Peter Rabe - The Box

“This can’t possibly take long. I’ll stand.”

Quinn shrugged. He said, “I’ll be here about one month, no more. If for that length of time you want to stand like that, look like that, then suit yourself. Except I don’t like it.”

“I’m too polite to laugh,” said Remal. “However, I will have you jailed.”

“I don’t think you can afford that,” said Quinn.

“Are you blackmailing me?”

“Of course.” Quinn got up, walked around the small table.

“And you want?” said Remal. He said it only because it was the next logical question, but not because he was really concerned. He must go, of course. Perhaps I will have him killed.

Quinn stopped walking and turned. It was suddenly all very simple. And if the mayor can feel as straight as I do now, all this can be over. It felt almost as simple as coming out of the box.

“I want you off my back,” said Quinn. “You understand the expression? I want you to leave me alone.”

“Are you leaving me alone?”

“It comes to the same thing,” said Quinn. “I want no part of your troubles. I want no part of your schemes. I’m not interested in you.”

“You make me sound like I don’t exist,” said Remal, and he thought again, I may have to have him killed.

“I wish to hell you didn’t exist, that’s a fact,” and Quinn meant it. “But while you do, I don’t want to get jumped in the dark, I don’t want your curfews. That’s what I mean by getting off my back.”

It was that simple. Quinn took a deep breath and knew this: if he gives the right answer now then he is off my back. I don’t even feel angry any more. He can be of no importance. If only he gives the right answer now Upstairs, Quinn could hear someone walking, then the sound of a chair. That’s the woman, he thought. What if Remal were not here at all “I don’t think you finished,” said Remal. “You didn’t say ‘or else’. Your kind always says ‘or else’.”

The bastard, thought Quinn. The ugly bastard “ ‘Or else’ what, Mister Quinn?”

Quinn sat down on a chair, put his arms on the table and looked at his hands. He didn’t give the right answer. He’s still on my back, no matter if I put him there or if he jumped on by himself, and now-He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to. He felt the dislike creep in again, like cold fog. The straight talk is over. I didn’t know I could talk that straight, but it’s over now and back to the conniving.

He looked up at Remal, and this was the first time that the mayor really saw the other man. He had missed everything that had gone before. He might have been looking at Quinn some time back, somewhere in New York, and there would have been no difference. I’ll kill him, of course “Mayor,” said Quinn. “For my information: let’s say a man, some man who lives in the quarter, comes up to you and says, ‘Sir, give me ten dollars or I go to the authorities and tell them everything I know about your shipping business.’”

“Who knows about it?”

“Don’t be naive. Everybody does.”

Remal let that go by. He conceded the point by closing his eyes. When they came open they were on Quinn again, taking him in with great care and interest.

“What would you do if some man came up to you like that?”

“Kill him,” said Remal.

Quinn smiled. He was starting to like the game.

“Now let’s say I come up, just like that rat from the quarter.” Quinn stopped smiling and leaned over the table a little. “You think you can do the same thing to me and get away with it?”

Remal thought for a moment because he had never considered that there might be a difference.

“I’m under official protection,” said Quinn, “of official interest. I’m a citizen of another country. I’m an active case with my consulate, and then suddenly I disappear.”

There was a silence while Remal folded his arms, looked up at the ceiling. When he looked back at Quinn, nothing had changed. Neither Quinn nor Remal.

“Yes,” said Remal. “You will just suddenly disappear.” He shrugged and said, “It has happened before. Even in your country it happens, am I right? And you have so many more laws.”

Now the bastard is laughing at me and he’s right and I’m wrong.

“Was that the blackmail, Mister Quinn?”

“No. And all I wanted from you…”

“Come to the point.”

There was a magazine on the table and Quinn flipped the pages once so that they made a quick, nervous rat-tat-tat. Then he looked up. “I’ve got some of your merchandise.”

“Also a thief, I see.”

“And this merchandise talks. She was going out on a boat tonight, white slave shipment to some place, which would interest anyone from your local constable to the High Commissioner of the Interpol system.”

This time Remal sat down, but he was smiling. “All this, Mister Quinn, so I don’t put you on a curfew?”

“That’s how it started,” said Quinn, which he knew didn’t answer the question. That’s how it started, he thought, but I don’t know any more. I might like to go further.

Remal threw his head back and laughed loud and hard. When he was done he did not care how Quinn was looking at him.

“You found her where, Mr. Quinn, on my boat?”

“In the quarter.”

“Ah. And she was being used, no doubt, somewhere in an alley.”

“The point is I have her.”

“Was she thin and young, Mister Quinn?” And when Quinn didn’t answer, Remal said as if to himself, “They usually are, the ones Hradin brings in.”

“Maybe you didn’t get my point, Mayor.”

“Oh that,” and Remal sighed. Then he said, “More important, you’re not getting mine. I know the trader who brought her, I know from which tribe she comes, and I know something else which seems to have escaped you. She, her type, has been owned since childhood. One owner, two, more, I don’t know. Uh, Mister Quinn, have you talked to her?”

“I don’t speak Arabic.”

“Neither does she. But have you talked to her?”

“Get to it, Mayor.”

“I will. The ones Hradin brings in, the women of her type-” Remal, in a maddening way, interrupted to laugh. He got up and kept laughing. “Mister Quinn,” said Remal from the door, “when or if you see that little whore again, ask her to open her mouth. She has no tongue, perhaps not since she was five.”

Remal slammed the door behind him, but even after that he kept laughing.

First Quinn sat, and it was as if he were blind with confusion. But this did not last. He sat and was blind to everything except his hate for the laugh, and for his own stupidity. Because, for a fact, Quinn was not new to this. Neither to the contest with the man, Remal in this case, nor to the simple, sharp rules of the game: that you don’t go off half-cocked, that you don’t threaten unless you can hit.

Quinn got up, left the house fast. His teeth touched on edge, as if there were sand there and he needed to bite through the grains. The garden gate was locked. He went back to the house, stumbled once on a stone in the garden.

“Quinn?” he heard in the hall.

One light was on over the stairs and Beatrice stood on the first landing, no longer looking half asleep. She came down, saying his name again.

“Open the gate for me,” he said. “It’s locked.”

She stepped up to him and put her hand on his arm. “Perhaps-” She didn’t seem to know how to go on.

“You got the key or not?”

“He’s gone,” she said. “He went out the back gate. If you like, you can stay here.”

He looked at her and felt surprised that she could seem so hesitant.

“What did you do?” she said. “He came back cold as ice.”