The Death Dealers Read online

  He left slack in the chain.

  All I had to do was close the door almost shut, use the tip of my pen to reach in and slide the catch back out of its holder, and the chain swung down across the door with a metallic click and I walked on inside. The legs were still crossed, keeping time to the rugged beat of the theme music.

  Yamu Gorkey was a big, wide-faced guy with scars over both eyebrows and lips twisted in a perpetual sneer even when he was enjoying himself. He sat there in his shirt-sleeves, hands folded across his belly, his expression mirroring the action on the TV screen. Unlike the outside of the building, the apartment was ornate, from the biggest color TV available to the expensive furniture that was shoved with lousy taste in any place it would fit. Jammed in a comer were three filing cabinets and the office desk next to it was loaded with papers and account books. Yamu Gorkey ran his operation out of his house as well as his office.

  I stood there thirty seconds before he saw me, and when he did his face become loose and flabby and for the first time his sneer dissolved into a look of fear. It was too sudden, too quiet. The gun was too big and just my standing there was enough to give him the wild shakes without a word being said.

  His mouth hung open and he swallowed hard, finally saying, “What the hell ...”

  “Teish,” I said. “Where is he?”

  Somehow they all do the same thing. They think they have the edge because you don’t shoot first and ask questions later. They grab the odds because they know that they have no conscience and when death is the perfect answer, they can produce it. Everybody else is a patsy to be taken and when you have them in your own back yard you can even get away with it in a court of law. They know that the right guys won’t move until the wrong ones make the first move and by then the wrong ones are right because the other ones are dead.

  So he got that look on his face and I wanted to tell him what kind of a mistake he was making and he didn’t give me a chance. He had the gun wedged in the chair beside him where it wasn’t supposed to be seen and it was only when he had it in his mitt and pointed at me that he knew he had made the big mistake, the one-of-a-kind type, and tried to scream for me to stop even as he pulled the trigger of his gun.

  The slug caught me in the left side with an impact that half twisted me around. Behind me I heard something break from where it had gone on through, smashing into glass, but by then it didn’t matter. Yamu Gorkey had no top of his head and was going backwards over his chair to lie in a ridiculous heap on the floor, a corpse that was too dead to bleed.

  On television, the announcer came on and talked about beer some more.

  I opened my coat, looked at the hole in my shirt turning red and felt the passage of the bullet. It had gone through the fleshy section between my ribs and hip, almost painless at the moment, but in a little while I’d be hurting. I stayed flattened back against the wall, protected by the angle of it. No other slugs came at me; there was no sound except the television, the rain and occasionally a yell from the street below.

  I left Gorkey where he was, pushed through the other rooms until I came to the bedroom at the back of the building. Every time I opened a door I expected another gun to blast out of the darkness and was ready for it, but none came.

  Then there was Teish El Abin, a pitiful little guy lying trussed up on a bed, spreadeagled so that his arms and ankles could be lashed to the metal framework, a gag stuffed into his mouth. His eyes were wide with some terrifying fear, not knowing who I was, but seeing the shape of me silhouetted there with the .45 in my hand.

  I yanked the gag out of his mouth and cut him loose before he recognized me. If I thought there would be thanks, I was wrong. All his Eastern wariness came back to him in an expression of absolute disdain and he said, “Your game has gone far enough, Mr. Mann.” He was exhausted, frightened and old, but he had to tell me.

  I jerked him out of bed and led him stumbling into the front room. Even the sight of the body on the floor didn’t seem to alter his attitude any at all. He sat down, slumping there, watching me. “It will do you no good.” He waved his hand toward the floor without looking at what was left of Yamu Gorkey. “Do you not think that in my time I have ... arranged such a scene?”

  I got sore then. He was still a gook in my country and he wasn’t handling me like that at all. He was begging, we weren’t asking. He came over here with his hand out and something to sell, but he didn’t own the world. He controlled only a tiny chunk of it that was good if we managed it for him. “You were suckered, old boy. You were jostled by the Soviets and they wanted you to think it was an American plot.”

  Teish nodded toward the body. “He is an American?” “Maybe by birth.”

  “And the other one?”

  “A Red agent.”

  “Ah, no. He spoke the language well. Too well.”

  “You aren’t that astute, Teish. Languages are easy to come by. The other one was Malcolm Turos.”

  His eyes were red rimmed, hating me, thinking of how he had offered me Vey Locca up on a platter. “You may kill me, but I know what I know.”

  Well, screw him. I opened up my coat. The bloodstain had damn near encircled my waist. “I don’t take a hit for anybody,” I said, making sure he could see it.

  His gesture was vague, but adamant. “Nothing. Self-inflicted wounds have many uses. They take a man from a battlefield. They are points of proof to minds not used to such things.”

  I grinned at the little mutt sitting there defying me. Age had certain advantages and he was taking his for all it was worth. But I still had a hole card. I took the recorder and the speaker rig out of my pocket and plugged them together. I let it run and let him hear Vey and Sarim Shey in conversation together and when it had run through the spool I said, “You’re in the wrong league, old man.”

  There was no fear in his eyes any longer. Simply fatigue, and when he looked up at me I saw the hurt there, the soft anger at what had been done to him, the hidden implications, the self-promises of what would happen if he could be in control again and he said, “I am sorry, Mr. Mann. After what I have said to you the insult can only be paid for with my life and that you have in your hands.”

  He sat there waiting. Had it been the other way around he would have killed me.

  I said, “There are two men in Selachin. Our men. One is Teddy Tedesco, the other Peter Moore. At present they are being hunted down in the hills by your people, led by the same ones who tried ... this.”

  “Yes?”

  There was a phone on the table next to him. “Stop them. I want them back alive. They are my friends.”

  “It is enough?”

  “It is enough,” I said.

  And a phone call went through on Yamu Gorkey’s phone bill that he would never be able to pay. It followed the Atlantic path, was transmitted through relay stations and was probably intercepted along the line, but it didn’t make any difference. In thirty minutes Teish El Abin had reached his palace and his words were direct and forceful. He spoke for five minutes before he hung up, then nodded solemnly to me. “It is done.”

  “Almost,” I said. I picked up the phone and called Virgil Adams. I got the report in and when I told him Teddy and Pete were off the hook he couldn’t say anything for a minute. He caught the sharp corners in my tone then.

  “You okay, Tiger?”

  “Hit.”

  “Bad?”

  “No. I’ll stay on it.”

  “Don’t be a fool. You got Lennie there and Casey Ballanca standing by. Pitch it at them.”

  “I have a personal interest in the business, buddy,” I said, then cradled the receiver.

  Teish was watching me with new interest, a peculiar expression lighting his eyes. I dialed Charlie Corbinet’s number, let it ring four times before he got on. I said, “I have Teish, Charlie.”

  I could hear him scramble to his feet. “Where?”

  “In an apartment over Sloan’s Bar,” I told him and gave him the address. “How’s Vey?”

/>   When I mentioned her name, Teish hands went white around the arms of his chair. Charlie said, “Conscious, but not talking. She’ll be all right. She won’t talk to anybody but you. It looks like you have everybody over a barrel.”

  “Martin Grady ought to be in the catbird seat then.”

  “He is, Tiger. Thery’re calling off that congressional investigation for the time being. The heat’s too much for them. Nobody seems to know how the hell you worked it, but they aren’t asking any questions. We’ll get our people right up there. You better get ready for a session with Hal Randolph.”

  “I won’t be here, Colonel.”

  “Look ...”

  “Malcolm Turos is still loose. He lost his main target but he still has a secondary one. Me.”

  I hung up, swung around to Teish who was sitting there quietly, waiting to hear what I had to say. I gave it to him, briefly, but in detail. When I finished he nodded, his dark eyes boring right through me. “I will have a son like you,” he said. “One way or another, he will be like you.”

  I didn’t answer him. I picked a handkerchief out of my pocket and jammed it under my shirt over the bullet hole. It was just beginning to hurt. Through the rain and the noise below I heard the whine of sirens coming closer. I belted the coat around me and stuck my hands in the pockets.

  Under my fingers I could feel the ruby.

  There was something smoothly sensual about it and when I touched it that little figure came out in my mind again, laughing at me. He danced closer and closer to the front and there was enough light on him for the first time and I knew he wouldn’t get away. I had a good look that time and knew that it was tied in with the ruby and if I thought on it I’d give him a name and he’d be gone forever.

  The sirens were louder now and people were running into the street. “They’ll be here in a minute. You’ll be all right now.”

  Teish nodded again, slowly. “Everything will be all right,” he said, his words filled with meaning.

  I went down the stairs, stood across the street until the squad cars and the unmarked ones pulled up in front of the buildings, then crossed over before they could get the street cordoned off and started walking aimlessly, head down into the rain and smelling the air.

  My fingers were wrapped around the ruby in my pocket.

  There are nights when you can have the city to yourself. The rain drives those who inhabit it further into the recesses of the buildings, away from the veins and arteries that connect its vast parts. Where I walked was like an amputated member of a body, a ghost town that had been alive only hours before.

  Overhead thunder rumbled and the rain came in waves of stinging needles, challenging my right to be there. Both sides of the street were flanked with aged masonry that soaked the rain into its pores, thirsty for anything that was life-giving. Their windows were dirty on the inside, blank. The wetness liberated smells that had been trampled into the pavement until the air was filled with the odor of commerce, green smells, sea smells, machine smells and the hint of sweating men who had left their spoor behind.

  I was alone there, but somewhere in the city was Malcolm Turos and a pig named Sarim Shey. In my pocket was the key that could unlock the door to their secret room so that I could go through and while I walked I fingered the blood-red thing that had rested so ably in the dimpled navel of a beautiful woman.

  What was it like? I thought. A ruby. Oval-shaped and thick through the middle. It wasn’t the appearance of it that mattered—I knew that. It was the shape. It reminded me of something that had been said—words that slipped from a tongue, never remembered by the person who had said them, but they were there, formed into a little dervish in my brain.

  He was laughing at me again.

  I laughed back.

  In a little while, I thought, it will come. Laugh while you can because when I remember you’ll disappear like a puff of smoke.

  A ruby ... a marble? No, that wasn’t it. The damn thing wasn’t very big at all. If I didn’t know what it was I’d take it for a nut somebody had rubbed smooth.

  I stopped, because the little dervish stopped too and was looking at me with bright eyes aghast at the thought that he had been recognized, then tried a crazy dance again to dissuade me from my trend of reasoning.

  A nut. I said it to myself, then again aloud. Who had mentioned nuts?

  The dervish was going mad now and I knew that I had him.

  Harry had said it. Malcolm Turos said he didn’t like the city because he couldn’t stand the smell of litchi nuts.

  And the little dervish disappeared in a puff of smoke like I knew he would.

  I left the end of the city that was the amputated part and walked back toward the lights until I saw the avenue where the life of it flowed. My side was a burning ache that throbbed constantly and I knew whatever I had to do had to be done soon and when I reached the intersection I stood on the comer and waited twenty minutes until a cab cruised by, coming back to Manhattan from taking a fare across the bridge to Brooklyn.

  I didn’t want to get involved with explanations, and outside of a few slobs who worked the TWA section of the Kennedy Airport, New York cabbies were the best when you put it to them right. I hung a ten-dollar bill from the Martin Grady fund over the back of the seat, watched it picked out of my fingers and said, “Find me a Chinese laundry.”

  He met my eyes in the mirror, trying to see if I was a kook or not, decided I had something going, then pulled away from the curb, scouting both sides of the street for what I wanted. When he ran out of possibles on one street he tried another, crisscrossing the city patiently.

  One thing you can say about the Chinese who work the laundry business—they’re ambitious. They never seem to sleep. Sometimes you think they work in shifts, but it’s always the same guy at the ironing board no matter what time you go by his place.

  The one we found was named George Tung and he was downstairs in a brownstone in the upper Forties blowing spray through his water pipe, hot irons cooking over a gas flame while a radio was piping in soft music from a local station.

  I got out of the cab, said, “Wait for me,” and handed the driver another ten. He liked the action and lit up a smoke.

  George Tung was a brown little man full of smiles and when I walked in lit up like a birthday cake. The talk was coming hard now, the gnawing pain in my side cutting off my breath.

  “Yes? You want laundry?” They have great memories, the Chinese. He knew damn well I had never been there before.

  Instead of trying to talk I laid another ten on the counter. He looked at the bill, then me, smiling, but not understanding and his mind reading me off for a hophead or something in strange characters. I pushed the bill his way. “Litchi nuts ... where do you buy them?”

  His head bobbed up, his eyes round over his smile. “I do not buy. Don’t like. I give something else.” He reached under the counter and threw a calendar at me with a naked blonde on the front of it.

  “Who sells them?”

  “You buy litchi nut?”

  “No, I want to know who sells them.”

  “You go Chinatown?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good. They don’t sell there.”

  There was one way to stop him. I reached out to take the ten bucks back and he put his thumb on it. “James Harvey, he sell.”

  “He’s not Chinese.”

  “Mother,” he said.

  “Got a phone book?”

  His head bobbed again and he added, “James Harvey my cousin. Have many cousin. He sell next to Flood Warehouse. You know where is? James live in fine house ’way uptown. Tomorrow you buy and I tell him you come, okay?”

  “Sure. You do that.”

  “You want litchi nut now?”

  I started to turn away. “No.” He was still looking at me like I was a nut too. “Any other places?”

  “My cousin biggest. Ask anybody. Tom Lee Foy has place not far from James. He sell. He have fine house too ’way uptown. Yo
u know Flood Warehouse?”

  “I know Flood Warehouse,” I said.

  When I reached the door he chuckled. “Bring laundry to George Tung. Do fine job. Very neat, not much starch.”

  “You got enough,” I said.

  The cabbie flicked his cigarette out the window when I got in. “Where to now?”

  “Flood Warehouse. You know where it is?”

  I got the eyes in the mirror again. “Yeah, I know where it is.”

  “Then let’s roll.” I sat back against the cushions and closed my eyes. I could feel the wetness seeping around my middle and wondered just how bad the thing in my side was. I had to get to a doctor and there just wasn’t that much time. I hated to give away any odds at all, and with a person like Turos that was all the edge he needed. I tried to rest easy while we drove, but the jouncing of the cab didn’t make it possible.

  The Flood Warehouse had a gigantic neon sign on the top of it but most of it was obscured in the cloud layer that hovered above the city. It cast a bluish pall over the square structure below it, extending to the ramshackle tenement buildings that flanked it on either side.

  I got out on the comer, the pain from my side drawing my face tight. The cabbie looked at me curiously. “You want I should wait?”

  This time I handed him a twenty. “Give me an hour. Can you sit it out?”

  “So I park with the doors locked, the lights off and the meter running. For this kind of dough, why not?”

  “Yeah, why not?” I slid out of the cab.

  “Hey, mister?”

  “What?”

  “You in trouble?”

  “Not me, buddy. Somebody else, but not me.”

  “Like I could call the cops or something?”

  “Like in an hour you do that if I’m not back.”

  “Hey, mister.”

  “What?”

  He saw my face in the lights then. “Nothing. I’ll wait for you.”

  James Harvey had an import house dealing in Chinese specialties right next to the warehouse. It was an old three-story building renovated years ago to accommodate a business and nothing had changed since. Although the area was littered with refuse from the other places, his was a neat establishment with a garage on one side and a wholesale grocery on the other. The few cartons of trash were neatly stacked awaiting pickup and the only smell from the place was a pleasant one that reminded me of an old country store with open herb containers when I was a kid.