Benny didn’t seem to be listening to our conversation. I looked at her and said, “Shacked up, huh?”
She slapped my blanketed knee. “You’re too weak to be thinking about things like that,” she said, and smiled at me.
“I’ll get well soon,” I said, and Ralph came in.
Abbie turned to him. “What now?”
“We wait,” he said.
“For what?”
“For Sol,” he said.
I said, “He’s coming here? Solomon Napoli?”
“Yeah,” said Ralph. “He wants to talk to you.”
By the time the doorbell sounded nearly an hour later I was about ready to come apart like a broken kaleidoscope. Abbie was sitting beside me on the bed, and I reached out and grabbed her hand, and we gave each other nervous smiles that were supposed to be encouraging, and I began to blink a lot.
There were voices in the hall, and then Ralph came in, and behind him three other guys.
Solomon Napoli?
Even in my astonishment there was no question which of the three was Napoli. The two on either side were just hoods, Benny and Ralph all over again, just better-dressed. It was the one in the middle who was Solomon Napoli.
I couldn’t help staring at him. He was barely five feet tall, for one thing, the top of his head just about reaching the shoulders of the two guys flanking him. He was dressed very formally, as though on his way to an opera first night. But the most amazing thing was his head, which was too big for his body. Not enough to look deformed, just enough to make him look imposing, commanding, impressive. Leonine, a leonine head, and with the thick mane of hair that goes with it. A square jaw, magnificent white capped teeth, strong level eyes, a healthy hint of tan. He was about forty, with the smooth weathered look of a man who keeps himself in shape with handball and self-esteem.
And he was smiling! He came in smiling like a politician opening a campaign headquarters, his teeth sparkling, his eyes showing bright interest in everything they saw, his stride youthful and determined-without-crabbiness. He came in, and his flankers
stopped just inside the door, and he came over to the bed, hand held out, saying to Abbie in a resonant voice, “Miss McKay! How do you do? I thought very highly of your brother. A shame, a shame.”
Through my own paralysis I could see that Abbie, too, was mesmerized. Her hand left mine, she rose uncertainly to her feet, she took his outstretched hand, in a vague and uncertain voice she said, “Uh, thank you. Thank you.”
He turned her off, turned me on. You could see him do it. He kept her hand, but he looked past her at me, his eyes and smile full of candle power, saying, “And how’s our patient?”
“Okay, I guess,” I mumbled.
“Good. Good.” He turned me off, turned Abbie on. “My dear, if you’ll go into the living room for just a few minutes, Chester and I have one or two things we want to discuss. We won’t be long. Ralph.”
“Here, boss,” said Ralph, and in his saying that the spell was broken. I had been totally hypnotized by Napoli up till now, his magnetism, his aura, the massive presence with which he filled the room. It wasn’t until Ralph said, “Here, boss,” that I remembered who this man really was. Solomon Napoli. Gangster.
I had to remember that. For my own good I had to remember it.
Suddenly I was twice as frightened as before. A cigar-chewing tough-talking obvious hood would have terrified me, but I would have understood him, I would at least have felt I knew what I was dealing with. But this man? I remembered how Sid Falco’s very ordinariness had been the most frightening thing about him, and this was Sid’s boss. A super-Sid.
I pulled the covers up around my chin and waited to see what would happen next.
Ralph led Abbie out of the room, she glancing back at me
with a worried look just before going out of sight, and then I was alone with the crocodiles. One of the new hoods brought a chair up beside the bed, Solomon Napoli sat down in it, and we were off.
He had turned me on again. “I guess you had a close call, Chester,” he said. His smile showed sympathy, but I didn’t count on it.
“I guess I did,” I said warily.
“Who would take a shot at you, Chester?” he asked, and now his smile implied an urge to be helpful, but I wasn’t about to count on that one either.
“I guess the people Tommy worked for,” I said.
“Why would they do that?” His smile was as delicate an instrument as a theremin, and now it projected polite curiosity.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I suppose they think I had something to do with killing Tommy.”
Can a smile be threatening? Can it glint as though it would bite? Napoli sat back in the chair and his smile changed again and he said, “Chester, I’m a very busy man. I’m due at the Modern Museum in”—he looked at his watch—“forty minutes for a meeting of the board of trustees. Please just take it for granted we already know your involvement, we already know Frank’s involvement, a lot of wide-eyed innocent lying isn’t going to get you anywhere. There are a few things I want you to tell me, after which I promise you you will not find me an unreasonable man. You know Droble’s people are after you now, it shouldn’t take too much intelligence to realize that under my wing is the safest place for you right now.”
I closed my eyes. “Oh, go ahead and shoot,” I said. “I really can’t take any more.” And at that moment I think I really meant it.
Nothing at all happened. I lay on my back, head against the
pillow, eyes closed, hands folded over my breast, already laid out you might say, and absolutely nothing happened.
Well, it wasn’t up to
me
to make the next move. I was done. I went on lying there.
Napoli said, “Chester, you don’t impress me.”
I continued to lie there. My eyes continued to be closed. But my despair, if that’s what it was, had already been diluted by my unsinkable liking for life, and I could feel myself beginning to tense up again. I had shut down like this out of conviction, but I was staying shut down as a kind of technique, mostly because I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
Napoli, with irritation finally creeping into his voice, said, “This is ridiculous. I have thirty-five minutes to get— Chester, I don’t
have
to give you a break.”
“A break?” I said. I didn’t open my eyes, because I knew if I was looking at him I wouldn’t be able to talk. Keeping my eyes shut and my body still, it was almost like talking on the phone, and I can talk to
anybody
on the phone. So my eyes were shut as I said, “You call that giving me a break? Getting a lot of wrong ideas into your head about who I am and what I’ve done, calling me a liar when I just so much as
hint
at the truth, sending people around to threaten me with guns, you threaten me with your
teeth
for God’s sake, you think—”
“Now just a—”
“No!” I was thrashing around in the bed by now, waving my arms to make my points, but my eyes stayed squeezed shut. “Ever since Tommy was killed,” I yelled, “one God damn fool after another comes after me with guns. Nobody asks
me
what I’m doing, oh, no, everybody knows too God damn much to ask
me
anything, everybody’s so God damn
smart.
Those clowns in the garage, and then Abbie, and then whoever shot at me, and
now you. You people don’t know what you’re
doing!
You’re so God damn
smug,
you know—”
“Keep your voice down!”
“The hell I will! I’ve been pushed around long enough! I’ve got a—”
I stopped because a hand was clamped over my mouth and I could no longer talk. The hand was also over my nose and I could no longer breathe. My eyes opened.
One of the new hoods was standing over me, his arm a straight line from his shoulder to my face. He was leaning a little, pushing my head deeper into the pillow. I blinked, and looked past his knuckles at Napoli.
Napoli at last had stopped smiling. He was looking thoughtful now, studying me with his arms folded and the side of one finger idly stroking the line of his jaw. He seemed to be thinking things over.
I needed to breathe. I said, “Mmmm, mmm.”
“Shut up,” he said carelessly, and went back to thinking.
“Mm
mmm
mmmm,” I said.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe there
is
a different explanation.”
Things were turning a darkish red. There was a roaring deep inside my skull. I began to thrash around like a fish in the bottom of a boat.
Napoli pointed at me the finger with which he’d been stroking himself. “
That
won’t do you any good,” he said. “You just be quiet and let me think.”
“Mm mmm
mmmmmmm!
” I said.
“We saw you with Frank Tarbok,” he said. “We followed you and the other two from your place. Now you talk about the clowns in the garage as though you don’t know Frank, as though you don’t work for him, don’t know anything about him. Is that possible?”
I scratched feebly at the hand between me and air. Far away, up through the red haze, the hood looked uncaring down the length of his arm at me. I tugged at his pinkie, to no avail.
Napoli was still talking, slowly, thoughtfully, considering all sides of the matter. I could no longer make out the words, the roaring in my head was too loud, it blotted out all other sounds. But through the darkening haze I could still see him, see his mouth moving, his brow furrowed in thought, his eyes gazing into the middle distance. How civilized he looked, but the red haze was closing in and I could no longer make him out clearly.
My head was a balloon, a red balloon, being filled up and up, filled up and up, the pressure increasing on the inside, the pressure increasing too much, the pressure increasing.
The last thing I heard was the balloon exploding.
How had I gotten so tiny? Swimming upside down in a cup of tea, warm orange-red tea, rolling around, needing air, wanting to get to the surface but sinking instead to the bottom of the cup. White china cup. Looking up through all the tea at the light in the world up there, knowing I had to get out of this cup before I drowned. Before somebody drank me. Holding my breath, orange-red in the face, the weight of the tea too much for me, pressing me down. Straining upward, pushing against the bottom of the cup, and then everything confused. Had the cup broken? I was falling out the side, tea splashing all around me, white cup fragments, falling out, falling down, landing hard on elbow and shoulder and cheek.
I was on the floor surrounded by legs, feet, and even though I was awake now I cowered as though I was still tiny and the feet would crush me. My left arm was pinned under me, but I managed to get the right arm up over my head.
Then hands were holding me, lifting me, voices were jabbering, and the confusions of the dream faded away, leaving the confusions of reality in their wake. When last I’d heard from the real world, somebody was strangling me.
I was placed on the bed and the covers drawn up over me. People were speaking, but I kept my arm up over my head and didn’t look at anything or listen to anything until Abbie touched my shoulder and spoke my name and asked me how I was. Then I came out slowly, warily, like a turtle in a French kitchen, to see Abbie sitting on the bed and leaning over me, with a lot of people I didn’t like in the background.
Abbie asked me again how I was, and I muttered something, and the leader of the pack came forward to say, “I want you to know that wasn’t intentional, Chester. I don’t do business that way.”
I looked at him.
“I hope there’s no hard feelings,” he said, and the expression his face wore now was concerned. Not that I believed there was ever any relationship between what he was thinking and what his face showed.
I looked at Abbie, and she gave me a look that said, “Be circumspect.” So I looked back at Solomon Napoli and said, “No damage done.” My throat was a little hoarse, so that my voice rasped a little, slightly undercutting the meaning of my words, but not so much that he couldn’t ignore the discrepancy, if he chose.
He chose. “That’s good,” he said. He glanced at his watch, gave me a smile that I guess was supposed to be friendly, and said, “I missed my meeting to be sure you were all right.”
“I’m all right,” I said.
“Good. Then we can get back to what we were talking about. Miss McKay?”
So Abbie squeezed my hand and went away, leaving me once again with Napoli and his two elves. Napoli seated himself in his bedside chair once again and said, “I’ve been thinking over what you said, and it’s entirely possible you’re telling the truth. It could be you’re just an innocent bystander in all this, you don’t work for Droble at all.”
Droble. Was that one of the names Detective Golderman had asked me about? It seemed to me it might have been, but I was in no condition to pursue the question. I didn’t really care one way or the other.
Napoli went on, “But if that’s true, if you are an innocent
bystander, how is it you’re underfoot all the time? You found the body, you had a meeting with Frank Tarbok, you kept hanging around this apartment, you’re traveling with McKay’s sister, you got yourself shot at. An awful lot of activity for an innocent bystander.”
“I’ve been trying to collect my money,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow. “Money?”
“I had a bet on a horse and he came in. That’s why I came here the time I found Tommy dead. I was coming to get my money.”
Napoli frowned. “And all of your activity since then has been concerned with collecting it?”
“Right. With Tommy dead I didn’t know who should pay me. I wanted to ask Tommy’s wife, but she’s disappeared some place.”
“And the meeting with Tarbok? Didn’t you collect your money then?”
“I didn’t ask,” I said. “I didn’t think to ask till it was all over.”
The frown deepened, grew frankly skeptical. “Then what
did
you talk about, you and Frank?”
I said, “Frank Tarbok is the man in the garage, right? The one I was taken to see Tuesday night.”
“Of course,” he said.
“You say of course, but I didn’t know his name till just now. He wanted to see me because he wanted to know if I worked for you.”