‘Where are they now?’
It wasn’t the the only thing Sullivan demanded to be told when he opened his eyes. But it was close enough to it.
Having learned from Tom with his first, hoarse-throated inquiry that all three had escaped the blast with nothing more than cuts and bruises, his second, directed with a bitter scowl at Cornero who was standing behind, was barely audible in the muffled world of sound that Tom now inhabited. It went entirely ignored in any case. Sullivan’s third inquiry, delivered as he heaved himself upright from the slump in which he’d been left since being dragged out into the night air, was this one: the whereabouts of Ross and Devlin.
Tom understood it as much by reading his lips as by hearing. Before he could reply, he felt a steely hand grip his shoulder and Cornero stepped in front of him to supply the answer.
‘They got away.’
‘The both of them?’ Sullivan glared at Cornero with a furrowing of the brow that wedded shock, disbelief and anger. Cornero replied with the heels of his hands and his best Italian shrug, apparently just as perplexed himself.
‘Into the night, like ghosts. We have no good idea how.’
Tom said nothing.
‘But I saw it with my own eyes. He went down, the gren—’ Sullivan broke off, pushing gray hair back off his brow, clenching his eyes shut as if determined to dredge the moment up from memory. ‘Didn’t he?’
‘Down, sure. But not out, detective,’ Cornero said, brushing his hands free of nothing and turning to walk away. ‘Don’t rightly know how. But they vanished. You don’t believe me, ask your pal here. Thin air. Ain’t that right, Collins?’
Almost the first thing Tom had seen when he came round, his sight resolving slowly from post-blast blur into a pin-sharp shock of recognition, was Devlin, tattered and bloodied, a bloated man-whale in moonlight, being dragged across the dust-blown lot and hauled into an open touring car.
How he himself had got to be outside, or came to be propped up beside Fay on the chromed footplate of a big Hispano-Suiza, attended by a gorilla-sized goon with a first-aid box, he had no idea. Fay, he was relieved to see, had suffered not a scratch beyond a ragged wound across her left shoulder that the goon was dabbing at, gentle as a junior nurse, with a wad of white cotton. Tom reached out a hand and took hers, and she turned and spoke to him but he couldn’t hear a word. He tried to say so, but his own voice was so damped he simply stopped. Something thick and god-sized had inserted itself between his hearing and the outside world. He knew then that Fay was suffering the same from the way she was pointing to her ears and laughing, and crying, without seeming to notice she was doing either. So he bent and cupped her perfect face in his hands, smeared the dirt and dust from her cheeks with a wipe of his thumbs, and kissed her and held her to him so hard the goon had to turn away, all bashful.
Tom walked back towards the house, surprised to find it still intact. Not collapsed or burned or anything else he might have expected, though an eight-foot gap had been blown through the wall at the front. It was through this that Devlin, leaking blood, nearly every stitch of clothing blown from him, was hauled on his back from the dark interior, two big goons pulling on each of his pink shredded legs, his big arms flailing, his eyes wide with pain or terror, unable to scream for the gag rammed hard in his mouth. Getting his unwilling, corpulent enormity into the waiting car took Cornero’s muscle boys a mammoth effort, a mesmerizing thrash of fists and boots and remorseless intent, a muted shadow play of grunting and cursing that ended with the roar of a motor, a kick-up of dust, and a sense of screaming yet to come.
It was then that Cornero strolled back across the lot and drew Tom aside, a comradely arm around his shoulder, an inquiry as to his wellness. Tom indicated he was having trouble with his hearing. Cornero grinned a big grin, then pushed his face hard up against Tom’s ear to be certain he understood, and explained to him in an exaggerated drawl exactly how things would have to be. How things could only be, if he wished his beautiful girl to make it through another day on earth. And, more imminently, if he wanted his detective pal to make it to the dawn of this one.
There could be no other way. No discussion. No negotiation. No recalcitrance or reluctance. No word of what had happened on this night to Devlin and Ross could ever be disclosed or discussed. Not to the detective squad. Not to the studios. Not to the newspapers. Not to any other ears. Silence was the price, and all that was required. It was for Tom to make it happen, and make sure it stayed that way. Or the cost would be their lives. A simple deal. All three or none. And that was how it had to be.
Silence. Silence. Silence.