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

(Terry’s admonition had been: “Leave your set turned on when you’re ready to leave. It shows up down in the street. I know, because I’ve seen it myself. Then if some cruise-car happens to go by, it’ll make it look like you’re still up there. It might be good for an extra hour or two, before they get wise.”)

The knock came on the door, and the charged tension in the room exploded once and for all; the build-up was over and the climax was on. He turned at the sound, and his face was the color of silver, both because it was so glistening and because it was so gray. He almost died a little right then and there. You could see his knees start to dip down, and his Adam’s apple to go up, like when the blood-supply has been cut off at both ends.

Then he pulled himself together and went over to it.

“Cleary,” a confidential voice said on the other side.

He opened it and he let him in.

Terry was the one to close it and to chain it up again. The man’s fingers were too discoordinated to be much good right then.

“I thought you ran out on me,” he said in a panting voice.

“When I make a deal, I deliver,” Terry said grimly.

He took a brown-paper bag out from inside his coat. It looked by its shape as though it had some kind of medium-sized bottle in it, Coke or club soda. He had the paper up by the open end twisted around to close it off. He held it slanted over the table, untwisted the paper, and shook a gun out of it.

The man recoiled in aversion, as if there were some huge black tarantula there on the table.

“This is what I told you I’d get for you.”

The man just looked the question at Terry, without voicing it.

“Never mind how I got it. I have ways of getting things I want. Maybe I took it off someone who had no right to have it in the first place — and then I didn’t turn it in. He’s not going to report it was taken away from him, you can make book on that. Just drop it in the drink on the way over — and nobody’ll be any the wiser.

“Pick it up,” he encouraged. “Get the feel of it.”

The man kept looking at it fixedly, almost as if he’d never seen one before that close.

“Do like I tell you,” Terry insisted. “Try it for size. Only, don’t touch the trigger, it’s loaded.”

The man took hold of it, timidly at first, then closed his fingers around it more firmly, angled it this way and that. He acted relieved when he’d put it down again, though.

Terry just nodded slightly; what that signified, only he could have said.

He took out a little unsealed envelope, about the size used to carry theatre-tickets in. “Here’s the plane seat you had them hold for you. I stopped by and picked it up on my way over just now. One-way to Zurich, non-stop. The night-flight, tonight. We got about an hour-twenty minutes yet—”

“You mean you went in for it yourself?” the man asked, widening his eyes in surprise.

“Too risky that way, they might identify me later. I waited outside the door, and when I saw a Western Union messenger go by, I handed him the money for it, told him what name to give, and had him bring it out to me. Then I slipped him a buck. They probably figured he was sent down after it special. A lot safer all around.”

The man looked at the ticket like you do the key to a jail-cell when it’s put into your hand. Then he laid it down on the table, outside its envelope.

“Is your passport in shape?” Terry asked, businesslike.

“I had it renewed a year and a half ago, before the net closed up as tight as it is now. It’s good for another six months yet.”

“You just have to turn it in at any American consulate wherever you are, when you want it renewed,” Terry reminded him. “It won’t be held out on you, there’s no Federal rap against you.” He gave him a look sharp as a gimlet, that brought the conversation up short. “Now let’s forget all that and get down to the main thing. What about the money? Didj’ do what I told you about that?”

“I did just what you told me.”

“Keep on,” Terry prodded.

“I told them I couldn’t come up there for it. I had them send a teller down with it. He came accompanied by an armed guard.”

“I watched them come and I watched them go,” Terry said contemptuously. “That guard couldn’t have shot his way out of a plastic garment-bag.”

“The minute I’d closed the door behind them, I split it two ways. There’s twenty thousand in my inside coat-pocket, in an unmarked sealed folder. The rest is in this locked attach£-case; I have the key to it around my neck on a metal chain.”

“But you only signed one withdrawal-slip for the whole amount, right?” Terry prodded, narrowing his eyes. “The twenty thousand isn’t set apart from the rest, separated in any way?”

“Only one, that’s right.”