"Make Room! Make Room!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

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Billy Chung managed to work the plastic container of soylent steaks up under his shirt and, when he bent half double, it wasn’t easily noticeable. For a while he could still move, then the press became too much and he sheltered against the wall and pushed back at the forest of legs that hammered him and jammed his face against the hot dusty brick. He did not try to move and a knee caught him in the side of the head and half stunned him and the next thing he was aware of was a cool spray of water on his back. The riot trucks had arrived and their pressure hoses were breaking up the crowd. One of the columns of water swept over him, plastered him against the wall and went past. The push of the crowd was gone now and he tremblingly got to his feet, looking around to see if anyone had noticed his bundle, but no one had. The remnants of the mob, some of them bloody and bruised, all of them soaking wet, streamed past the lumbering riot trucks. Billy joined them and turned down Irving Place, where there were fewer people, and he looked desperately around for a hiding place, a spot where he could have a few moments of privacy, the hardest thing to find in this city. The riot was over and in a little while somebody would notice him and wonder what he had under his shirt and he would get it, but good. This wasn’t his territory, there weren’t even any Chinese in this neighborhood, they would spot him, they would see him… He ran a bit but started to pant heavily and slowed down to a fast walk. There had to be something. There. Repairs or something against one of the buildings, a deep hole dug down to the foundation with pipes and a pool of muddy water at the bottom. He sat down next to the broken edge of the concrete sidewalk, leaned against one of the barriers that ringed the hole, bent forward and glanced around out of the corners of his eyes. No one looking at him, but plenty of people near, people coming out of the houses or sitting on the steps to watch the bedraggled mob move by. Running footsteps and a man came down the middle of the street holding a large parcel under his arm, glaring around with his fist clenched. Someone tripped him and he howled as he went down and the nearest people fell on him clutching for the crackers that spilled on the ground. Billy smiled, for the moment no one was watching him, and slid over the edge, going up to his ankles in the muddy bottom. They had dug around a foot-thick and corroded iron pipe making a shallow cave into which he backed. It wasn’t perfect but it would do, do fine, only his feet could be seen from above. He lay sideways on the coolness of the earth and tore open the box.

Look at that — look at that, he said over and over again to himself and laughed as he realized he was beginning to drool and had to spit away the excess saliva. Soylent steaks, a whole boxful, each flat and brown and big as his hand. He bit into one, choked and wolfed it down, forcing crumbling pieces into his mouth with his dirty fingers until it was so full he could hardly swallow, chewing at the lovely softness. How long had it been since he had eaten anything like this?

Billy ate three of the soybean and lentil steaks that way, pausing every now and then between bites and poking his head cautiously out, brushing the lanky black hair from his eyes as he looked upward. No one was watching him. He took more out of the box, eating them slowly now, and only stopped when his stomach was stretched out tautly, and grumbling at the unusual condition of being stuffed so full. While he licked the last of the crumbs from his hands he worked on a plan, already feeling unhappy because he had eaten so many of the steaks. Loot was what he needed and steaks were loot and he could have stuffed his gut as well with weedcrackers. Hell. The white plastic box was too obvious to carry and too big to hide completely under his shirt, so he had to wrap the steaks in something. Maybe his handkerchief. He pulled this out, a dirty and crumpled rag cut from old sheeting, and wrapped it around the remaining ten steaks, tying the corners so they wouldn’t fall out. When he tucked this under the waistband of his shorts it did not make too obvious a bulge, though it pressed uncomfortably against his full stomach. It was good enough.

“What you doing down that hole, kid?” one of the blowzy women seated on the nearby steps asked when he climbed back to the street.

“Blow it out!” he shouted as he ran for the corner followed by their harpy screams. Kid! He was eighteen years old even though he wasn’t so tall, he was no kid. They thought they owned the world.

Until he got to Park Avenue he hurried, he didn’t want to get any of the local gangs after him, then walked uptown with the slow-moving traffic until he reached the Madison Square flea market.

Crowded, hot, filled with a roar of many voices that hammered at the ears and noisome with the smell of old dirt, dust, crowded bodies; a slowly shifting maelstrom of people moving by, stopping at stalls to finger the ancient suits, dresses, chipped crockery, worthless ornaments, argue the price of the small tilapia dead with gaping mouths and startled round eyes. Hawkers shouted the merits of their decaying wares and people streamed along, carefully leaving room for the two hard-eyed policemen who walked side by side watching everything — but keeping to the main pathway that bisected the Square and led to the patched grayness of the old Army pyramidal tents of the long-established temporary tent city. The police stayed out of the narrow paths that twisted away through the jungle of pushcarts, stands and shelters that jammed the Square, the market where anything could be bought, anything sold. Billy stepped over the blind beggar who sprawled across the narrow opening between a concrete bench and the rickety stall of a seaweed vendor and worked his way inward. He looked at the people there, not at what they were selling, and finally stopped before a pushcart loaded with a jumble of ancient plastic containers, mugs, plates and bowls, with their once-bright colors scratched and grayed by time.

“Hands off!” The stick crashed down on the edge of the cart and Billy jerked his fingers away.

“I’m not touching your junk,” he complained.

“Move on if you’re not buying,” the man said, an Oriental with lined cheeks and thin white hair.

“I’m not buying, I’m selling.” Billy leaned closer and whispered so that only the man could hear. “You want some soylent steaks?”

The old man squinted at him. “Stolen goods, I suppose,” he said tiredly.

“Come on — you want them or not?”

There was no humor in the man’s fleeting smile. “Of course I want them. How many do you have?”

“Ten.”

“A D and a half a piece. Fifteen dollars.”

“Shit! I’ll eat them myself first. Thirty D’s for the lot.”

“Don’t let greed destroy you, son. We both know what they are worth. Twenty D’s for the lot. Period.” He fished out two worn ten-dollar bills and held them folded in his fingers. “Let’s see what you have.”

Billy pushed the stuffed handkerchief across and the man held it under the cart and looked inside. “All right,” he said, and still with his hands beneath the cart transferred them to a square of heavy, wrinkled paper and handed back the cloth. “I don’t need that.”

“The loot now.”

The man handed it over slowly, smiling now that the transaction was finished. “Do you ever come to the Mott Street club?”

“Are you kidding?” Billy grabbed for the money and the man released it.

“You should. You’re Chinese, and you brought these steaks to me because I’m Chinese too and you knew you could trust me. That shows you’re thinking right…”

“Knock it off, will you, grandpa.” He hit himself in the chest with his thumb. “I’m Taiwan and my father was a general. So one thing I know — have nothing to do with you downtown Commie Chinks.”

“You stupid punk—” He raised his stick but Billy was already gone.

Things were going to change now, yes they were! He did not notice the heat as he dodged automatically through the milling crowds, seeing the future ahead and holding tight to the money in his pocket. Twenty D’s — more than he had ever owned at one time in his life. The most he had ever had before was three-eighty that he had lifted from the apartment across the hall the time they had left their window open. It was hard to get your hands on cash money, and cash money was the only thing that counted. They never saw any at home. The Welfare ration cards took care of everything, everything that kept you alive and just alive enough to hate it. You needed cash to get on and cash was what he had now. He had been thinking about this for a long time.

He turned into the Chelsea branch of Western Union on Ninth Avenue. The pasty-faced girl behind the high counter looked up and her glance slid away from him and out the wide front window to the surging, sunlit traffic beyond. She dabbed at the sweat droplets on her lip with a crumpled handkerchief, then wiped the creases under her chin. The operators, bent over their work, didn’t look up. It was quiet here with just the distant hum of the city through the open door, the sudden lurching motion as a teletype clattered loudly. On a bench against the rear wall six boys sat looking at him suspiciously, their searching eyes ready to fill with hatred. As he went toward the dispatcher he could hear their feet shifting on the floor and the squeak of the bench. He had to force himself not to turn and look as he waited, imitating patience, for the man to notice him.

“What do you want, kid?” the dispatcher said, finally looking up, speaking through tight, pursed lips reluctant to give anything away, even words. A man in his fifties, tired and hot, angry at a world that had promised him more.

“Could you use a messenger boy, mister?”

“Beat it. We got too many kids already.”

“I could use the work, mister, I’d work any time you say. I got the board money.” He took out one of the ten-dollar bills and smoothed it on the counter. The man’s eyes glared at it quickly, then jerked away again. “We got too many kids.”

The bench creaked and footsteps came up behind Billy and a boy spoke, his voice thick with restrained anger.

“Is this Chink bothering you, Mr. Burgger?” Billy thrust the money back into his pocket and held tightly to it.

“Sit down, Roles,” the man said. “You know my rule about trouble or fighting.”

He glared at the two boys and Billy could guess what the rule was and knew that he wouldn’t be working here unless he did something quickly.

“Thank you for letting me talk to you, Mr. Burgger,” he said, innocently, as he felt back with his heel and jammed his weight down on the boy’s toes as he turned. “I won’t bother you any more—”

The boy shouted and pain burst in Billy’s ear as the fist lashed out and caught him. He staggered and looked shocked but made no attempt to defend himself.

“All right, Roles,” Mr. Burgger said distastefully. “You’re through here, get lost.”

“But — Mr. Burgger…” he howled unhappily. “You don’t know this Chink…”

“Get out!” Mr. Burgger half rose and pointed angrily at the gaping boy. “Out!”

Billy moved to one side, unnoticed and forgotten for the moment, and knew enough not to smile. It finally penetrated to the boy that there was nothing he could do and he left — after hurling a look of burning malice at Billy — while Mr. Burgger scratched on one of the message boards.

“All right, kid, it looks like you maybe got a job. What’s your name?”

“Billy Chung.”

“We pay fifty cents every telegram you deliver.” He stood and walked to the counter holding the board. “You take a telegram out you leave a ten-buck board deposit. When you bring the board back you get ten-fifty. That clear?”

He laid the board down on the counter between them and his eyes glanced down to it. Billy looked and read the chalked words: fifteen cent kickback.

“That’s fine with me, Mr. Burgger.”

“All right.” The heel of his hand removed the message. “Get on the bench and shut up. Any fighting, any trouble, any noise, and you get what Roles got”

“Yes, Mr. Burgger.”

When he sat down the other boys stared at him suspiciously but said nothing. After a few minutes a dark little boy, even smaller than he, leaned over and mumbled, “How much kickback he ask?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t be a chunkhead. You kick back or you don’t work here.”

“Fifteen.”

“I told you he would do it,” another boy whispered fiercely. “I told you he wouldn’t keep it at ten…” He shut up abruptly when the dispatcher glared in their direction.

After this the day rolled by with hot evenness and Billy was glad to sit and do nothing. Some of the boys took telegrams out, but he was never called. The soylent steaks were sitting like lead in his stomach and twice he had to go back to the dark and miserable toilet in the rear of the building. The shadows were longer in the street outside but the air still held the same breathless heat that it had for the past ten days. Soon after six o’clock three more boys trickled in and found places on the crowded bench. Mr. Burgger looked at the group with his angry expression, it seemed to be the only one he had.

“Some of you kids get lost.”

Billy had had enough for the first day so he left. His knees were stiff from sitting and the steaks had descended far enough so he began to think about dinner. Hell, he grimaced sourly, he knew what they would have for dinner. The same as every other night and every other year. On the waterfront there was a little breeze from the river and he walked slowly along Twelfth Avenue and felt it cool upon his arms. Behind the sheds here, with no one in sight for the moment, he pried open one of the wire clips that held on the tire sole of his sandal and slipped the two bills into the crack. They were his and his only. He tightened the clip and climbed the steps that led to the Waverly Brown which was moored to Pier 62.

The river was invisible. Secured together by frayed ropes and encrusted chains the rows of ancient Victory and Liberty ships made up an alien and rusty landscape of odd-shaped superstructures, laundry-hung rigging, supports, pipes, aerials and chimneys. Beyond them was the single pier of the never-completed Wagner Bridge. This view did not seem strange to Billy because he had been born here after his family and the other Formosa refugees had settled into these temporary quarters, hastily constructed on the ships that had been rotting, unwanted, at their mooring up the river at Stony Point ever since the Second World War. There had been no other place to house the flood of newcomers and the ships had seemed a brilliant inspiration at the time; they would certainly do until something better was found. But it had been hard to find other quarters and more ships had been gradually added until the rusty, weed-hung fleet was such a part of the city that everyone felt it had been there forever.

Bridges and gangways connected the ships and occasionally there would be a glimpse of foul, garbage-filled water between them. Billy worked his way over to the Columbia Victory, his home, and down the gangway to apartment 107.

“About time you got in,” his sister Anna said. “Everyone’s through eating and you’re lucky I saved you anything.” She took his plate from a high shelf and put it on the table. She was only thirty-seven yet her hair was almost gray, her back bent into a permanent stoop, her hope of leaving the family and Shiptown was long since gone. She was the only one of the Chung children who had been born in Formosa, though she had been so young when they left that her memories of the island were just vague and muted echoes of a pleasant dream.

Billy looked down at the damp slices of oatmeal and the brown crackers and felt his throat close up: the steaks were still clear in his memory, spoiling him for this. “I’m not hungry,” he said, pushing it away.

His mother had caught the motion and turned from the TV set, the first time she had bothered to notice him since he had come in.

“What is the matter with the food? Why are you not eating the food? That is good food.” Her voice was thin and high-pitched with a rasping whine made more obvious because she spoke in intonated Cantonese. She had never bothered to learn more than a few words of English and the family never spoke it at home.

“I’m not hungry.” He groped for a lie that would satisfy her. “It’s too hot. Here, you eat it.”

“I would never take food from my children’s mouths. If you won’t eat it the twins will.” While she talked she kept looking at the TV screen and the thunder of its amplified voices almost drowned out hers, throbbing against the shriller screeches of the seven-year-old boys who were fighting over a toy in the corner. “Here, give it to me. I’ll have just a bite myself first, I give most of my food to the children.” She put a cracker to her mouth and began to chew it with quick, rodentlike motions. There was little chance that the twins would see any of it since she was a specialist in consuming crumbs, leftover scraps, odds and ends; the pudgy roundness of her figure showed that. She took a second cracker from the dish without moving her eyes from the screen.

The heat and the nausea he was still feeling choked at Billy’s throat. He was suddenly aware of the closeness of the steel-walled compartment, his brothers’ whining voices, the scratchy roar of the TV, his sister rattling the plates as she cleared up. He went into the other room, the only other room they had, and pulled the heavy metal door shut after him. It had been a locker of some kind, it was only six foot square and was almost completely filled by the bed on which his mother and sister slept. A window had been made in the hull, just a rectangular opening with the ragged thirty-year-old marks of the cutting torch still clear around the edge. In the winter they bolted a cover over it, but now he could lean his arms on the opening and look across the crowded ships to the distant lights on the New Jersey shore. It was almost dark, yet the air on his face felt just as hot as it had all day.

When the sharp edges of the metal began to cut into his arms he went and washed up in the basin of murky water behind the door. There wasn’t much of it, but he scrubbed his face and arms and plastered his hair back as well as he could in the tiny mirror fixed to the wall, then turned quickly away and pulled down the corners of his mouth. His face was so round and young and when he relaxed, his mouth always had a slight curve so that he seemed to be smiling, and that was not how he felt. His face lied about him. With the last of the water he rubbed down his bare legs and removed most of the dirt and mud; at least he felt cooler now. He went and lay on the bed and looked at the photograph of his father on the wall, the only decoration in the room. Captain Chung Pei-fu of the Koumintang Army. A career soldier who had dedicated his life to war and who had never fought a battle. Born in 1940, he had grown up on Formosa and had been one of the second-generation soldiers in Chiang Kai-shek’s time-marking, aging army. When the Generalissimo had died suddenly at the age of eighty-four Captain Chung had had no part in the palace revolutions that had finally pushed General Kung to the top. And when the disastrous invasion of the mainland had finally taken place he had been in the hospital, ill with malaria, and had stayed there during the Seven Deadly Days. He had been one of the very first people airlifted to safety when the island fell — even before his family. In the photograph he looked stern and military, not unhappy the way Billy had always known him. He had committed suicide the day after the twins had been born.

Like a vanishing memory the photograph faded from sight in the darkness, then appeared again, dimly seen, as the small light bulb brightened and dimmed as the current fluctuated. Billy watched as the light faded even more, until just the filament glowed redly, then went out. They were cutting the current earlier tonight, or probably something was wrong again. He lay in the suffocating darkness and felt the bed grow hot and sodden under his back, and the walls of the iron box closed in on him until he could stand it no more. His moist fingers groped along the door until they found the handle and when he went into the other room it was no better, worse if anything. The flickering greenish light of the TV screen played over the shining faces of his mother, his sister, his two brothers, transforming their gape-jawed and wide-eyed faces into those of newly drowned corpses. From the speaker beat the tattoo of galloping hoofs and the sound of endless six-shooter gunfire. His mother squeezed mechanically on the old generator flashlight that had been wired to the set, so that it could be played when the house current was off. She noticed him when he tried to go by and held out the generator to him, still contracting mechanically.

“You will squeeze this, my hand is tired.”

“I’m going out. Let Anna do it.”

“You will do what I say,” she shrilled. “You will obey me. A boy must obey his mother.” She was so angry she forgot to work the generator and the screen went black and the twins began crying at once, while Anna called to them to be quiet and added to the confusion. He did not go out — he fled — and did not stop until he was on deck, breathing hoarsely and covered with sweat.

There was nothing to do, no place to go, the city pressed in around him and every square foot of it was like this, filled with people, children, noise, heat. He gagged over the rail into the darkness but nothing came up.

Automatically, scarcely aware he was doing it, he threaded his way through the black maze to the shore then hurried toward the wide-spaced street lights of Twenty-third Street: it was dangerous to be in the darkness of the city at night. Maybe he should take a look into Western Union, or maybe he better not bother them so soon? He turned into Ninth Avenue and looked at the yellow and blue sign and chewed his lip uncertainly. A boy came out and hurried away with a message board under his arm; that made room for another one. He would go in.

When he turned into the doorway his heart thudded as he saw that the bench was empty. Mr. Burgger looked up from his desk and the anger was as fresh on his face as it had been that afternoon.

“It’s a good thing you made up your mind to come back or you just wouldn’t have had to bother coming back. Everything is moving tonight, I don’t know why. Get this delivered.” He finished scrawling an address on the cover, then slipped the gummed-paper seal through the hole in the hinged boards and licked it and sealed it shut. “Cash on the counter.” He slapped the board down.

The clip wouldn’t unbend and Billy broke a fingernail when he had to work the money out and unroll one of the bills and slide it across the scratched wood. He held tight to the other bill, clutched at the board and hurried out, stopping with his back to the wall as soon as he was out of sight of the office. There was enough light from the illuminated sign to read the address:

He knew the address and, though he had passed the buildings an untold number of times, he had never been inside the solid cliff of luxury apartments that had been built in 1976 after a spectacular bit of corruption had permitted the city to turn Chelsea Park over to private development. They were walled, terraced and turreted in new-feudal style, which appearance perfectly matched their function of keeping the masses as separate and distant as possible. There was a service entrance in the rear, dimly lit by a wire-caged bulb concealed in a carved stone cresset, and he pressed the button beneath it.

“This entrance is closed until oh-five hundred hours,” a recorded voice clattered at him and he held the board to his chest in a quick spasm of fear. Now he would have to go around to the front entrance with its lights, the doorman, the people there; he looked down at his bare legs and tried to brush away some of the older stains. He was clean enough now, but there was nothing he could do about the ragged and patched clothing. Normally he never noticed this because everyone else he met was dressed the same way, it was just that things were different here, he knew that. He didn’t want to face the people in this building, he regretted that he had ever worked to get this job, and he walked around the corner towards the brilliantly lit entrance.

A pondlike moat, now just a dry receptacle for rubbish, was crossed by a fixed walkway tricked out to look like a drawbridge, complete with rusty chains and a dropped portcullis of spike-ended metal bars backed by heavy glass. Walking the brightly lit path of the bridge was like walking into the jaws of hell. The bulky figure of the doorman was silhouetted behind the bars ahead, hands behind his back, and he did not move even after Billy had stopped, just inches away on the other side of the barred glass, but kept staring down at him coldly with no change of expression. The door did not open. Not trusting himself to say anything, Billy held up the message board so the name could be seen on the outside. The doorman’s eyes flicked over it and he reluctantly touched one of the decorative whorls and a section of bars and glass slid aside with a muffled sigh.

“I got a message here…” Billy was unhappily aware of the uncertainty and fear in his voice.

“Newton, front,” the doorman said and jerked his thumb at Billy to enter.

A door opened on the far side of the lobby and there was a rumble of masculine laughter, suddenly cut off as a man came out and closed the door behind him. He was dressed in a uniform like the doorman’s, deep black with gold buttons, but with only a curl of red braid on each shoulder rather than the other’s resplendent frogging. “What’s up, Charlie?” he asked.

“Kid with a telegram, I never saw him before.” Charlie turned his back on them and resumed his watchdog position before the door, his duty done.

“The board is good,” Newton said, twisting it from Billy’s grasp before he realized what was happening, and running his fingers over the indented Western Union trademark. He handed it back and when Billy took it he quickly patted his shirt and shorts, under the arms and in the crotch.

“He’s clean,” then he laughed, “except I gotta go wash my hands now.”

“All right, kid,” the doorman said without turning, his back still to Billy, “bring it up and get down here again, quick.”

The guard had his back turned too as he walked away leaving Billy alone in the center of the lobby, in the middle of the stretch of figured carpet with no sign of what to do or where to go next. He wanted to ask directions but he couldn’t, the automatic contempt and superiority of the men had disarmed him, driven him down so that all he wanted to do was find a place to hide. A gliding hiss from the far end of the room drew his numbed attention and he saw an elevator door slide open in the base of what he had taken to be a giant church organ. The operator was looking at him and Billy started forward, the telegram board held before him as though it were a shield against the hostility of the environment.

“I got a message here for Mr. O’Brien.” His voice quavered and almost cracked. The operator, a boy no older than he was, produced a half-authentic sneer; he was young but was already working hard at learning the correct staff manners.

“O’Brien, 41-E, and that’s on the fifth floor in case you don’t know anything about apartment houses.” He stood, blocking the elevator entrance, and Billy was uncertain what to do next.

“Should I… I mean, the elevator…”

“You ain’t stinking up this elevator for the tenants. The stairs are down that way.”

Billy felt the angry eyes following him as he walked down the hall and some of the anger caught in him. Why did they have to act like that? Just working in a place like this didn’t mean they lived here. That would be a laugh — them living in a place like this. Even that fat chunk of a doorman. Five flights — he was panting for breath before he had reached the second and had to stop and wipe off some of the sweat when he got to the fifth. The hall stretched away in both directions, with alcoved doors opening off of it and an occasional suit of armor standing guard over its empty length. His skin prickled with sweat; the air was breathless and hot. He started in the wrong direction and had to retrace his steps when he found out that the numbers were decreasing toward zero. Number 41-E was like all the others without a button or knocker, just a small plate with the gilt script word O’Brien on it. The door opened when he touched it and, after looking in first, he entered a small, darkly paneled chamber with another door before him; a sort of medieval airlock. He had a feeling of panic when the door closed behind him and a voice spoke, apparently from thin air.

“What do you want?”

“A telegram, Western Union,” he said and looked around the empty cubicle for the source of the voice.

“Let me see your board.”

It was then he realized that the voice was coming from a grille above the inner door, next to the glassy eye of a TV pickup. He held up the board so that it could be seen by the orthicon. This must have satisfied the unseen watcher because there was the click of the circuit going dead and shortly after that the door opened before him, letting out a wave of chilled air.

“Let me have it,” Michael O’Brien said, and Billy handed him the board and waited while the man broke the seal with his thumb and opened the hinged halves.

Though he was in his late fifties, iron gray, carrying an impressive paunch and a double row of jewels, O’Brien still bore the marks of his early years on the West Side docks. Scars on his knuckles and on the side of his neck — and a broken nose that had never been set correctly. In 1966 he had been a twenty-two-year-old punk, as he was fond of saying when he told the story, with nothing on his mind but booze and broads and a couple of days’ stevedoring a week to pay for the weekends, but when he had walked into a roundhouse swing in a brawl at the Shamrock Bar and Grill it had changed his life for him. While recovering in St. Vincent’s (the nose had healed quickly enough but he had fractured his skull on the floor) he had taken a long look at his life and decided to make something of it. What it was he made he never added when he told the story, but it was common knowledge that he had become involved with ward politics, the disposal of hijacked goods from the docks and a number of other things that were best not to mention in his hearing. In any case his new interests paid better than stevedoring and he had never regretted a moment of it. Six foot two, and swaddled in an immense and colorful dressing gown like a circus elephant, he could have been ludicrous, but wasn’t. He had seen too much, done too much, was too sure of his power ever to be laughed at — even though he moved his lips when he read and frowned in concentration while he spelled out the telegram.

“Wait there, I want to make a copy of this,” he said when he came to the end. Billy nodded, happy to wait as long as possible in the air-cooled, richly decorated hall. “Shirl, where the hell is the pad?” O’Brien shouted.

There was a mumbled answer from the door on the left and O’Brien opened it and went into the room. Billy’s eyes automatically followed him through the lit doorway to the white-sheeted bed and the woman lying there.

She lay with her back turned, unclothed, red hair sweeping across the pillow, her skin a whitish pink with a scattering of brown freckles across the shoulders. Billy Chung stood unmoving, his breath choked in his throat; she wasn’t ten feet away. She crossed one leg over the other, accentuating the round swell of buttock. O’Brien was talking to her but the words came through as meaningless sounds. Then she rolled over toward the open door and saw him.

There was nothing he could do, he could not move and he could not turn his eyes away. She saw him looking at her.

The girl on the bed smiled at him, then reached out a slender arm to the door, her breasts rose full and round, pink tipped — the door swung shut and she was gone.

When O’Brien opened the door and came out a minute later she was no longer on the bed.

“Any answer?” Billy asked as he took back the message board. Did his voice sound as strange to this man as it did to him?

“No, no answer,” O’Brien said as he opened the hall door. Time seemed to be moving slowly now for Billy, he clearly saw the door as it opened, the shining tongue of the lock, the flat piece of metal on the wall with the hanging wires. Why were these important?

“Aren’t you gonna give me a tip, mister?” he asked, just to occupy a moment more.

“Beat it, kid, before I boot your chunk.”

He was in the hall and the heat hit him doubly hard after the cool apartment, pressing on his skin and meeting the spreading warm that suffused the lower part of his body, just the kind of feeling he had the first time he got near a girl; he rested his head against the wall. Even in the pictures they passed around he had never seen a girl like this. All the ones he had banged had been glimpsed briefly in a dim light or not at all, thin limbs, gray skins, dirty as he, with ragged underclothing.

Of course. A single lock on the inner door guarded by the burglar alarm above. But the alarm was disconnected, he had seen the dangling wires. He had learned about things like this when Sam-Sam had run the Tigers, they had broken into stores and done a couple of jobs of burglary before the cops shot Sam-Sam. A sharp jimmy would open that door in a second. But what did this have to do with the girl? She had smiled, hadn’t she? She could be there waiting when the old bastard went to work.

It was a lot of crap and he knew it, the girl wouldn’t have anything to do with him. But she had smiled? The apartment was different, a quick job before the wiring was fixed, he knew the layout of the building — if only there was a way of getting by those chunkheads at the front door. This had nothing to do with the girl, this was for cash. He went quietly down the stairs, looking carefully before turning the corner on the ground floor and hurrying on to the basement.

You had to ride your luck. He didn’t meet anyone and in the second room he entered he found a window that also had a disconnected burglar alarm on it. Maybe the whole building was like that, they were rewiring it or it had broken and they couldn’t fix it, it didn’t matter. The window was covered with dust and he reached up and drew a heart in the film of dust so he could recognize it from the outside.

“You took a long time, kid,” the doorman said when he came up.

“I had to wait while he copied the message and wrote an answer, I can’t help it.” He whined the lie with unsuspected sincerity, it was easy.

The doorman didn’t ask to look at the board. With a pneumatic hiss the portcullis opened and he went across the empty drawbridge to the dark, crowded, dirty and stifling street.