Occasion ... for Disaster
The driver addressed Malone. "Do you ever see either of these boys
before?"
"Never," Malone said.
"Nor do I," the cabbie said. He eyed the gunman. "We are not your
friend," he said. "Either of us."
"No, no," the gunman said. "Not you. This friend, he ... uh ... owns a
taxi, and we thought this was it. It was kind of a joke, see? A
friendly joke, that's all. Believe me, the gun's not even loaded. Both
of them aren't. Phony bullets, honest. Believe me?"
"Why, naturally I believe you," the cabbie said politely. "I never
doubt the word of a stranger, especially such an honest-appearing
stranger as you seem to be. And since the gun is loaded with false
bullets, as you say, all you have to do is reach over and take it away
from me."
There was a short silence.
"A joke," the gunman said feebly. "Honest, just a joke."
"We believe you," Malone assured him grandly. "As a matter of fact, we
appreciate the joke so much that we want you to tell it to a panel of
twelve citizens, a judge and a couple of lawyers, so they can
appreciate it, too. They get little fun out of life and your joke may
give them a few moments of happiness. Why hide your light under an
alibi?"
The horn continued its dismal wail for a few seconds more before two
patrolmen and a sergeant came up on horses. It took somewhat more time
than that for Malone to convince the sergeant that he didn't have time
to go down to the station to prefer charges. He showed his
identification and the police were suitably impressed.
"Lock 'em up for violating the Sullivan Law," he said. "I'm sure they
don't have licenses for these lovely little guns of theirs."
"Probably not," the sergeant agreed. "There's been an awful lot of
this kind of thing going on lately. But here's an idea: the cabbie
here can come on with us."
The top of the cabbie's head turned pale. "That," he said, "is the
trouble with being a law-abiding citizen such as I have been for
upwards of thirty years. Because I do not want to lose twenty dollars
to these young strangers, I lose twenty dollars' worth of time in a
precinct station, the air of which is very bad for my asthma."
Malone, taking the hint, dug a twenty out of his pockets, and then
added another to it, remembering how much he had spent in Las Vegas,
where his money funneled slowly into the pockets of Primo Palveri. The
cabbie took the money with haste and politeness and stowed it away.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I am now prepared to spend the entire night
signing affidavits, if enough affidavits can be dug up." He looked
pleased.
"Mr. Malone," the sergeant said wearily, "people just don't realize
what's going on in this town. We never did have half enough cops, and
now, with so many men resigning and getting arrested and suspended, we
haven't got a quarter enough. People think this strike business is
funny, but if we spent any time fiddling around with traffic and
parking tickets, we'd never have time to stop even crimes like this,
let alone the big jobs. As it is, though, there haven't been a lot of
big ones. Every hood in the city's out to make a couple of bucks--but
that's it so far, thank God."
Malone nodded. "How about the FBI?" he said. "Want them to come in and
help?"
"Mr. Malone," the sergeant said, "the City of New York can take very
good care of itself, without outside interference."
Some day, Malone told himself, good old New York City was going to
secede from the Union and form a new country entirely. Then it would
have a war with New Jersey and probably be wiped right off the map.
Viewing the traffic around him as he hunted for another cab, he wasn't
at all sure that that was a bad idea. He began to wish vaguely that he
had borrowed one of the policemen's horses.
* * * * *
Malone wasn't in the least worried about arriving at Mike Sand's
office late. In the first place, Sand was notorious for sleeping late
and working late to make up for it. His work schedule was somewhere
around forty-five degrees out of phase with the rest of the world,
which made it just about average for the National Brotherhood of
Truckers. It had never agitated for a nine-to-five work day. A man
driving a truck, after all, worked all sorts of odd hours--and the
union officials did the same, maybe just to prove that they were all
good truckers at heart.
The sign over the door read:
National Headquarters
NATIONAL BROTHERHOOD
OF TRUCKERS
Welcome, Brother
Malone pushed at the door and it swung open, revealing a rather
dingy-looking foyer. More Good Old Truckers At Heart, he told himself.
Mike Sand owned a quasi-palatial mansion in Puerto Rico for winter
use, and a two-floor, completely air-conditioned apartment on Fifth
Avenue for summer use. But the Headquarters Building looked dingy
enough to make truckers conscience-stricken about paying back dues.
Behind the reception desk there was a man whose face was the
approximate shape and color of a slightly used waffle. He looked up
from his crossword puzzle as Malone came in, apparently trying to
decide whether or not this new visitor should be greeted with:
"Welcome, Brother!"
Taking pity on his indecision, Malone strode to the desk and said:
"Tell Mike Sand he has a visitor."
The waffle-faced man blinked. "Mr. Sand is busy right now," he said.
"Who wants to talk to him?"
Malone tried to look steely-eyed and tough. "You pick up the
intercom," he said, "and you tell Sand there's a man out here who's in
the cloak-and-suit business."
"The what?"
"Tell him this man is worried about a recent shipment of buttons,"
Malone went on.
"Mister," the waffle-faced man said, "you're nuts."
"So I'm nuts," Malone said. "Make the call."
It was put through. After a few minutes of earnest conversation the
man turned to look at Malone again, dizzied wonder in his eyes. "Mr.
Sand says go right up," he told the FBI Agent in a shocked voice.
"Elevator to the third floor."
Malone went over to the elevator, stepped in and pressed the
third-floor button. As the doors closed, the familiar itch of
precognition began to assail him again. This time he had nothing else
to distract him. He paid very close attention to it as he was carried
slowly and creakily upward.
He looked up. There was an escape-hatch in the top of the car.
Standing on tiptoe, he managed to lift it aside, grasp the edges of
the resulting hole and pull himself up through the hole to the top of
the car. He looked back down, memorizing the elevator, and then pulled
the hatch shut again. There was a small peephole in it, and Malone put
his eye to it and waited.
About twenty seconds later, the car stopped and the doors opened. A
little more time passed, and then a gun, closely followed by a man,
edged around the door frame.
"What the hell," the man said. "The car's empty!"
Another voice said: "Let's cover the stairway."
Two pairs of footsteps receded rapidly down the hall. Malone, gun in
hand, teleported himself back to the previously memorized elevator,
tiptoed to the door and looked out. The two men were standing at the
far end of the hall, posted at either side of the stairwell and
obviously waiting for him to come on up.
Instead, he tiptoed out of the elevator hefting his gun, and came up
silently behind the pair. When he was within ten feet he stopped and
said, very politely: "Drop the guns, boys."
The guns thudded to the floor and the two men turned round.
"All right," Malone said, smiling into their astonished faces. "Now,
let's go on and see Mr. Sand."
He picked up the guns with his free hand and put them into his coat
pockets. Together, the three men went down toward the lighted office
at the far end of the hall.
"Open it," Malone said as they came to the door. He followed them into
the office. Behind a battered, worm-eaten desk in a dingy room sat a
very surprised-looking Mike Sand.
He was only about five feet six, but he looked as if weighed over two
hundred pounds. He had huge shoulders and a thick neck, and his face
was sleepy-looking. He seemed to have lost a lot of fights in his long
career; Sand, Malone reflected, was nearing fifty now, and he was
beginning to look his age. His short hair, once black, was turning to
iron-gray.
He didn't say anything. Malone smiled at him pleasantly. "These boys
were carrying deadly weapons," he told Sand in a polite voice. "That's
hardly the way to treat a brother." His precognitive warning system
wasn't ringing any alarm bells, but he kept his gun trained on the
pair of thugs as he walked over to Mike Sand's desk and took the two
extra revolvers from his pocket. "You'd better keep these, Sand," he
said. "Your boys don't know how to handle them."
Sand grinned sourly, pulled open a desk drawer and swept the guns into
it with one motion of his ham-like hand. He didn't look at Malone.
"You guys better go downstairs and keep Jerry company," he said. "You
can do crossword puzzles together."
"Now, Mike, we--" one of them began.
Mike Sand snorted. "Go on," he said. "Scram."
"But he was supposed to be in the elevator, and we--"
"Scram," Sand said. It sounded like a curse. The two men got out.
"Like apes in the trees," Sand said heavily. "Ask for bright boys and
what do you get? Everything," he went on dismally, "is going to hell."
* * * * *
That line, Malone reflected, was beginning to have all the persistence
of a bass-bourdon. It droned its melancholy way through anything and
everything else. He signed deeply, thought about a cigar and lit a
cigarette instead. It tasted awful. "About those buttons--" he said.
"I got nothing to do with buttons," Sand said.
"You do with these," Malone said. "A shipment of buttons from the
Nevada desert. You grabbed them from Palveri."
"I got nothing to do with it," Sand said.
Malone looked around and found a chair and an ashtray. He grabbed one
and sat down in the other. "I'm not from Castelnuovo," he said. "Or
Palveri, or any of the Mafia boys. If I were, you'd know it fast
enough."
Sand regarded him from under eyelids made almost entirely of
scar-tissue. "I guess so," he said sourly at last. "But what do you
want to know about the stuff? And who are you, anyhow?"
"The name's Malone," Malone said. "You might say trouble is my
business. Or something like that. I see an opportunity to create a
little trouble--but not for you. That is, if you want to hear some
more about those buttons. Of course, if you had nothing to do with
it--"
"All right," Sand said. "All right. But it was strictly a legitimate
proposition, understand?"
"Sure," Malone said. "Strictly legitimate."
"Well, it was," Sand said defensively. "We got to stop scab trucking,
don't we? And that Palveri was using nonunion boys on the trucks. We
had to stop them; it was a service to the Brotherhood, understand?"
"And the peyotl buttons?" Malone asked.
Sand shrugged. "So we had to confiscate the cargo, didn't we?" he
said. "To teach them a lesson. Nonunion drivers, that's what we're
against."
"And you're for peyotl," Malone said, "so you can make it into peyote
and get enough money to refurbish Brotherhood Headquarters."
"Now, look," Sand said. "You think you're tough and you can get away
with a lot of wisecracks. That's a wrong idea, brother." He didn't
move, but he suddenly seemed set to spring. Malone wondered if, just
maybe, his precognition had blown a fuse.
"O.K., let's forget it," he said. "But I've got some inside lines,
Sand. You didn't get the real shipment."
"Didn't get it?" Sand said with raised eyebrows. "I got it. It's
right where I can put my finger on it now."