Somebody Owes Me Money

I climbed out slow, and he followed me. The driver pointed straight ahead and I walked straight ahead. It was a wide clear lane with a rank of cars on each side, the cars facing one another with all those blank headlights, me walking between them down the gauntlet. I kept feeling eyes on me, as though I were being stared at, but I knew it was only the cars. I couldn’t help it, I had to terrify myself even more with an image of one of those cars suddenly leaping into life, all four headlights blaring on, the engine roaring, the car slashing out of its slot to run me down like an ant on a racetrack. I walked hunched, facing only front, blinking frequently, and the cars remained quiet.

At the end there was a wall, and a flight of olive-green metal steps against the wall going upward to the right. As I neared it, I was told, “Go up the stairs.”

I went up the stairs. Our six feet made complicated echoing dull rhythms on the rungs, and I thought of Robert Mitchum. What would Robert Mitchum do now, what would he do in a situation like this?

No question of it. Robert Mitchum, with the suddenness of a snake, would abruptly whirl, kick the nearest hood in the jaw, and vault over the railing and down to the garage floor. Meantime, the kicked hood would have fallen backward into the other one, and the two of them would go tumbling down the steps, out of the play long enough for Mitchum either to (a) make it to the door and out of the building and thus successfully make his escape, or (b) get into the hood’s car, in which the keys would have been left, back it at top speed through the closed garage door, and take off with a grand grinding of gears, thus successfully making his escape and getting their car in the bargain.

But what if I spun around like that, and the guy with the gun was Robert Mitchum? What would he do then? Easy. He’d duck the kick and shoot me in the head.

I plodded up the stairs.

At the top was a long hall lined with windows on both sides. The windows on the left looked out on a blacktop loading area floodlit from somewhere ahead of me. The windows on the right, interspaced with windowed doors, looked in on offices and storage rooms, all in darkness except for one room far down at the end of the hall. Yellow light spilled out there, angled across the floor. There was no sound.

I stopped at the head of the stairs, but a hand against the middle of my back pushed me forward, not gently, not harshly. I walked down the hall toward the yellow light.

It was an office, the door open. Inside, a heavyset man in an overcoat with a velvet collar sat at a scruffy wooden desk and smoked a cigarette in an ivory holder. His head seemed too large for his body, a big squared-off block matted with black fur everywhere but in front. His face shone a little, as though he’d been touched up with white enamel, and his heavy jaw was blue with a thick mass of beard pressing outward against the skin. He sat half-turned away from the desk, a black velvet hat pushed back from his forehead, his one forearm resting negligently on the papers on the desk top, as though to imply this wasn’t his office really, he was above scraggly offices like this, he’d just borrowed this one from some poor relation for the occasion.

He looked over at me when I stopped in the doorway, his eye a pale blue, blank and unblinking. It was as though that wasn’t really his eye, his actual eye was hidden behind that one, was looking through that one at me without giving me a chance to look back.

The hand in my back again sent me into the room. I stopped in front of the desk, looking at the man sitting there. The other two stayed behind me, out of my sight. I heard the door close with a little tick of finality, like the last shovel-pat over a filled-in grave.

The man at the desk took the cigarette and holder from his mouth and pointed with them at a wooden chair beside the desk. “Sit down.” His voice was husky, but emotionless, not really threatening.

I sat down. I put my hands in my lap, not knowing what to do with them. I met his eye — his eye’s eye — and wished I could control my blinking.

He glanced at one of the papers littering the desk, saying, “How long you been working for Napoli?”

I said, “Who?”

He looked at me again and his face finally took on an expression: saddened humorous wisdom. “Don’t waste my time, fella,” he said. “We know who you are.”

“I’m Chester Conway,” I said, struck by the sudden hope that this whole thing could be a case of mistaken identity.

It wasn’t. “I know,” he said. “And you work for Solomon Napoli.”

I shook my head. “Maybe there’s another Chester Conway,” I said. “Did you look in the phone books for all the boroughs? A few years ago I used to get calls—”

He slapped his palm on the desk. It wasn’t very loud, but it shut me up. “You pal around with Irving Falco,” he said.

“Irving Falco,” I repeated, trying to think where I knew the name from. Then I said, “Sure! Sid Falco! I’m in a poker game with him.”

“Irving Falco,” he insisted.