A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Terry caught his implied meaning and went over to it. He chained it and he double-locked it. Then he turned around and faced him again.

“This way we’re safe from sudden outside interruption,” he said. “Could be anybody; and I can’t chance being caught in here with you.

“You have to learn to trust me,” he said. “Until you do, what I say won’t make any sense. Once you do, it’ll make plenty.”

The man still didn’t, obviously. His eyes were oscillating like two little metronomes, back and forth, back and forth, ready to spring wide in alarm at the first suspect move.

“You know what you’ve done,” Terry said. “For years you were on the payroll of one of the crookedest big-time operators that this town has ever known and right while you were on the force. When a raid was building, somebody tipped him off. Who could that have been? Whoever it was figured it could never be proved, and it never was. But whoever it was didn’t figure Mike’s son was going to be in the raiding detail. And get a bullet, and get killed. The guy that shot him went to the chair years ago. But the guy that was really the cause of it, all he got was a dismissal from the force, exact charges never specified. And with all that nice dirty money piled up waiting for him.”

He spat on the floor with compassion.

“Mike has no son now.

“Mike’ll never forget that.

“You can’t win, except my way.”

The eyes had stopped their wary flickering now. They were suddenly still. Dead-still, as if reflecting back the very thing that they were looking at: the face of death. Then he covered them briefly with both hands, palms against sockets, with a fling of hopelessness. Then lie dropped his hands again as quickly, as if to symbolize mutely the very hopelessness even of hopelessness itself.

Terry said, speaking low and very slow: “I don’t have to tell you what your situation is, but I will anyway, so we can go on from there. You can’t get out of here. You’re barricaded, like in the Middle Ages when a guy took refuge in a church — a sanctuary — and they couldn’t come in there after him and get him because that would have meant desecrating the church. So they waited outside and finally cut him clown when hunger or something else drove him out again. This is like that pretty much, except that the church is now a hotel. The hotel-chain that owns it has considerable influence in the right places, and it doesn’t want you removed by force from its premises — unless you have been first charged with some crime on the books, and you haven’t been — not only because of the bad publicity it would give them, but also because of the risk of an eventual damage-suit. Since there is no outright crime of violence against you down on our books — it’s more a case of alleged moral turpitude — the powers-that-be have agreed to go along with them on this, and wear you out by waiting just outside for you. As long as you don’t commit any violations (and you’re very careful not to, from what we can see), the hotel likes having things just the way they are: they’re milking the situation for all it’s worth. Where else can they get five-hundred dollars a month for one of their rooms, and from a tenant who’s practically handcuffed to them for the rest of his natural life?”

Terry looked at him almost curiously.

“It’s the most unusual case that’s come along in years, there’s nothing else like it to be found in our files.”

Without saying a word, the man broke a fifth of Courvoisier out of a Louis XV liquor-cabinet and swallowed a jigger of it neat, as if he couldn’t get it down fast enough. He forgot to offer any to Terry, only he didn’t know it, but that was one thing Terry wouldn’t have mooched from him right then. Terry wanted to keep his head with him.

“The way it stands right now, it’s what you might call — stabilized. But it won’t stay that way long, it’ll start going downgrade on you. Within a few months, or a year, human nature being what it is, you’ll find yourself at the mercy of every conniving employee in the hotel, because they’ll know they have you over a barrel and you can’t fight back. You’ll be disrespected, things’ll be stolen from you — who you going to complain to, us? Until one fine clay some good-looking chambermaid with a shifty boyfriend will let him put her up to the idea of walking into your room with her hand stretched out in front of her and calmly saying ‘Five hundred dollars, please, or else I’ll scream and say you made a pass at me.’ You’ll have to pay, you can’t afford not to. Then somebody else will see how easy it was, and they’ll try it too, only the second time it’ll be a thousand. You’ll be bled white by the time they’re through with you. Then the hotel will throw you to the wolves anyway.”

The man squeezed his eyes tightly shut with one hand held over them, and pounded his fist against the top of a chair in helpless frustration.

Terry watched him closely, carefully, to see how he was doing. He, Terry.