Эд Макбейн - Learning to Kill - Stories

There was a lot of uniformed brass around the cars, too, and they all talked it up, figuring who was going to be the first to die, in case Harry was carrying a gun. Harry was born and raised right in this neighborhood, and all the kids knew him from when he used to be king of the hill. And Harry was always heeled, even in those days, either with brass knucks or a switch knife or a razor or a zip gun, and later on he had a .38 he showed the guys. That was just before he lammed out — the time he knocked off that crumb from uptown. I remember once when Harry cut up a guy so bad, the guy couldn’t walk. I swear. I mean it. He didn’t only use the knife on the guy’s face. He used it all over so the guy couldn’t walk later, that guy was sorry he tangled with a customer like Harry, all right. They only come like Harry once in a while, and when you got a Harry in your neighborhood, you know it, man. You know it, and you try to live up to the rep, you dig me? You got a guy like Harry around, well hell, man, you can’t run the neighborhood like a tea party. You got certain standards and ideals, I guess you would call them. So we was all kind of sorry when Harry had to take off like that, but of course he was getting all kinds of heat by that time, not only from the locals who was after him for that crumb uptown, but also he was getting G-heat because the word was he transported some broads into Connecticut for the purpose of being illegal, leastways that’s the way they read it off on him at the lineup, and I know a guy who was at the lineup personally that time, so this is straight from the horse’s mouth.

But if those cops were wondering whether or not Harry was heeled, I could have saved them a lot of trouble if they wanted to ask me. I could tell them Harry was not only heeled but that he was probably heeled to his eyeballs, and that if they expected to just walk in and put the muscle on him, they had another guess coming, or maybe two or three. It didn’t make one hell of a big difference anyhow, because the cops looked as if they took along their whole damn arsenal just to pry Harry out of that seventh-floor apartment.

The streets were really packed now with people and cops and reporters and the emergency cop truck, and I expected pretty soon we would have President Eisenhower there to dedicate a stone or something. I began to wonder where the hell the boys were because the rooftops were getting lined pretty fast, and if the cops and Harry were going to shoot this thing out, I wanted to watch him pick them off. And unless we got a good spot on the roof, things would be rugged. I was ready to go looking for Aiello when he comes back with Ferdy and Beef.

Ferdy is a guy about my height and build, except he’s got straight black hair and brown eyes, and my hair is a little curly and my eyes are not brown really, they’re amber — that’s what Marie says, and she ought to know, dad. I been going with Marie since we was both thirteen, and that makes it close to three years now, so she knows the color of my eyes, all right.

“This the straight dope?” Ferdy asked. Ferdy used to be on H, but we broke him of it ’cause there’s no room in our bunch for a hophead. We broke him by locking him in a cellar for about two weeks. His own mother didn’t even know where he was. We used to go down there and give him food every day, but that was all. He could cry his butt off, and we wouldn’t so much as give him a stick of M. Nothing till he kicked the heroin monkey. And he kicked it, dad. He kicked it clear out the window. It was painful to watch the poor guy, but it was for his own good, so we let him claw and scream all he wanted to, but he didn’t get out of that cellar. Pot is okay, ’cause it don’t give you the habit, but anybody wants to hang around me, he don’t have no needle marks in his arm. He can bust a joint anytime he likes, but show me a spoon, and show me a guy’s bowing to the White God, and I break his butt for him, that’s the truth, that shows you the kind of guy I am.

“Harry’s up there,” I told Ferdy.

“How you like that?” Beef said. Beef must weigh about two thousand pounds in his bare feet. He don’t talk English so good because he just come over from the old country, and he ain’t yet learned the ropes. But he’s a big one, and a good man to have in the bunch, especially when there’s times you can’t use hardware, like when the bulls is on a purity drive or something. We get those every now and then, but they don’t mean nothing, especially if you know how to sit them out, and we got lots of patience on our street.

“What took you guys so long?” I said.

“A only just reached us,” Ferdy said.

“A’s turnin’ into a real slowball,” I said. “Look at them goddamn rooftops. How we gonna watch this now?”

The boys looked up and seen the crowd.

“We shove in,” Beef said.

“Shove this,” I told him. “There’s grown-ups up there. You start shoving with all them bulls in the street, and they’ll shove you into the Tombs.”

“What about Tessie?” Ferdy said.

“What about her?”

“Her pad’s right across the way. We stomp in there, dad, and we got ringside seats.”

“Her folks,” I said sourly.

“They both out earning bread,” Ferdy said.

“You sure?”

“Dad, Tessie and me’s like that, ” Ferdy said, crossing two fingers.

So we lit out for Tessie’s pad.

She didn’t answer the door till we told her who we was.

Even then, she wasn’t too keen on the idea. She played cat and mouse with Ferdy, and he’s honeying her up, come on doll, open the door, and all that kind of crap until I tell her to open it or I’ll bust the goddamn thing right off the hinges. She begins to whimper she ain’t dressed then, so I told her to throw something on because if that door ain’t open in three flat I’m going to bust it open.

She opened the door then, and she was wearing a sweater and skirt, and I said, “You’re a fast dresser, huh?” and she nodded, and I wanted to paste her in the mouth for lying to me in the first place. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s anybody who lies.

We go over to the windows and throw them open, and Tessie says, “What’s all the noise about?” and Ferdy tells her Harry’s in the apartment across the way and maybe we’ll see some lead soon. Tessie gets the jitters. She’s a pretty enough broad, only I don’t go for her because Marie and I are that way, but you can bet Marie wouldn’t get all excited and shaking because there might be some gunplay. Tessie wants to clear out, but Ferdy throws her down on the couch and she sits there shaking as if she’s got pneumonia or something. Beef goes over and locks the door, and then we all pile onto the windowsills.

It’s pretty good because we can see the apartment where Harry’s holed up, right across the alleyway and only one floor down. And we can also see the street on the other side where the bulls are mulling around. I can make out Donlevy’s strut from up there, and I feel like dropping a flowerpot on his head, but I figure I’ll bide my time because maybe Harry’s got something better for that lousy bull.

It’s pretty quiet in the street now. The bulls are just about decided on their strategy, and the crowd is hushed up, waiting for something to happen. We don’t see any life coming from the apartment where Harry’s cooped, but that don’t mean nothing.

“What they doing?” Beef says, and I shrug.

Then, all of a sudden, we hear the loudspeaker down below.

“All right, Manzetti. Are you coming out?”

A big silence fell on the street. It was quiet before, but this is something you can almost reach out and touch.

“Manzetti?” the loudspeaker called. “Can you hear us? We want you to come out. We’re giving you thirty seconds to come out.”