had come a long way from the pitched battles of the Depression, when the steel mills hired cops to break the strikes by breaking heads and union executives were selected for their skill with blunt instruments. They had come exactly thirty-eight floors.
I stepped off the car into a carpeted octagon with elevators on every side but one, a pair of glass doors behind which a middle-aged black man in light blue uniform, with a face like a squashed cigar, sat at a reception desk. I went on in. Two men occupied black vinyl-upholstered couches reserved for visitors, one on either side of me. They were large and well-dressed and sat with their hands resting on their thighs, watching me. A third stood smoking near the desk: A tall man, very slim, in a tan suit cut with an engraving tool, one hand resting casually in his pocket. He was watching me too.
“This isn’t a public floor,” the security man informed me. His eyes were pinpoints of light in sharp, weathered creases. “You got an appointment with Mr. Montana?”
I ignored him, focusing my attention on the tall man. “You must be the personal secretary.”
He spent some time trying to stare me down. He had tan hair clipped short at the ears and neck and combed in crisp waves. His face was the same shade of tan as his hair and suit, as were his eyes, and between them they showed enough expression to fill an ant’s eye cup. A gray thread worked its way upward from the end of his cigarette to a ventilator hidden in the ceiling, describing a square, twisting pattern that reminded me of the image on the screen of an oscilloscope.
There was something familiar about him. The something flashed in my memory but was gone before I could grasp it.
“That settles that,” he said finally, in the cool, self-assured voice I recognized from the telephone. “Now who are you, and like the man said, do you have an appointment with Mr. Montana?”
“I might have if you had let me speak to him earlier.”
It took him a moment to place me, but then he had and rage came to his eyes like a face to a window. I looked past him, through the glass beyond the half wall that separated the reception area from the rest of the offices. Outside, the sky was darkening, not with night but with sudden overcast, washing the streets and buildings in middle-register gray, pierced here and there with spots of yellow light like holes in a bedcurtain. On Woodward an opportunistic neon sign squirted now red, now green, while cars crawled past, towed by beams of light the width of toothpicks. Even in the rarefied air of the RenCen I could feel the pressure building. A storm was on its way.
“We must have had a bad connection,” said the secretary. “I told you the man is too busy to speak to you.” His voice held a cutting edge.
“That was over the telephone. In person he’ll have both hands free and can go on working while we talk. I won’t mind.”
“Get him out of here.”
The two men who had been sitting on the couches rose silently. In their nice suits and James Dean haircuts they might have been college proctors but for their height. One of them wore horn-rimmed glasses. They took up positions on either side of me, with Size Fourteens spread slightly and spade-like hands folded in front of them, looking resigned and patient, like tanks in a motor pool.
I slid my hand inside my overcoat pocket and the world stopped turning.
The secretary’s eyes flicked to the pocket and his lips parted, showing a row of caps as alike as cars on an assembly line. I felt rather than saw the Terrible Twins place their hands inside their pockets.
“I’m going after a box,” I said. “Just a box.”
There was another long pause. Even the smoke leaking from the forgotten cigarette seemed to stand still, forming a question mark in the motionless air. Beyond the glass the city had sunk into a crouch beneath the lowering sky, awaiting the first flash and bang. Then the secretary nodded. A nearly indiscernible gesture, involving only his chin. But there on the thirty-eighth floor it carried the force of an explosion.
“Slowly,” he warned.
I eased the box into the open and held it out to him. The two giants returned to parade rest. The man in uniform behind the desk relaxed visibly. He was just window dressing, like the sharp suits and the fancy office.
The secretary read my card, rolled off the rubber band, lifted the lid, and spent some time reading its contents carefully. There was nothing written inside, just the ring. I used the time to wonder where I knew him from. He was young, nearly ten years my junior. The others weren’t much older, except for the guard. They wouldn’t remember, any more than I would, the sit-down strikes of the thirties or machine gun implacements atop the Ford River Rouge plant or Walter Reuther getting kicked down the steps of the Miller Road overpass. Such things would mean no more to them than the casualty count of the Trojan War. They were part of the new wave of hybrid union employees who perspired in bed with blond file clerks and not over vats of glowing molten steel, dined from china at martini lunches rather than from black tin boxes, and thought a device was something a two-hundred-dollar hooker showed when she leaned down to pick up her napkin. I had him pegged, but I still couldn’t place him.
When the tan eyes rose at last to meet mine I bet myself ten dollars what he was going to say next and won.
“An engagement’s a serious step. Can’t we just go on dating for a while?”
I gave him the deadpan. “I guess you fellows don’t get much humor up here.”
He didn’t like that only half as much as he didn’t like not getting a laugh out of the others. “I don’t get it,” he snarled. “What’s this got to do with anything?”
He could have been legitimate. He could have been acting. I didn’t care either way. “Take it in to Mr. Montana. He’ll know.”
“I’m not sure I like a shamus coming up here and telling me what I should do. As a matter of fact, I’m sure I don’t.”
“Call it a request.”
“How do I know you’re who you claim you are? Assassins have tried to crack our security before. Let’s see some identification.”
“I’m going for my wallet,” I told the men beside me, and reached in to withdraw it with two fingers. The secretary gave the photostat license and sheriff’s shield the same attention he’d given the ring. I put away the wallet.
“I thought you said you weren’t with the police.”
“I used to be a process server. The badge is honorary. It’s saved me a beating or two.”
“Times change.” He stood there tapping the box with his index finger, looking every inch the gangster’s right-hand man from
The Big Heat,
then remembered his cigarette and took a last drag before flipping it into a steel dingus attached to the wall. “Wait here,” he said, exhaling smoke. A meaningful glance at the duo, and he went through the opening at his back.
“What else?” I was talking to the wall.
I
MADE A COUPLE
of attempts to strike up a conversation with the guards, but they weren’t having any of it. It was getting darker outside. It wouldn’t be long now.
The secretary returned, looking cool and unprovoked. I looked for the ring. He didn’t have it, a good sign.
“I’m stunned,” he said. “He’ll see you.”
I took a step and ran into his palm. His tan eyes snapped beyond my shoulder, and the bodyguard with the glasses flicked up my elbows with thumbs like air jets and frisked me from chest to ankles in less time than it takes to tell it. My hat was lifted from my head, then replaced. He stepped away, shaking his head.
“You understand the necessity for precautions,” explained the secretary gravely as he stepped aside to let me pass. His manners had improved considerably since our first encounter. I had won an audience with Mr. Montana and was thus entitled to such treatment as was reserved for visiting royalty. But he didn’t have to like it.
“We’re both working stiffs.” I excavated my pack of Winstons and offered him one.
He accepted the cigarette and broke it in one hand. His eyes remained on mine as he cast the mangled paper and tobacco into the steel ashtray.
“If that’s the way you want it.” I motioned to him to lead the way.
We followed the curve of the building for forty feet, past a dozen or so partitioned offices, each with its own desk and window overlooking the city and the Detroit River with Windsor on the other side. It reminded me vaguely of the set from an executive comedy of the fifties, in which a chain of cute secretaries squeak, “Good morning, Mr. Whoozis,” as the gruff businessman in homburg and carrying the
Wall Street Journal
marches between them. Only there wasn’t a cute secretary in the place. The desks were occupied by young men in snug Hughes & Hatchers, tripping away at IBM typewriters and video terminals with all the individuality of soldier ants. A tepid rendition of “Summertime” floated out of a speaker mounted near the ceiling of each cubicle. None of the young men looked up as we walked past.
At length we came to a door next to an uninhabited cell, which I took to belong to the secretary. The door was unmarked. He tapped discreetly, and without waiting for an answer opened it and ushered me inside. The door closed behind me.