Ed Mcbain - Money, Money, Money

Jassim blinked.

“It started three minutes ago, sir. I’m sorry, those are my orders.”

The time was nine-twenty-two.

The Mendelssohn concerto had started at nine-nineteen, and the bomb was set to detonate at nine-thirty.

WILL WAS WONDERING how long he’d have to sit here. He was thinking that maybe him and Antonia could go for a bite to eat after this fiddle player did his thing, there seemed to be a nice Italian restaurant right across the avenue.

He was also wondering if anybody had ever tried to steal instruments from this place. Was there a room where they stored tubas and trombones and such? Or did all those musicians up there have their own instruments? He guessed maybe they did. Besides, he had to stop thinking like a thief. If Antonia went along with his scheme, he would never in his lifetime have to commit another burglary.

But, man, wasthis boring!

JASSIM LOOKED AT his watch again.

It was now nine-twenty-four.

The first movement of Mendelssohn’s accursed violin concerto was about twelve and a half minutes long. The Jew had started playing it at nineteen minutes past nine, which meant he would end the first movement at a bit past nine-thirty-one, perhaps later, nine-thirty-three, even nine-thirty-four, depending on how much artistic license he took with the piece. Jassim could not wait until any of those times because the bomb was set to go off at nine-thirty, which meant that unless he went into the hall, it would explode right here in the lobby in six minutes.

He took a deep breath.

“Hey!” the guard shouted, but he was too late.

Jassim had thrown open one of the doors and was already running down the aisle on the right hand side of the hall.

WILL TURNED TO look up the aisle when he heard somebody screaming. The person screaming was a short dark man carrying a handbag, holding it by the straps and beginning to twirl it over his head as he ran toward the stage, screaming. Will didn’t know what the man was screaming because it was in a foreign language, but whatever it was, there was enormous rage in the words. As the man rapidly approached the stage where the Israeli was playing, he almost looked like an undersized David twirling a slingshot to hurl a stone at a giant Goliath.

Will got to his feet the moment he realized this was close to what the little man intended.

“Hey! What the hell you doing?” he shouted, and threw himself at the man, intending to tackle him, but missing by a hair. He stumbled forward, off balance, as the man stopped some three feet from the stage and shouted something else in the same foreign language.

Will didn’t know quite why he hurled himself at the man again. Perhaps he was simply trying to impress Antonia, who sat in the seventh row, watching him with her mouth agape and her eyes wide. Perhaps he was remembering that the Khmer Rouge who’d tortured him had also spoken a language he couldn’t understand. Whatever the reason, he threw himself into the air again just as the man released his grip on the handbag’s straps. The Israeli tried to deflect the missile coming at him, raising the violin by its slender neck, simultaneously stepping aside to his right.

In that instant, Will landed on the man’s back.

In the next instant, the bag exploded.

13 .

NEW YEAR’S EVE dawned bright and clear and piercingly cold. Something had gone wrong with Hoch Memorial’s heating system during the night, and while technicians fiddled with thermostats and nozzles and valves, nurses ran around wearing sweaters or even coats over their starched white uniforms.

A multitude of people had drifted into Will’s room at all hours of the night, there to take his temperature or his blood pressure, to change the dressings on his face and his hands, to offer him medication and the sort of tender loving care a wounded individual deserved. When he heard voices outside the door to his room, he thought it might be more nurses coming in to change the sheets or the dressings or the bags hanging by the bed, but instead it was just someone asking a nurse if it was okay for him to go in and talk to the patient.

The man who entered his room looked a lot like Detective Stephen Louis Carella.

“Hey, hi,” Will said. “What’reyou doing here?”

Carella had just supervised the orderly discharge and transfer of one Anna DiPalumbo—which turned out to be the blond shooter’s true and honorable name—from Hoch Memorial to the hospital wing at the Women’s House of Detention downtown, but he didn’t offer this information to Will because discussing an informant with a person who was a known felon was simply stupid and might come back to haunt him later on. If Halloway’s threats were at all realistic, the arraignment later this morning might be sent south even without any further help, but it didn’t hurt to err on the side of caution, as the sage once remarked.

“I had some business here,” Carella said, which was true enough. “How are you doing?”

“Well, okay, I guess,” Will said. “A lot better than some of the others, that’s for sure.”

The newspapers this morning had reported that the Israeli violinist, Svi Cohen, had been killed in what was cautiously being called “a supposed terrorist bombing” at Clarendon Hall. Six musicians in the string section had also been killed. Plus eight concert-goers sitting in the first two rows. Plus the unidentified bomber himself. Carella didn’t think Halloway’s case would be helped by the fact that the person who’d tried to stop the bomber was a professional burglar and not one of W&D’s own elite band of brothers, as he’d called them, or sisters if you included Anna DiPalumbo, who was now on her way downtown in an ambulance, and whom Carella never cared to meet again on any snow-covered street anywhere in the world, thank you. But where were you when we needed you, Mr. Halloway? When push came to shove last night, where were all your knights in shining armor? The only hero last night had been little ole Wilbur Struthers here, sitting up in bed now and grinning like a kid on Christmas Day.

“Your picture’s on the front page of two newspapers, did you know that?” Carella said.

“Yeah, I saw them. I was on TV, too, early this morning. They came here to my hospital room, can you believe it? I guess it was because of the book deal.”

“What book deal?” Carella asked.

“Man from a publisher here in the city came to see me, offered me a whole bunch of money for my life story. Not as much as they gave Hillary, but a goodly sum of money anyhow. I figured I ought to take it.”

“Are you free to say howmuch money?” Carella asked.

“A million-five,” Will said.

“That’s a goodly sum of money, all right,” Carella said.

“I guess there’s more than one way to make a killing, after all, huh?”

“I guess so,” Carella said.

HE STOPPED AT his mother’s house on the way home.

The front walk had been shoveled clean, he wondered who had shoveled it for her. He rang the doorbell, and heard chimes sounding inside, and then her voice calling, “Just a minute.” He waited.

When she opened the door, he almost burst into tears.

He had seen her only two days ago, but she seemed so suddenly old all at once.

He took her in his arms.

They hugged.

“Are you okay, son?” his mother asked.

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“I love you, Steve,” she said.

“I love you, too, Mom.”

They sat at the kitchen table the way they used to when he was a boy eating breakfast before heading off to school, sat there now drinking coffee, and he told her he’d just come from an arraignment on what was going to shape up as a very difficult case, but at least they’d got past the first two hurdles. It was a miracle they’d managed to get the guy arraigned at all, and whereas they were hoping at best for bail in the millions, the judge had denied bail altogether, which was very good for their side. He told her all this sitting at the kitchen table, the way he used to sit there after school when he was a kid, drinking his milk and telling her everything that had happened that day.