Chapter 15

I heard the footsteps of a guard, and we all froze, and with the same invisible gesture of a magician, Joey Earp’s gun was in his hand and the muzzle was touching my ear. I stopped breathing, and the steps went away. There was evidently agreement among all the guards in that place to avoid us. No guards, no alarms, no bells. I tried the green box, and it was locked.

“See,” I pointed out to them, “no use. It’s locked.”

“We are burglars,” Freddy Upson replied, not without a note of pride, and then he took a little buttonhook sort of thing out of his pocket and he fiddled around the box and the door was open. There were three fat fuses in it. I pulled each of them out and handed them to Freddy Upson for safekeeping. There were also two large switches, both of which I opened. Nothing happened. Nothing happened when I pulled the fuses. Nothing happened when I opened the switches. The dim night lights did not even flicker.

“Well, that cuts the alarm,” I said.

“Your voice is a mite shaky, Harvey.”

“Well, bless my soul, wouldn’t your voice be a mite shaky if you were here with two oversized Texans who were planning to blow your brains out the moment your usefulness to them was over?”

“Now we don’t take kindly to that kind of talk, Harvey,” Joey Earp said.

“I don’t take kindly to dying.”

“You keep making such a fuss about dying, Harvey. Don’t you fret now. Did I say anything about dying? Did Freddy? Now you just take us to where that old Dutch painting is hanging and we’ll get down to the business we’re here for.”

I nodded glumly and led them on. We turned right, past the twentieth-century American painting, left and then right again, and there we were, in the Rembrandt room, with the noble painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer square in the center of the wall to the right. Now we walked forward slowly, and the three of us ranged ourselves in front of the painting, standing and staring at it. After a long moment, I played my last card.

“What does the fat man pay you for a job like this?”

“He don’t cotton to being called the fat man, Harvey.”

“He pays pretty damn good, Harvey.”

“I pay pretty good.”

“Come on, Harvey,” said Joey Earp, “don’t be foolish. If we come out of here without that painting, even Texas ain’t large enough to hide us.”

“I’m thinking about me, not the painting,” I said. “To me, I’m worth a lot more.”

“That’s reasonable, Harvey.”

“I could buy out,” I said.

“Harvey!”

“Eighty-five thousand dollars for me, Miss Dempsey and Cynthia.”

“Harvey!”

“Real money,” I said desperately.

There was a pop at that moment, a hollow pop that was choking with menace. It’s a hard sound to describe if you never heard a silencer. Joey Earp, who was looking at me, stopped looking at anything and he collapsed on the floor. Freddy Upson spun around, clawing for his gun, but the second pop was quicker. It was a staged trick, an astonishing illusion. At one moment there were two live Texans; the next moment, two dead ones. They lay there on the floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Joey Earp with a hole in his white-on-white pleated shirt that had cost him $42.50 at Neiman-Marcus, and Freddy Upson with a hole between his eyes and his own Neiman-Marcus shirt untouched. Myself, I remained motionless, uncertain as to whether I was alive or dead, and unwilling to make any sudden motion that would precipitate one condition or the other. It seemed to me that I remained in just this position for quite a while, until a voice said, “All right, Harvey. Turn around—slow and steady, because it is better to be standing than slumbering there with those two slobs on the floor. Am I right, Harvey?”

“Right. But I don’t carry a gun.”

“I know, Harvey. Just turn easy.”

I made a picture for myself of a glass of beer standing squarely on the top of my head, and then I turned so carefully that not one drop of the beer spilled—and came face to face with a man of thirty years or so, a well-knit, good-looking, brown-skinned, hard-faced man, dressed meticulously in what was probably a Brooks Brothers’ gray flannel suit and holding in his right hand a Luger pistol fitted with the newest, five-inch German silencer.

“All right, Harvey—right there. Hold it.”

“I don’t intend anything personal,” I said, “but you seem to know my name—”

“Harvey, they wired the hotel—we wired the hotel.”

“They?”

“The shmucks from Texas. Harvey, do I have to draw you a picture?”

“Then Cynthia was right. He was a real count—”

“He was a real count, Harvey. Gambion de Fonti, poor little bastard.”

“And you’re Valento Corsica.”

“Bright, Harvey. The boys said you are stupid. You’re not stupid. Maybe a little slow on the pickup, but not stupid, Harvey.”

“But no accent—the way you talk, the way you dress—”

“Harvey, the world changes. I spent four years at New York University—School of Commerce, business administration. A year of graduate work at Harvard. The rackets are different, buddy. We don’t intimidate—we administrate. And the rough stuff is gone—except at moments.”

“And this is a moment?”

“Well, what the hell do you think, Harvey? We hear this fat half-wit from Texas is bent on taking over, so we lay a little intriguing trail with poor Count Gambion. Who ever thought they’d knock over the poor little feller! Well, that’s the way it crumbles, but we didn’t push it that way. The fat man likes to own hotels, and we would have tied a financial knot around him that he would never unravel. But it didn’t go that way, and now I got you on my hands.”

“I didn’t see a thing,” I said firmly.

“Harvey, you simply have no idea how thoroughly we plan a thing. Every loophole plugged, every contingency considered. We even maneuvered the fat man into buying the Ritzhampton; we made the loans available to him; we hooked E.C. Brandon into the deal, and some of us wanted to let it unfold and then finger Brandon with the picture hidden away in his cellar. That had virtues, but better to have Brandon outside where we can use him. We got some darling tapes on him and the fat man and the Rembrandt, and then we got his daughter.”

“You got his daughter? The hell you have! The fat man’s got her, and while we stand here yakking and waiting for the guards to turn up, he can be putting her away and Lucille Dempsey with her.”

“Don’t worry about the guards, Harvey. Don’t worry about the fat man. We got the fat man, Harvey. We got the girls. We got the two morons he uses for trigger men. You got real things to worry about.”

“Like what?”

“Like being present when I had to kill these two cowboys.”

“My God, Mr. Corsica, you saved my life.”

“Is that what you’re going to say on the witness stand, Harvey?”

“This won’t ever get there. My lips are sealed.”

“Don’t be a horse’s ass,” Corsica said.

“No?” I shrugged. “What the hell’s the difference—horse’s ass or not. I’m on the short end. The cowboys were leading me to the last roundup. Now you.”

“Don’t bracket us, Harvey.”

“After all, it was self-defense.”

“Harvey,” he said patiently, “do you know who I am or don’t you?”

“I know.”

“All right,” he said. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the butt of the Luger carefully. Then he took it by the muzzle and handed it to me. I took it and covered him.

“Don’t move,” I said.

“Harvey!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Well, Goddamn it, you give me a gun—”

“Would I give you a loaded gun, Harvey?”

I pointed it at the door and fired. It clicked.

“By golly,” I said respectfully, “you went up against them with two bullets—”

“No, Harvey.” He took a small Smith & Wesson out of his jacket pocket and covered me. “I got another gun. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

I took out my own handerchief, wiped the butt and dropped the Luger to the floor. It fell with a crash that would have awakened the dead, but our own seclusion was not disturbed.

“There will not be another patrol of guards for thirty minutes or so, Harvey. As for the alarm system, we have disconnected it. So it will do you no good to be petulant.”

“Well, I pulled three enormous fuses,” I said foolishly. “It’s got to do something.”

“It did something,” he replied patiently. “It cut the current to the converter which changes AC to DC for the old freight elevator. I know the plans and the wring of this place better than the head curator, Harvey. Don’t worry. We don’t steal art. Shmucks steal art. Texans steal art. We don’t. So now pick up the gun, Harvey.”

I picked it up. “It’s not my gun. Where does it get you?” I asked.

“Let me do it my way, Harvey—yes?”

“Yes,” I said.

“The gun is registered in your name, Harvey. The girls will swear that you were taken here under duress and forced to participate in this attempted heist. You will be a hero, Harvey.”

“Not in Texas,” I said glumly. “Not in the Nineteenth Precinct either,” I said, even more glumly.

“Even in Texas, Harvey. The fact of the matter is that Coventry comes from Brooklyn first. They’re all wanted in Texas. The fact that you got them both with a gun that had only two cartridges in its magazine—a gun you forgot to load—”

“I’m against violence,” I said desperately. I felt sorry for Coventry now. A fat cowboy who comes from Brooklyn is maybe the most pathetic thing on earth.

“You took a life to save a life.”

“You’re putting me on,” I said miserably.

“No, sir, Harvey. I am not.”

“Why should you let go of Cynthia?”

“Because a bird in the hand, Harvey, tax-free, is worth a whole flock of birds in the bush.”

“What bird in the hand?” I was almost shouting now, and he politely asked me to lower my voice. “What bird in the hand?” I repeated more softly.

“The bird in your pocket, Harvey—the eighty-five grand in traveler’s checks that you tried to buy the cowboys with.”

“Me have eighty-five thousand? That’s a pipe dream. I was conning them. I made that eighty-five out of thin air.”

“Harvey,” he said coldly, “we tapped your room in Toronto—we got taps all over the hotel—we even got connections in banks. Now, do you give me that eighty-five grand, or do I have to push you around a little and maybe shoot you a little to get it?”

“You give me both girls?”

“Both.”

“When?”

“When you sign the traveler’s checks and hand them over.”

I reached into my pocket, took out the fat folder of checks, and held it up.

“Sign them, Harvey.”

“Where?”

“Sit down on the floor and sign them.”

He tossed me a ballpoint pen, and I sat down on the floor, alongside of the two dead Texans, and signed five ten thousand-dollar checks, five five thousand-dollar checks and ten one thousand-dollar checks. Then I pushed the lot over to him.

He picked up the checks, stuffed them into his pocket, and said, “OK, Harvey—stay where you are. Don’t move. Count to one hundred, but don’t move, because it’s been nice and it would be a pity to louse it up at this point. So don’t move.”

He backed away, and then suddenly he turned around and took off out of the room. I might have gone after him, but it is a lot more likely that I might not have gone after him. In any case, the decision was taken away from me, because before my counting reached twenty, Cynthia and Lucille burst into the room, and Lucille threw her arms around me and kissed me and wept copiously, which was exactly what my battered ego required. Cynthia, on the other hand, stood there forlornly. I expected her to have hysterics, but at that moment Cynthia reached a sort of adulthood.

“I do feel sorry for them,” she said, “but they weren’t very nice people, were they?”